Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-05-04
Strategic planning, Wikipedia and scientists and more
Strategic planning process announced, jobs posted
The Wikimedia Foundation is developing a strategic plan for the Foundation for the next three to five years. The process was announced in a Foundation Board resolution, and was then elaborated in messages posted to the Foundation-l mailing list. The process will officially kick off in July, and will involve a series of open working groups.
To support the strategic planning process, the Foundation intends to hire three new paid positions on short-term contracts: a Project Manager, a Research Analyst, and a Facilitator. These are all one-year contract positions, from July 2009 to July 2010, and they have now been posted on the Wikimedia Foundation site.
Society for Neuroscience calls on members to edit
The Society for Neuroscience, a professional organization for neuroscientists, has launched a Neuroscience Wikipedia Initiative and is calling on its members to contribute. The society released a 10-page contributor guide that summarizes how Wikipedia works and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of important neuroscience articles. The society is also trying to recruit content facilitators to lead the editing efforts in 12 different topic areas within neuroscience, based on the Neuroscience#Major branches section of the neuroscience article.
The Project Overview describes two phases of the initiative. In the now-active first phase, the society is recruiting contributors and will also "collaborate with the Neuroscience Information Framework, an NIH-funded initiative that developed NeuroLex". The second phase, scheduled to begin in the fall of 2009, will bring Wikipedia work into graduate and undergraduate neuroscience courses.
April policy updates
The monthly summary of Wikipedia policy and guideline updates is available for April. These include:
Briefly
- A survey of scientists conducted by the Foundation and the Public Library of Science indicates that many scientists support Wikipedia, with 67.93% of respondents indicating support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, according to the Wikimedia blog.
- Members of Wikimedia Argentina visited the La Plata Museum on May 2 to write articles about museum themes and take pictures.
- An RFC on an updated arbitration policy is currently ongoing.
- Voting for the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest ended this week. While official results are still being tabulated, a page of unofficial results is available.
Milestones
- The Polish Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles.
- The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 150,000 articles.
- The Turkmen Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
Reader comments
Calling Dr. Wikipedia, the cause of Encarta's fall, and more
Researchers call on physicians to edit Wikipedia
Last week the Signpost briefly noted a new study, "Seeking health information online: does Wikipedia matter?", showing that Wikipedia is the most prominent source of online health information. In the study, authors Michaël R. Laurent (User:Stevenfruitsmaak) and Tim J. Vickers (User:TimVickers) argue that physicians should get more involved in improving Wikipedia. That aspect of their paper has been picked up in prominent news sources. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh responded by saying, "We absolutely want to see more subject matter experts participating in Wikipedia."
Encarta shutting down; is Wikipedia to blame?
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would be shutting down its Encarta service. While many have pointed to Wikipedia as the reason for Encarta's downfall, Randall Stross of the New York Times concluded that Encarta would have failed anyway, due to Google's system of indexing the Web.
Wolfram Alpha to rely on Wikipedia
Wolfram Alpha, an answer-engine from the company of Stephen Wolfram that is scheduled for release this month, will reportedly rely on Wikipedia as a "popularity index" for choosing between ambiguous query terms. Effusive coverage in The Independent describes the new project, based on a natural language processing, as the "biggest internet revolution for a generation".
"Wiki-Ocracy" needed to manage economic stimulus, says columnist
CBS News columnist Christopher Lochhead argues that a public wiki, following the model of Wikipedia, would be a good way to manage the recent American economic stimulus package. Lockhead writes that
To ensure success from the $787 billion federal stimulus package we obviously need great governance, more ideas, and wiser use of technology. But taxpayers also need a platform so they can get involved. We need an end to apathy (or we’ll get more of the same). What we need something that I call Wiki-Ocracy.
Attack reported as a killing on Wikipedia before news broke
The Los Angeles Times reports on a story that made its way through the Russian blogosphere last month: shortly before news broke that human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov had been assaulted on Mar 31/Apr 1, his Russian Wikipedia entry was edited to say that he had been killed in an attack. More details can be found in a post by blogger Robert Amsterdam from shortly after the incident.
Reader comments
Re-examining Featured lists
Looking through the current FLCs, I see the same types of lists being nominated. I get the feeling that people are just reaching for the low hanging fruit and working on the easy FLs. [...] It's frustrating that people are aiming so low. In many cases, pages are created (some with questionable notability) and brought to FL, whereas I would prefer to see more users improve existing pages. And the reason we are getting so many FLs in certain topics is because of how easy it has become to get them promoted. The problem is that they seem to exist just so they can become FLs.
—Scorpion0422, [1]
In an essay titled "State of the FL process", Featured List (FL) director Scorpion0422 expressed concern about the overall quality of the FL process, saying the lack of a criterion that focused on stand-alone lists was a problem and that, although some lists were technically eligible for FL status, they did not need to be split off from the parent articles and therefore did not represent Wikipedia's "best work". He also attributed a decline in quality to a lack of Featured List Candidates (FLC) reviewers (an ongoing problem in other content review processes), lack of variety in Featured Lists, and, at times, lack of directorial oversight of the process.
In particular, Scorpion0422 highlighted two types of FLs that "hurt the process":
- "Easy FLs" – Lists that users nominate primarily to gain featured credits rather than for readers' benefit.
- Recreations of lists from parent articles – Sublists that recreate content of their main articles without providing further detail.
Featured lists that Scorpion0422 considered did not meet the current criteria are listed at User:Scorpion0422/FL audit, categorized according to issues. He posted the results at the FLC discussion page, noting that numerous FLs (nearly 20% as of 25 March 2009) did not meet the FL criteria at the time. Dweller, a former FL director, disagreed with some of the conclusions.[2]
Revised criteria
A discussion of proposals to revise the criteria was started.
- Usefulness – With the number of small lists growing, some believed that the criteria allowed for content forks to become Featured Lists. The usefulness criteria was meant to establish that a FL had to be worthy of a stand-alone list and not recreated content from another article.
- Images – Because many FLs contain a large number of images (e.g., List of Nobel laureates in Literature and List of United States Naval Academy alumni), editors felt that adherence to image-use policy needed to be a more prominent provision of the criteria.
- Naming conventions – Lists are named according to Wikipedia's conventions on naming stand-alone lists.
- Length – Several discussions have been raised over whether smaller lists truly represent Wikipedia's best work. There has been an unofficial limit of ten items enforced by reviewers, but no hard limit had been established. Due to the varying types and formats of FLs, establishing a hard, enforcable limit is difficult, and a proposed criterion stated that "exceptions must be discussed beforehand on a case-by-case basis".[3]
- Lead sentence – Before changes at FLC and MoS, a number of FLs started with "this is a list of ..." A number of current FLs still start in this fashion, so a proposal was made to clarify the manner in which FLs should begin. However, it was dropped because the criteria already required an FL to have an "engaging lead section", making the proposed clarification redundant.
After more than two weeks of discussion and four proposed drafts of the new FL criteria, the following changes were implemented:
- 3 (b) "In length and/or topic, it meets all of the requirements for stand-alone lists; it is not a content fork, does not largely recreate material from another article, and could not reasonably be included as part of a related article."
- This criterion change had the largest impact; its implementation meant that dozens of current FLs no longer met standards.
- 5 (b) "It has images and other media, if appropriate to the topic, that follow Wikipedia's usage policies, with succinct captions or "alt" text. Non-free images and other media satisfy the criteria for the inclusion of non-free content and are labeled accordingly."
New FLRC delegate
On April 5, The Rambling Man was named co-delegate of Featured List Removal Candidates (FLRC), filling the spot vacated by Dweller in January. Delegates determine the exact timing of the process for each review. Sephiroth BCR had served as the sole delegate for several months because the low number of reviews did not necessitate a second delegate.
An administrator and bureaucrat, The Rambling Man's first Featured List was List of Italian football champions, promoted on April 26, 2007. He has since successfully nominated 18 FLs. In May 2008, he was appointed one of the first co-directors of the Featured List process (see related story). He served as director until September 2008, when he resigned to travel. The Rambling Man returned not long after the revised criteria discussion started. With the revised criteria close to being implemented, it was decided that a second delegate would be able to help control the potential increase in activity. The Rambling Man accepted the FLRC delegate position; approval for this appointment was unanimous.
New nomination process
On May 1, a new FLC and FLRC nomination process based on stable subpages was implemented (see related story).
Reader comments
Approved this week
Administrators
One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Graeme Bartlett (nom).
Bots
Nine bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: MauritsBot (task request), Erik9bot (task request), WebCiteBOT (task request), NeuRobot (task request), SVnaGBot1 (task request), LivingBot (task request), Sambot (task request), AnomieBOT (task request) and Polbot (task request).
Featured pages
Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: Zinc (nom), Damien (South Park) (nom), Jesus College Boat Club (Oxford) (nom), Raymond Brownell (nom) and Sale, Greater Manchester (nom).
Three lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of San Francisco Giants managers (nom), List of ROH World Tag Team Champions (nom) and List of castles in Cheshire (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: M.I.A. albums (nom).
Two portals were promoted to featured status this week: Portal:Formula One (nom) and Portal:Fungi (nom).
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Acid2, Ælfheah of Canterbury, Idlewild and Soak Zone, John Frusciante, Structural history of the Roman military and Ed Stelmach.
Former featured pages
Four articles were delisted this week: Mozilla Firefox (nom), Ziaur Rahman (nom), The Boondock Saints (nom) and Knights of Columbus (nom).
Two lists were delisted this week: List of premiers of Saskatchewan (nom) and List of awards and nominations received by Coolio (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Ijazh, Red Jacket, Richmond, London, Empire State Building, Hispano Aviación HA-1112, Napoleon Bonaparte and Piano Sonata No. 28.
No media files were featured this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Eighteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen -
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The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Committee revised their proposed re-organization of Arbitration-related pages in light of comments received on their earlier proposal. They also released a "redacted and anonymised" report on Checkuser usage.
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, and closed none, leaving nine cases open.
Evidence phase
- Abd and JzG: A case brought regarding a dispute between Abd and JzG about the latter's use of administrative tools on Cold fusion.
- Macedonia 2: A case about naming disputes at the Macedonia article, and ChrisO's use of administrator tools in the dispute.
- Aitias: A case regarding Aitias's use of his administrator tools.
- Tang Dynasty: A case about editing conflicts on Inner Asia during the Tang Dynasty.
- Ryulong: A case regarding Ryulong's use of his administrator tools.
- Obama articles: A case opened to review behavior of editors of articles related to Barack Obama.
- Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved.
Voting
- West Bank - Judea and Samaria: A dispute about editor behavior in discussions about naming conventions for certain Israel- and Palestine-related locations.
- Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case, COFS.
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