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10 September 2012

 

2012-09-10

Signpost adapts as news consumption changes

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By The ed17

Over the past three decades, newspapers have undergone several radical changes. Possibly the most significant change is the print-based model's decline and unclear future, as a much greater proportion of users access these stories through the internet.

Yet the internet as we know it is itself undergoing a rapid reconstruction. Over the past several years, the number of personal and laptop computer users has been dropping in favor of those whose online experience is dominated by tablets and smartphones. And in another significant dilution of the power of traditional journalism, the internet has allowed the formerly captive readers of hard-copy newspapers to escape to the wider world of blogs and free news aggregators.

Fortunately (for us), the Signpost has been spared the majority of the problems plaguing the traditional model for news production and consumption, but only because of the unique niche we hold and the medium in which we serve and publish. Still, we also need to keep up with new trends in what has become a very unstable environment. Thanks to the initiative of Yuvi Panda and Notnarayan, the Signpost now has an Android app, free for download on Google Play. A screenshot of the app is available to the right, with more on Wikimedia Commons; more information on the app itself is in this week's Technology report.

We have a question for readers, though: is there sufficient interest from you for Yuvi and Notnarayan to develop a Signpost iOS port, used in Apple devices? Please leave your thoughts on the talk page and vote in this week's poll: Would you be interested in downloading a similar Signpost app onto your iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch)?


In unrelated notes: "In the news" has been renamed to "In the media", and the "Arbitration report" will be discontinued as a separate page until we have enough content to warrant more than a few sentences. The report will now appear in "News and notes" under the 'In brief' section each week.

—The ed17, Signpost editor-in-chief

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2012-09-10

Fixing Wikipedia's help pages one key to editor retention

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By Peter Coombe
Peter Coombe is a community fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation who is researching help pages. He is also an editor on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikinews under the username the wub.
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only. Readers are invited to respond or offer critical commentary in the comments section, while those wishing to author their own op-ed may use the Signpost's opinion desk.


Peter Coombe, Wikimedia community fellow

Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated. There are several issues with the current network of help pages:

  • Too long. Wikipedia:Citing sources is one of the most viewed of all help pages, and it's more than 8000 words long.
  • Widely varying complexity. If you're a new user who wants to learn what the "edit summary" box is for, you're probably not interested in precisely which MediaWiki message defines the autogenerated summary for page blanking. But we told you anyway (at least we used to—thankfully someone has removed this now).
  • Accumulated cruft. Early on in my fellowship I found a help page that was just about how to draw chemical structures using ASCII art. So I thought, that's quaint, it's from 2003, obviously things were a bit different then. I checked with the people at WikiProject Chemicals, and it turns out ASCII art was never encouraged. This was just someone's random page, in Wikipedia space, telling people how to do something that had always been against guidelines. (It was deleted).
  • Navigation is poor. One thing people complain about is that after they arrive at a useful page, it's often hard to find it again. A pattern we see over and over is people adding links on their own userpage when they find useful pages, building their own navigation system, so that they don't lose the useful page. People really shouldn't have to resort to this: pages should be findable.
  • Fragmentation and duplication. We have at least four pages about how to make tables in wiki markup, and it's unclear which is most suitable for a given problem. And they all need to be kept up to date.

For some idea of the scale of the problem, the main help landing page – Help:Contents – now gets around 10,000 hits a day. It's my belief that improving Wikipedia's help system is one of the most important steps we can take to improve editor recruitment and retention. That's why for the past few months I've been working as a Wikimedia community fellow to research how we can improve help pages.


How disorganised is this? Partial map of Wikipedia's help pages, created by User:Ironholds. Full version (5 MB png)


Community project

There were already some community attempts to improve the help pages, such as the Help Project, but sadly they had become fairly inactive. Because improving and maintaining the help pages is such a huge ongoing task, there's no way I can do it on my own, and I really don't want the efforts to end with my fellowship. Therefore I've worked to revive the project: the homepage received a major overhaul, and there's now a monthly newsletter for members and a regularly updated statistics page covering all the pages within scope. (If you want to get involved, or just keep up with the latest developments, do sign up!)

Learning more

The next major step was a large survey, taking in both new and experienced users, to find out what they are looking for help on, how they find it, and what they think of the existing pages. The full results and conclusions are available. Unsurprisingly, "how to use wiki markup" and "how to start a new page" are the most popular topics among new users. What is surprising is that people rate the help on these topics as ok. It's still not great and could certainly use improvement, but it's better than the others. The help topics people really didn't like are how to add references and how to add images. This is fairly consistent across all experience ranges, from newly registered users with no edits to old hands with thousands of edits.

Recently we've also been able to deploy the article feedback tool to help pages. This should allow us to get extremely valuable feedback: until this deployment and the survey I conducted, we really had very little evidence on what users thought of them.

Tutorials

One thing the Help Project created in the past were a couple of "Introduction to ..." tutorials: Introduction to policies and guidelines and Introduction to talk pages. These focused tutorials have a friendly tone and don't overwhelm new users with details. They've been very well received by the new users who find them, so I decided to make the tutorials we do have more prominent, and developed new tutorials in the same vein on topics that the survey suggested would be valuable: Referencing, uploading images, and navigating Wikipedia. These are brand new, so please edit and improve them! But do try to avoid making them too long and detailed, or adding too many links.

The new tutorials make use of vertical tabs, which were well received in usability tests.


"Helped by people"

Probably the clearest finding in the survey is that experienced editors love the results they get from asking questions on another user's talk page, but new users aren't really aware of that as an option. The same is true to a lesser extent of asking questions at the Help Desk, or in IRC, as clinched by one respondent's comment: "I was helped by people, not help pages." The personal touch certainly seems to ease things along, and that's why it's great that we have new initiatives like the Teahouse, and more friendly warning messages that explicitly invite questions on the warner's talk page. Part of my work to redesign the navigation will try to make these question pages more visible to those who could benefit from them. This is particularly true of the Reference Desk, even though the article feedback tool has only been deployed for a few days we have already seen many factual questions appearing in the feedback for help pages.

Making help findable

Over the next month I'll be focusing on the final part of my project: redesigning Help:Contents, the main entry point into our help system. At the moment this page is a mess, with too many subpages, too many links, and not enough explanation. Many of the links that do exist are misleadingly labelled. This was borne out by usability tests I conducted, where people found it difficult to navigate and find the help they were looking for.

A serious problem with Help:Contents is that it has to speak to many different audiences:

  • Readers looking for info ("-1" edits). The biggest volume. Not a primary target of the fellowship, but we certainly need to better support them, help them find places like the Reference desk, and maybe we could entice them to edit with calls to action.
  • Readers who want editors to fix something. Similar to the above.
  • Brand new editors (0–1 edits) looking to get started, most likely with step-by-step tutorials and hand-holding.
  • New editors (10–100 edits) looking for specific help on a topic.
  • Experienced editors and admins (100+ edits) looking for more advanced help.

At the moment links relevant to these different groups are all mixed together. The aims of the redesign are to better funnel these different users to where they can get the right kind of help, and to better expose the personal help mentioned previously for those who want it—and, one hopes, to make the page look a bit more attractive too! Again I'll be doing usability tests to try to identify any potential problems with the new design, and to confirm that it's better than the existing one.

How to get involved

If you're interested in improving help pages, please do join the Help Project and the discussions on its talk page. There are also some open tasks you could get started on. It's going to be a long haul, but this work is something that could really make a big difference to the future of Wikipedia.

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2012-09-10

Author criticizes Wikipedia article; Wales attacks UK government proposal

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By The ed17

Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia

Anthony Hopkins played the lead character in the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the subject of Roth’s complaint

Philip Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, wrote an open letter in the New Yorker addressed to Wikipedia this week, alleging severe inaccuracies in the article on his The Human Stain (2000).

The saga began on Wikipedia in late August, when an IP editor—claiming to be Roth’s official biographer—removed this paragraph from the article:

Salon.com critic Charles Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of The Human Stain, was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white.[1] Roth states there is no connection, as he did not know Broyard had any black ancestry until an article published months after he had started writing his novel.[2]

The IP was reverted within a minute, with the edit summary "Can you verify that?" Nineteen minutes after the revert, the IP removed the paragraph again, saying "the reference to Anatole Broyard ... is wholly inaccurate and therefore pointless. I am Roth's biographer, and have removed it at his request." The article was edited again six minutes later by Parkwells (talk · contribs), who over the next two hours added a significant amount of content to the article. The entire process was seemingly concluded within three total hours, and the article remained in this state until Roth’s open letter was published on 7 September. The new content relevant to Roth’s complaint read:

Kakutani and other critics were struck by the parallels to the life of Anatole Broyard, a writer and the New York Times literary critic in the 1950s and 1960s who was of Louisiana Creole mixed-race descent and passed for white.[3][4][5]

Roth said that he had not learned about Broyard's ancestry until after starting to write this novel.[6]

In this open letter, which was first brought to the community's attention by a Wikimedia Foundation employee, Roth was highly critical of Wikipedia. Interestingly, the ‘interlocutor’, most likely Roth's biographer, either emailed or was emailed by an English Wikipedia administrator, who said that removing the claim would require "secondary sources", even though they acknowledged that "the author is the greatest authority on their own work." This email is what led Roth to publish in the New Yorker, giving the real inspiration for the novel and its protagonist, Coleman Silk, in great detail: the experience of Melvin Tumin, a long-tenured professor of sociology at Princeton, with a seemingly innocuous question which turned into multiple major accusations of racism.

The question, "Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?", was prompted by the constant absence of two students from his class. Unfortunately for Tumin, 'spooks' happened to be an old derogatory term for African Americans, and both students turned out to be from that race. It was only several months later that Tumin could clear his name, after "several lengthy depositions" and what Roth described as a "witch hunt".

It appears that while Wikipedia was correct both before and after the removals—the article versions noted that the claim was a literary reviewer's opinion, and that Roth had rebutted the claim—the article never stated the genesis of the book, leaving the Wikipedia article with phrases Roth called "not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip".

However, it also appears that the open letter was the first time Roth has identified Tumin's story as the basis for The Human Stain.

References

  1. ^ Taylor, Charles (April 24, 2000). "Life and life only". Salon.com.
  2. ^ Philip Roth interview at bloomberg.com
  3. ^ Taylor (2000), "Lie and Life Only, Salon, Quote: "The thrill of gossip become literature hovers over “The Human Stain”: There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years. But Coleman Silk is a singularly conceived and realized character, and his hidden racial past is a trap Roth has laid for his readers..."
  4. ^ Lorrie Moore, "The Wrath of Athena", New York Times, 7 May 2000, accessed 20 August 2012. Quote: "In addition to the hypnotic creation of Coleman Silk -- whom many readers will feel, correctly or not, to be partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard -- Roth has brought Nathan Zuckerman into old age, continuing what he began in American Pastoral."
  5. ^ Brent Staples, "Editorial Observer; Back When Skin Color Was Destiny, Unless You Passed for White", New York Times, 7 September 2003, accessed 25 January 2011. Quote: "This was raw meat for Philip Roth, who may have known the outlines of the story even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. told it in detail in 'The New Yorker' in 1996. When Mr. Roth's novel about passing -- The Human Stain -- appeared in 2000, the character who jettisons his black family to live as white was strongly reminiscent of Mr. Broyard."
  6. ^ Robert Hilferty (2008-09-16). "Philip Roth Serves Up Blood and Guts in 'Indignation' (Update1)". Bloomberg. I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book.

In brief

  • Wales on the so-called 'snooper's charter': Jimmy Wales sharply and publicly criticized an initiative by the British government to track internet and email use in the country when giving evidence to a British parliamentary committee this week. Using hyperbolic language, he labeled the proposal as "technologically incompetent" and "something I would expect from the Iranians or the Chinese." He was joined in this criticism by the founder of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee. Wales also stated that to protect web users, Wikimedia Foundation projects would "immediately" begin encrypting all British web connections if the bill was enacted. (More: zdnet, Guardian, Register, Telegraph)
  • Conservative Party chairman edits own Wikipedia entry: The Guardian, among others, reports that the new British Conservative Party chairman, Grant Shapps, edited his own Wikipedia entry to remove information about his school history and political donations, while adding a "glowing" account of his work with homeless individuals. Shapps stated to the Daily Mail that "these days when I see stuff that's blatantly wrong on my Wiki page, I just shrug my shoulders. If people want to claim I'm a Jehovah's Witness, agnostic or crashed a car into a school wall—all real edits I'd previously changed—then I just leave them to it." The Conservative Party backed Shapps' actions, saying "Individuals are free to monitor the information that is available about them online—particularly when this information is purposefully vandalised by others. This is absolutely not in breach of Wikipedia rules."
  • Administrator attrition: The Telegraph has once again drawn attention to the declining number of active administrators on the English Wikipedia, as previously covered in the Signpost in a 2010 op-ed and a 2012 investigative report.

    Reader comments

2012-09-10

Not a "Gangsta's Paradise", but still rappin'

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By Crisco 1492
OutKast
Kanye West
Three hip hop discographies were promoted this week: click on the rappers' names to see their oeuvres.
This issue covers content promoted from 1 to 8 September 2012
In the Grey Cup, the Montreal Alouettes and Edmonton Eskimos face off.
Bronwyn Oliver's Palm
A featured portrait of a European Wildcat
A cutaway view of an M4A4 Sherman tank
The Christmas flood of 1717

Eleven featured articles were promoted this week:

  • Grey Cup (nom) by Resolute. The Grey Cup is the name of both the championship game of the Canadian Football League and the trophy awarded to the victorious team. Commissioned in 1909, it was first won by the University of Toronto Varsity Blues. In 1920 the championship took an east-versus-west format and has since been played, almost exclusively by Canadian teams, in various weather conditions. The Toronto Argonauts have the most championships, while the Edmonton Eskimos have won the greatest number of consecutive cups.
  • SMS Kaiser (1911) (nom) by Parsecboy. SMS Kaiser was a German battleship and the lead ship of the class of the same name. Launched in 1911, she was armed with ten 30.5-centimeter (12.0 in) guns in five twin turrets. After numerous conflicts during World War I in the Atlantic ocean, she was hit during the Battle of Jutland, suffering minor damage. When Germany lost the war, Kaiser was scuttled with the fleet at Scapa Flow, but later raised and broken up.
  • Stephen Hawking (nom) by Fayedizard. Hawking (born 1942) is a British theoretical physicist and author known for his work on relativity, gravitational singularities, and black holes, and for popular science writings on these theories. Almost entirely paralysed by a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, he speaks using a speech generating device and is limited to a wheelchair. Hawking has received many awards, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom from the United States.
  • The Concert in Central Park (nom) by GreatOrangePumpkin. The Concert in Central Park is the first live album by American folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel. Released in 1982, it was recorded at a free benefit concert with a 500,000-strong audience. Originally conceived by Gordon Davis and Ron Delsener, the concert featured a 21-song set of duets, solos, and covers; nineteen of these were used on the album. The album was a commercial success, but the duo decided against a permanent reunion.
  • Cley Marshes (nom) by Jimfbleak. Cley Marshes is a 176-hectare (430-acre) nature reserve on the North Sea coast of England and the oldest managed by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust. Established in 1926, the marshy reserve is known for its birds; it serves, for example, as a breeding place for scarce species like Pied Avocets as well as a resting place for migratory species. Humans have historically used the area for farming, and it held a prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War.
  • Giant anteater (nom) by LittleJerry. The giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) is an insectivorous mammal native to Central and South America; males top out at 217 cm (7.12 ft) in length and a weight of 41 kg (90 lb). One of four extant anteater species, it is the largest and most terrestrial of its brethren. It has featured in pre-Columbian myths and folktales as well as modern popular culture, but is now considered vulnerable to extinction: it has been extirpated from some parts of its former range.
  • Bronwyn Oliver (nom) by Hamiltonstone. Oliver (1959–2006) was an Australian sculptor who worked primarily with metal. Raised in New South Wales, she trained in Sydney and London. Her aesthetic works demanded high technical skill and are now featured in collections throughout Australia. Shortly before her suicide, she was short-listed for the Clemenger Contemporary Art Award.
  • "The Post-Modern Prometheus" (nom) by Gen. Quon. "The Post-Modern Prometheus" is a 1997 episode of the American science fiction television series The X-Files. Directed by Chris Carter, the episode follows FBI agents Mulder and Scully as they track a genetic creation who is forcibly impregnating women. Inspired by Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, the episode was watched by 18.68 million viewers and garnered seven Emmy nominations.
  • Melford Stevenson (nom) by John and Malleus Fatuorum. Stevenson (1902–1987) was an English barrister and later a High Court judge who was known for his controversial conduct and outspoken views. Starting his legal career with work in insolvency, Stevenson became a Deputy Judge Advocate during World War II; in his later career Stevenson heard several high profile cases, and by the time he became a High Court judge he was known for his strict sentencing.
  • Inocybe saliceticola (nom) by J Milburn. Inocybe saliceticola is a fungal species found in moist habitats in Nordic countries. Its brown caps can measure up to 40 millimetres (1.6 in) across, while the stems can be up to 62 millimetres (2.4 in) long. It grows in mycorrhizal association with willow, but species favoured by the fungus may include beech and alder taxa. I. saliceticola was first described in 2009 and has been found in Finland and Sweden.
  • Auriga (constellation) (nom) by Keilana. Auriga (meaning "chariot") is a constellation visible from the northern hemisphere and parts of the southern hemisphere, covering an area of 657 square degrees. Its brightest star, Capella, is an unusual multiple star system; other astronomical bodies are located in and around the constellation. Ptolemy listed it as a constellation, but the Chinese grouped Auriga's stars in other constellations.

Ten featured lists were promoted this week:

  • Outkast discography (nom) by Sufur222. The American hip hop duo Outkast have released 8 albums, 35 singles, and 21 music videos since their 1994 debut Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. Their most successful release to date is the double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which topped two charts in the US.
  • List of international cricket centuries by Sunil Gavaskar (nom) by Vensatry. Sunil Gavaskar scored 35 centuries at the international level during his 16-year career, the third highest of any Indian cricketer. The first batsman to surpass 10,000 Test cricket runs, he scored his first century in 1971.
  • List of Formula One fatal accidents (nom) by NapHit. In Formula One racing, the highest class of open-wheeled auto racing, there have been 49 fatalities caused by automotive accidents. The most recent to die during a Grand Prix was Ayrton Senna in 1994, and two more have died in other races since then.
  • Nebula Award for Best Script (nom) by PresN. The Nebula Award for Best Script is awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for the best science fiction script published in the preceding calendar year. The award was established in 1974; fourteen awards were given before the award was discontinued in 2010.
  • List of Kings XI Punjab cricketers (nom) by Thine Antique Pen. In the Indian cricket franchise Kings XI Punjab, at least fifty-seven players have played in at least one game since it was established in 2008; five of these players have served as captain. Shaun Marsh has won the most runs for the team.
  • CPJ International Press Freedom Awards (nom) by Khazar2 and Crisco 1492. The International Press Freedom Awards from the American-based Committee to Protect Journalists have been awarded since 1991 to four to seven journalists and publications worldwide which work to promote press freedom in the face of hardship.
  • Mystikal discography (nom) by Sufur222. The American rapper Mystikal has released eight albums, twenty-two singles and fourteen music videos since 1995. Starting with a self-titled debut, Mystikal saw his greatest success in the US in 2000 with Let's Get Ready. In 2001 his only number one song, "Stutter", was released.
  • 30–30 club (nom) by Bloom6132. In Major League Baseball, the 30–30 club is the group of batters who have collected 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases in a single season. This was achieved first by Ken Williams, and 36 times since. The rate at which players have been reaching this number has increased over the past twenty years.
  • Kanye West discography (nom) by Holiday56. The American rapper Kanye West has released eleven albums, four mixtapes, a hundred singles, and eighty-four music videos since his debut on "Slow Jamz". He is among the best selling digital artists and his debut album The College Dropout was certified double platinum.
  • List of Indian Premier League centuries (nom) by Vibhijain. The Indian Premier League, a Twenty20 professional league from India, has seen 24 centuries scored since the league's establishment in 2008. The Delhi Daredevils, with five centuries, have scored the most centuries, while two franchises have yet to make any.

Seven featured pictures were promoted this week:

Space shuttles Atlantis (foreground) and Endeavour on launch pads in Florida


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2012-09-10

WikiProject Fungi

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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.
The "indigo Lactarius" fungus Lactarius indigo
The "wrinkled peach" fungus Rhodotus palmatus
the "orange mycena" fungus Mycena leaiana

After a week's hiatus, the WikiProject Report returns with an interview featuring WikiProject Fungi. Started in March 2006, the project has grown to include over 9,000 pages, including 47 Featured Articles and 176 Good Articles. The project maintains a list of high priority missing articles and stubs that need expansion. We interviewed Casliber and J Milburn.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Fungi? Do you have an academic background in mycology? Do you enjoy eating any varieties of fungi?

Casliber: My father's family (being Polish) collected wild mushrooms for eating. He had a bunch of books with illustrations that I found fascinating when I was a kid. I guess I still do. I do like eating different varieties too.
J Milburn: I started writing articles on mushrooms because I had access to a few books on mushrooms- I quickly realised just how fascinating a subject mycology is, and how the existence of other interested editors makes writing so much more rewarding. I have no background in academic biology; it's just a hobby for me.

The project is home to 46 Featured Articles and 171 Good Articles. Have you worked on any of these articles? Are there any resources you've found that are particularly useful in sourcing fungi articles?

Casliber: I've nominated seven FAs and co-nominated two with Sasata. Sasata and I have been meaning to collaborate on some of the heftier ones....sometime
J Milburn: As of right now, I have nominated four FAs and co-nominated one with Sasata. I've written over a dozen good articles, and reviewed many more. One amazing resource for fungi articles is Mushroom Observer; think of it as a Flickr for mushrooms. Many of our 31 featured pictures are originally from that site, and countless articles are illustrated thanks to the site's membership. Cyberliber is another useful website, archiving a number of mycological journals and academic texts.

The project has a list of "unwritten articles" that need to be created and stubs needing expansion. What have been the greatest challenges preventing the project from expanding Wikipedia's coverage of fungi? What are some sections or templates a non-expert can easily contribute to existing articles on fungi?

Casliber: It's a fairly trouble-free area to edit really. Some more obscure authors and fungi lack good online sources and require some ferreting around libraries...and university access to online journals helps immensely!
J Milburn: I agree with Casliber: much use has to be made of hardcopy books and scholarly databases, rather than a quick Google Web search. The key difficulty is that the WikiProject covers such a huge area; there are hundreds of thousands of named and described species of fungi, and there could be millions more as yet undescribed. I try to write articles about more significant species when I can: our articles on the largest ever and a a few familiar woodland species were written by me. That said, I also write about comparatively less important species.

How difficult has it been to acquire images for fungi articles? Are there any species of fungi that are more difficult to locate and photograph than others?

Casliber: As a field, one of the main issues is accurate identification - made much tricker in countries like Australia where only 5% of the mushroom species have been officially described (!). Timing is the key, as if they are not throwing up mushrooms, then they are to all intents and purposes invisible...and some species only seem to fruit every few years or so (!) We've had some great photographers such as Luridiformis (talk · contribs) contribute over the years though.
J Milburn: I'm based in the UK, and so identification is less difficult for me. However, many species can be accurately identified only by microscopic characteristics. As I've said, Mushroom Observer is one excellent resource for images, and there are others, too. Also, I've found that academics are often willing to share their images if you ask nicely. Three of my featured articles are illustrated thanks to the generosity of the academics who first documented the respective species.

How does Wikipedia's coverage of fungi compare to the coverage of other living things? Are the fungi of any geographic regions better covered than others?

Casliber: It has improved dramatically since 2007. Amanita phalloides was the first Featured Article in 2007. Since then the FA crop has grown to 47, with Sasata and J Milburn producing some great content. Active writers often write about what is near them or what they know, hence I've buffed some content on Australian fungi which are generally poorly known. We've buffed material from Europe and North America. Africa is underrepresented, and some of the better known widely cultivated fungi such as regular button mushrooms and Shiitake have been in the too-hard basket for a while...but we'll get there....
J Milburn: Inevitably, I started by writing about fungi local to me, and perhaps even fungi I'd photographed. However, I've since branched out, writing about fungi from North America, Asia and Australasia. Africa and South America are probably underrepresented, but that is perhaps true of mycology generally, not just on Wikipedia. As for fungi compared to other areas, by FA and especially GA count, mycology compares well to botany (though lags well behind zoology).

Next week, we'll revel in the spotlight of India's silver screen. Until then, check out the production values of the Report's archived material.

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2012-09-10

Two Wikipedians may face jury trial

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By Tony1 and The ed17

The gloves come off: Internet Brands sues volunteers; WMF sues Internet Brands

James Heilman, one of the two volunteer Wikipedians named in the lawsuit

In dramatic events that came to light last week, two English Wikipedia volunteers—Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday)—are being sued in the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Internet Brands ("IB"), the owner of Wikitravel.org. Both Wikipedians have also been volunteer Wikitravel editors (and in Holliday's case, a volunteer Wikitravel administrator). IB's complaints focus on both editors' encouragement of their fellow Wikitravel volunteers to migrate to a proposed non-commercial travel guidance site that would be under the umbrella of the WMF (Signpost story "Tough journey for new travel guide").

Disenchantment within the volunteer Wikitravel community appears to concern an intensification of advertising on the site, IB's technical management, and the company's treatment of the volunteers who have built the CC-licensed content over many years. In today's New York Times article, "Travel site built on wiki ethos now bedevils its owner", veteran journalist Noam Cohen writes that, according to Heilman, "as many as 38 of the 48 most experienced and trusted volunteers at Wikitravel have said they will move to the Wikimedia project". The migration of the remaining Wikitravel volunteers to the foundation would come six years after German-speaking Wikitravel editors walked out of the project soon after Internet Brands acquired it, forking into a new Wikivoyage site, followed soon after by their fellow Italian-speaking editors. The non-profit association that runs Wikivoyage voted three months ago to join the proposed travel-related WMF project.

After months of community-led discussion on Meta, last Thursday the WMF's Deputy General Counsel, Kelly Kay, announced that the board "is moving forward with the creation of this new project", and had filed a lawsuit "seeking a judicial declaration that IB has no lawful right to impede, disrupt or block" the creation of a new WMF travel website.

Kay's statement accuses IB of "disrupting this process by suing the two volunteers to intimidate other community volunteers from exercising their rights to freely discuss the establishment of a new community focused on the creation of a new, not-for-profit travel guide under the Creative Commons licenses." She said the foundation believes it is the real target of IB's legal action, and that its "only recourse is to file a lawsuit to deal head on with Internet Brand’s actions over the past few months in trying to impede the creation of this new travel project."

We will steadfastly and proudly defend our community’s right to free speech, and we will support these volunteer community members in their legal defense. We do not feel it is appropriate for Internet Brands, a large corporation with hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, to seek to intimidate two individuals.  — Kelly Kay, WMF Deputy General Counsel

On an ominous note, IB's lawsuit states that "further investigation continues to reveal additional co-conspirators" and that it expects to amend its action to include additional defendants, among them "other Administrators that have been most corrupt in this scheme and any entity or individuals that provided them support or otherwise participated in these wrongful acts. This potentially includes the Wikimedia Foundation, members of its Board [and] other individual members of the Foundation".
IB's lawsuit against the volunteers

Among other things, IB's 57-paragraph lawsuit:

  • states that Wikitravel's content "can be created, deleted, modified, modified, and otherwise edited by anyone", and that every contributor to the site "gives the right to anyone else to copy the content", provided attribution to the original content creator is given and the CC-licensing is retained;
  • asserts the company's ownership of the trademark Wikitravel, and that this has been established "at great labor and expense";
  • claims that the use of a similar term (Wiki Travel Guide) by Holliday and Heilman "is intentionally designed to replicate" IB's trademark (the US Lanham Act is cited);
  • alleges Heilman "announced" that the new WMF site would be called "Wiki Travel Guide", and accuses Holliday and Heilman of attempting to trade on the trademark, confuse the marketplace, and violate the CC-license;
  • points out that Heilman is a board member of Wikimedia Canada (without clarifying its status as an independent entity or that chapters have no power to announce the creation of a new WMF sister project);
  • reports that Heilman met with others at Wikimania on 12 July "to reach a further meeting of the minds as to the unlawful acts to be undertaken" (although there is no acknowledgement that IB's Chief Marketing Officer Chuck Hoover flew to Washington DC for the meeting, having publicly announced his intention to participate);
  • takes exception to a number of instances of emailing within the Wikitravel volunteer community, in which it is claimed that the two volunteers "deliberately misrepresented facts and conspired with each other and many more to violate several laws in order to gain personally"; and
  • alleges that as a result of the actions the company is complaining of, Holliday and Heilman "have been unjustly enriched and Internet Brands has been injured and damaged."

Defendants are profiting, directly or indirectly, through the use of Internet Brands’ Wikitravel Trademark in a deliberate, willful, intentional and wrongful attempt to trade off of Internet Brands’ goodwill, reputation and financial investment in its Wikitravel trademark.  — Paragraph 50, Internet Brands' legal complaint

IB asks the court to restrain the defendants (and potentially the WMF by implication) from making visible use of the Wikitravel trademark; to award damages and costs against Holliday and Heilman; and to award punitive damages against the volunteers (i.e., to deter anyone from engaging in similar conduct). IB has specifically asked the court to consider Ryan Holliday's business as liable to the court's adjudication of his personal liability, and has asked for a jury trial.

The Signpost understands that Heilman has not yet been served with a summons and legal papers, and that after he is served he will have up to 30 days to provide a written response to the court and the plaintiff. The WMF has arranged for both volunteers to be represented by the high-profile international legal firm Cooley LLP, which has expertise in trademark, copyright, user-generated content, intellectual property, and competition law. Cooley LLP—comprising some 300 litigation attorneys—will also represent the foundation in its lawsuit against Internet Brands. IB is represented in both actions by Wendy E Giberti of iGeneral Counsel in Beverly Hills, CA.

The WMF's lawsuit against IB

Although the right to fork CC-licensed content has been assumed to be legal, it has received little judicial attention in the US. The foundation is asking the Superior Court of California in the County of San Francisco to declare that:

  • IB has no right to limit the use of user-created CC-licensed content on Wikitravel;
  • all such content may be freely migrated without interference from IB;
  • IB has no lawful right to prevent current or former Wikitravel volunteers from freely contributing to a new Wikimedia-owned travel website;
  • Wikimedia may contact, communicate with, or express support for any current or former volunteer Wikitravel authors or administrators who are seeking to participate in the new website, even if this results in those people no longer contributing to Wikitravel; and
  • Wikimedia may assist people to copy and migrate content from Wikitravel to a WMF or third-party site.

The foundation is asking that costs be awarded against IB.

The German news portal heise.de reports in its story "Right to fork: Wikimedia sues Wikitravel operators" that IB told them the company "has no problem that Wikimedia is launching a new travel site—but we insist that the foundation respect our copyright and trademark rights, and the laws against unfair competition." (the Signpost's translation)

The Signpost has been unable to ascertain the likely timeframe for each action, but understands that the legal processes will probably hold up the launching of the new site for some months.


The Signpost is a volunteer news outlet dedicated to providing fair and balanced reportage to the Wikipedia communities. It is independent of the Wikimedia Foundation, its board of trustees, and the various independent chapters. The content here does not represent the views of any particular editor or group on any website, Wikimedia-affiliated or otherwise.

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2012-09-10

Researchers find that Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus"

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By Jan eissfeldt

Readability of Simple English and English Wikipedias called into question

In its September issue, the peer-reviewed journal First Monday published The readability of Wikipedia, reporting research which shows that the English Wikipedia is struggling to meet Flesch reading ease test criteria, while the Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus".

The statistical method developed by Flesch (1948) focuses on two core components of the concept of readability: word length and sentence length. The test is widely used in the US, with areas of application ranging from Pentagon files to life insurance policies. The concept has been adapted for other languages, including a German version by Toni Amstad (1978). The Flesch test uses the following formula to indicate the readability of a given text:[1]

Higher scores indicate material that is easier to read, and lower scores that it is more difficult. While in theory the results can vary widely due to the artificial construction of very complex or simple sentences, in practice natural English typically results in a score between 0 and 100, which can be interpreted as shown in the table.

Score Notes
90.0–100.0 Very easy
80.0–90.0 Easy
70.0–80.0 Fairly easy
60.0–70.0 Standard
50.0–60.0 Fairly difficult
30.0–50.0 Difficult
0.0–30.0 Very difficult

The authors assume that the English Wikipedia should score around 60–70 on average ("standard"), and Simple English, which explicitly aims at audiences with less advanced literacy skills, around 80 ("easy"). An older study, Besten and Dalle (2008), had found on the basis of the same test method that the overall readability of Simple had decreased from around 80 in 2003 to just above 70 in 2006.

The 2012 study examined two 2010 database dumps it sampled from English Wikipedia and Simple. For the study, the scientists filtered out lists, redirects, and disambiguation pages, and removed components such as tables, headings, and images. Thus, the study examined 88% of the English and 85% of Simple Wikipedia's articles in the database dump. In a second step, the methodology excluded short articles with fewer than six sentences (due to their likely wide fluctuation in readability).

The analysis found that English Wikipedia articles scored 51 on average ("fairly difficult") with more than 70% of all articles scoring less than the set goal of 60 ("standard"). Simple scored 62 on average ("standard") with 95% of all entries below the set 80 ("easy") goal. In addition, a set of around 9600 respective articles was comparable between both Wikipedia versions; Simple scored 61 on these, while the related English Wikipedia articles scored 49.

The paper argues that the creation of Simple as a solution for readability issues of the English Wikipedia with some audiences has run into difficulties. The average reading ease of Simple, while still above the English Wikipedia, declined compared to the findings of Besten and Dalle in 2008 (2003: 80, 2006: just above 70) to 62 on average. Based on the outlined methodology, the authors conclude that Simple has "lost its focus … this version now seems suitable for the average reader, instead of aiming at those with limited language abilities."

The English Wikipedia findings indicate that the results of another study in 2010, focusing on the readability of English Wikipedia entries on cancer (Signpost coverage), cannot be fully generalized. The paper in 2010 found that articles in the targeted topic area scored about 30 on average.

However, both studies show that the English Wikipedia potentially excludes major segments of the English-speaking world, including (for example) large parts of the US public. According to a major study on literacy in the US in 2002, 21–23% (extrapolated: more than 40 million people) "demonstrated skills in the lowest level of prose, document, and quantitative proficiencies".

The authors of the study on readability of Wikipedia have set up a demo site where users can calculate the readability of English and Simple English Wikipedia pages based on the automatic measure they deployed in the paper.

Brief notes

2012-09-10

Mmmm, milkshake...

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By Jarry1250

August engineering report published

“ In August 2012:
  • 97 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki (up by five from June)
  • The total number of unreviewed commits steady at 360.
  • About 35 shell requests were processed (no change).
  • 25 developers received developer access to Git and Wikimedia Labs (down by 55).
  • Wikimedia Labs now hosts 120 projects (up by six), 214 instances (up by three) and 587 users (up by 28).
 ”

—Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog

A slide outlining Echo, a new notifications system that would replace watchlists and is already in development

The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for August 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment). Three of the four headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: the site outage caused by a fibre cut in early August, refinements to the active editors metric, and major work on the Wiki Loves Monuments app, launched last week. The report drew attention to the work of the WMF's Internationalization team on the Universal Language Selector (ULS; see previous Signpost coverage), Project Milkshake to create "generic jQuery components for commonly needed internationalisation features" and WebFonts.

Other items covered in the report include work by WMF Performance Engineer Asher Feldman to expand the number of MySQL servers in the Foundation's secondary data centre Ashburn, and by Tim Starling to write a new Redis-based client for session handling. The two developments are linked insofar as both will be needed for the Foundation to meet its target of making the Virginia site Wikimedia's primary data centre within the next quarter, in an attempt to boost performance. Elsewhere, WMF Security Engineer Chris Steipp worked on adding two new major features to the AbuseFilter extension (global rules and global throttling), for improved detection and prevention of cross-wiki spam. It was, however, a slower month for the TimedMediaHandler, Echo, OAuth and ResourceLoader 2.0 projects.

The monthly report is also a good source of tech news that had otherwise slipped under the radar—in this case, that work on Flow (a talk page reform project) will start in January and that a new mirror for Wikimedia data has been found ("network management solutions" firm), who have also agreed to replicate non-essential data such as "page view files, archives, and more, as well as a full copy of our media files". This month saw the creation of the "Micro Design Improvements" team, an ad-hoc group of staffers who will look at "small but useful design" improvements for MediaWiki, including this week a proposed reworking on the edit window.

Among other news, the first Wikipedia Engineering Meetup (held on 15 August in WMF headquarters in San Francisco), first mentioned in last month's report, attracted approximately 100 developers. The series of two-monthly meetings is intended "to showcase Wikimedia's interesting engineering problems and products to the local developer community"; the inaugural meetup "featured talks about Mobile engineering, Analytics and the VisualEditor".

In brief

Signpost poll
MediaWiki Foundation

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.

  • The Signpost on your mobile: As covered this week in an editorial, readers with a phone running Google's Android operating system can now read the Signpost on their phones using a dedicated app. The app, developed by former WMF mobile team member (and now volunteer developer) Yuvi Panda, features a mobile-friendly homepage and reading interface, as well as "share" links and a notification system that alerts users when a new edition has been published. The app is available to download for free from Google Play, which is best accessed using the Play Store app on your compatible device.
  • Lua timetable assessed: In light of the largely positive coverage surrounding new template programming language Lua, WMF Engineering Community Manager Sumana Harihareswara took the opportunity to clarify the predicted timetable for deployments. Writing to Wikitech Ambassadors (users who have expressed an interest in spreading tech-related news to their communities), she confirmed that a wider release to Wikimedia wikis was not imminent (being tentatively scheduled this week for early next year) and would be dependent on an assessment in October of the results of the current testing phase. In related news, a user-led study of the "Luaification" of common templates concluded that it was simply too difficult to tell until better tools were in place to separate the effect of the intended changes from environmental confounding factors.
  • HTML5 coming (part III): After three years of speculation and failed attempts to implement it (see previous Signpost coverage), all Wikimedia wikis will be set once more to HTML5 mode on September 17 (wikitech-l mailing list). The news comes two months after WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier expressed renewed interest in the switchover and suggested late July as a possible time to bring it into effect. Developers hope that the move, which should – if everything goes to plan – have little or no visible effect, will this time be met with more permanency than the two previous efforts to future-proof Wikimedia wikis in this way. Since the announcement, the possibility of browsers dropping support for features not in the HTML5 specification (such as font tags) has caused some concern; there is, however, little to suggest any imminent danger, suggesting any decision regarding converting existing usage of such features could be postponed. Any such postponement would of course bring into play the impact of the new wikitext parser, which is unlikely to arrive much before the new year.
  • MediaWikiWidgets.org: is the perfect the enemy of the good? It was suggested this week that MediaWikiWidgets.org, an external site that hosts easy-to-install "widgets" to non-Wikimedia wikis, be merged into MediaWiki.org (wikitech-l). Although the widgets system is widely used, security concerns have meant that it garners little but disdain from a significant percentage of mainstream developers; consequently, views on seemingly legitimising existing widgets (regardless of quality) proved mixed with a clear consensus yet to emerge. An alternative proposal that emerged was the development of a better widgets system to replace the existing security-problem-prone construction.
  • Translation memory upgrade: Translation memory – the use of a substantial back library of translations to inform new ones – is now available to Wikimedia installations of Extension:Translate, rather than just external translation site translatewiki.net, which handles MediaWiki's interface translation (Wikimedia Blog). Developer Niklas Laxström used the opportunity to explain some of the difficulties he encountered in implementing the service on the Wikimedia cluster.
  • Gerrit corruption: The Gerrit-managed code repositories of several extensions and other WMF-hosted projects were temporarily unavailable this week (Wikimedia blog; also wikitech-l). For reasons as yet unknown, a significant number of commits in these repositories were left "dangling": that is to say, important data linking these code revisions to those that preceded and succeeded them was lost. All such cases were later fixed by WMF developer Chad Horohoe, who first managed to prevent the commits being lost forever, and then piece the repositories back together. In a couple of cases, repositories were more seriously corrupted – with committs actively being lost – and are yet to be fully recreated from backups at time of writing. In other news, Wikimedia Labs, which hosts (among other things) a test Gerrit instance, will shortly be dropping its "beta" designation, it was announced this week, promoting some refinements to the way in which accounts are handled.

    Reader comments

2012-09-10

Closing Wikiquette; Image Filter; Education Program and Momento extensions

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By J36miles

Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include:

Proposals

Adding broad topic box to main page
A new section on the main page has been suggested to encourage editing of more topics. This box would contain broad topics that may persuade a reader to become an editor.
Closing Wikiquette assistance
Wikiquette assistance is a place where users who feel they are being treated uncivilly can request assistance to come to a mutual solution.
Personal Image Filter
An image filter that lets users toggle images on and off is being proposed.
Main page redesign
A competition has begun to find a better alternative to the current main page, which was last redesigned in March 2006.
New Village Pump layout
A new layout has been suggested for the Village Pump so that each topic gets it own dedicated thread.

Requests for comment

Turning on Education Program extension
Should the Education Program extension be turned on to make it easier for the community to track assignments?
Turning on the Memento Extension
The Memento extension makes it easier to access the historical version of articles.
Pending Changes Level 2
Before a new version of Pending Changes goes live, some more discussion is needed to work out the finer points of the process.
Wording for Requested Moves policy
Clarification is requested for wording in regards to the Requested Moves policy and Article Titles.
Categorization of persons
Should biographies be further categorized to include genetic and cultural heritage, faith or sexual orientation?

Reader comments
If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
The Signpost is looking for new talent.
  1. ^ http://www.editcentral.com/gwt1/EditCentral.html
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