Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-08-29
Abuse filter on all Wikimedia sites; Foundation's report for July; editor survey results
Abuse filter introduced on all Wikimedia sites
In March 2009, a new extension was enabled on the English Wikipedia: the abuse filter (see previous Signpost coverage). However, at least on the English Wikipedia it was soon renamed as the Edit filter to avoid implicitly labelling edits that are merely incorrect as "abuse". The form of the filter has remained largely unchanged. The broad power it offered to deal conclusively with whole patterns of vandalism at once was very appealing to administrators on a number of projects: since March 2009, another 65 wikis have asked for the extension to be enabled for their community. Now the service is to be enabled by default for Wikimedia wikis, the Foundation has announced, extending it to all 843 wikis under the Foundation's guidance (WMF blog).
The move is primarily designed to free up the time of developers, who have otherwise had to process the dozens of access requests separately, and the time of local admins, who no longer have to wait for it to be deployed (foundation-l mailing list). Reaction to the announcement has been mixed: several users (MZMcBride, Nemo, wjhonson) expressed concern that, in its present state, the extension may allow
Since the extension comes with no filters by default, there will be no immediate noticeable difference. In addition to the filtering of edits, the extension is also responsible for tagging edits.
Wikimedia Foundation report for July published
The Wikimedia Foundation's report for July has been published on meta-wiki. It reports that visitor numbers are down compared to earlier in the year, but still exceed figures from the same period last year, whilst both income and expenditure were higher than expected for various reasons, including the rescheduling of grant payments. The report also confirms that the Foundation has been struggling to hire new employees at the rate it had intended to; the Foundation's human resources department put this down to its focus on quality, and said that it would "need to stay focused and engaged to make [its] target of 40 more hires".
The report also draws together the activity of the Foundation's many other sub-departments, much of which was reported during July by The Signpost (which is itself linked in the report), such as the month's
Full Editor Survey results released
The Wikimedia Foundation has published a report (also discussed on the Foundation blog) summarising the results of the editor survey conducted in April. Interesting findings include demographic data showing that the stereotypical image of the Wikipedian as a twenty-something graduate student geek may be less accurate than previously thought. The Board of Trustees election was unfamiliar to 45% of editors, and 46% of editors did not know whether there was a Wikimedia chapter in their country. Some findings had already been published earlier in a series of blog posts (see e.g. Signpost coverage: "First results of editor survey: Wikipedians 90% male, 71% altruist", "Further data from editor survey", 2011 editor survey: Board of Trustees elections").
Only 8% of respondents were women and women contributors generally had a lower number of edits, but the number of women editors is growing and the number of women reporting issues with stalking and other negative behavior is only 5% of the total number of women editors. There is plenty of good news: editors that get positive feedback tend to edit more, and editors report getting more positive than negative feedback. Interestingly, over half of contributors edit Wikipedias in more than one language and 72% of contributors read Wikipedia in more than one language.
The report touches on the growing importance of mobile access to Wikipedia with high numbers of people reporting having a mobile phone (84%), but significantly, only 38% have a smartphone.
In brief
- Steward elections seek candidates: Nominations remain open in the second steward elections of 2011 but will close by September 8. Because of the departure of Cary Bass as Volunteer Coordinator, stewards will have to organize the whole election themselves, with input from the Foundation's Head of Reader Relations, Philippe Beaudette. The Board of Trustees decided that this time they will abstain from confirming the result of the new elections. As a result, stewards decided to create an Election Committee consisting of volunteers for closing the second steward election in 2011, certifying the outcome of the elections, after all votes cast in all candidatures were verified for eligibility; and appointing the elected candidates.
- Jimbo speaking in Cambridge, UK: The business networking group Cambridge Network has announced a speech by Jimmy Wales on September 8.
- Celebrations for ten years of Polish Wikipedia: Wikimedia Polska has announced a tenth anniversary celebration to take place at Stary Browar in Poznań on September 24–25. Speakers will include the journalists Jan Wróbel and Edwin Bendyk. A session will also be given by Kpjas and Ptj, the two founding members of Polish Wikipedia. They also hope to screen the documentary film Truth in Numbers?
- Triple Crown awards: Last week, the awards for contributions to nominate themselvesfor a Triple crown with just one set of DYK, GA and FC.
- Wikimedia District of Columbia: The WMF Chapters committee has signalled its approval of the request of The Wiki Society of Washington, DC Inc. to become Wikimedia's latest chapter. The committee's motion, passed on 22 August with 8 votes in support and 2 in opposition, officially refers the request for interim use of Wikimedia trademarks, including the name Wikimedia District of Columbia, to the WMF Board of Trustees for final approval.
- New Wikizine: A new edition of Wikizine has been published.
Milestones
- The Russian Wikipedia has reached 750,000 articles.
- The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles, with the article about the Brazilian municipality Contenda.
- The Azerbaijani Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.
- The Kazakh Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
- The Sanskrit, Hill Mari, and Sinhalese Wikipedias have all reached the 5,000 article mark.
- The Punjabi Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
- The Assamese Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
- The Shona Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.
A number of other wikis also reached milestone user number totals. For example, the Swahili Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users, double the number reported by The New York Times in January of last year in a report on the Google-assisted efforts at developing the project. Also passing milestones were the Burmese Wikipedia, the Waray-Waray Wikipedia, and the Kazakh Wikipedia, who all also surpassed 10,000 registered users this month.
Reader comments
Wikipedia praised for disaster news coverage, scolded for left-wing bias; brief news
Virginia Earthquake: Wikipedia as a news source revisited
Although Wikipedia explicitly identifies itself as
Such rapid growth attracted its own media attention. The
Wikinews also has articles on the events: Tropical Storm Irene passes over New York and Magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Virginia felt up and down U.S. east coast. In addition to specific coverage of the Wikipedia articles, a number of news organisations quoted Wikipedia articles for facts and figures on the events and similar ones from history.
Wikipedia's endemic left-wing bias?
Pulling no punches, David Swindle kicked off a series of articles for
After a brief interlude discussing the vulnerability of Wikipedia to high-profile
This is not the first time Wikipedia has been accused of having a liberal bias, the issue has been raised most notably by Andrew Schlafly who asserted that "Wikipedia is six times more liberal than the American public" and started his own website Conservapedia to be a conservative alternative. Last year, FrontPageMag already described Wikipedia as "an Islamist hornet’s nest" (Signpost coverage: "Wikipedia accused of 'Islamofascist dark side'"), and had one author explain her negative experiences while editing Wikipedia by the hypothesis that "Wiki has an Israel problem. Wiki has a Jewish problem" (Signpost coverage: "Wikipedia downplaying the New York Times' anti-semitism?").
In brief
- Pravda Online, an online news service founded by former editors of the now defunct Soviet newspaper of the same name, weighed in on the imminent demise of Wikipedia. The website compared its importance to that of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for previous generations, and gloomily asserting that "Most likely, the encyclopedia is no longer the medium for the people." By contrast to the English Wikipedia, the Russian Wikipedia has seen very stable editor numbers over the last two years, with a slight growth in that period reported.
- The British Library Editathon, held in June (see previous Signpost coverage), was reported in The New Yorker ("Nerd Out", currently paywalled).
- The day-long scavenger hunt Wikipedia Takes Montreal, held on August 28, was highlighted in The Canadian Press and on the blog of Tourism Montreal.
- In the first of a series of posts looking at the use of Wikipedia for marketing, SocialFresh asked "Wikipedia for marketing, should your business use it?". Reassuringly, the article starts off by saying that small business owners should not try to use Wikipedia for marketing purposes; it then continues with an accurate exploration of the English Wikipedia's notabilityrequirements.
- XXL, a magazine devoted to "hip-hop on a higher level", revealed the existence of a "Wikipedia Rap" (download) by impresario Skyzoo in the final installment of his The Penny Freestyle series. Of course, in doing so he builds on a Wikimedian tradition of writing and rewriting songs to describe the daily life of contributors; existing hip-hop songs include "Bold I Be" by User:Scartol.
Reader comments
Article promotion by collaboration; deleted revisions; Wikipedia's use of open access; readers unimpressed by FAs; swine flu anxiety
Effective collaboration leads to earlier article promotion
A team of researchers from the
Deleted revisions in the English Wikipedia
Wikipedia and open-access repositories
The paper "Wikipedia and institutional repositories: an academic symbiosis?"
Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, a total of 297 links were estimated to go from Wikipedia articles to these repositories (40% of which went to the three Australian controls), mostly to support specific claims but also (in 35% of the cases) for background information. In terms of document type linked from Wikipedia, PhD theses, academic journal articles and conference papers each scored about 20% of the entries, whereas in terms of Wikipedia language, 35% of links came from non-English Wikipedias.
The paper cites strong criticism of institutional repositories[4] but proposes "a potential symbiosis between Wikipedia and academic research in institutional repositories" – Wikipedia getting access to primary sources, and institutional repositories growing their user base – as a new reason that "academics should be systematically placing their research work in institutional repositories". Ironically, the author himself did not follow this advice. However, such potential alignments between Wikimedians and open access have been observed in related contexts – according to the expert participation survey. For instance, Wikipedia contributors are more likely to have most or all of their publications freely available on the web.
As is custom in academia, the paper does not provide links to the underlying data, but the Yahoo! Site Explorer queries can be reconstructed (archived example) or compared to Wikipedia search results and site-specific Google searches. There is also code from linkypedia and the Wikipedia part of the PLoS Altmetrics study that could both be adapted for automating such searches.
Quality of featured articles doesn't always impress readers
In an article titled "Information quality assessment of community generated content: A user study of Wikipedia" (abstract),[5] published this month by the Journal of Information Science, three researchers from Bar-Ilan University reported on a study examining judgment of Wikipedia's quality by non-expert readers (done as part of the 2008 doctoral thesis of one of the authors, Eti Yaari, which was already covered in Haaretz at the time).
The paper starts with a review of existing literature on information quality in general, and on measuring the quality of Wikipedia articles in particular. The authors then describe the setup of their qualitative study: 64 undergraduate and graduate students were each asked to examine five articles from the Hebrew Wikipedia, as well as their revision histories (an explanation was given), and judge their quality by choosing the articles they considered best and worst. The five articles were pre-selected to include one containing each of four quality/maintenance templates used on the Hebrew Wikipedia: featured, expand, cleanup and rewrite, plus one "regular" article. But only half of the participants were shown the articles with the templates. Participants were asked to "think aloud" and explain their choices; the audio recording of each session (on average 58 minutes long) was fully transcribed for further analysis, which found that the criteria mentioned by the students could be divided into "measurable" criteria "that can be objectively and reliably assigned by a computer program without human intervention (e.g. the number of words in an article or the existence of images)" and "non-measureable" ones ("e.g. structure, relevance of links, writing style", but also in some cases the nicknames of the Wikipedians in the version history). Interestingly, a high number of edits was both seen as a criterion indicating good quality by some, and indicating bad quality by others, and likewise for a low number of edits.
Comparing the quality judgments of the study's participants with that of Wikipedians as expressed in the templates revealed some striking differences: "The perceptions of our users regarding quality did not always coincide with the perceptions of Wikipedia editors, since in fewer than half of the cases the featured article was chosen as best". In fact, "in three cases, the featured article was chosen as the lowest quality article out of the five articles assessed by these participants." However, those participants who were able to see the templates chose the "featured" article considerably more often as the best one, "even though the participants did not acknowledge the influence of these templates".
In swine flu outbreak, Wikipedia reading preceded blogging and newspaper writing
A paper published in Health Communication examined "Public Anxiety and Information Seeking Following the H1N1 Outbreak" (of swine influenza in 2009) by tracking, among other measures, page view numbers on Wikipedia, which it described as "a popular health reference website" (citing a 2009 paper co-authored by Wikipedian Tim Vickers: "Seeking health information online: Does Wikipedia matter?"
While these findings may not be particularly surprising to Wikipedians who are used to current events driving attention for articles, the authors offer intriguing comparisons to the two other measures of public health anxiety they study in the paper: The number of newspaper articles mentioning the disease or the virus, and the number of blog entries mentioning the disease. "Increased attention to H1N1 happens most rapidly in Wikipedia page views, then in the blogs, and finally in newspapers. The duration of peak attention to H1N1 is shortest for the blog writers, followed by Wikipedia viewers, and is longest in newspapers." Examining correlations, they found that "The number of blog entries was most strongly related to the number of newspaper articles and number of Wikipedia visits on the same day. The number of Wikipedia visits was most strongly related to the number of newspaper articles the following day. In other words, public reaction is visible in online information seeking before it is visible in the amount of newspaper coverage." Finally, the authors emphasize the advantages of their approach to measure public anxiety in such situations over traditional approaches. Specifically, they point out that in the H1N1 case the first random telephone survey was conducted only two weeks after the outbreak, and therefore underestimated the initial public anxiety levels, as the author argue based on their combined data including Wikipedia pageviews.
Extensive analysis of gender gap in Wikipedia to be presented at WikiSym 2011
A paper by researchers of GroupLens Research to be presented at the upcoming WikiSym 2011 symposium offers the most comprehensive analysis of gender imbalance in Wikipedia so far.[7] This study was covered by a summary in the August 15 Signpost edition and, facilitated by a press release, it generated considerable media attention. Below are some of the main highlights from this study:
- reliably tracking gender in Wikipedia is complicated due to the different (and potentially inconsistent) ways in which users can specify gender information.
- self-identified females comprise 16.1% of editors who started editing in 2009 and specified their gender, but they only account for 9% of the total number of edits by this cohort and the gap is even wider among highly active editors.
- the gender gap has remained fairly constant since 2005
- gender differences emerge when considering areas of contribution, with a greater concentration of women in the People and Arts areas.
- male and female editors edit user-centric namespaces differently: on average, a female makes a significantly higher concentration of her edits in the User and User Talk namespaces, mostly at the cost of fewer edits in Main and Talk.
- a significantly higher proportion of females have participated in the "Adopt a User" program as mentees.
- female editors have an overall lower probability of becoming admins. However, when controlling for experience measured by number of edits it turns out that women are significantly more likely to become administrators than their male counterparts.
- articles that have a higher concentration of female editorship are more likely to be contentious (when measured by proportion of edit-protected articles) than those with more males.
- in their very initial contributions, female editors are more likely to be reverted than male editors but there is hardly any statistical difference between females and males in how often they are reverted after their seventh edit. The likelihood of the departure of a female editor, however, is not affected more than that of a male by reverts of edits that are genuine contributions (i.e. not considered vandalism).
- females are significantly more likely to be reverted for vandalizing Wikipedia’s articles and while males and females are temporarily blocked at similar rates, females are significantly more likely to be blocked permanently. In these cases, though, self-reported gender may be less reliable.
A second, unpublished paper addressing gender imbalance in Wikipedia ("Gender differences in Wikipedia editing") by Judd Antin and collaborators will be presented at WikiSym 2011.
"Bandwagon effect" spurs wiki adoption among Chinese-speaking users
In a paper titled "The Behavior of Wiki Users",
- Performance expectancy (measured by agreement to statements such as "Wikis, for example Wikipedia, help me with knowledge sharing and searches")
- Effort expectancy (e.g. "Wikis are easier to use than other word processors.")
- Facilitating conditions (e.g. "Other wiki users can help me solve technical problems.")
- User involvement (e.g. "Collaboration on wikis is exciting to me.")
The impact of user involvement was the most significant. Social influence (e.g. "The people around me use wikis") was not found to play a significant role. On the other hand, the researchers state that a person's general susceptibility to the "bandwagon effect" (measured by statements such as "I often follow others' suggestions") "can intensify the impact of [an already present] intention to use wikis on the actual use ... This can be explained in that users tend to translate their intention to use into actual usage when their inclination receives positive cues, but the intention alone is not sufficient for them to turn intention into action. ... people tend to be more active in using new technology when social cues exist. This is especially true for societies where obedience is valued, such as Taiwan and China."
In brief
- Mani Pande, a research analyst with the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Development Department, announced the final report from the latest Wikipedia Editor Survey. A dump with raw anonymized data from the survey was also released by WMF (read the full coverage).
- In an article appearing in the Communications of the ACM with the title "Reputation systems for open collaboration", a team of researchers based at UCSC discuss the design of reputational incentives in open collaborative systems and review lessons learned from the development and analysis of two different kinds of reputation tools for Wikipedia (WikiTrust) and for collaborative participation in Google Maps (CrowdSensus).[9]
- A paper presented by a Spanish research team at CISTI 2011 presents results from an experiment in using Wikipedia in the classroom and reports on "how the cooperation of Engineering students in a Wikipedia editing project helped to improve their learning and understanding of physics".[10]
- Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology released an analysis and open dataset of 33 language corpora extracted from Wikipedia.[11]
- A team from the UC Irvine will present a new tool at WikiSym 2011 for vandalism detection and an analysis of its performance on a corpus of Wikipedia data from the Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse (PAN) workshop.[12]
- A paper in the Journal of Oncology Practice, titled "Patient-Oriented Cancer Information on the Internet: A Comparison of Wikipedia and a Professionally Maintained Database",[13] compared Wikipedia's coverage of ten cancer types with that of Physician Data Query(PDQ) [1], a database of peer-reviewed, patient-oriented summaries about cancer-related subjects which is run by the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI). Last year, the main results had already been presented at a conference, announced in a press release and summarized in the Signpost: "Wikipedia's cancer coverage is reliable and thorough, but not very readable". In addition, the journal article examines a few other aspects, e.g. that on search engines Google and Bing, "in more than 80% of cases, Wikipedia appeared above PDQ in the results list" for a particular form of cancer.
- A paper published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science presents a new link prediction algorithm for Wikipedia articles and discusses how relevant links to and from new articles can be inferred "from a combination of structural requirements and topical relationships".[14]
References
- ^ K. Nemoto, P. Gloor, and R. Laubacher (2011). Social capital increases efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia – HT '11, 231. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI • PDF
- ^ A.G. West and I. Lee (2011). What Wikipedia Deletes: Characterizing Dangerous Collaborative Content. In WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis. PDF
- ^ Alastair Smith (2011). Wikipedia and institutional repositories: an academic symbiosis? In E. Noyons, P. Ngulube and J. Leta (Eds), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics & Informetrics, Durban, South Africa, July 4–7, 2011 (pp. 794–800). PDF
- ^ Dorothea Salo (2008). Innkeeper at the Roach Motel. Library Trends 57 (2): 98–12. DOI • PDF
- ^ E. Yaari, S. Baruchson-Arbib, and J. Bar-Ilan (2011). Information quality assessment of community generated content: A user study of Wikipedia. Journal of Information Science (August 15, 2011). DOI
- ^ Michaël R. Laurent and Tim J. Vickers (2009). Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter? Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association: JAMIA 16(4): 471-9 DOI • PDF
- ^ S.T.K. Lam, A. Uduwage, Z. Dong, S. Sen, D.R. Musicant, L. Terveen, and J. Riedl (2011). WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance. In WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis, 2011. PDF .
- ^ Wesley Shu and Yu-Hao Chuang (2011). The Behavior of Wiki Users. Social Behavior and Personality: An International Journal 39, no. 6 (October 1, 2011): 851-864. DOI
- ^ L. De Alfaro, A. Kulshreshtha, I. Pye, and B. Thomas Adler (2011). Reputation systems for open collaboration. Communications of the ACM 54 (8), August 1, 2011: 81. DOI • PDF
- ^ Pilar Mareca, and Vicente Alcober Bosch (2011). Editing the Wikipedia: Its role in science education.In 6th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI). HTML .
- ^ Denny Vrandečić, Philipp Sorg, and Rudi Studer (2011). Language resources extracted from Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Knowledge capture - K-CAP '11, 153. New York, New York, USA: ACM Press, 2011. DOI • PDF
- ^ Sara Javanmardi, David W Mcdonald, and Cristina V Lopes (2011). Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: A High-Performing, Feature-Rich Model and its Reduction Through Lasso. In WikiSym 2011: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis, 2011. PDF
- ^ Malolan S. Rajagopalan, Vineet K. Khanna, Yaacov Leiter, Meghan Stott, Timothy N. Showalter, Adam P. Dicker, and Yaacov R. Lawrence (2011). Patient-Oriented Cancer Information on the Internet: A Comparison of Wikipedia and a Professionally Maintained Database. Journal of Oncology Practice 7(5). PDF • DOI
- ^ Kelly Itakura, Charles Clarke, Shlomo Geva, Andrew Trotman, and Wei Huang (2011). Topical and Structural Linkage in Wikipedia. In: Advances in Information Retrieval, edited by Paul Clough, Colum Foley, Cathal Gurrin, Gareth Jones, Wessel Kraaij, Hyowon Lee, and Vanessa Mudoch, 6611:460-465. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011 DOI • PDF
Reader comments
The pending changes fiasco: how an attempt to answer one question turned into a quagmire
The following is an
The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
Wikimedia Foundation endorses open-access petition to the White House; pending changes RfC ends
28 May 2012
The future of pending changes
16 April 2012
The pending changes fiasco: how an attempt to answer one question turned into a quagmire
29 August 2011
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
11 October 2010
French million, controversial content, Citizendium charter, Pending changes, and more
27 September 2010
Page-edit stats, French National Library partnership, Mass page blanking, Jimbo on Pending changes
13 September 2010
Pending changes analyzed, Foundation report, Main page bias, brief news
6 September 2010
Pending changes poll, Public policy classes, Payment schemes debate, and more
23 August 2010
Collaboration with the British Museum and in Serbia, Interaction with researchers, and more
21 June 2010
Wikipedia better than Britannica, Pending changes as a victory of tradition, and more
21 June 2010
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
14 June 2010
Pending changes goes live, first state-funded Wikipedia project concludes, brief news
14 June 2010
Hoaxes in France and at university, Wikipedia used in Indian court, Is Wikipedia a cult?, and more
14 June 2010
"Pending changes" trial, Chief hires, British Museum prizes, Interwiki debate, and more
7 June 2010
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I had good intentions, and they led me straight into Wikipedia Hell. As most of you know,
I had applied PC to a few dozen articles during and after the trial period. I got a message on my talk page from a user who noted that I was still using it even though the trial period was over. I didn't think I was doing anything drastic, but it was still bothering some folks because there was no clear mandate to continue using the tool. I'd participated in a number of policy discussions in the past, so I took it upon myself to seek an answer to the question of whether we wanted to retain this tool or not. Six months later, the question remains unanswered.
The RFC
It started with a simple
Things were getting a bit out of control as discussions were duplicated and new participants added new sections without apparently having read previous posts. On March 8 the second phase of the RFC began. The rate of participation was high, and disruption and factionalism were low. However, a small (it seemed to me) but very vocal group of users felt that we shouldn't have a conversation about whether to keep it until it was turned off. Gradually, this became the primary topic of discussion on the talk page. Contributors began to split into two camps: editors who wanted the tool turned off and those of us who felt this was irrelevant. I was dismayed by what I saw as the emergence of an adversarial relationship. The waters were becoming muddied and an unpleasantly confrontational atmosphere was developing on the talk page: a storm was brewing.
To try once again to organize discussion into a format that would yield usable results, I proposed yet another phase. The idea would be a survey for editors to complete. I'd participated in the Wikipedia:RfA Review/Recommend survey and liked the format. I believed this issue was not as contentious as RfA, and that we could use the combined results of the three phases to determine what the community wanted and move forward. I still believe that.
Phase three
I tried to roll out the third phase. I asked for feedback on it, but got very little. Eventually it was clear the increasingly vocal users who wanted to switch off PC didn't like the existence of the third phase. For my part, while I didn't "own" the RFC I did feel it should focus on the particular purpose for which I'd created it: to determine whether or not we should continue to use PC. How could we craft a policy on the use of a tool if we couldn't even decide if we would use it, and how could we expect the Foundation to expend its resources to develop it if we were unable to tell them if it would end up being used? I decided to push ahead as only a few users out of the 100+ who had participated in earlier phases had objected to the final phase. The breakdown of what happened in phase two suggested that we had some fairly usable results, and I didn't want to lose the momentum we had. I wanted to get this over the finish line and answer what I was now calling "The Big Question".
I turned on the questionnaire phase after ten days of discussion that had resulted in changes to both the wording and ordering of the questions. Nobody had proposed an alternative procedure other than reverting back to open discussion, which had already proved to be too messy to yield any usable results in my view. Was I being pushy? Maybe, but I felt it was important to resolve this issue, which had by then been discussed for more than a month.
Two questionnaires had been submitted when a user decided to revert phase three and place it on hold pending further discussion. For the first time, I was actually feeling stress and getting angry about something on Wikipedia. I am usually able to keep my cool fairly well, but accusations were being leveled at me and I felt that irrelevant objections were sidelining a major policy discussion that would have far-reaching consequences. I repeatedly stated that if turning PC off was what it would take to get the conversation back on track that we should just do it. That wasn't good enough for some users, and a new third phase was created whose sole purpose was to discuss the temporary use of the tool. I admit that I began to make some intemperate remarks and some foul language crept into my conversation. I was frustrated with Wikipedia for the first time in years. My third phase was put on hold while the other issue was being resolved. By now the RFC had been open for 45 days.
There's a lot more I could say about what happened next, but it is all there in the archives for those who want the details. Eventually I decided I'd had enough: too much time was being spent debating my alleged motivations as opposed to the actual issues, and I quit the process—a process I'd initiated with the simple intention of answering one question. I un-watchlisted the related pages and haven't looked at them again until now. A couple of users expressed concern that I might quit Wikipedia altogether, and I re-assured them that I was just sick of the tactics used in the debate, and didn't want to be part of it anymore. The RFC was finally closed on May 27, 101 days after I opened it. In the end, all that happened was that PC was "temporarily" taken out of use, the same way it was temporarily turned on. It's still there, we just aren't allowed to use it until we finally answer that "big question" I set out to answer back in February. Nothing more substantive than that was decided. There's still no policy on PC. For all that effort, we failed to achieve the primary goal of deciding whether or not to use the tool, although, after a poll, it was eventually removed from all pages on which it was still being used.
Aftermath
When I got the discussion about PC going, I saw it as my opus, my great contribution to Wikipedia's policy structure. Whether PC was kept or not, we would finally have a policy on it one way or the other after many years of debate. Although I admit I had a preferred outcome, what I wanted most, what Wikipedia needed most, was a yes or no answer. I dedicated many hours to organizing the debate and engaging in discussion. In the end it was a bitter disappointment that accomplished nothing. There seems inevitably to come a point in any such attempt where there are simply too many voices, too many nonsensical objections, too much petty bickering to get anything done. This is a growing, systemic problem at Wikipedia, and eventually we are going to have to deal with it.
When people talk to me about Wikipedia I always tell them that the best thing about it and the worst thing about are the same thing. The consensus-based decision-making model works in a lot of cases, but sometimes it fails us because there are no controls. Nobody was able to keep this process moving in a forward direction once those who wanted to discuss a different issue had derailed it. Perhaps, when the tool has been switched off for long enough, we can look at this again and try to answer that one question without the psychological barrier of its simultaneous non-consensual operation. When that day comes, I'll be happy to be on the other side of the fence as a participant, not the guy trying to be the ringmaster of an out-of-control circus.
NOTE:click here to see this piece as it was originally submitted
Reader comments
WikiProject Tennis
- drive in September to move free images to the Wikimedia Commons. There are lots of prizes in store for those who sign up and help out.
- The Guild of Copy Editors will be holding another copy edit drive in September. The September Drive's pagehas already been launched, so sign up today!
To celebrate the start of the
What motivated you to join WikiProject Tennis? Are you a fan of a particular tennis player?
- Sellyme: I joined WikiProject Tennis as I'm an avid sports fan who's always watching sports and getting results through live feeds, so I thought I'd put my spare time to use by updating the tennis draws and results on Wikipedia.
- Totalinarian: For me, it was the history of the game. Tennis is one of those rare sports where a significant amount of history has been made available to the public via the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women's Tennis Association (WTA), but it is ignored more often than not. These public sources also fail to go far enough in dealing with the complexities of accepted professional tennis – that is, after 1968 – in its early years, so I decided to join the WikiProject to try and take the challenge on. Of course, this comes with its pitfalls...
How does the project handle the notability of tennis players? Have you had to deal with any editors creating articles for non-notable players?
- Sellyme: The project has a very clear set of guidelines for notability, which run across every form of competition and level of tennis, from the ATP World Tour/WTA Tour to the Challenger series and the Futures events, to international competitions and team events. It's a relief to have such clear notability guidelines, and I've only ever been involved in one or two discussions about notability due to this.
Like many sports-related projects, WikiProject Tennis often deals with
- Sellyme: I have never seen a BLP issue on this WikiProject, as the official sources (ATP and WTA) have in-depth biographies for every player who passes notability and more, and this information is frequently expanded on by third party sources. The biggest issue with biographies is debate over how the infobox should look!
The project has a very active talk page. What brings tennis enthusiasts together? What tips would you give to projects that struggle to foster discussion?
- Sellyme: Well, tennis is such a global sport, it allows for people from every culture and time-zone to come together under one banner, and this creates a lot of differing opinions and ideas. This creates discussion, and continual new outlooks on parts of the project, allowing for continuous improvement. Personally, I'd recommend that small projects get people from different backgrounds and cultures to look into it, instead of just the few Wikipedians the project members would already know. Search through relevant page histories for names that you may not recognise that pop up a lot, ask if they would like to join. Diversity creates a great environment and great improvements.
The Tournament Task Force was created this summer. What are the task force's goals? What resources are needed to reach those goals?
- Totalinarian: The Tournament Task Force strives to create guidelines for both new and old articles about tennis tournaments. The Task Force also maintains and improves current articles, and encourages anyone with reliable information to provide the Task Force with their input. At present, the resources required for the Task Force are a challenge – it basically comes down to other references, and not just what is publically available. The best references for tournament articles tend to be World of Tennis annuals, which summarise years in tennis and provide tournament histories from 1968 onwards. Older references are, sadly, far rarer to come across, which makes the challenge of writing about tennis prior to the Open Era almost impossible to meet. This particular editor, however, lives in hope...
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Sellyme: At the moment, the project has a few issues with inconsistencies. If anyone had the spare time (or the scripting knowledge) to correct tie-break scores across nearly all articles, that would benefit the project greatly, as many new editors use the traditional ATP tie-break format (such as 7-64) without being aware of the project stance on tie-breaks. Due to some people who may not know how tennis scoring works, we prefer tie-breaks to be formatted like this: 77-64. This only became a solid guideline recently, so many hundreds or even thousands of articles have the previous format. Another important part of the project is the draw pages such as 2011 Australian Open – Men's Singles, which the members of the project keep almost completely live, most of the time updating even faster than the official ATP and WTA websites! However, sometimes the most frequent updater of a page has something important on, or the tournament is in a time-zone with few contributors, so the draw doesn't get updated.
Next week we'll find a faster way to commute to Westminster. Until then, take the tube over to the archive.
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The best of the week
Featured articles
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- Richard Nixon (nom) (1913–94), the 37th President of the United States and the only one to resign from office (nominated by User:Wehwalt and User:Happyme22).
- Gerard (archbishop of York) (nom), who owned a book of astrology and studied Hebrew, actions so disturbing to his clergy that they refused to have his body inside York Minster. Or perhaps it was the man's temper that got him off-side with his colleagues: he once kicked over an Archbishop of Canterbury's chair in a fit of anger. (Ealdgyth) picture at right
- Far Eastern Party (nom)—how Douglas Mawson was forced to eat his dogs to survive almost two months in the Antarctic, and how the livers of those dogs poisoned his companion, Xavier Mertz. "It's an incredible story" of epic survival, says nominator Apterygial. picture at right
- Harmon Killebrew (nom), Baseball Hall of Famer, who died last month. Nominator Wizardman says the article was harder to develop "because he was known as a nice, quiet guy; it's a lot easier to write about someone if they are (at least a little bit) verbose or controversial, as there's more to sink your teeth into." The article was the first promotion by User:Ucucha, who became an FAC delegate last week.
- Gobrecht dollar (nom), a coin minted from 1836 to 1839 to determine whether or not a circulating silver dollar would prove favorable with the American public. Nominator RHM22 says, "Evidently it did, as the denomination continued steady production until 1873."
- Tropical Storm Carrie (1972) (nom), a strong storm that affected the east coast of the United States in early September 1972. (Juliancolton)
- Rova of Antananarivo (nom), the palace complex of the kings and queens of Madagascar. It was established in 1610 on a traditional model dating back to the 1400s or earlier. Just before the site's anticipated inscription on the World Heritage List it was destroyed by fire, in 1995. It is currently being rebuilt. (Lemurbaby)
- Manhattan Project (nom), a World War II research and development program—led by the US with contributions from the UK and Canada—that produced the first atomic bomb. (Hawkeye7)
- Iranian Embassy siege (nom) in London in April/May 1980, which ended when the SAS stormed the building. The assembled press captured the images of men dressed entirely in black and armed to the teeth abseiling down the back of the building and broadcast them on live television during prime time, a defining moment in British history and for the Thatcher government. Just 17 minutes later, five of the six terrorists were dead and all but one of their hostages freed. (HJ Mitchell)
- Maple syrup (nom), which nominator Nikkimaria says is "the syrup of Sunday mornings, the sweet topping on everything from waffles to ice cream, and the best thing to combine with snow in spring".
- Ferugliotheriidae (nom), an enigmatic group of extinct mammals from 84–66 million years ago. Although they coexisted with dinosaurs, their size was of a different order: they weighed only about 70 g. (Ucucha)
- Thomas the Slav (nom), whose revolt is one of the most complex, controversial and fascinating stories of 9th-century Byzantium. (Constantine)
- John Treloar (museum administrator) (nom) (1894–1952), the soldier who seemed to have never fired a shot in battle. Instead, he became one of the most important figures in Australia's military history, heading the military's record-keeping units during both world wars and the Australian War Memorial for the last three decades of his life. A workaholic, he lived next to his office in the years before his early death. (Nick-D)
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- Murder of Julia Martha Thomas (nom), one of the most notorious crimes in late 19th-century Britain. Mrs Thomas, a widow in her 50s who lived in Richmond in west London, was murdered on 2 March 1879 by her maid Kate Webster, who disposed of the body by dismembering it, boiling the flesh off the bones, and throwing most of what was left into the Thames. It was alleged, although never proved, that she had offered the fat to neighbours and street children as dripping and lard. (Prioryman)
- Alister Murdoch (nom) (1912–84), a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force, having trained as a seaplane pilot and participated in an Antarctic rescue mission for lost explorers in 1935. During World War II, he commanded No. 221 Squadron RAF in Europe and the Middle East. (Ian Rose)
- Super Science Stories (nom), a companion to Astonishing Stories, which recently went through FAC. Science-fiction historian Raymond Thompson describes Super Science Stories as "one of the most interesting [sci-fi] magazines to appear during the 1940s", despite the variable quality of the stories. (Mike Christie)
- Final Fantasy XIII (nom), a video game set in the fictional floating world of Cocoon, whose government is ordering a purge of civilians who have allegedly come into contact with Pulse, the much-feared world below. (Sjones23, PresN)
- Brazilian battleship São Paulo (nom), a dreadnought battleship designed for the Brazilian Navy by the British company Armstrong Whitworth. Launched in 1910, the São Paulo was soon involved in the Revolt of the Lash, in which crews on four Brazilian warships mutinied over poor pay and harsh punishments for even minor offenses. The ship sank in 1951 while en route to be scrapped. (The ed17)
- Paxillus involutus (nom), a fungus widely eaten in Eastern Europe that mysteriously kills people, a fact that nominator Casliber read about as a child. He says, "now I am a doctor and we know why it does, and I find it even freakier".
- Thurisind (nom) (died c. 560) was king of the Gepids, an East Germanic Gothic people, from c. 548 to 560. He was the penultimate Gepid king, and succeeded King Elemund by staging a coup d'état and forcing the king's son into exile. Thurisind's kingdom was in Central Europe and had its centre in Sirmium, a former Roman city on the Danube River. His reign was marked by multiple wars with the Lombards, a Germanic people. aldux
Three featured articles were delisted:
- United States Marine Corps (nom): prose, comprehensiveness, sourcing and images
- Sharon Tate (nom): sourcing
- Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (nom): referencing, reference formatting, prose, MOS compliance and images
Featured lists
Three lists were promoted:
- List of National Treasures of Japan (writings: Japanese books) (nom) (Nominated by Bamse.)
- List of Square Enix video games (nom) (PresN.)
- List of De La Salle University people (nom) (Moray An Par.)
Featured pictures
Eleven images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
- related article), and example of the table-top mountains, or mesas found in the Guiana Highlands of South America, especially in Venezuela. This image is taken from Tëk river base camp. (Created by Paolo)
- related article), showing its breeding plumage. Members of this species migrate east–west between Australia and New Zealand, rather than following a more common north–south route. (Created by User:JJ Harrison)
- related article), photographed in the inland area of Julatten, north-eastern Australia. (Created by User:JJ Harrison)
- Davy Jones. (Created by John Tenniel, of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland fame)
- related article), showing two adults in Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. Since one bird is facing away from the camera, the image provides a nearly complete view of the bird's plumage. (Created by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim)
- Blois panorama (nom; related article), viewed from the south-east on the far side of the Loire River. Explore the location on Google maps; click on the minus sign to zoom out to view the whole of France. (Created by User:Diliff) picture at top
- Black-headed heron (nom; related article), Mikumi National Park, Tanzania. Common throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, it is mainly resident, but some west African birds move further north in the rainy season. This species usually breeds in the wet season in colonies in trees, reedbeds, or cliffs, and builds a bulky stick nest for two to four eggs. Its flight is slow, with neck retracted, and its call is a loud croaking. The image was a stitch of several segments. (Created by User:Muhammad Mahdi Karim)
- Sonia Sotomayor (nom; related article), an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. A graduate of Princeton and Yale, she has served since August 2009. (Created by Steve Petteway, from the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States) picture at right
- Space Shuttle Discovery STS-120 (nom; related article, plus more than 60 other articles), the Space Shuttle Discovery and its seven-member STS-120 crew head toward Earth-orbit and a scheduled link-up with the International Space Station. Lift-off from Kennedy Space Center's launch-pad was at 11:38:19 a.m. (EDT) on 28 October 2007. On board were astronauts Pam Melroy, commander; George Zamka, pilot; Scott Parazynski, Stephanie Wilson, Doug Wheelock, European Space Agency's (ESA) Paolo Nespoli and Daniel Tani, all mission specialists. (Created by NASA, edited by User:Jjron) picture at right
- Nasser Al-Attiyah (nom; related article), action shot of Nasser Al-Attiyah's Ford Fiesta S2000 at Rannakylä shakedown in Muurame of the Neste Oil Rally Finland 2010. (Created by User:Kallerna)
- New Charlton. See the location on Google Maps. (Created by User:Diliff) picture at bottom
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Four existing cases
No cases were opened or closed this week. Four cases remain open:
- WP:NPOV, making "consensus in solving disputes not only on page edition but also on naming issue practically impossible"; and Cla68, who argues that some editors "give the impression that they are trying to reclaim the islands on behalf of [a] government". Little new material has been submitted in the case's workshoppage.
- Abortion, a dispute over the lead sentence of Abortion and the naming of abortion-related articles, also said to have been exacerbated by disruptive editing. Little new evidence was submitted this week, but the case's workshop was busy: six users have now presented proposals, including suggestions of article probation, discretionary sanctions, and a new noticeboard. All are yet to receive attention from a large number of arbitrators.
- Manipulation of BLPs, a general exploration of the phenomenon named by the title. This week, a considerable amount of content was added to the case's already large evidence page, although some was also withdrawn. The case's workshop page was similarly busy, seeing more than 200 revisions in the past week alone, which added 100 kB to the page's size, to exceed a total of 200 kB. Arbitrators have not yet responded to proposals submitted by five editors.
- Cirt and Jayen466, a dispute that centers on the editing of the two editors. No new evidence was presented to the committee this week, but the case's workshop page was active; a number of proposals are now on the table, though none has yet been voted on by arbitrators.
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The bugosphere, new mobile site and MediaWiki 1.18 close in on deployment
What is: the bugosphere?
Wikimedia Labs: soon to be at the cutting edge of MediaWiki development?
23 April 2012
MediaWiki 1.20wmf01 hits first WMF wiki, understanding 20% time, and why this report cannot yet be a draft
16 April 2012
What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live
12 September 2011
The bugosphere, new mobile site and MediaWiki 1.18 close in on deployment
29 August 2011
Code Review backlog almost zero; What is: Subversion?; brief news
18 July 2011
Wikimedia down for an hour; What is: Wikipedia Offline?
30 May 2011
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
25 April 2011
What is: localisation?; the proposed "personal image filter" explained; and more in brief
21 March 2011
This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger coined the term "bugosphere" to describe "the microcosm that evolves around a particular instance of Bugzilla" such as the MediaWiki Bugzilla. In this edition of What is?, we look at the processes and procedures underlying the Wikimedia bug reporting system (in Bugzilla terms, a 'bug' may be a problem with the existing software or a request for features to be added in future versions, which may also be referred to as an 'enhancement' when differentiation is desired).
Bug #1 was filed on 10 August 2004; as of time of writing, 30602 bugs have been submitted. Of those, approximately twenty-four thousand have been closed, whilst six thousand are still open (about 60 percent of which are requests for enhancements). Not all bugs related to Wikimedia wikis; the MediaWiki Bugzilla collates reports from all users of the software, in addition to bug reports that do not relate to MediaWiki but instead relate to Wikimedia websites. In any given week, approximately 90 bugs will be opened, and approximately 80 closed (in extraordinary weeks, such as bug sprints, as many as 65 extra bugs may be closed). As such, Bugzilla serves as central reference for monitoring what has been done, and what still needs doing.
Registration on Bugzilla is free but necessary (logins are not shared between Bugzilla and Wikimedia wikis for many reasons, including the increased visibility of email addresses on Bugzilla). Anyone may comment on bugs; comments are used principally to add details to bug reports, or suggestions on how they should be fixed. Voting in support of a bug is possible, but in general bugs are worked on by priority, or by area of expertise; few "critical"-rated bugs remain long enough to accumulate many votes. In January this year, the Foundation appointed Mark Hershberger as bugmeister, responsible for monitoring, prioritising and processing bug reports. More recently, he has been organising a series of "
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- An interwiki-following redirection website has been created to allow users who cannot easily type in their native language, because of a restricted keyboard, to access their chosen article by typing the English name equivalent of it.
- The Abuse Filter extension (known on the English Wikipedia as the edit filter) has been deployed to all Wikimedia wikis by default (see also this week's "News and Notes"). Since it comes with no filters by default, this should cause no visible change.
- In unrelated news, the JavaScript component of the Abuse filter was significantly upgraded to use the jQuery framework and the ResourceLoader, cutting load times (bug #29714).
- Developer Jeroen De Dauw blogged this week about his efforts to add "campaign"-style functionality to the new Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard, allowing for those uploading photos as part of an upload drive (such as this year's Wiki Loves Monuments competition) to enjoy a customised experience. The resultant functionality, he said, was ultimately "very generic" and therefore could be deployed for many future competitions and programmes.
- "After last weeks successful triage and the large amount of work that everyone has been doing were getting pretty close to having MobileFrontend [the new mobile Wikipedia site] production ready" reports the WMF's Director of Mobile Projects Tomasz Finc. He also listed the small number of bugs (at time of writing, six) that could still use developer attention.
- Similarly approaching its target deployment date is MediaWiki 1.18, scheduled for 16 September. Early in the week, there were concerns about the high number of revisions still marked as "fixme"s (59), a figure that has since been reduced to 45, as of 27 August. In particular, a developer skilled in Objective CAMLis sought to help review the 'Math' extension.
- On the English Wikipedia, bots were approved to Commonscat}} template to reflect moves, redirections and deletions at Wikimedia Commons. Still open are requests for a bot to add wikilinks to
{{{publisher}}}and{{{work}}}parameters of citation templates, and to remove flags from certain infoboxes.
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