Backlog drive; youth and confidence among Wikipedians, brief news

The Wikipedia Contribution Team, a group of editors who are part of the Wikimedia Foundation's outreach effort to the English Wikipedia community, calls for participation in a "Great Backlog Drive", to clear out Wikipedia's backlogs during the Foundation's 2010 fundraising period (which officially started on November 15, is envisaged to run until mid-January, and places special emphasis on community involvement this year, see Signpost coverage). Backlog elimination drives held earlier this year by the Guild of Copy Editors and WikiProject Wikify have substantially decreased their backlogs. WikiProject Unreferenced BLPs is always busy hacking away at their backlog. Other backlogs have not seen such a huge focus. Some small backlogs could be easily completed by any interested editors:

• Broken or outdated citations
• Disambiguation pages in need of being split
• External links cleanup
• Geodata verifications
• Images with watermarks
• Missing reference lists
• Non-free image and sound size reductions
• Requests for an editor review

Some larger backlogs could use watchful eyes on a daily basis to reduce the backlog and/or help prevent it from growing larger:

• Articles needing sections
• Articles which may no longer need images
• Dead external links
• Peacock terms
• Self-contradictory articles
• Style editing

The Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner recently traveled to Sweden, attending Wikimedia Sverige's third "Wikipedia Academy" in Stockholm, and on that occasion wrote two posts on her personal blog. In "Wikipedia Pattern: the very young editor", she described meeting a Swedish Wikipedian who had started to contribute at the age of 10, and observed generally: "It used to be that unusually smart kids were typically kind of isolated and lonely, until they met others as smart as them, either in university or later. I think that one of the unsung benefits of the internet, and Wikipedia in particular, is that it makes it possible for smart kids to connect with other people who are equally curious, who share their intellectual interests, and take them seriously, in a way that would’ve been completely unavailable to them 10 years earlier." Earlier this month, German magazine Der Spiegel had portrayed four teenage Wikipedians in an article titled "Wie Jugendliche uns die Welt erklären" ("How youngsters are explaining the world to us"). In another post titled "Länge leve Wikipettrar!", Sue Gardner reported learning from a journalist about the Swedish neologism "wikipetter", a pejorative for Wikipedians which is derived from the Swedish word "viktigpetter" (meaning "know-it-all" or "smart-ass"). On the Swedish Wikipedia, entries about the term have been deleted several times since 2007 (it has a page in the project namespace though, where it is related to the English Wikipedia's concept of wikilawyering). While acknowledging that Swedish Wikipedians might find it insulting, Gardner said "I think it’s charming that the Swedish people have developed a special word for smarty-pants Wikipedians", and also observed that "if I had to pick a single characteristic that’s common to all [Wikipedia] editors, I’d say it’s confidence. All Wikipedia editors share the belief that they know something worth sharing with others."

• GLAM-WIKI conference: On November 26/27, the GLAM-WIKI conference organized by Wikimedia UK and convened by Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) brought representatives from various galleries, libraries and museums together with Wikimedians, at the British Museum in London. User:HstryQT has collected several quotes from the presentations as reported on Twitter ("Best quotes from #GLAMWIKI"). Audio recordings of the presentations are expected to become available soon, and the next Signpost issue might contain fuller coverage. Another GLAM-WIKI conference is taking place in Paris this week.
• Wikipedia's mobile strategy: On the Strategy wiki, Mani Pande (Senior Research Analyst in the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Development department) posted a draft summary of "four trends that are going to define the mobile experience globally", serving "as guideposts for us for Wikipedia's mobile strategy". The four trends are that Internet access by mobile devices is growing faster than "desktop Internet", a "segmentation" of users regarding access speed, with faster connections not available to many Internet users in the Global South, and significant barriers to the adoption of 3G networks there, and the continuing importance of social networking sites, especially Facebook. Recommendations include improvements to reading and editing on the mobile versions of the site, both for high- and low-speed access, and partnering "with network providers in key regions" to provide Wikipedia's "thin client" (mobile.wikipedia.org) at low or no cost, and to "provide integration of mobile versions of Wikipedia sites with Facebook mobile."
• Wikidata: On the Foundation-l mailing list, the Foundation's Deputy Director Erik Möller mentioned plans for a "Wikidata Commons", a central repository of structured data for all Wikimedia projects, with similarities to existing projects, such as the Semantic MediaWiki-based "Shortipedia" and Freebase. Back in 2004, Möller had already proposed the Wikidata project. (See also recent Signpost coverage of related proposals: "A centralised 'data wiki'".) Möller said that the Foundation's "Data Summit" that has been planned for a while (bringing together various people involved in such efforts) had to be delayed until next year. Speaking about Wikimedia sites in general, he remarked that "we're continuing to fall behind the rest of the web in terms of usability."
• Lobbying for freedom of panorama: The Argentinian Wikimedia chapter has written a letter to legislators petitioning them to amend the nation's copyright law to include freedom of panorama exemptions similar to those of other countries (allowing the distribution of photos of works of art that are permanently on display in public places). It warns that otherwise "many images of national culture will disappear from Wikipedia", citing recent deletion debates on Wikimedia Commons and the article about Floralis Generica (a flower sculpture landmark in Buenos Aires 23 m high) as examples. The Argentine chapter has previously been involved in similar lobbying efforts about other aspects of Argentine copyright law, which is considered very restrictive compared to that of other countries, and two of the chapter's members recently traveled to Europe to present a book about the copyright situation in Argentina at the Frankfurt Book Fair - see Signpost coverage.

  

  
  
• Mindmaps from Wikipedia articles: The website en.inforapid.org offers mindmap-like diagrams of the relation of any Wikipedia article with similar articles. It was announced by German company Inforapid as a non-commercial project to demonstrate their "KnowledgeMap" server. WikiMindMap has been providing similar maps (based on the FreeMind software) for a while, with a simpler structure but with the advantage of being under a free license.
• MediaWiki in Japan: On his personal blog, Ryan Lane (Operations Engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation) wrote about giving "Community and architecture talks in Osaka and Tokyo, Japan" earlier this month, including some insights about cultural differences – for example the high ratio of anonymous contribution on the Japanese Wikipedia and, similarly, that the possibility to contribute to MediaWiki development pseudo-anonymously (without giving one's real name) appeared to be important for the audience.
• 90 days of a Trustee: On her personal blog, Wikimedia Board member Phoebe Ayers (User:phoebe) summarized some of her activities during the last three months, several of them Wikimedia- or Wikipedia-related.
• Why academics don't contribute: On Wikiversity, User:Mietchen (who is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee and recently became the Managing Editor of Citizendium), posted a list of the "Top ten reasons why academics do not contribute to Wikipedia", intended as "a basis for discussion of expert involvement in Wikipedia and other wiki projects."

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• There are two types of young Wikipedia editors: The clueful and successful type, and the immature, annoying, less-than-clueful type that shouldn't be on here. I know of more than a few young users (12–14) in the latter category and I simply cannot believe that they don't understand how to maneuver the corporate nature and internal politics of Wikipedia. I'm not sure I've ever masked my disapproval of most young editors (90% waste time without much [quality] end result), but anyone who disagrees with me is invited to email me or discuss this issue on IRC. I don't wish to start a firestorm here. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:49, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• Well, of course, 12-14 year olds are generally do not have much "real world" experience, so they are less able to understand why some parts of Wikipedia work in the way they do. Many of them also probably do not see the point in reading seemingly boring pages full of "policies", aka "rules". A young Wikipedian probably enters Wikipedia with the mindset that Wikipedia is an unstructured free-for-all. Not that I'm saying all young Wikipedians start out like this. Brambleclawx 02:47, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• When I started editing there were only four rules. And that's as it should be. Moreover the structure (and rules) should support ad-hoc editors. It's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" not the "encyclopedia anyone who can be bothered to read all the guidelines, polices, essays and precedent can edit". Rich Farmbrough, 19:34, 30 November 2010 (UTC).[reply]
  

• From my experience, the clueful types have been roughly distributed amongst the age groups. I have found some contributors in the 12-14 group who are very mature & intelligent, as well as some 30+ who are clueless & very immature. Maybe there are fewer jerks amongst the 50+ groups because they would rather say "it's too hard to edit Wikipedia" & forgo doing so, than prove the problem is on their side of the keyboard. -- llywrch (talk) 20:50, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

• By no means are the young the only people who can be clueless. Generalizations aren't fair, even if you do have a point. bahamut0013^words_deeds 19:37, 5 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Inforapid mindmaps

The Inforapid mindmaps can't index articles with apostrophes in them. They don't appear in other articles' mindmaps and can't be searched for as the root of a map. Try, for instance, Macy's or Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Powers ^T 15:17, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cleanup suggestion

I have suggested it before - but would it be possible to have a 'Random article with an action required tag' (or similar) linke on the side menu?

Also - it might be useful to group some of the 'pages requiring care, consideration and attention' by subject rather than by type of action necessary. Jackiespeel (talk) 16:42, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are such lists, created by bot, on a project by project basis. The "Expert" tag also supports subject classification up to a point. It would be reasonably simple to extend the clean-up category system to cope with a set of generic subject clean-up categories, and it might forestall the incessant creation of subject-specific clean-up tags. If this would be considered useful, gain consensus and let me know and it can be implemented. Rich Farmbrough, 19:31, 30 November 2010 (UTC).[reply]

Something quite close exists: lists of articles needing cleanup by WikiProject. Considering that most WikiProjects are based around some subject, this should give you what you want. Svick (talk) 20:41, 30 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

SuggestBot is also worth a subscription, if you're not already on their list. 84.51.181.140 (talk) 21:55, 2 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

You can use the linkintersection tool as well. I use it to find Novels that are orphaned with this query. I like it because it doesn't just give me articles tagged by Novels WikiProject but also newly created ones in the category tree, Sadads (talk) 15:08, 3 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]