Personal image filter referendum highlights polarization
The breakdown of scores for the first question in the personal image filter referendum.A word cloud of the most frequently occurring words in participants of the image filter referendums' comments, a sample of which were assessed as 30% positive, 29% neutral, and 41% negative. The results of the image filter referendum were released this week. In this "largest exercise of its type for the Wikimedia Foundation", some 24,000 votes were cast, more than 7000 of them accompanied by comments, which are still being analysed. The referendum featured a small number of questions, each asking voters to attach importance to a number of potential features; as such, it attracted considerable criticism for those who felt it was unclear how voters would signal their dissatisfaction with the whole idea of a filter.
The results are unlikely to calm the rhetoric on either side of the debate. With mild support shown overall—the most general question had a median result of 6 (on a scale from 0–10, where 5 was "neutral")—there is probably enough encouragement to ensure that the proposal is not abandoned altogether, and some useful results were gathered with regard to priorities. On the other hand, about 3750 respondents (16% of the sample) gave a score of zero to the broadest question, "It is important for the Wikimedia projects to offer this feature to readers", the clearest indication yet that a significant body of editors would oppose the implementation proposed by the Foundation regardless of its features. (This result looks set to be endorsed by a poll run in parallel on the German Wikipedia which currently indicates that about fourth-fifths of Wikipedians there are opposed to the measure as stated.) A third group consider the referendum to have been badly mismanaged in a way that would render the result meaningless.
As British Wikimedian Michael Peel commented, the poll probably points towards a "no consensus" result. As a result, the next move of the Foundation is unclear. In all likelihood it will choose to alter the proposed implementation to build a new consensus, since it is dubious as to whether the Foundation could now meaningfully proceed without convincing at least a small proportion of those currently skeptical to the idea. One possible compromise would be on whether or not there was a single global implementation of the filter. User:FT2 added that "enabling on some wikis and not on others" may yet be a good way to "leave more people feeling fairly satisfied".
Index of editor satisfaction released
Mani Pande, Wikimedia Head of Global Development Research, has revealed on the Foundation's blog a new metric as a tool for analysing community health: the Wikipedia editor satisfaction index (WESI). The WESI is based on the answers to two questions.
Editors are asked to select two adjectives from a list of eight—four positive (Collaborative, Intelligent, Helpful, Friendly), four negative (Arrogant, Unfriendly, Rude and Dumb)— that described their perception of the editing community.
Editors are asked if feedback through other editors had helped them become a better editor or not.
The two options from Question 1 are scored for one point each: +1 if the response was a positive adjective, and −1 for a negative. The response to Question 2 is scored as +2 for helpful, and −2 for feedback having been "a bad experience". Added together, they span a range from +4 to −4, which is normalized to a 0–10 scale.
The initial results of compiling the index were greeted by Pande as "encouraging": around 47% of respondents gave a score of 10/10, and about 77% of the editors surveyed scored 7.5 or higher, which she took to indicate that "the majority of our editing community is very satisfied with their experience" of the project and have "a healthy assessment of fellow editors". Delving deeper into the breakdown of the findings, Pande isolated three factors critical to determining an editor's satisfaction with their contributing experience: being offered help, enjoying the respect and recognition of their peers, and receiving adequate explanations for when their contributions are reverted. It is expected that the WESI will be established as an ongoing metric for measuring satisfaction, to yield further insights into the self-reported experiences of Wikimedians in the future.
In brief
WikiHistories – the Armenian Wikipedia: Lusine Grigoryan, one of the Foundation's WikiHistories summer fellows, reported from Armenia about possible efforts from Armenian educational instutions to invigorate the country's Wikipedia. Last week, research Patricia Sauthoff wrote a second article about the coverage of articles about the Indian subcontinent.
Ukrainian Wikipedia's growth noted: The Ukrainian Wikipedia now ranks 14th amongst all language Wikipedias in terms of the number of articles, a fact which was reported by a Ukrainian news agency. The article notes that the country's former education minister has previously encouraged Ukrainian scientists to contribute more to Wikipedia.
Online quiz reveals knowledge of sister projects: Sporcle, a trivia quiz website, published a game asking participants to name the ten Wikimedia Foundation projects. The results can be used as a very rough index of the relative knowledge of the sister projects. 99.2% of more than 7000 participants (at the time of writing) managed to enter Wikipedia, which unsurprisingly ranked first. Wiktionary came second with 37.1% recognition, followed by Commons at 33.4%, and Wikiquote at 29.5%. Wikibooks had 19% recognition, Wikinews had 16%, Wikisource 13.7%, Wikiversity 11.6% and Wikispecies 10.6%. MediaWiki, rather a trick entry, had 7.1%. The quiz also accepted Meta and Incubator as extra answers. The actual numbers may not be very accurate (participants are only one click away from the answers) but the relative ranking is of more interest.Logo of the "This month in GLAM" newsletter
New edition of GLAM newsletter: The eighth edition of This Month in GLAM, a newsletter on Wikimedia collaborations with cultural institutions, has been published. Among various news covered previously in the Signpost, and numerous minor events such as edit-a-thons and article promotions, it records the beginning of GLAM partnerships with Israel's national museum (Wikipedia:GLAM/IMJ, including the country's first Wikipedian-in-Residence) and the UK National Archives (Wikipedia:GLAM/TNA). Meanwhile, the residence of User:Dominic at the US National Archives and Records Administration (Signpost coverage) has been extended, and more than 100,000 images from the institution's archives are being uploaded to Commons, where help is requested to categorize them.
New edition of Wikizine: A new edition of Wikizine was published on September 2. Founded in 2005, the "independent internal news bulletin for the members of the Wikimedia community" has recently been relaunched after a long hiatus, at the initiative of User:Millosh.
Milestones
The last week saw the following milestones among WMF-supported projects:
The Hindi Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles (attracting a blog post from new WMF member of staff Gerard Meijssen).
The Persian Wikisource has reached 20,000 text units.
The Occitan Wiktionary has reached 20,000 entries.
The Armenian Wikisource has reached 2,000 text units.
Britannica and Wikipedia like "apples and chairs"; should anyone who's anyone get an article?; and why fighting and barriers to editing may be useful after all
Wall Street Journal on the ramifications of editor decline
In a column for the Wall Street Journal, "numbers guy" Carl Bialik examined the issue of the slowing growth in the number of Wikipedia contributors in recent quarters. Analysing activity levels for June, Bialik found that fewer than 36,000 registered editors had contributed during the month, a decline of more than a third from the peak of March 2007. Perhaps forebodingly, this peak came only a month after the essay Wikipedia is failing caused consternation within the community (see previous Signpost coverage). Bialik chose however to highlight a more narrow metric as cause for concern: the health of the core community. Approximately 3% of editors account for 85% of contributions to the project, according to the statistician, and participation among this group has declined "even more sharply" than the active registered userbase in toto. Bialik focused not on the trend of decline but the intuition of a "magic number" of contributors at which community health and thus encyclopaedic quality would flourish, echoing the sentiments of Wikimedia Foundation officials in saying that "it isn't clear how many more editors are needed to sustain the critical mass" of the project.
Elaborating on the subjects examined in the column for the online edition of the newspaper, Bialik delved further into the issue of the encyclopaedia's flagging participation rates. Bialik commented on the Article Feedback Tool, noting that Wikipedia readers seemed to be more critical than many users of sites with rating features (granting an average rating of 3.7 compared to 4.17 on websites in the Power Reviews network). The tool was initiated by the Wikimedia Foundation in part as an exercise in encouraging a greater conversion rate of readers to editors and the foundation's spokesman Jay Walsh was quoted enthusiastically on this point: "[d]uring the feedback tool trial phase over 90% of the raters had never edited before". Bialik also sought to compare Wikipedia's 3.7 million articles and almost 40,000 editors (June 2011) with the comparable figures for arch-rival Encyclopaedia Britannica; officials for that project disclosed their article count at 140,000 (with more than 75 million words), but not before taking issue with the notion that it was competing with Wikipedia for market share. In a departure in tone from notorious comments from the company comparing Wikipedia to a public restroom, spokeswoman Orly Telisman was keen to amicably distance the two encyclopaedias:
“
Comparing the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia is not comparing apples to apples — it’s more like comparing apples to chairs... We’re just different. Both companies come from very different beginnings, our products and values are different — we are editorially based, they are open-sourced (again, nothing wrong with either execution, but it seems difficult to me to make a one-on-one comparison).
”
The sum of all human knowledge?
Forbes contributor Brandon Mendelson, in an unyielding critique entitled "Wikipedia sucks (but not for the reasons anyone ever talks about)", took aim at the encyclopaedia from an angle unusual in the press, arguing that Wikipedia does not deserve its high visitor levels because it lacks comprehensiveness (thus contrasting the typical critique that Wikipedia includes a vast quantity of irrelevant, often inaccurate "trivia" as covered, for example, in The Times). Whilst previous commentators have nonetheless suggested that perfectly useful articles should not be ruthlessly discarded (as in the case of the German Wikipedia controversy of 2009 and last year's deletion of the article on "naturoids"), few have openly taken a stance similar to that suggested by Mendelson: namely, that any person who "[has] an impact on other people's lives" should be entitled to an entry, reducing the barrier for inclusion to zero in practical terms.
In doing so, Mendelson takes his side in a long standing debate among Wikipedia contributors about which topics deserve standalone articles (the so-called "deletionist-inclusionist divide"). Where inclusionists see a value in every article, deletionists tend to stress the importance of a minimum quality standard for articles, a stance which is only possible if the inflow of articles is limited. Despite an observable balance, it should be noted that the stance which the English Wikipedia takes, although more inclusionist than that of the German Wikipedia, is still fundamentally incompatible with that outlined by Mendelson (his examples of articles Wikipedia should have may yet be created, however). Nonetheless, a number of more inclusionist wikis do exist, although they are not WMF-supported.
In brief
Shirky: "structured fighting" and some barriers to newcomers are necessary: ReadWriteWebreported about a talk by US writer (and WMF advisory board member) Clay Shirky at last month's LinuxCon North America, about online collaboration in projects such as Wikipedia. Drawing on topics from his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus (Signpost review), but also introducing new examples, Shirky presented "a contrarian look at collaboration", for example rejecting the idea that fruitful collaboration always has to be peaceful: "'When you vastly increase people's ability to communicate with one another [this] means more fighting.' The question, says Shirky, is how to structure that fighting to lead to productive results. We're not good at subjecting our own beliefs to scrutiny, says Shirky, but we're very good at scrutinizing others' beliefs and work." Another commonly held view that Shirky took issue with was the characterization of Wikipedia and Linux as "large collaborative projects" – rather, as summarized in the article, "they're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort.... it's a small core of contributors who do the bulk of the work and integrate the work from others who only contribute a small amount." According to ReadWriteWeb, Shirky added that it is important "that people cannot join [an online collaboration] project too easily. Even given the presumption that all the participants have goodwill towards the project, he says that it shouldn't be too easy to change every aspect of a project. Some parts of the system should be easy to change, some parts should be hard."
"Left-wing bias" thesis extended: In the second of a series of articles purporting to reveal the systematic left-wing bias of Wikipedia, David Swindle of FrontPageMag, a conservative website based in California, examines the biographies of progressivist activists (see also last week's "In the news").
Wikipedia's exemplary efficiency:The Moscow Timesreported on a critical analysis of Russian state spending on websites by the Izvestia newspaper. The paper questioned why the cost of upgrading Zakupki.gov.ru, the website for state tenders, was set at 778 million rubles ($26 million), "almost four times more than annual budget for Wikipedia", a content-rich online site of global stature. The Wikimedia Foundation has projected that its spending in 2010–11 more than doubled that of the previous year, up to $18.5 million.Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Achal Prabhala, who is leading the oral citations initiative.
Critical analysis of oral citations project: India's Economic Times covered the Wikimedia Foundation's oral citations project (see previous Signpost coverage), which aims to expand the scope of verifiable information in languages with limited printed resources. The paper noted that reception of the project within the Wikimedia community has been far from uniform, including the local communities within which the project is being trialled: mailing list threads have included "scathing criticism, supporting arguments and balanced suggestions", and tension surrounding issues of authority and tolerance of original thought. Achal Prabhala, the Wikimedia fellow leading the project, maintained that "the sum of human knowledge is far greater than the sum of printed knowledge", and stressed the experimental, exploratory nature of the project.
Lolita under the microscope: The Awl ran a forensic examination of the history of the controversial article on Vladimir Nabokov's celebrated novel Lolita. The "case study" included an analysis of the growth and development of the article, its peak viewing figures, a controversy over alleged plagiarism, and conflicts over whether or not to label the protagonist as a "pedophile". The author concluded by invoking the neutrality principle as an unachievable ideal: "Entries such as the one on Lolita demonstrate why perfection on Wikipedia remains an 'unattainable' goal—when the topic is contentious, perfection will always butt heads against 'is completely neutral and unbiased'."
Doctor Who sidekick's death by Wikipedia?: In yet another instance of celebrities declared dead by mischievous vandals, The Daily Mailrevealed the shock of actress Jean Marsh at her reported untimely demise. In an unusual twist, The Signpost was unable to locate the offending edits in either the history of the biographical article or the associated logs, suggesting laxity on the part of the publication or an inventive public-relations operative.
"Wikipedia Art" to return in hotel room form? The Vancouver Courier reports that the city's 11th annual New Forms Festival taking place from September 9 to 11 is to feature an exhibit in a room of the Waldorf Hotel focusing on one of the stranger noteworthy pranks perpetrated in Wikipedia's mainspace; the Wikipedia Art fiasco (see previous Signpost coverage). Cricketer and former captain of Pakistan Shahid Afridi, who was lampooned as puffing up his Wikipedia biography by ESPNcricinfo this week.
Notables profiled and parodied: ESPNcricinfo featured a parody of prominent cricketer Shahid Afridi vaingloriously editing the Wikipedia article on himself. In related news, the Wikipedia Files project, run by Chicago public radio station WBEZ, continued its exposure of Wikipedia biographies of living people with an episode in which stand-up comedian Marc Maron fact-checked the entry on himself.
Taught by Wikipedia: US National Public Radio interviewed 22-year-old college graduate Meredith Perry, an entrepreneurial inventor of "a transmitter that can recharge wireless devices using ultrasonic waves" called UBeam; Perry has no background in electrical engineering and learned all she knows on the topic from online research, primarily reading Wikipedia.
Articles as stimulus in word association study: ZME Science reported the work of researchers at Princeton University who used condensed versions of 3,500 Wikipedia articles to study the neurochemical imprint of word association. By monitoring neural activity while test subjects were exposed to specific terms from the articles, the researchers were able to map brain patterns, thus allowing them to tell in advance what the participants would think about when exposed to certain stimuli.
David, a Londoner for most of his life, has been on Wikipedia since March 2005. A Chartered quantity surveyor, his main interests are history, architecture, transport (specifically London Underground), genealogy, music and literature. A Wikipedian since March 2006, Simply south is from Hertfordshire, and is interested in rail, geographical, other forms of travel and transportation.
Tell us a bit about yourself, and what motivated you to become a member of WikiProject London Transport?
DavidCane: My interest stems from an early fascination with the London Underground. I grew-up in a southern suburb of London, so a trip as a child on the Underground was often a prelude to a visit to the centre of the city. The impact that London's transport infrastructure had on the development and expansion of the city are so great that it is impossible to imagine London being the city it is now without the railways, the Underground, the trams or the buses that enabled its inhabitants to move progressively further from the work place. I became involved in the Project in 2006 because I wanted to see better articles on the Project's topics.
Simply south: I have always been interested in transport, especially rail transport. I joined as I was invited by Unisouth just when the Project was getting off the ground. I have always had a particular interest in the Docklands Light Railway and London Underground ever since I was young, but this has since branched out.
Your Project has over 2,800 articles associated with it. How does the Project keep all these up to standard, and what are its biggest challenges?
DavidCane: It's a slow process. A laborious assessment exercise last year means that all of the articles do, at least, have a quality and importance rating; though more than 80% of the articles are still stubs or start class, and the quality varies considerably. We try to standardise articles as much as possible by providing a reasonably flexible style guide and by using a range of templates including various infoboxes and navboxes, which help structure basic articles and group them thematically.
Simply south: There are so many dedicated editors in the Project that not enough credit cannot be given to them whether their effort is big or small. Problems are discussed on the Project talk page or related Projects. A previous challenge has been how to revitalise the Portal, which was done through getting rid of selection processes and adding sections such as biographies. This had spikes over several months but through dedication, this has since achieved Featured status a few months ago. There are more people showing interest in the project every month. There are various resources and templates the Project uses in improving articles.
WikiProject London Transport has 26 Featured articles, 4 Featured lists, 26 Good articles and a Featured Portal. How did your Project achieve this and how can other Projects work toward this?
DavidCane: I think that the Project has achieved these numbers largely due to the good fortune of having dedicated editors working on articles that they are interested in over an extended period. We don't at present have a strategic plan, targets or collaborations to achieve particular goals in particular topic areas. I know this works well for some Projects but we tend to be more of a loose affiliation than a focused team.
Your Project overlaps with WikiProjects UK Railways, Trains, UK Roads, UK Waterways and UK Trams. Have there been any problems with this? Does WP:LT collaborate with any other WikiProjects?
DavidCane: I am not aware of any problems. Aside from WP:London, the Projects with the most overlap are the UK Railways and Trains. Aside from having an agreed naming convention for station articles between the Projects, we don't collaborate in a formal way.
Simply south: In the past, we have also had loose collaborations with WP:TIS, WP:BUS, WP:UKROADS and many county Projects around the UK, as well as the Geography Project and WP:RDT. We have had some article specific collaborations but not much on a large scale.
DavidCane: We used to have monthly selected articles, biographies, [and] pictures which were nominated by members periodically, but this petered-out some time ago, so the Portal was automated to use a random selection from pre-selected lists of these subjects. The news section is updated regularly with items sourced from the press release sections of various relevant organisations.
What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject London Transport? How can a new contributor help today?
DavidCane: It would be nice if all of the Top- and High-importance articles could be improved to GA status. There's currently about 80 of these that are below GA quality, but an editor can just get stuck anywhere they have an interest.
Anything else to add?
Simply south: I also maintain the Project newsletter, [when] the torch was passed to me when the founder left the Project. This is usually released monthly (occasionally bimonthly), giving an update on how the Project is progressing, as well as news outside the Project. I feel this is small but still key to developing interest in the Project. I have also occasionally had guest editors doing their own versions, or adding/rearranging the newsletter, The Metropolitan.
Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 is a photo contest on National Heritage Sites in Europe, which runs throughout the month of September. There is a central European website for participants, with separate websites for each participating country, and a comprehensive project portal on Commons. There are currently 16 participating countries, and over 10,000 images have already been uploaded so far. The Signpost spoke with Lodewijk (user:Effeietsanders), Jane, Maarten (User:Multichill) and Romaine regarding the project.
A chemistry student from the Netherlands, Lodewijk is mainly active on the Dutch Wikipedia, and is a former steward on Meta-Wiki. Jane has been a Wikipedian since May 2006, and is interested in historical museums and reading local history. Both Maarten and Romaine also contribute to the Dutch Wikipedia, and Maarten is an administrator on Commons.
Tell us more about Wiki Loves Monuments 2011. What is its history, scope and objectives?
Lodewijk: We already learned in 2009 with Wiki Loves Art NL (5400 photos, 45 participating museums), that photo contest are a great way to get new people involved with Wikimedia, and that they make people aware of free knowledge and licensing. We continued that model in 2010, but with a more publicly accessible topic – monumental buildings. There are 60,000 of them in the Netherlands, and it has been a topic that was worked on in the Dutch Wikipedia for a few years. Editors are really motivated to cover the topic well in Wikipedia, and working with that enthusiasm and lots of outside submissions, we were able to get 12,000 submissions in 2010.
Shortly after that, we got some messages from chapters in other countries that they would like to hold a similar contest because of the impact and possibilities, and we created useful documentation on Wikimedia Commons. We held a special workshop meeting in Berlin in May 2011, and have been able to get more than 15 countries involved, with contests being organized by 13 chapters and 2 non-chapter groups. The objective is of course, the simple number of free images that will result – images that can be used in articles, on monument lists and by the general audience. But another important less direct objective is to make people aware of the fact they can contribute to Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and we hope that several of the photographers will choose to continue releasing their images, and perhaps start editing.
Jane: I joined last year, so I can only speak for my experience during the 2010 campaign. I had been contributing regularly on the English Wikipedia to articles about rijksmonuments when I got a message on my Wikimedia Commons talk page last fall from Maarten to invite me to take part in Wiki takes Haarlem. Maarten is the man behind a lot of what I call bot-magic on Commons and found me through my Haarlem photographs. He assumed because I had uploaded so many pictures of Haarlem rijksmonuments that I might be interested, and he was so right! At that time, I was mostly contributing to the English Wikipedia, but when I made photo illustrations, I usually linked them to the corresponding Dutch Wikipedia page (if it existed). I enjoy attending the Monumenten Dag in Haarlem every September and some of the pictures I have taken inside buildings on those days are used on more than two sister projects, like this one, which I took on Monumenten Dag in 2007. When Maarten contacted me, it was the first time I would meet fellow Wikipedians and I was so curious! At the time, I was totally unfamiliar with the Wikimedia chapter in the Netherlands, but I was eager to meet and "commiserate" with others about the difficulties of uploading to Commons. It turned out that most of the people who came were highly experienced Commons users who didn't have any problems at all. Lodewijk was the only one who understood my difficulties with Commons and was able to reassure me that my rijksmonument photo's would not be deleted if they had the rijksmonument id number, and he even told me about a tool to use for uploading more than one picture at a time. Thankfully, that function is now included in the new Commons uploader.
Maarten: And don't forget the windmill project! At the Dutch Wikipedia some years ago, some windmill enthusiasts started a windmill project(in Dutch). Their goal – get an article with a photo for every windmill in the Netherlands (1,100+). First, they made lists of all windmills. Based on these lists, they made a clever system to track progress. For example, the number of windmills in Gelderland with a photo. This system worked really well. People want to get things complete. People want to reach milestones. With a system like this, you encourage that. Based on this system, the lists of rijksmonument were created. A lot of towns already have a photo for every rijksmonument because someone wanted to reach the 100%.
Wiki Loves Monuments 2010 was quite a success, with over 12,000 photos uploaded to Commons. What lessons did you learn from that, and how do you plan to better that effort?
Winning monument from the 2010 contest
Lodewijk: There were a few general lessons we drew from the 2010 contest, which are quite general to organizing public contests: make it really easy to participate – KISS; make it fun to do; make it nearby [one's] home – make sure everybody has something around the corner; make it clear people help Wikipedia. People love Wikipedia, and if they can help, why not? Awards are to attract attention primarily; make sure results are quick and visible – get the images on the articles a.s.a.p., seeing that motivates people to keep going. What we are doing better this year, is communication and partnering. We have some really great partners including the European Commission, the Council of Europe, Europeana, Europa Nostra and Open Images. Thanks to them, we have been able to use networks of experts throughout Europe.
Jane: Of course, the biggest lesson I learned this year comes from the fact that it's a Europe-wide photo contest, so merging the country heritage lists into a "Dutch model" has brought a whole new set of terms into the thesaurus of cultural heritage on Commons. Helping to organize this and attending the Berlin hackathon was a real help to me in understanding European cultural heritage lists and how the various countries deal with this. Until Berlin, I thought that the European Heritage Days were only celebrated in the Netherlands. On a personal level, Wiki Takes Haarlem was good for more than a thousand of the pictures taken in the 2010 campaign. That experience taught me so much about rijksmonuments in Haarlem that I suppose I could be working on articles for years, since Haarlem is still nowhere near "done" in terms of historical coverage. But Haarlem is just one of the cities in the Netherlands with more than a thousand rijksmonuments. This year, there are several "Wiki takes your city" events planned in the Netherlands, with the most notable in Amsterdam during Monument Day. The Canals of Amsterdam are on the UNESCO World Heritage list, but like many other European world heritage sites, are seriously under-photographed on Commons, in my opinion! As far as improving our result over last year, I not only hope for good photos of world heritage, but I also hope for more photos of remote sites in less populated areas, and I also hope for some interesting video footage, since in the Netherlands, there will be a prize for this. Video footage is a category that wasn't even available last year.
Maarten: Don't try to start a new community, work together with an existing one – we worked together with the online Wikipedia community. We couldn't have done this project without the volunteers helping people, updating the lists and other tasks. We also contacted Flickr users who participated in Wiki Loves Art. Do an evaluation of your project – we did an evaluation of our project and that really helped improve this year's project. If we can all can learn from previous experience, our future projects will get better and better.
I am in Europe but my country is currently not a participant. How can I include my country?
Lodewijk: You can still participate if you submit photos of participating countries. Have you been on vacation in Austria, or on a business trip in Spain, and happen to have images of monuments lying around? Submit them! There is no need to photograph them in September, only the submission date matters. If you really want your country to participate, then it is good to realize that it requires quite a lot of preparation, and perhaps next year is a better goal to strive for. Multiple countries have indicated that they want to organize Wiki Loves Monuments next year, so you won't be alone.
Jane: Including your country is only possible if you have the heritage list, and for this you need to contact your Ministry of Culture or local European Heritage Days organization. Once you have the list, then you need to set them up. For this, I defer to Lodewijk and Maarten.
Maarten: We tried to contact people in most European countries to get the project going. In some countries, the local chapter indicated that they didn't have time for it, [and] in other countries, we didn't get any response at all. For this year it's too late, but if we do Wiki Loves Monuments next year, you have plenty of time to start organizing it.
What are some of the key requirements for participating, and who judges the contest?
Countries participating in WLM 2011
Lodewijk: The requirements are quite simple. You need to be the photographer, release the photo under a free license in September through our upload platforms and identify the monument on the picture. That's all! Then, a national jury will select the best pictures in their country (and award the national prizes) and nominate 10 images to the European jury. Then, the European jury will go through those nominees and decide who will get the main European award and [who] gets to visit Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC!
Jane: Before you upload, you need a Wikimedia Commons user account with an email address. Most Wikipedians have this through their global account. For new people, it may be easier to create an account first on their native Wikipedia and then get to Commons through their global account (because the default on Commons is always in English).
Maarten: Less is more in this case. Just a couple of clear rules. For the juries, we try to have a mix of people with different backgrounds: photographers, heritage people and Wikipedians. This way, we try to have a balanced jury.
Jane: You can experiment with looking up identifier numbers with the (English) instructions on the European website. The quickest way is to copy and paste the exact street address into your favorite Internet search engine, which will generally lead to the proper Wikipedia list with the identifier (if it's not a commercial building). The local websites have map search capabilities. If you have some old picture of some monument in some participating country, and you have been able to look up the identifier, just scan it in (if it's not digital already) and then follow the local website instructions. Once you have done one, the rest is easy. Here is a short video on how it's done for photos of "monument istoric" or Romanian heritage. Even though it's in Romanian, you can see that the "Wiki Loves Monuments" Commons uploader is the same for any other country. As far as photo-taking goes, if you are located in Europe and want to participate in your area, then I also recommend my own Haarlem tricks, such as taking a picture of the whole street and the house numbers when you are busy "taking a street". Otherwise, when you get home, you may have the proper identifier and street address, but you can no longer remember which house was which. If you want more tips and tricks from experienced Commons users, and you live in Amsterdam, come to the Wiki Takes Amsterdam(in Dutch) on September 10! For local events in other countries, see those local websites.
Anything else to add?
Maarten: I'm quite happy about how we are working together with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to adapt the upload wizard for Wiki Loves Monuments. Last year, we used a simplified upload form for Wiki Loves Monuments. This worked really well, but it was quite a hack to get it working. This year, we wanted something cleaner and scalable. I contacted the WMF about how we can work together to improve the upload wizard and to modify it in a way that it would be useful for Wiki Loves Monuments. I made requirements together with the WMF developers. Based on that and more input, the "campaign" part of the upload wizard was implemented. It's really nice to see how all these people with different backgrounds, different nationalities and in different languages work together on one big project. This is probably the first big European project organized by the European Wikimedia chapters, and I'm very happy to be part of it.
Romaine: Another aspect of Wiki Loves Monuments are the picture tours called "Wiki takes ..." with the ellipsis being the city or town in which it is held. "Wiki takes ..." are events in which people go in several groups taking pictures of monuments, each group in another part of the town or city, and coming together afterwards and uploading and talking about the tour they made. To make it successful, someone has to make routes to go so that as much as possible, monuments are [captured in] the pictures, avoiding two groups photographing the same monuments. These "Wiki takes ..." are especially held in places where of lot of monuments pictures are missing. An important need for organizing these tours are the lists of monuments, so that participants know what our cultural heritage is and what we would like pictures of. The lists of monuments should be translated in several languages in many Wikipedias so that people from elsewhere can learn about the cultural history of the world.
New featured picture: the mouth of the great Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, taken by Commons photographer User:Sbork in May last year. The glacier, which flows about a foot (30 cm) each day, is more than 100 square miles (260 sq km) in area.
This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday, 28 August – Saturday, 3 September
Drymoreomys (nom), an unusual rice rat found close to the massive city São Paulo in Brazil, and named only this year. (Nominated by Ucucha)
Brunette Coleman (nom), a pseudonym used by the English poet and writer Philip Larkin (1922–85). As an Oxford undergraduate he assumed the persona of a woman, "Brunette Coleman", to write risqué stories and verses about schoolgirls. Some critics think of it as worthless Peeping Tom drivel; some think it provides important clues to the mature Larkin's poems; others think it is merely funny, even charming. (Brianboulton)
Liverpool F.C. (nom), founded in 1892, is the second most successful club in the history of English football. (NapHit)
Calgary Stampede (nom), a ten-day annual rodeo, exhibition, and festival every July in Alberta, Canada, attracting more than a million visitors each year. (Resolute) picture at right
Lists of Grand Tour general classification winners (nom), with four featured lists. The Grand Tours are the three most prestigious multi-week stage races in professional road bicycle racing. The competitions are the Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España, contested annually in that order. Cyclists are ranked on the basis of their total wins in the three Grand Tours. (nominator NapHit). Picture at right
Featured portal
Portal:Michigan Highways (nom) was promoted, with more than 110 articles. There are 9,716 miles (15,636 km) of state-maintained highways in Michigan that run through all 83 counties of the 11th largest state in the US. Picture at right
Featured pictures
Three images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
Matanuska Glacier mouth (nom; related article), a valley glacier in Alaska. The mouth is pictured of this largest glacier accessible by car in the US. The glacier measures 27 × 4 miles (43 × 6.4 km), and it lies near the Glenn Highway about 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Anchorage. It flows about 1 foot (30 cm) per day (created by User:Sbork). Picture at top
New featured picture: the official mansion of the governor of Virginia, taken in 1905 and now held by the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division. In the high-res version of the image, a young man and older woman can be seen conversing in front of a circular fountain.
Moonriddengirl has been a Wikipedian since the first half of 2007, becoming an administrator for the English Wikipedia later that year. In that capacity, she dedicates much of her volunteer time to dealing with copyright concerns at the English Wikipedia's copyright problems board and contributor copyright cleanup, attempting to implement Wikimedia's zero tolerance policy on copyright infringements. In addition, she works for the Wikimedia Foundation in community liaison. Below, Moonriddengirl outlines her view that all contributors need to pull together to manage copyright concerns on the English Wikipedia.
The views expressed are those of the author only. Other editors will often leave opposing views and potential corrections in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
We have a copyright crisis. Wikipedia is full of copyright problems. How full, I don't know.
I do know that CorenSearchBot (before it became inoperable due to a catastrophic change in Yahoo's terms) routinely found several dozen new articles every day built on content copied from other websites. I know that every day more articles and images are tagged by human contributors for speedy deletion for copyright concerns or listed for the slower processes of the copyright problems board or possibly unfree files. I know that there are more tens of thousands of articles and images awaiting copyright review at WP:CCI than I want to tally; this is content placed by people we know have repeatedly violated copyright. Odds are good that a substantial portion of this content is a problem, too. In spite of policies prohibiting it—and in spite of prominent reminders of those policies on every edit page—more copyrighted content finds its way into our project every day.
Why it happens
People place copyrighted content on Wikipedia because they can, because it's easier to copy somebody else's words than write your own, because it's hard to resist using somebody else's picture when the only other alternative is that an article has no pictures at all. Some people do it accidentally, attempting to change content but not changing it enough. Some people do it defiantly, using Wikipedia as part of their own statements against copyright laws.
Most people do it with good intentions, I believe. I've talked to hundreds of people about this over the last few years. Few of them seem to be out to deliberately cause trouble, even the ones who wind up being blocked because we can't get them to stop. The fact is that many of them just don't see the harm, and some have trouble even understanding what the issue is.
In some cultures, copyright is no big deal—even reputable sources copy without obvious concern. (No kidding: I've seen books by evidently respected academicians that have baldly copied from Wikipedia without credit and government websites that have done the same.) In a way, it's not much of a deal to the international Internet culture we all share. People paste news articles into their blogs or appropriate copyrighted cartoon characters as their avatars all the time, without a thought as to whether the content is copyrighted and what that might mean.
Why we should care
This may be why even some of the contributors who don't cause the problems and who plainly do understand the concept of copyright simply don't think about whether or not it's happening here. Blatant violations may pass right in front of them, and they don't notice. They simply don't seem keyed in to the issue. It happens everywhere, and, after all, if a copyright holder objects, all we have to do is take it down.
While technically true, this is an attitude Wikipedia can't afford. For whatever reasons people place the content, and however we ourselves may feel about copyright, keeping it is not only potentially damaging to copyright holders, it's bad for us. It's bad for our reusers; it's bad for Wikipedia; it's bad for our volunteers.
I'm not going to discuss the question of whether intellectual property laws are a good thing or a bad thing. (Although as a published writer who receives small royalty checks every year, I have a certain interest in the question.) It's a passionately debated subject, and, in my opinion, it's not necessary to go into it to settle the important point. It's a simple matter of fact that we are subject to intellectual property laws, and we need to recognize how working within that reality is in our best interests. While we have the option to swiftly address copyright concerns by simply pulling material from publication—indeed, we have a legal obligation to have a designated agent to answer takedown notices sent to us by copyright holders and their representatives—our content reusers may not have the option of responding so simply. If a video documentarian uses images that were hosted on Wikipedia under the mistaken belief that the free license label on them is accurate, he may have to recut his documentary to remove them or replace them with something else. If a publisher places some of our featured articles on animals in a textbook, she may have to pull it from distribution.
A propaganda cartoon explaining why multilicensing benefits reusers, part of the push to accommodate reusers.
This is a major problem. We like content reusers (if not all of them). We really do. We encourage them to do it—to use our material online, in books, newspapers, video documentaries; to use it and modify it whenever and however they like, so long as they follow the licensing terms. Indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." We've made it as easy for them as we can. But how many times would a reuser encounter the trouble or expense of withdrawing problematic content before deciding to avoid our work? If the content we bill as "free" is not, we risk damage to our reputation and discouraging the global dissemination of our work.
Beyond that, I have personally observed the inconvenience and expense (at least in terms of time) to our volunteers when copyright problems created by others are encountered too late. "Too late" in this context would be after they have themselves engaged with the content. Too often, somebody creates an article or expands it with copyrighted content placed without permission of the copyright holder. Others come behind to improve the article, sometimes putting a great amount of time into polishing prose, locating sources, adding text. Their work is tainted, too. The time they've spent polishing copyrighted content is lost when that content must be removed. The hours they've put in could have been better spent building usable content or creating an article we can retain. Then there is the cost to their motivation. I've spoken multiple times to people in this situation who are heartsick and discouraged by the experience. I hate the thought that we've wasted their time, that we might lose them, because of a problem that was not promptly detected or resolved.
There's also a cost to the volunteers who create the problems in the first place. As I said, I believe most of these people are working in good faith. Those who have trouble grasping the issue may require more guidance than those who simply didn't think it mattered, but copyright problems can be corrected. If the issue is discovered early in a Wikipedian's career, we may be able to more easily clean up any outstanding issues and help them avoid creating more, enabling them to move forward as constructive and valuable contributors. If problems linger, more articles may be tainted and fall-out greater in terms of both collateral damage to others and loss of the contributor themselves.
While copyright cleanup can use all the active contributors it can get, you can help with the problem simply by being conscious of the potential so that you recognize copyright issues when they appear. Does an image look unlikely to be original to the uploader? Text too polished or disjointed in tone? Even if you don't feel that you can help with cleanup, you can tag a suspicious text or image copyright concern for others to evaluate. You can save reusers potential time and expense, save your fellow volunteers wasted effort, perhaps a reparable contributor issue from devolving into an unsalvageable one. The simple act of identifying the problem is the first, crucial step to resolving it. Swift handling is the best service we can provide to our reusers, to the project and to our contributors (as well as, in my opinion, to the copyright holders). By recognizing the problem and resolving it when it first appears, we can keep it contained.
Further reading
Wikipedia:Cv101: How to handle text-based copyright problems
In the case, opened to examine the meta issues involved in biographies of living persons, all proposed principles, findings of fact, and remedies have passed. All but one (Manipulation of search engine results) passed without opposition.
Among the findings, the Arbitration Committee reaffirmed that "all editing of articles must comply with the biographies of living persons policy", but did not find any specific editors at fault. "The subject-matters of the evidence and workshop proposals in this case have been wide-ranging, including evidence of some troublesome edits and problematic interactions between editors, but not to a level that the Committee believes necessitates any findings or remedies against specific editors at the present time."
Drafting arbitrator Newyorkbrad acknowledged that some may "feel that the decision comprises a series of generalities and does not discuss or resolve the specific BLP and user-conduct disputes raised in the evidence", but explained that he did not "find this case to be a suitable vehicle for proposing findings and remedies aimed at specific editors".
Cirt and Jayen466 nearing completion
This dispute, between Cirt and Jayen466, is also nearing completion.
The committee passed relatively standard principles on collegiality, maintaining a neutral point of view, undue weight, biographies of living people, and fair criticism and personal attacks. A more atypical principle on "bias and prejudice", which passed only 6–4, argues that editors should avoid "engaging in a pattern of editing that focuses on a specific racial, religious, or ethnic group and can reasonably be perceived as gratuitously endorsing or promoting stereotypes[, bias or prejudice]." Concerns that the new principle judges "outcome rather than methodology" were raised by one arbitrator who argued "NPOV contributions that use RS'es" should not be rejected merely because of the subject matter of their edit, writing that "if one is to observe that in America, Asians tend to be better educated than whites, is that promoting a stereotype against white people?". Concerns were also raised about the principle applying to religious groups; some anti-religious editors, particularly those focusing on fringe groups, arguably do very necessary work fighting bias, but yet could be said to be evincing their own "bias and prejudice against the members of the group". Another arbitrator wrote that "there are plenty of hypersensitive people on Wikipedia floating around any topic of high emotional content. What such editors sincerely believe to be [so] may [in fact] be dispassionate, NPOV editing." Another arbitrator, clarifying the wording, said, "Work done by the words 'gratuitously' and 'invidious' should not be underestimated; legitimate criticism of any group or individual, consistent with applicable policies, is not proscribed."
Both proposed findings of fact are in the process of passing. Cirt was found to have placed undue weight on negative issues in BLPs and articles on new religious movements using poor sources, which he had previously admitted. Jayen466 was found to have engaged in inappropriate conduct in respect of Cirt, primarily by being over-focused on Cirt's editing and by being indiscriminate in his accusations about Cirt.
Remedies that have passed so far include a topic ban prohibiting Cirt from making any edit to articles relating to new religious movements or their adherents, and another restriction prohibiting Cirt from editing any article that is substantially the biography of a living person where (1) the notability of the BLP subject relates to politics, religion, or social controversy, or (2) the subject of the edit relates to politics, religion, or social controversy. A proposed remedy to desysop Cirt, introduced late in the process, is being voted on. Interaction between Cirt and Jayen466 will be restricted. Administrators have been authorized to enforce the restrictions with blocks starting at up to one month in length and the committee has reserved the right to desysop with a simple motion in the future.
Open cases, AUSC reshuffle
Abortion, a dispute over the lead sentence of Abortion and the naming of abortion-related articles, also said to have been exacerbated by disruptive editing moved into its fourth week.
Senkaku Islands, which looks at the behavior of editors involved in a dispute over whether the naming of the articles Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute is sufficiently neutral. It is alleged that the content dispute has been exacerbated by disruptive editing moved into its third week.
Following a period of inactivity, User:bahamut0013 had his permissions removed this week on the direction of the Arbitration Committee. As a result, bahamut0013 also had his place on the audit subcommittee, which monitors use of the Oversight and CheckUser permissions, withdrawn. User:AGK, as the reserve candidate drawn from recent elections, replaces him. It is not known when bahamut0013, who began his term on the subcommittee in April, might return to regular editing.Postscript. In September 2011, The Signpost learned that User:bahamut0013, aka Sergeant Robert P Lemiszki Jr., United States Marine Corps, died. (Signpost coverage.)
Work concluded this week on this year's MediaWiki-related Google Summer of Code projects. Of the seven projects that made it to the half-way stage, all passed their end of term assessments and will now submit their work to Google for auditing. (Google will then issue a final monetary reward to contributors for their volunteer development efforts over the summer.)
Of the seven projects, then, a number are likely to have an impact on Wikimedia wikis, including student Salvatore Ingala's project to make gadgets more easily customisable. One of his two mentors, Max Semenik, stressed that the project had been designed to make it compatible with the Foundation's own work to improve the usability of gadgets, and so it was unlikely to be discarded. He was also pleased with his student's progress in general, adding that constant intervention to keep the project on track and up-to-standard had not been necessary, with advice focussed only on small bursts at the beginning, middle, and end of the timeline. Yuvi Panda's attempt to make the compilation of large article subsets easier via a new extension also seems to fill a need onwiki. Other potentially Wikimedia-related projects include Kevin Brown's experimental ArchiveLinks extension and Aigerim Karabekova's work on Extension management. Also of interest is Akshay Agarwal's progress on separating the logic of logging in and registration from its presentation, with a view to allowing new ways to log in in future.
Other projects included work on the Semantic MediaWiki variant and on a Facebook-esque "status update" feature.
August Engineering Report published
Wiki Loves Monuments (logo pictured) was one of the community projects to receive developer attention in August.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for August was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (because of the discrepancy of Wikimania, the August report was published approximately two weeks after July's). Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the Wikimania and Developer Days, progress on HTTPS support, major work on customized campaigns for the Wiki Loves Monuments event, and the increasing readiness of both MediaWiki 1.18 and a new mobile platform for Wikipedia.
Nonetheless, the report also contained developments, which, although classified as major, have not yet received external coverage. In particular, a new team was set up within Wikimedia engineering to support a renewed effort at making Wikimedia-related software both readable and in particular more writeable in other languages (localisation and internationalisation). Comprising four staff members, its primary aim is to provide "a set of tools to facilitate editing in languages using a non-Roman alphabet". Also of note was a significant operations team meeting, focussed on improving its workflow and re-prioritising outstanding projects. Other projects which saw progress include data dumps (improved ability to restart failed processes without having to throw away previous progress) and the visual editor project, where the possibility of having a transaction-based edit system is being looked at. Such a system would allow for edits to be more easily merged in the event of edit conflicts.
Also included in the report was news that, after new users began to use the WikiLove extension as an easy way to send messages to other users, a new tool will be developed to provide a more consistent framework for this action. Meanwhile, developer Neil Kandalgaonkar "continued to work on real-time collaboration and is close to presenting a [working] demo" while Ian Baker "investigated and started to work on a chat system to be integrated to the concurrent editing interface, for collaboration and live help". Another project to look out for in the future is a renewed effort to allow a safe subset of arbitrary code to be included in pages to simplify template syntax.
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 many weeks.
How you can help
Popularise Hackathons
Hackathons try to convert potential developers and technical contributors into full-time members of the development community. This relies on publicising the events to local technology interest groups, which requires volunteer help via social media such as Twitter and Facebook. (For example, the hackathons scheduled for New Orleans and Brighton are currently in the publicity-generating stage.)
How to hold a Hackathon: The Foundation's Volunteer Development Coordinator Sumana Harihareswara posted a detailed list of things to consider when organising a Hackathon (a Wikipedia meetup with a strong technical focus). Hackathons are currently scheduled for the American city of New Orleans (October) and the British seaside resort of Brighton (November).
Improved HTTPS support comes to Wikimedia Commons: A series of bugfixes prompted a test deployment of improved HTTPS support to Wikimedia Commons and the WMF's own wiki (wikitech-l). The move establishes https://commons.wikimedia.org as a second, (albeit still buggy) secure alternative to the http:// address. By incorporating developments regarding protocol relative links, the new site should provide a more integrated and secure browsing experiencing than the existing https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ site when fully complete.
New full-time member of staff: Aaron Schulz, a long-time developer of the MediaWiki software that powers Wikimedia wikis, has been hired full-time by the Wikimedia Foundation. As a part-time programmer, Schulz has worked on the flagged revisions extension, code review, and the heterogeneous deployment system that will allow MediaWiki 1.18 to be trialled on smaller wikis before it hits larger ones (wikitech-l mailing list).
Bugs fixed: approximately 70 bugs were closed in the last week, resulting in users of the (current) secure server no longer receiving non-functional "confirm email" links (bug #30647) and the gender label "unspecified" being changed to "undisclosed" to recognise that editors consider it an active rather than purely passive option (bug #30455).
Bug triage "pretty good": The latest bug triage, overseen by bugmeister Mark Hershberger, was held this week, focussing on internationalisation (I18N) related bugs (wikitech-l). "We focused on a small subset of the over 100 bugs tagged with 'i18n' and still managed to go over the allocated 1 hr for discussing things" wrote Hershberger (full notes from the triage are also available). Triages focussing on bugs related to the UploadWizard and the Wikibooks projects have been scheduled for the next two weeks (full schedule).
Advice to skin developers: Developer Daniel Friesen published his advice on writing MediaWiki skins compatible with the latest versions of the software on the wikitech-l mailing list. Skins are often used by third-party installers of wiki software to brand their local installations without touching the underlying software itself; in addition, registered users on Wikimedia wikis have the ability to choose their own skin from a limited selection.
An example cryptographic hash function of the sort that may soon be included for revision text. Note that even small changes in the source input (here in the word "over") drastically change the resulting output, implying the strong link between "identical text" and "identical" hash which some argue would be very useful for researchers.Provision of revision text hashes: There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list regarding the possible addition of a column of hashes to the revision table (now a full RFC). Although such decisions to undertake schema changes are not taken lightly, advocates of the addition argue that it would make reversions much easier to spot without looking directly at page text, as well as improving the ability for database dumps to have their integrity checked. Hashes are already provided in the image table on integrity-checking grounds.
Action pages to go?: A formal Request for Comment (RFC) has been opened on the issue of action pages (URLs of the form index.php?title=Foo&action=Bar), suggesting that they should become redirects to a uniform system of special pages (which are already in use for some actions such as blocking users). http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/wikitech/247348
Orphan image tagging to begin: Fbot (task 5), which will tag orphaned images to encourage their use, was approved this week. Discussions surrounding other bot tasks are continuing; outside input is vital if they are to be properly assessed.
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