The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
26 November 2014


news specials opinion media research laughs 🔍︎ archives
Featured content
Orbital Science: Now you're thinking with explosions
In the media
A Russian alternative Wikipedia; Who's your grandfather?; ArtAndFeminism
Recent research
Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures
WikiProject report
Back with the military historians
Traffic report
Big in Japan
 

2014-11-26

Orbital Science: Now you're thinking with explosions

Contribute  —  
Share this
By The Herald, Adam Cuerden, and Hafspajen
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 10 to 16 November 2014. Anything in quotation marks is taken from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Four featured articles were promoted this week.

File:Paddlefish USFWS.jpg
This American paddlefish comes from a 300-million-year-old lineage (Yep: older than the dinos), and is now a featured article.

Four featured lists were promoted this week.

The Saltford Brass Mill, which dates from the 1720s, is one of many scheduled monuments in Bath and North East Somerset.
A mass grave from the Spanish Civil War discovered in a recent excavation in Estépar, Burgos; as photographed by Wikipedian Mario Modesto Mata. These sort of documentary images are very valuable since, naturally, the general goal is to return the bodies to their families for burial after the documentation of the murders are complete, meaning there's only a short amount of time for photographers to step in and document history.

Eleven featured pictures were promoted this week.

Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream
Wikipedian Francis C. Franklin's photograph of a great tit.
Roses by Vincent van Gogh
Toompea Castle, as photographed by Abrget47j.
Selfoss, a waterfall in Iceland on the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum, as photographed by Martin Falbisoner.

One featured topic was promoted this week.

The twenty initial members of the Council of Lithuania. The council sits at the center of a new featured topic.


Reader comments

2014-11-26

A Russian alternative Wikipedia; Who's your grandfather?; ArtAndFeminism

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Gamaliel

In Russia, Wikipedia edits you

Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library

Numerous media outlets are reporting on a November 14 statement on the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library announcing the formation of a Russian "alternative" to Wikipedia, a "regional electronic encyclopedia" dedicated to "Russian regions and the life of the country".


Western media outlets including Newsweek and the Washington Post have noted that this comes following efforts by the government of Vladimir Putin, who called the internet a "CIA project" earlier this year, to control online activities under the banner of "online sovereignty". The government gained the ability to block websites without a court order and immediately blocked the pages of several government opponents. Bloggers were required to register with the government. Russia has launched its own search engine, Sputnik, and even its own alternative internet called Cheburashka. It has also tried to have its say on Wikipedia, with numerous encyclopedia edits on topics like the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and Russia's conflict with the Ukraine traced to computers belonging to Russian government entities (See previous Signpost coverage). One person compiled a list of nearly 7000 such edits to the Russian Wikipedia.

"What Wikipedia Taught Me About My Grandfather"

Frederic M. Richards

The Atlantic features a story by particle physicist and science communicator Ben Lillie called "What Wikipedia Taught Me About My Grandfather" (November 18). Lillie's grandfather was Frederic M. Richards (1925–2009), Sterling Professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Though a physicist himself, Lillie discovered that he had not known the extent of Richards' work and the importance of it to the field of biophysics. Lillie wrote that he had always scoffed at Richards' disappointment at not being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, thinking it "an example of how absurd academics' expectations of themselves are", but learned that scientists thought that he could have shared the 1972 Prize with Christian Anfinsen.

Lillie talked with User:Dcrjsr, who brought the article from little more than a paragraph up to Good Article status. Dcrjsr is Jane S. Richardson, Professor of biochemistry at Duke University, former president of the Biophysical Society and a driving force behind WikiProject Biophysics. Richards' article is the only biography of the six articles at GA status within the scope of WikiProject Biophysics. When deciding which biophysics articles to improve, Richardson and her husband, Duke Professor of biochemistry David C. Richardson, told Lillie “There were three people who had really influenced us very strongly. The other two had pretty decent Wikipedia pages, and Fred’s just seemed terrible.”

Lillie wrote "A sense I’ve had my whole life of who my grandfather is can be transformed by the addition of a single fact from a stranger writing on the Internet."

ArtAndFeminism organizers included on "Global Thinkers" list

Dorothy Howard (left) at the February 2014 ArtAndFeminism New York City Edit-a-thon at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center

Foreign Policy included Siân Evans (User:Siankevans), Jacqueline Mabey (User:Failedprojects), Michael Mandiberg (User:Theredproject), Richard Knipel (User:Pharos), Dorothy Howard (User:OR drohowa), and Laurel Ptak on its list of "The Leading Global Thinkers of 2014". The list includes 100 "remarkable individuals who smashed the world as we know it" and "showed that a better future demands tearing down foundations and building something entirely new."

The magazine honored the six for their work towards "correcting the Wikipedia gender gap", noting that "as of 2013, only 13 percent of Wikipedia's contributors were female." The group organized the February ArtAndFeminism campaign, which featured thirty one Edit-a-thons in six countries on three continents. About six hundred participants created over a hundred articles and edited over 90 more on articles "related to art, feminism, gender studies, and LGBTQ issues". Another campaign is planned for March 2015.

Creator of Wikipedia sex illustrations is an "anonymous legend"

Seedfeeder's kiss-off

Gawker profiled User:Seedfeeder, the celebrated and notorious creator of numerous illustrations for Wikipedia articles for sex acts, calling him an "anonymous legend" and "Wikipedia's Greatest Sex Illustrator" (November 12). Gawker also featured a not safe for work gallery of "The Best of Seedfeeder", taken from the 46 of his sexual images in the Wikimedia Commons category Sex drawings by User:Seedfeeder. These images illustrate 36 Wikipedia articles, including pegging, gokkun, deep throating, frot, and tribadism.

Gawker calls Seedfeeder's work "unmistakable" and "striking": vector graphics, empty backgrounds, and a flat and almost clinical style that Seedfeeder said was inspired by "the simple illustrations in airline safety pamphlets". His work was popular with Wikipedia editors from his first upload in July 2008, with editors almost immediately inundating him with requests for images of specific sex acts for articles. He also gained him praise and attention off of Wikipedia, with his work being featured and discussed in B3ta, Cracked, Przegląd, and on Reddit. His work also has plenty of detractors, who have criticized him for what they perceive to be the reinforcement of racial stereotypes and depiction of non-consensual acts, criticism that has prompted alterations to or replacements of the images.

Seedfeeder's identity is unknown, and nothing is known about him outside of what information he's offered on Wikipedia, where he has identified himself as a heterosexual male and a mechanical engineer. After complaining about "the prejudices and concerns of the small-minded" for years, Seedfeeder left Wikipedia in June 2012. His final upload was an image of an Asian woman blowing a kiss he titled Wiki-so-long.png.

In brief

2014-11-26

Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Piotr Konieczny, Maximilian Klein, and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia"

This article[1] contributes to the discussion on gender inequalities on Wikipedia. The authors take a novel approach of looking for answers outside the Wikipedia community, thus also tying their research into the analysis of new editors recruitment, motivations, and barriers to contribute. The authors focus their analysis on the role of Internet experiences and skills, and their lack among certain groups. The authors study whether the level of one's skills in digital literacy is related to their chance of becoming a Wikipedia editor, by surveying 547 young adults (aged 21–22) – students at a (presumably American) university, the most used convenience sample in academia. The survey was carried out in 2009, with a follow-up wave in 2012. The students were asked about their socioeconomic and demographic background, as well as about their level of digital literacy skills. The authors report that "the average respondent's confidence in editing Wikipedia is relatively low" but that "about one in eight students had been given an assignment in class at some point either to edit or create a new entry on Wikipedia" – which likely suggests that the (undisclosed by authors) university was one where at least one member of the faculty participated in the Wikipedia:Education Program. The vast majority (99%) of respondents reported having read an entry on Wikipedia, and over a quarter (28%) have had some experience editing it (interestingly, even when controlling for students who were assigned to edit Wikipedia, the former number is still as high as 20%).

Regarding the gender gap issues, women are much less likely to have contributed to Wikipedia than men (21% to 38%), and that becomes even more divergent when controlling for student assignments (13% to 32%). The authors find an indication of gender gap affecting the likelihood of Wikipedia's contributions: students who are white, economically affluent, male and Internet-experienced are more likely to edit than others. The strongest and statistically significant predictor variables, however, are Internet skills and gender, and regression models show that variables such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, time availability, Internet experience, and confidence in editing Wikipedia are not significant. The authors find that the gender becomes more significant as one's digital literacy increases. At a low level of Internet skills, the likelihood of one's contribution to Wikipedia is low, regardless of gender. As one's skills increase, males became much more likely to contribute, but women fall behind. The authors find that women tend to have lower Internet skills than men, which helps explain a part of the Wikipedia gender gap: to contribute to Wikipedia, one needs to have a certain level of digital literacy, and the digital gap is reducing the number of women who have the required level of skills. The authors crucially admit that "why women, on average, report lower level understanding of Internet-related terms remains a puzzle. Although studies with detailed data about actual skills based on performance tests suggest no gender differences in the observed skills, research that looks at self-rated know-how consistently finds gender variation with real consequences for online behavior". This suggests that while men and women have, in reality, similar skills, women are much less confident about them, which in turns makes them much less confident about contributing to (or trying to contribute to) Wikipedia. This, however, is a hypothesis to be confirmed by future research. In the end, the authors do feel confident enough to conclude that "gender and Internet skills likely have a relatively mild interaction with each other, reinforcing the gender gap at the high end of the Internet skills spectrum." In conclusion, this reviewer finds this study to be a highly valuable one, both for the literature on gender gap and online communities, and for the Wikipedia community and WMF efforts to reduce this gap in our environment.

In nutritional articles, academic citations rise while news media citations decrease

A study published in First Monday[2] analyzed the development of the referencing of 45 articles over nine topic groups related to health and nutrition over a period of five years (2007–2011) (unfortunately, the authors are not very clear on which particular articles were analyzed, and tend to use the concepts of an article and topic group in a rather confusing manner). Authors coded for references (3,029 total), information on editing history, and search ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines. The study confirmed that Wikipedia articles are highly ranked by all search engines, with Yahoo! actually being even more "Wikipedia-friendly" than Google. The author shows that (as expected) the articles improve in quality (or at least, number and density of references) over time. Crucially, the authors show that the overall percentage of mainstream news media references has decreased, while references to academic publications increased over that time. By the end of the study period, only the article on (or topic group of?) trans fat contained more references to news sources than to academic publications. The authors overall support the description of Wikipedia as a source aiming for reliability, though they are hesitant to call it reliable, pointing out that for example 15% of analyzed references were coded as "outside the main reference type categories or... not be clearly determined". The authors conclude, commendably, that "Wikipedia needs to be high on the agenda for health communication researchers and practitioners" and that "communications professionals in the health field need to be much more actively involved in ensuring that the content on Wikipedia is reliable and well-sourced with reliable references".

Wikipedia user session timing compared with other online activities

Comparison of time between user interactions on Wikipedia, AOL and Cyclopath
reviewed by Maximilianklein (talk)

In a recent preprint titled "User Session Identification Based on Strong Regularities in Inter-activity Time"[3], Halfaker and team from the Wikimedia Foundation's Analytics department and the GroupLens Lab ask whether there is some way we can talk about contributions in terms of "sessions" rather than atomic operations, in all collaborative work online. The researchers would like to answer "yes," and that a "session" can be defined as the operations conducted until "a good rule-of-thumb inactivity threshold of about 1 hour" is reached, regardless if you're editing Wikipedia, viewing Wikipedia, rating movies, searching AOL, or playing League of Legends. You may recall that Halfaker and Geiger came to a similar conclusion about "edit sessions" in a 2013 paper, but now the idea is to cement that fact as a universal heuristic across many domains. Opposition to this idea has been that session length thresholds will always be arbitrary, or that a session deviates from completing a task that might extend beyond someone logging off for a night.

Stack Overflow user interactions

To bolster their argument, the authors use empirical data collected from seven datasets to test the hypothesis. The method employed is to take the log-normal time between user events, and then fit a bimodal distribution to the histogram. Once we have a two-humped histogram, we simply find the point which makes half the data "within" session and the other half "between" session.

AOL search data, Cyclopath route-getting requests, and Wikipedia viewing (from the desktop, mobile and apps) seem to fit bimodally. Together their the threshold is in the range of 29 to 115 minutes, but all would not be far off of an hour, say the authors. Yet when it comes to Wikipedia editing, OpenStreetMap editing, and MovieLens reviewing and searching, a bimodal 1-hour fit is good, but can be further explained by a trimodal model. In the case of the first two activities the third category is the wikibreak, and in the latter it is the ease the site make in rating movies in quick succession.

Even trimodally though, "this strategy for identifying session thresholds is not universally suitable for all user-initiated events". For instance they show League of Legends, which has modal peaks at 5 minutes and one day. As a reviewer this is easy to describe from a player's perspective. If you play 5 games in a row, which takes 5 minutes queueing between games, and then repeat it daily, you get the histogram seen where the 5 minute peak is about 5 times as tall as the day peak. Stack Overflow does not easily fit into their model at all with a threshold of 335 minutes. The authors claim this is from the high quality edits expected at Stack Overflow.

Overall the authors conclude that one hour seems to suffice as a rule of thumb. But does it? The issue is that a goodness of fit with the bimodal models is not presented. This leaves outliers like Stack Overflow either able to be modeled but not compliant with the one hour rule, when they could just potentially not be describable using the proposed heuristic.

Briefly

  • "Wikimedia Movement in European countries as an example of civil participation": This Polish-language book chapter[4] (with an English abstract) looks at the Wikimedia community as a social movement. In the first subchapter, it argues that the Wikimedia movement is a type of new social movement which is fighting for equal access to free education. The bulk of subsequent subchapters consist of describing the European Wikimedia projects through tables listing whether they exist, estimated size in articles, members, etc., and briefly describing their activities such as involvement in the Wikipedia Loves Monuments initiative or with the GLAM sector. The book chapter is interesting as clearly placing itself in the relatively small body of literature that describe Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a social movement. Unfortunately it is primarily a descriptive rather than an analytical piece, and does not provide any significant theoretical justification for calling the Wikimedia movement a social movement, a weakness amplified by the fact that this work fails to engage with the prior relevant body of Wikipedia research, and is only very loosely connected to the literature on social movements.
  • Ranking public domain authors using Wikipedia data: This article[5] proposes a way to combine Wikipedia and Online Books Page data, for the purpose of identifying the most notable (important, popular, read) authors whose work is about to enter the public domain, in order to facilitate and prioritize digitization of their works. The following information from the authors' Wikipedia articles are used: "article length, article age in days, time elapsed since last revision, revision rate during article’s life, article text (200 topic weights derived from a topic model), category count, translation count, redirect count, estimated views per day, presence of translation for the 10 Wikipedias with the most translations, presence of bibliographic identifier (GND, ISNI, LCCN, VIAF), article quality classification ("Good Article" and "Featured Article"), presence of protected classification, indicator for decade of death for decades 1910–1950, and interactions between article age and all features." The proposed algorithm may be of interest to members of WikiProject Books, WikiProject Libraries, WikiProject Open, and related projects, as a means of generating an importance rating and selecting underdeveloped articles for development.
  • "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures"[6]: The authors use Pierre Bourdieu's theories to analyze cultural similarities and differences between 31 European countries, by looking at the differences between articles on various national cuisines across 27 different European-language Wikipedias. They find that the existence, quality and links of studied Wikipedia articles can be correlated with data from the European Social Survey on cross-cultural ties between European countries. In addition to expected findings (all cultures are interested in their own cuisine first, then in famous ones such as French cuisine and in those of their neighbours), the article does present some interesting data, for example noting that the articles on Turkish cuisine are relatively well-developed on numerous Wikipedias, which could be explained by long-term and significant in size migration of Turkish people to various European countries, and the resulting interest in Turkish cuisine in those countries. The authors also find that significant differences do exist between different language Wikipedias, as different cuisines can be very differently described on different projects, thus reinforcing the theory that knowledge can be significantly influenced by one's culture. For Wikipedia editors, this is a reminder that all language editions suffer from significant biases, and that articles in different language editions can be and usually are significantly different.
  • Dissertation on automatic quality assessment: A recent PhD dissertation[7] by Oliver Ferschke at the Technical University of Darmstadt "shows how natural language processing approaches can be used to assist information quality management on a massive scale" on Wikipedia. As the first main contribution, the author highlights his definition of a "comprehensive article quality model that aims to consolidate both the quality of writing and the quality criteria defined in multiple Wikipedia guidelines and policies into a single model. The model comprises 23 dimensions segmented into the four layers of intrinsic quality, contextual quality, writing quality and organizational quality." Secondly, the dissertation presents methods for automatically detecting quality flaws (overlapping with previous publications co-authored by Ferschke), and evaluates them on a "novel corpus of Wikipedia articles with neutrality and style flaws". Thirdly, the dissertation presents "an approach for automatically segmenting and tagging the user contributions on article Talk pages to improve work coordination among Wikipedians. These unstructured discussion pages are not easy to navigate and information is likely to get lost over time in the discussion archives."
  • 39% of talk page threads contain wrong indentations: Ferschke's "English Wikipedia Discussions Corpus" ("EWDC") is used in a paper[8], to be presented at the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing next month. In the paper, his doctoral adviser Irina Gurevych and another author construct an method to detect adjacency pairs (a user comment that responds to another) by analyzing the content, in particular detecting "lexical pairs" (giving the examples "(why, because)" and "(?, yes)"), validated against human annotation. As a side result, they observe that "Incorrect indentation (i.e., indentation that implies a reply-to relation with the wrong post) is quite common in longer discussions in the EWDC. In an analysis of 5 random threads longer than 10 turns each, shown in Table 1, we found that 29 of 74 total turns, or 39%±14pp of an average thread, had indentation that misidentified the turn to which they were a reply."
  • Which talk page comment refers to which edit?: Another paper co-authored by Gurevych, titled "Automatically Detecting Corresponding Edit-Turn-Pairs in Wikipedia"[9] uses machine learning to automatically identify talk page comments about a particular article edit.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

  • "Does the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia Shut out New Candidates Because of the Acquaintance Relation?"[10] (cf. earlier coverage of related publications by the same authors: "Decline of adminship candidatures on Polish Wikipedia", "What it takes to become an admin: Insights from the Polish Wikipedia", "Predicting admin elections based on social network analysis")
  • "Development of a semantic data collection tool. : The Wikidata Project as a step towards the semantic web."[11] (bachelor thesis)
  • "To Use or Not to Use? The Credibility of Wikipedia"[12]
  • "Indexing and Analyzing Wikipedia's Current Events Portal, the Daily News Summaries by the Crowd"[13] From the abstract: "Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (WCEP) is a special part of Wikipedia that focuses on daily summaries of news events. ...First, we provide descriptive analysis of the collected news events. Second, we compare between the news summaries created by the WCEP crowd and the ones created by professional journalists on the same topics. Finally, we analyze the revision logs of news events over the past 7 years in order to characterize the WCEP crowd and their activities. The results show that WCEP has reached a stable state in terms of the volume of contributions as well as the size of its crowd..."

References

  1. ^ Hargittai, Eszter; Aaron Shaw (2014-11-04). "Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia". Information, Communication & Society. 0 (0): 1–19. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2014.957711. ISSN 1369-118X. Closed access icon
  2. ^ Messner, Marcus; Marcia W. DiStaso; Yan Jin; Shana Meganck; Scott Sherman; Sally Norton (2014-10-29). "Influencing public opinion from corn syrup to obesity: A longitudinal analysis of the references for nutritional entries on Wikipedia". First Monday. 19 (11). ISSN 1396-0466.
  3. ^ Halfaker, Aaron; Oliver Keyes; Daniel Kluver; Jacob Thebault-Spieker; Tien Nguyen; Kenneth Shores; Anuradha Uduwage; Morten Warncke-Wang (2014-11-11). "User Session Identification Based on Strong Regularities in Inter-activity Time". arXiv:1411.2878.
  4. ^ Patryk Korzeniecki: Ruch Wikimediów w państwach europejskich jako przykład aktywności obywatelskiej (Wikimedia Movement in European countries as an example of civil participation). Chapter 6 in: Joachim Osiński, Joanna Zuzanna Popławska (eds.): Oblicza spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego. WARSAW SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS PRESS, WARSAW 2014
  5. ^ Riddell, Allen B. (2014-11-08). "Public Domain Rank: Identifying Notable Individuals with the Wisdom of the Crowd". arXiv:1411.2180.
  6. ^ Laufer, Paul; Claudia Wagner; Fabian Flöck; Markus Strohmaier (2014-11-17). "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures". arXiv:1411.4484.
  7. ^ Ferschke, Oliver (2014-07-15). "The Quality of Content in Open Online Collaboration Platforms: Approaches to NLP-supported Information Quality Management in Wikipedia". Darmstadt: Technische Universität Darmstadt. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ^ Emily K. Jamison, Iryna Gurevych: Adjacency Pair Recognition in Wikipedia Discussions using Lexical Pairs. PDF
  9. ^ Johannes Daxenberger and Iryna Gurevych: Automatically Detecting Corresponding Edit-Turn-Pairs in Wikipedia [ http://acl2014.org/acl2014/P14-2/pdf/P14-2031.pdf PDF] Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Short Papers), pages 187–192, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 23-25 2014.
  10. ^ Spychała, Justyna; Mateusz Adamczyk; Piotr Turek (2014-06-30). "Does the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia Shut out New Candidates Because of the Acquaintance Relation?". International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems. 7 (1 and 2): 103–112. ISSN 1942-2679.
  11. ^ Ubah, Ifeanyichukwu (2013). Development of a semantic data collection tool. : The Wikidata Project as a step towards the semantic web.
  12. ^ Hilles, Stefanie (2014). "To Use or Not to Use? The Credibility of Wikipedia". Public Services Quarterly. 10 (3): 245–251. doi:10.1080/15228959.2014.931204. ISSN 1522-8959. Closed access icon
  13. ^ Tran, Giang Binh; Mohammad Alrifai (2014). "Indexing and Analyzing Wikipedia's Current Events Portal, the Daily News Summaries by the Crowd" (PDF). Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. WWW Companion '14. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 511--516. doi:10.1145/2567948.2576942. ISBN 978-1-4503-2745-9. (ACM)


Reader comments

2014-11-26

Back with the military historians

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Rcsprinter123


Previous Reports
Military history
These are previous editions of the WikiProject Report related to today's topic. For more old Reports, visit the archive.

It's time for this year's edition of the Report looking at possibly our largest WikiProject: Military history. Since our last interview in June 2013, the project has had no break in its huge quest to document everything in their scope, that is, militaries and conflicts of the past. As usual, its participants were eager to answer the questions posed by The Signpost and update us on how they are doing. So without further ado, here are TomStar81, Adam Cuerden, Peacemaker67, Hawkeye7 and Nick-D.

Can you tell us about any events that have happened this year at WikiProject Military history? Have there been any contests, reached milestones or promoted significant featured content in 2014?

  • TomStar81: Well the big one for us was the commencement of the centennial anniversary of World War I, which we marked with a handful of Op-Ed pieces, and added a new section to our in house news letter covering the major battles, campaigns, and events of the First World War for the project members to keep apprised of as we hit the anniversaries of these early battles in what may be one of the most important wars of the last century. Along with the centennial of World War I has come a slightly increased interest in both the World War I task force and Operation Great War Centennial, one of four so called Special Projects of the Military history WikiProject with the goal of covering World War I's major battles.
  • Adam Cuerden: My personal goal is to try and mark as many battles from the American Civil War and World War I on their 150th and 100th anniversaries, respectively using the featured picture process. The Battle of Franklin, a crippling defeat for the Confederate Army in the late stages of the war, will be marked on 30 November, and I'm pretty proud of my work on restoring a historical lithograph for that, but, honestly, I'm actually more happy about something that I had far less input into: I managed to find one of the artworks used by The Illustrated London News in their initial coverage of the Christmas truce in World War I. This was an event I would be ashamed had Wikipedia not been able to commemorate. It's not something I restored. The research to find it was "I know how to effectively use Google". But it's such an iconic event, and now we can commemorate it this Christmas.
Oh, and also, did you know there's photographs of the Battle of Nashville in the American Civil War? Actual photographs of the battle? Not yet finished, but... it's my current project, and it's amazing (and a ridiculously large amount of work).
Self-propelled gun ISU-152 in the Kubinka Tank Museum
I would also like to mention a topic close to my heart, one that is heavily centred in WP:MILHIST but also has a central role in WP:Yugoslavia, and that is Operation Bora. Bora is a focused initiative to improve articles pertaining to the World War II history of Yugoslavia to featured status. It calls for collaboration on a span of battles, biographies, and factions. In the last year, Bora has produced one FL, four MILHIST A-class articles, 18 GA's, and 35 MILHIST B-class articles. That is not to be sneezed at, particularly given the language issues in accessing sources. While it might not be receiving mass support at MILHIST, it has generated support across several WikiProjects, including WikiProject Serbia and WikiProject Croatia.
  • Hawkeye7: A recent milestone was the project's 300th Featured Picture. It has also generated over 800 Featured Articles.

Last time the Signpost spoke to this project in June 2013, we were asking about Operation Normandy, an initiative of the project dedicated to the 1944 campaigns. How has this subproject progressed this year, and with the 70th anniversary occurring this June?

  • TomStar81: I'm not sure how well Normandy has been doing since its not an area I'm well familiar with, (although by proxy, as a maritime history editor, I've worked on articles for ships that were involved in the operation). I do know that this past June a total of four articles – Australian contribution to the Battle of Normandy, Falaise pocket, Battle of Verrières Ridge, Operation Perch – were singled out for attention on the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion as candidates for main page appearances as Today's Featured Article, and after the discussions Operation Perch and Australian contribution to the Battle of Normandy were featured on the main page on 14 June and 20 July, respectively.

Can you explain the role of the "coordinators" of the project? How are they appointed? Do all of them perform their responsibilities, or is the work spread unevenly? If a coordinator is unable to due to time constraints or other reasons, are they able to easily to resign the position? Would you recommend that a similar system of leaders is introduced to other projects – do they bring advantages?

  • TomStar81: In point of fact we have been asked these question so often that we created two Academy Courses – Becoming a coordinator and Advice from former coordinators – to help better explain the role for our members. Essentially, coordinators are a system we have found that aids the project by ensuring that a minimum number of editors are specifically charged with the maintenance duties for certain project run initiatives, such as closing our A-class reviews and handing out certain Milhist specific awards (such as our A-class medals and the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves). We are not actually appointed, we are elected to the general position of coordinator by the community in an election held once a year (usually in September). Before the election takes place the coordinators will discuss the election to determine the exact start and end dates for the election, and to find a consensus on the number of slots to be filled. Once these two points are sorted out, the page is open for nominations and voting, after which the tally is added up and the users who qualified become coordinators. Our Lead Coordinator is also selected by this process, as we traditionally offer the role to the user with the highest number of support votes cast.
As to the rest of the rest of your questions, we do have issues with an uneven work flow on account of the fact that we volunteer to do whatever needs done, so we do have some coordinators that are overly active and others that are generally non-participants in the work load. If a coordinator feels that he or she is unable to do what is asked of them they may resign without prejudice, and we have had coordinators in the past that have resigned during a given term (which we call a tranche). Lastly, I've seen a number of projects that have adopted our coordinator system, which suggests to me that the system has its merits for a larger project or an intricate project, regardless of the community's approval or disapproval (lol) of the use of such a system.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

  • Peacemaker67: We have around a dozen coordinators in this project, and this has hovered about the same number for quite a few years. I have been a coordinator for the last year and a bit, having been on WP for three years or so. The coordinators have made a significant contribution to MILHIST, mainly through oiling the wheels. We do the bulk of the GA, A/AL-class, and FA/FL reviews, with support from other MILHIST members, including former coords, and keep the project moving forward. We administer the awards processes and ensure consistency in assessment, we ensure successes are celebrated, and coalesce around poor quality articles to ensure they are improved before promotion. Despite being tagged by some as "gatekeepers", we promote a lot of quality articles developed by new editors, and hold older editors to WP standards if they try "to slip one through". I think we do a good job in general. Do we get every article right, no. But, on average, we do a bloody good job. I don't know what a lot of other WikiProjects do, but many could do a lot worse than adopting our model.
  • Hawkeye7: In addition to the regularly elected coordinators, we also have two coordinators emeritus, Kirill Lokshin and Roger Davies. They were elected to this position on the basis of their long-term contributions to the project.

Is there any significance to the Military history WikiProject's coordinator's insignias? Which members receive which devices? When were the insignias first handed out?

 
  • TomStar81: To the right are the three insignias used by the Military history WikiProject's coordinators, all of which are based on actual military insignias. The Coordinators use the 5-star insignia, which was used in World War II by the United States Army and United States Navy to denote officers that held the rank of General of the Army and Fleet Admiral, respectively. The 6-star insignia is used by the Lead Coordinator for the project, and is based on a conjectured design for a US Army or Navy officer that would hold the rank of General of the Armies or Admiral of the Navy, respectively. The Golden 6-star insignia is used to represent our two Coordinators Emeriti, and combines the design of the 6-star General of the Armies insignia with gold stars, which were used by General of the Armies John J. Pershing. Upon his promotion to the rank of General of the Armies, Pershing was given leeway to design his own insignia for the rank. He opted to retain the 4-stars he already had, but switched the material to gold in recognition of his new rank. Congress never formally recognized his insignia, so the design was never considered official. The five and six star insignias for the lead and assistant coordinators (as the coordinators were known at the time) were first handed out around 2007, while our golden six star insignia was created around 2009 when we approved a motion to name Kirill Lokshin (talk · contribs) coordinator emeritus.
This image of SMS Von der Tann represents the featured topic Battlecruisers of the World, promoted last October

The current number of members is approximately 1200, making it one of the largest WikiProjects around. Have you been successful in attracting many new members this year, and how much do new participants tend to contribute to articles relating to this subject after they have joined; do some appear to forget their membership straight away?

  • TomStar81: Speaking just for myself, trying to attract new members to any project here is an exercise in futility since editors (and contributors in general for that matter) will always work on what they consider their own little part of Wikipedia. If it so happens that their little corner of Wikipedia happens to be one of the corners upon which our project has some invested interest then I consider it to be a victory for the project as it means someone cared enough to help us out with an article by editing and/or contributing. As for the project as a whole, were not particularly active in attracting new members since most of the editors here tend to be men and most men tend to have some interest in military history, so we do alright. That having been said, we are starting to see some of the generally apathy that has plagued Wikipedia the last few years creep into our project – notably, our members seem to have mentally shifted from full throttle to cruise control, so we've seen a slow down in participation in some projects, task forces, and review areas. We do have some members who join but contribute little if any, but on the whole most people who join stay with the project. I credit that to our size: with so many areas of military history you'd be hard pressed not to find at least one you have some interest in.
  • Hawkeye7: Go into many bookstores and you'll see a section on military books. The subject is accessible to a general audience in a way that subjects like mathematics are not. This gives us a much larger pool of expertise to draw on than some other projects, but not that Military History is widely understood or appreciated. Create a university unit entitled "Military History 101: World War II" and watch the lecture theatre fill with eager kids. (Gary Sheffield has done just that.) Unfortunately, universities don't work that way. If you want to have a go at writing about Military History though, this is the place. With all the work that has been done, I think Wikipedia can be intimidating to newcomers. Someone was recently looking at our conflict infobox, and it's been lovingly converted to Lua. I think it's awesome, but I know some people find it overwhelming.

How long have you been a member of WikiProject Military history? Do you prefer working on articles related to particular subjects, people, or time periods?

  • TomStar81: This past September I marked 10 years on Wikipedia, and I've been with the Military history WikiProject for roughly 8 years. I spend my editorial time working mostly with battleship related articles, although I've been known to flirt with armored warfare and battle/campaign articles from time to time.
This picture of students going to man the barricades could be an illustration to the scene of students going to man the barricades in Victor Hugo's 1862 classic Les Misérables, however, it's from 1870, during the Siege of Paris.
  • Adam Cuerden: I've been a sort of follower of the project for several years, I've only really become an active member in the last two, however, when I finally stepped in and said "someone needs to curate the military history photograph collection, and I want to do it!" Honestly, it was military history, in part, that first started my passion for historical imagery; I was working on articles about the plays of W. S. Gilbert, and was looking through old newspapers, when I discovered The Illustrated London News. Their coverage of the Franco-Prussian War was both beautiful and engagingly written. The shooting of the elephants at the Paris Zoo to feed the populace during the subsequent Siege of Paris is probably one of the most memorable images I... er... didn't bring to Wikipedia. Oops. I really wish I knew what Victor Hugo thought of it: eight years earlier, he wrote Les Misérables, centring on the anti-monarchist June Rebellion of 1832. Then, in 1870, French Emperor Napoleon III surrenders to the Germans, and... that's when things start to get really crazy. The French literally kick Napoleon III out of his emperorship rather than let him surrender for them. The Germans march on Paris. The French refuse to surrender. The French are starving. They shoot the elephants at the zoo, and refuse to surrender. The French surrender. The French form a socialist commune, and refuse to surrender. Seriously, why don't people study this? It's amazing.
  • Peacemaker67: I joined WP and MILHIST almost exactly three years ago. In that time, I have helped 11 FA/FL achieved that status, and a total of 21 articles achieve MILHIST A-Class, as well as something like 35 articles reach GA. In an area like Yugoslavia in WWII, that is a BIG contribution. I'm pleased about that, but there is a lot more to do.
  • Hawkeye7: I have been a member of the project for eight years. In that time I have helped 40 articles achieve FA/FL status, and 75 A-class articles. I like the project's comradely atmosphere, and its ethos of creating high quality content. Despite the prohibition on original research, many military articles have the finest accounts of a subject that you'll find anywhere. There's always a tug of war for me between writing articles on which I have special expertise and no one else is likely to tackle, and ones that appeal to a wider audience. Some people think that military history is all about battles, but it is a much broader field than that. Over the last two years my focus has been on improving the Manhattan Project articles. I have taken the main article to FA, along with articles on well-known scientists like Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr; but I have also created articles on subjects that are not so well-known, people like Priscilla Duffield and Edward Creutz, and topics the Project Camel and the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. These are not what many people associate with military history.

In your opinion, what is the single best achievement of this project?

  • TomStar81: Hard to say. A great many of the project's initiatives, standards, and systems have been widely adopted by other projects on site, while the project as a whole has maintained a wide and impressive array of quality content. If the measure of a project's success is based upon how many other projects look to us to solve issues relevant to them then I feel that this is our single best achievement.
  • MisterBee1966: I believe that I have said this before, in my opinion the single best achievement of this project is the global team spirit. Exceptions to this statement aside, I believe the project members embrace a common understanding that helping each is in benefit of the result. Many members of this project have joined us from across the globe, naturally with a stronger emphasis from English speaking countries. The challenge here is that we sometimes have to engage with people who may not speak the English language like a native speaker, like myself; this deficit however is more than compensated and allows for a much more unbiased view on a subject area that can have many shades of gray. I believe this to be the single strongest asset of this project.
  • Hawkeye7: It was great to see an article that I created on the Singapore Strategy has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Russian, Indonesian and Arabic.
  • Nick-D: I think that the project's A-class review process and the page where editors can request B-class assessments have been remarkably successful in encouraging editors to develop high quality articles. I'd also note the sheer breadth of the high-quality articles which have been developed through these processes.

Anything else you'd like to add?

  • TomStar81: We're always looking for a few good editors, so if you'd like to lend a hand we would appreciate the help!

That's all with this project until, hopefully, next year. In the next issue we'll be talking to some islanders and asking how they get their work done. Before then, feel free to browse the archive for older reports.

Reader comments

2014-11-26

Big in Japan

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Milowent

Often times in popular culture, a subject will be quite popular among a distinct niche of people or region of the world, but little-known elsewhere -- like a musical artist that is boasted to be "big in Japan". The Traffic Report provides a bevy of examples this week. The article on deceased singer Aaliyah was quite popular as the result of a new cable television movie about her life. The movie drew 3.2 million viewers, which was considered very successful. Though that figure only represents a very small fraction of the world's population, the attention was enough to make the article the second most popular one on Wikipedia this week. Meanwhile, in India, the marriage of the daughter of actor and screenwriter Salim Khan propelled his article to #9. And in the greater Top25, in the gaming world, a trailer video for Eve Online raised that game's profile to #17, and the new first-person shooter game Far Cry 4 debuted at #23. In Britain, the appearance of retired footballer Jimmy Bullard on a reality show brought him new attention and landed spot #19. And, last but not least, American wrestling fans raised their latest spectacle, Survivor Series (2014), to spot #25.

Competing for attention amidst the niche-driven articles was an assortment of topics of broader popularity, including the film Interstellar (#1), which is topping our list for the third straight week, news that imprisoned killer Charles Manson (#3) is getting married, the death of director Mike Nichols (#5), also husband of Diane Sawyer (#14), and the continuing troubles of comedian Bill Cosby (#6).

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of 16-22 November, 2014, the ten 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 Interstellar (film) B-class 1,409,615
This movie remains Wikipedia's most popular article for the third straight week. Since opening on 5 November, it has grossed $120.6 million in North America, and almost $450 million worldwide.
2 Aaliyah Featured Article 1,349,666 Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, a biopic about the American singer who died in 2001, debuted on the Lifetime cable network this week. It was quite successful, bringing in over 3.2 million viewers.
3 Charles Manson B-class 1,308,091
On 17 November the world learned that this demented killer, who has been in prison for over 40 years, has recently obtained a marriage license to wed a 26-year old who has been visiting him in prison for over nine years, and who runs websites proclaiming Manson's innocence.
4 Stephen Hawking B-Class 802,353
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon got a boost with the release of the biopic, The Theory of Everything, in the United States on 7 November. Up from #16 last week.
5 Mike Nichols C-Class 788,230 This highly regarded American film and stage director died of a heart attack in New York City on 19 November. In 1968, Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate, and he had helmed a host of critically acclaimed movies, his last being 2007's Charlie Wilson's War
6 Bill Cosby B-Class 756,135
The American comedian probably had one of the worst weeks in his life, as allegations that he had sexually assaulted as many as 16 women in the past were the subject of renewed and more much high-profile attention, causing a planned new sitcom and comedy special to be sidelined. New allegations included those of former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who publicly alleged for the first time that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982. It is difficult for many to square these burgeoning sordid tales of private life with the clean father-figure persona which Cosby represented for so many years.
7 Thanksgiving C-class 663,886
Down almost a million views from last week, but mobile views are up to 19.9% (from about 5% last week), suggesting that legitimate views are starting to overtake the spammer views which has affected the viewcounts of this article and others such as Online shopping which are connected to the biggest shopping season of the year in the United States.
8 Facebook B-class 628,013
A perennially popular article, as it is the second most popular website in the world, after Google.
9 Salim Khan Start-class 562,555
An Indian actor and screenwriter, the nuptials of his adopted daughter Arpita Khan (which link redirects to his article and got over 286,000 views itself) occurred this week, and have drawn much attention in India.
10 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 Start-class 536,903
The third of four planned movies made from The Hunger Games trilogy starring Jennifer Lawrence (left) debuted this week.
If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
Explore Wikipedia history by browsing The Signpost archives.



       

The Signpost · written by many · served by Sinepost V0.9 · 🄯 CC-BY-SA 4.0