The Wikipedia Signpost
The Wikipedia Signpost
Single-Page View Archives


Volume 5, Issue 24 15 June 2009 About the Signpost
(← Prev) 2009 archives (Next →)
Book review
Review of Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes
News and notes
License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
In the news
In the Google News, London Review of Books, and more
WikiProject report
WikiProject Chemistry
Discussion report
Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins
Approved this week
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Arbitration report
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Home  |  Archives  |  Newsroom  |  Tip Line Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SPV

Review of Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Sage Ross

Books on the sociocultural and political impacts of the Internet have typically focused on the advances online communication makes possible or the good things in modern culture that the Internet is pushing aside. Proponents of Internet culture highlight the failings in traditional systems of power and cultural production that online communities can overcome; critics emphasize the good things in those systems that the Internet is undermining. In Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes, Mathieu O'Neil instead explores the ways online communities recreate the failures of offline culture.

O'Neil, a researcher who works in Australia and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from a French university, approaches online social systems from the perspective of critical theory. Other scholars have used critical theory to explore the Internet in terms of communication and knowledge production—in the case of Wikipedia, for example, "Wikipedia, Critical Social Theory, and the Possibility of Rational Discourse" argues that Wikipedia is a close approximation of Jürgen Habermas's ideal of rational discourse—but O'Neil focuses instead on the twin concepts of autonomy and authority.

The first half of Cyberchiefs develops a conceptual basis for understanding online authority. In the second half, O'Neil presents four case studies on individual "tribes" with very different authority structures: the anarcho-primitivism website primitivism.com, the political blog community dailykos.com, the free software community of debian.org, and our own free encyclopedia project wikipedia.org (specifically English Wikipedia).

Rethinking online authority

The prevailing ideology of the Internet, O'Neil observes, is closely aligned to the philosophical and political outlook of the earlier hackers who built it:

Since utopian political solutions are no longer considered likely to occur offline, the Internet has come to embody the spirit of Utopia. In such a charmed universe everyone can have a say, from 'cyberlibertarians' who decry the influence of governments to 'cybercommunists' who believe that peer production will revolutionise both the market economy and traditional hierarchy. The primary tenet of the ideology of the Internet is that online networks are privileged sites for the flowering of freedom.[1]

The flowering of freedom is indeed an important part of the Internet's impact, but this emphasis on freedom obscures the ways that traditional forms of power, privilege and domination carry over to the online world. Early students of online sociology described the web as inherently anti-authoritarian (primarily because of its technical structure, an open network). O'Neil shows that concepts of authority and power developed by social theorists can apply to both the web in general and to specific online tribes—a term he uses to indicate that the social and political structures of online communities are largely independent of nation-states. Adapting Max Weber's tripartite classification of authority, O'Neil identifies three forms of authority that structure the social environment of online tribes:

Index-charisma authority comes from having many connections and being well-known.
Sovereign authority consists of rules and laws; individuals may wield sovereign authority, but ultimately authority of this type inheres in the community-accepted rules themselves.
  1. Hacker-charisma authority – a form of charismatic authority rooted in respect for broadly-construed "hacking" ability—the special talents and skills that are relevant to the goals of a particular tribe. The canonical example of this type of authority is project leadership in free software development communities, where those with acknowledged coding ability and an intimate understanding of a particular software system are deferred to by other programmers. In Wikipedia, hacker-charisma authority is the un-codified respect given to editors who are good at what they do (whether article writing, copy-editing, identifying sockpuppets, scripting, or some other task).
  2. Index-charisma authority – another form of charismatic authority, based on concepts from network theory such as centrality and preferential attachment. In a social network, having links to many others and/or very important others is itself a type of authority, in the form of a large audience; just as highly linked sites are the top results in search engines and thus attract more links, well-connected members of online tribes (especially early adopters) have index-charisma authority from being well-known. This is most obvious in Wikipedia in terms of the rising standards of adminship (which means it was much easier for early editors to become administrators), but it works in subtler ways as well—as when, upon joining large discussions, we look first to familiar and respected users.
  3. Sovereign authority – the analog of Weber's rational authority, which is based on norms, rules and laws (including, in the online context, laws programmed into the system). On Wikipedia, sovereign authority is invoked whenever editors use guidelines and policy to justify their actions or point out violations. The various classes of privileged editors—rollbackers, administrators, bureaucrats, etc.—embody sovereign authority, and are expected to act as enforcers of the community-created rules rather than powers unto themselves.

In addition to these forms of potentially legitimate authority, O'Neil shows that vestiges of power, privilege and symbolic violence from the broader culture, what he terms archaic force, have a dramatic impact on the web's social landscape. For example, in principle blogging is a way for anyone—no matter how qualified or unqualified, powerful or marginal—to reach a wide audience and make him or herself heard. But in practice the "A-list" bloggers that do reach large audiences are overwhelmingly social elites; "they are not only white, male and middle-class," writes O'Neil, "they are also highly educated, placing them effectively higher on the social ladder than the 'elite' mainstream journalists whose power they are supposed to be contesting."[2]

This type of pattern—those with the training and free time afforded by social privilege rise to the top—is also apparent in free software communities and on Wikipedia and other seemingly egalitarian online knowledge projects. O'Neil sees at work here "the heart of social domination [which is] making the socially constructed appear natural."[3]

Archaic force also manifests itself in received netiquette conventions and patterns of online discourse that encourage symbolic violence. Flaming and trolling are the purest expressions of archaic force; the flaming and trolling of newcomers and others who do not conform to community norms is a way of asserting power. O'Neil writes that "In general women have a deep aversion towards the kinds of adversarial exchange that men thrive on", and argues that early netiquette specifically encouraged male styles of adversarial discussion, even flaming, about intellectual and ideological matters but discouraged discussion of personal matters.[4] (We see the legacy of such netiquette on Wikipedia, where aggressive discussion is acceptable but personalizing disputes is forbidden; whether O'Neil would consider this an archaic residue of sexism is unclear, but at least one scholar of wiki communities has argued that Wikipedia-like projects have an inherent gender bias.)

The tribes

The four online communities explored in Cyberchiefs sit at different points on what O'Neil terms the space of online authority. Online primitivists—whose philosophy is fundamentally opposed to the internet and who have no interest in organizing a participatory online community—eschew both charismatic authority and sovereign authority online; primitivism.com acts as a venue for presenting the views of a small number of primitivist "anti-authorities" and extending offline debates among published primitivist thinkers through the fisking of rival essays.

The liberal American political blog Dailykos.com, like other blog communities and the blogosphere as a whole, is structured mainly by charismatic authority, with the hacker-charisma and index-charisma types both playing important roles. The initial popularity and broad political influence (i.e., index authority) of Daily Kos derived, in part, from founder Markos 'Kos' Moulitsas's talent for predicting election outcomes (a form of hacker-charisma), and in terms of community governance, what Kos says goes. In the rest of the Daily Kos community, the two forms of charismatic authority intertwined; members with trusted judgment and blogging ability are given access to the front page and select diaries (blog posts) of others to highlight, and the most popular posts are also linked automatically on the front page. However, autonomy is limited for those who would challenge the charismatic authority of Kos and his deputies, as O'Neil documents in the case of Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary; Kos and much of the community supported Barack Obama, and strident Clinton supporters were systematically marginalized and ostracized, without recourse to much in the way of codified rights or community laws to protect them.

The debian.org development community features strong elements of both popular sovereign authority and charisma authority. O'Neil considers Debian "by far the most revealing of what tribal distributed leadership would entail for the management of complex infrastructural systems", in part because "the stakes are much higher when participants can cause significant harm to the project."[5] Debian stands out among open source communities because of its well-developed governance system. Final authority rests with the development community itself, with leaders elected by the developers and major decisions decided by vote; strict merit-based gatekeeping limits entrance into the community to those with demonstrated software skills. The community structure is highly modular (paralleling the software itself), which allows a degree of autonomy for each developer even while the output of the project as a whole must be tightly coordinated. Although there are elements of index-charisma authority—long-term influence from early leaders—by-and-large, Debian is governed according to the collective will of its community, successful anarchy in action. Conflict in the Debian community often centers on the defense of honor, either against outside threats or intra-community insults; when there is a perceived affront to a developer's honor, communications can break down into flame wars, to the detriment of the community.

Tribal authority on Wikipedia

In the book's final case study, O'Neil examines how authority works on Wikipedia. Wikipedia governance relies primarily on charismatic authority—users deferred to because of their reputations, as talented contributors (hacker-charisma) and/or long-standing and dedicated active community members (index-charisma)—and popular sovereign authority—community-created rules and norms.

Is the surveillance-centered social and technical structure of Wikipedia like the street culture of a close-knit neighborhood or the discipline-minded watchmen of the Panopticon?

"Can people pull rank in a rankless universe", he asks?[6] The answer, of course, is yes; things like rollback rights, adminship, checkuser, and even—perhaps especially—edit count can serve as markers of authority in a social system based on constant surveillance of everyone's actions by everyone else. (In The Wikipedia Revolution, Andrew Lih compared Wikipedia to the benign street culture praised by urbanist Jane Jacobs: cities are safe when they are always under the watchful eye of residents. Others invoke a more sinister metaphor, likening Wikipedia to the Panopticon prison in which inmates never know whether they are being watched and so must behave as if they are.)

It is when surveillance breaks down that authority becomes a problem in the Wikipedia community. The Essjay controversy is the best known example of this; while claiming (falsely) to be a professor of theology, editor Essjay at times touted his supposed credentials in content disputes. But the most significant section focuses on what O'Neil terms "the Durova dust-up", the incident in which User:Durova briefly blocked User:!! as a sockpuppet based on an investigation that was not transparent to community surveillance (which led to Durova resigning her adminship). Here the dangers of both too much and too little surveillance were at work. O'Neil explains that "the incident resonated deeply with many editors, because it commingled authority and secrecy." The affront to the project's core value of openness and transparency was matched by "an equally powerful, and opposite, feeling: that some admins had been the victim of harassment and stalking because of their work for the project; that these experiences were frightening and painful; and that most of the victims were female."[7] [Clarification: O'Neil does not discuss specific instances of harassment, but refers in the preceding quote to the broader context of harassment as part of the spectrum of disruptive action, which efforts like "sock hunting" are employed to prevent.]

Charismatic and sovereign authority predominate, but archaic force is not altogether absent from Wikipedia. O'Neil singles out a Jimmy Wales quote from a 2006 New Yorker article (the one at the center of the Essjay controversy) to show how offline injustice and inequality is reinscribed in Wikipedia: "If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist", said Wales. (O'Neil offers a wider discussion of Wikipedia in his recent essay from Le Monde diplomatique, "Wikipedia: experts are us".)

Historical factors and offline injustices—sexism, economic inequality, political geography—can clearly tilt the scales in online tribes. There are (at least so far) no online Utopias. The question for Wikipedia is, how deep is the shadow of history? How set in stone is Wikipedia's community culture, crafted as it has been by the earliest members with their peculiar outlooks and inclinations? Through the mechanism of preferential attachment in article creation and expansion and the propagation of charismatic authority, will Wikipedia always retain the mark of the early community's interests and prejudices?

O'Neil's particular analysis of Wikipedia includes some worthwhile points (and some errors and misinterpretations), but the case study only breaks the surface of the authority issue. The concepts of archaic force and the three modes of online authority are useful concepts for thinking about the community; Wikipedia authority is heterogeneous, sometimes with charismatic authority most important, sometimes with sovereign authority, and in our worst moments with archaic force deciding things.

References

  1. ^ p. 18, O'Neil's emphasis
  2. ^ p. 61
  3. ^ p. 61, O'Neil's emphasis
  4. ^ p. 68
  5. ^ p. 146
  6. ^ p. 154
  7. ^ p. 167, O'Neil's emphasis


Reader comments

SPV

License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Phoebe and Tilman Bayer

Licensing update

Related articles
2009 licensing

License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009

Licensing vote results announced, resolution passed
25 May 2009

Licensing vote begins
13 April 2009

Community weighs license update
30 March 2009

License update, Commons cartoons, films milestone, and more
16 March 2009

News and notes: Elections, licensing update, and more
8 February 2009

GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
17 November 2008

More articles

License update, Google Translate, GLAM conference, Paid editing
15 June 2009

Licensing vote results announced, resolution passed
25 May 2009

Licensing vote begins
13 April 2009

Community weighs license update
30 March 2009

License update, Commons cartoons, films milestone, and more
16 March 2009

News and notes: Elections, licensing update, and more
8 February 2009

GFDL 1.3 released, will allow Wikimedia migration to Creative Commons license
17 November 2008

Erik Möller has proposed final site terms of use "to be implemented on all Wikimedia projects that currently use GFDL as their primary content license, as well as the relevant multimedia templates." [1] The draft of these terms can be found on Meta, including a proposed footer for all projects, text to go under the edit box, and a page outlining site-wide terms of use, which includes instructions for reusers. Discussion of the terms is occurring on the Meta talk page.

In his message to Foundation-l, Möller proposed updating the site-wide variables for the terms on June 15, and adding a terms of use page to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki for all projects to refer to. Although acknowledging that this is not nearly enough time for translations to be done, Möller stated that there is a "fixed deadline" of beginning the licensing change of June 15.

On the English Wikipedia, the changes were implemented at 00:34 and 00:39 on 16 June 2009.

Google Translate

On June 9th, the Google Translator Toolkit was released. It allows translators to improve Google's machine translations. Documents can be uploaded for translation, and then worked on in a Google Docs-like interface. There is built-in support for translating Wikipedia articles; one of the uploading options is to simply type in a Wikipedia URL and choose which language you wish to translate it to. According to the Wikimedia Foundation's blog post, "Volunteers at Effat University in Saudi Arabia have been working with Google to translate over 100,000 words from the English Wikipedia into Arabic to help build the Toolkit and pave the way for further translations of Wikipedia content."

Australian GLAM conference

Wikimedia Australia is planning a conference called "Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia: Finding the common ground" for August 6 and 7 in Canberra. The conference has a wiki page at http://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM. The event is aimed at stakeholders from Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums in Australia and New Zealand. The lead organizer of the event is Liam Wyatt, VP of Wikimedia Australia.

More information and background to the event can be found in Brianna Laugher's blog post and Liam Wyatt's message to Foundation-l.

At the beginning of last week, it was revealed that User:Nichalp, a longtime editor with bureaucrat, oversight and administrator status, had been accepting money from various companies and persons to create articles about them according to their wishes, using a sockpuppet (User:Zithan). A survey by User:Ha!, posted on June 12, connected more than 10 different job ads on Elance.com (a US website allowing freelancers to bid for tasks submitted by companies) with Zithan's edits. The public job history for nicholas a on Elance lists 16 different accepted projects, all Wikipedia-related, from October 2008 to June 2009, with disclosed payments for one article ranging from $110 to $600, adding up to total earnings of $2,525, and several very satisfied customer reviews.

On June 13, the ArbCom published a decision (adopted 8-0 with one abstention) stating:

In response to community concerns about Nichalp (talk · contribs) using an undisclosed account (Zithan (talk · contribs)) for paid editing, and because of Nichalp's failure to reply to the Arbitration Committee's email enquiry about these concerns, Nichalp's bureaucrat, administrator and oversight status, and his access to the associated mailing lists (<functionaries-en@lists.wikimedia.org> and <oversight-l@lists.wikimedia.org>), are temporarily removed and User:Zithan is indefinitely blocked.

Nichalp had described himself on his user page as a 26-year-old from Bombay, India, with 26,000 edits, 17 featured articles and 31 barnstars since joining Wikipedia in 2004, and "entitled to display [a] Platinum Editor Star". He marked the account inactive in January 2009, but Zithan has edited as late as June 1, and the profile for "nicholas a" on Elance.com currently shows June 12 as the last sign-in date.

The discovery prompted the creation of a Request for comment on June 9, about how to handle paid editing in general (see also this week's Discussion report). The RfC generated a considerable amount of discussion. As of June 15, 56 users have submitted a statement, among them Jimbo Wales, who wrote:

It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor, administrator, bureaucrat, etc. I will personally block any cases that I am shown. There are of course some possibly interesting alternatives, not particularly relevant here, but the idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now.

In 2006, a company, MyWikiBiz, attempted to set up such a service; see the coverage in the Signpost's October 9, 2006 edition.

Briefly

SPV

In the Google News, London Review of Books, and more

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Cryptic C62 and Sage Ross

Reactions to Google News linking to Wikipedia

As mentioned in a previous issue, Wikipedia articles have begun appearing in Google News results. The Washington Post discussed the various opinions on the issue. Search expert Michael Gray described the idea as "incredibly horrible." Zachary M. Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab supported the idea as potentially being a major step forward in journalism.

As of 14 June, it appears that Google News has rolled out Wikipedia links for all users. The links were initially only shown to a limited number of Google News users. The World News section has included prominent links to a number of Wikipedia articles.

London Review of Books essay

In "Like Boiling a Frog", David Runciman reviews Andrew Lih's The Wikipedia Revolution for the London Review of Books and takes a broad look at Wikipedia. The title of the essay comes from a line in the collaboratively written final chapter of Lih's book, which deals with Wikipedia's future and the gradual but significant changes that are going on in the project. Runciman first complains of about the cliché, and says about the group-edited style of Wikipedia itself (here he is writing specifically of the set of Objectivism articles):

All of it reads as though it has been worked over far too much, and like any form of writing that is overcooked it alienates the reader by appearing to be closed off in its own private world of obsession and anxiety.

However, Runciman concludes: "There is no other way I could have found out about boiling frogs – truly, for all its flaws, Wikipedia is a wonderful thing."

Holocaust Museum murder suspect made a Wikipedia userpage

In "Traces of Gunman’s Online Life Begin to Vanish" (The New York Times News Blog, June 10, 2009), Noam Cohen reports on the web presence of James von Brunn, the suspect in the June 10 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting.

Brunn appears to have a Wikipedia account, although one with very few edits. After creating the account in December 2007, User:James von Brunn edited the article about Cordell Hull (US secretary of state during the Roosevelt administration) to add the claim that his wife was an "Orthodox Jew" (which, as Cohen notes, was removed by another user). In May 2009 he published a short biography of himself on his user page, mentioning his anti-semitic views and his previous imprisonment for his 1981 attempt "to place the Federal Resrve Board of Governors [sic] under legal, non-violent citizens arrest". His request for advice on how to convert this text into a Wikipedia article was answered by a suggestion to read Wikipedia:Your first article, Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and Wikipedia:Notability. He also seemed to ask about how to add a letter from the late White Nationalist Revilo P. Oliver to the article about US holocaust denier Willis Carto. The account was blocked indefinitely on June 10, and the userpage was deleted for a short time. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh stated: "The editors have identified that the statements on his user page constituted a violation of policy of hate speech and moved quickly to protect and remove the information". Walsh also noted that the same biographical information had appeared on other websites, too. The complete deletion of the user page has since been reversed; as of now the only deleted revisions are vandalism and commentary added after von Brunn was linked to the shooting. A notice was placed on the page explaining that "The text on this page violated Wikipedia's policies on user pages and it has been blanked".

Briefly

SPV

WikiProject Chemistry

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Cryptic C62

In May 2009, Chemistry, Atom, Periodic table, and Carbon each received over 100,000 page views. Our chemistry articles have a wide appeal, including students, scientists, material engineers, and just plain curious folk. WikiProject Chemistry covers nearly 4000 articles and nearly 150 participants. Here to tell us more about the project are Physchim62 and Walkerma.

1. WikiProject Chemistry has several daughter projects covering such aspects as chemical elements and chemicals. What sorts of articles does WikiProject Chemistry provide unique coverage of?

Amadeo Avogadro (1776–1856) was a Piemontese nobleman, ecclesiastical lawyer and political revolutionary. His most important scientific work, which laid the basis for modern atomic theory, was all but ignored during his lifetime.
Physchim62: The simple answer is that the scope of WikiProject Chemistry is "anything on Wikipedia to do with chemistry". That could go from very technical details concerning the MediaWiki software or the CSS to a whole class of articles such as the chemical compounds. The visible side – the talk page tags – are placed on articles which are obviously related to chemistry and not covered by a daughter project: Chemistry and atom are two examples, but we include pH, concentration, chemical reaction and several thousand more.
WikiProject Chemistry basically works as a set of tools for editors, and by far the most important of those tools is the project talk page. When we identify issues which are starting to monopolise the talk page discussion, we split them off so that WT:CHEMISTRY remains a general meeting point. Both WP:ELEMENTS and WP:CHEMICALS form natural groups of articles which have similar editing needs (and which are particularly prominent, so attract many editors): it makes sense to discuss them on dedicated talk pages, and historically this meant separate daughter WikiProjects. We also have a special page for discussing the technical issues of drawing chemical structures, and other ad hoc structures (many of which are currently inactive, having served their original purpose).
Walkerma: In one sense, it covers "everything except elements and chemicals". In practice the main article types unique to chemistry are concepts such as acid, chemical groups and families such as alkene, chemical principles and theories such as Avogadro's law, chemical reactions and processes like olefin metathesis and chemists such as Robert Burns Woodward.

2. Excluding articles covered by WP:ELEMENTS and WP:CHEMICALS, WikiProject Chemistry has only three Featured Articles: Aldol reaction, Atom, and Diamond, none of which were brought to FA status by the project's members. While featured articles are not the perfect measure of a project's success, what factors do you attribute to the lack of effort put forth by the project members towards building them?

Walkerma: I think WP:Chemistry is a less cohesive group than WP:Chemicals or WP:Elements, and so we've only rarely had tight collaborations. I think our general style has been to focus on getting more articles up to a "decent" level, rather than spending a lot of time at WP:FAC; my sense is that we'd rather have 10 B-Class articles than one FA, as the best way to meet the needs of a typical user. I suspect this reflects the fact that chemistry is a very broad subject area with only a few active editors (most of whom work at the daughter projects too), so we have a lot of articles that need serious work! WP:Elements, on the other hand, has a very tight focus and limited number of articles, and they have done a great job of bringing many element articles up to the GA or FA level. We have a long way to go before we can consider that.
Not an FA star, but an etched disc of pure copper. A featured image from our colleagues at German Wikipedia.
Physchim62: My utter contempt for the featured article process is well known. I think that it's to the credit of the project that its members have spent their time improving encyclopedic content, rather than trying to submit themselves to the shifting sands of a minute group of users who have proclaimed themselves editors-in-chief of Wikipedia. It's not simply that "featured articles are not the perfect measure of a project's success": featured articles are not a valid indicator of anything at all, not even compliance with featured article criteria.
The answer is almost in the question itself, at least in the three articles you cite. Aldol reaction was worked on by many members of WP:CHEMISTRY during the more than two years between its "promotion" to "featured-article status" and its appearance on the Main Page, simply because the original version was unacceptable, at least in the eyes of the editors who spent hundreds of hours bringing it up to scratch. Diamond is laughable as a featured article these days: I've just downgraded it to start class for WikiProject Chemistry.[1] Atom is definitely a good article, but written from a physicist's point of view: it is not among the best articles that chemists have produced on Wikipedia.
So, for the three articles you cite as "representing Wikipedia's very best work", I'm unhappy with at least two of them. You couldn't nominate all the substandard featured articles for featured article review, the whole system would collapse (an outcome I'd welcome with open arms, but which hasn't received much support elsewhere). The standard response is clear: Improve them! But no, there are plenty of other things to do that are actually more important.
A Grubbs' catalyst, a widely used class of homogeneous catalysts for olefin metathesis reactions.

3. Indeed, it seems that there are always little cracks that need to be filled. What can you tell us about the old Gold Book pilot test?

Physchim62: Well, I should explain first! The Gold Book is a sort of dictionary for chemists. It contains accepted definitions for much of the jargon which is used, about 6000 terms in total, covering the whole of "chemical science". It is published by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), so it carries a certain institutional weight, although it is not the "last word" on any given definition.
Back in 2007, we were approached by the group which maintains the Internet version of the Gold Book, who wanted to know if there were any way that they could help Wikipedia through their database. We were obviously delighted for the external recognition, and we set up the pilot project to see how things might work.
We quickly realised the problem: many of the Gold Book entries are very specific, really just dictionary definitions. The job of finding the entries which would be useful and which could be expanded into encyclopedic articles for a general audience was simply too much. Or, to put it another way, it was just the normal process of improving Wikipedia and so didn't need a specific workgroup.
Still, the exercise in itself was very useful for us. It led us to expand our system of citation templates for common sources of information (including the Gold Book), for example. It taught us to be less naïvely optimistic when dealing with external partners – even with the best intentions on both sides (as in this case), the partnership can still fall flat if it doesn't offer something to each party. On a personal note, it led me to create a whole new WikiProject devoted to units and systems of measurement, when I would never have believed that there was a need for such a project before. I think we can say that Wikipedia as a whole has profited from the experience, although not in the way that was originally intended.
Walkerma: I think the exercise was very useful in identifying "low hanging fruit" - the cases where a Gold Book entry matched an article name, for example. But I found that when I came to add Gold Book content into a broader article, it sometimes took several hours of research and writing to provide the necessary context for just one definition, so comprehensive coverage of Gold Book terms looks to be a long way off.
Physchim62: We also need(ed) to ask ourselves whether it was really such a big deal that Wikipedia doesn't have an article on Mesophase pitch-based carbon fibre (for example)! Comparison with the Gold Book is only one way of measuring the comprehensiveness of our chemistry coverage, there are plenty of others. I'd like to see Wikipedia having all the theory necessary for a bachelor's degree course in chemistry, which we don't at the moment but we do have the editors who could create it – many of them earn their livings precisely by teaching such courses!
J. F. van 't Hoff was a Dutch physical chemist and the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry: does Wikipedia's coverage of his field do it justice?

4. What gaps in coverage exist that could be filled by such contributors?

Walkerma: Despite it being a major area of chemistry, our coverage of physical chemistry is very spotty because we don't have many active members with that speciality; I think most of our active editors are inorganic or organic chemists. Chemistry is a subject where it can be hard for an expert in one area to write a good and thorough article on a subject outside their own field. Another weak area historically was biochemistry, but thankfully this coverage has been greatly improved with some excellent work by the closely related Molecular and Cellular Biology WikiProject.
Physchim62: I was flattered to see you mention materials science in the introduction to this interview, as I think it's one of weakest areas! We had a very keen polymer scientist in the project a few years ago, who then became an admin and now spends his time doing "other useful work" for Wikipedia ;) A regular story, WP:CHEMISTRY seems to be quite a good training ground for admins!
I think our particular trial by ordeal comes in early October each year, when the Nobel Prize for Chemistry is announced. We have the eyes of other Wikipedia editors upon us (as the award is a virtual certainty for WP:ITN), and also the eyes of many, many users who come to Wikipedia looking for an explanation of what on earth is so important about that particular discovery! While it is fairly easy to write a basic biography of the winner(s), it is very hard to describe their research if we are missing coverage.
Walkerma: Physchim62's comments remind me of nanoscience and nanotechnology - areas of immense importance in chemistry at present, yet we have very few people at WP:Chemistry active in those fields. Analytical chemistry is also weak.
Physchim62: I hope Walkerma doesn't have some top secret inside information from the Nobel Committee there; otherwise, WP:CHEMISTRY will have a busy few days in October!

5. As for contributors with no expertise in such areas, how can they help to improve chemistry articles?

Walkerma: People who can write well are always appreciated, whatever the topic. Someone with a very basic understanding can often help in making the writing more accessible; working chemists (which nearly all of us are) tend to forget that not everyone in the world knows what an N-heterocyclic carbene is! So we need some generalists who can write well, to help in explaining the topic for a general audience.
Physchim62: I'd go one further and say that what we really need is for people to use the resources. WP:CHEMISTRY does not – and cannot – operate in isolation from the rest of the encyclopedia. If nobody reads the articles, we'll never find out whats wrong with them! You could say that if nobody reads them, it doesn't matter if there's something wrong: but when even a fairly obscure article like Hantzsch pyrrole synthesis is viewed ten times a day, quality control is very important. Persistent carbene, which is the redirect target of Walkerma's example above, gets nearly forty hits a day and the most commonly used type of persistent carbene – Grubbs' catalyst (pictured above) – gets more than a hundred hits a day.
The Hantzsch pyrrole synthesis. Most professional chemists will have already forgotten what it is: maybe that's why ten users every day (on average) visit the Wikipedia article, to remind themselves…
I always get a little frightened when I look at our page view statistics, but they are only going to get higher as Wikipedia becomes more linked in to other semantic publishing initiatives such as RSC Prospect and Nature Chemistry. We can hardly complain when people actually want to use the content we're creating.
So, please, read our articles! Be bold and edit them – if something looks wrong, it probably is wrong; at the very least, it's not sufficiently explained. Link to chemistry articles from other articles wherever there is relevance, and tell us if the article you would like to link to is still a redlink. If you're not sure, ask! All help is gratefully received.

6. Finally, do you think any chemistry-related articles would benefit from the implementation of flagged or sighted revisions?

Physchim62: If I could think of any specific articles, I certainly wouldn't post the links here! Seriously, I think the effect of flagged or sighted revisions on WikiProject Chemistry would be somewhere from zero to slightly positive: it hasn't been a big deal in our discussions. Personally, I'm in favour of some sort of move in that direction, because I think it would benefit other areas of the encyclopedia; but our problems with bad edits in chemistry articles tend to be of a much longer timescale, and so would tend to pass these filters.
WikiProject Chemicals does use an in-house, bot-based form of sighted revisions for a small number of infobox data, as I mentioned in a previous Signpost article, but we're still looking to see if that approach could be of interest to other projects. We'll be presenting a poster at Wikimania in August, so we'll see how the feedback goes. In any case, it is very different from the site-wide proposals which have been discussed for English Wikipedia.

Afterword

  1. ^ Physchim62: Never underestimate the power of the Wikipedia Signpost! Even before this week's issue had come out, an editor had stumbled across the incomplete interview page (completely by accident), read my comments, and nominated diamond for featured article review, an outcome that I'm sure will please the process wonks. Nevertheless, there have been concerns about the quality of the article since at least December 2006: it has taken 2½ years to start the process to remove its beloved little star, and there will be another two weeks of WikiBureaucracy while the issue is decided! In the meantime, as on 4 June 2009, there are 529 featured articles (more than 20% of the total) with maintenance tags, a fairly clear sign that they don't currently meet the criteria. The are also an unknown number that are equally bad, if not worse, but that nobody's got round to tagging yet: some FAs get fewer than ten hits a month, so it is illusionary to suggest that all problems have been found.
    In response to a comment made at the FA review, diamond is certainly a better article than it was two months ago, thanks to the efforts of several editors, but it would still be lucky to pass a good article nomination in its current state, let alone an FAC.


Reader comments

SPV

Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Drilnoth

The following is a brief overview of discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Policy

Style

  • Request for comment: Should the relatively new template, italictitle, be used to italicize names? If so, what articles should it be used for?
  • Discussion: Should guidelines be adopted for what order talk page templates should be sorted in? There is a draft of the proposed guideline.
  • Request for comment: Should a bot "fix" section levels when they are skipped (e.g., changing a level 2 header followed by a level 4 header to being a level 2 header followed by a level 3 header). Currently 14 supporters and 5 opposers.

Technical

  • Discussion: Should the section [edit] links be moved next to the header name? A working sample is available for live testing. Current discussion is leaning towards moving the link.
  • Discussion: Should the time since an article was last edited be displayed on the page? If so, should it replace or be in addition to the current "last edited at" information in article footers? Current discussion shows a consensus for displaying it.

Open bot requests for approval

This is a list of current bot requests for approval, with brief descriptions of the proposed tasks. See this week's technology report for information on recently-approved bots.

Other

  • Discussion: Are administrator candidates being asked too many questions?

Open requests for adminship

The following requests for adminship are currently open:

  • Ched Davis: 72 support, 5 oppose, 3 neutral. Ends 23:12, 18 June 2009.
  • Enigmaman 3: 140 support, 6 oppose, 5 neutral. Ends 15:06, 15 June 2009.
  • Kingpin13: 31 support, 20 oppose, 7 neutral. Ends 8:53, 18 June 2009.
  • Mazca: 69 support, 3 oppose, 2 neutral. Ends 16:50, 18 June 2009.

    Reader comments

SPV

Approved this week

Contribute  —  
Share this
By seresin

Administrators

Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Colds7ream (nom) and Enigmaman (nom).

Bots

This section is now being written in the Technology Report, and contains an expanded description of the bots that have been approved. This week's article.

Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: 1941 Florida hurricane (nom), Tropical Storm Marco (2008) (nom), Subtropical Storm Andrea (2007) (nom), Wilfrid (nom) and The Hardy Boys (nom).

Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Emperors of the Han Dynasty (nom), List of Grade I listed buildings in Sedgemoor (nom), List of U.S. state and territory mottos (nom), List of Medal of Honor recipients (Veracruz) (nom), Duffy discography (nom), Roberto Clemente Award (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Snow Patrol (nom), List of PWG World Tag Team Champions (nom), 2008 IIHF World Championship rosters (nom), List of United States Military Academy alumni (athletic figures) (nom), List of State University of New York units (nom) and List of Washington Metro stations (nom).

Six topics were promoted to featured status this week: Lights and Sounds (nom), 2008–09 Michigan Wolverines men's basketball team (nom), Tucker class destroyers (nom), Paul London and Brian Kendrick (nom), Grade I listed buildings in Runcorn (nom) and Han Dynasty (nom).

No portals were promoted to featured status this week.

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: New York State Route 311, Ōkami, Cherry Springs State Park, 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, British Empire, Sei Whale, Michael Tritter and William D. Boyce.

Five articles were delisted this week: New Radicals (nom), Omnipotence paradox (nom), Eldfell (nom), Yesterday (song) (nom), Equal Protection Clause (nom),

No lists were delisted this week.

One topic was delisted this week: Wilco discography (nom).

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Japanese calligraphy, Coachella Valley, Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Tasmanian Native-hen, European beewolf, Aqueduct of Segovia and Saddam Hussein.

No featured sounds were promoted this week.

No featured pictures were demoted this week.

Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.



Reader comments

SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Jarry1250 and Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

MediaWiki updated on Wikipedia

The version of MediaWiki running on Wikimedia servers has been updated from r48811 to r51904 (r51864 for extensions). The last code update prior to this was on March 25. This means that many previously mentioned bug fixes and new features will now be available. If you notice any new bugs, you can ask about them on the Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) or the tech IRC channels, and they can be reported via the bug tracker. The update caused a number of user scripts (including Twinkle) to break; this was quickly noticed and fixed for those better maintained but errors may linger in older scripts.

Bots approved

7 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These included:

LaraBot (task request), for warning editors who create unreferenced biographies of living people;

Erik9bot (task request), for performing a range of categorisations and maintenance edits on articles about chemical elements and their isotopes.

Also approved were MastiBot (task request), RedBot (task request), AHbot (task request), WikiStatsBOT (task request) and Egmontbot (task request). This week's discussion report contains information on bot requests and related discussions.

Bug fixes

  • Category Tree has been updated so that [+] expand links are not hidden. (r51817, bug 18203)
  • The new section link is no longer displayed when viewing old talk page revisions. (r51822)

New features

  • DISPLAYTITLE now can accept some wiki markup including single quotes. (r51594)
  • The default sortkey has been changed (bug 16552) so there's no longer any need to add {{PAGENAME}} when categorising templates.

Other news

SPV

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Contribute  —  
Share this
By X!

The Arbitration Committee opened one case and closed three this week, leaving five open.

Evidence phase

  • Seeyou: A case examining the conduct of user Seeyou.
  • ADHD: A case examining the dispute on the ADHD article and the conduct of the editors involved therein.

Voting

Closed

  • Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. The final decision provides that no "mass date delinking" should take place until the Arbitration Committee is notified of a Community-approved process for the mass delinking, and that "date delinking bots will perform in a manner approved by the Bot Approvals Group." In addition, specific remedies ranging from admonitions to topic-bans or restrictions to full site-bans were adopted against a total of 21 editors.
  • Tang Dynasty: A case about editing conflicts on Inner Asia during the Tang Dynasty. The final decision provided for restrictions and a mentorshop for Tenmei and general admonitions to all users involved in the dispute. It also urged a review of content issues on the article by previously uninvolved editors.
  • Macedonia 2: A case about naming disputes at Macedonia and related articles, including ChrisO's use of administrator tools in the dispute. The final decision provides that a discussion is to be convened within seven days regarding resolution of naming disputes concerning the entities known as "Macedonia". Pending the results of the discussion, no Macedonia-related articles are to be moved or renamed. Specific remedies such as admonitions, topic bans, and site-bans were imposed against a total of 10 editors. The resignation of one administrator during the case was noted, and the administrator privileges of another administrator were suspended for three months.

    Reader comments

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-15/SPV