The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)—the body of chapter-affiliated volunteers set up last year as a major part of the Wikimedia Foundation's financial restructuring—released its recommendations to the WMF board last Sunday. The news that the Hong Kong chapter's application for a grant of almost US$212K had failed was followed just eight hours later by a strongly worded resignation announcement by Deryck Chan on the public Wikimedia-l mailing-list.
Currently a student of environmental engineering at the University of Cambridge, England, Chan is an admin on the Cantonese and English Wikipedias and an active photographic contributor on Commons. He has resigned from his roles as administrative assistant for the chapter and as its representative on the Chapters Association; but he will fulfill his remaining duties as a member of the organising team for Wikimania 2013, the movement's major annual event. This year, it will be hosted in early August by the Hong Kong chapter, with separate funding from the WMF. Deryck Chan wrote:
| “ | Despite my desperate attempts to assist WMHK's board to keep up with deadlines and comply with seemingly endless requests from WMF grantmaking and FDC support staff, we received an overwhelmingly negative assessment which resulted in a complete rejection of our FDC proposal. ... / My experience with the FDC process has confirmed my ultimate scepticism about the WMF's direction of development. WMF has become so conservative with its strategies ... that it is no longer tending to the needs of the wider Wikimedia movement. / [The] WMF is expecting fully professional deliverables which require full-time professional staff to deliver, from organisations run by volunteers who are running Wikimedia chapters not because they're charity experts, but because they love Wikimedia. | ” |
A particular issue he raised was what he termed "the chicken-and-egg problem", referring to the challenge faced by chapters without paid staff in preparing effective applications for FDC funding that would enable them to hire their first staff. The Norwegian chapter's Erlend commented in response: "Getting the first employee demands the resources that only come with the first employee. ... One result will be an even more unevenly distributed outreach and campaigning power between some professionalised hubs (Germany, India, UK, Switzerland, Israel), and totally amateur hubs (Hong Kong, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, Vietnam, Denmark, Norway, etc)."
The Signpost has been told that the large payrolls of some European chapters (Wikimedia Germany employs the equivalent of some 40 full-time staff) have influenced the aspirations of chapters around the world.
The FDC's second round saw US$665.5K recommended for allocation, bringing the total in both rounds to $9.17M of its maximum budget of just over $11M. The French chapter was granted $525K (70% of its request), having received only bridging funding in the FDC's first round last October; the Norwegian chapter secured $140K (59%). The other two applicants, the Czech and Hong Kong chapters, received no funding. The Committee has recommended that the remaining $2M be returned to Foundation reserves.
The FDC's comments on the round have sent clear messages to the movement. The Committee encourages diversity of funding; in assessing applicants' existing and proposed programs it takes into account the strategic focus and clarity of expected outcomes, sustainability, and community involvement; it takes technical compliance with the eligibility rules seriously; it is quite prepared to underspend its maximum budget where it sees fit; and the Committee expressed concern that "some of the applicants in Round 2 did not adequately understand the FDC framework, and applied for annual plan funding when project grants may have been more appropriate".
However, a major reason for its recommendations to reduce the French and Norwegian bid and to reject Hong Kong's request was its unease at plans for precipitous growth in funding and/or staffing: "We are concerned about the general increase in staff hiring that has been taking place over the last year, in particular where staff are performing functions that volunteers have been leading. We encourage entities to focus on balancing the work done by staff and volunteers in line with the Wikimedia movement's ethos of volunteers leading work, and to focus on having staff coordinate volunteer activities. We are also concerned about the growth rates of both staff and budgets. We would ask entities to consider whether their growth rates are sustainable in the long term, and whether they are leading to the most impact possible."
The recommendation comes after a comment by an FDC member last week during the feedback session at the Wikimedia Conference in Milan, that there is a limited number of dollars to give out, and it's not going to be possible to staff up all chapters.
Deryck Chan's announcement has provoked a stormy debate on the mailing list, in which more than 100 related posts have already appeared. Within an hour, Nathan wrote that "taking a chapter from essentially no funding to US$200k in one year is a massive leap that is both risky and unnecessary. ... Perhaps what's needed from the FDC is better guidance in advance about what the organic growth chart of chapter organizations should look like ...." He later commented:
| “ | It's not logical to assume that because the WMF has funds it should in some way equitably distribute those funds around the world. Supporting chapter operations, and funding offices and staff in dozens of countries, is not the chief object of the money raised from donors. We need to get away from the belief that chapters are unquestionably the best use of movement resources. There is a place for outreach, publicity, and targeted educational programs. But the WMF is best situated to supplement the efforts begun by volunteers, in the same way the WMF itself was created and has grown. It would be a poor use of movement funds indeed if the WMF decided to pour money into infant chapters with minimal development and fuzzy strategic goals. That's a recipe for, at an absolute minimum, good-faith mismanagement and waste of scarce donor resources. Avoiding this path was a very wise decision by the trustees, and I only hope they remain resolute ... | ” |
The WMF's Head of Global South Relationships, Asaf Bartov, who is also in charge of the (non-FDC) grants program, accused Derryck Chan of writing "a letter full of wikidrama", and of following this up "with a direct accusation of our team of 'foul play' ". Just before the publication of this edition of the Signpost, Deryck Chan issued an apology and partial retraction:
| “ | I apologise that my intentionally harsh words in the original mail and subsequent public replies may have been construed as bad-faith personal attacks against certain members of WMF staff and the FDC. In particular, I recognise that my anecdotal use of the words "foul play" may have hurt people's feelings; I apologise and retract this remark. I have already filed a formal complaint in my personal capacity to the FDC ombudsmen. I'm determined to step away from Wikimedia administration matters, so I won't comment any more on this matter. | ” |
Asaf Bartov and Dariusz Jemielniak accepted Chan's statement.
The Signpost understands that much of the frustration in Hong Kong rested on the fact that upon the closing date for applications the chapter was deemed "eligible". Referring to the reasons for the subsequent ineligibility, Asaf Bartov said: "I would like to stress that this is not a minor point of slight tardiness or some missing receipt—this is actual mismanagement of funds and does indeed reflect on WMHK's ability to handle large grants." However, he stressed that there was no bad faith on the part of the chapter, or "anything illicit or ethically improper".
Dariusz Jemielniak, the FDC's volunteer chair, told the Signpost that the chapter subsequently "did not return unused funds from a past grant or ask for a reallocation of funds as was requested by staff". With characteristic diplomacy, he said: "The Grantmaking team can—and will—improve in its communication with the chapters and entities, help them understand the significance of staying in compliance throughout the FDC process, and coordinate better with the WMF Finance team to ensure that entities maintain eligibility throughout the proposal process. This is a significant learning for the Grants team overall."
However, the critical point he made to us was that "the issues of compliance were not the critical reasons for the FDC’s recommendations on [the HK and Czech] proposals. Questions about WMHK’s proposal related to programmatic impact, sustainable growth, internal governance and the capacity of volunteers to manage a grant of the requested size, needed face-to-face deliberations before a recommendation could be made."
In a statement to the Signpost, Dariusz Jemielniak said that a "letter of intent" will now be an early point of contact between applicants and the FDC from the next round onwards, "which will allow the FDC staff to reach out to interested entities in a much more informed and intentional manner during the months that precede the ... deadline. The FDC staff intends to work closely with the entities and will set up IRC chats and other conversations to help entities decide if annual plan funding through the FDC or project grants through the Wikimedia Grants Program is the better option for their needs."
"While there will be every attempt made by the FDC staff and the FDC to clarify the process and help navigate its intricacies, ... the FDC process is demanding and rigorous for a reason: we are privileged as a movement to have the resources we have, and we should be thoughtful and responsible about how we ensure programmatic impact through these resources. This is what the FDC proposals are assessed on, ... Around the world, many all-volunteer organisations that hire their first staff receive much smaller grants than what we have already seen requested (and granted) in this first year of the FDC process." He told us that because FDC allocations provide general, or unrestricted, funds to entities, so the level of review is even higher than for project-specific funds. "It’s important for our movement to recognise the responsibility we have to each other and to our donors in order to ensure transparency and accountability."
WMF Trustee Jan-Bart de Vrees told the mailing-list: "I think that WMHK should reapply to the GAC (because I do think we need to fund them as a movement) with a modest proposal (and reading Asaf's long mail it seems to me that this is a much better place for their proposal. I just wonder how we can ensure that affiliates apply to the right funding the first time around. Of course a condition to any funding is being in compliance)." His encouragement to apply through the GAC was echoed by Trustee Samuel Klein, who wrote "Support for the first stages of growth should be handled differently from later infrastructure support. ... More continuous feedback is needed. Eligibility should be simple and unchanging throughout the process. Whether or not a proposal is approved, there should be follow-up support to help applicants figure out next steps."
The first-ever GLAM "boot camp" was held in Washington, D.C. this week, with 17 Wikimedians in attendance. The camp comes on the heels of GLAM-Wiki 2013 in London, which will be covered in the Signpost's Wikizine section in May.
The three-day conference was organized by one of the two regional chapters in the United States, Wikimedia DC, along with Dominic McDevitt-Parks and Lori Byrd Phillips, who have participated in the project as the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration and the United States Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) respectively, in the past.
The boot camp focused on the GLAM-Wiki projects in the United States and Canada. It aimed to have an "honest conversation" about where these projects have succeeded and where they have failed, so that the participants would be able to improve their own projects in the future. As such, the sessions revolved around the history of GLAM-Wiki, how to approach GLAMs, what GLAMs think of Wikipedia collaborations, and how to apply for grants and other related WMF funding. There were also breakout sessions on how to improve the GLAM pages to show to institutions, and tutorial workshops on editing the Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.
Most sessions were taken extremely well by the participants. In particular, the tutorial in editing Wikisource, which was entirely new to all but three people, generated a large amount of interest and led to the partial transcription of The Yellow Wall Paper. Participants also discussed the problems of GLAM-Wiki, which notably included the Gibraltarpedia controversy from last year; similar COI concerns may also be spreading to the German Wikipedia. The discussions occasionally branched out beyond purely GLAM-related concerns. One person, who works for an institution in the United States and has improved an article related to his employer (while being transparent on the talk page of the article involved), asked what has become a central question in the paid editing debate: "what happens if I use my skills as a Wikipedia editor to go to a GLAM institution and offer to improve the related article, even if I am paid?"
The benefits of GLAM-Wiki partnerships took precedence, though, as these reasons are necessary to convince a GLAM to work with an editor, and most attendees were not affiliated with a GLAM. One of the largest benefits was Wikipedia's global reach, with more than 500 million unique users a month, which can be invaluable in increasing access to a museum's holdings. For example, the German Federal Archives collaboration ended in 2010 after about 100,000 images were uploaded, but this was despite the vast benefits (PDF) the partnership brought to the table, including very accurate error reports and a vast increase in page views and revenue from image licensing. In fact, part of the reason was that the collaboration was too successful: the institution saw a 230% increase in research requests without a related increase in employees to handle them. There was also the downside of the digital world, in that many simply disregarded the Creative Commons share alike licenses when using the images outside of Wikimedia projects.
A variant of Joy's Law was also brought up as a benefit by Michael Edson, the director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian: "the person who knows the most about that object...you can't find them. You don't know who they are. But if you do it right, they can find you."
These lessons, and teaching them to interested Wikimedians, are key in the growth of the GLAM-Wiki project and its goal of having a self-sustaining project by the end of 2013, something that was aimed for but not attained under Liam Wyatt's 2011 Foundation Cultural Partnerships Fellowship and Phillips' 2012 Foundation position.
Other, unintended, results of the conference included the creation of a new article, Death during consensual sex, and the first two WikipediaWeekly podcasts in nearly a year.
On 24 April 2013, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published what turned out to be an influential op-ed in the New York Times. In her piece, "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists", Filipacchi explained that she had just—
| “ | ... noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the "American Novelists" category to the "American Women Novelists" subcategory. ... The intention appears to be to create a list of "American Novelists" on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. | ” |
Noting that there wasn't a category for "American men novelists", Filipacchi said that readers looking at the category listing for "American novelists" might not even be aware that women had been excluded. It is "small, easily fixable things like this", she argued, "that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world."
Her point was picked up and endorsed by other mainstream publications including –
These writers generally expressed incomprehension at why even the most minor male novelists remained listed in Wikipedia's "American novelists" category, while major American novelists such as Harper Lee were moved to a subcategory purely on the basis of their gender. The Independent quoted Caroline Criado-Perez of feminist website "The Women's Room":
| “ | It perpetuates the idea that men are the default and don't need to be marked in any way, whereas women are still seen as the outliers. If it is a prominent woman, it is a special case; it is a really Victorian attitude and shocking to see in 2013. It exemplifies how far we have to go for women just to be as accepted as men are; as the default. | ” |
Sarah Ditum, writing for the New Statesman, pointed out that Wikipedia appeared to sift Victorian novelists the same way as American novelists:
| “ | It's not just America which is to be sifted by sex. I took a look at Victorian Novelists, and there you can find a single subcategory: Victorian Women Novelists. While some women get to sit in the main section, many don't — including George Eliot. George Eliot, arguably both the finest novelist and the most Victorian of all Victorian novelists, tucked away in a feminine dependency of literary history. No such fears of perverse classification for Hardy or Dickens, of course: Victorian Male Novelists doesn't even exist as a category, because to be a man is to be neutral of gender in this system. It doesn't feel like we've shaken off all that much of the sexism which caused Mary Anne Evans to publish Middlemarch under a male pseudonym, does it? | ” |
The controversy deepened when Filipacchi published a follow-up in the New York Times on 28 April (this also appeared in the paper edition), reiterating her earlier points and noting that her Wikipedia biography as well as Wikipedia articles related to her and her work had come in for unfavourable attention from Wikipedians:
| “ | As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed "additional citations for verifications." Too bad they'd just taken out the useful sources.
In 24 hours, there were 22 changes to my page. Before that, there had been 22 changes in four years. Thursday night, a kind soul went in there and put back the deleted sources. The Wiki editors instantly took them out again. I knew my page might take a beating. But at least I'm back in the "American Novelists" category, along with many other women. For the moment anyway. |
” |
Articles in Salon and The New York Review of Books followed a day later. Focusing on the edits that Wikipedians had made to Wikipedia articles related to Filipacchi, Salon writer Andrew Leonard asserted that "Sexism isn't the problem at the online encyclopedia. The real corruption is the lust for revenge".
| “ | Welcome to the age of "revenge editing." The edits didn't stop at Filipacchi's page. Edits were also made to pages about her novels, stripping content from them on the grounds that they were overly self-promotional (a big Wikipedia no-no.) One editor ... even started editing the pages devoted to Filipacchi's parents, and slashed huge swaths from a page about the media conglomerate Hachette-Filipacchi, whose chairman emeritus happens to be Filipacchi's father, Daniel Filipacchi. As is usually the case with Wikipedia, high-profile "revenge editing" clearly motivated by animus tends to draw a lot of attention. A frequent result: ludicrous "edit wars" in which successive revisions are undone in rapid succession. ...
Wikipedia's saving grace is that all the edit wars—all the ugly evidence of "revenge editing"—is preserved for eternity for anyone curious enough to investigate in the "talk pages" that reveal precisely how Wikipedia's knowledge is constructed. ... the vast majority of the anti-Filipacchi edits [were] made by just one person, a Wikipedia editor who goes by the user-name "Qworty." |
” |
Leonard then quoted various talk page contributions by Qworty that he felt reflected very poorly on Wikipedia:
| “ | Wow! We've got Judith "weapons of mass destruction" Miller, penis comparisons, dog feces and accusations that Filipacchi "sent thugs" after Wikipedia editors, all popping up in the context of an apoplectic defense by one Wikipedia editor of actions that other Wikipedia editors labeled "revenge editing." There's a lot of anger here (not to mention an unhealthy fixation with excrement!). Call me persnickety, but reading Qworty's comments did not give me the greatest faith in Wikipedia's internal process for building an encyclopedia of human knowledge. | ” |
Both Andrew Leonard in Salon and James Gleick in The New York Review of Books stated that a large number of recategorisations performed by a single contributor, named by Gleick as User:Johnpacklambert, had been responsible for precipitating the crisis.
In his article, Gleick reviewed User:Johnpacklambert's edits in some detail, and gave John an opportunity to put his point of view:
| “ | Lambert vehemently disputes suggestions that he is motivated by sexism (or racism, as the case may be). He cites principles of Wikipedia categorization: arguing, for example, that huge categories should be broken up and "diffused" because they become useless for navigation. "This whole hullabaloo is really missing the point," he told me. "The people who are making a big deal about this are not being up-front about what happens if we do not diffuse categories." Others argued that laypeople are simply misunderstanding the purpose of a big category like American novelists. "It is really a holding ground for people who have yet to be categorized into a more specific sub-cat," said a user called Obi-Wan Kenobi. "It's not some sort of club that you have to be a part of." | ” |
Gleick added that the problem seemed to be "more general and pervasive than most had originally thought", pointing out that African-American and other non-white writers also regularly found themselves "diffused" from the default category to subcategories. He gave the example of Maya Angelou—Gleick found that her biography was categorised in African-American writers, African-American women poets, and American women poets, but not American poets or American writers.
NPR also covered the story, featuring an interview with Wikimedia Foundation employee Ryan Kaldari, who said:
| “ | Wikipedia does have problems with sexism because, as a lot of people know, only about 10 percent or less of the editors at Wikipedia are women. And so a lot of times there's this subconscious, white, male, privileged sexism that exists on Wikipedia that isn't really acknowledged. | ” |
With discussions ongoing in Wikipedia, on 30 April Amanda Filipacchi published a new piece on the controversy in the Atlantic, titled "Sexism on Wikipedia Is Not the Work of 'A Single Misguided Editor'. It's a widespread problem."
In this latest piece, Filipacchi took issue with the assertion made by Leonard and Gleick the day before, that a single editor—User:Johnpacklambert, according to Gleick—was to blame for the controversy. Listing a number of edits made to women novelists' biographies in Wikipedia over the past few months, with dates and the names or IP addresses of the editors who made them, Filipacchi showed that User:Johnpacklambert was only the latest in a line of editors who had recategorised major women novelists in the manner she had described in her op-ed.
In the process, Filipacchi also rebutted claims made by Liz Henry in a widely-tweeted post on bookmaniac.org, titled "Journalists don't understand Wikipedia sometimes". Henry, stating that she was "a bit annoyed at the facile reporting that does not seem to take into account the complexity of how information gets added to Wikipedia", had claimed in her post that two of the novelists named by Filipacchi, Donna Tartt and Amy Tan, had in reality never been in the "American novelists" category, and thus had never been removed. In response, Filipacchi provided verifiable dates and times when they were so removed, along with the names of the editors making the edits.
Filipacchi noted that User:Johnpacklambert had done "something particularly interesting and annoying" after her biography had had the American novelists category restored to it: he removed the category again, and instead added Filipacchi to a new category he had just created: "American humor novelists". The change was undone, and at the time of writing, Filipacchi's biography is categorised among American novelists in Wikipedia.
In a piece listed by The Verge among the week's best writing on the web, Kevin Morris of The Daily Dot illuminated the unusual background of the Yuri Gadyukin hoax, which was discovered and deleted from Wikipedia in early March. The hoax, detected by Yaroslav Blanter, had remained undiscovered for three years and seven months.
It turned out that the Wikipedia and IMDB articles for Gadyukin were part of a viral marketing campaign for a faux documentary project by film makers Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker.
| “ | The hoax that fooled the largest encyclopedia and Internet movie database on the planet for nearly four years began when Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker stumbled into a Belgian restaurant in London in 2002. They were tired. Boyter was an inexperienced director who would sometimes shoot reams of footage in a single day. Along with Ducker—who has editing credits on more than 20 films—he'd just passed the whole day cutting down footage for his first film, Anniversary.
The drinks and exhaustion sparked their imagination. They tossed out fantastic hypotheticals, wondering what kind of director would "shoot an insane amount of material, more material than anyone could ever watch," as Ducker later recalled. "What kind of person would shoot an endless film, just never stop shooting?" The two friends were forging a fascinating character—a fictional marriage of legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and control-freak geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, an archetypal director slowly creeping into madness. Or as Ducker described him, "a slightly psychotic person. And a slightly manipulative person." They were creating Yuri Gadyukin. |
” |
Ducker explained that the viral campaign was "a way of us starting to tell a story, starting to create the world, while in the meantime we waited for people to give us the money. We were determined not be to be stopped from getting that. You have to make sure nobody stops you. That's the key to making a film."
Yuri Gadyukin may well survive the deletion of his Wikipedia and IMDB biographies—the film project is still on.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted between April 21 and 27, 2013.
Nine featured articles were promoted this week.
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
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Three featured pictures were promoted this week.
One featured topic was promoted this week.
This week, we traveled to the Japanese Wikipedia's WikiProject Baseball for perspectives from a version of Wikipedia that treats WikiProjects as their own unique namespace (プロジェクト:) independent of "Wikipedia:". WikiProject Baseball was started in November 2005 to cover the game of baseball, including leagues in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. The project's members noted that language barriers create difficulties in contributing between the English and Japanese Wikipedias, a challenge we also encountered in preparing this interview for publication. We interviewed もきゅもきゅー, CHELSEA ROSE, and Num.
Next week, we'll mix our scientific disciplines. Until then, discover the mysteries of life in the archive.
Reader comments
After the special report on article popularity published in February, the WP:TOP25 and WP:5000 reports have continued to chronicle the most popular Wikipedia articles on a weekly basis. For the most recently reviewed week (22–28 April), we see that it was generally a slow week, dominated by pop culture, previous entries to the list, as well as Google Doodles and Reddit threads.
For the week of 22 to 28 April, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
| Rank | Article | Views | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ella Fitzgerald | 1,902,708 | .jpg) |
| 2 | Iron Man 3 | 652,309 | As per usual in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the third installment in the Iron Man series was released internationally a week early, triggering interest before its release in its home country on May 3. |
| 3 | Game of Thrones | 543,047 | This epic fantasy TV series launched its third season on March 31, and has seen its ratings almost double on its premiere episode. |
| 4 | Munich massacre | 503,257 | An attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany on the Israeli Olympic team by the Palestinian group Black September. Most views came on April 25, cause is not certain. |
| 5 | 488,397 | A perennially popular article, it always appears in the WP:TOP25 | |
| 6 | Hemlock Grove (TV series) | 474,142 | Produced by schlockmeister Eli Roth, who also directed the pilot, this predictably gory werewolf series, based on a novel, was released in its entirety via Netflix on April 19. |
| 7 | Oblivion (2013 film) | 466,461 | Despite narrowly losing the weekend top spot to Michael Bay's sociopathon Pain & Gain, this Tom Cruise star vehicle still handily beat it in the Wikipedia stakes, garnering more than twice its views. |
| 8 | Deaths in 2013 | 426,855 | The list of deaths in the current year is always a quite popular article. |
| 9 | Socotra | 407,165 |  |
| 10 | George Jones | 404,786 |  |
Notes:
The Sexology case, which was covered in detail in last week's "Arbitration report", closed shortly after publication with no changes. Two cases remain open.
In the case, brought by Lecen, an editor is accused of systematically skewing several articles involving former Argentine president Juan Manuel de Rosas to portray a brutal dictator as a democratic leader, in keeping with the political motives of Argentine "nationalists" or "revisionists".
The evidence stage was scheduled to close 12 April 2013, the workshop stage on 19 April, and a proposed decision was scheduled for 26 April.
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 was due by 20 March 2013, the workshop was to close on 27 March, and a proposed decision was scheduled for 3 April.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.
The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.
A paper[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. The sample of scientific items is made of the entries in the ACM digital library including more than 100 k papers, 150 k authors and 35 k keywords. However, only a tiny subset of these could be found in English Wikipedia pages (the authors considered all Wikipedia pages in the English edition which contain at least two mentions of any of the scientific items in the sample). The academic reputation is calculated based on three criteria: frequency of appearance, number of citations each item receives from the others, and PageRank calculated on the citation network. The Wikipedia ranking is based on three popularity measures of all the pages that have mentioned the item: number of mentions, sum over PageRank of all the mentioning pages, and sum over in-degrees of all the mentioning pages in Wikipedia's hyperlink network.
These 3 times 3 choices give 9 combinations of academic ranking and Wikipedia ranking for 3 types of scientific entities (authors, papers, keywords). All these 27 pairs are shown to be correlated according to Spearman's Rank Correlation, indicating that in general Wikipedia mentions are non-randomly driven by scientific reputation. However, most of the combinations are less significant. Surprisingly, the most relevant Wikipedia ranking criterion turns out to be the pure total number of mentions, compared to the more sophisticated ones, i.e., PageRank and in-degree measures.
In a separate part, authors define two sets of scientific items, those which are mentioned in Wikipedia, and those which are not mentioned at all (the latter is larger in size by a factor of 2 for keywords, 100 for authors, and 300 for papers). They show that for all 3 types, the set of items which are mentioned in Wikipedia have a better academic rank on average.
From this, the author concludes that "the Wikipedia community is unconsciously mimicking the general historiography of the country", in particular a glorification of Angkor and other early kingdoms at the cost of later periods, and observes a "continuing dominance of the traditional historiographical narrative of Cambodian history in Wikipedia." The subsequent section of the paper tries to put these results into the context of the historical debates in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a suggested remedy for problems with the under-representation of the developing world in the media, put forth by a UNESCO commission in the MacBride report (1980):The early history of Cambodia is represented by an extremely weak article, but there is an improvement in the articles dealing with the early kingdoms of Cambodia. The improvement ends abruptly with articles on the 'dark age' of Cambodia, the French Protectorate, the Japanese occupation, and early postindependence periods being of a much lower quality. Afterward, the quality picks up again with especially good articles on the American intervention in Cambodia, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, and the People's Republic of Kampuchea. However, the quality does not last; as we near contemporary times, the articles take another turn for the worse.
The author's argument is somewhat weakened by asserting erroneously that "there exists no Cambodian-language Wikipedia", but generally aligns with other quantitative research that has found a geographic unevenness of coverage in Wikipedia. The author is an information studies professor at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and previously published a related paper in the same journal examining the Wikipedia article History of the Philippines, reviewed in the August issue: "The limits of amateur NPOV history".Wikipedia provides access—it is free to use by anyone with an Internet connection, and print versions can also be distributed. But the whole thrust of the NWICO argument is that content matters and those who create content matter perhaps even more, with the commission stressing that countries needed to 'achieve self-reliance in communication capacities and policies' ... Contrary to popular belief, in the new 'information age' content is, once again, the preserve of the few, not the many, and a geographically concentrated few at that.
Julia Preusse, Jerome Kunegis, Matthias Thimm, Thomas Gottron and Steffen Staab investigate[4] mechanisms of changes in a wiki that are of structural nature, i.e., which are a direct result of the wiki's linking structure. They consider if the addition and removal of internal links between pages can be predicted using just information about the network connecting these articles. The study's innovation lies in considering the removal of links, which account for a high proportion of removals and reverts. The authors performed an empirical study on Wikipedia, stating that traditional indicators of structural change used in the link analysis literature can be classified into four classes, which indicate growth, decay, stability and instability of links. These methods were then employed to identify the underlying reasons for individual additions and removals of knowledge links.
The network created by links between articles in Wikipedia is characterized by preferential attachment. Prior work on social networks has identified a phenomenon called "liability of newness", in which new connections are more likely to be broken than older ones. To provide a better predictive model of link evolution the team considered five hypotheses:
To test these hypotheses, they created networks based on the history of the mainspace articles till 2011 of the top five Wikipedias after the English one. For example, in the French Wikipedia, 41.7 million links were added and 17.3 million removed during that time. The data was used to create a link creation predictor and a link removal predictor. These were then evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.
The results were that Preferential attachment and Embedding are good indicators of growth. Liability of Newness did not turn out to be a good indicator of link removal, but more of article instability. Reciprocity is also an indicator of growth, but is not as significant since most links in a wiki are not reciprocated.
An article[5] in the Journal of Information Science, titled "Understanding trust formation in digital information sources: The case of Wikipedia", explores the criteria used by students to evaluate the credibility of Wikipedia articles. It contains an overview of various earlier studies about credibility judgments of Wikipedia articles (some of them reviewed previously in this space, example: "Quality of featured articles doesn't always impress readers").
The authors asked "20 second-year undergraduate students and 30 Master’s students" in information studies to first spend 20 minutes reading "a copy of a two-page Wikipedia article on Generation Z, a topic with which students were expected to have some familiarity", and answer an open-ended question explaining how they would judge its trustworthiness. In a subsequent part, the respondents were asked to rank a list of factors for trustworthiness in case of "either (a) the topic of an assignment, or (b) a minor medical condition from which they were suffering". One of the first findings was a "low pre-disposition to use [Wikipedia], possibly suggesting a propensity to distrust, grounded on debates and comments on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia" – possibly to the fact that the example article contained an example of vandalism, a fact highlighted by several respondents (e.g. "started off as a valid entry ... due to citations strengthening this ... however came to the last paragraph and the whole document was marred by the insert of 'writing articles on Wikipedia while on amphetamines' [as purported hobby of Generation Z members]... just feels that you can't trust anything now").
Among the given trustworthiness factors, the following were ranked most highly:authorship, currency, references, expert recommendation and triangulation/verification, with usefulness just below this threshold. In other words, participants valued having articles that were written by experts on the subject, that were up to date, and that they perceived to be useful (content factors). ... Interestingly these factors all seemed more or less equally important for both contexts, with the exception of references, which for predictable reasons were seen as having greater importance in the context of assignments.
In a conference paper titled "Analyzing the flow of ideas and profiles of contributors in an open learning community"[6] (see also audience notes from the presentation), the authors construct a graph from the set of revisions of a set of Wikiversity pages, with two kind of edges: 1) "Update edges", linking a page's revision to the directly subsequent revision. These are understood as representing "knowledge flow over the course of the collaborative process on a single wiki page". 2) "Hyperlink edges" between two revisions of different pages with a wikilink between them - but pointing in the opposite direction, because the idea is that they indicate knowledge flowing from the linked page to the linking page. By requiring the source node of a hyperlink edge "as the latest revision of the hyperlinked page at the moment of creation of the target revision", both kinds of links point forward in time, resulting in a two-relational directed acyclic graph (DAG), which is "depicting the knowledge flow over time." After filtering out "redundant" hyperlink edges and attaching authorship information to each node (page revision).
The authors apply this procedure to a set of Wikiversity articles in the area of medicine, starting with v:Gynecological History Taking. The results are interpreted as follows:The method is subsequently applied to profile the activities of various users.the beginning, short after the category medicine was founded, the authors in this category built up the basic structure of the knowledge domain. The main relations and idea flows between the learning materials were established early in the development of the domain. After that the authors have been focusing on elaborating the articles without introducing new important hyperlinks. The overall picture of the learning process in this domain suggests a divergent evolution of ideas after an initial period of mutual fertilization between different topics. This conforms to the idea of groups of learners that followed different interests in the medicine domain with little inter-group collaboration on the creation of new shared learning resource.
The authors have integrated these algorithms, including visualization tools, into a "network analytics workbench ... used in the ongoing EU project SISOB which aims to measure the influence of science on society based on the analysis of (social) networks of researchers and created artifacts."
This week saw the deployment of the Echo extension, also known as "notifications". Deployed by the EE team, the extension adds a "Facebook-style" notifications menu in the top right of a users screen, to let them know about different events. Discussion quickly erupted over the loss of the new messages bar, aka the orange bar of doom. A user script was quickly written to restore it. A RFC to properly restore it is underway on the talk page.
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.
