Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-04-18/News and notes

News and notes

Commons milestone; newbie contributions assessed; German community to decide on €200,000 budget; brief news

Commons reaches ten million files

The ten millionth file was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons at 23:12 on Friday night, determined as a photo of a waterfowl observation platform in Poland that was taken last July by Leinad as part of a photo expedition organized by the Polish Wikimedia chapter. The file history of the photo showcases the collaborative aspect of Commons, as the original upload received brightness and color corrections by two other users.

The community-written press release on Commons noted that "the 5 millionth uploaded file was attained on September 9, 2009, so the project has doubled in size in only eighteen months." The Wikimedia Foundation's press release mentioned planned technical improvements that should increase the growth rate further: The new upload tool (Signpost coverage: "Upload Wizard release expected shortly") and better support for video.

Quality of newbie contributions decreases since 2004, but majority still constructive

As part of the ongoing discussions about improving participation and newbie friendliness in Wikimedia communities (also topic of last week's IRC Office hour with WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner), specifically the WikiGuides project, the Foundation's Community Department tried to answer the question "How much do new editors actually improve Wikipedia?", by analyzing a random sample of "155 new registered users on the English Wikipedia who made at least one edit in mid-April of this year" and assessing the quality of their first edit on a five-level scale from "vandalism" to "excellent". They found that

“

most new editors made contributions worth retaining in some way, even if they weren’t perfect. More than half of these first edits needed no reworking to be acceptable based on current Wikipedia policy. Another 19% made good faith edits but needed additional help to meet standards defined in policy or guideline.

”

A comparison with an analogous sample from 2004 indicated that the ratio of vandalism has multiplied since then, while the ratio of acceptable or better quality edits has declined. However, the blog posting focuses on a positive aspect of the result: "The key thing to note in comparing the two samples is that the percent of acceptable edits made by newbies did not dramatically decrease from 2004 to 2011."

German chapter offers €200,000 "community project budget"

The German Wikimedia chapter has set aside €200,000 for a "community project budget", which will fund "the realization of ideas from the Wikimedia communities for the Wikimedia projects", according to the announcement in the "Kurier" (the Signpost's sister publication on the German Wikipedia). The selection of projects to fund, with a minimum budget of €5000, will be based on the recommendation of a seven-member budget committee, consisting of the chapter's treasurer, three members elected by chapter (Verein) members, and three members elected by the community.

The idea is a reaction to a blog posting by longtime Wikipedian Southpark. In January, during the run-up to a non-regular general meeting of the chapter that had been prompted by a motion of distrust against the chapter's board (signed by more than 60 members, based on criticism of the board's unilateral decision process while restructuring the chapter – Signpost coverage -, but ultimately unsuccessful), he observed:

“

The Problem: Wikimedia Deutschland is sitting on a whole lot of donation money. No one really knows what to do with it, and the opinions about spending it efficiently are diverging, to put it mildly. Particularly few money is flowing directly back into the projects. Part of the reason is that no one knows where to spend it there in a sensible way.

”

To solve this part of the problem, Southpark started an open call for ideas in his user space, which received a lot of suggestions, some of which might now get a chance of being realized.

Some months ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's grants process, funding mission-related projects from US$500 upwards, was expanded from chapters "in a limited way, to volunteers and like-minded organizations."

In September, the German chapter had announced a "contest of ideas" dedicated to promoting free knowledge, aiming to include non-Wikimedia projects (Signpost coverage). Eight winning projects (each funded with a sum between €500 and €5000) were announced in December, among them the purchase of high-resolution aerial images for 500 German cities for use by the OpenStreetMap community, and a "motivational video for Creative Commons", encouraging artists, authors and others who create content to release it under a free license.

Briefly

Wikimania 2012 will take place in Washington, D.C., as announced by the jury last week. After the 2006 Wikimania in Boston, this will be the second time that the annual Wikimedia conference takes place in the US. The second finalist was the bid for Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Adminship required for higher access levels?: A request for comment started last week asked "Should adminship, obtained via WP:RFA, be a requirement for being granted checkuser or oversight rights by the arbitration committee ?" A related RfC proposed to remove the technical necessity for adminship when carrying out these roles (as well as bureaucratship), by adding the right to view deleted revisions to the checkuser, oversight and bureaucrat roles, and the right to move pages without redirects to the latter.
Wikimedia Spain report: The Spanish Wikimedia chapter published a brief report for January–March 2011, including its approval by the WMF in February.
Catalan report: The "Amical Viquipèdia" ("Friends of Wikipedia") association of Catalan Wikimedians has published its report for March 2011, mentioning among other things "great impact in the media" generated by press releases about the Catalan Wikipedia's tenth anniversary, and the presentation of a book titled "Wikipedia", 150 copies of which were distributed to schools by the department of linguistic policy of the government of the Balearic Islands (a part of Spain).
British Wikimedia conference: Wikimedia UK hosted their first WikiConference in Bristol on Saturday, combining the annual general meeting of the chapter with talks on a number of aspects of Wikimedia including the GLAM collaborations like the rollout of QR codes pointing to Wikipedia in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, the role of wikis, Wikipedia and Wikiversity in education, and Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. Audio of the event was recorded and will be released in the next few weeks, and the slideshow presentations are available on the UK chapter wiki. It was announced that the chapter intends to run the event annually in a different city each time.
Tools to extract data sets from Wikipedia: On the Wiki-research-l mailing list, Mohamad Mehdi posted a compilation of links to "online tools used to extract Wikipedia articles and ... pre-compiled Wikipedia articles data sets", inviting additions.

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Commons reaches ten million files

It's worth noting that the two-fold increase in the past eighteen months is due in part to a great increase in Moving files to the Commons during that time. – Athaenara ✉ 12:42, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This problem is going to come to a head eventually. Commons is very lacking in administrative resources, yet a few people keep dumping more and more files there. Gigs (talk) 13:17, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "this problem" and "a few people"? – Athaenara ✉ 22:22, 20 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Newbe edits

It looks to me as though the "changes" between 2004 and 2011 are not significant.

Aside from that though, I'm left wondering what the assessment criteria were. A "vandal" edit is fairly obvious, but what makes a single edit "excellent" instead of "average"?
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 14:50, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hey Ohms law. Let me describe the criteria for you more:

An excellent edit was marked as one that added a paragraph or more of text that included a reference, or as I said in the post, an edit which would be indistinguishable from that of a very experienced editor. Remember these are people's first registered edit only though, which is why we handed out only one five in each sample.
Acceptable edits did not add a significant amount of content that was verified, but the edit did not obviously violate policy or guideline and would not likely be reverted.
A low quality edit is one that was clearly made in good faith, but which was very poor in quality and would likely be reverted -- like someone adding a broken link to an image. And vandalism is pretty obvious, like you said.

As far as changes between the two years... the big change is that while there wasn't a large decrease in the percent of decent edits made by newbies, the actual amount of newbies showing up and making edits in 2011 is enormously bigger. 60 in one of the days we looked at then and 1,800 on Monday last week, to give you an idea of the difference. But in any case, the most striking conclusion to me is not a change between the years. It's that in both of the two years we sampled, the majority of first edits made newbies are good. Cheers, Steven Walling at work 16:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the info, Steve. :)

Let me state first, my complements. I don't at all want to be all negative about this, since overall I think that this is definitely a good idea.

"Quality" is rather inherently subjective, so any metric where you're attempting to assess quality is going to be imperfect. The problem that I see though is "did (or didn't) not add a significant amount of content". I mean, I don't see someone who corrects a bunch of spelling or grammatical errors making any less valuable contributions then someone who adds paragraph(s) of text to an article. And then there's the issue of contributing "significant" amounts of content over several (usually consecutive) edits...

I don't think that the entire study is flawed or anything, but I don't personally see the utility in considering anything other then "vandal"/"non-vandal" edits.

As to the amount of editors in the samples, I agree with you wholeheartedly that the raw increase in editors is one of the most significant findings. If I had written the piece about this I probably would have lead with that information, actually.

Thanks again for your reply.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 19:20, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

You're completely correct that any measure of quality is inherently subjective. In thinking about the methodology and its flaws (and there are flaws) it's important to keep in mind that this was a working experiment to get a general understanding for the Wiki Guides project. We just needed to get an idea of how many first edits by new accounts are any good at all. Any other questions, such as the value of WikiGnoming versus the value of an entire new article, were sort of outside of our scope for that sampling. Steven Walling at work 23:28, 19 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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