Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2012-04-09
The next big thing? An interview with Wikidata
Wikidata, an initiative led by Wikimedia Deutschland and aimed at providing a central Wikimedia data repository, has prompted a raft of comments in the week after its first major press release (Signpost coverage). To recap, development will proceed in three stages. The first, expected to end by August of this year, will overhaul the language versions system by providing a central interwiki repository. The second, to finish by December, will use a similar method to standardise the content of infoboxes, allowing editors to add and use the data within the framework and allowing smaller wikis to share in localised versions of this data for their own infoboxes. Finally, the third stage of development will enable the automation of list and chart creation based on Wikidata data, at which point (hopefully by March 2013) Wikimedia Deutschland plans to hand over operation and maintenance to the Wikimedia Foundation.
To this framework, several requirements were added to the project pages this week, seemingly to reassure Wikimedians by establishing a narrow, achievable focus. They include a stipulation that "the success of Wikidata is not measured by the amount of data it stores, but by the creation of a healthy community and its usefulness for Wikipedia and other applications" and another affirming that "Wikidata will not be about the truth, but about statements and their references". Nevertheless, the Wikidata mailing list has been abuzz with discussion of possible applications and extensions of the project. In light of the level of attention being given to the formative project, the Signpost decided to catch up with Wikidata's community communications manager Lydia Pintscher and developer Daniel Kinzler.[nb 1]
The Signpost: When you express this in simple terms, what would you say is the "take home" message of Wikidata?
- We are creating a central place where data can be stored. This could for example be something like the name of a famous person together with the birthdate of that person (as well as a source for that statement). Each Wikipedia (and others) will then be able to access this information and integrate it in infoboxes for example. If needed this data can then be updated in one place instead of several. There is more to it but this is the really simple and short version.
It certainly seems like an interesting project, and one that has captured imaginations for many years. Why do you think no-one has been able to act on the same idea before? For example, Daniel, you worked on the not dissimilar OmegaWiki project back in 2005 – have lessons been learned from projects like that?
- Wikidata is a large and non-trivial project. There are three factors that make or break a project like this in my opinion: people, resources and timing. We are incredibly fortunate that it seems all of this is in place for Wikidata now to finally make it reality.
- People: We have brilliant and dedicated people on the team who know their way around the community and codebase and who are passionate about the possibilities Wikidata will bring to the world. Many of them have worked or are still working on related projects like Semantic Mediawiki. At the same time many people in the community can’t wait for Wikidata to finally be available to them to start building on the base it will provide.
- Resources: We have Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google as generous donors, not to mention Wikimedia Deutschland running the project. Previous projects have not been so lucky.
- Timing: We're at a place in time where more and more people and organisations are pushing for and using open data. Wikidata is in a unique position to become a key player there. Much more importantly, Wikidata can be a significant part of the answer to Wikimedia's current challenges of editor recruitment and retention as well as expansion to new demographics.
- We have certainly moved on since the original experiments in 2005: the data model has become a bit more flexible, to accommodate the complexity of the data we find in infoboxes; for a single property, it will be possible to supply several values from different sources, as well as qualifiers like the level of accuracy. For instance, the length of the river Rhine could be given as 1232 km (with an accuracy of 1 km) citing the Dutch Rijkswaterstaat as of 2011, and with 1320 km according to Knaurs Lexikon of 1932. The latter value could be marked as deprecated and annotated with the explanation that this number was likely a typographical error, misrepresenting earlier measurements of 1230 km. This level of depth of information is not easily possible with the old OmegaWiki approach or [that of] classic Semantic MediaWiki. It is however required in order to reach the level of quality and transparency Wikipedia aims for. This is one of the reasons the Wikidata project decided to implement the data model and representation from scratch.
How do you envisage convincing Wikimedians who instinctively want to keep local control over articles' infoboxes that centralisation is a good thing?
- Editors are completely free to keep their infoboxes in their local control. Of course we would love if everyone used Wikidata but first and foremost Wikidata is an offer. It is an offer to the community to make use of it in the ways the team envisions Wikidata to be used and in ways we couldn’t even dream of. We see huge potential for everyone involved and I hope with time this is seen by everyone. One of the biggest potentials for the Wikipedia community is probably the help Wikidata can provide to smaller Wikipedias who do not (yet) have the manpower necessary to curate all the data that larger Wikipedias have.
The project description encourages volunteer developers who want to contribute code to do so. How do you see this working out with WikiData?
- We are still figuring this out to be honest. We will have a public SCRUM log where people can follow the work and get involved when they see something they would like to contribute to. I hope we have this up and running in the next days. Please be a bit patient with us here though as we are getting started. The other part is tasks we are definitely not going to do, like writing bots. If there is consensus in the community that this is something desirable then people are free to make this happen. I am always happy to help people figure out a way to contribute. Just let me know.
In the past, big projects such as LiquidThreads have proved difficult to bring to fruition. Are you confident that Wikidata will make it past phase 1 and 2 and into phase 3? Are you confident you will be able to keep the project sufficiently tightly focused to allow this to happen?
- It will not be easy and there will be technical and social hurdles to overcome but I am confident we will be able to do this with everyone's support. All in all our goals for each step are rather modest and by using SCRUM we will take one step at a time. Even if we don't reach every single one of our goals, what we will have achieved by the end will still be significant.
- As such, keeping focused is definitely one of the worries we have. A lot of people have really great plans for Wikidata but we absolutely need to focus on getting the project to a usable and useful state over the next year. We have written down some of the important assumptions and requirements we have for the initial development [the Requirements referenced earlier]. Those will be our guiding principles. Once the initial development is done a lot more will be possible of course but it is important that we focus on getting an initial release out that people can build on.
Lydia, Daniel, thank you.
Notes
- ^ The Signpost is also indebted to Gerard Meijssen, with whose permission two questions and answers originally published on his personal blog Words and What Not are reproduced here.
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Funds, fiduciaries, and the Foundation: the complex dynamics of scaling
On the first weekend in April, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation published several resolutions addressing issues such as finance and movement roles (Signpost coverage). The Signpost interviewed community-elected board member Samuel Klein (Sj) for last week's issue to get an overview of the topic of movement roles and the surrounding debates. In this second interview, the only trustee voting against the fundraising resolution speaks in detail on the background of decisions taken on a broader range of issues from the Berlin resolutions to the make-up of the newly founded Wikimedia Chapters Association and of the Board of Trustees itself.
The most significant development that's emerged from the recent discussions on the organisation of the movement – the most radical change – is the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC).
- Samuel Klein: Yes. The one somewhat urgent consideration was our auditors’ suggesting that we needed to make sure there were direct financial controls for the use of a significant chunk of the funds we raise. And when they found out the scale of the fundraising that was passing directly to chapters, they said so how well do you know what those processes look like? Now they were asking for this additional layer of visibility; that was a big change for us, and we tried to respond promptly.
So this marks a turning point, from a laissez-faire attitude to these disparate far-flung chapters, to a more centralised set-up for auditing of transparency and accountability?
- Absolutely, and we should have already set some standard – that anyone who raises at least a certain amount is committed to an annual audit and global standards that we all share. The Foundation itself has grown very quickly, and that level of change, and the quality of our oversight has gotten much better. Now that sort of growth is happening to some of the national chapters. So I agree that it’s absolutely a turning-point.
One decision that you've made has been to create a two-tier system, recognising the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, and in effect the US as the five jurisdictions where it's much easier to donate with tax-deductibility. Is this just a by-product of the Foundation’s wish to tighten up on auditing?
- Those are the five where, in 2011, people could donate with tax-deductibility. This was not an active decision to limit tax-deductible donations on that kind of principle. The first concerns, raised last summer in Haifa, were about accountability, and these financial controls we’ve just been talking about. There are still some open questions as to what the right controls look like, and as people pursued that line of thought they had discussions with the 12 chapters which two years ago had been processing donations. This was reduced to four chapters during our discussions, which laid out seven principles that groups need to follow to responsibly process fundraising.
So Switzerland, a small chapter that doesn’t process much, is recognised, but Italy is not, despite the fact that it's a much bigger chapter?
- Correct. Among other differences, Switzerland has very clear guidelines and oversights for the transfer of funds to other countries, so it is easy for them to transfer surplus beyond their budget back to the Foundation / the FDC.
Will more chapters be able to join the tax-deductibility arrangement, or is the current list of five set in stone until the next review in 2015?
- As a result of negotiations and assessments, since Haifa the Audit Committee and others began to worry about issues of project redundancy and efficiency. This was a much more amorphous set of concerns, still about doing the right thing by donors, but deeper than the initial urgent issues of accountability.
Do you have examples at hand that were very worrying?
- Rather than a few compelling instances of cases where this was problematic, there were 10 or 15 smaller concerns. Together they seemed to some to paint a picture of a somewhat inefficient if not risky process that didn’t have any huge success stories or failures. There was also the general sense that this was an ongoing distraction for both the Foundation and for chapters that were talking about whether and when they could directly process donor contributions. And I think the strongest argument that people made against highly distributed donation processing was “if we’re doing things right, the initial flow of funds doesn’t matter – as long as we're actually all working together to figure out how the funds should be spent”.
- You mentioned tax benefits to donors. And a number of people have suggested that with the limited data available to us, this makes a small but not a huge difference to donors, and that maybe it makes less of a difference than things like getting the formatting style of the donation page right. I think it's good that we'll be able to compare a number of jurisdictions where there is tax deductibility. Certainly if it turned out that it matters greatly to groups of donors to have tax deductibility, and this was visible ... that would give the lie to one of the major analyses made so far.
So it's still a work in progress?
- What makes sense to us as a movement is very much a work in progress. In the last year and a half, it was very much a series of two-party negotiations with groups involved advocating for a certain capacity just for themselves. This has even been explicitly... tied to a group's importance in the decision-making process of the movement. As an example, Thomas Dalton, ex-treasurer of the UK chapter, proposed a model for FDC membership in which chapters that directly process funds get extra votes on how funds are distributed.
- The argument is that every entity that processes donations has a slightly greater responsibility to ensure that those funds are spent well. The Foundation thinks it is harmful to the movement to divide it that way into first- and second-class entities, with the first-class having a greater voice in what we're doing, defined for example by how much money people in a country have to give.
Whereas you're defining first-class according to auditing of transparency and governance?
- No; in the Foundation's initial draft, who has a say in decisions by the FDC would not be tied to any of those things ... The processing of donations is just not important in this regard. It doesn't make the view of the Foundation or any chapter more important; it's purely a technical and procedural "fact", a mechanism at the point of donation that welcomes the donor to become part of the movement.
If the FDC is to be explicitly a "volunteer-driven" body, does that mean a clear majority of its members will be volunteers rather than Foundation trustees and employees?
- At most a third of the members will be WMF staff. That's not because the WMF is processing funds, but because it's designed to have this global scope and has been doing this already. I think once the FDC has been around for a while, we can find better criteria to figure out who should be on it.
With the dual creation of a new Wikimedia Chapters Association and the Foundation's own revamped Chapters Committee, we have two bodies that could conceivably overlap in their interests and duties.
- They certainly will have a lot of work to share and to coordinate. Some of the people who have been helping to plan the chapters association have been part of the chapters committee, and some of the definitions of the new expanded chapters committee or the affiliations committee assume the future existence of a chapters association.
- The Foundation's chapters committee will always have a unique responsibility to make the final recommendation to the WMF board on whether any group should be recognised for the first time, and it could be responsible for some of the mentoring when groups are approaching recognition, whereas the chapters association is interested in mentoring groups as soon as they're recognised, so there will definitely be overlap in that respect.
Is the chapters association going to be strongly encouraging good governance among its own members? Are there areas where there could be conflicts of interest? For example, what if delegates of a chapter are participating in the audit of that chapter?
- Yes, if they were directly responsible, there would be a conflict; but as a peer-review group, it seems ideal.
Is there a chance that lobbying the Foundation's board might turn out to be the principle function of the chapters association?
- I believe one of the association's founding goals (not in the context of lobbying) is to provide a framework for chapters to coordinate their ideas and to present sensible unified ideas that all of their members can support.
| “ | We've not been bound by confidentiality – trustees have always been willing to talk in general terms about a vote; but they'd get uncomfortable if it came to saying exactly who said what. There was just light social pressure against being the only trustee to talk about one's vote: you ran the risk of outing the votes of other trustees. | ” |
You were the only Foundation trustee to vote against the board's recent fundraising resolution. Why was that?
- There was strong consensus to respond to the somewhat urgent need to be stricter about accountability for anyone handling hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations. But this was combined with other less urgent concerns, and I think we just don't have all of the data about what's distracting, what's empowering, what the benefits and drawbacks are of a system that encourages everyone with the capacity and skill to deal directly with donors [to do so].
So you thought it was premature?
- Not premature, but I think people got excited about trying to improve what had previously been an unconsidered framework for raising funds, and ended up combining responses to urgent needs with longer-term ideas about what might be more efficient but [where] I think the answer is not clear. We also discussed the need to explicitly empower chapters by helping them with funding and to develop capacity, and the need to avoid single points of failure.
So that risk of failure was why you voted against it? In your view there wasn't sufficient caution on the board about things that could go wrong?
- What I'm hearing from lots of chapters is... not that they care about the technicalities of processing funds, but they hate being told "we know you want to do this, and it's not that you're bad at it, but we don't think you should". And personally I think that's a valid complaint, and I don't think the funding resolution considered that trade-off.
No doubt you'll be hoping that your fears are not borne out.
- Well, the response at the chapters meeting in Berlin was very productive, and even people who were disappointed by the results said, "it doesn't actually keep us from doing the work we care about". No one said, "I really personally care a lot about this technicality". The Foundation's said, "Let's focus on something else: let's get the distribution of power right and not worry about the technical issue." The FDC aims to decentralize and share power. The real power is how you decide what to spend, and until this year the Foundation has always made 90% of those decisions, so it's explicitly saying we want to share, we don't want to be that body.
Although in the end, the Foundation has the last say on every cent that is spent. True?
- Since you mentioned fiduciary responsibility earlier ... if the FDC made a decision that the Foundation felt it could not responsibly accept, it might refuse to support an investment the FDC had recommended. But [that] would be like the Foundation rejecting the recommendations of its chapters committee – something we've never done.
| “ | The Foundation's view is that processing [sitewide] donations does not imply any extra rights to spend those donations. | ” |
But you must foresee that some of the chapters might feel that they have to work a bit harder to get their money, to put it crudely: not only do they have to come under your microscope of governance and financial scrutiny, but they might actually have to apply for their special purpose money. Do you think that's behind some of the chapters' fears about the new arrangements?
- Only a few chapters were in a position to process donations last year. Everyone I have read, including those chapters, agreed that processing donations does not imply any extra rights to spend those donations. There was surprising unanimity – on internal mailing lists and on Meta – that chapters should not be granted easy access to funds just because donors in their country gave those funds to the Foundation as a whole.
- Of course this refers to funds donated through the sitewide fundraisers, which are predominantly from donors supporting the movement as a whole who are not, as far as we know, particular about which part of the movement they're giving to, [not] funds either restricted or unrestricted that are explicitly given to an organization.
In the chapters association, we have for for the first time a high-profile mouthpiece to speak plainly for the chapters, perhaps particularly for the stronger, more powerful, more vocal chapters. Might the association – subtly or not – put pressure on the two chapter-selected trustees?
- Absolutely – that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's only an imbalance in that the Wikimedia projects don't have a strong institutional voice analogous to the chapters association to synthesize, coordinate, and articulate a more nuanced set of desires, interests, and ideas, more than just the single vote for the community-selected trustees. So I would like to see a strong voice for the projects as well, which would benefit the project communities.
The Signpost will as always be keeping a close watch on the changing dynamics of organisation and relations between the Wikimedia Foundation and the sometimes nebulous array of movement entities in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, for the latest developments surrounding the nascent and powerful Funds Dissemination Committee, consult this issue's "News and notes" report.
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Projects launched in Brazil and the Middle East as advisors sought for funds committee
Education Program launches Brazil pilot
The Wikipedia Education Program (WEP) has launched a pilot program in Brazil for editing the Portuguese Wikipedia. This has been a recent goal of the Brazilian community, which, in late 2011 and early 2012, discussed the idea with professors from universities in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. These professors had an overall positive response to the idea of "Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in their classes". After discussions, five professors and 150 students were included in the pilot program, covering the topics of history, sociology, physics, and public policy.
The new program is the latest in a long line of developments relating Wikipedia to the classroom – a budding number of projects and programs spearheaded by the Public Policy Initiative conducted in 2010 and 2011. The approach has already seen success in Brazil, with a smaller solo project revolving around articles on Roman history. The five professors are Pablo Ortellado of the University of São Paulo, whose classes will collaborate on articles on cultural policy (of 11 proposed articles, only one exists); Edivaldo Moura of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, whose 13 students have each chosen to expand an article related to electromagnetism; Vera Henriques, whose class will improve articles related to biological systems; Heloisa Pait of the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, whose sociology students are to "explore their cultural memories"; and Juliana Bastos Marques, whose 60 freshmen will encounter Wikipedia in their history class.
As with all pilot programs, professors have been given creative freedom to shape their participation as they think best suits their specific coursework, and the community is keen to see the results of their varied models of participation. The second component, the program's ambassadors, are coming together as well in the face of geographical and logistical challenges; WEP participants and local meet-ups have helped spread the word in that regard. The community will track student contributions and motivation to gauge the effectiveness of the program; potential ambassador candidates are encouraged to introduce themselves on the program's page.
Call for advisers on new funding committee
A call for participation in the new advisory group of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) was issued on the foundation-l mailing list on April 9 (the list has since been renamed wikimedia-l). The group is to advise the FDC, which was created by the Board of Trustees by resolution at the end of March in Berlin after months of debate over how funding ought to be distributed (chronicled in the Signpost most recently in an interview this week and a report on the resolution in last week's edition). The committee-to-be is intended to provide recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation on how to handle the distribution of all funds, except core and operative reserve as defined in the resolution, collected for the Wikimedia movement through Wikimedia project sites such as the English Wikipedia.
According to the formation process page on Meta, several seats (up to three of maximal eleven) of the new advisory board are open to all community members meeting the criteria—notably experience in finance and administering projects within the scope of the body, as well as a time commitment of roughly four hours per week on average over 18 to 24 months. In cooperation with the Bridgespan Group, the group will draft recommendations to the Foundation's board on how to make the FDC work and support the implementation of the resulting new volunteer-run committee.
The open nomination period will end on April 17 and the first meeting of the advisory board is scheduled for the week of April 30th. (Self-)nominations are invited on Meta.
Arabic Language Initiative gets off the ground
The Wikimedia Foundation's Arabic Language Initiative to boost participation in Arabic language projects made progress at the end of March, as Moushira Elamrawy, Consultant for the Arabic Language Initiative, reported on the Wikimedia blog on April 6.
She and the Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead conducted a series of outreach visits to local Wikimedia communities, conferences, NGOs, educational and research institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco. Among the events in the North African kingdom was a consultation with a potential GLAM partner, the Moroccan Bibliothèque Générale et Archives.
Notably, while in Cairo, Newstead took part in a meeting on the nascent Cairo Education Pilot (in preparation since October 2011). The program is being conducted during the 2012 spring semester (February to June), at Ain Shams University and Cairo University. Documentation of the results is scheduled until the end of June.
Brief notes
- Call for POTY organizers: Mono, coordinator of the sixth annual Picture of the Year contest on Wikimedia Commons, has issued a call for volunteers for this year's organising committee. The contest, held since 2006, is a volunteer-run event that aims to identify the best freely licensed image promoted to featured status in a given year; this year's event will cover images uploaded in 2011. Last year's POTY counted a sum total of 2,463 votes; committee members are expected to help in "set[ting] up contest pages, posting messages in relevant locations, translating interface messages, assisting voters, and counting votes". Interested editors are invited to fill out the application form.
- Creative Commons 4.0: On April 2, Creative Commons, whose CC-BY-SA license has powered Wikipedia since June 2009, announced the release of the first draft of CC 4.0. According to the development timeline, the first opportunity for public input – either via the mailing list or the wiki – is open until May 2.
- Board Q&A: The Board of Trustees has issued a Q&A document about its recently published fundraising and funds dissemination resolutions (Signpost coverage). The document is divided into three sections: one is an overview of the board process leading up to the decision and its summary, while the other two deal with specific questions (some already asked, some anticipated) about the resolutions. Discussions are directed towards the resolution talk page.
- Wikidata office hours: The Wikidata team (whom the Signpost interviewed elsewhere in this issue) held their first office hours on April 5; the log has been published.
- Teahouse, AFT, and Triage updates: The metrics summary for the Teahouse project to date has been published, showing visitor statistics and feedback. Updates regarding the Article Feedback Tool include an announcement of new office hours by liaison Okeyes (WMF), as well as the release of instructions for feedback evaluation on Version 5 of the project. Elsewhere, feedback is requested on the New Page Triage talkpage.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes our newest administrator, Yngvadottir, "an experienced clean-up editor [with] a long history of rescuing/improving bad articles, often taking articles from AfD to the front page." Following her successful nomination, she plans to be most active at did you know?.
- Milestones this week: The Nepali Wikipedia has reached 250,000 page edits, Mediawiki has reached 100 administrators, the Japanese Wikipedia has reached 800,000 articles, and the French Wikipedia has reached a total of 5,000,000 pages.
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The Land of Steady Habits: WikiProject Connecticut
- New issues of the Teahouse, London Transport, and Video Games newsletters have been released
- New members are needed at WikiProject Merge, a recently created project that deals with the 3-year backlog of articles to be merged
- The April Wikify Drive is in full swing. Start earning your barnstar today!
- The Teyler's Museum in the Netherlands is sponsoring a contest from now until May with real-world prizes as part of the Teylers GLAM project
This week, we explored the Constitution State with the folks at WikiProject Connecticut. Started in January 2007, the project has grown to include nearly 40 active members overseeing more than 8,000 pages, including 13 pieces of Featured material and 32 Good Articles. The project watches for recent changes and proposed deletions that affect articles under the project's scope. WikiProject Connecticut has a sister project focusing on the University of Connecticut and shares a task force with WikiProject U.S. Roads. We interviewed Markvs88, Orlady, and Grondemar.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Connecticut? Do you contribute to the projects of any other US states? How would you compare activity at WikiProject Connecticut to activity at other state projects?
- Markvs88: I was working on various articles and over time was naturally drawn to articles within my own state. I discovered the wikiproject by accidentally clicking on the banner (I didn't know what a project was) and joined after reading what it was all about. I occasionally contribute to articles in other states, but am not a member of any other state project so I really don't know what other project activity levels are. However, since some state projects have gone defunct, I'd say that WPCT is fairly active.
- Orlady: I was surprised when I was invited to this interview, because I never officially joined WikiProject Connecticut. I do edit Connecticut articles, though, and I've participated in WikiProject talk page discussions, so maybe I'm a de facto member. Connecticut is one of several states I've lived in; I know a fair amount about the state and I enjoy contributing to articles about it.
- I am a listed member of the WikiProject for Tennessee, where I live, and I've worked on content for several other states. None of the geography-based WikiProjects that I'm involved with is particularly active – they are all collections of individuals who work separately most of the time, but pitch in to help each other when a need arises. What stands out for me about the Connecticut WikiProject is that most of the project participants work across the whole state, rather than focusing on a particular region. That pleasant phenomenon is explained by the state's size.
- Grondemar: As a lifelong resident of the state of Connecticut I have had always had a strong interest in the history of my state. Most of my contributions to Wikipedia have been related to the University of Connecticut (UConn) and its athletic teams. Joining the project seemed natural. While some of my contributions have been to articles under the auspices of other state WikiProjects, I am not a member of any of those projects. I'm not that familiar with most of the other state projects, other than to note that many of them are inactive; by that standard, WikiProject Connecticut is a hive of activity.
Please describe the community at WikiProject Connecticut. Has the size of Connecticut helped or hindered building a community at WikiProject Connecticut? Does the state have any interesting cultural attributes that have spilled over into the WikiProject?
- Markvs88: It's definitely helped. Some editors sometimes don't get along with each other (yes, that also includes me!), but that often brings attention to problems and their eventual resolution. The WPCT is not very large – we have just hit 8,000 articles and have at any time about half a dozen to a dozen editors so while there is room for growth, it isn't unmanageable. Nutmeggers are pretty well known for slow, steady progress and IMO that's how the WPCT has grown since at one time the project was listed as semi-active.
- Grondemar: Markvs88 has done a good job in organizing initiatives to draw in more project participants. One of the most successful were the Photo Contests held last year, which caused the donation of hundreds of pictures that massively improved our photographic coverage of state landmarks. The size of Connecticut is a double-edged sword for project participation: it makes the number of articles to cover manageable, but also means that we have a smaller potential editor base from which we can pull.
The project has undertaken an initiative to upload seals and flags to illustrate the articles for every town in Connecticut. How difficult was this endeavor? Has the project had to deal with any copyright issues related to the images of town seals?
- Markvs88: It's been a bit of a challenge, as we still have a goodly-sized list of towns where we don't have information on their seals (and flags, if applicable). Every one of Connecticut's 169 towns has a seal, since the State of Connecticut passed a law requiring one (I believe either with the banishing of the county governments in 1960 or for the 1976 US bi-centennial). Most of the time, copyright has not been an issue as many of the town seals are very old (many are pre-Civil War era, and quite a few date to the colonial era). Some towns just don't write back if you query them, and I can understand that. Many towns either have their seal as the flag or lack a flag entirely.
Have you contributed to any of the project's 12 pieces of Featured content and 33 Good Articles? What are the greatest difficulties in improving Connecticut articles to FA or GA status?
- Markvs88: No, I have not. I spend most of my time rescuing new articles from deletion, rolling back vandalism, tagging articles for the project and improving Stubs or Starts. Personally, I'd rather see 4000 C-class articles instead of the 2000 Starts and 2000 Stubs we currently have so I focus my activities there.
- Grondemar: I have been the primary contribution to two Featured Lists under the project's purview: Huskies of Honor, a recognition program for the best of UConn's athletes; and List of Connecticut Huskies bowl games, those games in which the Connecticut Huskies football team has participated. I don't see there being any Connecticut-specific challenges in preparing Featured and Good content, other than the common issue of lack of reviewers. While lack of reviewers is a huge problem especially in processes such as WP:FAC, it becomes even a larger issue with topics where there may be fewer potential editors interested in the topic.
WikiProject Connecticut's only sub-project is WikiProject University of Connecticut (WPUC). Is there any collaboration between the two projects? Does WikiProject Connecticut collaborate with any other projects?
- Markvs88: Yes, there are several members of WPCT that are also on WPUC, which is to be expected so there is collaboration there. And there is the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Connecticut as well. There is also collaboration with other projects such as New York, Rivers, Trains, Universities and a few others (such as our friends at WikiProject National Register of Historic Places), depending on the subject.
- Grondemar: I wouldn't describe WP:UCONN as a subproject of WP:CONN; they are close sister projects, but are fully independent of one another. WP:UCONN was created as several topics related to the University were only tangentially or not at all related to the state. A good example is 2009 International Bowl; this game took place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, a place with virtually no connection to Connecticut. Since UConn played in and in fact won that game, it is very significant to the university. Maintaining independent projects allows for the proper assignment of the Importance rating between the projects; certain topics important to UConn are not important to the state, and vice versa. I have seen that other state projects do have their state university as a subproject, such as WikiProject Oklahoma and the University of Oklahoma. However, the approach described above has worked for us.
- Markvs88: That's definitely true! I'm also a member of both projects, and while UConn is Connecticut's state university, the WPUC isn't an offshoot of WPCT. There's a little bit of overlap, mostly for Biographies or for a few programs that the state has a hand in or co-located venues. But as Grondemar said they're really separate foci.
Several state projects have spawned city-specific projects. Why are none of Connecticut's cities the subject of their own WikiProject? In your opinion, when does a city warrant a WikiProject?
- Markvs88: Connecticut is a small state, and we have a small number of regular editors. Our biggest city, Bridgeport, Connecticut is only the 51st largest in the country. If anything, I would think that we'd see a Yale University sub-project long before a Bridgeport, New Haven or Hartford one. I'd also someday like to have the time for a sub-project on the Connecticut Western Reserve, which is now northern Ohio but was a part of Connecticut for 138 years, including 24 years after the writing of the Declaration of Independence.
- Orlady: As Markvs88 said, Connecticut is a small state geographically. There are six counties in California that have a larger area than the entire state of Connecticut! It's no wonder that people working in a big state like California might want to focus on the specific city, metro area, or region they know best. In my experience with the Tennessee WikiProject, I've encountered questions about far-away parts of the state about which I know almost nothing, but Connecticut editors don't often face that kind of problem. Connecticut is compact, and it has some media outlets that cover much of the state. People in any one corner of the state are likely to know at least a little about the state's other three corners, as well as its middle parts. With a state so geographically compact, there's no good purpose to dividing the state into separate projects. I suspect the lack of interest in city wikiprojects also has something to do with the fact that Connecticut cities don't grow by annexation and consolidation like cities in most other states do. The boundaries of the state's 169 towns were established in earlier centuries, so the state's cities cannot grow beyond their current boundaries. Concentrations of population spill across town lines, particularly along the corridor connecting New York and Boston, but people in towns adjacent to cities like Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven identify strongly with their towns, not with the city next door.
- Grondemar: Markvs88 and Orlady hit the nail on the head on this one. Connecticut's small size, the relative compactness of the state's cities, and citizen's strong identifications with their home towns rather than the neighboring cities means that it is more effective to cover all of the cities within a single project than to create several individual city subprojects.
What are WikiProject Connecticut's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
- Markvs88: I'd love to see perhaps another half dozen or so new editors, especially ones that are interested in biographies, entertainment (art, music, film et al.) and/or manufacturing, there's a wealth of stuff here that could use work. We've also been blessed with folks willing to take pictures for our occasional photography contests, which we'd love to have more participants for.
- Grondemar: I want to get the core articles related to the state, such as the main article Connecticut, improved to Good and then Featured quality. One of my personal goals is to eventually bring the article Charter Oak, about the legendary tree that hid the Connecticut colony's charter and helped ensure that Connecticut would remain an independent state, to Featured quality. We can always use more editors interested in improving articles and collaborating to tackle the more-challenging article improvement tasks facing the project.
Next week, we'll flutter through the air like a butterfly. Until then, look for other holometabolous insects in the archive.
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Assassination, genocide, internment, murder, and crucifixion: the bloodiest of the week
Featured articles
Nine featured articles were promoted this week:
- Rwanda (nom) by Amakuru. Rwanda, officially the Republic of Rwanda, is a country in central and eastern Africa with a population of approximately 11.7 million people (2012). Located just south of the Equator, all of Rwanda is at high elevation, dominated by mountains in the west, savanna in the east, and with numerous lakes throughout. The population is young and predominantly rural, with a density among the highest in Africa. Rwandans comprise three groups: the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. The Twa are a pygmy people who descend from Rwanda's earliest inhabitants, while scholars disagree on the origins of and differences between the Hutu and Tutsi. The country endured a civil war in 1990, which was followed four years later by a genocide during which Rwanda's economy, based mostly on subsistence agriculture, suffered heavily but has since strengthened.
- Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956–1962 (nom) by Coolug. During the Khrushchev era, from 1956 through 1962, the Soviet Union attempted to implement wage reforms intended to move Soviet industrial workers away from the mindset of overfulfilling quotas that had characterised the Soviet economy during the preceding Stalinist period and toward a more efficient financial incentive. Industrial managers were often unwilling to implement actions that would effectively reduce workers' wages, however, and frequently ignored the directives they were given. As a result, the reforms ultimately failed to create a more efficient system.
- Air raids on Japan (nom) by Nick-D. Allied forces conducted many air raids on Japan during World War II, causing extensive destruction to the country's cities and killing at least 241,000 people. The air campaign waged by the United States military against Japan began in earnest in mid-1944 and intensified during the war's last months. Japan's military and civil defenses were unable to stop the Allied attacks. The Allied bombing campaign was one of the main factors which influenced the Japanese government's decision to surrender in mid-August 1945. In addition to the loss of life, the raids caused extensive damage to Japan's cities and contributed to a large decline in industrial production. In contrast, Allied casualties were low.
- Psilocybe aztecorum (nom) by Sasata. Psilocybe aztecorum is a species of psilocybin mushroom in the Strophariaceae family. Known only from central Mexico, the fungus grows on decomposing woody debris, and is found in mountainous areas at elevations of 3,200 to 4,000 m (10,500 to 13,000 ft), typically in meadows or open, grassy forests. The species was first reported by French mycologist Roger Heim in 1956 as a variety of Psilocybe mexicana before he officially described it under its current name a year later. Named for its association with the Aztec people, P. aztecorum may have been one of the sacred mushroom species, or teonanácatl ("flesh of the gods"), reported in the codices of 16th-century Spanish chronicler Bernardino de Sahagún.
- Rainilaiarivony (nom) by Lemurbaby. Rainilaiarivony (1828–96) was the Prime Minister of Madagascar from 1864 to 1895, succeeding his older brother Rainivoninahitriniony. His career path mirrored that of his father Rainiharo, a renowned military man who became Prime Minister during the reign of Queen Ranavalona I. Despite a childhood marked by ostracism from his family, Rainilaiarivony rose to a position of high authority and confidence in the royal court as a young man, serving alongside his father and brother. After his brother was deposed in 1854, he took his place as Prime Minister, remaining in power for the next 31 years by marrying three queens in succession: Rasoherina, Ranavalona II and Ranavalona III.
- Assassination of William McKinley (nom) by Wehwalt. The 25th President of the United States, William McKinley, was assassinated on September 6, 1901, inside the Temple of Music on the grounds of the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was shaking hands with the public when he was shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist. Czolgosz had lost his job during the economic crisis known as the Panic of 1893, and regarded McKinley as a symbol of oppression. McKinley initially appeared to be recovering, but took a turn for the worse on September 13 as his wounds became gangrenous, and died early the next morning.
- Elias Abraham Rosenberg (nom) by Mark Arsten and Livitup. Elias Abraham Rosenberg (1810–87) was a Jewish immigrant to the United States who, despite a questionable past, became a trusted friend and adviser of King Kalākaua of Hawaii. Rosenberg told the king Bible stories and encouraged him to revive traditional Hawaiian religion—an idea that angered his political rivals. In June 1887, Rosenberg returned to San Fransisco. Soon after his departure from Hawaii, the June 1887 Constitution – which curtailed royal power – was forced upon Kalākaua.
- Murder of Joanna Yeates (nom) by Paul MacDermott and BabbaQ. Joanna Clare "Jo" Yeates (1985–2010) was a 25-year old landscape architect from Hampshire, England, who went missing on 17 December 2010 after an evening out with colleagues. A highly publicised appeal for information on her whereabouts and intensive police inquiries led to the discovery of her corpse. A suspect, Christopher Jefferies, was arrested but found innocent. The nature of press reporting of his arrest led Jefferies to bring libel action against eight UK newspapers, resulting in the payment to him of substantial damages. In October 2011, Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak was tried for Yeates' murder, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
- Bastion (video game) (nom) by PresN. Bastion is an action role-playing video game produced by independent developer Supergiant Games and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Bastion's story follows the character of "the Kid" as he moves through floating, fantasy-themed environments and fights enemies of various types which attempt to harm him. The player controls "the Kid" as he collects special shards of rock to power the titular Bastion. Since its release, Bastion has won many nominations and awards, including several for best downloadable game and best music.
Featured lists
One featured list was promoted this week:
- List of international cricket five-wicket hauls by Waqar Younis (nom) by Sahara4u. Waqar Younis, a retired Pakistani cricketer, took 35 five-wicket hauls during his career in international cricket. In cricket, a five-wicket haul refers to a bowler taking five or more wickets in a single innings. Fewer than 40 bowlers have taken more than 20 five-wicket hauls at international level in their cricketing careers. Younis' career-best figures for an innings were 7 wickets for 76 runs against New Zealand at Iqbal Stadium, Faisalabad, in October 1990.
Featured pictures
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:
- Arlington Row, the Cotswolds (nom; related article), created and nominated by Saffron Blaze. The Arlington Row Cotswold stone cottages are located in Bilbury, England. Build in 1380 to store wool, the row is one of the most photographed Cotswold scenes. The image was promoted over objections from reviewers during its featured picture candidacy that a quick internet image search showed that a better composition was possible.
- Averbode Abbey (nom; related article) by JH-man, nominated by Tomer T. Averbode Abbey, a Premonstratensian monastery in Belgium, was established in 1134. However, the oldest surviving building on the site – the gate house – dates from the 1300s.
- Andersonville Prison (nom; related article) by John L. Ransom, restored and nominated by Jujutacular. Andersonville prison, officially known as Camp Sumter, served as a Confederate prisoner of war camp during the American Civil War. The map depicts different locations within the prison, labeled in the article.
- Andersonville Survivor (nom; related article) by an unknown photographer, restored and nominated by Jujutacular. Prisoners of war are persons held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict. This Union Soldier was held in terrible conditions at Andersonville Prison during the American Civil War.
- St Luke's Church, Frampton Mansell (nom; related article) by Saffron Blaze. St Luke's Church in Frampton Mansell, Stroud, was built in 1843 and sits on the top the Churn Valley. The church is an English Heritage Grade II Listed Building.
- HP Pavilion at San Jose (nom; related article), created by JaGa and nominated by Tomer T. The HP Pavilion, also known as The Shark Tank, is a hockey arena used primarily by the San Jose Sharks. Opened in 1993, the arena can seat between 11,000 and 20,000 spectators, depending on the event.
- Your Liberty Bond will help stop this (nom; related article), created by Fernando Amorsolo, restored and nominated by Crisco 1492. The newly featured poster, an American World War I propaganda piece from the Philippines aimed at selling war bonds, depicts the story of The Crucified Soldier—reportedly a Canadian soldier crucified on a tree or door by German troops.
- Zoe Lyons with Cigar (nom; related article), created by Steve Ullathorne and nominated by A Thousand Doors. This new featured picture of American comedian Zoe Lyons received enthusiastic support: reviewer's endorsements included "a portrait image of a comedian couldn't have been better" (Sanyambahga) and "best free image of a living person nominated here yet" (Daniel Case).
- So hilft dein Geld (nom; related article) by Lucian Bernhard, restored by Bellhalla, and nominated by Crisco 1492. This World War I German propaganda poster depicts the need for war bonds (Kriegsanleihe); this was imperative during the war as Germany could not draw international loans.
- American Gothic (nom; related article), created by Grant Wood and nominated by Crisco 1492. Wood's American Gothic, painted in 1930, was inspired by a Gothic Revival cottage and the artist's idea of who lived there. It is one of the more famous works of American art.
- Christ Crucified (nom; related article), created by Diego Velázquez and nominated by Crisco 1492. Velázquez's Christ Crucified, painted in 1632, is a frontal nude which depicts the crucifixion of Jesus. The painting is housed in the Museo del Prado.
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Featured portal
One featured portal was promoted this week:
- Arts (nom) by Cirt. The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art", which as a description of a field usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompass visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts—music, theatre, dance and film, among others.
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Arbitration evidence-limit motions, two open cases
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, bringing the number of open cases to two.
Open cases
Rich Farmbrough (Week 1)
This newly opened case involves accusations of disruptive editing against Rich Farmbrough. Specifically, concerns have been raised about the editor and bot policies. Arbitrator Hersfold originally filed the case, which the committee chose to accept on 4 April. Hersfold and Elen of the Roads (who had blocked Rich Farmbrough) have both recused from participation in the case.
Arbitrator Newyorkbrad is drafting a proposed decision, expected in about a month's time. Until then, evidence submissions and workshop proposals are permitted until 25 April. There have already been several such submissions in the past week.
Race and intelligence review (Week 4)
A review was opened of the Race and intelligence case as a compromise between opening a new case and ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case and will cover conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 case. Over the past week several editors submitted specific evidence at the request of the committee. While the posting of the complete proposed decision is expected in the next few days, several proposed principles have already been posted.
Other requests and committee action
- The Arbitration Committee has begun voting on a series of proposals to change the limits for evidence submissions in cases. At the time of publication, no motion had passed.
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Next Wikimedia deployment already in the pipeline and details of recent performance improvements
1.20wmf1 in the pipeline
| “ | To reiterate, I think most of the problem [volunteer resentment at the apparent preferential treatment of staff-written code] will disappear when we have regular code deployment again. At this point, it's best to focus solely on that and forget about all other complaints. If problems linger for long after everyone's code is getting deployed on a regular basis, we can talk about that then, and I think everyone will be talking on much more amicable basis. | ” |
| — Aryeh Gregor, October 2010 | ||
A provisional timetable was released for the first mini-deployment on Wikimedia sites from new version control system Git. Beyond the technical challenge of releasing against a substantially different code management background, the release should also herald the start of a new era of far quicker deployments to Wikimedia wikis—itself a development that has been discussed off-and-on for at least eighteen months (Signpost coverage).
With only a couple of months' worth of changes included (most of them simple bug fixes), it would be easy to overlook the release. Such a mistake is unlikely to be made by any developer aware of its historical significance, however, it being the quickest deployment of a block of changes (as opposed to individual "emergency" merges) in nearly two and a half years. The release thus marks the retirement of the previous paradigm – merging a small subset of revisions but retaining the majority for irregular watershed deployments – in favour of a new model focused on regular "mini"-deployments. Only time will tell whether or not Aryeh Gregor (quoted above in October 2010) will be proven right, and whether the problem of the volunteer-staff average review time divide (a problem which flared up once again on the wikitech-l mailing list only this week) will be settled once and for all.
According to the plan published on wikitech-l this week, non-Wikipedia sites (that is to say, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiquote and Wikiversity) should receive the update on April 16, with the English Wikipedia following on April 23. Should the deployment go well, the remaining wikis will be updated on April 25, just two months after they enjoyed the benefits of 1.19.0, which will only complete its own release cycle when it is made available to external sites later in the month.
March Engineering Report published
| “ | In March 2012:
|
” |
—Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog | ||
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for March 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. March was dominated at first by the deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 to all Wikipedias and more latterly by the move to Git and its associated code review system Gerrit. Other headlines from the month will also be familiar to regular Signpost readers, including the completion of the move of all Wikimedia domain names away from registrar GoDaddy in protest at their political stance on SOPA; the publication of a report on the first phase of Article Feedback version 5; and design improvements to the mobile front-end.
As is often the case, many of the changes that came in under the radar relate to incremental performance improvements aimed at allowing Wikimedia to support a rapidly increasing audience. For example, significant work was done with regard to preparing the newer Ashburn data centre to share responsibility with its Tampa counterpart for internal search functionality. Attempts to improve image caching were stymied by lingering concerns about "overloading the NIC cards and the risk of concentrating too much cache on each server", yielding only a trial improvement thus far. Network peering was also added to the Ashburn site, allowing it to pool resources with a dozen or so websites and ISPs—a move expected to reduce latency for users in Europe, Japan and Hong Kong. Similar motivations also led the Foundation to begin investigating the possibility of establishing a caching centre on the West Coast of the United States, the report said. Meanwhile, the switch in default thumbnail handling system to Swift finally settled down during the month after numerous problematic attempts at deployment during February; the same system is now expected to start handling non-thumbnailed images sometime in late May.
Elsewhere, it was announced that Wikimedia Labs' main per-project storage space (71,000 GB, currently distributed in 300 GB chunks) came online during March, though there were also two labs outages during the month. In addition, the Visual Editor team have now finalised a decision to base the new WYSIWYG editor around the contentEditable HTML5 property, having previously worked on a separate "editsurface" system in parallel, paving the way ahead towards a summer release. Finally, the first release of a complete copy of the English Wikipedia in the specialised ZIM file format (containing about 4 million articles, 11 million redirects, and 300,000 mathematical images) was also completed during March; the hope is to use regularly generated ZIM files – viewable with the WMF-supported Kiwix reader – to provide a complete offline browsing experience in the so-called "global south".
In brief
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Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- Updated apps for iOS and Android: This week saw new releases of the official Wikipedia app on both target platforms – version 1.1 for Android (a significant incremental release) and version 3.1 for iOS (which jumps forward to parity with the Android version, which before this week was significantly more advanced). It was ultimately a stressful week for the Wikipedia Mobile team, who were forced to work around the clock to fix a number of bugs with the initial releases of both versions despite significant pre-release testing. Thus the Android line of releases saw not just 1.1.0 this week but also 1.1.1, a minor bugfix release, while the iOS line received 3.1.0, 3.1.1 (a major bugfix release) and will shortly receive 3.1.2 to fix another high priority bug. Both version releases add improved tablet support as well as full text search and "Did you Mean?"’ correction support (Wikimedia blog). It was the replacement of Google Maps with OpenStreetMap as the base map provider for both versions that really caught the attention of the media, however, being highlighted on technology news websites such as CNET and PCMag, as well as the website of Austrian daily Der Standard.
- Developer starts work on Gerrit replacement: After discussions last week about the apparent shortcomings of new code review system Gerrit (Signpost coverage), one developer announced this week that he would be starting work on a new, custom-built system (wikitech-l mailing list). In announcing the "long term" project, experienced coder Daniel Friesen stressed that it was a response to "issues stemming fundamentally from how Gerrit is designed" rather than the minor UI issues that have also been discussed at length. The initial reception was largely negative, with Wikimedia regulars stressing that Friesen was taking a risk putting time into something that would only be considered for Foundation support and eventually implementation when it became a "real alternative" to Gerrit.
- Google Summer of Code applications closed: At midnight on April 6, applications closed for summer placements at the Wikimedia Foundation (provided via the Google Summer of Code programme). Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara reported that the Foundation had received 63 such applications, of which 41 were of sufficient quality to go forward to the assessment phase. There they will compete for a number of places decided by Google; last year that number was eight, but it could well inch up slightly this week. Foundation staff and other top developers will now begin discussing and ranking proposals; successful applicants with be notified on April 23. In unrelated news, applications are now open to present at the Strange Loop conference, which will be held in Missouri in September this year.
- One-ish bots approved: 4 BRfAs were recently approved:
- Thehelpfulbot's 13th BRfA, general tagging (and untagging) of categories as requested, typically after CfD closures
- Hazard-Bot's 7th BRfA, a re-implementation of its 3rd BRfA
- Two extensions to H3llBot's 2nd BRfA (2b and 2c), switching to existing archived copies once a link dies; and tagging identified, dead domains/links with {{dead link}}
- Additionally, Rcsprinter123 has nominated himself for BAG membership; the community is encouraged to join that discussion, as well as those relating to the 16 currently active bot approvals.
- WMF organisation chart published: As reported by Erik Möller on the wikitech-l mailing list, Mark Holmquist (a contractor working for the Foundation) has generated a series of organisation charts for the organisation. The charts, which show staff names, locations and job titles hierarchically, currently cover all engineering departments; the hope is to expand them to also cover the remaining Wikimedia Foundation departments.
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