Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2012-02-13
Fundraising proposals spark a furore among the chapters
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees chair Ting Chen has published a letter to the members of the Wikimedia movement, stating what the Board intends to do with fundraiser money. This opened a new front in a war of words that had raged on Meta for weeks, as posts in a personal capacity by WMF's treasurer, Stu West on the foundation's mailing list and on his blog attracted waves of heated commentary.
The statement has brought to a head a complex set of issues that have been causing friction between the WMF and local chapters for at least a year. The disagreements appear to revolve around the extent to which WMF fundraising should be decentralised to the chapters, which currently operate under different tax-deductibility and donation laws. Each country has its own rules on how funds can be disseminated from the chapter to other organisations and countries, and in some cases it is messy to transfer locally raised funds to a foreign entity—in this case the WMF in San Francisco. Some chapters believe their cultural independence owes a lot to their ability to conduct fundraising and manage the proceeds in their own jurisdictions. Other Wikimedians have expressed disquiet at the proposed new "grant" system for disseminating donor funds.
Background
Historically, certain established chapters such as those of Germany, France and the UK have played the role of processing donor payments during the annual fundraiser under a revenue-sharing agreement with the Foundation (see the 2011 Fundraising Agreement for the specifics).
Following an August 2011 meeting in Haifa, the Board of Trustees issued a "Letter regarding fundraising accountability" in which it disclosed that US$4M of donor money (or 15% of the total) had been retained by 12 national chapters in the previous year's fundraiser. The letter went on to question the merit of the chapters, especially the recently established and less organised ones, receiving significant funds largely on the basis of the geographical distribution of donors rather than organisational need. It also found fault with the lack of consistency in the chapters' transparency, regulatory environment and use of funds; the letter announced the expansion of the Foundation's grants program and called for a new needs-based model of fundraising and fund dissemination.
In early 2012, at the board's request, Foundation executive director Sue Gardner issued a series of draft recommendations for a radical restructuring of fundraising, proposing that all proceeds of the annual fundraiser should be processed and retained by the Foundation, with chapters and other affiliate entities left free to raise their own money or to apply for funding from a newly established central Funding Dissemination Committee (FDC), staffed by community members.
In an article covering the developments for the Kurier, the president of the Wikimedia Nederland chapter Ziko van Dijk commented that chapters' role in fundraising had become "a question of prestige" in some cases, even though control rested with the Foundation in any respect – as chapters had to submit to it their budgets under the existing system. He assessed the likely impact of the proposed restructuring:
| “ | Gardner's model is impressive in its cogency, addressing older discussions and requests in an intelligent way, and appealing to many people, individually and collectively. The FDC is supposed to make the model acceptable, because it can perhaps restrict the so far unlimited power of the WMF. Purely from the chapters' perspective, however, there is reason for concern. What's more, in a decentralized fundraising model, the individual Wikimedia activist has several doors to knock at for his plans, behind which decisions are being taken independently. In a centralized one, it would be just one door, at the end of the day. | ” |
The February letter from the board
On February 9, chair of the WMF board Ting Chen published a letter on the foundation mailing list announcing the board's latest position on the issues at hand. The gist of the announcement was summarised in the subsequent discussion by Alice Wiegand (lyzzy), a member of board of Wikimedia Germany until July last year [minor corrections made]:
- Some chapters will still be able to fundraise; the criteria are not yet fixed and need discussion.
- The ability to fundraise should not be connected to any type of entitlement to the raised funds.
- Funds dissemination will be managed by a new body (the Funds Dissemination Committee; FDC); the details of how this will be realized are not yet fixed and need discussion.
- The points in the letter mark the main direction for the Board's discussions and decision on the matter.
Board member Phoebe commented, "... we do intend to discuss fundraising in Paris with everyone, we will receive Sue's final recommendations in early-mid March; and we will plan to take a final vote at (or perhaps just after) the Berlin meeting. ... it would be bad to talk about this for two days in the Board meeting and not report back to the community about where we were at."
The letter is reproduced below:
Dear members of the Wikimedia Movement,
As you are probably aware we have been discussing the the future of fundraising and fund dissemination for the Wikimedia Movement for almost 6 months now. After discussing fundraising and funds dissemination at this past meeting, the board has drafted the following statement. It our intention to discuss these matters in the coming weeks to come to a final decision mid March.
But first we would like to thank everyone who took part in the discussion so far and spent their valuable time providing us with their viewpoints which we have of course taken into account in our decision making process. We hope that you will continue to participate by giving feedback on this letter.
- Funds dissemination
The board wants to create a volunteer-driven body to make recommendations for funding for movement-wide initiatives (Working title: Funds Dissemination Committee, FDC). The Wikimedia Foundation has decision-making authority, because it has fiduciary responsibilities to donors which it legally cannot delegate. The new body will make recommendations for funds dissemination to the Wikimedia Foundation. We anticipate a process in which the Wikimedia Foundation will review and approve all but a small minority of recommendations from the FDC. In the event that the Wikimedia Foundation does not approve a recommendation from the FDC, and the FDC and the Wikimedia Foundation aren't subsequently able to reach agreement, then the FDC can ask the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees to request the recommendation be reconsidered.
- The FDC will be a diverse body of people from across our movement (which may include paid staff) with appropriate expertise for this purpose, whose primary purpose is to disseminate funds to advance the Wikimedia mission.
- The WMF staff will support and facilitate the work of the FDC.
- Proposals can range from one time smaller contributions for small projects from individuals to larger financing for operational costs of chapters or associations.
The board intends to evaluate this process together with the FDC and see if it is working.
- Fundraising
Our thoughts on fundraising are less specific. We have come to the following two statements which are important
- If and when payment processing is done by chapters, it should be done primarily for reasons of tax, operational efficiency (including incentivizing donor cultivation and relations), should not be in conflict with funds dissemination principles and goals, and should avoid a perception of entitlement.
- The board is sharpening the criteria for payment processing. Payment processing is not a natural path to growth for a chapter; and payment processing will likely be an exception -- most chapters will not do so.
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees
NB: Please note that rather than spend a LOT of time on wording at this time, the board preferred to amend the above text if necessary when moving towards a resolution. This letter indicates our intent, and we may "wordsmith as needed" in our final resolutions.
Responses and discussion
It is becoming clearer that the Board has in mind at least a partial shift towards the distribution of worldwide donor funding on the basis of grants, whether by application by the chapters and others in the Wikimedia movement, or by centralised fiat. WMF treasurer Stu West says on his personal blog:
| “ | The reasons I prefer a grants process, to reiterate again, are 1. it distributes funds around our movement based on an assessment of impact rather than based on arbitrary splits, 2. it can be more efficient for our movement as a whole by reducing duplicated effort on bureaucracy and distraction from program work, 3. it gives chapters the option of not focusing on fundraising and 4. it helps avoid the whole host of legal/financial control problems we discussed back in our Haifa letter. I totally appreciate the challenges of a new system. Grant-giving has got to be efficient and truly-reflective of our movement principles, ... | ” |
Former Wikimedia UK treasurer Thomas Dalton (Tango) was scathing in response: "I’m getting very tired of vague claims like this from the Foundation. We have had enormous and ever-increasing success with fundraising over the last few years. What has gone so terribly wrong? [Your point 3] is just complete nonsense. Giving chapters the option means letting them decide. If you decide for them, that is taking away options. ... It is very unclear if the economies of scale from centralisation are enough to counter the advantages to local fundraising (tax, desire of donors to suppose local organisations, local payment methods, etc.)."
Craig Franklin (Lankiveil), treasurer of the Australian chapter and a candidate for an upcoming chapter-appointed seat, said, "these sorts of changes will just push chapters into spending valuable time and effort looking for other sources of income. In essence, you are proposing to replace one set of problems with another set of problems. ... My fear is that by cutting off chapters from fundraising, they’ll end up wasting even more time trying to find other revenue sources, which will benefit no one."
Liam Wyatt (Wittylama), also a candidate for a chapter-appointed seat, told The Signpost he believes there are conflicting signals coming out of the Foundation – pointing to both financial "decentralising" and "centralising". "In that context," he says, "this FDC looks like a 'scapegoat solution' where the problems of the existing system are placed upon a new and undefined committee to own."
Pavel Richter (Pavel Richter (WMDE)), chief executive of the German chapter, told Stu West that "a localised fundraising model is more effective and more efficient than a centralised model", referring to the Wikimedia Deutschland proposal. Much of the angst among chapters appears to stem from differences in tax laws." The German chapter's Jürgen Fenn, speaking on his own behalf, said "tax deductability is a standard that makes a charity organisation notable and honorable in the eyes of donors. In this country, it is an absolute must for anyone who is willing to donate money. We will not contribute to other organisations. Period. There is a world outside the U.S. where people act according to different standards and think and decide differently." In reply, Stu West said, "my gut instinct is that no one makes a €20 donation because of tax deductibility. But we can and should do this analysis, understand the tradeoffs, and make an informed decision."
Florence Devouard (Anthere), a former chair of the WMF Board and current vice-president (with responsibility for fundraising) of Wikimedia France, was more positive, although she was critical too. She told The Signpost, "I think the board took a good decision, but expressed it very poorly, which raises many doubts and unfortunately weakens the bold position they took. [The Board has] reiterated their desire for a somewhat decentralized organization, using a peer-reviewed system for funds allocations movement-wide. [It's commendable that they've chosen] this difficult path, which remains to be clearly defined."
One senior chapter member who preferred not to be named told The Signpost, "The German chapter has put forward a well-formulated and articulated model for fundraising and dissemination that's widely regarded by the chapters as viable and self-consistent." He was particularly annoyed by Ting Chen's statement that the Foundation "has fiduciary responsibilities to donors which it legally cannot delegate". He said, "this is self-serving circularity: you centralise the fundraising system, then you say you have a direct relationship to the donors and that it can't be legally delegated. These donors are the same that were just taken away from the chapters."
Stu West's fellow WMF Board member, Bishakha Datta, is skeptical about West's stance: "Because decentralization is such a core value of this movement, I believe we need a decentralized approach to the organizational part of this movement, including fund sharing. I signed on to the fundraising letter because I believe that the proposed Funds Dissemination Committee is a step in the right direction – it decentralizes one layer of financial decision-making. Despite your observation that distributed payment processing does not work, I believe the jury is still out on that one – there may be regions where it does make sense, regions where it does not work. Until there is clear evidence of one or the other, I do not believe we have the information we need to make a solid decision on this."
Stu West responded by pointing out what he sees as the inadequacies of the current system:
| “ | The one part of distributed payment processing that I absolutely feel doesn’t work was the automatic assignment of a fixed percentage of the funds raised to the local entity. As i said in my “impact” section, i think this is a horrible and possibly negligent way for us to allocate donor funds. Impact should be the driver. And I’d rather an imperfect assessment of impact (e.g. from a Funds Dissemination Committee) than an outright bad model of automatic allocation to one or another entity. | ” |
Discussion on the issues shows no sign of abating, as national chapters have become a locus of scrutiny and debate not only in the light of fundraising considerations, but amid fresh calls for restructuring Foundation-affiliated organisations and continuing debate over the allocation to chapters of seats on the Board of Trustees itself. The future of movement roles – and particularly the relationship between the Foundation and the chapters – promises to dominate much of the agenda in the coming year.
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Foundation launches Legal and Community Advocacy department
Legal and Community Advocacy department announced
Philippe Beaudette, formerly Head of Reader Relations, will be the Director of Community Advocacy, reporting to the General Counsel, Geoff Brigham. Several other positions have been reorganized to accommodate the needs of the new department. The Foundation plans to base the department on the Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary.
LCA's first order of business will be a consultation period, expected to take 6–12 months, as it builds its team and develops its goals. Part of this process will be its establishment of a community advisory board to reinforce its commitment to "a global perspective while understanding and promoting communities beyond English Wikipedia". The team held its first office hours on 10 February.
The announcement precipitated much discussion on foundation-l, with particular focus on what it might mean for the Wikimedia Foundation's attitude towards community consultation in its decisions, legal strategy, and what role the new department might have in catalysing the community in activism. It may also indicate the continuing evolution in the handling of sensitive matters such as threats of suicide, takedown challenges, criminal activity affecting local projects, and legal liability for functionaries – which, although traditionally handled by volunteers (raising legal and ethical questions), have increasingly become the domain of the tireless Mr. Beaudette and his colleagues.
Brief notes
- Milestones: Several projects reached milestones this week: the Outreach wiki has reached 200 administrators, the German Wiktionary has reached 200,000 entries, the Hungarian Wikibooks has reached 10,000 book modules, the Wikimania 2012 wiki has reached 1,000 registered users and 10 administrators, and the Chinese Wikipedia has reached 400,000 articles. Of particular note is the opening of the Marathi Wikisource to editing. Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. There are more than 68 million fluent speakers—the 15th most spoken language in the world.
- January 2012 Foundation report: The Wikimedia Foundation has released its January 2012 Foundation report, summarizing the Foundation's numerous activities in January. Highlights include the site-wide SOPA blackout (see Signpost coverage), the first San Francisco Hackathon, and the announcement of the Official Android app and partnership with telecommunications provider Orange.
- Foundation initiates metrics videos scheme: Every month Foundation staff gather together in the office and review "metrics and activities" from different departments. The meetings are to consist of impact, finance and human resources briefs, updates from departmental staff, and a closing statement by Sue Gardner that focuses on current organizational priorities. Starting with the February 2 meeting covering January, these meetings will be recorded and uploaded for all to see as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's monthly report; accordingly, the first such video may be viewed here.
- Stewards election underway: The 2012 stewards election is now open for voting. Stewards is a usergroup with unfettered access to the entirety of the Wikimedia interface across all userspaces, mainly intended to act as enhanced user-rights users for small wikis without local administrators, or for other occasional cross-wiki roles. Voting will remain open until February 27 2012, and voters must fall within certain parameters to gain suffrage. The election process has been simplified this year, and confirmations for existing Stewards are being held alongside elections; comments are welcome on the talk page.
- Summer of Research: Steven Walling, Foundation Community Department staffer, has disclosed the total expenditure of the Wikimedia Summer of Research 2011. The largest expenditure was "Salaries and Wages", at just over $109K spent; the total amounts to just over $123K.
- Wikimania updates: The deadline to apply for a Wikimania 2012 travel scholarship is February 16 (23:59 UTC). Wikipedians are encouraged to apply. Wikimania 2012 will take place July 12–15, 2012 at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Proposals for presentations may be submitted until March 18. It has been announced that the event will be hosted in conjunction with the U.S. Department of State.
- Wikimedian in Residence sought at British Library: Wikimedia UK have announced the opening of a paid position for a Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library. Experienced Wikipedians familiar with GLAM initiatives are invited to apply.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes a new administrator, GiantSnowman, whose second nomination passed without opposition.
- Featured article delegates change: This week SandyGeorgia and Karanacs resigned as featured article delegates. They were replaced by GrahamColm and Ian Rose.
Reader comments
Scholars and spin doctors contend with the emergent wikiorder
Scholar confounded by rules fit for the everyman
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.
– Timothy Messer-Kruse, "The Undue Weight of Truth", The Chronicle of Higher Education
In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Timothy Messer-Kruse, a professor at Bowling Green State University specialising in the history of the American labor movement, detailed his frustrated encounters with Wikipedia's immune system in endeavouring to set perceived inaccuracies in its historical coverage to rights. Messer-Kruse had been moved to correct the "detailed and elaborate" Wikipedia article on the Haymarket affair – the controversial trial of left-wing radicals for allegedly bombing police officers during a labour march in Chicago in 1886 – but saw his efforts repeatedly thwarted by the enforcers of the encyclopaedia's nuanced doctrines of content authorship – verifiability, neutrality and original research.
Attempted corrections were rebuffed successively as unsourced, inappropriately sourced to primary documents, and ultimately – after Messer-Kruse tried to appeal to a book of his on the topic published in the interim – as undue weight. In dialogue with his editing opponents in the meantime the professor incurred charges of incivility and possible vandalism, and against the barrier of "verifiability not truth" his efforts foundered. He concluded the column with a tepid expression of hope that in time, his stance on the facts would win over sufficient numbers of his colleagues to tip the scales of due weight in the direction of his studied perspective.
The anecdote is unlikely to turn too many heads among Wikipedians, rather serving to confirm established beliefs on either side of the divided line of content policy. For critics, it can be taken as yet another instance of the core community's mistreatment of expert contributions and its comparative disregard for the truth; for ardent defenders of the encyclopaedia, as an illustration of the resilience and necessity of author-blind scholarly vetting procedures, vital for production process requiring consistency, balance and openness – as prone to the pitfalls of outdated or spurious claims as they may be. The text of the article was posted on the foundation-l mailing list.
Political staffer's editing meets with mixed reception
A report by CNN.com casting a critical light on edits by Joe DeSantis, communications director for U.S. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, reverberated online this week, being picked up by Toronto Star, The Daily Beast, International Business Times, Slate, Wonkette, ThinkProgress, Global Post, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times. Although it noted that the Gingrich staffer had registered an account under his own name – Joedesantis – and disclosed his interest in the topic area on the account's userpage, the CNN report and articles it inspired portrayed him as having conducted an ongoing campaign to present a more favourable view of his employer, only curtailing after being reprimanded by Wikipedia's editors.
DeSantis' activity was initially flagged in an article by Politico last month (Signpost coverage), which, compared to the unsympathetic tone of some of the subsequent coverage, was restrained and noncommittal as to DeSantis' record of contribution. In a rebuke of the critical news cycle, marketing professionals' website Socialfresh published a critique of the CNN report, outlining how DeSantis had stuck mostly to talk pages as conflict of interest guidelines recommend and hadn't edited the articles about his employer or his employer's wife in over a year, and that Wikipedians' responses to his activity had been selectively quoted by CNN to give the impression that the encyclopaedians were generally critical (reception has been far from unequivocal). Jimbo Wales, who had taken a proactive interest in the issue of paid advocacy in the wake of the Bell Pottinger affair (Signpost coverage), declared that since being informed of conflict of interest issues, DeSantis' had been "following what I consider to be best practice ... he's openly identified his affiliation and he's interacting with the community directly and respectfully, but he's completely avoiding article space edits".
In brief
- A heuristic for truth detection? Pivoting off the Gingrich advocacy controversy, Discovery News's Rob Pegoraro laid out his methodology for ascertaining the likelihood that the veracity of a given Wikipedia article had been compromised by ideologically-motivated mischief. Advice for readers included checking the talk page for heated discussions and omitted information, the page history of the article for edit wars, and user talk pages of active contributors for criticism and warnings. He illustrated this by pointing out the squeaky-clean nexus of activity surrounding the article on his employer's parent corporation – Discovery Communications. The author's highest regard was reserved for another indication of article health, however—the number and frequency of the edits themselves, invoking the crowdsourcer's chestnut "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
For a special edition covering the ongoing debates in the editorial pages of news media over piracy and copyright enforcement on the internet, see this week's "In focus" feature.
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Skirmishes in the 'great sectarian war of the Internet'
A trio of editorials appeared in American national newspapers this week, reigniting the war of words over the protests against SOPA and PIPA earlier this year which saw an unprecedented blackout of Wikipedia and other websites inspire the defeat of the proposed anti-piracy legislation.
Keller: "Steal This Column"
The latest round of the debate was initiated by The New York Times' writer Bill Keller in an op-ed for the paper's February 6 edition, "Steal This Column", on February 6. The polarizing struggle over the bills had been widely characterised as a resounding albeit temporary defeat of efforts by established content industries to protect their business models (through muscular copyright enforcement) by an upsurge of opposition by internet users marshalled by a ragtag group of technology firms and their allies, Wikipedia prominent among them. Keller, whose recently concluded tenure as executive editor at the Times had been dominated by the threat to its future posed by the new media environment heralded by the internet, took sideswipes at the lofty rhetoric of web titans Google and Facebook, but sang the praises of Wikipedia:
| “ | Among the wonders of the Internet, Wikipedia occupies a special place. From its birth 11 years ago it has professed, and has tried reasonably hard to practice, a kind of idealism that stands out in the vaguely, artificially countercultural ambience of Silicon Valley. ... Wikipedia, while it has grown something of a bureaucratic exoskeleton, remains at heart the most successful example of the public-service spirit of the wide-open Web: nonprofit, communitarian, comparatively transparent, free to use and copy, privacy-minded, neutral and civil. | ” |
Although he appeared to take a conciliatory tack in "the great sectarian war over the governing of the Internet" by critiquing the inadequacies of the defeated legislative efforts, Keller wrote vociferously of the "rampant online theft of songs, films, books and other content", arguing that "parasite Web sites should be treated with the same contempt as people who pick pockets or boost cars". He adopted the framing of the bills' supporters in referring to topic of the debate as "the attempt to curtail online piracy", and disclosed his surprise and dismay at seeing "Wikipedia’s founder and philosopher, Jimmy Wales" giving credence to the opposition in emerging as "a combatant for the tech industry".
Keller cast doubt on the OPEN Act praised as an alternative by Wales, describing it as fraught with loopholes and difficult to enforce, while calling on the music and film industries to engage with it and come to terms with the internet coalition. Wales' plea for "serious reform" rather than sectarian struggle was deemed by Keller to be at odds with the polarized state of American politics. He posited that the sense in which the volunteer encyclopaedia was "free" was distinct from the notion of "free" expression as laid out in the U.S. Constitution – one markedly infused with an emphasis on intellectual property and copyright protection.
Keller ended his piece by arguing that content industries and internet firms are bound in a co-dependent relationship, with the former dependent on the latter's capacity for channeling creative expression, and the internet – and Wikipedia specifically – dependent on the copyright-protected content for its own part. Commenters on the article were notably resistant to this conception, with many voicing skepticism about the notion that copyright still served its purported function of fostering creativity, and speculating as to whether the legacy content owners had more incentive to obstruct rather than embrace the new internet-enabled forms of innovative expression and collaboration. Keller's woes continued later in the week, when the newspaper was alleged by The Boston Phoenix to have flagrantly disregarded its copyright by hosting and linking to content belonging to its competitor on New York Times servers.
Sherman: "What Wikipedia Won't Tell You"
The following day saw the paper run another op-ed on the issue, this time from Recording Industry Association of America head Cary Sherman. The article, "What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You", again strongly emphasised the piracy combating purpose of the defeated legislative efforts, but unlike Keller's piece, it explicitly denounced the opponents of the bills as having used the "dirty trick" of inflammatory misinformation to goad a credulous public into mass outrage. Furthermore, Sherman contested, in doing so internet-based organisations had transgressed by violating their users' expectation of neutrality:
| “ | The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations. | ” |
It was proof positive for Sherman of the self-serving hypocrisy of a culture which in loudly arguing for net neutrality had insisted on that the controllers of service providing platforms refrain from the temptation to misuse them for their own ends. Unlike the unscrupulous websites, the lobbyist pointedly noted, broadcast media such as television and radio networks did not use their access to an audience to push their point of view. Although he granted that some opponents of the bills were sincerely concerned with fighting piracy but alarmed by potential overreach of the legislation, Sherman went on to characterise other constituents of the protest alternately as dupes, proponents of piracy, or malevolent hackers bent on suppressing points of view contrary to their own. Sherman called on the obstructionist internet entities to partake in "respectful fact-based conversations" with their erstwhile opponents to address the "real and damaging" problem of piracy, concluding with a barbed reiteration of Keller's summation the day before: "We all share the goal of a safe and legal Internet. We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve it."
The reader response was predictably scathing, seeing Sherman accused of disingenuously dodging the real motivations for opposition to the bills – a fear of draconian, overreaching powers going far beyond the aim of sustaining creativity through copyright to imposing unreasonable and burdensome regulations that would have the effect of curtailing free expression, all orchestrated by powerful vested interests lobbying to have their way in an undemocratic behind-closed-doors process. Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Watch summarised the fallout as follows: "Readers, however, had no sympathy for Sherman or the RIAA. Overwhelmingly, readers supported the efforts of Google and Wikipedia to kill the bills." At Ars Technica, Nate Anderson accused Sherman, whom he recognised as having a "keen grasp of the issues", of engaging in "hand-waving demagoguery", and declared the "strangely angry" response to be so alienating and off-the-point that it would become a textbook case study of how not to respond to a controversy. The opponents of the bills, he argued, were unlikely to want to engage in reasoned discourse about the way forward with a self-pitying accusatory adversary.
In a column for Techdirt titled "RIAA Totally Out Of Touch: Lashes Out At Google, Wikipedia And Everyone Who Protested SOPA/PIPA", Mike Masnick was also damning of Sherman's editorial, contending that while the misinformation put forth by opponents of the bills was explainable by an errant focus on early drafts and the participation of a subset of the public prone to exaggeration and untruth, the misinformation propagated by the supporters was "the direct and planned out strategy of the MPAA, RIAA and US Chamber of Commerce to directly mislead Congress and the press by presenting information in a manner that was flat out false". Masnick concluded:
| “ | Eleven paragraphs of pure rhetoric and misinformation... and then at the end, a plea for an end to such tactics? Sorry, but it might help if you actually started dumping the misinformation and nasty rhetoric yourself. Then feel free to join the rest of us on the open internet where these discussions are already ongoing. | ” |
Wales and Walsh: "We Are The Media, And So Are You"
On February 9, Wikimedia Foundation trustees Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh gave voice to the dominant perspective of Wikimedians in an op-ed for the Washington Post, "We are the media, and so are you". It was notable by contrast to the week's two preceding editorials in that the authors resisted the framing of the debate as a battle between the competing worlds of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, vested interests at war to protect their narrow goals by whatever means at their disposal. Rather, Wales and Walsh, proposed, the defeat of SOPA/PIPA represented an awakening of political consciousness on the part of millions of regular internet users who had hitherto been "all but invisible to Congress". Defying charges that the upswell of protest was a calculated instigation by deep-pocketed technology firms and their lobbyists – "about as organic as the masses of North Koreans crying in the streets upon hearing of Kim Jong Il’s death" (PCC Associates), Wales and Walsh distanced themselves and this emergent activist movement from the large technology companies, whom they characterised as just another instantiation of rising commercial powers enmeshing themselves in the murky world of legislation for their shareholders' benefit. Wikipedia, a donation-funded mass movement of ordinary people, was an entirely different entity, they conjectured:
| “ | Wikipedia is not opposed to the rights of creators — we have the largest collection of creators in human history. The effort that went into building Wikipedia could have created shelves full of albums or near-endless nights of movies. Instead it’s providing unrestricted access to the world’s knowledge. Protecting our rights as creators means ensuring that we can build our encyclopedias, photographs, videos, Web sites, charities and businesses without the fear that they all will be taken away from us without due process. It means protecting our ability to speak freely, without being vulnerable to poorly drafted laws that leave our fate to a law enforcement body that has no oversight and no appeal process. It means protecting the legal infrastructure that allowed our sharing of knowledge and creativity to flourish, and protecting our ability to do so on technical infrastructure that allows for security and privacy for all Internet users. | ” |
The Wikimedia movement is uninterested in entering a phase of permanent advocacy, they argued, but what the debates had changed is that they forced the acknowledgement that the projects' existence was inherently political, and demanded defence on those grounds. The Wikimedia movement could no longer stand on the sidelines while organisations such as Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought to protect the environment that facilitated its existence, the trustees argued; the shifting cultural and political landscape meant that the institutions of Congress and copyright, designed for times now past in which small number of industrial titans controlled the dissemination of culture and information, required rethinking in this age of technologically-enabled mass expression. The piece concluded with a forceful reframing of the terms of debate:
| “ | [W]e are the media industry. We are the creators. We are the innovators. The whole world benefits from our work. That work, and our ability to do it, is worth protecting for everyone. | ” |
In the spirit of this distributed media age, the privilege of editorials need not remain the sole domain of the elite thoughtleaders. The Signpost is soliciting compelling, thoughtful and provocative opinion essays of all perspectives: if you think you could have something worthy of attention and debate to write on this or another issue of critical relevance to the reading community, consider proposing it at our dedicated desk or by email to wikipediasignpost
gmail.com
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WikiProject Stub Sorting
- WikiProject Cooperation is a new project providing guidance, oversight, and resources for editors paid by companies or organizations to edit Wikipedia.
- WikiProject Wikify's February Drive is underway. Get busy and earn a barnstar for your efforts.
- The Teyler's Museum in the Netherlands is sponsoring a contest from now until May with real-world prizes. The competition is open to contributors of any language of Wikipedia and is part of the Teylers GLAM project.
- WikiProject Open Access is a new project aimed at improving the coverage of Open Access and related topics and widening the use of Open Access materials on Wikimedia projects.
This week's subject, WikiProject Stub Sorting, was started in November 2004 with the intention of organizing and categorizing stubs and stub categories. The project's 267 participants use a vast array of categories, celebrate the discovery of new categories, and discuss the deletion of unnecessary ones. The project maintains a field guide for stub sorters, to-do list, and handbook on naming conventions. We interviewed Grutness and PamD.
Sorting articles sounds like a mundane task. Why do you do it? What motivates so many Wikipedians to join WikiProject Stub Sorting?
- Grutness: A lot of Wikipedians seem to prefer the idea that they can do small amounts to help the articles – that's the reason there are so many projects and task-forces related to the behind-the-scenes work of Wikipedia. Even if you haven't a huge amount to add to a specific topic (not everyone is an expert in some obscure or arcane subject), you can still help to improve the encyclopedia. Stub sorting is attractive because it helps other editors to facilitate the expert addition of information to articles by making those articles more easily found. It's a lubrication and liaison process really between article and expert.
- PamD: It's a useful job to do, to help subject experts get access to the stubs in their areas for further development. And it becomes a challenge: "There must be an appropriate stub type out there...", and the other challenge of "Let's get Category:Stubs emptied. (Though sometimes, if an editor has had a stub-creation frenzy and produced a mass of stubs I don't find interesting, I'll give up and just clear out one particular letter of the alphabet as my particular patch.) It introduces you to articles (OK, stubs) on a wide range of topics, broadens the horizons. I tend to do a lot more than just stub-sort: where appropriate I add {{DEFAULTSORT}}, {{unref}}, {{coord missing}}, and sometimes I will sort out formatting, grammar, add links, etc if the article seems worthwhile but is struggling. Sometimes I create missing redirects from alternative titles given in the article if they're missing. So as well as stub-sorting I do a fair bit of cleanup and wikification. I also check that if a stub has a disambiguated title it's got the appropriate link from a dab page or hatnote – or move it to the correct title if it doesn't need disambiguated. It's all very WikiGnomish: tinkering around usefully and satisfyingly.
Why do stubs deserve special attention? How does proper categorization benefit stubs and the encyclopedia as a whole?
- Grutness: Stubs deserve special attention for several reasons, not least of all simply because they are stubs – they're areas where there is a clear lack of information of a subject, so they're areas where the encyclopedia needs work. They're also – let's face it – a little embarrassing. You get a newbie checking out a random article on Wikipedia and they come across one sentence on a subject – it doesn't put the project as a whole in the best light. Categorisation, as explained above, is vital to the process of getting stub articles to editors who are interested in specific subject areas.
The project's talk page receives new posts on a daily basis. What sort of discussions attract editors to the project's talk page? Describe the community that keeps this project going.
- Grutness: I'm not sure what kind of editor is attracted to stub sorting – maybe obsessives and neat freaks! But any large body of information needs organisation (imagine an encyclopedia with no form of indexing or cross-referencing!) and there are people who realise the importance of such a task. One group of editors who are naturally drawn to stub discussions is those associated with the specific subject area, and as such WP:SS tries to liaise with other WikiProjects on a regular basis. Let's face it, splitting a subject's stub category into smaller categories often requires arcane information about specific subjects, information far more readily available to people who are experts in their field. While some subjects are easy to split (It's pretty easy to split a category for African politicians by country, for instance), others require a lot more expertise, and that's where outside help for other projects comes in. So there's generally discussion from a hard core of stub sorters and visitors from subject-specific topics.
Amid the vast variety of stub categories, how do you determine which categories to use for a stub? Have there been any efforts to educate editors on how to select categories for stub articles? Do you foresee the number of categories increasing or decreasing in the future?
- Grutness: Again, liaison with other projects makes some of this task easier, and the gradual splitting of oversized stub types into more specific stub types reduces the number of stubs that an article will get (to use the same example as above, whereas a stub may have been marked as both an African politician stub and a Ghanaian biography stub, it can not be marked simply as a Ghanaian politician stub). In general, there is a very rough hierarchy of which stubs should go on an article, but in most cases we're guided by the exact nature of the article itself. I'd see the number of categories and stub types as continuing to expand as long as the number of stubs expands – we try to keep the number of articles in individual stub categories to a specific range, a sort of "sweet spot" of between about 60 and 600 articles, which tends to make the search for editable stubs easier for editors working in a specific subject area. So as the number of stubs expands, the number of categories does too.
- PamD: Quite often I know the stub type anyway from experience; sometimes I go to that huge hierarchy and move downwards; sometimes I find a relevant category and move upwards until I find a category which has a stubs subcategory (and sometimes I then add extra links in that hierarchy where the stub category wasn't a child category of the best matching category). Some stubs don't have much content, and I'll often explore to find out more information on the topic (e.g. which country it's in, where the stub says "X is a village near Y" and not much more) to get it stub-sorted as closely as possible.
When working with stubs, how often do you come across articles about non-notable subjects, promotional material, and other examples of what Wikipedia is not? Does your effort to sort stubs benefit other stub-related projects?
- Grutness: Well, it definitely benefits subject-specific wikiprojects, so yes from that point of view. But yeah, while the principal aim of stub sorting is to sort stubs, naturally, a lot of stub sorters combine that work with adding other cleanup templates or activities such as WP:prodding and WP:AFDing. A lot of new stubs in particular (those which are simply marked with {{stub}} rather than a subject-specific stub type) are likely deletion candidates that have slipped through the new pages patrol.
- PamD: Yes, I'll sometimes Speedy or PROD a stub, as well as stub-sorting it (even it seems a clear CSD I'll sort the stub to get it out of the unsorted stubs category and save the time of the other stub-sorters).
What are WikiProject Stub Sorting's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
- Grutness: There are always over-sized categories which need looking at to see whether there's any possible split that can be proposed, and there are always new stubs coming in that need sorting into their specific subject types. And given the hierarchy of stub types, even the newest of stub sorters can quickly learn a handful of stub templates that will help them move stubs further up the hierarchy (e.g., sorting bio-stubs or geo-stubs by nationality or country is as simple as adding "CountryName-" to the front of a stub tag and is a big help). It does take a little while to get a feel for the ways in which new stub type proposals are made, but it's not so esoteric that it can't be picked up by anyone fairly quickly, so I'd recommend anyone interested in joining WPSS to start by doing some simple sorting and lurk on the proposals page for a short while – it should give them a fair idea of what goes on, and it won't be long before they find themselves joining in with the discussions and proposals.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Grutness: One thing that people do tend to complain about with stub-sorting is the axes on which stubs are split, which often seem a little counterintuitive to individual subject WikiProjects. There are reasons for this – usually to try to make stub types as uniform as possible across the whole of Wikipedia (something which is a major aim of WPSS and does occasionally bring its members into conflict with other editors. There are several useful essays and subpages in Category:WikiProject Stub sorting which try to explain some of the less obvious things which happen in stub-sorting, and they're well worth looking at, by prospective stubsorters and non-stubsorters alike.
- Hope that helps! I should note that I am no longer nearly as active within WPSS as I once was, but unless things have drastically changed at the project in the last two or three months, most of the information is still accurate.
- PamD: A couple of small pleas to editors adding {{stub}} to articles:
- Remember it goes at the end after everything except inter-language links (per WP:FOOTERS) – if you put it in the right place first it's easier to find it and saves us having to move it.
- Please don't capitalise the "S" in {{stub}} – it saves a few keystrokes if it's already lower-case when we're changing it to {{something-stub}} (multiply it by the number of stubs – quite a lot of keystrokes). Thanks.
Next week, we'll head to the phoenix city to see a country that has risen from the ashes of war time after time. Until then, sing Mazurek Dąbrowskiego in the archive.
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The best of the week
Featured articles
Eight featured articles were promoted this week:
- Turning Point (2008) (nom) by Wrestlinglover. Turning Point (2008) was a professional wrestling pay-per-view event produced by the Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) promotion, which took place on November 9, 2008 at the TNA Impact! Zone in Orlando, Florida. It was the fourth in the Turning Point chronology and featured eight professional wrestling matches, with three involving championships. The TNA Legends Championship was successfully defended by Booker T.
- Jonathan Agnew (nom) by Dweller and The Rambling Man. Jonathan Agnew (born 1960) is an English cricket broadcaster and former professional cricketer. He had a successful career as a fast bowler for Leicestershire from 1979 to 1990, played for the England team, and was named one of the Cricketers of the Year by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack in 1988. While still a player, Agnew began a career in cricket journalism and commentary, and is a leading voice of cricket for BBC radio and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
- Cross of Gold speech (nom) by Wehwalt. The "Cross of Gold" speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan, a former congressman from Nebraska, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. In it he decried the gold standard, concluding the speech, "you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold". It helped catapult him to the Democratic Party's presidential nomination and is considered one of the greatest political speeches in American history.
- Manhunter (nom) by Grapple X. Manhunter is a 1986 American thriller film based on Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon. Written and directed by Michael Mann, it stars William Petersen as FBI profiler Will Graham and Brian Cox as the killer, Hannibal Lecktor. The film focuses on the forensic work used to track down the killer, known as the "The Tooth Fairy", and highlights the similarities between the FBI profiler and his quarry.
- George W. Romney (nom) by Wasted Time R. American businessman and politician George W. Romney (1907–1995) was chairman and CEO of American Motors Corporation from 1954 to 1962, Governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, and the US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1969 to 1973. He is the father of former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney and the husband of former Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Lenore Romney.
- Monteverdi's lost operas (nom) by Brianboulton. The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), in addition to a large output of church music and madrigals, wrote prolifically for the stage. Opera as a musical and theatrical genre began to emerge during the early part of Monteverdi's career, initially as a form of courtly entertainment. Although the music has disappeared almost entirely for seven operas, three—L'Orfeo (1607), Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1643)—have survived with their music and librettos intact.
- John Barbirolli (nom) by Tim riley. Sir John Barbirolli was an English conductor and cellist. He is remembered above all as conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, which he helped save from dissolution in 1943 and conducted for the rest of his life. Earlier in his career he was Arturo Toscanini's successor as music director of the New York Philharmonic, as well as serving a guest conductor for many other operas.
- Hadji Ali (nom) by Fuhghettaboutit. Hadji Ali was a vaudeville performance artist famous for acts of controlled regurgitation. His best known feats included water spouting, smoke swallowing and nut and handkerchief swallowing followed by disgorgement. Ali's most famous stunt, and the highlight of his act, was drinking copious amounts of water followed by kerosene, and then acting by turns as a human flame thrower and fire extinguisher as he expelled the two liquids onto a theatrical prop.
Featured lists
Two featured lists were promoted this week:
- Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play (nom) by Albacore. The Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play was established in 1949 under the title Tony Award for Actor, Supporting or Featured (Dramatic) in the United States. Since then, numerous actors have won this award, with Frank Langella being the only one to win it twice. Several portrayals of the same character by different actors have also won.
- Malmö FF in Europe (nom) by Reckless182. Malmö Fotbollförening, a Swedish football team out of Malmö, has participated in 13 seasons in the European Cup and Champions League, 13 seasons in the UEFA Cup and Europa League, five seasons in the Cup Winners' Cup, one season in the Intertoto Cup, and a competition organized by FIFA. The team has recorded 41 wins, 26 draws, and 46 defeats. Its most decisive victory was the 11–0 win over Pezoporikos Larnaca of Cyprus in the 1973–74 European Cup Winners' Cup.
Featured pictures
Ten featured pictures were promoted this week:
- Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, restored (nom; related article), created by Leonardo da Vinci, restored by Dcoetzee, and nominated by Crisco 1492. The Mona Lisa, considered the most famous painting in the world, was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the early 16th century. Famous in part for its enigmatic smile, the model depicted is commonly said to be Lisa del Giocondo. Digitization by the Center for Research and Restoration of Museums of France.
- Temple Square, Salt Lake City, in 1899 (nom; related article), created by William Henry Jackson, retouched by Tom dl, and nominated by Mmxx. The new featured photochrom print depicts Temple Square in central Salt Lake City. The temple complex, covering ten acres (40,000 m²), is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and consists of the Salt Lake Temple, Salt Lake Tabernacle, Salt Lake Assembly Hall, the Seagull Monument and two visitors' centers.
- Sri Shanmukaha Subramania Swami by Raja Ravi Varma (nom; related article), created by Raja Ravi Varma and nominated by Redtigerxyz. Murugan, also known as Kartikeyan, Skanda, Subramania, and Subrahmanyan, is a Hindu deity mainly worshiped by Tamil Hindus. The new featured picture depicts Murugan and his consorts riding his mount, the peacock.
- Italian artist painting with watercolours (nom; related article), created by Dongio and nominated by Papa Lima Whiskey 2. This new featured picture depicts an Italian painter using watercolour paints in Dolceacqua, Liguria, Italy. Watercolour paints, also known as aquarelles, are paints consisting of pigments suspended in a water base.
- Everest and other mountains viewed from airplane (nom; related article), created by Shrimpo1967, edited by Durova and Papa Lima Whiskey 2, and nominated by Crisco 1492. This new featured image, annotated on Commons, depicts two of the world's highest mountains, Everest and Lhotse, as well as several other mountains. Taken from a Druk Air flight south of the mountains, the image provides topographical information of the area around them.
- The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (nom; related article), created by Vincent van Gogh and nominated by Crisco 1492. The Starry Night, also known under its Dutch title De sterrennacht, is an 1889 impressionist painting by Vincent van Gogh. The painting, measuring 73.7 cm × 92.1 cm (29 in × 36¼ in), is widely hailed as his best work and has been part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941. The featured digitization is from the Google Art Project.
- Girls' Generation (nom; related article), created by LG Corp. and co-nominated by Crisco 1492 and Eustress. Nine-member Korean girl band Girls' Generation, formed in 2007 by S.M. Entertainment, has released four full albums (one in Japanese and three in Korean), three mini-albums, and numerous singles. The new featured picture, taken in January 2012 by LG Corp to advertise its Cinema 3D TV, depicts members Kim Tae-yeon, Kim Hyo-yeon, Seo Joo-hyun, Choi Soo-young, Im Yoona, Jessica Jung, Tiffany Hwang, Sunny Lee, and Kwon Yuri.
- Portrait of Balthazar Castiglione by Raphael (nom; related article), created by Raphael and nominated by Crisco 1492. Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, painted c. 1514–1515 and commonly attributed to Italian artist Raphael, depicts diplomat and humanist Baldassare Castiglione. Possibly meant to accompany Castiglione's wife and children when he went abroad, the portrait may have taken its inspiration from Leonarda da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The new featured painting was digitized by the Google Art Project.
- Messier 82 (nom; related article), created by NASA and co-nominated by Crisco 1492 and Extra999. Messier 82, the prototype starburst galaxy, is located approximately 12 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Ursa Major. The new featured picture combines exposures taken with four colored filters that capture starlight from visible and infrared wavelengths as well as the light from the glowing hydrogen filaments.
- USS Arizona (BB39) underway (nom; related article), created by an unknown author and restored/nominated by Mmxx. The American warship USS Arizona, built in the 1910s, was a Pennsylvania-class "super-dreadnought" battleship that measured 608 ft (185.3 m) in length and 97 ft (29.6 m) across at the beam. Named to honour Arizona's entry as the 48th US state, the ship was sunk in a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
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Betacommand 3 closed, proposed decision in Civility enforcement, AUSC candidates announced
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases this week, and closed one case (Betacommand 3), leaving three open.
AUSC candidates announced
On 9 February, the Arbitration Committee announced the five editors whose application to serve as community members on the Audit Subcommittee ("AUSC") were approved for consideration. AUSC was established by the committee to investigate complaints concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia, and to provide better monitoring and supervision of the CheckUser and Oversight positions along with the use of the applicable tools.
There are three vacancies in non-arbitrator positions on the subcommittee, due to the election of past community members AGK and Courcelles to the full committee itself and the expiration of community member Keegan's term in March. Applicants for the positions will be reviewed by arbitrators in internal discussions starting on 19 February. Until then, the community is invited to question and discuss the candidates. The committee is due to announce the appointments on 29 February.
The five candidates are:
- Avraham – administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, oversighter and steward
- DeltaQuad – administrator & SPI clerk
- MBisanz – administrator, bureaucrat, former AUSC member (2010–2011) & former SPI clerk
- Ponyo – administrator & OTRS volunteer
- Salvio giuliano – administrator & ArbCom clerk
Closed cases
Betacommand 3
The arbitration case regarding Δ (formerly Betacommand) has closed. The case was opened to address the multitude of sanctions in effect on the editor. In the final decision, the committee noted that the community had the ability to sanction editors who cause a detriment to the encyclopedia, and that sanctioned editors are expected to correct the identified issues, lest more severe sanctions be implemented.
They found that the community had in the past raised concerns about Betacommand regarding both the content of his edits and his failure to adequately communicate their purpose when asked, and that the community had placed him under various restrictions as a consequence.
The committee determined that the community sanctions that were imposed on Betacommand have not been successful at addressing the editing problems, noting that he had on several occasions ignored the sanctions, and that he was still not communicating with other editors in an appropriate manner.
As a result of this, by a 10–6 majority, the committee superseded the community sanctions that were in place and imposed a site ban of no less than one year. Betacommand may request that the ban be lifted once the year has passed and after detailing his intended editing activities and demonstrating his understanding of and intention to refrain from the actions which resulted in his ban. Such a request would then be presented to the community for review.
Open cases
Civility enforcement (Week 7)
This case was initially opened due to the actions of several administrators in relation to an editor who was blocked over perceived incivility. The evidence and workshop phases ended over a week ago with the submissions of over twenty editors. A proposed decision was posted by Hersfold on February 14, with sanctions proposed that range from admonishments to desysopping for the administrators involved in the case, and admonishments to site bans for Malleus Fatuorum. A general warning to the community has also been proposed, warning against conduct that causes a breakdown of communication within a discussion, reminding that uncivil conduct can be a factor in the breaking down of consensus forming, and that blocks or other restrictions may be used in the event of repeated disruption to ensure the collaborative environment of Wikipedia is maintained. At the time of writing, there is no clear indication as to which remedies are likely to be implemented.
Article titles and capitalization (Week 3)
This case was opened to review alleged disruptive editing on the Manual of Style and other pages to do with article naming. Over the last week, 11 editors submitted evidence to the Committee while 7 editors discussed proposals at the case workshop. Decision drafters AGK, David Fuchs, and Casliber will close these two stages on 19 February, a week prior to the release of a proposed decision.
On 9 February, a major party in the case, JCScaliger, was blocked as a sockpuppet of Pmanderson by arbitrator Elen of the Roads. However, the latter editor noted on her talk page that the block was not under the aegis of the Arbitration Committee, but rather one made in her capacity as the administrator who originally blocked Pmanderson. The block decision is notable as it has shown an evolution in sockpuppet investigations, as the evidence employed sophisticated forensic analysis to match the two accounts. Additionally, The Signpost can independently confirm similarities between the two user accounts from an analysis of the relevant data in question.
TimidGuy ban appeal (Week 9)
This case was brought to the Committee by an editor to appeal a site ban that was imposed by Jimbo Wales. The expected proposed decision, as mentioned in previous Signpost coverage, is yet to be posted but has been scheduled for 17 February.
Other requests and committee action
- The Committee amended their Racepacket decision by indefinitely site banning Racepacket for violating an interaction ban posted in their original decision. The vote was 10–0–1, with two arbitrators recused.
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January sees prototype new geodata API; but February looks to be a testing time for top developers
January engineering report published
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for January 2012 was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. The projects and events picked out by the report writers (the San Francisco Hackathon, SOPA blackout, release of an official Wikimedia Android app, and creation of extra testing facilities ahead of 1.19's deployment) have all been covered in the previous issues of The Signpost; however, the report did contain several items of note that were not.
For example, the report describes how developers Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw recently visited Ballarat, Australia to attend the linux.conf.au conference, where they presented a talk about the Wikimedia Resource Loader entitled Low-hanging Fruit vs. Micro-optimization, Creative Techniques for Loading Web Pages Faster. It also includes a list of 11 open engineering-related positions at the Foundation, as well as confirmation of the changes in personnel over the month; news of the successful upgrade of Wikimedia's mail servers (likely to allow all users to enjoy email notifications for watchlist changes if they so wish); and expansion in the number of projects running on Wikimedia Labs; the slower but still good progress in expanding the range of functionality included in the new parser (and hence eventually destined for support in the new Visual Editor); and the creation of a beta geo-coordinate API module that will allow, for example, proximity searches when fully deployed and integrated.
Testing time ahead for top developers
At the time of writing, https://test2.wikipedia.org is set to soon be updated to run MediaWiki 1.19. This will yield the closest approximation yet of how the software is likely to fare when deployed to front-line wikis, as it is scheduled to in the coming weeks (see also a detailed recent blog post describing how best to help test the software before its release). 1.19 had been formally branched on Wednesday, clearly defining which features have and have not made it into the release: from now on, only bug fixes will be accepted into the branch.
Unfortunately for the head developers managing the release process, the hard part is still to come. From here on in, they will be fighting not only to get 1.19 out on time and on spec, but to ensure the swift and satisfactory switchover of the core MediaWiki repository from Subversion (SVN) to Git. The former had required a long code "slush" in order to allow developers to review months' worth of unchecked code; the latter demands that in many respects it must continue until Git is cut loose from SVN (wikitech-l mailing list). Long code slushes are difficult for developers to work with, however, since they block easy collaboration and obstruct development work more generally; indeed, avoiding the need for future code slushes (or indeed full code freezes) is one of the motivating factors behind the switchover. The next few weeks, then, are likely to be tense ones as staff and volunteer developers alike hold back on major development work unrelated to getting 1.19 on time and agree upon the myriad of details necessary to ensure a clean Git switchover, first of core code and later of extensions (also wikitech-l).
One such detail that received discussion time this week was the code review system to be used under Git (since the current system is highly customised for use with SVN). A system developed at Google and known as Gerrit was generally assumed to be the preferred choice, with some members of the Wikimedia system administration team already using it. This week the prospect was raised of instead switching to the more GUI-friendly Phabricator developed at Facebook; lead developers have decided to postpone a final decision until the summer and to use Gerrit in the meantime (also wikitech-l).
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- FOSS, a beginner's guide: Open Advice, subtitled FOSS: What We Wish We Had Known When We Started, was published online this week. Naturally, the collection of essays about Free and open software, which includes contributions for MediaWiki regulars such as Guillaume Paumier and Felipe Ortega, is free to download and open-licensed. Essay topics (of which there are 42) span "from 'Writing patches' to 'Documentation for Novices', to business models, conferences, translation, design, and more". The comprehensive 300-page work is available in PDF, mobile, and print editions (Wikimedia blog, direct link to accompanying website).
- API formats to be phased out?: After it was discovered that certain API formats would routinely output content deemed (incorrectly) as unsafe by well-known security software, there was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about the possibility of dropping support for a number of output formats entirely. JSON is currently the preferred output format, and the one recommended for new API users.
- Berlin Hackathon dates confirmed: This year's Berlin Hackathon will be held on 1–3 June, it was confirmed this week (wikitech-l mailing list). The hackathon, which is sponsored by Wikimedia Deutschland and now in its fourth year, is expected to have well in excess of 100 attendees, and will cover "user scripts, gadgets, API use, Toolserver, Wikimedia Labs, mobile, structured data, templates" and other topics.
- Prompt for edit summary? But there's one there already: With the resolution of bug #17416, the inbuilt "Prompt for edit summary" preference will no longer prompt for a new summary if the user has simply accepted the preloaded edit summary.
- Thumb file backend system migrated: As discussed in last week's "Technology Report", this week saw significant migration of Wikimedia's file backend. All thumbnail images are now being served by Swift, the new, more scalable system designed to increase redundancy and hence avoid future glitches from affecting end users; the images themselves are set to follow later in the year, according to a post on the Wikimedia blog. As predicted, there was minimal disruption during the switchover period.
- Translation memory upgrade: Translatewiki.net founder Niklas Laxström described this week on his blog his recent efforts to improve translatewiki.net's translation memory capabilities. Such a memory allows translations to be pre-filled based on similar past translations, saving translators increasing amounts of time and hence allowing them to translate more, quicker. In other localisation-related news, fellow team member Gerard Meijssen used a blog post to note the open question of how the translation framework might be adapted to work better in the months leading up to Lua-integration (see previous Signpost article for context).
- The role of Volunteer Development Co-ordinator: Sumana Harihareswara, who currently works as the WMF's Volunteer Development Co-ordinator and whose name appears regularly in editions of the "Technology Report", blogged this week about what that role had entailed, through the lens of events since 1 February. The list included at least 285 work-related emails sent as part of her work to "nurture the software community that supports the Wikimedia movement".
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