Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-11-21
Last-minute candidates for ArbCom, the Sue Gardner European Tour hits London
ArbCom election: 18 editors step forward
Nominations for the annual elections to the Arbitration Committee are now closed. There are 18 candidates, vying for a maximum of seven vacancies (sitting arbitrators are marked with an asterisk):
AGK, *Coren, Courcelles, DeltaQuad, Eluchil404, Geni, Hersfold, Hot Stop, *Jclemens, *Kirill Lokshin, Kww, Maxim, NWA.Rep, Panyd, *Risker, *Roger Davies, SilkTork and Worm That Turned.
These community-run elections involve candidates' nomination statements, a guide to the candidates, questions for those running, links to individual voter guides, and discussion pages; all are accessible through this template. The five "fallow" days for voters to further question and discuss candidates have begun. Voters can view candidates' responses to a set of common general questions, and to specific questions that editors have posted. These specific questions have included queries about a candidate's statement, requests to comment on scenarios involving problematic editors, questions on individual ArbCom cases, and issues concerning real-world legal threats.
The election, via the SecurePoll voting interface, will go live from 27 November to 10 December. MediaWiki sysadmin Tim Starling will assist with the setting up and troubleshooting of the SecurePoll interface. Three WMF-identified editors—Happy-melon, Tznkai, and Skomorokh—have offered to be election administrators. They will oversee the election, including the SecurePoll voting system.
The vote will then be audited by three independent scrutineers drawn from the ranks of non-native stewards, to ensure the election is free of double-voting, sockpuppetting, and other irregularities, and to tally the results and announce it on the election page. The stewards will be Bencmq (originally from the Chinese Wikipedia), Trijnstel (originally from the Dutch Wikipedia), and Vituzzu (originally from the Italian Wikipedia). All community editors will be invited to scrutinise the list of those who have voted as the election proceeds, using their knowledge and intuition to help ensure that all votes are legitimate.
The results will be announced on the election page. Successful candidates will start their two-year terms on 1 January 2012.
Sue Gardner at Imperial College, London
As part of her annual European travel, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke at Imperial College, London last Sunday 13 November on the participation of female editors on Wikipedia and its sister projects.
More than 40 people attended, including around half a dozen students. Gardner opened the address with an introduction to Wikimedia projects, the slides of which talk are available on the Foundation wiki. She suggested that attendees watch with the intention of giving the same talk themselves someday. The introduction focused on the remarkable popularity of Wikipedia, which dwarfed that of conventional informational outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, BBC and so on.
The gender imbalance of editing on Wikipedia was first brought to the attention of the public after an article on the topic was published in The New York Times in January of this year.
Gardner addressed the reasons put forth to explain the gender gap, substantially recapping her landmark February blog post Nine Reasons Why Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words). She referred frequently to data to support her analysis, citing amongst other studies the 2011 Women and Wikimedia Survey. The first – and simplest – reason she gave was that MediaWiki markup is "a pain" to learn. She said that a WYSIWYG editor is in the works and will help all editors to contribute. She used several direct references to opinions from women who had been quoted in the survey results; one woman had stated that she was "not thick-skinned enough for Wikipedia" – an opinion Gardner endorsed. "Many of the editors," she said, "used the heated discussion as a form of intellectual sparring" and that it's "not necessarily as serious as it seemed."
One female Wikimedian had also voiced the worry that "[Female YA author(s)] are not notable, meanwhile 1-Book, Nobody Dude's Wikipedia page is 14 printable pages long!" Gardner agreed that topics of interest to female editors were often less well-developed than articles on areas of interest to men, citing hairstyles as an example. The issue of Wikimedia culture being sexualised also arose, as she recounted a problem she herself had come across where she was surfing Wikipedia articles and had arrived on an article on garment necklines of shirts. The article was illustrated with an image of a woman wearing a round necked shirt, and while the content of the image itself was fine, the file was denoted by a "less than satisfactory name: it was called Boobies.jpg". Although the file was renamed during the talk, the notion was a cause for concern; a culture which produced such decisions as well as phenomena like userpage galleries of sexualised depictions of women lent weight to the conclusion that "Wikimedia can seem like a smutty mens' locker room at times". Another worry highlighted by female editors was that, in some language projects where words are gendered, female editors have been addressed by the male version of the word "user" – "the software called me male!".
Gardner elaborated on "what it took to be a Wikipedian", describing a conversion funnel which begins with being literate, proceeded through requirements as having access to the Internet, having spare time (however little), being reasonably tech-literate and thick-skinned and being pedantic and emphasised the importance of having a topic you love. She made the remarkable admission that despite their keen appreciation of the significance and causes of the gender gap, Foundation staff had no plans to specifically combat it, but were instead relying on existing outreach efforts such as the Global Education Program to attract a more balanced gender distribution than that of the existing editing community. The talk ended with a brief question-and-answer session and a presentation of gifts to the speaker by Wikimedia UK volunteers.
In brief
- How many Britannicas?: According to Wikipedia:Size in volumes, the encyclopaedia has now surpassed 1,600 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in size.
- Education on the Foundation blog: Last week saw two posts on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog about the Wikipedia Education Program. The first was an overview of statistics and metrics. It examined gender representation and how the program had grown since the fall semester last year. The second was a story from a professor about how the Wikipedia Education Program helped him learn to love Wikipedia.
- Reasons to donate and protest: Also posted on the Foundation's blog were 5 Reasons to Donate – which included the fact that Wikipedia was both free of ads and cost-free – and a declaration of support for American Censorship Day, highlighting the issue of the Internet Blacklist Bill. The English Wikipedia community, in contrast, decided against officially supporting the day of protest (see "Discussion report").
- AFT team in office hours: The last four IRC office hours sessions (October 27, November 3, November 10 and November 18) have featured the Wikimedia Foundation staff tasked with developing the next iterations of the Article Feedback Tool, including Howie Fung, Fabrice Florin, Brandon Harris, Dario Taraborelli and Oliver Keyes. A report on the progress of the tool's development is expected soon.
- Autowikiography: In what is perhaps a first, a spoken version of the Chris Nunn article was recorded by the subject himself (ogv).
- Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Atlanta: Wikipedians in Atlanta gathered for a Wikipedia Loves Libraries meetup on Saturday, November 19 at the Atlanta-Fulton Central Library, having been invited by librarian Jillian Barnes. Wikipedian Ganeshk gave an introduction to the site, fellow editor Katie Filbert discussed GLAM collaborations, the campus ambassadors program, and staff gave a tour of the library's special collections. The group also discussed the possibility of making Wikipedia meetups at the library a regular occurrence.
- Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones this week: The Breton Wikipedia reached 40,000 articles; the Estonian Wikipedia reached 90,000 articles in a week that also saw the winners announced in its Wiki Loves Monuments contest; the Thai Wikipedia reached 70,000 articles; the Afrikaans Wikipedia reached 20,000 articles; the Buginese Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles; and lastly the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles. In addition, the Catalan Wikipedia celebrated its 100,000th registered editor.
- RfA drought: No editors were made administrators this week, and at the time of writing there were no extant Requests for Adminship.
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Indian wikiconference heralds expansion, fundraiser in Silicon Valley major donor coup, import of Wikipedia reconsidered
WikiConference India showcases expansion efforts
The first annual WikiConference India, held this past weekend at the University of Mumbai, attracted widespread coverage in the national press and beyond. BBC News reported that the event commenced with an opening address by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, in which he speculated that the 700-strong gathering "could be the largest wiki-conference that's ever been held" and outlined the Wikimedia movement's expansion plans in India. The Hindu picked up on Wales' belief that the rules and procedures in operation on the English Wikipedia would need to be simplified for smaller language projects if organic growth was to be encouraged – "There are over three million entries in English. A large community needs a lot of rules. But we don't need to copy these for a small group." According to BBC News, the Hindi Wikipedia has only 50 editors, and is thus dwarfed by the more than 35,000 editors of the English Wikipedia.
Hundreds of millions of people are more comfortable thinking and dreaming and talking and counting in their mother tongue ... The different kinds of sweets, saris, history, culture – at about every parameter there's so much magic you could write about.
— Hisham Mundol, addressing the conference, as reported by BBC News, November 20
The expansion plans were elaborated upon by the Wikimedia Foundation's head of India programmes Hisham Mundol, who put particular emphasis on the development of Indic language projects, revealed efforts at getting DVD versions of Wikipedia into schools (motivated by the still slow rate of Internet penetration), and described the recent university outreach efforts of the India Education Program. Colleague Nitika Tandon also discussed the pilot program, which saw Indian students encouraged to submit their essays as Wikipedia articles, and noted problems the pilot had revealed concerning students' understanding of copyright and plagiarism norms (see Signpost special report). A special Hackathon was held simultaneous to the conference, focusing mainly on the challenges of non-Latin scripts used by the Indic language projects (see "Technology report").
Coverage of the content of the conference appeared in The Times of India, Moneycontrol.com, Asia Times, Hindustan Times, Hindustan Times again, The Hill Post, Business Standard and The Jakarta Post. Daily News and Analysis ran a series of articles, covering Wikipedia plans various initiatives in India, Marathi Wikipedia targets schools in villages yet to get Internet, In India, for 10 people, there are 12 opinions: Jimmy Wales, Wikipedians not impressed with Arnab Goswami's talk in WikiConference, and Wikipedia's future lies in India, says co-founder Jimmy Wales.
A group of about a dozen protestors from the youth wing of the nationalist BJP political party demonstrated against one map on Wikipedia, whose depiction of the contested border regions surrounding Jammu and Kashmir they objected to. The Times of India revealed that several protestors were detained by police, and planned to file a criminal case against "Jimmy Whales and Wikipedia's India chairman [sic]". An unruffled Wales responded "It's very important all people become educated on the issues. I want Wikipedia to be neutral on the issues; it's not up to us to decide what's the correct map of India of course, but it is up to us to explain there is this controversy." The fracas threatened to overshadow the conference, inspiring the creation of a Wikipedia entry (now deleted) as well as articles in a host of media outlets and websites, not limited to The Hindu, The Times of India, OneIndia News, Silicon India, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, GulfNews, Khaleej Times, the Daily Pioneer, and Wikinews splinter outfit OpenGlobe.Fundraiser scores half a million from Silicon Valley royalty
The Wikimedia Foundation's 2011 Fundraiser had its first major donor coup this week, with US$500,000 from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation of Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki – co-founders of Google and 23andme respectively. Although the Foundation averred its commitment to relying on small donations rather than seeking indulgent sponsors following its Strategic Planning findings last year, it welcomed the news in a press release as "an important endorsement" of the organisation and its work. The story was picked up by a host of media outlets and technology websites, notably The Washington Post, Reuters MediaFile blog, the San Francisco Mercury News, VentureBeat, and Ars Technica, and inspired much commentary in response.
The New York Times Bits blog greeted the news with the impudent remark "Keep an eye on Sergey Brin’s Wikipedia page. It might just get a more positive spin soon", and noted previous tensions with Google over Google Knol, a now-stagnant crowdsourced knowledge repository project once mooted as a Wikipedia-killer. The dedicated Wikipedia-watchers at The Register saluted the entrepreneurs' generosity with the caveat "even if the Wikimedia Foundation can be a bit of an odd duck at times". PC Magazine wondered whether Brin had simply gotten tired of seeing Jimmy Wales' face.
The Brin Wojcicki Foundation has previously donated to causes including the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's research, the X Prize Foundation for the development of private space exploration, the anti-poverty group Tipping Point Community, the cyberactivists Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as Creative Commons. The Wikimedia Foundation said it had raised $1.2 million in the first day of the fundraiser, and Arutz Sheva reported that it seeks to raise over $28 million this fundraising season, which is expected to last into January.
The Jimmy Wales banner appeals have already attracted the by-now-traditional mockery taking advantage of the impression that the omnipresent banner image relates to the topic of the Wikipedia article, notably highlighted this year in The Oatmeal, which illustrated several images of Wales' face adorning the Douche, Sex offender, Nazi, Crossdressing and Anal wart entries. Alexia Tsotsis of TechCrunch was less forgiving, excoriating the fundraiser for inviting ridicule on this front, and advising Wales to "take some of the donation money, especially the 20 bucks I’m about to throw at you out of guilt for writing this post, and hire a professional graphic designer so you’re not creeping people out or (worse) making them laugh unintentionally." This cost assessment may be at odds with those of the Foundation's accountants, who have budgeted fundraising expenses at $1.8 million for 2010-2011.
In brief
| “ | Why is Twitter or Facebook such a priority, while Wikipedia goes unnoticed? Are you over-investing in shiny objects? Why have we invested in large, fragmented, unmanageable social sites that can take years to build a following and grow SEO, when a hand-full of rule-bound, manageable, community built pages already top the search tools we know all our constituents use every day? | ” |
| — David King of Socialfresh on marketers' outreach efforts | ||
- Tech classic of the decade or just more important than Twitter? In response to a Slate attempt at chronicling the New Classics of contemporary culture, The Guardian disputed its selection of the iPod as the archetypal technology artefact of the first decade of the millennium, instead nominating Wikipedia with the remark (following the usual caveats) "[I]t has gradually been relegating paper-based encyclopedias to the dustbin of history or the shelves of antiquarian book dealers. Future generations will wonder how we ever did without it." Meanwhile at Socialfresh, David King set out to explain Why Wikipedia is More Important than Twitter in an effort (that may perhaps render aghast patrollers and admins) to convince companies that their much vaunted engagement of time and effort into social media would be better spent focusing on their portrayal in the free encyclopaedia. It cited as obstacles the technical barriers to entry, onerous policies to comply with, a prickly editing community, and the established maturity of the site as reasons why Wikipedia had been overlooked by public relations professionals.
- Vicious circle of careless citations: Randall Munroe's webcomic xkcd this week devoted an entry to the phenomenon of "Citogenesis", whereby a baseless claim in Wikipedia is taken at face value by writers whose subsequent articles are then used as supporting sources for the aforementioned claim in Wikipedia, which then becomes referenced as fact ever after. The process was interrupted in the case of Yahoo reporter Eric Shirey, Airlock Alpha revealed this week; Shirey had allegedly derived his report about a reconciliation of the copyright dispute between writers Harlan Ellison and Andrew Niccol from an unsourced account in Wikipedia. The reporter lamented that this was the first time a claim he had taken from Wikipedia had turned out false, and that he "had worse luck with things being inaccurate on IMDb". Alas, it took the repetition of his erroneous story by the very same Airlock Alpha for Niccol's attorneys to contest the story, which may give Mr. Munroe cheer that "Citogenesis" is not an inevitable consequence of irresponsible Wikipedia editing and lazy reporting.
Foundation chief Sue Gardner, who spoke on editorial strength and diversity with BBC Radio 4 this week. - Gardner talks gender and growth: As part of the London leg of her European tour (see "News and notes"), Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner was interviewed by BBC Radio 4's The World at One program. The discussion, which centred on the demographics and health of Wikipedia's contributor community drew the attention of The Wall blog's Sue Keogh, which summarised recent thinking on the "gender gap" and related issues and suggested that the Foundation "get a usability expert in" and offer training to potential contributors. No doubt Keogh will be enthused to learn that this is precisely the course of action Gardner has propounded.
- Sanger speaks: The Next Web interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger following the recent launch of Reading Bear, the latest project of his WatchKnowLearn online educational initiative. The nascent site seeks to teach children through simple, phonetically-oriented online videos. As well as an account of the new project, Sanger recounted some details of his family life, gave an insight into how his background as a philosophy professor has affected his career in online startups, and his brief status as a worldwide authority on the Y2K problem. He also remarked on the state of play on Citizendium, the expert-oriented free encyclopaedia he founded as an alternative to Wikipedia, saying it was still being maintained and developed, and had sufficient funding for the time being. The rest of the interview was largely given over to Sanger's early experiences as Community Organizer of Wikipedia, a story he said "has been told as much as people want to hear it" and which he expressed little regret over. He revealed a "burning desire" to work on his underfunded wiki Textop, specifically its Collation Project, an imagined collaborative knowledge tool that "has the potential to change education and research…especially in the humanities".
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Much ado about censorship
Proposal to block out the Wikipedia logo in protest of proposed U.S. censorship laws
- A requested move discussion has been initiated, seeking consensus to move the article Republic of China to the title Taiwan, and have the article currently named Taiwan name moved to Taiwan (island).
- A suggestion to deprecate the Portal namespace has been made. Since the proposal was put forth, a discussion on improving the visibility and quality of portals has also been started at the same page.
- The proposal to restructure the Verifiability policy's handling of "verifiability, not truth", detailed in the October 31 edition of the Discussion report, is still ongoing. Almost 450 people have commented on the proposal thus far.
- A discussion has been started by WMF employee Annie Lin on how to best improve the United States Education Program.
On November 15, a proposal was put forth at the Village pump asking the Wikimedia Foundation to place a black bar over the Wikipedia logo on November 16, site wide, in protest of two laws moving through the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The proposal garnered more opposition than it did support, and the 16th came and went without a change to the logo.
The Wikimedia Foundation blog placed the bar over its own logo, and released a statement endorsing American Censorship Day, the name adopted by the websites that have altered their logos. In the post, Head of Communications Jay Walsh made the argument that the proposed laws would threaten Wikipedia, saying "In short, our users and all of our projects, would be forced to operate in an untenable legislative environment, putting Wikipedia at the beck and call of the rights owners as opposed to the distribution of free knowledge."
Proposal to integrate a user status display
MediaWiki developer Petrb put forward a proposal that the OnlineStatusBar extension be integrated into Wikipedia as an opt-in feature for registered users. The extension checks when a user last viewed a Wikipedia page while logged-in, and uses that information to display a message in the top right corner of an opted-in user's talk page indicating whether or not that user is online at the moment (example). According to the developer, a key advantage that this system has over the existing Qui and StatusTemplate scripts is that OnlineStatusBar does not require the user to make an edit to update the bar.
The proposal initially met with a large amount of opposition, centered mainly around the social networking aspects of such a tool, as well as potential privacy concerns. Support for the proposal came strongly in the days after the proposal was made, however, and at the time of writing the proposal has been archived without being closed, with a 5:1 ratio in support for the implementation.
Multiple discussions over Occupy Wall Street
A Request for Comment was started on November 8 to decide whether or not the article Occupy Wall Street should mention that the movement has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party and the American Communist Party, as well as to determine if anti-Semitism expressed by some of the protesters warranted inclusion. Consensus against covering either point has emerged since the RfC began.
A second RfC, this one regarding the usability of a specific image, was initiated on November 11. The image in question, taken by David Shankbone and displayed to the right, is alleged to be unusable because of the logos on the flag and on the poster that the protester is holding. While large in size, the discussion has attracted only a few editors. The matter has since been brought to Media copyright questions, where an editor judged that the image was allowable under the principle of de minimis. The RfC was closed on November 16, with instructions that further concerns should be raised at Wikimedia Commons, where the image is hosted.
Finally, the lead section of the article is also in dispute, with several editors each submitting their own proposed leads for consideration. Thus far none of the suggestions have gained any significant amount of support, and a formal Request for Comment has not been filed on the matter.
RfC on NOTCENSORED and "incidental material"
A Request for Comment was opened on November 4 asking the community to decide whether or not NOTCENSORED protects "incidental material" from being removed from articles. The RfC mentioned a number of articles in which disputes over images have erupted, including Pregnancy and Muhammad, but did not actually define what the author meant by "incidental material". A number of threads were subsequently opened below the RfC in attempts to resolve that question. With the discussion largely ground to a halt, the view that NOTCENSORED does protect material from being removed has more support than the alternative by a 3:2 margin.
In brief
- Change proposed to the wording of the citation needed tag: A proposal was made at the beginning of the month to change the template {{Citation needed}} so that the template text, when viewed in an article, would read "please add a citation" instead of the current "citation needed". Participation in the discussion has been low, and the proposal has received near unanimous opposition.
- Two RfCs about the content of the Ugg boots article: After the article Ugg boots was placed under full protection for edit warring, an RfC was started on October 17 asking the community whether or not a specific section of the article, on a study of boot quality done by an advocacy group, should be removed. Support for removing the section, which had had been the source of the edit war, is high. A second RfC was opened on November 4 to seek consensus for whether or not court cases involving counterfeit boots should be included in the article. It is still ongoing.
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Working on a term paper with WikiProject Academic Journals
- The new WikiProject Dispute Resolution seeks to improve Wikipedia's coverage of dispute resolution, and they're looking for members.
- WikiProject Motto of the Day needs you! Show your support by showing today's motto on your userpage or nominating the next motto of the day.
- This is the last full week of the Guild of Copy Editors November Backlog Elimination Drive. It's not too late to get involved, so help improve Wikipedia and earn a barnstar along the way!
- WikiProject Articles for Creation has been inundated with submissions now that the userspace draft option was removed from the Article wizard, placing greater responsibility upon Articles for Creation. Please help the project approve and improve articles submitted by new users.
- WikiProject National Register of Historic Places is holding a Fall Photo Contest. Earn barnstars for posting requested pictures of historic sites or sponsor your own photography challenge. The contest ends 4 December.
- The new Roald Dahl Task Force is looking for editors.
We're pulling an all-nighter in the university library with WikiProject Academic Journals. Started in February 2007, the project has grown to include a long list of participants maintaining over 9,000 pages covering academic journals, publishers, societies, conferences, prizes, and monographs. To help fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage, the project keeps lists of missing journals and missing journals that have been cited in Wikipedia articles. In addition to creating and improving articles, the project tries to promote the use of citations, particularly the {{cite journal}} template. We interviewed Headbomb and DGG.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Academic Journals? Do you specialize in a specific academic field?
- Headbomb: I honestly don't remember. I think I was doing some citation tidying up and noticed that journal wikilinks tended to be red. So I decided to be pro-active about the issues, and started creating journal stubs and joined the project around the middle of 2009. I tend to keep around physics-related fields, as I am a physicist, but my personal interests include pretty much all of academia, so I end up touching a little bit of everything. I wrote and rewrote several hundred articles on journals such as Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and Nuovo Cimento.
- DGG: It's the main thing I worked on during my career as a librarian. At Wikipedia, I started writing some missing academic bios and noticed the journals were missing also. In my first year or so many very notable journals were deleted at AfD through lack of understanding, which led to the present informal guidelines. They're more or less accepted, because almost all the people who care about the subject agree with them. Getting formal guidelines adopted in Wikipedia is a generally futile endeavor, because in practice it can be stonewalled by one stubborn individual.
What are some of the difficulties of improving articles about academic journals? Has the project struggled with promoting articles to FA and GA status? Are some academic disciplines better covered on Wikipedia?
- Headbomb: The main difficulties is mostly finding out something to write about journals. It's quite the endeavour to find out the history of a journal such as e.g. Naturwissenschaften (especially if you don't speak German), but things get incredibly hard with newer or lesser-known journals. There is very often not a lot to say about the journal, so most of our articles tend to peak at a certain length which other projects would consider "start"-class. Luckily, over the years, we developed WP:JWG (Journals Writing Guide), which gives great guidance on how to make the most of what little there is available.
In terms of coverage, I would say that Math, Physics, and Astronomy are ahead of the curve, but Medicine, Psychology, and Biology are severely lacking. I haven't paid attention much to Law journals, but I suspect they get "average-ish" coverage.
- DGG: Very few articles on journals will ever reach FA or GA, except those famous ones with very long and complicated histories. My own guide is here; I think it's still accurate. As with all other articles on academic subjects, the humanities are the worst covered. Even the sciences mentioned by Headbomb as being poorly covered are covered very well relative to the traditional humanities.
How frequently does the project deal with issues about notability and conflict of interest? How easy is it to show that an academic journal has received substantial coverage in other publications?
- Headbomb: We run into that fairly often. Unlike other fields on Wikipedia, COI (Conflict of Interest) editors are rather easily converted into productive editors. "COI editors", in my experience, tend to be interns hired by publishers to create Wikipedia entries on their journals. The undesirable behaviour is usually curbed by familiarizing the editor with our Journal Writing Guide and notability guidelines for journals. Most of the newcomers are happy to hear the advice, and adjust accordingly. We'll often babysit them through one article so they get the hang of it, and then they can create articles on a series of (notable) journals. Those who don't listen usually end being blocked rather quickly.
Also unlike in several other areas on Wikipedia, I think WikiProject Journals is more welcoming of those "COI editors" because several of them end up saving us massive amounts of work with article creation, updating articles with the latest information (impact factors, editors, etc.), and so on. So if we have an intern from e.g. Cell Press taking care of Category:Cell Press academic journals, then that's 11 journals we don't need to monitor for vandalism, outdatedness, etc.
- DGG: Conflict of Interest is a continuing problem, as everywhere else in Wikipedia. However, a proper journal article according to our guideline is purely objective and can be written by anyone, so Conflict of Interest should make no difference—but in practice almost nobody from a publisher has gotten it right initially. Some can be taught. There's one frequent copyright problem: the promotional statement of purpose and coverage on the journal website, but it is usually so meaningless – saying, in essence, we cover everything that might possibly be in our subject, that there's no reason to rewrite or get permission – it isn't needed at all; I don't know why public relations people bother. The concept of notability according to the general notability guidelines (GNG) does not apply easily to academic journals. The only ones normally written about in a substantial way are the dozen or so most famous. We've been getting the GNG to fit by saying that the listings in the major selective databases are third party statements of importance.
In addition to improving articles about journals, the project supports and recommends that Wikipedians use the {{cite journal}} template. How widespread have these citations become? What kinds of citation mistakes do you find yourself correcting most frequently?
- Headbomb: Well the answer to that is pretty much "look at the usage stats". That template is used 271,000+ times apparently. So it's pretty widespread, especially in sciences. As for citation mistakes, it's usually typos, bad formatting, or someone simply not filling them properly (like using
|volume=33 p.58rather than|volume=33|page=58). Luckily AWB and bots such as CitationCleanerBot help a lot with those tasks. - DGG: The way I suggest to use the template is with the Cite gadget, which greatly simplifies problems with citations, though it cannot deal with all cases.
The project maintains a massive list of red links for missing journals. Have you had any success reducing this list? What kind of resources does the project need to tackle a task of this magnitude?
- Headbomb: Most definitely. Back when the list started in 2009, we had journals (or abbreviations) cited several thousand times without corresponding articles or redirects. That list (and WP:JCW in general) has been one of the biggest drives behind article creation at the project. Now our most-cited "missing" journal is cited 100 times (as of writing). So we've improved things by two orders of magnitude over two years. It is by all measures a resounding success.
- DGG: The idea behind the list is that if a journal is used as a Wikipedia reference, there should be some information about the journal so readers can check the nature and standing of the journal.
Is there substantial crossover membership with other academic or literary projects? Does WikiProject Academic Journals collaborate with any other projects?
- Headbomb: We do collaborate with other projects, usually in the form of compiling lists of missing journals for individual WikiProjects. Some projects are very responsive to this (especially Astronomy, Physics, and Math in my experience); others seem to completely ignore them (Biology, Psychology, and Medicine come to mind). This is a real shame because right now, most of our highly-cited missing journals tend to be in those fields (especially medicine). So WP:MEDICINE people et al., get to work! But really anyone that wants such lists for their project (or even for themselves) just needs to drop us a note at WT:JOURNALS, and I (or someone else) will compile a list of missing journals for that project.
- DGG: Since being an editor of a major journal is one of the criteria that meets WP:PROF, the notability guideline for researchers, there's an overlap with WikiProject Biography, especially the Science and Academia Work Group. If a journal article can include all the names of the editors-in-chief, past and present, the names should be linked—if there are not articles already, the red links will be an indication that they should be written. (This doesn't include assistant editors, or members of the editorial board—that's much less of a distinction.) Inversely, if this information is added to biographical articles, it should be linked to the journals; if there's no entry, it's reason for one to be written.
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new member help today?
- Headbomb: We really need more people from the medicine fields to get involved in writing articles on their big journals (all fields of medicine, neurology, virology, pediatrics, oncology, etc...). We have a great guide at WP:JWG to make things easy for you! Of course other non-medicine fields journals need attention too, so really whatever your interest there is always something to do. But medicine is really the field with the worse coverage as far as journals are concerned.
- DGG: They're really easy to do. The project suggests starting with an infobox, and then transcribing the information, which is really all there is to it. You don't even need actual access to the text of the journal, except for a few titles. The only problem is Journal Citation Reports, which is needed in the sciences and social sciences, and which only people in large universities can access—but the people at the project will gladly look up the numbers. These articles are usually so mechanical, actually, that the work isn't necessarily very interesting all by itself, certainly not in large numbers, and most of us do it as an auxiliary to other things. If more people filled in a few when they noticed them missing, we would get there quickly.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Headbomb: It's all summed up in our journal writing guide. And if you like numbers and tables, you really need to check out Journals Cited by Wikipedia.
- DGG: The principle of having articles for the journals used as references should be extended to newspapers and popular magazines, and then, probably to books and other sources also—either in articles about the books, or about their authors, or their sponsors.
Next week, we'll toot the horn of a military publication. In the meantime, get some R&R in the archive.
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The Napoleonic Wars (nom) were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to the application of modern mass conscription. The portal includes rotations of selected battles, pictures, and biographies. pictures above and at the bottom
Featured articles
Four articles were promoted to featured status:
Australian cattle dog (nom), a breed of herding dog originally developed in Australia for driving cattle over long distances across rough terrain. A medium-sized, short-coated dog, it has either brown or black hair distributed fairly evenly through a white coat, which gives the appearance of a "red" or "blue" dog. It has been nicknamed red heeler and blue heeler on the basis of this colouring and its practice of moving reluctant cattle by nipping at their heels. Mdk572 coordinated the work of many editors in preparing the article, and shepherded it through the FAC process. The Signpost asked her how she became interested in the breed:
- "I grew up on a cattle station in central Queensland in the north-eastern part of the continent, and Australian cattle dogs have always been part of my life. Over the years I've collected all of the books, articles and pamphlets on the breed that I stumbled across or could search out.
- "Robert Kaleski was influential in establishing the breed, but many of his explanations of breed characteristics are not supported by modern science. His theories continue to be circulated as fact, so researching the article involved cross-checking all published information against independent sources; this involved topics as apparently disparate as the history of the Hunter Valley and the canine genome project.
- "Contributing to the article gave me a new understanding of Kaleski; self-schooled in a Sydney library in his teens, he was a thinker, writer, inventor, and environmentalist, and like me a fan of the Australian cattle dog."
Amundsen's South Pole expedition (nom). Nominator Brianboulton says, "Almost 100 years ago a team of Norwegian explorers led by Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole, narrowly preceding a British expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen's party returned safely, Scott's men died on their return journey. This tragedy overshadowed Amundsen's achievement for decades; many thought that he had stolen an unfair march on Scott by being less than honest about his expedition's objectives. Here is the story of his expedition".
Epsilon Eridani (nom), a star with an orange hue only 10.5 light years away – the third closest of the individual stars or star systems visible to the naked eye and the closest star known to host a planet. Its age is estimated at less than a billion years, compared with the Sun's 5 billion years. Despite being smaller and less massive than Sol, its stellar winds are up to 30 times stronger. (RJHall)
Persoonia lanceolata (nom), created and expanded by Casliber. Commonly known as lance-leaf geebung, it is a shrub native to the mid-eastern region of the Australian continent. The plant lives in sandstone-based nutrient-deficient soil in the dry sclerophyll forest. After a fire, it can regenerate itself using seed banks stored on the ground.
Featured list
One list was promoted: Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (nom) (nominated by Albacore). This is an honour presented at the Grammy Awards – a ceremony that was established in 1958 and was originally called the Gramophone Awards – to recording artists for works containing quality "spoken word" performances aimed at children. Among the recipients are former US President Bill Clinton, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and actor Sophia Loren, for their work on the album Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf. The award was given to Audrey Hepburn in 1994, just after her death. By coincidence, a famous image of the actor was promoted to featured status this week. picture at right
Featured pictures
Three images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
Audrey Hepburn (nom; related article) (1929–93), the great British actor in her 20s, by an unknown photographer. This was a publicity shot for the 1957 film Love in the Afternoon. As nominator J Milburn said, "a striking photo of a striking woman". picture at right
Qasr Kharana in Jordan (nom; related article), close to the border with Saudi Arabia. It is believed to have been built sometime before the early 8th century, and is one of the earliest examples of Islamic architecture in the region. Reviewer Materialscientist wrote that this is a "remote historical jewel". Its purpose remains unclear today. "Castle" is a misnomer as the building's internal arrangement does not suggest a military use, and slits in its wall could not have been designed as balistraria, or arrow slits. It could have been a caravanserai or a resting place for traders, but lacks the water source such buildings usually had close by and is not on a major trade route. It is well-preserved, whatever its original use. The photographer, Wikimedian High Contrast, took this picture in 2009.
Patrouille de France (nom; related article), the French Acrobatic Patrol, is the precision aerobatic demonstration team of the French Air Force. Established in 1931, it is one of the world's oldest and most skilled demonstration teams, and is noted for the presence of women in the team of pilots. In this image, the pilots are captured flying the Dassault-Breguet/Dornier Alpha Jet in full formation. (created by Wikimedian Łukasz Golowanow).
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End in sight for Abortion case, nominations in 2011 elections
Two cases remain open, Abortion and Betacommand 3.
End is in sight for Abortion case
After several weeks of low activity, Abortion entered the voting phase this Tuesday when the drafting arbitrators, Jclemens and Coren proposed 17 principles, 11 findings of fact and 16 remedies. Some of these appear to be quite unusual, notably a mandatory three year semi-protection for the relevant articles (including even the talk pages) and the opening of a structured discussion co-ordinated by the Committee with the intent of resolving the naming dispute once and for all. Many users, including several very established ones, are also set to receive bans of various sorts. Stay tuned to next week's arbitration report for the final results!
Nominations near closing in annual elections
Nominations for candidates wishing to stand in the 2011 elections to the Committee are due to close by midnight tonight UTC. At the time of writing, sixteen candidates had stepped forward (see "News and notes").
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Mumbai and Brighton hacked; horizontal lists have got class
Mumbai, Brighton Hackathons
Two hackathons were held simultaneously over the weekend, one in Mumbai, India, and another in the British seaside town of Brighton. The former was designed to coincide with WikiConference India, a major meetup for editors interested in the expansion in Wikimedia's presence in India (see "In the news").
The Mumbai Hackathon featured work on the Narayam extension, allowing editors to work with non-Latin scripts more easily within MediaWiki. The WebFonts extension, set to be deployed to several wikis on 12 December and aimed at eliminating the "square box" character phenomenon by taking advantage of the latest web technologies, was also tested. Unfortunately, the typeface used for a number of Indic scripts was found to be lacking for certain characters, prompting a number of bug reports to be sent to its maintainer Red Hat.
Mumbai also saw work on the Kiwix reader, India-MobileFrontend tie-ins and, more broadly, the hackathon helped to share knowledge among the large number of potential developers and contributors at the event. Overall, internationalisation team member Gerard Meijssen was led to comment that "the [India] hackathon proved as always that when you bring great people together special things can and do happen." Among others, the hackathon was attended by WMF Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara and staff developers Brandon Harris, Tomasz Finc and Patrick Reilly.
The smaller Brighton Hackathon had fewer participants, with work on creating a standalone version of MediaWiki within the Vagrant framework and on bugsmashing (approximately 25 bugs were resolved), among other projects. In attendance were staff developers Roan Kattouw, Antoine Musso and Sam Reed, along with a number of other volunteer developers, Wikimedians and members of the wider free culture movement (notes from Saturday, notes from Sunday).
Horizontal lists have got class
In March 2007, a method for having horizontal lists – especially those in navboxes – rendered as proper, semantically-correct, standards-compliant and more accessible HTML lists was proposed by Andy Mabbett. The following month, he created the {{flatlist}} template for this purpose. In those days, however, support for the necessary CSS styling was severely lacking in some browsers. In March this year, Andy again asked for help to resolve the outstanding issues, but poor CSS support in older Microsoft browsers was still a problem. Despite this, editors increasingly began to add the flatlist template to navboxes.
This November, discussion resumed, prompting Erwin Dokter to do a complete overhaul, using CSS that is supported by all modern browsers, along with a few lines of JavaScript to extend support to older browsers, to achieve horizontal lists without recourse to the previous method of using resource-hungry templates such as {{nowrap}} and {{•}}. This method quickly gained the consensus needed to roll out the revised format for horizontal lists en masse. Currently, several editors are in the process of converting navboxes to use the new hlist class, replacing most inline templates. A bot to complete the task has also been requested.
The advantages extend to both readers and editors. In addition to easier editing of navboxes and speedier page-load times, users of screen readers will no longer hear the confusing sequence "one dot two dot three dot..." and instead hear just the list items. Any type of list is permitted, and nested lists are also supported. For more details, see WP:HLIST.
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.
- Page text storage centralised onto dedicated servers: "The Technical Operations team has just completed behind-the-scenes work that will likely never be noticed by our readers." So began a post this week on the Wikimedia blog. That work related to moving away from a mishmash where revision text was stored on many different servers (sometimes with conflicts between them) and towards a configuration of eight dedicated page text servers. The work improves page load time slightly in some cases, but, for the most part makes the configuration much more reliable and easier to maintain in future.
- MediaWiki 1.18.0rc1: The first release candidate for MediaWiki 1.18 was released on 17 November (wikitech-l mailing list). Release candidates normally signify the "beginning of the end" of the release cycle, with a full release to external sites expected imminently. In related news, code review statistics for MediaWiki 1.19 are now available, though they appear to show an unexpectedly large backlog of revisions needing to be checked before 1.19 can be deployed to Wikimedia wikis (also wikitech-l).
- Can an app store cope?: Gerard Meijssen used a post on his personal blog to muse on whether or not app stores were designed to cope with programs likely to change as regularly as translatewiki.net supported ones, which can be updated with new translations as regularly as every day. Virtually all app stores operate a heavy scrutiny app pre-review process for all new apps and, crucially, updates to those apps.
- TL;DR: WMF Director of Platform Engineering, Rob Lanphier, posted on the Wikimedia blog about the Technical Liaison; Developer Relations (TL;DR) team at the Foundation. "While everyone in Engineering is responsible for those things to some extent, the team helps fortify our commitment to this" wrote Lanphier. According to the post, the grouping current consists of three staff all well known to Signpost readers: Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara, bugmeister Mark Hershberger, and Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier – who writes (among other things) the WMF's monthly engineering reports. As Lanphier also admitted, one incentive to blog was "because we’re hiring, and we (still) want to get the word out [about that]". In unrelated news, the analytics team blogged about the tools currently available for supporting volunteers analysts and researchers.
- New Wikimedia map-pack released: Data analyst Erik Zachte reported this week how he had recently made two new maps of Wikimedian activity available on the stats.wikimedia.org site. The two maps (number 4 and 5 on the display) illustrate page view distribution and mobile penetration respectively.
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