Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2014-08-06
A technologist's Wikimania preview
As the start of Wikimania proper on 8 August approaches, the Signpost looks ahead to what its dozens of presentations might offer the technologically inclined, whether attending in person or taking advantage of what promises to be a strong digital offering.
Friday
Featured speaker: Lydia Pintscher, Project Manager Wikidata (10:30, Barbican Hall)
Highlights: Two themes dominate the pick of Friday's programme. The first is interface design, a key area in which the Foundation's ambitions are yet to be realised (Interface Vision, 16:30, Auditorium 1). In particular, prototypes for a new skin – codenamed Athena – which caused a splash when aired at Wikimania 2012 (see Signpost Op-Ed) make a return in a talk by WMF Senior Designer Brandon Harris (The Athena Project: Where are We?, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Not only do such design proposals intimately affect readers and editors alike, the five years since the creation of Vector (see previous Signpost coverage) have seen dramatic changes in the web design landscape, not least those stemming from the responsive web design ("mobile first") initiative that Athena seeks to build upon.
The second theme is multimedia, another area where progress has been tantalisingly slow. Fresh from recent controversy over the Media Viewer (see previous Signpost coverage), WMF Product Manager Fabrice Florin gives an overview of where the Foundation's plans are heading (Multimedia Overview, 11:30, Auditorium 2). Florin and Andrew Lih then focus in specifically on video, and Brion Vibber on video and audio (The State (and Fate) of Video in Wikimedia, 12:00, Auditorium 2; Freedom in motion: the state of open video and audio at Wikimedia, 12:30, Auditorium 2), a fascinating area as Wikimedians – but Wikipedians in particular – struggle to break free from their original text-centric paradigms.
Also available: Structured Wikiquote • CirrusSearch: How we've replaced a great search engine with an awesome search engine • Human-centered design for free knowledge • Fixing grammar errors semi-automatically • Machine aided article translation
Saturday
Featured speaker: Brandon Harris, WMF Senior Designer (14.30 Barbican Hall)
Highlights: No such unifying themes dominate Saturday's offering. In the morning, Ask the developers (10:30, Auditorium 2) will rightly prove a popular favourite as the tech-savvy crowd take advantage of the annual opportunity to quiz the WMF's development team, here represented by Siebrand Mazeland and a yet-to-be-announced lineup. In the afternoon, one of the Foundation's biggest success stories, Wikipedia Zero – providing free Wikipedia access to hundreds of millions of people across the globe – arguably deserves more attention than it gets (Access to Knowledge and Wikipedia Zero, 14:30, Fountain Room). The relatively uncontroversial nature of the Zero project contrasts sharply with the VisualEditor team's experience. But such controversy should not occlude what could be a very productive avenue for all involved, especially new editors (VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, 16:30, Auditorium 1; for a more technical discussion see also VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, 12:30 Sunday, Frobisher 123).
Looking further into the future, an extension of the VisualEditor to real-time collaboration of the sort found on Google Docs or Etherpad is the subject of a talk by WMF Deputy Director Erik Moeller (It's Alive! The Joy of Real-Time Collaboration, 17:00, Auditorium 1; see also Real-time Collaborative Editing with TogetherJS, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Although it is unlikely to be deployed any time soon, the continued interest in the project by senior developers hints at its future adoption by the WMF; Moeller's talk should at least prove sufficient to whet the tastebuds. Those feeling more overwhelmed may want to try another of his contributions, Join the technical community - an introduction for absolute beginners (09:30, Barbican Hall).
Also available: Replaying Edits & Visualising Edit History • Finding and fixing software bugs for the Wikipedias • Showcase ALL the (cool) things! • Unmasking anonymous editors on Wikipedia • Parsoid: Dealing with Wikitext so you don't have to™ • FastCCI: Taming the Commons Category Tree • Testing internationalized applications for Wikimedia content
Sunday
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Highlights: For those who miss Lydia Pintscher's featured address on Friday morning, Wikidata - current state and Q&A (09:30, Frobisher 123) could provide a useful introduction to one of a handful of truly successful chapter-led development projects, though Pintscher suggests the latter talk is likely to be targeted at an audience more familiar with the site. With often very significant communities, bot-related talks always prove popular, a trend set to continue with Bots and Pywikibot (11:30, Fountain Room) given its onwiki support. Staying in the Fountain Room yields two other talks (What’s this volunteer support all about anyway?, 12:00, and The Wikimedia open source project and you, 12:30), which may also prove of interest.
Walking around a conference so dominated by Wikimedians, it is easy to forget that the work of volunteer – and sometimes staff – developers need not be focussed on Wikimedia projects. In How about a MediaWiki Consortium?, Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger discuss the options for ensuring reusers of the MediaWiki platform (of which there are hundreds), though often far from developers' minds, remain represented at the negotiation table (11:30, Hammerson Room). Likewise, Wikisource technical infrastructure: what we have done and what we could do (15:30, Fountain Room) promises to give a flavour of the technical support smaller projects receive, well away from the controversy and hubbub of the larger Wikipedias.
Also available: A data and developer hub for Wikimedia • How we've grown mobile into something that everyone does • Big in Japan: Combating Systemic Bias Through Mobile Editing • Context visualization for Wikipedia articles • Wikidata Toolkit: A Java library for working with Wikidata • JavaScript and long-term relationships • User interface: Consistency • Tech news • Open Scholarship Tools - a whirlwind tour. • The Full OA Stack - Open Access and Open Source
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks. "In brief" incorporates text from Tech news, a global community-led publication prepared by tech ambassadors (subscribe or unsubscribe).
- MediaWiki updated: The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. With deployments delayed because of the heavy developer presence at Wikimania, it will only go live to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and will be deployed to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). Users are unlikely to notice any significant changes.
- VisualEditor updated: Users can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor (bug #49603). In unrelated news, the cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has also been removed. Users can still use the Read tab and the Back button in their browser to cancel their edit (changeset #147682). Recent work focusses primarily on bug resolution, the team reports.
- Badges heading to Wikidata: Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If their wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. bug #40810
- Empty pages made possible: It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. bug #57238 [1]
- New PDF renderer heads into beta: Users can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files (wikitech-ambassadors mailing list). The new renderer promises particular improvements for non-Latin and right-to-left scripts.
- Commons mobile uploads curtailed: In an attempt to improve the quality of uploads from mobile sources, new users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file (bug #62598).
- Watch-on-revert: In the resolution to a long-standing bug report, users will soon have a user option to watch pages after they revert edits (bug #4488)
- Wikivoyage wikis broken: Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 because of a configuration problem (bug #68815). In an unrelated event, some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1 (bug #69007).
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Ebola drives reader interest
Serious news continues to dominate the most popular articles chart on Wikipedia this week, with Ebola virus disease—the sickness humans get—far and away in the top spot. In the top 25, we see the related articles Ebola virus, which talks about biological aspects, at #18 and 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak at #19. Articles concerning the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict remain in high demand for another week, including Gaza Strip (#5) and Hamas (#6), as well as three more in the top 25: Israel (#12), Israeli–Palestinian conflict (#20), and Palestine (#24). Two films also made the top 10 this week: the American film Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Hindi Kick.
For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.
For the week of 27 July to 2 August 2014, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:
Rank Article Class Views Image Notes 1 Ebola virus disease 
2,031,341 
The continuing growth of the 2014 West Africa Ebola outbreak of this serious disease, which began in March in Guinea, is causing great interest in this article. Views began growing on 23 July (18,000+ views), and by 30th have been usually exceeding 300,000 views per day. As of August 1, the World Health Organization has reported 1603 suspected cases and 887 suspected deaths from the disease. Data from Guinea through mid-June indicate the outbreak has a probable fatality rate of about 64%. Figure includes hits for the redirect Ebola page. 2 Guardians of the Galaxy (film) 
640,568 
Up from #16 last week, this 2014 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics series opened in the UK on 31 July and the US on 1 August. As of 5 August, the film's worldwide earnings are over $170 million. 3 World War I
576,281 
Fighting in World War I began one hundred years ago this week, causing the normal round of press coverage we see at such big anniversaries. What were people occupying themselves with in 1914 before war broke out? Check out 1914 and peruse the many links in the infobox. 4 Kick (2014 film) 
381,965 
Up from #11 last week, this Hindi action film starring Salman Khan (pictured) was released on 25 July. The film has received mixed reviews, but has set several domestic box office records. One reviewer at Bollywood Hungama, while noting that Khan's movies are "critic proof", concludes that Kick "is a paisa vasool, seeti-maar entertainer." That means you get your money's worth (paisa vasool), and you'll "blow the whistle"—meaning enthusiastically cheer—(seeti-maar) if you go see it. 5 Gaza Strip
426,854 
The latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, part of a very long and complicated history of conflict, keeps this article on the list for the third straight week. 6 Hamas
365,631 
Also seeing continuing popularity due to the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. 7 Susanne Klatten
353,063 
German billionaire Susanne Klatten is one of the top 50 wealthiest people in the world, and the richest woman in Germany. On 30 July, a Reddit "Today I Learned" thread noted that she met her husband while she worked at BMW (which she owned a stake of, via her father) under an assumed last name; he didn't know she was filthy rich until after they were sure about each other. This is a likely fantasy of many male internet users, let's be honest. 8 Laura Prepon
340,514 
The bulk of views on the article about this Orange Is the New Black actress came on August 1, and though we cannot find a precise cause, it is the type of article (an attractive current American actress) that will get the occasional intense burst of popularity. She is a likely fantasy of many male internet users, let's be honest. 9 Deaths in 2014 
324,661 
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article. Deaths this week included British politician Christine Oddy (July 27), American journalist Margot Adler (pictured) (July 28), Sierra Leone physician Umar Khan (July 29; died of ebola, headed the country's efforts to combat the outbreak), Argentine football executive Julio Grondona (July 30), Indian actor Mukku Raju (July 31), Norwegian writer Jan Roar Leikvoll (August 1), and Olga Voronets (August 2), a popular Russian singer of the 1960s and 1970s. 10 Facebook
322,490 
A perennially popular article.
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From the raw WP:5000 stats, some notes:
- 113 articles exceeded 100,000 views this week, the last being 2013 videogame The Last of Us, coinciding with the release of updated version for the PlayStation 4 called "The Last of Us Remastered".
- Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (#3 last week and #2 two weeks ago) dropped all the way to #99 (109,717) as the press apparently ran out of angles to cover the lack of progress at the crash site.
- 17-year old Kazakhstani volleyball player Sabina Altynbekova was #105 with 106,948 views. But the article was subsequently removed via Articles for Deletion, as she was primarily in the news because her coach is complaining her attractiveness is causing too much distraction. There's precedent for this deletion, but nothing we can easily cite because, well, it was deleted.
- Two weeks ago, 2014 FIFA World Cup was #1. It is now down to #133 (90,870 views).
- Twitter went crazy this week about Sharknado 2: The Second One which debuted on the SyFy Channel on July 30. On the WP:5000, it made #275 (62,814 views), though its prequel Sharknado hit #168 (79,655 views), also due to the hoopla of its sequel.
- The last article to hit 50,000 views was Elon Musk (#422); Joan Rivers (#1647) was last to break 25,000; and German footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger (#5000) was last to make the list with 13,494 views.
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Engravings, fairies, and a cruiser ship
Featured articles
Eight featured articles were promoted this week.
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- Horatio Bottomley (nominated by Brianboulton) (1860–1933) was an English financier, journalist, editor, newspaper proprietor, and Member of Parliament. He is best known for his editorship of the popular magazine John Bull, and for his patriotic oratory during the First World War. His career came to a sudden end when, in 1922, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years imprisonment.
- The Lewis and Clark Exposition dollar (nominated by Wehwalt) was a commemorative gold coin struck in 1904 and 1905 as part of the United States Government's participation in the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, held in the latter year in Portland, Oregon. The coins are now worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on condition. This is the only "two-headed" American coin, with a portrait of one of the expedition leaders on each side.
- HMS Indefatigable (R10) (nominated by Sturmvogel 66) was a British aircraft carrier, completed late in the Second World War. The ship and its aircraft saw action against the docked German battleship Tirpitz, and later bombed Japanese land installations in the Pacific. Decommissioned after the conflict, Indefatigable was used in the 1950s as a training ship before being scrapped.
- Ukiyo-e (nominated by Curly Turkey) is a genre of woodblock prints and paintings, popular with the prosperous merchant class in the urbanizing Edo period (1603–1867). Themes included beautiful women, kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers, scenes from history and folk tales, travel scenes and landscapes, flora and fauna, and erotica. The bold formalist Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa and the serene, atmospheric series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Hiroshige are among the best-known works of Japanese art. Ukiyo-e was central to forming the West's perception of Japanese art in the late 19th century.
- Subway Sadie (nominated by Taylor Trescott) is a 1926 American comedy-drama film directed by Alfred Santell. Adapted from Mildred Cram's 1925 short story Sadie of the Desert, the film focuses on a relationship between New York salesgirl Sadie Hermann (Dorothy Mackaill) and subway guard Herb McCarthy (Jack Mulhall). Many publications wrote positively of the film, praising its acting and Santell's direction.
- Hurricane Iris (nominated by Hurricanehink) was the most destructive hurricane in Belize since Hurricane Hattie in 1961. The second-strongest storm of the 2001 Atlantic hurricane season, it reached peak winds of 145 mph (230 km/h) before making landfall in southern Belize. It killed 42 and caused $250 million in damage.
- The Okęcie Airport incident (nominated by Cliftonian) was a dispute between players and technical staff of the Poland national football team in 1980, starting at the team hotel in Warsaw and climaxing at Okęcie Airport. An incident of footballing insubordination at a time when strike action and other forms of civil resistance were intensifying in communist Poland, it caused a domestic press storm, which led first to the suspension of several prominent players, then the resignation of the team manager, Ryszard Kulesza.
- The 2013 Rosario gas explosion (nominated by Cambalachero) in a residential area of Rosario, the third-largest city in Argentina, occurred on August 6, 2013. It was caused by a large gas leak; a nearby building collapsed, and others were at high risk of structural failure. Twenty-two people died, and sixty were injured.
Featured pictures
Fifteen featured pictures were promoted this week.
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- Engravings created for U.S. Banknotes based on historical paintings: Landing of Columbus, DeSoto Discovering the Mississippi, Baptism of Pocahontas, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, Declaration of Independence, Surrender of General Burgoyne, and Washington Resigning his Commission (created by American, Continental, and National Bank Note Companies under contract to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, prepared, restored, and nominated by Godot13) Godot13 continues his cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution, this time giving us the original engravings based on historical paintings in the Capitol Dome, from the banknotes' planning stages, for his new article, Art and engraving on United States banknotes.
- SMS Seeadler (created by Detroit Photographic Co., restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) An unprotected cruiser of the Bussard class laid down in 1890, SMS Seeadler was a ship of the Imperial German Navy that saw service suppressing the Boxer Rebellion and the Maji Maji Rebellion, before being used as a mine storage hulk in World War I, at which time an explosion caused her to sink, albeit with no casualties. This photograph shows her on a diplomatic visit to New York City early in her service.
- Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom (created by Edwin Landseer, nominated by Hafspajen) A Midsummer Night's Dream has much of its plot based around færie magic and love potions. A subplot involves "rude mechanicals" – peasants, basically – trying to put on classical theatre. In this scene, one of the rude mechanicals, Bottom, has had his head turned into that of an ass, and the queen of the færies, Titania, has been enchanted to fall in love with him.
- Portrait of Bindo Altoviti (created by Raphael, nominated by Hafspajen) This portrait of Bindo Altoviti (a redlink ... for now) was completed by the red-headbanded, sai-wielding ... wait, wrong Raphael. The Renaissance master took three years to finish this portrait. The graceful, almost effeminate position of the subject along with the heavy contrast between light and shadow are atypical of Raphael's work.
- Coventry Cathedral, The Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral, and Cloister of Worcester Cathedral (created and nominated (1, 2, 3) by David Iliff) David Iliff, one of our best architectural photographers, is currently active on a project, funded by Wikimedia UK, to photograph cathedrals and landmarks throughout Britain. These absolutely gorgeous photographs are just some of the wonderful results of this project so far.
- Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (created by Édouard Manet, nominated by Hafspajen) Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) shocked audiences in 1863 with its contrast between an otherwise-respectable picture of clothed gentlemen lunching in a rural setting and a naked woman.
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Featured topics
Two featured topics were promoted this week.
- Petropavlovsk-class battleships (Automatic promotion from good topic; originally nominated by Buggie111) Only three of these Russian pre-dreadnought battleships were built, and two of them were at the bottom of the sea within six years of launch. The longest-lived of these ships, Poltava, was sunk by the Japanese in 1904 only to be reraised and captured, used against Germany forces in World War I, and then sold back to the Russians; this "undead" ship supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution, was captured by the British, then abandoned and captured by Russia. It was sunk for good in 1924. Hot potato on the world stage?
- Audie Murphy (nominated by Maile66) This American soldier, one of the most decorated in World War II, rode his fame to a successful film and music career, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. He was a Mason too... coincidence, or not?
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Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico
Introduction
Global Education—WMF's Perspective
13 August 2014
Leading universities educate with Wikipedia in Mexico
6 August 2014
Success in Egypt and the Arab world
30 July 2014
Education program gaining momentum in Israel
23 July 2014
Serbia takes the stage with Filip Maljkovic
16 July 2014
Exploring the United States and Canada with LiAnna Davis
9 July 2014
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Global Education—WMF's Perspective |
The Wikimedia Education Program currently includes 60 programs around the world, in which students and instructors participate at almost every level of education. The subjects covered include law, medicine, arts, literature, information science, biology, history, psychology, and many others. This Signpost series presents a snapshot of the Wikimedia Global Education Program as it exists in 2014. We interviewed participants and facilitators from the United States and Canada, Serbia, Israel, the Arab World, and Mexico, in addition to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wikimedia education in Mexico
- Based on an email interview with Leigh Thelmadatter, regional ambassador for Mexico and instructor at Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, ITESM). This report focuses on Leigh’s work with ITESM, which is also known as Wiki Borregos after the school’s mascot, borregos (rams). ITESM is a private university with 31 campuses in 25 cities throughout Mexico that enrolls 90,000 students. ITESM is noted for its internationally ranked business school and its high volume of patent applications; it was the first university in Latin America to be connected to the Internet. There is a separate education program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which is the largest public research university in Latin America; international rankings place it among the top 200 universities globally, and among its alumni are three Nobel Prize winners.
Can you describe how the Education Program started in Mexico?
- There is no one Mexican education program. I work with the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM). I did my first classes with Wikipedia in 2007 when I worked at the Toluca campus. Activities at the Mexico City campus, where I am currently at, began in 2011, with use of Wikipedia in English as a foreign language classes and the establishment of a student group. (This was followed shortly by efforts made by Wikimedia Mexico).
- Editor's note: see also Leigh's post on the Wikimedia blog, "Wikipedia as a foreign culture", which describes the beginning of her education work with Wikipedia in more detail.
How many instructors and students currently participate in the program?
- We have five instructors and the campus librarian of the Mexico City campus currently active. Wikipedia was just accepted by the system administration as part of the Tec 21 program to encourage innovation in teaching, especially with technology. This is particularly important because we have 31 campuses spread over various parts of Mexico.
- Currently we have 23 students working with us for the summer session. Most of these are students doing "servicio social" a community service requirement for all Mexican undergraduate students. These students, after training, set up projects and receive hours negotiated beforehand upon the completion of said projects. Our goal for the fall semester is at least ten classes participating with Wikipedia in some way, which will give us about 300 students along with the servicio social participants.
- Acceptance into the Tec 21 program has meant so far that we have had 3 major teacher training sessions (June 6, June 19/20 and July 3/4) with a total of 28 teachers now knowing the basics of working with Wikipedia. We are also scheduled to do three 3-hour workshops for three weeks of what the Tec is calling "National Teachers' meetings" These are meetings of professors from all the campuses grouped by field, to discuss innovative ideas with the ultimate aim of redesigning the system's curriculum (plan de estudios). Wikipedia is being presented as one of the options to look at implementing systematically.
Which areas of the country currently participate?
- Right now efforts are concentrated in the Mexico City area, but we have had presentations and workshops for professors and others in the system in Monterrey and Puebla. We have a two-day workshop for instructors this month to train more people in working with Wikipedia.
What grade levels are the students who participate?
- The system has a college and high school division and students from both levels participate.
As you probably know, Wikipedia editors are predominantly male in most languages. Approximately what percentage of the students who participate in the Mexico education program are female?
- About a third are female. For example 7 of 22 students currently working with Wikipedia to complete community service hours (required by law for Mexican undergraduate students) are female. It is interesting to note that the most innovative students working with Wikipedia so far have been female. Natalia0893 was the first to create sound files as part of her work, RaquelSchaar created the first map/illustration project and currently, Alma Cebrian is creating simple digital animations. She did some on chess pieces and is currently working on a series of how the letters of the alphabet are drawn.
How are instructors and students trained to use Wikipedia?
- Until this summer, training for professors was nearly-non existent, with those who did projects heavily dependent on me for guidance. As noted above, the acceptance into the Tec 21 program changes this as professors are starting to take Wikipedia seriously. We have a four-hour session for my department this past June 6. We have 11 professors registered for the two-day workshop on 19-20 June.
Do students and instructors usually use VisualEditor?
- Only for minor corrections and at the very beginning. Much of the work done by our students has been translation from English to Spanish and working with Commons. This is best done in the regular editor. Once students have done a translation project, they are comfortable with the normal editor.
What kinds of assignments do students receive when using Wikipedia in the classroom? For example, are they translating, editing existing articles, or creating new articles? Which languages do they use?
- Translation has provided the most bytes to Wikipedia, all into eswiki. We have calculated the stats last semester and you can see them here. The next most common assignment is with Commons and we have had some interesting activities including Day of the Dead photo contests sponsored by the campus library and a Spanish as a foreign language teacher who had her students go and explore aspects of Mexico City such as markets, bakeries and residential streets that most foreign visitors do not go to see. We have had some article creation, including article creation in English (especially the Medical English class and this summer's community service group has been doing more article writing than past groups. (They chose their own projects)
- Students primarily work in Spanish Wikipedia. The translation assignments are to take advantage of the fact that most of our students have an advanced level of English (with some in French and German as well), but students rather work in Spanish.
How do you expect the program to develop in the next few years?
- We expect major growth over the next year, again because of formal acceptance by ITESM administration. The main question for us is how we will relate to the rest of the Wikimedia community. We put in for user group status a year ago and that application is still pending.
- See Leigh’s post in the Wikimedia Blog, “Wiki Learning” to be adopted at Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey
Is there anything else that you would like Signpost readers to know about the program?
- We were the first campus to use translation regularly as a classroom assignment, a practice that the Wikipedia Education Program brought over to Egypt and other places. Our work is regularly covered in the This Month in Education bulletin as well as the Wikimedia Blog. I have a list of other coverage here and our main web page is here on Meta).
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"History is a human right"—first-ever transparency report released as Europe begins hiding Wikipedia in search results
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The Wikimedia Foundation has published its first transparency report, covering from July 2012 to June 2014. The move comes on the same day the organization announced that Google, in order to comply with a recent court order upholding the "right to be forgotten", has removed a number of Wikipedia articles from their European search results.
Transparency report
The transparency report reveals that the WMF has given out users' personal data on eight out of 56 occasions. There are few details given about the specific circumstances, but all of the granted requests were the result of US civil or criminal subpoenas; of note, the WMF granted every instance of the latter. Eleven different accounts were affected.
The data revealed can include the IP address used by the editor, regardless of whether they are using an account or not, or their proxy server and user agent.
The WMF states that the eight requests abided by their requirements for requesting such information. Excepting emergencies, these stipulate that the demands fully comply with US law, must be reasonable and not overly broad, and note that there is "generally" a 30-business-day waiting period so that the affected user has time to reply.
However, most press coverage of the report focused on the amusing aspects of the other half of the report: content alteration and takedown requests. This page featured examples, including a photographer's request to remove a "monkey selfie", featured at right. According to the WMF, "A photographer left his camera unattended in a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. A female crested black macaque monkey got ahold of the camera and took a series of pictures, including some self-portraits. The pictures were featured in an online newspaper article and eventually posted to Commons. We received a takedown request from the photographer, claiming that he owned the copyright to the photographs.
"We didn't agree, so we denied the request."
Also of note were the 24 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests that were granted, out of a total of 58. As with user data, the vast majority of these were from the US; unsurprisingly, then, the largest target was the English Wikipedia, followed closely by Commons.
European Union's "right to be forgotten"
The WMF also announced that it has received notice that over 50 Wikimedia pages have been removed from Google searches in Europe. On the English Wikipedia, these include Gerry Hutch, an Irish cab driver and the prime suspect in several crimes, and File:Tom_Carstairs_In_Concert.jpg, which will likely be deleted shortly. The Italian Wikipedia was also subjected to two removals, while over 50 pages on the Dutch Wikipedia were removed; all relate to the amateur chess player Guido den Broeder, who has been the subject of numerous discussions.
Press attention on the matter coalesced after a press conference at Wikimania with the WMF's executive director Lila Tretikov, general counsel Geoff Brigham, and co-founder Jimmy Wales resulted in a flood of quotable remarks. Chief among them was Wales, who stated "History is a human right, and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.
"I've been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That's history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that's deeply immoral." (Telegraph)
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Right behind was Tretikov, who wrote in a blog post that "The European court abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive, and impart information. As a consequence, accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review and no appeal process. The result is an internet riddled with Orwell's 'memory holes'—cases where inconvenient information simply disappears."
The New York Times wrote that Brigham spoke against the "right to be forgotten" and likened it "to a law that required libraries to remove records from the card catalog while leaving the offending books on the shelves. 'We don't think that makes any sense,' he said. 'It has delegated the protection of the right of freedom of expression to private search engine companies.'"
Aside from these concerns, it is impossible to know how many Wikimedia pages are actually affected. Search engines are not legally obligated to inform the WMF, and Google is currently the only company who has sent these notices to them.
In brief
- Wikimedia blog redesign: The WMF has relaunched the Wikimedia blog with an entirely new design from Heather Walls and a revamped logo that drops the word "foundation". Automattic, the company best known for WordPress, is the WMF's partner in hosting the blog.
- Wikimania: Retrospective coverage of Wikimania 2014, which is being held in London this weekend, will come in next week's edition.
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