This week, our travels brought us to Pittsburgh, the American city known for steelworks and bridges. WikiProject Pittsburgh was started in August 2006 to cover the 5,000 articles about Pittsburgh. Included in that total are 9 pieces of Featured material and 26 Good Articles maintained by 12 active and 14 semi-active members. The project's relative WikiWork is a tough 5.42, placing the average article between start and stub class. WikiProject Pittsburgh maintains the Pittsburgh Portal, monitors several to-do lists, and collects helpful resources for writing Pittsburgh articles. We interviewed CrazyPaco, Marketdiamond, and Piotr Konieczny.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Pittsburgh? Have you been involved with any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? Do you contribute to any other WikiProjects covering Pennsylvania or Appalachia?
CrazyPaco: Joining the WikiProject was just a natural extension of my interests in topics related to Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. Years ago, I was first drawn into editing Wikipedia articles because of the poor shape or absence of some topics related to the region so I naturally migrated to the WikiProject in order to discuss approaches and concerns about article creation and improvement.
Of course, spending any length of time editing in any one topic will result in one's work ending up in some Featured or Good Articles, at least to some degree, but my interest has always been more towards creating new articles, adding and sourcing content to existing articles, and illustrating articles, more so than polishing them for review. So I can't take credit from the hard work of people who have made that a priority for their editing.
I do contribute to other regionally-related WikiProjects, particularly the University of Pittsburgh Wikiproject and the Pennsylvania WikiProject, where perhaps my largest effort was helping to create lists of the state's 2,000 historical markers. Regarding Appalachia, although there are geological or socio-economic reasons that place Pittsburgh in he Appalachian region, Pittsburghers and Western Pennsylvanians really only identify with Western Pennsylvania itself. In my experience, people that are drawn to topics about Western Pennsylvania aren't necessarily going to share similar interests in another region just because it happens to fall within Appalachia. Appalachia, as a region of self-identification, isn't really in the thought process of Pittsburghers or other Western Pennsylvanians, at least in my experience.
Marketdiamond: A desire to retain and link some of the many factoids, stories and events of the region that I run across spurred me to join wikipedia. Pittsburgh being hard to pigeon hole--everything from the midwest/eastcoast/Appalachia divergent opinions to its unique nature of being a tiny landmass city in a region that has more municipalities than Montana, its playing second fiddle to Philadelphia despite being closer to Cleveland and D.C. and finally the whole "smoky city" stereotype by out-of-towners that somehow persists--has a wealth of factoids that always made me go hmm. After years in Florida, New York and elsewhere and thousands of encounters with both positive and negative misconceptions of the area that I knew were false but forgot where I heard/read/saw it, wikipedia's great citation and database approach that encouraged consensus proved to be very helpful in my own goal of remembering what those "sources" were.
The featured or good articles I see as very important and valuable, however for the foreseeable future I have no plans to focus on attaining that although I always contribute in ways that can add to an articles featured or good status. There's simply not much time left after linking, listing, categorizing, and contributing the data I find--although time consumptive that ability to organize the data in multiple ways and platforms is why I appreciate wikipedia so much. Other wikiprojects such as Pennsylvania and Appalachia do not interest me at this moment--partly because of time constraints and partly due to the cultural differences, both real and perceived. "Pennsylvania" to many people I run into is synonymous with "metro philly", it may be a unique thing but I personally find contributing to the Pennsylvania project the same as contribution to the Philadelphia wikiproject or even the Mid Atlantic or Atlantic Coast wiki articles, the perception though false exists. I have contributed some to the Appalachia articles thou I am not a member of its wikiproject (due mainly to time--I have considered joining), I agree with CrazyPaco that the vast majority of Pittsburghers both in the metro area and transplants to the sunbelt and NYC do not identify with "Appalachia" thou from my travels through West Virginia and Kentucky etc. the cultures are remarkably similar social class to social class. Parts of the southern/western Pittsburgh metro area also relates with West Virginia, including the part I hail from, although even some in Northern WV don't consider themselves "Appalachian" first. In short, I would join the WV and Appalachia wikiprojects before I considered joining the Pennsylvania one, my years of living outside Pittsburgh have taught me that to the average American "Pennsylvania=Philadelphia/East Coast" and my limited experience on wikipedia in that area confirms that.
Piotr Konieczny: I have joined this project as I've lived in Pittsburgh for several years; I think it is only good form to try to became involved in local projects. I have not been very active in writing for this subject, mostly due to the fact that I prefer subjects more affected by WP:SYSTEMICBIAS. I did contribute a number of photos from my time in Pittsburgh, thus, and I still fondly remember writing up on Edward Manning Bigelow - even if he didn't make it past start/DYK, it was fun to research a street name and find such an interesting if obscure persona behind it.
The activity at WikiProject Pittsburgh may come as a surprise considering that there are many stagnant WikiProjects covering mid-sized cities in the United States. What has made WikiProject Pittsburgh different? Is there something unique about Pittsburgh that has helped your online community grow?
CrazyPaco: To be honest, I do believe it is something unique about Pittsburgh. I did not grow up in Pittsburgh, and even though I haven't lived there in over 15 years, I still remain drawn to it and I think this is true for many other ex-Pittsburghers. There is a deep-rooted pride in the city and region that few other places that I have lived can match, and it is contagious. My girlfriend thought it was just me until we recently moved to the east coast and she realized that my affliction was mild compared to other Pittsburghers that she has now met. And there is good reason for this pride because Pittsburgh today is very much the antithesis of the stereotype of the smokey, industrial, rust-belt city that many still imagine it to be. I'm not going to suggest that it compares, point-by-point, to metropolises that dwarf it in size like New York or San Francisco, but aesthetically, culturally, and socially to is a beautiful and interesting place to live. There is a reason it has gotten so much press lately and won so may "most livable" city awards, and Pittsburghers, past and present, are somehow ingrained to want to let you know about it. Having accurate, informative Wikipedia articles on Pittsburgh-related topics is one way that some have determined to fulfill that mission. But then, you also have to keep an eye out for WP:SOAP, too.
However, I would be remiss not to mention the role that Piotr Konieczny has played. Piotrus has organized Wikipedia meet-ups in Pittsburgh and even conducted area workshops on teaching with Wikipedia. He is very active and experienced Wikipedian and having a Pittsburgh-based editor so active in both the Wikipedia community and in the real world helps quite a bit with maintaining the activity of the project.
Marketdiamond: I think CrazyPaco has expressed it very well, having lived up and down the east coast and great lakes as well as being very wonkish and deep into culture and anthropology people from the Pittsburgh "Tri-State" seem to have a very intense sense of place and regional pride. Wikipedia has given those internet savvy a medium for that pathos in some ways.
Piotr Konieczny: Luck, perhaps. With a thanks to CrazyPaco for mentioning my activities, the local meetups died out after a year; I gave up when the only two people at one was myself and a visitor from another state :/ I am still clueless to the reason that we didn't achieve the critical weight needed to transform to a community that could've supported regular meetups, but I am glad to see that the project has a visible virtual wiki presence.
Are there any Pittsburgh topics that are better covered than others? What can be done to fill the gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of Pittsburgh?
CrazyPaco: I think the universities and sports teams are pretty well covered. Many of the articles on historic landmarks and buildings could be fleshed out with more information. However, I may feel that just because I have a tendency to concentrate on historic sites within my own editing interests.
Marketdiamond: Again I think CrazyPaco is extremely well acquainted with this. Pittsburgh is a sports town more than anything. In my experience people contribute and join wikipedia because they are passionate about a topic, possibly local meet ups that do some outreach to include area residents from different segments of society could fill gaps in coverage both known and unknown. To me gaps are few but again I learn some new topic exists every day on Wikipedia.
Piotr Konieczny: As everywhere, people like to write about popculture. Not sure how we can change it.
How difficult has it been to acquire images for articles about Pittsburgh? What are some missing images that could be easily provided by someone who lives or works in Pittsburgh?
CrazyPaco: Pittsburgh is filled with rivers, valleys and architecture that makes it a pretty photogenic city, so we are pretty lucky as a project to have a fairly good selection of images to work with from those already uploaded to Commons or transferred from Flickr. However, we've also been pretty blessed with some great collaborations between editors. For example, one of my other projects was creating list articles about Pittsburgh's historic landmarks (building off of the national registry listings example, we created a list for the city's own local registry as well as one from a local, independent landmarks foundation). I was working on this while living in San Francisco, and while I would transfer creative commons released photos from Flickr when I could find them, it was locally based Leepaxton who would tramp around the region taking photos of landmarks that weren't otherwise available. So far, we have images for almost 300 of the ~500 landmarks designated by the private foundation and all 87 of the city's designations are illustrated. You can't find illustrated lists of these historical properties and structures anywhere but on Wikipedia. Building the type of informational resource is what Wikipedia is all about, as well as being an example of a successful, if not incomplete, collaboration between distantly located editors within the WikiProject.
As far as other photos that are needed, were still missing images for that landmarks list, which is something that I'd personally like to see completed. Often pictures of living individuals are hard to come by for biography articles. I think images of the architectural details of building interiors are always more scarce than those of exterior façades, and the project can always use photos of major events that occur throughout the Pittsburgh region. We're always looking for better images than the ones we currently have for any article.
Marketdiamond: CrazyPaco covered this well, all I would add is that I would love to see some images of the mayors, police chiefs, city council presidents of the past added to those articles. And a big thanks to the many that have added some great images, I'm a huge fan of them, and the historical landmark articles are wonderful works!
Piotr Konieczny: It would be nice if more people contributed to Wikipedia rather than to Facebook or such, alas, that's hardly a problem unique to WP:PITTSBURGH area.
Does the project collect any resources for editors to use when building articles? What are some of the better sources for historical and contemporary information about Pittsburgh?
Marketdiamond: Not much left to add (great job CrazyPaco), I do wonder about the project collecting these resources at a central page, could be something to look into, in a round about sort of way I have done some of this on the On this Day section of the portal, but could be expanded and centralized into a single page.
Piotr Konieczny: CP, as always does an excellent job covering the sources. We should probably copy his statement to the WikiProject page :)
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
CrazyPaco: This is probably a similar question to the one above regarding the gaps in the project. Any new contributor can look into those gaps if they are looking for a direction to edit in, and it may be particularly useful to take a look at the project's Assessment table, but any contribution is helpful and appreciated. I think probably the most important thing is to make sure that you having fun, and that usually involves, at least for me, participating in areas where your own interests lie.
Marketdiamond: Agreed with similar to gaps, if an editor wanted to help today and had the resources images of mayors, police chiefs, city council members etc. would be helpful. Also expansion of the Three Rivers Film Festival article is something I have worked on. Long term view is correct like CrazyPaco said, any contribution no matter how small is always appreciated and helpful, goes without saying though to follow wiki policy on adding a citation and being neutral etc.
Piotr Konieczny: More contributors are needed - hardly different than the urgent need of every single WikiProject out there.
Anything else you'd like to add?
CrazyPaco: I have to give a shout out to all the editors, including some anonymous IPs, that have made so many important contributions to Pittsburgh-related articles. Personally, in addition to those editors that I mentioned above, I am thankful for the collaborative work of Marketdiamond, GrapedApe, Grsz11, and Notyourbroom, but really, I could list every editor listed on the WikiProject page.
Marketdiamond: A huge thank you to all editors, anon IPs and even retired editors for hours of hard work in all sorts of specialized topics concerning the area. To think that a "committee" actually did build a thorough bred like the Pittsburgh articles is amazing to me. Also a thanks to those at the help desks for technical and resource/citation assists on some items, even though not part of the project or even interested in Pittsburgh those highly skilled editors have always been very kind, prompt and instructive in my experiences.
One thing we could do as a project is present a monthly award or even yearly award to members, good for morale and encouraging the wikipedia way sort of thing.
Piotr Konieczny: I'd love to see the meetups resume, so then when I come back visit one day I have more great people to meet :)
Next week, we're answering your questions. Until then, look for answers in the archive.
Soursops are fruits of Annona muricata trees. The photo is a new featured picture.
This issue of the Signpost's "Featured content" covers content promoted between 17 March and 23 March 2013.
Featured articles
East Brother Island lighthouse, a new featured pictureHagia Sophia, a new featured pictureShakespeare's Memorial Theatre, a new featured pictureThe U.S. Federal Building and District Court in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The photo appears in the new featured article United States v. The Progressive.
Seven featured articles were promoted this week:
Mother India (nom) by Dr. Blofeld, Dwaipayanc and Redtigerxyz. Directed by Mehboob Khan, the epic melodrama film released in 1957 is a remake of Khan's own earlier production Aurat (1940). Mother India focuses on the story of a poverty-stricken village woman who struggles to raise her sons. Titled after Khan's polemical book of the same name, it was the most expensive and highest-grossing Hindi cinema production at the time of its release.
George Lansbury (nom) by Brianboulton. Lansbury (1859–1940) was a British politician and social reformer who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. After converting to socialism in the early 1890s, he was elected to parliament in 1910, only to resign in 1912. He returned in 1922, and after the 1931 general election, Lansbury became the head of the Labour Party.
Lambertia formosa (nom) by Casliber and Melburnian. Commonly known as mountain devil, the formosa is a shrub of the family Proteaceae, endemic to Australia. First described in 1798 by James Edward Smith, it is generally found in heathland or open forest, and its flowers hold profuse amounts of nectar and are pollinated by honeyeaters.
Disco Demolition Night (nom) by Wehwalt and Balph Eubank. Disco Demolition Night was a famously disastrous baseball promotion. The event happened on July 12, 1979 in Chicago, Illinois. A crate filled with disco records was blown up on the baseball field between games. After the explosion, attendees rushed to the field, and the playing surface was severely damaged, postponing the second game of a two-night doubleheader between Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.
History of Gibraltar (nom) by Prioryman. Gibraltar, a small peninsula on the Iberian coast, was first inhabited over 50,000 years ago by Neanderthals, and its recorded history began with the Phoenicians around 950 BC. The terrain became part of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania following the collapse of the Roman Empire, was settled by the Moors, later became part of Spain and was ceded to Britain in 1713, which declared it a Crown colony.
Biscayne National Park (nom) by Acroterion. Located in southern Florida, the park preserves Biscayne Bay and its offshore barrier reefs. The bay was inhabited by people of the Glades culture as early as 10,000 years ago, and later by the Tequesta people from about 4,000 years before the present to the 16th century. The offshore portion of the park includes the northernmost region of the Florida Reef, one of the largest coral reefs in the world.
United States v. The Progressive (nom) by Hawkeye7. United States v. The Progressive was a lawsuit against The Progressive magazine by the United States Department of Energy that followed a temporary injunction to prevent the publication of an article that purported to reveal the "secret" of the hydrogen bomb. Although the information was compiled from public sources, the Department of Energy claimed that it violated the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The article was eventually published, and the case dropped, after additional information was published by other sources and the Department of Energy declared the case moot.
Featured lists
One featured list was promoted this week:
List of honors received by Maya Angelou (nom) by Figureskatingfan. African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou has been honored by a wide array of entities throughout her professional career. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and received three Grammy Awards for her spoken word albums.
Featured pictures
Six featured pictures were promoted this week:
Annona muricata (nom) created by Muhammad Mahdi Karim and nominated by Muhammad Mahdi Karim. Annona muricata produces a fruit called soursop. The fruit is 20–30 centimeters (7.9–12 inches) long, and can weigh up to 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds).
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (nom) created by Detroit Publishing Co, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden. Shakespeare's Memorial Theatre opened in 1879 and burned down in 1926. It was replaced by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
Nancy Storace (nom) created by Pietro Bettelini, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden . Nancy Storace (27 October 1765 – 24 August 1817) was an English soprano who had a very successful career in opera. This portrait is by Italian engraver Pietro Bettelini.
Hagia Sophia (nom) created by ArildV and nominated by Tomer T. The Hagia Sophia (full Greek name Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας or "Shrine of the Holy Wisdom of God") has a complicated history and is currently a museum. It is the third building to stand on its present location, and was inaugurated in the year 537.
East Brother Island Light (nom) created by Frank Schulenburg and nominated by Tomer T. The East Brother Island Lighthouse was opened in 1874. The lighthouse is listed in the United States National Register of Historic Places. The former keepers' house now operates as a bed and breakfast.
Featured topic
One featured topic was promoted this week:
Dan Leno on stage and record (nom) nominated by Cassianto. The topic includes three articles, all of them featured. Dan Leno (20 December 1860 – 31 October 1904) was a comedian and actor in Victorian England.
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, was opened over a dispute about transgenderism topics that began off-wiki. The evidence phase was scheduled to close March 7, 2013, with a proposed decision due to be posted by March 29.
This case was brought to the Committee by KillerChihuahua, who alleges the discussion over this American political group has degenerated into incivility. Evidence for the case was due by March 20, 2013, and a decision is scheduled for April 3, 2013.
Other requests and committee action
Amendment request: Rich Farmbrough: An amendment request was made by Rich Farmbrough to amend a motion in an arbitration case involving automated edits. While the request was still in progress, the requester was blocked for one year after an arbitration enforcement request.
Request for amendment: GoodDay: An amendment request was made by GoodDay to lift an editing restriction related to diacritics.
The arbitration committee had previously issued a call for applications for three vacancies for non-arbitrator members to the subcommittee, to be submitted before April 1, 2013. However, during a discussion on the noticeboard talk page, a statement from the foundation's legal team indicated that "...we require an RFA or RFA-identical process for access to deleted revisions." Several followup questions regarding various election processes, as well as the role of administrators and non-administrators in arbitration roles were posed to the foundation, and are awaiting a response.
Procedural issues at WP:Arbitration Enforcement: A request for clarification has been brought by Gatoclass regarding whether an administrator can "act in a request" involving 1RR restrictions, whether an administrator can act when an editor has not received a formal warning, whether an administrator can adjudicate in an appeal if they adjudicated in the decision that lead to the appeal, and whether an administrator can issue a warning before consensus on a request has been reached.
Monty Hall problem: An amendment request has been made to the committee by Martin Hogbin for amendment of the remedies, including removal of discretionary sanctions.
Clarification request: Climate change: A clarification request of the climate change case was filed by NewsAndEventsGuy, who requests clarification of who can post arbitration enforcement notices to talk pages and add to the notifications, blocks, bans, and sanctions log.
Clarification request: Discretionary sanctions appeals procedure: A request to clarify the appeal process for discretionary sanctions warnings was filed by Sandstein
Executive director Sue Gardner will leave the Wikimedia Foundation
Sue Gardner in 2010
On Wednesday 27 March, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, announced that she plans to leave the position when a successor is recruited. Ranked as one of the most powerful women in the world by Forbes magazine, and one of only two women running a top-10 internet player, Sue Gardner is widely associated with the rise of the Wikimedia movement as a major custodian of human knowledge and cultural products.
Shortly after her announcement, Foundation board deputy chair Jan-Bart de Vreede wrote: "As a board member I will forever be grateful that she was willing to bet on a small organization with a lot of potential [and built on that potential] to make it one of the most powerful examples in the space of open knowledge and learning." Gardner's departure will not be immediate: the recruitment and transition are expected to take some six months, and she says she will be fully engaged in the job until a new person is in place.
Under her leadership, the WMF has undergone fundamental changes. In 2007, it spent only $3.5 million. By 2012, this had risen to an annual $22.3 million, the year in which a five-country fundraiser netted $25 million in just nine days. Over the same period, the Foundation has expanded beyond a simple server-supporting organization, funding programs from education to GLAM opportunities. The WMF itself was transplanted from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco and has expanded from fewer than 10 employees to 160—of these, 100 have arrived over the past two years.
The ex-CBC producer cites two reasons for her decision. "First, the movement and the Wikimedia Foundation are in a strong place now. ... If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't feel okay to leave. In that sense, my leaving is a vote of confidence in our Board and executive team and staff." Her second reason may give the movement pause: "although we’re in good shape, ... the same isn’t true for the internet itself. Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is not." She says, "Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments", and that increasingly we are "seeing important decisions made by unaccountable non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens".
When I joined, the Foundation was tiny and not yet able to
reliably support the projects. Today it's healthy, thriving, and a
competent partner to the global network of Wikimedia volunteers
— Sue Gardner
Gardner warns that while many organisations and individuals advocate for the public interest online ("what’s good for ordinary people"), other interests are more numerous and powerful. "I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next."
This is driving her towards a new role—"one very much aligned with Wikimedia values and informed by my experiences here, and with the purpose of amplifying the voices of people advocating for the free and open internet." While Gardner has not yet decided the exact trajectory of her next career phase, she "feels strongly that this is what I need to do."
"Until then, nothing changes. The Wikimedia Foundation has lots of work to do, and you can expect me to focus fully on it until we have a new Executive Director in place."
The Foundation board, which will be ultimately responsible for appointing the new executive director, has established a transition team consisting of board member Jan-Bart de Vreede (who will chair the team); chair of the board and community-elected trustee Kat Walsh; chapter-selected trustee Alice Wiegand (also a member of the HR Committee); Sue Gardner; her deputy, Erik Moeller; WMF General Counsel Geoff Brigham; and Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Gayle Karen Young. An outside recruitment firm will be engaged to assist in the task.
Jan-Bart de Vreede says the team will meet informally over the next few weeks, and will conduct its first first physical meeting in mid-April in Milan as part of the Wikimedia Conference, after which he will release a status report. Members of the movement are welcome to attend office hours on Saturday 30 March at 18:00 UTC, and Jan-Bart de Vreede can also talk about the matter on the list. He will set up corresponding pages on Meta over the next few days and community members are strongly encouraged to share their views there in due course.
The Signpost invites its readers' views on what talents should be looked for in a new executive director on the talk page, on Facebook, or through tweeting @wikisignpost.
Wikinews debate
German-language Wikipedians are in the vanguard of an effort to close down Wikimedia sister project Wikinews, the latest in a series of closure movements over the past few years.
The current discussion, which is currently being debated on Meta—the coordinating website for the Wikimedia movement—began from a discussion on the talk page of the Signpost's German-language cousin, the Kurier, which has been published since 2003; its motto is "not necessarily neutral [and] not encyclopedic". The newsletter recently ran a story on the future of Wikiversity, the site that is "devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university." In comments on the talk page, discussion quickly turned to Wikinews; a day later, the debate moved to Meta.
Wikinews has had a controversial history within the Wikimedia movement. Various language versions have been proposed for closure over the last several years, including in 2011, in 2012—where the English-language Wikinews was contentiously kept open—and in 2013. Additionally, several individuals have argued that Wikipedia covers recent news better than Wikinews—essentially stating that it beats its sister project at its own mission—including the Nieman Journalism Lab in 2010.
The English-language Wikinews has seen perhaps the greatest amount of controversy despite its small number of editors. A Signpost report documenting a fork of Wikinews in 2011 put the number at just two dozen active editors, not all of whom published articles. This number is most likely not aided by the project's editorial atmosphere, which has been described as "hostile". The fork, named OpenGlobe, was a direct result of this and Wikinews' complicated publishing process; it took nine of Wikinews' two dozen editors. Over time, OpenGlobe lost editors due to real life issues, leading to its end in August of last year.
Today, the English Wikinews still ranks as among the top language Wikinews sites. The report card reveals that the site has just 17 active editors, with four being "highly active", correlating to five or more and 100 or more edits per month, respectively. The number of new articles per month, a key barometer in a news-geared site, has slowly declined from a high of over 400 in April 2005 to below 50 today.
In contrast, the Russian Wikinews has seen recent success, with over 250 new articles being created in January 2013. However, the Russian and French Wikinews sites are the only ones with over 100 articles created in a single month in 2013; the Serbian Wikinews may also fall in this category, but the report card does not cover it.
The Meta debate has included many of these arguments and has a statistical analysis of all active or semi-active Wikinews projects. In a related discussion, Liliana stated:
“
Wikinews is flawed by its very definition. Normally, the wiki principle dictates that content with time grows and becomes better by gathering information from secondary sources (or, in the case of Wikibooks, first-hand knowledge). However, this principle doesn't work for Wikinews. News by definition are current and their value diminishes with time. There is no reason why anyone would want to use Wikinews when the big news portals are much more up-to-date and have much more content. Given that we have no correspondents across the world who are able to directly write reports on what's happening, we are forced to copy from the other news portals, which makes us pretty much useless. ...
Wikinews across the board has failed completely as a WMF project. It may be relaunched at a later date, but then there would need to be a proper plan on how to get a constant stream of news going so we can establish ourselves as a useful news source. I fail to see anything like that in our current Wikinews projects.
”
Those in support of Wikinews, such as odder, have focused on a perceived lack of Wikimedia Foundation support for Wikinews:
“
Let me also just point out that the costs of keeping Wikinews — all its language versions — alive, as compared to the English Wikipedia, are negligible. No current WMF employee works with the Wikinews community, and the number of page views, the size of the database, etc. of all Wikinews language editions is much smaller than of the English Wikipedia alone. Seeing that the Foundation focuses the vast majority of its resources on that single wiki — especially employee time, which is the most expensive of all — the financial argument being brought up above doesn't seem in touch with the reality.
”
Still, as Gestumblindi says in the Meta debate, "A small random selection of (mostly) retold news is not a news site." Should the various-language Wikinews sites be closed? The Signpost encourages our readers to post their thoughts on the talk page.
Triple TFA: The English Wikipedia's Bugle, the newsletter of the Military history project, has published an article by Prioryman on the first-ever triple "Today's featured article", which included Blockhaus d'Éperlecques, La Coupole and Fortress of Mimoyecques. They were on the main page on 25 March, which marked the 70th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's approval to construct them. Prioryman, who was the author of the three articles, noted that all three were "secret German bases in north-eastern France which were intended to house the V-2 rocket and the V-3 cannon." The entire process took Prioryman two years and included a trip to the sites in 2011, visits to the British Library and UK National Archives, and figuring out how to use the major source on these sites, which happened to be written by noted Holocaust denier David Irving, who was later cited by an English court as having "persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" for ideological reasons.
Quarterly review: The minutes of the quarterly review with the WMF's mobile team have been published. WMF executive director Sue Gardner positively remarked on the team's work, though she noted that it was "partly luck and circumstances" alongside "good management [and a] skilled team."
History of WMF grants: The WMF has published a retrospective of its grantmaking from the fiscal years 2009 to 2012. Outside contractor Kevin Gorman, an English Wikipedia editor since 2011, was commissioned to write the report.
New Armenian chapter: The newest Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia Armenia, has been approved by the Affiliations Committee and recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation. The addition of Wikimedia Armenia brings the total number of global chapters to thirty-nine, most being nation-based (the two exceptions being the American New York City and DC).
Adminship developments: The third and final round of the adminship reform request for comment is open for voting. Ymblanter has been granted adminship rights on the English Wikipedia. One request for adminship and one request for bureaucratship are open for comments.
Wikimedia hackathon scholarships: A Wikimedia-related hackathon will be held from 24 to 26 May. To request a scholarship to attend, please register for the event and request a scholarship by 20 April on Mediawiki.
Core Contest: Another edition of the Core Contest—a "short intensive contest ... [focusing] on improving Wikipedia's most important articles, particularly those in the worst state of disrepair"—will begin on 15 April and end on 13 May. Contest entries will be submitted at Wikipedia:The Core Contest/Entries. £250 in Amazon vouchers will be given out to the winners, who will be determined by contest judges Casliber, Brianboulton, Steven Walling, and Binksternet.
James Forrester updates the Signpost on progress with the Visual Editor
The logo of the Visual Editor project, as uploaded in June 2012. In fact, the project is over a year older, and discussions over possible Foundation-sponsored WYSIWYG editors older still.
Since its inception in May 2011, the Foundation's Visual Editor (VE) project has grown to become one of its main focuses. Considering that a Wikimedia-deployable WYSIWYG wikitext editor has been one of the most requested features since the language was first used, the hype is perhaps unsurprising. As the project nears its two-year birthday, the Signpost caught up with Visual Editor project manager James Forrester to discuss the progress on the project.
Hi James. So to start with the obvious, 18 months in, where are we now?
The current Visual Editor interface. Areas shaded out in green and white are uneditable.Hi. The Visual Editor is currently deployed to the English Wikipedia as an opt-in test for all users to be able to edit all articles and user pages; it's also on MediaWiki.org as always-on for the VisualEditor: test namespace. Right now, it supports text, headings, preformatted text, basic annotations (bold, italics) and links (internal and external); other items, such as images and templates, are "alienated" - marked as not-able-to-be-edited and shaded out in green and white. As we add the ability to edit new components ("node handlers"), these green items will gradually disappear.
The Visual Editor currently works equally well in both Monobook and Vector and we'll look to keep it that way (though all our design cues are off Vector).
July has recently been given as a possible rollout date. What needs to happen before that, and what will be included?
We're aiming for the Visual Editor to become the "default" editor - that is, when you click the "edit" button, you get the Visual Editor. There'll still be the current text-based editor, of course, accessed via "Edit Source". In addition to the functionality already present, the aim is currently for us to also deliver all four of templates, references, categories and images (at least, basic abilities of each) before we roll-out.
One of the key items before July is to allow templates to be edited in a way that users aren't expected to memorise how they work. To help with that, there will be a new extension ("TemplateData") which will let users add hinting to templates on how they should be used. We'll be deploying that soon and making some initial example ones so that it's clear to community template writers how it will help.
In addition, I want to get us testing on non-English Wikipedias so that we know how much more we have to do on i18n/l10n support - we think we're reasonably far, but our users can tell us much more accurately than our pontificating from the ivory tower.
So in July it’ll be English Wikipedias and non-English as well?
That's the intent. Almost certainly not non-Wikipedias, sadly, as we've not yet had time to look at their specific needs (like integrating Wikisource's ProofreadPage extension).
Sounds great. And after July it'll be a case of incrementally adding whatever's still missing -- tables, for example? Are there some things that will never be implemented on the VE, do you think? Magic words, manual interwikis?
Yes, table structure editing and other things are on the backlog for 2013/14. It's quite possible that we'll never implement some things, but there are lots of things for us to work on before then. For example, yes, interwikis (individual and Wikidata) and page-setting magic words will both be supported and editable (but probably not for July).
Yes. So finally, the project will be two years old in May. If the WMF did it again, what would it do differently?
Well, actually we were talking about a rich-text editor in 2002. But yes, obviously we'd love to have made more progress, faster. I think we're confident that we are balancing the desire to get it out as fast as possible to the need to build the best possible editor that we can, so that editors have it easier (and especially for new editors).
Ultimately, both the Visual Editor and Parsoid are both research projects still - a good chunk of what we're doing has never been done before, or at best only been done a few times, and there's no settled way to do them. That's why it takes time, and the dead-ends we've encountered and the times we've chosen to change course have led to VE and Parsoid being higher quality and ultimately better for our users
Thank you.
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 several weeks.
MediaWiki 1.21 in the pipeline: Discussions have started regarding the branching and release of MediaWiki 1.21 to external sites (wikitech-l mailing list). Wikimedia wikis have already benefited from the same code, deployed in 12 batches (wmf1 through wmf12) over the last six months. The issue was complicated by the need to briefly rollback wmf12 from Wikimedia wikis this week after the deployment broke page move functionality on setups with multiple databases (bug #46397; also wikitech-l).
Wikidata phase 2 coming to a wiki near you: Phase 2 of Wikidata – allowing data points to be replicated from Wikidata.org to client wikis – will go live to ten wikis including the Italian and Russian Wikipedias on 27 March (wikitech-l, blog post) following a successful deployment to a testwiki on Monday. The wikis included collectively account for some 10% of all Wikimedia pageviews.
Pick of the blogs: The Wikimedia blog this week carried a round-up of the Foundation's improvements to the translation process for interface messages and other documentation, while former Localisation Team member and serial commentator Gerard Meijssen blogged about the interesting case of trying to create a Wikipedia written almost entirely in sign language. Elsewhere, WMF-mentored Outreach program for Women (OPW) intern Mariya Miteva wrapped up her experience over the last three months. "If you need anything from anyone, ask as early as possible, let them know you will need their help and when, and poke them if you are not hearing back", Miteva advised future interns.
A paper presented at last month's CSCW Conference, titled "Keeping eyes on the prize: officially sanctioned rule breaking in mass collaboration systems"[1] observes that "Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order", yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization. Rule breaking in bureaucracies is a slippery slope quickly leading to potentially dangerous exceptions, so Wikipedia has a mechanism called "Ignore all rules" (WP:IAR) for officially sanctioned rule breaking. The researchers have considered IAR's impact within the scope of deletion requests. The results show that the IAR policy has meaningful influences on deliberation outcomes, which rather than wreaking havoc, provides a positive, functional governance mechanism.
This paper is another welcome addition to the growing literature on AfD, examining the effectiveness of rule breaking using WP:IAR within these discussions. It starts with an in depth examination of rule breaking within collaborative environments. Then these six hypotheses are postulated:
Invocation of WP:IAR in support of vote correlates with increased likelihood of the decision that the vote will be on the winning side.
This effect is expected to increase with the number of policies cited in the deletion proposal (since they may be contradicting each other).
Invoking IAR to override the deletion proposal’s policy citation tends to reduce the proposal’s likelihood of success.
When IAR is used together with another policy domain (e.g. Content/Conduct/Legal) as the proposal’s rationale, it will negate the proposal’s success.
Increased dissonance between policies arising in the discussion will increase the chance that the IAR argument will be successful.
IAR will increase in effectiveness as the policies invoked increase in complexity.
To test these, the researchers scoured AfD discussions starting from April 2006 to October 2008, collecting those where WP:IAR had been invoked. These were then supplemented by randomly drawing a control group from non IAR AfD discussions from the same date. The resulting dataset contained 555 AfD discussions. These were coded by Outcome, for Keep/Delete and IAR usage in Keep/Delete vote, Policy Match and Category Match. Each hypothesis and the control were fitted to a linear regression model. The results were as follows:
H1 was supported only in cases where IAR is used in keep vote, but showed insignificant impact as a delete argument. H2, H3 & H4 look for conditions in which IAR's impact on the ultimate decision would be strengthened. H2 was supported only marginally; H3 was not supported; H4 was not supported and actually indicated that in the case where a keep voter has invoked IAR with another policy this will only increase the chance of a delete outcome! H5 and H6 consider if IAR fares better when pitted against increasingly contradictory or complicated policies and both of these are supported. Overall, the authors conclude that IAR plays a significant role in Wikipedia's policies, and recommend its use to other communities. They point out that IAR is also an indicator of where policy is weak in addressing the community's needs.
Activity of content translators on Wikipedia examined
Another CSCW paper titled "Could someone please translate this?": activity analysis of Wikipedia article translation by non-experts"[2] analyzes the work of a volunteer translator of Wikipedia articles. It goes into great detail: it breaks down the big translation task into many sub-activities, such as looking up complicated words in the source language, choosing the right translation, using editing software, etc. It presents all the activities according to the Activity theory methodology. Though there are other papers that deal with translation of Wikipedia content, it is the first paper to examine the actual volunteer translator's activity.
Interestingly, this paper notes the importance of the Simple English Wikipedia several times, as a tool that may help people translate the content, with the assumption that the language of the main English Wikipedia may frequently be complex and challenging (this assumption is based on another paper, which compared the English and Simple English Wikipedias). It relies on the Simple English Wikipedia a bit too much, though; for example, it cites its main page as a source for some statistics, which would better be obtained directly from stats.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia's main statistics site.
It has some shortcomings, which should be addressed in future works on the subject:
It lists several possible definitions of "Wikipedia translation": Translation of articles, with which it deals, and also translation of talk pages, translation of WikiProject pages, etc. It also mentions several software tools that are related to Wikipedia translation and multilinguality, such as WikiBhasha and Omnipedia. However, it notably omits any mention of MediaWiki's Translate extension, which is used on the translatewiki.net website for translating of the user interface of MediaWiki and its many extensions, making MediaWiki one of the most thoroughly localized software packages ever, and also for various documents on Wikimedia sites, such as Meta, MediaWiki.org and Wikidata. Though they are certainly not identical, the latter workflow of translating documents is especially similar to the workflow of Wikipedia article translation. (Disclaimer: The reviewer is one of the developers of the Translate extension.)
It provided pre-selected articles to translate to the subjects of the experiment. This may have been unavoidable in a first small controlled experiment, but it misses an important activity of volunteer translators in Wikipedia: selection of the article to translate. This is done in several ways, among which are:
Selection by translators themselves, based on their interests or other factors.
Requests from other users who speak the target language.
Requests from users who speak other languages. Notable examples of these are the Wikipedia articles about Kurów, a town in Poland, and True Jesus Church, a Christian denomination, which are at least partially translated to nearly all languages in which a Wikipedia is available.
It only deals with translation from English to other languages, but not with translation from other languages into English and other languages. For many reasons, English is not the only source for translation and this must be noted.
The paper notes that one of the criteria for choosing the articles for the experiment was that the article content is representative of the general Wikipedia article language complexity". It is not clear, however, how this was measured.
New users of Wikipedia were chosen and not experienced editors. Testing with new users is valuable, but it would be useful to repeat the experiment with veteran Wikipedians.
It claims that it found that paraphrasing machine translation can be a more desirable strategy for translating conceptual articles than biographical articles in Wikipedia, even though the English language might be more complex. This may be true, but it is unclear how such a bold statement could be made from such a small sample of source content.
Despite these shortcomings, this paper is valuable for several reasons:
Opening the topic of close examination of Wikipedia's translators work is important in itself.
Its bibliography has many useful pointers to other articles about Wikipedia's multilinguality and volunteer translation.
Its high level of detail in analyzing the translators activity is commendable, and with some improvements, this methodology could be useful for people who design translation tools.
Its particular comments about the special challenges of translation to Chinese should be very useful for optimizing future translation tools for this language. Of course, the experiment should be repeated with other languages, too.
Finally, the article promises further research and suggestions about building tools for translator support, which would be very interesting to read.
Comparison of collaborative editing in OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia
A preprint titled "Has OpenStreetMap a role in Digital Earth Applications?"[3] studies OpenStreetMap, the wiki-based collaboratively editable map, as a predominant example of Volunteered Geographical Information projects. The paper addresses two main research questions: 1) How successful is the OSM project in providing spatial data and to which extent can it be compared to Wikipedia in this sense, 2) what are the main characteristics of OSM stemming from its crowd-sourced nature? The paper gives a very comprehensive overview of the work-flow of OSM, reviews the main characteristics of its collaborative mapping process very well, and tries to compare these characteristics with those of Wikipedia: In contrast with Wikipedia, the administrative structure of OSM is unknown and not very well defined within the community of its editors; however both platforms show the same Zipfian characteristics among their editors; a few editors are responsible for large numbers of contributions and many editors have only a few contributions. Although the criteria are quite different on the two platforms, the paper finds that the relative population of OSM Featured Objects is evidently larger than the ones of Wikipedia (Featured Articles). In the conclusion, the authors express that they "believe that OSM will continue its growth for the foreseeable future". However, the route to this conclusion is not very well described in the manuscript.
Wikipedia's coverage of breaking news stories is still a fertile field of research
The Chelyabinsk meteor on February 15 did not just leave its traces in the Ural region, but Wikipedia entries on the event had been started in 29 languages by the end of that day. Today, there are 44.
In MJ no more: Using Concurrent Wikipedia Edit Spikes with Social Network Plausibility Checks for Breaking News Detection[4] by Thomas Steiner, Seth van Hooland and Ed Summers, the controversial (per WP:Recentism and WP:RS) field of breaking news articles is investigated. Motivated by the overloading of Wikipedia during the breaking of the news of Michael Jackson's death, researcher Thomas Steiner created an open source exploratory tool called The Wikipedia Live Monitor. This tool allowed his team to examine clusters of related activity based on edit spikes in a 5 minute window within multiple streams fed by Wikipedia's recent changes; Twitter Feeds; Google+ and Facebook. The main research question posed is: are edit spikes in Wikipedia, clustered with related social network activity, useful indicators for identifying breaking news events, and with what delay? By considering action along multiple streams, they are able to cross-check the plausibility of information being disseminated by many less reliable sources.
Their approach is based on prior work by S. Petrović, M. Osborne, and V. Lavrenko in Streaming First Story Detection with Application to Twitter, who used the document vector space model from classic information retrieval to cluster twitter feeds. But in this case the researchers are clustering multiple streams which can potentially hold far more information when a story breaks and can therefore detect these very quickly.
While they could locate breaking news, they may need more work to optimize the timing parameters of the algorithm. Further research is planned into automating the classification of edits, which could reform future use of non-reliable sources.
A WikiSym 2012 paper titled Staying in the Loop: Structure and Dynamics of Wikipedia’s Breaking News Collaborations[5] looked at the trajectory of article construction which captures the collaboration structure embedded in the creation of breaking news stories. They have shown that these stories, fueled by mass media and social networks, tend to create a social melting pot surrounding the editing of these events. A social network analysis of the relations between editors of breaking news stories located editors in diverse social roles, such as Creators, early contributors, the highly centralized activity coordinators (admins) and the marginal vandals and their tireless opponents, the spam fighting bots and recent changes patrollers. Another result is that most articles - those which are not breaking news stories - lack the dense creation trajectories found in breaking news stories.
Exposing talk page discussions leads to drop in perceived article quality
As once observed by Ward Cunningham, one important feature by which Wikipedians improved his invention, the wiki, was to introduce "a talk page or a discussion page behind every page, so you don't actually have to see the discussion and it makes a much more finished product". Yet surfacing this deliberation could engender trust in the process if the deliberation process appears fair, well-reasoned, and thorough. Alternatively, it could encourage doubts about content quality, especially if the process appears messy or biased. In a CSCW '13 paper titled "Your process is showing: controversy management and perceived quality in wikipedia",[6] the researchers report on an experiment in which they found that exposing discussions generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article, especially if the discussion revealed conflict.
Motivated by how university students learn to assess reliability of controversial articles such as Supreme Court decisions or about individuals like Pope Pius XII and Yasser Arafat, the researchers considered how beneficial it would be to reveal the process of articles creation. In wikis the discussions used to produce the articles are hidden from view using talk pages and other coordination spaces. It was believed that when deliberations appear fair, well-reasoned, and thorough it should engender trust in the reader and that a process which appears biased or chaotic should diminish the confidence in the article's quality. The paper outlines the issues involved in assessing the credibility of online information sources. The paper first considers prior work on article quality but reframes the issues based on an idea presented in the recent best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow by economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The research questions posed are:
RQ1: What is the effect of exposing discussions about article content on perceived article quality?
RQ2: Do different kinds of conflict resolution have different effects on perceptions of content quality?
RQ3: What do participants believe about how viewing the discussion may have changed their perceptions?
These questions are then interpreted using Kahneman's System 1 (slower deliberative thinking) and System 2 (faster associative thinking). The questions were investigated in an experiment run on Amazon's mechanical Turk — a crowdsourcing platform allowing micropayments. Beginning with 3500 controversial articles, the researchers selected featured articles, and discarded newsworthy items leaving only 50 articles. Elite Turkers were then shown ten brief vignettes illustrating talk page discussion about a selected controversy, meant to display one of ten forms of editor coordination or conflict activities. They then had to answer a questionnaire, and complete two reading comprehension tasks. The researchers noticed that exposing Wikipedia readers to such discussions with any type of conflict generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article. They point out that the magnitude of the reader's negative perception depends on the type of editors’ interaction. Finally they note that while participants may have suffered a confidence crisis with respect to specific articles, at the same time they gained respect for Wikipedia in general. A final conclusion is that while the experiment, especially the comprehension task, was designed to engage readers in System 1 thinking, watching the discussions may well have triggered a System 2 critical response.
In brief
100 million hours spent editing Wikipedia: Edit counts are often used as a measure of the amount of activity on a wiki, but as the work that goes into one edit can vary between mere seconds and many hours or even days, they don't translate easily into work time. Still, in 2008, Clay Shirky and IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg estimated as a "back-of-the-envelope calculation" that "about 100 million hours of thought" had gone into Wikipedia (a number later featured prominently in Shirky's book Cognitive Surplus). A CSCW 2013 paper titled "Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia"[7] calculates work time as the length of edit sessions, defined as "a sequence of edits made by an editor where the difference between the time at which any two sequential edits are saved is less than one hour". They estimate that a total of 102,673,683 labor hours were spent editing Wikipedia (in all languages) until April 2012 (which was compared to 168 lifetimes of work) and 61,706,883 hours on the English Wikipedia. The paper also contains a list of the 20 editors who (by this measure) spent the most time editing the English Wikipedia in March 2012.
Wiktionary and sign language: In "Between Wictionary [sic] and a Thesaurus : Some Dilemmata of a Sign Language Dictionary",[8] apparently an abstract of a paper to be presented at a conference, the author presents the challenges to writing a dictionary of sign language in the world of modern lexicography. In the author's opinion, Wiktionary in general, and the Czech Wiktionary in particular, is an important example of one of the latest innovations in lexicography: It is based on contributions by volunteers who are not necessarily professional to achieve a work of a volume that would be extremely expensive to produce in traditional professional lexicography, although it sacrifices some of the advantages of the latter, such as a carefully selected glossary and rigorous standardization. The author sees future in using a wiki technology for creating dictionaries for sign languages that will be better than the current dictionaries at least in some characteristics, and makes some suggestions on how to implement it well. Notably, the author discusses displaying the signs as illustrations and videos and does not mention SignWriting - a system of standardized characters for representing signs, which was already used for several dictionaries and websites; it is not encoded in Unicode yet, but experimental support for SignWriting is available for MediaWiki as an extension. A minor nitpick is the misspelling of the name "Wiktionary" – the author writes it with a 'c' rather than a 'k'.
Wikipedia compared to Q&A website in Korea: In South Korea, Wikipedia lags behind several other services in popularity, such as Naver's KnowledgeiNknowledge market Q&A service. A new paper[9] compares the English and Korean Wikipedias to the KnowledgeiN service, and analyzes some of the factors involved in how users perceive quality in wikis and Q&A services. About 200 users of each of the three websites participated in the survey. The authors found that perceived quality helps to determine how useful the users are going to see a given site. Previous research suggesting that community expertise, size and diversity all contribute to quality is confirmed, and those factors are recognized and valued by the general public. As might be expected, the authors find that users of Q&A sites value expertise of contributors more than users of wikis. In turn, wikis rely on the size of their community to achieve quality. Predictably, the authors conclude that the smaller Wikipedias such as the Korean one suffer from small community size, and recommend that to improve the quality and popularity of such Wikipedias, more editors should be recruited. The study notes a number of limitations that affected it; notably it did not take into account any possible cultural differences, and it does not provide any discussion of why Wikipedia's popularity in Korea is lacking compared to many other websites, such as KnowledgeiN. The development of the ureteric bud in C57BL/6 mice in the absence (left) or presence (right) of the protein Cer1.[mediasource 3]
Wikipedia articles on nephrology reliable, but hard to read: An article[10] by four Toronto-based medical authors concludes that "Wikipedia is a comprehensive and fairly reliable medical resource for nephrology patients that is written at a college reading level". Comprehensiveness was measured by coverage of ICD-10 items pertaining to this area of medicine. The reliability of articles was also measured in a purely quantitative way, based on "(i) mean number of references per article, and (ii) mean percentage of ‘‘substantiated’’ references—which we defined as references corresponding to works published in peer-reviewed journals or from texts with an associated International Standard Book Number (ISBN)". Readability was measured using three standard formulae including the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.
Comparing English and Arabic Wikipedia POV differences: Khalid, Schutze and Kantner compare point of view (POV) differences between English and Arabic articles about "international personalities".[11] They use Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate sentences as positive, negative and neutral and build a statistical classifier to predict the POV score of a document. The authors find that Arabic articles are generally more positive than their English counterparts and conclude that there are at least two possible reasons for a POV difference: either because of a generally lower or higher level of absolute POV in a language, or because of a genuinely different evaluation of a personality in different Wikipedias. The article also contains rich detail about the challenges of evaluating POV differences using both human and automatic classifiers.
The overrepresentation of cricket on English Wikipedia: This article[12] for the 2013 edition of The International Journal of the History of Sport analyses 115 English wikipedia articles about Australian sportspeople and finds that a disproportionately large number are cricketer biographies. They find that, instead of reflecting the most popular sports in Australian society (of which cricket is one of the least popular), Wikipedia reflects the interests of a small special interest group. In this case, two Wikipedians are behind the creation and maintenance of almost all the content of the high-quality cricket articles. The authors note that cricket is also generally better represented in literary sources where the sport takes on a nostalgic narrative embodying traditional Australia. They conclude with the question of whether the extensive literature on cricket is reflected in Wikipedia articles and, if so, whether the existence of the same factors that have led to the creation of high-quality articles on Australian cricket - are relevant or whether there are other dynamics at play.
"serious typographical error" may have led 2008 personality study to wrongly claim Wikipedians are close-minded: A blog post for Psychology Today[13] re-examined a widely quoted 2008 survey among 69 Israeli Wikipedians[14] that (as summarized by the New Scientist at the time) had concluded that "Wikipedians are grumpy and close-minded" (Signpost coverage). The author found that the paper "contains serious errors and even contradicts itself ... [C]ontrary to what was reported, Wikipedia members of both sexes actually had higher mean scores on openness to experience compared to non-members, not lower ones. Perhaps the authors’ were confused by the presence of a serious typographical error that appears in the Results section of their article".
Wikipedians do not tend to conform more to groupthink when in a less anonymous situation: In a survey,[15] 106 editors on the English Wikipedia were asked (with approval of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee) how they would act in three real-world scenarios (not involving Wikipedia - e.g. "a group of tenants dealing with a noisy/problematic neighbor"), each "carefully designed so that the individual would have a high incentive to resolve the problem, but would also incur some sort of penalty for voicing a dissenting opinion", and assuming varying levels of anonymity (e.g. complete anonymity, pseudonymity, or use of real names). The paper's main hypothesis, "that with higher levels of anonymity the likelihood of not conforming increases as well", found only weak support, which the author calls "a promising result for online communities and the future of online communication. Given that non-conformity in this study meant ensuring a contribution of alternatives to the group, this is a positive outcome for preventing groupthink."
Estimate for economic benefit of Wikipedia: $50 million by 2006 already: In a recent article, The Economist examined the question "How to quantify the gains that the internet has brought to consumers", citing a 2009 paper by two economists that attempted to calculate the monetary value of consumer surplus generated by broadband Internet, focusing on how much value Internet is providing for free (that otherwise people would be prepared to pay). While this paper did not mention Wikipedia, The Economist cited one of the authors (Shane Greenstein, known to readers of this research report for his work on political POV language in Wikipedia articles, reviewed in the January 2012 and February 2012 issues), who "thinks Wikipedia accounted for up to $50m of that surplus" as of 2006 - in other words, Wikipedia provides a good that otherwise people would be willing to buy, spending $50m on it that instead they get to spend on something else. The Economist commented that "such numbers probably understate things" as the paper's methodology assumed that "internet access meant the same thing in 2006 as it did in 1999." Journalists cover many topics.[mediasource 4] So does Wikipedia.
91% of German journalists use Wikipedia: A survey[16] conducted by a PR agency among "over 2,600 journalists from France, the UK, America and Germany" asked them about various aspects of their work including Wikipedia usage, finding among other results "91% of the German national media journalists admitting to using Wikipedia to research stories."
Inserting weblinks on Wikipedia to drive traffic: A case study published in D-Lib Magazine ("the magazine of digital library research"), titled Using Wikipedia to Enhance the Visibility of Digitized Archival Assets[17] reported on "the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets ... by adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles". In a blog post, Europeana also reported on exposure to its content received via Wikipedia, in a somewhat different approach - by providing the content on Wikipedia itself.[18]
Case study on "Accommodating the Wikipedia Project in Higher Education": A 94 page master's thesis[19] finds that the University of Windsor, treated as a case study, is torn between two groups: one encouraging the use of new digital tools like Wikipedia, and the other, conservative, opposed to it. There is a general lack of understanding of Wikipedia (a finding similar to a study reviewed in last month's issue: "UK university lecturers still skeptical and uninformed about Wikipedia"). Many participants (instructors, scholars) use Wikipedia and recognize it has been improving and becoming more convenient, but are mostly unwilling to contribute to it; one participant noted that doing so would be a career "academic suicide". Nonetheless the study also suggest that there is significant sympathy for Wikipedia, and many interviewees indicated that they would like to contribute, but are stymied by "lack of time, lack of academic credit, and overall lack of resources to do work not directly related to their professional responsibilities." Wikipedia outreach to academia is seen as noble, but likely not to progress quickly due to those issues.
Wikipedia student club participation: A dissertation titled "Investigation of Disassembling Polymers and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Molecular Gelation, and Implementation of a Class-Project Centered on Editing Wikipedia"[20] contains some observations on the first ever Wikipedia student club in the US: "the students who enter the Wikipedia community through the student club have a different editing contribution pattern than the general population and the students who enter through a class project. These editors still remain active after a year from creating the account. Although they start at a lower editing efficiency, they peak later in the year and have a more gradual decline in active editing activity." (p.170)
Monthly edits still on the rise: Erik Zachte, a data analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation, observed in a blog post[21] that "the overall volume of manual edits by registered users on all Wikimedia wikis combined is still increasing, slowly but steadily" (somewhat different from the number of active editors, which has been slightly decreasing or stagnating over the last few years), generating some discussion on the possible reasons.
How many Wikipedia edits come from locals?: On the "Zero Geography" blog, researcher Mark Graham continued his series about geostatistical aspects of Wikipedia, presenting "A map of edits to articles about Egypt",[22] providing an overview article on some earlier results that appeared in a Rwandan magazine[23] and asking "What percentage of edits to English-language Wikipedia articles are from local people?".[24]
New overview page of Wikimedia data for researchers: A new page on Meta-Wiki gives an overview for researchers of various sources of open data published by the Wikimedia Foundation about Wikipedia and its sister projects (Wikipedia dumps, stats, live feeds, etc.)
Wikimedia funding for Wikisym '13 despite open access concerns: A request for financial support from the Wikimedia Foundation for the 2013 WikiSym/OpenSym conference - as in previous years - was approved this month, but not without serious concerns among the Foundation's volunteer-based Grant Advisory Committee about the organizer's choice of the ACM Digital Library as the publication venue of the conference proceedings, which makes them available for download cost-free but not under a free license. The issue had been brought up as early as in 2010, when the contribution of one conference speaker was not included in the proceedings because he had insisted on republishing it under a CC-BY-SA license.
Research newsletter started on French Wikipedia: "Nouvelles du Wikilab" is a new community-written research newsletter on the French Wikipedia, summarizing and sometimes enriching this monthly research report in French. It offers subscription (for delivery to one's user talk page on the French Wikipedia). There are also ideas for an on-wiki French language research review journal named Wikilogie, to publish original research about Wikipedia which could be useful for the community, and to facilitate dialogue with researchers.
Inferring relationships from editing behavior on Wikipedia: A paper presented at the 8th Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop (January 8 – 10, 2013, link to event) reports on the application of Transfer Entropy, a promising information-theoretic tool originally devised by neuroscientists to study causal connections among biological neurons, to infer a network of "social relationships" among editors of Wikipedia, using only information about their editing behavior.[25] As Wikipedia lacks explicit information about social ties among editors, the authors needed to define a "ground truth" network using interaction on User Talk pages. The method attains a high level of precision but a very low level of recall. The contribution won the best paper award at the workshop in which it was presented.
Google Research releases the WikiLinks Corpus: 40M mentions to Wikipedia pages collected from 10M web pages.: Researchers at Google recently released a Natural Language Processing dataset of 40M terms occurring in 10M pages, obtained by crawling the Web and looking for links that point to Wikipedia articles. According to the blog post about the release, the dataset is the largest set of disambiguated mentions to date, nearly 100 times bigger than the second largest database publicly available. A technical report covers in detail the collection, generation, and curation of the dataset.[26]
^Jaehun Joo, Ismatilla Normatov: Determinants of collective intelligence quality: comparison between Wiki and Q&A services in English and Korean users. Service Business, February 2013 PDF
^Garry R. Thomas, Lawson Eng, Jacob F. de Wolff, and Samir C. Grover: An Evaluation of Wikipedia as a Resource for Patient Education in Nephrology. Seminars in Dialysis—Vol 26, No 2 (March–April) 2013 pp. 159–163. DOI: 10.1111/sdi.1 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sdi.12059/abstract
^Townsend, Stephen; Gary Osmond; Murray G. Philips (2013). "Wicked Wikipedia? Communities of Practice, the Production of Knowledge and Australian Sport History". The International Journal of the History of Sport. 30 (5): 545. doi:10.1080/09523367.2013.767239. S2CID145732434.
^Timothy Allan Brunet: Accommodating the Wikipedia Project in Higher Education: A University of Windsor Case Study. http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/504
^
Cheryl Lillian Moy: Investigation of Disassembling Polymers and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Molecular Gelation, and Implementation of a Class-Project Centered on Editing Wikipedia http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/96104
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