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Alongside the Signpost's interviews with the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees candidates, we asked the candidates for the two new Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) seats and its Ombudsperson a series of questions. The FDC makes recommendations to the WMF Board on how to disburse donors' funds to affiliate organizations (in the first two rounds, more than US$11M), which thus far the Board has accepted without change. The significant responsibility the two successful candidates will take on for recommending allocations and commenting on standards and practices in the movement appears to have garnered little attention from the editing community.
In late news, the election will not begin on 1 June, as notified some time ago. Little more than 12 hours before the advertised start, the election was postponed by a week, to 8 June. The reasons given involve the inability to verify the voter list and that SecurePoll is properly functioning, and the fact that the voter interfaces have not been translated from English to other languages.
Six candidates are standing for the FDC: Smallbones (en.wp userpage), Cristian Consonni (CristianCantoro), Delphine Ménard (notafish), Ben (ImperfectlyInformed), Abbas Mahmood (Abbasjnr), and Mile Kiš (MikyM).
Two candidates are standing for ombudsperson: Matthew Bisanz (MBisanz) and Susana Morais (Lusitana).
For brevity, we will refer to each candidate by first name.
Wikimedia chapters are affiliated but independent organizations founded to support and promote the Wikimedia movement. Most are based in nation-states. The affiliate entities have grown significantly over the past five years in number (now 39) and funding. The Foundation's financial reforms last year put chapter funding and scrutiny under more centralised control, and has introduced two new types of entities that are not tied to geographical regions—user groups and thematic organisations—although few of these other types of entity have yet been launched.
The Signpost asked the FDC candidates about this large increase in funding, which now accounts for almost a third of the movement's expenditure of donors' funds, and whether it is achieving its intended objectives, such as improving the number of editors, increasing female participants, and boosting the quality of WMF sites in the developing world.
Many of the candidates believe there are not enough metrics in place to adequately measure the impact the money is having (Ben, Delphine, Cristian, Smallbones, and Michał). Ben has some reservations about the amount of money being spent, highlighting part of the 2011 editor survey, where 82 percent of those surveyed who knew about a chapters' existence in their country were not members. Put another way, "when faced with another opportunity to contribute to The MissionTM, 82 percent of Wikipedians—who had above reported that they were here and/or had joined to contribute to The MissionTM—said 'no, thank you'." Michał, on the other hand, believes that chapters are "key intermediaries" between the WMF and the global editing community, as he believes they provide a key "talent and volunteer pool and could ... act as competence centres." As for the Global South, Delphine and Abbas hope that the FDC will increase its reach to encourage more programs like Afripedia in the developing world.
The candidates are split on whether the related user groups and thematic organizations—of which only five total have been approved by the Affiliations Committee so far—should be eligible to receive funds from the FDC. Most believe it's a possibility in the future, but with the FDC only a year old (Abbas), and the activities of these groups being so limited at the present time (Cristian, Smallbones), they should not be applying at the present time. Michał is hesitant due to "possible competence clashes and problems with representation of various cultures and communities in these affiliates." Mile says: "the WMF already has programs that allow thematic organisations and user groups open access to funds. The FDC is a much more complex process that requires good results in the past and the ability to manage funds well. That means that grantees have to have an appropriate structure and capacity. If some thematic organisations or user groups have such kind of structure, there's the possibility for negotiation. It's certainly a topic for further discussion." Ben is the only candidate to fully support both organizations' ability to apply; Delphine supports thematic organizations, but doubts that user groups would even need to apply.
The Foundation's global funding model is divided between the FDC for eligible chapters and the Grant Advisory Committee (GAC) for other chapters and affiliated groups. Individual engagement grants (IEGs) have been recently added to the mix for small, project-based grants.
Asked whether having a division between the FDC and GAC is the optimal method of financing the Wikimedia movement, the candidates came out with interesting positions. Ben thinks that having both the FDC and GAC as reactive committees—i.e. they only respond to specific proposals put forward to them—is a poor arrangement, as it prevents them from soliciting projects that specifically align with the Foundation's core goals. He says, "it seems parochial and it is quite likely that the most effective service provider may not be a formal member of the 'movement'. The economics is that a wider and more flexible pool of options is more efficient."
Delphine believes that there is no optimal model, as "both models make sense in their particular environment and answer to a specific need at a specific time in the life of organisations or groups that wish to engage with Wikimedia. ... There's no one size fits all. And we do need a mix of caution and boldness in the way we attribute grants: we need to foster initiative and new ideas to tackle our issues, but we also need to be take responsibility for what we do with the donations entrusted to us." Cristian and Abbas see the two-headed organization financing model as the best model for the WMF, though Abbas hopes that the first year of FDC grants will be analyzed to see if the process can be improved. Mile says that despite their similarities, both FDC and GAC have many differences, and "it's good to have different bodies involved in the process."
With this election, the FDC will move from being a fully appointed body to partially community-elected. We asked the candidates if this was a positive trend, and if it should continue to its logical conclusion, with all members facing scrutiny in a full election.
Ben, Delphine, Cristian, Smallbones, and Michał all expressed reservations, for different reasons. They believe that appointed slots for individuals with specific skill sets would be desirable, similar to the 40% of Board trustees. Smallbones and Delphine went further, hoping that in addition to skills, the appointed slots should be used to ensure that the FDC is balanced "in geography, languages, and culture as well as skill sets and gender" (Smallbones). Abbas is the only candidate to support a fully elected body.
As the Signpost reported four weeks ago, the Hong Kong chapter's FDC application for US$212k was rejected, due to the FDC's concern with the plan's impact, along with "WMHK’s internal governance, financial management capacity, and [the] capacity of its volunteers to manage a plan of this size." The FDC recommended that the chapter "[address] these issues before undertaking a plan of this extent." Was this the right decision?
Only one candidate, Cristian, thinks Hong Kong's request was "reasonable", though he continued to say that too much was requested, given the limited history of activity by the chapter. He thinks the Committee should have consulted with the chapter to find a more "gradual path." Abbas, Ben, and Michał all agreed with the FDC's decision; Michał based his decision on a total lack of analyzable history, few proposed programs, one of which was "professionalization ... which is not a goal per se", and what he saw as overambitious growth. On the other hand, Delphine says that without seeing the FDC's deliberations, she's not well-placed to make a decision, but it appears that it "suffered from a typical case of cultural miscommunication. The FDC should and will ... implement an even stronger pre-request monitoring of grant requests." Mile stressed the need for a "mentor/supervisor" to provide technical advice.
We concluded our interview questions with three related questions about the FDC internal processes: the application forms, community feedback, and the WMF staff role in the process. Cristian did not answer these questions because he has "no experience as a proponent of a FDC request", though from his experience with the GAC, he can say that "comments from the community or the staff are usually valuable and ... a source of good ideas."
The candidates are broadly satisfied with the forms, although several candidates believe that they could be simplified. In addition, Ben and Michał both wish that more data could be displayed in charts and spreadsheets. As it stands, Ben says, it's difficult for the FDC to get a grasp on the submissions; he thinks the Meta website (which houses the FDC) "in general feels a bit like a maze, which can be frustrating. I'd like to see more data on number of articles, edits, and unique visitors", while Michał commented on "an obvious weakness of MediaWiki ... if the form were in some spreadsheet, you could easily compare submissions, create ratings, perform calculations etc." Delphine was the only candidate with a strong stance against the forms; she believes that they are too complicated and don't give requesting organizations the freedom to show the information they want to display. She believes they can be greatly improved by incorporating recommendations from past applicants.
Nearly all candidates decry the lack of community feedback in the FDC process. While they express gratitude for those who had commented, Ben highlights the "sparse" feedback, Delphine's reaction is one of dismay, and Smallbones pushed at the need for more community oversight over the disbursement of such a large amount of donors' funds. Michał attributes this lack to volunteers' responsibilities on their projects. Abbas is the only candidate satisfied with the level of community input.
The role of WMF staff role in the FDC process is supported by all candidates. Ben poses the only questions: how do the WMF staff assess the WMF's own application without a conflict of interest; but then notes that a hired consultant completed the assessment, not a WMF staff member. Delphine says the pre-request monitoring "needs to be strengthened ... to avoid misunderstandings and formal inadequacies."
Editors are invited to ask questions of the candidates on Meta.
Matthew Bisanz and Susana Morais, the two candidates for the FDC ombudsperson position, also responded to inquiries by the Signpost. To start, we asked them about the FDC's process, including the application forms, the tripartite communication structure between the FDC, staff, and applicants, and the ombudsperson role itself.
With regards to the application forms, both candidates express their support for them as-is, but believe they can be improved. Matthew says that "the parts on comparative financial activity and SWOT could use substantial re-working to help the proposal flow more for the organization preparing [their application]", while Susana hopes that the issue of filling out these forms in wikimarkup can be improved in the future. On FDC, staff, and applicant communications, which faced criticism after the Hong Kong chapter incident, Susana believes that they can be improved. Matthew agrees, and goes farther with specifics:
| “ | I think part of this is structural. There appears to be an excessive number of pages, subpages, templates, forms, etc., relative to the actual submission and review of the proposals. Minimizing the number of pages people are editing and talking to each other on (and minimizing the use of email to supplement page discussions) will improve communication. Also, identifying bilingual individuals who can can review proposals originating from non-native English countries as well as to communicate comments back to the submitters will help to better align the expectation of grant requestors with those of the FDC and to ensure a thorough understanding of the proposals and comments. | ” |
The role of the ombudsperson, however, showed the starkest difference between the candidates. Susana, the incumbent, believes that it met her expectations, because she was able to ensure that the process remained transparent, any complaints were addressed, and comments on the process were taken on board in considering future proposals. Matthew, on the other hand, criticized the role's expectations. In his view, these are extremely unclear and blend being a mediator, internal auditor, and program evaluator; currently there is little definition "as to when the ombudsperson should act as a mediator to resolve a complaint, when they should act as an internal auditor to shine light on errors, and when they should act as a program evaluator to document ways to improve the process."
What are their top three pieces of advice for applicants who are framing an appeal or a complaint about the outcome of their FDC proposal? Matthew:
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Susana:
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Editors are invited to ask questions of the candidates on Meta.
| “ | Although his particular reign of terror did not wipe out modern paganism, he has to have done more damage to Wikipedia's image than Tomás de Torquemada managed for the Catholic church in Spain. | ” |
In the continuing saga of User:Qworty's outing as author Robert Clark Young, several blogs and websites including Salon.com covered the now-banned user's anti-Pagan editing. In an article published on 22 May 2013, TechEye—calling Wikipedia (albeit inconsistently) "Wackypedia"—described Qworty's edits as a "reign of terror" and were pleased to find that he had not succeeded in removing several prominent Pagan biographies from the encyclopedia. The article cited one of Qworty's talk page comments as saying that practitioners of Stregheria (Italian Paganism) were "mentally ill, delusional people". The same day, Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters wrote on the group blog "The Wild Hunt" about Qworty's lack of NPOV and revenge editing against Jeff Rosenbaum, a prominent Pagan figure. Pitzl-Waters also quoted Qworty's previously mentioned comments about Stregheria at length and mentioned Qworty's numerous sockpuppets, concluding his piece with a call for his readers to help improve Wikipedia's Pagan content (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Neopaganism).
On 24 May 2013, Andrew Leonard published a follow-up to his earlier article on Qworty (see related Signpost coverage) in Salon. Leonard pointed out the irony in Qworty's accusations that prominent Pagan writer David Jay Brown edited his own article, which was deleted in November 2012. Leonard quoted Qworty's comments during the AFD: "[Brown sees himself as] a modern-day messiah who combined all of the powers of Jesus and Freud and Einstein and Marx and, oh why the heck not, Timothy Leary, lol." Leonard states that Qworty's editing in this area was brought to his attention by the Pagan community after he published the initial outing article, and that the Pagan community was very concerned about Qworty's deletion nominations, as they felt those people were notable. Leonard noted the irony in Qworty's comments about Brown seen alongside his inflated writing about himself, quoting both extensively. Both Rosenbaum and Brown responded to Leonard's request for comment, saying that though they had violated the rules about spam and COI years ago, they had since learned how to edit properly and had contributed productively. Right as the story of Young's identity broke, Brown nominated his article for deletion under the same rationale Qworty had posted for his biography, what Leonard called "hilarious in its own perverse way"—though the article was kept.
Last week the Signpost began a two-part interview with the candidates for these positions; this week, the second and final part of the interview explores two broad themes: Meta, the site that hosts movement-wide coordination; and offline entities—the chapters and the new thematic organisations and user groups.
The 12 candidates are Leigh Thelmadatter, Milos Rancic, Liam Wyatt, Phoebe Ayers, Tom Morton, John Vandenberg, María Sefidari, Jeromy-Yu Chan, Samuel Klein, Kat Walsh, Michel Aaij, and Francis Kaguna. Kat Walsh was alone among all candidates in sending no responses to the Signpost.
In late news, the election will not begin on 1 June, as notified some time ago. Little more than 12 hours before the advertised start, the election was postponed by a week, to 8 June. The reasons given involve the inability to verify the voter list and that SecurePoll is properly functioning, and the fact that the voter interfaces have not been translated from English to other languages. Given that the Signpost had just been published, we were not in a position to make enquiries about what went wrong.
All active editors of WMF projects (with minor exceptions) can vote, and there is information on how to vote, including a direct link to the SecurePoll system, which will be active from UTC midnight start of Saturday 1 June for two weeks. Risker, a member of the independent election committee, told the Signpost that banners with direct links should appear for logged-in users during the voting period. Elections for two seats on the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and its ombudsperson are being held concurrently. Candidates for these positions are interviewed in this week's "News and notes".
Meta was a child of the very early wiki environment in 2001, a time when there was little more than a threadbare English Wikipedia. Meta is the main site for stewards, the Foundation’s grantmaking activities, WMF elections, and the archives of chapter reports. The boundaries are not entirely distinct between Meta and the Foundation’s official website, and between Meta and Outreach. Despite the increasingly global reach of Meta, the site remains almost entirely in English, technocratic, and with a certain in-house mentality; editors who are new to the fray and who lack fluency in English face significant hurdles in participating.
Are candidates happy with the accessibility of Meta to members of the editing communities?
Some candidates point to the elephant in the room—that "most Wikipedia editors don't know exactly what Meta is all about" (Michel, Leigh). Milos says: "Meta is used by all Wikimedia communities, which creates a specific kind of mess. Although as a steward I'm a Meta 'native', it's often hard for me to navigate there. I don't have a particular idea of how to solve it, except to call [for] better design." Phoebe comments: "not many folks on the projects know about Meta, and they probably find it confusing to navigate, as the site has suffered from a lack of concerted maintenance over time. The best thing we could do ... is to continue to consolidate key information and projects like outreach and event planning there, and put in some design work to make it easier to use."
Samuel believes that "both small tools to support cross-wiki and cross-language discussions, and better coordination of announcements" would help. John says that although improvements have been made in translation tools, "Meta has been left to languish and be dominated by 'insiders' because the WMF and its Board have chosen to make many decisions without adequate consultation of the community, [with a few] notable exceptions." Tom emphasises the need for active links from other projects: "we lack enough hyperlinks to Meta, which means people approach it in a very haphazard manner. ... The meta community probably needs to broaden and diversify [with] more strategic collaboration there to build links between projects."
To what extent should two-way communication between Meta participants be assisted by funded translation services, and would this be viable and practical?
The responses were generally cautious and suggest that there's no clear strategy for improving inter-linguistic communication on Meta. Leigh says: "if money were no object, of course funded translation would be a necessity. However, with 270+ languages, it's not feasible." Liam is against paying people to translate, pointing to the huge amount of text at issue: "Are we also willing to pay to translate fundraising info, monthly reports, important software messages, and election information? What translation is paid for and what is not would need consensus." On this issue, Michel refers to the goals of increasing participation and reach in the Strategic Plan. Volunteer translation is the default, he says, but for important matters the Foundation should consider paying for translation—at least for the major languages and the major pages. "That shouldn't cost an arm and a leg and it would lower the threshold for [participation by] non-English speaking editors." María believes "some crucial questions or issues for the movement should have translations assured to the main languages at the very least." Her preference would be "to empower our translation volunteers".
In Phoebe's opinion, "the Board should put in more effort to make sure critical Board information is widely translated. Paying for translation is a complex proposition: it varies hugely in quality and must be reviewed by someone knowledgeable about the projects; however, I'd support it as an aid to our volunteer translator community for some documents." Tom says: "Perhaps. But a proper cost–benefit analysis would be needed. The first step would be to actively try and create a volunteer translation service, perhaps as a thematic organisation. Another option would be to look at hiring some of our more prolific volunteers to conduct translation, similar to how the Foundation has hired other community members."
Samuel set out a specific plan: "We have a body of talented multilingual editors and translators. We should commit ourselves to supporting two-way communication across a set of five or six major languages, and invest in expanding and supporting our translator community. This may include funding translation as a temporary stopgap, but should focus on honoring and recruiting [volunteer] translators, and providing them with training, tools, and a visible portfolio. This has been done with other communities, such as GlobalVoices, which handle higher volumes of text than the daily throughput of Meta."
John says: "I do not support the Foundation's outsourcing of translation to US for-profit organisations. ... In my experience, volunteers are happy to do translations if they have sufficient time." He wants "a small grants program" to facilitate discussion and dissemination of upcoming changes for editors in a particular language, and to coordinate volunteer translation, or when necessary do the translation themselves or outsource it to a local translator. He believes the WMF should fund chapters to help volunteers without English-language skills who wish to participate in an English-dominated Meta discussions.
Two second-language speakers were concerned about the quality of paid translations they have seen. Milos says that outside the key documents, translations are often "not of substantial value. English is global lingua franca and a person wanting to participate in global community has to have functional knowledge of English." Jerome-Yu has experience with the translation service hired by WMF for English to Chinese: "I still need to fix a lot, there's unfamiliarity with the terms, and ... the service is not really viable." In some cases, he says, fixing up paid translations "is actually more difficult and tedious than doing our own all over again."
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The chapters are independent organisations founded by interested individuals to support and promote Wikimedia projects. While projects such as Wikipedia are globally structured by language, most chapters are set up as nation-state-based organizations. The chapters have grown significantly over the past five years, now numbering 39 and accounting for almost a third of the movement's expenditure of donors' funds. The Foundation's financial reforms last year put chapter funding and scrutiny under more centralised control by insisting on the publication of regular activity reports on Meta. The Foundation has introduced two new types of entities that are not tied to any geographical region—user groups and thematic organisations—although few of these have been launched at this early stage.
Is the substantial funding allocated to chapters yielding value for money in terms of the quality and scope of WMF sites related to developing-world languages?
Despite the specific terms of the question, candidates responded to a wide spectrum of self-selected responses—some focusing on chapters, others on languages. Leigh says: "No. There is too little oversight to how the money is being spent or even if a chapter is following Wikimedia rules and values. There are far too many stories of people building little "kingdoms" of themselves and even marginalizing those they do not like."
Milos doesn't think we could create something "substantially better than chapters are", although he says it is difficult to predict how chapters, thematic organisations, and user groups will play out against each other in the coming years. Liam is upbeat about chapters: "I have always championed the raising of the bar in terms of professionalism and programmatic-reporting by chapters—and this is what we have seen in the last year with the introduction of the FDC. But this should be matched by programs to support the different stages of development of an organisation." He believes that "only when we have different metrics for different levels of organisational capacity can we make judgements on whether a chapter (or any project for that matter) is 'yielding value for money'."
María has confidence in the movement's grantmaking ability: "There are controls in place that make it possible to deny anyone, be it the developing world or elsewhere, continued access to WMF funding if they fail to report and fail to demonstrate impact." Phoebe is "really pleased with the general direction of the new Affiliations Committee and funding models (of grants and the FDC); I strongly supported more community review for all Wikimedia groups and activities, and we are slowly getting there." Jerome-Yu is generally supportive of chapters, but we should "also empower other entities, and even individuals, to fill the gap the chapters may have missed".
Samuel says: "We need to allocate more funding to chapters in the developing world in order to better advance the quality and scope of the projects in local languages. The funding allocated to chapters in the developing world has supported many of the largest outreach, writing, and content partnerships in local languages. ... Chapters in the developed world receive more than 90% of all chapter funding. They have supported some excellent projects to improve offline access to knowledge, he says, but local language quality and scope is not their primary focus."
On support for the developing-world languages on WMF sites, Tom says: "There are some great success stories within the developing world ... [like the] Kiwix and the Africa projects of European chapters. [While] a lot of funding goes into Western chapters, now we need to find ways to fund on-the-ground outreach in the developing world. The chapter model does seem to work, so why not continue to use it." Phoebe says: "we have a long way to go", but that we need to balance this against the "need to retain our editor base for our more established projects, which many chapters have been focusing on. ... For many parts of the developing world, there's a lot of potential for supporting the creation of user groups—more lightweight structures that can support particular initiatives."
John is critical of some aspects of the centralised approach: "Most Wikimedia funding for languages in the developing world remains under the operational budget and control of the US Wikimedia Foundation. Some chapters have funded programs to help the languages of the developing world and have had good return on investment, but most funding given to chapters (especially with the new FDC model) tend to be spent in the first world, or on program activity that benefits the English Wikipedia and other European-language projects." Jerome-Yu would rather there were less administrative burden for entities to get funding, whether from the WMF or locally, citing issues with charity status and the volunteer effort necessary to gain WMF funding. He wants to see chapters "be professionalized to free up volunteers to deal with the quality and scope things."
Is the nation-based model for chapters working, given that our editing communities define themselves through languages that transcend national borders?
Here again, the responses were strikingly different. Milos says, "mostly not, but that's highly politicized question without possibility to be solved in the near future." For Leigh, the nation-based model has worked best in Europe, and is useful to an extent; but "the Foundation has started to realize some of those limitations". Michel's answer is a "pragmatic" one, based on history: "Chapters owe at least part of their existence to the idea that one could physically meet up. Nationhood is a 19th-century invention that we cannot yet do without; it's a reality we all live with."
Samuel regards the geographically defined chapters to be "one of many models for movement entities that we need to integrate our work with the rest of the world. Social infrastructure—from volunteer communities and media to pools of content or funding—has developed along geographic lines, and is often drawn up along them." But other models that transcend geography are also urgently needed, he says, "which is why I pushed to expand the set of models we recognize for Wikimedia affiliation."
Liam highlights the advantages of having chapters correspond to legal jurisdictions with which so much of the freeing of cultural products is involved. "We often need a non-profit organisation to have a bank account, or to talk with the local government, or to form partnerships with national cultural institutions." Phoebe's view resonated with this: "the national model ... works with the governmental and legal constraints. ... But there's a big gap—most language editions of our projects are edited by a diaspora community of people located around the world, and I'm not sure that we've managed to tap into that effectively with current outreach efforts. I think the new thematic organizations/user group model, working with chapters, is a very promising one to address cross-border interest groups and language issues." María also sees the value in the nation-state model: "Most organizations, particularly public ones, are country-based. And most of the work chapters do is offwiki outreach, so in that context it can't just be understood from a language point of view."
While broadly supportive of "the current model for chapters and other affiliates", John believes it is "far from optimal". He sets out a possible process by which entities should be nurtured and funded once approved by the Affiliations Committee, "with the WMF providing support in finding suitable candidates if necessary for expert positions, and the candidates also being identified to the WMF as is required for stewards."
Might the new entities—thematic organisations and user groups—become more relevant than chapters to the Board's medium-term strategies?
The prevailing mood among candidates is that it's too early to tell, and that shouldn't be a competition between different entities. For Francis, what matters is "the integration of accountability" among these various layers. Leigh cites "the community of medical Wikipedians and the spinning off of US/Canada education activities from the Wikipedia Education Program" as showing promise already for thematic organisations. "However, there have already been conflicts with geographical chapters who feel threatened by these new group types." Milos predicts that chapters will be no less relevant than thematic organizations during this decade. Liam's view is that at this early stage "it's hard to tell how effective or popular [thematic organisations and user groups] are going to be. More important ... is to give every type of organisation every possible chance to succeed. ... Either way it's not going to a one-size-fits-all solution." María believes that "ideally, affiliates will complement each other and work together when needed."
Tom points out that "chapters and thematic groups both have strong relevance to the ongoing strategic plans. It's not an either/or situation". He raises an interesting question: "How do [these new groups] properly interact with other language projects? Do we end up with multiple thematic groups for different languages?" For John, "chapters and thematic organisations are complementary [to chapters.] The WMF should always be a stakeholder in any large program to provide oversight and fill any gaps in expertise". Jerome-Yu believes all types of entities should be treated equally, like chapters, but that clearer guidelines are necessary to attract more applications for thematic organisations and user groups.
Michel, again, steps back to take a big-picture view: "I think we'll find that geography is overrated. That's not to say it's not important: non-virtual human interaction is great, and I've benefited greatly from meeting people at Wikimania and the Education Summit. But I think that the kind of professionalization that will, for instance, increase article quality (one of the strategic plans) will have to come from thematic organizations."
Editors are invited to ask questions of the candidates on Meta.
This week, we plotted out the demarcations of WikiProject Geographical Coordinates, which aims to create a single standard of handling coordinates in Wikipedia articles. We talked to Jim.henderson, The Anome, Dschwen, Andy Mabbett, and Backspace.
Next week, we'll invade Europe with a well-known WikiProject. Until then, operate within the boundaries of our archive.
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
An article in Library Review titled "Motivating and Discouraging Factors for Wikipedians: the Case Study of Persian Wikipedia"[1] offers a much needed comparison of data from a population of editors outside the English Wikipedia. Most findings related to reasons people start and continue contributing confirm previous studies – important reasons for contributing include the desire to share knowledge and gaining recognition, and are reinforced by friendly interactions.
The authors find that "content production and improvement of Wikipedia in local language" is a significant motivation too, something missing or seen as mostly irrelevant for contributors to the English Wikipedia. The authors also look at reasons for editors to become less active, an area that is not as well understood. Their findings confirm previous research – editors may leave because they find rules too confusing or other editors too unfriendly, or because they do not have enough time. They list some additional reasons not mentioned significantly in the existing literature, such as "issues with Persian script; sociocultural characteristics, e.g. lack of research-based teaching instruction and preference for ready-to-use information; strict rules against mass copying and copyright violation; small size of Persian Web content and a shortage of online Persian references." The paper suffers from small sample size (interviews with 15 editors) and does not report statistics or rankings for some of the data, making it difficult, for example, to conclude or verify which motivations are more and less important. (Reviewer note: the reviewed pre-print copy did not include figures, which may contain the missing data.)
This paper[2] poses an interesting question: are there differences between what is popular in different language Wikipedias? This is measured through the comparing the highest-traffic articles in different Wikipedias. The authors chose four: the German, English, Spanish, and French, using open-source software for the analysis ([1]; from the paper and the software page it is unclear whether the software was developed specifically for this project). The researchers obtained 65 most popular articles from six random months of 2009. They then divided the pages into categories: entertainment (ENT), current issues (CUR), politics and war (POL), geography (GEO), information and communication technologies (ICT), science (SCI), arts and humanities (ART), and sexuality (SEX).
Two tables were compiled, the first showing some major differences between the popularity of articles on different Wikipedias. For example entertainment topics form 45% of popular articles on English Wikipedia, but only 16% on Spanish, where in turn the science articles form 24% (compared with only 3% on the English site). The second table compares the most contributed to content, again noting significant differences between different Wikipedias, as well as suggesting a lack of a major relation between a content's area popularity and number of contributors.
The paper suffers from a number of issues. The authors noted that the division of articles into categories had to be done manually, but the paper does not describe how this was accomplished (this reviewer can't but wonder: how did the researchers deal with classification of an article that would fit into more than one category, for example); nor is there any appendix that would list the articles in question. Given the rather surprising findings ("most remarkable"), this methodological omission raises issues about the reliability of the research. A number of similar issues plague the paper; for example the tables contain a "MAIN" category that is explained nowhere in the paper. The paper does not discuss any potential biases or issues, such as how the results may not be representative of cultural traits, but of short-term media news coverage; or why the data was limited only to few months in 2009 and how this could have affected our ability to generalize from it. There may be, for example, seasonal patterns of interests in certain topics; for example, one could hypothesize that science topics would receive more visits during the school year than holiday months; and if holiday months are different in sampled countries, this could be a factor in the popularity of science topics. (On a side note, this reviewer would also like to point out that his own paper is cited totally out of context by the authors.)
Overall, such exploratory research is certainly valuable, but the authors stop short of any significant analysis of data, in fact noting themselves that the presented data would benefit from a deeper sociological or sociocultural analysis. Unfortunately, there is no indication that their data set has been made publicly available. Nonetheless, despite lack of significant analysis, and methodological issues, the authors' findings are quite intriguing, suggesting that there may be a much more significant difference in coverage of topics by different language Wikipedias than most have suspected so far.
Another paper by the same four authors, titled "Visitors and contributors in Wikipedia"[3] examined a sampled pageview log of the top ten language versions of Wikipedia from 2009, discerning article views, views of history pages and edit requests (URLs with "action=edit" or "action=submit"). Among other things, they find that article views and edit requests "are highly correlated throughout the days of the week only for a group of Wikipedias: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian and Russian. This fact can be associated to a more participative attitude on behalf of the users of these editions as it seems that contributions come from the whole mass of visitors. On the contrary, editions where visits and edits are not correlated, or even negatively correlated [the Japanese and Dutch Wikipedias], can be considered as supported by a minority of contributors." (An earlier paper by some of the same researchers, based on the same 2009 sample, was reviewed in this space in 2011: "Wikipedians' weekends in international comparison".)
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Second only to the technical track of Wikimania in terms of numbers, the Berlin Hackathon (2009–2012) provided those with an interest in the software that underpins Wikimedia wikis and supports its editors a place to gather, exchange ideas and learn new skills. This year the focus moved to Amsterdam, where Dutch chapter Wikimedia Nederland organised their first multi-day developer event (May 24-26). Other chapters supported the event by helping with participants’ travel and accommodation costs, as did the Wikimedia Foundation for its staff as well as some volunteer participants.
Though it is difficult to pin down a central theme for a conference with 140 attendees, the choice of workshops suggest consolidation: Wikidata, Lua (slides), and Wikimedia Labs (slides) are hardly new projects and were all demo'ed at last year's hackathon. Nevertheless, there was plenty to talk about, with upbeat developers leaving sessions excited at the progress the Foundation has made with each. In particular, the negativity that had previously surrounded the Wikimedia Labs project (see previous Signpost coverage) seemed peculiarly absent, the result no doubt of the dramatic improvements in the functionality and ease of use associated with the Tool Labs project.
Also on show was a first prototype of the Visual Editor's reference, image and category modules, all of which it will need if it is to be deployed on schedule in the first week of July, as well as a myriad of pet projects among the 100 or so volunteer developers attending. All workshops were recorded and will be soon be available on Commons.
Critics will point to the high cost of hosting international events, the decision not to prioritise the grant-supported invitation of Wikimedia outsiders, and the decision to implement WMF policy on having staff sleep in better accommodation than grant-funded attendees, who stayed in six-person rooms at the venue itself (a youth hostel). Perhaps because of the lack of outreach, the gender and ethnic composition of Hackathon attendees will also concern those who see such imbalances as corrosive. Nevertheless, it is clear that whatever the price-tag, those that did attend left happy.
The Signpost understands that external sponsorship worth €2,295 (US$2975) was pledged by Google in support of the event.
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. The author is indebted to Tech News, a Foundation-assisted attempt to create weekly tech briefings.
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