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26 November 2014

 

2014-11-26

Orbital Science: Now you're thinking with explosions

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By The Herald, Adam Cuerden, and Hafspajen
  • This wasn't a triumph / I'm making a note here, giant boom / Even though there were no indications / Orbital Science / We do what we can, and then explode / This isn't good for all of us / But least there's nobody dead.
    Orbital Science
    / We do what we can, and then explode / This isn't good for all of us / But least there's nobody dead.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 10 to 16 November 2014. Anything in quotation marks is taken from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Featured articles

Four

featured articles
were promoted this week.

dinos
), and is now a featured article.

Featured lists

Four

featured lists
were promoted this week.

scheduled monuments in Bath and North East Somerset
.
A mass grave from the Spanish Civil War discovered in a recent excavation in Estépar, Burgos; as photographed by Wikipedian Mario Modesto Mata. These sort of documentary images are very valuable since, naturally, the general goal is to return the bodies to their families for burial after the documentation of the murders are complete, meaning there's only a short amount of time for photographers to step in and document history.

Featured pictures

Eleven

featured pictures
were promoted this week.

Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream
Wikipedian Francis C. Franklin's photograph of a great tit.
Roses by Vincent van Gogh
Toompea Castle, as photographed by Abrget47j.
  • The Raven (created by Gustave Doré, restored by Lise Broer, nominated by Crisco 1492) "And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; / And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming, / And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; / And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor / Shall be lifted—nevermore!" Gustave Doré was a master of eerie woodblock engravings, and here pairs with probably the only horror poet anyone is likely to have ever read, Edgar Allan Poe.
  • King Solomon
    , his son from this marriage, was his successor on his throne, was known as an intelligent and wise ruler. He presumably didn't get it from his father.
  • The Gulf Stream (created by Winslow Homer, nominated by Crisco 1492) An 1899 oil painting by Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream shows a man in a small rudderless fishing boat struggling against the waves of the rough sea. The painting has been described as "a particularly enigmatic and tantalizing episode, a marine puzzle that floats forever in a region of unsolved mysteries", but, at one point, sick of the inquiries about the fate of the man in the painting, he wrote, "You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who now is so dazed & parboiled, will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily."
  • Mass grave from the Spanish Civil War (created and nominated by Mario Modesto Mata) One of several mass graves from the start of the Spanish Civil War discovered in an excavation from July–August 2014 at Estépar (Burgos). The grave contains twenty-six republicans who were assassinated in August-September 1936 by fascists.
  • Skagen painters, as well as featuring in poems and novels; in particular, he had his heroism and unfair treatment by the authorities in (initially) refusing to recognize said heroism celebrated in a poem and prose account by the Danish poet and dramatist Holger Drachmann
    .
  • Danube School, painters who started presenting subjects against landscape backgrounds, and this was once upon a time the beginning of Western landscape painting as an art form. The small people in the lower right corner, at the feet of the bigger figures, are reminiscent of the people of Lilliput from Gulliver's Travels or possibly the series Land of the Giants
    - they are the donors who didn't want to be depicted as big as the other, sacred figures.
  • unmanned craft
    , no-one was injured or killed in the explosion.
  • Great tit (created by Francis C. Franklin, nominated by The Herald) The great tit is a roughly sparrow-sized bird common throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Central and North Asia, with a yellow stomach, olive back, and black and white head. After last week, I'm refraining from naughty puns, but feel free to make your own now. The great tit is quite a vocal bird, and has up to 40 types of calls, from soft single notes such as "pit", "spick", or "chit", to a loud "tink" used by adult males as an alarm or in territorial disputes. One of the most familiar is a "teacher, teacher", often likened to a squeaky wheelbarrow wheel, which is used in proclaiming ownership of a territory.
  • Order of the Brethren of the Sword, and the Teutonic Order, before being converted into an administrative center after the Livonian War. Oh, and apparently, during the time those Danish crusaders were trying to take it over, God dropped a flag down to spur the Danes on. There are, however, doubts as to the veracity of this. Either way the Dannebrog
    is the special pride of The Danish.
  • Still Life: Vase with Pink Roses (created by Vincent van Gogh, nominated by Crisco 1492) People think about van Gogh as a painter who painted with strong colours, oranges, yellows, reds, sunflowers and fields that are glowing in the sun. But he could be a very sensitive and delicate painter too, using pastel colors, sky blues and delicate pinks. Or, like in this painting cream and whites with soft light greens. Painted near the end of his stay in the Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy in 1889-90, this still life is usually interpreted as reflecting Vincent van Gogh's optimism for the future. He would be dead from suicide less than three months later. The painting was valued at $60 million when it was gifted to the National Gallery of Art by Pamela Harriman in memory of her husband, an irony of fate - van Gogh hardly ever sold a painting while he was alive.
  • Selfoss (created by Martin Falbisoner, nominated by EuroCarGT) The river Jökulsá á Fjöllum is the second longest river in Iceland, and, as it approaches the coast, it drops down a series of waterfalls, to reach the ocean, the Selfoss being one of these, and Dettifoss, and Hafragilsfoss the others. Jökulsá á Fjöllum flows from the melting Vatnajökull glacier, and flows through the former Jökulsárgljúfur National Park (now part of Vatnajökull National Park), which was formed by the explosion of a volcano situated directly beneath the river. The river is located in the northeast of Iceland and forms the eastern boundary of Ódáðahraun, a wild and enchanting, untamed landscape of lava field that makes one feel this is the way the world looked when it was created.
Selfoss, a waterfall in Iceland on the river Jökulsá á Fjöllum, as photographed by Martin Falbisoner.

Featured topics

One

featured topic
was promoted this week.

  • First World War, Lithuania, which had been part of the Russian Empire, found itself invaded by Germans. Paradoxically, this was, on the whole, a good thing for Lithuania: Lithuania had been trying to gain independence for years, and Germany didn't want to upset the Russians by merely grabbing their territory, but could form an alliance with an independent Lithuania. They allowed the Vilnius Conference on independence, hoping that the conference would come down firmly on independence and a closer relationship with Germany, but the conference only came down for independence, the closer relationship dependent on Germany recognizing them as an independent state. The conference created the Council of Lithuania, formed from a group of men of a variety of social classes and positions, and they were set the task of negotiating terms, but it wasn't until Germany finally lost the First World War in 1918 that the Lithuanians were finally in sufficiently good of a position to push through the independence they wanted. World War II
    and reconquest by Russia lurked in the country's future, but, for the time, Lithuania was free.
The twenty initial members of the Council of Lithuania. The council sits at the center of a new featured topic.


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2014-11-26

A Russian alternative Wikipedia; Who's your grandfather?; ArtAndFeminism

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By Gamaliel

In Russia, Wikipedia edits you

Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library

Numerous media outlets are reporting on a November 14 statement on the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library announcing the formation of a Russian "alternative" to Wikipedia, a "regional electronic encyclopedia" dedicated to "Russian regions and the life of the country".


Western media outlets including Newsweek and the Washington Post have noted that this comes following efforts by the government of

Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 and Russia's conflict with the Ukraine traced to computers belonging to Russian government entities (See previous Signpost coverage). One person compiled a list of nearly 7000 such edits to the Russian Wikipedia
.

"What Wikipedia Taught Me About My Grandfather"

Frederic M. Richards

Christian Anfinsen
.

Lillie talked with

Good Article status. Dcrjsr is Jane S. Richardson, Professor of biochemistry at Duke University, former president of the Biophysical Society and a driving force behind WikiProject Biophysics
. Richards' article is the only biography of the six articles at GA status within the scope of WikiProject Biophysics. When deciding which biophysics articles to improve, Richardson and her husband, Duke Professor of biochemistry David C. Richardson, told Lillie “There were three people who had really influenced us very strongly. The other two had pretty decent Wikipedia pages, and Fred’s just seemed terrible.”

Lillie wrote "A sense I’ve had my whole life of who my grandfather is can be transformed by the addition of a single fact from a stranger writing on the Internet."

ArtAndFeminism organizers included on "Global Thinkers" list

Eyebeam Art and Technology Center

User:OR drohowa), and Laurel Ptak on its list of "The Leading Global Thinkers of 2014". The list
includes 100 "remarkable individuals who smashed the world as we know it" and "showed that a better future demands tearing down foundations and building something entirely new."

The magazine honored the six for their work towards "correcting the Wikipedia gender gap", noting that "as of 2013, only 13 percent of Wikipedia's contributors were female." The group organized the February ArtAndFeminism campaign, which featured thirty one Edit-a-thons in six countries on three continents. About six hundred participants created over a hundred articles and edited over 90 more on articles "related to art, feminism, gender studies, and LGBTQ issues". Another campaign is planned for March 2015.

Creator of Wikipedia sex illustrations is an "anonymous legend"

Seedfeeder's kiss-off

deep throating, frot, and tribadism
.

Gawker calls Seedfeeder's work "unmistakable" and "striking": vector graphics, empty backgrounds, and a flat and almost clinical style that Seedfeeder said was inspired by "the simple illustrations in airline safety pamphlets". His work was popular with Wikipedia editors from his first upload in July 2008, with editors almost immediately inundating him with requests for images of specific sex acts for articles. He also gained him praise and attention off of Wikipedia, with his work being featured and discussed in B3ta, Cracked, Przegląd, and on Reddit. His work also has plenty of detractors, who have criticized him for what they perceive to be the reinforcement of racial stereotypes and depiction of non-consensual acts, criticism that has prompted alterations to or replacements of the images.

Seedfeeder's identity is unknown, and nothing is known about him outside of what information he's offered on Wikipedia, where he has identified himself as a heterosexual male and a mechanical engineer. After complaining about "the prejudices and concerns of the small-minded" for years, Seedfeeder left Wikipedia in June 2012. His final upload was an image of an Asian woman blowing a kiss he titled Wiki-so-long.png.

In brief

2014-11-26

Gender gap and skills gap; academic citations on the rise; European food cultures

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By Piotr Konieczny, Maximilian Klein, and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia"

This article

Wikipedia:Education Program
. The vast majority (99%) of respondents reported having read an entry on Wikipedia, and over a quarter (28%) have had some experience editing it (interestingly, even when controlling for students who were assigned to edit Wikipedia, the former number is still as high as 20%).

Regarding the gender gap issues, women are much less likely to have contributed to Wikipedia than men (21% to 38%), and that becomes even more divergent when controlling for student assignments (13% to 32%). The authors find an indication of gender gap affecting the likelihood of Wikipedia's contributions: students who are white, economically affluent, male and Internet-experienced are more likely to edit than others. The strongest and statistically significant predictor variables, however, are Internet skills and gender, and regression models show that variables such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, time availability, Internet experience, and confidence in editing Wikipedia are not significant. The authors find that the gender becomes more significant as one's digital literacy increases. At a low level of Internet skills, the likelihood of one's contribution to Wikipedia is low, regardless of gender. As one's skills increase, males became much more likely to contribute, but women fall behind. The authors find that women tend to have lower Internet skills than men, which helps explain a part of the Wikipedia gender gap: to contribute to Wikipedia, one needs to have a certain level of digital literacy, and the digital gap is reducing the number of women who have the required level of skills. The authors crucially admit that "why women, on average, report lower level understanding of Internet-related terms remains a puzzle. Although studies with detailed data about actual skills based on performance tests suggest no gender differences in the observed skills, research that looks at self-rated know-how consistently finds gender variation with real consequences for online behavior". This suggests that while men and women have, in reality, similar skills, women are much less confident about them, which in turns makes them much less confident about contributing to (or trying to contribute to) Wikipedia. This, however, is a hypothesis to be confirmed by future research. In the end, the authors do feel confident enough to conclude that "gender and Internet skills likely have a relatively mild interaction with each other, reinforcing the gender gap at the high end of the Internet skills spectrum." In conclusion, this reviewer finds this study to be a highly valuable one, both for the literature on gender gap and online communities, and for the Wikipedia community and WMF efforts to reduce this gap in our environment.

In nutritional articles, academic citations rise while news media citations decrease

A study published in First Monday[2] analyzed the development of the referencing of 45 articles over nine topic groups related to health and nutrition over a period of five years (2007–2011) (unfortunately, the authors are not very clear on which particular articles were analyzed, and tend to use the concepts of an article and topic group in a rather confusing manner). Authors coded for references (3,029 total), information on editing history, and search ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo! search engines. The study confirmed that Wikipedia articles are highly ranked by all search engines, with Yahoo! actually being even more "Wikipedia-friendly" than Google. The author shows that (as expected) the articles improve in quality (or at least, number and density of references) over time. Crucially, the authors show that the overall percentage of mainstream news media references has decreased, while references to academic publications increased over that time. By the end of the study period, only the article on (or topic group of?) trans fat contained more references to news sources than to academic publications. The authors overall support the description of Wikipedia as a source aiming for reliability, though they are hesitant to call it reliable, pointing out that for example 15% of analyzed references were coded as "outside the main reference type categories or... not be clearly determined". The authors conclude, commendably, that "Wikipedia needs to be high on the agenda for health communication researchers and practitioners" and that "communications professionals in the health field need to be much more actively involved in ensuring that the content on Wikipedia is reliable and well-sourced with reliable references".

Wikipedia user session timing compared with other online activities

Comparison of time between user interactions on Wikipedia, AOL and Cyclopath
reviewed by Maximilianklein (talk)

In a recent preprint titled "User Session Identification Based on Strong Regularities in Inter-activity Time"

searching AOL, or playing League of Legends. You may recall that Halfaker and Geiger came to a similar conclusion about "edit sessions" in a 2013 paper
, but now the idea is to cement that fact as a universal heuristic across many domains. Opposition to this idea has been that session length thresholds will always be arbitrary, or that a session deviates from completing a task that might extend beyond someone logging off for a night.

Stack Overflow user interactions

To bolster their argument, the authors use empirical data collected from seven datasets to test the hypothesis. The method employed is to take the log-normal time between user events, and then fit a bimodal distribution to the histogram. Once we have a two-humped histogram, we simply find the point which makes half the data "within" session and the other half "between" session.

AOL search data, Cyclopath route-getting requests, and Wikipedia viewing (from the desktop, mobile and apps) seem to fit bimodally. Together their the threshold is in the range of 29 to 115 minutes, but all would not be far off of an hour, say the authors. Yet when it comes to Wikipedia editing, OpenStreetMap editing, and MovieLens reviewing and searching, a bimodal 1-hour fit is good, but can be further explained by a trimodal model. In the case of the first two activities the third category is the wikibreak, and in the latter it is the ease the site make in rating movies in quick succession.

Even trimodally though, "this strategy for identifying session thresholds is not universally suitable for all user-initiated events". For instance they show League of Legends, which has modal peaks at 5 minutes and one day. As a reviewer this is easy to describe from a player's perspective. If you play 5 games in a row, which takes 5 minutes queueing between games, and then repeat it daily, you get the histogram seen where the 5 minute peak is about 5 times as tall as the day peak. Stack Overflow does not easily fit into their model at all with a threshold of 335 minutes. The authors claim this is from the high quality edits expected at Stack Overflow.

Overall the authors conclude that one hour seems to suffice as a rule of thumb. But does it? The issue is that a goodness of fit with the bimodal models is not presented. This leaves outliers like Stack Overflow either able to be modeled but not compliant with the one hour rule, when they could just potentially not be describable using the proposed heuristic.

Briefly

  • "Wikimedia Movement in European countries as an example of civil participation": This Polish-language book chapter
    GLAM
    sector. The book chapter is interesting as clearly placing itself in the relatively small body of literature that describe Wikipedia/Wikimedia as a social movement. Unfortunately it is primarily a descriptive rather than an analytical piece, and does not provide any significant theoretical justification for calling the Wikimedia movement a social movement, a weakness amplified by the fact that this work fails to engage with the prior relevant body of Wikipedia research, and is only very loosely connected to the literature on social movements.
  • Ranking public domain authors using Wikipedia data: This article
    importance rating
    and selecting underdeveloped articles for development.
  • "Mining cross-cultural relations from Wikipedia - A study of 31 European food cultures"[6]: The authors use Pierre Bourdieu's theories to analyze cultural similarities and differences between 31 European countries, by looking at the differences between articles on various national cuisines across 27 different European-language Wikipedias. They find that the existence, quality and links of studied Wikipedia articles can be correlated with data from the European Social Survey on cross-cultural ties between European countries. In addition to expected findings (all cultures are interested in their own cuisine first, then in famous ones such as French cuisine and in those of their neighbours), the article does present some interesting data, for example noting that the articles on Turkish cuisine are relatively well-developed on numerous Wikipedias, which could be explained by long-term and significant in size migration of Turkish people to various European countries, and the resulting interest in Turkish cuisine in those countries. The authors also find that significant differences do exist between different language Wikipedias, as different cuisines can be very differently described on different projects, thus reinforcing the theory that knowledge can be significantly influenced by one's culture. For Wikipedia editors, this is a reminder that all language editions suffer from significant biases, and that articles in different language editions can be and usually are significantly different.
  • Dissertation on automatic quality assessment: A recent PhD dissertation[7] by Oliver Ferschke at the Technical University of Darmstadt "shows how natural language processing approaches can be used to assist information quality management on a massive scale" on Wikipedia. As the first main contribution, the author highlights his definition of a "comprehensive article quality model that aims to consolidate both the quality of writing and the quality criteria defined in multiple Wikipedia guidelines and policies into a single model. The model comprises 23 dimensions segmented into the four layers of intrinsic quality, contextual quality, writing quality and organizational quality." Secondly, the dissertation presents methods for automatically detecting quality flaws (overlapping with previous publications co-authored by Ferschke), and evaluates them on a "novel corpus of Wikipedia articles with neutrality and style flaws". Thirdly, the dissertation presents "an approach for automatically segmenting and tagging the user contributions on article Talk pages to improve work coordination among Wikipedians. These unstructured discussion pages are not easy to navigate and information is likely to get lost over time in the discussion archives."
  • 39% of talk page threads contain wrong indentations: Ferschke's "English Wikipedia Discussions Corpus" ("EWDC") is used in a paper[8], to be presented at the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computing next month. In the paper, his doctoral adviser Irina Gurevych and another author construct an method to detect adjacency pairs (a user comment that responds to another) by analyzing the content, in particular detecting "lexical pairs" (giving the examples "(why, because)" and "(?, yes)"), validated against human annotation. As a side result, they observe that "Incorrect indentation (i.e., indentation that implies a reply-to relation with the wrong post) is quite common in longer discussions in the EWDC. In an analysis of 5 random threads longer than 10 turns each, shown in Table 1, we found that 29 of 74 total turns, or 39%±14pp of an average thread, had indentation that misidentified the turn to which they were a reply."
  • Which talk page comment refers to which edit?: Another paper co-authored by Gurevych, titled "Automatically Detecting Corresponding Edit-Turn-Pairs in Wikipedia"[9] uses machine learning to automatically identify talk page comments about a particular article edit.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

  • "Does the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia Shut out New Candidates Because of the Acquaintance Relation?"[10] (cf. earlier coverage of related publications by the same authors: "Decline of adminship candidatures on Polish Wikipedia", "What it takes to become an admin: Insights from the Polish Wikipedia", "Predicting admin elections based on social network analysis")
  • "Development of a semantic data collection tool. : The Wikidata Project as a step towards the semantic web."[11] (bachelor thesis)
  • "To Use or Not to Use? The Credibility of Wikipedia"[12]
  • "Indexing and Analyzing Wikipedia's Current Events Portal, the Daily News Summaries by the Crowd"[13] From the abstract: "Wikipedia's Current Events Portal (WCEP) is a special part of Wikipedia that focuses on daily summaries of news events. ...First, we provide descriptive analysis of the collected news events. Second, we compare between the news summaries created by the WCEP crowd and the ones created by professional journalists on the same topics. Finally, we analyze the revision logs of news events over the past 7 years in order to characterize the WCEP crowd and their activities. The results show that WCEP has reached a stable state in terms of the volume of contributions as well as the size of its crowd..."

References

  1. ISSN 1369-118X. Closed access icon
  2. ISSN 1396-0466
    .
  3. arXiv:1411.2878
    .
  4. ^ Patryk Korzeniecki: Ruch Wikimediów w państwach europejskich jako przykład aktywności obywatelskiej (Wikimedia Movement in European countries as an example of civil participation). Chapter 6 in: Joachim Osiński, Joanna Zuzanna Popławska (eds.): Oblicza spoleczenstwa obywatelskiego. WARSAW SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS PRESS, WARSAW 2014
  5. ^ Riddell, Allen B. (2014-11-08). "Public Domain Rank: Identifying Notable Individuals with the Wisdom of the Crowd".
    arXiv:1411.2180
    .
  6. arXiv:1411.4484
    .
  7. ^ Ferschke, Oliver (2014-07-15). "The Quality of Content in Open Online Collaboration Platforms: Approaches to NLP-supported Information Quality Management in Wikipedia". Darmstadt: Technische Universität Darmstadt. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ^ Emily K. Jamison, Iryna Gurevych: Adjacency Pair Recognition in Wikipedia Discussions using Lexical Pairs. PDF
  9. ^ Johannes Daxenberger and Iryna Gurevych: Automatically Detecting Corresponding Edit-Turn-Pairs in Wikipedia [ http://acl2014.org/acl2014/P14-2/pdf/P14-2031.pdf PDF] Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Short Papers), pages 187–192, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, June 23-25 2014.
  10. ISSN 1942-2679
    .
  11. ^ Ubah, Ifeanyichukwu (2013). Development of a semantic data collection tool. : The Wikidata Project as a step towards the semantic web.
  12. ISSN 1522-8959. Closed access icon
  13. ^ Tran, Giang Binh; Mohammad Alrifai (2014). "Indexing and Analyzing Wikipedia's Current Events Portal, the Daily News Summaries by the Crowd" (PDF). Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web Companion. WWW Companion '14. Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee. pp. 511--516.
    ISBN 978-1-4503-2745-9. (ACM
    )


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2014-11-26

Back with the military historians

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By Rcsprinter123


Previous Reports
Military history
These are previous editions of the WikiProject Report related to today's topic. For more old Reports, visit the archive.

It's time for this year's edition of the Report looking at possibly our largest WikiProject: Military history. Since our last interview in June 2013, the project has had no break in its huge quest to document everything in their scope, that is, militaries and conflicts of the past. As usual, its participants were eager to answer the questions posed by The Signpost and update us on how they are doing. So without further ado, here are TomStar81, Adam Cuerden, Peacemaker67, Hawkeye7 and Nick-D.

Can you tell us about any events that have happened this year at WikiProject Military history? Have there been any contests, reached milestones or promoted significant featured content in 2014?

Oh, and also, did you know there's photographs of the Battle of Nashville in the American Civil War? Actual photographs of the battle? Not yet finished, but... it's my current project, and it's amazing (and a ridiculously large amount of work).
Self-propelled gun ISU-152 in the Kubinka Tank Museum
I would also like to mention a topic close to my heart, one that is heavily centred in
Operation Bora. Bora is a focused initiative to improve articles pertaining to the World War II history of Yugoslavia to featured status. It calls for collaboration on a span of battles, biographies, and factions. In the last year, Bora has produced one FL, four MILHIST A-class articles, 18 GA's, and 35 MILHIST B-class articles. That is not to be sneezed at, particularly given the language issues in accessing sources. While it might not be receiving mass support at MILHIST, it has generated support across several WikiProjects, including WikiProject Serbia and WikiProject Croatia
.
  • Hawkeye7: A recent milestone was the project's 300th Featured Picture. It has also generated over 800 Featured Articles.

Last time the Signpost spoke to this project in June 2013, we were asking about Operation Normandy, an initiative of the project dedicated to the 1944 campaigns. How has this subproject progressed this year, and with the 70th anniversary occurring this June?

  • TomStar81: I'm not sure how well Normandy has been doing since its not an area I'm well familiar with, (although by proxy, as a maritime history editor, I've worked on articles for ships that were involved in the operation). I do know that this past June a total of four articles – Australian contribution to the Battle of Normandy, Falaise pocket, Battle of Verrières Ridge, Operation Perch – were singled out for attention on the 70th anniversary of the Normandy invasion as candidates for main page appearances as Today's Featured Article, and after the discussions Operation Perch and Australian contribution to the Battle of Normandy were featured on the main page on 14 June and 20 July, respectively.

Can you explain the role of the "coordinators" of the project? How are they appointed? Do all of them perform their responsibilities, or is the work spread unevenly? If a coordinator is unable to due to time constraints or other reasons, are they able to easily to resign the position? Would you recommend that a similar system of leaders is introduced to other projects – do they bring advantages?

  • TomStar81: In point of fact we have been asked these question so often that we created two Academy Courses – Becoming a coordinator and Advice from former coordinators – to help better explain the role for our members. Essentially, coordinators are a system we have found that aids the project by ensuring that a minimum number of editors are specifically charged with the maintenance duties for certain project run initiatives, such as closing our A-class reviews and handing out certain Milhist specific awards (such as our A-class medals and the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves). We are not actually appointed, we are elected to the general position of coordinator by the community in an election held once a year (usually in September). Before the election takes place the coordinators will discuss the election to determine the exact start and end dates for the election, and to find a consensus on the number of slots to be filled. Once these two points are sorted out, the page is open for nominations and voting, after which the tally is added up and the users who qualified become coordinators. Our Lead Coordinator is also selected by this process, as we traditionally offer the role to the user with the highest number of support votes cast.
As to the rest of the rest of your questions, we do have issues with an uneven work flow on account of the fact that we volunteer to do whatever needs done, so we do have some coordinators that are overly active and others that are generally non-participants in the work load. If a coordinator feels that he or she is unable to do what is asked of them they may resign without prejudice, and we have had coordinators in the past that have resigned during a given term (which we call a tranche). Lastly, I've seen a number of projects that have adopted our coordinator system, which suggests to me that the system has its merits for a larger project or an intricate project, regardless of the community's approval or disapproval (lol) of the use of such a system.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

  • Peacemaker67: We have around a dozen coordinators in this project, and this has hovered about the same number for quite a few years. I have been a coordinator for the last year and a bit, having been on WP for three years or so. The coordinators have made a significant contribution to MILHIST, mainly through oiling the wheels. We do the bulk of the GA, A/AL-class, and FA/FL reviews, with support from other MILHIST members, including former coords, and keep the project moving forward. We administer the awards processes and ensure consistency in assessment, we ensure successes are celebrated, and coalesce around poor quality articles to ensure they are improved before promotion. Despite being tagged by some as "gatekeepers", we promote a lot of quality articles developed by new editors, and hold older editors to WP standards if they try "to slip one through". I think we do a good job in general. Do we get every article right, no. But, on average, we do a bloody good job. I don't know what a lot of other WikiProjects do, but many could do a lot worse than adopting our model.
  • Hawkeye7: In addition to the regularly elected coordinators, we also have two coordinators emeritus, Kirill Lokshin and Roger Davies. They were elected to this position on the basis of their long-term contributions to the project.

Is there any significance to the Military history WikiProject's coordinator's insignias? Which members receive which devices? When were the insignias first handed out?

 
  • TomStar81: To the right are the three insignias used by the Military history WikiProject's coordinators, all of which are based on actual military insignias. The Coordinators use the 5-star insignia, which was used in World War II by the
    Emeriti, and combines the design of the 6-star General of the Armies insignia with gold stars, which were used by General of the Armies John J. Pershing. Upon his promotion to the rank of General of the Armies, Pershing was given leeway to design his own insignia for the rank. He opted to retain the 4-stars he already had, but switched the material to gold in recognition of his new rank. Congress never formally recognized his insignia, so the design was never considered official. The five and six star insignias for the lead and assistant coordinators (as the coordinators were known at the time) were first handed out around 2007, while our golden six star insignia was created around 2009 when we approved a motion to name Kirill Lokshin (talk · contribs
    ) coordinator emeritus.
Battlecruisers of the World
, promoted last October

The current number of members is approximately 1200, making it one of the largest WikiProjects around. Have you been successful in attracting many new members this year, and how much do new participants tend to contribute to articles relating to this subject after they have joined; do some appear to forget their membership straight away?

How long have you been a member of WikiProject Military history? Do you prefer working on articles related to particular subjects, people, or time periods?

  • TomStar81: This past September I marked 10 years on Wikipedia, and I've been with the Military history WikiProject for roughly 8 years. I spend my editorial time working mostly with battleship related articles, although I've been known to flirt with armored warfare and battle/campaign articles from time to time.
Siege of Paris
.

In your opinion, what is the single best achievement of this project?

Anything else you'd like to add?

  • TomStar81: We're always looking for a few good editors, so if you'd like to lend a hand we would appreciate the help!

That's all with this project until, hopefully, next year. In the next issue we'll be talking to some islanders and asking how they get their work done. Before then, feel free to browse the archive for older reports.

Reader comments

2014-11-26

Big in Japan

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By Milowent

Often times in popular culture, a subject will be quite popular among a distinct niche of people or region of the world, but little-known elsewhere -- like a musical artist that is boasted to be "

Top25, in the gaming world, a trailer video for Eve Online raised that game's profile to #17, and the new first-person shooter game Far Cry 4 debuted at #23. In Britain, the appearance of retired footballer Jimmy Bullard on a reality show brought him new attention and landed spot #19. And, last but not least, American wrestling fans raised their latest spectacle, Survivor Series (2014)
, to spot #25.

Competing for attention amidst the niche-driven articles was an assortment of topics of broader popularity, including the film Interstellar (#1), which is topping our list for the third straight week, news that imprisoned killer Charles Manson (#3) is getting married, the death of director Mike Nichols (#5), also husband of Diane Sawyer (#14), and the continuing troubles of comedian Bill Cosby (#6).

For the full top 25 list, see

WP:TOP25. See this section
for an explanation of any exclusions.

For the week of 16-22 November, 2014, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Interstellar (film) B-class 1,409,615
This movie remains Wikipedia's most popular article for the third straight week. Since opening on 5 November, it has grossed $120.6 million in North America, and almost $450 million worldwide.
2 Aaliyah Featured Article 1,349,666 Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B, a biopic about the American singer who died in 2001, debuted on the Lifetime cable network this week. It was quite successful, bringing in over 3.2 million viewers.
3 Charles Manson B-class 1,308,091
On 17 November the world learned that this demented killer, who has been in prison for over 40 years, has recently obtained a marriage license to wed a 26-year old who has been visiting him in prison for over nine years, and who runs websites proclaiming Manson's innocence.
4 Stephen Hawking B-Class 802,353
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, black hole theorist and latter-day science icon got a boost with the release of the biopic, The Theory of Everything, in the United States on 7 November. Up from #16 last week.
5 Mike Nichols C-Class 788,230 This highly regarded American film and stage director died of a heart attack in New York City on 19 November. In 1968, Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate, and he had helmed a host of critically acclaimed movies, his last being 2007's Charlie Wilson's War
6 Bill Cosby B-Class 756,135
The American comedian probably had one of the worst weeks in his life, as allegations that he had sexually assaulted as many as 16 women in the past were the subject of renewed and more much high-profile attention, causing a planned new sitcom and comedy special to be sidelined. New allegations included those of former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who publicly alleged for the first time that Cosby drugged and raped her in 1982. It is difficult for many to square these burgeoning sordid tales of private life with the clean father-figure persona which Cosby represented for so many years.
7 Thanksgiving C-class 663,886
Down almost a million views from last week, but mobile views are up to 19.9% (from about 5% last week), suggesting that legitimate views are starting to overtake the spammer views which has affected the viewcounts of this article and others such as Online shopping which are connected to the biggest shopping season of the year in the United States.
8 Facebook B-class 628,013
A perennially popular article, as it is
the second most popular website in the world
, after Google.
9 Salim Khan Start-class 562,555
An Indian actor and screenwriter, the nuptials of his adopted daughter
Arpita Khan
(which link redirects to his article and got over 286,000 views itself) occurred this week, and have drawn much attention in India.
10 The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 Start-class 536,903
The third of four planned movies made from
The Hunger Games trilogy starring Jennifer Lawrence
(left) debuted this week.
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