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2016-12-22

Looking back on 2016

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By Pete Forsyth
Wikipedia birthday cake from Armenia

The Wikimedia community's shared history took center stage in 2016. On January 15, Wikipedians and news media around the world celebrated the site's 15-year anniversary with cake and reflections. Two other important milestones were greeted with less fanfare: the Wikimedia movement's five-year strategic plan—produced in 2010 at an expense of US$1 million and with the input of 1,000 individuals—had expired; and an endowment fund was finally established following years of discussion, with high ambitions but little in the way of published governance structures. Neither received much attention from either external media sources or the Wikimedia world.

The celebratory mood surrounding the anniversary was diminished by unprecedented turmoil in the Foundation's leadership. As former Signpost editor Gamaliel wrote on January 13,

The celebration of Wikipedia's 15th birthday threatens to be overshadowed by debates concerning governance of the various Wikimedia projects and how much of a voice the community will have in the future direction of the Wikimedia movement. These debates also threaten to overshadow another debate we should be having about the future of the community, regarding what lies at the heart of the movement and its community: the encyclopedia itself.

Upheaval in the organization, of course, need not directly impact volunteers' work of building an encyclopedia and other online resources. The curation of all human knowledge into a free repository continued without apparent interruption. Our projects continued their perpetual growth; the English Wikipedia, for instance, grew to exceed 5.3 million articles. However, some trends offered less cause for celebration: there was no substantial change in the overall decline in Wikipedia contributors that began in 2007, (inaccurate; note comment below) or in the various demographic skews, like the oft-noted "gender gap", among our ranks.

WMF leadership struggles

Related articles
Knowledge Engine

Gamaliel's January 13 editorial reflected only the first of several events that would rock the Foundation throughout 2016. Community-nominated trustee James Heilman had just been summarily ejected by the votes of all but one of his fellow board members. In an unrelated case, the appointment of trustee Arnnon Geshuri was about to be rejected by community members. And the story behind the Knowledge Engine, a central aspiration of then-executive director Lila Tretikov, had not even begun to emerge, and may never be fully known. Tretikov's departure, under rapidly increasing pressure from Foundation staff and community members, was still more than a month off. Many other indications of organizational instability were yet to come:

  • Numerous longtime staff were departing, in a sharp upward trajectory of a trend analyzed by Terry Chay, former WMF director of features engineering, in September 2015.
  • The board unilaterally appointed María Sefidari to Heilman's vacated, community-elected seat, and then made her vice chair. (Sefidari had the strongest finish of the unsuccessful candidates in the most recent election.)
  • Another trustee departed prematurely—this time, community-nominated trustee Denny Vrandečić
  • Two more trustees departed, including the board chair; both were replaced with new selections from affiliate organizations
  • Two seats remained vacant through most of the year; Vrandečić's seat, vacated in April, will presumably be filled upon its normal expiration, in the 2017 election, while the effort to fill Geshuri's appointed seat, vacated in January, appears to have started in September.
  • All appointments to the WMF's Advisory Board expired without formal comment from the WMF; no new members were appointed. The WMF's page on the body, however, has listed no personnel changes since 2013, suggesting that the expiration of all memberships may result from an oversight, rather than an intentional disbanding.
  • The board's Governance Committee proceeded with efforts to review board practices, but appeared to eschew some of the more politically challenging possibilities, such as eliminating the founder's seat (the only position on the board without term limits, reserved exclusively for Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales)

(See Wikipedian Molly White's timeline for further details.)

Against a backdrop of internal unrest, the board took little substantive action in 2016. Beyond managing the membership of the board itself, it appointed Katherine Maher as executive director (first interim, and then ongoing), addressed logistics around the endowment fund, increased the threshold for gifts requiring board approval, and approved the annual plan.

Amid growing concerns about the Foundation's formal leadership, the volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)—formed in 2012 with the primary purpose of advising the WMF on how to fund eligible affiliate organizations—strongly asserted its own voice. The FDC's May 2016 report highlighted the Foundation's "extended period of turmoil" in its May 2016 report, reiterating a sentiment first expressed in its November 2015 report. While the FDC praised the "passion and professionalism" in leaders' efforts to resolve the organization's issues, it reiterated its previous recommendation to solicit an "external assessment ... of the various constituent parts of the WMF", and called for the appointment of an ombudsperson, to "act as a bridge between the Board and any person or entity who is not already a member or officer of the Board."

In October, the long-vacant post of chief technical officer was filled with the hire of Victoria Coleman.

Relationships between WMF and volunteer communities

Volunteer communities have had their own governance structures for producing and maintaining Wikimedia sites, many of which predate the existence of the WMF. Many volunteers also take a strong interest in the work of the WMF itself, and its efficacy in serving the Wikimedia vision and mission. Governance and transparency issues, which impact communication around strategic and tactical work, are closely entwined with the WMF's relationships with the volunteer community. 2016 saw much discussion about governance issues, in various venues.

The WMF increasingly advertises specific ways for community members to weigh in on decisions in a variety of areas. For instance, the Community Wishlist process, now in its second iteration, has successfully invited community input, in a structured format that first collects and then ranks proposals, to help determine the priorities for developing technical features. The process has produced worthy results, and has earned praise from many quarters.

In another example, the WMF's most recent strategy consultation presented three strategic priorities, and an open invitation for responses in a two-week window in March, after a similar "Stage 1" comment period on the same three priorities in January. For anyone who wanted to express views in that relatively narrow scope, the opportunity was straightforward and efficient; but community members wishing to address strategic questions more broadly may not have had much opportunity to do so.

Community members often self-organize to express concerns where feedback has not been explicitly solicited. But fully absorbing unsolicited input presents challenges, and the WMF lacks the structures to do so effectively. According to trustee Dariusz Jemielniak, "currently, [the WMF doesn't] have the staff bandwidth" to be substantially more transparent, which suggests it also may not be adequately staffed to process input.

2016 was the third year in which the WMF declined to formally acknowledge receipt of a 2014 letter signed by more than 1,000 people, concerning the controversial "Superprotect" software feature. Tretikov's vacuous statement upon removing Superprotect—that it had created a "precedent of mistrust"—is all the organization's leadership has had to say in public on the matter; it was made at a moment of extraordinary political upheaval in the WMF. In April 2016, Tretikov became the third and final recipient of the letter to leave the organization (after deputy director Erik Möller and board chair Jan-Bart de Vreede). It has become clear that the organization considers the matter closed, and expects to address its communication challenges to the community without reference to this significant event.

There were bright spots during 2016. In October, the WMF's grantmakers provided a substantive accounting of the impact of 2014 criticism of the Foundation's funding of a controversial Wikipedian in residence program at Harvard University's Belfer Center. And of course, a great deal of effective staff–volunteer collaboration took place in day-to-day improvements on technical features—to which the Signpost's Technology Report section offers frequent testimony.

In January, as the controversies around Heilman and Geshuri were unfolding, WMF staffer Adam Wight started the Wikimedia Foundation transparency gap page on Meta, and encouraged staff and community members to engage. The page saw a flurry of activity, with several dozen editors building a list of 21 areas in need of improvement. Although there was no explicit connection, newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv started a similar page in October, opening with the bold statement that "Board transparency needs improvement. We lack understanding of what it means to be transparent."

Fundraising

The 2011 strategic plan predicted that the WMF's budget "might grow to approximately $50 million by 2015." In this respect, the plan's goals were massively exceeded: the WMF's 2014–15 revenue was more than $75 million. The WMF continued its success in substantially increasing its revenue every year for a decade. It also established a new endowment fund; and beyond that, formally and informally affiliated organizations—such as the German, Swiss, and Indonesian chapters, and the Wiki Education Foundation—all generate additional revenue of their own.

The WMF's fundraising success was accompanied by efforts to improve the messaging of its banner ads, a perennial source of criticism from members of the Wikimedia community. In particular, many have questioned the propriety of messaging that conveys a sense of Wikipedia's impending doom. An October presentation from the fundraising team highlighted their evolving approach and efforts to incorporate feedback.

But criticism didn't end entirely. When the banner campaign achieved its _target ahead of schedule, former Signpost editor in chief Andreas Kolbe argued in several venues that the campaign should not continue, as scheduled, through the end of 2016. A detailed rebuttal from the WMF's Lisa Seitz Gruwell and Jaime Villagomez argued for continuation, but seemed to draw little support outside the organization. The discussion spread to other sites, including Slashdot and Reddit. In the view of Slashdot user careysub, "it appears that Jimmy Wales has broken new ground in "charity engineering", operating a charity in such a way that the various scoring factors for a well-run charity are met, without actually providing any real transparency."

Curating and disseminating knowledge continued apace

Organizational challenges aside, Wikipedia's 15th anniversary was indeed a cause for much celebration. The WMF coordinated efforts to rally goodwill around the world via the site 15.wikipedia.org; India alone hosted 14 events as local communities around the world marked the occasion. Numerous media outlets around the world took note.

Wikimedians continued to build, curate, and disseminate knowledge resources. The Wiki Education Foundation ran the Year of Science, engaging higher-education institutions in North America in an ambitious effort to improve Wikipedia's science coverage. The WikiProject Med Foundation worked with Wikimedia Switzerland and Kiwix to produce mobile apps that present medical information in several languages. The Signpost archives from 2016 contain many stories about enterprising volunteers and novel organizational initiatives to realize the Wikimedia mission.

Wikidata, one of the more important yet less prominent Wikimedia projects, transitioned from funding via Wikimedia Germany to direct funding from the Wikimedia Foundation. A recent blog post, 10 cool queries for Wikidata that will blow your mind. Number 7 will shock you, highlighted the use of SPARQL queries on Wikidata, which were enabled in 2015.

The annual Wikimania conference was held in a small village in Italy—a substantial shift from recent venues in major world cities like London, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. National Wikimedia conferences in France, India, and North America earned praise from many quarters. Emily Temple-Wood and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who edit as Keilana and Rosiestep (respectively), were named co-Wikipedians of the year due to their work with anti-harassment on Wikipedia. Months earlier, Temple-Wood had been featured in several news outlets for using harassment as motivation to write articles on women scientists. National conferences were held as well, including the second-ever WikiConference India and its notably successful hackathon.

Note: Story was updated after publication to reflect the 2016, rather than 2015, strategy consultation.



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2016-12-22

Strategic planning update; English Wikipedia ArbCom election results

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By Pete Forsyth and Go Phightins!
Former executive director Sue Gardner in 2010. None of the architects of the 2011–15 strategic plan is still with the WMF.

Hazy assessment of past strategic planning, as WMF launches new effort

In 2011, then-WMF board chair Ting Chen formally announced a five-year strategic plan that had taken more than a year to produce, at a cost of about 10% of the WMF's overall 2009–10 expenditures. He was "very pleased" as he highlighted the "transparent collaborative process" and the involvement of "more than a thousand participants"—echoing the board's initial guidance, which had proclaimed that principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration should guide the strategic plan's construction: "This is the first time ever that anybody has developed a five-year strategic plan in a truly open, collaborative process", Chen continued. "We should all be very proud of what we've done here."

Eugene Eric Kim

While the plan's initial launch was greeted with fanfare and accolades, its expiration at the end of 2015 was met with silence from the WMF. There was no blog post comparable to Chen's to note the expiration, to assess the success or shortcomings of the WMF or of the Wikimedia movement in attaining the plan's goals. Months later, in October 2016, the WMF published an assessment on the process followed in producing the plan, in its audit of past strategy processes; and the process audit did make oblique reference to the overall outcomes; it stated, for instance:

the plan was too large in scope to be properly implemented, which caused unrealistic expectations and a feeling of failure

And that the execution "led to a break in trust in the leadership’s ability."

Philippe Beaudette

The process audit drew a striking criticism from the plan's architect, Eugene Eric Kim, when he first learned of it in December. "There are several items that are just plain wrong", Kim said on the talk page.

Although Kim praised the WMF's wish to review the process, he disputed a core premise of the audit, which asserted: "the initial step of community engagement – asking community members to write proposals – was intended as simply information gathering." Echoing a concept that was consistently at the core of the creation of the plan, Kim said soliciting community input was "not the foundation of the process", but was rather "a first step in doing some collective listening and an opening for us to help shift away from tactical (how) thinking into more strategic (why) thinking."

When asked about Kim's comment, WMF communications strategist Gregory Varnum said, "The audit was meant to be an initial, high-level overview of past strategic processes to inform early thinking, and not a comprehensive or final review." If the WMF conducted any assessment of the plan's success or failure, beyond the brief words in the process audit, that assessment has not been made public. Chen also responded to a Signpost inquiry, stating that he was unconvinced that Kim's view was strongly at odds with the WMF assessment.

Tretikov responds to a question about strategy at about 1:00:25.

The WMF's negative assessment of the plan's value is not entirely isolated. In a November 2015 meeting attended by trustee Jimmy Wales, then-executive director Lila Tretikov openly mocked the value of a five-year strategic plan, claiming—on behalf of both herself and the board—that such a plan couldn't be "iterative".

But, like the 2009–10 cohort of the board, the volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)—formed in 2012 with the primary purpose of advising the WMF on how to fund eligible affiliate organizations—offered a strikingly different assessment. In its November 2015 report, the FDC stated that it was "appalled by the closed way that the WMF has undertaken both strategic and annual planning, and the WMF's approach to budget transparency (or lack thereof)", and that "financial cost of having an unclear strategy in an organisation of this size is significant and very real." Its May 2016 report reiterated the point: "The lack of clarity in strategic direction since 2014 has caused significant waste of time, money, talent, goodwill, and momentum." (Its November 2016 report did not revisit the issue.)

A December update from executive director Katherine Maher acknowledged that "The absence of a movement strategy ... is hampering our ability to work toward our mission", and that "this is an expensive opportunity cost." The update credited "members of the FDC" (rather than the institution as a whole), and other community members, with bringing the problem into focus. When asked about the minimal reporting and belated planning of strategic initiatives, FDC member Liam Wyatt speculated that both resulted from a "series of abortive attempts at a strategy process – none of which were clearly described, conceived, or sufficiently inclusive" under the guidance of the previous executive director. Wyatt also underscored the value of taking the necessary time to get the process right, even if it means an extended gap between plans.

Do Kim's comments reveal a rift between his approach and that of current WMF leaders? Or between the views of WMF's 2010 leadership and that of the present day? Or is the disagreement, as Chen suggested, minor and semantic? As discussion plays out on the process audit's talk page, perhaps an answer will emerge.

Meanwhile, the WMF has mapped out a process for developing a future strategic plan, and will solicit volunteer input starting in early 2017. Maher sent a detailed announcement email to the Wikimedia-L list (mirrored on Meta Wiki), and emphasized the following:

The Wikimedia Foundation Board has approved a spending resolution and timeline for the upcoming strategy work. We anticipate beginning broad community conversations on the process, goals, and themes in early 2017. The Foundation is looking for an external expert to work with us (community and staff) to support an effective, inclusive process. I’ve been remiss in regular updates, but we will share them going forward. And of course, please share your thoughts and feedback on this list and on Meta-Wiki.

If the expired plan indeed led to "a break in trust in the leadership’s ability", as the process audit states, and if there are indeed fundamental disagreements within the organization about the best way to approach strategic planning, the road ahead may be a rocky one. Wikimedia volunteers may relish the challenge, or may prefer to devote their efforts to the everyday work of using our open platform to build an encyclopedia and other resources. It will be interesting to see the depth of volunteer engagement, and the robustness of the WMF's authority to establish a strategy for the Wikimedia movement as a whole. The Signpost expects to follow up in greater detail in January. PF

Seven elected to English Wikipedia ArbCom, including two new members

Eleven candidates stood in the 2016 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections, six of whom were either current members of the committee or had served previously. Seven candidates secured two-year terms.

Two former members of the committee, Newyorkbrad and Euryalus, were elected to new terms, and three current members, DGG, DeltaQuad, and Dougweller, were re-elected. The two new members of the committee are Ks0stm, who has served as an arbitration clerk since 2013, and Mkdw, who has experience with the Volunteer Response Team (often referred to as OTRS) and the Unblock Ticket Request System, but has never held a position with the Arbitration Committee.

The record low number of candidates was contrasted with the high number of votes.

English Wikipedia ArbCom voter and candidate numbers 2008–16

The results for all 11 candidates are listed below—with the percentage of voters who supported each candidate, followed by the results of the formula on which the candidates are ultimately ranked (support votes divided by (support + oppose votes)) in parentheses:

Candidate S÷total S÷(S+O)
NewYorkBrad 0.565 0.839
DeltaQuad 0.508 0.791
Doug Weller 0.495 0.769
DGG 0.438 0.698
Euryalus 0.422 0.751
Ks0stm 0.371 0.707
Mkdw 0.349 0.649
Salvidrim! 0.313 0.557
LFaraone 0.291 0.566
Calidum 0.303 0.549
Writ Keeper 0.214 0.365

Compared with a raw percentage (support÷(support+oppose+neutral)), the application of the (S÷(S+O)) formula did not yield different overall results, but shifted some of the individual ranks. DGG would have placed fourth under a raw percentage formula, but instead placed sixth. Euryalus and Ks0stm moved up from fifth and sixth positions, respectively, to fourth and fifth; LFaraone moved up from tenth to eighth; Salvidrim! moved down from eighth to ninth. Unlike last year, these differences between direct support and the formula made no difference to the outcome, for which the boundary was between seventh (elected) and eighth (not elected).

Only one candidate, Writ Keeper, received more oppose votes than support votes. An administrator and former bureaucrat (who voluntarily relinquished his tools), his nomination statement—which read, in its entirety, "Eh, why not?"— may have hindered his prospects for election.

Given the success of those with previous experience on the committee in this election, it should come as little surprise that incoming arbitrators shared no plans to make sweeping changes when the Signpost invited comments on plans and goals for their upcoming terms.

DGG suggested that the committee should recognize that "its role is not solving conduct disputes as if we were a social website, but solving conduct disputes in order to allow and encourage people of good will to contribute to the encyclopedia without interference from those who do not share our purpose. For example, the strictness of the rules on privacy are for the protection of good faith contributors, not of undeclared paid editors knowingly violating the terms of use."

Doug Weller suggested that the workshop phase of cases can become collaborative among more arbitrators and community members to enable the Committee to reach "better decisions." GP

Brief notes

  • The WMF is holding a Wikimedia Developer Summit in San Francisco, January 9–11, 2017. Registration is closed, with 172 people expected to attend; but some sessions will be streamed, and there will be some opportunities for remote participation. Those interested are asked to register in advance.



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2016-12-22

German Wikipedia ArbCom implodes amid revelation of member's far-right political role

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By Tony1
AfD demonstrators in Geretsried, Germany, in March 2016: "Close the borders".

On 18 December, the ten-member German Wikipedia ArbCom (widely known as "the SG" for Schiedsgericht, or "arbitration court", in German; Google translation) suffered its eighth resignation since September, leaving only four arbitrators—fewer than the quorum of five for making case judgments. There is no provision for by-elections, and the next election is not due until May 2017; former arbitrators are unable to undo their resignation.

The trouble began on 6 September, after three arbitrators—Krd, DCB, and Alnilam—resigned within a few hours of each other, without substantive reason beyond "personal causes". The opaqueness of these resignations may have been in deference to the local community’s strong tradition of data protection or the site's privacy policy; despite being actions that on the English Wikipedia would be expected to come under intense public scrutiny, there was little comment.

The Signpost learned that the resignations followed a Skype audio meeting of the SG in which one member, MAGISTER, announced in the context of a broader casual conversation that he was an active state functionary of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland ("AfD"). Founded in February 2013, the party already has members of state parliaments, and is expected to do well in next November's federal election. Sebastian Wallroth, the most recent to resign, told the community that:

In May 2016, MAGISTER was elected to his fourth one-year term since 2011. Notably, he did not disclose his political affiliation to voters; he received the most votes of all candidates, with 144 supports and only 22 opposes, in an election marked by low turnout. It was not until 13 December that he publicly confirmed (Google Translate) that he is an AfD functionary, at the same time stating that although he publicly represents the positions of the party, he does not bring his political involvement to Wikipedia.

The SG continued to function with seven arbitrators, and the twice-yearly elections for half of the members were duly held in November. The Signpost has been told that the six new members were apprised of MAGISTER's affiliation at their first meeting, in early December. Rumours soon began to circulate, and on 10 December, JosFritz leaked MAGISTER's affiliation on his talkpage (Google Translate); an admin then blocked JosFritz for three days for "repeated infringements of WP:ANON", extended to a month by another admin, but rescinded after appeal. The next day, another editor was indefinitely blocked for statements in relation to the AfD affiliation. By this stage, the news had spread widely in the German-language community.

On 13 December, arbitrator AnnaS. aus I. resigned, followed by four more a day later (Miraki, Gnom, Ghilt, Helfmann). The seriousness of the situation was brought home by Sebastian Wallroth's resignation on 19 December, denying the SG the quorum it needs. Wallroth claimed that MAGISTER: "is willing to resign only if someone proves that the AfD is under surveillance by the Verfassungsschutz [a federal intelligence agency for the protection of the German constitution]."

This resignation has left just Magister and three other arbitrators: Ali1610, Freddy2001, and Man77. The German Wikipedia now has no supreme body for the resolution of behavioural conflict and policy violation.

The SG meltdown involves a complicated set of circumstances, and raises questions on several levels. Should candidates for elected office disclose their real-life political activities, especially where they might be seen as controversial? One of the arbitrators who resigned, Gnom, told the Signpost:

One of the remaining arbitrators, Man77, told the Signpost he found Magister collegial as a fellow arbitrator: "... I really enjoyed having him in the SG, not knowing about his political affiliation [for the first 18 months]. I do not share that proximity to right-wing populism at all, but for me his political affiliation is not sufficient reason to assume I cannot work in a committee with him any more. ... There is no proof so far that Magister shares the extreme political beliefs that some prominent AfD members represent." Man77 also hinted at the highly politicised dynamics on the SG during the crisis:

Remaining arbitrators Ali1610 and Freddy2001 did not respond to our emails.

Reaction and analysis

There is no doubting the strong emotional reaction on the German Wikipedia. One editor wrote of those criticising MAGISTER: "Can you still look in the mirror without puking?" Another wrote a thread entitled: "Farewell to neutrality". The Kurier talkpage contains extended and voluble discourse, and the matter has prompted significant coverage in German-language news outlets.

What now? The rules did not envisage this kind of scenario, and there is a question-mark over the community's ability to come up with a short-term solution. While the SG's caseload has diminished over the years, arbitration involves high elected office and is symbolically powerful. Is the MAGISTER issue simply a cultural embarrassment for community members who do not want the outside world to see them as associated with the far right—particularly given the history of political extremism in the German-speaking world in the first half of the 20th century? Is that embarrassment worsened by having elected MAGISTER to office multiple times without being told of his affiliations? Immigration has become a flashpoint in much of Europe, and the use of a truck on 20 December to mow down visitors to Berlin's Christmas market—for which Islamic State has claimed responsibility—is likely to play into the narratives of politicians who trade off community fears of "the other". Are German-speaking Wikimedians concerned that their fundraising efforts might be damaged? One member of the German Wikipedia community told the Signpost, on condition of anonymity, that "the site could easily function in the short term without the SG. The greatest damage concerns the external image of Wikipedia among German-speakers, and the cultural confidence within the editing community."

Perhaps these issues will be played out, whether implicitly or explicitly, until at least the SG election in May. Or perhaps Gnom's optimism will somehow prevail: "I don't know what will happen now in terms of dispute resolution on the German Wikipedia. I suppose there will be a vote of some kind so we can appoint a new SG in some way or another." An opinion survey (Google translation) on whether one or more of the remaining arbitrators should resign has produced an overwhelming vote against holding of the survey in the first place. The community is working on options to change the SG rules to enable by-elections or some other means to reinstate a functional SG—here (Google translation) and here (Google translation)—but the few supporters thus far in each suggest that these attempts could be going nowhere.

Editorial note: two corrections have been made to translated text after publication.



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2016-12-22

Active user page filter prevents vandalism and harassment

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By Chris Schilling
Funcrunch (left) and I JethroBT (right) at WikiConference North America in 2016.
Chris "Jethro" Schilling (User:I JethroBT) is an editor and admin on the English Wikipedia. He is also a community organizer for the Wikimedia Foundation who runs Inspire Campaigns to encourage ideas and collaboration across Wikimedia projects on thematic topics and challenges that our communities face.

A proposal from the Inspire Campaign to address harassment was recently implemented to prevent unconstructive and malicious editing on user pages. Since its activation, it has been effectively preventing cases of vandalism and harassment directed at specific editors.

User pages are particular pages – separate from the article space – that editors use to talk about themselves, what they enjoy editing, and Wikimedia-related projects they work on. In June 2016, editor Pax (Funcrunch) submitted an idea to the Inspire Campaign titled Protect user space by default, which proposed placing all base user pages (but not subpages) under semi-protection, which would prevent unregistered and very new editors from modifying those pages. User talk pages would remain unaffected.

Sometimes, editors are _targeted for vandalism or harassment by way of maliciously editing their user page. This kind of disruption can be mundane, such as insertion of random gibberish, but can also be harsher, such as personal attacks and provocation. Editors who are involved in sensitive, controversial, or otherwise divisive topic areas are particularly prone to these sorts of attacks. Pax, who is openly transgender and uses singular they pronouns, learned of the anti-harassment campaign shortly after their own user page was vandalized; the anonymous attacks included deadnaming and misgendering. While Pax has experienced similar harassment elsewhere on Wikipedia and on other Internet sites, the defacement of their user page felt particularly violating, akin to spray-painting hate speech on their front door.

The proposal received enthusiastic support during the campaign and many volunteers were interested in supporting it. Like with many ideas from the campaign that focused on proposing changes to local project policies, I contacted Pax in my official capacity (as I JethroBT (WMF)) to offer my support in preparing a formal proposal that the community could decide on. This support came in the form of reviewing examples of good/poor RfCs in the past in terms of preparation and structure, thinking about pros/cons of different kinds of proposal structures, inviting feedback from other editors on proposal drafts, and minor suggestions for revisions.

The resulting Request for Comments (RfC) that we and other volunteers drafted together was posted in August 2016 (with several other protection options for consideration). The basic rationale for this preventative measure was based on a number of factors, such as:

  • Many editors have experienced vandalism or harassment on their own user page; for some it is infrequent, for others it is ongoing. These edits are not constructive, and because these are user pages, malicious edits are inherently more personal.
  • A sample of 100 recent edits from unregistered editors showed that roughly half were cases of vandalism or harassment. The other half were edits that appeared to be made while logged-out (e.g. to an article draft), and a small proportion of edits were problematic edits made in good faith.
  • There isn't a compelling use case for unregistered or very new editors making changes to others' user pages.

The discussion was divided. On the one hand, some community members felt that this change was too restrictive, did not address a sufficiently important problem, or that there are sufficient tools to deal with this problem. There were also concerns expressed around development time needed to change page protection to accommodate the proposal. On the other hand, many community members supported some form of protection, and acknowledged that we ought to be doing more to prevent vandalism and harassment against editors.

The discussion was closed with consensus favoring ongoing semi-protection of user pages. A subsequent discussion was opened to consider the logistics of implementing this change and to address various clarifications and concerns. Some commented that making changes to the MediaWiki software for page protection was not feasible. Krenair wrote, Yeah, this is not something MediaWiki allows us to do. MusikAnimal also noted, I suspect there's a lot of work involved to get this functionality in [the] MediaWiki core. It was suggested that an edit filter might be an easier approach. MusikAnimal then quickly and single-handedly developed a test edit filter that accomplished the same outcomes as semi-protecting user pages by default.

This general sequence of events was a good example of how it is helpful to build consensus around an idea, and then have a subsequent discussion on the implementation of that idea once consensus has been reached. It is during those implementation discussions where creative (and, in this case, simpler) solutions can emerge to solve a problem. This approach was also used in the discussions for new page reviewers.

On 30 November, the filter was turned on. Since then, it has prevented over 1000 edits to user pages from unregistered or very new editors. Here are several edits prevented by the filter (note: usernames / article topics have been redacted):

  • Personal attacks / Provocation / Other disruptive behavior
    • I'm a wanker
    • Please Remove mentally sick dog and admin. editor (Redacted)! Remove that sick Dog!
    • WARNING – THIS PERSON IS OFFENDED BY ADULT EROTICA
    • I have a little wiener
    • slut
    • (Redacted) is a full of shit dictator. An honest description of (Redacted) gets eliminated. Hey (Redacted) we r building a wall and I am coming for u. BANG
    • Unsubstantiated additions/removals of the {{sockpuppet}} template
    • Additions/Changes to userboxes regarding mental status, gender identity, and sexual identity.
    • Breaking wikilinks
  • Spam
    • (Redacted) – is the first and largest wine flash website. We offer wines from around the world, one at a time, at up to 70% off...
  • Gibberish/nonsense
    • jiohe9ewuifrwer9eit9-i3490r8t4908t oerbgi45y7y8r34yu8957r8wyuidfAFUopqeri0-23o4lsp[doqwd0-23o4o23iero3-g0
  • Page blanking

There has also been some discussion around opting out of the filter on one's own user page. A template is currently being tested and should be available soon for those who wish to opt out of the filter.

The filter is by no means a holistic solution to preventing vandalism and harassment for editors, but it is a productive step in the right direction. Furthermore, while the filter is currently enabled on the English Wikipedia, we will also be working to develop some documentation of the edit filter on Meta. This documentation can then be translated, and we will be inviting other Wikimedia projects to consider implementing the filter should their community find it beneficial. Please feel free to get in contact with either myself or Funcrunch if you'd like to help in preparing or translating this documentation.



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2016-12-22

Operation successful, patient dead: Outreach workshops in Namibia

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By Peter Gallert
Peter Gallert (Pgallert) has been a Wikipedian since 2008. He has done Wikipedia outreach work in Namibia since 2012. A lecturer at Namibia University of Science and Technology he also conducts research on the relationship of Wikipedia and indigenous knowledge, which has made him a frequent guest at Wikimedia conferences.

Workshops—at least mine—don't work

Some attendees of a Wikipedia workshop in Opuwo, Namibia.

I have done many small outreach workshops in Namibia. Once I could not get sufficient accounts created and Internet access was too slow, another time we lost an entire day to a power outage and the attendees had little use for Wikipedia editing skills. On many other occasions something was wrong with the organisation, the workshop was too short, the computers too few, the venue too hot, et cetera.

This time everything was right. I had four half days instead of two or three, allowing for plenty of technical help, explanation, and revision. I had the right participants – teachers, a translator of indigenous languages, an employee of the local Teachers' Resource Centre and one of a local tourist information, plus some people that explicitly wanted to attend, and that knew about Wikipedia at least in theory. Everyone was informed in advance, thanks to a local community activist who, for a small fee to cover his expenses, phoned after everyone and negotiated time and duration. Internet access was stable and reasonably fast, there were enough computers, and I even got my accountcreator right back without hassle after it had been removed shortly before.

From previous workshops I know that English Wikipedia is not an ideal place to practice. Although Namibia's national language, English is no Namibian's native tongue, and English Wikipedia's 1001 rules make a basic introduction difficult. Some participants are embarrassed to write in English in public and under supervision, fearing that they might make a mistake. Editing in Otjiherero on the Incubator on the other hand has a lot of advantages: Participants can write about whatever they wish, as there are just a few dozen existant articles. It doesn't matter for now that spelling in this indigenous language is still a matter of academic dispute, and if an article like this is slightly promotional, that's not the end of the world.

And yes, we were reasonably productive, not by the quantity of produced content but by its variety. Participants wrote short articles and categorised them, sent messages to each other, helped an Incubator regular to translate a template. They found and linked pictures on Commons and even started a deletion request there. Alas, before my car left town editing dropped to zero, and no single edit has been performed on Wp/hz ever since. Which is, in a nutshell, the story of all my outreach in Namibia. Operation successful, patient dead: A well-run workshop resulted in exactly zero new editors, zero subsequent edits, zero subsequent picture uploads. What I did get, however, were several SMS messages from attendees, asking to have such an enjoyable workshop again soon!

Wikipedians are a tiny minority

Building on anecdotal evidence, outreach workshops have not been successful anywhere. Some simple number crunching gives you one idea why: English Wikipedia has attracted about 3K very active editors (100+edits/month) and some 30K active editors (5+edits/month), out of 1.5 billion speakers of that language. Per million speakers, this is about 2 very active and 20 active editors. Proportionally, Somalia has more doctors than the world has active Wikipedians. There are more professional chess players in the world than very active Wikipedians. Wikipedia is a hobby of a tiny minority.

Otjiherero has roughly 250K speakers. Applying above statistics to it there might, or might not, be a future very active Wikipedian amidst them, and there should be about five potential active editors speaking Otjiherero. I haven't found them yet. Which is no wonder as, with 5–20 participants per workshop, it would require 2,000 workshops to skim 10% of the speaker base, and thus have a 50% chance of finding one of the five.

I am convinced by now that recruiting Wikipedia editors by offering a workshop nearby is a terribly ineffective measure. We always easily get funding for such initiatives, and we might do them for the publicity. But to increase our editor base there is hardly any method less successful than running workshops.



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2016-12-22

Coverage of gender gap initiatives, banner fundraising, and more

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By Milowent, Pete Forsyth, and Tony1

In brief

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



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2016-12-22

The Christmas edition

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By Armbrust
As their name suggests, bee-eaters predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees and wasps, which are caught in the air by flights from an open perch.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 13 November to 17 December.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.
Lewis Hamilton gestures to his home crowd following his fifth win of the 2015 Formula One season at Silverstone.
Reconstructed Giganotosaurus skull
First Tennessee Park's most distinctive feature is its guitar-shaped scoreboard.
Flyer for the Broadway production of Night of January 16th
Lithograph of SMS Mecklenburg from 1902
Ike Altgens played Secretary Lloyd Patterson in the low-budget science fiction thriller Beyond the Time Barrier.
After the Deluge is now in the collection of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Guildford.
John Wark was one of the four inaugural members of the Ipswich Town F.C. Hall of Fame.
Baltimore is the largest municipality in Maryland.
Nazeing Triangle is the smallest Local Nature Reserve in Essex.

Twenty-three featured articles were promoted.

  • Aries (nominated by Magiciandude) is the ninth studio album by Mexican recording artist Luis Miguel. It was released by WEA Latina in 1993. After attaining commercial success in 1991 with his previous album, Romance, Miguel decided to return to a style similar to his earlier work, featuring pop ballads and dance numbers with R&B influences. The record was produced by Miguel, who was assisted by Kiko Cibrian, Rudy Pérez, David Foster, and Juan Luis Guerra. It peaked at number one on the US Billboard Latin Pop Albums, where it stayed for 19 weeks. Internationally, the album was certified triple platinum in Mexico, and was certified diamond in Argentina. Aries sold over two million copies worldwide through 2000. Upon its release, the album received mixed reviews from music critics; they were divided on the dance tunes and ballads, although Miguel's vocals and the album's arrangements garnered positive reactions. Miguel received several accolades, including a Grammy Award for Best Latin Pop Album.
  • Northampton War Memorial (nominated by HJ Mitchell) is a First World War memorial on Wood Hill in the centre of Northampton, the county town of Northamptonshire. Designed by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it is a Stone of Remembrance flanked by twin obelisks draped with painted stone flags standing in a small garden in what was once part of the churchyard of All Saints' Church. Today it is a Grade I listed building.
  • The 2015 Formula One season (nominated by Tvx1) was the 66th season of the Formula One World Championship, a motor racing championship for Formula One cars, recognised by the sport's governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, as the highest class of competition for open-wheel racing cars. Twenty-two drivers representing ten teams contested nineteen Grands Prix, starting in Australia and ending in Abu Dhabi as they competed for the World Drivers' and World Constructors' championships. Lewis Hamilton secured his third Drivers' Championship with three races left in the season. The runner-up was his teammate Nico Rosberg, with Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel third. Mercedes clinched the 2015 Constructors' title at the Russian Grand Prix, ahead of Ferrari and Williams, and ended the season with a record 703 points.
  • Giganotosaurus (nominated by FunkMonk) is a genus of theropod dinosaur that lived in what is now Argentina, during the early Cenomanian age of the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 99.6 to 97 million years ago. The holotype specimen was discovered in the Candeleros Formation of Patagonia in 1993, and is almost 70% complete. The animal was named G. carolinii in 1995; the genus name translates as "giant southern lizard" and the specific name honours the discoverer, Rubén D. Carolini. A dentary bone, a tooth and some tracks, discovered before the holotype, were later assigned to this animal. The genus attracted much interest and became part of a scientific debate about the maximum sizes of theropod dinosaurs.
  • First Tennessee Park (nominated by NatureBoyMD) is a minor league baseball park in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. The home of the Triple-A Nashville Sounds of the Pacific Coast League, it opened in 2015, and can seat up to 10,000 people. It replaced the Sounds' former home, Herschel Greer Stadium, where the team played from its founding in 1978 until 2014. The design of the park incorporates Nashville's musical and baseball heritage and the use of imagery inspired by country music, Sulphur Dell, and Nashville's former baseball players and teams. The ballpark's wide concourse wraps entirely around the stadium and provides views of the field from every location. The greenway section connects with two other greenways in the city.
  • Turbinellus floccosus (nominated by Casliber) is a cantharelloid mushroom of the family Gomphaceae native to Asia and North America. The orange-capped vase- or trumpet-shaped fruiting bodies may reach 30 cm (12 in) high and 30 cm (12 in) wide. The lower surface, the hymenium, is covered in wrinkles and ridges, and is pale buff or yellowish to whitish. T. floccosus forms symbiotic relationships with various types of conifer, growing in coniferous woodlands. Though mild-tasting, they generally cause gastrointestinal symptoms of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea when consumed.
  • Crucifix (nominated by Ceoil and Kafka Liz) is a wooden crucifix, painted in distemper, attributed to the Florentine painter and mosaicist Cimabue. The work was commissioned by the Franciscan friars of Santa Croce and is built from a complex arrangement of five main and eight ancillary timber boards. It is one the first Italian artworks to break from the late medieval Byzantine style and is renowned for its technical innovations and humanistic iconography. The work was in the Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence, since the late thirteenth century, and at the Museo dell'Opera Santa Croce since restoration following the flooding of Arno in 1966. It remains in poor condition despite conservation efforts.
  • Night of January 16th (nominated by RL0919) is a theatrical play by Russian-American author Ayn Rand, inspired by the death of the "Match King", Ivar Kreuger. Set in a courtroom during a murder trial, an unusual feature of the play is that members of the audience are chosen to play the jury. The court hears the case of Karen Andre, a former secretary and lover of businessman Bjorn Faulkner, of whose murder she is accused. The play does not directly portray the events leading to Faulkner's death; instead the jury must rely on character testimony to decide whether Andre is guilty. The play's ending depends on the verdict. Rand's intention was to dramatize a conflict between individualism and conformity, with the jury's verdict revealing which viewpoint they preferred.
  • SMS Mecklenburg (nominated by Parsecboy) was the fifth ship of the Wittelsbach class of pre-dreadnought battleships of the German Imperial Navy. Laid down in 1900 at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin, she was finished in 1903. Mecklenburg was armed with a main battery of four 24 cm (9.4 in) guns and had a top speed of 18 kn (33 km/h; 21 mph). It spent the early period of her career in the I Squadron of the German fleet, participating in the peacetime routine of training cruises and exercises. After World War I began in 1914, the ship was mobilized with her sisters as the IV Battle Squadron. She saw limited duty in the Baltic Sea against Russian naval forces, and as a guard ship in the North Sea. The German High Command withdrew the ship from active service in 1916 due to a threat from submarines and naval mines, together with severe shortages in personnel. For the remainder of her career, Mecklenburg served as a prison ship and as a barracks ship based in Kiel. She was stricken from the navy list in 1920 and sold for scrapping the following year.
  • State Route 76 (nominated by Rschen7754) is a 52.63 mi (84.70 km) long state highway in the U.S. state of California. It is a much used east–west route in the North County region of San Diego County. A route along the corridor has existed since the early 20th century, as has the bridge over the San Luis Rey River near Bonsall. The route was added to the state highway system in 1933, and was officially designated by the California State Legislature as SR 76 in the 1964 state highway renumbering.
  • Super Mario Galaxy (nominated by Jaguar) is a platform video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Wii worldwide in 2007. It is the third 3D game in the Super Mario series and the eighth main instalment overall. The game was re-released as a Nintendo Selects title in 2011, and as a download via the Wii U's eShop in 2015. The story revolves around the protagonist, Mario, who is on a quest to rescue Princess Peach whilst simultaneously saving the universe from Bowser. The levels in the game consist of galaxies filled with minor planets and worlds, with different variations of gravity, the central element of gameplay. It was a critical and commercial success, hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time. Critics praised the game's graphics, gravity mechanics, and setting.
  • Ike Altgens (nominated by ATS) (1919–1995) was an American photojournalist, photo editor, and field reporter for the Associated Press (AP) based in Dallas, Texas, who became known for his photographic work during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He was 19 when he began his AP career, which was interrupted by military service during World War II. When his service time ended, Altgens returned to Dallas and got married, then went back to work for the local AP bureau and eventually earned a position as a senior editor. Altgens appeared briefly as a film actor and model during his 40-year career with the AP, which ended in 1979. He spent his later years working in display advertising, and answering letters and other requests made by assassination researchers. Altgens and his wife died in 1995 at about the same time in their Dallas home.
  • After the Deluge (nominated by Iridescent) is a Symbolist oil painting by English artist George Frederic Watts, first exhibited as The Sun in an incomplete form in 1886 and completed in 1891. It shows a scene from the story of Noah's Flood, in which after 40 days of rain Noah opens the window of his Ark to see that the rain has stopped. Watts felt that modern society was in decline owing to a lack of moral values, and he often painted works on the topic of the Flood and its cleansing of the unworthy from the world. The painting takes the form of a stylised seascape, dominated by a bright sunburst breaking through clouds. Although this was a theme Watts had depicted previously in The Genius of Greek Poetry in 1878, After the Deluge took a radically different approach. With this painting he intended to evoke a monotheistic God in the act of creation, but avoid depicting the Creator directly.
  • Bradley Cooper (nominated by FrB.TG) (born 1975) is an American actor and producer. His career began with a guest role in the television series Sex and the City in 1999 and his film debut came two years later in Wet Hot American Summer. He first gained recognition as Will Tippin in the spy-action television show Alias (2001–2006), and achieved minor success with a supporting part in the comedy film Wedding Crashers (2005). His breakthrough role came in 2009 with The Hangover, a commercially successful comedy which spawned two sequels in 2011 and 2013. In 2011, Cooper was named International Man of the Year by GQ and Sexiest Man Alive by People. He is one of the highest-paid actors in the world, and has been nominated for several accolades, including four Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.
  • The Pale Emperor (nominated by Homeostasis07) is the ninth studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released in 2015, through Marilyn Manson's Hell, etc. label, and was distributed in the US by Loma Vista Recordings and internationally by Cooking Vinyl. The album was released in standard and deluxe editions on CD and 2×LP vinyl, and as a limited edition box set. The standard version of the album contains ten tracks; the deluxe edition includes three acoustic versions as bonus tracks. The album was released to generally positive reviews from music critics. Several writers referred to it as the band's best album in over a decade, and multiple publications ranked it as one of the best albums of 2015. It was also a commercial success, debuting at number eight on the Billboard 200 with the band's highest opening week sales since Eat Me, Drink Me in 2007. It topped Billboard's Hard Rock Albums chart, as well as the national albums chart in Switzerland, and peaked within the top ten in fifteen other countries.
  • Seri Rambai (nominated by Singora) is a 17th-century Dutch cannon displayed at Fort Cornwallis in George Town. It is the largest bronze gun in Malaysia, a fertility symbol and the subject of legends and prophecy.
  • Gottlob Berger (nominated by Peacemaker67) (1896–1975) was a senior German Nazi official who held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS, and was the chief of the SS Main Office responsible for Schutzstaffel recruiting during World War II. He had a key role in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories from mid-1942. In this role he proposed a plan to kidnap and enslave 50,000 Eastern European children between the ages of 10 and 14, under the codename Heuaktion, a plan that was subsequently carried out. He surrendered to U.S. troops near Berchtesgaden, and was promptly arrested. He was tried and convicted in the Ministries Trial of the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunals for war crimes, and was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment. His sentence was soon reduced to 10 years, and he was released after serving six and a half years.
  • Dick Cresswell (nominated by Ian Rose) (1920–2006) was an officer and pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). He held command of No. 77 (Fighter) Squadron twice during World War II, and again during the Korean War. Cresswell was credited with being the first RAAF pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft at night over Australian soil, the only man to serve as commanding officer of an RAAF squadron on three occasions during wartime, and the first officer to lead a jet-equipped Australian squadron in combat. His performance in Korea earned him both the Commonwealth and the US Distinguished Flying Crosses.
  • The Montreal Laboratory (nominated by Hawkeye7) was established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research in collaboration with the United Kingdom, and to absorb some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some of the world's first nuclear reactors.
  • The bee-eaters (nominated by Sabine's Sunbird and Jimfbleak) are a group of near-passerine birds in the family Meropidae containing three genera and 27 species. Most species are found in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia, and New Guinea. They are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers. All have long down-turned bills and medium to long wings, which may be pointed or round. Male and female plumages are usually similar.
  • The Tahiti rail (nominated by FunkMonk) is an extinct species of rail that lived on Tahiti. It was first recorded during James Cook's second voyage around the world (1772–1775), on which it was illustrated by Georg Forster and described by Johann Reinhold Forster. The Tahiti rail was 9 in (23 cm) long, and its colouration was unusual for a rail. The Tahiti rail was supposedly flightless, and nested on the ground. It is said to have been seen in open areas, marshes, and in coconut plantations.
  • Love, Inc. (nominated by Aoba47) is an American television sitcom, created by Andrew Secunda, which originally aired for one season on United Paramount Network. The show revolves around five matchmakers working at a dating agency. Despite being set in New York, filming took place at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Los Angeles and other locations in California. It was canceled following UPN's merger with the WB to launch the CW in 2006. Critical response to Love, Inc. was mixed: some critics praised its multi-ethnic cast, while others felt that the storylines and characters were unoriginal and Philipps' portrayal of her character as unsympathetic.
  • The Alabama Centennial half dollar (nominated by Wehwalt) was a commemorative fifty-cent coin struck by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1921 as a belated acknowledgement of the 100th anniversary of Alabama's admission to the Union in 1819. The coin was created by Laura Gardin Fraser, who became the first woman designer of a coin. To boost sales, a symbol, 2X2 (recognizing Alabama as the 22nd state) was included in the design for a minority of the coins; these are generally more expensive today.

Ten featured lists were promoted.

  • Ipswich Town F.C. is an English association football club founded in 1878. In 2007, the club created a hall of fame (nominated by The Rambling Man) into which a number of personnel associated with the club are inducted every year. The inaugural members, Ray Crawford, Mick Mills, Ted Phillips and John Wark, were selected in 2007 by a ballot of former Ipswich players. As of 2016, forty-six people have been inducted into the hall of fame.
  • The Masters Tournament Par-3 contest (nominated by The Rambling Man) is a golf competition which precedes the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. The first Par-3 contest was held in 1960, and was won by three-time Masters champion Sam Snead. The contest takes place in a single round on a nine-hole, par-27 course in the northeast corner of Augusta National Grounds, which was designed in 1958 by George Cobb and club founder Clifford Roberts. Traditionally the golfers playing in the contest have invited family members onto the course to caddy for them, sometimes allowing them to play shots on their behalf. Numerous holes in one have been made during the history of the tournament, including nine in the 2016 tournament. No winner of the Par-3 contest has gone on to win the Masters in the same year.
  • Ravichandran Ashwin (born 1986) is a Test, One Day International and Twenty20 International cricketer who represents the India national cricket team. As of December 2016, Ashwin has taken 24 five-wicket hauls in international cricket (nominated by Vensatry); he ranks joint 13th in the all-time list, and joint third among his countrymen. He is one of only 45 bowlers who have taken 15 or more five-wicket hauls at international level in their cricketing careers.
  • Michael Fassbender (born 1977) is a German-Irish actor. His filmography (nominated by Cowlibob) includes thirty-two films, seven television films and thirty-six television episodes. He also voiced Logan in the 2010 video game Fable III.
  • A One Day International (ODI) is a 50 over cricket match between two representative teams, each having ODI status, as determined by the International Cricket Council (ICC). As of November 2016, 50 players have represented the Kenyan national team in ODIs (nominated by Yellow Dingo), since its debut in 1996. Thomas Odoyo and Steve Tikolo have played the most ODIs for Kenya with 131 each. Tikolo has scored the most runs with 3369 for the team, while Odoyo has taken the most wickets with 141.
  • Shannen Doherty (born 1971) is an American actress, producer, author, and television director. She has appeared in numerous television programs and motion pictures. (nominated by Aoba47) She has appeared in sixteen films (with currently four of them being in post-production), in forty-eight television films and numerous television episodes (being a series regular on seven television shows).
  • Rajinikanth (born 1950) is an Indian actor who predominantly works in Tamil cinema. He began his film career (nominated by Kailash29792 and Vensatry) by playing antagonistic and supporting roles before graduating to a lead actor. After starring in numerous commercially successful films throughout the 1980s and 1990s, he has continued to hold a matinée idol status in the popular culture of Tamil Nadu. Writing for Slate, Grady Hendrix called him the "biggest movie star you've probably never heard of." Rajinikanth has also worked in other Indian film industries such as Bollywood, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. As of 2016, he has appeared in over 150 films.
  • Maryland is a state located in the Southern United States. According to the 2010 United States Census, Maryland is the 19th most populous state with 5,773,785 inhabitants but the 9th smallest by land area spanning 9,707.24 sq mi (25,141.6 km2) of land. Maryland is divided into 23 counties and contains 157 incorporated municipalities (nominated by Mattximus) consisting of cities, towns, or villages. Incorporated municipalities cover only 4.4% of the state's land mass but are home to 26.2% of its population.
  • Cardiff City F.C., a professional association football club based in Cardiff, Wales, was founded in 1899. As of the end of the 2015–16 season, the club had spent 11 seasons in the top tier of English football, 47 in the second, 22 in the third and 5 in the fourth. This list (nominated by Kosack) details their achievements in first-team competitions, and records their top goalscorer, for each completed season since their first appearance in the English football pyramid as members of the Southern Football League in 1910–11. Due to the unavailability of complete statistics, seasons prior to 1910 in the amateur Welsh leagues are not included.
  • Essex is a county in the east of England. It has an area of 1,420 sq mi (3,700 km2), with a coastline of 400 mi (640 km), and a population of 1,393,600 according to the 2011 census. As of August 2016 there are forty-nine Local Nature Reserves (LNRs) in Essex (nominated by Dudley Miles). Nine are also Sites of Special Scientific Interest, three are also Scheduled Monuments and four are managed by the Essex Wildlife Trust. LNRs are designated by local authorities under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. The local authority must have a legal control over the site, by owning or leasing it or having an agreement with the owner. LNRs are sites which have a special local interest either biologically or geologically, and local authorities have a duty to care for them. They can apply local bye-laws to manage and protect LNRs.

Twenty-one featured pictures were promoted.



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2016-12-22

Labs improvements impact 2016 Tool Labs survey results

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By Legoktm and Evad37

In 2015, the Wikimedia Labs team ran a survey of Tool Labs developers to further understand how they feel about the service, what they like, and what they want to see improved. This year, Bryan Davis, a senior software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation providing Tool Labs support as part of Community Tech, ran the survey again, and announced the results on the Labs-l mailing list in late November.

The survey showed that developers' opinion of the reliability of the Tool Labs platform has increased from 64% last year to 87%, and is likely to be the main aspect that users of tools hosted on Tool Labs care about. Davis attributed this to infrastructure work performed by members of the Labs Operations team.

Users' responses about reliability, split into cohorts based on how many years they've used Tool Labs/Toolserver (first four bars), how many tools they've developed and actively maintain (next eight bars), and how many hours a week they spend maintaining tools. There were 175 participants in the survey.

He specifically highlighted Chase Pettet and Madhumitha Viswanathan’s work on improving the underlying Network File System (NFS) servers for performance and stability, Andrew Bogott’s work on the OpenStack cloud that powers the servers that run Tool Labs. YuviPanda is leading the effort to migrate from the unsupported Open Grid Engine (OGE) to the newer and more stable Kubernetes platform, which has led to cleaning up and improving the web server related code.

“Moving to a codebase that is about 20 years newer and supported by an active community can do a lot to improve things”, said Davis. He noted that there may be some recency bias, since the period immediately before the 2016 survey was relatively stable, while there was instability in the months before the 2015 one.

The Labs team monitors uptime as well, explained Davis. For the months of October and November, the combined availability (all services being up) was 99.669%, or about two and a half hours of downtime per month on average. They are currently aiming for 99.9% availability, or 45 minutes of downtime per month.

Davis also shared some of the planned improvements in 2017 that should help with stability and reliability.

Servers in the Virginia datacenter

“We have a new database cluster coming online soon", said Davis. “Rather than just setting up the same old system on bigger hardware the database administration team has taken a deep look at the problem of replication with filtering and made configuration and architecture changes to improve the whole stack.”

Another goal is to improve the OpenStack networking system by upgrading it to “Neutron”. This would allow the Labs team to distribute servers better in the datacenter, ensuring that a power outage for a single row of servers won’t take down all of Labs (as it currently would).

And as mentioned earlier, work on transitioning away from OGE will continue. Davis is currently working on evaluation criteria for the OGE replacement system, and expects to do actual testing next quarter.

89% of Tool Labs developers found the support to be as good as or better than the support they received while using the Toolserver, compared with 71% last year. Davis credited the community for coming together and helping each other more, citing the number of people answering questions on IRC and improving documentation on wikis.

He also saw a lot of room for improvement, noting that documentation was the most mentioned problem in the free form comment section of the survey.

“We have pretty good coverage of highly technical topics on the Wikitech wiki, but there are very few start to finish tutorials on how to create an account, upload your code, and see your app running”, said Davis. “It would be nice to see "my first X" tutorials for different basic projects (web service, editing bot, IRC bot, etc) for various languages.”

Usage of the three main services of Tool Labs, LabsDB, cron jobs, and web services, were all down from last year; but the number of respondents who don’t actively maintain any tools went up from 16% to 22%. Davis had a few hypotheses as to why, such as people switching to Quarry for database queries instead of direct access, or people signing up, finding it difficult, and then losing interest.

“I'd love to hear more from the Tool Labs community on the 'why' here”, said Davis. He can be contacted on his Wikitech talk page.

Davis expects the survey results to affect planning for the Labs team in 2017–2018 and the longer term.

“The single biggest take away for us early on is that the documentation needs to be improved”, said Pettet. “We need to update it, curate it, and make sure our users understand it.” He added that it's heartening that users are seeing the benefits of all of their efforts working on uptime and availability.

Stealing some of Wikimedia's Principles to Democratize Programming

“I've got this vision that I think a few others share of a world where making a technical contribution to the movement has a really low barrier of entry”, said Davis. “Ideally manipulating the data we have about what is happening in the wikis should be as easy as editing an article. Sure there will always be a few rules and local conventions that you need to follow, but you shouldn't have to learn a lot of new technology before you can get some work done.” He pointed to YuviPanda’s talk on “Stealing some of Wikimedia's Principles to Democratize Programming” that discusses the same kind of world, using the popular Quarry and relatively new PAWS tools as examples of lowering barriers to technical tasks.

“We are never going to get everyone to freely share in the sum of all knowledge if there are arbitrary silos that large numbers of people are locked out of just because they don't use the right computer operating system or understand the technical difference between an array and a vector”, said Davis.

The full survey results are available on Meta-Wiki. L

In brief

New user scripts to customise your Wikipedia experience

Newly approved bot tasks

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2016 #49 & #50. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.

Installation code

Further information: Wikipedia:User scripts § How to install user scripts
  1. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/PageCuration.js]]
  2. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/SpecialNewPages.js]]
  3. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Lourdes/TFAhistorylink.js]]
  4. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:The Voidwalker/centralAuthLink.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:The Voidwalker/centralAuthLink.js]]
  5. ^ Copy the following code, click here, then paste:
    importScript( 'User:Opencooper/lastEdit.js' ); // Backlink: [[User:Opencooper/lastEdit.js]]



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2016-12-22

Post-election traffic blues

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By Serendipodous and Milowent

Traffic reports of the most-viewed articles of the week for the past four weeks.

For the full top-25 lists, see WP:TOP25. Please also see our archives for weekly lists going back to January 2013, as well as recently added archives of the most popular articles in Wikipedia's earliest years: 2001–2004, see, e.g., Wikipedia:Top 25 Report/October 2001.

November 13–19

Waiting to exhale: We are still coming down from election, which saw the highest average numbers we've ever recorded, and numbers, while down from last week's ludicrous levels, are still not near normal. This list is very similar to last week's, with only a small number of new entries. It's almost as if last week's list breathed in a swarm of numbers and is slowly now breathing them out. – Serendipodous

For the week of November 13–19, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Donald Trump C-Class 3,321,262
Numbers are slowly returning to normal for America's 45th president. Would that his country could.
2 Steven Bannon C-Class 2,746,898
Apparently, the nation of America was shocked to the core when it learned that the head of the racist, anti-semitic, misogynistic Breitbart News, who had acted for months as Donald Trump's chief strategist, would continue to act as Donald Trump's chief strategist. What? You elect someone specifically to disrupt the status quo and you're surprised when the status quo is disrupted?
3 United States presidential election, 2016 B-Class 1,693,874
Views peaked at 2.36 million on November 9.
4 Melania Trump C-Class 1,422,580
Mrs. Trump will be the first foreign-born First Lady of the United States since Louisa Adams in the 1820s. Louisa was British, so Melania will be the first non-native speaker of English to hold the title, which is a bit bizarre considering Trump's rhetoric on immigration. Though her English is not perfect, she does speak six languages – a feat few people, and fewer native English-speakers, can claim.
5 Elizabeth II Featured Article 1,354,307
For the third consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
6 UFC 205 B-Class 1,215,708
The latest Ultimate Fighting Championship was held on November 12, 2016 at Madison Square Garden. The headline match was won by Conor McGregor who defeated Eddie Alvarez in a technical knockout in the second round.
7 Frederick Banting C-Class 1,203,940
The discoverer of insulin got a Google Doodle on his 125th birthday on November 14.
8 Ivanka Trump Start class 1,148,947
No doubt the most liked Trump outside core Trump-fandom. Her views regularly exceeded those of her siblings. In the report for the July 2016 week of the Republican National Convention, Ivanka placed #4, ahead of her three adult siblings. (Trump's youngest child Barron Trump is only 10 years old and should not have his own article here, if the precedent set for Malia and Sasha Obama is applied. ETA: And he no longer does after an AfD closed. - MW)
9 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) C-class 1,137,420
This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (it currently has a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
10 Conor McGregor C-Class 1,107,299
See #6.

November 20–26

A Holiday Week, and Some Oldies: The death of Fidel Castro (#1) was the most-viewed topic of the week, followed by the Harry Potter universe film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. And the popular British TV series The Crown continues to push British royalty into the chart. The American Thanksgiving holiday (#3) and consumer holiday of Black Friday (#5) returned for another annual appearance, as United States politics continues to recede a bit in popularity, and view counts return to more normal ranges.

In other news, The Top 25 report's archives are slowing expanding to include data on article popularity from long ago, to the extent we can track it down. See, for example, the most popular article list for October 2003. Wikipedia was a much smaller place 13 years ago. While Fidel Castro got 1.76 million views last week, in October 2003, the most viewed page (after the Main Page), was "Current events" with a mere 26,838 views for the entire month. Back then, however, traditional encyclopedic topics could compete for top spots, and Mathematics was #5 for the month with 13,796 views. Last week it only placed #3685 (31,637 views). – Milowent

For the week of November 20–26, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Fidel Castro Good Article 1,760,389
Somebody had to knock Donald Trump (#4) out of the top spot. The strongman ruler of Cuba, though out of the spotlight the last few years due to his poor health, died on November 25 at age 90.
2 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) C-class 1,617,874
Up from #9 last week, with almost 500,000 more views. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
3 Thanksgiving C-class 1,279,737
Off about 100,000 views from last year, but that's fairly consistent. This beloved North American holiday has, in the past, been very ill-used by Wikipedia viewers. Every year, when it came around, immediately money-spinning spammers started flooding Wikipedia with fake views for this article, thus forcing us to remove what should have been a perfectly acceptable annual addition to this list. For the second year, however, it appears that the article has been included entirely on its own merits without any, ahem, stuffing.
4 Donald Trump C-Class 1,249,878
Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#8), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet.
5 Black Friday (shopping) C-Class 1,149,155
The day after Thanksgiving is also the day that retailers have earned enough to cover their debts from the previous year, and are thus "in the black" (at least, that's what they say; in truth it probably originated as a reaction to the traffic). In recent years it has become a major day on the shopping calendar and the unofficial start of the Christmas shopping season, though Cyber Monday is increasing in popularity every year, allowing the spirit of consumerism to continue to expand.
6 Survivor Series (2016) Start-class 1,096,605
Pay-per-view wrestling event held on November 20. Goldberg (#22) was among the match winners.
7 Elizabeth II Featured Article 1,050,072
For the fourth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
8 United States presidential election, 2016 B-Class 940,657
Still popular as people refresh their screens occasionally to make sure Wikipedia was not vandalized.
9 Betsy DeVos C-Class 901,852
The billionaire and education activist for school voucher programs has been nominated to be president Trump's secretary of education.
10 Westworld (TV series) C-Class 806,567
To be clear: this is not based on a novel by Michael Crichton: Crichton was a filmmaker as well as a novelist, and Westworld was a film he both wrote and directed back in the 1970s. But whereas that was a straightforward "monsters on the loose" movie, about a Western-themed amusement park staffed by hyperrealistic robots who go insane and start murdering the guests (sound familiar?), this series looks like it will be taking a more thoughtful, hard scifi approach, with the robots' gradual evolution from programming to quasi-consciousness forming the main plot thread. With a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and ratings of just under 2 million (roughly what Game of Thrones received when it began), it's off to a solid start, though whether it will be the show to carry HBO past Game of Thrones's end remains to be seen.

November 27 – December 3

Breathe steady: What's this? A two-million view cap? A ~400,000 entry? Television shows? Movies? Reddit threads? Google Doodles? Recently dead people? Could it be that Wikipedia has finally returned to normal? Well not exactly. There's a remarkably shallow curve at the top, meaning viewership is still up on previous weeks, mostly due to news events such as the appointment of James Mattis as US Secretary of Defense, or the tragic crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933. But if things keep going the way they are, this job might just get boring again. – Serendipodous

For the week of November 27 to December 3, the ten most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Fidel Castro Good Article 2,401,418
Numbers are up by nearly a million on last week, so obviously people still cry for la revolucion to vivir, even though el revolucionario está muerto.
2 Associação Chapecoense de Futebol B-Class 1,406,474 The football team that tragically lost most of its members in the crash of LaMia Airlines Flight 2933 (see #11)
3 Jagadish Chandra Bose B-class 1,385,705
The Indian biologist who invented the crescograph received a Google Doodle on his 158th birthday on November 30.
4 James Mattis C-class 1,059,661
Amid a string of controversial Trump appointments, the former general's appointment as secretary of defense feels almost normal. About the only thing controversial about him is a mildly hawkish stance on Iran.
5 Louisa May Alcott C-Class 1,047,171
The author of Little Women and Little Men got a Google Doodle on her 184th birthday on November 29.
6 Westworld (TV series) C-Class 920,398
Numbers are up for the penultimate episode of the season, which saw the realisation of a number of long-held fan theories and bodes well for next week's 90-minute season finale. A second season has been greenlit, so expect even more water cooler moments next year.
7 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (film) C-class 830,774
Down from #2 last week. This cinematic spinoff to the Harry Potter series, set in 1920s New York, and scripted by the books' author herself, JK Rowling (pictured), opened this week to decent notices (a 76% on Rotten Tomatoes) and a solid, though unspectacular, $75 million US opening.
8 Elizabeth II Featured Article 825,747
For the fifth consecutive week, the longest-reigning British monarch in history places on this list thanks to The Crown, a $100 million melodrama about her early years where she is played by Claire Foy.
9 Deaths in 2016 List 773,350
The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the last few weeks.
10 Donald Trump C-Class 717,438
Numbers continue to drop since the November 8 United States presidential election, 2016 (#11), but they can be expected to rebound in January. Also, Trump continues to tweet.

December 4–10

India rising: Topics from India, usually films, often make this chart. But the death of Jayalalithaa, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, is notable for rising to #1 and over 4 million views, though never before appearing on the chart. Former minister M. G. Ramachandran also placed #5. It took 678K views to hit the Top 10, the lowest threshold since the slow week of October 16-22. – Milowent

For the week of December 4–10, the 10 most-popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Jayalalithaa C-class 4,067,619
Jayalalithaa Jayaram was an Indian actress and politician who served five terms as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, for over 14 years between 1991 and 2016. She fell ill in September 2016, and died on December 5 after a long hospitalization. India declared a day of national mourning, while the state of Tamil Nadu declared seven days of mourning.
2 John Glenn C-class 1,280,797
The first American astronaut to orbit Earth in 1962, and later a United States Senator. With all the notable deaths this year, it makes me think that the 20th century itself really died in 2016. Yes, the icons of every century linger into the next, but if you want to draw a line, this year seems like a good one.
3 Westworld (TV series) C-Class 1,272,033
The season finale episode, The Bicameral Mind, aired on December 4.
4 Rømer's determination of the speed of light B-Class 997,296
Has to be Reddit. Also an interesting article on a topic I knew nothing about.
5 M. G. Ramachandran B-Class 861,766 Indian actor who was Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu from 1977-87, so no doubt popular due to #1.
6 Junaid Jamshed Start class 861,766 This popular Pakistani recording artist died on December 7 in the crash of Pakistan International Airlines Flight 661.
7 Deaths in 2016 List 761,247
The deaths list has always acted as this list's lodestone; it is so consistent on a day to day basis that where it appears is an indication of the weekly traffic levels. That said, we may have to recalibrate our mathematics, since its numbers have been slowly going up over the past few weeks, and continued this week.
8 Kirk Douglas B-Class 759,816
This American actor turned 100 on December 9.
9 Attack on Pearl Harbor C-Class 694,555
The 75th anniversary of Japan's attack on the United States, which led to the entry of the U.S. into World War II, occurred on December 7. The memorial services held for the event will likely be the last major gathering of living survivors of the attack.
10 Last Tango in Paris Start class 678,802
Details about the infamous rape scene in this 1972 movie caused controversy this week.



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2016-12-22

Winning photos in world's largest photography contest reveal a world of monuments—and the volunteers who love them

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By Jeff Elder
The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. Any views expressed in this piece are not necessarily shared by the Signpost; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. For more information on this partnership, see our content guidelines.
 


A lawyer carefully studied the arches and staircases of the Berlin district courthouse as he came and went for work, “not always liking the place”. One afternoon the crowds disappeared, the light from the towering windows softened, and Ansgar Koreng captured its elaborate elegance for first place in the contest.

 


Colin, from Britain, waited for Open House London to take a photo of Royal Albert Hall. He hauled a tripod to the central box of the grand tier, and set to work, hoping the light wouldn’t change as he pieced together a high-resolution composite image, giving music lovers a glowing view of the legendary venue. The photo took second place.

 


Tahsin Shah, a Pakistani police chief, drove 500 kilometers pursuing the “romance and decaying glory” of the ninth century Derawar Fort. He captured a camel caravan strung along its bastions, a scene that could have taken place 1,000 years ago, for tenth place.

Beginning photographer Vladimír Ruček likes to hike the mountains of his homeland, Slovakia, sleeping in “a million-star hotel”, alone under the night sky. He photographed the old stone Čachtice Castle greeting the morning sun and took thirteenth place.

Welcome to the largest photo competition in the world – by the world and for the world. Wiki Loves Monuments drew 277,365 entries from 10,748 participants this year, the largest pool of submissions of any photo competition. Volunteers go through all of those, first on the national level, then for the global finals. Above are some of the stories behind the top 15 photos—winnowed all the way down from the more than a quarter-million—and announced on December 15.

Lawyer Ansgar Koreng placed first, winning a €1000 prize, Colin’s Royal Albert Hall photo placed second, Pakistani police chief Tahsin Shah placed tenth, and Slovakian hiker Vladimír Ruček placed thirteenth.

Like Wikipedia, Wiki Loves Monuments is a sprawling enterprise filled with fascinating diversity. Winners represent the world’s best photos of the cultural heritage in 42 nations. Museums and observatories, old mills and modern architecture. If Wikipedia is the story of the world, Wiki Loves Monuments could well be its most beautiful slide show.

The contest, started in 2010, judges photos submitted via Wikimedia Commons, the 36 million-file free media repository for the Wikimedia movement. The photos help illustrate articles about countries’ national monuments on Wikipedia, and are freely licensed for everyone to appreciate. In fact, one of the main criteria for judging is “Usefulness of the image on Wikipedia”.

Wiki Loves Monuments also introduces some contributors to the collaborative Wikimedia culture. This year around 8,500 people used a new Wikimedia account to submit photos to the competition, something that generally correlates to having never before contributed to Wikimedia projects.

Every nation has its own 10 winners who compete at the global level. One German photographer, the Wikimedia Commons user Tilman2007, submitted 16,507 photos this year, and has submitted 46,352 to Wiki Loves Monuments since 2011 and 102,875 to Wikimedia Commons in total with the help of uploading tools. Another participant, Francesca, submitted one-half of a photo, and was a finalist in Italy. Francesca submitted a glowing photo of the Church of Santa Maria De’ Armeni in Matera, which she took with a collaborator, her boyfriend. She only submits photos taken with her boyfriend; it is entirely a labor of love.

One thing is true about all of them, and all contributors to Wikimedia projects. As the photographers capture national treasures, they invest something of themselves.

Albrecht Landgraf of Germany took a roadtrip with his family in Saxony where one side of his family is from. “All our relatives in this area passed away years ago, and the remaining family is spread out all over Germany.” They drove back in through family history to a park in Gablenz. “That’s when we found this little gem”, he said, “in a small village.”



 


His fourteenth place photo is an emerald, a quiet photograph of a serene lake garlanded with lush greenery with the arc of a bridge perfectly meeting its reflection in the water. His family may have long since left Saxony, but Albrecht returned to rediscover his roots—and left the region a gift.

For more information on the winning photos and the 2016 competition, go to wikilovesmonuments.org/ or the Wikimedia Blog.

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation



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2016-12-22

Privacy risks as perceived by Tor users and Wikipedians

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By Tilman Bayer

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

"Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: a study of Tor users and Wikipedians"

This qualitative study,[1] based on interviews with privacy-conscious Wikipedia editors and users of the Tor anonymization software, is an informative examination of the privacy issues that are particular to the work on the radically transparent online encyclopedia. It also tries (largely unsuccessfully, in this reviewer's opinion) to make the case that Wikipedia should relax its restrictions on editing via Tor.

The three authors from Drexel University carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with two groups:

  • 12 "Tor users who have also contributed to “online projects." (recruited e.g. on the mailing list of the Tor project)
  • 11 "Wikipedia editors who have considered their privacy while editing", including some administrators and Wikimedia Foundation employees

In both groups, the majority (8 in each case) was male.

The goal was "to examine the threats that people perceive when contributing to open collaboration projects and how they maintain their safety and privacy". Interview responses examined using thematic analysis, to identify the most important concepts.

As first part of their findings, the authors group the types of threats described by the participants into five areas:

  • "Surveillance/Loss of privacy", i.e. the general "fear that their online communication or activities may be accessed or logged by parties without their knowledge or consent". This more abstract concern was more prevalent in the Tor users group than among the privacy-conscious Wikipedians interviewed for the study.
  • "Loss of employment/opportunity", such as when a potential employer decides against a particular job candidate because she derived certain kinds of negative information from his online activity, or a transphobic boss learning that a particular employee is a transgender person.
  • "Safety of self/loved ones". Some of the Wikipedians reported "threats of rape, physical assault, and death as reprisals for their contributions to the project".
  • "Harassment/Intimidation", which was brought up far more often by the Wikipedians (8) than among the Tor users (1). In particular "Editors who took central positions like administrator or arbitration committee member found that additional authority and responsibility brought with it publicity and vulnerability", including rape and death threats in case of a female administrator.
  • "Reputation loss" in general. One participant related that often Wikipedians edits anonymously (i.e. only identified by their IP address) because "they don't want someone to go on a vendetta against them and what's a volunteer hobby for them suddenly turns into something that affects their professional career".

The researchers seem to have struggled a bit to clearly delineate these five threat areas. For instance, there appears to be quite a bit of similarity between the intimidation and safety concerns, and as the authors point out themselves, "the potential for contributions to controversial topics to be misinterpreted and result in lost opportunities" - the second area - is also related to the more general concern about reputation loss. Nevertheless, for those interested in the privacy threats editors associate with the activity of contributing Wikipedia, this is a very worthwhile read. A thematically related document is the Wikimedia Foundation's 2015 Harassment survey 2015 (Signpost summary) - unfortunately not mentioned in the paper. The WMF survey, while also not designed to be completely representative, covered some of the same ground with vastly more respondents (3,845) than the 23 interviewees in the present study.

Turning to the strategies that the interviewees employ to mitigate these perceived risks, the study identifies "two broad overlapping categories of activities: modifying participation in projects and enacting anonymity." Modifying participation can include refraining from editing certain topics. Under "enacting anonymity", the researchers subsume both "operational approaches that limit others’ ability to connect activities with participants real identities (e.g. maintaining multiple accounts [ also known as sockpuppets on Wikipedia])", and technical means such as Tor (for "participating anonymously on the Internet" in general). It is in this section that the paper becomes a bit muddied about the distinction between privacy threats on the internet in general and on Wikipedia in particular. This is particularly unfortunate as it seems to have been at least partly motivated by the longstanding discussions about the restrictions on editing Wikipedia via Tor (demands from the Tor community to lift these go back at least a decade), with the authors making the case that Wikipedia is incurring a significant loss of contributions because of these restrictions. There is no doubt that the public edit histories can reveal a lot about a Wikipedian's interests etc. (Or as this reviewer concluded in in a 2008 Wikimania talk that presented several real-life examples of conclusions that can be drawn from a Wikipedia user's editing patterns: "Wikipedia contributors don't just give their time to the project, but pay with their privacy, too.") But the obfuscation of IP addresses that Tor provides is largely irrelevant for this, because editors' IP addresses are not made public anyway, if they don't choose to edit under an IP. In an early presentation about the study at the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) (slide 33), the authors themselves alluded to this :

"According to Wikipedians most deanonymization is done based on contextual cues. Tor won’t help with this"

But this kind of caveat is missing from the present paper.

(Interestingly though, Wikipedians in the study reported using Tor-like tools outside of Wikipedia, to avoid "being _targeted by groups with a history of harassing Wikipedians:": "when I'm reading Wikipediocracy or one of the Wikipedia criticism sites, because I know that they scoop up IP addresses, I use an IP obfuscator for that.")

Briefly

Conferences and events

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

  • "A method for predicting Wikipedia editors' editing interest: based on a factor graph model"[2] From the abstract: "Recruiting or recommending appropriate potential Wikipedia editors to edit a specific Wikipedia entry (or article) can play an important role in improving the quality and credibility of Wikipedia. ... this paper proposes an interest prediction factor graph (IPFG) model, which is characterized by editor's social properties, hyperlinks between Wikipedia entries, the categories of an entry and other important features, to predict an editor's editing interest in types of Wikipedia entries. ... An experiment on a Wikipedia dataset (with different frequencies of data collection) shows that the average prediction accuracy (F1 score) of the IPFG model for data collected quarterly could be up to 0.875, which is about 0.49 higher than that of a collaborative filtering approach."
  • "Stationarity of the inter-event power-law distributions"[3] From the abstract: "We show that even though the probability to start [Wikipedia] editing is conditioned by the circadian 24 hour cycle, the conditional probability for the time interval between successive edits at a given time of the day is independent from the latter. We confirm our findings with the activity of posting on the social network Twitter. Our result suggests there is an intrinsic humankind scheduling pattern: after overcoming the encumbrance to start an activity, there is a robust distribution of new related actions, which does not depend on the time of day."
  • "Controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification"[4] From the abstract: "We hypothesize that intensities of controversy among related pages are not independent; thus, we propose a stacked model which exploits the dependencies among related pages. Our approach improves classification of controversial web pages when compared to a model that examines each page in isolation, demonstrating that controversial topics exhibit homophily."
  • "WIKIREADING: a novel large scale language understanding task over Wikipedia"[5] From the abstract: "We present WIKIREADING, a large-scale natural language understanding task and publicly-available dataset with 18 million instances. The task is to predict textual values from the structured knowledge base Wikidata by reading the text of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. ... We compare various state-of-the-art DNN [deep neural networks]-based architectures for document classification, information extraction, and question answering."
  • "A contingency view of transferring and adapting best practices within online communities"[6] From the abstract: "Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects." From the paper: "We collected the history of CotW [Collaboration of the Week] in 146 Wikiprojects and measured how different types of modifications influenced their success, in terms of the length of time the CotW continued to be used in a project, the amount of work they elicited from project members and the number of unique editors who contributed to them."
  • "Centrality and content creation in networks – the case of economic topics on German Wikipedia"[7] From the abstract: "We analyze the role of local and global network positions for content contributions to articles belonging to the category “Economy” on the German Wikipedia. Observing a sample of 7635 articles over a period of 153 weeks we measure their centrality both within this category and in the network of over one million Wikipedia articles. Our analysis reveals that an additional link from the observed category is associated with around 140 bytes of additional content and with an increase in the number of authors by 0.5. The relation of links from outside the category to content creation is much weaker. ... We find non-neoclassical themes to be highly prevalent among the top articles."
  • "A platform for visually exploring the development of Wikipedia articles"[8] From the abstract: "... associated to each [Wikipedia] article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points." (Also see previous coverage: "Contropedia" tool identifies controversial issues within articles", http://www.contropedia.net/ and the following paper:)
  • "Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia"[9] From the abstract: "... we study how the affordances of Wikipedia are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous (re)negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia."

References

  1. ^ Forte, Andrea; Andalibi, Nazanin; Greenstadt, Rachel (2017-03-25). "Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: a study of Tor users and Wikipedians" (PDF). Proceedings of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). Portland, OR. CSCW '17. College of Computing and Informatics, Drexel University Philadelphia, PA, USA. p. 12.
  2. ^ Zhang, Haisu; Zhang, Sheng; Wu, Zhaolin; Huang, Liwei; Ma, Yutao (July 2016). "A method for predicting Wikipedia editors' editing interest: based on a factor graph model". International Journal of Web Services Research. 13 (3): 1–25. doi:10.4018/IJWSR.2016070101. ISSN 1545-7362. Closed access icon
  3. ^ Gandica, Yerali; Carvalho, Joao; Aidos, Fernando Sampaio Dos; Lambiotte, Renaud; Carletti, and Timoteo (2016). "Stationarity of the inter-event power-law distributions". arXiv:1607.05004 [physics.soc-ph].
  4. ^ Dori-Hacohen, Shiri; Jensen, David; Allan, James (2016). "Controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification". Proceedings of the 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 797–800. doi:10.1145/2911451.2914745. ISBN 9781450340694.
  5. ^ Hewlett, Daniel; Lacoste, Alexandre; Jones, Llion; Polosukhin, Illia; Fandrianto, Andrew; Han, Jay; Kelcey, Matthew; Berthelot, David (2016-08-07). "WIKIREADING: a novel large scale language understanding task over Wikipedia" (PDF). 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Berlin, Germany: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1535–1545., see also Paper notes and dataset
  6. ^ Zhu, Haiyi; Kraut, Robert E.; Kittur, Aniket (2016). "A contingency view of transferring and adapting best practices within online communities". Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. CSCW '16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. pp. 729–743. doi:10.1145/2818048.2819976. ISBN 9781450335928. Closed access icon, Author's copy
  7. ^ Kummer, Michael E.; Saam, Marianne; Halatchliyski, Iassen; Giorgidze, George (2016). "Centrality and content creation in networks – the case of economic topics on German Wikipedia". Information Economics and Policy. 36: 36. doi:10.1016/j.infoecopol.2016.06.002. ISSN 0167-6245. Closed access icon
  8. ^ Borra, Erik; Laniado, David; Weltevrede, Esther; Mauri, Michele; Magni, Giovanni; Venturini, Tommaso; Ciuccarelli, Paolo; Rogers, Richard; Kaltenbrunner, Andreas. "A platform for visually exploring the development of Wikipedia articles" (PDF). ICWSM 2015. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. p. 2.
  9. ^ Weltevrede, Esther; Borra, Erik (2016-06-01). "Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia". Big Data & Society. 3 (1): 2053951716653418. doi:10.1177/2053951716653418. ISSN 2053-9517.



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Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2016-12-22&oldid=1183873315"
  NODES
3d 1
Association 5
camera 1
coding 1
Community 52
ELIZA 3
games 1
games 1
HOME 10
Idea 9
idea 9
innovation 1
Interesting 4
Intern 21
iOS 1
languages 7
mac 3
musik 3
Note 17
OOP 9
os 199
server 8
text 6
Theorie 1
Training 1
twitter 12
Users 21
visual 2
web 7