The radio buttons in the user interface through which editors vote. This time the middle, default column is No vote, renamed from Neutral in previous years.Voting has already started in the annual election for the Arbitration Committee. Arbitrators perform among the most important and prominent roles on the English Wikipedia, and all eligible editors are urged to consider voting. Just over a day after going live, nearly 300 have cast their vote. Last year more than 850 editors had voted by the close, and the year before nearly 1,000 had done so.
A public page displays who has voted when (most recently in the case of voters who've changed their votes), and is a convenient way for editors to verify that their vote has been registered in the system. Voters' choices are confidential. After voting, an editor may change their choices any time before the close of voting on Saturday 10 at 23:59 UTC, but will need to start again from scratch, because previous votes will not be displayed and submission of a new ballot page will override all previous votes by that editor. For this reason, voters should consider keeping a private record of their vote.
Voters are reminded that there can be last-minute technical logjams, and are asked to vote at least an hour before the close—that is, by Saturday December 10 at 23:00 UTC (11 pm). On the east coast of North America the equivalent "safe margin" time is Saturday 18:00 (6 pm), and on the west coast Saturday 15:00 (3 pm). On the east coast of Australia this is 10 am Sunday December 11, and on the west coast 6 am Sunday.
The technical side of ACE2011 has run smoothly, except for a minor glitch in which it was discovered that editors who are blocked on any of the WMFs projects were blocked from voting; this problem was promptly fixed by the election administrators. (Only editors blocked from the English Wikipedia are unable to vote).
Since last week's Signpost report, Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry, whose term had not been due to finish until the end of 2012, unexpectedly stepped down from the committee to avoid any potential conflict of interest arising from his new full-time position as the Office and Development Manager for Wikimedia UK. In his announcement, he wrote, "This is a permanent role based in London. As there is a potential conflict of interest between the two roles, especially with regard to Arbitration cases and ban appeals that involve UK Chapter members, the Wikimedia UK Board have asked me to step down in order to maintain complete transparency. I agree with their position. It is therefore with great regret that I am announcing my intention to stand down as an arbitrator on 31 December 2011."
An RfC was launched to allow a quick decision on whether Chase me's seat should be filled in the current election, which resulted 22–13 in favour of filling the vacancy at the election—in other words, to expand the maximum number of vacancies to be filled from seven to eight seats. In closing the RfC, the three election admins, Happy-melon, Tznkai, and Skomorokh, said, "we are unanimous in concluding that both past precedent and a rough majority of contributors to this RfC support the conclusion that Chase Me's seat will be filled in this election. Given that, the second section of the RfC indicates clear support that the extra arbitrator will sit for one year, ending when Chase Me's seat would originally have expired. This is also in line with the past precedent from the 2009 and 2010 elections."
News from the fundraising front
Comparison's of this year's (yellow) and last year's (blue) totals so far.
This year's Fundraiser launch is off to a stirring start, with a record total of 1.2 million dollars in the first 24 hours alone, shattering the previous record of $790,853.48. An even greater accomplishment is the amount of support, with donations coming from 65,000 people in 150 countries, compared to the previous record of 26,082 donors on December 31, 2010. As of the time of writing, the Fundraiser has raised nearly US$7 million, an amount that was not reached for 25 days last year.
The annual fundraiser is the Wikimedia Foundation's biggest single source of income, and has been growing with the project since early efforts from 2004. As with previous years, the event kicked off with Jimbo Wales' "personal appeal", which consistently received the highest feedback in previous drives, and has done again this year; interestingly, using a green background in the banner increased contributions.
A message from Wikimedia Foundation Senior Designer Brandon Harris was added later this week, and has performed similarly to Wales' appeal (see "In the news" for reaction from around the 'net). The fundraisers are currently in the process of adding community appeals, with which they intend to start "highlighting stories from many different Wikimedians to help raise our budget". Editors are invited to sign up and help draft appeals towards the continuation of the Fundraiser.
GLAM fellow Liam Wyatt visits Qatar
Outside the city of Ajdabiya during the Libyan revolution – one of the historically significant Al Jazeera English photos now available on Commons
Wyatt also met with Al Jazeera English, the Qatar-based broadcaster; shortly after the meeting they changed the settings on their Flickr feed, with many images from the Arab Spring, to CC-by-SA. A bot has been steadily importing them onto Commons.
Wyatt also demonstrated translatewiki.net to the members of the "let's tweet in Arabic" group Taghreedat who are attempting to localise the Twitter interface for Arabic.
He also made a presentation to librarians from the "Education City" to demonstrate how to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, and also with the ictQATAR's digitization and business incubation teams to discuss ways free-culture can also be used in a commercial setting.
Brief notes
The Czech Wiktionary's 30K commemorative logo.
POTY exhibit in Poland: Wikimedia Poland is planning a traveling Picture of the Year exhibit, to start in Warsaw. The exhibition is similar to a previous two-week display in Poznań that celebrated Wikipedia's 10th anniversary (see Signpost coverage). The exhibit is currently looking for venues; see also its Facebook group.
Google Knol closes down: It has been announced that Google Knol, a publicly contributed reference site of the same type as Wikipedia, will close its doors on April 2012. Knol was originally launched in 2007, and follows a more open format than Wikipedia, with articles, called "knols", ranging from encyclopedic entries to how-to, opinion essays, cooking instructions and sales listings. The project is currently being transferred to the Wordpress-based Annotum.
New administrators: No administrators were promoted this week; despite this, what had looked like the first month without a new administrator since October 2002 may yet be averted, as there are five open nominations with favourable levels of support at the time of writing.
Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: the Indonesian Wikipedia reached 700,000 pages, our English Wikipedia reached 500,000,000 page edits, the Czech Wikitionary reached 30,000 articles with cs:respecter, and the Dutch Wikipedia has reached 2,000,000 total pages.
The top section of Requests for undeletion, whose appearance Wikipedia neophyte Danny Sullivan greeted with the exasperated comment "I wish my head hadn’t exploded before, because now it really would."Frustrated new contributor Danny Sullivan in happier times
The catacombs of contested deletions
Search marketing specialist Danny Sullivan wrote a scathing account of his experiences on Wikipedia trying to intervene on behalf of a colleague, Jessie Stricchiola, whose article had been deleted at AfD in late October. While the unpopularity of Wikipedia's restrictive notability policies for biographies among internet users and the furor of subject matter experts at its egalitarian norms will not be news to readers, Sullivan also had harsh words for the complexity and relentless user-unfriendliness of the procedures he encountered. Confronted with {{Afd-top}} – The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.[1] – Sullivan seethes "Already, I’m annoyed. As usual, trying to contribute to Wikipedia means that you’ve got to know what a "talk page" is or where to find a "deletion review"." Finding that the talk page the notice directed him to had evidently been deleted, and no indication as to where the "deletion review" might be found, Sullivan (as Dannysullivan (talk·contribs)) tried to post directly on the closed AfD itself his rationale for why Stricchiola merited an entry.
Next he was confronted with an email notifying him that his user talkpage had been changed (this feature, activated by default in user preferences, is documented at mw:New Editor Engagement/Email notifications), linking to a diff of the edit in question, which provoked Sullivan further: "OMG, my message is a revision comparison of what’s been added to the user talk page that I barely even know that I have? Who creates this type of mess? Who tolerates this as an effective working environment?" The edit was an explanation that posting comments on a closed AfD is discouraged, and containing a link to the deletion review. Sullivan followed the link in the email to the userpage of the editor who had left the message to respond, but was greeted with a {{notice}} asking him not to post messages there, but on the user talk page instead, leading him to remark "Oh, don’t post messages on the page I was specifically told to go to in order to contact the editor. Nice, Wikipedia." At the top of the user talkpage, the following notice appeared:
If you need assistance relating to a particular article, please try to provide a link to the article so I can see what the problem is in regard to. If your question relates to an article that has been deleted, please provide an appropriate red link, like this one, to the former article.
This served only to incite Sullivan further: "Yeah, there’s nothing like that. If you’re leaving a message about an article that was deleted, assuming you even know how to leave a message, you’re also informed to do it with an “appropriate red link” with instructions on how to make links red, except that leads to a page that doesn’t explain this, and OMG, did my head just explode over all this bureaucracy?" He protested to the editor who had left him the message, venting his frustration questioning whether the Wikipedia interface and bureaucracy was serving the interests of creating an "accurate crowd-sourced encyclopedia", or only those of the "incredibly tiny few number of people who care to play in the high priesthood of Wikipedia editing". From here, he proceeded to deletion review, but the morass of unintelligible instructions there failed to indicate to Sullivan that it was the appropriate venue for objecting to closed deletion discussions, and he sought out Requests for undeletion instead. The sight that confronted him (pictured at top) sufficed to push Sullivan over the edge. The process asked for the title of the deleted page, which he did not know how to find, and explained the venue's purpose in alternately vague and impenetrable terms (for pages that have been "uncontroversially deleted" by processes "such as CSD G6" or that had had "little or no participation"). After leaving a request for the restoration of the article, which was declined with a default template, he concluded:
It’s insane. It really is. And with respect to the many hardworking people who have created a generally useful resource, it’s not a friendly resource. It doesn’t have systems, as far as I can tell, designed to help it improve. It has walls, walls you believe (with many good reasons) are designed to protect it from being vandalized. But those walls themselves are their own type of vandalization of the very resource you’re trying to protect.
The internet responds
"It took two weeks for Wikipedia to determine that this article should be deleted. During that entire time, her article stood with a very prominent notice saying it was going to be deleted, with a prominent link allowing people to argue in favor of keeping or, better yet, locate a real reliable source backing up any claim to her notability. Two weeks. Read the AfD. Read DGG's exegesis of the sources cited in this article – the guy found out how many libraries carried her book.
Now, think about this: Jessie's article wasn't a marquee deletion event. Nobody gave a shit. It was just one of many pages up for AfD that week, alongside the founder of a political party nobody has ever heard of and 3 members of non-professional football clubs. In every one of those retarded articles, someone had to marshall real arguments, chase down real sources, and in many cases defend those arguments against both bona fide Wikipedia contributors and also sockpuppets of the subjects of the article. Every time.
Anyone who can snark that Wikipedia is a knee-jerk or arbitrary culture is betraying a deep ignorance of how the most successful Internet reference project in the history of the Internet actually works."
— From the top-ranked post in the Hacker News discussion, by commenter tptacek.
Comments were closed on Sullivan's post, but it was picked up at Hacker News, where it attracted reams of discussion between sympathisers and Wikipedia defenders. Commenters defended Wikipedia's inclusion criteria, made the point that people should not try to add or edit content about subjects related to them due to potential conflict of interest, and debated whether those responsible for creating the bulk of content on Wikipedia were a separate caste from those controlling the byzantine and cryptic maintenance systems. That these systems were prohibitively bureaucratic and hostile to new participants was less contested, but many put the blame on an overactive immune system that had developed in response to combating articles like the one that Sullivan was trying to save.
Journalist and Wikipedia critic Seth Finkelstein wrote a response to the episode on his personal blog, focusing on the issue of the treatment of subject matter experts, which he said was indicative of "very troubling social undercurrents" – that experts such as Sullivan expect to be treated with respect but run up against a status hierarchy of an altogether different kind at Wikipedia, where only "with the right political skills, clique alliances, and of course a huge amount of time and effort, that expert could hope rise to as exalted a ranking level as the Wikipedia editor". Finkelstein cited this culture, and the alienation of experts it inspires, as a contributory factor in his not embracing the project.
A twist in the tale
ReadWriteWeb senior writer Marshall Kirkpatrick was also inspired to respond to Sullivan's post, but from a different angle: his own experiences in writing the Fubonn Shopping Center article as an inexperienced editor. His account is markedly different from that of Sullivan. Kirkpatrick's first step was to review and copy the coding of the articles related to the topic, then adapt it to fit his topic, and finally flesh it out with sources gleaned from Google News. He ran into a stumbling block when trying to copy an image from Flickr's Creative Commons section for use in the article, as it was swiftly deleted, as he learned from "a long paragraph of confusing explanation". A patrolling editor made some minor changes to the article and assessed it for WikiProject Oregon as Start-class and Low-importance, causing Kirkpatrick to take issue with the latter designation, after research revealed the notoriously uneven application of the rating of the assessment scheme. He commented:
There were some parts of the experience that I found confusing and disappointing, but when I woke up in the morning I felt silly for having complained about that the night before on Twitter and Google Plus. This was my first major contribution to the giant sprawling, pseudo-democratic experiment that is Wikipedia. Why am I entitled to just jump in and be praised for everything I do?
Despite conceding his encounter with Wikipedians had made him "bristle", Kirkpatrick did not endorse technologist Nat Torkington's acerbic invocation of Wikipedians as "vain nano-Napoleons" who "having built a valuable resource ... hide behind hostile UIs". He was enthused by the positive responses to the Fubonn article expressed by readers through the Article Feedback Tool, and began to muse that involving his nine-year-old niece in contributing to Wikipedia would be "an incredibly empowering experience for a young person old enough to appreciate it." He concluded:
If Wikipedia can figure out how to welcome more and more new editors onto the site, and I don’t think coddling us is necessary, perhaps that will become reality in the future. It’s an incredibly complicated community management situation though. Danny Sullivan’s experience having his entry about an important woman in technology get deleted is super frustrating and an example of how things can go wrong.
But there’s a whole lot about that’s right about Wikipedia, too. The difference between many Wikipedia entries and old encyclopedia entries on the same topics is so substantial that it deserves to be sung about from mountain tops.
Fun and games with the Fundraiser
WMF Senior Designer and style icon Brandon Harris presses the flesh at a Wikimania 2011 party in Haifa, Israel. Incidentally, it's his birthday today, so be sure to get your greetings in in the comments.
The 2011 Fundraiser continued its successful start this week (see "News and notes"), but its reception in the news media and wider internet focused less on its record-smashing haul of donations and more on how to get rid of or ridicule the donation appeal banners, which have been variously found to be sources of annoyance, intimidation and hilarity.
Female-oriented tech site Chip Chickled the coverage with one of the more serious assessments, outlining the background of what the Wikimedia Foundation is and why it has opted for funding based on donations rather than advertisements—as some commenters have called for (see Signpost coverage). Network World revealed that even Jimmy Wales found the banners annoying, but as TechEye reported defended the use of his appeal as effective in raising money, while TIME magazine offered readers "three easy steps" to banishing the banners from reader's view.
On November 22, the Jimmy Wales banners were replaced with those of Wikimedia Foundation Senior Designer Brandon Harris (Jorm), whose long, lustrous hair and stern countenance elicited much glee, fear and speculations as to the programmer's possible biker gang/metal band affiliations from internet denizens. TechCrunch writer Alexia Tsotsis reacted to the switch by swiping "Now You’re Just Messing With Us Wikipedia", after being inundated with emails comparing Harris's appearance to that of Jesus, Nickelback lead singer Chad Kroeger and a member of Hell's Angels. The column was greeted with fierce defences of Harris and the fundraiser in the comments.
Such was the reaction on the wider web that Harris submitted an AMA ("ask me anything") question-and-answer session on Reddit, the popularity of which soon took off and rocketed the programmer to the front page of the site. A link to the Foundation's fundraiser statistics visualisation tool Harris included to illustrate fundraising progress drew so many views that it crashed the tool and caused a server outage that brought down Wikimedia sites for 30 minutes on November 27 (see "Technology report"). The Q&A drew the attention of Gawker, New York magazine and a recalcitrant TechCrunch. The focus of the coverage was Harris' revelations that the alignment of the pictures in the appeals over the titles of articles was intentional on account of being lucrative, and the secret fashion tip he used to get his hair just so.
The blackout effect added to the Criticism section of the African National Congress article in protest at the organisation's perceived support of censorship.
ANC article blackout protest: Times LIVEreported the blackout protest instigated in this edit to the Criticism section of the African National Congress (ANC) article in protest at passage of the Protection of State Information Bill by the ANC-dominated South African National Assembly (edit summary: Censored by the POIB on 22 Nov). ANC spokesman Keith Khoza decried the action as inconsistent with a civilised society, asking "How does that assist any cause or anybody to tamper with information?" Critics of the bill allege it is an attack on press freedom. The IP address from which the edit was made geolocates to Johannesburg. The story was also picked up by News24, Business Live and Memeburn (who identified the use of similar tactics in Twitter protests).
For whom the bell Knols: Google this week announced the closure of a number of its faltering initiatives including Knol, a user-generated reference work hailed as a potential "Wikipedia-killer" after its launch in 2008 (see Signpost coverage). The announcement was widely picked up on in the online tech press, with articles in the Wall Street Journal blog, ZDnet, PC Mag, TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch and Technologizer, which offered an analysis seeking to explain "Why Knol Failed". The demise of Knol, whose contents are expected to be exported to WordPress-based platform Annotum, had long been anticipated, as Business Insider reported, saying "Knol was supposed to provide a more authoritative source than Wikipedia – articles are written by subject matter experts – but after almost two years, the site has so many gaps in content that it's practically worthless. Google should be indexing the Web's knowledge, not providing a half-hearted storehouse for some randomly selected portion of it." One Wikipedia competitor refusing to give up is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, whose launch of their latest mobile offering, an app for the iPhone, was this week noted by the Chicago Tribune.
^An earlier version of this article inadvertently showed the plaintext version of {{Afd-top}}; this has now been replaced with the actual visual output of the template when deployed.
Are you a regular follower of coverage of Wikipedia and related topics in the media? The Signpost is looking for regular writers for this column; interested editors are invited to email wikipediasignpost@gmail.com or leave a note in the Newsroom. Please consider contributing!
Collaboration pattern analysis: Editor experience more important than "many eyes"
One of the motifs indicating article quality: One editor (top) having worked on several related articles (bottom)
A paper titled "Characterizing Wikipedia Pages Using Edit Network Motif Profiles"[1] by three researchers from University College Dublin indicates that the quality of a Wikipedia article can be predicted from characteristics of its "edit network" – a graph derived from the collaboration of Wikipedians in that area. Network motifs are small graphs which occur particularly frequently as sub-graphs of networks of a certain kind, and can be regarded as its building blocks in some sense. (The concept is popular in bioinformatics, where it is applied to gene regulatory networks.) In this paper, the authors use graphs with at most five nodes consisting of users and articles, which are connected by an edge if the user has edited the article – giving 17 possible "Wikipedia network motifs". (Anonymous users are disregarded.) For a Wikipedia article, the researchers form an "ego network" consisting of that article, articles which link to it (and have been edited by at least one of the users who edited the core article), and the users who edited them. For a sample of around 2000 articles from the History and United States categories, the frequencies of the 17 "Wikipedia network motifs" in those article's "ego networks" were calculated.
Using machine learning techniques, the researchers discerned with some certainty articles of basic quality (defined as having been assessed as Start class by Wikipedians) from those of good quality (defined as Featured or B class), solely based on this set of motif frequencies in the article's edit network. Looking at the impact of each of the 17 types separately, they found that "all network motifs have some potential to discriminate between good and basic Wikipedia articles" in the sample, but that among the four best predicting motifs, three are "stars with editors at their centre":
"This is interesting because it shows that many eyes is not really the defining characteristic of quality; instead experience is important – the editors should have worked on many other articles."
Another section of the paper constructs spatializations of the sample (i.e. a 2D mapping where articles with similar motif frequency are close to each other). For the history articles sample, this visualization clearly separated B class and Start class articles, but Featured articles are "more spread out", with two clusters on opposite sides of the diagram. The researchers made the interesting discovery that this seems related to the assessed importance of the articles:
"It transpires that the Featured Articles on the left are inclined to be low or mid importance compared to high or top importance articles on the right. This niche characteristic is emphasized by the fact that these articles are inclined not to have been featured on the Wikipedia main page. We conclude from this that, at least in edit network terms, some low importance Featured Articles look like more ordinary articles. ... It seems that articles on niche topics can reach Featured Article status without a huge amount of collaboration."
Systemic bias quantified for 20 Wikipedias
A paper titled "Cultural Configuration of Wikipedia: Measuring Autoreferentiality in Different Languages"[2] by two researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain, published in the proceedings of the "Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing" conference and apparently based on the first author's masters thesis[3] attempts to test the hypothesis that contributing to the visibility of one's own country- or language-related content is among the motivations to participate in Wikipedia. According to the authors, informal surveys in the Catalan-based Wikipedia association Amical Viquipèdia showed how these topics "are a focus of interest for writing and conflict". They propose the concept of autoreferentiality "to describe the interest of a culture [in] itself, which in WP translates to the interest of editors [in] their own local content in a WP language edition", and set out to measure it by various quantitative features, which are defined on the article level and tested on a selection of articles that are assumed to be "local content", using the Java-based WikAPIdia tool. (This set is formed by starting with a few keywords clearly pertaining to the local language, and adding articles that share categories. As examples from their own language, the authors list "“catalunya”, “català”, and also “valencia” or “mallorquí”" as start words, which "retrieve titles in articles and categories like escriptors de catalunya or dret català, referring to writers and law".) Among the tested quantitative features were:
Isolation, based on the number of interwiki links
Effort, based on the size of the article and the number of internal links it contains
Prominence, based on the number of incoming wikilinks, the number of categories where the article is a member, and its PageRank
Edition, a measure of how diverse the authorship of an article is, specified as the smallest number of editors who together contribute 80% of the page's edits (assumed to be lower for local content because it is edited by "highly motivated users")
The paper applies the eventual formula to Wikipedias in 20 languages – the English-language edition is excluded due to its size and the difficulty of processing it "in all dimensions", as well as the second- and third-largest Wikipedias (German and French). In the final "autoreferentiality index", the Icelandic, Japanese and Swahili Wikipedias come out as the most locally focused among these 20, while, curiously, the Catalan edition which prompted the research question has the lowest autoreferentiality value.
Caused a "heavy editorial event" earlier this year: Elizabeth Taylor
Does "In the news"-like attention have a positive effect on article quality?
A five page paper[4] by a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Iowa examines "The Impact of Heavy Editorial Events on Wikipedia Page Quality" – for example the flurry of edits to the article Elizabeth Taylor after the actor's death in March 2011. To measure quality, the approach of an earlier paper[5] is used, which assigns article contributors a reputation value depending on how many of their earlier contributions have been deleted, and by whom, and also takes into account whether the article revision in question was reverted later. The resulting formula was applied to "high editorial events" in 100 articles of the English Wikipedia, from the start of Wikipedia in 2001 until the beginning of 2010. As expected, the data supported the hypothesis that "high editorial events would contribute positively to a page's quality". The five articles impacted most positively among the studied sample (biased toward the beginning of the alphabet) were art, Allen Ginsberg, anarcho-capitalism, chiropractic and death. The paper also found that a higher increase in the edit rate was associated with a higher quality increase, but does not address the question of whether the relation could be explained by the mere number of edits (i.e. whether the same number of edits over a longer time might have had the same effect).
Detecting POV pushing editors
A working paper posted this month to ArXiv with the title "Pushing Your Point of View: Behavioral Measures of Manipulation in Wikipedia" presents a method to score the neutrality of Wikipedia contributors and to "detect potential POV pushing behavior".[6] The authors propose two metrics to quantify an editor's involvement in controversial topics. The first metric (Controversy score or C-score) measures the amount of attention spent by an individual editor on controversial articles, where controversiality is defined on the basis of several quantitative factors previously established in the literature. The second metric (Clustered Controversy score or CC-score) quantifies the focus of an editor's attention on controversial articles on the same topic or very similar topics: the purpose of this metric is to tease apart editors involved in genuine controversy resolution (such as administrators who are likely to participate in a broad range of discussions on controversial topics) from "potentially manipulative users" who focus their attention on a narrow set of controversial topics. To assess the validity of the above metrics the authors test their discriminatory power at identifying which editors are blocked and which are regular users who were never blocked. The remainder of the paper examines the breakdown of edits by administrators immediately after a successful Request for Adminship. The results, based on qualitative coding by a single reviewer, suggests that some topical areas in the English Wikipedia (such as politics and media) are more likely to be frequently edited by administrators with a high C-score and CC-score than any other topical categories.
Historian of encyclopedias reviews Good Faith Collaboration
The most recent issue of Annals of Science (a scholarly journal about the history of science and technology, founded in 1936) contains a four-page review[7] of Joseph Reagle's book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (published in 2010 and recently released on the Web under a CC-BY-NC-SA license). The reviewer Jeff Loveland, who has written extensively about the early history of encyclopedias, criticizes the book for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization" (he mentions two 18th-century precedents which should have been given more attention, as they, like Wikipedia, intended to include contributions from the public: Vincenzo Coronelli's Biblioteca Universale and Zedler's Universal-Lexicon) – and rejects Reagle's claim that "historically, reference works have made few claims about neutrality as a stance of collaboration, or as an end result": "References to such values as impartiality, unbiasedness and objectivity are frequent in the prefaces of encyclopaedias over the last three hundred years". On the other hand, the reviewer praises the book for "com[ing] close to offering" a comprehensive introduction to Wikipedia, "touching as it does on nearly all aspects of the encyclopaedia" and he commends the author's writing style as "informal, energetic and appropriately paced". The "insightful and worthwhile" ethnography of Wikipedia is highlighted as the second success of the book.
Regarding Chapter 3 of the book, which postulates Neutral Point of View and Assume Good Faith as the two principles at "the heart of Wikipedia collaboration", the review recommends "Anne Goldgar’s study of conduct as a force binding together the early modern Republic of Letters in Impolite Learning (1995) [as] an interesting point of comparison" regarding "the historical connection between knowledge and civility". Commenting on Chapter 7, which examines criticism of Wikipedia, Loveland observes that "the portrayal by critics of a possible Wikipedian collective intelligence as anti-individualistic, or anti-rationalistic seems opportunistic and off-the-mark. Meanwhile, Wikipedia now bears the brunt of a refurbished but centuries-old accusation against encyclopaedias, namely that they trivialize and fragment knowledge."
Briefly
Automatically assessing editors' reputations: Wöhner, Köhler, and Peters present new metrics for automatic reputation assessment of Wikipedia editors. They evaluate seven potential metrics for reputation assessment including editing frequency and contribution to high-quality articles, plus new metrics that they conceived including 'efficiency' which they define as 'the portion of an author's contribution that is persistent and quantifies the acceptance of the author within the Wikipedia community.' They evaluate the metrics using a database of the Germany Wikipedia from January, 2008 and tested their metrics against Wikipedia's internal user classification of blocked users, administrators and anonymous users. They conclude that editing efficiency is most significant for reputation assessment since it was able to distinguish between blocked and regular authors with an accuracy rate of 86%.[8]
Students reflect on Wikipedia assignments: Chen and Reber present the results of a pilot study where students from a Norwegian and a German university were asked to reflect on their experience writing a Wikipedia article as a course assignment. They provide the results of two independent judges who analyzed the written reflections of students on ten dimensions including: relevance for society, learning outcome and difficulty, among others. The authors conclude that students were highly motivated by the task and 'have learned much about the topic that they wrote about'.[9]
Too few newbies?: A paper titled "Too Few New Wikipedians? Modelling Effort and Participation in Wikipedia"[10] evaluates "the efficiency of the Wikipedia projects in different languages in transforming inputs (people using the Internet) into outputs (articles). We find a decreasing return to scale in the biggest projects, but the size or the age of the projects are not the main explanation for the variations in efficiency we see."
How student editors use sources: synthesis vs plagiarism: Sormunen and Lehtio report the findings of a pilot study on how Finnish secondary-school students use sources when they are required to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their coursework. They interviewed, observed, and analyzed the work of 11 groups of students, and found that: (1) the students relied almost exclusively on Web sources, (2) a sizable fraction (33%) of their work was copied verbatim (or very lightly edited) from their sources, (3) 30% of sources used were not cited at all. The dataset in this study is extremely small and the sample was not designed to be at all representative. Still, the conclusions are disconcerting, especially considering the recent controversy over student plagiarism in a related Wikipedia writing program (Signpost coverage: "A post-mortem on the Indian Education Program pilot"). The interviews with the students could potentially provide insight into why student plagiarism occurs.[11]
Tracking changes in Wikipedia: A student thesis in Computer Science at the University of Dresden[12] describes the prototype of a software that tracks and categorizes edits on Wikipedia – trying, among other things, to detect articles that are being affected by external events. In a test sample containing articles that had been subject to major news events in recent years, such as Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "about 74% of the events ... have been detected and about 68% of these detected events (74%) are recognized correctly."
Gendered language on Wikipedia: Several Wikimedians have announced a study titled "Mind the Gap(s)! Writing Styles of Female Editors on Wikipedia",[13] applying algorithms that try to classify a text as "male" or "female" (based on the frequency of "male keywords" and "female keywords") to text contributions by editors who state their gender on their user page (1,119 females and 722 males). Among the conclusions: "While the data is insufficient to reach the conclusion that Wikipedia attracts females who code their language usage as male in all circumstances on-wiki and off-wiki, we have shown that females use a more male style of writing when writing for Wikipedia."
References
^Wu, Guangyu, Martin Harrigan, and Pádraig Cunningham (2011). Characterizing Wikipedia pages using edit network motif profiles. In Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Search and mining user-generated contents - SMUC 2011, New York, NY, USA: ACM Press, October 28, 2011. DOI • PDF
^Ribé, Marc Miquel, and Horacio Rodrìguez (2011) Cultural Configuration of Wikipedia: Measuring Autoreferentiality in Different Languages. In Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, 316–22. Hissar, Bulgaria. PDF
^Ribé, Marc Miquel (2011) Cultural configuration of Wikipedia: Measuring autoreferentiality in different languages. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. PDF
^Oliver, Corey (2011) The Impact of Heavy Editorial Events on Wikipedia Page Quality. PDF
^Javanmardi and C. Lopes. Statistical Measure of Quality in Wikipedia. In: 1st Workshop on Social Media Analytics (SOMA ’10), July 2010. PDF
^Das, Sanmay, Allen Lavoie, and Malik Magdon-Ismail (2011). Pushing Your Point of View: Behavioral Measures of Manipulation in Wikipedia. arXiV, November 8, 2011. PDF
^Loveland, Jeff (2011). Review of: Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. Annals of Science 68 (4) (October) 555-558. DOI
^Wöhner, Thomas, Sebastian Köhler, and Ralf Peters (2011). Automatic Reputation Assessment in Wikipedia. In ICIS 2011 Proceedings. HTML
^Chen, Weiqin, and Rolf Reber (2011). Writing Wikipedia Articles as Course Assignment. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computers in Education, T. Hirashima et al. (Eds). Chiang Mai, Thailand. PDF
^Crowston, Kevin, Nicolas Jullien, and Felipe Ortega (2011) Too Few New Wikipedians? Modelling Effort and Participation in Wikipedia. SSRN eLibrary. PDF
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^Deng, Yihan (2011) Change Tracking in Wikipedia. Master Thesis, PDF
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
The nameplate of The Bugle matches the logo of WikiProject Military HistoryThis image has been borrowed by several projects to decorate their pages and used to illustrate multiple issues of the WikiProject Report, making it our favorite stock photoThe Bugle'sembedded journalists bring us news from the front line
This week, The Signpost tried to dig up some dirt on the other big newspaper in town, The Bugle. Circulated monthly since March 2006 as the official newsletter for the enormous community at WikiProject Military History, The Bugle is one of the few long-running, continuously published newsletters devoted to a WikiProject. Kirill Lokshin inaugurated the publication with a simple one-page list of the project's newest peer reviews, collaborations, and task forces. New writers and editors have brought changes to the publication's design over the years and expanded its content. Today, the newsletter delivers project news, summaries of featured content, book reviews, and opinion pieces to over 1,200 editors, including Wikipedians who are not members of the project. We interviewed Buggie111, Ian Rose, Nick-D, and The ed17.
How long have you been writing for the Bugle? Is there a particular section of the newsletter to which you most frequently contribute? Are you involved in the editing and publishing process?
Ian Rose One way or another I think I've contributed to every part of the Bugle. Mostly it's reporting on the project's monthly writing contest and doing article news, i.e. writing blurbs for the articles that have passed A-Class Review and FAC. Last month I wrote my first op-ed piece, kicking off a set of reminiscences of September 11, and this month I contributed my first book review and guest edited the issue as a whole, which included the opening 'from the editors' piece.
Buggie111 I've been focusing on the editorials, and have written two of them.
Nick-D I've contributed book reviews for the last four editions of the Bugle and intend to keep doing so due to the good reception the reviews have received. I also wrote an editorial for one edition of the Bugle last year.
The ed17: I've been involved on-and-off since early 2010 and became one of two editors of the newsletter when the project created the positions in November 2010. Cam was the other editor, but as he has been on a de facto wikibreak for school, he stepped down a few days ago. Ian Rose has taken over for him. I've done every part of the newsletter at various times except for book reviews.
The Bugle is one of the oldest continuously published newsletters on Wikipedia. What has kept it going so long? Do you have any tips for other projects that publish newsletters?
Ian Rose Three things spring to mind that help explain the longevity: 1) commitment, i.e. it's always there and pretty professional-looking; 2) evolution, i.e. the format hasn't been stuck in a rut; 3) accessibility, i.e. pretty well anyone can contribute to it in some way. I guess those three thoughts would also constitute my advice to other projects for a newsletter.
Nick-D I agree with Ian's comments. The point about the benefits of the Bugle evolving over time is a particularly good one. I'd also add that as the newsletter is focused on reporting significant developments to articles and publishing editorials in which editors discuss approaches to writing and research it's never really short of material and is automatically focused on topics members of the project find interesting. There's never any Wikipolitics or reports on other kinds of Wiki-dramas, for instance.
The ed17: Commitment is huge. People like Ian, Nick, and AustralianRupert have volunteered a lot of their on-wiki time over the last two years to finish sections, write book reviews, and copy in article blurbs. Before that, we had Roger Davies, Kirill Lokshin, and TomStar81. Without these editors, our newsletter would be nowhere near what it is today.
Give us an estimate of the Bugle's circulation and readership. Is there anything in the newsletter that might interest Wikipedians who are not members of WikiProject Military History?
Ian Rose Well I think every project member receives it unless they opt out. As to interest for non-MilHist people, I guess op-ed pieces are the most accessible, as they focus on Wikipedia-wide issues as well as aspects of the project.
Nick-D As Ian notes, the op-ed articles are likely to be of interest to people outside the project. As the project also produces a lot of FAs, editors might also be interested in the reports on articles which have been promoted to A class through the project's A class reviews. They can see how these assessments are conducted and some of the articles which will be nominated for FA class in the future.
The ed17: The Bugle goes out to about 1,200 editors, although a significant portion of them are inactive. Nearly all are members of the project; only 23 other editors have signed up to receive it. As Ian Rose says, the op-eds would probably be the most interesting pieces for outside Wikipedians, but there are specific interests others can watch for. For example, editors could keep an eye on our "Project news" page and implement some of the improvements we are making in their own WikiProject.
Please describe the organization and planning behind the Bugle. How do you attract new writers? Has there been a struggle to meet deadlines?
The ed17: We have two editors, Ian and I, and one of us decides when the newsletter is ready to be published. We currently use a relatively stable four-page format that includes project news, article news, book reviews, and an op-ed. The project news holds all of the new developments in the project over the last month, award recipients, and the contest results, while the article news shows the month's new FA and A-class articles. We typically run two book reviews a month. Op-eds are explained below.
Writers normally come to us, as they are interested in a certain topic and want to bring that to a wider audience. If an editor has something tangentially related to military history or would be of interest to our readers, they write something and we put it in an op-ed. If it'll be a recurring series, we create a new section for it. We haven't had to reject any submissions yet, but we have had a few times where we had no new op-eds. When this happens, we solicit an op-ed from someone who is an expert in something relevant to the project, like Moonriddengirl's two-part essay on copyright in August and September 2010, Fifelfoo's thoughts on plagiarism in June 2011, or WereSpeilChequers' op-ed on the request for adminship process in July 2011.
The newsletter has changed its format a few times over the years. Why was the current layout chosen?
The ed17: We made many tweaks for the January 2009 issue (before, after), but there were two major changes in 2010. The first was in June 2010 (before, after), where we moved to a Signpost-style multiple page format while trying to keep the feel of the old newsletter. The other change was in October 2010 (before, after), where we made a complete break and moved to a less-cluttered format. The newsletter today is the result of tweaks to this version. For those interested, the discussions leading to these changes are located here, here, and (October 2010) here.
In addition to news, the Bugle has run book reviews, editorials, and op-eds. What are some of the challenges of publishing opinion pieces? Do you have any tips for the Signpost, which began publishing more opinion pieces a couple months ago?
Nick-D I suppose one suggestion would be that the opinions be on topics closely related to developing articles as this is the main thing that most readers are interested in. I started the book review section as a way of providing an assessment of the usefulness of some newish books in developing articles, for instance.
The ed17: Book reviews work best when there is an explicit raison d'être – e.g. we have military history, the Signpost has Wikipedia-related books – and one or more dedicated writer(s). We have very good people who are reading and writing these reviews, and I'm very happy Nick-D (and now Ian Rose) volunteer their time to write them.
Opinion pieces are a bit more difficult. The choice and presentation of topics will sometimes be inflammatory to a segment of readers. The editors have a duty to try to mitigate this impact and vitriol while still allowing the views to be aired, possibly by soliciting an opposing view to run in the same or next edition (similar to The New York Times' "Room for Debate"), but there's only so much they can do. For us, while military history is a relatively uncontroversial subject, you will never know when someone will raise strong objections; thankfully, the Bugle has not had to deal with this yet.
The Signpost will have a much more difficult time, as a certain portion of the topics covered will be objectionable to one or more of Wikipedia's factions. I'm fully in favor of the Signpost's move towards designated opinion articles, as the views shared may goad the community into discussion on important issues. The cautionary note I'd sound is that opinions need to stay in the opinion section. I'll be keeping an eye on how the Signpost attempts to manage all this and the effect of the op-eds on the community. It'll be an interesting ride.
It's been a year since we dropped in on WikiProject Military History. Since you constantly monitor the project's pulse, give us a brief review of the project's biggest news stories this year.
The ed17: Inside the Bugle itself, our biggest story was the op-ed "Remembering 9/11," which was sent to our subscribers on the anniversary of the attacks. For the project, the introduction of C-Class (more information), the closure of the review department (more information), and reaching the goal of 500 FAs in Milhist's scope were the biggest stories.
Buggie111: We've also had a new coordinator election and the death of a contributor, bahamut0013.
Ian Rose: This year the project achieved a target of 500 featured articles, an event that – ironically – didn't attract much attention in the Signpost, if I remember correctly...
For news junkies interested in discovering the newsletters of other WikiProjects, check out the newsletters mailbox. For more WikiProject news, read The Signpost's WikiProject Report each week. To share your project's news and notes with the readers of The Signpost, simply post a message at the WikiProject Desk and we'll try to include it in the news sidebar at the top of each issue.
If you're confused by the ambiguous clues we leave in the last two sentences of each WikiProject Report issue, just wait until next week! In the meantime, find what you're really looking for in the archive.
From the recently promoted article HMS Courageous (50), nominated by Sturmvogel 66: the cruiser was photographed here shortly after its completion in 1916.
HMS Courageous (50) was sunk in September 1939 after being torpedoed by the German submarine U-29. A shocking 500 crewmen went down with the ship.
This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 20 – Saturday 26 November
Featured articles
A Serbian Orthodoxicon of Prince Jovan Vladimir, ruler of medieval SerbiaThe 1924 double eagle coin, the image taken by Wikimedian Wehwalt, by kind permission of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Wehwalt's article Indian Head gold pieces is the latest in his numismatic series to be featured.New featured picture by Commons photographer Holger Krisp, from Germany: the stinking earthfan fungus.Four articles were promoted to featured status:
HMS Courageous (50) (nom), the lead ship of a class of cruisers built for the Royal Navy during the First World War. The ship was later converted to an aircraft carrier to avoid its scrapping after the Washington Naval Treaty, and became the first British warship sunk in the Second World War when it was torpedoed by the U-29. (Nominated by Sturmvogel 66)
Jovan Vladimir (nom) (c. 990 – 1016), ruler of Duklja, the most powerful Serbian principality of the time, from around 1000 to 1016. He ruled during a war between the Byzantine Empire and the First Bulgarian Empire, which culminated with TsarSamuel of Bulgaria's defeat and death. In 1016 Vladimir fell victim to a plot by Ivan Vladislav, the last ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire. He was beheaded in front of a church in Prespa, the empire's capital, and was buried there. He was soon recognized as a martyr and saint; his feast day is celebrated on 22 May. (VVVladimir)
Ruby Laffoon (nom), the 43rd governor of the state of Kentucky, who served from 1931 to 1935. He was known for appointing a record number of Kentucky colonels, including Harland Sanders, who used the title when he opened the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain of restaurants. (Acdixon)
Featured pictures
Six images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
Stinking earthfan (nom; related article), a species of fungus found in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. The fruit body is a coral-like tuft, repeatedly branched from a central stalk. The unpleasant smell of the earthfan has led to the accusation that it's "a candidate for stinkiest fungus in the forest". (Created by Commons user Holger Krisp, from Germany.)
Peter Oliver (nom;
related article), a self-portrait of the 17th-century miniaturist Peter Oliver. The original painting is only 8.8 centimetres (3.5 in) in height.
The Great Picture (nom; related article), the world's largest print picture, was taken in 2006 as part of the Legacy Project, a photographic compilation and record of the airfield's history before it is transformed into the Orange County Great Park. The project used an abandoned F-18 hangar at the closed Marine Corps Air Station El Toro fighter base in Irvine, California as the world's largest pinhole camera. The aim was to make a black-and-white negative print of the Marine Corps air station with its control tower and runways, with the San Joaquin Hills in the background, marking the end of 165 years of chemistry-based photography and the start of the age of digital photography.
2011 flooding in Ayutthaya, Thailand (nom; related article), Satellite photographs showing flooding in Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani Provinces, Thailand, in October 2011 (right), compared to before the flooding in July (left) NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team and the United States Geological Survey.).
Cliff House from Ocean Beach (nom; related article), a restaurant perched on the headlands on the cliffs just north of Ocean Beach on the western side of San Francisco, California. It overlooks the site of the former Sutro Baths and a room-sized camera obscura and is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, operated by the National Park Service. (created by Mbz1).
New featured picture: A pair of satellite images showing portions of Thailand's Ayutthaya and Pathum Thani Provinces before (left), and after (right), a flood.
This year's elections to the Arbitration Committee have entered the voting phase. Eligible editors are invited to cast their vote before the end of Saturday December 10 (see "News and notes").
Abortion case ends
The Abortion case closed this week, after 15 weeks of contentious arbitration. The remedies included the provisions that all articles related to the topic "be semi-protected until November 28, 2014"; "not be moved absent a demonstrable community consensus"; and "are authorized to be placed on Standard discretionary sanctions". The announcement of these measures was greeted with raised eyebrows at the administrators' noticeboard, where it was pointed out that the number of articles and talkpages affected would be over 1500.
Among the other remedies were the predicted slate of topic-bans and reminders to behave for offending editors of varying degrees of culpability, and the following declaration:
"Structured discussion is to take place on names of articles currently located at Opposition to the legalization of abortion and Support for the legalization of abortion, with a binding vote taken one month after the opening of the discussion." The Committee has traditionally avoided motions to establish binding discussions in light of its aversion to getting involved in content disputes, but has in the past taken similar measures with respect to Ireland article names, the Macedonia naming dispute, and the Palestine-Israel working group.
The Requests for clarification saw little activity this week, with the Arbcom-unblocked editors request entering its fifth week without arbitrator comment while arbitrator SirFozzie proposed that the Eastern European mailing list request be archived as stale.
The Request for amendment of Russavia-Biophys remains in its early phase, with arbitrators seeking clarification and further context from the assembled personages.
The Betacommand 3 case remained in Evidence & Workshop phase, although no evidence was submitted this week and nothing was workshopped.
Potential shown for mobile and tablets when reading Wikipedia
Readers are using smartphones more than ever to browse content.
As detailed in previous Signpost coverage (1, 2), a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the development of an improved mobile platform for Wikimedia wikis. On 16 November, the Foundation's Mani Pande and Ayush Khanna presented a round up of recently conducted research into this field and to tie it into the Foundation's development strategy.
The results of the recent survey question "On which devices have you ever read Wikipedia?"
For example, the report noted that statistics generated recently demonstrate clearly that readers are no longer sticking to conventional desktop and laptop computers. Instead, they are already viewing an entire range of devices; smartphones are used by 21% of the 4000 globally distributed readers surveyed recently, tablets by 7% and gaming devices by 4%. Statistics also showed that over half of Wikipedia readers from Brazil, India and Mexico intended to buy a smartphone within the next year, emphasising the possibility of growth in this area. Additional research showed that Wikipedia-related apps (rather than simply browsing the site in a mobile web browser) had been tried by 41% of smartphone-owning users. The most popular app identified in the survey was the WMF's own official iPhone app. 37% of readers who had browsed content sites on a mobile device considered Wikipedia to have offered a superior experience.
These statistics, drawn from the 2011 Reader Survey (see Signpost coverage) will no doubt influence future resource allocation with regard to mobile projects, as will a second survey aimed specifically at mobile readers, the results of which are yet to be published. Development time is currently being focused on finishing an official Google Android app as well as improving the generic mobile site, including through the addition of the edit functionality it currently lacks.
The lunge for improved mobile support mobile will of course be tempered by the fact that desktops remain the most widely used device for reading Wikipedia, with over three-quarters of all readers having read Wikipedia articles from a desktop. Nonetheless, there is significant concern that developing countries will soon see whole generations that browse the web on mobile devices but have never touched a desktop; including them in the Wikimedia project could be key to fulfilling Wikimedia's long term mission for these countries.
Wikipedia instant search
An engineering student at India's BITS-Pilani KK Birla Goa campus has recently created "WikiLive", a minimalistic search tool offering instant search results of Wikipedia, MediaNama reports. Similar to Google Instant, the website also offers a preview of the actual article, all in real time. Unfortunately, the website's features are currently limited to the English Wikipedia. The launch of Google Instant in September last year had already prompted the creation of several such tools for Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage) – of the four examples listed back then, two are still online: The Instant Wiki and WikInstant.com.
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
An example screenshot from the BugTender mobile phone appMobile bug editing facility: Brion Vibber blogged about his efforts over the Thanksgiving weekend to create a functioning mobile version of a Bugzilla installation such as Wikimedia's. He describes his initial effort, dubbed "BugTender", as providing developers "with a mobile-friendly interface to browse (and later, comment on & triage) [their] bugs".
Server outage: Wikimedia sites suffered from an outage of about 30 minutes on Sunday November 27 around 11:00 pm UTC. It was initially thought to be caused by faulty hardware on a database server, but Performance Engineer Asher Feldman later explained that the outage was probably due to a reddit thread (see "In the news"). The thread, an "Ask me anything" discussion started by Wikimedia staff member Brandon Harris (currently featured on fundraising banners), linked to the "Special:FundraiserStatistics" page on the Wikimedia Foundation website, but the page "wasn't suitable for high volume public consumption" because it ran a "very expensive [database] query". The statistics page has been temporarily disabled.
1.19 code revision targets in place: Rob Lanphier this week published what look like will become the accepted code revision targets for the MediaWiki 1.19 release cycle (wikitech-l mailing list). Based on performance during the 1.18 release cycle, the numbers generated (including four hundred revisions dealt with in the first week and all revisions handled by the end of January) reflect the fact that reviewing will start quickly and end more slowly as only more complex changes are left to be reviewed. The projections also account for a code review lull over the Christmas break.
Bugzilla vandalised; future new contributors constrained: In the last week, vandals have repeatedly targeted the Wikimedia bugzilla installation by impersonating staff and then using the "mass change" feature of the software to alter dozens of bugs within a handful of minutes. In the past, vandalism had been rare – there is very little incentive to vandalise the site, which is viewed almost solely by Wikimedia developers – and had operated a fairly generous permissions package for new users. Unfortunately, it is now likely that those advanced permissions will be denied in future to new users by default (wikitech-l mailing list).
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