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11 April 2011

 

2011-04-11

Editor retention; Malayalam loves Wikimedia; Wikimedia reports; brief news

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By Ironholds, Smith609, Tinucherian and Tilman Bayer

Efforts to improve editor retention continue

As reported last week ("Fighting the decline by restricting article creation?"), concerns about editor retention and the attraction of new users have spawned several new projects and proposals, including the Wiki Guides, the new pages incubation trial, a village pump discussion on restricting the ability of new users to write new articles, and the work of User:Snottywong and User:Kudpung to document new page patrollers and their contributions. This issue looks at both how these various projects are doing, and also new events in the area which have occurred during the week.

Board resolution

On Friday 8 April, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees published an resolution on "Openness", affirming the WMF's commitment to keeping the projects open to new users and asking individual projects and contributors to follow the same principles:

The Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors....Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse editors, and to retain our experienced editors. ... We consider meeting this challenge our top priority.

In particular, the resolution urges the community to

The resolution comes less than two weeks after the Board's "Message to (the) community about community decline", and less than a month after the Executive Director Sue Gardner's "March 2011 Update" (Signpost coverage).

Update on ongoing projects

The proposal on requiring new users to attain autoconfirmed status has now entered the Requests for Comment stage. Attracting around 200 distinct users, the proposal appears likely to pass - the most popular comment in favour has 144 endorsement, while the most popular comment against it has 44. With this apparently clear, efforts have shifted to determining how it should be activated; should a trial be launched, and if so, in what form, or should the proposal simply be passed on to the developers and activated? Trial proposals vary; one suggests activating it for 3 months, and then analysing the results, leaving the system activated until the results are analysed and consensus can be reached on the back of them. Another suggests a similar chain of events, but with the system deactivated after the 3 month period. A third suggests that, if the new users are to rely on the Article Wizard and Wikipedia:Articles for Creation, these should be revamped and made friendlier before anything comes into effect.

Initial statistics from the Wiki Guides project, showing the article editing counts over time of mentored and non-mentored users

The Wiki Guides project, which pairs experienced editors with newbies (or "turtles") in an attempt to improve retention rates, while comparing their actions to those of non-paired newbies ("controls"), has now entered its sixth week. The first statistics have been published with an analysis; James Alexander is preparing to publish the second round of statistics as the Signpost goes to print. The project has now attracted 65 experienced editors helping to guide new users, including 8 in the last week - more, however, are always appreciated and invited to sign up on the project page.

In contrast, the new pages incubation trial, launched 3 weeks ago, is not going so well. Only 8 articles have been submitted to the program - James Alexander, the lead Community Department contact for the project, tells the Signpost that the trial "was a great idea but unfortunately simply isn't scalable; interest is not sufficient for it to expand. As such, we've backed off from that approach; that being said, those currently involved (and those interested in it) should join the Wiki Guides who, if successful, will eliminate the need for incubation".

Malayalam loves Wikimedia

Malayalam Wikimediayaye Snehikkunnu (Malayalam loves Wikimedia) is a free image photography initiative by Malayalam Wikipedians. Inspired by the resounding success of Wiki projects elsewhere—like "London loves Wikimedia"—the new Malayalam Wiki project seeks to bring in more free and copy-left images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia in this two-week project. National daily The Hindu quotes Shiju Alex, Malayalam Wiki activist and sysop, "During the two-week project period between April 2 and April 17, we intend to sensitise Malayalam Wiki contributors and users to enrich Malayalam Wiki ventures by contributing free-to-use photographs. Despite boasting over 17,000 articles on a variety of topics, the Malayalam Wiki can't claim to have many copyright-free pictures. Hence the project". Wiki activists Rajesh Odayanchal and Ajay Kuyiloor have designed a logo and advertisements for the project. More than 1150 images have already been uploaded as a part of this project, which is the first of its kind in India.

Foundation releases monthly report and yearly tax form, signs amicus brief

The Wikimedia Foundation has published its monthly report for March 2011. Apart from various items previously reported in the Signpost, it notes that at the end of March, 24 of 30 Wikimedia chapters had signed a chapter agreement with the Foundation (among the missing ones are two of the oldest Wikimedia chapters, Germany and Italy). This year's WikiSym conference will be supported by a $20,000 grant. The legal department has started the search for a Deputy General Counsel, a new position whose duties will include "participating in effective and clear communications relating to legal topics with chapter organizations and members of our Community, including users and volunteer editors" according to the job opening posted last week. The legal department also "worked on policies to help guide WMF employees on how to approach content issues."

The report mentions that the Foundation was going to sign an amicus brief in Golan v. Holder, a US court case started in 2001 "where the Supreme Court must decide whether the Copyright Clause gives Congress authority to take a work out of the public domain". (In 2007, the Foundation had signed an amicus brief in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a case involving the enforceability of free licenses.)

Also last week, the Wikimedia Foundation published its tax form for the 2009–10 fiscal year (Form 990, due on May 15), accompanied by a Q&A. The (voluntary) financial report for the same period had already been released in October (Signpost coverage: "Foundation's financial statements released"). Among the mandatory information, it lists the compensation for all independent contractors: The Bridgespan group, a non-profit which for example facilitated the strategic planning process (Signpost coverage) received $304,210 for consulting services, PR firm Fenton Communications was paid $195,000 for communications (including work on the somewhat controversial "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER" 2009-10 fundraiser), and law firm Squire, Sanders & Dempsey received $116,627. The functional expenses total around $10 million, including $311,564 in Paypal fees.

Briefly

  • New gadget simplifies referencing: A new gadget simplifies the addition and formatting of references. The Citation expander, which logged-in users can enable via their user preferences, brings the functionality of the Citation bot to the edit page. After entering minimal information into a citation template, the gadget will consult online databases to complete any partial citations on the page being edited, whilst making the formatting consistent with existing references.
  • Wikimedia Estonia report: The Estonian Wikimedia chapter has published its report for January–March 2011. It mentions a meeting at the Nordic Council of Ministers office to prepare a now-ongoing article-writing contest in the Estonian Wikipedia about the cooperation of Nordic countries, and meetings with Estonia's National Heritage Board and the metropolitan of the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church about cooperation on the upcoming "Wiki Loves Monuments" contest.
  • Wikimedia Sweden report: The Swedish Wikimedia chapter has published its monthly Chapters Report for March 2011, which included the election of a new Board at its annual meeting. Jan Ainali is the chapter's new chairman, succeeding Lennart Guldbrandsson who stepped down because he took up a fellowship at the Wikimedia Foundation (Signpost coverage).
  • Wikimedia Denmark report: Having committed itself to quarterly reports, the Danish Wikimedia chapter published the first one, for the first quarter of 2011. It lists collaborations with the National Museum of Denmark and the Danish State Archives planned later this year, possibly involving Wikipedia-in-residence like positions.
  • Wikimedia Nederlands elects new board: The Dutch Wikimedia chapter elected a new board on April 2nd. The new president is Ziko van Dijk (User:Ziko) - remarkably a German citizen, while vice president Austin Hair (international relations) as well as board member Jane Darnell are Americans. The chapter has recently acquired dedicated office space and is hiring its first employees.
  • Edit notice changed: On the request of the Wikimedia Foundation's legal department, the system message appearing in the edit window was recently modified. The new wording includes an explicit agreement to the Privacy policy, in addition to the copyright licenses for the contributed content.
  • Tamil Wikipedia crosses 30,000 articles: Tamil Wikipedia becomes the fifth Indic language Wikipedia to cross the 30,000 articles milestone. It took more than 2 years for the first 1000 articles, while the last 1000 articles were created organically in just the last 3 weeks.
  • Using Wikipedia edits to get tenure: A blog post from the Foundation Policy Initiative ("Tenure awarded based in part on Wikipedia contributions") describes how a U.S. academic added mention of his Wikipedia contributions to the "research" part of his portfolio for an eventually successful tenure application, "based on the claim that Did You Knows, Good Articles, and Featured Articles are all scrutinized more or less during (sic?) a peer-review process".
  • How to read a version history: Also on the Foundation's official blog, a posting by two Wikimedia Campus Ambassadors explained how to read the version history of a Wikipedia article, using as example the recent erroneous media reports that singer Christina Aguilera's mistaken lyrics in a performance of the US national anthem had originated in a Wikipedia error (Signpost coverage: "UK tabloid wrongly blames Wikipedia for US national anthem gaffe at Super Bowl").
  • New mailing list on education and Wikimedia: A new mailing list devoted to the Educational use of Wikimedia content or projects and related topics was started on April 8.


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2011-04-11

What if experts just want to get their links into Wikipedia?; brief news

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By Tilman Bayer and Tinucherian

Experts and GLAMs – contributing content or "just" links to Wikipedia?

As Wikipedia tries to encourage contributions by academic experts and seeks collaborations with academic and cultural institutions, two examples reported last week illustrated that one of the most popular forms of such contributions seems to be enriching Wikipedia or Commons with links to one's own website.

In a letter to The Guardian, responding to an editorial that had called "academics serious about public erudition" to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia (see below), three UK professors from "an independent network of nearly 300 historians" wrote that they had "discussed the pros and cons" of doing so, and "decided to insert links in the references of Wikipedia entries" to their own website, http://www.historyandpolicy.org/. "The result was startling: a few dozen links increased visitors from Wikipedia to H&P significantly, moving the online encyclopedia from below 10th to the third most popular source of traffic to our site. We intend to continue embedding links to our papers in relevant Wikipedia entries."

And as reported by Inside Higher Ed, librarians from the University of Houston described at the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries "how they had recently enlisted a student, Danielle Elder, to evangelize the content of their Digital Library on Wikipedia, the eighth most popular website in the world ... Wikipedia quickly became the No. 1 driver of web traffic to Houston's online collections, surpassing both Google and the university's home page." For example, the student contributed to the article about former US president George H. W. Bush, adding a link to a photograph showing Bush shaking hands with former University of Houston chancellor Philip G. Hoffman.

But if the goal is to increase overall exposure of the content in an institution's collection rather than traffic on its own website, uploading it to Wikimedia sites might be even more effective than inserting a link there. Last September, the Dutch National Archives and Spaarnestad Photo had donated more than 1000 images depicting significant events and people in Dutch politics, mostly since World War II (Signpost coverage). A report published last week (summarized in Dutch here, and in briefer form but in English by User:Ziko on his blog) found that the donated photos had been viewed two million times within five months, more than 500 times as often as on the original site. In January 2011, 52% of the uploaded images were in use on Wikipedia, a ratio that the authors compare favorably to the images uploaded by Deutsche Fotothek (3.42%) or Tropenmuseum (7.40%).

Banksia, one of 53,000 taxa whose entries on Wikipedia and the NCBI database have been linked

Links to databases maintained by GLAMs or academic institutions can carry additional value for Wikipedia as identifiers. A recent article titled "Linking NCBI to Wikipedia: a wiki-based approach" in the scholarly journal PLoS Currents: Tree of Life (abstract, full text) by biologist Roderic D.M. Page (User:Rdmpage) from the University of Glasgow described a project ("iPhylo Linkout") that has connected 53,000 biological taxa between Wikipedia articles and a genetic database from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, which now links to Wikipedia articles (example). However, on the Wikipedia side the insertion of these links in a prominent place, the Taxobox, has been controversial. In a Nature article last year, Page had explored the idea that "Wikipedia has emerged as potentially the best platform for fulfilling E. O. Wilson’s vision [of] 'an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth'".

Briefly

Antonio Spadaro SJ (2008)
  • Jesuit praise for Wikipedia: In its March 19 issue, the Vatican-based Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica published an article about "The Hacker ethic and the Christian vision", which gained the attention of several English-language media noting its defense of the former, and its praise for Wikipedia. As summarized by Techworld, the author, Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, "had particular praise for the collaborative knowledge-sharing model of Wikipedia, an example of networked intellectual collaboration that was capable of transforming the very idea of cultural production." In 2005, Spadaro had devoted an entire article in La Civiltà Cattolica to Wikipedia. In 2008, the Italian Wikinews interviewed the "jesuit 2.0" about the relationship between catholicism and Wikipedia, and Internet culture in general.
  • "World's biggest seminar" needs more academic contributors: A short editorial in The Guardian ("In praise of… academic Wikipedians") followed up on the paper's earlier coverage of the Wikimedia Foundation's "Expert barriers to Wikipedia" survey. After making a case for open access ("A Library of Alexandria in which all humanity held a card would indeed be an institution worthy of Plato's Republic"), it argued that more academics should contribute to Wikipedia: "Fresh means must be found to lure big brains into the world's biggest seminar."
  • Attempts to revive Odia Wikipedia: The Hindu reported attempts to revive Odia Wikipedia. The Odia Wikipedia was one of the first few Indian language Wikipedias to be created. Although started in 2002, along with Wikipedias in Assamese, Punjabi, Nepali, Oriya and Malayalam, prior to even the Hindi Wikipedia in July 2003, the Odia Wikipedia never actually grew, with to date, only 700 articles. The revival of Odia Wikipedia is led by Indian Wikipedian Shiju Alex and another Odia Wikipedian Subhashish Panigrahi who jointly organised Odia Wikipedia workshops in Bangalore and Bhubaneswar. The article which was prominently featured on the rear cover page of the national newspaper, gained lots of attention.
    Photo of a train model, taken during the "backstage pass" event at the industrial museum of Derby
  • Backstage Pass tour at Derby museum: As reported in BBC local news ("Derby's Silk Mill gets visit from Wikipedia volunteers"), a "backstage pass" event took place on April 9th in the industrial museum of Derby, which had closed to the public earlier this month but enabled Wikimedians to take photos and notes on this occasion. The event was part of ongoing collaboration efforts with GLAM institutions in the British city. They also included the launch of a "multilingual challenge" last week, "to show what Wikipedia could do for any museum, anywhere in the world" – in this case for the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, which together with the WMF will award prizes in September, to submissions that consist of new or improved articles in any language version of Wikipedia, with the condition that they must contain a blue link to the article about the Derby Museum and Art Gallery in that language, and that articles in at least two different languages must be submitted.
  • Politician's COI editing: Politico.com reported conflict of interest editing in the article about a Republican politician ("Rep. David Rivera's war with Wikipedia").
  • Britannica iPad app compared to Wikipedia: PC Mag reviewed the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia 2011 on the iPad, comparing it to Wikipedia several times (example: "A Wikipedia junkie, I found the entries a bit too brief; they often present a very basic overview of a topic. There also aren't any listed sources, something I've grown accustomed to using Wikipedia").

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2011-04-11

Research literature surveys; drug reliability; editor roles; BLPs; Muhammad debate analyzed

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By Tilman Bayer

This week's issue of the Signpost introduces an irregular section dedicated to summarizing recent academic research about Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

Meta-research: Trying to survey existing research literature on Wikipedia

Last month, Wikipedia researcher Finn Årup Nielsen published a draft of a survey paper titled "Wikipedia research and tools: Review and comments". He notes that "well over 1,000 reports have been published in the field" by now, making a complete review impossible, but still provides an extensive overview of publications regarding many different fields of Wikipedia research. A review on the blog of researcher Paolo Massa lists the covered fields and calls Nielsen's draft "a very useful 56-pages resource highlighting key areas of research for Wikipedia (with citations to relevant work already published). ... The cited papers (with annotations!) are 236! Even if this is draft paper, it is a super valuable resource!"

Also in March, a research group from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada announced that they were "conducting a systematic literature review on Wikipedia-related peer-reviewed academic studies published in the English language", starting with a database search that had "identified over 2,100 peer-reviewed studies that have 'wikipedia', 'wikipedian' or 'wikipedians' in their title, abstract or keywords. As this number of studies is far too large for conducting a review synthesis, we have decided to focus only on peer-reviewed journal publications and doctoral theses; we identified 625 such studies. In addition, we identified around 1,500 peer-reviewed conference articles". They updated the page Wikipedia:Academic studies of Wikipedia accordingly (bringing it to almost 1 MB in text, while a separate list of conference papers weighs 1.5 MB).

On the Wiki-research-l mailing list, the announcement gave rise to discussion about a possible shared database for Wikipedia literature review, for example using Acawiki or Zotero. It was pointed out that there had been earlier attempts that failed.

Pharmacological study criticizes reliability of Wikipedia articles about the top 20 drugs

A study titled "Reliability of Wikipedia as a medication information source for pharmacy students" (abstract) in this month's issue of the journal Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning found the quality of Wikipedia articles on the 20 most frequently prescribed drugs lacking, concluding

Like an earlier study, part of the criticism was based on differing expectations on what information should be included in such articles ("Categories most frequently absent were drug interactions and medication use in breastfeeding"). The article even explicitly acknowledged that one of the information categories whose lack it criticized - namely, dosage information - was discouraged by the Wikipedia:Manual of Style (medicine-related articles), but used this to turn the fact that half of the articles fulfilled the study's requirement in that respect into additional criticism: "... our finding that 10 of the 20 articles included dosing information provides evidence for the lack of regulation of content on Wikipedia."

However, the paper's critical conclusion was also based on factual inaccuracies and the finding that "referencing was poor across all articles, with seven of the 20 articles not supported by any references." (As pointed out by WhatamIdoing, all of the articles currently contain multiple reliable sources. The quoted claim may have been intended to refer to only the part of the articles that concerned the 20 information categories studied. Also, the paper does not state which versions of the Wikipedia articles were judged, apart from noting that they "were accessed on a single day". The above mentioned Manual of style page is cited using a permalink to a May 2007 version, to describe Wikipedia regulations "at the time this analysis was performed".)

Metformin package: Better rely on the package insert?

The accuracy of information on Wikipedia was judged based on whether it agreed with package inserts, or, if the Wikipedia information was not present there, with certain databases. As example for "inaccurate information that could lead to inappropriate use of medications and potential patient harm", it named the fact that the article on the diabetes drug metformin listed "lung disease as a contraindication, which is inaccurate per the Glucophage (Bristol-Myers Squibb, New York, NY) package insert. This inaccuracy could prompt a pharmacist to inappropriately recommend against the use of metformin, a medication shown to reduce mortality in the treatment of diabetes, in patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The metformin Wikipedia article also lists a higher serum creatinine for defining the contraindication of kidney disease compared with the package insert. This inconsistency could result in a recommendation to use metformin in a patient where it is contraindicated."

In reaction to the study, User:Colin from WikiProject Pharmacology said:

Classifying newbies and veterans as experts, gnomes, vandal fighters or social networkers

In February, a paper titled "Finding social roles in Wikipedia" (abstract, earlier, incomplete online draft) won a Best paper award at iConference 2011, an annual gathering of US information scholars and practicioners. The seven researchers from Cornell University and other institutions first use a qualitative approach to identify an initial set of potential social roles of Wikipedia contributors, and then aim to characterize these by "quantitative signatures", derived from a dump of the English Wikipedia comprising edits until October 2006. They arrive at four "key roles" (not meant to be exhaustive or mutually exclusive), and relying on an initial sample of 40 hand-picked and hand-classified editors, they propose quantitative criteria that are based on the distribution of edits across different namespaces (divided into six categories: "content" [i.e. articles and images], "content talk, user, user talk, wikipedia, and infrastructure [the rest, e.g. templates or categories]):

  • "Substantive experts" who "contribute by providing substantive content to article pages" and "invest time in fact checking and article talk to discuss details of articles". Characterized by having between 30 and 80% content edits, and the non-content edits being "<30% to Infrastructure, >45% in content talk and Wiki combined; and >25% content talk".
  • "Technical editors" who focus on small fixes and improvements, e.g. "spelling, grammar, hyperlink format, out of date facts, links to other language editions of Wikipedia," or categorization, similar to what Wikipedians call WikiGnomes. Characterized by having more than 60% content edits, and the non-content edits being ">45% in Wiki and Infrastructure combined, and <25% content talk."
  • "Counter vandalism editors" who "find vandalized articles, correct them, and sanction vandals." Characterized by having more than 60% content edits, and the non-content edits being "<25% content talk, >30% user and usertalk combined, and >20% Wiki pages." The "surprisingly high rates of edits to the User and User Talk namespaces" is explained by the practice of blocking admins to place a message on the blocked user's page.
    Logo of the "Birthday Committee", frequented by "Social networkers" according to the study
  • "Social networkers" who "build strong ties with other users through channels other than article collaboration". They "create elaborate profiles that showcase their Wikipedia personalities", often containing "many Userboxes, small snippets of self-identifying information including interests, group membership, and personal characteristics. Social networkers often participate in projects that can be seen as community-building", e.g. the Birthday Committee, the Welcoming committee and "parts of the now defunct 'Esperanza' project whose goal was to strengthen the Wikipedia community." Characterized by having less than 45% content edits, and the non-content edits being in "content talk less than 25%, greater than 45% user and user talk combined, greater than 25% wiki pages."

The study then uses these formal criteria (admitting that they "are quite primitive and imprecise") to classify two larger samples of editors, one consisting of 1954 "long-term dedicated" Wikipedians (defined as having made edits both in or before January 2004, and in January 2005), and the other of "new" editors, defined as all 5839 users who created an account and made at least one edit in January 2005. The ratio of Social networkers was very small in the "new" cohort and even smaller among the "dedicated" editors (1% vs. 0.5%), a finding the authors explain by the fact that "using Wikipedia for social networking was actually a relative new development in 2006". The other three roles were all found somewhat more often among the "dedicated" editors (32% vs. 28% for Substantive experts, 11% vs. 10% for Technical editors, 7% vs. 5% for Vandal fighters). Addressing concerns about the sustainability of Wikipedia's community voiced in 2005 by Eric Goldman (cf. recent Signpost coverage), the authors state "it seems that potential role players are arriving and developing at a rate that is more than sufficient to supplement and grow the current population", clearly indicating that the paper's underlying data is somehow outdated when compared, for example, to the WMF's recent Editor Trends Study.

Another section draws some informal conclusion from users' social graphs, as defined by their edits of other users' talk pages. Example: "At the most general level, technical editors and vandal fighters have similarly sparse local networks, while the social networkers and substantive experts’ networks show larger community structures", however social networkers differ from substantive experts in that the former "are likely to develop user talk networks that only include friends who are similar to themselves, or other folks that they run into in the backstage". Also, technical editors and counter vandalism editors were said to share some social network attributes with what has been called "answer people" in a study of Usenet participants, while social networkers were similar to "discussion people".

Overview of the BLP problem features analysis of subject's participation in deletion discussion

The authors chose flammability as a metaphor for the inherently contentious nature of biographies of living persons

Presented at the same conference was a paper titled "Handling Flammable Materials: Wikipedia Biographies of Living Persons as Contentious Objects". It gives a rich overview about the history of the controversies about BLPs (conceptualizing them as "contentious objects") on the English Wikipedia, from the 2005 Seigenthaler affair and the Daniel Brandt controversies (Signpost coverage) to more recent community discussions about BLPs, such as when "Users Scott MacDonald and Lar began a campaign in January 2010 to delete unsourced and inadequately sourced BLP articles" (citing this diff as evidence for the "consternation of other Wikipedia editors" that it caused), and the introduction of "sticky prod" (proposed deletions) for BLPs soon afterwards, noting that the latter involved "470 editors contribut[ing] over 200,000 words of discussion". The paper names four different ways in which organizations can manage risk in general, and classifies Wikipedia's response to the BLP problem according to them:

  • The statements "Wikipedia is not a battleground" and "Wikipedia is not an anarchy" from "What Wikipedia is not" are interpreted as examples for the first one: risk avoidance. However it is noted that the most obvious risk avoidance - excluding BLPs completely - does not seem to be considered as a serious option.
  • Wikipedia's notability guideline is cited as an example for the second kind of strategy, risk minimization.
  • The third approach, threat management, is exemplified by the BLP policy itself (which the authors describe as "clear guidelines for editors and writers of BLP articles [written] with such a threatening attitude that they will feel compelled to follow them", noting that its introduction "is written in forceful imperative tones"), and its subpage containing advice for BLP subjects.
  • Lastly, there is impact containment, defined as "the development of procedures to minimize the damage once conflict occurs", for which the authors examine the AfD process for BLPs.

A statistical analysis of "257 nominations of articles for deletion where the subject of the article expressed an interest in whether or not the article is kept" (in 190 cases preferring deletion, in 63 preferring that the article should be kept, and voicing ambiguous opinions in 4 cases) found that "if the subject’s interests are stated in the nomination for the article deletion, whether or not the expressed interest is for deletion or retention of the article, [...] the article is 78% more likely to be kept". However, "the subject’s open vote in the discussion concerning whether or not to keep the article in Wikipedia, does not have an impact on the outcome of the AfD process [...], suggesting that stating one’s preference without arguing about it and, therefore without creating open conflict, lets the Wikipedia editorial community address the AfD through more minor threat reduction methods." The authors interpret this as follows: "The subject of an article who gets directly involved in the AfD discussion realizes the Contentious Object potential and forces the community to turn to conflict containment strategies that are more defensive and more conforming to community policy and less reflective of the subject’s desires."

Muhammad cartoons debate dominated by appeals to precedent, impact and relevance

A third paper from iConference 2011, titled "Lifting the veil: the expression of values in online communities" (abstract) contains "a case study of a polarized talk page debate" - namely, the controversy about whether the article Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy should be illustrated with an image of the cartoons themselves. The three authors from the University of Washington applied the hierarchy of values framework to a sample of 314 discussion threads, containing 2785 individual postings, randomly selected from 6094 postings made on the article's talk page from January 28th, 2006 to February, 25th 2006. Computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) was used to classify "the stance expressed by the post author (at the post level)", i.e. whether they argued for the inclusion of the cartoons (55%), against it (13%) or for some kind of compromise (24%), and the "types of appeals the [Wikipedia] author uses to argue their case (at the sentence or utterance level)", from a list of ten such types, e.g. "Policy: cartoons should be retained or removed based on the explicit policies of Wikipedia", or legal arguments. The three most frequently used appeals were to impact (effect of the inclusion of the cartoons on Wikipedia and elsewhere, used in 20% of the postings), precedent (both on Wikipedia and elsewhere, e.g. illustrations in the Muhammad and Piss Christ articles, or the decision of some newspapers in Arab countries to reprint the cartoons and of CNN not to reproduce them; 18%), and the relevance of the cartoons to the article (also 18%). To the authors, this suggests that the participants in the debate "in general recognized a common set of values for Wikipedia article content", although there was disagreement about the relative priority of these (the impact appeal was number one among "against" and "compromise" postings, but only fourth among "for" postings, behind the appeal to "the stated or implied identity, mission or purpose of Wikipedia"), and "that on Wikipedia, making the correct type of appeal is crucial both to persuading other editors to agree to a decision and to enforcing that decision".

The authors' own stance in the debate becomes apparent in the introduction and the conclusions, where they argue that the decision to include the images went against the goal of "multicultural inclusivity" which they see implied in "Wikipedia’s stated ideological commitment to equal access and global empowerment", but also (somehow contradictorily) criticize "invocations of Wikipedia’s core values" in the cartoons debate because they "only served to increase polarization and defeat attempts at compromise." Venturing beyond their actual empirical findings, they warn that "without additional mechanisms for resolving cultural controversies, Wikipedia risks losing access to the valuable knowledge assets of a potentially large number of contributors and may also have trouble succeeding in its mission of being a true 'encyclopedia for everyone.'"

Briefly

  • How high school students assess credibility of Wikipedia articles: A student essay from the University of Twente ("Appraise this, appraise that : everyday Wikipedia credibility assessments of high school students and university students") contains the results of a think aloud. According to the abstract (the full text does not seem to have been published), "we found that the three most important features for high school students are text, pictures and appearance of the articles." In addition, differences in the credibility assessments by older students (as observed in an earlier study at the same university) were found, both generally and with regard to the attention paid to the criterion of references. Last year, another student thesis from the University of Twente had also examined high school students' judgements of Wikipedia articles, with similar methodology and conclusions.

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2011-04-11

WikiProject Japan

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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.
Sakura producing cherry blossoms in a field of Phlox subulata
The skyline of Tokyo with Mount Fuji in the background
Sumo wrestlers
The Tokyo Stock Exchange
The Itsukushima Shrine is a Shinto shrine and a UNESCO World Heritage Site
Bullet trains of the East Japan Railway Company
The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, the most famous painting by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai
A fire at the Cosmo Oil refinery in Ichihara caused by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake
Search and rescue activities in Miyako, Iwate after the subsequent tsunami
Japanese and international teams construct temporary buildings for disaster victims

This week, we turned our attention to WikiProject Japan. Started by Nihonjoe in March 2006, the project has 323 members and is home to 84 pieces of Featured material, 78 Good and A-class articles, an enormous list of DYKs, and 31 task forces. Our initial interview with WikiProject Japan was scheduled for March 14, but the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami prompted us to postpone the report. We followed-up with some of our interviewees from March 15 through March 23 to update our readers on the situation following the disaster. Our interview included Nihonjoe (日本穣), Cla68, Frank (Urashima Tarō), Hoary, Oda Mari, bamse and Torsodog.

Nihonjoe is an admin and bureaucrat who used to live in Japan and says he can read Japanese better than he can speak it. He started the project "because it didn't exist and I thought it would be a useful way to help coordinate work on Japan-related articles." His work helped prepare the article on Japan for Featured status. Cla68 is from the US and began living off-and-on in Japan since 1994, spending a total of about 10 years in Japan. Married into a Japanese family, Cla68's Japanese is improving, "but I would still put myself at a beginner's level." Frank is from Italy but has lived in Japan since 1982 and would prefer to be a citizen of the world. He reads and writes Japanese, writes almost exclusively about Japan, and decided that joining the project "seemed the thing to do." Hoary is an admin who lives in Japan and speaks and writes the language, "but very unsatisfactorily." Oda Mari is a native Japanese speaker, living in Japan: "I'm here to use my knowledge of the country and my language skill to help English speaking editors and provide correct information on Japan." Bamse used to live in Japan and is interested in Japanese art, architecture, and history. He is currently working on improving coverage of the National Treasures of Japan. "WikiProject Japan has been a very helpful and friendly place for translation and other questions, so I eventually joined it." Torsodog lives in Chicago but has contributed to a number of Japanese articles and the project's portal. He is particularly interested in Japanese baseball.

Have you contributed to any of the project's DYKs, Featured, or good articles? Are you currently working on a FA or GA nomination? Do you have any tips for Wikipedians trying to improve articles about Japan to FA or GA status?

  • Cla68: I was the primary editor on 23 of the project's Featured articles, co-editor on three other FAs, primary editor on one good article, and heavily involved with one Featured topic.
  • Hoary: A grand total of one GA is primarily my work. Surely I must have fiddled with FAs and others over the years, though I don't remember having made a major contribution to any. I've never submitted anything to DYK, because I've never mustered the stamina to read about all the hoops one has to go through. I'm working on an article that might eventually become a GA or above, but that would be a long time off and anyway it is irrelevant to Japan. Somebody wanting to write good articles should be willing to spend a lot of time in a very good library.
  • Nihonjoe: I've contributed to some of the FA/A/GA articles, as well as a number of the DYKs (you can see my fairly complete list of articles to which I've contributed for more details on which ones, keeping in mind that I haven't marked how they are assessed for the most part).
  • bamse: I contributed one GA and one or two DYKs. I've been mostly busy with a number (10 or so) of Featured lists as part of a series of Lists of National Treasures of Japan. Once finished, I would like to bring a (probably history related) article up to GA level.
  • Frank: I am not interested in and I do not believe in the usefulness of assessing articles. I actually consider assessing counterproductive: Wikipedia's peer-review system doesn't work. How would you like spending a month writing an article and then be rewarded with a single letter, usually a C, no comments, by someone who probably isn't familiar with the subject and will never come back? I need the comments, not the letter. I contributed about 30 DYKs.

Have you ever translated information to or from the Japanese Wikipedia? Does the project collaborate with WikiProject Intertranswiki?

  • Cla68: I sometimes check the Japanese Wikipedia for information, like birth dates, but I've never translated an article into the English Wikipedia.
  • Hoary: If one encounters a good article that appears to be scrupulously sourced, and checks and confirms that the footnotes do all say what they're presented as saying, then why not translate (complete with footnotes)? But such articles are extraordinarily rare in ja:WP. On very rare occasions I have (with native-speaking help) translated material that I wrote into Japanese for ja:WP. I have never wanted to translate material from it, because the material in ja:WP on subjects that interest me is seldom itself interesting and virtually never sourced in any way. I don't know whether to be horrified or amused when I see {{Expand Japanese}} ("Please expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in the Japanese Wikipedia") stuck on a talk page; but I hope that nobody acts on the request. I'd never rely on ja:WP for anything, even a birth date. However, some assertion within a ja:WP article may make it easier to look for the information in a more reliable source.
  • Frank: I agree with Hoary. We should never translate articles from another language.
  • Nihonjoe:Yes, though I make sure I have some sources to go with it as I'd rather not go to the work of translating it if it's just going to be deleted. I actually hadn't heard of WikiProject Intertranswiki until you mentioned it.
  • bamse: Yes, but because of the lack of sources in ja:WP articles, I mainly translated undisputed articles about mountains, lakes, etc. A while ago I had a look at some Wikiproject concerned with translating articles from other Wikipedias (not sure whether it was "Intertranswiki"). However I never figured out how to use its advanced template syntax (for marking status of translation, etc.) and gave up on it.

The project has a lengthy list of unreferenced biographies of living persons. Why does WikiProject Japan take such an active role in BLPs? Should other projects undertake similar efforts to provide relief for the editors at WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons?

  • Cla68: Lately, after years of issues and abuses, some Wikipedians have stepped up and made an effort to verify or source the unreferenced information that exists in many BLPs. I'm happy to see WP:Japan involved in helping with that effort.
  • Nihonjoe: I think it's important to have sources for all the articles here on Wikipedia. Given that the concerted effort to source articles only began a couple or so years ago, however, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area.

The Japan Portal is a Featured portal. Share with us some of the planning and effort that went into this portal.

  • Nihonjoe: User:Torsodog is the main one to ask about this. My main contribution was working on the "On this day..." section. There are still a few days which need adding, too.
  • Torsodog: My work on Portal:Japan started relatively early in my Wikipedia career--sometime in mid-2008. Portal work is probably something that a user shouldn't tackle until they are very familiar with everything Wikipedia, but for some reason I was feeling up for it. Looking back on it, I'm not sure how I got through it. Getting the portal to Featured status is by far my most difficult Wikipedia endeavor, and I've been a contributor in almost all possible featured categories at some point. When I first encountered the portal, it was one page and rather low on content. The first thing I did was find a Featured portal that I would like to model the Japan portal after. I chose Portal:Africa. After that, I got to work. Building the portal was a lot of trial and error. It is without a doubt the most technical writing I've ever done on the site. I learned a lot at the time, but don't ask me to make another portal anytime soon. I have long forgetten all of the behind-the-scenes skills and tricks needed to needed to make them tick. Slowly, the layout finally became functional and I populated it with all of the great work our project has produced over the years. In order to do this, you have to make many, many, many subpages. I'm talking subpages to organize the subpages. Once that was done, I created a slick graphic and called it a day. I haven't been able to keep it updated as much as I'd like, but when creating a portal, you try to make it as self-sufficient as possible. I think I succeeded in that.

Were you or anyone you know directly impacted by the earthquake and tsunami?

  • Hoary: No, I was not. I'm rather alarmed not to hear anything from one old friend who's a fair bit closer to the disaster area than I am, but I've no other good reason to think that he might have suffered. I'm in Tokyo, and on the ground floor. My employer strongly discourages me from coming to work, but past experience of the results of minor tremors makes me think that the content of my office will be complete chaos. Supplies of some foodstuffs are short, and I think that people have started to stockpile, although discreetly. We have a relative billeted with us because she normally depends on commuting on one train line that has stopped because of subsidence; also water was cut off there until earlier today. All of this is of course utterly trivial compared with the horrendous suffering of people living further north, the efforts of the rescue staff, and the bravery of the people who are trying hard to minimize leaks of radioactive material.
  • Nihonjoe: I wasn't directly affected, but I have friends with family in the area (which they haven't heard from yet), and I know a couple people who live somewhere near there.
  • Cla68: I experienced the earthquake in Kanagawa Prefecture. There was no damage to my workplace or my home and no one I know in my area was injured. I have friends in Aomori Prefecture and Sendai. They were uninjured in the quake and aftermath, but are now fairly isolated and dealing with power, gas, and food shortages. One of their hometowns is Kuji, Iwate, which I understand was very heavily damaged This column closely mirrors my experience and feeling about the earthquake, except that I was at work instead of at home. Just like [The Japan Times columnist] Dillon, as soon as the earthquake was over, I wondered who and where had gotten it worse. Flipping on the TV I saw the water swirling around and appearing to recede off of a coastal city in northeast Japan and knew that a tsunami was on its way. I'm proud of the way the Japanese people have handled most aspects of the crisis since then, including my own family.

Has activity at the project changed since the disaster? What articles, new and old, are in the greatest need of updated information?

What can our readers do to help the people of Japan?

  • Hoary: Much of what follows may be obvious, but nevertheless, I too would guess that some things could have been designed better and that some people with responsibilities have been incompetent. But please refrain from finger-pointing until the facts are in. Unfortunately there's a history of email and other "charity" scams. Treat any email that makes an urgent request for funds with great skepticism; at least check that the website it points you to really is for the charity that it claims it's for and that it belongs to a reputable charity (Wikipedia may be of help in assessing the charity.) Better to wait until large adverts appear in newspapers, and act on them. But then give, a lot, because the number who are homeless makes it clear that short- and medium-term relief is going to cost a fortune. When things have settled down a bit and you start to meet Japanese people who've lived through this, remember that their experiences of it may be very different: if one Japanese person refers to earthquakes and tsunami with some gallows humor, the next Japanese person may have seen family members die.
  • Nihonjoe: I think the biggest way to help would be donating to the American Red Cross as they are directly involved in efforts to assist in Japan.
  • Cla68: The Japanese Red Cross appears to be well-organized and has already begun a very visible and active effort to assist in the quake and tsunami-hit areas. I've seen interviews with Japanese Red Cross administrative and medical personnel on TV over the last few days. So, donations to the Red Cross probably would have a direct effect.
  • Oda Mari: Donating to the Red Cross is the best. If possible, donate directly at the Japanese Red Cross. Let me say, "Thank you America for Operation Tomodachi!".

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

  • Frank: In my view, the most important thing one can do is to find quality sources and use copious citations.
  • Cla68: This is my advice to any editor: choose a topic that you find fascinating, chose an article within that topic, find as many sources as you can on the topic, and start writing. If the article is on a Japan-related topic, please feel free to ask for source or translation help at the project's talk page. If you're a Japanese speaker or otherwise have helpful knowledge about Japan, please put the project's talk page on your watchlist and jump in and help answer questions or concerns raised by other editors.
  • Nihonjoe: I'll echo what the others have posted: just jump in and help where you find a topic which interests you in some way. Watch the talk page of the project and see if there is anything you can do to help someone else (questions get posted fairly regularly).

Anything else you'd like to add?

  • Hoary: A major problem for the would-be contributor is that the Japanese-language internet is so feeble. Certainly no newspaper leaves a significant amount of material on the web. (There's nothing remotely like guardian.co.uk.) Typically a search in Google for a likely-sounding subject brings up little more than impressionistic blog entries, unsourced and dubious material by anonymous people purporting to be experts, and the like. So somebody wanting to add material may well have to use dead-tree sources for it.
  • Cla68: I'll second this. Japanese print media don't seem to put a lot of their content online. Japanese weekly tabloids (which, in my opinion, are more reliable as sources of information than many of their western counterparts) are especially focused on print rather than Internet. So, if you are a reader of Japanese print media and see some good information, please add it to the appropriate article before throwing your newspaper away. Otherwise, some of these articles may never go anywhere.


Next week, we'll check out the WikiProject WikiProject. Until then, refer to the resources in our archive.

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2011-04-11

The best of the week

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By Dabomb87 and Tony1
From new Featured list List of longest rivers of the United States (by main stem): The Snake River, with the Grand Tetons in the background. Photo by Ansel Adams.
This week's "Features and admins" covers Sunday 3 – Saturday 9 April

Administrators

No editors were granted administrator status this week.

At the time of publication there was one live RfA: Bahamut0013, due to finish Wednesday.

From the new FA, conservation of slow lorises. Slow lorises are nocturnal primates that live in south and southeast Asia, and are threatened by deforestation and the wildlife trade.
An 1823 painting by Stephen Poyntz Denning of the young Alexandrina Victoria, later Queen Victoria, the ruler of the British Empire at its peak

A total of 13 articles were promoted to featured status:

  • SMS Markgraf (nom), a König-class battleship of the German Imperial Navy which served during World War I. (Nominated by Parsecboy)
  • U.S. Route 113 (nom), a 75-mile (121 km) road in the U.S. states of Maryland and Delaware. (Viridiscalculus)
  • Conservation of slow lorises (nom), an effort that has received significant recent publicity after online videos of the species gained popularity. (Visionholder)
  • Tom Driberg (nom), a former gossip columnist who became the British Labour Party chairman. (Brianboulton)
  • Rosendale trestle (nom), a continuous truss bridge in the U.S. state of New York. It was sold for one dollar to a man who unsuccessfully attempted to operate it as a bungee jumping platform. (Gyrobo)
  • Maya (M.I.A. album) (nom), an electronica album incorporating elements of industrial music, by British-Tamil artist M.I.A. who prefers to spell its title as "/\/\ /\ Y /\", allegedly to avoid its detection in Internet search engines. (ChrisTheDude)
  • 1911 Atlantic hurricane season (nom), a relatively inactive season. (Juliancolton)
  • La Stazione (nom), a former train station in upstate New York that was later converted into an Italian restaurant. (Gyrobo)
  • Galápagos tortoise (nom); with a lifespan in captivity of up to 170 years, it is one of the longest-lived vertebrates. (Minglex, TCO, DrKiernan, Mike Searson and NYMFan69-86)
  • Shakespeare authorship question (nom); concerning the argument that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works traditionally attributed to him, considered a fringe belief by most scholars and historians. Until recently the subject of an arbitration case (Signpost coverage), the article includes mention of itself, citing a reliable source's judgement that Wikipedia's coverage of the authorship controversy "puts to shame anything that ever appeared in standard resources". A blog dedicated to alternative theories protested against the FA promotion, claiming it was "effectively closing the page to any further edits for a year" and represented "inaccurate and unjustified bias against all discussion of the Shakepseare [sic] authorship question". (Tom Reedy, Paul Barlow, Nishidani and Xover)
  • Fantastic Adventures (nom), an American pulp science fiction magazine published from 1939 to 1953. (Mike Christie)
  • Queen Victoria (nom), the longest-reigning female monarch in history. She ruled during a period of monumental change in the United Kingdom and British Empire. (DrKiernan)
  • Akodon spegazzinii (nom), a species of rodent found in northwestern Argentina. (Ucucha)

Two featured articles were delisted:

New featured picture: An inner view of a Seagate 3.5-inch hard disk drive, manufactured in Malaysia in 1998.

Three lists were promoted:

Four featured lists were delisted:

The internal anatomy of a video webcam is exposed in this industrial CT scan.
The Black-winged Stilt, with long pink legs, and a long thin black bill

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

Three sound files were promoted:

  • Overture on Hebrew Themes (nom; related article); Written on commission for the Jewish ensemble Simro, it uses the unusual combination of clarinet, string quartet, and piano. Performed by the Advent Chamber Orchestra in 2009.
  • Fireside Chat 1 On the Banking Crisis (nom; related article), one of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt's famous evening radio speeches during the Great Depression. He reassured worried American citizens and appealed to them to support his agenda.
  • Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech (nom; related article), another speech by Roosevelt, this time addressed to the newly seated 77th United States Congress as his State of the Union address. It expressed fundamental universal rights that went beyond those expressed in the United States Constitution.
The Svyato Mikhailovsky Cathedral in Ischewsk, Republic of Udmurtia in Russia
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.


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2011-04-11

Two cases closed – what does the Coanda decision tell us?

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By Ncmvocalist and Lord Roem

The Arbitration Committee closed two cases during the week, and opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.

Open cases

Noleander (Week 2)

During the week, another 86 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence while proposals and comments were submitted in the workshop by arbitrators, parties and others.

Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AEsh) (Week 5)

During the week, further comments were submitted in the workshop by arbitrators, parties and others.

Closed cases

Henri Coanda (Coanda) (Week 3)

This case was opened after allegations of tendentious POV-pushing and a content dispute involving the usage of sources in the Coanda-1910 article. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by four editors. Drafters Newyorkbrad and Jclemens posted a proposed decision last week, and the case came to a close this week after 14 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.

What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?
  • The scope of sanctions imposed as remedies in arbitration cases, such as topic-bans, should be clearly defined so as to avoid later misunderstandings and disagreements. A sanction remedy should also clearly specify the duration of the sanction and the procedure available to the sanctioned user to seek lifting or modification of the sanction.
  • Lsorin (talk · contribs) is indefinitely topic banned; he cannot edit or comment on articles about the Coandă-1910 aircraft, its inventor Henri Coandă, or the history of the jet engine, anywhere on Wikipedia. Lsorin may request that the topic ban be terminated or modified after at least 6 months have elapsed. In considering any such request, the Committee will give significant weight to whether Lsorin has established an ability to edit collaboratively and in accordance with Wikipedia policies and guidelines in other topic-areas of the project. This topic ban does not preclude Lsorin from responding to good-faith, reasonable inquiries from other editors on his user talkpage seeking information about the Coandă-1910, as long as Lsorin does not misuse this permission.
  • Editors should endeavor in good faith to work toward consensus when content disputes arise. Editors are not required to abandon their beliefs about historical or other facts, or to simulate agreement with article content with which they continue to disagree. However, where consensus is clear, after appropriate discussion and the use of applicable dispute resolution methods, disagreeing editors should not edit against that consensus; it may cross into the line of disruptive editing and may warrant sanctions.

Rodhullandemu (Week 6)

This case was opened to examine the circumstances surrounding the removal of Rodhullandemu (talk · contribs)'s administrative privileges, and his conduct and status as an administrator. When opening the case, the Committee revoked an earlier motion and replaced it with a motion which suspended Rodhullandemu's administrator privileges for the duration of the case. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by six editors, including recused arbitrator Elen of the Roads, and the subject of the case, Rodhullandemu.

Case closed by motion

During the week, the Committee passed a motion. The motion notes that while the case was open, Rodhullandemu was blocked for reasons unrelated to the issues raised in the case, and that since then, the Committee voted to indefinitely block Rodhullandemu. (cf. last week's Signpost coverage). The motion concluded that "[a]ccordingly, Rodhullandemu's administrator privileges are revoked and the case is closed."

Other

AUSC appointments

The Committee has announced the criteria which were used for the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) appointments that were published in last week's Signpost. Unless announced otherwise, these criteria will be used for future AUSC appointments.

Changes requested to CU/OS

The Committee requested (bugzilla:28440) that the deletedhistory, deletedtext, and browsearchive rights be added to the CheckUser and Oversight permission groups; this was to remove the technical limitation that these permission groups must also be administrators to review deleted content.

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2011-04-11

The Toolserver explained; brief news

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By Jarry1250

What is: the Toolserver?

With server space on Wikimedia servers unsuitable for auxiliary web programs ("apps" in modern parlance), several Wikimedia Chapters decided to provide their own services. Of these "toolservers", the most successful was, and still is, operated by Wikimedia Deutschland, occupying the domain name http://toolserver.org.

Although the Toolserver has been part-funded by the WMF, it remains a project privately owned and operated by the German Wikimedia chapter, who currently budget €60k a year for its upkeep (according to the notes from a discussion about Toolserver governance at last month's Wikimedia Conference). Progress on bringing other chapters into Toolserver governance have been slow, but several chapters (including those representing the United Kingdom and Italy) have begun to donate funds towards its upkeep. But for all the tangles over operational issues, the project has boomed. Over 500 developers currently have space on its servers to operate scripts relating to Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap projects, including bots and tools with graphical user interfaces. In addition to the space, developers can also create their own database and access replicated versions of central WMF databases. The project has its own mailing list toolserver-l, and the whole system is monitored by a paid employee of Wikimedia Deutschland, River Tarnell.

Although no comprehensive list of all projects on the Toolserver exists, many tools exist to fill a specific purpose and are linked to from Wikimedia projects directly. For example, Magnus Manske provides a tool that aids in the research of chemical identifiers, and links to it are provided directly from the {{CAS}} template. Some projects also have a much broader scope, such as WikiMiniAtlas tool, from which maps are loaded for the co-ordinate templates dropdowns.

The future of the Toolserver is uncertain. The Foundation has announced a $1.5 million project to develop Wikimedia Labs, which will build upon the "trailblazing" work of the Toolserver pioneers, and has accordingly stopped funding the Toolserver directly. The project is unlikely to be ready until well into 2012, and even then, the Toolserver will undoubtedly still be needed for a neat migration to occur.

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.

  • Developer Tim Starling reported that initial tests of HipHop suggest that switching Wikimedia sites over to it could cut parsing times by 80%. He also called for developers to help with the project (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • The API can now filter contributions and recent changes based on whether or not they are the "top" revision to a page (bugs #26873 and #28455).
  • Wikimedia Deutschland has offered a contract to any developer who wishes to work on "GraphServe", "an infrastructure for rapidly analysing and evaluating Wikipedia's category structure... that allows CatScan-like queries to run in under a second instead of minutes" (wikitech-l mailing list)
  • On 3 April, several new features went live, including an improved {{filepath}} magic word (rev:85256).

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The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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