Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-02-07
New General Counsel hired; reuse of Google Art Project debated; GLAM newsletter started; news in brief
New General Counsel hired
On February 4, Sue Gardner announced the hiring of Geoff Brigham as General Counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation. The General Counsel is in charge of the Foundation's day-to-day legal issues. According to the job description, the General Counsel is responsible for "maintaining and developing the legal and contractual infrastructure required of a US-based nonprofit foundation which operates internationally; maintaining and developing policy and legal defenses relevant to the operation of a Top 10 multilingual information website created via the efforts of a broad, international volunteer community; [and] advising the Wikimedia Foundation and the global Wikimedia movement on ethical and mission-driven policy positions."
The office was created in 2006 (Signpost coverage: "Foundation hires Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim executive director"). In July 2007, Mike Godwin was hired for the position. Godwin handled legal affairs for the project for three years, dealing with several high-profile disputes, before leaving the project last October for undisclosed reasons. In late October, human resources firm m|Oppenheim was charged with finding a replacement for Godwin. Sue Gardner noted the challenge to recruit a person who "can handle a broad range of legal issues including the legal defense of our projects in an international context, an array of matters related to policy and regulatory compliance, issues such as privacy, and helping us with the challenges of opening a new office in India." m|Oppenheim talked to "hundreds of connectors and candidates" for the position, and around 12 short-listed candidates were interviewed.
English- and French-speaking Geoff Brigham received his law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington DC, and a BA in Political Science and French from the Indiana University in Bloomington. Prior to the appointment, Brigham was for nearly eight years Deputy General Counsel of eBay, where he handled legal affairs in 15 countries. Before that, Brigham was the Assistant US Attorney in Southern District of Florida, Senior Liaison Legal Officer in Paris, Federal Appellate Attorney, Associate with Finley, Kumble, Wagner et al., and Judicial Law Clerk. Wikimedians have been welcoming him to the Foundation on the Foundation-l mailing list.
Echoes of the NPG public domain controversy: Reuse of Google's gigapixel art reproductions debated on Commons
Interactive large-image-viewer (non-Flash), 19,578 × 14,260 pixels at 88.22 MB (reduced resolution from Google's reproduction)
After the launch of the Google Art Project last week, which hosts very high-resolution images (up to more than 10 gigapixels) of famous artworks from galleries and museums around the world, a debate ensued on whether and how to upload those that show public domain works to Wikimedia Commons.
It was discussed whether Google's terms of services permit such reuse, whether it would still be legal under copyright in case of the lack of such permission, and whether it might offend cultural institutions that are collaborating with Wikimedia or could intend to do so.
Witty lama, who has long been known for his work on such GLAM relationships (Galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and in December took up a fellowship position at the Wikimedia Foundation, strongly advised against copying the reproductions: "Of course, legally and ethically the community and WMF's position remains that you can't copyright a PD artwork merely by making a faithful reproduction of it (cf. Bridgeman v. Corel). However, from a pragmatic point of view the advantages of having a dozen gigapixel images of important paintings (as awesome as that would be) would, IMHO, be outweighed by the blow this would deal to our reasonably good-standing in the cultural sector these days."
Apart from the diplomatic concerns, the images also present technical challenges, their full resolution exceeding the 65536 x 65536 pixels maximum of the JPEG specifications and the 100MB file upload limit on Commons. Dcoetzee announced that he had started to download and archive some of the images in full resolution, and has already uploaded three of them in a somewhat lower resolution to Commons (File:Giovanni Bellini - Saint Francis in the Desert - Google Art Project.jpg,File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder- The Harvesters - Google Art Project.jpg, File:Van Gogh - Starry Night - Google Art Project.jpg). The full 1.6 gigapixel version of one image, Starry Night, has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
Recalling the 2009 legal threat of the UK's National Portrait Gallery (NPG) against Dcoetzee for similar uploads of reproductions of public domain paintings (Signpost coverage: "Copyright threat"), Witty lama strongly criticized him for the new uploads: "Didn't we learn anything from the NPG fiasco, especially you Derreck!?" David Gerard retorted "Yes: we learnt to stand up to odious and reprehensibly fraudulent claims of copyright on public domain works. ... Derek did nothing wrong and is doing nothing wrong." Dcoetzee said that the three images were just a "sample" and that he planned "no further uploads for a while, just gathering data on local storage". He also indicated that the legal concerns from the NPG case do not apply to museums in the countries like the US where the public domain status of faithful reproductions of 2D public domain artworks is more clearly established than in the UK.
It was also debated whether Wikimedia projects have a need for such high resolutions at all. Dcoetzee defended their usefulness, pointing to an essay titled "Why we need high-resolution media". The newly created category "Google Art Project" already contains a few detail images that were excerpted from Google's reproductions (one of them currently being used in the article Tudor rose). The version of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Harvesters" uploaded by Dcoetzee (see above), while reduced to 280 megapixels from Google's 4.5 gigapixels, compares favorably to a previously uploaded high resolution version (3.6 megapixels) from another source, allowing the viewer to recognize grazing cattle in the background or the facial expressions of the harvest workers in the foreground.
Monthly GLAM newsletter started
In other GLAM-related news, a monthly newsletter titled "This month in GLAM" has been started on the Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, the first issue records the following events for January:
- Coinciding with Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, the Derby Museum announced that they were starting a collaboration with Wikipedia. To celebrate this cooperation, there will be a Backstage Pass and GLAMWIKI event on April 9, 2011 at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. This marks the first regional GLAMWIKI in the UK. The museum have been eager to see that articles about their artifacts be written in other languages than English.
- The Brooklyn Museum's exhibition incorporating Wikipedia has been pronounced a success.
- On her blog Museumtwo, popular museum critic and author of "The participatory museum" Nina Simon advised: "Want to get your content out there? Put it in Wikipedia."
News in brief
- A "social history" of the Russian Wikipedia: Maryana Pinchuk (m:User:Buickmackane) and Victoria Doronina (User:Mstislavl), who around the end of September started an eight-week research project under the Foundation's Community fellowship program to develop methods for writing histories of Wikimedia projects (Signpost coverage), have drafted an (English-language) "attempt of a social history" of the Russian Wikipedia. It depicts the project's history as defined by a continuous struggle between "Allowists" and "Restrictors" (user groups with differing attitudes towards the necessity of strict rules, similar to the Inclusionists versus Deletionists antagonism on the English Wikipedia), which they attribute to the high "uncertainty avoidance" observed for Russia in sociologist Geert Hofstede's framework for assessing culture. Other aspects of Russian culture that shaped the numerous conflicts and affairs recounted in the text include nationalism and the fact that "the subject of homosexuality is still taboo". On the other hand, the project has dealt with issues familiar to English Wikipedians, such as large-scale sockpuppet abuse and a case of a closed mailing list used to coordinate actions against other users, described as "very similar" to the English Wikipedia's Eastern European mailing list case of 2009.
- Decreasing editor-to-reader ratio: User:Benjamin Mako Hill, a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board, has published a blog post about "Editor-to-Reader Ratios on Wikipedia" with a "back of the envelope estimation on the proportion of users that are editors", based on the WMF's statistics. Between February 2008 and December 2010, the resulting graph shows "a 42% decrease in the proportion of readers who edit at least five times a month". He said that the "discrepancy between rising readership and stable or sinking editorship should raise major concern". In a related blog posting ("Wikipedia loves editors: 2011 campaigns?"), board member Sj suggested using banners like those of the fundraiser to invite contributors, drafted by WikiProjects to indicate their specific needs. As reported earlier, the 2010-11 fundraiser campaign was intended to include banners (after reaching its financial goal) "to ask people to contribute - not financially, but with their knowledge. We will _target readers, and encourage them to become editors", but Sj indicated that while "some general-purpose 'discover Wikimedia' banners were run the first week of January", they were "soon overtaken by preparations for the (wickedly fun) 10th anniversary celebrations."
- Professionalization of chapters: User:notafish has started a series of blog posts titled "Wikimedia Chapters: We Want to Hire Someone, Where Do We Start?" (part I, part II), drawing on her perspective as a board member of Wikimedia Germany, the oldest of the around 30 Wikimedia chapters (founded in 2004), which currently has around 12 employees: "In the constellation of Wikimedia Chapters, it is the only one with such a strong presence of staff at all. Other chapters have hired people, but no other chapter, as far as I know, has more than 3 permanent employees."
- South African chapter being founded: According to a press release, efforts to found a South African Wikimedia chapter (the first on the continent) are well underway. Kerryn McKay, who is director of the non-profit African Commons Project and is working on the founding of the chapter, said it "started with a kick-off workshop last September that pulled together Wikipedians from around the country. We are now finalizing the by-laws and are awaiting approval from the Wikimedia Foundation," and expect the chapter to be operating in the second quarter of 2011.
- History of Wikipedia in India: On his blog, Wikimedian Gautam John has posted "Thoughts on Wikipedia in India", among other things including the history of the Tamil Wikipedia and that of the Indian Wikimedia chapter.
- Log of general Wikimedia IRC meeting: A log of the February 5 Wikimedia meeting on IRC (attended by community members and some Foundation employees and trustees) has been published. Topics included ways to preserve the momentum shown in the many local meetups that celebrated Wikipedia's tenth anniversary, Wikipedia's "gender gap", possible changes in the Foundation's identification procedures for volunteers that would extend the mandatory identification to all OTRS volunteers and retain the identification data at the Foundation, a planned extension of the "Wiki Loves Monuments" contest held by the Dutch chapter last year, and Wikimania 2012 bids.
- New Global Development staff positions: The Foundation's Global Development Department has announced the hiring of Asaf Bartov (from Wikimedia Israel) as "Head of Global South Relationships", and a contract extension of Egypt-based Moushira Elamrawy to serve as "Chapter Relations Manager". As explained by Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead, the new positions replace the initially planned "Chapter Development Director" and "seek to enhance WMF's relationships with and support of chapters and other groups/individuals in the movement". Together with Newstead, both will attend two m:IRC office hours on February 11, at 15:00 and 22:00 UTC.
- 500 featured article milestone: With Nick-D's Bombing of Singapore (1944–1945), the Military history WikiProject has reached a total of 500 featured articles in its scope. This was a major goal set more than a year ago by the coordinators of the project.
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Wikipedia controversies about Mormon topics examined; brief news
Mormon newspaper examines struggles about Mormon topics on Wikipedia
The Deseret News, a Utah newspaper owned by the Mormon (LDS) Church, published an article titled "Wiki Wars: In battle to define beliefs, Mormons and foes wage battle on Wikipedia". It stated that "for people looking into the doctrines, history and practices of the LDS Church and other religions, Wikipedia is seen as the most accurate, reliable and unbiased definition", and cited a 2007 comment by M. Russell Ballard, a member of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve: "[Internet] conversations will continue whether or not we choose to participate in them. But we cannot stand on the sidelines while others, including our critics, attempt to define what the church teaches."
Much of the rest of the article illustrates the "battle" by focusing on two editors: User:Bochica (later User:Roger Penumbra), a mormon who got involved in Wikipedia in 2006 after experiencing "the power of Wikipedia.org to define the world – and his faith" through an exchange with an LDS missionary who had grown doubts about the church's tenets after reading Wikipedia, and User:John Foxe, an account which according to Deseret News belongs to "a professor at Bob Jones University, a Christian college and seminary located in Greenville, South Carolina that has historically been hostile to the LDS Church".
Finally, the newspaper quoted Richard L. Bushman, a professor of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University and author of the reference cited most often in the article on Joseph Smith, Jr. (founder of the LDS movement). Bushman called the article "a picky piece that isn't inaccurate, but it sort of lacks depth. It ends up being shallow, I think."
Briefly
- Wikipedia, the queen of the Web: An article that appeared on the front page of Argentine newspaper La Nación titled "Wikipedia, the queen of the Web" highlighted Wikipedia's success and widespread use despite heavy criticism regarding the accuracy and reliability of its content.
- Art installation prints recent changes: Artist Dean McNamee has posted photos and a video (featured on Gizmodo and other media) of the art installation that he and Tim Burrell-Saward had been commissioned to create for "Wikipedia's official 10th anniversary party" on January 13 at the Louise T. Blouin Foundation in London. It consisted of 18 printers installed on a scaffolding in the building's entrance lobby, constantly dropping cards each corresponding to an entry from the English Wikipedia's recent changes. (While Gizmodo claimed that the edits were "printed in real time", it appears that at least some were stored in advance - the example featured in McNamee's video dates from January 6.)
- Reagle interviews: Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle recently gave several audio interviews about his book Good Faith Collaboration - The Culture of Wikipedia: On Jerry Brito's Surprisingly Free podcast [1], to the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations [2] and to Brian Lehrer[3].
- Executive Director's TEDx video: The video of Sue Gardner's talk at TEDx Dubai in December (see also last week's "News and notes") has been published.
- Creation of the Wikimedia PR videos: Opensource.com interviewed director Jelly Helm about "telling the open source story" with the videos he created for the Foundation last year, featuring interviews with Wikipedians conducted at Wikimania 2010.
- Do BLP concerns make Wikipedia too "vanilla"?: A comment in Canadian tabloid the Winnipeg Sun, titled "Wikiepedia goes vanilla" [sic], criticized what it described as "the sterile face of geek consensus" in some Wikipedia articles, citing the absence of information about a certain controversy in the article about the city's mayor Sam Katz (it has since been added). The author conjectured: "Perhaps this mindset got stamped early onto the institutional psyche of Wikipedia. With seemingly everyone expecting an open, online encyclopedia to spiral into information anarchy, it triggered a surprisingly low institutional tolerance and a hypersensitivity to mainstream criticisms of inaccuracy."
- The top five Wikigroans: The Daily Telegraph followed on earlier reports of Wikipedia's gender bias by seeing if it could detect a demographic bias produced by Wikipedia's young male editors. It called the results its top five Wikigroans (using a term introduced in 2007 by Something Awful). Similar to The New York Times article that ignited the recent debate (see last week's "In the news"), The Daily Telegraph article compared a number of articles it deemed to have an important historic or cultural significance and compared their length with similar articles which might be of interest to young males. Thus Francis Xavier is compared with Professor X, Love with masturbation, Beowulf with He-Man, John Locke to John Locke (Lost) and Sex with World of Warcraft. In each case the first mentioned "cultural article" is shorter than the second "pop culture/male article".
- "Personal appeal" to include affiliate advertising on Wikipedia: TechCrunch ran a guest post titled "Please read: a personal appeal TO Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" (alluding to Wales' well-known fundraiser messages), worrying whether "Wikipedia [can] sustain itself for another 10 years without a significant change to its business model" and arguing that Wikipedia should include affiliate marketing links, relaxing the external links guideline statement against such links: "From the Hawaii page, a simple Orbitz affiliate link will produce $3 for each plane ticket sold, 3–5% for a hotel reservation, and so on." The author noted previous opposition by Wales to advertisements, but said that such links would be "a simple solution previously unexplored".
- Least essential Wikipedia pages: Humor website Something awful listed what it considers "The least essential Wikipedia pages", including the list of animals with fraudulent diplomas.
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Widespread discussions about the low participation of women in Wikipedia
New York Times article sparks extended discussion of Wikipedia's "gender gap"
Concerns about the small proportion of women editing Wikipedia have been voiced for a long time, e.g. by senior Wikimedia figures including Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales in recent interviews. However, The New York Times front-page story on January 31 (see last week's "In the news") brought an enormous amount of additional attention to the topic. This attention included further international media coverage (some summarized by Gardner on her personal blog), and a renewed discussion among Wikipedians. Much of the latter discussion took place on the newly opened "Gendergap" mailing list, which is hoped to "become a space where Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians can share research and information and tactics for making Wikipedia more attractive to women editors" (Gardner). The Gendergap mailing list discussion reached almost 200 postings within less than a week. The issue was also highlighted in a posting on the Foundation's official blog.
On the Gendergap list, Sue Gardner recommended a discussion on Metafilter on the topic ("Wikipedia, Snips & Snails, Sugar & Spice?"). Jessamyn West, who works as a full-time community manager at Metafilter and had written one of the eight commentaries invited by the NYT after its initial article, described on the list why the Metafilter community had a more balanced gender ratio – around 60/40 male/female:
| “ | I credit this both to some aggressive moderation in what is otherwise a lightly moderated site [we delete rape jokes and I'll take the heat when people flip out about censorship] some cultivation of female members and some visible norm-setting among all the moderators for how we want the community to run. | ” |
Sue Gardner concluded that "the lesson for Wikimedia [from the Metafilter example], is that if the community makes something a priority, and continually reinforces it, then culture change can be achieved. I find this heartening because I think the people at Metafilter are fairly similar to the people at Wikimedia".
Gardner outlined a "kind of 'theory of the problem'", starting by saying the reason why the gender gap should be considered a problem for Wikipedia at all: "We want women to contribute to Wikipedia because we want Wikipedia to contain the sum of all human knowledge, not just the stuff that men know." She then went on to list the reasons for the gap, one being that "for many reasons that there's no point articulating because they're outside our control, women tend to be less tech-centric than men, and they tend to see technology as less "fun", something to be addressed by usability efforts. Secondly, that "women tend to have less free time than men, and they tend to spend their free time less in solitary pursuits". Adding to this, she observed a "social/cultural barricade [that] is essentially: women (tend to) dislike fighty cultures more than men".
Annie Lin and Sage Ross from the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative pointed out "that the Wikipedia Campus Ambassador program is currently about 55% male and 45% female – a gender ratio that we are quite proud of"[4] and that "a lot of our Campus Ambassadors are people who totally new to the community"[5]. (Gardner, too, had remarked in earlier interviews that women seemed more ready to volunteer for such activities when classes were asked on campus.)
Another issue, criticized as "hardcoded discrimination", is that in languages where there are different female and male forms of the word "user", such as German ("Benutzerin" vs. "Benutzer"), a user page on the corresponding Wikipedia will appear to denote a female Wikipedian as male (such as in de:Benutzer:Example), and standard messages inviting people to create a user account might appear to address newbies as male too. Sue Gardner called this "awful" and "a key piece of information that is important and new (at least to me)."
Empirical basis: The UNU-MERIT study
The estimate that only 12.64% of Wikipedians are female, which formed the bases of much of the debate – having been quoted in some form in nearly all the recent media coverage, as well as in various WMF interviews in past months – comes from the 2010 UNU-MERIT study. In a posting on "Floatingsheep" (a group blog by researchers from the University of Kentucky and the University of Oxford) the authors wondered "if this figure accurately reflects the Wikipedia community", asking about possible sample bias ("for example, Russia and Russian speakers are the largest language and country groups represented in the survey even though the Russian section of Wikipedia is only the 8th largest linguistic group"), and further possible selection bias: "There were three times as many male respondents as female respondents. Does this accurately reflect the makeup of the Wikipedia audience? Given the unexpected results for language and country, it is not clear if there might be gender bias as well". Indeed, a different estimate of the Wikipedia audience by Quantcast (quoted by Jezebel writer Anna North in her contribution to the NYT debate, "The antisocial factor") gives vastly different numbers for Wikipedia's readers: 52 percent men, 48 percent women.
In addition, the Floatingsheep post noted a lack of information about the methodology on wikipediasurvey.org (which may be somewhat mitigated by the slides from a Wikimania 2009 talk about the then ongoing study). Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle (who is currently working on the topic of free culture and sexism) also noted that it was "as most surveys" subject to selection bias, but quoted an earlier, smaller survey which had given an even lower percentage: 7.3%.
Assuming its validity, the report of the UNU-MERIT study includes several further insights into the gender gap besides the much-quoted number, including:
| “ | The overall share of unregistered users among female Wikipedians [i.e. visitors to Wikipedia sites] is significantly higher than the respective share within male Wikipedians (52% vs. 35%). ... This gender difference is not surprising, and is probably explained by female Wikipedians being more protective of their privacy than male Wikipedians, and thus less likely to register. ...
The share of ex-contributors within 10–17 years old female Wikipedians is 3.1% and exceeds thus by far the respective share of this group in the [corresponding] male age cohort (2.2%). ... ... female contributors to Wikipedia appear less specialised in thematic fields than their male colleagues, and while their degree of specialisation increases with age, this increase is is less for male Wikipedia contributors. ... In accordance with overall patterns of education and labour markets in many economies, the share of scientists among male contributors is about three times larger than the share of scientists among female contributors. Another gender specific is that female contributors tend to focus on philosophy, religion (belief systems) and social sciences at a young age while male contributors focus on these thematic fields in the oldest age cohort. ... The reasons why women in this age cohort [32 and older] spend more than 2 hours more per week than men have to be further analysed, but the fact that women at this age are less often full-time employed, often stay at home in order to care for children, and often work as freelancers may play a role here. |
” |
The report noted that the gender gap does not only show in edits, but extends to financial contributions: "Men are obviously more willing to donate money to Wikipedia than women, as they show considerably higher shares of donors in all age cohorts".
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Stargazing aboard WikiProject Spaceflight
- The new WikiProject Essex is seeking contributors to improve coverage of towns and villages in Essex.
- WikiProject RISC OS is a recently established subproject of WikiProject Computing that could use your help!
- Check out the new WikiProject Fictional Characters which seeks to create and maintain well-referenced articles on fictional characters like Mario, Harry Potter, and Luke Skywalker.
- WikiProject Basketball has been rebooted. Drop by to discuss changes and improve articles.
- The February Wikification Backlog Elimination Drive is in full swing. Join in the fun and earn barnstars for your efforts!
This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Spaceflight. Started in September 2006 by Mlm42, it has 40 active members. The project is home to 12 Featured articles, 5 Featured lists, 22 Good articles, and a portal – with a total of 5,258 articles under its care.
The Signpost interviewed five project members, and started by asking what motivated them to join the project. It is clear that all members have a passion for topics related to space. Colds7ream and Mlm42 were both drawn to spaceflight articles because of STS-115 during 2006, then under WikiProject Space missions. Mlm42 was inspired by banners like {{WPMILHIST}}, and was keen to jump on the 1.0 Article Assessment bandwagon, hoping to create a project banner that could track spaceflight articles. There was a discussion in 2007 to reorganize all space-related WikiProjects under a "WikiProject Space", and in 2008, WikiProject Space missions and WikiProject Space travelers were merged into WikiProject Human spaceflight as part of an effort to increase editor activity. A couple of years later, Mlm42 decided to bring Expedition 1 up to GA-status, in time for its 10 year anniversary in August 2010. Following a further discussion, it came to light that WikiProject Astronomy was not using, and had no desire to use, the "WikiProject Space" banner that had been created in 2007. So, it was decided to dissolve WikiProject Space completely, and simultaneously merge everything under Spaceflight into one project. GW was actively editing in this area prior to joining the project, and became a member when its scope was expanded from exploration-related articles to everything to do with spaceflight. He is active in both content and organizational areas of the project, and has been involved with most of the reorganization of space projects over the last four years. ChiZeroOne realised that collaboration with other editors is a means to improvement, and has been helping in any way possible with the revival of WikiProject Spaceflight. N2e has been editing space-related articles since 2004, and is particularly interested in private space ventures, such as the recent new competition for the national-monopoly governmental space initiatives of the early decades of the space age.
WikiProject Spaceflight has 5,258 articles associated with it. How do you keep all these up and what are your biggest challenges?
- Colds7ream: I suppose we really have two major challenges with our articles. The first is a major problem with recentism; ongoing spaceflights receive much more attention than past missions despite the fact that they may be less important historically. A perfect case in point is to compare the articles for STS-115 (which at one point had an extra article dedicated to the mission's timeline) and STS-107, or Salyut 1 and International Space Station. We could really do with a few more historians to help out and fill in the gaps we have in spaceflights' past. The other problem we have is a fairly Western bias; missions conducted by the former Soviet Union or Russia seem to receive much less activity than US missions, the prime examples here can be seen by comparing articles to do with space shuttle missions and those regarding Soyuz flights, and the expeditions they delivered. Some help here, particularly as more new sources of information are published, would be greatly appreciated.
- GW: There are a lot of articles, and it is hard for a small group of editors to keep up with it all, as I think the project's cleanup listing reveals. That said, this is an issue faced by many projects. I agree with Colds7ream that systemic bias is a big problem. I am not sure if this is an issue of demographics, or simply that there are more English-language information about US space programs than other countries. Another issue is that when the mainstream media covers spaceflight, their articles tend to be oversimplified and in some cases poorly researched, which often leads to problems like Buran being included in the list of space shuttle missions because the media seem to consider all space planes to be "space shuttles", as well as more generic issues such as confusion between mass and weight.
- ChiZeroOne: I should probably point out that a good 700 or so of those are fortunately non article-space, like templates or files – useful content in supporting editing. These only require the odd bit of maintenance so it's not as bad as it looks. A problem that had affected the old project was organization, or rather lack of it. With the aid of a number of bot-maintained tools we use, as well as our efforts at collaboration, we are starting to get a hand of the situation. For example, with timely restart of Article Alerts we can now keep a greater track of issues important to the project. As for the Western (particularly US) bias in our articles, the reality is that NASA is a large source of public domain information whereas elsewhere, free-use material is harder to come by. There's also the language barrier, which technical subjects seem to suffer from.
- N2e: There's really no way to keep up with over 4,000 articles in an emergent phenomena of spaceflight-related written knowledge. Rather, as with most editors, I just work at the margin to make some small difference that helps vector change in a positive direction.
Do you collaborate with other WikiProjects?
- Colds7ream: At the moment, not really. The main collaborations the project had in the past were with the projects it absorbed. We would, however, very much like to set up some associations with other WikiProjects, for instance the Aerospace biography task force of WP:AVIATION for our astronaut biographies and WikiProject Rocketry for launch vehicles. Plus, we also still maintain a cordial relationships with astronomy-related WikiProjects that we'd like to make more of in the future. Of course, if there are any other projects out there that would like to get involved in a collaboration with us, we'd love to hear from them!
- GW: I think we have yet to address the issue of how collaboration should be achieved and how the projects should interact. I think there is a lot of common ground with some of the aviation WikiProjects; the Military History, Rocketry, Astronomy and Solar System WikiProjects. There was recently some talk of a joint task force with Astronomy and Solar System, however, nothing seems to have come of it.
WikiProject Spaceflight has Task Forces as well as Working Groups. What are the differences between the two?
- Colds7ream: They can pretty much be thought of as an experiment in collaboration. The Task Forces are what remains of WikiProject Human spaceflight and WikiProject Unmanned spaceflight, and their model is to operate a large editor base responsible for a range of articles with general aims. The Working Groups on the other hand, we see as task-dependent. Their model is to take a small group of editors and a small group of articles, and carry out a specific task.
- GW: When this structure was decided upon, the Task Forces were intended to look after large numbers of articles, taking care of general tasks and breaking the project's content into more manageable sections, as well as maintaining a structure similar to what had existed prior to the reorganization. In practice, the project has become more centralized than expected, so maybe this element of the structure needs to be reviewed. The Working Groups are intended to be small groups of editors collaborating on an area of common interest, and in some cases with a particular goal or end result. We currently have two such groups with very different aims. The Timeline of Spaceflight Group is attempting to produce a comprehensive timeline of spaceflight, listing every spaceflight since 1943, while the Space Stations Working Group works to develop a series of Featured topics on space stations. The working groups are intended to be ad-hoc collaborations, which can be created for any purpose as long as several editors want to collaborate in that area.
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Spaceflight, and how can a new contributor help?
- Colds7ream: What we'd really like to achieve in the near future are some more Good articles or Featured topics, with our current focus being on space stations. We think that having such featured content would give the project some good press and attract some new editors to join, which is always a good thing. In a similar vein, we'd really like to get Portal:Spaceflight up to Featured portal status for the same reasons. So, if anyone out there is good with topics or portals, we'd be very much appreciative of their help.
- Mlm42: If an editor wants to start small, they could try chipping away at the Spaceflight cleanup listing, where about half of all spaceflight articles are tagged with some kind of problem. I've found this tool useful, because it groups together articles that have similar problems.
- GW: I agree with Colds7ream and Mlm. Increasing the levels of Featured content, particularly Featured topics, is a priority, and we do have quite a backlog of cleanup tasks. Aside from that, there are a lot of articles which have not yet been created, and many more which could benefit from a great deal of expansion. A multilingual contributor could also help by expanding articles with information from non-English sources, which may help to eliminate some of the systemic bias.
- N2e: I would add that a new editor with a history focus could join us to look at the many articles that document older/past missions and projects but are poorly referenced, and thus may not stand the Wikipedia sands of time, where unverified material will, quite naturally, be gradually culled out.
Any final words?
- Colds7ream: We'd love to point out to the community at large the benefits of merging small, inactive projects into larger editor groups. Before the big WikiProject Space reorganization in December 2010, there were five spaceflight-related WikiProjects, each with small editor bases and largely inactive. By merging these projects together, we've re-energized the editor base and got much more of a community spirit going, which we hope will be able to achieve better things than the split projects could. We'd urge small projects to get in contact with related projects and consider merges, and reiterate to editors starting new projects to first join an already-existing one to see if that project can help, rather than splitting up editors. For instance, during the reorganization, we "discovered" a WikiProject Eclipses, which had one member and was completely unknown to any other editors who might have been interested.
Next week, we'll see the genesis of new articles authored by anonymous users. Until then, read all the articles created by Signpost regulars in the archive.
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The best of the week
New administrators
The Signpost welcomes four editors as our newest admins.
- Smartse (nom), from the UK, has been editing consistently for the last two years, having made around 18,000 edits; he is a member of WikiProject WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology and WikiProject Plants, and does "a fair bit of gnoming". He is an experienced participant at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard, and has been assisting at WP:CSD, WP:PROD and WP:AfD.
- Gonzonoir (nom), also from the UK, works in new-page patrolling, Speedy deletion, WP:AfD, the help desk, and providing assistance to new users. She also gives assistance to editors in the paraphrasing vs. direct quotation issue, an issue of increasing prominence.
- Ponyo (nom) (who signs as Jezebel's Ponyo), is from British Columbia. She has been working on BLP clean-ups, and is interested in helping out at BLPPROD and PROD backlogs. Ponyo plans to contribute to WP:RFPP and CSD, using her experience with the criteria relevant to recent changes and new-page patrol.
- Acdixon (nom), from Kentucky, is an MSc graduate of Western Kentucky University in Computer Science. He expects to use the tools mainly to move pages over redirects when it makes sense to do so, and to impose short periods of semi-protection in cases of persistent, obvious IP vandalism. Acdixon is active in article creation and content improvement, particularly in Kentucky-related topics.
At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: 5 albert square, due to finish 7 February, and ErikHaugen, due to finish 10 February.
Featured articles
- Nikolai Kulikovsky (nom) (1881–1958), a military officer who married into the Russian royal family. (Nominated by DrKiernan).
- Ian Dougald McLachlan (nom) (1911–90), a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force in four theatres and campaigns during World War II. (Ian Rose).
- M-6 (Michigan highway) (nom), almost 32 years in the making—an on-again off-again project that cost $22M a kilometre; it included the first single-point urban interchange in the state. (Imzadi1979).
- Walden–Wallkill Rail Trail (nom), a scenic five-kilometre route between two villages in Upstate New York. A rail-trail has been converted from a disused railway easement into a multi-use path, typically for walking, cycling and sometimes horse riding (Gyrobo).
- Action of 1 January 1800 (nom), a naval battle of the "Quasi-War" that took place off the coast of present-day Haiti. (XavierGreen).
- Psilocybe semilanceata (nom), the most common psilocybin-containing mushroom (Sasata; picture at right.)
Featured lists
Four lists were promoted:
- List of selected stars for navigation (nom) (Nominated by Haus).
- Linkin Park discography (nom) (Neo139).
- List of Premiers of the Soviet Union (nom) (Trust Is All You Need; picture at right.)
- List of Oxford United F.C. records and statistics (nom) (Eddie6705).
Featured pictures
- Whistler self-portrait (nom; related article), Arrangement in gray: portrait of the painter, c. 1872, by the notable American painter (1834–1903)—a wit, a dandy, and a shameless self-promoter who influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers. The painting is held by the Detroit Institute of Arts. picture at right
- The Castello Plan (nom; related article), the redrawn version from 1916 by John Wolcott Adams and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes of a 1660 map of Lower Manhattan, New York City, created by Jacques Cortelyou, surveyor of New Amsterdam at the time. Around 1667, cartographer Joan Blaeu bound the plan, together with other hand-crafted New Amsterdam depictions, to an atlas, which he sold to Cosimoc III de’ Medici, a transaction that probably occurred in Amsterdam. The plan arrived in Italy, where it was found in Villa di Castello near Florence in 1900. (picture at top)
- Canadian Museum of Civilisation, Gatineau (nom; related article), Canada's national museum of human history, its most-visited museum, receiving more than 1.3 million visitors annually. (Created by Wladyslaw; picture at bottom.)
- 1933 Double Eagle Coin (obverse side) and 1933 Double Eagle Coin (reverse side) (nom; related article), an American gold coin of which nearly half a million were minted in 1933, the last year of production for the Double Eagle. No specimens ever officially circulated and nearly all were melted down when the domestic gold standard was terminated in 1933. (Scanned from the US Mint Pressroom Image Library website).
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.
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Open cases: Shakespeare authorship – Longevity; Motions on Date delinking, Eastern European mailing list
Two cases are open. The Committee did not open or close any cases during the week.
Open cases
Shakespeare authorship question (Week 3)
Due to the unavailability of one of the parties, a final extension has been granted for evidence submissions: the deadline is 9 February 2011; the _target date has accordingly been extended to 13 February. During the week, over 200 kilobytes of content was added to the workshop by arbitrators, parties and others.
Longevity (Week 11)
During the week, arbitrators, parties, and others, added 110 kilobytes of content to the workshop; over 45 kilobytes of this content was contributed by a single party. No proposed decision has been submitted for the arbitrators' consideration.
Closed cases: applications for amendment
- Lightmouse
Following the completion of an automation task as authorised by the Committee (see Signpost coverage: 6 September 2010), Lightmouse (talk · contribs) filed an amendment request on 29 January 2011 applying for another single automation task authorised by the Bot Approvals Group. Six arbitrators replied, with three soliciting feedback from the community. Three editors, including arbitrator Shell Kinney, stated their belief that the previously granted permission would still apply to the task for which approval is sought this time; four indicated potentially supporting granting approval for Lightbot (talk · contribs) to "floating" tasks negotiated with the BAG. On 6 February, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed an amendment.
- Ohconfucius
On 1 February, Ohconfucius (talk · contribs) filed an amendment seeking to terminate the restriction on his use of alternative accounts, citing his desire to operate a bot to ensure consistency of date formats in articles in line with WP:MOSNUM. Arbitrator Jclemens, along with six other arbitrators, indicated they would not oppose a single bot account, conditional on BAG approval for the task. They noted that no justification was advanced for multiple accounts, so they would address a wholesale removal of the restriction once the bot has proved successful. On 6 February, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed an amendment.
Mathsci (talk · contribs) proposed an amendment seeking a site ban on Captain Occam (talk · contribs). A few arbitrators indicated that they do not think further action is warranted at this time and that everyone should move on within their respective restrictions. A couple of arbitrators indicated that the request is more of an arbitration enforcement report, while another indicated that the act of fighting old battles needs to stop.
Motions
On 5 January 2011, Piotrus (talk · contribs) requested the Committee to lift his modified topic ban which bans him from "articles about national, cultural, or ethnic disputes within Eastern Europe, their associated talk pages, and any process discussion about these topics". The ban was set to expire on 2 March 2011 (see Signpost coverage: 10 January 2011). A motion to end the ban was passed on 3 February 2011, with two abstentions and three recusals. The motion included a reminder that "further disruption related to this case may result in the topic ban or other remedies being re-imposed."
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
MediaWiki 1.17 deployment imminent
For most of its history, code for the MediaWiki software which forms the basis of WMF wikis and other sites was developed, packaged into sequential releases every three or four months, and then deployed. However, more recently, major changes have been deployed immediately (i.e. out of cycle), easing the pressure on set-piece deployments of code. On Tuesday, February 8, starting at 07:00 UTC, the latest major release of the MediaWiki software, version 1.17, will be released, giving WMF wikis around six months' worth of not-already-deployed code updates (Wikimedia Techblog). A release to other sites will follow soon after. The release represents a massive code review effort in the last two months to check all updates to the software (approximately 1200 of them) before they are released.
If the deployment goes well, it is unlikely that Wikimedians will notice much difference: most of the major features have already been implemented on WMF wikis. (Some interim disruption is nonetheless expected; for example, database dumps are to be stopped temporarily.) Among the major unreleased developments is the new ResourceLoader, designed to speed up page loading times, though it could cause JavaScript errors on less well maintained (smaller) WMF wikis. Other updates are less obvious: a full list, which includes already released developments, is also available. A number of other developments dependent on 1.17 will be added shortly after its release.
The regularity of releases – and particularly the criteria used for determining which updates were deployed immediately and which had to sit in the queue – has been a contentious issue in recent months (see, for example, previous Signpost coverage from October 2010: 1, 2). There is now hope that after the release of 1.17, it may be possible to act upon volunteer developers' calls to have a more regular development cycle. For example, Brion Vibber, for a long time Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Wikimedia, commented (wikitech-l mailing list):
| “ | 1.17 releasing soon should bring the schedule back to semi-annual, but there's no firm impediment other than our own self-organization to pushing 1.18 out 3 months later instead of 6 or 13. | ” |
February Engineering Update published
In addition to the major announcement concerning 1.17, the Foundation's Engineering Update for February (and covering the activities of January) was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. It summarised the developments:
| “ | January 2011 was a tough month for Wikimedia engineers. About 75% of us caught the "WikiPlague" (a.k.a. RSV) and were out of commission between 3 and 10 days. Also, with the end of the Fundraiser coming early, this past month has been a time of re-starting and re-setting priorities... Major accomplishments this month include: the completion of equipment specs and negotiations to order all equipment for the new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia; major work on getting MediaWiki 1.17 released, especially by reducing the Code Review queue to releasable levels; and work on increasing Nagios and Watchmouse monitoring [to prevent and minimise downtime]. | ” |
The update also noted that new job openings for the positions of Operations Engineer and Senior QA Engineer, previously announced, had been published; and that work had been done on evaluating LiquidThreads but that development of the Article Feedback tool had been put off until after the release of 1.17. Other noticeable improvements include the imminent launch of improved category collation code, allowing sub-categories, files, and pages to be paged separated. This "dark-launch" will be invisible at first, while the feature is stress-tested to check for errors before it is finished and made visible to the average user. According to the update, a survey related to the Wikimedia mobile site is also being drafted.
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.
- After the news that all remaining IPv4 addresses had been allocated to regions – effectively signalling the possible end of the standard in some regions within the next eighteen months – there was a discussion about how Wikimedia sites could (better) support the new specification, IPv6 (wikitech-l mailing list).
- The search engine Google briefly stopped including much of the German Wikipedia in their search listings after a "bug on their end" (Wikimedia bug #27155). There had been conjectures that it was related to the FlaggedRevs extension (which includes a "noindex,nofollow" tag in unreviewed page revisions, though by default these are only displayed as current revisions to logged-in users), which even made it into German media: a Spiegel online headline read "Bug lets Wikipedia vanish".
- The Foundation held a "data summit" on February 3/4, "a working session about semantic data, analytics and research into data dumps" in California. Speakers included developers for Semantic MediaWiki and various projects that extract structured data from Wikipedia (including Freebase, DBPedia, Ultrapedia and Shortipedia), as well as in-house experts from Wikimedia such as Data Analyst Erik Zachte. The session on analytics included a one-hour discussion of privacy issues, with Foundation staff explaining potential community concerns to external researchers, e.g. about a possible use of a session cookie to track the reading behavior of Wikipedia visitors or analysis of the geographical provenance of logged-in edits. Videos from the event were streamed live (wikitech-l mailing list) and recordings are expected to become available online. A day later, the FOSDEM conference in Belgium featured a talk by Tomasz Finc and Arthur Richards titled "Free Culture, Free Data - How we use Data to Drive at Wikipedia".
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