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4 March 2013

 

2013-03-04

We must do more to turn readers into editors

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By Ypnypn
Ypnypn is an inclusionist who has been editing Wikipedia since 2010. He wrote the essay Don't overwhelm the newbies.
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk.

Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.

This made me realize how much of the general populace views Wikipedia – as a website put together by some mysterious people, probably professionals. "that anyone can edit" is a phrase like Coca-Cola's "It's the real thing", seen a thousand times without ever really being thought about. The numerous [edit] links? Who knows what will happen if you click, but probably not worth finding out. Most sites have dozens of random links floating around, so people tend to mentally adblock them, especially considering that the links are all the way on the right side of the page.

That's right, a simple change of moving the [edit] links to a more visible location might gather many new editors. Companies spend vast amounts of money and time to determine the perfect layout to attract customers; we need to spend just as much effort trying out various tweaks to determine what will attract editors. This needn't harm the readers, if done right. But we absolutely must engage in trial-and-error to figure what will work best. Maybe my suggestion will help; maybe not. But there's no excuse for ignoring the issue.

Of course, the position of the [edit] links is hardly the only reason for the popular misunderstanding of Wikipedia. MediaWiki may be simpler than HTML, but is nothing compared to Microsoft Word. It's not a coincidence that so many Wikipedians understand some form of programming. VisualEditor should help the issue somewhat, but it's years behind schedule. Other causes may include the uniqueness of Wikipedia: readers have no experience with the idea that online info comes directly from other readers.

But perhaps the main reason why readers don't realize that this is really an encyclopedia "that anyone can edit" is that it isn't. Consider this: out of the top ten articles visited per this, three are semi-protected. Most major articles like United States, science, sun, apple and encyclopedia are protected (from a reader's perspective), so the edit links don't show up at all. While it's been claimed that only 5% of articles are protected, these more or less coincide with the 5% most viewed articles (with plenty of exceptions which prove the rule). Readers don't see protection as an unfortunate action taken to prevent vandalism; they see it the same way they can't edit the New York Times's website, evidence of a clear-cut distinction between readers and editors. To make matters worse, so-called anonymous editors can't create pages (unlike in most language versions of Wikipedia), so a casual visitor will have little inclination to believe that (s)he can, indeed, take part in building the world's greatest source of knowledge.

There isn't a simple solution to this. Encouraging helpful edits while preventing unhelpful ones is an ultimately impossible task. But as time goes on, we feel an increasing need to fully-protect Wikipedia's reputation by semi-protecting its articles, making us resemble Citizendium. It's easy to revert vandalism; let's not focus solely on preventing it no matter the cost.

The introduction of pending changes protection may help somewhat. Readers are once again given the [edit] links, thus being invited to contribute. But after they click "submit (not save) changes", they are told that their submission will need to be reviewed by an experienced editor. Encyclopædia Britannica offers the same thing, and almost any newspaper will take a look at what you mail them. The concept of readers being the writers is completely lacking. And in any case, pending changes can not feasibly be applied to thousands of pages, as a huge backlog would quickly develop.

A lot of effort has been spent on trying to enhance newbies' experiences. This effort, including the Teahouse, is certainly vital. But it does nothing about getting people to make a single edit in the first place. We're so used to seeing Wikipedia through the eyes of editors that we don't understand how it looks to a reader. We enjoy claiming that "All readers are editors" without doing anything to make this saying a reality. Before I started seriously editing, I didn't even know what a star or plus in the upper right corner meant. The average visitor has no clue and no real desire to have a clue – fact: most people who want to join Wikipedia already did – and we don't really care, preferring to spend time making new rules about hyphens and dashes, and designing a Teahouse to help newbies navigate them.

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2013-03-04

Outing of editor causes firestorm

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By The ed17
Editor's note: Outing and other privacy-related issues are taken very seriously on the English Wikipedia. Given the sensitive nature of this story, readers are requested to respect these policies in any comments they make below.

"WP:OUTING", the normally little-noticed policy corner of the English Wikipedia that governs the release of editors' personal information, has suddenly been brought to wider attention after long-term contributor and featured article writer Cla68 was indefinitely blocked last week. This snowballed into several other blocks, a desysopping by ArbCom, and a request for arbitration.

Alleged outing

The saga stems from a post by Cla68 on the talk page of User:Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and its sister sites. There, Cla68 asked her to comment on a post published on Wikipediocracy, the successor to Wikipedia Review, which outed User:Russavia.

Wikipediocracy includes articles written by current, blocked, banned, and retired English Wikipedia editors. Its mission statement says that it exists "to shine the light of scrutiny into the dark crevices of Wikipedia and its related projects; to examine the corruption there, along with the structural flaws; and to inoculate the unsuspecting public against the torrent of misinformation, defamation, and general nonsense [from Wikipedia]." The site's founders conceived Wikipediocracy as a successor to Wikipedia Review, seeing the reincarnation as an attempt to return to Wikipedia Review's "better days" (as opposed to its worse days, when it gained a reputation as a toxic attack site). In at least one part, the project succeeded: the Signpost notes that Wikipediocracy is more active than Wikipedia Review, which has not allowed new registration since April 2012 and has one moderator left.

The sequence of events:

(i) Cla68 posts link on a prominent page to an external page that outs Russavia

(ii) post oversighted and Cla68 indefinitely blocked

(iii) Cla68 directly outs Russavia in his unblock request

(iv) request oversighted and declined

(v) Cla68 outs Russavia again in second unblock request

(vi) request declined and oversighted; Cla68 blocked from his talk page

(vii) Kevin unblocks Cla68 without approval

(viii) Kevin desysopped by ArbCom; Cla68 reblocked

(ix) ArbCom motion to reinstate Kevin's adminship succeeding.

Long-time Signpost readers will remember Russavia's involvement in several arbitration cases, including Russavia–Biophys, Eastern European mailing list, and enforcement of the earlier Eastern Europe. He was blocked for 12 months from the English Wikipedia in May 2012, but this was lifted on 7 March by the Arbitration Committee after a successful appeal. He is also a prolific contributor, administrator, and bureaucrat on Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty-two hours after the post, User:Beeblebrox oversighted it and blocked Cla68 indefinitely. In most cases, an outing is accidental and the situation is swiftly resolved with an apology and promise to not do it again. Cla68, however, asked for an unblock in a statement on his talk page that again could be construed as outing. The names Cla68 used in this statement were quickly suppressed by Someguy1221. A second similar appeal was also rejected, and Cla68's access to his talk page was revoked.

The oversighting team was hampered by long-standing conventions that prevent them from publicly discussing oversight actions, but Beeblebrox pointed out that the block "was discussed at length on the oversight mailing list and there is broad agreement that the oversighting, the block, and the revocation of talk page access were all not only permitted by policy but the right thing to do."

The net widens

The story quickly gathered pace, with watchers of Cla68's talk page chiming in on both sides of the debate. Cla68 told the Signpost that he did not see the original post as outing, as "[Russavia's] real name was linked to his [Wikipedia] username on two official, public mailing lists that are hosted on WMF servers. Since links to those mailing lists are used in Wikipedia and many, if not most, are presented as being an official part of Wikipedia, then it appears that he self-outed on Wikipedia." Cla68 also highlighted other self-outings that, in his view, suggest that Russavia had already outed himself and that Cla68's subsequent unblock request was within the outing policy.

Defenders of Cla68 used much the same reasoning. Beeblebrox rebutted these arguments to the Signpost, saying "whether the information is available on some other website is not the point—there has never been such an exception to the outing policy. Each of us has the right to choose not to use our real name on Wikipedia regardless of whether or not we tie [our] account name to our real name elsewhere." Cla68 noted, though, that "each individual Internet user is responsible for their own privacy. If someone is at least making an effort to be private, then Wikipedia should try to help them ... however, the editor in question was not making much effort ... to protect his privacy. In that case, it makes Wikipedia's administration look very foolish to act like a serious violation of privacy had occurred."

Supporters of the block additionally discovered that Russavia had previously blocked Cla68 on Wikimedia Commons, leading to accusations of petty revenge. Echoing similar positions, Prioryman stated that "while Cla68 didn't write the blog post in question (I assume), his act of posting a link to it also clearly constitutes an act of harassment ... Honestly, none of this is rocket science."

Discussion on Cla68's talk page has led to nearly 100,000 bytes of text, while the snowball has also been rolled large enough to capture User:Kevin, who unblocked Cla68 without approval from ArbCom's Ban Appeals Subcommittee. This led to his desysopping under Level II procedures and even greater amounts of debate. The saga has led to a request for arbitration, and a motion proposing the return of his administrator rights is pending and currently succeeding. The committee is allowed to refuse a reinstatement of the administrator right, but for this a full arbitration case is required.

Beeblebrox told the Signpost that he believes Kevin's unblock was an "extraordinarily poor idea. This should have been handled by the ban appeals sub committee ... because they are experts [who] specialize in handling difficult or sensitive block situations like this." For his part, Kevin told the website Examiner.com (in an article written by banned English Wikipedia editor Gregory Kohs):


Also caught up in the controversy was User:MZMcBride, who was blocked by User:David Fuchs for "Disruptive editing: WP:OUTING, IDIDNTHEARTHAT, trolling" in regards to comments made on the Arbitration Committee's noticeboard.

The Wikipediocracy question

The Signpost asked Cla68 to provide a hypothetical reply to editors who think Wikipediocracy is unhealthy for the Wikipedia community. He told us:


Commenting on the same topic from another point of view, User:Risker stated:


In brief

  • AFT RfC rejects expansion of the tool: On 28 February, the widely debated Article Feedback Tool (AFT) request for comment (RfC) was closed by Geni. He concluded that the community said "no to full roll-out but there is a large enough minority to support continued experimentation if the foundation wants to do that". The decision was also noted on the German Wikipedia, which is currently undertaking an AFT-pilot—in which oversight policy issues take center stage—of its own.
  • OmegaWiki RfC: A RfC on whether to adopt OmegaWiki as a Wikimedia project is underway on Meta, the coordination website for the Wikimedia movement and its various projects. The main points debated concern the potential relationship of the project to the already established dictionaries (the Wiktionaries) and Wikidata.
  • Individual Engagement Grants review results: On March 4, the WMF released aggregated scores of the application assessments delivered by the volunteers of the IEG advisory committee. The new grant scheme, designed to empower individual and small groups of volunteers to tackle large and time-consuming structural community issues, attracted 23 eligible proposals and a wide range of additional ideas under development in the scheme's open ideas lab. Funding decisions by the WMF are set to be published on March 29.
  • Teahouse anniversary: The Teahouse, a forum to assist new editors, has reached its first anniversary. The Wikimedia Blog stated "One year later, the data show that Teahouse indeed has a positive impact on the new editor experience for English Wikipedia, and demonstrates some promise as a gender gap strategy."
  • Steward appointments, reconfirmations: The results of this year's stewards election were announced on 28 February. Six new volunteers, including QuiteUnusual of the English Wikipedia, will have global access to all tools. In addition, the annual reconfirmation of all stewards resulted in three removals and two resignations.
  • WMF ends recognition of Kenya chapter: The foundation has declined to extend its provisional recognition of the now-former Wikimedia Kenya, as the chapter failed to meet the condition to legally incorporate within one year. The WMF stated that "the provisional board disintegrated (with some people leaving the chapter entirely) and no replacement announced, almost no activity took place this past year, casting doubt on the group's sustainability as a chapter, and certain personal issues added much confusion and demoralization, which no doubt contributed to the inactivity." They encouraged the participants to form a user group instead.
  • Chapters association chairmanship election: On 6 March, the nominations phase among chapter representatives to the chapters association ended. Three contenders, Kirill Lokshin of Wikimedia D.C., Lorenzo Losa of Italy, and the German chapter's representative Markus Glaser, will contest the election, in which the 22 council members will decide who will succeed Ashley Van Haeften as the group’s chairman.

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2013-03-04

Slow week for featured content

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By Crisco 1492
This edition covers content promoted between 24 February and 2 March 2013.
Gulf Fritillary
Laura Secord warns the British
Dan Leno as Mother Goose, from a list of his productions

Three featured articles were promoted this week:

  • Gravity Bone (nom) by Hahc21. Gravity Bone is a freeware video game developed by Blendo Games and released in 2008. Built on the Quake II engine, the game included music from various films. It was well received by critics, who considered it to have a cohesive story, atmosphere and its ability to catch the player's interest over a very short time span without feeling rushed or incomplete.
  • Marcus Ward Lyon, Jr. (nom) by Maky. Lyon (1875–1942) was an American mammalogist, bacteriologist, and pathologist. He published more than 160 papers and formally described six species, three genera, and one family.
  • Laura Secord (nom) by Curly Turkey. Secord (1775–1868) was a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812 best known for warning the British of an impending American attack. The deed was almost unrecognised during her lifetime, and Secord died in poverty. Although she now sees greater recognition, including various namesakes, most Canadians associate her name with an eponymous chocolate company.

Six featured lists were promoted this week:

Three featured pictures were promoted this week:

NGC 2467, a star-forming region, popularly known as the "Skull and Crossbones nebula"


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2013-03-04

WikiProject Television Stations

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By Mabeenot
Women's History Month
Join a project today
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, we tuned to WikiProject Television Stations, a project that dates back to March 2004. WikiProject Television Stations primarily focuses on local stations, national networks, television markets, and other topics related to television channels in North America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific countries. Other areas of the world are handled by the regional subprojects dedicated to British, Australian, and Indian television or by the parent WikiProject Television. Among the various tasks handled by WikiProject Television Stations are developing the television station infobox, keeping the project's categories tidy, updating station lists, and building articles. The project has a fair bit of work ahead of them with over 4,000 unassessed articles and only one Good Article out of 626 assessed articles, giving the project a relative WikiWork rating of 5.262. We asked Nate (Mrschimpf) how we can help.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Television Stations? Have you contributed to any other television-related WikiProjects?
I have had a long-held interest in television stations and broadcasting in general since I was a child. Although I never went into the industry, the fascination with local television, the many ways of presenting local television news and graphical identities led me to keep following it. Naturally I joined Wikipedia after hearing about it from the television critic for the Kansas City Star eight years back, and my main interest has remained in local television stations. I do consider myself a floating, but not official member of WP:TV, as I usually stick to articles about television shows that interest me most and keeping articles about children's networks and programming from turning into promotional pieces.

How technical do articles about television stations tend to be? Are some sections of these articles harder to research and write than others? What images are needed to illustrate articles about television stations?
If there's one thing I'm glad for, the public domain information from the Federal Communications Commission provides a nice and stable ground to start articles about stations, thus the most technical details to be found out are the neighborhoods and areas where the transmitters and studios are and of former transmitter sites that are defunct due to suburban encroachment or the digital transition, or other factors. Being technical about a station is fine, but you have to still give the article a touch that the average reader can understand.

As for images, as a longtime editor, we have become more focused in what images are used in articles. Because of the restrictions on fair use guidelines over the years, an article that in 2007 may have contained multiple screengrabs and historical logos now in 2013 usually only provides the current station logo, an image of the station's newscast opening or the main anchor team, and in rare cases (such as for larger market stations), public domain or Creative Commons images of other station staff. Previously before the culling of this, articles were more focused on imaging, where now television station articles are more focused on basics and newscast descriptions. Admittedly the fair use policies took a bit to get used to as they were instituted, but they provide a good idea of where we must go, and there are other resources (such as Wikia's Logopedia) where those interested can look up historical station logos.

Why does WikiProject Television Stations focus primarily on stations in North America? Are some regions of North America better covered by Wikipedia than others? What can be done to improve articles about television stations in other parts of the world?
Mainly it's more the setup of North American television more than anything, specifically that of Canada, the United States and Caribbean states, and to a lesser extent, the Philippines, which as a former American dependency shares some part of the North American television structure (Japan also does to a point, though they have their own eccentricities). Australia also is structured American-style, though with much fewer stations than the US and Canada. In other nations, the setup of network television consists of:

  • Main station in country's capital/largest city
  • Smaller stations retransmit that signal with maybe only a local news/weather cut-in
  • Main network/engineering third party maintains all stations and transmitters

Also in the Middle East, India and Africa, those stations usually have negligible station coverage and then mostly satellite networks serving them.

Thus in those cases, the main network article covers everything, and for all intents and purposes, nobody in London knows BBC One as "Channel 26" in that area, because the digital system bumps everyone to "Channel 1" to watch BBC One. So covering local television is a less critical need of coverage for nations with the 'hub-spoke' broadcasting model.

Canada and US are by far the most covered by WPTVS, with Mexico a close third in my view, followed by the Philippines and Australia. Trailing off from there, are other North American markets where little information is available, such as Puerto Rico. As expected, the coverage of Mexico, the Philippines and Central and Caribbean America is only as good as the devoted contributors there, and depends on good language comprehension. In vacation destinations though, the coverage is much more spotty as it's natural that a Wikipedia contributor's priority is low in covering the television happenings of the US Virgin Islands. Coverage can be improved with more outreach to the editors of those other nations, but one problem has been the Filipino coverage of their stations is much more influenced by 'network fans' because of the very competitive television network scene in that nation, which results in promotional problems with coverage in the nation's stations.

In 2008, the project dealt with the ramifications of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown order. What happened, how did it impact the WikiProject, and have there been any new developments since then?
The takedown of the Designated Market Area (DMA) information by ACNielsen was a shock to be sure. The DMA information provided a simple way to categorize the nation's television markets from largest to smallest, and when we lost that, we had to scramble. Public domain descriptions of geography helped to define a general area of a television station's territory rather than the defined DMA borders, and other factors such as natural weather warning areas and regions certainly have helped make things as easy as possible. Using US Census information to sort largest-to-smallest areas has helped too, though I do admit the Nielsen-defined areas were easier. But we have been able to manage. Nothing has really changed since 2008, except for letting newer contributors know about the DMCA claim when they put in the numbers without knowing the problems.

How are defunct television stations treated? Where can Wikipedians find historical information on television stations?
It depends on the station. If it was on the air for less than a year, it can usually be summarized within another article in the general area, especially if it's shared another channel in the past. But that is definitely something more done by local viewers who are eager to share the information through library and archival searches using hard copy sources such as newspaper microfilm, station archives (in these days, much harder as stations merge and things get trashed), local listings and memories of others; the Internet definitely does not contain that much about the UHF white dwarfs of the 1950's. Thankfully many television enthusiasts are out there to tell us about the intricacies and histories of their markets.

What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Our most urgent need is good and focused article writing. Too many of the smaller articles (such as those for Class A television stations and minor network affiliates are less researched than major full power stations. They need more help than most. Another need for articles is more sources for research. Many have sprung up since Wikipedia began, and now even with the FCC with a few clicks you can see a station's coverage area within Google Earth. But we can always get better.

As for new contributors, I always say they're welcome to pick up and start helping us out, we could always use their eyes as to how their television stations are, though we ask for neutrality in their writing. Especially, we're always looking for international coverage to expand, and in Canada with their shifting television scene as the CBC and other networks close stations to make wide swaths of that nation cable-only, we're looking for some help there. As I say on my userpage, bring the bricks of your knowledge, and we'll put a good foundation below it with our expertise.

Anything else you'd like to add?
That should pretty much cover everything. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to speak about WPTVS, and hopefully the Signpost can provide our group a little more wide exposure.


Next week, we'll begin oral arguments in the landmark case of this century. Until then, enjoy the supreme wisdom of our previous interviews in the archive.

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