Ragesoss (Sage Ross), our current editor-in-chief, has announced his resignation. Citing a new job that "isn't compatible with much Signpost involvement", Ragesoss's resignation triggered a stream of response from Signpost contributors. The Signpost team is sad to say goodbye to Ragesoss after his excellent work as Signpost editor since February 2009, and wishes him the best of luck in his new job. HaeB will be acting editor while discussion continues.
It has been a great pleasure for me to work with so many fine Wikimedians during my tenure as Signpost editor-in-chief. I'm stepping down after nearly a year-and-a-half, but I'm confident that experienced editors and new hands will pick up the slack, and then some. We are, right now, discussing a slew of proposals for improving the Signpost, so if you have ideas on how to make the Signpost better, please share your thoughts.
As the global Wikimedia community grows, and grows more diverse, our community journalism must adapt to serve this wider community. Knitting together Wikimedia communities across wikis (much less across languages) has always been a great challenge, but the Signpost and/or other community organs may be able to make some headway. As a symbol of our commitment to Wikimedia-wide coverage, we've been considering changing names from The Wikipedia Signpost to simply the Signpost. But that commitment cannot stop at symbolism, whether it involves expanding the scope of the Signpost or collaborating with other community news venues.
As the Wikimedia Foundation and the financial dimensions of the Wikimedia projects grow, the need for a strong Signpost is greater than ever. Holding the powerful to account is a core purpose of the broadsheets we've tried to emulate. I've always viewed the Signpost 's independence from, and constructively critical stance toward, the Foundation as a key part of the Signpost 's identity—if at times an underdeveloped one.
I look forward to seeing where the Signpost goes from here.
The Signpost is now available in Wikipedia book format, thanks to the work of Headbomb and FinalRapture (who coded Signpost Book Bot). Each issue in our archive has been converted into a book that can be downloaded as a PDF, printed out, or ordered as a volume. A full list is at Book:Wikipedia Signpost; we hope you will enjoy reading the Signpost offline.
To centralize discussion, please report rendering problems or make any suggestions for improvements at Book talk:Wikipedia Signpost rather than on individual issues' talk pages.
This week, Tony1 has sparked a discussion on the next direction for The Wikipedia Signpost. What do you think would improve the Signpost? Ideas being floated at the talk page include:
The Signpost exists to serve its readers, so if you have an opinion on any of these proposals or anything else you'd like to see, please share your thoughts in the comments section below or on the Signpost talk page.
Do you have what it takes to be a reporter your fellow Wikimedians rely on to keep them in the picture?
As writers move on or shift focus, we need enthusiastic new writers to deliver the rich and diverse weekly articles the community has come to expect. With changes coming, the Signpost is looking for new contributors to help us improve and expand. We're looking for dedicated and talented regulars to write the regular Signpost features and to start innovative new ones. There are opportunities for special reports, and balanced opinion pieces, book reviews and interviews are always very welcome. Existing features requiring contributors are:
And, as always, your help is invaluable compiling "News and notes" and "In the news", long the cornerstones of The Signpost. Be sure to alert us to newsworthy items throughout Wikimedia projects and in the external media!
Reader comments
According to a post by William Pietri, project manager for the Flagged Revisions Deployment Project, the flaggedrevs extension will be deployed on the English Wikipedia on June 14.
Unlike other projects such as the German Wikipedia (where the extension has been live since 2008), the English Wikipedia will make use of only the "flagged protection" feature, which has been renamed "pending changes" following extensive discussion on the mailing list Foundation-l and the terminology subpage. It allows administrators to apply a new kind of protection to a page, under which it can still be edited by every user, but the change will not be visible (in the default view) to unregistered users unless it has been made or confirmed by a trusted user.
The feature will be activated only for a trial, which is expected to last two months and will be limited to a maximum of 2,000 pages. The trial is likely to generate considerable media attention, given the fact that its mere announcement last August has already received coverage (see Signpost story).
A new help page, with which Pietri has requested assistance, is here. Some diagrams explaining the terminology are here. The feature can be tested out before deployment on the flaggedrevs test wiki.
There was some debate in a recent RfC on whether or not the trial configuration should involve the separate "Reviewers" user rights group or use the existing "Autoconfirmed" group as the trusted users group. Some technical details of the deployment are still being hammered out.
The following table summarizes permissions under current settings for the trial (more details here):
Unregistered or newly registered | Confirmed or autoconfirmed | Extended confirmed | Template editor ★ | Admin | Interface admin | Appropriate for (See also: Wikipedia:Protection policy) | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No protection | Normal editing | The vast majority of pages. This is the default protection level. | |||||
Pending changes | All users can edit Edits by unregistered or newly registered editors (and any subsequent edits by anyone) are hidden from readers who are not logged in until reviewed by a pending changes reviewer or administrator. Logged-in editors see all edits, whether accepted or not. |
Infrequently edited pages with high levels of vandalism, BLP violations, edit-warring, or other disruption from unregistered and new users. | |||||
Semi | Cannot edit | Normal editing | Pages that have been persistently vandalized by anonymous and registered users. Some highly visible templates and modules. | ||||
Extended confirmed | Cannot edit | Normal editing | Specific topic areas authorized by ArbCom, pages where semi-protection has failed, or high-risk templates where template protection would be too restrictive. | ||||
Template | Cannot edit | Normal editing | High-risk or very-frequently used templates and modules. Some high-risk pages outside of template space. | ||||
Full | Cannot edit | Normal editing | Pages with persistent disruption from extended confirmed accounts. Critical templates and modules. | ||||
Interface | Cannot edit | Normal editing | Scripts, stylesheets, and similar objects central to operation of the site or that are in other editors' user spaces. | ||||
★ The table assumes a template editor also has extended confirmed privileges, which is almost always the case in practice. | |||||||
Other modes of protection:
|
See also the Signpost's backgrounder on the history of the extension (An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions, August 2009) and other Signpost coverage dating back to 2006.
The Wikimedia Foundation has hired two new employees: Zack Exley will be Wikimedia's new Chief Community Officer, and Barry Newstead will be the Chief Global Development Officer. According to an FAQ about the positions Exley will be in charge of programs, including Fundraising, Reader relations, Public outreach, and volunteer coordination; Newstead will be in charge of Communications and Business Development.
Zack Exley has worked in high-profile positions organizing fundraising and volunteer activities for MoveOn.org, the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign of John Kerry, and the UK Labour Party's 2005 election campaign. In recent years he has advised other organizations on similar issues, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, the NAACP, the International Rescue Committee and Greenpeace USA. He also ran the parody website gwbush.com.
Barry Newstead is currently a partner at the strategy consultancy firm The Bridgespan Group, where he has been leading the team assisting the Foundation in the Strategic Planning process since last year. Newstead has written a series of blog postings about the process on the web site of the Harvard Business Review. In one of his first postings, Newstead expressed concern that the inner Wikipedia community might not be "open to more radical strategic options that might advance the vision", citing the "near-taboo" of advertising as one possible example. However, in a later posting, Newstead offered huge praise for the contributions of Wikipedia volunteers to the strategy process.
Originally, the Foundation had set out to hire a Chief Development Officer, responsible for fundraising (a common position in non-profits) and a Chief Global Program Officer (responsible for relations with Wikipedians and readers). According to a Q&A and a separate announcement to the community by the Foundation's executive director Sue Gardner, the CDO role was expanded to that of a Chief Community Officer, at the suggestion of Exley, who argued that donors should be regarded as part of the same community as editors and readers, instead of being treated separately.
According to Gardner, filling these positions is the result of a search process of "many months", and "completes the C-level hiring, with the exception of the Chief Human Resources Officer", which is expected to be announced within six weeks. (The other two C-level posts are the Chief Financial and Operating Officer, filled by Véronique Kessler since 2008, and the Chief Technical Officer, for which Danese Cooper was hired earlier this year – see Signpost coverage – following the departure of Brion Vibber.)
In an article titled Venerable British Museum Enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution, The New York Times covered the event at length, explaining that the British Museum's motivation to collaborate with Wikipedia is "to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages". The article noted that museums and Wikipedia have as their common interest "educating the public: one has the artifacts and expertise, and the other has the online audience", but also mentioned possible conflicts, recalling the legal threats issued last year by the National Portrait Gallery, but not subsequently pursued, against a Commons user who had uploaded high-resolution scans of public domain images from the Gallery's collection (see Signpost coverage). Regarding the Wikimedia side, the NYT quoted Wyatt's objection to what he saw as free culture "extremism": "‘Content liberation’ is the phrase that has been used within the Wikimedia community, and I hate that: they see them as a repository of images that haven’t been nicked yet." (The term "content liberation" has been used in the past by German Wikipedian Mathias Schindler, now project manager at Wikimedia Germany, who had negotiated large scale image donations from Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Fotothek.)
Among the results of the tour are photos and new articles (including several DYK nominations) about the British Museum's artefacts. Unknown to Wyatt, one participant also started the article Wikipedian in Residence.
The Signpost is delighted to report the announcement of the British Museum's Featured Article Prize: five prizes of £100 (≈$140/€120) at their shop/bookshop for new Featured Articles on topics related to the British Museum in any Wikipedia language edition. Ideally, the topics will be articles about collection items.
The rollout of the new user interface on May 13 brought some controversial changes, among them the relocation of the search box, some of the modifications to the Wikipedia logo (see Signpost coverage) and making Wikipedia inaccessible for some rare browsers (on Blackberry and PS3). The controversy about another change culminated only recently, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between volunteer and paid developers, or more generally the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia foundation.
In the default view of the new user interface, the interlanguage links to articles about the same topic in other Wikipedia language versions are hidden behind a link titled "Languages" (using the "CollapsibleNav" JavaScript module). Once a user clicks on the link, the whole list will be displayed (as in the old interface), until the end of the browser session.
Many users objected to this, and Bug 23497 was filed. On June 3, a volunteer developer made the requested change and restored the old behavior, only to be reverted by a developer from the usability experience (UX) team which had developed the new user interface in a 16-month effort:
Howie Fung later explained the background of the team's decision as follows:
On the Foundation-l mailing list and on the usability wiki, numerous users still questioned the decision. Sue Gardner defended the usability team, arguing that "[t]he folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers."
Erik Möller, Deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, summarized some of the objections as follows:
Möller and Fung outlined a compromise approach, where only a limited number of language links would be shown per default, and the rest would be hidden under a "see other languages" link. Various ideas were discussed on how to generate a selection that is likely to contain the languages that are most useful to the user (e.g. based on browser language preference). The influence of different configurations on users' clicking behavior will be evaluated.
Altogether, the issue generated more than 160 postings on the Foundation-l mailing list within a few days (although a good part of this was a sub-thread, started by the Chair of the Board of Trustees, about racial, intercultural and gender issues – at one point readers of the list were educated on the origin of the term lynching in the American Revolution.)
In a subsequent post titled Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases, Erik Möller observed that "the massive thread regarding the default sidebar language link expansion state has surfaced a number of fundamental and significant questions regarding the working relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community". He offered a number of general thoughts which he summarized as follows:
In a study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, researchers compared Wikipedia's coverage of ten different cancer types with that of Physician Data Query (PDQ)[1], a database of peer-reviewed, patient-oriented summaries about cancer-related subjects which is run by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). In the abstract, the authors write:
However, when the content of each site was compared against pre-selected statements from standard oncology textbooks, it was found that
However, the readability in the study sample was better for the PDQ texts. As measured by a Flesch–Kincaid readability test (calculated from word and sentence lengths), they were written at a level accessible to ninth-grade high-school students, while Wikipedia articles were written at a level suitable for college students. Both Wikipedia and PDQ were judged to be under-reporting controversial aspects of cancer care.
The study was covered by LiveScience, The Washington Post, Time, The Independent, and the Los Angeles Times.
In an article titled Does the Internet Make You Smarter?, Clay Shirky, writing for the Wall Street Journal, mentions Wikipedia as an example of what can be accomplished when even a small amount of humanity's collective "cognitive surplus" is used to create, rather than merely consume, information: "Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching [television] ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources." Shirky, a member of the Wikimedia Foundations's advisory board, had first published this observation in a 2008 speech titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. It features in his upcoming book "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age".
Smartmobs.com reported on a recent interview with Jimmy Wales about the governance model of Wikipedia. Wales talked "about the influence of Friedrich von Hayek’s essay The Use of Knowledge in Society on his initial thinking about Wikipedia" (in 2005, Wales had said that "Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project [and that] one can't understand my ideas about Wikipedia without understanding Hayek"). Wales compared Encyclopaedia Britannica's traditional way of building an encyclopedia to a centrally planned economy, and Wikipedia's to a market-based economy.
In a different comparison, Wales argued that Wikipedia’s governance system resembles the UK's constitutional monarchy more than the political system of the US, because the latter is based on a fixed constitution, while the British system largely consists of "unwritten rules and all kinds of interesting leftover questions that don’t get answered because they don’t need to be."
The idea of the free travel-shirt arose during the meet-up of some Wikipedians in Hanover, Germany, on 3 March 2009. The objective was to raise awareness on a global scale of the international movement for free knowledge, and to bring Wikipedians all over the globe closer together. It was intended to remind Wikipedians that they are part of one of the world’s most important networks ever launched, and to reinforce the foundation’s mission statement “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally”.
The idea was that the shirts would circle the globe much like the torch relay before the start of the Olympic Games, and that this would attract new editors to Wikipedia and raise the profile of the Wikimedia Foundation. A blueish T-shirt from Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. (size L) with “Enzyklopädist” written on it (German for “encyclopedist”) and a white T-shirt (size XL) embossed with the English Wikipedia logo were taken to many different places. Wikipedians were asked to pose for photographs holding or wearing one of the shirts, with distinctive motives, features and people as evidence of the long journey the shirts have been on. These pictures have been uploaded to Commons at Free travel-shirt 2009 and added to the organization page on metawiki m:Free Travel-Shirt.
At the end of the journey, the two shirts came back again to Hanover for the start of this year’s CeBIT on 2 March 2010. Since June 2010, they have been up for auction for the benefit of Wikimedia Foundation Inc.: white shirt, blue shirt.
The white shirt first went through Germany, where it was presented at Wikimedia Deutschland’s general assembly in March 2009 and Wikimedia’s Board’s, Chapter’s and Developers’ Meeting in April 2009, where Wikimedians from all over the world took pictures of it, and Jimbo Wales signed the white shirt. The shirt was taken to Israel, where it was signed by Tzipi Livni, current Israeli Opposition Leader, and Ivri Lider, pop rock singer-songwriter.
Before it arrived in Germany, the white shirt had done the rounds in San Francisco and New York City, where Wikimedia attorney Mike Godwin added his signature. In Germany, the shirt was signed at a summer party of former President Horst Köhler in Bellevue Palace by Christian Wulff, Prime Minister of Lower Saxony, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Federal Minister of Finance. The white shirt was taken to Switzerland, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Liechtenstein and the Czech Republic, and finally arrived in Hanover in March 2010.The white shirt can now be purchased on eBay, from which the proceeds will go to the the Wikimedia Foundation.
The blue shirt went to Azerbaijan before it was returned to Germany to be presented at Wikimedia Deutschland’s general assembly in March 2009 and Wikimedia’s Board, Chapter and Developers’ Meeting in April 2009, where it was signed by Jimbo Wales and appeared in many photographs. The blue shirt then went to Sweden, the Tripoint where the German, French and Swiss borders converge, and to Berlin, where it was signed by Christian Wulff, one of the instigators of the idea.
Next on the tour was Moscow and a number of other Russian cities, and then Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where it was signed by the Chairman of Wikimedia Argentina, Patricio Lorente. From there, steward Mardetanha brought the item to Iran and Dubai. During a longer trip through Poland it was photographed in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Poznań and Wrocław. Finally, it was snapped during a trip along the Ruhr river in northwestern Germany, and came back to Hanover in March 2010. It now can be purchased on eBay for the benefit of the Wikimedia Foundation.
WikiProject Comedy was started by AdamjVogt in June 2007. The project covers all articles related to comedy, including comedians, movies, television shows, sketches, albums, and an assortment of other topics. The project's 59 members oversee 3,324 articles, including 77 featured pages and over 350 A-class and good articles. WikiProject Comedy shares the Arrested Development Taskforce with WikiProject Television and serves as a parent for a variety of other projects, ranging from WikiProject Blackadder to WikiProject South Park. The project could use help maintaining their portal, assessing articles, and tackling their list of unreferenced biographies of living persons. This week, we interviewed ISD and Cirt.
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Comedy?
The project currently has 45 featured articles, 33 featured lists, 4 A-class articles, and 344 good articles. Which of these articles are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?
Have any of the project's major initiatives ended unsuccessfully?
WikiProject Comedy serves as a parent for several other projects that focus on television programs. How does WikiProject Comedy communicate and collaborate with these television projects? Does your project have close connections to any other projects?
What are WikiProject Comedy's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll revisit a large, old project that just completed a new initiative. Until then, review our old Reports in the archive.
Reader comments
7 (nom) was promoted to administrator. Xeno was made a bureaucrat.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article:
Seven articles were promoted to featured status: No Line on the Horizon (nom), 1910 London to Manchester air race (nom), Halkett boat (nom), SMS Helgoland (nom), Loggerhead sea turtle (nom), Horses in World War I (nom) and Symphony No. 8 (Mahler) (nom).
Six lists were promoted to featured status: Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album (nom), 1991 College Baseball All-America Team (nom), List of Honorary Fellows of Keble College, Oxford (nom), 1966 NBA Expansion Draft (nom), Atlantic Coast Conference Men's Basketball Coach of the Year (nom), Hugo Award for Best Novella (nom).
Two articles were delisted: S-mine (nom) and Henry James (nom).
Two featured pictures were demoted. 1958 Corvette (nom) was delisted because it lacks sharpness and is no longer "used in a meaningful and encyclopedic manner"; Hansom cab (nom) was delisted because of its small resolution.
Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status:
Jesse Jackson in 1983 | A knight's tour | A 2600 series car in the Chicago transit system | Molybdenum | |||||
Main circuits of the basal ganglia | This and the next six photographs are a featured set. They depict the scales which compose the wings of the Inachis io butterfly. | Closeup of the scales | High magnification of the scales | |||||
This and the next four images were taken with an electron microscope. This image is approximately 50× magnification. | Approximately 200× magnification | 1000× | 5000× |
The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week and opened another, leaving one case open.
Users of full database downloads (known colloquially as "dumps") of Wikimedia content will be pleased to know that a full schedule of dumps has restarted after certain problems were fixed. These problems had caused XML dumps from several projects, including the English Wikipedia, to have inconsistencies or missing text. Dumps provide an offline backup of the content of Wikipedia and other projects, and can also be used in preference to "live" data for research and more complicated full-text queries.
Ideas and thoughts about unifying the many different frameworks written for bots in the programming language PHP have resurfaced at the bot operators' noticeboard. The idea is to parallel a similar framework written in Python, pywikipediabot, which has achieved a significant level of use among the MediaWiki/Python community. Anyone with experience of coding bots in PHP – or with any thoughts of how best to achieve the "holy grail" of a common backbone for PHP-based bots – is invited to comment.