Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2012-07-09
Reforming the education programs: lessons from Cairo
Background
Wikipedia has a long history of collaborating with educational institutions. The Schools and Universities Program—international and in many languages, but dominated by American institutions—started in 2003 and evolved case by case with little system. This changed in 2009 as Wikimedia embarked on its formal strategic process, and outreach in higher education came to be seen in terms of achieving explicit goals—especially that of increasing editor participation.
The first "strategic" Wikimedia Foundation program to emerge was the Public Policy Initiative (PPI) in 2010–11 (see Signpost coverage: September 2010, July 2011), a highly successful pilot to improve the English Wikipedia’s articles in the field of US public policy, centering on the participation of college classes supported by Wikipedia ambassadors, and funded by the Stanton Foundation. The foundation then expanded the model beyond the US, most notably with the Indian Education Pilot 2011 in Pune. This ended in abject failure (Signpost coverage), largely due to a lack of community engagement by the consultants running the pilot, and it resulted in significant damage to the reputation of the education program within the Wikipedia community. Now the so-called US–Canada education program is in reform mode, attempting to resolve the structural problems and controversial issues that have arisen over the past year.
Other programs have since included chapter-run pilots in Europe, and the Cairo pilot as part of the foundation’s Arabic language initiative, which gathered pace under the guidance of the PPI core staff just as the problems in the Indian program were coming to light and the US education program was scaling up the PPI structures.
The Arabic language is a priority for the Wikimedia Foundation because of the significance of the language and its peoples as opposed to the relatively small size of the Arabic Wikipedia and editing community. As the sixth most popular language of the world, Arabic is the native tongue of about 300 million people. It is spread laterally thousands of kilometres from Morocco, the Spanish Sahara, and Mali on the Atlantic coast of North Africa to its millenium-old eastern boundary on the Iraq–Iran border. Arabic's cultural and scientific heritage alone make it an important part of the goals of the movement to provide free knowledge for everyone; but its importance as one of the world's great contemporary languages spoken by great numbers of people in societies undergoing radical change have highlighted the value of supporting movement-related education programs there. Egypt is the largest of the Arab-language nations, with some 80 million speakers. Egyptian Arabic is just one of many dialects; although there is a small Wikipedia site devoted to the dialect, the education program has focused on the standard-Arabic Wikipedia.
The Cairo pilot
The recent pilot deployed methods to overcome significant challenges in both real-life and on-wiki environments, and has produced positive results despite the current political instability in Egypt and more widely the wave of demonstrations and protests in the Arab-speaking world since December 2010, known in some quarters as the Arab Spring.
While the Indian pilot and some participating college classes in the US education program suffered from structural problems, such as an unbalanced student–ambassador ratio, and were widely criticised as being out-of-touch with the editing community, the Cairo pilot was carefully designed to marshal strong support for the program and individual students from the local university and Arabic Wikipedia communities. This was achieved through careful organisation at the institutions and by reaching out in advance to the Arabic Wikipedia community, especially local community members on the ground in Cairo, and limiting the number of participating classes to seven, each with a maximum size of fifteen.
The program produced solid overall results, with 246 articles edited by 56 participating students. Major contributions to the Arabic Wikipedia by article creation, improvement and translations like of the Spanish articles of the author Laura Restrepo (Google translate) and the painter Ernesto Sabato (Google translate) or the Panic of 1907 (Google translate) into Arabic were made during the pilot. Both lecturers and participating students as well as community members involved were largely satisfied with the initiative and its conduct and a large number of students taking part in this terms project signed up as campus ambassadors for the next term, thereby expanding the previously small local Cairo community.
The Signpost was unable to speak with local participants at short notice, but LiAnna Davis, the foundation's Wikipedia education program communications manager, made contact with us after an all-day meeting in Cairo to discuss how the movement can use the results to further improve its education initiatives. "We had no idea if the Wikipedia Education Program would work in Egypt, especially given the uncertainty following the Arab Spring. We wanted to start very small in case it didn't work. Our goal was to see if the program could work in Egypt, and if it was appropriate for professors and students to edit the Arabic Wikipedia with help from ambassadors. The answer was that it absolutely worked. Taking students, professors, and ambassadors together," LiAnna said, "50% were very satisfied, 38% somewhat satisfied, 4% mixed reactions, and 8% somewhat dissatisfied."
We asked LiAnna to elaborate on the statement in the draft pilot report that "the campus ambassadors' skills for effectively helping the students need to be improved". For the initial campus ambassador training," she said, "we recruited current Cairo Wikipedians to lead the training in Arabic. We suggested some topics, but it was a community-led process focusing on what they thought was most important for students to know from their ambassadors. We expect ... a learning process that will enable them to continuously improve their ability to support the teachers and students." LiAnna and her colleagues are delighted that "the students who participated in the pilot were very eager to be campus ambassadors next term and help improve the training to focus on what they as students receiving help from Ambassadors felt was most needed."
A notable aspect of the report is that some female students were uncomfortable in communicating online with people they didn’t know, and had a male student in the class write as proxies. We asked LiAnna whether this signals a larger problem in getting female Arabic-speakers to participate in WP. She pointed out that it just wasn't possible to recruit female online ambassadors because the community isn't yet big enough. The 15 online ambassadors (as opposed to the campus ambassadors) were drawn from the ranks of experienced Arabic Wikipedians, who number fewer than 70 over the entire Arabic-speaking population worldwide, and are almost entirely male. "One positive is that 87% of the students who participated were female, and they've expressed a lot of enthusiasm for continuing to contribute to Wikipedia, so we're hopeful we can have an impact on those numbers as the program grows larger."
"According to our survey, 92% indicated they'd like to continue. Of course, other responsibilities often get in the way of good intentions, but we are hopeful that many will continue to contribute in some form to the Arabic Wikipedia. Students, professors, and ambassadors all spoke extensively about how important it is to have information available in Arabic on the internet, and how it's their civic duty to improve the Arabic Wikipedia. I'm really looking forward to seeing this program mature and what kind of difference we can make on the Arabic WIkipedia."
The only technical hitch was apparently that participants found the left-to-right wikimarkup confusing and unintuitive (almost all semitic languages are written from right to left). LiAnna says that the foundation technical department has been informed of this issue.
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Russian Wikipedia shuts down to fight censorship threat; E3 team and new tools; Wikitravel proposal bogged down
Russian Wikipedia blacked out
In news that has come in just as we publish this week's edition, the Russian Wikipedia has been blacked out for 24 hours until 20:00 UTC Tuesday as a protest against a bill currently before the Duma (the Russian parliament) that proposes mechanisms to block IP addresses and DNS records. Visitors to the Russian Wikipedia are confronted by the sign above in protest at a bill before the parliament that appears to enable significant internet censorship. The Russian word for Wikipedia is crossed out in this banner, and the text says: "Imagine a world without free knowledge. The State Duma is currently conducting the second reading of a bill to amend the "Law on Information", which has the potential to lead to the creation of extra-judicial censorship of the Internet in Russia, including the closure of access to the Russian Wikipedia. Today, the Wikipedia community protests against censorship as a threat to free knowledge that is open to all mankind. We ask that you oppose this bill."
The action by the Russian Wikipedia echoes the worldwide blacking-out of the English Wikipedia on 18 January as a protest against two bills before the US Congress (see previous Signpost coverage and Wikipedia initiative). The head of Wikimedia Russia, Vladimir Medeyko (User:Drbug), told the Signpost that in practice this will probably give the government authority to take action against internet websites—potentially including Wikipedia—and it could be delegated to police officers and intelligence operatives without due diligence. "Although the draft legislation allows for judicial appeal, in Russia this is typically a very lengthy process that is likely to lead to significant harm to internet freedom."
A post on Wikimedia Russia's Meta blog states (translated by the Signpost):
| “ | The Russian Wikipedia will be closed on 10 July because the Russian parliament is debating amendments to information law that could create real censorship of the internet—a blacklisting and filtering of internet sites. Supporters of the law say it is aimed only at widely prohibited content such as child pornography, ... but we believe the conditions for determining where content falls under this law will create something akin to the Chinese firewall. The existing Russian legal environment suggests that the worst-case scenario is not unlikely, in which access to Wikipedia will soon be closed throughout the country. | ” |
Medeyko says the second reading of the bill is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, Moscow time. "What makes it so dangerous is that the decision to ban an address may be issued by any 'duly authorised' agency, with unexplained procedures for providing evidence to the 'registry'. The very vagueness of this wording is most concerning. The Russian Wikipedia community moved quickly with a proposal for the black-out—it was voted on in only one day—and implemented with 292 in support, 22 for posting a banner only, and 74 against any action. The decision was that no one would edit the project during the blackout, although administrators are technically still able to do so."
The Russian minister for information, Nikolay Nikiforov, has made several tweets that suggest the government may not force the law through in the short term, including: "I am sure that this law will still be accepted, to the 2nd of reading only a few managed to avoid controversial positions and extend up to 1 Nov." and "the idea of combatting child pornography on the web is correct. But in general, the Internet should remain a free environment".
Two feature updates and a new experiment
The Wikimedia Foundation's efforts regarding editor engagement having recently focused on achieving three results: the rollout of version 5 of the article feedback tool; research into the effectiveness of the existing MoodBar extension; and the creation of the LastModified extension, representing the first feature experiment completed by the new editor engagement experiments (E3) team, founded in April 2012.
The fifth incarnation of the article feedback tool, AFT5, started in August 2010 as part of the public policy initiative. The feature empowers readers, who otherwise wouldn't participate in the discourse on an article, leaving publicly displayed feedback at the bottom. A prominent example is Higgs boson, on a topic that is at the center of public attention over the CERN experimental results. The article feedback tool received 400 responses, ranging from praise to editorial suggestions and trolling, so far. While SPat, an author of the article, praised the tool, there remains the question of how to handle the display or removal of inappropriate input. The tool is due for deployment in some 10% of English Wikipedia articles by July 17, and issues surrounding its use are still open for community debate.
Another project inherited by E3, the MoodBar, started in June 2011; the tool aims to improve the interaction between new editors and the established community. Results published over the past month suggest that while new users who use MoodBar tend to be more active than the average new editor, "there is only mild and circumstantial evidence that the reported mood is associated with a higher or lower edit count".
In May 2012, E3 undertook a timestamp experiment to test whether making the article history more prominent would result in its wider usage, and thereby an article more transparent to its readers (see also this week's Technology report). Results based on a sample of about 20,000 English Wikipedia articles show that IP editors and readers clicked on the normal "View history" tab more than twice as often when the prominent timestamp was present.
While the timestamp experiment has now closed and the AFT and MoodBar will continue to be tested (see the main research page for more information), the specifications of the new post-edit feedback tool and the long-awaited new RC tool, under development since March 2012 as a monitor of newly created pages, have yet to be finalized.
Commercialisation fears unaddressed in Wikitravel proposal
The Wikitravel proposal, launched in April 2012 (Signpost coverage on April 16 and 23) is still live after nearly three months. On July 6, the RfC entered its second round having been promoted in a site notice from April 18 after weeks of debate on Meta as to whether Wikimedia should host a travel guide project.
The move came after weeks without substantial progress on Meta, while the German NGO that hosts Wikivoyage, a second project that forked away from WikiTravel in 2006, is applying to join the proposal, in effect using a migration to the WMF umbrella to merge back with WikiTravel. Wikimedian Doc James, who is strongly supportive of the Wikitravel proposal, forwarded the Wikivoyage proposal to WMF board trustee Samuel Klein and WMF executive director Sue Gardner on May 27.
It has been claimed that the stalling, despite wider community support for the experiment in the RfC, suggests a broken innovation process on Meta and the responsible committee has yet to sort out its own formal framework, the WMF board is scheduled to look at the application during its meeting at Wikimania in Washington DC this week. Volunteers interested in the proposal are due to meet at the conference on July 12.
The Signpost notes that the WikiTravel site currently hosts sidebars of direct Google travel-related advertising, although WikiVoyage site does not. While there would be no direct advertising for information from a travel site migrated to the foundation, the nature of consumer tourism does expose the WMF's narrative text to unseen pressure to mention and describe commercial operators, which will in itself represent a highly effective form of product placement under the foundation's authoritative logo.
In brief
- Wikidata logo contest: The ongoing community contest to pick a logo for Wikidata is in full swing. Wikidata aims to improve the database infrastructure of Wikimedia projects by providing a free data base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.
- 500 million edits: The 500 millionth edit on the English Wikipedia was made at 03:35 UTC last Saturday from an IP in New Zealand.
- Wikimania in Washington DC: Starting with pre-events such as a Hackathon on July 10, the annual Wikimedia conference, Wikimania, will be held in Washington DC this week, and will end with an unconference on July 15.
- Cairo education pilot report: The WMF's Cairo higher education pilot (see this week's Signpost Special report, has published a final report draft. The team has also reported on the final meetup in the foundation's blog.
- Content policy update: The quarterly update of modifications to Wikipedia's content policy pages is available.
- New administrator: The Signpost welcomes a new administrator, Zagalejo, who was granted adminship with 110 supports to four opposes. Zagalejo hails from Chicago (US), and his editing is concentrated on basketball-related topics.
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Summer sports series: WikiProject Football
- The new WikiProject Animals in Media is looking for members
- A new issue of the WikiProject Formula One newsletter has been released
- WikiProject Fungi has attracted the attention of the Mycological Society of America and a possible collaboration will be discussed this week at the 2012 Wikimania in Washington, DC
- The July Copyedit Drive has begun, but you can still join and earn barnstars for your efforts
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Football, which focuses on the sport also known as association football or soccer. WikiProject Football is by far the largest sport project and one of the most active projects on Wikipedia in terms of the number of articles covered, edits to articles, and talk page watchers. In the seven years since the project was founded, nearly 400 active members and an equally large number of former members have contributed to the project. There are a wealth of football-related subprojects and taskforces. To learn how things have changed since our previous interview in March 2008, we turned to project members BigDom, League Octopus, WaitingForConnection (WFC), Thumperward (Chris Cunningham), and Cloudz679.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Football? What team(s) do you support? Have you ever played in a football/soccer league?
- BigDom: I've always enjoyed football and am a season ticket holder at Burnley, so I first joined the WikiProject to help improve the coverage of Burnley players.
- League Octopus: For the first year or so I was content to undertake my Wikipedia work "in something of a bubble" and was not interested in communicating with others. However around a year ago, having seen some of my work get deleted, I changed my position and decided to seek to understand and appreciate how WP Footy operates, in particular "Nominations for deletion and page moves". My main interest is in the "football league systems" of various countries, reflecting my enthusisam for non-league football in England. I support Bristol Rovers and Bury Town and played my football in the Bristol and Avon League.
When we first interviewed WikiProject Football four years ago, the project was home to 34 Featured Articles, 42 Featured Lists, and 56 Good Articles. Since then, the project's collection has exploded and now encompasses 65 Featured Articles, 146 Featured Lists, and 323 Good Articles. How did this happen? Why have Good Articles grown so much faster than the Featured materials?
- BigDom: There's been a great effort by the Project to improve football articles and it shows in the amount of featured and good content that we have. I think the reason the number of Good Articles has grown so quickly is that although there is still a lot of work involved, they are so much easier to write than Featured Articles.
- WFC: In general I favour quality over quantity. But more than three quarters of our articles are currently identified as stubs, so I think it makes sense that this WikiProject leans towards taking undeveloped articles up to Good Article standard.
How often do you encounter regional differences in football rules, terminology, and tradition? How are conflicts resolved?
- BigDom: One of the great things about football is that the rules are the same all over the world and whatever level you play at. We have participants from all over the world, which helps other editors to understand the nuances of the terminology or traditions in other countries. Whenever there are conflicts, a quick message on the project talk page usually solves any problems fairly rapidly.
- League Octopus: Football has a common language of its own and with the careful use of a much improved Google Translate it is now possible to produce better quality articles of foreign clubs, taking into account regional differences and traditions. However, whilst producing a reasonable quality stub should be relatively straight forward, it remains a challenge to prepare more detailed articles that go into greater depth using a variety of sources. I perceive that the quality of many foreign club articles remains at a low level, reflecting a poor command of English by many contributors. The issue of "strange terminology" often arises in such cases. It is not just a matter of a contributor using Google Translate - a proper understanding of English football terminology is essential. It is going to take an awfully long time to address the issue badly written articles.
- Chris Cunningham: Typically if a discussion can't be resolved on an article talk page it's brought back to WT:FOOTY (which is one of the most active pages on the encyclopedia). Many of our most active editors have now been around for years, so typically if there's been a debate over a subject in the past someone is around to point to it, or at least explain what happened. Of late we've discussed having a "settled consensus" page for recording the most common cases of this, but we haven't yet discussed what form that will take. WP:FOOTY is interesting in that there's a significant "do-ocracy" element to our decisions (editors are encouraged to create their own solutions, and we are deliberately rather more sanguine regarding such things as editing of project templates than many projects) but occasionally we take years to actually settle a discussion. :)
In addition to English, versions of WikiProject Football exist in 31 other languages. Have you had any contact with editors from these other versions of Wikipedia? Has there been any sharing of content or resources among WikiProject Football's counterparts?
- League Octopus: I have made contact with contributors to both Finnish Wikipedia and Swedish Wikipedia. The Finnish contact proved most helpful in providing details of historical football material that can be accessed online from the Sports Museum Foundation of Finland. - Suomen Urheilumuseo. The Swedish contact proved less helpful in providing an English version of a football table template that he had designed for Swedish Wikipedia.
How difficult has it been to acquire images for football articles? Are some countries or time periods more difficult than others to find appropriately licensed images?
- Cloudz679: I have used FIST, which has been somewhat helpful in tracking down existing free-to-use images, while where I have been unsuccessful, the old "take a camera and go to a football match" seems to be quite a fast and convenient way of getting images, which I then upload onto Commons. Due to WikiProject Football members coming from all over the globe, I suppose this is one of the Project's strengths. Having said that, an image drive may go a long way to improving things in this respect, particularly outside of British football.
- BigDom: I have always found it very difficult to locate usable images for the articles that I edit or create. With the laws on cameras in football stadia, it is hard to take quality photos of your own. Saying that, a good proportion of players in the English leagues seem to have images nowadays, but there is still a noticeable lack of images on players from other countries and players from more than 5-10 years ago.
- League Octopus: For me this is a major issue when preparing articles for clubs outside of the UK. I would love to include appropriate photos of foreign football grounds but find that very little content has been uploaded into Commons. It is almost as if after 2009 contributors stopped providing content for Commons and concentrated on providing photographic material for Flickr, Picasa (Google) and Facebook etc. There are simply thousands of photos in these other sources that would enhance my football articles but their use is very heavily restricted because of licensing/copyright limitations. It is terribly frustrating and the quality of my articles suffer as a result. I think the basic problem with Commons is that contributors find uploading content unwieldy and at the same time baulk at making their photos available to all. I normally take a camera to away matches (non-league) in England but that is little help to me when producing articles for clubs in Portugal, for example. It would be such a step forward if it was made easier for contributors like myself to obtain appropriately licensed images from other sources than Commons.
WikiProject Football is by far the most active sport-related project on Wikipedia and claims a very large membership. What has attracted so many editors to this project? How can other WikiProjects emulate WikiProject Football's success? Would WikiProject Football be open to collaborating with editors from less-active sports projects?
- Cloudz679: Possibly the global appeal, moreso the presence of banners on almost 100% of associated talk pages and an active ongoing forum at WT:FOOTY, where collaboration between users really helps resolve disputes and gain a consensus for developing articles. In part though, I would say it's difficult to emulate the success due to the reduced appeal of other sports. I do feel, however, that minority interest parts of football such as the women's game and non-league football are benefiting from the project and that can be seen in the rise of quality articles connected with these aspects of the game.
- League Octopus: As Cloudz679 indicates above, the large membership is a reflection of the global popularity of football. Whilst there is an impressive umbrella forum at WT:FOOTY the break-down of individual Task Groups is rather fragmented and can contribute to a piece-meal approach across different nations. There is a lot to be said in grouping countries together in larger Tasks Groups as a mechanism to avoid duplication of process and to ensure greater consistency of approach. I personally think we need to take stronger measures to get our own house in order before collaborating with editors from less-active sports projects.
- Chris Cunningham: The global popularity of the sport is obviously what drives people to us, but I'd like to think that the project runs itself very well. We don't have any project hierarchy, the discussion page is usually friendly and on-topic, and we've always tried to work well with the rest of the encyclopedia (for instance, by following wider consensus rather than enforcing our own rules). In some ways we already collaborate with other sports projects: for instance, editors from other projects have asked for help in adapting our templates to serve their own sports.
What are WikiProject Football's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- WFC: I always like to start with a positive – our featured articles and lists are among the best sports coverage anywhere on Wikipedia. But in contrast to the 3,462 articles assessed at C-class or above, at the other end of the scale 130,811 articles are stub or start-class. Furthermore, a large proportion of those undeveloped articles are BLPs.
For those with some interest in the sport, one good way to contribute is to periodically update the prose of articles on people that interest you. Given that a lot of football articles do not seem to be developing, I think all editors – regardless of their knowledge about the sport – could help by providing feedback on whether our notability guidelines for football seem in line with the general notability guideline, and if not, how we might change them. Internal discussions about guidelines have at times been contentious – some fresh input could provide inspiration.
- Cloudz679: The project has over 100,000 stub articles. Any new contributor can help out by adding references or new information to these articles. Another way is to locate your favourite team/player and check the article for accuracy, sourcing any controversial statements and challenging anything which you believe not to be correct.
- BigDom: I don't know if the high number of stub articles is a problem; even if it takes us decades, they will get expanded eventually. There's loads of ways to help; I would say that writing new articles about notable players, adding references to existing articles and uploading new images are three of the most important.
- League Octopus: WP Footy can appear a very intimidating environment to a new contributor. There are a number of recent examples of new editors seeing their work deleted (often in an officious manner) and the normal reaction is for that editor to then exit and abandon their Wikipedia work. This is a great shame as as with education and encouragement such editors could become important long-lasting contributors to the project. I think Administrators in general need to perhaps act in a more tactful and sensitive manner by subtly mentoring and educating new editors rather than just deleting their work under a smokescreen of jargon. I cannot over-emphasise the need to address this issue.
- Chris Cunningham: Just like everywhere else on Wikipedia, our most pressing need is manpower. There are almost certainly more professional footballers living right now than dead (as with the general world population), and BLPs do not write (or maintain, or patrol) themselves. As for how to help, get stuck in! There's almost no subject under the project's purview that doesn't still have at least some low-hanging fruit to pick. Category:Top-importance football articles has 39 articles, and only two are FA-class.
Next week's article will be a tour de force. Until then, ride over to the archive to read our previous reports.
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Keeps on chuggin'
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Featured articles
Eight featured articles were promoted this week:
- Aries (constellation) (nom) by Keilana. Aries the Ram (symbol ♈) is one of the constellations of the Zodiac and one of 88 currently recognised constellations. Its area is 441 square degrees (1.1% of the celestial sphere). Although fairly dim, with only three bright stars, it is home to several deep-sky objects.
- A Journey (nom) by Paul MacDermott. A Journey is a memoir by former British prime minister Tony Blair. The 624-page book covers the events of his rise to power and premiership. The proceeds and advance for the memoir, which became the fastest-selling autobiography of all time at the bookstore chain Waterstones, were donated to The Royal British Legion. Its mixed reception included criticism from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, anti-war protests, praise from Labour politician Alistair Darling, and an accusation of plagiarism.
- Tammar wallaby (nom) by LittleJerry. The Tammar wallaby (Macropus eugenii) is a small macropod native to South and Western Australia; it has also been introduced to New Zealand. Around the size of a rabbit, the grey-coated Tammar is one of the smallest wallabies. It has colour vision and the ability to drink seawater, and females can nurse a joey in their pouch while gestating a fetus. Its endangerment is classified "Least Concern", despite continual destruction of its habitation.
- William the Conqueror (nom) by Ealdgyth and Agricolae. William (c. 1028 – 1087) was the first Norman King of England, reigning from 1066 until his death. Born illegitimate in Normandy, he consolidated support and became the region's duke in 1035. In 1066 he conquered England after a dispute over the succession to Edward the Confessor. His reign was marked by further internal dissent and rebellion, both in England and Normandy; after his death, his son Robert received Normandy, and his son William received England.
- Douglas MacArthur (nom) by Hawkeye7. General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) was Chief of Staff of the US Army during the 1930s; he received the Medal of Honor for his prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. Beginning his military career in the early 1900s, he distinguished himself quickly, becoming a brigadier general during World War I. He retired in 1937, but was recalled to active duty in 1941. In 1951 MacArthur was relieved from his duties during the Korean War by President Truman.
- Cave Story (nom) by Axem Titanium. The freeware video game Cave Story was developed, designed, and programmed over five years by Daisuke Amaya and released in 2004. The 2D platformer, intended as an homage to earlier games, follows an amnesiac in his attempt to defeat a scheming doctor. The game was a critical success and has been ported to numerous systems, including the Nintendo Wii and 3DS.
- Boeing 757 (nom) by SynergyStar. The Boeing 757 is a mid-size, narrow-body twin-engine jet airliner produced by the American company Boeing from 1981 to 2004. Intended to replace the smaller three-engine 727, the 757 can carry 200 to 289 passengers for a maximum of 3,150 to 4,100 nautical miles (5,830 to 7,600 km). There are five major variants, as well as special-purpose variants. A total of 1,050 were produced.
- Banksia ilicifolia (nom) by Casliber and Hesperian. B. ilicifolia is a tree in the family Proteaceae that is endemic to southwest Western Australia. It generally reaches up to 10 metres (33 ft) in height with a columnar or irregular habit. Robert Brown described Banksia ilicifolia in 1810, and, although variable, there are no recognised variants. The rarely cultivated plant is limited to sandy soils.
Featured lists
Eight featured lists were promoted this week:
- List of international cricket centuries by Kumar Sangakkara (nom) by Astronomyinertia. The Sri Lankan cricket player Kumar Sangakkara, a left-handed top-order batsman, has made centuries on 30 and 13 occasions in Test and One Day International (ODI) play. He made his first century in 2001, in Test cricket; his first ODI century was in 2003.
- List of international cricket five-wicket hauls by Kapil Dev (nom) by Vensatry. The Indian cricket player Kapil Dev, a right-arm fast bowler, took 23 five-wicket hauls in Tests and one five-wicket haul in ODI during his career, from 1978 to 1994. He has third highest number of international five-wicket hauls among Indian cricketers, as of 2012.
- List of best-selling albums in the United Kingdom (nom) by A Thousand Doors. This list, compiled by the Official Charts Company, contains forty albums, mostly British. The best-selling album in the United Kingdom was Queen's Greatest Hits, and the most represented decade is 2000–2009.
- Cleveland Blues (NL) all-time roster (nom) by Neonblak. During its five years of existence, the American baseball team Cleveland Blues had a total of 66 players. The National League team, established in 1879, never finished higher than third place in the standings and was financially unstable by the time it dissolved in 1884.
- Counties of Croatia (nom) by Tomobe03. Croatia has a total of twenty counties, the country's primary administrative subdivision, in addition to the capital city of Zagreb. Each county has an assembly, headed by a county prefect, with members elected by popular vote through closed lists in local elections. Funding is derived from the national government.
- Jordin Sparks discography (nom) by Ozurbanmusic. American R&B and pop recording artist Jordin Sparks has released two studio albums, twelve singles, eight soundtrack appearances, two extended plays and twelve music videos since winning the 2007 edition of American Idol. Her debut album, Jordin Sparks, has sold two million units worldwide, while several other works have charted platinum.
- Grade I listed churches in Cheshire (nom) by Peter I. Vardy. The English county of Cheshire has had Christian churches since the Anglo-Saxon era, but most remaining churches are of Gothic architecture, although there are examples of Neoclassical architecture. Of the 43 churches in the county, several have timber framing, and most are dedicated to Saint Mary.
- List of accolades received by My Week with Marilyn (nom) by JuneGloom07. The British drama film My Week With Marilyn has garnered numerous awards for its plot and acting. Among its 64 nominations are two at the Academy Awards, seven at the British Academy Film Awards, and three at the Golden Globe Awards. It has won 16 awards, including a Golden Globe.
Featured pictures
One featured picture was promoted this week:
- Union Pacific 844 at Painted Rocks (nom; related article), created by Drew Jacksich and nominated by Bruce1ee. 844 was the last steam locomotive built for the Union Pacific Railroad, and it is the only North American Class I railroad steam engine to have remained in continuous operation into the present day.
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Three cases, Carnildo desysopped
No cases were closed or opened, leaving the number of open cases at three.
Open cases
Fæ (Week 7)
The case concerns alleged misconduct with regards to aggressive responses and harassment by Fæ toward users who question his actions. The case was brought before the committee by MBisanz. The other parties are Michaeldsuarez and Delicious carbuncle. A decision was expected on 6 July.
In response to a workshop proposal calling for the removal of his adminship, Fæ's administrator rights were removed at his request on 18 June; he has declared he will not pursue RfA until June 2013, and that should another user nominate him and he feels confident to run, he will launch a reconfirmation RfA rather than requesting the tools back without community process.
Falun Gong 2 (Week 6)
The case concerns behavioural issues related to Ohconfucius, Colipon, and Shrigley. The accused parties deny TheSoundAndTheFury's claims and decried his alleged "POV-pushing". According to TheSoundAndTheFury, the problem lies not with "these editors' points of view per se"; rather, it is "fundamentally about behaviour".
In the proposed principles, drafting arbitrator Hersfold reaffirms that Wikipedia is a reference work built through consensus and written neutrally, that it is not a battleground, nor a soapbox for propaganda, that editors are expected to act civilly and respectfully and pending further cases where long-term disputes cannot be resolved, the committee may "adopt draconian measures as a last resort for preventing further damage to the encyclopedia."
In view of the dispute, the committee has observed that certain involved parties have pushed their own points of view; in particular Homunculus has edited to enhance the Falun Gong movement and discredit the Communist Party of China, whereas Ohconfucius and Colipon have been found editing in a manner which enhances the party and discredits the movement. The former was found engaging in uncivil conduct and the latter failing to assume good faith. Further, Ohconfucius and Homunculus have engaged in edit-warring on topics related to the movement.
Given these findings it has been proposed that Colipon, Homunculus and Ohconfucius be topic-banned from articles related to the movement and "prosecution thereof". Mandated external review by uninvolved administrators was also proposed; editors placed on review would be subject to the following restrictions:
- Major edits (beyond grammatical and aesthetic edits) must be proposed on the article's talk page and discussed by interested editors until a consensus to make the edit is formed.
- Once consensus in support of the edit has been reached, the proposal must be reviewed by an uninvolved editor to ensure the neutrality and verifiability of the information presented.
- When approval is received from the uninvolved editor, the editor subject to mandated external review may proceed.
Perth (Week 4)
The case, filed by P.T. Aufrette, concerns wheel-warring on the Perth article after a contentious requested move discussion (initiated by the filer) was closed as successful by JHunterJ. The close was a matter of much contention, with allegations that the move was not supported by consensus. After a series of reverts by Deacon of Pndapetzim, Kwamikagami and Gnangarra, the partiality of JHunterJ's decision was discussed, as was the intensity of Deacon of Pndapetzim's academic interests in the topic. Questions were also raised about the suitability of the new move review forum.
In a workshop proposal, uninvolved user Ncmvocalist outlined in proposed principles the need for administrators to lead by example, behave respectfully and civilly in their interactions with other users, learn from experience, and avoid wheel-warring irrespective of the circumstances or nature of the dispute; and that WikiProjects are not platforms for point-of-view pushing or the pushing of one's own agenda and where consensus cannot be reached other venues of discussion should be sought out. Proposed decisions are due on 12 July.
Motions
Carnildo's administrative tools revoked
The committee resolved unanimously to revoke Carnildo's administrative tools for "long-term poor judgement" in his use of the tools, particularly in view of the recent block he issued to Itsmejudith. Carnildo may regain the tools via a successful request for adminship.
Reader comments
Optimism over LastModified and MoodBar, but change in clock time causes downtime
LastModified trial results are in
The results from last month's trial of the LastModified extension were published this week on the Wikimedia blog. The first analyses have indicated a significant positive impact, suggesting that the extension – which makes the time since a page's last edit much more prominent in the interface – could eventually find its way onto Wikimedia wikis.
This more prominent display (see right) was added to some 20,000 English Wikipedia articles, linking directly to the full revision history. The results of this trial were nevertheless surprising: rather than click on the new timestamp, visitors preferred to click directly on the history tab, indicating salience of its location. "The increase was particularly strong for anonymous editors and readers, who landed on the history page more than twice as often (+120.6%) [as the control sample]", explained Steven Walling, on behalf of the Foundation's editor engagement experiments (E3) team. "For registered users, there was a smaller but still significant increase in article history views (+42%). This result was seen even when we controlled for repeat clicks on either link".
Despite this apparently positive result, Foundation developers (perhaps feeling the effect of recent controversies) seem wary of pushing the extension onto communities for the moment. Anonymised data has been released, but thereafter the E3 team will simply move onto new experiments – such as "transforming this timestamp into a more direct call to edit articles that are severely outdated, though clearly the point at which an article becomes out of date is somewhat subjective" – rather than handing over the extension to a deployment focused team.
Also published this week was an extensive analysis of the impact of the already-deployed MoodBar extension. That research, also suggestive of a broadly positive impact, is expected to be followed up with a further study to eliminate the possibility of selection bias.
Leap second causes problems
"At midnight UTC on July 1, Wikimedia’s search cluster stopped working" (Wikimedia blog). The proximal cause was surprising: the insertion of a single leap second, so that June 30 officially had 86,401 seconds rather than the usual 86,400. This caused significant problems, not just on Wikimedia wikis but across the web, affecting sites such as Reddit, Foursquare and LinkedIn. Wikimedia's search services were restored in slightly less than two hours.
As Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling explained, "leap seconds are added to our clocks once every few years so that the sun will be directly overhead of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich at precisely 12:00. Some people believe that the desire to keep these two time standards synchronised is anachronistic, and that it would be better to let them drift apart for 600 years and then add a single “leap hour”. I’m sure many computer engineers would breathe a sigh of relief if such a change were implemented."
A knock on, more general problem was finally resolved on July 2 following technical work by the WMF's network operations team (wikitech-l mailing list). Given that those problems seem to have affected the Foundation's servers hosted only in Tampa, Florida (and not their Ashburn, Virginia counterparts), the implication is that ageing hardware that is expensive to replace could have exacerbated the problem. The Signpost hopes to publish an interview with a member of the operations team about this and other recent issues in the near future.
In brief
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
- MediaWiki 1.20wmf7 begins deployment cycle: 1.20wmf7 – the seventh release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch – was deployed to its first wikis on July 9 and will be deployed to all wikis by July 18. The release incorporates some 250 changes to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, comprising 130 "core" changes and 120 changes to affected WMF-deployed extensions. Among the changes (themselves the production of some two week's worth of development time) are a fix for date sorting in tables and a raft of edits to the Visual Editor prototype released last month. A release to external sites including the same selection of bug fixes and new features is not expected for some time.
- Wikimania looms: Wikimania, an annual conference targeted at Wikimedians and often well attended by those with a technical slant, will be held in Washington DC later this week. Preceding the event is a "beginner friendly" hackathon (July 10–11) to include both development-focussed activities and guidance for those wishing to "contribute without programming". Wikimania itself (July 12–14) will host 14 wholly (and an additional half-dozen partially) technology-focussed sessions of 80 minutes each, with the possibility of conflict. Each session will include two or three talks or workshops, the pick of which include community engagement (1, 2); operations and performance (1, 2); Wikipedia mobile; Wikidata; Visual Editor; Athena (a possible successor to the Vector skin, announced in November last year) and an "Ask the Developers" panel. A room has also been arranged for technology conversations to continue on July 15 during the "unconference" period of Wikimania. There will be a review of Wikimania talks in next week's Signpost.
- Wikidata vote announced: Voting is now open to choose a logo for the Wikidata project and its eventual data repository (Wikimedia Deutschland blog). Voters (essentially all Wikimedians are eligible to vote) can choose from more than 30 designs selected by the Wikidata team from an original pool of 70 user-generated submissions. Voting is open until July 12 at 23:59 UTC, with the result announced on July 13, in time for next week's edition of the Signpost.
- Kiwix, Lua investigated: Gerard Meijssen this week published an interview on his personal blog with Emmanuel, one of the developers behind Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader that has received WMF support since early 2011 (see previous Signpost coverage). As Emmanuel explained "Kiwix [allows] people to read Web contents without an internet connection. ... It's used to access Wikipedia offline, by reading pre-packaged Wikipedia ZIM files [and is] mainly used by people who want to have an encyclopedia, but are too poor to have [consistent] access to the internet." The interview touched on the current Kiwix setup and possible future developments with the software. For the official Wikimedia blog, Meijssen interviewed Derk-Jan Hartman (User:TheDJ) about his experience trying out the forthcoming support for parsing scripts written in programming language Lua at last month's Berlin Hackathon (see previous Signpost coverage).
- Unique contributor figures standardised, revised upwards: Following a thread on the wikitech-l mailing list, unique MediaWiki code contributor counts for the last few months have been updated to reflect a new, standardised way of obtaining the figures. Specifically, as a result of that improved methodology, April's figure was revised upwards from 53 to 67, while May's soared from 41 to 77. The revisions go a long way to explaining the post Git switchover drop in the number of unique contributors to MediaWiki; the unofficial figure for June (92), buoyed by the Berlin hackathon, is broadly comparable to pre-switchover figures.
- Gerrit upgraded: MediaWiki code review system Gerrit was upgraded this week from version 2.3 to 2.4.2 this week (wikitech-l mailing list). Announcing the change, WMF developer Chad Horohoe highlighted "the new 'Rebase' button, which will hopefully make it easier to rebase your changes against your branch without having to download the change first". In related news, developers also discussed Gerrit's "sandbox" feature, also enabled by Horohoe this week (also wikitech-l). The feature, which is currently live, allows users a personal space in which to host code not yet suitable for official review.
- Bots approved: 3 BRFAs were recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
- Robert SkyBot's 5th BRfA, changing "Reference" to "References" and "External link" to "External links" in section headers;
Reader comments
- Robert SkyBot's 5th BRfA, changing "Reference" to "References" and "External link" to "External links" in section headers;