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27 September 2010

News and notes
French million, controversial content, Citizendium charter, Pending changes, and more
In the news
Wikimedia moves into India, critical conference, Vandalism detection contest
WikiProject report
Designing WikiProject Architecture
Features and admins
The best of the week
Arbitration report
EEML amendment requests & more
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
 

2010-09-27

French million, controversial content, Citizendium charter, Pending changes, and more

French-language Wikipedia reaches a million articles

The 1,000,000th logo for the French Wikipedia.
The growth in the number of articles on the French Wikipedia

The French-language Wikipedia celebrated its millionth article with the creation of the article Louis Babel on September 21. The French-language Wikipedia is the third to cross this threshold, after the German (with 1.1 million) and English Wikipedias (with 3.4), having grown at a steady rate since its formation in 2001. It has more than 60 million individual edits and 300,000 active contributors; article creation at WP.fr spiked in 2005–06, driven by the addition of some 36,000 geographical stubs, then stabilized to a present rate of 300–400 new articles a day, as well as 800 active contributor registrations per month.

The milestone was also announced on Wikimedia France's Twitter feed. Because of lag on the Wikipedia page lists, the milestone was expected to be hit two days later, on September 23; following a flurry of page creations, the developers revealed that the milestone had been hit with the creation of Louis Babel, two days prior to the expected date.

The next Wikipedias likely to break the threshold are the Polish (now at 729,000 articles) and the Italian (728,000).

Draft of controversial content recommendations published

Part Two of three installments of the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content has been released (see earlier Signpost coverage: "Board resolution on offensive content", "Study on controversial content"). Authored by consultants Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris, it sets out 11 recommendations for discussion, to be presented to the Board in October, among them that:

Part Three will contain a "rough catalogue" of existing sexual images on Commons.

Citizendium adopts charter, Larry Sanger's leading role ends

Larry Sanger

After a deliberation process lasting more than a year, the free wiki-based online encyclopedia Citizendium has adopted a charter (consisting of 55 articles laying a constitution-like foundation for the project's governance). This was announced last week by its founder Larry Sanger, whose role as editor-in-chief ended with the charter's ratification.

Plans for a charter had already been mentioned in Citizendium's initial press release in October 2006, but the drafting process did not start until a July 2009 statement by Sanger, in which he announced his intention to step down as editor-in-chief, partly to fulfill his pledge to do so two or three years after Citizendium's inception, and partly due to his inactivity on the project.

The charter's 55 articles are in seven sections ("Citizenship and editorship", "Content and style", "Organization and offices", "Community policy", "Behavior and dispute resolution", "Administrative matters", and "Transitional measures"). A nomination process has now begun to fill governance roles set out in the charter: A five-member Management Council, a seven-member Editorial Council, a Managing Editor, and an Ombudsman. The preamble to the charter describes Citizendium as "a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and cultivate knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free", without mentioning the word "encyclopedia". There were concerns about ambiguous statements and a lack of copy-editing in the final version (there are typos such as "Managament Council"). Sanger himself, who was not directly involved in the drafting process, had objected to the wording of several articles, including those mentioning original research and advertising, and to the absence from the charter of "anything like a bill of rights enumerating the rights of Citizens against unfair procedures and punishments". In last week's announcement, Sanger also criticized the charter's "lack of any requirement that articles be family-friendly" (as in Citizendium's current family-friendly policy), and added that "there is some seriously twisted stuff on Wikipedia that has no business in a resource calling itself an 'encyclopedia'" (cf. Signpost coverage of his earlier allegations against Wikimedia Commons). On the other hand, he expressed hope that the charter would make it easier to exclude problematic contributors from Citizendium, which he said suffered from the presence of "ideologues" and "cranks" (the project has been criticized for being over-lenient towards advocates of topics such as homeopathy or chiropractic).

Despite the criticism of the final version, it was overwhelmingly approved, by 65 of 72 participating members. (In each of the past two months, there were around 100 active Citizendium users, i.e. accounts that had made at least one edit, according to Citizendium's statistics.) Half of the eight-member Charter Drafting Committee had "dropped out" before the vote, and one of the remaining committee members (also the Secretary of Citizendium's Editorial Council) justified the decision not to delay the process further: "Citizendium is on intensive care life support. I think it has a chance to recover with an imperfect charter".

In his announcement, Sanger dismissed "hopeful, mean-spirited reports of our impending demise", observing that "our traffic has been steadily growing, and I've observed new people continuing to get involved". However, he warned that "the funds available to pay for the Citizendium servers are running low" and advised the community to think about funding options and cheaper hosting (see also July 26 Signpost coverage).

Interim poll on pending changes ends

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More articles

The interim poll on the use of Pending changes on Wikipedia has closed. After the two-month Pending changes trial, an earlier straw poll had produced 407 in favor, 217 opposed, plus 44 other responses. Jimbo Wales then asked the Wikimedia Foundation to keep the tool running until there had been further discourse (see Signpost story).

The interim poll, from September 20–27, was run to decide whether the system should be kept in place until the release of a new version, projected for November 9, that is expected to address some concerns. It closed with 289 votes for temporary continuation and 199 for temporary removal.

A trial that would apply Pending changes to WP:MEDS articles has been proposed, to gather additional data. Testing has been centralized, and the poll has received a large amount of debate on its talk page.

Briefly

2010-09-27

Wikimedia moves into India, critical conference, Vandalism detection contest

Wikipedians from Mumbai
Wikipedians from Bangalore

India: Media speculation on country's future "Wiki-capital"; community newsletter released

Barry Newstead, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer, visited India last week to prepare the opening of the organization's first office outside the US, combined with the hiring of a "National Program Director" for India (see Signpost coverage: September 6 and August 30).

Newstead visited New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. It was the first time a Wikipedia Meetup was ever organized in New Delhi and Mumbai. It brought together a mix of bloggers, Wikipedians and people generally interested in contributing to Wikipedia. Some 40 people attended the Mumbai and Bangalore Meetups and about 20 attended the Delhi meet, despite heavy monsoon rains disrupting the city. Along with WMF Trustee Bishakha Datta and advisory board member Achal Prabhala, Newstead addressed a press conference in Bangalore city.

The office is set to open in early 2011, and its location has not been announced yet. Yet various Indian media speculated which of the three cities might have the best chances. Bangalore, which is already the seat of the Indian Wikimedia chapter appears to be the front-runner according to The Hindu ("Wikipedia eyes Bangalore"), Times of India ("Wiki logs into India for its second office"), and The Economic Times ("Wikipedia aims to interact in top 10 Indian languages"). However, The Press Trust of India ("Wikipedia to open India office soon") said "Wikipedia" would launch the office "probably in Mumbai", while Daily News and Analysis ("Bangalore is in fray to become Wikipedia's India capital") mentioned Pune as a fourth possibility.

Wikimedia India Community Newsletter

Time Out Mumbai quoted Prabhala on possible reasons that might still be "keeping Indians from becoming active contributors". The Economic Times described some of Newstead's personal background. Before becoming the Foundation's CGDO in June (see Signpost coverage), he had been a consultant at the non-profit Bridgespan Group, having quit a lucrative career at the Boston Consulting Group. Newstead explained: "I’ve always had a passion for education and knowledge. I enjoyed the training I got in consulting, but it was a personal decision to spend my career working on important social issues".

In related news, the first Indian Wikimedia Community Newsletter has been released last week. The publication contains a foreword by Bishdatta and Jimbo Wales (who already praised the Indian-language Wikipedias last month). The newsletter is 36 pages long in PDF format.

The newsletter reports the size of the Indian community: because of the large number of languages in India, there are about 20 different Wikipedias, as well as a similar number in the incubator. There is also significant Indian editing activity on the English Wikipedia (English is one of the official languages of India). There is a story on the activities of the Indian Wikipedia Chapter, and information on the activities of the various Indian-language WMF projects and the interactions between them. Some interesting tidbits:

Presentation at the CPOV conference in Leipzig

Third "critical point of view" conference

On September 25 and 26, the third "CPOV" conference about Wikipedia took place in Leipzig, Germany. Unlike the previous installments that had been held in Bangalore in January and in Amsterdam in March (Signpost coverage), this one was held in a local language (Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt).

As in the other conferences, most of the presentations were by academic researchers from the humanities. But this installment saw more participation by active Wikipedians, several of whom discussed with researchers in a "Wikipedia and Science" roundtable and on a "Wikipedia and Criticism" panel, and gave introductory Wikipedia workshops on the first day, supported by the local chapter, Wikimedia Germany.

The event generated coverage in several major German media. For example, TV news service Tageschau interviewed the director of the Leipzig university library (one of the conference sites) about Wikipedia, with one question being about the new Article feedback tool.

Vandalism detection competition

The "1st International Competition on Wikipedia Vandalism Detection" was held in Padua, Italy on 22–23 September 2010, to evaluate automated tools for detecting malicious edits on Wikipedia (workshop page), having received submissions from nine teams. It was based on a corpus of 32452 edits, sampled from one week of Wikipedia's recent changes, that had been classified by 753 human annotators recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk, enabling the project to check the accuracy of the automatic vandalism detectors, for example by comparing true positives and false positives ("TP" and "FP" in the PDF file). One conclusion was that a combination of all 9 submitted detectors can perform better than any single detector. The combined detector has performance of FP=20% at a threshold level where TP=95% (right-hand chart on page 11), i.e. it would catch 19 out of 20 vandalism edits if it were allowed an error rate of wrongly classifying one in five legitimate edits as vandalism. A data point for higher detection levels is FP=35% at TP=98%. The paper also catalogued the different features that the detectors combine to assess the probability that a given edit is vandalism (one of the simplest characteristics, employed by seven of the nine contestants, is whether it was made by an anonymous editor).

Some other automatic vandalism detection tools were not part of the competition, among them vandal fighting bots like User:ClueBot that already operate on Wikipedia, the STiki tool developed at the University of Pennsylvania (whose author says that it would have finished second if it had participated) and a recently announced project at the University of Iowa.

Briefly

  • How Wikipedians use sources: A paper that appeared in this month's issue of the journal "Information Research" ("Where does the information come from? Information source use patterns in Wikipedia") reported on a Web survey that had been answered by 108 Wikipedians in spring 2008. Based on the results, the author Isto Huvila distinguishes five groups of Wikipedians according to their use of references (e.g., whether they tend to find sources by online search or by visits to the library): "Investigators", "Surfers", the "Worldly-wise", "Scholars" and "Editors".
  • Use of image donation analyzed: Five months after announcing a large scale upload of "no known copyright" images from its collection to Wikimedia Commons (Signpost coverage), the Brooklyn Museum has published a brief statistical analysis showing how often the images are used on different Wikipedias, and how often the various metadata fields in the image descriptions were changed or corrected by Wikimedians ("Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?").

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2010-09-27

Designing WikiProject Architecture

WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
30 St Mary Axe, nicknamed 'The Gherkin', designed by Norman Foster
Sydney Opera House – increasingly subject to official photographic and copyright restraints
The China Central Television Headquarters building, Beijing, by Rem Koolhaas

This week, The Signpost visited WikiProject Architecture. The project was created in April 2004 to explore architecture, buildings, and construction. Members and enthusiasts discuss common issues, develop standards, and create templates. The project is now home to more than 16,000 articles, including 67 featured articles, 67 featured lists, 3 A-class articles, and 183 good articles. We interviewed project members Binksternet, Warofdreams, and Elekhh.

Warofdreams started the WikiProject back in 2004 upon a suggestion from User:Isomorphic. This architecture graduate had already been contributing on a wide range of topics connected with this area architecture. Having just created the timeline of architecture, he hoped to encourage the identification of gaps and weak areas in en.WP's coverage. Project member Binksternet joined the WikiProject because of his interest in architectural preservation in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived. He is inspired by Spanish Revival and Art Deco architecture from the 1920s and 1930s, mid-century modern and Googie from the 1950s and 60s, and "bold and fanciful statements made in construction of a building".

For Elekhh, who started contributing to Wikipedia only a year ago with the aim of improving architecture and articles related to urban design, joining this WikiProject was natural. He is interested in 20th-century and contemporary architecture. Elekhh is also a member of WikiProject Urban studies and planning, which he says is unfortunately not very active.

Binksternet has contributed his share to building the project's repertoire of Featured and Good Articles. He greatly expanded the article about architect Timothy L. Pflueger, helped it to earn GA status, and hopes to bring it to FA some day. He was heavily involved in the articles 100 McAllister Street and Hotel Valley Ho, and advanced them to GA. Having reviewed articles for GA status including World Trade Center and Architecture of Denmark, and helped with FA reviews, he is eager for more. However, he encourages more new editors to get involved, and hopes to encourage anyone to jump in and learn what is required to get an article to GA status.

Many of the potential subjects covered by the project are iconic works of art, and deserve to be portrayed by high-quality images. Warofdreams says it is easy to take average-quality pictures of buildings, as they are easily accessible to all. However, he has some advice to offer for getting better results: "If you have the time, visiting a building at different times of the day or week can reveal how the appearance of the building changes with different lighting. It's also good to consider whether a Wikipedia article might benefit from close-ups of particular details, or shots illustrating the setting of the building, or showing it in use." Binksternet, a casual photographer, expressed frustration at not being able to "stalk" the perfect shot by always being ready at the right time of day or season.

Elekhh says some jurisdictions may impose legal constraints of photographing buildings and monuments. He said that the main difficulty of illustrating 20th-century architecture articles lies with compliance with the Wikimedia image licensing requirements in countries without Freedom of panorama, such as France, Italy or Russia.

The project has a large backlog of requests for new articles. Elekhh says there has been effort by project members to treat these requests by prioritising articles of general interest over local interest. Articles belonging to the former category have been addressed more swiftly in the last year. Unfortunately, many requested articles stay unaddressed for a longer period. These tend to be about architects or buildings of local interest and would be rated as low-mid importance for the Wikiproject.

The way forward

Warofdreams laments how many requests for input posted elicit little or no feedback. He urges more editors with an interest in the field to join, add it to their watchlist, and take part in relevant discussions. Elekhh said "Architecture articles have a good coverage of English speaking countries, in particular of the United States, but rather weak coverage of other countries. I see attracting contributors from non-English-speaking countries to the English Wikipedia as a priority. Binksternet believes that topics of architectural lighting, interior architecture and landscape architecture deserve greater attention.

Editors can help the project by creating and improving articles about architects, architecture, buildings, and construction. Next week, we'll get to the core of a hot project. Until then, read our previous reports in the archive.

Reader comments

2010-09-27

The best of the week

Featured picture Choice of the week, the medieval Mespelbrunn Castle, was built in a forest between Frankfurt and Würzburg. It is one of the most visited water castles in Germany.

Administrator

The Signpost welcomes Ron Ritzman (nom), from Atlanta, as a new admin. Ron focuses on maintenance tasks and has a history of contributions going back to 2005, with high levels of activity since mid-2008. He has particularly strong experience at AfD and as a new-page patroller.

An Andalusian performing dressage at the 2007 World Cup Finals, from the new FA Andalusian horse

Four articles were promoted to featured status. These will be considered for Choice of the week in the next edition.

Eleven lists were promoted:


From FL Choice of the week, List of National Treasures of Japan (crafts: swords). This is a Katana with an inscription in gold inlay. Katanas were characterised by a curved, slender, single-edged blade, a circular or squared guard, and a long grip to accommodate two hands; they were associated with the samurai of feudal Japan.


Choice of the week. Ruslik0 has written three featured lists in astronomy topics, and is a regular reviewer at FLC. Here is his favorite of the week:


Bryaninops yongei, shown here on whip coral. In a commensal relationship with the coral, the fish derives benefit from its host without harming it (picture by User:Nhobgood)
Eleven images were promoted. For medium-sized displays, please click on "nom".

Choice of the week. Gazhiley, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost:


From the newly featured List of longest streams of Oregon, the North Umpqua and Little Rivers come together head-on, near Glide, Oregon (picture by User:Little Mountain 5).


Reader comments

2010-09-27

EEML amendment requests & more

The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases, leaving one open.

Open case

Climate change (Week 16)

This case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start. However, the handling of the case has been criticized by some participants; for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for about five weeks, during this time, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see earlier Signpost coverage).

The proposed decision, drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse, sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion, much of it comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrator Carcharoth, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion has continued to increase significantly. Rlevse had said that arbitrators were trying to complete the proposed decision before September 6, but it was later made clear that he will no longer be voting on this decision. This week, arbitrators made further additions to the proposed decision.

Closed cases

Radeksz (Week 3)

Earlier this week, arbitrators provided their first responses to the request to reimpose an Eastern European topic ban on Radeksz. As reported earlier, the proposed topic ban was originally imposed at the conclusion of the case, but was lifted three months ago by the Committee. Arbitrator SirFozzie warned that most “drastic action” may result if there is no improvement in the topic area, and echoed this in response to the Piotrus request (see below). Arbitrator KnightLago stated that there was a “growing tiredness within the Arbitration Committee for all things EEML related” which "confused" an editor a bit. Other arbitrators asked participants to read and consider both arbitrator's comments.

Piotrus (Week 1)

Earlier this week, Piotrus filed a request for his Eastern Europe topic ban to be lifted. This amendment request is identical to the request which was filed in July (see earlier Signpost coverage) – in that request, this statement (by former arbitrator Charles Matthews), and this statement, persuaded the majority of the Committee to oppose modifying the restrictions. However, arbitrator Newyorkbrad is again considering a motion to partially lift the effect of the restriction.

At the time of writing, no further progress has been made on this clarification request since last week’s Signpost coverage concerning discretionary sanctions. In response to arbitrator Newyorkbrad's question of whether anything further is being requested, the filer confirmed that arbitrators have not responded to, or not answered multiple questions that the filer asked.

At the time of writing, no further progress has been made on this amendment request - to impose a topic ban on Ferahgo the Assassin from race and intelligence related articles. Although an arbitrator stated that he would support a topic ban, no arbitrator has cast formal on-wiki votes for the proposal yet.

Other

The Community has been invited to comment on the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC); in particular, the preferred methods of selecting community representatives, and the duration of time they would serve. “The result of the discussion will inform the Arbitration Committee on how best to proceed before progressing to another election cycle.” AUSC is a subcommittee of the Arbitration Committee which should review and act upon concerns received by the community about CheckUser and Oversight activities. Currently, AUSC consist of three community representatives elected by the community, who serve one-year terms, and three arbitrators who rotate every six months or so. A summary of AUSC’s activity has also been posted for comment.

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2010-09-27

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

CTO Danese Cooper does Office Hours

Danese answering questions during the office hours session

Wikimedia's Chief Technical Officer Danese Cooper last week took part in an "office hours" discussion on IRC. Speaking about her own role, the state of Wikimedia's technical departments, and answering questions from the community, she gave insights into what the future might hold for Wikimedia (public logs). Although discussion was fragmented, a number of important points were touched on:

  • the hiring of Zak Greant a technology writer, and a volunteer engineering coordinator later this year, to help bridge the communication gap between paid staff and the development community;
  • that the future of the Toolserver (currently paid for and hosted in Germany by Wikimedia Deutschland) has been discussed with WMDE, although the Foundation is "not ready" to disclose the conclusions;
  • that plans for the "Data Summit" have not been finalised, including discussion on structured data, analytics and research announced in July;
  • a reiteration of her priorities, as outlined earlier this month, particularly uptime; and
  • the news that the Foundation does intend to announce a financial assistance program to help bring developers together at events such as next month's "Hack-a-ton" (see last week's Signpost).

Video developments for Wikimedia Commons

"Cats" (edit)

Michael Dale, a Kaltura employee working with the Wikimedia Foundation to build easier ways of using the power of video in Wikimedia projects, this week announced the creation of a free "video sequencer" for Commons (Wikimedia techblog). The sequencer, which allows users to remix existing and new video, audio, text and images into single video sections (see example, right), was described by Kaltura as "a stepping stone in the world of online media". It requires a modern browser to use, with the best performance by the Firefox 4 betas. It is hoped the sequencer will bridge the gap between images, which are relatively common on Wikimedia projects, and videos, which are relatively rare, to create overview, documentary-style introductions to topics on Wikipedia, among other uses.

As the capabilities around video are refined and expanded, a worry has been that increased usage of video would impose a significant additional cost on the Foundation, especially due to bandwith usage. Michael Dale announced a cooperation with P2P-Next, who presented at Wikimania this year. Their technology makes it possible to use peer-to-peer technology for downloading the videos and all you need is to enter the mwEmbed video pilot and install the P2P-Next Swarmplayer Firefox plugin (a plugin for Internet Explorer and a MacOS version of Swarmplayer are still in development). After viewing the video, your browser will share the video for you with other viewers and thus alleviate the strain on the resources of the Foundation. It is claimed that the sharing is configurable and will not get in the way of your browsing experience.

Google Summer of Code: Stephen LaPorte

We conclude a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Stephen LaPorte, a law school student, who describes his project to creating a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikipedia's sister project Wikisource:

Stephen worked on four such tools: importing U.S. Supreme Court cases (example), importing the current U.S. legal code (example), wikifying legal citations (tool) and helping categorise U.S. Supreme Court cases (tool).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

  • Since Brion Vibber, former Wikimedia CTO and general MediaWiki guru, departed almost a year ago, the code review workflow has been continuously playing catch-up. The process, which defines the time it takes to get code from the sandbox to live Wikimedia sites, has slowed down considerably, with only Tim Starling responsible for monitoring it. The amount of work is only increasing, while Tim will be having less time on his hands next month because he expects to become a father. For this reason the Foundation has rehired Brion under a temporary 2 hour-per-day contract, while continuing to look for a more permanent solution to this problem (Wikimedia announcement).
  • The MediaWiki API's "action=parse" module was briefly deactivated over performance concerns stemming from the Extension:ImageAnnotator gadget, before being re-enabled.
  • In an unrelated development, the ability to flag parameters as "required" on the API was added, causing an error to be triggered if they are left unset.
  • Adding the text <!-- interwiki at top --> to a page will now prevent bots running on the popular pywikipedia framework from moving interwikis to the bottom of the page (as is the norm for the vast majority of pages).
  • There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about when non-WMF MediaWiki users could expect version 1.17 of the software. The conclusion, though indeterminate, was that "I think we can all agree that it doesn't make sense to cut a new release of MediaWiki until the ResourceLoader stabilizes" (User:RobLa) and that that point may be some time off yet. Neil Kandalgaonkar questioned whether fixed releases were required at all.
  • User:RobLa has invited collaboration on October's WMF Engineering Overview (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Developer Trevor Parscal opened a discussion on the idea of more clearly defining which code should be in the "core" MediaWiki setup and which should be classed as optional extensions.
  • With the resolution of bug #16574, it will eventually be possible to exclude specific IP addresses from the account creation limit. This feature would be useful to, for example, allow Wikipedia to be made available in an educational or event context without all but the first 6 users getting very little out of it owing to being unable to create an account.

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