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2011-08-08

Seventh annual Wikimedia conference concluded in Haifa, Israel

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By Tom Morris
Party after the first day of Wikimania in the gardens of the Rapaport Center in Haifa.

Wikimedians from across the world congregated in Haifa, Israel, last week for three days of intensive discussion of Wikimedia projects as part of Wikimania 2011, an annual gathering that has taken place every year since 2005 when it was first organized in Frankfurt, Germany. This year saw over 650 participants attend the main conference, accompanied by the pre-event meetings for developers, a chapters meeting and a meeting of the Communications Committee. (See also this week's "News and notes" and "Technology report")

On Wednesday, participants were welcomed to the event with professionally produced badges, lanyards, conference programmes, goody bags, T-shirts and very necessary cold drinks. The first order of business was a welcome from the organisers, and a welcome from a representative of the Israeli parliament. Outside the venue, a "tent city" had been set up, where young Israelis protested the rising cost of housing (see 2011 Israeli housing protests, the Wikinews story and media from Commons).

Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler presenting at Wikimania.

Professor Yochai Benkler, the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard University and author of The Wealth of Networks, presented the opening plenary session on Thursday. Benkler was the first academic to write about Wikipedia, in an article in the summer of 2001 entitled "Coase's Penguin", and this time presented a highly optimistic lecture arguing that a fundamentally positive and co-operative vision of human nature is captured in projects like Wikipedia as well as free and open source software. He tied it to the housing protests, describing how "right outside, people are standing, sitting in tents, trying to claw back a sense of what a decent society and what a decent community can be within a market system beyond simply maximizing the returns for capital", and also went further to reference the protest movement in Syria. What then does the Arab Spring share with Wikipedia? The understanding of how "humans can work together to overcome structures of hierarchy, structures of markets that necessarily reduce us to supply and demand curves. According to Benkler, before Wikipedia, the principles behind open source were ignored with various attempts at special pleading: the theory went that one has nothing to learn from strange hackers writing open source software in a profoundly strange way. When normal people started writing encyclopedias for the same reasons hackers write open source software, that argument was undermined.

To show how academia was dominated by market thinking before Wikipedia, Benkler pointed to Information Rules, a 1999 book by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, which described the disruption to the business model of Encyclopedia Britannica brought by Microsoft's Encarta. They could easily see how a modestly priced CD-ROM encyclopedia threatened an expensive printed encyclopedia like Britannica, but completely failed to see how much more radically disruptive Wikipedia was or could become.

Benkler goes on to describe how there now seems to be a shift in a wide variety of academic disciplines away from markets and selfishness to co-operation: in economics, evolutionary biology and the social sciences.

Sue Gardner

Sue Gardner giving the Year in Review at Wikimania.

Perhaps appropriate for Wikimania in the tenth anniversary year of Wikipedia, Sue Gardner signalled the increasing maturity of the Wikimedia projects by quoting a French journalist who told her "Making fun of Wikipedia is so 2007". Gardner listed two primary challenges facing the Foundation over the coming year: user retention and mobile. The new mobile version of Wikipedia is in development and promises great improvements over the old version, but Gardner also hinted at the search for new editing behaviours for a world where the vast majority of users will interact with Wikipedia less on desktop and laptop computers and more on phones (both smart and otherwise), tablets, and post-PC devices.

Board Q&A

WMF board at Wikimania.

Following the presentation by Sue Gardner, the current board of trustees were introduced by Harel Cain, one of the main organisers for Wikimedia Israel, to take part in the customary Q&A session. Top of the agenda was the question of "Facebook-isation", a criticism raised following the rollout of both the Article Feedback Tool and WikiLove on English Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales harshly criticised the current trend in Silicon Valley technology companies for "gamification" or introduction of game mechanics on "check-in" sites like Foursquare describing them as "what you do when you don't have a good idea". Wales also said of WikiLove that the behavior of thanking users was already an established practice on Wikipedia, and that the extension simply makes this existing behaviour easier.

Kat Walsh also described one fundamental difference between the aspects of social networking being tested tentatively on Wikipedia by arguing that compared to Facebook, the social tools on Wikimedia have a purpose: to help produce free knowledge.

Kat also described one of the reasons why participation on Wikipedia may be slowing by saying that "it's just part of the Internet now", hinting that it is no longer a grand experiment in participatory culture and the original impetus to participate may have faded slightly as it becomes just a handy reference tool rather than an experiment.

Open source developer Benjamin Mako Hill asked the board why they haven't started any new wiki projects since the opening of Wikiversity in 2006, hinting at the potential benefits of creating Wikipedia-level, Foundation-blessed sister projects to collect material on genealogy (to break the hold of proprietary database services) and also to collate bibliographic material and annotations to academic papers and documents, perhaps to connect with the increasing quantity of open data being published by scientists. Board member Samuel Klein (SJ) described how the board "don't have a clear process" for deciding on the creation, closing and modification of scope for existing projects but pointed to work being done by the Movement Roles project.

Jimmy Wales took a different tack, not endorsing the creation of new projects and not ruling them out, but suggesting that the Foundation and the board could do a better job of focussing on improving support for the other projects including specifically Wikinews: "the Foundation has never provided much to Wikinews". Specifically on Wikinews, Wales noted that it "has not been the success it could have been", and compared it to the Huffington Post which has been much more successful using a partially volunteer-driven model even though "it's not high quality" in terms of fact checking and neutrality like an improved Wikinews could be.

The board were asked about improving outreach to academics and Phoebe Ayers pointed to the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier in the year, which celebrated the Public Policy Initiative.

From here, the questions became slightly more critical. One questioner welcomed the desire to increase participation in the Global South but questioned why Africa seemed to not be part of the plan in the way Brazil and India seemed to be. Board members pointed to infrastructure problems in Africa that prevented effective outreach, and board chairman Ting Chen welcomed the formation of a new Wikimedia chapter in South Africa. Another questioner asked about the sustainability of the Foundation with the increase in funding being requested as part of the fundraiser each year and stated that at the rates of growth the fundraisers have been operating, in 2031, they would exceed the current global GDP.

Joseph Reagle

Joseph Reagle speaking at Wikimania.

The plenary on Friday was given by Joseph Reagle, author of Good Faith Collaboration, who gave a talk asking whether or not Wikipedia was inevitable and traced what he described as a "universal encyclopedic vision" that flowed down the ages from Denis Diderot and the Encyclopédie. Many aspects of Wikipedia, Reagle argued, could be found in previous proposals. Even the metaphor of the jigsaw which forms Wikipedia's logo can be found in H. G. Wells's "world encyclopedia": "we can solve the problem of that jig-saw puzzle and bring all the scattered and ineffective mental wealth of our world into something like a common understanding."

Reagle went on to describe a variety of network-based projects that followed the "encyclopedic vision" including Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project, Project Gutenberg, the Interpedia proposals, Richard Stallman's proposal for a "free universal encyclopedia" and then finally the development of Nupedia and then Wikipedia.

Reagle asked a number of questions about the historical status of Wikipedia and argued that it was inevitable as it has a number of innovative ideas built into it that previous proposals did not have. Reagle also poked a bit of fun at some of Wikipedia's critics: in 2002, Peter Jacso ridiculed the goal of getting to 100,000 articles from the measly 16,000 or so the project then had. Reagle also responded to Robert McHenry's famous criticism of Wikipedia as being akin to a public restroom ("[what] he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him") by pointing out that with talk pages and history listings, the reader actually "can see who pissed in Wikipedia". Reagle notes that criticism of reference works has a long history, and such criticism is a proxy for "culture wars" and other sociopolitical conflicts: the classic example being the criticism of Webster's for inclusion of the word "ain't" in the third edition published in 1961.

User retention

In the session on editor trends, some unnerving statistics were revealed about editor retention. In 2006, there were 244 new editors who became very active in the next year and made over 10,000 edits on the English Wikipedia. In 2009, that measure dropped to 56 users. This matches concerns expressed about the decreasing number of candidates suitable and willing to run for adminship on English Wikipedia. Similarly, according to the editor trends statistics, of new accounts created, the number who make one or more edits has been declining since the first quarter of 2007. The number of negative templates placed on user pages has also increased, a potential measure of the number of negative barriers for users.

GLAM

One of the recurring themes of Wikimania this year has been the growth and successes of "GLAM", the outreach to galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Liam Wyatt (slides) described how a few years ago, what have now become GLAM volunteers, ambassadors, Wikimedians in Residence, etc. were not able to get museums and cultural institutions to return their phone calls, and now the Louvre is on the waiting list. Liam listed some of the successes of 2011 so far: residencies at the National Archives and Records Administration in the US, the rollout of QR codes at Derby Museum and a twenty-four challenge at the Château de Versailles. The GLAM projects have also worked to increase self-organisation through communication by running the This Month In GLAM newsletter and a number of GLAMcamp events to share success stories among Wikimedians. Liam made a number of suggestions on how to improve GLAM in 2012: a GLAMcamp in Utrecht, Netherlands, creating national "outreach coordinators" to train volunteers and creating a short term Community Liaison post at the Wikimedia Foundation. The success of GLAM projects in the United States also prompted Liam to suggest the creation of a "USA GLAM Fellow" to coordinate the dozen or more Wikipedians in Residence programs at many more American art museums Liam expects to happen in 2012.

One aspect which Liam thought needed work was better management and development of tools to support GLAM activities: currently, there are lots of different tools, often hacky and custom-built for mass upload of images and metadata management, and it would make life easier if they could be improved and standardised. In addition, often institutions need metrics to show the effectiveness of image uploads, article collaboration and other activities, which are currently not provided as well as they could be.

Maarten Dammers (User:Multichill) from Wikimedia Netherlands gave a talk on the "State of GLAM in the Netherlands" (slides) discussing outreach with the Tropenmuseum, Wiki Loves Monuments and other GLAM outreach projects they conducted.

Jimmy Wales: State of the Wiki

Jimmy Wales at Wikimania.

As at previous Wikimanias, Jimmy Wales rounded off the event with a report on the "State of the Wiki". Wales responded to the reports that the number of editors was dropping by arguing that "Wikipedia is not dying". Increasing the number of editors is only of secondary concern; the primary concern is increasing quality. Pointing to WikiLove and the Article Feedback Tool, Jimmy argued that through software changes we can improve the experience of editing Wikipedia dramatically. He asked the community to help in this process: "we need to relax a bit and be less conservative".

Illustrating the complexity of the current system on the English Wikipedia, Jimmy described the process of trying to use Requested Moves (WP:RM) in order to seek consensus on moving John Hutton (British Labour politician) to John Hutton, Baron Hutton of Furness in March—Jimmy is well known for his interest in the House of Lords. He found it exceptionally complicated to do so and after making a mistake, a bot came and overwrote it, a process he described as feeling as if "a robot ate my homework!" If, he goes on, this is too complicated for a long-time user of the site to get right, how on earth do we expect ordinary users to get it right?

Campus ambassadors in Washington, D.C., the home of the next Wikimania.

Jimmy also announced the creation of an annual award—Global Wikipedian of the Year. This was given to Rauan Kenzhekhanuly of Kazakh Wikipedia and consisted of a $5,000 award to Wikibilim, the chapter in Kazakhstan, to pay travel expenses to Wikimania next year. This would be presented to Kezhekhanuly at a ceremony in Kazakhstan with the country's prime minister Karim Massimov. The Kazakh Wikipedia has been a dramatic success: the number of active editors has increased from 15 to 231 and has passed the milestone of 25,000 articles. Kezhekhanuly mentioned in an article in June that the Kazakh Wikipedia is adding 500 new articles a day and is aiming to get to 200,000 articles by the end of the year. At the time of writing, it has 68,935 articles.

Immediately following Jimmy's talk, James Hare made a presentation on behalf of the Wikimania 2012 team. Wikimania 2012 will be held on the Georgetown University campus in Washington, D.C. in July 2012 and will include an unconference day and a dedicated track for GLAM outreach.

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2011-08-08

Wikimania a success; board letter controversial; and evidence showing bitten newbies don't stay

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By Saqib Qayyum, TheGrappler, Jarry1250, Aaron Halfaker, and Buickmackane

Wikimania draws to a close

Wikimania's official logo

From 4 to 7 August, Wikimedians congregated in Haifa, Israel for this year's Wikimania conference, which also included preliminary events on 2 and 3 August. Unofficial estimates put the number of attendees at around 1,000 when both locals and visitors from 54 other countries around the world are included. The full schedule included some 125 sessions available for attendees, a large number of which were filmed and will be put on both Commons and Wikimedia Israel's own YouTube channel, which already includes shorter teaser videos of highlights from the conference. See also the dedicated coverage of some of the most important sessions in this Signpost issue.

Whereas previous conferences have struggled to make sufficient Wi-Fi coverage available to the hundreds of Wikimedians who attend each year, attendee Christophe Henner tweeted that Wikimania 2011 included "fully working wifi", helping to make hands-on sessions during the event run more smoothly.

The first registration slots for Wikimania 2012, to be held in Washington D.C., are expected to become available later this month. Suggestions for what makes a successful Wikimania are already coming in. Adam Hyland, who attended Wikimania 2011, commented that "diversity made this conference a success", while more mundane suggestions include the designation of a 24-hour lounge area and the creation of a space accessible to curious members of the public.

Further coverage of Wikimania is available from the Wikipedia Weekly podcast, which returned from a two year hiatus to publish three recordings from the conference (44 minutes, 39 minutes and a 20-minutes interview with Liam Wyatt about GLAM outreach). A summary of coverage relating to the technical side of Wikimedia can be found in this week's "Technology report".

Board officers announced, letter on chapter funding

Ting Chen, who retains the post of Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees for another year

During a board meeting coinciding with the seventh annual Wikimania conference, in Haifa, Israel, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees announced the allocation of roles and responsibilities for the 2011–12 board members, the composition of which was confirmed after board elections held earlier this year. According to the posting, Chinese Wikimedian Ting Chen retains the post of Board Chair, which he has held since July 2008, and Dutch Wikimedian Jan-Bart de Vreede regains the post of Vice-Chair that was briefly held by financial expert Stuart West from 2010 to 2011. According to the blog post, West will remain the Foundation's Treasurer and Phoebe Ayers will take responsibility for secretarial matters. The four officers share the board with Samuel Klein, Bishakha Datta, Matt Halprin, Arne Klempert, Kat Walsh and Jimmy Wales (in his "Founder" role). In unrelated news, the new Secretary was responsible for posting a summary of the Board's activities in May and June this year.

As expected, the Board of Trustees took the opportunity to discuss possible adjustments to the method for allocating funding between chapters—in particular, the utility of direct, automatic allocations to chapters of funds donated from within their countries was discussed. Justified by what it described as "its legal and financial obligations to safeguard money" given by donors, the group released a joint letter calling for greater restrictions to this funding channel (the Foundation also offers project-driven grants to chapters). Coming just weeks after the latest round of Foundation–chapter fundraising agreements were signed, the letter's publication has provoked consternation in some quarters. John Vandenberg of Wikimedia Australia said that imposing what he sees as an arbitrary condition (tax deductibility) on eligibility for direct donations so soon after negotiations finished "is not how you do change management". However, overall there was general consensus among commentators that the accountability of chapters needs to be improved; Chris Keating of Wikimedia UK stated that "Chapters' performance in terms of reporting and accountability has not been great on the whole". MZMcBride suggested that it should not be out of the question "to ask for some of the money back" from last year's fundraiser if it had not been used. Phoebe Ayers defended the letter's publication, adding that with the 2011 fundraiser approaching, the Board was "short on time" if it sought to improve practices.

Researcher Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail) of the Wikimedia Foundation's Summer of Research has discovered a strong predictor of new editor retention – the rejection they experience when first trying to edit the encyclopedia.

As a response to recent results that point to a decline in new editors retention since 2007,[1][2] Aaron examined the work that new editors perform in their first few editing sessions and the community's reaction to that work, in order to build a model for retention. The results suggest that rejection of newbies' first few edits plays a strong role in newcomer retention. Moreover, the amount of initial investment (edits in the first session) exhibited by a new user exacerbates the effect.

"Wikipedia's climate has changed since the early days before and during the exponential growth. Back then, the community was driven toward building content. More recently, with popular articles becoming longer and more elaborate, a shift seems to have occurred for quality over quantity. I suspected it has become much more difficult for newbies to make edits that wouldn't be immediately rejected and that this would has an effect on their motivation to continue editing. I wanted to look for such an effect and find out how much it matters with respect to the decline in new editor retention."

The changing average length of articles new editors edit. See the write-up.

Aaron's work on the length of an articles the newbies are editing provided him with evidence that editors are editing longer articles, and that this is a strong predictor of being reverted, [3][4] presumably because of Wikipedia's increasingly stringent quality control mechanisms.[5]

To understand whether this increased rejection could explain the decline in editor retention, Aaron used a logistic regression model to explore factors that predict whether a new editor will survive or not. He found that the proportion of an editor's edits that are rejected by being deleted or reverted in their first three edit sessions[6] is a strong negative predictor of survival. This confirms the hypothesis that if a newbie's first experience editing Wikipedia is full of rejection, he or she would be unlikely to continue working in the project. It turns out that this effect has existed throughout the history of Wikipedia and has been increasing over time, though it has decreased somewhat in recent years. What's more, while editors who show a high initial investment in the community (by making many edits in their first edit session) are more likely to survive in general, these highly invested new editors suffer even more from having their work rejected than editors who express a lower investment.

Total and surviving new editors by year of first edit.

These findings suggest that it is precisely the kind of newbies that Wikipedia needs – highly invested and prolific editors – who are being turned away by reverts and deletion.

The proportion of new editors making more than 5 edits in their first session plotted over time.

However, it is also evident that the characteristics of newcomers are changing. Newcomers are expressing less initial investment, making fewer edits than they used to. This could be explained by an early/late adopter effect, or some other external factor.

A WMF report suggests that the number of editors who make acceptable contributions to the encyclopedia is still very high, but a more thorough analysis is needed to determine how much the increase in rejection can be attributed to changes in the quality of new editors' first contributions.

  1. ^ The Editor Trends study [1]
  2. ^ Suh et al., The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia. WikiSym'09 http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1641322
  3. ^ Dalip et al., Automatic quality assessment of content created collaboratively by web communities: a case study of Wikipedia, JCDL'09 [2]
  4. ^ Blumenstock, Size matters: word count as a measure of quality on Wikipedia, WWW'08 [3]
  5. ^ Stvilia et al., Information Quality: Discussions in Wikipedia. ICKM'05 [4]
  6. ^ An edit session is defined as a sequence of edits saved in the encyclopedia separated by less than an hour. It's assumed that by grouping edits together this way, the amount and type of work an editor does in one editing session on Wikipedia can be analyzed.

News in brief

  • Personal image referendum set to begin: reminders have been sent out regarding a movement-wide referendum over the possible introduction of an opt-in image filter set to begin on 12 August. Details are available, as are Frequently Asked Questions. The proposal is the result of a previous study into controversial content on Wikimedia sites.
  • Foundation secures cybersquatting domain: after filing a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in June, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted the domain name "WebhostingWikipedia.com", which had been registered by a British company. The July 27 decision by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center found that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to the Foundation's "Wikipedia" trademark and hence an infringement of Wikimedia's rights. (Although the Wikimedia Foundation promotes open policies on copyright, it considers trademark protection necessary to preserve the integrity of the movement in the long term. To this end, it registered the "Wikipedia" trademark in 2006, allowing it to pursue cases of infringement more easily.) Wikimedia has so far filed nine cases with the arbiters and has thus far lost none.
  • WikiHistories – Tagalog Wikipedia: One of the Foundation's WikiHistories summer fellows reported for a second time on her field trip to the Philippines to study the local Wikipedia and Wikimedia community. (See prior Signpost coverage). She interviewed Eric Andrada-Calica, Tagalog Wikipedia’s first active editor.
  • New edition of GLAM newsletter: The seventh edition of This Month in GLAM, a newsletter produced to help keep track of collaboration between Wikimedia projects and galleries, libraries, archives and museums, has been published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Outreach Wiki. The issue is the first to be divided into individual country reports; the USA, UK, France, Spain and Germany were all represented.
  • Good articles monthly round-up: In July 2011, the number of good articles rose to 12,442. The monthly increase of 205 is the highest since April 2011, and outpaced the percentage growth of the total number of articles. This means that a record proportion of more than one in 300 Wikipedia articles have been assessed as passing the good article criteria. These criteria came under debate at the end of July, with calls to make checks for copyright violation part of the assessment process. The discussion continues. Elsewhere, a proposal has been made to introduce a slot for good articles on Wikipedia's Main Page, by making newly promoted good articles eligible for the Did you know section for a one-month trial period. An earlier poll in 2010 failed to reach a consensus on the issue.

Milestones

  • The Hindi Wiktionary increased from 50,000 entries to over 100,000 entries this week, as VibhijainBot creates thousands of entries about cities in India.
  • The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles, with the article about the Brazilian municipality, Contenda.
  • The Azerbaijani Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
  • The Tajik Wiktionary has reached 500 entries.
  • The Sanskrit Wikipedia reached 5,000 articles as did the Hill Mari-language Wikipedia.
  • The Malagasy Wiktionary has reached 100,000 words in the Malagasy language.

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2011-08-08

Israeli news focuses on Wikimania; worldwide coverage of contributor decline and gender gap; brief news

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By Jorgenev and Jarry1250

Wikimania coverage

Shalom Life described Wikimania as "the largest wiki conference in history"

As expected, this year's Wikimania conference has attracted a significant amount of media coverage, particularly within the Israeli press who were pleased that Israel had been allotted the event. For example, the pride of the outgoing chairperson of Wikimedia Israel was evident in a quotation selected by YNetNews, the English-language edition of a popular Israeli news site. "In the world of free content," wrote Shay Yakir, "the decision to hold the conference in Haifa of all places is like having Israel host the Olympic Games". The article also included a positive quotation attributed to the mayor of Haifa and thoughts from an American Wikimedian at the event. Similar coverage could be found in the Jerusalem Post (Israel's "most-read English website"), whose article, entitled "Wikipedia: Prophecy fulfilled or info apocalypse?" rounded off with a positive review of Wikipedia, concluding that it was "a happy accident that has surpassed all expectations". Haaretz included an article focussed on Wikimedia's effort in outreach (both in terms of GLAM-collaborations and in distributing offline copies of content), whilst the Jewish Chronicle was one of a number of sources to highlight the fact that Wikimedians had flocked to Israel even from countries that do not officially recognise Israel (Venezuela and Indonesia). Shalom Life described the gathering as "the largest wiki conference in history".

Wikipedia's decline in contributors draws media coverage

Outside Israel itself, the international media tended to focus on specific aspects of the news from Wikimania, including Jimmy Wales' concern that the number of Wikimedians on big-language projects cannot be sustained in the current editorial climate. Following an article by The Associated Press published on Thursday in which Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying "We are not replenishing our ranks, it is not a crisis, but I consider it to be important", there was additional media coverage of the issue in PC Magazine ([5]), The New Republic ([6]), The Atlantic Wire ([7]), Boston Globe ([8]), and PCWorld ([9]). Frederic Lardinois, writing for PaidContent, a site that focusses on methods for monetising the web, described Wales' remarks as "[probably] the first public acknowledgement by Wales and Wikipedia that the number of contributors is indeed declining... [and] that it's an issue". Although this may be true, the rush of press coverage follows months of internal analysis on editor trends (see previous Signpost coverage).

In attributing causes to the decline, the articles cite Wales' concerns over "impenetrable" editing practices in addition to other possible factors, including the diminishing amount of so-called "low hanging fruit": opportunities for ordinary people to write about things they know, rather than more specialist topics. In addition, The Atlantic Wire jokily suggests the problem might be the advent of Google's new social networking site Google+, which has rapidly built up a large number of young male users. According to the news site, Wales described the average contributor to Wikipedia as "'a 26-year-old geeky male' who moves on to other ventures, gets married and leaves the website". By contrast, The Independent quoted Wales as saying that "the current number of contributors is stable and sustainable" and that he only wanted to increase visitor numbers in order "to improve Wikipedia's accuracy and reach".

Gender gap also revisited

An article in British newspaper The Independent this week covered Wikimedia's "gender gap" in an article entitled "Wikipedia seeks women to balance its 'geeky' editors". The article contains the rather dubious assertion that "Mr Wales revealed that he plans to double the number of people actively editing the site's pages within a year", probably a misquote. A leading editorial for the newspaper agreed with the desire to get more women involved in Wikipedia. "Mr Wales is right," said The Independent, "Women of the web: Wikipedia needs you".

Following the publication of The Independent's article, a number of other news outlets devoted space to the issue, including The Guardian ("Women! Wikipedia needs you"), ITProPortal ("Wikipedia Seeks Balance, Recruiting Female Contributors"), New Zealand-based TopNews ("Wikipedia founder wants more female contributors", and articles syndicated from the QMI Agency, including CANOE ("Wikipedia wants women").

Briefly

2011-08-08

Shooting the breeze with WikiProject Firearms

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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.

This week, we set our sights on WikiProject Firearms. Started in December 2006 by LWF, the project has grown to include 80 active members maintaining nearly 4,000 pages including 2 Featured Articles and 10 Good Articles. The project works on a long list of open tasks, oversees very detailed weapon infoboxes and cartridge infoboxes, and monitors a watchlist. The project is closely related to the Weaponry Task Force at WikiProject Military History. We interviewed project members Mike Searson (Mike), MatthewVanitas, DeusImperator, Three-quarter-ten (¾-10), and Berean Hunter.

This image of a shell casing flying out of an M4 carbine is a Featured Picture
Engravings on a second generation Peacemaker
Firearms originated in China with the hand cannon
The Thompson, originally marketed to law enforcement officials as the "Anti-Bandit Gun", became associated with mobsters as the "Tommy Gun" during Prohibition and earned the moniker "Trench Sweeper" when it was adopted by the United States military in World War II
The Flag of Mozambique is the only national flag to include a modern rifle, the AK-47
A blunderbuss pistol, or dragon, found at a battlefield in Cerro Gordo, Mexico
A Mauser C96 with stripper clip
A young Teddy Roosevelt poses with his personalized Model 1876 Winchester rifle

What motivated you to join WikiProject Firearms? Do you own any rare or unique firearms?

Mike: I have been involved with firearms my entire adult life, when I was 17 I joined the Marine Corps and became a Rifleman, after I left the Corps I worked in the firearms industry as a ballistician, gunsmith, instructor, and was even sent overseas to inspect guns and ammo for an importer. Currently I author two firearms columns on Examiner.com, one under the header of guns and shooting as a hobby and as personal defense; the other is more concerned with Gun Rights in Nevada. The project seemed a natural fit. As to the second question, I am a Colt Collector and own a Colt Single Action Army Revolver which is 108 years old and a few Colts (a New Service and a 1911) that were used by the US Military in WW1. I have a large collection, but those are my favorites. Many pieces from my collection are used in various Wiki articles as photos.
MatthewVanitas: Been interested in firearms since my late teens, and was in the United States Marines for six years, including Iraq and Afghanistan. While there is pretty decent coverage here, the firearm world is full of all kinds of niche topics since a plethora of small makers/companies have come and go over centuries, and even small ones have often somehow wandered into Notability. While I have some firearms I don't have anything particularly exotic, but in my travels I've had the chance to get a few cool photographs of very obscure firearms and add those. I'm interested in firearms in pretty much the same way I'm interested in musical instruments, so WPGUNS and WPMUSINST are projects I keep coming back to.
DeusImperator: I have been interested in firearms since my early 20s. Fell in love with the sport, shooting handguns, rifles, and shotguns in different sporting disciplines. I have been a supporter of the armed forces of both Canada and the United States. I am a big bore rifle affectionado and own several of these. Read almost every firearms magazine between 1993 to 1999 - several boxes of past magazines until last year. Also love the stories behind the firearms - there is always a story behind everything.
¾-10: I have been interested in firearms since my mid-20s, when I realized that I was ignorant about them and I didn't like being so ignorant about a topic that is inherently important for many reasons (society, government, police work, military, rule of law, self-defense, criminology and crime deterrence, constitutional law, balance of power between states and individuals, and on and on). Given my already-existing interest in metalworking and the history of technology, it was imperative that I become more knowledgeable about firearms, because firearms and artillery were the applications that drove so much of industrial development and the rise of applied science. Not just mechanical engineering and gunsmithing, but also industrial engineering, metallurgy, and the advancement of machine tool technology. From interchangeable parts to the armory system to mass production to the Atomic Age, the thirst for weapons to dominate others, or to defend against others' dominance, is what drove humans to invest in science and engineering more than any other single domain of applications. Having read a dozen or so books about or related to firearms (history, use, carry, etc), I felt I had something to contribute to Wikipedia's coverage of firearms (and to WikiProject Firearms per se). I helped develop the articles handgun, pistol (formerly merged with handgun), revolver, safety (firearms), gun safety, concealed carry, and others. Currently I am drafting the article on modes of carry for firearms, although I may not get around to finishing it for a while. That's OK—Wikipedia is forever. We've got time.

The project's talk page is very active. What attracts editors to the talk page? Do you have any suggestions for other projects that struggle with bringing their members together for discussions?

Mike: Firearms can be controversial, there is the "pro-gun" vs "anti-gun" controversy; but even within the firearms community there are different "camps". This can lead to heated talk page discussions, sometimes editors go against project guidelines and it is brought to the project's attention.
MatthewVanitas: If I had to guess what brings folks in, I think part of it is that project members specifically direct people from the Talk pages of specific articles to the Project Talk page if they have overarching concerns (like arguments about the Project's unofficial guidelines on cruft, etc).

Do discussions about firearm-related articles ever become heated? How have you handled situations like these?

Mike: They have in the past, lately not so much. Sometimes there are disputes over whether a particular gun rates its own article or is it merely a variant of another model. Sometimes people want to list every criminal activity a with which particular model has been used or every appearance of a gun in movies, video games, etc. In some cases this is warranted, such as the Sharps rifle used in Quigley Down Under or Dirty Harry's Smith & Wesson Model 29; other times we're doing a disservice if we have a list including trivial bits like "the bad guy in Lethal Enforcers IV's accomplice uses a pistol which resembles a Glock". There has to be a line drawn somewhere.
MatthewVanitas: Over the years, I've noticed less heated "guns = bad vs. good" issues, and more internal geekery arguments, like disputes over technical minutiae that'd be over the head of the average reader, and the ongoing arguments over cruft. That aside, it's a pretty cordial project since it is quite technical and attracts people who are pretty serious about the details.
DeusImperator: Within the firearms project itself there everyone seems polite ("an armed populace is a polite populace" carries on even here). But there are guidelines that are required. Especially in the United States there are the wildcatters who THINK that they have the answer to all the problems and that the cartridge that they just made up is the answer to it all. They want their 15 min. of fame and sometimes you need to douse their flame. :). Individualism is a good thing but everyone's little garage project has no place on the internet (Notability).
¾-10: I've always advocated keeping a section in the handgun article on semi-automatics versus revolvers (pros and cons of each). Not because this material is especially encyclopedic (it's not) but simply because if you provide a lightning rod for listcruft, then it has somewhere to discharge its natural energies that were going to flow to somewhere anyway. The energy may as well flow to ground efficiently through a ground conductor (a section resigned to cruft) instead of through the house (scattered throughout the article).

The project's main page is no-frills black-and-white text, and the project does not maintain a portal. Are the elaborate templates and decorative items found on many other projects seen as unnecessary? How has the project remained so active without them?

Mike: Although I've been a member of the project for a few years, I only recently became the Coordinator. That will be something I will take a look at. As for our success without them, it has been my experience from 25 years involved in the hobby that shooters and firearms enthusiasts are a motivated group. As most of the mainstream media and academia has a notable distaste for guns, it is up to the people who are interested to keep the information flowing.
MatthewVanitas: A lot of the project members are highly self-motivated for particular sub-sub-stub topics (French WWI pistols, rifles using straight-pull bolt assemblies, etc) so there's not quite as much need for clear coordination beyond the Talk page. For me, the primary items of interest on the Main page are the New Articles section, and the To-Do list template, though I think the To-Do list template is rather underutilised, again partially because people already have a notion of the specific things they're eager to cover.
DeusImperator: Gunnies are not terribly big on frills and colors. Firearms are also pretty simple objects.

Does WikiProject Firearms collaborate with any other projects? If so, how do you split the workload between these projects?

Berean Hunter: Although there is rarely any formal collaboration with other projects, many of the members are also members of the Military History Project as the two subjects are inextricably linked. There is also the Knife Project which shares common members.
Mike: Exactly, I'm the founder and coordinator of the Knife (or Cutlery) Project and most of those members came from this one. I am a member of the Military History one, but most of those folks are more concerned with items larger than "small arms". I would like to see more work with WP:MILHIST in the future, maybe even some of the film or videogame groups.

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?

Berean Hunter: We have a task list that editors are encouraged to help whittle down. Of course, adding citations to any of the articles is always welcome, too.
Mike: Many of the articles were written and sourced a while ago and are in need of cleanup. Sometimes it is formatting existing sources, sometimes it is prose cleanup. Quite a few articles are in need of pictures. I own about 100 guns, but don't own enough to supply the rest of wiki with much needed pics! The open task list is one I try to whittle down as I get spare time.
MatthewVanitas: Catching up on sourcing old articles, and particularly adding photos. For almost every article we have, somebody out on a gun forum somewhere has a pic. I've attempted a few times to stir folks up on gun forums with little success, but have had some more success contacting folks who run fansites and getting their permission to use an image or two, and also by going into GoogleBooks to find old engravings of early firearms that are out of copyright. All these are coincidentally the same procedures I use to get more images into WikiProject Musical Instruments.
DeusImperator: Need a house-keeper and coordinator. I was focusing on the to-do list which is a great place to start. However, it is out of date and requires the services of our housekeeper and coordinator. Gunnies aren't big on pictures and that is sometime a bad thing - i should be taking my own advice here. some editors (like me) require someone to follow and fix my typos. Many articles are merely a stub and need to be researched and expanded. We need someone to go through each article evaluate them, classify them and let the project know (to do list) as to what needs to be done.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Mike: I am glad to see very little bias against our project on Wikipedia. I am very proud of most of our editors for keeping a cool head and adhering to NPOV. There are folks out there that see "Guns" and think "Crazy Americans and the Wild West" or think of only the negative aspects. I hope more will see in the future that there is often an art behind firearms and people come to appreciate the engineering and craftsmanship that well written articles point out. In many ways, firearms development was the impetus for the Industrial Revolution, be that good or bad they have been an important part of human history for the past 500 years.
MatthewVanitas: In particular, there is a lot of misinformation about firearms in the public sphere; not speaking of politics at all, but simply of misapprehensions and urban legends, often highly abbetted (or originating) in movies and TV. Some of these are just goofy misunderstandings, others can actually be unsafe assumptions if a person ever comes into contact with a firearm. It's my hope that someone who sees a given firearm in a video game or movie, or hears a friend on Xbox Live share his "wisdom" on it, might come and read the article and come away with a more accurate understanding and be able to dispel the misinformation floating around. (NOTE: I have a variety of examples, but having trouble thinking which might be the most useful/accessible to a layman reader; if anyone else has any examples of gun mis-information that might be corrected by WP, it'd be neat to have some of those here).
¾-10: Acquire knowledge. Share knowledge. Resist ignorance.

Next week, we'll interview a project that has struggled with "reverse Californication". Contemplate what that means in the archive.

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2011-08-08

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
New featured picture: the Library of Congress Main Reading Room in a sweep of light, shade and colour. The image was taken by Carol M. Highsmith, the notable American architectural photographer. Highsmith is donating her life’s work of more than 100,000 images, copyright-free, to the Library of Congress, which has established a rare one-person archive to house them.


This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 31 July – Saturday 6 August


GF Handel (1685–1750), the baroque master who composed the oratorio Messiah, the subject of a new featured article. This painting is from 1727.
From the new featured article, the famous cracked Liberty Bell on the reverse of the Franklin half dollar.
From the new featured article, Small-toothed sportive lemur, photographed by Edward E. Louis Jr.
New featured picture: a Mangrove Robin, photographed in the Cairns Esplanade, Cairns, Queensland, Australia
Seven articles were promoted to featured status:
  • Messiah (Handel) (nom), among the most frequently performed and best-loved works in the whole choral-music literature. People who know hardly a note of classical music are still likely to recognise the opening notes of the "Hallelujah" chorus. (Nominated by Tim riley, Gerda Arendt, and Brianboulton)
  • Franklin half dollar (nom), a coin struck by the United States Mint ("Mint") from 1948 to 1963. The fifty-cent piece pictures Founding Father Benjamin Franklin on the obverse, and the Liberty Bell—complete with its crack, a matter of some controversy at the time—on the reverse. (Wehwalt)
  • Operation Kita (nom), the dramatic voyage of two Japanese battleships and their escorts from Singapore to Japan in February 1945. By this stage of World War II, the Allies were close to cutting off Japan's shipping routes, and the warships—loaded with supplies of raw materials—evaded attacks by 26 submarines and over 88 aircraft. Remarkably, they sustained no damage and all reached Japan. (Nick-D)
  • Small-toothed sportive lemur (nom), a primate species that, like all lemurs, is endemic to Madagascar. It lives in dense rainforest in southeastern Madagascar, off the south-east coast of Africa. (Visionholder)
  • Richard Dannatt, Baron Dannatt (nom), a retired British Army officer and former defence adviser to the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron; he has served in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and is the incumbent Constable of the Tower of London. (HJ Mitchell)
  • Robin Friday (nom), an English association football player who played professionally as a forward for Reading and Cardiff City during the mid-1970s, and who was also known off the field for his heavy smoking, drinking, womanising, and drug-taking. He died in 1990, aged 38, after a heart attack. (Cliftonian)
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (nom), a 1989 American science fiction film, and the penultimate to star the cast of the original Star Trek science fiction television series. The film was directed by cast member William Shatner. (David Fuchs)

One featured article was delisted: Belgium (nom: referencing and coverage)


Five lists were promoted:

One featured list was delisted:

Six images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":


From the new featured picture by User:Mmxx: a photomontage of 16 images that have been digitally manipulated in Photoshop to give the impression of a real landscape.




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2011-08-08

Manipulation of BLPs case opened; one case comes to a close

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee closed one case, and opened a new case this week. There are now two open cases.

Closed case

MickMacNee (Week 8)

The case was opened to examine allegations of incivility, unnecessary aggression, battleground behavior, and disruptive editing, as well as inappropriate and unnecessary use of the blocking tool. A few days after the case was opened, arbitrator Risker blocked the filer of the case, Chester Markel (talk · contribs), as a sockpuppet of a banned user. To mitigate the potential influence on the end result of the case, the sockpuppet-filer's proposals and evidence were collapsed/archived. 13 users, including the blocked sockpuppet-filer, submitted on-wiki evidence in this case, while arbitrators, parties and others submitted various comments in the workshop. Drafter Kirill Lokshin submitted proposed principles for comment, but did not propose editor-specific rulings in the workshop. During the week, these principles and the remainder of the proposed decision were submitted for arbitrators to vote on, before the case came to a close.

What is the effect of this decision and what does it tell us?
  • All participants and contributors to Wikimedia projects are expected to conduct themselves according to standards of collegiality and professionalism set forth in the Wikimedia Foundation Resolution on Openness. This Resolution urges editors "to promote openness and collaboration", treat new editors with patience, kindness, and respect, "work with colleagues to reduce contention", "promote a friendlier, more collaborative culture", "discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers." The Wikipedia community has outlined similar standards in the "fourth pillar" of community policy.
  • The expectation of collegiality among participants goes beyond mere compliance with the minimal standards explicitly outlined in behavioral policies (such as Wikipedia:No personal attacks). Even if a particular activity or attitude is not explicitly prohibited, it may still be inappropriate or disruptive in the Wikipedia environment. Users who have been sanctioned for improper conduct are expected to avoid repeating it; failure to do so may lead to the imposition of increasingly severe sanctions.
  • Administrators are expected not to take administrator actions arising from disputes in which they themselves are involved. See Wikipedia:Administrators#Involved admins. As a specific and clear application of this rule, an administrator who is a party to a pending arbitration case may not block another editor who is a party to the same case, particularly when the case arose in large measure from disputes between the two of them.
  • MickMacNee (talk · contribs) is indefinitely banned from Wikipedia until such time as he demonstrates to the Committee that he is no longer a threat to the collaborative nature of the project. The Committee have set the earliest possible date by which the ban may be lifted as 4 August 2012.
  • Δ (talk · contribs) is admonished for engaging in hostile and uncollegial conduct, and warned that the Committee may impose additional sanctions by motion if such conduct reoccurs.

Open cases

Following a request for arbitration, the Committee passed a motion to accept two separate cases (which are currently open). No other cases are currently open.

Cirt and Jayen466 (Week 3)

This case, the first of a pair of cases, was opened a fortnight ago, to examine the conduct of Cirt (talk · contribs) and Jayen466 (talk · contribs) – including articles about new religious movements (broadly construed) and BLPs, as well as interpersonal conduct issues arising between Cirt and Jayen466. The Committee determined that for this case, those two users will be the only parties and that evidence in relation to broader issues or other editors is not permitted – instead, such evidence will be allowed in the second of the two cases ("Manipulation of BLPs", below). During the week, several editors submitted on-wiki evidence. Arbitrators have extended the evidence phase of this case by one week; this means that the evidence phase is now expected to close on 15 August 2011.

Manipulation of BLPs (Week 1)

This case, the second of a pair of cases, was opened this week, to examine meta-behavioural issues and to reconcile relevant principles. During the week, several editors submitted on-wiki evidence.

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2011-08-08

Wikimania technology roundup; brief news

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By Jarry1250

Wikimania draws to a close (technology supplement)

One of the presentations at Wikimania 2011's pre-conference Hackathon

As Wikimania 2011 wound down (it officially ended on 7 August; see this week's article on Wikimania, as well as coverage in "News and Notes", for details about the conference), a number of Wikimedia and MediaWiki developers published materials related to the conference, including slides, photos and videos. For example, notes for the pre-conference Hackathon were compiled in real time using the live collaboration software EtherPad before being transferred to Wikimedia wikis. These include notes for a workshop session where "two thirds of the participants had actually done some work" despite beginning with very varied skill levels, according to a blog posting by attendee Gerard Meijsen.

During Wikimania proper, realtime collaborations were also frequent. They included the questions and answers of Wikimania's own "Ask The Developers" session. The notes show that during the session German Wikimedian and developer Daniel Kinzler outlined "Wikimedia Germany's plans to develop a central repository for factual data" while Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber referred to the ongoing project to make "[server] configuration... editable from the wiki [concerned]". Efforts to make right-to-left editing work better were also mentioned in the session, according to the notes made by a number of attendees. Brandon Harris answered questions regarding default styling by pointing people to the MediaWiki style guide which, like Wikipedia's own Manual of Style, gives instruction on how to keep contributions from many different editors consistent.

Several presenters at Wikimania have posted their slides online for public dissemination. For example, Brion Vibber's slides for his Parser 2.0 project are a useful primer on the tricky subject of WYSIWYG editing, whilst also introducing his project that "combines the best" of previous attempts and promises better mobile editing support. It is scheduled for a mid-2012 public release, with opt-in functionality available later this year. This is in contrast to the much smaller Collaborative Watchlist project, whose slides show an initiative to build small efficiencies into existing systems rather than redesign them completely. Andrew West's slides (PDF) from his talk about combating vandalism form a useful introduction to ongoing initiatives at improving artificial intelligence to prevent linkspam. Meanwhile, a few bloggers have highlighted their thoughts about their stay at Haifa: the Wikimedia Deutschland blog, for example, commented on a talk about the Article Feedback Tool (quoting the fact that it is currently receiving 10 million valuations a month, compared to "only" 3.6 million edits to the wiki).

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.

  • Wikimedia Commons has been experiencing a number of problems relating to uploads which are currently being looked into (for example, bug #30201, #30086). Some of these, however, have effectively been fixed, including an incorrectly configured server that prevented API uploads, which are used by external tools such as Commonist.
  • Improvements were rolled out to Wikimedia's Squid servers, which handle the caching of requests and hence the display of most pages to logged-out editors. An invitation to switch to elements of the new mobile infrastructure is expected next week (more software deployments).
  • The Wikimedia Toolserver experienced further problems this week, continuing its trouble from last week. With Cassia now effectively out of action, its functions have been transferred to backup server Hyacinth whilst the problem is looked into (toolserver-l mailing list).
  • With the resolution of bug #18634, it is now possible for bots to more easily determine the fallback language to use in edit summaries for a given wiki. For example, if a translation is not available in Alemannisch, the correct fallback should be German rather than a global fallback such as English.
  • Roan Kattouw worked on problems related to the switch of a test wiki to protocol relative URLs (see previous Signpost coverage). With all but one bug fixed, the number of wikis using the https-friendly URLs has increased to three (test, wikimania2005 and Wikimedia's own internal wiki). The week commencing 15 August has been suggested as the date for a fuller rollout (wikitech-l mailing list). In unrelated news, there was a question about incidental redirection to http of some Toolserver addresses (toolserver-l).
  • All users whose user agent strings identify them as mobile users will be automatically redirected to the mobile site as of next week, potentially breaking some unofficial Wikipedia apps (Wikimedia Foundation blog).
  • Simple pre-commit hooks have been introduced for developers, preventing them from, for example, not using a commit summary (the equivalent of an on-wiki edit summary) and submitting overtly broken code (wikitech-l mailing list).

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