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18 February 2013

 

2013-02-18

Thank you for flying WikiProject Airlines

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By Mabeenot
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An interesting example of aircraft livery celebrating the 25th anniversary of ATA Airlines

This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Lists and 26 Good Articles. There is a convenient template that keeps track of the project's announcements, upcoming Featured Articles on the main page, reassessments and reviews, requested moves, and articles nominated for deletion. The project is a child of WikiProject Aviation (see our 2010 interview), sister to WikiProject Aircraft (interviewed in 2011) and WikiProject Airports, and parent of the Defunct Airlines Task Force. We interviewed Compdude123.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Airlines? Do you contribute to any of the other aviation-related WikiProjects?
Compdude123: I joined this project because I'm interested in airlines and I just happen to edit those articles the most. In fact my first major endeavor on Wikipedia was to significantly expand an airline article, Alaska Airlines. The expansion/improvement continued up until it became a Good Article last September.
Are airlines associated with certain geographic areas or time periods better covered than others? Do you tend to focus on airlines based in a particular country or region? Have you participated in the Defunct Airlines Task Force?
Compdude123: I'm not sure about differences in coverage over geographic areas, but airlines that currently exist obviously have better coverage than defunct airlines. (except those that ceased operations fairly recently) Even with airlines currently in existence, the history section is often filled with more events from the year 2000 onward, with less info prior to then. I tend to focus most on US airlines, since I live in America. I'm a member of the Defunct Airlines task force but I haven't done a whole lot of work with defunct airlines.
The project has a wealth of Good Articles and four Featured Lists, but no Featured Articles. What challenges has the project faced when improving articles to higher classes? Are there any Good Articles that are nearing Featured status?
Compdude123: I don't think there's been any challenges with getting some featured articles, it's just that nobody has gone ahead and worked on making an article be up to snuff for FA status. I'd have to look at the good articles we do have and see which one would be closest to being an FA, because I've never really looked into that.
How difficult has it been to acquire images to illustrate articles about airlines? Aside from an airline's livery, what other aspects of the airline can be photographed by the average flyer for use in Wikipedia articles?
Compdude123: It actually has been pretty easy to fill articles with pictures relating to the airline. Thanks to Russavia, we now are able to use thousands of images from the airplane-photography site Airliners.net. The biggest benefit of this is that we have access to many historical images of older airplanes that an airline used to operate. Besides the livery and aircraft, other things that people could take pictures of would be shots of the airplane's interior, certain cabin classes, as well as the headquarters of the airline.
With several major airlines undergoing restructuring, rebranding, merging, or modernizing their fleets, what changes do you anticipate will be necessary for Wikipedia's coverage of airlines? What other aspects of the airline business need attention?
Compdude123: We have done a good job of keeping airline pages up-to-date with things like fleet modernization and mergers. It's not that difficult to find news about that sort of thing, as there are several news organizations that deal specifically with the aviation industry. Some aspects of the airline business that could use some attention would be articles about airline terminology. These seem to be ignored by most of us in this project!
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Compdude123: Clearly we need to have some featured articles but another issue with many airline articles is that some sections, particularly those talking about cabin classes, lounges, and frequent-flyer programs are often written like a travel guide, with way too many details that a reader of an encyclopedia could care less about. A great and easy way for a new contributor to help out is by trimming such sections to make them look less like free advertising for the airline. If you really want to earn a gold star, you could add some info about how the look of an airline's cabin, lounge, or frequent flyer program have changed over the years. There is no airline article that I know of with this type of info.


In next week's special report, we'll see how WikiProjects can measure their workload and productivity. Until then, check out our previous specials in the archive.

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2013-02-18

Better templates and 3D buildings

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By Jarry1250 and Dschwen

Twenty wikis get Lua, more deployments

As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.

The deployments were announced on 15 February for 18 February (wikitech-l mailing list); consequently, most wikis are yet to decide upon policies towards template refactoring. Arguments in favour of a swift implementation cite the proven ability of Lua to reduce like-for-like rendering times (particularly on longer pages) when applied to heavily used templates. The language also allows more complex templates to be created and improves code readability. Arguments in favour of a more cautious approach centre on the propensity for templates to become ever more complex, obscuring their methods to the average user.

The CodeEditor extension is also being deployed, providing Lua developers with a range of proper debugging tools; both it and the Scribunto extension (which provides the basic Lua functionality) have been in testing for several months following initial demos at the 2012 Berlin Hackathon and Wikimania 2012. Lua scripts will be written in a new Module: namespace, being invoked (probably from the Template: namespace, though potentially directly) via a new #invoke: parser function.

WikiMiniAtlas gets 3D buildings and more

3D buildings on the interactive map gadget WikiMiniAtlas

The WikiMiniAtlas is a built-in mapping gadget hidden behind the icon, that shows up on all articles with geographic coordinates attached. Overlaid on a basemap derived from OpenStreetMap data the WikiMiniAtlas (WMA) displays links to geocoded Wikipedia articles and Commons image thumbnails. It features a user interface that is translated into dozens of languages and can display coordinates from over 70 Wikimedia projects.

The latest feature in WikiMiniAtlas is solid 3D buildings at high zoom levels; examples include the Petronas Towers, Burj Khalifa, the Empire State Building and many more. This feature requires a browser with WebGL support (all modern browsers except Internet Explorer). For modern Internet Explorer a wireframe view acts as a fallback. For browsers that do not support the canvas element (older Internet Explorer versions and obsolete browsers) no buildings are shown (it should degrade gracefully). Building geometries are extracted from open source data released by the OpenStreetMap project.

In list articles such as the List of volcanoes in the United States all coordinates from the page are highlighted with blue dots on the map, with the dots being clickable to navigate the list (example). The WikiMiniAtlas also displays OSM object outlines through the WIWOSM project and embedded KML data. Thus the Navajo Nation article (video) is an example of the former and Mojave Desert is an example of the latter. Arbitrary outlines can be dragged across the map to allow for size comparisons; an example of such a comparison is that between Texas and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (video). And of course WikiMiniAtlas goes beyond earth, showing globes of the Moon, Mercury, Mars, Titan, Io, and Venus (example).

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 several weeks.

  • Third time lucky for English Wikipedia Wikidata deployment: On the third attempt, the Wikidata client was successfully rolled out to the English Wikipedia, with a date in early March now set for all remaining Wikipedias. Although most language links can now be safely removed from any project with the Wikidata client installed, not all can be; users unsure of which links fall into which category are advised to avoid removing any links. Please see Wikipedia:Wikidata for more information.

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2013-02-18

Wikimedia Foundation declares "victory" in Wikivoyage lawsuit

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By The ed17

On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared "victory" in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. Signpost readers will recall that IB is in turn owned by private equity investors Hellman & Friedman LLC, which bought the company in a US$640M deal. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.

In August 2012, Wikitravel contributors wished to create a new, non-commercial travel guide under the auspices of the WMF. The process began in April 2012, with significant segments of the Wikitravel contributors in support. Though the process bogged down in the following months, a request for comment on the matter gained 78% support for starting a Wikimedia-affiliated travel guide project. But IB indicated that it would not give up without a fight; there were several ominous warning signs, including the IB legal department's ultimatum to eight Wikitravel volunteer editors: "Please be advised that your recent actions communicating directly with members of Wikitravel could put you in violation of numerous federal and state laws. We strongly urge you to cease and desist all action detrimental to Wikitravel.org. If you persist in this course of conduct, you will potentially be a named defendant, and therefore liable for any and all resulting damages."

Things came to a head in September, when the company sued two volunteer editors, Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday), focusing on their encouragement of Wikitravel editors to fork and join a Wikimedia-run travel guide (see our special report: "Two Wikipedians may face jury trial"). Geoff Brigham, the WMF's general counsel, stated yesterday that in the lawsuit:


This lawsuit was dismissed in November.

Soon after IB's action, though, the WMF countered with its own lawsuit, asking the court to declare that:

  • IB has no right to limit the use of user-created CC-licensed content on Wikitravel;
  • all such content may be freely migrated without interference from IB;
  • IB has no lawful right to prevent current or former Wikitravel volunteers from freely contributing to a new Wikimedia-owned travel website;
  • Wikimedia may contact, communicate with, or express support for any current or former volunteer Wikitravel authors or administrators who are seeking to participate in the new website, even if this results in those people no longer contributing to Wikitravel; and
  • Wikimedia may assist people to copy and migrate content from Wikitravel to a WMF or third-party site.

After clearing several hurdles and receiving a tentative ruling in the WMF's favor, the second lawsuit ended on 14 February in a negotiated settlement between the two entities. IB agreed to release the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V., the not-for-profit operator of the original Wikivoyage, from "any and all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project" in return for the WMF's dismissal of the lawsuit. Brigham summed up the outcome at the end of his Wikimedia blog post:


Ryan Holliday, one of the two volunteers who were originally sued, commented:


In brief

Twice25, an Italian Wikipedian, passed away this week.
  • Death of a Wikipedian: The Italian Wikipedia contributor Twice25 passed away this week. Twice25, who was also known on the site by his real name Tullio, had been an editor since 2003, contributing more than 130,000 edits in that time and organizing meetups in his native Genoa. Cruccone commented on Wikimedia-l that Twice25 "always refused any proposal for adminship, but nonetheless he has been really influential in the growth of the project, always willing to give advice to anyone needing it. ... We have lost a great Wikipedian, but above all we have lost a friend." A goodbye section has been set up on the Italian Village Pump; many editors are also signing their names on Twice25's talk page.
  • Affiliations Committee (Affcom): The new appointments to the recently expanded Affcom, in charge of guiding organizations seeking to affiliate themselves with the WMF through a process on Meta, have been announced, with two reappointments and five new editors. There are a total of eleven voting members of the committee, with the others being appointed last March.
  • Individual Engagement Grants (IEGs): Siko Bouterse, the head of IEGs, has announced the members of the first IEG committee, which will recommend IEG proposals to the WMF to fund. In addition, the first round of the IEG process has begun. Members of the community are invited to join in the open discussion period.
  • German row over COI and trademark policies: On 13 February 2013, news broke on the German Wikipedia, which is undertaking a chapter-funded paid-editing investigation, that Arne Klempert (former CEO of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE), former chapter-selected WMF trustee, and current adviser to the Affiliations Committee) has created a Wikipedia Corporate Index for his employer, Fleishman-Hillard International Communications. The tool analyzes German Wikipedia entries on businesses; the page also highlights Fleishman-Hillard's competences to advise on developing and implementing a "sustainable Wikipedia strategy". Several German Wikipedia community members were quick to point to potential violations of the WMF trademark policy and CC-by-SA-licensed content (since then taken on board). The ethical status of the effort – based on conflicts of interests among other grounds – was also questioned. Senior German-language Wikimedians were split over the legitimacy of the issue; Kurt Kulac said he was "shocked" to see this effort by a former WMF trustee; Pavel Richter (WMDE) defended it.
  • Flow funding: User:West.andrew.g, who co-authored a Signpost report on popular articles two weeks ago, has opened his flow funding portal. Flow funding is currently a Foundation pilot project, which seeks to give volunteers "decision-making power to fund projects aligned with the Wikimedia movement's strategic goals."
  • Wikimania scholarships: Applications for scholarships to Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong are still being accepted. Full scholarships cover airfare, lodging, and registration; part scholarships cover up to half of the estimated airfare. Applicants will be rated on their Wikimedia activity (both on- and off-wiki), their open-source activity more broadly, their interest in both Wikimania and the Wikimedia movement, and their grasp of the English language. Applications will be accepted until 23:59 UTC on Friday, 22 February.
  • Search begins for new WMF board member: The WMF has announced the beginning of their search for a new member of the Board of Trustees to fill the appointed seat vacated by Matt Halprin. They are looking for "a Board member who has experience with organizations that have grown and evolved rapidly, and who understands how boards can evolve to provide appropriate governance support in these changing circumstances. Experience with international, community-driven, consensus organizations is also important as the Foundation would not exist without the community." Those wishing to apply should see the full position description and contact Lisa Grossman at lisag@moppenheim.com.
  • Featured sounds: Editors are currently discussing a proposal to relaunch the featured sound candidates program, which has been dormant for more than a year.
  • WP:5000: The 5000 most popular pages and the most-requested red links (uncreated articles) on the English Wikipedia are available for viewing and taking action.
  • Hours spent building Wikipedia: A new paper, titled "Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia", has estimated the amount of time spent creating Wikipedia's content: "a total of 102,673,683 total labor-hours." Andrew Gray took this farther, estimating that it would have taken "Three years [of] work by a mid-sized university of around 15,000 people (assuming a working day of eight hours and 250 working days in the year)", among others.
  • UK-based shiplovers wanted: The Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums are advertising a paid Wikimedian-in-Residence post. The position is part-time from 25 March 2013 through 14 June 2013. Andrew Gray, the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Library, added that Tyne & Wear is "particularly interested in the prospect of someone wanting to work with [their] shipbuilding and industrial history collections, [along with] digitising some of the material they have in their archives." Full details of the position are available here (.doc file). Applications are open until March 4.

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2013-02-18

Sue Gardner interviewed by the Australian press

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By Andreas Kolbe
External audio
audio icon The in-depth interview with Sue Gardner broadcast by ABC on 15 February 2013
audio icon Shorter ABC interview broadcast on 13 February 2013

Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in The Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data.

The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years. Gardner commented:


Voicing concerns about efforts to introduce government regulation of the internet, Gardner recalled the 2012 blackout of the English Wikipedia, saying: "Would I support them in doing it again? I would. I'm not sure we'd ever do it again, but I'd certainly be open to doing it again."

Gardner also discussed the deletion discussion concerning the Wikipedia article about the death of Melbourne ABC employee Jill Meagher (see Signpost coverage). An Australian female librarian had mentioned to her the possibility that male bias might have led to the article's being proposed for deletion, as "she felt that men were more likely to say that it was not a notable event. [She thought] there was a gender factor, which is really interesting."

Another interview appeared on ABC News on 13 February, under the headline "Wikipedia flush with funds, short on volunteers". Gardner discussed the financial health of the Wikimedia Foundation, which now had annual takings of $40 million—up from around 1 million in 2007—and a healthy cash surplus. She also touched on the editor decline:


The interview further covered Wikipedia's competition, third-world expansion, and how the availability of information online is changing the way people think.

An almost hour-long interview with Gardner, recorded in front of a live audience at the State Library of Queensland, was broadcast by the ABC on 15 February 2013, as part of the series "Conversations with Richard Fidler". Among the topics discussed in this in-depth interview were Wikipedia's origins, reliability and mission, its donor structure, its contributor demographics and the gender gap and their effect on Wikipedia content, the lack of editorial control of Wikipedia content by the foundation, contributor anonymity, censorship and handling of controversial content, the editor decline and the visual editor, as well as Gardner's personal background.

In brief

  • Towards closing the gender gap: A piece on the gender gap by Netha Hussain appeared in the HuffPost Tech UK Edition on 9 February 2013.
  • WikiExperts offers free evaluation of corporate Wikipedia pages: A PR Newswire piece by paid editing service WikiExperts (the "premier Wikipedia visibility agency") appeared on a number of media websites on 11 February 2013, offering companies a cost-free evaluation of their Wikipedia entry.
  • Watchlists for mobile phones: Engadget and SlashGear were among tech sites reporting on 13 February 2013 that mobile phone users will in future be able to use Wikipedia's watchlist function.
  • Larry Sanger in new crowdsourcing venture: As reported in the Daily Dot on 13 February 2013, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is apparently preparing a new crowdsourcing project.
  • The Register, again: Andrew Orlowski, a frequent critic of Wikipedia, has published two more articles in the Register on the topic in the past week, focusing on the Did you know... project's continued allowance of Gibraltar-related hooks and Wikimedia UK's governance review, which the Signpost covered last week.

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2013-02-18

Featured content gets schooled

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By Crisco 1492
This edition covers content promoted between 10 and 16 February 2013
The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, a lyceum in Russia
Artistic depiction of Canis Minor
St Cuthbert's Church, one of the Grade I listed churches in Cumbria
Indian educator Mumtaz Ahmed Khan
A Richard's Pipit in Thailand

Two featured articles were promoted this week:

  • Kenneth Widmerpool (nom) by Brianboulton. Widmerpool is a fictional character from A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. Succeeding at everything except romance, Widmerpool – the antithesis of the sequence's narrator-hero Nicholas Jenkins – finds his downfall in a New Age-type cult. He has been called an embodiment of many of the worst aspects of the British character and one of the more memorable characters of 20th century fiction. Various unsuccessful attempts have been made to find out who the character was based on.
  • Canis Minor (nom) by Casliber and Keilana. Canis Minor, meaning "small dog", is one of the 88 modern constellations. A small constellation in the northern celestial hemisphere, it contains only two stars brighter than fourth magnitude. Western cultures have often portrayed it as a dog, sometimes following the hunter Orion, while several other cultures have connected the constellation to water.

Nine featured lists were promoted this week:

  • List of works by H. C. McNeile (nom) by SchroCat. The British writer Cyril McNeile wrote 20 short story collections and 15 novels, first drawing inspiration from his experience on the front then shifting to detective novels. He is best remembered for his character Bulldog Drummond.
  • List of film producers of the Dutch East Indies (nom) by Crisco 1492. The Dutch colony which is now Indonesia saw 22 film producers active in its 23 years of cinema. All were men, and the vast majority were ethnic Chinese.
  • List of NFL champions (1920–69) (nom) by Toa Nidhiki05. The National Football League in the US saw numerous champions between its establishment in 1920 and merger with the American Football League in 1970. Champions were first selected by the league; regular championship games only began in 1933.
  • Grade I listed churches in Cumbria (nom) by Peter I. Vardy. The English county of Cumbria is home to 49 Grade I listed ecclesiastical buildings, some dating back to the 11th century. The most recent Grade I church on the list dates from the late 19th century.
  • HMV's Poll of Polls (nom) by A Thousand Doors. HMV's Poll of Polls is an annual list of albums which has been compiled by British music retailer HMV from various sources since 1998. It tends to be topped by indie albums.
  • List of songs recorded by Fiona Apple (nom) by Another Believer and Ruby2010. American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple has recorded over sixty songs since making her debut in 1996. Her work includes several duets and songs for compilation albums and film soundtracks.
  • List of Hong Kong ODI cricketers (nom) by AssociateAffiliate. Twenty cricketers have represented Hong Kong at One Day Internationals. Although it has never gained ODI status, the city has sent players to four matches.
  • List of Birmingham City F.C. players (25–99 appearances) (nom) by Struway2. More than 300 men have played 25 to 99 matches for the English football club Birmingham City since it was established in 1875. Several have had high achievements while with the club.
  • MGMT discography (nom) by Sufur222. The indie rock group MGMT have released 3 albums, 4 EPs, 9 singles, and 12 music videos since they were established in 2002. Their best performing release is Congratulations in 2010, which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200.

Thirteen featured pictures were promoted this week:

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The Oval at Stanford University


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