The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
23 June 2017

News and notes
Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)
In the media
Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill
Op-ed
Facto Post: a fresh take
Featured content
Will there ever be a break? The slew of featured content continues
Traffic report
Wonder Woman beats Batman, The Mummy, Darth Vader and the Earth
Recent research
Utopian bubbles: Can Wikipedians create value outside of the capitalist system?
Technology report
Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all
 

2017-06-23

Departments reorganized at Wikimedia Foundation, and a month without new RfAs (so far)

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Altercari
Interim Vice-President of Product Toby Negrim (pictured) made the announcement alongside CTO Victoria Coleman.

Wikimedia Foundation changes

Victoria Coleman, Chief Technology Officer

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a reorganization of the Product and Technology departments. The re-org is expected to deliver better product development with community engagement and an audience-based approach, a more efficient pipeline and to "better prepare our engineering teams to plan around the upcoming movement strategic direction". In the new organization, the Product department will be renamed the Audiences department. The Editing team becomes the Contributors team; the Reading team the Readers team. The Discovery team will be distributed to the Readers team and the Technology department (but will still work together on various projects). The Fundraising Tech team will be moved to the Technology department. Team Practices group members working directly with teams in the Audiences and Technology departments will move into those teams, and the rest will move to the Talent & Culture department, under the newly-appointed T&C Chargée d’Affaires Anna Stillwell. Four audience verticals will be condensed into three: Readers, Contributors and Community Tech. The Design Director role will be reintroduced.

Brief notes



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Jonatan Svensson Glad

This Signpost "In the media" report covers media primarily from April to June 2017.

Kalanick's nipples

The nipples in question

The anatomy of Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick's chest area, more exactly his nipples, has been the talk of the month. That is at least what one can gather from a Motherboard article (June 9), in which the author Sarah Emerson asks why Wikipedia hasn't replaced the image with any of the "dozens of fair use, high-resolution options" on Flickr. This because she fails to understand our strict policy on fair use images, disallowed when free alternatives are available. However, she's partly correct that there exist a few alternatives, like this one by TechCrunch.

The article includes two screenshots of "heated" debate from the talk page spanning three years. However, this discussion only included six comments in total, one of which pointed out that the nipples were worth some $2.1 billion each. Normally I would have applied {{citation needed}} to such a statement, but given that a 5-minute Uber fare in central Stockholm costs me $13, I'm not so surprised that the pennies trickle in for the CEO. J.

Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill

The reality drama series that is the Donald Trump presidency continues onwards with its latest breathtaking episode. In a shocking development Newsweek reports (June 8) that with the help of the Twitter account @CongressEdits they've been able to uncover a traitor within the midst of the United States House of Representatives. As the Comey hearing unfolded, a rogue agent used a House IP address to add a controversial example of obstruction of justice to our encyclopedia. J.

In brief

How long will this logo have to be used on Turkish Wikipedia?
Related articles
censorship

Liquidation of Wikimedia RU
24 December 2023

Censorship, medieval hoaxes, "pathetic supervillains", FB-WMF AI TL bid, dirty duchess deeds done dirt cheap
1 August 2022

WMF staff turntable continues to spin; Endowment gets more cash; RfA continues to be a pit of steely knives
31 January 2019

Court-ordered article redaction, paid editing, and rock stars
1 December 2018

Kalanick's nipples; Episode #138 of Drama on the Hill
23 June 2017


More articles

  • Building a wall, and letting readers pay for it: Katherine Maher described "alternative facts [as] nothing new" in an interview with a Swedish newspaper, based on the title of the pay-to-read piece. (Svenska Dagbladet, May 22) J.
  • Wikipedia HacKeD!1: Another day, another tabloid hack who doesn't know the meaning of the word. Yet again has the media described an article suffering from common vandalism following the British election as being "hacked" (Daily Mirror, June 9). To quote the last issue of The Signpost, it is indeed "a sexy word to use in a headline". J.
  • "Turks click away but Wikipedia is gone": In early April, the Turkish government blocked access to Wikipedia. While the news was covered online and around the world, the best[COI] writing on the subject comes from Wikinews (May 2). C., J.
  • Jimmy on tour: Wiki founder Wales found a moment to mention his start-up, Wikinews copycat Wikitribune, while discussing the Facebook echo chamber in a CNBC interview (June 16) earlier last week. J.
  • Oh, to be young and free! Do you remember those times? Wikipedia was but a mewling infant, with fewer articles than Trump had lawsuits. VatorNews sure does! In a recent throwback article (June 13) they did a recap of Wikipedia's history – from Nupedia to now. J.
  • secure.wikimedia.org: Motherboard (May 26) and Siliconrepublic (May 30) wrote pieces about Wikipedia's 2011 switch from HTTP to HTTPs – adding another layer of security for readers against govermental spying and censorship. J.
  • The Signpost in the media: A special report from February written by Smallbones about paid editing has gotten traction in the "real media", and has been discussed in an article by The Times of Israel (May 29). J.
  • Wikipedia lives to lobby again: It feels like just yesterday Wikipedia protested against the proposed American legislation SOPA/PIPA. Now Wikipedia has launched FairCopyrightOz, teaming up with organisations in favor of fair use in Australia. The campaign has been covered by Gizmodo (May 22), The Sydney Morning Herald (May 21) and others. J.
  • I hear 'Happy Birthday' is in order! The Wire passes on their congratulations (June 4) to the Odia Wikipedia community, which just turned 15. Join The Wire and The Signpost in giving them a big round of applause! J.
  • Dead suits brought back to life: After Wikimedia's lawsuit against the NSA was dismissed, the WMF appealed the ruling, and the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously to review the suit. Vice News believes this "could reveal secrets of [the] NSA surveillance program" (May 24). J.



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Facto Post: a fresh take

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Charles Matthews
Wikicite 2017

I come late to the vision thing. I remember still that when I was standing for the Foundation Board in 2006, one Wikimedian described my platform as "pragmatic", though not in a good way. I suppose I have usually felt that the main way to build an encyclopedia is an enormous amount of painstaking effort. Right now, though, I feel the need to kick up a fuss.

The catalyst was the latest in the WikiCite conference series. I missed the Vienna meeting in late May, but it was clearly vibrant in a way that can only be welcomed. I started the Facto Post mass message to bottle the buzz.

Backstory: Wikimedia integration

I count myself as a four-tab Wikimedian. This means that when I sit down to my machine, I have Wikipedia, Commons, Wikisource and Wikidata tabs open. I have been heavily involved with Wikisource since 2009, and Wikidata since 2014. I arrived on Wikipedia in June 2003. So, where is Wikimedia heading right now? I have taken part in the current Wikimedia movement strategy exercise, and have mixed feelings about it. Radicalism? I don't see it there.

I have tried thinking about Wikimedia integration around Wikidata. I think this is happening, but it is hard to explain to anyone not already a Wikimedian working on several of the sister projects. Some people seem to feel threatened by Wikidata. Others regard it, with rather more justification, as the sonic screwdriver of the Wikimedia universe: Brion Vibber is supposed to have said that it solves all problems.

Presentation and content

I put my head over the parapet with s:Wikisource talk:Wikimedia Strategy 2017#Greater scope for data, citation reform and integration on Wikipedia, and make the clear case for our place in education. What would I be meaning there?

"Citation reform" suggests something is broken. Not everyone would agree. But consider whether the reader is able to view Wikipedia references consistently, in a given style. Is there a setting in "Preferences" for that? No, there may be 100 different referencing styles used in Wikipedia, and by convention there has to be a good reason for an editor to change the referencing style in an article. Normally, and this is a strength of Wikipedia, the reader is the customer here. In the way references are presented, the original author of an article has more of the status of someone who is "always right", in selecting the citation style.

Software engineers are going to recognise the issue here, namely separation of presentation and content. The essential content of a reference can be displayed in numerous ways, e.g.: which comes first, given name or family name of an author (content)? The reader who really wants family name written first, which always reminds me of old library card indexes, could in principle have that option via "Preferences" (presentation). That is a futuristic idea: another is that we should actually know the area of text that a reference applies to. (Strange but true, we don't now.) In any case, Wikidata could do the job of implementing the separation.

Integration: a fresh take

Here and now, I'm still talking about integration, but in a more encyclopedic way. Crucially, too, in a community way. The input-output issues around Wikidata now seem like a good way to understand things in the large, not just Wikidata's place among sister projects. Wikidata inputs (automated, semi-automated, and via the fact mining which I'm working on at WikiFactMine project). Holding areas such as mix'n'match, potentially LibraryBase. Wikidata outputs, not just to infoboxes but via SPARQL, and some form of WikiCite export (in other words, reuse of bibliographic and citation data held in Wikidata).

What I was saying in detail about citation reform is a technical possibility once the WikiCite project takes hold. It is a good example of a way ahead. I would think less of a Wikimedia movement strategy that didn't mention such things.

So I mean to take "post-Wikidata" seriously. About five years since its inception, there is a new perspective available, coming from Wikidatans, but not only them. Librarians find it of interest, some of the open science crowd, those looking for the salvation of digital humanities.

Facto Post

I felt, already last summer, that Wikidata was undeniably doing something for the digital humanities, moving our take beyond GLAM. See Andrew Gray's blogpost in the first issue of Facto Post. People really should get behind new tech possibilities for Wikimedia, I say. I believe that the "technophile versus Luddite" stand-off is divisive rather than helpful. I respect the caveat-oriented scepticism that is appropriate to new technology, but the difference between entering a caveat and nitpicking is a judgement call. So, I will go so far as to question the judgement of those who can only find nay-saying in their hearts.

To get past the title, Facto Post is a play on words. Ex post facto is Latin for "retrospectively", so reversed is possibly "prospectively"? But the play is also from the middle of "WikiFactMine", on which I'm currently working: I have a summer job as Wikimedian in Residence, at ContentMine, whose project it is. Fact as in "fact mining", a subarea of text and data mining, for us the extraction of scientific facts from original papers. Some of them are headed for Wikidata, as referenced entries.

Tim Berners-Lee himself is planning a revised Web; he praised our governance, if adding that Wikipedia is not perfect. And it is not. We are still straining to adjust Wikipedia to the semantic Web concept, his previous version. In fact, the potential is only just becoming apparent in terms of Wikimedia content being much more easily manipulated. Taming the plethora of referencing styles is just a start. The excitement is emergent, not just another "next big thing". I sought to nail it in the Editorial to the first issue of Facto Post. No doubt several passes will be needed.

Sign up to the Facto Post mailing list, do.



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Will there ever be a break? The slew of featured content continues

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Eddie891
Panoramic view of the Amphitheatre of El Jem, an archeological site in the city of El DjemTunisia.

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from May 21 through June 18 . Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

German troops registering people from Kragujevac and its surrounding areas prior to their execution
The skeleton of a dire wolf recreated in the Sternberg Museum of Natural History
Olympic Avenue in downtown Arlington
The Civic Building in Jerome, Arizona
A view of the Chrysler Building from the Empire State Building on November 20, 1953.
This image shows Hurricane Katrina. Studies regarding the name-letter effect have shown that people with a name beginning in K especially donated to the relief effort.

Twenty-two featured articles were promoted.

The Wiggles (with a fan) in 2004

Twenty-two featured lists were promoted.

Six featured pictures were promoted.

[[File:|center|240px|]]
Máscara Dorada, a Mexican luchador enmascarado associated with Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre

One featured topic was promoted.



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Wonder Woman beats Batman, The Mummy, Darth Vader and the Earth

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Eddie891
Ann Louise Gilligan (right), Irish feminist theologian, made the Deaths in 2017 list on the fourteenth. Here she is pictured with her politician wife Katherine Zappone attending a service at the Trinity College chapel in 2014.
The Top 25 Report summarizes the most popular articles each week, drawing from Andrew West's Top 5000 list. We often republish the top 10. Here are all 25, with commentary by OZOO, Igordebraga and our own Eddie891.

Summer blockbusters and sports, Trump and world events

It has been an eventful week in the world of Wikipedia page views. Gal Gadot (retaining first place from last week) was buoyed by the success of the Wonder Woman (2017 film), which took second place. The 2017 NBA Finals kept Kevin Durant (#3), LeBron James (#11), Steph Curry (#17), the Golden State Warriors (#21) and List of NBA Champions (#10) in the top 25. Despite mixed reviews, The Mummy (2017 film) was propelled to #5. Other entertainment figures and productions ranked high as well. A movie about Tupac Shakur shot him up to #12, Dear Evan Hansen was propelled to #14 and Orange Is the New Black was catapulted up to #19 after the release of a fifth season.

On a sadder note, injury and deaths (#9) also ranked high on the list. The deaths of Adam West (#4), and the injury of Steve Scalise (#8) featured prominently. E.

The twenty-five most popular articles on Wikipedia for the week of June 11, 2017, were:

Rank Page Image Views Class Comments
1 Gal Gadot
1,233,820
C Class
C Class
Having made her name playing Gisele Yashar in the The Fast and the Furious franchise, Israeli actress and model Gadot has moved on to playing Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman in the nascent DC Extended Universe. The character debuted in last year's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice; Gadot returns as Wonder Woman in the eponymous film. And on the subject of that film...
2 Wonder Woman (2017 film)
1,192,581
C Class
C Class
...it is second in this list. Patty Jenkins has directed the fourth film in the DC Extended Universe, and the first superhero movie from a major studio to have a female lead since 2005's Elektra, since when there have been three new Batmen, two new Hulks and two versions of the Fantastic 4, to give you an idea of how long that is in film-making time. The film has thusly obtained some symbolic value as a test of the viability of female led movies in the modern era, and with a gross of $571.8 million to from opening day to June 19, it's probably passed.
3 Kevin Durant
1,053,517
Good Article
Good Article
Top scorer for Golden State Warriors in every game of the 2017 NBA Finals, unanimously named the winner of the Most Valuable Player Award.
4 Adam West 961,246
C Class
C Class
The late Batman actor saw much interest after his death on June 9, at 88 years old. He, while mainly known for being Batman in the 1960s, also played opposite Chuck Connors in Geronimo (1962) and The Three Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming (1965). He also appeared in the science fiction film Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), and performed voice work on The Fairly OddParents (2001), The Simpsons (1992, 2002), and Family Guy (2000–2017).
5 The Mummy (2017 film)
896,532
C Class
C Class
The 2017 American action-adventure film debuted to negative reviews. The film has grossed $295.6 million (up to June 19). While it was the largest global debut for Tom Cruise, the film was largely a flop in the United States. It only made $31.7 million of the originally projected $35–40 million (second behind Wonder Woman). In its second weekend, ticket sales dropped 56% to $13.9 million, and fourth place at the box office.
6 Grenfell Tower fire
836,550
B Class
B Class
The 24 storey building was struck by a fire on June 14. 79 people are presumed dead as a result of the fire, and all of the building's inhabitants are homeless. The fire burnt for around 24 hours and was fought by hundreds of firefighters and 45 firetrucks. The fire is the deadliest fire in mainland Britain since the start of the 20th century.
7 Darth Vader
778,261
B Class
B Class
There has lately been a revival of interest in this famed villain. The announcement (and subsequent release) of a new comic about Vader in late March (and early June) may be driving traffic.
8 Steve Scalise
747,127
C Class
C Class
Steve Scalise getting shot has a lot of people heading over to his Wikipedia page to figure out, "Who exactly is Steve Scalise?" The Republican current United States House of Representatives Majority Whip and representative for Louisiana's 1st congressional district, serving since 2008 (and as House Majority Whip since 2014). Before that, Scalise served for four months in the Louisiana State Senate and twelve years in the Louisiana House of Representatives. Scalise's condition has improved from "imminent risk of death" to "critical" with "vital signs stabilized." Scalise is still in intensive care and is likely to be in the hospital for weeks. On a brighter note, the Congressional Baseball Game was not cancelled due to the incident, and in fact attracted a larger crowd than usual, raising over $1 million for charity.
9 Deaths in 2017
689,172
List Class
List Class
The near-ever-present list of the deceased stayed in the same place this week while losing about 11,000 views in total.
10 List of NBA champions
675,034
Featured Class
Featured Class
For the third year in a row, the NBA Finals came down to the Golden State Warriors against the Cleveland Cavaliers, with the former winning.
11 LeBron James
643,575
Good Article
Good Article
The professional basketball player was at the forefront of the Cavaliers' effort to win in the finals for the second time in a row. Despite scoring an average of 33.6 points per game, it was not enough this time for the Cavs to overcome the deficit and they lost, 1–4.
12 Tupac Shakur 610,200
B Class
B Class
Shakur is consistently ranked as one of the greatest and most influential rappers of all time, and occasionally one of the greatest artists of all time. The release of All Eyez on Me has spiked his popularity again, fittingly, just as he would have been nearing 46 years of age.
13 Otto Warmbier 607,175
B Class
B Class
The recent spike in popularity was driven in the earlier part of the week by the release – after eighteen months in captivity – of this 22 year old American by North Korea. However, Warmbier succumbed to his injuries after six days.
14 Dear Evan Hansen
578,312
Start Class
Start Class
This musical, following a high school senior with social anxiety disorder in the turmoil that follows a classmate's death saw an increase in views following the 71st Tony Awards, in which it was nominated for nine awards, winning six including Best MusicalBest Score, and Best Actor in a Musical for its lead Ben Platt.
15 Rafael Nadal
577,002
C Class
C Class
"The King of Clay" has proven his dominance yet again. He won the 2017 French Open, bringing his total French Open wins to an astounding 10. Only one player has ever topped that in a Grand Slam tournament, Margaret Court with 11 Australian Opens.
16 Earth
571,679
Featured Class
Featured Class
It's the Earth.
17 Stephen Curry
562,359
B Class
B Class
Oft considered the greatest shooter in history, Curry proved his dominance yet again, seizing the championship title, after narrowly being denied last year.
18 Donald Trump
526,315
C Class
C Class
Trump's back. Well he was never really gone. As it is, he appears on the list again, this time due to reversing the Cuban Thaw policies of Obama, his predecessor.
19 Orange Is the New Black
494,706
C-class
C-class
The release of the fifth season of the popular Netflix original about women in prison sent it up to #19.
20 ICC Champions Trophy
471,026
Start Class
Start Class
When things are big in India, they are really big. Everywhere.
21 Golden State Warriors
449,547
B Class
B Class
The Warriors won their fifth championship against the Cavs. They took their lead early, and held on to it with the help of two players you may have heard of. Kevin Durant and Steph Curry.
22 Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
436,040
C Class
C Class
The undefeated five-division professional boxing world champion announced he has seen a contestant emerge from a whole different sport: MMA star Conor McGregor (#24), who will fight Mayweather in August.
23 Pound sterling £ 432,583
C Class
C Class
From Brexit to the snap election, this currency just can't seem to get a break. Regardless, most traffic is probably driven by... you guessed it, Reddit.
24 2017 ICC Champions Trophy
421,569
Start Class
Start Class
The 2017 edition of this quadrennial cricket tournament was held in England and Wales. India returned to the final, held on June 17, but lost to neighbour/rival Pakistan.
25 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup
420,904
Start Class
Start Class
In preparation for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Russia is receiving the continental champions, plus current world champion Germany, in a tournament that started on Saturday. Like in the previous edition, it is being held amidst nationwide protests – but not exactly tournament related, despite plenty of reasons they could be.



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Utopian bubbles: Can Wikipedians create value outside of the capitalist system?

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Dorothy Howard, Simon Razniewski and Tilman Bayer

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

Arwid Lund

"Wikipedia, work, and capitalism. A realm of freedom?"

Review by Dorothy Howard

In his first book, Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism. A Realm of Freedom?,[1] Arwid Lund, lecturer in the program of Information Studies (ALM: Archives, Libraries and Museums) at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden investigates the ideologies that he believes are shared by participants in peer-production projects like Wikipedia. The author typologizes the ways that Wikipedians understand their activities, including “playing v. gaming” and “working v. labouring,” (113-115) to explore his hypothesis that “there is a link between how Wikipedians look upon their activities and how they look upon capitalism.” (117) Lund characterizes peer-production projects by their shared resistance to information capitalism—things like copyright and pay-walled publishing, which they see as limiting creativity and innovation. His thesis is provocative. He claims that the anti-corporatist ideologies intrinsic to peer production and to Wikipedia are unrealistic because capitalism always finds a way to monetize free content. Overall, the book touches on many issues not usually discussed within the Wikipedia community, but which might be a useful entry point for those who want to consider the social impacts of the project.

Lund uses a combination of social critique and qualitative interviews conducted in 2012 to provide supporting evidence for his thesis. One recurrent theme is that Wikipedia is part of a larger trend in gamification—a design technique developed in Human–computer interaction (HCI) to describe the process of using features associated with "play" to motivate interaction and engagement with an interface. One example he gives is that editors report that they find Wikipedia's competitive and confrontational elements to be game-like. (143-144) He also claims that Wikipedians' descriptions of their work and play balance changes as they take on more levels of responsibility and professionalism in the community, such as adminship. Still, it’s highly questionable whether the 8 interviews, which mainly focus on the Swedish Wikipedia, are a sufficient sample size to make his claims scalable.

The culture of Wikipedia valorizes altruism in its embrace of volunteering for the project to produce information for the greater good. Lund argues that Wikipedians' belief in the altruistic aspect of the project, makes it easy for them to depoliticize their work and to ignore the how Wikipedia participates in the corporate, information economy. To him, Wikipedia is symptomatic of the devaluation of digital work, when in past generations, making an encyclopedia might be a source of income and employment opportunities for contributors.

So, he argues, contributors believe that peer production represents a space of increased autonomy, democracy, and creativity in the production of ideas. But from his view, attempts at a “counter-economy,” “hacker communism,” or “gift economies” (239, 303) are prone to manipulation, because we can’t create utopian bubbles within capitalism that aren’t privy to its influence. Still, peer production projects operate as if creation of value outside of the capitalist system is possible. Lund argues that Wikipedia cannot avoid competition with proprietary companies which see Wikipedia as a threat, and have an interest in harvesting its content for their own benefit. (218) Yet it would be nice if he brought in more examples to make this claim. The reader is left wondering who these corporate interests are, and what exactly they derive from Wikipedia. Having this information would help us understand where Lund is coming from.

Marxist linguist V.N. Volosinov, one of the references for Lund's analysis

Although the word “work” in the title might suggest that Lund focuses on wage labour, the author’s aims are more broad, and he uses the word to connote a variety of aspects of social, value-producing activities. (20) Namely, the production of “use-value,” the Marxist term for the productive social activity of creating things which are deemed useful and thus of value to be bought and sold in the market (even if producers don’t consider their work to be commodities). He draws from Marxist thinkers and semioticians, among them V.N. Volosinov, Terry Eagleton, and Louis Althusser, to unpack different approaches to describing why Wikipedians might feel like they are playing when they are really working. (107-108) Marxists call such assumptions “false consciousness,” but the concept is difficult because it requires us to analyze manifest and latent (discursive and non-discursive) awareness. It would have been useful for Lund to look at how the fields of anthropology or psychology talk about ideology. Both fields have extensively researched the topic. More stringent ethnographic or qualitative methods might have also made his argument more convincing. But, based on the references he provides, it seems that the book's target audience may be media theorists and social scientists, people who already familiar with Marxist political economy.

Lund makes a compelling case that capitalism instrumentalizes freely-produced knowledge for its own monetary gains. Meanwhile, he says, Wikipedia's design and its heavily ideological agenda, make it difficult for the community to address the issue. The book is an interesting contribution to ongoing conversations about how Wikipedia and projects motivated by copyleft principles can be defined from a social perspective.


How does unemployment affect reading and editing Wikipedia ? The impact of the Great Recession

Review by Tilman Bayer

A discussion paper titled "Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?"[2] investigates how "drastically increased unemployment" affects contribution to and readership of Wikipedia. To study this question statistically, the authors (three economists from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany) regarded the Great Recession that began in 2008 as an "exogeneous shock" that affected unemployment rates in different European countries differently and at different times. They relate these rates to five metrics for the language version of Wikipedia that corresponds to each country:

"(1) aggregate views per month, (2) the number of active Wikipedians with a modest number of monthly edits ranging from 5 to 100, (3) the number of active Wikipedians with more than 100 monthly edits, (4) edits per article, and (5) the content growth of a corresponding language edition of Wikipedia in terms of words"

For each of these, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes monthly numbers. Since the researchers did not have access to country-level breakdowns of this data (which is not published for every country/language combination due to privacy reasons, except for some monthly or quarterly overviews which the authors may have overlooked, but only start in 2009 anyway), "to study the relationship of country level unemployment on an entire Wikipedia, we need to focus on countries which have an (ideally) unique language". This excluded some of the European countries that were most heavily affected by the 2008 crisis, e.g. the UK, Spain or Portugal, but still left them with 22 different language versions of Wikipedia to study.

An additional analysis focuses on district-level (Kreise) employment data from Germany and the German Wikipedia, respectively. None of the five metrics are available with that geographical resolution, so the authors resorted to the geolocation data for the (public) IP addresses of anonymous edits (which for several large German ISPs is usually more precise than in many other countries).

In both parts of the analysis, the economic data is related to the Wikipedia participation metrics using a relatively simple statistical approach (difference in differences), whose robustness is however vetted using various means. Still, since in some cases the comparison only included 9 months before and after the start of the crisis (instead of an entire year or several years), this leaves open the question of seasonality (e.g. it is well-known that Wikipedia pageviews are generally down in the summer, possibly due to factors like vacationing that might differ depending on the economic situation).

Summarizing their results, the authors write:

"we find that increased unemployment is associated with higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia and an increased rate of content generation. With higher unemployment, articles are read more frequently and the number of highly active users increases, suggesting that existing editors also increase their activity. Moreover, we find robust evidence that the number of edits per article increases, and slightly weaker support for an increased overall content growth. We find the overall effect to be rather positive than negative, which is reassuring news if the encyclopedia functions as an important knowledge base for the economy."

While leaving open the precise mechanism of these effects, the researchers speculate that "it seems that new editors begin to acquire new capabilities and devote their time to producing public goods. While we observe overall content growth, we could not find robust evidence for an increase in the number of new articles per day [...]. This suggests that the increased participation is focused on adding to the existing knowledge, rather than providing new topics or pages. Doing so requires less experience than creating new articles, which may be interpreted as a sign of learning by the new contributors."

The paper also includes an informative literature review summarizing interesting research results on unemployment, leisure time and volunteering in general. (For example, that "conditional on having Internet access, poorer people spend more time online than wealthy people as they have a lower opportunity cost of time." Also some gender-specific results that, combined with Wikipedia's well-known gender gap, might have suggested a negative effect of rising unemployment on editing activity: "Among men, working more hours is even positively correlated with participation in volunteering" and on the other hand "unemployment has a negative effect on men’s volunteering, which is not the case for women.")

It has long been observed how Wikipedia relies on the leisure time of educated people, in particular by Clay Shirky, who coined the term "cognitive surplus" for it, the title of his 2010 book. The present study provides important insights into a particular aspect of this (although the authors caution that economic crises do not uniformly increase spare time, e.g. "employed people may face larger pressure in their paid job", reducing their available time for editing Wikipedia). The paper might have benefited from including a look at the available demographic data about the life situations of Wikipedia editors (e.g. in the 2012 Wikipedia Editor survey, 60% of respondents were working full-time or part-time, and 39% were school or university students, with some overlap).

Briefly

How complete are Wikidata entries?

Author's summary by Simon Razniewski

While human-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata provide usually high-quality data (precision), it is generally hard to understand their completeness. A conference paper titled "Assessing the Completeness of Entities in Knowledge Bases"[3] proposes to assess the relative completeness of entities in knowledge bases, based on comparing the extent of information with other similar entities. It outlines building blocks of this approach, and present a prototypical implementation, which is available on Wikidata as Recoin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Ls1g/Recoin).

"Cardinal Virtues: Extracting Relation Cardinalities from Text"

Author's summary by Simon Razniewski

Information extraction (IE) from text has largely focused on relations between individual entities, such as who has won which award. However, some facts are never fully mentioned, and no IE method has perfect recall. Thus, it is beneficial to also tap contents about the cardinalities of these relations, for example, how many awards someone has won. This paper[4] introduces this novel problem of extracting cardinalities and discusses the specific challenges that set it apart from standard IE. It present a distant supervision method using conditional random fields. A preliminary evaluation that compares information extracted from Wikipedia with that available on Wikidata shows a precision between 3% and 55%, depending on the difficulty of relations.

Conferences and events

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

References

  1. ^ Lund, Arwid (2017). Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism. Springer: Dynamics of Virtual Work. ISBN 9783319506890.
  2. ^ Kummer, Michael E.; Slivko, Olga; Zhang, Xiaoquan (Michael) (2015-11-01). Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network.
  3. ^ Ahmeti, Albin; Razniewski, Simon; Polleres, Axel (2017). Assessing the Completeness of Entities in Knowledge Bases. ESWC.
  4. ^ Mirza, Paramita; Razniewski, Simon; Darari, Fariz; Weikum, Gerhard (2017). Cardinal Virtues: Extracting Relation Cardinalities from Text. ACL.
  5. ^ Meseguer-Artola, Antoni (2014-05-26). "Aprenent mitjançant la comparació amb la Wikipedia: la seva importància en l'aprenentatge dels estudiants". RUSC. Universities and Knowledge Society Journal. 11 (2): 57–69. doi:10.7238/rusc.v11i2.2042. ISSN 1698-580X. ("Learning by comparing with Wikipedia: the value to students’ learning", in English with Catalan abstract)
  6. ^ Pathade, Prasad R. "Use and awareness of Wikipedia among the M.C.A students of C. D. Jain college of commerce, Shrirampur : A Study" (PDF). International Multidisciplinary e-Journal. ISSN 2277-4262.
  7. ^ Reis, Fernando; di Consiglio, Loredana; Kovachev, Bogomil; Wirthmann, Albrecht; Skaliotis, Michail (June 2016). Comparative assessment of three quality frameworks for statistics derived from big data: the cases of Wikipedia page views and Automatic Identification Systems (PDF). European Conference on Quality in Official Statistics (Q2016). Madrid. p. 16.
  8. ^ Heller; Blümel; Cartellieri; Wartena. "Discovery and efficient reuse of technology pictures using Wikimedia infrastructures. A proposal". Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.51562.
  9. ^ Ekenstierna, Gustaf Harari; Lam, Victor Shu-Ming (2016). "Extracting Scientists from Wikipedia". From Digitization to Knowledge 2016. p. 8.
  10. ^ Almeida, Paulo Dias; Rocha, Jorge Gustavo; Ballatore, Andrea; Zipf, Alexander (2016-07-04). "Where the Streets Have Known Names". In Osvaldo Gervasi; Beniamino Murgante; Sanjay Misra; Ana Maria A. C. Rocha; Carmelo M. Torre; David Taniar; Bernady O. Apduhan; Elena Stankova; Shangguang Wang (eds.). Computational Science and Its Applications -- ICCSA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer International Publishing. pp. 1–12. ISBN 9783319420882. Closed access icon



Reader comments

2017-06-23

Improved search, and WMF data scientist tells all

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Evad37

Sister projects in search results

Sister project search results for "Brazil"

When you search on Wikipedia you can now find pages on other Wikimedia projects that could be relevant. They appear next to the search results. By introducing this feature, the Discovery department hopes to provide visitors with additional information, and reduce the likelihood of searches returning zero results. This also raises the visibility of sister projects, and may encourage visitors to explore these projects further, and potentially contribute to them. Some communities have already had similar functionality via custom JavaScript.

On English Wikipedia, a Village Pump RfC was held to determine which sister projects should be included. There were concerns that "content returned by some projects is too often irrelevant, problematic, outdated, spammy, or in some other way contradictory to the aims and purposes of [English Wikipedia] and not really what we want to send our readers to". The RfC resulted in the following projects being approved:

Commons multimedia, Wikinews, and Wikiversity results will not be shown. Wikidata and Wikispecies are not within the scope of this feature.

Results from Wikibooks are also currently displayed, in contrast to the RfC closure; a Phabricator task has been opened requesting their suppression.

Since the feature was enabled, there have been multiple requests for an opt-out option. A way to collapse the sister project results was suggested on a Village pump (technical) thread:

Here's a quick snippet you can add to your common.js to make it collapsible and collapsed by default:

	if ( mw.config.get( 'wgCanonicalSpecialPageName' ) === 'Search' ) {
		$.when(
			mw.loader.using( 'jquery.makeCollapsible' ),
			$.ready
		).done( function () {
			var $mwInterwikiResults = $( '#mw-interwiki-results' );
			
			$mwInterwikiResults.addClass( 'mw-collapsible mw-collapsed' )
				.find( '.iw-results' ).addClass( 'mw-collapsible-content' );
			$mwInterwikiResults.makeCollapsible();
		} );
	}


— User:Murph9000

While at a Village pump (proposals) discussion, code to remove those results was posted:

just add

div#mw-interwiki-results { display: none !important }

to your own common.css.
— User:Nemo bis

WMF data scientist answers the Internet's questions

Aaron Halfaker

Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), a data scientist with WMF, conducted an Ask Me Anything session with Reddit contributors on 1 June (UTC). The question-and-answer session attracted 118 comments and covered Halfaker's ORES AI-based antivandal project and AI construction in general, Wikipedia editing for wider audiences, Reddit, and AIs for content generation, including automatic summarization for unseen Twin Peaks episodes. B.

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Newly approved bot tasks

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2017 #24 & #25. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Installation code

  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js' ); // Backlink: User:Evad37/MoveToDraft.js



Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.



       

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