FBI requests takedown of seal, Public Policy advisors and ambassadors, Cary Bass leaving, new Research Committee
Hands up. Put our seal on the floor. Now!
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has written to the Wikimedia Foundation requesting that their seal be removed from Wikipedia, threatening that "failure to comply may result in further legal action. We appreciate your timely attention to this matter ... Whoever possesses any insignia ... or any colourable imitation thereof ... shall be fined ... or imprisoned ... or both", the BBC reported on Tuesday. The New York Times reports "those at Wikipedia" as saying the problem with these demands is that the law cited in the FBI's letter (Section 701 of 18. U.S.C.) "is largely about keeping people from flashing fake badges or profiting from the use of the seal, and not about posting images on noncommercial Web sites. Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal." (In the following days, the image seems to have been removed from the page on Britannica.com.) The letter stated that the FBI finds the issue "particularly problematic, because it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations of restrictions by Wikipedia users."
"Other organizations might simply back down", says the newspaper, "but Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers are misquoting the law." The response, by the Foundation's general counsel, Michael Godwin, read: “while we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it,... we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version [you provided].... "the enactment of [these laws] was intended to protect the public against the use of a recognisable assertion of authority with intent to deceive. [The seal] is in no way evidence of any 'intent to deceive', nor is it an 'assertion of authority', recognizable or otherwise.... we are prepared to argue our view in court." Godwin signed off his letter "with all appropriate respect."
An FBI spokesperson told the newspaper that by law, its seal cannot be used without "the permission of the [FBI] director”. The BBC questioned why the FBI "singled out Wikipedia, when the FBI seal is published on numerous other websites." Asked by The New York Times to comment, Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the FBI "has better things to do than this."
Earlier this year, Wikimedia and the FBI had already appeared in headlines together, in news reports about Larry Sanger's announcement that he had reported the WMF to the FBI for "knowingly distributing child pornography" (see Signpost coverage). Although Foundation staff stated several weeks later that they had not received any notice from the FBI that the images in question would violate federal laws, and there have been no media reports about actions of the FBI in this matter, Larry Sanger appeared to interpret the letter about the seal as the FBI's indirect reaction to his complaint: "The FBI finally got back to Wikimedia, but not about its child porn holdings"[1], "this action from the FBI is a not-too-subtle hint [to the WMF] to get its house in order"[2], "hubris, meet your nemesis. The FBI" [3]. Sanger and other Wikipedia critics later noted a passage at Wikipedia:Logos#U.S. government agencies that read: "U.S. law prohibits the reproduction of designated logos of U.S. government agencies without permission. Use restrictions of such logos must be followed and permission obtained before use, if required. However, this does not affect the copyright status ..."
Soon after the story broke on Tuesday, a DYK nomination of the article Seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation was submitted, which would presumably entail displaying the image on the Main page. So far, it does not seem to have gained consensus, first for failing the DYK criterion of having "been created, or expanded fivefold or more, within the last 5 days", but also because several users found it would be unwise in the current situation (Jimbo Wales opined that "It is clearly politically provocative, and it's just not appropriate for Wikipedia to behave that way").
Public policy initiative announces advisory board, starts training campus ambassadors
The Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative posted two announcements on the Foundation blog last week, introducing the members of its advisory board and describing its first "Wikipedia Campus Ambassador training". (The initiative, announced in May and funded by the Stanton Foundation, is a project to improve Wikipedia's coverage of public policy topics in the United States of America by collaborating with educational institutions. See also the initiative's WikiProject United States Public Policy and earlier Signpost coverage: Introducing the Public Policy Initiative.)
The advisory board consists of "eight experts from the academic, nonprofit, and wiki communities": Barry Bozeman, professor of Public Policy at the University of Georgia, Michael Carroll, professor of Law at the Washington College of Law and founding board member of Creative Commons, Robert Cummings, assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi and author of "Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia" (see also Signpost reviews and Wikivoices episode), Charles Cushman, associate dean of the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University, Mary Graham, co-director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard University, Wayne Mackintosh, founding director of the International Centre for Open Education based at Otago Polytechnic/New Zealand (and also member of the WMF's advisory board), Barry Rubin, professor at Indiana University, and Rob Schneider from the nonprofit Consumers Union.
"Campus Ambassadors" is the initiative's term for volunteers that work with professors and go into participating institutions to train and support the students in person that are supposed to edit Wikipedia as part of their coursework. In the other blog post last week ("Welcome Wikipedia Ambassadors"), Frank Schulenburg, the WMF's Head of Public Outreach, described the idea behind the Campus Ambassadors, and said that a three day training session for them would take place this week at George Washington University, with "20 Wikipedians, students, teaching assistants, librarians and professors" participating. There are also "Online Ambassadors", "experienced Wikipedians [who] will support newcomers through their first 100 edits", on the wiki, by email, on IRC and via other media, a position for which applications are still invited.
Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass to leave Foundation staff
Cary Bass (User:Bastique), the Volunteer Coordinator of the Wikimedia Foundation, has announced he will leave the staff at the end of December. He will "continue to be involved with the Wikimedia movement as a volunteer, both as a contributor and in the organization of the annual Wikimania conference", and has decided to enroll in graduate theological studies. Bass was hired in March 2007 (see Signpost coverage: Community manager hired). The Foundation has recently formed a new Community Department following the hiring of Chief Community Officer (CCO) Zack Exley (see Signpost coverage: Foundation hires two new chief officers, New Community Department to hire community members). Bass says the Foundation "is not planning to hire another volunteer coordinator to look after the specific range of work I've been doing", and that users who are unsure which staff member will take over a specific responsibility should contact him over the next months.
Foundation to set up new "Wikimedia Research Committee"
The Wikimedia Foundation is calling for volunteers for a new "Wikimedia Research Committee", to "support the management of relationships between Wikimedia communities and the broader communities of researchers who study Wikimedia projects". Among the tasks outlined in the announcement by Deputy Director Erik Möller are the formulation of a policy governing the access of non-public data by researchers, reviewing research projects in cases of a conflict of interest, and "helping to formulate small tactical experiments related to Wikimedia's strategic goals". Historically, the WMF used to designate a "Chief Research Coordinator" (until 2007 "Chief Research Officer"), a volunteer with some similar responsibilities, guiding the "Wikimedia Research Network", which appears to have been inactive for years. Recently, the Foundation added a new user rights group named "Researcher" to the English Wikipedia and suggested the community should develop processes for granting this permission (see Signpost coverage). In March, a page on the English Wikiversity about researching Wikipedia by "Ethical Breaching experiments", which contained some suggestions to vandalize it on purpose, generated controversy (see Signpost coverage.)
In other news, four WMF employees that comprise "most of the current staff at the Wikimedia Foundation currently engaging in research" introduced themselves on the Wiki-Research-l mailing list on Monday: User:Nimish_Gautam, Howie Fung, Amy Roth and Parul Vora.
Briefly
- Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia chapter representing the United Kingdom, has announced a "microgrants" scheme, providing funds ranging from £5 to £100 to support applicants' Wikimedia activities (more details).
- Although this year's deadline for the Foundation's chapter grant process has officially passed already, grant submissions will now be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. The process was recently expanded to include consideration "in a limited way" of grants submitted by "volunteers and like-minded organizations" that follow the grant requirements, as well as just chapters. Barry Newstead, the Foundation's new Chief Global Development Officer (CGDO), has taken over the grants process and intends to experiment with grants to non-chapter entities in the future.
- Discussion about the use of Google's machine translation tools to increase content on smaller Wikipedias (see Signpost coverage: 19 July, 26 July) continued last week on the Foundation-l mailing list. Google employee Michael Galvez (who had also given a talk about the topic at Wikimania) described how some issues had been addressed, such as avoiding formatting and spelling errors and collaborating more closely with the local Wikipedia communities when selecting the articles to be translated.
- User:SieBot, a bot that resolves and adds interwiki links, has surpassed 10 million edits across all Wikimedia wikis, as noted by its owner, nl:User:Siebrand. This corresponds to about 0.9% of all edits, which currently number around 1.076 billion. In Wikimedia's Bot activity statistics (for Wikipedias), SieBot is currently the bot with the most overall edits, followed by TXiKiBoT and Thijs!bot, both of which are also adding or fixing interwiki links.
- Wikimedia Sverige has published a very short chapter report for the month of July, mainly noting that five of the chapter's board members and eight other members attended Wikimania.
- The Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner, published two posts on her private blog recently. In How to Help Wikipedia, and How to Hurt It, she started out from reading "sociologist Gary Marx‘s documentation of tactics covertly used by external parties to hurt or help social/political movement", eliciting several comments including one from a poster identifying himself as Larry Sanger. In What Wikimedia can learn from the Quakers, she noted that both the Quakers and Wikimedians use consensus decision-making. She said that "some Quaker practices, I think, are relevant to Wikimedia, and we are either already using versions of them, or should consider it." In particular, she mentioned that the "Clerk" role "is very similar to our leadership roles such as board or committee chair", said that "Quaker methods of reconciling dissent might be particularly useful for us" in the context of the Board of Trustees' decisionmaking, and that their "delineation of roles-and-responsibilities among board, staff and community members [could] be a good model for us."
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Wikinews interviews Umberto Eco, and more
Wikinews interviews Umberto Eco: "I am a compulsive user of Wikipedia"
User:Aubrey from Wikimedia Italia interviewed famed novelist, critic and semiotician Umberto Eco in his Milan home on April 24, 2010, as part of the chapter's WIKI@Home project. An English translation of the interview was recently made available on the Italian Wikinews (Wikinotizie).
Professor Eco described himself as "a compulsive user of Wikipedia, also for arthritic reasons: the more my back hurts, the more it costs me to get up and go to check the [Encyclopedia] Treccani .... When I write, I consult Wikipedia 30–40 times a day, because it is really helpful". However, he questioned its reliability. He stated that Wikipedia is good for the (intellectually) "rich" and bad for the "poor", explaining that as an educated person, he knows how to filter the information on Wikipedia, checking and comparing multiple sources rather than accepting a fact while a less well-educated user might not be as discriminating.
Asked whether it is better to have more people involved on a topic, as it is stated to be the case (under certain conditions) by the "wisdom of the crowds" theory of James Surowiecki, Professor Eco replied:
| “ | I don't quite agree with this. I am a disciple of Peirce, who argues that scientific truths are, ultimately, approved by the community. The slow work of the community, through revisions and errors, as he put it in the nineteenth century, carries out "the torch of truth". The problem is the definition of truth.
If I were forced to replace "truth" with "crowd", I would not agree. If you make a statistical analysis of the 6 billion inhabitants of the globe, the majority believes that the Sun revolves around the Earth, there's nothing you can do. The crowd would be prepared to endorse the wrong answer. This also happens in a democracy: we are noticing it these days, the crowd votes for [the Italian politician] Bossi. We must therefore find another criterion, which I think is the motivated crowds. People who work on Wikipedia ... are not the indiscriminate crowd [but] are the part of the crowd who feels motivated to work with Wikipedia. Here it is: I'd replace the theory of the "wisdom of the crowd" with the theory of the "wisdom of the motivated crowds." The general crowd says we should not pay taxes; the motivated crowd says that it's fair to pay them. In fact, it's not the ditch diggers or illiterates who contribute to Wikipedia, but people who already belong to a cultural crowd for the very fact they're using a computer. |
” |
The interviewer observed a cultural difference on Wikipedia between the coverage of "hard" and "soft" sciences, and related it to a similar difference between the corresponding academic communities. Eco agreed that "hard" sciences place more value on collaboration and less on authorship than humanities. "Science is cumulative-destructive, it stores what it needs and throws away what it doesn't require. Humanities are totally cumulative, they don't throw away anything: in fact, there is always a return to the past." He also agreed that the strong collaboration on Wikipedia, facilitated by the use of free licenses and a culture of pseudonymity or even anonymity, might be part of a larger trend, which in 50 years would probably lead to "a cultural situation similar to the one in the Middle Ages, where [...] the authoriality was lost." However, he doubted this development would reach total anonymity, which, while it might give the appearance of democracy, "gives the idea that just one and only one truth exists".
When asked about free licenses and intellectual property in general, Eco said he did not consider piracy to be a tragedy, at least not for himself. The interview touched on the copyright controversy about Google Books, the e-book market, Adobe Reader and free software (Eco praised Open Office). Aubrey concluded by stating that Wikipedia, too, comes from the open source world.
A thread on Foundation-l contains background information on the interview and the "Wiki@Home" program. Apart from Eco, several other notable people have been interviewed. Questions are prepared collaboratively on a page on the Italian Wikinews; Wikimedia Italia then contacts the potential interviewee and chooses the interviewer (usually one of the chapter's members).
Briefly
- A large number of media outlets reported on the efforts by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation to make Wikipedia take down the image depicting the FBI seal. (See full coverage in this week's News and notes section.)
- British musician M.I.A. was recently asked by The Guardian to comment on the Wikipedia article about her (MIA takes on Google, YouTube and Wikipedia): "I hate my Wikipedia page. It's really boring to look at. I'd get rid of all this white space. And I'd make the font a bit more interesting." The Guardian remarked that "If you've ever seen the fluoro overload of her own website or Twitter page this should come as no surprise." When asked to examine the text for possible inaccuracies, though, she found none. However, she noted that "the section on Diplo got removed when we stopped working together. He emailed me about that; that's why I know that section's missing", and that she had "no idea" who removed it (it appears to refer to this edit). She said she had never edited the article herself: "I really don't know how to do that."
- In a The New York Times article, "Plagiarism lines blur for students in digital age", Trip Gabriel wrote that "digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students—who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking—understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image." She went on to say that "at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries—unsigned and collectively written—did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge."
- "Facebook, Wikimedia and the rest are making millions from the value created by users, acting like a cooperative but paying itself like a private company", freelance creative Richard Buchanan argued in The Guardian on August 4. Open-source advocate Felix Cohen says in the comments: "I was halfway convinced until you conflated Wikimedia and Facebook".
- On Reddit last week, many users responded to the question Who here actually contributes to wikipedia articles?. On the Foundation-l mailing list, Sue Gardner called it "a really interesting thread [with] lots about deletionism and notability."
- An analysis published on Reddit (US Army intelligence report copied wholesale from Wikipedia) found that a 2007 report by a US military unit in the Afghan War Diary (a collection of documents recently published by Wikileaks) appears to have copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article HN-5, to describe a type of missile the unit had secured from locals. The posting noted that the apparently copied content had been added to Wikipedia some months earlier from an IP registered to L-3 Communications, a US government contractor. It did not examine the possibility that both might be based on a third source. The posting was noted by Wikileaks on Twitter and received more than 9,800 hits.
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RfA drought worsens in 2010—wikigeneration gulf emerging
- WereSpielChequers is an editor on the English Wikipedia, the Strategy Process, and occasionally various other projects. He has been active at RfA for more than two years, and has researched its history back into the first year of Wikipedia.
The drought in RfA (Requests for Adminship) has now run for 28 months and is worsening. The number of admins promoted in 2009 was very low compared to previous years, and each of the past six months since has seen even fewer successful RfAs than the same month in 2009. The number of active admins has fallen from the peak of 1,021 in February 2009 to 802 on August 1, 2010.
Requirements have been increasing at RfA in various ways, and since the unbundling of rollback in early 2008 (see Signpost coverage) it has been difficult for candidates to succeed simply as "good vandal fighters". One result of this is that there is now a gulf growing between admins and non admins in terms of "Wiki generations". Over 90% of our admins first edited more than three and a half years ago. It is probably no surprise that there are no admins who first edited in 2010, but only nine started editing in 2009 and thirty-eight in 2008. Even the Wikipedians who joined us in 2007 are still under-represented in the admin cadre.
| Month\Year | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | Totals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | 2 | 13 | 14 | 44 | 23 | 36 | 6 | 6 | |||
| February | 2 | 14 | 9 | 28 | 35 | 27 | 9 | 7 | |||
| March | 8 | 31 | 16 | 34 | 31 | 22 | 13 | 2 | |||
| April | 6 | 20 | 25 | 36 | 30 | 12 | 14 | 8 | |||
| May | 10 | 23 | 17 | 30 | 54 | 16 | 12 | 8 | |||
| June | [1] | 24 | 13 | 28 | 28 | 35 | 18 | 12 | 6 | ||
| July | 3 | 11 | 17 | 31 | 26 | 31 | 16 | 10 | 7 | ||
| August | 4 | 9 | 12 | 39 | 26 | 18 | 12 | 11 | |||
| September | 0 | 17 | 29 | 32 | 22 | 34 | 6 | 8 | |||
| October | 0 | 10 | 16 | 67 | 27 | 27 | 16 | 7 | |||
| November | 3 | 9 | 27 | 41 | 33 | 56 | 11 | 13 | |||
| December | 1 | 15 | 24 | 68 | 19 | 34 | 9 | 6 | |||
| Total promoted | n/a |
44 |
123 |
239 |
387 |
353 |
408 |
201 |
121 |
44 |
1920
|
| Total unsuccessful | n/a |
n/a |
n/a |
63 |
213 |
543 |
512 |
392 |
234 |
99 |
2056 [2]
|
| Total RfAs including by email | n/a |
44 |
123 |
302 |
600 |
896 |
920 |
593 |
355 |
143 |
3976 [3]
|
| Percentage promoted | n/a | n/a | n/a | 79.1% | 64.5% | 39.4% | 44.3% | 33.9% | 34.1% | 30.8% | 44.1%[4] |
| Year | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | Totals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Year admins started editing[5] | 32 |
109 |
223 |
404 |
481 |
328 |
107 |
38 |
9 |
0 |
1731
|
| Year active admins started editing[6] | 14 |
34 |
71 |
163 |
221 |
183 |
69 |
29 |
9 |
0 |
793
|
| Admins still active % | 43.8% |
31.2% |
31.8% |
40.3% |
45.9% |
55.8% |
64.5% |
76.3% |
100% |
45.8%
|
| Year | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | Today |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active admins at end of year [7] | n/a |
n/a |
143 |
360 |
722 |
979 |
1,005 |
943 |
870 |
802 | |
| Inactive or desysopped (net) | n/a |
n/a |
24[8] |
22 |
25 |
96 |
382 |
263 |
194 |
||
| Inactive or desysopped (net)% | n/a |
n/a |
14%<ref>Over three years not one |
6% |
3% |
9% |
28% |
22% |
18% |
Notes
About one new admin per day was promoted from mid-2005 to mid-March 2008; this pattern oscillated between half and a fifth of that rate until late 2009, and since then the promotion rate has dropped to one every five days.
Originally sourced from User:NoSeptember/Admin stats#Year to year comparison of promotions by months, copied here and colour-coded. Updates from Wikipedia:Unsuccessful adminship candidacies (Chronological) and active admins from User:NoSeptember/Admin stats and Revision history of Wikipedia:List of administrators
- Early 2003 from User:NoSeptember/RfA_chronological
On the counting of admins
Nobody really knows how many admin accounts there have been on the English Wikipedia, or how many actual people they represent. Some stats include admin bots, others do not. If an admin has their account renamed they are still one admin, but if they leave and return with a new account and have that sysoped then some stats count them as two admins. Nowadays developers and other staff members have a "staff" flag, but some early staff members were simply made admins, and at least one measure of our number of admins would include them if they made an admin action. If a protected page is moved, the automated moving of the protection settings is counted as a page protection and is listed under the username of the person who moved the page, whether or not they are actually an admin. Also, stewards can act as admins on enwiki. Records for the early days are incomplete. We have had 1,920 admins appointed (not including bots), we currently have 1,741 accounts with an admin flag (including bots), of whom 802 are active as editors, and as of August 2, 2010, 2,019 editors are recorded as carrying out admin actions on the English Wikipedia, but see the note above.
- ^ 33 had been appointed in 2001 and early 2002
- ^ 2004–2010
- ^ unsuccessful 2003 are n/a; the earliest phase was done by email and there is no record of the people who were turned down
- ^ This percentage represents all years from 2004 onwards.
- ^ last calculated Aug 2010 – this only includes current accounts of people who are still admins, but includes inactives.
- ^ User CBM
- ^ active admins peaked at 1021 on 28/2/2009
- ^ Over three years not one
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Strategic Planning update
- Theo10011 is a bureaucrat and administrator at Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Process.
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The Wikimedia Foundation's Strategic Planning Process began as a major initiative in July 2009, designed to provide an outlet for the community to formulate a five-year plan that will shape the direction of the Foundation and its projects. Community members, consultants, staff members and benefactors were invited to come together to contribute in a single forum, task forces were established to formulate recommendations, and everyone involved was invited to write proposals and provide recommendations. Eugene Eric Kim and Philippe Beaudette served as facilitators (see also Eekim's earlier Signpost article: The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community); they developed and nurtured the Strategic Planning Process over the next few months. The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit strategy consulting group, facilitated the interviews and provided consulting for the process along with Eugene on behalf of his consulting firm, the Blue Oxen Group.
As a result, there were close to 900 proposals, 14 task forces, a repository for statistics gathered for the process, and a specialized community to discuss and influence the direction of all Wikimedia projects. Editors were invited to vote on proposals and provide feedback, and a task force comprising some of the authors of the proposals finalized the recommendations based on their proposals. The strategy wiki also served as a testbed for two relatively new software features - the LiquidThreads talk pages and the feature for rating the proposals. After many passionate discussions, debates and brainstorming sessions—some of which occurred face-to-face at the recent Wikimania in Gdansk—we finally had a road-map for where the Foundation will proceed over the next few years.
Broad groups of people were enlisted to discuss and refine these ideas. Bridgespan conducted interviews with many different specialists, such as Ward Cunningham (the inventor of the wiki) and the late political scientist Howard Zinn, and comparisons were made with the business models of similar organizations, such as the Mozilla Foundation.
The Priorities outlined five specific areas of focus:
- achieving continued growth in readership;
- focusing on quality content;
- increasing participation;
- stabilizing the infrastructure;
- encouraging innovation.
The Foundation will focus on the Global South to achieve its growth in readership for the next decade—particularly India, Brazil and the Middle East. It will increase the quality of the content by focusing on more collaborations with cultural institutions, increasing inter-project collaboration across different languages and projects, and establishing quality baseline and reader-submitted rankings to judge the 'quality' metric. To increase participation, the Foundation will focus on increasing entry of new editors into some of the mature projects, and achieving higher retention rates among all editors. To stabilize the infrastructure, there will be a target of 99.99% uptime for site availability with secure offline copies of all projects, along with regular measurements of site performance in different parts of the world. The Foundation will nurture more community-oriented campaigns as well as internal Wiki related gadgets, tools, and extensions for use in all the projects, and will provide up-to date archives of public data to researchers.
At this stage, we want to circulate these priorities as widely as possible and to encourage those who supported them to view them and complete a survey that will provide metrics for comparison on what we want to achieve. Sue Gardner sent out an email recently asking community members to provide feedback to the Movement Priorities through this survey. It is intended to give a target range and provide a benchmark for the priorities, and will be available until August 15. The "Movement priorities", targets, and measures of success are located at Strategic Planning Movement Priorities. The process is ongoing, and all community members—existing and new participants in the Process—are invited to read them and provide feedback. The finalized strategy plan will be presented to the Board for approval in late August.
Although the Strategy Process is nearly finalized, there is still room for discussion along with a repository of facts and figures for the community to examine. Above all, there is now a place for the community to discuss the direction that it is going to take. As a member of the strategy wiki, I would like to acknowledge all the support provided by Eugene and Philippe. Without their tireless guidance and continued support, this process would not have been possible; so, thank you guys.
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Chocks away for WikiProject Aviation
- WikiProject Disability is looking for new members
- The Motto of the Day project has opened up a Motto Shop where users can request a motto that they "live by" on Wikipedia
- The new August WikiProject Universities Collaborations are Cornell University and Belarusian State University
This week we hung out with WikiProject Aviation, which covers all aspects of air travel. The project has 150 GAs, 52 FAs and maintains a Portal. We chatted to Mjroots, Ahunt, SidewinderX and Bzuk to uncover the hidden workings of this project which covers over 42,500 articles.
Mjroots joined the project in late 2007/early 2008, with Ahunt joining in April 2005, SidewinderX joining in the middle of last year and Bzuk joining in the middle of 2006. When asked what the biggest problem has faced the project since they joined, they shout out different answers; Mjroots said that, one area of disagreement [in the project] is what constitutes a notable aircraft accident, something which WP:AIRCRASH attempts to resolve, but not always successfully. SidewinderX and Ahunt both agreed saying that there are many subjects, such as aircraft that still don’t have articles. In five years they’ve gone a long way, but there’s still a long way to go. Bzuk made a completely different point saying: I noted that the group of aviation articles that I read had widely divergent writing styles and reference notes. Although that is the inevitable result of a "too many cooks" syndrome, it appears to be getting better.
Mjroots was inspired to join the project mainly due to his interest in civil aviation and aircraft accidents. He is also an occasional SLF. Ahunt was a pilot for 31 years and is still an aviation journalist. He laughs, “So I have good access to refs. I have tens of thousands of arcraft photos which I’m slowly uploading to illustrate articles." SidewinderX admits that his background influenced him to join the project, as he is an aerospace engineer. He sees working on Wikipedia articles as a way to keep up with his field. With the added advantage of helping out others of course! Bzuk’s first contributions were entirely self-serving as an article on VC winner Andrew Mynarski needed some work, but since then, he has dabbled in a number of other interest areas including automobiles, films and current events. He's a librarian (35+ years), writer (10 books on aviation and counting), filmmaker (13 films as screenwriter, technical consultant and director, mostly aviation documentaries), historian (of sorts) and is actively involved in the aviation industry as an executive director of an industry trade association (at least till August 2010).
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When onto the subject of Featured and Good articles/lists and whether they have been the project's best achievments, all have been involved in the promotion of at least one, apart from Ahunt who says that, in some cases, he has seen the relentless pursuit of these [articles] under their rigid rule sets, result in articles that are of lower quality. He thinks that instead of these articles being the project’s greatest achievements, what are really important are the level of coverage they currently have and the great working relationships they have on the project. Mjroots, SidewinderX and Bzuk, on the other hand, all have stories to tell. Mjroots was responsible for the major expansion and promotion to GA status of BOAC Flight 712. This was, he says, the hardest of his six GAs. He also added that FAs are supposed to be projects’ greatest achievements, although he was recently surprised to discover that a main page FA from this WikiProject [WikiProject Aviation] appeared not to meet FA standards at the time. SidewinderX has recently completed his first FAC. He also, with the help of many others in the Wikiproject, got the CFM International CFM56 article promoted to FA. He admits that it’s rewarding to have accomplished that although he feels that they could have got 5 articles to high B-class level, which, he says, ultimately seems more useful for the community. Bzuk has actively contributed to most, if not all, of the FA and GA projects. He says that if there is an agreement to work in a collaborative manner there is a great reward. He also notes that the efforts devoted to Concorde in its latest reincarnation show the opposite with one editor dominating rather than working as part of a team. He feels strongly that the greatest achievements in the project are the coming together of experts in the field from all over the globe and yet being able to blend that diverse group together into a cohesive "band of brothers."
Aviation and air travel are a large project scope and the interviewees all deal with the vandalism level this brings in different ways. Mjroots is an Administrator so has access to tools and options such as warnings, protection and banning. Overall, he feels that the level of vandalism is not overly high. Ahunt’s method is simple but effective: long watch lists he says, laughing. SidewinderX agrees; “Long watch lists and a sense of humor”, he nods. “Also,” he adds, “A lot of vandalism seems to be of the patriotic type for instance, Indian plane XYZ is soooooo much better than Chinese plane ABC. It helps to be able to step back, fix the vandalism and hope the vandals get bored and move on. Bzuk backs up Mjroot’s point: “The aviation topic does not attract the great unwashed but most of the vandalism is concentrated on the high risk subjects such as POV pushing for Amelia Earhart being found on Gardner/Nikumaroro Island or in rewriting history in attacking the Wright Brothers, but eventually, the troll attacks bring out the admins and a suitable defence is launched. One of the most consistent vandal fighting efforts is the simple vigilance that is bestowed by having so many editors having a large watch list of the controversial subjects in our group.”
The interviewees' goals for the project all vary greatly. Mjroots’ is to create more aircrash articles and finish off List of accidents and incidents involving the Douglas DC-3, as well as creating other lists of accidents and incidents for major civil airliners. SidewinderX’s current goals include improving engine component articles (such as the recently improved Combustor and Turbine blade articles), as well as some of the high profile articles that recently lowered in quality, like Jet engine and Turbofan. Bzuk laughs; “My goals are to not waste so much time on trivial pursuits, such as this WikiWacky world nerds like me inhabit."
When asked how a new editor can help the project they all chime in with ideas. Ahunt points out that, because the project is so large, an editor can help by working in any areas where they have knowledge or interest and especially that they have references for. SidewinderX furthers this saying, “Any editor with an interest can jump in and start expanding or creating the 1000s of articles that are stubs or nonexistent. I also think it would be great to get some non-technical editors to read through some of our more technical articles and help us make them more accessible to all readers. Bzuk adds that the Aviation WikiProject does need to encourage and support newcomers who can help to expand the small group of dedicated editors, since the task of chronicling the story of aviation is extremely vast.
The new rules on BLPs haven’t really affected the project in any way, with Ahunt not working on them and SidewinderX not actually knowing what they mean. Bzuk feels that they’re not much of a concern: ”This issue [unreferenced BLPs] is not so much a concern in a topic area dominated by “nuts and bolts” I mean, the articles here...". He laughs. “But COI does tend to crop up, and one ever watchful editor in the US has been relentless in a pruning of the "vanity press".
With the end of the interview in sight I ask the guys if there is anything they want to say before their "ten minutes of fame" are over. As before they all want to get in first. Ahunt and SidewinderX both agree that the project needs more interested editors with a fresh point of view on subjects. Bzuk makes a similar point, saying that contributors who have an interest in a particularly specialized subject area can be a means of introducing the newbie to the benefits and rich rewards of working with a group of like-minded souls.
Next week, the Report will wave the checkered flag. Until then, feel free to burn some rubber in the archive.
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Supermarine Spitfire XVI at Duxford, September 2006. -
1786 description of the historic Montgolfier Brothers' 1783 balloon flight. -
Air Force One, the typical air transport of the President of the United States, flying over Mount Rushmore.
Reader comments
The best of the week
Featured articles
Nine articles were promoted to featured status:
- Russian battleship Slava (nom), launched in 1903, played important roles in suppressing the Sveaborg Rebellion of Russian soldiers in 1906, rescuing survivors of the 1908 Messina earthquake, and resisting the German navy in World War I (Sturmvogel 66).
- Wotton railway station (nom), the story of a station built in 1871 on a private horse-drawn tramway as part of the Duke of Buckingham's "increasingly harebrained scheme to provide a mass-transit service to an area populated almost exclusively by cows" (Iridescent).
- Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (nom) is the third book in US writer Maya Angelou's six-volume autobiography, set from 1949 to 1955, which examines such themes as race, conflict, and motherhood (Christine).
John E Brownlee, premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, 1926–30 - Minnie Pwerle (nom) (1915–2006), an Indigenous Australian artist whose much-sought-after work was characterised by a "spontaneous" style, typified by bold and vibrant colour executed with great freedom (Hamiltonstone).
- Shimer College (nom), a small, academically rigorous US college with an unusual history and curriculum (Nasty Housecat).
- John Brownlee as Attorney-General of Alberta (nom), recounting Brownlee's major role as a conservative in the United Farmers government of the province of Alberta in western Canada (Steve Smith).
- Pathways into Darkness (nom), a 1993 video game in which the player has to rescue the world from a godlike being (David Fuchs).
- Transandinomys (nom), a genus of two long-whiskered, medium-sized rice rats from Central and South America (Ucucha).
- Walter Bache (nom), a 19th-century English pianist and conductor who was a prominent student of Franz Liszt (Jonyungk).
Choice of the week. The Signpost asked featured article review delegate Dana boomer to select her best of the week. "I chose Walter Bache. Featured articles on classical music are rather few and far between, and I found this one to be a fascinating read. I’ve never studied the classical composers and artists, and so to learn more about them, and be routed to such articles as War of the Romantics, was quite fun."
Four featured articles were delisted:
- Nintendo Entertainment System (nom: sourcing, prose, comprehensiveness and copyrights)
- Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (nom: sourcing, original research and copyrights)
- Ziad Jarrah (nom: sourcing and copyrights)
- Ike Altgens (nom: sourcing and copyrights)
Featured lists
Five lists were promoted:
- List of Chicago Cubs first-round draft picks (nom). Of the 56 players picked in the first round by the Cubs, 28 have been pitchers, the most of any position. One of the picks has won the MLB Rookie of the Year award, and another is a member of both the 3,000 hit club and the 500 home run club (nominated by Courcelles).
- Grammy Award for Best Dance Recording (nom), awarded since 1998. Recent winners include Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (Alive 2007)" and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face". (Another Believer)
- List of Digimon video games (nom). The Digimon series revolves around the eponymous Digimon creatures and their human "Tamers", who both serve as player and non-player characters depending on the game (Tezero).
- List of Cleveland Indians managers (nom). Two managers, Tris Speaker and Lou Boudreau, have led the Indians to World Series championships (LAAFan).
- List of volcanoes in the Hawaiian – Emperor seamount chain (nom), comprising the volcanoes in the Hawaiian archipelago, Northwestern Hawaiian islands, and Emperor seamounts. The ages of these volcanoes range from 400,000 to 85 million years (Resident Mario and Awickert).
Choice of the week. Staxringold has written 26 featured lists, mostly on the subject of baseball. Here is his pick: "Much as I might like to go with a baseball list, my choice has to be List of volcanoes in the Hawaiian – Emperor seamount chain. The nominators went through three FLCs, grinding out all the little details for this in-depth, very nice list covering the chain of volcanoes near the Hawaiian archipelago. Dynamic lists are never easy to pull off, and Mario and Awickert did a great job."
Featured pictures
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Ten images were promoted:
- Thrissops formosus (nom), a fossil of the extinct fish Thrissops from the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The reviewers were all enthusiastic; Greg L pointed out how rare it is to find "so much soft tissue fossilized—and with so much fossil/matrix color differentiation; that is just awesome", and that "the lighting angle is great and the resolution is very high". (Created by H. Zell.)
- Mike Godwin (nom), known for his Godwin's Law currently works as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. There was some discussion about avoiding the featuring of this picture on the main page due to WP:SELF (Lane Hartwell, on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation). (below)
- Knut Steen (nom), the Norwegian sculptor, photographed in 2007 (Nina-no).
- Cymbiola nobilis (nom), a species of sea snail in the Volutidae family, picture of the shell shown from four directions (H. Zell).
- Nicholas Kratzer (nom), a 1528 portrait of Nicholas Kratzer. This is one of the images over which the National Portrait Gallery of London claims copyright (unknown painter, in the style of Hans Holbein the Younger). (right)
- Chicago Theatre (nom), A HDR image of Chicago Theatre. After debate about several "ghosted" people at the bottom, these digital processing flaws were carefully removed by the creator Daniel Schwen. (below)
- Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi (nom), A portrait of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (created by International Monetary Fund—photographer uncredited). (right)
- Pectinaria koreni (nom), a species of trumpet worm, shown with and without its sand tube (created by Hans Hillewaert).
- Liftoff Space Shuttle Atlantis (nom) A HD video of the liftoff of Space Shuttle Atlantis in STS-132—the last scheduled flight of Atlantis before its scheduled retirement. The promotion of this video (with several low-resolution options) required the creation of a new template {{FPlowres}}, since policy states we should link low-resolution video to pages, but have links to the high-resolution versions in the caption for people with higher-bandwidth Internet connections (created by NASA) (top).
- Martyrdom of Joseph and Hiram Smith in Carthage Jail, June 27th, 1844 (nom), an unusual lithograph that mixes one colour and black. There was some discussion about its historical accuracy. Restorer Adam Cuerden said the original was so big it took three hours to crop, rotate, and adjust the colour. "Ground my system to a halt, and I have a reasonably good computer. Mind you, I also spent three hours cleaning up the blank border surrounding the image – and maybe an hour or two on the image itself.... every slight smudge shows on blank paper (created by G. W. Fasel and Charles G. Crehen; published by Nagel & Weingaertner).
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Choice of the week. We asked JovanCormac, a member of the Organising Committee for the Commons Picture of the Year, to choose his number-one for the week: "Picking this week's standout was an easy choice: This NASA film of Atlantis taking off is simply one of the best videos in our library. Shot in impeccable 1080i full HD quality, it shows details I'd never seen before from the liftoff. Even though from a technical viewpoint it's just as easy to include videos in articles as it is to embed pictures, in my opinion there is still not nearly enough video footage on Wikipedia; in particular, videos are often overlooked in the featuring process. The newly featured video gives me hope that this might improve in the future, confirms NASA's status as one of the foremost contributors of public domain material, and is a jewel in our slowly but steadily growing collection of commercial-quality encyclopedic footage." (top)
One featured picture was delisted:
- Armillaria sp Marriott (nom), replaced by a version edited to remove the "background distraction" in the original.
Administrators
There were no promotions to adminship.
Reader comments
Tricky and Lengthy Dispute Resolution
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
Open cases
- Climate change (Week 9): This case, which is technically open, resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Special rules of conduct were put in place when this arbitration commenced. Two weeks ago, participants requested an update on when to expect a proposed decision, and a similar request was made again last week, but since July 19 (three weeks ago) when the workshop phase was closed, arbitrators have still not set any specific target date. This has sparked a large quantity of discussion among participants, some of which was collapsed as "Extended content".
- Race and intelligence (Week 10): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The proposed decision that was drafted by Coren has sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants (example). Other proposals by other arbitrators are being considered, however, more than six days had passed since the proposed decision attracted any other votes or proposals from arbitrators.
Other
- Applications for CheckUser and Oversight permissions have closed. Next week, The Signpost is likely to publish the names of applicants being actively considered for appointment.
Reader comments
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Multimedia Upload Wizard ready for testing
Further to previous Signpost coverage, Guillaume Paumier (User:guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability Team has announced that the new Multimedia Upload Wizard is ready for public testing:
| “ | The prototype isn't finished yet, but we feel it's important to continue to include the Wikimedia community in the ongoing development of our tool. We would like to invite you to test the prototype, read the Questions & answers page, and share your comments and questions on the feedback page (after checking the list of existing bugs and improvements we're already working on).
We thank in advance every user who will help us provide better tools and interfaces for the Wikimedia contributors. The prototype is located at http://commons.prototype.wikimedia.org. |
” |
The wizard is first being targeted at Wikimedia Commons, but there is little to rule out a subsequent deployment on the English Wikipedia.
A centralised "data wiki"
This week, Daniel Kinzler (User:Duesentrieb), a MediaWiki developer employed by Wikimedia Germany, outlined his thoughts on how a "data wiki" might be set up as a common repository for facts and figures.
| “ | There has long been talk about a "data wiki", that is, a way to collect and maintain structured, factual data in a collaborative, wiki-like fashion. The most obvious application for this would be to manage the information we now see in Wikipedia's infoboxes on the right side of many articles. The basic requirements for such a system are:
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He went on to list some of the programmatic challenges facing developers if this is to be achieved, and how they might be overcome.
The history of such ideas goes back at least to Erik Möller's 2004 Wikidata proposal. It has recently been noted that one of the current Google Summer of Code projects ("Reasonably efficient interwiki transclusion") could have the side effect of establishing Commons as such a data wiki.
In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live on WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- Editing for many WMF wikis, but not the English Wikipedia and a handful of others, was temporarily prevented by a full disk on August 7 (Wikimedia techblog).
- Similarly, but in a separate incident, emailing OTRS was temporarily prevented. Emails were eventually processed.
- In a recent interview with the Web Hosting Industry Review, the Foundation's CTO Danese Cooper explained the plans for the second US data center which will be set up in Ashburn, Virginia and is planned to be online by January 1, 2011.
- With the resolution of bug #24677, it is now possible to use "axto=" parameters on "allXXX" queries through the API, where the given title will be the last listed.
- The permissions a group can add and remove are now available through the API (bug #24236).
- Bug #23848 was solved, making a new magic word available:
{{ARTICLEPATH}}, which returns the$wgArticlePathvariable, i.e., the part of the url on the wiki used for articles, with $1 instead of the article name. Its current value is thus the string"/wiki/$1"(see discussion). - There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about Adobe Flash: Is it banned on Wikimedia? Probably. Should we relax this rule? Possibly, or we'll have to wait for HTML5 to catch up.
- The ImageAnnotator gadget has been enabled on the English Wikipedia, allowing notes to be attached to areas of an image. This gadget has been enabled for everyone on Commons for some time, and editors of images such as File:Solvay conference 1927.jpg and File:State Govt Complex.jpg have already taken advantage of the feature. (see discussion.)
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