Amy Chozick's profile of Jimmy Wales in The New York Times sparked significant controversy in international news outlets this week. Chozick's profile covered Wales's personal life, including his 12-year-old daughter, ex-wife, and current wife Kate Garvey, describing Wales himself as "a well-groomed version of a person who has been slumped over a computer drinking Yoo-hoo for hours." Chozick described his current role in Wikipedia as "Benevolent Dictator for Life", a statement which garnered conflict from all corners of the web, including from Wales, who responded to the piece as a whole with a lengthy talk page statement. The piece also reported his net worth at approximately US$1 million, attributed to his stock in Wikia and his frequent speaking engagements on the subject of Internet freedom.
| “ | But some have wondered if Wales, who couldn't figure out a way to become rich off his innovation, was cynically making a play to cash in on being a great humanitarian. "Did Jimmy have the vision or did he settle into his spontaneous role?" asked Scott Glosserman, a filmmaker who spent a year with Wales filming "Truth in Numbers?" a 2010 documentary about Wikipedia. | ” |
It also touched on the controversies surrounding Wales's mainspace editing, including allegations that he edited the page of American rapper will.i.am to include information he acquired firsthand, without adhering to the Reliable Sources policy. Chozick tells the Wikipedia origin story sans Larry Sanger (though she later details the contention over Sanger's role) with an emphasis on what people close to Wales and various experts think about Wales's desire (or lack thereof) for wealth. Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard Law School professor, was quoted as saying, "Jimmy has had an ongoing valedictory lap for having catalyzed one of the greatest creations in the history of human knowledge ... it's hard to begrudge him for that. I think he's been feeling his way around. It's not like there's a lot of precedent for this." However, others, like filmmaker Scott Glosserman, were more critical. Chozick concluded the piece by describing Wales's busy life and newfound political connections, repeatedly questioning the economics of Wikipedia.
Wales responded to the inaccuracies he saw in a thread on his talk page, where the community at large discussed the article and its implications. Wales was critical of the piece and what he perceived as many factual errors included: "Then there is the cute bit about "B.D.F.L." [Benevolent Dictator for Life]—but as Wikipedians will know quite well, it's just not true. I'm not that, I'm not known as that, I've completely rejected that title, and it doesn't reflect the history or current reality of Wikipedia ... it's a weird piece with lots of errors of basic fact that could have been gotten right." Criticism was levelled at both Chozick and Wales over the article by members of the community in that thread. Chozick answered questions in a New York Times Behind the Cover Story piece.
The Atlantic's Wire section covered the story in an article called "Jimmy Wales is Only Worth $1 Million", commenting that "Wales has run with an entrepreneur image that doesn't include dollar signs and has transformed himself into a kind of benevolent pseudo-celebrity". Business Insider focused on the Bomis angle, titling their piece "Wikipedia was Started With Revenue from Soft-Core Porn". BI reported that Bomis, which funded the early years of Wikipedia, hosted nekkid.info, a pornographic website discussed on Wikipedia at the Reference Desk in 2006. VentureBeat covered the story as well, pointing out some of the criticisms of Wales in the NYT story.
Adam Lanza, the perpetrator behind one of the United States' worst single-person mass shootings, was again the subject of a flurry of articles this week when the Hartford Courant reported that investigating authorities discovered that Lanza had used various Internet websites, including Wikipedia, under the same username.
The Courant withheld the username in question, but the quotes taken verbatim from Lanza's alleged posts made it a simple task for news sources to name User:Kaynbred, who edited between August 2009 and February 2010. In the same time frame, a user with the same name posted on various gun- and computer-related Internet forums, discussing topics varying from gun restrictions to .32 ACP to the capabilities of his laptop computer.
The Wikipedia user's twelve edits were possibly inaccurately described in sources as "a near-fixation" (Courant) and an "obsession" (Daily Dot) with Wikipedia's coverage of mass shootings, given the small number combined with large gaps in time between edits. Later reports contacted the Wikimedia Foundation for comments, with head of communications Jay Walsh responding in part that "[twelve] is a small number of edits, and we would not consider [them] to be an active user." Still, all of the edits were focused on human massacres—including the 2009 Collier Township shooting, Dawson College shooting, Richard Farley, and others—and many of the edits modified the guns used in the events. Farley, in particular, shows that Kaynbred added a complete list of the weapons used, an edit that remains mostly intact in the current article.
On-wiki discussion occurred at the Village Pump.
These revelations come just a few months after news reports detailing convicted mass shooter Anders Breivik's grand total of four Wikipedia edits, including a lengthy but copyright-infringing translation of Heimskringla (see previous Signpost coverage).
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Four featured articles were promoted this week.
Four featured lists were promoted this week.
Fifteen featured pictures were promoted this week.
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This week, the Signpost went to the kennel and interviewed WikiProject Dogs. The project has several featured and good articles, along with a large number of "Did you know" entries. We asked Miyagawa, Tikuko, and Sagaciousphil about the challenges of creating, curating, and maintaining canine content in an increasingly dog-obsessed world:
What motivated you to join WikiProject Dogs? Do you have any canine companions?
Are some breeds better represented on Wikipedia than others? What can be done to improve coverage of neglected breeds?
In addition to breeding, what aspects of the canine world are documented by Wikipedia? Are there any dog-related topics that have been overlooked?
Dogs have had a fairly strong showing in the Did You Know? section of Wikipedia's main page. Why do new dog articles sprout so frequently? Has there been any concern at the project that efforts to create stubs and start-class articles might overshadow efforts to improve articles to Good or Featured status?
Has it been difficult to find sources for articles about dogs? What online and offline resources are available to editors?
Like images of cats, images of dogs are ubiquitous on the internet. How does the project determine which photograph will serve as the primary identifying image for a particular dog article? Do disputes arise between editors who favor their own pet's image in an article?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Keep your fires going for next week, when we interview a project focused on areas underneath the red dragon. Until then, practice your roaring in the archives.
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The key annual event in the Wikimedia calendar, Wikimania 2013, will be held in Hong Kong in just five weeks' time. Among the events will be a presentation by two people who are working to promote the development of medical content on Wikimedia projects. One is James Heilman of Wiki Project Med, a non-profit dedicated to making "clear, reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date educational resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences freely available to all people in the language of their choice". The other is Lori Thicke, president of Translators Without Borders (TWB), the Connecticut-based organisation set up in 2010 to provide pro-bono translation services for humanitarian non-profits.
At Wikimania, Heilman and Thicke will discuss how TWB and Wikipedia are collaborating to improve medical content. Thicke told the Signpost that "more people die from lack of information than from lack of medication. ... We chose to work with Wikipedia because it’s the most frequently consulted health resource on the web. It's not only scalable, but with Wikipedia Zero, consumers in some parts of the developing world actually have access to Wikipedia free of data charges." Crossing the language barriers to health knowledge, she says, is a major hurdle for enabling people in the developing world to live healthier and longer lives.
Heilman, who was recently interviewed in a Bulletin of the World Health Organization, says that while medical articles are in a reasonable state in a few European languages, Wikipedias in almost all other languages have threadbare coverage, including languages spoken where medical services are poor or non-existent. Wikipedias there have significant potential to improve health care in many parts of the world, he says, "but translation is essential if we're going to realise that potential ... and the key to translation is that an article be important and of high quality."
The collaboration has already produced nearly 200 translations into more than 30 languages, but this is a drop in the ocean of information that Wikipedia could make available across languages. Most projects have no equivalent to the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, although Heilman listed eight other Wikipedias in which there is a reasonably strong presence: the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Romanian Wikipedias. Of passing interest is Heilman's observation that TWB's active membership is about 90% female, the inverse of the gender imbalance in the Wikipedia editing community.
In March, the cross-language medical drive attracted a $14.5k grant from the Indigo Trust to help train and fund English–Swahili translators in Kenya. The current collaboration is learning from a Google–Wikipedia translation project Health speaks, which emphasised the use of advanced machine translation. Heilman says, however, that "it's more important to forge close links between article reviewers, Wikipedia's medical editors, and the translation corps"—a hallmark of more recent efforts.
Among our emerging medicine-based relationships with external organisations is one that arose from last year's Wikimania in Washington DC. It was there that Heilman was introduced to Hilda Bastian, who works for the PubMed health project (funded by the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world's largest medical research funding body). In collaboration with the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine, Bastian has since arranged for two of her team members to spend part of their time using their scientific expertise to improve the quality of Wikipedia's medical articles.
Bastian's particular interests are post-traumatic stress disorder and women's health, including pregnancy. Speaking to the Signpost as an individual—and not on behalf of the NIH or its funded agencies—she responded to our question about the state of Wikipedia's articles on women's health by suggesting that serious improvements are needed: "Drawing in people with an active interest in women's health is a priority for me personally. Take just one example, Postpartum hemorrhage: this is one of the main reasons young women die globally and it's mostly preventable. Yet it's start class and only rated as of mid-importance."
Just over a month ago, WikiProject Medicine held a community conference at NIH's National Library of Medicine just outside Washington DC. Attended by Bastian and Heilman, the conference included an editathon conducted by Lane Rasberry for a group of NIH staff.
Yet another key player is involved in Wikipedia's medical efforts. The Cochrane Collaboration is an independent non-profit that aims to systematically organise medical evidence-based research information, with some 28,000 volunteers worldwide. Cochrane has built a medical database of great significance to modern healthcare research, much of it based on the organisation's reviews and meta-analyses. User:Ocaasi has gained rare access to this database by persuading Cochrane to donate 100 free full licenses to Wikipedian medical editors. He told the Signpost that "Cochrane was always a top target for us ... their donation gives us access to high-quality, reliable secondary sources so that our articles can reflect the best available scholarship about the efficacy of medical treatments."
The Signpost can reveal that Cochrane is likely to extend its relationship with the Wikimedia movement by taking on a Wikipedian-in-residence in the northern autumn, for which Wiki Project Med is helping to coordinate the search for the best candidates. Ocaasi says the position—essentially online and not requiring relocation—will be with Cochrane's Infectious Disease Group in Liverpool, UK: "The Wikipedian-in-residence will help Cochrane's authors interact with Wikipedia, understand its policies, add reliable sources to expand and update medical articles, and engage with the broader community on medical issues."
To these medical efforts a higher-educational dimension has recently been added. Ocaasi and Heilman were recently invited to visit UCSF, a major medical research and training university, where they gave lectures and ran editing sessions on Wikipedia and medicine. In the first such move, the university is introducing a senior undergraduate option to train medical students to improve health-related articles on Wikipedia.
The Signpost asked Heilman to identify the biggest challenge we face in improving the dissemination of free medical information around the world. He pointed to two separate needs: "one is for more people writing content in English, and this is where initiatives like UCSF's will hopefully help; the other is for more people to integrate translated content into the respective language of Wikipedia. For the first, we want content experts; for the second, we want Wikipedians in targeted languages who can integrate translated material."
This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 3 July 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, and recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
The VisualEditor extension has gone live by default to registered users on the English Wikipedia, marking a huge milestone in a project that has taken the best part of a decade to reach fruition. The extension was previously described as "the biggest and most important change to our user experience we’ve ever undertaken" by the WMF team behind it.
| “ | At the moment, we know that very few people who create an account ... ever complete an edit or become members of the community. One of the reasons for this is that Wikipedia, unlike almost everywhere else on the Internet in 2013, expects users to learn a markup language to properly contribute. | ” |
—WMF VisualEditor team | ||
| “ | It would be no overstatement to call it the most significant change in Wikipedia’s short history | ” |
—The Economist, December 2011 | ||
The idea of a fully-integrated What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor has a long history. The associated Meta-wiki page—now a redirect—was created in 2004, drawing on an already significant literature. Much of its content then ("many would-be users of MediaWiki are put off by what looks to them—rightly—to be code of any sort") would not look out of place in a discussion of contemporary developments, and at least one of the page's authors, Gabriel Wicke, has been able to help bring his ideas into fruition as a staff developer. When asked in July 2004 what one thing he'd change about Wikipedia, wiki-innovator Ward Cunningham immediately listed the installation of a WYSIWYG editor.
With much of the web moving its user-facing interfaces over to various WYSIWYG systems in the years following (WordPress went WYSIWYG in December 2005, for example), several WYSIWYG editors—specially tailored to output Wikitext rather than HTML—were created, including a popular fork of FCKEditor (2007). Commercial wikifarms Seedwiki and Wikia were among those to benefit, allowing site administrators to banish wikitext from their wikis as early as 2005.
Nevertheless, the freedom that Wikitext provides editors, the difficulties of working with MediaWiki's evolving and generally idiosyncratic Wikitext-to-HTML parser, and a drive for perfection prevented the introduction of any WYSIWYG editing capability to Wikimedia wikis—at least by default (previous Signpost coverage).
That changed in May 2011, when the Wikimedia Foundation took on the challenge of creating a fully functioning visual editor (a commitment with its origins in the 2010 Wikimedia Usability Initiative and confirmed in 2011's product whitepaper, which described rich-text editing as a "great movement project").
At the time, June 2012 was given as a first release date, albeit for a smaller wiki. Though a working prototype was successfully released on time in December 2011, attracting (mostly positive) attention from the press, including The Economist, PC World and The Verge, the project ultimately got off to a bad start when an early decision to build their own edit surface ("ES") rather than use the (then rudimentary) ContentEditable ("CE") component built into browsers was reversed in March 2012. As a result, users would have been forgiven if they could not see the difference between the first prototype and the second, released in June 2012 on MediaWiki.org. Indeed, months of development restricted to behind-the-scenes code refinements to both the VisualEditor itself and Parsoid—the new and improved wikitext parsers that underpins it—meant that a year after the first prototype and six months after the original deployment target, the team was still demo'ing almost exactly the same feature set as it had always done: bold/italics, lists, links and headings.
Seven months on and the transformation is complete. The editor now includes template prompting, reference tag integration, image handling and category support—in theory at least. The revised timetable, published a year ago, seems to have been broadly kept to, for better or worse. If the trend continues, anonymous users on the English Wikipedia will get the editor next week, users on other large Wikipedias the week after, and all other Wikipedias where compatibility can be guaranteed a week after that—an adventurous timetable, especially given the storm of comment after the initial deployment on the English Wikipedia and the bug reports it provoked. It is not known when users of Internet Explorer will be able to use the editor, though support for recent versions of the browser is planned.
Based on an estimated 4 FTEs over two years, back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest the project has cost the Foundation upwards of half a million US dollars. It is hardly surprising, then, that the Foundation stands by its assertion that the VE will help reverse the recent decline in editor numbers. Certainly, there can be little doubt that the VisualEditor will, once any bugs are ironed out, make it easier to edit. Whether that translates into a net positive, however, is more dubious. As Ubergizmo suggested back in December 2011, it is not clear that the edits that Wikimedia wikis miss out on every day because they are too hard to edit are of the high-quality variety, drive-by vandalism, or (more likely) a mixture of the two. Other commenters have suggested that new editors may now be additionally bewildered when learning to use talk pages, which still rely on wikitext. In any case, as more data is collected—a trial on new editors started last week—the question of impact should more or less be laid to rest.
In the meantime, the nature of the present deployment—with its focus on existing users—has shifted the focus of discussion onto the merits of providing the VisualEditor to power users by default. Fueled by the fact that only a gadget (instead of a proper preference) allows editors to effectively hide the VE, along with VE's lengthy loading times, bugs (including occasionally adding <nowiki> tags without being prompted), and the lack of reference and template support, many immediate comments on the tool's feedback page have been generally negative. "This is yet another botched new feature deployment by the WMF" wrote one; "turn it off and fire whoever developed it" wrote another. Other comments were more helpful, pointing to the lack of integration with features such as the citation toolbar and special character selection, while yet others posted their appreciation for a tool that "has greatly eased [their] editing"; one user explained that he had "given up on editing" many times, and that VE now allowed him to contribute. The results of an A/B test on new users will be forthcoming. At time of writing, the VisualEditor team say they have no plans to reverse the deployment.
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Summary: The real world made a strong showing in the top 10 last week, as news stories such as Yahoo!'s purchase of Tumblr, the murder of Odin Lloyd, the continuing drama over NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the ill-health of Nelson Mandela crowded out the usual roster of TV shows, movies, websites and video games. Not that they were entirely excluded, of course.
For the complete Top 25 report with analysis, see here.
For the week of June 23 to 29, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
| Rank | Article | Views | Image | Class | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yahoo! | 2,901,780 | .svg) |
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Once considered moribund, the Internet company has been radically redesigning itself; purchasing Tumblr, dropping AltaVista and refocusing its attention on mobile applications. It seems to have worked; stock is up 50% on last year, and interest is high (this was the most viewed article on Wikipedia in over four months). |
| 2 | Antoni Gaudí | 1,154,577 |  |
|
The designer of the Sagrada Família cathedral got some posthumous recognition thanks to a Google Doodle on what would have been his 161st birthday. |
| 3 | Aaron Hernandez | 952,383 |  |
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A football player for the New England Patriots who was arrested for the murder of Odin Lloyd on June 26. |
| 4 | Edward Snowden | 814,450 |
|
The whistleblower of the NSA's domestic spying program has been denied a passport by the US government and remains in Terminal E of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, seeking asylum in Ecuador. Polls suggest Americans are still fairly divided on whether to treat this man as a hero or a traitor, which augurs more debate and, likely, more Wikipedia views in future. | |
| 5 | Nelson Mandela | 804,204 | .jpg) |
|
The 94-year-old former President of South Africa was rushed to hospital on June 8 amid serious worries about his health. His condition, described as critical, added poignancy to Barack Obama's visit to South Africa. |
| 6/7 | World War Z (film) and Man of Steel (film) |
683,510/ 659,271 |
 /
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These two Hollywood films, despite each being out for more than a week, remain the only ones in Wikipedia's top 40. Conversely, Monsters University, which leads the current weekend and has already outgrossed World War Z by a wide margin, barely cracked the top 50, while the two latest releases, The Heat and White House Down, were both well outside the top 100. | |
| 8 | 570,110 | .JPG) |
|
A perennially popular article. | |
| 9 | Raanjhanaa | 529,383 |  |
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The Bollywood debut of award-winning Tamil actor Dhanush was released on June 21 and has already made back its ₹35 crore ($6 million) budget, no doubt aided by a score from internationally renowned composer A. R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire) |
| 10 | The Last of Us | 514,965 |
|
This eagerly awaited and critically praised not-quite-zombie apocalypse video game was released on June 13. |
Following a one-month period of moderated discussion, Tea Party movement has been reopened by the Committee. The proposed decisions are currently being voted upon. Race and politics remains suspended pending the return of Apostle12. The Audit Subcommittee terms for Arbitrators User:Newyorkbrad, AGK and Timotheus Canens expired on 30 June 2013. Newyorkbrad and AGK will be sitting for another term and Risker will be filling the position vacated by Timotheus Canens. Risker was previously the subcommittee's coordinator; that position has been filled by NuclearWarfare.
The case, brought before the Committee on 23 February 2013 by KillerChihuahua, involves accusations raised against Goethean and the filer. The filer alleges North8000 insulted him and "misrepesented Goethean" and Malke 2010 accused the filer of being Goethean's meatpuppet. He called the environment "toxic" and went on to say that North8000, Malke 2010 and Arzel had previously engaged in battleground behaviour and violations of Wikipedia:No personal attacks.
In his statement, North8000 stated that the dispute is a two-way dispute between himself and the filer. He alleged that the crux of the dispute does not lie with nor did it take place on the talk page for the Tea Party movement article. In his statement, Arzel claimed that KillerChihuahua's statement that: "They [Arzel and North8000] reject any editors and any sources which do not promote the Tea Party movement, to the point that the New York Times and MSNBC were dismissed as non-RS - rather snidely, too - by Arzel and Malke 2010." is completely inaccurate and a baseless accusation.
He clarifies his position by stating that his involvement in the dispute began when an editor added to the Tea Party movement article the "agenda/defintion [sic] from the point of view of a person outside of the movement. I simply moved that sentence to later in the section with the reasoning that the movement should define itself first." He then provided a verbatim copy of his edit and asked the filer where in this edit he mentions the New York Times and MSNBC as being unreliable sources:
The case was unsuspended on 2 July 2013.
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