Three weeks ago, the Signpost ran an article on the Wikimedia Commons entitled "Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy". Non-US editors and chapters have taken issue with a multitude of image deletions done to comply with the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, a US law that brought the country into compliance with the Berne Convention. By doing so, they granted or regranted copyright protection to several works that have entered the public domain in their countries of origin. Many supporters of these actions have noted that the deletions ensure that images on the Commons are free for all to use, not just users in some countries, while one opposer characterized the actions as a "extremist interpretation of an intra-American affair."
We asked three users for their perspective on a related issue: is the Commons primarily a repository of free media for the world, as stated on its welcome page, or should it limit itself to being a media repository for the various Wikimedia projects?
Delirium: a distinction without a difference
To me the question of whether Wikimedia Commons is primarily a repository of free media for the world, or primarily a media repository for the Wikimedia projects, should ideally be a distinction without a difference. I'm primarily active in Wikipedia, not on Commons, and I visit Commons mostly in its "supporting role" when I need to add images to Wikipedia articles. But we all have the goal of producing free content for the world. Copyright law is a mess with a lot of gray area, so in practice things aren't ideal, and different groups of Wikimedians may have different views of how to navigate the morass. But I think the goals are, or should be, the same: to produce free content that's reusable, remixable, and republishable (in theory and in actual practice), by ourselves and others, to spread knowledge worldwide. To that end, a media repository for the Wikimedia projects should also be a repository of free media, and work to fulfill both roles!
I personally am not very active on Commons, and mainly edit Wikipedia. But I nonetheless find Commons to support the mission of the other projects very well. In its support role for Wikipedia, I find Commons' close attention to being a "repository of free media for the world" quite valuable. I live in Denmark, and for various reasons I want to reuse excerpts of the English Wikipedia. Unfortunately for me, the English Wikipedia makes extensive use of U.S.-specific copyright exceptions, such as the pre-1923 rule and American fair-use law. So, articles need to have their media sanitized to be safe to reuse in Denmark. Here is a simple semi-automated heuristic I use: if any image is hosted at Commons, keep it; if an image is locally hosted on en.wikipedia.org, flag it for review or replacement. In effect I defer to the vetting of the Commons community for copyright review of media. This works fairly well, and helps me reuse content from Wikipedia. So from my own perspective, I find the mission of Commons to provide a free media repository for the world very much in line with its mission to support the other Wikimedia projects. Many projects are a bit loose on verifying the actual free-content reusability of their images, but Commons takes that job seriously, greatly enhancing the reusability of all Wikimedia projects.
Mark Nelson is a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He has been a Wikipedian and an administrator on the English Wikipedia since 2003.
TeleComNasSprVen: optimistic about receding CoI
Wikimedia Commons’ mission is, as its tagline suggests, to provide "a database of 20,536,186 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute". However, Wikimedia Commons is also hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, and I believe was originally set up in order to serve as a centralized database of media content to be served to all the various language editions of Wikipedia. With respect to the WMF, the mission of Commons therefore stands in a conflict of interest; originally designed by Wikimedians, its first responsibility was also for Wikimedians. With the advent of InstantCommons however, now all wikis regardless of their affiliation with Wikimedia could access the large database of freely licensed files at Commons by merely installing a simple extension. Commons now serves more than the Wikimedia Foundation, it serves a wide variety of public wiki-based organizations as well. Like Wikipedia, which caters its main content to the public in the form of encyclopedic articles, Commons serves to cater its main content to the public in the form of a wide range of freely licensed and freely accessible media files.
There is still a rather large pro-WMF bias prevalent around Wikimedia Commons however. There is a common misconception that Commons serves as central repository for any kind of free media file. However, Commons frequently rejects or deletes files that do not comply with the CC-BY-SA guidelines, or files considered outside the scope of the project, defined at Commons:Project scope. Files that are vaguely licensed as "free for use" or "use on Wikipedia" are sometimes rejected/deleted, and files which serve no educational purpose (a rather vague and much debated criterion) are also nominated for deletion at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests. For the purpose of Commons, "excluded content serving no educational purpose" are typically "vanity" files, images of non-notable companies (here the bias towards Wikipedia’s notability criterion shows), and, barring obvious educational potential, pages that are not in use on any other Wikimedia project. Even if a media file were freely licensed, Commons sometimes rejects/deletes the file submissions, and asks its uploaders to use other free file-sharing or file-hosting websites for their own purposes instead, such as Flickr or Picasa which might be more willing to accept such images.
Like any of the big Wikimedia wikis, Wikimedia Commons suffers from its own various problems, some of which are easily solvable and some which are not. At least with the advent of the InstantCommons MediaWiki extension, I am optimistic that Commons is moving further away from its dependence as a primarily Wikimedia site to one which can better serve a more global community. It is hoped that while Commons considers its host, the Wikimedia Foundation, important in running its day-to-day activities, and Wikimedians for supplying some of its content, Commons can also achieve its designed primary purpose as "a database of 20,536,186 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute".
TeleComNasSprVen is a frequent editor of the Commons, with 45,000 edits since he registered in 2010.
Thryduulf: change is needed
Wikimedia Commons defines itself as a media repository with two goals:
[to make] available public domain and freely licensed educational media content to all, and
[to act] as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
However, based on the observed actions of the Commons community, in particular the choice of which files need to be deleted, I feel that the project today could be more accurately be described as:
A repository for educational media files that are either:
Explicitly and provably released under a free license; or
Public domain according to the laws of the United States and the source country.
Notable is the absence of reference to the other Wikimedia projects. Further narrowing the utility to the wider Wikimedia family is the way these criteria are interpreted—the impression one gets is that if anyone disputes that a file is free, it will be deleted regardless of the merits of the concern. Just as administrators on other projects require no formal qualifications, admins at Commons are not required to have any legal training at all. Indeed I have heard Commons admins and nominators for deletion described as being amateur lawyers overly obsessed with copyright (although using rather less polite language), and is hard to disagree with that characterisation at times.
In discussions, most people who are Commons administrators fail to see any problem with the ultra-conservative approach to acceptability. Indeed, if one’s goal is to solely be a repository of media that can be freely used by anybody in every imaginable circumstance, then this is arguably the best policy to have. However, that is only part of Commons’ self-declared scope.
What the projects want and need, and what they would like Commons to be, is a reliable repository of files they can use to illustrate, their encyclopaedia articles, dictionary entries, books, etc. Where Commons takes a hard line view of copyright issues, most projects seem to take a more pragmatic approach—for example, there is a desire to have access to media that is out of copyright for all practical purposes, where there remains only the theoretical possibility that someone may have a copyright claim or where the chances of a copyright owner actually choosing to enforce their copyright are pretty much indistinguishable from “none”. This, relaxed “keep it unless we get a valid takedown notice”, approach to the issue is the one that appears to match the Foundation board’s view, taken in consultation with legal advice.
The way deletions on Commons are handled, particularly the observed extreme reluctance to inform anyone other than the image uploader of a deletion nomination (such as the watchers of articles using the media), seemingly arbitrary durations to discussions and the apparent irrelevance in many cases of any discussion that does occur, means that Commons is not at present a reliable host of media for the projects. In many cases the first people are aware that images that have been in use on a page for years have been questioned is when the images have been deleted.
As far as I can see, only four possible ways forward for the short term have been identified.
The first is no change, and this seems to be favoured by the majority of Commons admins and others who view the Commons mission as being entirely a repository of absolutely free media. It is the least popular option among the majority of others who have commented.
The second option is to change Commons to match what the projects want it to be—i.e. more relaxed about what they host. This is fiercely opposed by the current admins and those who misunderstand this as a request for Commons to host fair use material (it explicitly is not).
Thirdly is a return to projects or chapters hosting their own images. This is least efficient option by far, and could be storing up problems for the future. Nevertheless it is an option not ruled out by the Israeli and Argentinian chapters among others.
Finally, and possibly most radically, is to set up a second media repository with the sole mission of hosting content for the Wikimedia projects. Undoubtedly there will be technical hurdles to overcome, but most that have been identified are trivial and none are insurmountable. This option is probably the least favoured overall in terms of raw numbers, but if change is desired and the current Commons community cannot be persuaded to go for option two, then it may be the best.
I am firmly in the “change is needed” camp, and local project hosting does not feel to me like a good thing in the long term. Whether I prefer changing or supplementing Commons though is not such an easy call to make. Possibly the additional repository is the less optimal one, particularly if longer-term actions such as campaigning for changes to copyright laws bear fruit. Although on the other hand the risks of breaking the community from changing Commons against its will might be the greater?
I don’t know the answer, and ultimately it is something only the Wikimedia community can decide. Still, a decision does need to be made and refusing to engage with the discussion does no group any favours.
Thryduulf was an admin on the Commons from December 2005 until he let the position lapse in February 2008 due to inactivity. He is currently active there as an uploader and categoriser.
Amical Wikimedia has organised a contest running from 16 March to 15 April called the Catalan Culture Challenge which asks editors to improve and translate into as many languages as possible articles about Catalan culture, including articles on this list of 50 notable people.
This week, we visited WikiProject History, an ancient project with roots dating back to 2001. The project is home to 196 pieces of Featured material and 483 Good and A-class articles independent of the vast accomplishments of its various child projects. WikiProject History maintains a lengthy list of tasks, oversees the history portal, and continues to build Wikipedia's outline of history. The project was first featured by the WikiProject Report in 2007 but hasn't been interviewed until now. We spoke with Chris troutman and bobrayner.
What motivated you to join WikiProject History? Do you specialize in a particular time period or geographic area?
Chris troutman: I'm a history undergrad at Loyola Marymount University so participating in history-related articles is a natural fit. I'm very much a generalist as all of history is interesting and important.
bobrayner: I'm interested in Ottoman, African, and economic history.
When we first introduced WikiProject History to Signpost readers in 2007, the project was overseen by two project coordinators. Does the project still have coordinators? What role do they serve in furthering the project's efforts?
Chris troutman: To be honest, I'm not sure where everyone went. WikiProject History may comprise a significant portion of the Missing Wikipedians list. The loss of this WikiProject could be its own historical study.
bobrayner: History is big! As en.wikipedia has developed, I think that editing has become more focussed. There are now many narrower wikiprojects and taskforces which take a lot of the load which might otherwise be on WikiProject History's shoulders. A lot of activity has now moved to WikiProject Military History, which reflects where many people's interests lie. Nonetheless, there is still room for generalists.
How active are the project's nearly 300 members? Is there a lot of collaboration or do members typically stay in their own niches?
Chris troutman: Activity on the project's talk page isn't necessarily representative of what editors are doing on thousands of articles of historical focus, so it's hard for me to say.
bobrayner: As with most WikiProjects, we have a handful of very active editors and a larger number of occasional editors (and, no doubt, many have come and gone over the years). This activity is mostly in article-space, where it counts.
Do you participate in any of the project's subprojects? Which subprojects tend to be the most active? What role does WikiProject History play in the initiatives of its child projects?
bobrayner: I'm active in WikiProject Military History, probably English Wikipedia's most active and most accomplished WikiProject. History is so large of a subject that editors find themselves in niches of historical study without giving a second thought to the parent WikiProject itself.
Are there many contentious articles under the project's scope? How are disputes about history resolved?
Chris troutman: There's an adage that history is written by the victors. Thanks to Wikipedia, the losers are able to revise history as they see fit. You'd be surprised at the number of partisans that want to re-write why wars happened, who was responsible for what, which ethnic groups deserve praise or blame, etc. For instance, an innocuous example is Attack on Pearl Harbor. More than one book makes the claim that FDR and company left Pearl Harbor open for attack because they wanted a pretext to get into World War II. While you want to be fair to the minority view, the matter has to be mentioned as revisionist history.
bobrayner: The last 200 years of history have given en.wikipedia its most controversial articles and most intractable disputes. For example, the Ottoman succession alone has left us with Israel versus Palestine, a handful of other deeply controversial middle-eastern topics, Turkish nationalism and the Armenian genocide, and a dozen epic nationalist disputes in the Balkans. Disputes are rarely handled within WikiProject History itself, and indeed the nature of many of these disputes often makes it difficult to handle them in any WIkiProject; but go to any noticeboard that handles disputes, and you'll probably find some history there. All the way up to ArbCom.
There are so many layers of history ripe for the photographer. This is part of a Roman town in what is now Libya; the desert covered it, then the town was partly excavated and reconstructed in the modern era, then work was abandoned as more recent history washed over it...
Has sourcing been an issue for many history articles? What resources are available to editors wishing to create or expand history articles? Are there any resources that the project is not currently utilizing to its fullest extent?
Chris troutman: Whew. Sourcing is a major problem for many history articles. Too much of Wikipedia is written with online sources which give short shrift to actual study. Many articles have good references listed but lack in-line citations. Finally, most articles are entirely absent any discussions of historiography. Too many editors are inclined to cite whatever they find as gospel truth regardless of the source.
bobrayner: Most of Wikipedia suffers from something like FUTON bias, and there is also a near-universal bias towards English-language sources; WikiProject History is no exception to that. There is a huge range of high-quality sources that I can scarcely start to enumerate. I agree with Chris troutman's point about historiography.
Does the project run into any difficulties in finding images to illustrate history articles? Is it more difficult to find appropriate artwork, photographs, or other figures for some time periods and geographic areas? What can be done to build a larger and more varied collection of historical images?
Chris troutman: Thankfully the same avenues that make pictures freely available to Wikipedia work well with WikiProject History, too. Of course, history stretches back far before the invention of the camera, and even before the art of portraiture so images simply may not exist for subjects from antiquity.
bobrayner: I think there are millions of wonderful, informative historical images just waiting to be used - we just need to think laterally. There are countless artefacts in museums and documents in archives which could illuminate our articles. If we can't have a painting of (say) some medieval lord, why not use an important charter, or a map of their lands, or a photo of their castle's ruins? Original materials for anything but the most recent history are no longer in copyright, so we have an advantage over other areas.
Does WikiProject History collaborate with any projects that are not overtly history-related? What connections do all WikiProjects share with WikiProject History?
Chris troutman: What is history? History can be the study of anything from the past. Whether a Wikipedian is writing about technology from the 1950s, music from the turn of the 20th Century, or art from the Napoleonic era it's all historical in nature. History is like Olympus Mons. It's so big that you could be standing on a point halfway to the summit and not even realize it's a mountain.
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Chris troutman: Contributors (new and not so new) can join. There are plenty of editors already working on articles in our purview and they are welcome to let us know what they're doing and how we can help them in their editing.
bobrayner: New blood is always welcome. Away from the controversial pages, history editing doesn't have to be difficult - and close attention to sources will go a long way.
Until we climb to the top of next week, check out our previous interviews in the archive.
In a record-breaker, the English Wikipedia has a new largest good topic: the 71-article Light cruisers of Germany, which concerns the light cruisers used by Germany during the 20th century. American editor Nate Ott, an Ohio native who edits under the pseudonym Parsecboy, wrote all of the articles on the back of a passionate interest in German warships for most of his life. "I got a copy of Robert Ballard's Exploring the Bismarck when I was a kid," he told the Signpost. "I still have it—it's very tattered, mind you." The love kindled by this simple gift has come to fruition on Wikipedia with several large featured topics, and his latest effort.
Ott only applied this interest on Wikipedia when he came across several article stubs, like Brandenburg-class battleshipin 2007. With more acquaintance with the topic came quality content: in 2009, he finished his first featured article (FA), SMS Von der Tann, a game-changing vessel that was Germany's first turbine-powered warship. Ott's Wikipedia editing then led him to academia—he has a master's degree in military history and began a PhD program at Ohio State University, but left to spend more time with his young child.
His dream in 2009 was to raise every major warship of the Imperial German Navy to featured status. Five years later, he's well on his way as the author of every German battleship and battlecruiser article, which were the largest warships in the early 20th century. Called capital ships in recognition of their importance, most of the major navies in the world used them, as much for prestige as national defense.
Hugo Graf's S.M. Linienschiff Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1900. Restored by Adam Cuerden.What makes the German ships so important in the context of world history? "These ships", says Ott, "were expressions of German expansionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—something that put Germany on a collision course with Great Britain and helped produce World War I. The battle fleet created by Alfred von Tirpitz was especially provocative to Britain. And of course, many of these ships participated in major naval battles during the world wars and had significant impacts on the course of the war—Jutland is of course probably the most important, because in the aftermath of the inconclusive result, the Germans turned back to unrestricted submarine warfare, which brought the US into the war and sealed the fate of the Central Powers."
Ott started working on Germany's light cruisers in late 2011, although "that was alongside other projects, so it wasn't a continuous effort." Still, he had most of them completed by 2012, with the rest completed by the end of last year. The biggest challenge was the "thin level of detail available for many of these articles in English, especially the earlier ones." Another major obstacle is the increased difficulty in accessing German sources while living in the United States, although an editor in Germany (MisterBee1966) has helped him to acquire Hildebrand, Röhr, and Steinmetz's Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe (Volume 5), which Ott says was critical to expanding many of his articles: "Getting Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe has been a godsend. It has turned what would have been a bunch of articles that would have barely been able to scrape GA [good article] into solid articles, and halfway-decent perennial GAs into solid FAs."
Where will he go from here? Ott told us: "I'm most-way through the handful of unprotected cruisers Germany built in the 1880s, which should allow me to create a larger topic of all the modern cruiser types—armored, protected, unprotected, heavy, and light—which is in the 120-article range. I'm also looking into preparing a number of articles ... to run on the main page for major World War I centenaries (Emden is the first in that plan). After that, I'll probably return to expanding the German pre-dreadnought articles using Hildebrand, Röhr, and Steinmetz to turn the battleship topic to be completely featured."
The German battlecruiser SMS Moltke at Hampton Roads, Virginia (US), in 1912. Picture from the Library of Congress, restored by Durova and Staxringold; used in 25 articles on Wikimedia projects, including SMS Moltke and List of sunken battlecruisers.
Three-cent nickel(nominated by Wehwalt) – To readers from America, the idea of a three-cent nickel—which was, indeed, American coinage—might seem strange, as "nickel" is now the name of the American five-cent piece. According to the nominator, the three-cent nickel was conceived during the American Civil War thanks to "public disgust with dirty paper money, an industrialist's desire to market his product, and a mysterious political deal we still don't know much about." The five-cent piece proved the most popular, and the three-cent coin was eventually forgotten.
The 2007 Appalachian State vs. Michigan football game(nominated by Toa Nidhiki05) was an American college football game played between the prestigious and historically successful University of Michigan and a small university from the second-tier subdivision of the game, Appalachian State. Despite the latter's two straight championships at that level, the nominator tells us that "they were not expected to even come close to beating the Wolverines." Furthermore, their victory "was immediately hailed as one of the biggest in college football history."
The Rainbow trout(nominated by Mike Cline) is a ray-finned fish from the salmonidae family. While its native habitat is in freshwater tributaries of the Pacific Ocean in Asia and North America, it has been introduced into waters around the world. While the fish can be considered an invasive species, it is also a major game fish.
4 (Beyoncé album)(nominated by JennKR) was, as the name suggests, the fourth studio album put out by Beyoncé. Created after a year-long hiatus from music, Beyoncé was lauded for 4's "fusion of various genres" along with her own "strong vocal ability".
Erschallet, ihr Lieder, erklinget, ihr Saiten! BWV 172(nominated by Gerda Arendt), German for "Resound now, ye lyrics, ring out now, ye lyres!", is a church cantata composed by Johann Sebastian Bach. First performed on Pentecost Sunday of 1714, Erschallet, ihr Lieder is in six movements and scored for four vocal soloists, four-part choir, three trumpets, timpani, oboe, bassoon and a string orchestra of two violins, two violas, and basso continuo.
Bobby Peel(nominated by Sarastro1) was a cricketer from England who professionally played the game for fifteen years in the 1800s. He played his best season in 1896, but left the sport a year later after being suspended for drunkenness during a match.
Japanese battleship Nagato(nominated by Sturmvogel 66) was a Japanese warship with what the nominator called a "curious history" that was built during the First World War and served in the Second. Although Nagato was one of the few capital ships of Japan to survive that conflict, the ship did not last long—it was sunk by the United States in 1946 during atomic bomb testing.
Ezra Pound(nominated by Victoria, SlimVirgin, and Ceoil) was, in the words of one of the nominators, "a complicated man": he "helped develop the early careers of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, among others, but was charged with treason and spent 12 years in an asylum." Pound, who lived from 1885 to 1972, witnessed the carnage of First World War from England, the rise of Mussolini in Italy, and the inside of a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage after being charged with treason by the United States. He was also a major catalyst in the development of modernism and poetry's imagism.
The Great Eastern Highway(nominated by Evad37) is a 590 km (370 mi) road in Western Australia. The road's route was originally constructed with convict labor, and it served as the region's major road artery. Today, there are proposals to replace the road with a more northerly routing, but no money has been allocated by the federal government for the task.
Canadian drug charges and trial of Jimi Hendrix(nominated by GabeMc, Cullen328, and Doc9871) – In 1969, Canadian authorities arrested famed American rock musician Jimi Hendrix for possessing drugs in his bag as he passed through customs. Through a shrewd legal strategy that cast doubt over whether Hendrix was aware of the drugs, he was acquitted of the charges. Shockingly, the story was initially carried by only a few newspapers (all inside Toronto), despite the huge popularity of Hendrix, who was then at the height of his brief career. Hendrix's public relations manager has since revealed that he bribed a local member of the Associated Press to prevent it from hitting the news wire.
Pedro Afonso, Prince Imperial of Brazil(nominated by Lecen, Astynax, and Alex) was once the heir apparent to the throne of Brazil. Born in 1848, he was seen by the monarchy as "vital to the future viability of the monarchy", but he died of fever when he was less than two years old. He was the second son of Brazil's ruler, Pedro II, to die in three years. Afonso's death was a major cause of the later decline of Brazil's imperial system:
“
In the Emperor's eyes, the deaths of his sons seemed to presage the end of the imperial system. His younger son had represented his future and that of the monarchy. Although the Emperor still had a legal successor in his daughter Isabel, he had little confidence that a woman could rule Brazil in the male-dominated social climate of the time. He did nothing to prepare Isabel for the responsibilities of ascending the throne, nor did he attempt to encourage acceptance of a female ruler among the political class. The lack of a male heir caused him to lose motivation in promoting the imperial office as a position to be carried on by his descendants; he increasingly saw the imperial system as so inextricably linked to himself that it could not survive him.
”
Ian Smith(nominated by Cliftonian) was Rhodesia's Prime Minister from 1964 to 1979. According to the nominator, his "15-year tenure played out like a Greek tragedy": "To some he was a visionary who understood problems outside observers did not, a hero whose Unilateral Declaration of Independence had saved Rhodesia from disaster. To most, however, he was an almost cartoonish figure of derision, a deluded, bigoted racist who had tried to stop the tide of history. The truth, as I hope this article shows, is somewhere between these two extremes."
Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award(nominated by Bloom6132) contain the awardees of the Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award which is given annually to a Major League Baseball (MLB) player "whose on-field performance and contributions to his community inspire others to higher levels of achievement."
Popjustice £20 Music Prize(nominated by ChrisTheDude) lists the recipients of Popjustice £20 Music Prize, also known as the Popjustice Twenty Quid Prize, which is an annual prize awarded by music website Popjustice to recognise the best British pop single of the previous year.
Six pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
Wells Cathedral(created and nominated by Rodw) A very pretty image of Wells Cathedral - located in Somerset, England - and the reflecting pool in the grounds of the nearby Bishop's Palace. Considered one of the most beautiful cathedrals in England, and is one of a very few whose stained glass survived the English Civil War.
Auriga(created by Sidney Hall and Richard Rouse Bloxam, after Alexander Jamieson, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) The constellation Auriga comes from the Latin for charioteer, but is traditionally depicted with the reins of the chariot shown in one of his hands, the other holding a goat over his shoulder and two baby goats in his hand. Why goats? Because the goat Amalthea suckled Zeus as a baby, and the constellation representing her and her kids got combined into Auriga by Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D.. This depiction is from Urania's Mirror (1824).
Daedongyeojido (created by Kim Jeong-ho, nominated by User:Crisco 1492) Dating back to 1861, this map consists of twenty-two separate booklets, which can be combined into a map too large to fit in most rooms: 6.7 metres (22 ft) wide and 3.8 metres (12 ft) long. The scan is, naturally, gigantic, and actually breaks the large image viewer on Commons, at least on this author's computer, so you may want to use the offsite option. Make sure to read the article on it - it's sadly rather short, but good as far as it goes.
One of the first university Wikipedian in residence positions, hosted at Harvard University in 2012, has jumped back into the spotlight amid questions about its ethical integrity.
The position, advertised and promoted by the Wikimedia Foundation, was at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. They were looking for an "experienced Wikipedia editor" who would have a "unique role facilitating collaboration between the faculty, staff, and fellows at the Center and the Wikipedia volunteer community".
This chain of events was initially set in motion by the WMF's executive director Sue Gardner after an inquiry from Liz Allison of the Stanton Foundation, an organization that had donated several million dollars to the WMF (including $1.2 million in 2010 for the Public Policy Initiative and $3.6 million in 2011 for the troubled VisualEditor). While the Wikipedian-in-residence would be funded by the Stanton Foundation and work at the Belfer Center at Harvard, they asked the WMF to act as a fiscal sponsor for administrative reasons. The WMF also recruited candidates; their first choice, a long-time Wikipedian and former Harvard librarian, was rejected for not having enough experience in international security. The job description was sent to an email mailing list of academic international security programs; the WMF interviewed two candidates from the resulting applications. Timothy Sandole, who registered a Wikipedia account on the day applications closed, was selected by Belfer to fill the position on the basis of his previous academic experience with international security issues.
The offering of the position was not uncontroversial; the Foundation's deputy director, Erik Möller, has since written on the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Liam Wyatt, Pete Forsyth, Frank Schulenburg and LiAnna Davis were among those who either "noted the risks and issues early on" or "provided internal feedback and criticism ... pointing out the COI issues and the risks regarding the project." Left unstated was the strength of some of this feedback: "we told them so", Wyatt stated. "We tried ... to tell the relevant WMF staff that this was a terribly designed project, but the best we got in response was that we could help edit the job description after it had already been published! ... We did get to dilute the worst of the original job description so it wasn't so blatant a paid editing role ... The WMF dug themselves into this hole despite the frantic attempts, which were largely rebuffed, of several of the GLAM-WIKI community help them fix it—or at least reduce the number of problems."
Sandole's final report
Sandole was hired for the full-time position and remained in it for 12 months, from August 2012 to August 2013. His final report notes that he "made 80 significant edits to 63 Wikipedia articles", "conducted three Wikipedia seminar workshops, each lasting approximately 1.5 hours", and "privately consulted with five Harvard Kennedy School staff members/fellows and one student". Some of the edits he made could have the appearance of propagating a conflict of interest, albeit a minor one; his additions to Russia–United States relations are based on writings by Graham Allison, the Belfer Center's head. Participants on the mailing list have questioned the apparent editing for pay by Sandole, especially in the context of the Foundation's response to paid advocacy by the public relations company Wiki-PR and its resulting proposal to modify the Wikimedia site's terms of use.
Sandole was supervised by Sara Lasner of the WMF, though Möller emphasized that this was only administrative oversight, handling vacation requests and payments, among other unnamed duties. According to Möller, "Timothy's edits weren't monitored in detail by the Wikimedia Foundation." Yet there was enough supervision from Lasner for her to tell Sandole in September 2012 to "be conscious of not over-representing Harvard University in his research". Her superior Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the WMF's chief revenue officer, also sent an email "regarding awareness of conflict-of-interest issues in general."
Möller's thoughts reveal what he believes should have occurred at the WMF:
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a full and honest upfront conversation between WMF and Stanton early on about any perceived or real conflicts-of-interest issues in the context of this work;
strong follow-through in ensuring the highest standard of disclosure regarding all funding relationships, beyond the initial blog post, and continued reporting, including the final report;
a sufficient level of training and oversight for Timothy Sandole beyond administrivia.
”
He concluded his email:
“
The Wikimedia Foundation did and does not intend to undertake similar efforts again (programs that include paid editing), but these kinds of issues can extend to any program that includes active work on content. So my initial take is that we should aim [to] ensure that content-related programs are undertaken under a clear and simple set of public guidelines, and are situated in parts of the organization well-positioned to support them with subject-matter expertise. We'll discuss this more, and follow up on this as well.
Finnish investigation of donations to the WMF: An investigation into the Finnish Wikipedia's fundraising banner has been closed with no action. As we reported in February, Finland's Money Collection Act requires individuals to apply for and receive a permit before soliciting donations. Under this law, authorities in Finland served wikifi-adminlist.wikimedia.org, the mailing list of the Finnish Wikipedia's administrator core, with a "clarification request". That was forwarded to the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team, who issued a formal press release on 3 March:
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The Foundation's strong view is that the Finnish Money Collection Act is not applicable to the matter for numerous reasons that we laid out in our statement to the National Police Board. The Wikimedia Foundation does not have its own activity or representation in Finland. While there is an organization in Finland called Wikimedia Suomi ry, that organization is independent of WMF, is not owned by WMF, and is not operated by WMF. The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia and administers all global fundraising operations for Wikipedia in Finnish. All funds raised by WMF with its Finnish banners go directly to [the] WMF.
”
WMF's mid-year financial statements: The Foundation's mid-year financial statments have been published alongside a Q&A. The WMF's Finance and Administration Department reports that the organization's financial picture is "strong", although both revenue and spending are lower than anticipated.
Wikimania 2015: Six bids have been received for Wikimania 2015, including Bali, Indonesia; Esino Lario, Lake Como region, Italy; Cape Town, South Africa; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Monastir, Tunisia; and Mexico City, Mexico.
New York Times and GLAM-Wiki: Noam Cohen, who has previously written several reports of Wikipedia for the New York Times and attended several Wikimanias, profiled several Wikipedia collaborations with museums in a recent article. From the lead: "If ever there was the antithesis of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, it would be a museum, where an expert picks what is seen and not seen, then carefully prepares captions explaining what each piece of art means. But while there used to be innate suspicion toward Wikipedia among museum staffs, even hostility, in recent years there has increasingly been cooperation."
However affected we may be by their inherent drama, air accidents are rare. Out of roughly 40 million scheduled passenger flights in 2012, only 119 ended in an accident, of which just 15 involved fatalities. Accidents during flight, as opposed to take-off or landing, are rarer still, comprising just eight percent of the total. Put simply, planes don't just fall out of the sky. Except, of course, when they do, and the utterly mystifying events surrounding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which has not fallen from the sky so much as vanished from it entirely, has left an information-starved public scrambling for precedents, some logical, some... not.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of March 9 to 15, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
It's like something out of a novel by Robert Ludlum or Michael Crichton, or maybe an episode of Fringe: a fully loaded passenger jet deliberately cuts communication, flies dark for up to an hour, changes course and then... disappears without a trace. All while over one of the busiest shipping lanes and densely populated islands on the planet. It's no wonder people are spooked, or that the cable news channels are running 24/7 on pure speculation. But until more genuine information emerges, transfixed viewers, not to mention desperate relatives, have little else to go on.
A perennially popular article, but owes its current high position to a one-day spike on March 14; one-day spikes are usually the result of bots, though it's possible this one might have something to do with a recent spike in coverage for YouTube user PewDiePie and his unconventional rise to riches.
This 2009 air flight eerily prefigured the still-unresolved fate of Flight MH370 by crashing into the Atlantic Ocean during cruising, an exceptionally rare event. A quote from the New York Times in the event's Wiki page is chilling in retrospect: "No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely – without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar." That is certainly no longer true.
In the absence of facts, people turn to myths, so again it's not surprising that this old malarkey resurfaced, despite the fact that there is a far more fitting candidate for this event. The Triangle is largely a work of science fiction (ship disappearances are no more common in the purported area than elsewhere in the region) but when the real world makes no sense, sometimes nonsense gains credence.
Some have speculated that the attention given to the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web's invention by Sir Tim Berners-Lee has led to a spike in interest in this article, despite the fact that the Web and the Net are not the same thing (the Internet was invented by the US military in 1969).
The flag of the first island chain to be affected by the blast of a hydrogen bomb, which depicts the debt the islanders feel the US still owes them, became a topic of interest on Reddit this week.
The lead-up to one of the biggest drinking days of the year (and in the USA at least, opportunities for grade-school cruelty) on March 17 is not generating nearly as much interest as last year. It seems people have other things on their minds.
You can now view smaller versions of PNG images bigger than 20 megapixels. [1]
Article Feedback Tool was removed from the English and French Wikipedias on March 3. It will no longer be possible to add this tool to any Wikimedia wiki. [2][3]
You will now be able to use a Beta option to show a shorter list of language links. That way, Universal Language Selector will only show languages that are relevant to you. You will still be able to search for other languages. [5]
VisualEditor news
You can now change image size to default for your wiki. If you add new images to pages, they will also be default size. [6][7][8]
VisualEditor now has Arabic, Finnish and Kölsch icons for text styling. If you want icons for your language, ask in Bugzilla. [9][10][11]
It is now easier to edit templates. Complex tools are now in the "advanced" mode. [12][13]
It is also easier to edit images. You now have more options and they are explained better. [14]
We have improved the tool to add special characters. The buttons are now larger. More changes are coming. [15]
You can now use new keyboard shortcuts to undo the last action, clear formatting, and show the shortcut help window. [16][17][18]
Searching for template parameters in now case-insensitive. [19][20]
Required template parameters now have an asterisk (*) next to their edit boxes. [21]
Several template dialogs are now smaller, and their insert buttons have changed wording. [22]
Future software changes
You will soon see an error message if you try to log in or register with an invalid or taken username. [23]
list.wikimedia.org, the mailing list of the Finnish Wikipedia's administrator core, with a "clarification request". That was forwarded to the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team, who issued a formal press release on 3 March:
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