A week ago it looked like paid editing was ready to take over Wikipedia. The public relations firm Wiki-PR had been banned for employing hundreds of editors, possibly including our own administrators, to make thousands of edits, taking in perhaps a million dollars. But several editors argued that such a ban could not be enforced, and that we must "assume good faith," even of obvious advertisers. They argued that the problem was simply "point of view" editing, and that it could be dealt with easily, by just editing out the bias. Some even argued that we should get rid of our Conflict of Interest guideline.
The situation has now completely changed, with a proposed addition to the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, which says that all paid editors must disclose their paid edits and who paid for the edits. It does not ban paid editing, require the outing of paid editors, or allow harassment of paid editors. How could anybody disagree with that? Whether you agree or disagree, your opinion is welcome on Meta.
The proposed amendment would stop future edits by Wiki-PR and similar firms by letting volunteer editors know which articles the advertisers edit, thereby making it easier to check whether the paid edits follow our rules, and change or remove those edits if necessary. The advertisers would have to identify their paid edits to avoid legal action. The only people directly affected would be unethical advertisers who would no longer be able to slip in advertisements on the sly. Paid editors would be indirectly affected as their pool of customers dries up.
Still, I would like the requirements to be stricter, including prohibiting commercial editing of articles by or on behalf of businesses. There would be little difficulty in enforcing this ban. An advertisement, however indirectly, almost always suggests that a specific business placed it. These businesses, including the clients of the Wiki-PRs of the world, would be responsible for the editing of their agents.
Ads are already prohibited on Wikipedia and have been from almost the beginning. First we prohibited link-spam, editing by organizations, and meat-puppetry. Then we prohibited advertising and promotion, and finally marketing and public-relations content. The firm MyWikiBiz was banned in 2006. Every six months or so a new firm is found to be advertising and is usually banned.
Advertisers have often ignored our policies and guidelines. The conflict-of-interest guideline is scoffed at as "unenforceable". Apparently, these rules are too vague and changeable to be taken seriously. Enforcement of the rules by administrators and the Arbitration Committee has been shamefully lax.
By putting the prohibition in the Terms of Use, rather than in each project's policies and guidelines, enforcement is possible by the Foundation's legal team. The prospect of a slam-dunk legal decision going against them will remarkably improve advertisers' understanding of our rules.
The worst aspect of paid editing is how it changes our community. Paid editors are notoriously difficult to work with, ganging up on volunteers, defending their biased edits to the bitter end, wiki-lawyering until our policies and guidelines seem to have no meaning. Paid editors don't engage in collegial discussions of their edits. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" As paid editors increase, they change the rules to make paid editing easier, which encourages new paid editors and drives volunteer editors away.
I'm not a lawyer but let's cover some legal basics. Advertising and marketing include any communication from a business to a potential customer that may result in a sale. Omitting the source of the communication is deceptive advertising, which is illegal almost everywhere. A German court ruled that editing on Wikipedia by a firm was illegal, even though the firm disclosed the edit, because the disclosure on the article's talk page wasn't conspicuous enough. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates most advertisements in the U.S., prohibits any business communication that may result in a sale unless there is clear and conspicuous disclosure of the advertiser. The FTC is now explaining and enforcing their rules on Internet advertising, as are the European Union and the U.S. states of New York and California.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Paid advocacy 2012–14 These governments would likely prefer not to have to enforce their rules directly in an environment as complicated as Wikipedia, but I'm sure they will if we don't enforce our rules ourselves and provide guidance to advertisers. "No advertising, no paid editing of articles by businesses" would be remarkably good, concise guidance. It would be best if the individual Wikimedia projects were to enforce the rules, taking into account the quirks of each individual project, but enforcement by the Foundation is better than no enforcement or enforcement by a government agency.
It's up to us, Wikipedia's volunteer editors. Let's get rid of commercial editing and advertising on Wikipedia.
An effort is underway for Wikimedia to codify a principle that has been a cornerstone of my Wikipedia training and consulting practice, Wiki Strategies, since our launch in 2009: essentially, that certain conflicts of interest must be publicly disclosed.
Focused community consideration of this principle is long overdue, and I applaud this effort. Undisclosed conflicts of interest pose a significant threat to Wikipedia. Action is needed. Why? Because of things like this:
Last month, a company offering Wikipedia services proposed establishing a business relationship with me. The founder spoke at length about the importance of dealing with Wikipedia ethically; he proudly contrasted his approach with his less scrupulous competitors, like Wiki-PR, who use sock puppets. But then he described his international network of Wikipedia editors: 20% disclose their role.
80% do not disclose that they are under contract.
While he may sincerely wish to treat Wikipedia ethically, this person is dead wrong to believe his approach is ethical. He fails to see the dissonance. Adopting a new policy would highlight that problem in an unambiguous way, supporting the Wikipedia community's efforts to confront and fend off unethical approaches. So the proposal, at its core, reflects a good idea.
But a TOU amendment is not the way to accomplish those goals. While it may be a good fit for Wikipedia, it may not fit other projects, like Commons or Wikisource, as well. If a museum were to pay someone, for instance, to upload their CC-licensed files to Commons, does a lack of disclosure constitute a real problem? Perhaps; but I'm inclined to say it doesn't. I'm skeptical about a provision that would define worthwhile contributions to our shared vision as violations. We should avoid outlawing good behavior.
The better path is to establish local policies on projects that need them, such as English Wikipedia. A Board-passed amendment is an unnecessarily top-down approach. If the problem mainly pertains to Wikipedia, why wouldn't the Legal department simply propose to Wikipedia (in various languages) that it adopt local policies? The discussion would be healthy; I believe policies would pass. Why ask users to go straight to the Board of Trustees? The proposed action is out of step with Wikimedia's system of governance; I don't see any compelling reason for it to be done this way.
Regardless of how a policy is established, the way we announce it is important and delicate. We owe much of our success to our broad invitation to participate in the Wikimedia vision. Our concerns about conflict of interest are justified, of course; but we should keep in mind that we frequently benefit from alignments of interest. For instance, museums sometimes upload thousands of public domain images. Companies sometimes draw attention to articles about themselves that have become badly outdated. Such efforts bring us closer to fulfilling our vision. Any announcement of a transparency amendment must be worded in a way that respects the good faith and the contributions of many independent organizations.
Finally, although it is stated that disclosure is a minimum requirement – that is, a necessary condition for ethical engagement with Wikipedia – some readers will incorrectly conclude that disclosing a financial interest is sufficient, putting too much stock in this minimal step. We must not take too much satisfaction in a policy change like the one proposed, but remain attentive to the need to articulate Wikimedia's ethical needs in a wide variety of scenarios.
Regardless of whether this amendment passes, undisclosed conflicts of interest are toxic to the Wikipedia community, and make it difficult for us to fulfill our vision. What can we do to address the problem?
Staff members have been hired into positions that require engagement on Wikipedia, with minimal ethical or practical guidance on how to go about it. This includes me (in 2009), and the problem remains: in 2014 a WMF employee prominently left her position after a dispute over her Wikipedia editing. While many facts of that dispute are (properly) invisible to public review, surely the organization must bear final responsibility for such a substantial misunderstanding.
In addition, WMF has at times given bad advice to other organizations about how to engage ethically with Wikipedia. That should never happen, given the wealth of resources and expertise available to them in our community.
Maintaining an ethical approach to Wikipedia engagement demands constant vigilance and diligent self-inquiry, going far beyond mere disclosure. WMF has great influence over the thought and behavior of its staff, contractors, funders, service providers, and business partners. That influence should be consistently put to good use.
Many of us are passionate about Wikipedia's success, and also spend or earn money relating to Wikipedia. We should be proactively building a shared understanding of Wikipedia ethics.
Eight articles were promoted to featured status this week:
Three lists were promoted to featured status this week:
Nine pictures were promoted to featured status this week
This week, we found three Ph.D.s willing to give us a crash course on WikiProject Neuroscience. The project began in September 2005 and grew to encompass 14 Featured and 16 Good Articles out of a mere 1,655 total articles. WikiProject Neuroscience maintains a list of open tasks, a stub sorting initiative, a popular pages tracker, and a watchlist. We picked the brains of Looie496, Mark viking, and Tryptofish.
Next week, we'll throw a life preserver to some floundering articles. Until then, save the world by reading our old reports in the archive.
Reader comments
Ukraine, which has been an independent country in Eastern Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has been gripped by widespread protests over the past three months. Due to a decision by former president Viktor Yanukovych—at Russia's urging—to abandon integration with the European Union, the country was (and in many ways still is) split between the Europe-favoring Ukrainian-speaking western half and the Russian-speaking east and south.
In recent weeks the violence was growing worse. The government sent snipers into the streets to fire at demonstrators, while the opposition blocked roads and took members of the police hostage. By mid-February the country was edging closer to a full-blown civil war: thousands of protesters were advancing on the parliamentary building, both sides shooting each other, and a presidential decree passed that authorized the use of live ammunition on protesters. While Yanukovych was impeached on 22 February, the tension has continued to swell as a Russian intervention looks increasingly possible.
Hundreds have died during the unrest, leaving thousands of family members and friends to bury their loved ones. This week our Wikimedian colleagues in Ukraine are facing that challenge after the death of one of their own: Ihor Kostenko, who edited with the username Ig2000, died on 20 February. He is survived by both parents and a sister. Ihor was 22.
Ihor Kostenko was born on the last day of 1991, just a few short months after Ukraine's parliament approved a declaration of independence and mere weeks following a 92.3% vote to confirm that decision. He was born in the town where his grandparents still reside: the rural village of Zubrets, located in the Buchach region of Ternopil and home to 1800 people.
After high school, Ihor was admitted to Lviv University, the oldest and one of the most prestigious universities in Ukraine. He majored in organizational management in the university's geography department and was evidently an outstanding student; the dean of geography posthumously named him as one of his best student geographers. Ihor was also a journalist with a sports news outlet Sports Analysis (Спортаналітик), where he had written more than 6000 pieces.
Ihor was a notable editor on the Ukrainian Wikipedia, writing articles on several wide-ranging topics. Of note was his article on the Fidonisy-class destroyer
Nezamozhnik, which he shepherded through a "добра стаття" (good article) peer review. According to Ihor's article, Nezamozhnik was a Russian warship that was left unfinished after the First World War, completed in the 1920s, and during the Second World War conducted 120 combat missions, sailed 45,856 nautical miles, and shot down three planes.
Including his first edit in 2011, Ihor edited the Ukrainian Wikipedia more than 1600 times and created 280 articles. His interests on the site extended from soccer—he was a fan of FC Karpaty Lviv—to Formula One racing, economics, geography, and the history of the Ukrainian military. On the Ukrainian Wikinews, Ihor created six new articles on a variety of topics, including NATO's plans to intervene in Syria, the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix, and Earth Hour.
Ihor bolstered his on-wiki work with real-life promotion of the site. He founded and administrated the Ukwiki Facebook group, which has nearly 500 members, and advanced the idea of a "Wiki Flashmob", where Ukrainians from all walks of life would be invited to write and create new articles for the Ukrainian Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Ihor planned this for 20 January 2014, so the event had to be called off amid increasingly violent protests. As related by Wikimedia Ukraine, "Ihor believed that the flashmob would help fill Wikipedia with thousands of new articles in the course of a day and proposed a strategy to realize his dream".
| “ | Some would say it's selfish, but understanding the facts, watching the bloody statistics, and hearing about the terrible events in the country is one thing. To realize that your friend fell there is another. | ” |
| — Galya Stakhiv-Berezyuk | ||
On 18 February, Ihor joined with other students in traveling to the capital to participate in the protests. Holding a shield, Ihor placed himself on the front line. Two days later, Ihor was marching near the October Palace when he was shot twice by an unknown sniper, once in the chest and once in the head. He was laid to rest on 23 February as part of a massive funeral with hundreds of cars and streets lined with people holding candles.
This terrible news was first related to the Wikimedia community in a blog post, later translated by Maryana Pinchuk. The Ukrainian Wikipedia community added a black ribbon to their logo in memory of Ihor, and tributes from around the world poured into a dedicated Wikipedia page. Many never knew Ihor, but editing Wikipedia transcends language and national barriers; as Cimbail stated, "And there are those who spread the truth, the knowledge, in whatever language. There are those who care for a better future, who stand up for their freedom and for the freedom of others. Igor took part in spreading the knowledge, as an author of Wikipedia".
After the death of Aaron Swartz in January 2013, I wrote a special report for the Signpost that began with a few simple words: "Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How, then, can an entire community be comforted?"
I'm still looking for the answer.
Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. In part, it reads:
Volunteers from Argentina have been among the most affected by the policy adopted by Wikimedia Commons administrators regarding images that could fall under URAA copyright provisions. Argentine copyright law provides that images enter the public domain “only” 25 years after their production and 20 after their first documented publication. This relatively generous criterion has enabled unaffiliated volunteers and we as Wikimedia Argentina to enrich Commons with hundreds of thousands of historical images that are absolutely free under Argentine law: images of the political and every day life of the country, of its culture, of its popular idols, of its joyful and dark days, of its customs and architecture.
However, over the last months certain Wikimedia Commons administrators have conducted massive deletions of these contents, in many cases involving entire categories. The burden of proof has been inverted: instead of having to justify the deletion of a certain file, things go that volunteers have to devote their time trying to justify the validity of their efforts. This has caused great damage, not only by way of our readers losing access to free educational contents, but also de-motivating many editors and volunteers by making them feel that their efforts are ultimately vain and that our goal of free knowledge for everyone is being replaced by a certain legal fetishism whose reason gets lost in processes and misses the outcome.
In an effort to comply with the Berne Convention, the URAA regranted copyright protection to some works that had been previously free to use. Unsurprisingly, it quickly faced vociferous legal challenges; the largest, Golan v. Holder, failed on the steps of the US Supreme Court in 2012. The conflict on Commons stems from the location of the Wikimedia Foundation's servers, which are used to host all of Commons' images and are in the US, making them subject to US laws. Compounding this are the several Wikipedias—including four of the top nine by article count—which outsource their local image hosting to Commons.
The issuing of the open letters prompted a response from the Foundation's Board of Trustees. Under "on content", the board's chair Jan-Bart de Vreede stated that "The WMF does not plan to remove any content unless it has actual knowledge of infringement or receives a valid DMCA takedown notice. To date, no such notice has been received under the URAA. We are not recommending that community members undertake mass deletion of existing content on URAA grounds, without such actual knowledge of infringement or takedown notices." An impromptu vote to restore all images deleted to comply with the URAA is currently underway, with a majority in support as of publishing time.
One oppose vote came from Lupo, who wrote that "The WMF has told us several times that all files hosted must be free in the U.S. And now we should ignore the URAA? A U.S. law, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court? Just because the WMF doesn't like it?" Odder, who also opposes the proposal, called back to Commons' core principles: "... files have to be released under a free licence or be in the public domain both in the country of origin and in the United States. Undeletion of files that are unfree in the US will be in direct contradiction to this core principle of ours." In supporting, ליאור wrote that "6.7 billion non-American people should not be affected by an extremist interpretation of an intra-American affair." Supporters have also suggested adding a URAA-specific disclaimer to affected images that would warn US content reusers that they could face legal action.
Discussion is continuing on Commons, and Wikimedia Israel's Spain's, and Venezuela's open letters are available on Meta.
The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list. Other topics of interest for the English-speaking world this week include Facebook's purchase of the mobile messager WhatsApp and the new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which from the looks of things could spell another hit for Marvel Studios.
For the full top 25 report, including exclusions, see WP:TOP25
For the week of 16 to 22 February, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages were:
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2014 Winter Olympics | 
|
819,448 |  |
The 2014 Winter Olympics drew to a close this week. Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws and roundly condemned political imprisonments, this has become, whether it wanted to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest. |
| 2 | House of Cards (U.S. TV series) |
|
768,302 | The second season of this political thriller series was released in its entirety on Netflix on 13 February. | |
| 3 | Curling | 
|
690,932 |  |
The first major event at the Olympics, competitive ice resurfacing (sorry, curling) remains one of the quaintest and most intriguing. |
| 4 |
|
652,803 | The mobile messaging service, which has a reputation as the site kids use to avoid their parents snooping on their Facebook pages, exploded into the public sphere when people wondered why on Earth Facebook would pay $19 billion for it. | ||
| 5 | True Detective (TV series) | 
|
544,945 | This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey. | |
| 6 |
|
511,120 | .JPG) |
A perennially popular article | |
| 7 | Guardians of the Galaxy (film) |
|
507,948 | In the great Hollywood high-dive, Marvel Studios has no time for the safety cord. The phenomenal success of their current run of films was built on risk, and this is their riskiest project yet; a $100 million-plus space opera mega-epic about a bunch of guys you've never heard of, including a talking raccoon and a walking tree, directed by a guy who worked for Troma, and whose last film's lifetime theatre gross was exactly $327,716. Well, its first trailer was released on the 18th, so how did it do? Judging by its social media impact, spectacularly. Or at least better than Man of Steel. | |
| 8 | Ice hockey at the 2014 Winter Olympics – Men's tournament | 
|
502,792 |  |
A surprisingly specific article for the top 10, an indication of the event's popularity. Incidentally, Canada won gold; the US barely missed the podium. There will be some rowdy bars in Ottawa tonight. |
| 9 | Playboy Bunny |
|
487,854 |  |
Wearers of the first service uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office became a topic on Reddit this week. |
| 10 | Deaths in 2014 | List | 454,253 |  |
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article. |
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
The 17th ACM Conference on Computer-supported cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW '14) took place this month in Baltimore, Maryland.[supp 1] The conference brought together more than 500 researchers and practitioners from industry and academia presenting research on "the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks." Research on Wikipedia and wiki-based collaboration has been a major focus of CSCW in the past. This year, three papers on Wikipedia were presented:
 |
 |
| Slides from Editing beyond articles[1] | |
review by User:Maximilianklein
Building on the streams of rating editors by content persistence and algorithmically finding cliques of editors, Nakamura, Suzuki and Ishikawa propose[4] a sophisticated tweak to find like- and disparate-minded editors, and test it against the Japanese Wikipedia. The method works by finding cliques in a weighted graph between all editors of an article and weighting the edges by the agreement or disagreement between editor. To find the agreement between two editors, they iterate through the full edit history and use the content persistence axioms of interpreting edits that are leaving text unchanged as agreement, and deleting text as disagreement. Addressing that leaving text unchanged is not always a strong indication of agreement, they normalize by each action's frequency of both the source editor and the target editor. That is, the method accounts for the propensity of an editor to change text, and the propensity of editors to have their text changed.
To verify their method, its results are compared to a simplified weighting scheme, random clustering, and human-clustered results on seven articles in the Japanese Wikipedia. In six out of seven articles, the proposed technique beats simplified weighting. An example they present is their detection of pro- and anti-nuclear editors on the Nuclear Power Plant article. An implication of such detection would be a gadget that colours text of an article depending on which editor group wrote it.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Research & Data team announced its first public showcase, a monthly review of work conducted by researchers at the Foundation. Aaron Halfaker presented a study of trends in newcomer article creation across 10 languages with a focus on the English and German Wikipedias (slides). The study indicates that in wikis where anonymous users can create articles, their articles are less likely to be deleted than articles created by newly registered editors. Oliver Keyes presented an analysis of how readers access Wikipedia on mobile devices and reviewed methods to identify the typical duration of a mobile browsing session (slides). The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation every third Wednesday of the month and live streamed on YouTube.
A paper titled "What influences online deliberation? A wikipedia [sic] study"[5] studies rationales used by participants in deletion discussions, in the larger context of democratic online deliberation. The authors reviewed in detail deletion discussions for a total of 229 articles, listed for deletion on three dates, one of them being January 15th, 2012, three days before the the English Wikipedia's global blackout as part of the Wikipedia:SOPA initiative. The authors looked into whether this event would influence rationales of the deletion discussions and their outcome. They also reviewed, in less detail, a number of other deletions from around the time of the SOPA protest. The authors display a good knowledge of relevant literature, including that in the field of Wikipedia studies, presenting an informative literature review section.
Overall, the authors find that the overall quality of the discussions is high, as most of the participants display knowledge of Wikipedia's policies, particularly on the notability and credibility (or what we would more likely refer to as reliability) of the articles whose deletion is considered. In re, notability far outweighs the second most frequent rationale, credibility (reliability). They confirm that the deletion system works as intended, with decisions made by majority voters.
Interestingly, the authors find that certain topics did tend to trigger more deletion outcomes, said topics being articles about people, for-profit organizations, and definitions. In turn, they observe that "locations or events are more likely to be kept than expected, and articles about nonprofit organizations and media are more likely to be suggested for other options (e.g., merge, redirect, etc.) than expected". Discussions about people and for-profit organizations were more likely to be unanimous than expected, whereas articles about nonprofit organizations, certain locations, or events were more likely to lead to a non-unanimous discussion. Regarding the SOPA protests' influence on deletion debates, the authors find a small and short-lived increase in keep decisions following the period of community mobilization and discussion about the issue, and tentatively attribute this to editors being impacted by the idea of Internet freedom and consequently allowing free(er) Internet publishing.
The authors sum up those observations, noting that "the community members of Wikipedia have clear standards for judging the acceptability of a biography or commercial organization article; and such standards are missing or less clear when it comes to the topics on location, event, or nonprofit organization ... Thus, one suggestion to the Wikipedia community is to make the criteria of judging these topics more clear or specific with examples, so it will alleviate the ambiguity of the situation". This reviewer, as a participant of a not insignificant number of deletion discussions as well as those about the associated policies, agrees with said statement. With regards to the wider scheme, the authors conclude that the AfD process is an example of "a democratic deliberation process interested in maintaining information quality in Wikipedia".
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In a linguistics student paper[6] at Lund University, the author reviews the linguistic conceptualisation of femininity on (English) Wikipedia, with regards to whether language used to refer to women differs depending on the type of articles it is used in. Specifically, the author analyzed the use of five lexemes (a term which in the context of this study means words): ladylike, girly, girlish, feminine and womanly. The findings confirm that the usage of those terms is non-accidental. The word feminine, most commonly used of the five studied, correlates primarily to the topics of fashion, sexuality, and to a lesser extent, culture, society and female historical biographies. The second most popular is the word womanly, which in turn correlates with topics of female artists, religion and history. Girlish, the fourth most popular world, correlates most strongly with the biographies of males, as well as with the articles on movies and TV, female entertainers, literature and music. Finally, girly and ladylike, respectively 3rd and 5th in terms of popularity, cluster together and correlate to topics such as movies and TV (animated), Japanese culture, art, tobacco and female athletes. Later, the author also suggests that there is a not insignificant overlap in usage between the cluster for girlish and the combined cluster for girly and ladylike. He concludes that there are three or four different conceptualisations of femininity on Wikipedia, which in more simple terms means, to quote the author, that "people do indeed represent women in different ways when talking about different things [on Wikipedia]", with "girly and girlish having a somewhat frivolous undertone and womanly, feminine and ladylike being of a more serious and reserved nature".
The study does suffer from a few issues: a literature review could be more comprehensive (the paper cites only six works, and not a single one of them from the field of Wikipedia studies), and this reviewer did not find sufficient justification for why the author limited himself to the analysis of only 500 occurrences (total) of the five lexemes studied. A further discussion of how the said 500 cases were selected would likely strengthen the paper.
Ursula Reutner’s article “Wikipedia und der Wandel der Wissenschaftssprache”[7] discusses Wikipedia's linguistic norms and style as a case study of the development of academic language.
The article is divided into three main sections. After providing some historical context about Wikipedia and the history of encyclopedias (section 1), the article focuses on linguistic norms in Wikipedia and their relation to linguistic norms in academic language (section 2). Reutner identifies five crucial linguistic norms in Wikipedia: (1) non-personal language such as the avoidance of first- and second-person pronouns, (2) neutral language as expressed in the policy of a “neutral point of view”, (3) avoidance of redundancies, (4) avoidance of unnecessarily complex wording, and (5) focus on simple syntax and the use of short independent clauses. Although Reutner mentions many well-known differences between Wikipedia and traditional forms of academic writing (e.g. the dynamic, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia), she stresses that the policies of Wikipedia largely follow traditional norms of academic writing.
The third section focuses on case studies of Wikipedia articles (mostly fr:Euro and it:Euro) and finds a large variety of norm violations that suggest a gap between linguistic norms and actual style in Wikipedia. Reutner's examples of biased, clumsy, and long-winded formulations hardly come as a surprise as these quality issues are well-known topics in Wikipedia research[supp 2]. However, Reutner's analysis is not limited to quality problems but also addresses further interesting features of Wikipedia articles. For example, she points out that Wikipedia differs from many print encyclopedias in Romanic languages such as the Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico (1964) or the Enciclopedia Treccani (2010) through a focus on accessibility as illustrated by the use of copular sentences at the beginning of articles and the repetition of crucial ideas and terms. Furthermore, Reutner argues that Wikipedia differs from other forms of academic writing through narrative elements and a generous use of space.
Reutner's findings raise general questions regarding the relation between Wikipedia and the development of academic language and her short conclusion makes three suggestions: First, Wikipedia's policies largely follow traditional norms of academic writing. Second, the digital, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia leads to “emotional and dialogic elements that are surprising in the tradition of encyclopedias“ (p.17). Third, the focus on accessibility follows an Anglo-American tradition of academic writing (even in the Italian and French language versions). Although Reutner's conclusions seem well-justified, they leave the question open whether Wikipedia reflects or even influences the general development of academic language. For example, one may argue that many of Reutner's findings are effects of the partly non-academic character of Wikipedia and therefore not representative of the development of academic language. Other linguistic features are arguably effects of collaborative text production and it would be interesting to compare Reutner's findings with other collaborative and non-collaborative forms of academic writing. Finally, one may worry that some of Reutner's findings are artifacts of a small and biased sample. For example, Reutner only considers articles (de:Euro, en:Euro, es:Euro, fr:Euro, and it:Euro) that are created by large and diverse author groups but does not discuss more specialized articles that usually only have one or two main authors. However, it is well-known that the style and quality of Wikipedia articles depends on variables such as group size and group composition[supp 3] and diverse forms of collaboration patterns[supp 4]. It would therefore be interesting to discuss Reutner's linguistic findings in the context of a more diverse sample of Wikipedia articles.
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