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18 October 2010

 

2010-10-18

Wikipedia fundraiser event, Frankfurt book fair, news in brief

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By Resident Mario, Tony1, Tilman Bayer and Ziko

Wikipedia community gathers for fundraising event

Some of the Wikimedians who attended the event

As reported by Steven Ma, the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Associate, "more than one hundred Wikipedia editors, donors, and readers" attended an event titled Inside the Globe in New York on 7 October. The evening was both a fundraiser and an opportunity to introduce major donors to the people and culture of the projects. Roughly a dozen editors were present, including Wikimedia New York City board members and other local Wikimedians. Hosted by the Harnisch Foundation (a patron of Wikimedia) in the Metropolitan Tower, the evening saw presentations by Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia fellow Steven Walling. Steven spoke about "the identity and culture of the most involved editors, highlighting the motivations and methods behind their amazing accomplishments within the project". After the event, Ruth Ann Harnisch, the president of the Harnisch Foundation, expressed her pleasure to have introduced "so many people to the workings of their favorite online resource." In an August blog post, she had invited donors to attend the Wikimedia fundraising event, noting that she had added the WMF to her list of grantees several years ago (as a "tiny part of the support system for Wikipedia"); in the posting, she also expressed her support for the Wikimedia Foundation in its then ongoing conflict with the FBI over the reproduction of the Bureau's seal (see Signpost coverage).

Argentine Wikimedians at Frankfurt Book Fair

Wikimedians Patricio Lorente (right) and Beatriz Busaniche (second from left) on a panel at the Frankfurt Book Fair
Two members of the Argentine Wikimedia chapter recently traveled to Europe to present a book about the copyright situation in Argentina at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is considered the world's largest book fair and where Argentina was this year's "guest of honor" country. Beatriz Busaniche and Patricio Lorente are known to many Wikimedians as part of the organizing team of last year's Wikimania. Both also work with the Vía Libre Foundation, which collaborated with the German Heinrich Böll Foundation to produce the book Argentina copyleft.

The copyright situation in Argentina is considered particularly restrictive. In a 2010 Consumers International study of 34 countries, it came out sixth-worst for consumer rights. Argentina provides no fair use or library exceptions, and does not even permit the free use of public domain works in all cases (for some uses, a fee has to be paid to a fund supporting artists). The book argues that this is detrimental for education and culture. Wikimedia Argentina has engaged in various lobbying efforts regarding the copyright situation, such as signing a letter to parliament protesting last year's extension of copyright in phonograms (sound recordings) from 50 to 70 years after creation, and opposing ongoing lobbying by photographers to extend the monopoly on photographs from 25 to 50 years after creation, which would affect commons:Template:PD-AR-Photo.

Edited by Busaniche, the book collects contributions by various authors to the copyright debate in Argentina. One chapter, by Wikipedian and founding member of Wikimedia Argentina Roberto Fiadone, presents Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as examples of communities that generate free knowledge. Another chapter, on ebooks, was reprinted by the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. The Heinrich Böll Foundation funded a translation into German and organized a presentation of the book in Berlin, in addition to the panel at the Frankfurt event. The book is available as a PDF under a CC-BY-SA license. The Spanish version was downloaded more than 20,000 times during the first week. Busaniche also gave a podcast interview (in English) about the book to German blog Netzpolitik.

In brief

  • Executive director office hours: The log for the IRC office hours of 14 October with Sue Gardner has been released. Topics discussed included the blocking of Greg Kohs, owner of MyWikiBiz, from the meeting; the resolutions from the recent Board meeting (see last week's "News and notes") including the adoption of the WMF's Five-year targets (about which Gardner posted an additional Q&A); the WMF's support for GLAM outreach activities; accessibility for screen readers; expert assessment of articles (including ongoing work by the Public Policy Initiative), whether the Foundation should put out requests for proposals (RFPs) before contracting external companies for projects such as the recent donor survey; the possibility of offline versions of Wikipedia on e-readers such as the Kindle or iPad; and the study on controversial content (which three hours of the Board meeting were devoted to, with the Board concluding that further discussion was needed about some of the recommended policy changes). The office hour was also attended by WMF deputy director Erik Möller.
  • CGDO office hours: Part of the log for the October 15 IRC office hours with Barry Newstead, the Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer (like the previous one, facilitated by Steven Walling), has also been released, covering hardware deployment, local chapters, balancing legal jurisdictions, and progress in India.
  • Research analyst and other WMF hiring: Shortly after the office hours, Newstead announced the hiring of Mani Pande as the Global Development department's Senior Research Analyst (job description). In other WMF hiring news, the position of an User Interface Designer was added to the Foundation's Job openings page on Monday, while the Community Hiring program that was started in July to fill positions in the newly formed Community Department (Signpost coverage) was removed there last week. It is not known whether any community members have been added to the permanent staff via the program, which had received nearly 2000 applications by September, but three applicants were awarded temporary fellowships in the newly created "Community Fellows" program (Signpost coverage: September 20, October 4).
    One of many images uploaded to Commons on a field trip by members of the Israeli chapter: an inscription for the ancient Al-Budeiri Library in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem

  • WM Israel report: Wikimedia Israel has released its chapter report for March–September. Among the topics are the chapter's annual general assembly in June, at which Shay Yakir was re-elected chair and two new members were elected to the board; preparations for Wikimania 2011 4–7 August in Haifa; a report on the new copyright bill making state-owned photographs free, which will be passed back to the Knesset for voting into law and for which chapter members have assisted in the wording (see also last week's "In the news"); the second Wikipedia Academy Israel Conference on 14 June; collaboration by the chapter to ship Linux-installed computers—including a static version of the French Wikipedia's one-million-plus articles—to the African countries of Cameroon and Benin and the provision of training to local students in their use (cf. Signpost coverage); and a number of field trips to archaeological sites and kibbutzim within Israel.
  • WM NL annual convention: On October 9, Wikimedia Nederland held its annual members' convention in Utrecht, attended by 21 people. The meeting bid farewell to Hay Kranen, who left the board after three and a half years' service. After an amendment was passed allowing the board to have up to seven members, two new members were elected: Maarten Brinkerink and Sieband Mazeland. One topic was the matter of employing staff at the Dutch chapter, although the first appointment is not yet imminent. Another issue was the best way to transfer donations from the Netherlands to the WMF in the US. Paul Becherer said he expects to receive advice on this soon from the Netherlands tax office. January will see a bootcamp for Dutch Wikimedians on collaborating with museums, and a members' convention for the chapter's 2011 budget, when the results of fundraising are clear.

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2010-10-18

Show Me the Money: WikiProject Numismatics

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By Mabeenot
WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
An ancient coin featuring Claudius II
A 1,000 ruble banknote from the Russian Federation
File:1 litas coin - palace (2005).png
Litas, the currency of Lithuania, with a special design to commemorate the rebuilding of the Royal Palace
American Express started as an express mail business. Today, they produce financial products like credit cards and traveler's cheques.

This week, we took a look at WikiProject Numismatics, a project dedicated to money and its history. Included within the project's scope are articles about coins, banknotes, cheques, credit cards, stock certificates, medals, medallions, and token coins. The project started in 2004 and has grown to include 9 featured articles and lists, 7 good and A-class articles, and over 1,000 images. WikiProject Numismatics maintains a portal, to-do list (Numitasks), and a list of helpful sources. We interviewed Searchme (Joe) and Enlil Ninlil.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Numismatics? Do you collect coins, medals, or other items covered by the project?

Joe: As of now, I collect American coins and paper money. I joined the project to improve the articles and scope of the pages I had used to research my own collection.
Enlil Ninlil: I collect anything that circulated as money, and information on them, from China, India to Europe and from any period.

Do you prefer working on articles pertaining to coins (etc.) from recent history or ancient history?

Joe: I prefer reading the ancient ones for the history, buy prefer working on the modern ones because on the continuity of designs, designers, issuers and such.
Enlil Ninlil: Any time period would be fine with me.

Have you contributed to any of the project's featured or good articles? Are you currently working on bringing an article up to FA or GA status?

Joe: I believe I've only been a minor contributor on most of featured articles. I'm not currently working on anything in the project; my time on Wikipedia is greatly reduced for now.
Enlil Ninlil: Now I am not working on anything. I had updated many articles on Roman coinage, Byzantine coinage, and would like to do more articles on coins from the kingdoms of India, like Punch Marked coins, but information is scarce.

How difficult has it been to find images of rare coins?

Enlil Ninlil: Depends on the coin; I find free images of many coins, rare or common, hard to come by.
Joe: Not difficult at all. We have a number of members that run numismatics web pages or utilize their personal collection.

The project maintains a portal that receives around 60 views per day. How much effort goes into maintaining the portal? Is it a worthwhile component of the project?

Joe: Right now the portal gets no attention (I'm the main contributor there, and again, time issues). It is mostly on autopilot, the most neglected section being the news, which has never really been great. But the portal is featured and has a ton of interesting links; it should be the go to page for anyone interested in numismatics or the project.

Does WikiProject Numismatics maintain close connections with any other projects? Have there been any inter-project collaborations on articles?

Joe: WikiProject Philately and WikiProject Orders, Decorations, and Medals were originally under the purview of WikiProject Numismatics and a few editors are still members of two of them. There's no current collaborations that I'm aware of; most articles have been separated into their respective projects. The best places for a collaboration would be an item such as a stamp that was also or primarily used as money.

How can a new contributor help today?

Joe: All help is good, there's nothing too simple. There's so many articles that just need a little research to be good. And with the amount of numbers and specifications our articles have they are always vulnerable to vandalism; one person can't watch them all -- I've tried.
Enlil Ninlil: Anything, but articles on coinage of kingdoms or empires would be good.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Joe: I think one thing keeping this project from getting tons of help is the name, numismatics. It's kinda scary: scary to say, scary to spell, and most people don't have a clue what it is. Almost everyone collects coins, either a penny from their birth year or their first dollar. If we could highlight that numismatics is coin collecting, people's eyes would light up.


Next week, we'll visit a scary project just in time for Halloween. Until then, look for thrills and chills in the haunted archive.

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2010-10-18

A week for marine creatures

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
Featured picture Choice of the week, "White-spotted jellyfish", one of two new FPs of marine creatures by Wikipedian Nick Hobgood. It averages 45–50 cm in bell diameter, but grows to larger sizes in the Gulf of Mexico, where it has become an invasive species that is a potential threat to shrimp and fish populations. Read the judge's reasons and Nick's comments below.

New administrator

The Signpost welcomes Looie496 (nom) as our newest admin. Looie496 is a neuroscientist who specialises in learning and memory, with a focus on the hippocampus; many of his publications have involved theta rhythm. He has been contributing since April 2008, and since then has co-maintained WikiProject Neuroscience. More recently, Looie496 has been involved in an effort sponsored by the American Society for Neuroscience to encourage more scientists to contribute to Wikipedia. He is interested in dispute resolution, and has participated at ANI, WQA, and various other noticeboards, with an eye to contributing to AIV, UAA, and RPP.

Featured articles

The "bleeding tooth fungus", from new featured article Hydnellum peckii. The "teeth" covering the cap's underside are specialised spore-producing structures.
Four articles were promoted to featured status. These articles will be considered next week by the judge for Choice of the week.
  • Typhoon Sudal (nom) (2004), the strongest storm to hit the Pacific island of Yap in half a century, causing major damage to property but no loss of life (nominated by Hurricanehink)
  • Bring Us Together (nom), one of Richard Nixon's political slogans, and another article in the ongoing series prepared by Wehwalt on this American politician.
  • Hydnellum peckii (nom), the "bleeding tooth fungus", aka "strawberries and cream": it looks like candy, but doesn't taste like it, says nominator Sasata. (picture at right)
  • Sid Barnes with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (nom), an individualistic and colourful sportsman, known for his habit of fielding at point blank range to intimidate opposition batsmen. He once spent three weeks in hospital after taking a hit in the chest by a ball (YellowMonkey).

Four featured articles were delisted:

Featured lists

A man in red academic robes sitting in a chair with a city scene visible through a window
Philip Bliss, Keeper of the Archives at Oxford University from 1826 to 1857, from the eponymous FL Choice of the week
Five lists were promoted:

Choice of the week. We asked FL nominator PresN for his/her choice of the best. The choice is from both last week plus the three new FLs from the week before:

"Out of the five lists from this week and the three from the previous week, I'm going to go with Keeper of the Archives from last week. I found it interesting and informative on a subject that was a bit further outside the mainstream than most Featured Lists. I would have suspected any article about a subject going back to the 1600s to be scanty on sources and information, but found quite the opposite with this article. I probably shouldn't have been surprised that Oxford kept good records on their record-keeping position!"

One featured list was delisted:

Featured pictures

Fridtjof Nansen, Norwegian renaissance man and Nobel laureate
Bright-eyed, open-mouthed Loliginid squid
Ten images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom".

Choice of the week. DerHexer is a regular reviewer and nominator at Common’s featured picture candidates. He told The Signpost:


Featured portal


User:Diliff's photograph of Casa Milà in Barcelona, Spain, by the great modernist architect Antoni Gaudí—from the newly featured List of World Heritage Sites in Spain


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2010-10-18

Common issues seen in Peer review

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By Finetooth and Ruhrfisch
Don't worry: peer review is not as daunting as this!
Peer review exposes an article to a wider degree of formal scrutiny than it normally receives, and offers significant help on the journey to Good or Featured status. While each article is unique, a number of similar issues are frequently seen in articles reviewed in the Peer review process. Below we discuss these issues and provide some recommendations on how to deal with them.

Lead

While the lead is the first section our readers see, it is usually the last section in an article to be written (or at least finalized). This is because the lead should be a summary of the whole article. A good rule of thumb is to mention every section in the lead in some way, even if only through a word or phrase.

Because it is a summary, the lead should contain no material that does not appear elsewhere in the article. For the same reason, the lead should be brief — not more than four paragraphs.

While the lead can have references, most articles do not include them there (again since it is a summary, all information in the lead should be mentioned and referenced elsewhere in the article). The main exceptions to this are direct quotations and contentious claims, which should be referenced no matter where they occur.

A good way to write the lead is to wait a few days, then reread the whole article except for the lead, then try to summarize it as a lead section. Another way is to imagine that a reader is restricted to reading only the lead: what points are essential and what can be omitted in that situation?

More information

References

Citing reliable sources is critical to verifying an article's claims. A good rule of thumb is to provide at least one source for each paragraph as well as sources for all quotations, all statistics, and any claim that is challenged or likely to be challenged. Each source should clearly support the text it is used for. Blogs, personal websites, and other self-published materials are not usually reliable sources.

Wikipedia articles use what are called "inline citations", each of which is added to the main text. One option is to use parenthetical references, and another is to use clickable footnotes. For the latter, the citation details go between a pair of <ref></ref> tags. These should be placed inline directly after the end punctuation of the text that is being supported. Editors can format citations in a variety of ways, by hand or by using templates such as those of the "cite" family. A good rule of thumb for Internet sources is to include, if available, the author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and access date. WP:CIT includes lists of desirable data, such as ISBN numbers, for other kinds of sources.

A "References" or "Notes" section must be added to the article to make the citations fully functional. This section must contain either the <references/> tag or a small template such as {{reflist}}, which will automatically display the citation details, what is inside the <ref></ref> tags, in the "References" or "Notes" section.

Editors who use citation templates should take care not to mix the "cite" family with the "citation" family or other families. Dates in the citations of any particular article should be formatted in the same way; i.e, m-d-y or yyyy-mm-dd for US-centric articles and d-m-y or yyyy-mm-dd for most non-US-centric articles. Page ranges in the citations and elsewhere take en dashes rather than hyphens.

In addition to making Wikipedia's text verifiable, an article's citations provide readers and researchers, including other Wikipedia editors, quick access to sources that may be useful in other ways, such as when doing academic research. References add greatly to the encyclopedia's value.

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Images

Common image problems that are easily fixed involve size and spacing. "Thumb" is the preferred size for most images, though the lead image, maps, galleries, and panoramas are notable exceptions. It is possible to make images too small or too large, and it is possible to have too few images or too many. Judgment is required to decide how best to present an image in the larger context of the whole article. To avoid blankness on the one hand and clutter on the other, a good rule of thumb is to aim for one image per main text section and to place each image entirely within the section it illustrates. Generally, directional images such as eyes looking one way, or horses running left or right, should be placed so that "following" an image goes into the text of the page rather than away from it.

Images need captions, and it is good practice (although not explicitly required) to add alt text for readers who cannot see the images. WP:CAPTIONS has more on captions, and WP:ALT explains alt text.

Images must be properly licensed either as free-use or fair-use, and the image description and license page should include the "who, what, when, where" of the image itself, the license, the categories, and the author, original source, date, and any other information needed to verify that the license is legal and appropriate. Licensing is fairly straightforward with self-made photos but can be quite complicated in the case of images scanned from books, or obtained via Flickr, government web sites, or other sources. In these cases, great care must be taken to avoid violating copyright law.

Images used under the Fair use clause of United States copyright law must follow Wikipedia's policy on non-free content, which stipulates (in part) that fair use images must have no free equivalent, be used minimally, and must have contextual significance in the article in which they appear. So, for example, fair use images of living persons or existing buildings are almost never allowed, as they could conceivably be replaced with free images. Fair use media must be mentioned in the article in which they appear, and must add significantly to the reader's understanding of the topic.

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Prose

Although good prose styles can vary considerably, it is helpful to keep in mind the encyclopedia's diverse audience. A good rule of thumb is to imagine a readership of ordinary adults fluent in English but unfamiliar with the material being presented. Jargon needs to be explained or linked. Abbreviations generally need to be spelled out on first use. Slang, which can be bewildering to readers living in various places around the world, should be avoided. To the extent possible, technical material should be written in plain English and technical terms either explained or linked.

Paragraphs should be neither too long nor too short. Giant paragraphs put readers to sleep, while a succession of tiny ones clutters the page and turns prose articles into lists. Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs. If an article's essence is a list, it should have a title such as "List of rivers in Asia".

Good sentence structure can vary widely, but most sentences in an article should be neither extremely long nor extremely short. Exceptions can be delicious if clear; readers do enjoy variety.

Embrace the active voice. For example, instead of "Cat was chased by Mouse," write "Mouse chased Cat". Three words beats five.

Editors are often very familiar with the subjects they write about. If the article omits useful background information, this can cause problems for general readers who are less familiar with the topic. Be sure to provide context for the reader in all articles, and to write from a real-world perspective in articles about works of fiction. WP:MOSFICT has more on writing about fiction.

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Manual of Style

While Wikipedia's Manual of Style (MOS) covers many topics, there are some MOS issues that are frequently seen at peer review.

Section and subsection headings should be uniquely named within an article, and should not contain links. These headings should avoid repeating the name of the article if at all possible (so in an article on Chicago, the section would not be "Chicago parks", but just "Parks"—the reader already knows the article is about Chicago). Only the first letter of the first word and proper nouns are capitalized. Avoid very short sections or subsections.

Measurements are generally given first in International System of Units (SI) units, except for articles on the US, where United States customary units may be given first, and with a partial exception for the UK. Except for some scientific articles, units should be converted so that they are given in both systems; the {{convert}} template is useful for doing this for almost any conversion.

Use a non-breaking space (&nbsp;) between numbers and units or symbols such as $3 million or State Route 43, or between dates and months to avoid awkward line breaks. The convert template does this automatically, and the {{nowrap}} template has the same effect.

Quotations should be within double quotes ("like this"). Single quotes ('like this') are used only for a quotation within a quotation: "John asked Mary 'Are you going too?', but she was not interested." Wikipedia uses logical quotation, so unless it is a complete sentence or thought, the punctuation goes outside the quotation marks. Block quotes are generally three or more lines long, and should use the {{quote}} or related templates. The {{cquote}} template is used only for pull quotes.

Do not use italics to show that something is being quoted. Italics are used for names of genera, court cases, vehicles, works of art, foreign words, and to show words as words as in "the word bumblebee ". Italics can be used for emphasis, though this is rare; bold face is never used in this way on Wikipedia.

One of the most useful features of Wikipedia is the ability to use internal links or wikilinks to direct readers to other articles in the encyclopedia. The usefulness of such links is reduced if there are too many links in the article. Only link to articles which would help increase the reader's understanding of the topic. Avoid links to common terms and generally avoid repeating the same link in an article, unless the second one is much further down and it seems important to link it.

Spell out abbreviations on first use; for example, "the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR)", rather than just "the DCNR", unless it is so well-known that this seems unnecessary ("BBC").

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The peer review process

There are almost always more peer review (PR) requests than reviewers, which has led to limits and restrictions. Editors are limited to one peer review request per day, and no more than four open peer reviews at one time. Peer review is for more developed articles, which must be free of any major cleanup banners, including, but not limited to {{cleanup}}, {{wikify}}, {{NPOV}}, {{unreferenced}}, or large numbers of {{fact}}, {{clarifyme}}, and {{huh}}. An article that has had a peer review, or gone through the substantial review process at FAC unsuccessfully, cannot be listed at PR until at least two weeks after the archive of its previous review, to allow time for the comments from the previous PR or FAC to be addressed.

Peer reviews that have received little or no feedback after four days are placed on the PR backlog, where they will still receive a review. As this can take time, editors who submitted articles are encouraged to look at the links in the Toolbox on the peer review page for their article, and then fix any problems found using the various tools. These toolbox links include automated tips, as well as checks for disambiguation links and external links in the article.

Be aware that peer review is a place to identify problems, but not necessarily to receive fixes for them. The reviewers at PR generally do not have time to do copyedits or other large scale fixes. Peer review is a good place to help out; even a single comment can be very useful. More reviewers are always needed and welcome!

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2010-10-18

Climate change case closes after 4 months

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, but closed one, leaving one open.

Open case

Stevertigo 2 (Week 3)

This case concerns accusations of wiki-hounding and disruptive editing, and was filed by Stevertigo, a Wikipedia editor since 2002. He alleges that several editors deem his editing to be "disruptive" or "in need of banning" because they "still hold the grudge that previous cases did not find in their favor regarding [Stevertigo]". He also alleges that he "largely won" an argument against two editors in relation to the Time article, and that those two editors began editing the Punishment article due to an undue interest in Stevertigo's editing rather than due to an interest in the article. The case is currently in the evidence and workshop phase. Drafting arbitrators Kirill Lokshin and SirFozzie have placed proposals on the workshop page which have attracted limited input, mostly from a couple of parties and arbitrators. At the time of writing, no uninvolved users from the Community have commented on the proposals.

Closed case

Climate change (Week 19)

This case was opened after several requests for arbitration were filed on the same topic. Innovations were introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start. The case generated a number of concerns and criticisms, particularly in relation to its handling; a common concern was that arbitrators failed to sufficiently engage with participants, adversely affecting the ability of many participants to provide meaningful evidence in support of their (or in response to others) claims (see coverage by Signpost: last week, earlier).

The evidence and workshop pages were closed for an extended period; however, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing the case on the case pages. A month after the workshop pages were closed, a proposed decision was posted; this sparked a large amount of unstructured discussion, mostly comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrators, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion continued to increase significantly. Arbitrators closed or archived discussions more frequently, particularly in the final weeks of the arbitration. The highly anticipated decision was enacted during the week; it attracted several responses.

What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?

2010-10-18

Video subtitling tool, staff vs. volunteer developers, brief news

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By Jarry1250

Universal Subtitles editor comes to Commons

The Universal Subtitles editor can be selected from the "CC" icon in any mwEmbed player

For some time, visitors to Wikimedia Commons have been able to access "timed text" (a system of time references and accompanying text, better known by its applications as subtitles and closed captions) via the mwEmbed gadget. The subtitling effort has been hampered, however, by the lack of a useful editor for the timed text. "Universal Subtitles", a Mozilla Drumbeat project, aims to fill the void for all websites, but Wikimedia had not been able to integrate it. That changed this week, when developer Michael Dale announced that (Wikimedia Techblog):


An example is available, and it is also possible to leave feedback.

Staff, paid developers and volunteers: discussions continue

This week saw a revitalised drive towards reaching an understanding between WMF staff decision-makers, WMF paid developers, and the volunteer development community. For a long time the creation of the MediaWiki software, which Wikimedia, Wikia and a number of other sites rely on, had a development cycle that operated like a wiki, for better or worse. It included a large number of volunteer developers and only a handful of paid employees (for example, Brion Vibber); their contributions were checked and deployed in sequential order. With its budget expanding in recent years, the Foundation has been able to hire more developers, who are now involved in a large number of projects some would perceive as being nearly impossible for a volunteer to complete in their spare time. Likewise, the review system has been updated to allow important fixes to be deployed out-of-cycle without first reviewing other more minor edits. Staff and developers, both paid and volunteer, are now concerned that a tension is growing between the various parts of the jigsaw, an "us vs. them dynamic" (Erik Möller, Deputy Director), similar to the conflict that had flared up earlier this year between the User Experience team and volunteer developers over a seemingly minor issue (the display of interwiki links, see Signpost coverage), where Möller had likewise observed "a widening gap between staff and volunteer contributions". Paid developer Roan Kattouw put his thoughts down (Wikitech-l mailing list):

Volunteer Aryeh Gregor responded:

More optimistically, the discussion turned to possible solutions. There was general agreement that getting back to more regular updates was the solution (Roan Kattouw):

This sentiment was mirrored by Aryeh Gregor:

There was continuing disagreement, however, about whether or not the Foundation was doing enough to achieve this goal, and how quickly it needed to be achieved. Discussion included the expansion of the code review base - including the rehiring of Brion Vibber, for example - which unfortunately coincided with the paternity leave of head code reviewer Tim Starling.

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.

  • Google Summer of Code participant Peter Potrowl appealed for someone to take over the development of his "reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion" project (Wikitech-l mailing list). See also Signpost coverage of the project
  • The Brooklyn Museum built its first open source software release, BklynFlow. BklynFlow is a MooTools class for creating Coverflow-like user interfaces for the web. It was designed for accessing Wikipedia content on iPad Kiosks placed for a recent exhibition.
  • Microsoft Research has released a tool to assist people in translating Wikipedia articles. The tool makes machine translations of articles and has a simple integrated editor to make improvements upon that translation. The new product is called WikiBhasha and as Wikimedia CTO, Danese Cooper announced, it is an open-source project.

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