Currently a student of environmental engineering at the University of Cambridge, England, Chan is an admin on the Cantonese and English Wikipedias and an active photographic contributor on Commons. He has resigned from his roles as administrative assistant for the chapter and as its representative on the Chapters Association; but he will fulfill his remaining duties as a member of the organising team for Wikimania 2013, the movement's major annual event. This year, it will be hosted in early August by the Hong Kong chapter, with separate funding from the WMF. Deryck Chan wrote:
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Despite my desperate attempts to assist WMHK's board to keep up with deadlines and comply with seemingly endless requests from WMF grantmaking and FDC support staff, we received an overwhelmingly negative assessment which resulted in a complete rejection of our FDC proposal. ... / My experience with the FDC process has confirmed my ultimate scepticism about the WMF's direction of development. WMF has become so conservative with its strategies ... that it is no longer tending to the needs of the wider Wikimedia movement. / [The] WMF is expecting fully professional deliverables which require full-time professional staff to deliver, from organisations run by volunteers who are running Wikimedia chapters not because they're charity experts, but because they love Wikimedia.
”
A particular issue he raised was what he termed "the chicken-and-egg problem", referring to the challenge faced by chapters without paid staff in preparing effective applications for FDC funding that would enable them to hire their first staff. The Norwegian chapter's Erlend commented in response: "Getting the first employee demands the resources that only come with the first employee. ... One result will be an even more unevenly distributed outreach and campaigning power between some professionalised hubs (Germany, India, UK, Switzerland, Israel), and totally amateur hubs (Hong Kong, Egypt, Japan, Pakistan, Vietnam, Denmark, Norway, etc)."
The Signpost has been told that the large payrolls of some European chapters (Wikimedia Germany employs the equivalent of some 40 full-time staff) have influenced the aspirations of chapters around the world.
Second round of funding
The FDC's second round saw US$665.5K recommended for allocation, bringing the total in both rounds to $9.17M of its maximum budget of just over $11M. The French chapter was granted $525K (70% of its request), having received only bridging funding in the FDC's first round last October; the Norwegian chapter secured $140K (59%). The other two applicants, the Czech and Hong Kong chapters, received no funding. The Committee has recommended that the remaining $2M be returned to Foundation reserves.
The FDC's comments on the round have sent clear messages to the movement. The Committee encourages diversity of funding; in assessing applicants' existing and proposed programs it takes into account the strategic focus and clarity of expected outcomes, sustainability, and community involvement; it takes technical compliance with the eligibility rules seriously; it is quite prepared to underspend its maximum budget where it sees fit; and the Committee expressed concern that "some of the applicants in Round 2 did not adequately understand the FDC framework, and applied for annual plan funding when project grants may have been more appropriate".
However, a major reason for its recommendations to reduce the French and Norwegian bid and to reject Hong Kong's request was its unease at plans for precipitous growth in funding and/or staffing: "We are concerned about the general increase in staff hiring that has been taking place over the last year, in particular where staff are performing functions that volunteers have been leading. We encourage entities to focus on balancing the work done by staff and volunteers in line with the Wikimedia movement's ethos of volunteers leading work, and to focus on having staff coordinate volunteer activities. We are also concerned about the growth rates of both staff and budgets. We would ask entities to consider whether their growth rates are sustainable in the long term, and whether they are leading to the most impact possible."
The recommendation comes after a comment by an FDC member last week during the feedback session at the Wikimedia Conference in Milan, that there is a limited number of dollars to give out, and it's not going to be possible to staff up all chapters.
Controversy
Deryck Chan's announcement has provoked a stormy debate on the mailing list, in which more than 100 related posts have already appeared. Within an hour, Nathan wrote that "taking a chapter from essentially no funding to US$200k in one year is a massive leap that is both risky and unnecessary. ... Perhaps what's needed from the FDC is better guidance in advance about what the organic growth chart of chapter organizations should look like ...." He later commented:
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It's not logical to assume that because the WMF has funds it should in some way equitably distribute those funds around the world. Supporting chapter operations, and funding offices and staff in dozens of countries, is not the chief object of the money raised from donors. We need to get away from the belief that chapters are unquestionably the best use of movement resources. There is a place for outreach, publicity, and targeted educational programs. But the WMF is best situated to supplement the efforts begun by volunteers, in the same way the WMF itself was created and has grown. It would be a poor use of movement funds indeed if the WMF decided to pour money into infant chapters with minimal development and fuzzy strategic goals. That's a recipe for, at an absolute minimum, good-faith mismanagement and waste of scarce donor resources. Avoiding this path was a very wise decision by the trustees, and I only hope they remain resolute ...
”
The WMF's Head of Global South Relationships, Asaf Bartov, who is also in charge of the (non-FDC) grants program, accused Derryck Chan of writing "a letter full of wikidrama", and of following this up "with a direct accusation of our team of 'foul play' ". Just before the publication of this edition of the Signpost, Deryck Chan issued an apology and partial retraction:
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I apologise that my intentionally harsh words in the original mail and subsequent public replies may have been construed as bad-faith personal attacks against certain members of WMF staff and the FDC. In particular, I recognise that my anecdotal use of the words "foul play" may have hurt people's feelings; I apologise and retract this remark. I have already filed a formal complaint in my personal capacity to the FDC ombudsmen. I'm determined to step away from Wikimedia administration matters, so I won't comment any more on this matter.
The Signpost understands that much of the frustration in Hong Kong rested on the fact that upon the closing date for applications the chapter was deemed "eligible". Referring to the reasons for the subsequent ineligibility, Asaf Bartov said: "I would like to stress that this is not a minor point of slight tardiness or some missing receipt—this is actual mismanagement of funds and does indeed reflect on WMHK's ability to handle large grants." However, he stressed that there was no bad faith on the part of the chapter, or "anything illicit or ethically improper".
Dariusz Jemielniak, the FDC's volunteer chair, told the Signpost that the chapter subsequently "did not return unused funds from a past grant or ask for a reallocation of funds as was requested by staff". With characteristic diplomacy, he said: "The Grantmaking team can—and will—improve in its communication with the chapters and entities, help them understand the significance of staying in compliance throughout the FDC process, and coordinate better with the WMF Finance team to ensure that entities maintain eligibility throughout the proposal process. This is a significant learning for the Grants team overall."
However, the critical point he made to us was that "the issues of compliance were not the critical reasons for the FDC’s recommendations on [the HK and Czech] proposals. Questions about WMHK’s proposal related to programmatic impact, sustainable growth, internal governance and the capacity of volunteers to manage a grant of the requested size, needed face-to-face deliberations before a recommendation could be made."
Moving forward
In a statement to the Signpost, Dariusz Jemielniak said that a "letter of intent" will now be an early point of contact between applicants and the FDC from the next round onwards, "which will allow the FDC staff to reach out to interested entities in a much more informed and intentional manner during the months that precede the ... deadline. The FDC staff intends to work closely with the entities and will set up IRC chats and other conversations to help entities decide if annual plan funding through the FDC or project grants through the Wikimedia Grants Program is the better option for their needs."
"While there will be every attempt made by the FDC staff and the FDC to clarify the process and help navigate its intricacies, ... the FDC process is demanding and rigorous for a reason: we are privileged as a movement to have the resources we have, and we should be thoughtful and responsible about how we ensure programmatic impact through these resources. This is what the FDC proposals are assessed on, ... Around the world, many all-volunteer organisations that hire their first staff receive much smaller grants than what we have already seen requested (and granted) in this first year of the FDC process." He told us that because FDC allocations provide general, or unrestricted, funds to entities, so the level of review is even higher than for project-specific funds. "It’s important for our movement to recognise the responsibility we have to each other and to our donors in order to ensure transparency and accountability."
WMF Trustee Jan-Bart de Vrees told the mailing-list: "I think that WMHK should reapply to the GAC (because I do think we need to fund them as a movement) with a modest proposal (and reading Asaf's long mail it seems to me that this is a much better place for their proposal. I just wonder how we can ensure that affiliates apply to the right funding the first time around. Of course a condition to any funding is being in compliance)." His encouragement to apply through the GAC was echoed by Trustee Samuel Klein, who wrote "Support for the first stages of growth should be handled differently from later infrastructure support. ... More continuous feedback is needed. Eligibility should be simple and unchanging throughout the process. Whether or not a proposal is approved, there should be follow-up support to help applicants figure out next steps."
Editor's note: the author is a member of the Foundation's volunteer Grant Advisory Committee, which makes funding recommendations to the WMF outside the ambit of the FDC.
The first-ever GLAM "boot camp" was held in Washington, D.C. this week, with 17 Wikimedians in attendance. The camp comes on the heels of GLAM-Wiki 2013 in London, which will be covered in the Signpost's Wikizine section in May.
The three-day conference was organized by one of the two regional chapters in the United States, Wikimedia DC, along with Dominic McDevitt-Parks and Lori Byrd Phillips, who have participated in the project as the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration and the United States Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) respectively, in the past.
The boot camp focused on the GLAM-Wiki projects in the United States and Canada. It aimed to have an "honest conversation" about where these projects have succeeded and where they have failed, so that the participants would be able to improve their own projects in the future. As such, the sessions revolved around the history of GLAM-Wiki, how to approach GLAMs, what GLAMs think of Wikipedia collaborations, and how to apply for grants and other related WMF funding. There were also breakout sessions on how to improve the GLAM pages to show to institutions, and tutorial workshops on editing the Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.
Most sessions were taken extremely well by the participants. In particular, the tutorial in editing Wikisource, which was entirely new to all but three people, generated a large amount of interest and led to the partial transcription of The Yellow Wall Paper. Participants also discussed the problems of GLAM-Wiki, which notably included the Gibraltarpedia controversy from last year; similar COI concerns may also be spreading to the German Wikipedia. The discussions occasionally branched out beyond purely GLAM-related concerns. One person, who works for an institution in the United States and has improved an article related to his employer (while being transparent on the talk page of the article involved), asked what has become a central question in the paid editing debate: "what happens if I use my skills as a Wikipedia editor to go to a GLAM institution and offer to improve the related article, even if I am paid?"
The benefits of GLAM-Wiki partnerships took precedence, though, as these reasons are necessary to convince a GLAM to work with an editor, and most attendees were not affiliated with a GLAM. One of the largest benefits was Wikipedia's global reach, with more than 500 million unique users a month, which can be invaluable in increasing access to a museum's holdings. For example, the German Federal Archives collaboration ended in 2010 after about 100,000 images were uploaded, but this was despite the vast benefits (PDF) the partnership brought to the table, including very accurate error reports and a vast increase in page views and revenue from image licensing. In fact, part of the reason was that the collaboration was too successful: the institution saw a 230% increase in research requests without a related increase in employees to handle them. There was also the downside of the digital world, in that many simply disregarded the Creative Commons share alike licenses when using the images outside of Wikimedia projects.
A variant of Joy's Law was also brought up as a benefit by Michael Edson, the director of web and new media strategy at the Smithsonian: "the person who knows the most about that object...you can't find them. You don't know who they are. But if you do it right, they can find you."
These lessons, and teaching them to interested Wikimedians, are key in the growth of the GLAM-Wiki project and its goal of having a self-sustaining project by the end of 2013, something that was aimed for but not attained under Liam Wyatt's 2011 Foundation Cultural Partnerships Fellowship and Phillips' 2012 Foundation position.
Editor's note: the author attended the conference with financial assistance from Wikimedia DC, which in turn was funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Update, 2 May: Dominic McDevitt-Parks has also published a recap of the event on the GLAM-US mailing list.
In brief
Jimbo Award: The "Jimbo Award", which Jimmy Wales awarded to two editors at Wikimania 2011 and 2012, has been brought up again this week when it was discovered that he had not paid either editor the promised US$5000 reward. The 2011 winner has, according to Wales, been waiting for him to make a trip to Kazakhstan to award the money in person. Demmy, the 2012 winner, had been in contact with Wales in January, but Wales did not reply to subsequent emails. The next recorded contact was last Friday, after a journalist, possibly Kevin Morris of the Daily Dot, contacted Wales about the matter. Demmy told the Signpost that "$5000 is not a small cash for somebody like myself ... after Jimmy's initial promise, I put in an application for Wikimania 2013 scholarship ... I was accepted but had to decline because Jimmy's promise was not forthcoming and I had until April 19 to accept or decline. The money would have helped me cover some expenses while I would be gone and of course while I would be there."
Update, 16 June: Demmy has received the money and stated that the majority of the issues in transferring the money were on "his end", not Wales'.
Wikimedia Foundation election process begins: The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs the Wikimedia sites' infrastructure, has published a call for candidates for its 2013 elections to the Board of Trustees and the Funds Dissemination Committee.
French chapter steps back from payment processing: Wikimedia France's vice-president Christophe Henner announced last Tuesday that the chapter will no longer process donations raised in France, a privilege the Foundation has extended to only a few chapters. The reason, he said, concerned French regulations for tax-deductibility that make it difficult to transfer more than 50% of locally raised funds to an international organization; these funds are now more than 50% due to the success of fundraising in France. "In the coming month, WMFr will work with [the] WMF on explaining to French donors that they can't ask for tax deduction next year ... Late 2012, WMFr board decided to start looking for external funding sources. Removing ourselves will also allow us to dedicate more resources to that activity."
Affcom update: The Affiliations Committee (Affcom) has published their 2012 annual report.
Wikimania 2014: The location of Wikimania 2014 has been announced: it will be held in London. The bidding process was unusual in that the budget had to be reduced to 20–25% of the original figure, which was at a maximum of £804,500, and the committee went so far as to consider re-opening the bidding process to different cities who could provide a less "costly and complicated [conference with a] simpler core budget and lower-cost options for attendees."
Categorisation of women novelists sparks media debate on Wikipedia's sexism
Journalists have cited Wikipedia's gender imbalance as a major factor in the women's categorisation controversy.
On 24 April 2013, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published what turned out to be an influential op-ed in the New York Times. In her piece, "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists", Filipacchi explained that she had just—
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... noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the "American Novelists" category to the "American Women Novelists" subcategory. ... The intention appears to be to create a list of "American Novelists" on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men.
”
Noting that there wasn't a category for "American men novelists", Filipacchi said that readers looking at the category listing for "American novelists" might not even be aware that women had been excluded. It is "small, easily fixable things like this", she argued, "that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world."
Other publications weigh in
Her point was picked up and endorsed by other mainstream publications including –
These writers generally expressed incomprehension at why even the most minor male novelists remained listed in Wikipedia's "American novelists" category, while major American novelists such as Harper Lee were moved to a subcategory purely on the basis of their gender. The Independent quoted Caroline Criado-Perez of feminist website "The Women's Room":
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It perpetuates the idea that men are the default and don't need to be marked in any way, whereas women are still seen as the outliers. If it is a prominent woman, it is a special case; it is a really Victorian attitude and shocking to see in 2013. It exemplifies how far we have to go for women just to be as accepted as men are; as the default.
”
Sarah Ditum, writing for the New Statesman, pointed out that Wikipedia appeared to sift Victorian novelists the same way as American novelists:
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It's not just America which is to be sifted by sex. I took a look at Victorian Novelists, and there you can find a single subcategory: Victorian Women Novelists. While some women get to sit in the main section, many don't — including George Eliot. George Eliot, arguably both the finest novelist and the most Victorian of all Victorian novelists, tucked away in a feminine dependency of literary history. No such fears of perverse classification for Hardy or Dickens, of course: Victorian Male Novelists doesn't even exist as a category, because to be a man is to be neutral of gender in this system. It doesn't feel like we've shaken off all that much of the sexism which caused Mary Anne Evans to publish Middlemarch under a male pseudonym, does it?
”
"Revenge editing"
American novelist Amanda Filipacchi, whose Op-Ed in the New York Times, titled "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists", kicked off the ongoing media debate on 24 April.
The controversy deepened when Filipacchi published a follow-up in the New York Times on 28 April (this also appeared in the paper edition), reiterating her earlier points and noting that her Wikipedia biography as well as Wikipedia articles related to her and her work had come in for unfavourable attention from Wikipedians:
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As soon as the Op-Ed article appeared, unhappy Wikipedia editors pounced on my Wikipedia page and started making alterations to it, erasing as much as they possibly could without (I assume) technically breaking the rules. They removed the links to outside sources, like interviews of me and reviews of my novels. Not surprisingly, they also removed the link to the Op-Ed article. At the same time, they put up a banner at the top of my page saying the page needed "additional citations for verifications." Too bad they'd just taken out the useful sources.
In 24 hours, there were 22 changes to my page. Before that, there had been 22 changes in four years. Thursday night, a kind soul went in there and put back the deleted sources. The Wiki editors instantly took them out again.
I knew my page might take a beating. But at least I'm back in the "American Novelists" category, along with many other women.
Welcome to the age of "revenge editing." The edits didn't stop at Filipacchi's page. Edits were also made to pages about her novels, stripping content from them on the grounds that they were overly self-promotional (a big Wikipedia no-no.) One editor ... even started editing the pages devoted to Filipacchi's parents, and slashed huge swaths from a page about the media conglomerate Hachette-Filipacchi, whose chairman emeritus happens to be Filipacchi's father, Daniel Filipacchi. As is usually the case with Wikipedia, high-profile "revenge editing" clearly motivated by animus tends to draw a lot of attention. A frequent result: ludicrous "edit wars" in which successive revisions are undone in rapid succession. ...
Wikipedia's saving grace is that all the edit wars—all the ugly evidence of "revenge editing"—is preserved for eternity for anyone curious enough to investigate in the "talk pages" that reveal precisely how Wikipedia's knowledge is constructed. ... the vast majority of the anti-Filipacchi edits [were] made by just one person, a Wikipedia editor who goes by the user-name "Qworty."
”
Leonard then quoted various talk page contributions by Qworty that he felt reflected very poorly on Wikipedia:
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Wow! We've got Judith "weapons of mass destruction" Miller, penis comparisons, dog feces and accusations that Filipacchi "sent thugs" after Wikipedia editors, all popping up in the context of an apoplectic defense by one Wikipedia editor of actions that other Wikipedia editors labeled "revenge editing." There's a lot of anger here (not to mention an unhealthy fixation with excrement!). Call me persnickety, but reading Qworty's comments did not give me the greatest faith in Wikipedia's internal process for building an encyclopedia of human knowledge.
”
Both Andrew Leonard in Salon and James Gleick in The New York Review of Books stated that a large number of recategorisations performed by a single contributor, named by Gleick as User:Johnpacklambert, had been responsible for precipitating the crisis.
In his article, Gleick reviewed User:Johnpacklambert's edits in some detail, and gave John an opportunity to put his point of view:
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Lambert vehemently disputes suggestions that he is motivated by sexism (or racism, as the case may be). He cites principles of Wikipedia categorization: arguing, for example, that huge categories should be broken up and "diffused" because they become useless for navigation. "This whole hullabaloo is really missing the point," he told me. "The people who are making a big deal about this are not being up-front about what happens if we do not diffuse categories." Others argued that laypeople are simply misunderstanding the purpose of a big category like American novelists. "It is really a holding ground for people who have yet to be categorized into a more specific sub-cat," said a user called Obi-Wan Kenobi. "It's not some sort of club that you have to be a part of."
”
Gleick added that the problem seemed to be "more general and pervasive than most had originally thought", pointing out that African-American and other non-white writers also regularly found themselves "diffused" from the default category to subcategories. He gave the example of Maya Angelou—Gleick found that her biography was categorised in African-American writers, African-American women poets, and American women poets, but not American poets or American writers.
NPR also covered the story, featuring an interview with Wikimedia Foundation employee Ryan Kaldari, who said:
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Wikipedia does have problems with sexism because, as a lot of people know, only about 10 percent or less of the editors at Wikipedia are women. And so a lot of times there's this subconscious, white, male, privileged sexism that exists on Wikipedia that isn't really acknowledged.
In this latest piece, Filipacchi took issue with the assertion made by Leonard and Gleick the day before, that a single editor—User:Johnpacklambert, according to Gleick—was to blame for the controversy. Listing a number of edits made to women novelists' biographies in Wikipedia over the past few months, with dates and the names or IP addresses of the editors who made them, Filipacchi showed that User:Johnpacklambert was only the latest in a line of editors who had recategorised major women novelists in the manner she had described in her op-ed.
In the process, Filipacchi also rebutted claims made by Liz Henry in a widely-tweeted post on bookmaniac.org, titled "Journalists don't understand Wikipedia sometimes". Henry, stating that she was "a bit annoyed at the facile reporting that does not seem to take into account the complexity of how information gets added to Wikipedia", had claimed in her post that two of the novelists named by Filipacchi, Donna Tartt and Amy Tan, had in reality never been in the "American novelists" category, and thus had never been removed. In response, Filipacchi provided verifiable dates and times when they were so removed, along with the names of the editors making the edits.
Filipacchi noted that User:Johnpacklambert had done "something particularly interesting and annoying" after her biography had had the American novelists category restored to it: he removed the category again, and instead added Filipacchi to a new category he had just created: "American humor novelists". The change was undone, and at the time of writing, Filipacchi's biography is categorised among American novelists in Wikipedia.
Yuri Gadyukin: hoax with a difference
In a piecelisted by The Verge among the week's best writing on the web, Kevin Morris of The Daily Dot illuminated the unusual background of the Yuri Gadyukin hoax, which was discovered and deleted from Wikipedia in early March. The hoax, detected by Yaroslav Blanter, had remained undiscovered for three years and seven months.
It turned out that the Wikipedia and IMDB articles for Gadyukin were part of a viral marketing campaign for a faux documentary project by film makers Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker.
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The hoax that fooled the largest encyclopedia and Internet movie database on the planet for nearly four years began when Gavin Boyter and Guy Ducker stumbled into a Belgian restaurant in London in 2002. They were tired. Boyter was an inexperienced director who would sometimes shoot reams of footage in a single day. Along with Ducker—who has editing credits on more than 20 films—he'd just passed the whole day cutting down footage for his first film, Anniversary.
The drinks and exhaustion sparked their imagination. They tossed out fantastic hypotheticals, wondering what kind of director would "shoot an insane amount of material, more material than anyone could ever watch," as Ducker later recalled. "What kind of person would shoot an endless film, just never stop shooting?"
The two friends were forging a fascinating character—a fictional marriage of legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and control-freak geniuses like Stanley Kubrick, an archetypal director slowly creeping into madness. Or as Ducker described him, "a slightly psychotic person. And a slightly manipulative person."
They were creating Yuri Gadyukin.
”
Ducker explained that the viral campaign was "a way of us starting to tell a story, starting to create the world, while in the meantime we waited for people to give us the money. We were determined not be to be stopped from getting that. You have to make sure nobody stops you. That's the key to making a film."
Yuri Gadyukin may well survive the deletion of his Wikipedia and IMDB biographies—the film project is still on.
In brief
Churnalism: The arstechnica website reported on a new plagiarism detection tool on 24 April that enables users to check whether media stories have been copied from press releases—or from Wikipedia.
Wikidata a huge step: An article published on ghacks.net on 26 April noted that all Wikipedias can now make use of Wikidata in their articles.
Photo donation to Wikipedia now easier than ever: An article on Ubergizmo.com released on 29 April announced a new app released by Wikimedia Commons for iOS and Android devices that makes it easier to upload photos from a mobile device. Using the app, one can tag, title, and upload images through their account, which must be registered in advance. The app is available from the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.
Wikipedia "Echo" making Wikipedia more social: On 30 April, The Daily Dotreported on the introduction of Wikipedia's new notification system, "Echo": a small box displayed near your user ID at the top of your Wikipedia window that notifies you when you have new messages or other activity on Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales in the news: Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, has been prominently featured in BBC News this week for his statement that "boring" university lectures should be a footnote in history. As stated by the BBC, thanks in part to Wales' experience as a university student, he believes that "the traditional university lecture should have been condemned decades ago and replaced with an online video recording that can be stopped and started."
Various Ultimania companion books for Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy games seen at a bookstore. The list of video game companion books by Japanese publisher Square Enix is now featured.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted between April 21 and 27, 2013.
Featured articles
Nine featured articles were promoted this week.
Jane Cobden (nom) by Brianboulton. Cobden (1851–1947) was a Liberal politician and proponent of women's rights, elected in 1889 to the inaugural London County Council.
Albatrellus subrubescens (nom) by Sasata. Albatrellus subrubescens is a fungus found in Asia, Europe, and North America. The mushrooms are mildly poisonous.
George S. Patton slapping incidents (nom) by Ed!. In August 1943, George S. Patton (1885-1945) was a lieutenant general in the United States Army. He slapped two soldiers under his command in separate incidents. The incidents were detrimental to Patton's career.
James B. Longacre (nom) by Wehwalt. James Barton Longacre (1794–1869) was the fourth Chief Engraver of the United States Mint. The Indian Head cent, the Shield nickel, and the Flying Eagle cent coins were among Longacre's designs.
Famous Fantastic Mysteries (nom) by Mike Christie. Famous Fantastic Mysteries was published from 1939 to 1953. It included works of science fiction and fantasy. Authors published in the magazine included G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, and H. Rider Haggard.
Calostoma cinnabarinum (nom) by Squeamish Ossifrage. Calostoma cinnabarinum is a fungus commonly known as "stalked puffball-in-aspic" or "gelatinous stalked-puffball" among other names. It grows in the Americas and in Asia.
William Henry Bury (nom) by DrKiernan. William Henry Bury (1859–1889) was a convict who was accused of being the serial killer called "Jack the Ripper". Orphaned at a young age, Bury moved to London in 1887, where he married Ellen Elliot. Ellen was later murdered by Bury, who was hanged in 1889 for his crime.
California State Route 67 (nom) by Rschen7754. California State Route 67 is a state highway in San Diego County. A portion of the highway is noted for its high number of traffic accidents.
Zong massacre (nom) by Celuici. Approximately 142 African slaves were killed by the crew of the ship Zong in the year 1781 after the ship's supplies of drinkable water became low. The ship's owners later made an insurance claim about the loss of the slaves. The incident stimulated the abolitionist movement, and was commemorated in 2007 during the 200th anniversary of legislation that outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire.
American portraitist and engraver James B. Longacre (1794 – 1869) is the subject of a new featured article. Above are United States double eagle coins which he designed.
Featured lists
Three featured lists were promoted this week.
List of international cricket five-wicket hauls by Abdul Qadir (nom) by Sahara4u. Pakistani cricketer Abdul Qadir took 17 five-wicket hauls during his career, a feat that no more than 40 bowlers have ever achieved. Debuting in 1977, Qadir participated in the 1983 Cricket World Cup, and as of 2012, he is twenty-sixth overall among all-time combined five-wicket haul takers.
List of Square Enix companion books (nom) by PresN. Japanese video game company Square Enix has produced a number of strategy guide books for many of their games that were focused on artwork, developer interviews, and background information on the fictional worlds and characters in the games rather than on gameplay details. Perfect Works was the first series to be accompanied by these books, and since then, many others have been issued for most of their franchises.
List of people on United States banknotes (nom) by Godot13. Fifty-three people have appeared on the banknotes of the United States, mostly historical figures related to the history of the country. The list of people includes several presidents, cabinet members, founders and military leaders. Since their introduction, the creation, design and deployment of these banknotes has been supervised by the Secretary of the Treasury, with input from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
The list of five-wicket hauls by Pakistani cricketer Abdul Qadir is now featured. Five of those five-wicket hauls happened at National Stadium, Karachi, pictured above.
Featured pictures
This portrait of Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, is now featured.
Three featured pictures were promoted this week.
Horns (nom) created and nominated by Muhammad Mahdi Karim. An animal horn is often a curved or spiral projection. Horns are often used for defense against predators and for fighting members of the same species. They may also be used as thermal radiators.
Lake Bonneville map (nom) created by Fallschirmjäger and nominated by TCO. Lake Bonneville was a prehistoric lake in North America. It was more than 300 meters (1,000 feet) deep.
Featured topic
One featured topic was promoted this week.
Phedina (nom) nominated by Jimfbleak. Phedina is a genus of birds that includes only the Brazza's Martin and the Mascarene Martin. The topic includes two featured articles and one good article.
Brazza's Martin is a featured article in the new featured topic Phedina.
This week, we traveled to the Japanese Wikipedia's WikiProject Baseball for perspectives from a version of Wikipedia that treats WikiProjects as their own unique namespace (プロジェクト:) independent of "Wikipedia:". WikiProject Baseball was started in November 2005 to cover the game of baseball, including leagues in Japan, the United States, and elsewhere. The project's members noted that language barriers create difficulties in contributing between the English and Japanese Wikipedias, a challenge we also encountered in preparing this interview for publication. We interviewed もきゅもきゅー, CHELSEA ROSE, and Num.
もきゅもきゅー: The reason for joining was simple, I like baseball of course. My favorite baseball team in Japan is Chiba Lotte Marines and in America is the Detroit Tigers.
CHELSEA ROSE: Although I do not directly participate in the project, I am involved in editing the project's related articles. Enthusiasm has gradually faded, but there is still some interest. I was a fan of the Osaka Kintetsu Buffaloes in the past. I don't have a favorite team in MLB (I find the lack of bunting strange) but I think it is interesting to watch purely as a sport.
Num: I joined because I have been involved in the sport of baseball. I feel that many happy baseball fans who love baseball should get a good understanding of the rules, information that is fundamental to Wikipedia. I favor no team in particular, although I may go to see Yomiuri Giants and Saitama Seibu Lions since they are relatively local.
How does WikiProject Baseball keep track of its articles? Does the project tag or assess the quality of articles? Is this standardized across the entire Japanese Wikipedia?
CHELSEA ROSE: It's on a project-by-project basis. We primarily work on efforts that lead to the improvement of the articles, such as those mentioned above.
Num: We do standardize some of the terms used in the articles and the abbreviations for teams.
Does WikiProject Baseball collaborate with any other Japanese-language WikiProjects? Is there any overlap in the membership of WikiProject Baseball with that of other sports projects? Are there any resources the sports projects don't currently share that they should?
CHELSEA ROSE: I personally have been participating in the soccer player project. But this is just what I happened to come to participate in at that time, I do not necessarily have a focus on both. Even if they do not collaborate, those who are involved in baseball on a daily basis seem to focus a lot on the articles. Since there is no communication between the other languages, I do not know what's right even in the Japanese version.
Do you read or edit baseball articles in other languages? Has the Japanese Wikipedia benefited from translating material from other languages of Wikipedia? Are there any important articles on the Japanese Wikipedia that are currently neglected by the English Wikipedia?
Num: I worked on 振り逃げ (swing relief), which has attracted attention due to the trouble that occurred in a game in Japan. The article has been greatly revised and content has been enhanced. The English version is uncaught third strike and has been retouched with reference to the Japanese version.
What are the project's most urgent needs? Can contributors from the English Wikipedia help the Japanese WikiProject Baseball? How can Japanese Wikipedians contribute to the English Wikipedia's articles about baseball?
もきゅもきゅー: The challenge is to enrich various articles. To tell the truth, more and more members would be nice. I feel if Japanese editors do not know English, writing English sentences is difficult since translation sites for Japanese to English are poor. New editors, before coming to help, should write to users of the Japanese version for help or try to find a someone in Japan from English-speaking countries like America or Australia. If you find a good translation site, use it. I sincerely hope and want to write a good version of these for the Japanese version.
CHELSEA ROSE: You become the talk of the whole article baseball related project or rather, according to the author's official policy that the Japanese version of Wikipedia, and of course, to determine information, whether it is a necessary source within it, we sift through I think that is important. Articles such as athletes, seems difficult priority sides tend Eteshite so mad. To contribute to the English version myself is difficult, because I am not good at English, but editors from the English version who are skillful at Japanese are welcome. There is a growing interest in the MLB in Japan in recent years, so I'd like to thank the authors of the articles regarding the MLB. Thank you all!
Next week, we'll mix our scientific disciplines. Until then, discover the mysteries of life in the archive.
After the special report on article popularity published in February, the WP:TOP25 and WP:5000 reports have continued to chronicle the most popular Wikipedia articles on a weekly basis. For the most recently reviewed week (22–28 April), we see that it was generally a slow week, dominated by pop culture, previous entries to the list, as well as Google Doodles and Reddit threads.
For the week of 22 to 28 April, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
The First Lady of Song, the Queen of Jazz; she of the 3-octave range and 13 Grammy wins received a Google Doodle in honour of what would have been her 96th birthday on April 25.
As per usual in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the third installment in the Iron Man series was released internationally a week early, triggering interest before its release in its home country on May 3.
An attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany on the Israeli Olympic team by the Palestinian group Black September. Most views came on April 25, cause is not certain.
Produced by schlockmeister Eli Roth, who also directed the pilot, this predictably gory werewolf series, based on a novel, was released in its entirety via Netflix on April 19.
Despite narrowly losing the weekend top spot to Michael Bay's sociopathon Pain & Gain, this Tom Cruise star vehicle still handily beat it in the Wikipedia stakes, garnering more than twice its views.
Country music singer and onetime Mr. Tammy Wynette who died on April 26
Notes:
This list is derived from the WP:5000 report. It excludes the Wikipedia main page (and "wiki"), non-article pages, and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views).
Standard removals this week include G-force (continuing popularity of this article, which jumped in June 2012, has been without explanation) and Cat anatomy (explanation still unknown for its continuing high view counts)
Specific removals this week (those articles for which no reason for any sudden popularity could be located):
Daniel Luke Barth (likely automated views of a vanity BLP, as judged by subjects excitement about his accomplishment on Twitter.[2])
The Sexology case, which was covered in detail in last week's "Arbitration report", closed shortly after publication with no changes. Two cases remain open.
In the case, brought by Lecen, an editor is accused of systematically skewing several articles involving former Argentine president Juan Manuel de Rosas to portray a brutal dictator as a democratic leader, in keeping with the political motives of Argentine "nationalists" or "revisionists".
The evidence stage was scheduled to close 12 April 2013, the workshop stage on 19 April, and a proposed decision was scheduled for 26 April.
This case was brought to the Committee by KillerChihuahua, who alleges the discussion over this American political group has degenerated into incivility. Evidence for the case was due by 20 March 2013, the workshop was to close on 27 March, and a proposed decision was scheduled for 3 April.
Other requests and committee action
Arbitration clerk promotions:Callanecc, Hahc21, Ks0stm, and X!were promoted to full Arbitration Committee clerk positions, effective immediately.
Audit subcommittee appointments: Guerillero, MBisanz, and Richwaleswere appointed as community representatives to the Audit Subcommittee for one-year terms, from 1 May 2013 to 30 June 2014.
Audit subcommittee annual report: The audit subcommittee has published its annual report for the period ending April 2013.
Clarification request: WP:ARBPIA/Jerusalem: Advice was sought by Sm8900 over a committee-mandated RFC that appeared to have bogged down.
Clarification request: Scientology:Prioryman seeks to clarify the scope of discretionary sanctions in Scientology-related articles.
Clarification request: TimidGuy ban appeal: A 29 April 2013 request, initiated by MastCell requests the release of voting information for the rejection of Will Beback's ban appeal, or failing that, an explanation of why such information cannot be provided.
Clarification request: TimidGuy ban appeal: A 5 April 2013 request, brought by IRWolfie-, seeking to clarify the relationship between privacy and conflict of interest in a situation where employees of a transcendental meditation institute may be editing an article related to that institute, was closed, with the advice that a tension between anonymous editing and conflict of interest (COI) disclosures does exist, that editors should disclose COI on a topic in advance of editing, that editors with specialized knowledge about a topic can be valuable in writing the article, and that administrators at WP:MED may be of assistance in evaluating any civil POV pushing.
Clarification request: Discretionary sanctions appeals procedure: A request to clarify the appeal process for discretionary sanctions warnings was filed by Sandstein.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis
Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.
The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.
"A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking"
A paper[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. The sample of scientific items is made of the entries in the ACM digital library including more than 100 k papers, 150 k authors and 35 k keywords. However, only a tiny subset of these could be found in English Wikipedia pages (the authors considered all Wikipedia pages in the English edition which contain at least two mentions of any of the scientific items in the sample).
The academic reputation is calculated based on three criteria: frequency of appearance, number of citations each item receives from the others, and PageRank calculated on the citation network. The Wikipedia ranking is based on three popularity measures of all the pages that have mentioned the item: number of mentions, sum over PageRank of all the mentioning pages, and sum over in-degrees of all the mentioning pages in Wikipedia's hyperlink network.
These 3 times 3 choices give 9 combinations of academic ranking and Wikipedia ranking for 3 types of scientific entities (authors, papers, keywords). All these 27 pairs are shown to be correlated according to Spearman's Rank Correlation, indicating that in general Wikipedia mentions are non-randomly driven by scientific reputation. However, most of the combinations are less significant. Surprisingly, the most relevant Wikipedia ranking criterion turns out to be the pure total number of mentions, compared to the more sophisticated ones, i.e., PageRank and in-degree measures.
In a separate part, authors define two sets of scientific items, those which are mentioned in Wikipedia, and those which are not mentioned at all (the latter is larger in size by a factor of 2 for keywords, 100 for authors, and 300 for papers). They show that for all 3 types, the set of items which are mentioned in Wikipedia have a better academic rank on average.
1970s UNESCO debate applied to Wikipedia's systemic bias in the case of Cambodia
According to the author, the Angkor period dominates Cambodian historiography as well as tourist attention in the country, corresponding to an unevenness in the quality of Wikipedia articles
An article[3] in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology rated the quality of Wikipedia articles on the history of Cambodia (defined as those linked in the corresponding navbox, using four measures: 1) the article's ratio of the number of citations per the number of words, 2) the number of editors who have commented on its talk page, 3) the quality of the cited sources, rated in five categories ("traditional reference" like print encyclopedias, "news reports" including both newspapers and news websites such as CNN, "academic periodicals", "books", and "miscellany" like reports by governments or NGOs, or personal websites) and 4) "the number of unique authors cited", assuming that articles which are based on a larger variety of perspectives are of higher quality. The findings are summarized as follows:
The early history of Cambodia is represented by an extremely weak article, but there is an improvement in the articles dealing with the early kingdoms of Cambodia. The improvement ends abruptly with articles on the 'dark age' of Cambodia, the French Protectorate, the Japanese occupation, and early postindependence periods being of a much lower quality. Afterward, the quality picks up again with especially good articles on the American intervention in Cambodia, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, and the People's Republic of Kampuchea. However, the quality does not last; as we near contemporary times, the articles take another turn for the worse.
From this, the author concludes that "the Wikipedia community is unconsciously mimicking the general historiography of the country", in particular a glorification of Angkor and other early kingdoms at the cost of later periods, and observes a "continuing dominance of the traditional historiographical narrative of Cambodian history in Wikipedia."
The subsequent section of the paper tries to put these results into the context of the historical debates in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a suggested remedy for problems with the under-representation of the developing world in the media, put forth by a UNESCO commission in the MacBride report (1980):
Wikipedia provides access—it is free to use by anyone with an Internet connection, and print versions can also be distributed. But the whole thrust of the NWICO argument is that content matters and those who create content matter perhaps even more, with the commission stressing that countries needed to 'achieve self-reliance in communication capacities and policies' ... Contrary to popular belief, in the new 'information age' content is, once again, the preserve of the few, not the many, and a geographically concentrated few at that.
The author's argument is somewhat weakened by asserting erroneously that "there exists no Cambodian-language Wikipedia", but generally aligns with other quantitative research that has found a geographic unevenness of coverage in Wikipedia. The author is an information studies professor at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University and previously published a related paper in the same journal examining the Wikipedia article History of the Philippines, reviewed in the August issue: "The limits of amateur NPOV history".
Reasons why wikilinks are added and removed
Julia Preusse, Jerome Kunegis, Matthias Thimm, Thomas Gottron and Steffen Staab investigate[4] mechanisms of changes in a wiki that are of structural nature, i.e., which are a direct result of the wiki's linking structure. They consider if the addition and removal of internal links between pages can be predicted using just information about the network connecting these articles. The study's innovation lies in considering the removal of links, which account for a high proportion of removals and reverts. The authors performed an empirical study on Wikipedia, stating that traditional indicators of structural change used in the link analysis literature can be classified into four classes, which indicate growth, decay, stability and instability of links. These methods were then employed to identify the underlying reasons for individual additions and removals of knowledge links.
The network created by links between articles in Wikipedia is characterized by preferential attachment. Prior work on social networks has identified a phenomenon called "liability of newness", in which new connections are more likely to be broken than older ones. To provide a better predictive model of link evolution the team considered five hypotheses:
Preferential attachment: The number of adjacent nodes is a good indicator for link addition.
Embedding : The embeddedness of a link is suitable to predict the appearance of links and the non-disappearance of existing links.
Reciprocity: The presence of a link makes the addition of a link in the opposite direction more likely and the removal of a reciprocal link less likely.
Liability of Newness: Old age of an edge or a node is a good indicator for link persistence.
Instability The less stable two nodes are, the less stable the link connecting them is, or would be if it does not exist.
To test these hypotheses, they created networks based on the history of the mainspace articles till 2011 of the top five Wikipedias after the English one. For example, in the French Wikipedia, 41.7 million links were added and 17.3 million removed during that time. The data was used to create a link creation predictor and a link removal predictor. These were then evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.
The results were that Preferential attachment and Embedding are good indicators of growth. Liability of Newness did not turn out to be a good indicator of link removal, but more of article instability. Reciprocity is also an indicator of growth, but is not as significant since most links in a wiki are not reciprocated.
Generation Z judges [[Generation Z]], questioning role of amphetamines
An article[5] in the Journal of Information Science, titled "Understanding trust formation in digital information sources: The case of Wikipedia", explores the criteria used by students to evaluate the credibility of Wikipedia articles. It contains an overview of various earlier studies about credibility judgments of Wikipedia articles (some of them reviewed previously in this space, example: "Quality of featured articles doesn't always impress readers").
The authors asked "20 second-year undergraduate students and 30 Master’s students" in information studies to first spend 20 minutes reading "a copy of a two-page Wikipedia article on Generation Z, a topic with which students were expected to have some familiarity", and answer an open-ended question explaining how they would judge its trustworthiness. In a subsequent part, the respondents were asked to rank a list of factors for trustworthiness in case of "either (a) the topic of an assignment, or (b) a minor medical condition from which they were suffering". One of the first findings was a "low pre-disposition to use [Wikipedia], possibly suggesting a propensity to distrust, grounded on debates and comments on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia" – possibly to the fact that the example article contained an example of vandalism, a fact highlighted by several respondents (e.g. "started off as a valid entry ... due to citations strengthening this ... however came to the last paragraph and the whole document was marred by the insert of 'writing articles on Wikipedia while on amphetamines' [as purported hobby of Generation Z members]... just feels that you can't trust anything now").
Among the given trustworthiness factors, the following were ranked most highly:
authorship, currency, references, expert recommendation and triangulation/verification, with usefulness just below this threshold. In other words, participants valued having articles that were written by experts on the subject, that were up to date, and that they perceived to be useful (content factors). ... Interestingly these factors all seemed more or less equally important for both contexts, with the exception of references, which for predictable reasons were seen as having greater importance in the context of assignments.
Visualizing the "flow of ideas" on Wikiversity
In a conference paper titled "Analyzing the flow of ideas and profiles of contributors in an open learning community"[6] (see also audience notes from the presentation), the authors construct a graph from the set of revisions of a set of Wikiversity pages, with two kind of edges: 1) "Update edges", linking a page's revision to the directly subsequent revision. These are understood as representing "knowledge flow over the course of the collaborative process on a single wiki page". 2) "Hyperlink edges" between two revisions of different pages with a wikilink between them - but pointing in the opposite direction, because the idea is that they indicate knowledge flowing from the linked page to the linking page. By requiring the source node of a hyperlink edge "as the latest revision of the hyperlinked page at the moment of creation of the target revision", both kinds of links point forward in time, resulting in a two-relational directed acyclic graph (DAG), which is "depicting the knowledge flow over time." After filtering out "redundant" hyperlink edges and attaching authorship information to each node (page revision).
The authors apply this procedure to a set of Wikiversity articles in the area of medicine, starting with v:Gynecological History Taking. The results are interpreted as follows:
the beginning, short after the category medicine was founded, the authors in this category built up the basic structure of the knowledge domain. The main relations and idea flows between the learning materials were established early in the development of the domain. After that the authors have been focusing on elaborating the articles without introducing new important hyperlinks. The overall picture of the learning process in this domain suggests a divergent evolution of ideas after an initial period of mutual fertilization between different topics. This conforms to the idea of groups of learners that followed different interests in the medicine domain with little inter-group collaboration on the creation of new shared learning resource.
The method is subsequently applied to profile the activities of various users.
The authors have integrated these algorithms, including visualization tools, into a "network analytics workbench ... used in the ongoing EU project SISOB which aims to measure the influence of science on society based on the analysis of (social) networks of researchers and created artifacts."
In brief
Wikipedia Vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis:[7] The authors review how Wikipedia and Britannica coverage of topics related to several major corporations has changed in the past 6 years. They find unsurprisingly that Wikipedia coverage is usually much more detailed than that of Britannica; more interestingly, they note that one of the key differences is that Wikipedia focuses more on issues such as corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues, whereas Britannica will focus more on traditional aspects such as financial results. They note that both encyclopedias, while striving towards some form of neutrality, contain non-neutral ("positively and negatively framed") content, although it is more common to find it in Wikipedia. They also note that this content seemed to peak around 2008–2010, and attribute it to the negative views of major corporations common among the general public around that time, whose view was more likely to be represented on Wikipedia than on Britannica, also correlating this with the economic recession. The authors note that increasingly, knowledge available to the general public comes from social media collaboration projects such as Wikipedia, and are doubtful whether more traditional models like that of Britannica have a future. See also earlier coverage of a related paper by the same authors: "Are articles about companies too negative?" and of another where one of them (controversially) argued against the "bright line" rule on conflict of interest editing: "Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals".
Wikipedia uses in learning design: A literature review:[8] presents a relatively useful literature review of publications about the "teaching with Wikipedia" approach. The authors analyzed several scholarly databases (not explaining, however, why the selected ones were chosen and others were not), finding 30 works on related themes, and selecting 24 of those. They provide a number of useful breakdowns (2/3 of the works deal with higher education, 1/3 with secondary, none with primary) and analyze expected learning outcomes (the most popular being learning research methodology), knowledge fields that the papers represented (mostly fields of social science), and an overview of student tasks. While containing few revelations, the paper is a solid example of a literature review of an emerging field, and contains a valuable observation that more research is needed on how Wikipedia is used by elementary school students.
Wikipedia assignment has positive impact on students "research persistence": A paper by two Californian librarians, titled "From Audience to Authorship to Authority: Using Wikipedia to Strengthen Research and Critical Thinking Skills"[9] and presented at the recent conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), describes the results of two case studies "in which Wikipedia was used as the platform for assignments" for students, one of which "had, overall, a positive impact on research persistence" of the students.
Co-authorship patterns around Pope Francis, and Boston bombing views: In his blog,[10] Brian Keegan (known to readers of this research report for his previous research of Wikipedia's coverage of breaking news events) provides a refreshing preview of his upcoming research with visualization of Co-authorship patterns around the Pope Francis article. The Social network analysis produced by factoring edits from 607 editors who worked on the new pope's article and then adds all other articles they collaborated on since. The results which look like abstract artwork show a number of complex patterns in the data. However we will have to wait until the publication of the paper for these to be explained. Keegan does provide a number of teasers but you will have to visit his blog to read these. In another blog post,[11] Keegan examines pageviews of various articles related to the Boston marathon bombings.
Mining content removed from articles on breaking news events. A short paper[12] accepted to the 2013 WWW conference describes a new tool designed for mining the information removed from Wikipedia articles during breaking news events. The Wikipedia Event Reporter identifies "bursts" of editing activity in an article, then uses machine learning techniques to identify sentences from the revision history of the article that were added during these bursts but which are not contained within the current version, and finally displays this information to the user—all in real time! The designers of the tool state that the Event Reporter will be useful for "a journalist or a student studying about history [who wants] a comprehensive view of an event, and not only the socially accepted final interpretation". While Event Reporter looks to be both useful and intriguing, this reviewer challenges the assumptions behind the authors' intended scenario of use. On Wikipedia, information about breaking news events is often removed because it is factually incorrect, not for the "sake of brevity", out of considerations of political correctness, or other (possibly nefarious) social motives. The authors do not address the issue of determining factual accuracy in their paper—hopefully their intended audience (journalists!) will keep that issue in mind if they decide to re-publish the mined information. The reviewer would also like to have seen a performance evaluation of their Vector Machine Classifier, which relies on hand-labelled training data, included in the paper. Nonetheless, this seems to be a fascinating and very powerful piece of software. One cool future direction for the Event Reporter team might be to mine the content of the article talk page during and directly after these bursts as well, and employ the same classification technique to provide the end user with a better sense of why certain content was revised or removed.
Spam on the rise as reason for user blocks: User:Ironholds examined[13] the English Wikipedia's block log from 2006 to 2012 for the stated blocking reasons, and found "spam" being used more and more frequently.
10k birth places and 40k almae matres from Wikipedia biographies, human-vetted: Google has published[14] "a human-judged dataset of two relations about public figures on Wikipedia: nearly 10,000 examples of "place of birth", and over 40,000 examples of "attended or graduated from an institution". Each of these was judged by at least 5 raters, and can be used to train or evaluate relation extraction systems."
How Wikipedia's Google matrix differs for politicians and artists: Continuing the authors' research on the Google matrix of Wikipedia articles and links between them (earlier coverage: 'Wikipedia communities' as eigenvectors of its Google matrix"), an ArXiv preprint studies the "Time evolution of Wikipedia network ranking"[15], finding among other things that "PageRank selection is dominated by politicians while 2DRank, which combines PageRank and CheiRank, gives more accent on personalities of arts".
A Wikipedia search algorithm that emphasizes serendipity: A two-page paper to be presented at the upcoming WWW 2013 [3] conference explores algorithms for "Searching for Interestingness in Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers" [16], or "Serendipitous search" - defined as "when a user with no a priori or totally unrelated intentions interacts with a system and acquires useful information". The authors modify some standard information retrieval metrics by including sentiment analysis and a measure of a page's quality – in the case of Wikipedia, "the number of dispute messages inserted by editors to require revisions", which may be seen as questionable. The resulting two algorithms for ranking search results on both sites are tested for some popular search terms (drawn from the Google Zeitgeist lists), by asking test subjects to rank the results "for relevance, interestingness to the query, and interestingness regardless of the query". In the end, the authors suggest that they be combined into a hybrid system.
Usability study recommends 18-point font for Wikipedia: An "experiment with 28 participants with dyslexia [comparing] reading speed, comprehension, and subjective readability" found "that font size has a significant effect on the readability and the understandability of the text, while line spacing does not". On that basis, the four researchers from Barcelona "recommend using 18-point font size when designing web text for readers with dyslexia.[17]
OpenSym, Wikisym, ClosedSym?: This year the WikiSym conference will be co-located with OpenSym. This marks a step forward from a conference focused mostly on CSCW application of wiki technology to a broader investigation of OpenCulture. This year the conferences will be collocated with Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The WikiSym conference is funded in part by a grant by the WMF. However, as reported last month (Wikimedia funding for Wikisym '13 despite open access concerns), there has been debate about the tension between the requirements of WMF on supporting open access research and the fact that the conference papers will be published by the ACM – a closed access provider. In two subsequent blog posts, the organizers explain why they have not been able[18] to find an open publisher with a reputation comparable to the ACM for the 2013 proceedings, but formulate requirements for a suitable publisher for next year [19].
Provenance graphs: A conference paper by two computer scientists from the University of Newcastle[21] presents code to convert metadata from Wikipedia revision history and user contribution pages (e.g. the author of a particular revision, or articles edited by an editor) into provenance data in the W3C's PROV-DM data model. The graph of revisions and editors is visualized. Code and examples are provided on Github.
^Jennifer Rowley, Frances Johnson: Understanding trust formation in digital information sources: The case of Wikipedia. Journal of Information Science, first published on March 6, 2013 doi:10.1177/0165551513477820
^Iassen Halatchliyski, Tobias Hecking, Tilman Göhnert, H. Ulrich Hoppe: Analyzing the flow of ideas and profiles of contributors in an open learning community. LAK '13 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (April 08 - 12 2013, Leuven, Belgium), Pages 66-74. ACM New York, NY, USA. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2460296.2460311
^Marcus Messner & Marcia DiStaso: Wikipedia Vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis to Identify the Impact of Social Media on the Standards of Knowledge DOI:10.1080/15205436.2012.732649
^Georgios Fessakis, Maria Zoumpatianou: Wikipedia uses in learning design: A literature review [1]
^Michele Van Hoeck and Debra Hoffmann: From Audience to Authorship to Authority: Using Wikipedia to Strengthen Research and Critical Thinking Skills. PDF
^Mihai Georgescu, Dang Duc Pham, Nattiya Kanhabua, Sergej Zerr, Stefan Siersdorfer, Wolfgang Nejdl: Temporal Summarization of Event-Related Updates
in Wikipedia. WWW 2013, May 13–17, 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. PDF
^Roy Rosenzweig: Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46.
^Paolo Missier, Ziyu Chen: Extracting PROV provenance traces from Wikipedia history pages. EDBT/ICDT ’13 March 18 - 22 2013, Genoa, Italy. PDF
This week saw the deployment of the Echo extension, also known as "notifications". Deployed by the EE team, the extension adds a "Facebook-style" notifications menu in the top right of a users screen, to let them know about different events. Discussion quickly erupted over the loss of the new messages bar, aka the orange bar of doom. A user script was quickly written to restore it. A RFC to properly restore it is underway on the talk page.
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.
Changes to edit section links: Following a 2009 Usability Initiative study about moving the placement of the "[edit]" links, a change was written by developer Matma Rex and recently merged that moves the links next to the section title (screenshot). A simple CSS snippet has been provided for users who wish for links to go back to their original placement.
SUL finalization announced: In an email to the wikitech-ambassadors list, staff member James Forrester announced the plans to convert all accounts into global ones, regardless of conflicts. Discussion is underway at the bureaucrats' noticeboard, and on Meta-Wiki.
Toolserver/Labs migration: Office hours were held for users to ask questions about migrating their tools to Wikimedia Labs. Questions were raised about whether Labs will be able to provide everything the Toolserver did, with further ones being raised on the mailing list.
WikiLove disabled: WikiLove was disabled temporarily this weekend. Firefox users would have experienced issues when navigating to user pages and user talk pages due to underlying issues with mw.loader, which resulted in an emergency decision early Friday, April 25th (UTC, Thursday evening in the US) to disable the WikiLove extension for all wikis that have it enabled. That bug was fixed and WikiLove re-enabled on Monday, April 29th.
GSoC submissions closes this week: As the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) deadline draws near, student developers who have an idea on taking part in GSoC this year should make their decision soon and submit their applications by May 3rd at 19:00 UTC directly to the official website. The Wikimedia Foundation will make their decision for selected students shortly after that.
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