Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2013-07-31
The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change
- Erik Möller is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit behind Wikipedia and its related sister projects. This op-ed is the first of two that will examine the new VisualEditor, which allows editing without learning wikimarkup, but has proved controversial for a variety of reasons. (Update, 10 August: the editor who was going to write a response piece has decided that recent changes to the VisualEditor tool have assuaged many of his/her concerns; as such, the planned second op-ed will not be forthcoming.)
- The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Those wishing to submit an opinion piece of their own should email the editor-in-chief at least one week prior to their desired publishing date.
One of the narratives I've heard a lot is that Wikipedia is unable to change, that it's too stagnant, too poorly resourced, too inherently resistant to change. I don't believe that at all.
Here are some of the technical changes we've partially or fully deployed in the last few months:
- mobile editing
- a new login/account creation experience
- a new central login system
- a new language selection experience
- input methods for >150 languages
- automatic font delivery
- a new translation user experience
- article edit suggestions for new users
- mobile web uploads
- mobile app uploads for iOS/Android
- notifications, including user mentions & thanks
- Lua support for templates
- Wikidata support for templates and countless Wikidata improvements (development by Wikimedia Germany)
- and, of course, the VisualEditor Beta.
We've done this with a tiny engineering team by the standards of websites of our reach, working through a mountain of technical debt. We've done it with a QA team of two. We've done it with you. All these changes still need love, for sure.
Wikipedia was inspired by the free software and open source movement. All our software is open source. All the changes we make, the bugs we find, the discussions we have, the things we learn—we share. We continually improve in everything we do, both in what we do and how we do it.
When we embarked on the VisualEditor project, we knew it was going to be the most disruptive change to the user experience in the history of our projects, and also that it was going to be incredibly difficult. Anyone who says "what's the big deal—it's just a rich-text editor, there are a billion of those" doesn't have the faintest clue what's involved.
The single most complex thing to support: templates. What started as a simple idea (re-usable blocks of text) has turned the encyclopedia into a set of programmable documents, complete with a Turing-complete programming language. Every document is made up of in some cases hundreds or even thousands of transclusions that need to be updated dynamically whenever they change.
Because until now, as our software only had to spit out a single document for readers, it has been very tolerant of how templates are used. You can make almost any page content out of templates, including subway maps, football t-shirt graphics, vote result charts, chess diagrams, and of course citations. And templates can literally inject bits of markup into a page that don't make sense in isolation, but perform some function in the context of a table, inside image syntax, etc. (e.g. {{!}} which creates just the "|" that marks the boundary of a table cell).
There are two primary problems with this approach:
- If you edit a page visually, a visual editing environment needs to actually be aware of which parts of the page are templates, needs to properly isolate them, make them editable, and convert them back to wikitext. Depending on just what the template does, this can be very brittle. Encapsulating elements of a larger object like a table inside a template makes it harder to provide a consistent user experience for the whole object (e.g. changing properties of a table cell should always work the same way). Templates that insert code fragments are especially tricky, because you often can't map such a template against a well-defined part of an HTML structure, which means you're fighting against HTML rather than working within its semantic structure.
- Depending on the template's operation and purpose, it may never be possible to make it easy to use in a visual editing environment. A subway map created out of templates will never look useful in a visual editor—visually creating and editing such content just requires a completely different approach altogether (e.g. SVG editing).
When we released the beta of VisualEditor earlier in July, a lot of users were legitimately upset that in many cases, it doesn't yet deliver on the promise of easy editing for everyone; it has bugs (it's a beta) and can be slow especially on large pages, while imposing a new cost to the community:
Besides bugs, a new editing environment means that new types of errors can be made. Deleting an infobox in a markup editor means selecting a whole bunch of text and consciously removing it. Deleting it in a visual editor means accidentally backspacing one time too many. Positioning markup for formatting consciously around text using cursor keys increases precision around spacing and encapsulation of characters. Using the mouse to select text increases the likelihood of certain types of selection errors. And so on.
We've made many changes and improvements already. There are additional affordances we can create to reduce user error. There are changes we can make to the parser to improve its handling of complex template constructions. And in the long run, there are features we can build to make graphics, charts and other rich content easy to create and edit without templates.
We also need to have conversations about the future of wiki markup (yes, there may be uses of markup that will need to be deprecated), about how and whether certain features can even be supported with markup (e.g. annotations, real-time collaboration), and about the unavoidable consequences of having users edit articles in a visual editing environment (yes, there are types of editing mistakes that are inherently more likely in such an environment—others are less so). If you're coming to Wikimania, we'll create opportunities to have these and other conversations with you in person throughout the course of the conference.
Even though it's difficult and disruptive, there was no alternative to getting VisualEditor in front of thousands of real users. While there is more polish that we should have given core features before launching the beta to as many users, I can also tell you with confidence that the level of initial disruptive impact would have been 80% the same even with 3-6 months of additional development effort. Given the level of complexity involved (number of browser/OS/device combinations, amount and complexity of existing markup including templates, types of user actions), there's really no way around it. And yes, we've done tons of automated parser testing on Wikipedia's content, which has enabled us to minimize wikitext<->HTML roundtripping issues.
But as disruptive as it has been, it's also been incredibly useful. The stream of feedback we've been getting is invaluable. The continuing improvement of template metadata is essential. Seeing real-world diffs on a day-to-day basis that show whether a specific thing we're changing has had the desired effect on real-world users (without self-selection bias) is the only way to make VisualEditor awesome. We need to update user documentation, welcome messages, videos, tutorials, workshop resources, etc. etc.
An off-again, on-again approach doesn't work well. We have to keep improving every week, not fall into a pattern where development is largely isolated from the real world impact of its decisions.
Being bold, failing quickly, improving iteratively has been the way Wikipedia has evolved from the very beginning, both in technology and content. I don't believe in the mythology that Wikipedia can't change—in fact, that is all it ever does. I believe in our resilience as a community, and our ability to make it through complex change together.
That said, let's find the best way to do this together, and take the principle of iteration seriously even in how the VisualEditor is deployed. We do have a ton of useful actionable feedback and data that we didn't have a month ago.
And we can make VisualEditor prominently accessible with appropriate caveats, without making it the default primary experience. In doing so, we need to ensure that we maintain a large and diverse number of users (IP address users, new accounts, experienced users) so that we can continually improve VisualEditor under real world conditions and avoid blind spots. We're open to exploring the best ways of accomplishing that goal, and will alter the current beta configuration soon.
One other thing I'm taking away from our beta experience is that we'll need to make it really trivial to set your primary editing experience—whatever the secondary option is needs to be minimally intrusive. Complaints about the section editing experience with VisualEditor are completely valid in that context, for example; the progressive disclosure of wikitext section edit links was a bad idea.
And no, we're not taking markup-level editing away. Some users may always prefer it over visual editing, even if the exact nature of the markup changes, and even if VisualEditor becomes the best tool it can possibly be.
The VisualEditor/Parsoid team has solved some really challenging problems already, but I also recognize that we still have a long way to go. We are listening, and are continuing to iterate, in partnership with you. Thanks to you for embracing change while helping us to get it right.
Reader comments
Napoleon, Michael Jackson and Srebrenica across cultures, 90% of Wikipedia better than Britannica, WikiSym preview
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Multilingual ranking analysis: Napoleon and Michael Jackson as Wikipedia's "global heroes"
An ArXiv preprint titled "Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles"[1], authored by a group of physicists from France, examines the Wikipedia articles on individuals and their position in the hyperlink network of the articles in each Wikipedia language edition. There are 9 language editions studied. The authors try to locate the most "important" individuals ("heroes") in each language edition by calculating two different page rank scores: PageRank and CheiRank. After making the lists of individuals with highest ranks in each language edition (with 30 individuals in each list), overlaps between lists are investigated and local and global "heroes" are introduced. The lists of "global heroes" are topped by Napoleon for PageRank, and Michael Jackson for 2DRank. It is shown that both local and global heroes exist and while global heroes gain their central position in the network due to links from multiple other central nodes, local heroes are mostly notable because of the large number of links directly pointing to them. Finally, based on the nationality (language of origin) of the highly ranked individual, a network of languages is constructed and the position of each language in this network is analysed by calculating rank scores. The authors also analyzed the activities of those important individuals, and have found politicians and scientists to be quite often among the most important ones.
Wikipedia as Cultural Reference: Srebrenica Massacre, Art and Menstruation
- Editor's note: the contributing editor of this section, Han-Teng Liao, participated at the DMI Summer School 2013, though not affiliated with the DMI or University of Amsterdam.
The book chapter of "Wikipedia as Cultural Reference" in Richard A. Rogers' book "Digital Methods"[2] can be read as an example of the "digital methods" applied to Wikipedia, or a contribution to the emerging literature on cross-language-version or cross-cultural comparison of the same or similar encyclopedia articles in global Wikipedia projects. Not to be confused with "big methods", "virtual methods", etc.[3], the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI) is a school of Internet researchers at University of Amsterdam led by Rogers to 'create a platform to display the tools and methods to perform research that ... take advantage of "web epistemology"'. Currently the DMI has built some basic Wikipedia research tools that help social scientists to analyze cross-lingual images, anonymous edits, tables of contents, etc. Thus, as part of Rogers' research agenda in advocating the "digital methods", the Wikipedia projects become both a data set and analytical devices that can be repurposed for social research: "as a cultural reference, a vigilant community, a scandal machine and a controversy diagnostic machine"[4].
Self-defined as "cultural research with Wikipedia", this chapter compared the Srebrenica Articles (The Fall of Srebrenica, the Srebrenica Massacre, and the Srebrenica Genocide) across six language versions: Dutch, English, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Serbo-Croatian. Using various kinds of datasets, ranging from creation dates, edits by interlanguage article editors and top ten editors, the numbers of victims, tables of contents, referenced websites and images used, the findings show that the principle of neutral point of view does not automatically make Wikipedia articles universal (or at least similar) across language versions. The differences, especially those specific to the Wiki medium, can be used for cultural analysis on the selected topics. The content outcome is found to reflect the dynamics between the power editors in defending their sources and content using Wikipedia policies. Among these "umbrella articles", the English version is a highly contested article among many interlanguage editors, and the Serbo-Croatian version is much softened and unifying with very few editors.
Adopting and extending the digital methods, two groups of participants at the DMI summer school 2013 examined the cross-language-version differences on two topics: art and menstruation. The "Cross Lingual Art Spaces on Wikipedia" project (by Sangeet Kumar, Garance Coggins, Sarah Mc Monagle, Stephan Schlögl, Han-Teng Liao, Michael Stevenson, Federica Bardelli, and Anat Ben-David) sought to find the universal and specific articulations of the concept of art through (1) images and (2) concepts (i.e. strongly related articles), producing an image network visualization for 154 language versions and a concept network visualization for eight selected language versions. A Wikidata scraping tool was developed to identify different names for the same content for the process called "concept reference disambiguation".
The second project, "Menstruation Across Cultures Online" (by Astrid Bigoni, Loes Bogers, Zuzana Karascakova, Emily Stacey and Sarah Mc Monagle) looked at the cultural differences of Wikipedia images and Google autocomplete suggestions to find associated images and search queries. In addition, the English version of the article on menstruation was compared with other English-language sources such as Urban Dictionary and Twitter, producing an interesting cross-platform comparative tag cloud. While not full research articles, the research outcomes of the two projects nonetheless demonstrated the potential directions for cross-cultural and cross-platform comparison, when Wikipedia projects are compared among themselves or with other online platforms that contain user-generated content and/or activities.
Decline of adminship candidatures on Polish Wikipedia
A conference paper titled "Does the Acquaintance Relation Close up the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia?"[5] investigates why the Polish Wikipedia community of Administrators is growing slower than expected, as defined by a decrease in successful RfAs. The paper presents a useful literature review of related academic work on RfA, and is a welcome study of the under-researched population of editors at non-English Wikipedias. It seems to focus on the computer science dimension, with a developed statistics section, but little theory discussion. In this reviewer's opinion it would've been stronger if the authors engaged with more social science theory, such as the iron law of oligarchy.
The authors suggest at first such a decline may occur because administrators are chosen on the basis of acquaintance, thus creating a closed group which people lacking the right connections cannot join. Later, they conclude that this is unlikely, instead pointing to growing expectations about new candidates. Both of those would be valid hypotheses, but neither is clearly tied to any theory or previous study. The authors' analysis of the data is problematic; at one point they contradict themselves, noting that "[One of the observed phenomena] could indicate, however, that the community is closing up after all" although later their conclusion states "Our conclusion is that it cannot be claimed with certainty that the Polish Wikipedia community is closing up.".
The authors also misunderstand how the WP:RFA process works on English Wikipedia, noting that one of the key differences between Polish and English Wikipedia is voting, as in "in the case of English version of Wikipedia, new administrators are elected not by voting, but by discussion". That the authors are ready to take such policy claims at face value does cast a little doubt on the applicability of their findings.
Overall, the paper presents some interesting statistical data on trends in an understudied community, and contributes to our understanding of the governance of Wikipedia. The analysis of the received data is however rather lacking, particularly through weak ties to literature on leadership, volunteer motivation and related social science areas.
90% of Wikipedia articles have "equivalent or better quality than their Britannica counterparts" in blind expert review
A Portuguese-language dissertation at the University of Évora, titled "Colaboração em Massa ou Amadorismo em Massa?" ("Mass collaboration or mass amateurism?")[6] compared the quality of English Wikipedia with that of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As summarized in English on the author's blog, a representative random sample of 245 article pairs from both encyclopedias was generated, and "reformatted to hide [their] source and then graded by an expert in its subject area using a five-point scale. We asked experts to concentrate only on some [...] intrinsic aspects of the articles' quality, namely accuracy and objectivity, and discard the contextual, representational and accessibility aspects. Whenever possible, the experts invited to participate in the study are University teachers, because they are used to grading students' work not using the reputation of the source." They rated "90% of the Wikipedia articles ... as having equivalent or better quality than their Britannica counterparts".
First WikiSym 2013 papers available
The annual WikiSym research conference is taking place in Hong Kong from August 5 to 7. Since June, the organizers have been featuring the abstracts of the conference's papers on the conference blog, with online publication of full texts planned for August 5. But several authors have already made their papers available elsewhere:
- Barnstars: "A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Barnstars on Wikipedia Editing"[7] analyzed 21,299 barnstars awarded to 14,074 editors on the English Wikipedia, and found that users tended to be less active in article editing after receiving or presenting barnstars. Although there has been previous research questioning the effectiveness of barnstars, the authors here stop short of concluding that barnstars don't work, but instead hypothesize that the observed effect may be simply because an editor's high activity period "subsequently catches the attention of other editors, who are then more likely to reward them with barnstars."
- News coverage on Wikipedia and Wiktionary: Researcher Brian Keegan, who has published various research papers on how Wikipedia editors cover breaking news events, uses[8] sociologist Thomas Gieryn's concept of boundary-work to explore "how Wikipedia's response to the 9/11 attacks expanded the role of the encyclopedia to include newswork" in the early years of the project, and describes the "failure of Wikinews" which according to the author "illustrates the pitfalls of misappropriating professional newswork norms as well as the challenges of sustaining online communities."
- Software library for analyzing collaboration networks on Wikipedia: "Analyzing Multi-Dimensional Networks within MediaWikis"[9] presents a software library for analyzing "a variety of relationships about the content, history, and editors of its articles such as hyperlinks between articles, discussions among editors, and editing histories", using NodeXL.
- "An Actionable Quality Model for Wikipedia: Co-authored by the late John Riedl (see "Briefly" section), this paper contains both an overview of existing efforts to assess article quality on Wikipedia and a proposal for a new "simple model of article quality with actionable features".[10]
- "Temporal Analysis of OpenStreetMap users activity: Taha Yasseri from Oxford Internet Institute, who already has a paper on Circadian and Weekly Patterns of Wikipedia Editorial Activity, together with Giovanni Quattrone, and Afra Mashhadi from University College London, have studied the temporal patterns of user activity on OpenStreetMap, the wiki-based collaborative mapping project. By applying Principal Component Analysis, they have shown how the pattern of editing has been changing over years, most likely due to increase in use of mobile devices by the mappers. The Study compares the two cases of mappers in London and Rome showing a faster change in London compared to Rome.[11]
Survey participation bias analysis: More Wikipedia editors are female, married or parents than previously assumed
The fact that Wikipedia's editing community has a huge gender gap (with vastly more male than female editors contributing to the encyclopedia) was first brought to wider attention by a 2008 survey of Wikipedia readers and editors, whose results were published by UNU-MERIT and the Wikimedia Foundation in 2010. It found that only 17.8% of US-based editors were female, and 12.7% globally. As reported in the Signpost at the time, some concerns were voiced about the possible impact of participation bias on the results (an effect which is frequent in volunteer web surveys), for example because the survey had also found a gender gap in Wikipedia readers (39.9% female in the US), in contrast to other research which estimated the gender ratio among readers closer to 50%.
A new PloS ONE paper titled "The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation"[12] has made it possible for the first time to quantify this participation bias, regarding the subset of US-based editors. Using a method for propensity adjustment for web surveys first published in a 2011 statistical paper, they compare the 2008 survey with Pew Research data from around the same time, which is assumed to be free of the same kind of bias because it was based on different methodology (a phone survey), and had found 49.0% of US Wikipedia readers to be female. The authors write: "We estimate that the proportion of female US adult editors was 27.5% higher than the original study reported (22.7%, versus 17.8%), and that the total proportion of female editors was 26.8% higher (16.1%, versus 12.7%)." Likewise, they find evidence that the proportion of editors who are "married, or parents, [had] been underestimated, while the proportions of immigrants and students [had] been overestimated."
The authors emphasize that their results do not negate the existence of the gender gap in general ("the basic takeaways in regards to the underrepresentation of women in the WMF/UNU-MERIT survey remain intact"), and actually call for "the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic goal to increase female editorship to 25% [...] to be raised in light of these adjusted estimates." They observe that their method is not applicable to the three subsequent editor surveys conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2011/12 (the most recent one by this reviewer), because they focused solely on editors, and therefore the necessary reader comparison data (e.g. the data from Pew Research surveys) is not available. Still, the paper's results will definitely have a positive impact on the research efforts by the Foundation and others to better understand the demographics of the Wikipedia editing community.
Briefly
- "Researching collaboration for a better world: John T. Riedl (1962–2013)": A blog post by Dario Taraborelli in memory of computer scientist John Riedl and his numerous contributions to understanding of Wikipedia, ranging from the development of SuggestBot, vandalism, deletion, quality control, and editor retention to the gender gap [13]
- "Coordination and Learning in Wikipedia: Revisiting the dynamics of exploitation and exploration": An academic paper published for researchers of the sociology of organizations, under the volume topic of "Managing ‘Human Resources' by Exploiting and Exploring People's Potentials", applies the exploration vs. exploitation trade-off learning theory to understand the evolution of Wikipedia [14]. The authors thus identify three periods in the evolution of Wikipedia: (i) the establishment/take-off period from 2001 to 2002, (ii) the growth/consolidation period from 2003 to 2006, and (iii) maturation/sustainability period from 2007 onwards.
- Overview of Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias in China: An academic blog post [15] shares research materials for journalists to cover the Wikimania 2013 and Wikisym+Opensym 2013 events to be held in Hong Kong. It provides up-to-date information on Chinese-language user-generated content and online encyclopedias.
- "Peer production online community infrastructures": An academic conference paper [16] that examines the role of centralized and decentralized governance and platform architectures in determining a social software system's excludability: the degree to which users can control who contributes to or consumes the system's resources. Closed-source software platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the most excludable. Users have no control over the design of the platform, no ownership of the content, and the system owners have the right and the power to arbitrarily censor content or block contributors. Free software platforms like Kune allow both decentralized architecture and decentralized governance: they can be hosted anywhere and users themselves can decide how the platform and its content are used. Peer-to-peer network services, especially Darknets, are the least excludable. These services are decentralized and anonymous, so users potentially have more privacy and information security. But these features also facilitate their use in criminal activity. Wikipedia exists somewhere in the middle: the use of CC-by-SA license for content, and community-created policies for governance, reduce excludability. But the Wikimedia Foundation's ownership of the production servers (along with the technical power invested in administrators) make Wikipedia's architecture and governance more centralized, introducing a degree of excludability.
- Education Program case study: A paper titled "Wikipedia as a Tool for Teaching Policy Analysis and Improving Public Policy Content Online"[17] shares project objectives and lessons learned from having a class at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University participate in a Wikipedia writing assignment as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's 2010/11 Public Policy project.
- "Digital citizens" in the classroom: Similarly, a conference paper titled "Becoming Digital Citizens: Using Wikipedia to Enhance the Classroom" [18] describes the outcome of one course participating in the Wikipedia education Program, including a small survey among participating students (10 respondents). Another paper about the Education Program appeared in First Monday recently[19].
- Use P2P techniques to support Wikipedia hosting: According to a simulation by two German computer scientists[20], the Wikimedia Foundation "can reduce the traffic needed for article lookups in case of Wikipedia up to 72%" by having participants in a P2P network storing and serving some articles from their machines, while still also serving them from a central installation (cloud).
- Dissertation about vandalism: A dissertation titled "Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications"[21] examines the subject of vandalism on Wikipedia. The author is well-known to Wikipedians as the programmer of the widely used "STiki" vandalism-fighting tool, and for conducting a controversial vandalism experiment himself in 2010.
- Maintenance tag analysis: A thesis titled "Analyzing and Predicting Quality Flaws in User-generated Content: The Case of Wikipedia" [22] examines the use of cleanup tags on the English Wikipedia. Some of the author's previous work was covered earlier in this newsletter (e.g. "{{Citation needed}} more effective than {{unreferenced}}").
- Wikibooks case study: In "The NGS WikiBook: a dynamic collaborative online training effort with long-term sustainability"[23], a group of researchers (including Wikimedian Magnus Manske) describe their use of Wikibooks as a platform to write a handbook about Next Generation Sequencing (NGS). Another paper titled "Analysis of Existing Technological Platforms for the Collaborative Production of Open Textbooks"[24] contains a summary of the advantages and drawbacks of Wikibooks compared to similar platforms.
- Scraping Wikipedia tables: A conference paper describes "Methods for Exploring and Mining Tables on Wikipedia"[25], with an online demo available.
- Wiktionary and OmegaWiki compared: A paper analyzing the usefulness of Wiktionary and OmegaWiki for translation applications[26] summarizes the differences of the two platforms as follows: "While the openness and flexibility of Wiktionary has attracted many users, leading to a resource of considerable size and richness, the non-standardized structure of entries also leads to difficulties in the integration into translation applications. OmegaWiki, on the other hand, does not suffer from this problem, but the self-imposed limitations to maintain integrity also constrain its expressiveness and, along with that, the range of information which can be represented in the resource." The authors propose a method for using both at the same time, by automatically aligning the two resources at the level of word senses with good precision. This yields a substantial increase of coverage, especially concerning available translations."
- Quoting Wikipedians in research papers: try to ask them: On the group blog "Ethnography Matters",[27] researcher Heather Ford explored the ethical dilemma of how to quote online statements by members of collaborative communities such as Wikipedia in research papers: anonymously or by name? Ford arrives at the conclusion that "For now ... I'll use my best efforts to contact those whose statements and conversations on Wikipedia I want to quote. More generally, I'm going to continue to talk to Wikipedians about what they think about these issues."
- "Algorithmic governance" of Wikipedia: A conference paper titled "Work-to-Rule: The Emergence of Algorithmic Governance in Wikipedia" [28] "collected qualitative and quantitative data from Wikipedia in order to show how a community's consensus gradually converts social mechanisms into algorithmic mechanisms".
References
- ^ Young-Ho Eom, Dima L. Shepelyansky: Highlighting entanglement of cultures via ranking of multilingual Wikipedia articles http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6259
- ^ Rogers, Richard A. (2013). "Wikipedia as Cultural Reference". Digital methods. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: The MIT Press. pp. 165–202. ISBN 9780262018838.
(Note. A previous version of this chapter can be found (and freely accessible) here: a conference paper for the Wikipedia Academy Deutschland 2012).
- ^ For the five methodological views on the implications of digitization for social research, see Marres, Noortje (2012). "The redistribution of methods: on intervention in digital social research, broadly conceived". The Sociological Review. 60: 139–165. doi:10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02121.x. ISSN 1467-954X. Retrieved 2013-07-28.(Note. A pdf file can be accessed via the author's university website.)
- ^ See a slideshow for the DMI 2013 summer school by Erik Borra on Repurposing Wikipedia
- ^ Justyna Spychała, Piotr Turek, Mateusz Adamczyk: "Does the Acquaintance Relation Close up the Administrator Community of Polish Wikipedia? Analysing Polish Wikipedia Administrator Community with use of Multidimensional Behavioural Social Network [1]
- ^ Fernando Silvério Nifrário Rodrigues: Colaboração em Massa ou Amadorismo em Massa? Um Estudo Comparativo da Qualidade da Informação Científica Produzida Utilizando os Conceitos e Ferramentas Wiki. Universidade de Évora, 2012 English synopsis
- ^ Kwan Hui Lim, Amitava Datta and Michael Wise: A Preliminary Study on the Effects of Barnstars on Wikipedia Editing. PDF WikiSym '13, Aug 05-07 2013, Hong Kong
- ^ Brian C. Keegan: A History of Newswork on Wikipedia: http://www.brianckeegan.com/papers/WikiSym13-newswork.pdf WikiSym '13, Aug 05-07 2013, Hong Kong
- ^ Brian C. Keegan Arber Ceni Marc A. Smith: "Analyzing Multi-Dimensional Networks within MediaWikis PDF WikiSym '13, Aug 05-07 2013, Hong Kong
- ^ Morten Warncke-Wang, Dan Cosley, John Riedl: Tell Me More: An Actionable Quality Model for Wikipedia. WikiSym '13, Aug 05-07 2013, Hong Kong PDF
- ^ Taha Yasseri, Giovanni Quattrone, Afra Mashhadi: Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap. WikiSym '13, Aug 05-07 2013, Hong Kong PDF
- ^ Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw: "The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation" PLoS ONE Volume: 8, Issue: 6, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0065782
- ^ Taraborelli, Dario (July 30, 2013). "Researching collaboration for a better world: John T. Riedl (1962 – 2013)". Wikimedia Blog. Retrieved July 31, 2013.
- ^ Aaltonen, Aleksi; Kallinikos, Jannis (2012). "Coordination and Learning in Wikipedia: Revisiting the dynamics of exploitation and exploration" (PDF). Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Retrieved July 31, 2013.
- ^ Liao, Han-Teng (July 30, 2013). "Chinese conditions on user-generated content and online encyclopedias: press-friendly background materials". people.oii.ox.ac.uk. Oxford Internet Institute Blog. Retrieved July 31, 2013.
- ^ De Rosnay, Melanie (2013). Peer production online community infrastructures. First Conference on Internet Science. The FP7 European Network of Excellence in Internet Science (http://internet-science.eu). Retrieved July 31, 2013.
- ^ Donna Lind Infeld and William C. Adams: Wikipedia as a Tool for Teaching Policy Analysis and Improving Public Policy Content Online. Journal of Public Affairs Education / JPAE 19 (3), 445–459 (Summer 2013) PDF
- ^ Sarah Hernandez, Natalie Rector: Becoming Digital Citizens: Using Wikipedia to Enhance the Classroom PDF
- ^ Amy Roth, Rochelle Davis, Brian Carver: Assigning Wikipedia editing: Triangulation toward understanding university student engagement http://www.firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4340
- ^ Lars Bremer and Kalman Graffi: "Symbiotic Coupling of P2P and Cloud Systems: The Wikipedia Case". In: IEEE ICC'13: Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications. PDF
- ^ Andrew G. West: Damage detection and mitigation in open collaboration applications. Dissertation in Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, May 2013 http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~westand/docs/dissertation.pdf
- ^ Maik Anderka: Analyzing and Predicting Quality Flaws in User-generated Content: The Case of Wikipedia http://www.uni-weimar.de/medien/webis/publications/papers/anderka_2013.pdf
- ^ Jing-Woei Li et al.: The NGS WikiBook: a dynamic collaborative online training effort with long-term sustainability. Briefings in Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bib/bbt045
- ^ Xavier Ochoa, Gladys Carrillo, Ana Casali, Claudia Deco, Valeria Gerling: Analysis of Existing Technological Platforms for the Collaborative Production of Open Textbooks http://ariadne.cti.espol.edu.ec/xavier/papers/Pincay-EDMEDIA2013.pdf
- ^ Chandra Sekhar Bhagavatula, Thanapon Noraset, Doug Downey: Methods for Exploring and Mining Tables on Wikipedia. IDEA’13, August 11th, 2013, Chicago, IL, USA. PDF
- ^ M Matuschek, CM Meyer, I Gurevych: "Multilingual Knowledge in Aligned Wiktionary and OmegaWiki for Translation Applications" http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Group_UKP/publikationen/2013/tc3-article-MiM-ChM-final.pdf
- ^ Heather Ford: Onymous, pseudonymous, neither or both? Ethnography Matters blog, June 27, 2013 http://ethnographymatters.net/2013/06/27/onymous-pseudonymous-neither-or-both/
- ^ Claudia Müller-Birn, Leonhard Dobusch, James D. Herbsleb: "Work-to-Rule: The Emergence of Algorithmic Governance in Wikipedia" C&T '13 June 29 - July 02 2013, Munich, Germany PDF
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Bouncing Baby Brouhaha
Summary: Somewhat predictably, the birth of a new heir to the House of Windsor on 22 July led the English-speaking world to suddenly embrace Monarchism. In honour of this occasion, the Traffic report will be assiduously employing British spelling and dating conventions. Cheers.
For the complete top 25 report, see WP:TOP25
For the week of 20 to 27 July, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
Rank Last Wks Article Class Views Image Notes 1 - - Rosalind Franklin 
2,314,478 
The co-discoverer of DNA alongside Watson and Crick got a Google Doodle to celebrate her 93rd birthday on 25 July. 2 - - Prince William, Duke of Cambridge
790,630 
The baby-daddy of the day got the highest view count of his extended family, though nearly everyone got a look-in. 3 - - Elizabeth II 
694,842 
Still going strong after 61 years on the throne, no one can deny that the great-grandmother of the newly minted bundle of joy (her third great-grandkid so far) has done an excellent job of symbolising her country for all that time. 4 - - Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge
655,249 
That's Kate Middleton to the rest of us. You'd think she'd be higher, given that she did most of the work to bring about this situation. 5 - - Charles, Prince of Wales
527,043 
The heir to the British throne got some attention in accordance with his newly established granddad status. 6 - - Diana, Princess of Wales
523,396 
The baby's late and still much-lamented granny (the word just doesn't fit, does it?) may also have drawn attention due to a biopic coming out this year. 7 7 29 Facebook
515,653 
A perennially popular article. 8 14 2 The Conjuring (film) 
506,204 James Wan's latest ghost story (reportedly based on true events, take that as you will) stormed the US, taking $70 million in its first week. 9 - - The Wolverine (film)
477,296 The second attempt to give X-Men fan-favourite Wolverine his own franchise appears to be doing far better than the first, taking $21 million in its first day. 10 - - Dennis Farina
453,466 
Likable actor of Manhunter, Get Shorty and Midnight Run fame got a decent sendoff from Wikipedians after his death on 22 July.
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Babel Series: Politics on the Turkish Wikipedia
This week, we visited the Turkish Wikipedia for an interview with VikiProje Siyaset (WikiProject Politics). The project began in April 2010 and has sustained a small but enthusiastic group of editors focusing on both the domestic politics of Turkey and international politics. The basics for article quality and importance ratings have been determined, but tracking this data has not yet become widespread on the Turkish Wikipedia. The project maintains a portal, a variety of resources, and a rotating selection of images to spruce up the project's page. We interviewed Cano58.
- What motivated you to join WikiProject Politics? Do you focus primarily on Turkish politics or international politics?
- Cano58: I'm interested in politics from all times and anywhere. The project was set up by Ahzaryamed and was already running when I got there. However, there was not enough support. I liked the idea of having a project present to cover politics, so I tried to recruit some members. Then I encouraged them to contribute to the encyclopedia. I am interested in both local and international politics.
- How does WikiProject Politics keep track of its articles? Does the project tag or assess the quality of articles? Is this standardized across the entire Turkish Wikipedia?
- Cano58: We tried to follow the example of other current projects and existing assets from the Turkish Wikipedia projects. Articles on identifications and the church, "solidarity and cooperation in order", and by writing about the places we go. While we have certainly had some success replicating some of the contents of other Wikipedias, the politics project has stagnated recently. We need to continue to develop, update, and support articles about political ideas and/or the basics of Turkish politics. We have some resources to help: 1, 2, 3 and 4.
- Have you contributed to the Politics Portal? How important are portals to the Turkish Wikipedia? What can be done to improve the accessibility and usefulness of portals in general?
- Cano58: First, the portal is the vein of life of Wikipedia. Portals give to the reader of specific topics a direction, guidance, and support as well as structuring the information. When examining a topic, portals are a door providing access to the good and beautiful. I've made some edits to the Portal. However, thanks to the big contributions of my dear Hetanaheta, the format and order are set. The Portal is almost entirely his work. A special "portal site" should be created to serve as a connection point like the main pages of all Wikipedias. There are certainly issues with portals, but projects that are in operation can show off their finished articles and other results in the content of their portals.
- Do you read or edit politics articles in other languages? Has the Turkish Wikipedia benefited from translating material from other languages of Wikipedia? Are there any important articles on the Turkish Wikipedia that are currently neglected by the English Wikipedia?
- Cano58: I know mid-level Azerbaijani. For this reason, I do contribute to the Azerbaijani Wikipedia. But my low level of English drives me to improve my English as well and contribute to the content, and I also plan to work to build the English language Wikipedia. I will definitely benefit from translating content. Information can be enriched when learned in other languages. This is Wikipedia's sphericity. English Wikipedia is arguably the most advanced. However, all of the content specific and detailed in Turkey do not have entries in the English language Wikipedia. For example, mountains, villages, towns, lakes, small institutions and organizations, etc...
- In general, what role do WikiProjects play in improving articles on the Turkish Wikipedia? How does WikiProject Politics compare to some other WikiProjects you've encountered on the Turkish Wikipedia?
- Cano58: They are certainly effective. Wikipedia has an overall focus on co-operation. However, this is overall. When we look at specific subjects like mathematics, literature, geography, technology... there are many issues with the content. General projects are not comprehensive while smaller projects are less extensive but more comprehensive since they are only interested in their topic and do good work with beautiful and efficient results.
- What are the project's most urgent needs? What can contributors from the English Wikipedia do to help the Turkish WikiProject Politics? How can Turkish Wikipedians contribute to the English Wikipedia's articles about politics?
- Cano58: A simple question. Most articles will be in several languages. The same project (WikiProject Politics) is available in several language editions of Wikipedia. We can improve articles with material from other projects, through interaction between different languages, and with collaborating together (work, plan, layout, etc.).
- Is there anything else you would like to add?
- Cano58: The most important thing all the time, and let's not forget, is that every subject needs contributors. We are human beings who share the same ideals. It is a global structure. Politics is just one of dozens of subjects covered by Wikipedia. But no subject is more or less important than the other. Politics is a very interesting branch that is important in many different areas and all need work. Wiki-communities enrich the content of politics in all languages and can fulfill a greater potential.
Next week, we'll celebrate a freedom that makes Wikipedia possible. Until then, find your voice in the archive.
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Gearing up for Wikimania 2013
The ninth annual Wikimania conference will open in just over a week at the Jockey Club Auditorium, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Wikimania is for people worldwide who have an interest in Wikimedia Foundation projects. It features presentations and discussions on those projects, on free knowledge and content, and on related social and technical issues. Attendance at the first three conferences—in Frankfurt, Germany; Cambridge, US; and Taipei, Taiwan—ranged from 380 to 440. This rose to 500–650 for Alexandria, Egypt; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Gdansk, Poland; to 720 in Haifa, Israel in 2011; and then nearly doubled to around 1400 for Washington DC last year with relatively easy access for many Americans.
Wikimania 2013 will be held 7–11 August, and a related Facebook page and Twitter account are already active. Although the English Wikipedia article on Wikimania clearly announces the "Wikimedia Foundation" as the organiser, in fact a dedicated organising team is in charge of the event, arranged by the Hong Kong chapter, which owns copyright on the official logo.
The organisers told the Signpost they expect a thousand people to attend, including volunteers, journalists, and VIPs. There has been significant media interest, says the team's Deryck Chan: "Of interest to Signpost readers are two recent feature pieces in the South China Morning Post, the main English-language newspaper of Hong Kong: there was a front-page article on Wikimania two weeks ago, focusing on the gender gap, and a detailed piece just came out on Monday." The committee has also received significant media interest in covering Wikimania itself. The preparatory meetup in July, he says, "was attended by journalists from three news agencies ... Press pass registration has been open for a few weeks and we're having a good turnout of journalist registrations."
Several attendees at a previous conference complained to the Signpost that Internet connectivity was poor from venues and hotels. We asked Deryck Chan whether Wi-Fi access will be satisfactory: "Yes. We're grateful that [Polytechnic University] is aware of the heavy use of internet by Wikimania and is deploying additional network hardware to ensure good wi-fi coverage at the lecture halls and meeting rooms. For the HKBU dorms [the primary accommodations], wi-fi tickets are arranged for all Wikimania guests. Our hotel recommendations are also chosen partly based on their ability to provide internet connections to guests." Nevertheless, he warned visitors to expect slower connections to Wikimedia projects than are typical in some countries: "The physical distance between Hong Kong and Wikimedia's server clusters means that higher latency and slower speed are inevitable."
Schedule
Of the individual sessions, we can mention only a few. Wednesday and Thursday will be "pre-conference" days; they will include an Education Program Pre-conference, a Multimedia Roundtable for "exploring a range of solutions for providing a richer media experience" on WMF sites, a "meet and greet" for the European Union Free Knowledge Advocacy Group, and a three-hour welcome party on the Thursday evening.
Friday will kick off with an opening ceremony that will include addresses by the Hong Kong government's chief information officer and a plenary by Jimmy Wales ("The State of the Wiki", no doubt a pun on the US president's annual State of the Union address to congress). After morning coffee, among the sessions will be those on Wikipedia and Internet regulation in Mainland China, product management at the WMF, approaches to evaluating GLAM collaborations, and editor surveys. The afternoon will feature topics such as Science GLAM, the future of Wiki Loves Monuments, the multilingual Commons crisis, and movement-wide elections and referenda.
Saturday will start with a keynote by Hong-Kong-based entrepreneur and IT advocate Charles Mok. Morning topics will include the rebirth of Wikivoyage as a WMF project, the global south challenge for the WMF, the technical development of new admin tools, and a panel session on open access for academic research. Four major afternoon themes will be women and diversity, legal strategy (with WMF general counsel Geoff Brigham), languages and translation, and Imagine Wikipedia in 2022.
Sunday will open with a keynote by WMF executive director Sue Gardner, followed by a Q&A with the board of trustees. A tribute to Gardner's formative six-year stewardship of the foundation will be one of the highlights of this plenary session. Later sessions on Sunday will include those on paid editing (sure to be controversial), the difficulties of verifying indigenous knowledge on the Wikipedias; the severe challenges of giving people in parts of Africa access to WMF projects, taking quality images with cheap cameras (sure to be a winner), WikiTV, and the much-neglected challenges of script for the many non-roman languages, exemplified in the Javanese Wikipedia. Activating Africa will be a major theme on Sunday afternoon.
The financial model
There are three sources of funding for Wikimania: (i) WMF grants, scholarships, and other cash and in-kind contributions; (ii) cash and in-kind external sponsorship for the event, from both public organisations and private companies; and (iii) the costs of travel and accommodation that are borne by most attendees. Getting the tension right between these three sources involves juggling several needs: paying for a large international conference, garnering sufficient attendance to make it worthwhile, and avoiding any risk of conflict of interest in accepting funds from sponsors. For the movement as a whole, an additional question may be the extent to which donors' funds should subsidise the event.
Wikimania 2013's main page is cluttered with the logos of up to a dozen sponsors and partners; some are government organisations, some NGOs, and some private companies. Ask.com, for example, is a "diamond sponsor" (~US$41,000, going by the budget for Hong Kong's successful bid last year), Google is a "gold sponsor" ($19,000—three gold sponsors were claimed in the bid), wikiHow is a silver sponsor ($10,000—seven were claimed), and Dot.Asia is named as "co-host". These sponsors appear to be not inconsistent with the aims of the movement, although the websites of some displays link to too many other sites for us to follow up.
The Signpost put to the organising team that the actual details of sponsors' financial and in-kind support are unavailable on-wiki (despite the presentation of the budget in the bid). We asked (i) who is giving what cash and in-kind, (ii) whether the benefits remain as they were expressed in the bid (VIP tickets, naming rights, ads in the program, in situ logo displays, slideshows, and other promotional items), and (iii) whether the expected revenues in the bid have changed. The organising team declined to comment on these questions, saying that "a detailed financial report for the WMF will be prepared after the end of Wikimania."
We asked Garfield Byrd, the WMF's chief of finance and administration, to discuss whether the Foundation's allocation of funding is on the basis that it alone is insufficient to hold a successful event—i.e. that cash and in-kind funding from sponsors and other entities is now built into the financial model of Wikimania.
| “ | The model for Wikimania was that the Wikimedia Foundation will provide a grant (currently budgeted at $150,000 for the event and $150,000 for scholarships) and the balance of funding for Wikimania will come from sponsorships. For Wikimania 2012 and Wikimania 2013, this model has not worked as planned and so the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Community needs to review its funding commitments to Wikimania to ensure a successful event. For Wikimania 2012 and Wikimania 2013 sponsorships did not and have not provided the level of funding expected and the Wikimedia Foundation has provided additional funding. | ” |
We also asked Garfield Byrd whether the Foundation regards the ethics and practical considerations of sponsorship to be irrelevant to its continuing opposition to the acceptance of advertising on WMF sites. He told us that the corporate sponsorships have become part of the funding model for Wikimanias—something that in his view is entirely different from advertising on WMF sites—and that "it is up to the Wikimedia Community to decide if sponsorships are the best model going forward to fund Wikimania."
Would the WMF be uncomfortable if Wikimania organisers accepted sponsorship from a tobacco retailer, or a corporation that employs dubious practices? "As Wikimania is a Wikimedia Community event, it is up to the Wikimedia Community to decide which types of sponsors it does or does not want for Wikimania. The Wikimedia Foundation always encourages the organizers of any Wikimania to use good judgement when accepting sponsorships so that they are consistent with the values of the Wikimedia Movement. Sponsorships, both cash and in-kind, are to be used for the benefit of Wikimania and for charitable purposes."
He offered this further point: "The Wikimedia Foundation is open to a conversation on the best way to fund Wikimania. It is up to the Wikimedia Community to set the standards by which this event takes place and the Wikimedia Foundation will be a partner in ensuring a successful Wikimania. As with any Community event, funding models will change over time."
- Editor's note: the author is a member of the Grant Advisory Committee, but was inactive at the time of the Wikisym application in February.
In brief
In the media
- Mobile editing enabled: The Next Web was among media outlets reporting that it is now possible to edit Wikipedia on mobile devices.
- Aircel partners Wikimedia Foundation to offer free mobile Wikipedia access: The Business Standard was among the first of many Indian news outlets to report on the new Wikipedia Zero partnership with Indian telecom operator Aircel. India has 867 million mobile phone subscribers; Aircel accounts for 60 million of those, who will be able to access the English, Hindi and Tamil Wikipedias free of charge, along with those for 17 other Indian languages. Aircel is majority-owned by Malaysian billionaire Ananda Krishnan's Maxis Communications and has recently been in the news due to a government probe into alleged irregularities surrounding its acquisition by Maxis. See also last week's Signpost coverage, which focused more on Wikipedia Zero and its importance within the WMF.
- Edit-a-thon to improve coverage of women scientists: The Cambridge News reported on an edit-a-thon designed to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women scientists. The event was one of a series organised by the Medical Research Council, The Royal Society and Wikimedia UK.
- Museum Welcomes Wikipedia Editors: The New York Times reported on another edit-a-thon co-sponsored by Wikipedia and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, again the latest in a series of such events.
- Riley Cooper's Wikipedia page was updated accordingly after racist comment: Larry Brown Sports reported on vandalism to Riley Cooper following a racist comment the American football player made on camera.
- The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the strange case of the missing Wikipedia entries: Sean Thomas, blogger for The Telegraph, wrote an entry on what he perceived as anti-white bias in Wikipedia's coverage of racially-motivated violence.
- Wikipedia boom in Marathi, Malayalam, and other desi languages: The Times of India covered a study that showed a marked increase in popularity and editors for various Indian languages.
- Best fad in history: The 'Learned Pigs' who could read, do math: Death and Taxes reported on Wikipedia's article List of notable pigs.
- Wikipedians say no to Jimmy's 'buggy' WYSIWYG editor: The Register's Andrew Orlowski reported on the current controversy surrounding the VisualEditor. Orlowski, who is a noted critic of Wikipedia and whose reporting was the subject of a Signpost article in December 2012 ("The Register swings at the Wikimedia movement's finances, and misses"), inaccurately described the prime mover behind the VisualEditor as being Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and seems to believe that there are easy, 'off-the-shelf, open-source' alternatives. His comments on the VisualEditor, though, were accurate, in that it was met with a massive rejection from the German Wikipedia community, and appears to be meeting the same fate at the hands of English-language Wikipedians. See also this week's op-ed from WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller on the virtues of the VisualEditor and where the Foundation is attempting to go with it.
Wikimedia news
- Chief Revenue Officer steps down: The Wikimedia Foundation's Zack Exley will be leaving his position as Chief Revenue Officer, though he will remain with the organization on a part-time basis. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the WMF, said that the amount of money raised by the Foundation had tripled to US$56 million in the last three years, and Exley is "the single person most responsible for funding the growth of resources for the global movement."
- Foundation elections postscript: Risker, a member of the committee that oversaw this year's WMF elections (see Signpost coverage), has published a post mortem of what she sees as deficient aspects of the process and organization.
- Wikivoyage logo: Voting for the new Wikivoyage logo, as mandated by the WMF after a cease-and-desist letter from the World Trade Organization, is open.
- WMF Legal on EFF blog: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has featured the WMF's legal department and the Foundation's use of the US' Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
- Listen to Wikipedia: A "visual and audio illustration of live editing activity on Wikipedia" is now online.
- Chapters association begins a 'quest for a cool name': The chapters association—which is attempting to be a central organization of the various local chapters scattered around the world (though principally in Europe)—has decided to embark on an odyssey to change its name, after a recent vote decided to admit thematic organizations as full members and (in chair Markus Glaser's words) "give user groups a voice". Suggestions may be added or viewed on Meta.
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Race and politics case closes
The case Race and politics was closed. The workshop phase continues for Infoboxes. The workshop phase closes in Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds. Voting on the proposed decision continues in the Tea Party movement case.
Closed cases
Race and politics brought by UseTheCommandLine and dealing with sourcing methods in articles pertaining to race politics, was closed after being suspended for a two-month period, to see if an editor central to the case, Apostle12, would return. The user did not return, a topic ban was imposed with regards to any page relating to "race and politics", and the user was directed to inform the committee if he returns to editing.
Open cases
Infoboxes
This case, brought by Ched, involves the issue of who should make the decision to include an infobox in an article and to determine its formatting (right margin, footer, both, etc) -- whether the preferences of the original author should be taken into consideration, if the decision should be made by various WikiProjects to promote uniformity between articles, or whether each article should be decided on a case-by-case basis after discussion. It also involves what is perceived by some to be an aggressive addition or reverting of infoboxes to articles without discussion by some editors, in areas where they do not normally edit. Areas that have seen disputes over infoboxes include opera, the Classical Music and Composers project, and Featured Articles. The evidence phase of the case closed 31 July, the workshop closes 7 August, and a proposed decision is scheduled to be posted 14 August 2013.
Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, involves a dispute between Kiefer Wolfowitz and Ironholds, the original account of Wikimedia Foundation employee Oliver Keyes, that began on-wiki and escalated in off-wiki forums, ending with statements that could be interpreted as threats of violence. The evidence phase of the case closed 26 July, the workshop closes 2 August, and a proposed decision is scheduled to be posted 9 August 2013.
Tea Party movement
This case involving a US political group, brought by KillerChihuahua, is now unsuspended, after a moderated discussion failed to agree on the ground rules for such a discussion. Voting continues on the proposed decision.
Other requests and committee action
- Amendment request: Argentine History: A request was made by MarshalN20 for an amendment to a topic ban for history-related sections of the Falkland Islands article.
- Clarification request: Argentine History: A request was made by Cambalachero for a clarification of whether a topic ban on pages related to the history of Latin America applies to articles about recent politics or a brief mention of historical context in non-historical articles.
- Clarification request: Scientology: A clarification request was brought by User:Sandstein in response to a discussion on the administrator's incidents noticeboard. The request seeks to clarify the role of discretionary sanctions and outing after discretionary sanctions for the Scientology case were applied to two editors who posted a link on Sandstein's talk page to an old Arbcom case that contained an editor's previous username. A proposal has been made to vacate the sanction against one of the editors, and to impose a sanction regarding harassment. A discretionary sanction prohibiting onwiki publication of alleged real names of the named editor would be imposed, and all users who contributed to the discussions at either ANI or the clarification request would be notified of the new discretionary sanction. The notifications would be appealable.
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Caterpillars, warblers, and frogs—oh my!
Featured articles
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Eight featured articles were promoted this week.
- Benjamin Britten (nom) by Tim riley and Brianboulton. Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM, CH (1913–1976) was an English composer, conductor and pianist. He was a central figure of 20th-century British classical music, with a range of works including opera, other vocal music, orchestral and chamber pieces. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes, the War Requiem and the orchestral showpiece The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.
- Anne, Queen of Great Britain (nom) by DrKiernan. Anne (1665–1714) became Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland on 8 March 1702. On 1 May 1707, under the Acts of Union, two of her realms, the kingdoms of England and Scotland, united as a single sovereign state, the Kingdom of Great Britain. She continued to reign as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland until her death.
- Rani Mukerji (nom) by Smarojit. Rani Mukerji (born 1978) is an Indian film actress. Through her successful Bollywood acting career, she has become one of the most high-profile celebrities in India. Mukerji has received seven Filmfare Awards from fourteen nominations, and her film roles have been cited as a significant departure from the traditional portrayal of women in mainstream Hindi cinema.
- Interstate 496 (nom) by Imzadi1979. Interstate 496 (I-496) is an auxiliary Interstate Highway that passes through downtown Lansing in the US state of Michigan. Also a component of the State Trunkline Highway System, the freeway is a loop that connects I-96 to the downtown area. It has been named the R.E. Olds Freeway (sometimes just Olds Freeway) for Ransom E. Olds, the founder of Oldsmobile and the REO Motor Car Company.
- Sega v. Accolade (nom) by Red Phoenix. Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc. was a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit applied American intellectual property law to the reverse engineering of computer software. Stemming from the publishing of several Sega Genesis games by video game publisher Accolade, which had disassembled the Genesis in order to publish games without being licensed by Sega, the case involved several overlapping issues, including the scope of copyright, permissible uses for trademarks, and the scope of the fair use doctrine for computer code.
- Vernon Sturdee (nom) by Hawkeye7. Lieutenant General Sir Vernon Ashton Hobart Sturdee KBE, CB, DSO (1890–1966) was an Australian Army commander who served two terms as Chief of the General Staff. He developed a structure for the post-war Army that included regular combat formations. As a result, the Australian Regular Army was formed, laying the foundations for the service as it exists today.
- William Hely (nom) by Ian Rose. Air Vice Marshal William Lloyd Hely CB, CBE, AFC (1909–1970) was a senior commander in the Royal Australian Air Force. Hely came to public attention in 1936–37, first when he crashed on a survey flight in the Northern Territory, and later when he undertook two successful missions to locate missing aircraft in the same vicinity. His rescue efforts earned him the Air Force Cross. After occupying staff positions during the early years of World War II, Hely was appointed Officer Commanding No. 72 Wing in Dutch New Guinea in May 1944. Later that year he formed No. 84 (Army Cooperation) Wing, commanding it during the Bougainville Campaign until the end of the Pacific War.
- Garden Warbler (nom) by Jimfbleak. The Garden Warbler (Sylvia borin) is a common and widespread small bird that breeds in most of Europe and in western Asia. It is a plain, long-winged and long-tailed typical warbler with brown upperparts and dull white underparts; the sexes are similar and juveniles resemble the adults. The Garden Warbler's rich melodic song is similar to that of the Blackcap, its closest relative, which competes with it for territory when nesting in the same woodland.
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Featured lists
Five featured lists were promoted this week.
- 1987 Major League Baseball Draft (nom) by Albacore. The 1987 MLB Draft—where participating teams selected newly-eligible players in a predefined order—took place in June 1987. Ken Griffey Jr., one of the most prolific hitters in US baseball history, was drafted first by the Seattle Mariners.
- 2009 Mediterranean Games medal table (nom) by Bill william compton. The 2009 Mediterranean Games were held in Pescara, Italy. The host nation became victorious with 64 gold medals, followed by France and Spain. Italy also led by total number of medals, with 175. Overall, 782 medals were issued to 21 countries.
- List of Detroit Red Wings draft picks (nom) by Rejectwater. The Detroit Red Wings, a professional US-based hockey team, have taken part in all of the National Hockey League's annual drafts.
- Latin Grammy Award for Best Rock Solo Vocal Album (nom) by Hahc21. The "Best Rock Solo Vocal Album" Latin Grammy Award was given from 2001 until 2009 to solo rock artists for vocal or instrumental albums. It succeeded the Best Rock Album award, given in 2000, and re-introduced in 2010, when the former was withdrawn.
- Timeline of the 2012 Atlantic hurricane season (nom) by TropicalAnalystwx13. Nineteen tropical cyclones composed the 2012 tropical season, all of which intensified into tropical storms. This season included Hurricane Sandy, which caused $68 billion in damage and 285 casualties.
Featured pictures
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Seven featured pictures were promoted this week.
- Stanislaus of Szczepanów (nom, related article) created by Stanisław Samostrzelnik and nominated by Kpalion. Stanislaus of Szczepanów, or Stanisław Szczepanowski, (1030-1079) was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Kraków, Poland. He was martyred by Polish king Bolesław II the Bold. This painting is by Stanisław Samostrzelnik (c. 1490-1541), a Polish Renaissance artist and monk.
- HMAS Australia (D84) (nom, related article) created by Allan Green and restored/nominated by Crisco 1492. The heavy cruiser HMAS Australia did extensive service in the Second World War as a bombardment ship, convoy escort, and squadron flagship, and was damaged several times by Japanese suicide kamikaze aircraft.
- Sella Pass (nom, related article) created by Dmottl and nominated by Tomer T. The Sella Pass (Italian: Passo Sella) is a mountain pass in Italy. The pass is included in the annual Maratona dles Dolomites bicycle race in July, and is used by skiiers in winter.
- San Francisco Ferry Building (nom, related article) created by JaGa and nominated by Nikhilb239. The San Francisco Ferry Building is a ferry terminal. The building includes offices, a marketplace, and a 245-foot (75 m) tall clock tower. The building was designed by American architect A. Page Brown in 1892. Today it is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
- Spanish painted frog (nom, related article) created by Benny Trapp and nominated by Tomer T. The Spanish Painted Frog (Discoglossus jeanneae) may be found in a variety of habitats and is endemic to Spain.
- Lymantria dispar dispar caterpillar (nom, related article) created by Archaeodontosaurus and nominated by Tomer T. The larvae of the gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar dispar) are caterpillars such as the one seen in this photo. The larvae feed on plants and are noted for their damaging effects on hardwood trees. The species is considered a pest.
- Mycena overholtsii (nom, related article) created by US Forest Service 2011-2013 Southern Cascades Fungi Survey; photographer Noah Siegel and nominated by Sasata. The snowbank fairy helmet or fuzzy foot (Mycena overholtsii) is a mushroom. It may be found growing on decayed conifer logs after snowmelt. It grows only at elevations greater than 1,000 meters (3,300 feet).
Featured topics
One featured topic was promoted this week.
- United States Bicentennial coinage (nom) nominated by Wehwalt. The United States Bicentennial coinage set was struck in 1975 and 1976. Each coin bears the double date 1776–1976.
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Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles
</noinclude>
This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 31 July 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, and recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
Style and naming
- Manual of Style/Biographies: "Should templates in Category:Royal and noble family templates use the article titles or the honorifics?"
- University of Dar es Salaam's acronym, and "format" data in the citation template
- "Should past events in Day of the Year articles be written in past tense or present?"
Policies and guidelines
- VisualEditor default state
- Article titles; expert and layperson terms
- Closing discussions; what does "consensus of the community" mean?
- Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (U.S. state and territory highways); common names, highway titles, and article titles
- Discussion at article talk for "Luigi di Bella": "Is the policy "for persons which are not authors, musicians, & artists, only notable works that are heavily referenced by peers should be listed" a requirement?"
- Should thinkprogress.org be accepted as a reliable WP:NEWSBLOG?
- Crystal Lake Recreation Area section reworking to eliminate advertising
- Partially disambiguated page names
- Protection policy and persistent sockpuppets
- Include or exclude the name of the victim in the article "2012 Delhi gang rape case"?
- New users and Articles for creation
- Indic naming conventions
- Vietnamese naming conventions
WikiProjects and collaborations
- Should newly promoted GAs be allowed to be DYKs?
- WikiProject Eurovision; Eurovision Song Contest
- Mark the Article Incubator as historical or inactive?
- Featured article process governance
Technical issues and templates
Proposals
- All proposal RfCs are duplicated in other sections of this report
English Wikipedia notable requests for permissions
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
- None active as of the time of this writing
Meta
- Wikivoyage logo voting round 1, deadline 1 August 2013
- Start WeRelate as a new Wikimedia project?
- Start WikiNames as a new Wikimedia project?
- Adopt Wikidentify as a new Wikimedia project?
- Trademark practices
- Scope of the Ombudsman Commission
Upcoming online meetings
- Wikidata update and Q&A, 26 August 16:00 UTC
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