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"Five-year targets": Noting that the strategy project (Signpost coverage) was "nearing conclusion", the Board adopted the summary targets for the five-year plan. (According to the April meeting minutes, it had been planned to review the full plan at last week's meeting, too. According to the Foundation's August report - see below - a professional writer had been hired to help "distilling the material on the strategy wiki into a high-level document that could easily be shared with Wikimedia partners and supporters", followed by some vetting and refining, in order to present the strategy document at last week's meeting.)
Wikimedia fundraising principles: The Board established four general principles about Wikimedia's fundraising, concerning the maximization of public support, legal frameworks, transparency and donor privacy, and maximizing participation beyond financial contribution. (See also the Foundation's invitation to become involved in the preparation of the upcoming fundraiser, reported below, and last week's Signpost coverage: "German chapter remodeled to meet Foundation requirements")
"Trustee terms and evaluation": After the July meeting had heard recommendations by the Board's Governance Committee - aided by the Omidyar Network - about terms and evaluation of Board members, accompanied by "robust discussion" (see Signpost coverage), the Board now accepted part of the committees recommendations, namely to extend the term of appointed Board members to two years, and asked the committee to develop further detailed recommendations until the end of the year.
"Movement Roles October 2010": In this vote, the Board "approves the direction" of the recently formed "Movement Roles" working group (see earlier Signpost coverage: October 4, September 27, etc.), and "encourages all interested parties, particularly chapters and other stakeholders" to become involved in the process. The vote has been interpreted as a formal approval of the group's draft proposal.
The minutes for the meeting have not yet been published.
Fundraiser update: the 'Beat Jimmy' challenge
The Fundraising team has been measuring reactions to new slogans over the last 10 weeks, in preparation for the 2010–11 fundraising drive starting on 8 November. A page detailing the results of these preliminary banner tests has been set up, indicating that the majority of donations have been generated – as inpreviousyears – by Jimmy Wales' personal appeal.
In response, Head of Reader Relations Philippe Beaudette and the wider Fundraiser team have announced a challenge to editors: find the banner that will beat Jimmy. Beaudette explains:
There's no doubt about it: the appeal from Jimmy Wales is a strong message. We've tested it head-to-head against other banners, and the results are unequivocal - especially when you also compare its performance last year and the year before.
But nobody wants to just put Jimmy up on the sites and leave him up for two months!
Wikimedia also organized a donor survey, inviting 20,000 individuals from the much larger international Donor group, who contributed less than $1000 between 1 November 2009 and 30 June 2010. They were invited to participate in a 29-item survey of about 70 questions, conducted in August 2010, which attracted 3,760 responses. The tech team have also been making progress with two new tools; geotargeting and a simplified, one-step donation process.
Foundation report for August
The Wikimedia Foundation Report for August 2010 has been published. Apart from highlighting several developments that have been already covered in the Signpost, it contains a statistics update:
Collectively, the Wikipedia projects received a total of 373 million unique global visitors during August, marking a 3.7% monthly increase and 21.4% increase over the past year. Page requests reached 13.4 billion, a drop of 1% from the previous month but still a 23.9% increase on the previous year. One hypothesis for the unusually large drop – greater than the expected seasonal drop in traffic during the northern summer – is that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa may have been responsible for drawing attention from Wikipedia. Starting from August, traffic levels are returning to expected levels. The monthly report card for August is available here.
Visitors to the Foundation in August included James Gosling (known as the father of the Java programming language) and historian Timothy Garton Ash.
The number of good articles surpassed 10,000 this week.
Ten thousand good articles
In a major milestone, the English Wikipedia reached 10,000 good articles this week. Good articles are required to be well written, well researched, complete, accurate, as well as following Wikipedia guidelines. Although they are not as "well written" as Featured articles, they are nonetheless an important standard.
According to GimmeBot, the 10,000th good article is Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union), an important governmental office of the former Soviet Union. Editors are sharing their congratulations on the talk page. As of 9 October, about 1 in 343 articles is a Good article, and 1 in 230 is a good or featured article or featured list. According to GA reviewer Geometry guy:
Although good articles still represent less than one percent of the encyclopedia, it is an amazing achievement to bring the number of GAs to this level while also maintaining scrutiny of quality for individual articles. (Please keep contributing to WP:GAR to ensure that weak GAs are improved or delisted.)
Briefly
The Wikimedia Italia "introduction to Commons" video. Note: captions only display on Commons.
Introduction to Commons videos: Wikimedia Italia has released, on Commons and YouTube, a video introducing users to Wikimedia Commons. The video has English subtitles, and explains how to upload pictures to Commons. It covers project goals, sourcing, the upload page, how to register, the copyright process, OTRS, discussion and the help desk, featured image processes, and donating to the Wikimedia Foundation.
IRC Office hours: The log for the 5 October IRC office hour with Zack Exley, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Community Officer, has been posted. Issues covered included the meaning of his job title, page-editing statistics published by Erik Zachte that reveal a disparity between Global North and Global South (see earlier Signpost coverage), the 2010 fundraiser campaign, Exley's social background and standing, the internal organization of the Wikimedia Foundation, and where local chapters fall on the hierarchy.
Wikipedia and trust: Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has posted an entry on her personal blog titled "People trust Wikipedia because we tell them not to". Inspired by a joint talk of Timothy Garton Ash and Tobias Wolff, she discusses how the various cleanup tags are used to indicate required improvements on Wikipedia pages, saying that "people know they can trust it not to be aiming to manipulate them – to sell them something, either a product or a position. Wikipedia is just aiming to tell people the truth, and it’s refreshingly honest about its own limitations."
Research consultant hired: Diederik van Liere has been hired by the Foundation as a research consultant. He will work on research involving user trends and change patrolling tools.[1]
Wiki Loves Monuments: The Wiki Loves Monuments image contest by Wikimedia Nederland has received 12,227 pictures on the Commons and 274 on Flickr, by 235 participants [2]. As part of the project, 7,854 objects were covered; Wikimedia Nederland now has images for about 20,000 rijksmonuments, a third of the total number of 60,000.
On-wiki marriage proposal: Dutch Wikipedia contributor Cumulus this week proposed to fellow Wikipedian Rododendron on her talk page, with a photo of a homemade sockpuppet. Fifteen tense hours later, Rododendron replied...
On October 8/9, the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference took place at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, with Wikimedia Deutschland as one of the supporting co-organizers. Several presentations featured Wikipedia and Wikimedia as important examples of free culture. A talk by Shun-Ling Chen examined collaborative authorship on Wikipedia and in indigenous music, arguing that neither is adequately covered by the joint authorship clause in current US copyright law.
A "Wikimedia Panel" (summary on the conference blog) focused on efforts in several countries to make government works available under a free license. The panel was moderated by Mathias Schindler from the German Wikimedia chapter, who has been involved in such efforts, including negotiations that resulted in a donation of around 100,000 images from the German Federal Archive (see Signpost coverage). At the panel, Tomer Ashur from Wikimedia Israel reported on the chapter's progress in lobbying for a law that would release government works under a free license that includes permission for commercial reuse (earlier Signpost coverage: Rumble in the Knesset, Israeli "Wikipedia bill"). He expressed cautious optimism that the chapter will be able to announce the passing of the law at Wikimania 2011 (which is to be held in Haifa, Israel).
A presentation by Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack compared the Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons regarding both organizations' relation to the corresponding informal community, and endeavors to internationalize their development – in the case of Wikimedia, with respect to the increasing number of chapters.
Wikipedia vandals and The Register mislead readers
On the following day, British IT news website The Register, long known for its negative coverage of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, also reported on the incident ("The curse of Wikipedia strikes Norman Wisdom", WebCite archive: [3]), adding the claim that the wrong fact:
"was inserted not by a drive-by vandal, but by a Wikipedia Administrator – a high Operating Level Thetan in the Wikipedia bureaucracy. [... He] was making cosmetic changes to an earlier edit of his, but slipped in the bogus information without anybody noticing, on September 2nd."[4]
The article by "Register" author Andrew Orlowski included personal details and a photo of this admin. However, the diff he cited did not support the accusation, as it included several intermediate revisions.
Orlowski's article was changed on the same day, in which the passage above became:
"Attempts to remove the factoid were made, but a Wikipedia Administrator – a high Operating Level Thetan in the Wikipedia bureaucracy – stepped in to preserve the bogus information."[5]
Both the admin's personal details and his photo remained.
Five days later, on October 11, The Register issued a correction, signed "Team Register", retracting both versions of the claim about the admin (which was removed from the original article, too):
"We accept that both of these statements are incorrect, and apologise for any inconvenience or embarrassment caused."
Also last week, nearly 60 students from Geert Lovink's "New Media Practices" course at the University of Amsterdamblogged about their experience writing a Wikipedia article, as part of their coursework. Lovink
reports that "about half the students ran into trouble, either having their entry deleted or having to rename it, change topic and so on", and that "only 2 or 3 [of them] had ever edited a Wikipedia page" before [6].
Company sells 54,000 German Wikipedia article collections on Amazon
The German press recentlyreported on the print-on-demand publisher "Bucher Gruppe" (apparently the German arm of Books, LLC, using a mangled version of the German word Bücher, "books") which sells some 54,000 books on Amazon, all low-quality machine-created collections of articles from the German Wikipedia.
The books are usually just alphabetically ordered dumps of Wikipedia categories, with a machine-translated general introduction about Wikipedia and a machine-created index of poor quality, and without images.
The newspaper articles had been prompted by a web page by Andreas Weigel where he details his experience of buying a book from Amazon only to find that it contained six Wikipedia articles that he had written himself.
Süddeutsche Zeitung also reports that German, Swiss and Austrian scientific libraries have bought at least 417 books from Bucher Gruppe and related publishing houses.
Swiss award for Jimbo: Jimmy Wales has been awarded the 2011 Gottlieb Duttweiler prize, worth SFr 100,000 ($103,000). The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, based in Rüschlikon, Switzerland, said Wales was being honored for "his contribution to the democratisation of the access to knowledge". The prize will be presented on 26 January, along with a tribute by Roger de Weck, the director designate of swissinfo’s parent organisation, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. The prize is awarded at irregular intervals; the last recipient, in 2008, was former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Wikipedia plagiarism leads to retraction of biotech papers: As noted by Retraction Watch, the research journal Biotechnology Advances has retracted a 2008 review by researchers in India who allegedly copied parts of their manuscript from Wikipedia, StateMaster.com (a statistics clearinghouse), and other journal articles. According to the notice, the article, "Microbial production of dihydroxyacetone" has been retracted at the request of the editors, who found that "from a limited, non-exhaustive check of the text, several elements of the text had been plagiarised". According to Web of Knowledge, the paper had already been cited 11 times.
Teacher's guide plagiarizes Wikipedia: As reported by the BBC (Baccalaureate board probes Wikipedia plagiarism claim), some marking guides for the International Baccalaureate exam appear to have plagiarized from Wikipedia. The IB is a degree taken by teenage students; the plagiarized example answers concern history essays.
Wikipedia on xkcd map: The webcomic xkcd published a humorous Map of online communities last week, featuring a "Wikipedia talk pages" island between the "Troll Bay" and the "Sea of Memes", complete with an "Edit war memorial". The island is considerably smaller than in the 2007 version of the map, where land mass was based on member count rather than activity. Another version of the 2007 map, published in August by Ethan Bloch as an homage to Xkcd ("The 2010 social networking map"), showed the "United Territories of Wikimedia" which, oddly, included islands named Wikileaks and Citizendium.
"WikiWars" videos: Video recordings of the "WikiWars" conference, held in January 2010 at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, were made available online last week. The event was the first of the "CPOV" series, the third of which recently took place in Leipzig, Germany (Signpost coverage), and the second in Amsterdam in March (Signpost coverage).
Weird medieval claims wanted: The blog "Got Medieval" has announced a "Weird Medieval History contest" to find "the weirdest claim about the middle ages on Wikipedia". Both true and false statements are eligible, but the claim must have existed on Wikipedia before October 4. There is a $75 gift certificate from Costumes, Inc. as a prize.
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Wikimedians at the June 26, 2010 Meeting with Smithsonian representatives
This week, we discovered a project with real-life coordination. WikiProject Smithsonian Institution is a collaboration between Wikipedians and the staff of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. The project was born out of the 10th DC Meetup held this past summer when several editors met with Smithsonian personnel to plan the project's goals and organization. The project covers all of the Smithsonian's museums, artifacts, animals, notable curators and personnel, and other programs affiliated with or sponsored by the Smithsonian. WikiProject Smithsonian Institution is one of Wikipedia's GLAM projects, an initiative to get galleries, libraries, archives, and museums involved in the creation of content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. The two other current GLAM projects cover the British Museum and the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.
This week, we interviewed five members of the project: Accotink2, a retired engineer in Alexandria, Virginia; Sadads, an undergraduate studying history and English at James Madison University; Victuallers, a teacher in Derby, England; Taoboy49, an instructional technologist working at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian after receiving a doctorate in Instructional Technology from the University of Texas in 2003; and Aude, a geographer and web developer in Washington DC with a special interest in the digital humanities.
How was this project formed? What happened at the DC Meetup earlier this year? Does the real-life connection between editors help your efforts?
Sadads:User:Pharos contacted me at the beginning of the summer after meeting with one of the employees of the Smithsonian at a GLAM conference in Colorado early in the year. At the conference, she told him that the Smithsonian was beginning to explore more web activities, and the examples of GLAM participation which they had discussed at the conference, including the experience with the Federal Archives and the upcoming British Museum collaboration. Pharos and I had talked previously at a meetup in the DC area last winter, and he knew I was enthusiastic about building a stronger volunteer community in the DC area, to bring Wikimedia DC beyond a gather and get dinner and drinks kind of group. I began talking to the Smithsonian employee, and a meetup was scheduled at the end of June, so we got some of the more experienced editors in the area to meet with a our contact and a handful of other Smithsonian staff at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and floated ideas for participation. In order to facilitate their interest and to create a central place to discuss Smithsonian collaboration activities, we formed the GLAM/SI page and project.
Victuallers:Taoboy49, who, when he started editing Wikipedia back in November 2009, enjoyed the idea of doing some more on Smithsonian topics. He is an active member of the British Museum Project who had been working with Smithsonian Institute Resources [sic]. He was already keen to join the nascent project in the US but could not attend the meeting. He cited the Smithsonian's great willingness to share pictures, saying that images released into Commons by public institutions have inspired new Wikipedia articles – many are from the Library of Congress and the SI. Instead, he attended the August 19 Wikipedia training session.
Aude: I couldn't be at the June meetup :( but we made initial contact with the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the Wikipedia:Wikipedia Loves Art event in February 2009. It wasn't totally successful, not advertised well and had low participation in DC, but we learned some lessons and the Smithsonian is still interested in working with us. In the past year, I have become much more involved in the DC tech and social media community, and have run into Smithsonian people at various meetups and able to help stimulate interest in such collaboration and simply get the word out more about what Wikipedia volunteers are doing and that we have an active Wikipedia meetup group in DC. I have made it to some recent museum-tech meetups, getting a better sense of what the Smithsonian and others are interested... especially strong interest in mobile apps and location-based technology. As a geographer, OpenStreetMap contributor & web developer, in addition to Wikipedian, I envision ways that I can contribute in this space and establish a good working relationship with the DC area museum-tech and digital humanities communities. For the Wikipedia-Smithosnian collaboration, User:Sadads took the lead on moving things forward on the collaboration, and I'm happy to help move things forward in any way that's helpful.
What resources has the Smithsonian Institution provided to Wikipedia editors? Have there been any particularly interesting contributions of information or images?
Sadads: Thus far we have only done a close collaboration with a NMAI curator (User:Taoboy49) on Ernest Spybuck where he used his expertise and ability to acquire resources and images to produce a rather good article on a sparcely covered topic. He found our support to be very good, and is recommending it to his fellow employees. Their has also been some discussion of using some of User:Multichill's experience with uploading batch images, to bring in some large groups of images. However, a complicated terms of use on the Smithsonian's online content has slowed this image acquisition process. They have mixed copyright on much of their content because of their mixed Federal and private funding for creating the content. Where normally government related publication in the United States has a pretty straight forward copyright, the Smithsonian falls into a grey area. Hopefully we will be getting images some time in the future. I think their is interest on both sides, we just need to determine what they are willing to release. I think, to a large extent, many of us went into this project with a mindset more like the British Museum collaboration, where we are looking to get general support on content, not just media acquisition. The Spybuck article is a good case study, and it sounds like we should have some archivists participating in a similar article writing process soon. Hopefully with these under our belts, we can move to more interaction with the museum staff.
Victuallers: The resource that inspired me was a picture of Henry Morton Stanley that had gathered a lot of interest as it had a small black boy in the background. Someone suggested that this boy had a name and he was called "Kalulu". I spent several days researching this boy and I was able to find that he died still a teenager. But in his short life he travelled the world, had his model in Madame Tussaud's and attended David Livingstone's funeral as well as having a relationship of some intimacy with Stanley. The article got 10,000 hits on Did You Know and has been recreated in three other languages.
Taoboy49: One of the proposed articles for the National Museum of the American Indian was one on Ernest Spybuck, a Shawnee. The suggestion struck me because a few years back I got to see the originals with a group of Absentee Shawnee students who were doing a multimedia project on their culture utilizing our collection. The paintings were striking, especially with Shawnee culture bearers sharing their insight about what Spybuck was illustrating. Having easy access to Smithsonian Libraries with help from our NMAI librarian helped a great deal. Our photo archivist and photo services staff were able to share hi resolution images of Spybuck and a couple of his paintings to illustrate the article. NMAI has its own Collections Online project we were able to link to that had images and catalog information for most of the Spybuck items in our collections.
Aude: Focusing on what the Smithsonian can give us is not the right approach. Rather, what can Wikipedians offer, in terms of workshops, mentorship, etc. to help Smithsonian curators and other employee help improve content in relevant areas that they have expertise in? Down the road, I think there is opportunity to work with Smithsonian archivists on incorporating historical images in Wikimedia projects. I do anticipate challenges, especially in dealing with images of artwork (see commons:Derived works), trying to determine who has copyright, etc. Photographs of animals at the National Zoo and such might be more suitable, until we have greater capacity to deal with complex issues of copyright, and simply focusing on writing articles is great.
What are the toughest hurdles for museum staff who are beginning to use Wikipedia? What efforts have been made to introduce the Wiki software and lessen the learning curve?
Accotink2: The COI rules, they tend to be academics used to research citations
Sadads: Explaining notability and contributing without Spamming provided a very interesting set of discussions at our first Workshop. Also, we are working to figure out exactly what audience within the Smithsonian can best interact with us: curators, web staff, interns or volunteers. We need to get a few more case studies together to show the Smithsonian community how beneficial the interaction is, no matter who participates.
Taoboy49: Personally, I didn't find the COI policy hard to understand or adhere to, so it wasn't a hurdle to me at all. I have an unbiased interest in just about everything. The hardest thing for me was figuring out what digital resources I could share without violating SI policy on rights, which remains unclear to me. I'm hoping our working group can come up with some clearer guidelines to help SI editors make good decisions about what we can use, what we can't use, and how to quickly resolve the trickier decisions. For instance, some Spybuck paintings illustrate some "sensitive" religious ceremonies, and sharing those could alienate some of the museum's Native American constituents. Deciding not to use those images falls outside of mere copyright considerations.
And yes, the software and culture of using it is positively Byzantine, but I learned quickly that there is some real intelligence lurking behind it all in the guise of watchful, experienced Wikipedians. Thanks, everybody (you know who your are).
Aude: The COI policy is basic common sense and I think not a big deal for Smithsonian staff. Their mission to "increase & diffusion of knowledge" [7] fits nicely with the Wikimedia's vision "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". [8] What will be trickier is if/when we get to the point where the Smithsonian wants to contribute images of artworks and other materials, where we need to evaluate copyright issues. Having been around Wikipedia for a while now, it's still complex to understand some of the intricities of copyright law.
Has the project developed close ties with any other WikiProjects? Are there any plans to collaborate with other projects on articles?
Sadads: We have several projects which have volunteered ambassadors to work with us, if their topic area wants to be worked on by someone from the Smithsonian Institution side.
Victuallers: I am a member of the DYK, Derbyshire and British Museum project. So I guess I am collaborating, but I have had no contact with any other SI project members although I have been thanked by an SI staff member I think. (I neec to look back and check).
Aude: I haven't worked on any WikiProject collaborations yet for the Smithsonian project. There might be opportunity to collaborate with Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts or the various WikiProjects for zoology topics.
What are your impressions of the other GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) projects that have been started in the past year. Did you participate in the British Museum or Children's Museum of Indianapolis projects? Is it likely that more of these collaborations between Wikipedians and museums will occur in the future?
Sadads: I really would like to mimic the standard and approach of Liam at the British Museum, where his interaction with them was more about accessing their resources comprehensively instead of focusing on just recieving media for the commons. However, our lack of someone inside the Smithsonian, has made this harder.
I really like what we are doing with the Children's Museum, it seems having someone inside who is an employee creates a little more sense of urgency on the participation. This last summer I interned with the United States Army Center of Military History, and found that the historical and scholarly community there isn't really thinking about Web media, instead focusing on their research and traditional scholarly publication. It was only through my more forward thinking supervisor that I could begin working with Wikipedia content related to the Center's scope of history. However, even he was more concerned with a concrete connection to our webpage's traffic, not necessarily the improvement of another webpages's content accuracy. In order to prove the benefit to the Center, I had to intersperse edits that had to do with content with ones that made more consistent the presentation of references related to the Center's public domain content. I think the more urgent thing for Wikipedians, and anyone who thinks about bringing free culture in the GLAM community, is rather getting that GLAM community thinking about the web as interactive collaborative reciprocal tool for knowledge distribution, not an extension of their Public Relations Face. I don't think everyone is quite there yet. But, the presence of an employee or full time volunteer actively working within the organization seems to be much more effective in reinforcing the urgency of the GLAM communities's participation in the collaborative web.
Victuallers: I have attended two meetings at the British Museum collaborated on an FA and a two dozen or other articles have been created. I have only done one with reference to the SI but the only feedback so far has been an invitation to do this interview. It has to be noted that Liam's role was pivotal at the start but the BM project still has quite a few active members and the BM curators are helpful when approached.
Aude: I'm well aware of what User:Witty lama has been doing and it's good inspiration for us. :) Our capacity as the DC area Wikipedia meetup group is a bit limited right now, so we can't take on too many projects and then do them poorly because of lack of capacity. If/when we move towards forming a chapter in DC or expanding Wikimedia NYC to incorporate us and larger areas of the Northeast or US East Coast, then I think that will help. Wikimedia Germany and France, for example, get some steady income through the annual fundraiser, can apply for grants, etc. I think some resources would be helpful for us to hire an intern or provide a stipend for a "Wikipedian in Residence" at a museum. As a side note, I am exploring possible collaboration opportunities with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) through Carl Malamud's FedFlix project, and looking at ways Wikipedians can be helpful in that effort. Due to limit local capacity of Wikipedians, I can't promise much right now for other possible collaborations, don't want to take away resources from the Smithsonian project, etc.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Victuallers: Pleased to see the people who are putting together these interviews read the project page. It is the evidence of whats happening.
Sadads: We encourage everyone to help us develop content related to the Smithsonian and post it on our project page. Every little bit helps!
Accotink2: Sadads drove, I rode along.
Taoboy49: I have started working on another article, and I'm looking forward to doing more in the future. I don't know if I will become a prolific Wikipedian, but I find the culture and the technology fascinating, and I'm happy to be a small part of it.
Aude: I very much look forward to seeing how this project progresses! User:Sadads has been awesome, as have key folks at the Smithsonian to have vision to try new things like working with Wikipedians! Oh, and we have a meetup coming up on October 23, held in conjunction with MediaWiki Hack-A-Ton DC. If you are in DC or need an excuse to visit DC, please join us and we can discuss more about the Smithsonian collaboration, anything else Wikipedians and folks want to chat about, and "geek out" with some good food & beverages. :)
Next week, we'll be searching our pockets for spare change. Until then, admittance to the WikiProject Report Archive is free.
A 17th-century painting of Orpheus with his viol (left), and the front cover of the 1609 published score, from L'Orfeo, Claudio Monteverdi's landmark opera from the early Italian baroque, and our featured article Choice of the week.
The cover of Essai, by the significant but under-recognised 18th-century economist, Richard CantillonSix articles were promoted to featured status:
SMS Baden (1915) (nom), was Germany's last battleship of World War I, and the only capital ship not successfully sunk in Scapa Flow after the end of the war (nominated by Parsecboy).
Richard Cantillon (nom), although an obscure figure even within his profession of economics, is considered by some people to be the true father of economics (as opposed to Adam Smith), according to nominator Catalan. (picture at right)
Caesium (nom), straight from the periodic chart on your high-school chemistry classroom wall, this metal reacts explosively with frozen water, but melts in your hand (Nergaal).
L'Orfeo (nom) (1567–1643), the first opera by Claudio Monteverdi, the Italian composer who was the turning point between the European renaissance and baroque. This featured article completes a tryptich of his three surviving operas, all nominated by Brianboulton. (audio excerpt below)
Choice of the week.Raul654, Wikipedia's Featured Article Director, has shepherded the process since its early days. We owe it to him that featured articles have appeared since January 2004 in a prominent spot on the main page, which has greatly increased their profile in the project. The Signpost asked Raul to select the best of the week.
“
We had an interesting and diverse set of articles promoted this week. If I were choosing an article based strictly on my interest in the subject, it would go to SMS Baden, which is a great article in its own right. But clearly L'Orfeo, and its primary author Brianboulton, deserve special recognition. I know first-hand how hard it is to get fine arts articles up to FA status, especially musical ones. Particularly on a subject of great importance (L'Orfeo is one of the first operas ever written). The article contains everything a reader could expect – descriptions of the background, composition, instrumentation, and a plot synopsis.
I was especially pleased to see that the article includes a freely licensed sound clip. It is quite difficult to find good-quality freely licensed classical music recordings, which contribute greatly to a music article. (The audio clip got me thinking about using audio for musical articles on the main page in place of pictures – an idea that is shockingly obvious in retrospect)
Kudos, Brian – excellent work. Wikipedia is the better for it.
In a startling effect, the composer prepares us for the opening scene using just a single, unchanging harmony over a rustic drone.
Featured topics
Five topics were promoted, three of them prepared by WikiProject Military History. The first two complete the German pre-dreadnought series, leaving only the WWI-era Helgoland, Kaiser, and König classes and the handful of WWII-era ship articles to be done, "before this monster is finally finished", says nominator Parsecboy:
Wittelsbach class battleships (nom), the third class of German pre-dreadnoughts, was the first built under the naval expansion program of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.
Another of MilHist's Operation Majestic Titan projects, Kongō class battlecruisers (nom), with one featured article and four good articles, concerns the class of four battlecruisers/fast-battleships of the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War (nominator Cam).
Like a Virgin (nom) is about American recording artist (legend) Madonna's second studio album of this title, the singles released from the album, and the supporting tour and its subsequent live video release (nominator Legolas).
Brill Tramway (nom), with seven featured articles and one Good article, concerns a 10 km (six mi) privately built rail-line in the Aylesbury Vale, Buckinghamshire, England—a tramway with an interesting history (Iridescent).
The German battleship Hessen passes the Levensau Bridge—from Braunschweig class battleship, one of the articles in the new featured topic of that name.
Featured lists
Three lists were promoted. These will be considered for Choice of the week in the next edition.
Bryan Adams discography (nom), consisting of ten studio albums, five compilation albums, two soundtrack albums, three live albums and sixty-six singles (nominated by Trust Is All You Need).
A Plains Zebra (Equus quagga) in the Ngorongoro Crater in TanzaniaRare samples of the transition metal, rheniumSeven images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
USS Yorktown collision (nom), a dramatic photograph of the intentional collision with this guided missile cruiser by a Soviet frigate in what some observers have called "the last incident of the Cold War" (created by the US Navy, picture at bottom).
The chemical element rhenium (nom), a heavy, shiny metal, was the last naturally occurring stable element to be discovered, in 1925. It was named after the great river, the Rhine. It comes at a price of more than $6,000 a kilo (Alchemist-hp) (picture at right).
"Definitely not an easy choice this week. All the images are excellent, some depicting interesting historical events and others adding to our knowledge of natural history. Although much of my experience is underwater, having chased a good number of darting fish and other fast-moving critters, I can really appreciate the skill that was required to capture an image of a subject moving at high speed at such a distance. For me, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor (pictured at the bottom of last week's page) sticks out above the others as a high-quality image and a great choice for nomination. – Nick"
The US Navy captured this shot of the 1988 collision between USS Yorktown (CG-48)—while it was exercising "the right of innocent passage" through Soviet territorial waters—and the Soviet Krivak I class frigate "Bezzavetniy". The collision appears to have been intentional.
This article is a continuation of Tools, part 1 and Tools, part 2, a series meant to introduce readers to useful tools for article editing. This time, we will be treating tools that relate to checking compliance with the Manual of Style, with a special mention of wikEd.
Various other tools are hosted on the Wikimedia Toolserver (currently provided by the German Wikimedia chapter) and can be accessed via a web interface. Some are also hosted on non-Wikimedia websites.
Dash tool
The Dash tool converts dashes, hyphens, and minus signs to their proper format per the Manual of Style. Particularly useful for year and page ranges, which are often input wrongly, with hyphens. En dashes are much easier to recognise in these contexts and are recommended by most authorities as well as Wikipedia's style guide. The script has been demonstrated to have an extremely low false-positive rate.
Placement : Adds an en dash ("–") next to the history tab.
Demo : Paste javascript:importScript("User:GregU/dashes.js");autoEdExecute() into your browser's address bar while editing the article of interest.
Installation : Add {{subst:js|User:GregU/dashes.js}} to your Special:MyPage/skin.js page.
Peer reviewer
Peer reviewer checks pages against some Manual of Style rules and generates a report on that. It was used as a user script to post reviews at Wikipedia:Peer review for four years before it was set up as a tool on the Toolserver. Installed as a script, it also provides some (outdated) automatic formatting options. Despite being unmaintained and looking for a new maintainer, it is still useful for checking for general issues in an article.
Placement : Configurable, defaults next to log out on edit pages
Demo : Paste javascript:importScript('User:AndyZ/peerreviewer.js');output_PR = 'wpTextbox1';JSpeerreview_simple(); into your browser's address bar while editing the article of interest.
Alternative (alt) text is an appropriate text substitute for an image, such as in an audio rendering of a Wikipedia article used by blind or dyslexic users. It also has secondary uses for low-bandwidth web browser and search engine bots. Once a requirement for featured content, it has since been downgraded over confusion of what constitutes a good description.
Altviewer provide a method for examining and comparing an image's alt attribute without turning off images or install Fangs extension for Firefox.
WikiSort adds a "Sort words" link on the sidebar. Pressing this opens a separate window that displays all words longer than six letters; this is useful for spell-checking articles.
Placement : Adds a "Sort words" link to the Wikipedia side bar.
Demo : Paste javascript:importScript("User:Michael Devore/wiksort.js");wiksLoad(); into your browser's address bar while viewing the article of interest.
Installation : Add {{subst:js|User:Michael Devore/wiksort.js}} to your Special:MyPage/skin.js page
wikEd enhances the edit box with syntax highlighting with code check, on-page Show preview and Show changes, improved diff view, converting rich-text to wikicode, and nearly a dozen fix up buttons. Some features found their way into the usability team's editor; such as find and replace and reference and template folding.
wikEd boasts several translations, an API/customizations which are used by other scripts, and it is the second most popular gadget on the English Wikipedia. It works in most web browsers with the exception of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
This case concerns accusations of wiki-hounding and disruptive editing. Stevertigoalleges that several editors deem his editing to be "disruptive" or "in need of banning" because they "still hold the grudge that previous cases did not find in their favor regarding [Stevertigo]". He also alleges that he "largely won" an argument against two editors in relation to the Time article, and that those two editors began editing the Punishment article due to an undue interest in Stevertigo's editing rather than due to an interest in the article. The case is currently in the evidence and workshop phase; participants have started making submissions in both phases.
Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start of the arbitration. However, the handling of the case has been the subject of criticism; for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for an extended period, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see earlier Signpost coverage). More criticisms were expressed recently (examples: [9][10]) but as reported last week, a workshop will be held where users may provide feedback. The proposed decision, drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse, sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion, much of it comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrators, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion continued to increase significantly in the weeks that have followed leading to arbitrators closing or archiving discussions more frequently. Rlevse had said that arbitrators were trying to complete the proposed decision before September 6, but it was later made clear that he will no longer be voting on this decision.
Concerns and questions have been raised about the proposed findings of fact which relate to sockpuppetry in the CC topic area. At the centre of controversy is the proposal alleging that:
...a significant proportion of accounts (20-40% by current checkuser estimates) blocked as Scibaby [a now banned-editor, were] subsequently determined to be unrelated....
This week, participants pointedout that the AUSC report (which the figure is based on) only dealt with range-blocks by one individual (a former arbitrator, who in particular circumstances in 2009, resigned his access to CheckUser and Oversight tools). In response to the concerns about the accuracy of the proposal, arbitrator Corenemphasised that the figure is an estimate, while arbitrator Carcharothstated that he is still satisfied that there is an overreaction to the banned user. However, other participants have considered the approach as unconstructive, expressing concerns about the use of seemingly “outdated figures, which are confusingly billed as "current" checkuser estimates” and the making of statements which may unfairly malign “the people who are presently working on handling the sock puppetry”. Another participant also noted that other parts of the finding may need to be “reworded” due to the circumstances. All eight arbitrators who are voting on this decision continue to support the proposal as worded; arbitrators Newyorkbrad and Carcharoth stated that they are open to further explaining or simply dropping the figure, but no changes have been made at the time of writing.
Update: Earlier today, the proposal was reworded. The proposal now states that
...a significant proportion of Scibaby-related blocks (including range blocks), particularly before late 2009, were subsequently determined to be excessive or incorrect....
Pending changes is a new protection tool that allows administrators to apply "Pending changes" protection to a page. Under this setting, the page can be edited as normal, but only the most recent accepted version of the page will be visible to readers. This allows administrators to open up the editing of semi-protected pages to all editors, including those who edit anonymously. The technical work follows a request by Jimbo Wales that the Wikimedia Foundation developers keep Pending changes live (see earlier Signpost coverage), and the conclusion of an interim poll on the matter (see early Signpost coverage). Currently, the improved version of the Pending changes interface is in development at its own test wiki; developers are aiming to roll out an improved version of pending changes in November. Changes are based on feedback provided by users participating in the straw polls and discussions; for example, pending changes was the primary topic addressed by Sue Gardner's IRC meeting last week (see Signpost story).
In a separate development, Lanphier also called for collaboration on a list of "roadmap" bugs which the (paid) development team had been discussing. User:MZMcBride highlighted the post facto nature of the request, and asked that in the future the community be more involved in those discussions, rather than being invited to comment on conclusions alone. David Goodman (User:DGG) added that it was "more consultation than was had for some previous changes", before touching on the key tensions in the community about to what extent Pending changes was being developed for the English-language Wikipedia only.
Code review version updated
The internal installation of the "CodeReview" MediaWiki extension has been upgraded. The extension, which aids in the review of proposed changes to the MediaWiki software itself, has had the following changes implemented
(wikitech-l mailing list):
New statistics on code review have been added, specifically a "wall of shame" for fixmes (changes which have been sent back to the developer to fix as soon as possible)
There is now a new 'old' status for revisions, designed for anything that is two or more years old and still unreviewed (for example, those from before CodeReview was implemented).
The broken parser tests results system was removed, in favor of the phpUnderControl software.
Getting the code review software and process working efficiently again is one of the acknowledged priorities of the Wikimedia engineering department.
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.
The official "October" WMF Engineering update was published, with the summary having few major changes from the draft published by The Signpost last week. In addition, it includes substantial in-depth detail on those activities.
With the closing of bug #23819, bureaucrats will be able to suppress the redirects created when a user is renamed.
As part of a breaking change to the API, integer inputs will now be validated to make sure they are within a given range (bug #25303, fix still in progress).
Pywikipedia interwiki bots will now respect a greater range of possible indications that a page is a disambiguation page (revision #8613).
The Wikimedia installation of the jQuery Javascript library was upgraded from version 1.3.2 to the newer 1.4.2 (wikitech-l mailing list).
On 10 October (UTC) all Wikimedia wikis experienced a brief outage due to an apparent bug in the software used for balancing the many millions of requests Wikimedia receives between its servers. It was fixed after around 90 minutes (Wikimedia techblog).
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