a stream of response from Signpost contributors. The Signpost team is sad to say goodbye to Ragesoss after his excellent work as Signpost editor since February 2009, and wishes him the best of luck in his new job. HaeB
will be acting editor while discussion continues.
It has been a great pleasure for me to work with so many fine Wikimedians during my tenure as Signpost editor-in-chief. I'm stepping down after nearly a year-and-a-half, but I'm confident that experienced editors and new hands will pick up the slack, and then some. We are, right now, discussing a slew of proposals for improving the Signpost, so if you have ideas on how to make the Signpost better, please share your thoughts.
As the global Wikimedia community grows, and grows more diverse, our community journalism must adapt to serve this wider community. Knitting together Wikimedia communities across wikis (much less across languages) has always been a great challenge, but the Signpost and/or other community organs may be able to make some headway. As a symbol of our commitment to Wikimedia-wide coverage, we've been considering changing names from The Wikipedia Signpost to simply the Signpost. But that commitment cannot stop at symbolism, whether it involves expanding the scope of the Signpost or collaborating with other community news venues.
As the Wikimedia Foundation and the financial dimensions of the Wikimedia projects grow, the need for a strong Signpost is greater than ever. Holding the powerful to account is a core purpose of the broadsheets we've tried to emulate. I've always viewed the Signpost 's independence from, and constructively critical stance toward, the Foundation as a key part of the Signpost 's identity—if at times an underdeveloped one.
I look forward to seeing where the Signpost goes from here.
; we hope you will enjoy reading the Signpost offline.
To centralize discussion, please report rendering problems or make any suggestions for improvements at Book talk:Wikipedia Signpost rather than on individual issues' talk pages.
Ideas for improving the Signpost
This week, Tony1 has sparked a discussion on the next direction for The Wikipedia Signpost. What do you think would improve the Signpost? Ideas being floated at the talk page include:
A more modern layout and format
Full coverage of Sister Projects
Exploiting the potential for closer ties with foreign-language Wikimedia projects
Renaming The Wikipedia Signpost to The Signpost
Fortnightly publication
Combining "News and notes" with "In the news"
Moving the The Signpost to Meta or Wikinews
Using more images in articles
Enhancing interaction, possibly through reader comments or contests
The Signpost exists to serve its readers, so if you have an opinion on any of these proposals or anything else you'd like to see, please share your thoughts in the comments section below or on the Signpost talk page.
Call for writers
Do you have what it takes to be a reporter your fellow Wikimedians rely on to keep them in the picture?
As writers move on or shift focus, we need enthusiastic new writers to deliver the rich and diverse weekly articles the community has come to expect. With changes coming, the Signpost is looking for new contributors to help us improve and expand. We're looking for dedicated and talented regulars to write the regular Signpost features and to start innovative new ones. There are opportunities for special reports, and balanced opinion pieces, book reviews and interviews are always very welcome. Existing features requiring contributors are:
Discussion report(example) – drama, discussions, deletions and RfCs
Technology report(example) – software updates, resolved bugs and bot approvals
Dispatches(example) – our series of special reports on a wide variety of topics
Sister projects(example) – coverage of sister project news and milestones
And, as always, your help is invaluable compiling "News and notes" and "In the news", long the cornerstones of The Signpost. Be sure to
alert us to newsworthy items throughout Wikimedia projects and in the external media!
Revision history for an article under 'pending changes'
"Pending changes" trial to start on June 14
According to a post by William Pietri, project manager for the Flagged Revisions Deployment Project, the flaggedrevs extension will be deployed on the English Wikipedia on June 14.
Unlike other projects such as the German Wikipedia (where the extension has been live since 2008), the English Wikipedia will make use of only the "flagged protection" feature, which has been renamed "pending changes" following extensive discussion on the mailing list Foundation-l and the
terminology subpage
. It allows administrators to apply a new kind of protection to a page, under which it can still be edited by every user, but the change will not be visible (in the default view) to unregistered users unless it has been made or confirmed by a trusted user.
The feature will be activated only for a trial, which is expected to last two months and will be limited to a maximum of 2,000 pages. The trial is likely to generate considerable media attention, given the fact that its mere announcement last August has already received coverage (see Signpost story).
A new help page, with which Pietri has requested assistance, is
here. Some diagrams explaining the terminology are here. The feature can be tested out before deployment on the flaggedrevs test wiki
.
There was some debate in a recent
RfC on whether or not the trial configuration should involve the separate "Reviewers" user rights group or use the existing "Autoconfirmed" group as the trusted users group. Some technical details of the deployment are still being hammered out
.
The following table summarizes permissions under current settings for the trial (more details
here
):
Interaction of Wikipedia user groups and page protection levels
All users can edit Edits by unregistered or new editors (and any subsequent edits by anyone) are hidden from readers who are not logged in, until reviewed by a pending changes reviewer or admin. Logged-in editors see all edits, whether accepted or not.
Infrequently edited pages with high levels of vandalism,
BLP
violations, edit-warring, or other disruption from unregistered and new users.
Specific topic areas authorized by ArbCom, pages where semi-protection has failed, or high-risk templates where template protection would be too restrictive.
Scripts, stylesheets, and similar objects central to operation of the site or that are in other editors' user spaces.
* In order to edit through extended confirmed protection, a template editor must also be extended confirmed, but in practice this is almost always the case. Other modes of protection:
The Wikimedia Foundation has hired two new employees: Zack Exley will be Wikimedia's new Chief Community Officer, and Barry Newstead will be the Chief Global Development Officer. According to an FAQ about the positions Exley will be in charge of programs, including Fundraising, Reader relations, Public outreach, and volunteer coordination; Newstead will be in charge of Communications and Business Development.
and Greenpeace USA. He also ran the parody website gwbush.com.
Barry Newstead is currently a partner at the strategy consultancy firm The Bridgespan Group, where he has been leading the team assisting the Foundation in the Strategic Planning process since last year. Newstead has written a series of blog postings about the process on the web site of the Harvard Business Review. In one of his first postings, Newstead expressed concern that the inner Wikipedia community might not be "open to more radical strategic options that might advance the vision", citing the "near-taboo" of advertising as one possible example. However, in a later posting, Newstead offered huge praise for the contributions of Wikipedia volunteers to the strategy process.
Originally, the Foundation had set out to hire a Chief Development Officer, responsible for fundraising (a common position in non-profits) and a Chief Global Program Officer (responsible for relations with Wikipedians and readers). According to a Q&A and a separate announcement to the community by the Foundation's executive director Sue Gardner, the CDO role was expanded to that of a Chief Community Officer, at the suggestion of Exley, who argued that donors should be regarded as part of the same community as editors and readers, instead of being treated separately.
According to Gardner, filling these positions is the result of a search process of "many months", and "completes the C-level hiring, with the exception of the Chief Human Resources Officer", which is expected to be announced within six weeks. (The other two C-level posts are the Chief Financial and Operating Officer, filled by Véronique Kessler since 2008, and the Chief Technical Officer, for which Danese Cooper was hired earlier this year – see Signpost coverage – following the departure of Brion Vibber.)
British Museum gives "backstage pass" to Wikipedians, announces prizes
The British Museum's An Van Camp shows Wikimedians a print block by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528).
Wikipedian in Residence (see earlier Signpost coverage). Representing the largest ever wikimeetup in the UK, 40 Wikimedians joined him last Friday for a Backstage Pass event, consisting of private tours of some of the museum's public and non-public areas, followed by discussions and on-wiki collaboration with the staff (cf. Signpost coverage
of the announcement).
In an article titled Venerable British Museum Enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution, The New York Times covered the event at length, explaining that the British Museum's motivation to collaborate with Wikipedia is "to help ensure that the museum’s expertise and notable artifacts are reflected in that digital reference’s pages". The article noted that museums and Wikipedia have as their common interest "educating the public: one has the artifacts and expertise, and the other has the online audience", but also mentioned possible conflicts, recalling the legal threats issued last year by the
National Portrait Gallery, but not subsequently pursued, against a Commons user who had uploaded high-resolution scans of public domain images from the Gallery's collection (see Signpost coverage). Regarding the Wikimedia side, the NYT quoted Wyatt's objection to what he saw as free culture "extremism": "‘Content liberation’ is the phrase that has been used within the Wikimedia community, and I hate that: they see them as a repository of images that haven’t been nicked yet." (The term "content liberation" has been used in the past by German Wikipedian Mathias Schindler, now project manager at Wikimedia Germany, who had negotiated large scale image donations from Bundesarchiv and Deutsche Fotothek
.)
Among the results of the tour are
Wikipedian in Residence
.
The Signpost is delighted to report the announcement of the British Museum's
on topics related to the British Museum in any Wikipedia language edition. Ideally, the topics will be articles about collection items.
Hiding of interlanguage links debated
The rollout of the new user interface on May 13 brought some controversial changes, among them the relocation of the search box, some of the modifications to the Wikipedia logo (see Signpost coverage) and making Wikipedia inaccessible for some rare browsers (on Blackberry and PS3). The controversy about another change culminated only recently, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between volunteer and paid developers, or more generally the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia foundation.
In the default view of the new user interface, the interlanguage links to articles about the same topic in other Wikipedia language versions are hidden behind a link titled "Languages" (using the "CollapsibleNav" JavaScript module). Once a user clicks on the link, the whole list will be displayed (as in the old interface), until the end of the browser session.
Many users objected to this, and Bug 23497 was filed. On June 3, a volunteer developer made the requested change and restored the old behavior, only to be reverted by a developer from the usability experience (UX) team which had developed the new user interface in a 16-month effort:
"This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung <[email protected]> or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org"
Howie Fung later explained the background of the team's decision as follows:
"... we measured the click behavior for two groups of English Wikipedia users, Monobook and Vector (Vector users are primarily those who participated in the beta). Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links (out of 126,180 and 180,873 total clicks), respectively. We felt that fewer than 1% of Monobook clicks was a reasonable threshold for hiding the Language links, especially when taken in the context of the above design principle [that one should avoid the sheer number of language links making users "numb" to the list] and the implementation (state persists after expanding)."
Erik Möller, Deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, summarized some of the objections as follows:
"It has been legitimately argued that the language links are essential for many users, even if the click rate is lower than that of some other elements, and that they are also key to surfacing our value of language diversity. The reasonable hypothesis has also been presented that the click rates are higher in other languages than English."
Möller and Fung outlined a compromise approach, where only a limited number of language links would be shown per default, and the rest would be hidden under a "see other languages" link. Various ideas were discussed on how to generate a selection that is likely to contain the languages that are most useful to the user (e.g. based on browser language preference). The influence of different configurations on users' clicking behavior will be evaluated.
Altogether, the issue generated more than 160 postings on the Foundation-l mailing list within a few days
(although a good part of this was a sub-thread, started by the Chair of the Board of Trustees, about racial, intercultural and gender issues – at one point readers of the list were educated on the origin of the term lynching in the American Revolution.)
In a subsequent post titled Community, collaboration, and cognitive biases, Erik Möller observed that "the massive thread regarding the default sidebar language link expansion state has surfaced a number of fundamental and significant questions regarding the working relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community". He offered a number of general thoughts which he summarized as follows:
"I believe that the transparency of Wikimedia's engineering processes, and the general quality of these processes, has significantly improved over the last year. At the same time, I agree with those who are observing a widening gap between staff and volunteer contributions, and I think we need to work together to close this gap in full awareness of the cognitive biases present in all of us."
Briefly
An early version of the Wikimania 2010 programme has been published.
Voting on the finalists for the Picture of the Year 2009 contest on Wikimedia Commons is open until 23:59 (UTC) on June 11.
" at the 2010 "Writing across the curriculum" conference last month at Indiana University.
The process to determine the two Chapter-selected members of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees is currently underway after several delays. Currently, these seats are occupied by Michael Snow and Arne Klempert. The process is non-public, but two candidates have published statements: GerardM and phoebe. Results are due by July 1st, but might be delayed further if the chapters do not reach consensus early enough.
Due to a Wiki's lack of editorial control and formal structure, we hypothesized that the content would be less complete and less accurate than that presented on a formal, peer-reviewed web site.
However, when the content of each site was compared against pre-selected statements from standard oncology textbooks, it was found that
For both web sites, inaccuracies were extremely rare: less than two percent of the information on either site was discordant with that presented in the textbooks. There was no difference between the sites in depth of coverage.
However, the readability in the study sample was better for the PDQ texts. As measured by a
Flesch–Kincaid readability test
(calculated from word and sentence lengths), they were written at a level accessible to ninth-grade high-school students, while Wikipedia articles were written at a level suitable for college students. Both Wikipedia and PDQ were judged to be under-reporting controversial aspects of cancer care.
Wall Street Journal, mentions Wikipedia as an example of what can be accomplished when even a small amount of humanity's collective "cognitive surplus" is used to create, rather than merely consume, information: "Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching [television] ads. It only takes a fractional shift in the direction of participation to create remarkable new educational resources." Shirky, a member of the Wikimedia Foundations's advisory board, had first published this observation in a 2008 speech titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
. It features in his upcoming book "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age".
Wikipedia compared to a market economy and to the UK
Encyclopaedia Britannica
's traditional way of building an encyclopedia to a centrally planned economy, and Wikipedia's to a market-based economy.
In a different comparison, Wales argued that Wikipedia’s governance system resembles the UK's constitutional monarchy more than the political system of the US, because the latter is based on a fixed constitution, while the British system largely consists of "unwritten rules and all kinds of interesting leftover questions that don’t get answered because they don’t need to be."
Briefly
Bigipedia, a BBC radio comedy show lampooning Wikipedia, has been given a second series, according to The British Comedy Guide. (See also the Signpost review of Episode 4 from the first season)
Canterbury University, came from banning the use of Wikipedia in her class to handing out Wikipedia writing assignments to her students. Two other academics from New Zealand quoted in the article stated that concerns about the reliability of Wikipedia
should not preclude its use, since other sources could be wrong too and any text should be read critically.
The schedule for next month's Wikisym conference has been published, featuring several talks about Wikipedia.
The idea of the free travel-shirt arose during the meet-up of some Wikipedians in Hanover, Germany, on 3 March 2009. The objective was to raise awareness on a global scale of the international movement for free knowledge, and to bring Wikipedians all over the globe closer together. It was intended to remind Wikipedians that they are part of one of the world’s most important networks ever launched, and to reinforce the foundation’s mission statement “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally”.
The idea was that the shirts would circle the globe much like the torch relay before the start of the Olympic Games, and that this would attract new editors to Wikipedia and raise the profile of the Wikimedia Foundation. A blueish T-shirt from Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. (size L) with “Enzyklopädist” written on it (German for “encyclopedist”) and a white T-shirt (size XL) embossed with the English Wikipedia logo were taken to many different places. Wikipedians were asked to pose for photographs holding or wearing one of the shirts, with distinctive motives, features and people as evidence of the long journey the shirts have been on. These pictures have been uploaded to Commons at Free travel-shirt 2009 and added to the organization page on metawiki m:Free Travel-Shirt.
At the end of the journey, the two shirts came back again to Hanover for the start of this year’s CeBIT on 2 March 2010. Since June 2010, they have been up for auction for the benefit of Wikimedia Foundation Inc.: white shirt, blue shirt.
, Federal Minister of Finance. The white shirt was taken to Switzerland, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Austria, Liechtenstein and the Czech Republic, and finally arrived in Hanover in March 2010.
The white shirt can now be purchased on eBay, from which the proceeds will go to the the Wikimedia Foundation.
The blue shirt went to Azerbaijan before it was returned to Germany to be presented at Wikimedia Deutschland’s general assembly in March 2009 and Wikimedia’s Board, Chapter and Developers’ Meeting in April 2009, where it was signed by Jimbo Wales and appeared in many photographs. The blue shirt then went to Sweden, the Tripoint where the German, French and Swiss borders converge, and to Berlin, where it was signed by Christian Wulff, one of the instigators of the idea.
Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where it was signed by the Chairman of Wikimedia Argentina, Patricio Lorente. From there, steward Mardetanha brought the item to Iran and Dubai. During a longer trip through Poland it was photographed in Warsaw, Bydgoszcz, Toruń, Poznań and Wrocław. Finally, it was snapped during a trip along the Ruhr river in northwestern Germany, and came back to Hanover in March 2010. It now can be purchased on eBay for the benefit of the Wikimedia Foundation.
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Comedy?
reliable source, but considering it is linked to by organisations such as the BBC (see "Sites we like" at the bottom of the page) and comedians such as Mark Steel on his own website
I think it can now be considered to be one.
I suppose now my main motivation is to try and get as many comedy related articles up to good and featured status, but recently there has been a lack of motivation due to over commitments and partly due to the sheer difficulty and, if I may say so, the pedantic nature of some of the people reviewing FAs. Nothing annoys me more than people not wanting to promote an article just because you use the wrong "their/there", when they tell you information that you have little knowledge about, or when you carry out changes and the people recommending them do not get back in touch.
Cirt: I was motivated to become a member of the Comedy project, because through comedy and especially the techniques of parody and satire, comedians and writers are able to exercise freedom of speech and critically analyze topics affecting society and our culture.
The project currently has 45 featured articles, 33 featured lists, 4 A-class articles, and 344 good articles. Which of these articles are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?
"Truthiness", an audience's "gut feeling" in the absence of evidence, was defined by American television comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005. Truthiness is one of the project's featured articles
ISD: Well, out of the FAs the only one I've been involved with was Truthiness, but that was because I nominated it. I did little with the article but I could see it was a good one, so I put it up for nomination and it got the honour. Probably my proudest achievement was the list of QI episodes which I got promoted to FL. I managed to expand this small article in to a full working list which is still being expanded, due to a new series currently being recorded.
As for the WikiProject as a whole, probably the 30 Rock FLs is one of the best achievements. These include the FLs of the first three seasons, the list of episodes and the list of awards and nominations. We seem to be covering this area well.
Cirt:
Emmy Award, so it is beneficial for the project that this article also presents information to readers with an FA-quality page. Through research in successfully getting The Simpsons episode "The Joy of Sect" to FA status, I came across an analysis in the book The Psychology of The Simpsons, which was subsequently brought to GA status. So through work on one article and by stumbling upon research related to that topic, we are able to provide additional information on a resource relating to psychology, popular culture
, and comedy for others to utilize.
Have any of the project's major initiatives ended unsuccessfully?
ISD: I don't think so. Our only initiative is to get as many comedy related articles up to FA status and that this is ongoing. That means that the only way it will end is if the WikiProject does manage to get all the articles up to FA status, or if everybody gives up. One problem is that new comedies are always being produced, so it looks like the project will never end so long as there are people trying to improve articles.
Cirt: One way to analyze this would be to look at the page, Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Comedy articles by quality statistics, and specifically its history over time. We could plot charts of the growth of GA and FA articles over time, as well as the percentage of GA plus FA articles over total articles within the project over time. This would give the project a sense of how it is moving in terms of improving the quality of articles on Wikipedia within the subject matter.
WikiProject Comedy serves as a parent for several other projects that focus on television programs. How does WikiProject Comedy communicate and collaborate with these television projects? Does your project have close connections to any other projects?
ISD: I would say that for quite a bit of the time it is they who contact us rather than the other way around. Probably WP:COMEDY's most embarrassing moment when we had to remove the project from several articles such as episodes of The Simpsons and other shows, because what we in the project (mainly myself) used to do was tag them whenever they got nominated for GA, FA or FL. As we were taking for credit for doing little work, some of the projects got back to us and we decided that the best thing to do was to remove ourselves from the projects. Now we only cover episodes relating to shows that don't have their own WikiProjects, such as 30 Rock.
Cirt: Perhaps the best way to look at this would be to focus on going forward, and say that for the future it would be fun to expand collaborative efforts within various WikiProjects that are contained under the auspices of the topic of comedy. It might be helpful to compile a list of users that have access to certain key books within the subject, analyzing television series or seminar works on history in comedy, that could be used in working to upgrade the quality of articles to GA and FA.
What are WikiProject Comedy's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
ISD: Well, there are plenty of stubs that need expanding, as well as several episodes that can do with expanding and promoting up to GA. Finding good photos and getting them up to FP status would be good to. I think that radio is an area that should be expanded on as well (I also work for
up to GA status and now I'm trying to get them to FA) and think that this is an area often overlooked by Wikipedia.
Cirt: GA and FA topic drives such as
WP:SOUTHPARK/TOPIC
have worked out really well, helping to motivate others to improve articles along season-lists to GA and FA within subtopics of comedy. Perhaps if a new contributor is feeling ambitious, they could try joining one of those topic drives.
Anything else you'd like to add?
ISD: I just like to say that I will try to continue to improve the status of several Wikipedia article and hope to get them up to FA status. Articles I personally would like to get up to FA include QI, Green Wing, Mark Steel's in Town and Bigipedia.
Cirt: The concept of
free speech is indeed an interesting one. For further information on this, the unanimous decision in the United States Supreme Court case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell provides fascinating reading, and the oral arguments of the case are available online and make for enjoyable listening. Other Wikipedia articles related to this U.S. Supreme Court case include The People vs. Larry Flynt – a fictional film which focuses on the legal issues involved, and Beck v. Eiland-Hall – a case filed by Glenn Beck before the World Intellectual Property Organization where the final decision cited Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. The Hustler case was also cited by United States District Judge Dean Pregerson in a decision in favor of the television program Family Guy after it had been sued by Carol Burnett regarding her depiction in the episode, "Peterotica". There is more info on this, at Family_Guy#Lawsuits
.
Next week, we'll revisit a large, old project that just completed a new initiative. Until then, review our old Reports in the archive.
pictures were demoted. 1958 Corvette (nom) was delisted because it lacks sharpness and is no longer "used in a meaningful and encyclopedic manner"; Hansom cab (nom
The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week and opened another, leaving one case open.
Open cases
control the content
on articles related to race and intelligence. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
Recently closed
Fladrif
was placed under an editing restriction. In addition, the Committee encouraged uninvolved administrators to monitor the topic area to ensure that articles comply with Wikipedia policy, and noted it can invoke its right to review the behavior of editors working in the topic.
Other
A request for arbitration that was initiated over two weeks ago has still neither been accepted nor declined by the Committee.
Users of full database downloads (known colloquially as "
dumps
") of Wikimedia content will be pleased to know that a full schedule of dumps has restarted after certain problems were fixed. These problems had caused XML dumps from several projects, including the English Wikipedia, to have inconsistencies or missing text. Dumps provide an offline backup of the content of Wikipedia and other projects, and can also be used in preference to "live" data for research and more complicated full-text queries.
PHP bot framework
Ideas and thoughts about unifying the many different
the bot operators' noticeboard. The idea is to parallel a similar framework written in Python, pywikipediabot
, which has achieved a significant level of use among the MediaWiki/Python community. Anyone with experience of coding bots in PHP – or with any thoughts of how best to achieve the "holy grail" of a common backbone for PHP-based bots – is invited to comment.
Other updates
"Permanently disable mobile site" has been fixed in non-English variants (bug #23229)
A number of updates to the Flagged protect/"Pending changes" have been made before its impending release (see recent Signpost coverage).
Bugs pertaining to the usability rollouts, including the mis-inclusion of spaces by the "link" dialogue have been fixed. The Vector skin and new editing interface are scheduled to be rolled out on the Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, and Dutch Wikipedias on Thursday June 10.
Pending changes
Semi
Extended confirmed
Template
Full
Interface
.jpg)
