The Signpost

News and notes

Wikimania 2010, usability project, link rot, and more

Wikimania 2010 venue announced

Wikimania 2010 will be held in Gdańsk, Poland. The winning city was announced on May 7 after a lengthy committee deliberation process that lasted three weeks past the originally stated deadline. The other two final bidding cities were Amsterdam and Oxford. The Wikimania bid process requires communities interested in hosting Wikimania to outline their potential venue and accommodation options, a tentative budget and fundraising opportunities, and assemble a local bidding team. The bids are then presented on a page on Meta where the teams are open to questions from the bid jury and members of the community. In the announcement, the Gdańsk bid was praised for having an "organized team, roomy venue options, low cost for attendees, creative outing plans, and outreach potential to Eastern Europe."

The Wikimania bid jury committee is assembled every year for the purpose of choosing the Wikimania venue. This year the committee comprised four past organizers of Wikimania, one advisory board member, and the Foundation head of Public Outreach. Sue Gardner, executive director of the Foundation, and Michael Snow, chair of the Foundation Board of Trustees, acted as advisors.

Usability study report posted

The full report from the Wikimedia Foundation's Usability team is now posted. The study, which analyzed how people use Wikipedia through in-person and remote tests, was conducted in March 2009. A preview of the results was posted on the Foundation blog two weeks ago (see earlier story).

As part of the ongoing merger of the website of the International Herald Tribune (the international edition of the New York Times) into nytimes.com, the Tribune's archives were recently taken offline. This has created several thousand dead links in Wikipedia articles that use Tribune articles as sources. It is unknown whether the original iht.com links will be restored following the integration of the Tribune archives into the main New York Times website.

The dead iht.com links were brought to Wikipedians' attention by journalist Thomas Crampton, who complained in an open letter to New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. that "You Erased My Career". Link rot is not a new problem for Wikipedia, and as one Wikipedian noted at Village Pump, "They're not the first -- or worst -- offender in this regard". Still, many of the thousands of Tribune references have incomplete citation data, making it difficult or impossible to track down the original source without a working URL. In a follow-up post about the situation on Wikipedia, Crampton suggested that "this presents a great opportunity for someone in the WSJ or Washington Post to build up the authority of their publication on Wikipedia: Find and replace the dead links to IHT articles with links to their own publication."

Tribune links currently lead to a page that states:

Looking for an article from the International Herald Tribune?
The most recent IHT articles can now be found by searching NYTimes.com. We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition.

The rationale for the merger was noted in late March, but there was no indication that the archives would be disrupted.

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