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11 January 2010

From the editor — Call for writers

2009 in review
2009 in Review

Books
New Book namespace created

News and notes
Wikimania 2011, Flaggedrevs, Global sysops and more

In the news
Wikipedia in British schools, Hitler's Downfall meme, and more

Features and admins
Approved this week

2010-01-11

Call for writers

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By Sage Ross

This was the fifth year for the Signpost, which passed 250 issues. New features or revived features included the Discussion report, book reviews and author interviews, opinion and literary pieces, and a new and improved newsroom that makes it easier to collaborate on stories. The Signpost interface was also updated by Pretzels, and the archives were made more easily browsable and searchable.

Do you have what it takes to be the reporter your fellow Wikimedians rely on? The Signpost is looking for new talent! Phoebe, Pretzels, myself and others have tried over the past year to make it easier to contribute to the Signpost, to make it less dependent on any particular editor—in a volunteer projects such as this, people take on new tasks and leave old ones behind with little tying them down. Even so, I feel very fortunate that I've had the chance to work with so many dedicated and talented regulars over the past year. A bevy of writers this year raised the bar for regular Signpost features, including some new ones. But as writers move on or shift focus, we need enthusiastic new writers in order to deliver the rich and diverse set of weekly articles readers have come to expect.

We are looking for someone to cover the Arbitration report, one or more new contributors to the Discussion report, someone to take up the Technology report, and one or several people to revive the WikiProject report, someone to head up In the news, and of course (as always) more help with News and notes, long the cornerstone of the Signpost. There are also opportunities for one-off features: interviews, book reviews, opinion pieces, reports on other Wikimedia projects, or something else entirely.

Come on in to the newsroom and see if anything suits your fancy!

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2010-01-11

2009 in Review

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By Phoebe

2009 was Wikipedia's ninth year, and the sixth year for the Wikimedia Foundation. In the tradition of previous Signpost annual summaries, we are presenting a quick review of the past year. 2009 saw major growth of the Wikimedia Foundation, global outreach and partnership activities, and more major grants and fundraising than ever before. At the same time, questions were raised over the health of the Wikipedia community, and debates over quality, content and sustainability continued.

Growth and statistics

The number of Wikipedia articles continued to grow, with the English Wikipedia passing 3,000,000 articles in mid-August, and the German Wikipedia passing the milestone of 1,000,000 articles in December. Commons also passed 4,000,000 files in March and then 5,000,000 files in September. The English Wikipedia's count of good and featured articles passed 10,000. Several new projects were also created, including the Pontic Greek Wikipedia, the Finnish Wikiversity, the Sorani Wikipedia, the Western Panjabi Wikipedia, the Mirandese Wikipedia, the Acehnese Wikipedia and the Turkish Wikinews.

However, despite continued content growth, there was discussion and research in 2009 over whether the editor community is still growing along with content, or if the number of active editors is declining. Ed Chi's research provided one study into this, finding that editor growth was slowing and new editors were commonly reverted. Statistics produced by community members also showed a decline in editor participation. Results from the first general user survey, conducted by UNU Merit, were also released, showing trends in the editor population. These studies provided the background for ongoing concern over Wikipedia's community health, which was a topic of discussion at Wikimania 2009, a focus of the strategy project, and a subject in the news again in late 2009 when Felipe Ortega's work on the decline of the editing community was profiled by the Wall Street Journal (see below).

Meetups and Community

Wikimania 2009 was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina in late August. The conference featured a bilingual program and had several hundred attendees.

Other community conferences included a MediaWiki developer meetup in April in Berlin, colocated with the Chapters meeting; Wikimedia Polska's assembly in May; Wikiconference NYC in July; a working meeting for multimedia usability in Paris in November; Wikiconference Japan in November; and Wikimedia Brasil's unconferences, also in November. The only country in 2009 that had a meetup for the first time was Pakistan; other countries around the world also continued to host informal meetups. In February, Wikipedia Loves Art events were held around the United States and in London, with similar events in the Netherlands and Argentina.

Several new chapters were founded in 2009, including Wikimedia Macedonia, Wikimedia Danmark, Wikimedia Ukraine, Wikimedia Suomi, Wikimedia Portugal, and Wikimedia New York City, the first chapter in the United States. The second incarnation of Wikimedia UK was also recognized by the Board in 2009.

Community debates

One of the largest and furthest-reaching debates this year was over the future of licensing on the projects. Following the release of GFDL 1.3, which allowed large collaborative websites to switch to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license, the Foundation formed a taskforce to study licensing options. In May, there was a Wikimedia-wide vote on whether to adopt new licensing terms to switch to Creative Commons. The switch was approved with 17,462 votes cast, the largest vote in Wikimedia's history. This resulted in new terms of reuse for all Wikimedia content.

While debates over content quality were not as prevalent in the media as they were in the past, work was done in this area, such as with an article that analyzed drug information in Wikipedia. BLP issues continued to be a concern, particularly on the English Wikipedia, and the BLP taskforce was formed. Projects to work on article quality also included a collaboration with Chemical Abstracts for chemistry data. Content contests included the third annual WikiCup, which was won by Durova.

The Foundation-l mailing list saw drama in late 2009 when debates over whether members were posting too much led to temporary full moderation; this in turn led to new posting rules (no more than 30 posts/month for each member). In addition to the mailing lists and IRC Wikipedians also began using Twitter and Identi.ca more to communicate in 2009.

On the English Wikipedia, Arbitration Committee elections were held and the results announced in December. ArbCom saw dispute this year over the Law/Undertow sockpuppet scandal. The long-standing dispute between Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales over Wikipedia's founding also flared up again this year.

Outreach and Partnerships

2009 saw a new focus on partnerships with cultural organizations, or "GLAM" organizations (short for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). Following on the heels of the German Bundesarchiv donation in late 2008, there were several large donations of images in 2009 from external organizations, including the Deutsche Fotothek, Antweb, and the Mary Rose Trust. The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam also partnered with the WMF.

Relationships with archives took on a negative tone in July, when the National Portrait Gallery in the UK threatened a lawsuit towards an individual Wikipedian over images from the NPG that had been placed on Commons. This story was picked up in the news, and served to focus community discussion and work on relationships with GLAM organizations around the world. In August, Wikimedia Australia hosted a GLAM/Wikimedia conference, which was quite popular, and which discussed issues related to the dispute and partnership with GLAM organizations.

Also in 2009, there were several dedicated outreach activities put on by teams of Wikimedians around the world. One of the largest was the Wikipedia Academy at the NIH in July, where Wikipedians worked with scientists to teach editing. Outreach activity became a priority of the Wikimedia Foundation as well, which began a "bookshelf" project to develop educational materials about Wikipedia and Wikimedia. This in turn is part of the larger Outreach team and wiki.

Outside organizations continued to use Wikimedia content for new applications as well, for instance for the iPhone "augmented reality" app, Amazon's public data sets, Wikipedia articles in Google News, and the Openmoko Wikireader. The Wikimedia Foundation also negotiated a deal with Orange Telecom to display Wikipedia content on mobile phones.

Technical changes

Flagged revisions, under development for several years, is still not done. In January, Jimbo Wales requested that developers implement them on the English Wikipedia, and a community poll was held on the English Wikipedia in April. By the end of 2009, the process of launching flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia was not complete, although the Foundation invested more into the project by hiring a part-time project manager and developer. In the meantime, by February 2009 the German Wikipedia had made its first pass at flagging all articles as part of their implementation of flagged revisions.

Two major grant-funded projects to improve the usability of MediaWiki began in 2009, the usability project and a multimedia usability project. The usability project was funded with a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation, while the multimedia project was funded by a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and focuses specifically on improving workflows for image uploading. Over the course of the year, the usability project conducted usability studies, developed a new skin (Vector) which currently has nearly 300,000 users, and developed other experimental features to improve the editing interface. Another $100,000 grant was also given to the Foundation by the Mozilla Foundation, specifically to improve Ogg Theora audio and video support.

In other technical news, the mobile gateway for Wikipedia, mobile.wikipedia.org, was launched and refined. Liquidthreads was also further developed and deployed on some small wikis, including the Strategy project wiki. The books extension was enabled on English, and a new assessment class and namespace were created for it. The Abusefilter extension was enabled to allow preemptive filtering of vandalism. And in a long-awaited development, dumps of the English Wikipedia were finally fixed to allow new statistics to be produced about the project for the first time in several years.

Finally, in September long-time CTO Brion Vibber stepped down. The search for his replacement is still ongoing.

Foundation growth, strategy and fundraising

The Wikimedia Foundation grew this year, taking on new projects and hiring a number of new employees, including a Chief Program Officer (who subsequently left, and has not yet been replaced), several developers, and several people to work in the areas of fundraising, public relations and outreach. In September, the Foundation moved to new, larger offices in San Francisco.

The Foundation also began a year-long Strategy project, which is still ongoing. This led to a new wiki being started and two staff hired to manage the project, which consists of collecting community proposals, and gathering research from task forces and from Bridgespan, the firm hired to support the process, about the current state and future directions for the Foundation. Other major Foundation projects included the usability, multimedia, and bookshelf projects described above.

The Foundation received several major grants in 2009, including a $500,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation, a €300,000 donation of in-kind support from Dutch data center EvoSwitch, and a $2,000,000 grant from the Omidyar Network, along with the usability grants mentioned above. The Omidyar grant comes with certain conditions that must be met. However, spending also increased greatly beyond previous years, with a focus on supporting new outreach and communications projects, new staff, grants to chapters, and technical development.

At the end of 2009, the annual fundraiser was held. The fundraiser was controversial for its use of the "Wikipedia Forever" theme, a slogan which was developed by a marketing firm contracted by the Foundation. The slogans originally proposed for the fundraiser led to ire among Wikimedians, which resulted in some last-minute messaging changes. Despite the rocky beginning, however, the fundraiser resulted in over $8,000,000 in donations, with the single highest donation day of any fundraiser coming on the first day of Jimmy Wales' appeal letter.

In the Foundation Board elections this year, Samuel Klein, Ting Chen and Kat Walsh were elected to the three community representative seats, with 2940 votes cast. Arne Klempert took one of the Chapter-chosen Board seats, while Matt Halprin was appointed to the Board. Florence Devouard, former Board chair, was honored for her work on the Board with a Knighthood from the French government.

The composition of the advisory board also changed in 2009, with new members including Neeru Khosla, Roger McNamee, Craig Newmark and Domas Mituzas.

In the news

The slowing growth of Wikipedia's community was widely written about in the news. Ed Chi's research was widely quoted in the news in the spring of 2009, while at the end of 2009 a major story in the Wall Street Journal quoted research by Felipe Ortega about the declining editor community. This was picked up widely by other news outlets, and prompted a response by Erik Zachte that found that while community growth has leveled off compared to a few years ago, it is not declining at the rate reported.

Other major news stories throughout the year included ongoing coverage of flagged revisions (including many reports that they were "just around the corner"), the National Portrait Gallery controversy, the lack of information in Wikipedia about David Rohde's kidnapping, the block of Scientology activists by the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, the spike of pageviews and edits surrounding Michael Jackson's death (which briefly took Wikipedia offline), and a flap over Rorschach inkblots. Also in 2009, the comedy series Bigipedia debuted.

In Memory

Five Wikipedians that we know of died in 2009: User:Bradypus of the German Wikipedia, User:Glen Dillon of the English Wikipedia, User:Teenly of the English and Simple English Wikipedias, User:Nitelinger of the English Wikipedia, and User:Fg2 of the English and Japanese Wikipedias. They will be missed.

Past years in review

2005 in review
2006 in review, Part I, Part II
2007 in review, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV

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2010-01-11

New Book namespace created

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By notafish and Headbomb

Wikimania 2011, Flaggedrevs, Global sysops and more

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By Phoebe

Wikimania 2011 bidding opens

The bidding process to select the location for Wikimania 2011 has begun. Tentative bids can be listed on Meta. New cities can be listed until February 8; after that date, no new bids will be accepted. Bids then have nearly two months, until March 29, to finalize their information. Directions for listing a bid are on meta.

Bids will be judged based on the criteria for this year by the Wikimania Jury. Current bids in the running can be viewed on the Bids page.

FlaggedRevs update

Wikinews writing contest

Wikinews is sponsoring a Writing Contest that will begin on January 25, 2010 and finish on April 18, 2010. All editors are welcome; newcomers are requested to not contribute original reporting for their first few articles until they become familiar with Wikinews. A detailed point system for articles submitted during the 12-week contest is described on the contest page. Prizes will be offered to the winners.

Global sysops

A new global user group, Global sysops, has been proposed and is currently being voted on. The user group is proposed to include highly trusted users with a strong track record of cross-wiki contributions, who would be given sysop privileges on small wikis that have less than ten administrators. Larger wikis could opt into and smaller wikis could opt out of the system if they wished. According to the proposal, in addition to the standard tools, they would have the ability to globally block IPs, but would use these tools only in urgent cases of abuse, or for non-controversial maintenance. They would have no editorial control over content or the local community. The new role would differ from the current steward class in that their powers would be more limited. The global sysop would not have any access on the English Wikipedia (except for global block effects), as it is too large of a wiki.

Voting

All members of the Wikimedia community who meet all of the following criteria are invited to vote on the global sysops proposal:

Must have a registered account
Account at least 3 months old
150 edits on at least one project

The vote will run from 00:00, 1 January 2010 (UTC) to 23:59, 31 January 2010 (UTC), after which time a non-partisan review will be undertaken and the results enacted.

At the time of publication, there were 984 votes in favor and 264 against, along with many comments.

Wikimedia Report Card

The Wikimedia Report Card has been updated for November 2009. The statistics summary shows that trends from earlier this year largely prevailed in recent months: the number of unique visitors across all Wikimedia sites continues to rise steadily and rapidly, while overall editing activity is roughly holding steady and the influx of new editors is slowing slightly. The rate of uploads to Wikimedia Commons continues to increase, particularly the rate of video uploads.

Briefly

The Wikipedia in Picard was started. Picard is a language spoken in parts of Northern France and Belgium.
The language learning software project Parley, part of the free software KDE project, has begun using the Wiktionary database as a basis for vocabulary-building features.
A January course for students of Stanford, Harvard and MIT called "Difficult Problems", taught by Jonathan Zittrain and Elizabeth Stark, aims to solve four seemingly intractable problems of the online world over four weeks. One of the problems is the future of Wikipedia.

Milestones

The German Wikipedia celebrates the first million articles.

The Hebrew Wikipedia celebrates 100,000 articles.

The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
The Lower Sorbian Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
The Catalan Wikipedia becomes the first of the m:list of Wikipedias by sample of articles.
The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 90,000 articles.
The Basque Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
The Tatar Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The German Wikipedia arrives at its millionth article, a page on American horticulturist Ernie Wasson.
The Kikuyu Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
The Icelandic Wiktionary has reached 16,000 entries.
The Meadow Mari Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
The Extremaduran Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

This week in history

2005: First issue of the Signpost
2006: Wikipedia reaches 900,000 articles
2007: Journalist plagiarizes Wikipedia
2008: Rollback created
2009: Flagged revisions poll ongoing

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2010-01-11

Wikipedia in British schools, Hitler's Downfall meme, and more

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By Sage Ross

American English tips British teachers off to Wikipedia plagiarists

In "Schoolchildren told to avoid Wikipedia", by Graeme Paton, The Daily Telegraph reports that British schoolteachers have been warned to watch students' written work for tell-tale differences between American and British English as signs that pupils may have copied material from Wikipedia and other online sources.

Despite the headline (and a similar one from The Daily Mail, "[Pupils should use Google and Yahoo! for coursework but not Wikipedia, says exams watchdog]"), the recent students' guide to plagiarism produced by England's Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator gives what Wikimedia UK president Mike Peel describes as "some really good advice on using Wikipedia as a starting point for research - essentially the same advice as Wikipedia gives."

Hitler's Downfall, FAC edition

A Wikipedia-themed Hitler's Downfall parody video, "World War Wiki" drew the attention of some Wikipedians recently. It is one of many similar videos in a relatively enduring meme that uses humorous subtitles for a pivotal scene in the German film Der Untergang. In this version, Hitler expresses frustration with his failed attempt to put an article through the Featured Article Candidates (FAC) process; Wikipedians have been discussing it on the FAC talk page.

Patent citations of Wikipedia still rising

On his blog The Patent Librarian's Notebook, Michael White reports that citations of Wikipedia in U.S. patents numbered 809 in 2009, a 59% increase over the previous year (see previous Signpost coverage). Patent examiners have been barred from citing Wikipedia since 2006.

WorldNetDaily founder criticizes Wales, Wikipedia

In response to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial about online civility by Jimmy Wales and Andrew Weckerle, Joseph Farah [http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=120926 criticizes Wales] for "[presiding] over what may be the biggest and most blatant example of systematic, carefree and reckless defamation in the history of the world": Wikipedia. Farah, editor-in-chief of conservative news website WorldNetDaily, has been subject to insulting vandalism on Wikipedia; WorldNetDaily has frequently been critical of Wikipedia as well.

Briefly

The Washington Post picks up the story of the growing problem of jurors consulting Wikipedia during trials. (The Signpost previously noted discussion of this trend in an article in St. John's Law Review.)
A post on BoingBoing describes "Wikibumps", the high hit counts on articles that are related to big news. According to a previous analysis of hit count data from stats.grok.se, the "In the news" section of the Main Page is a particularly powerful driver of traffic.

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