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22 November 2010

News and notes
No further Bundesarchiv image donations; Dutch and German awards; anniversary preparations
In the news
Jimbo Wales interviewed and parodied; Wikipedia in politics
Book review
The Myth of the Britannica, by Harvey Einbinder
WikiProject report
WikiProject College Football
Features and admins
The best of the week
Election report
Candidates still stepping forward
Arbitration report
Brews ohare site-banned; climate change topic-ban broadened
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
 

2010-11-22

No further Bundesarchiv image donations; Dutch and German awards; anniversary preparations

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By Tilman Bayer and Resident Mario

German Federal Archives won't extend collaboration with Wikimedia

The Bundesarchiv's main building in Koblenz, 1999 (photo from the donated collection)
It was announced this month that after its 2008 donation of around 100,000 photos via Wikimedia Commons, the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) will release no more images as part of its collaboration with Wikimedia.

The donation of the images from the institution's archive of 10 million photographs under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license had been negotiated from 2007 to 2008 by members of the German Wikimedia chapter. As described in a case study on the Foundation's Outreach wiki, the Wikimedia side of the collaboration involved the improvement by Wikimedia volunteers of the Bundesarchiv's metadata set of 59,000 persons; this was done by connecting it with biographies on the German Wikipedia and with the Personennamendatei authority file of the German National Library.

In an article about the collaboration for Archivar (the most important German archivist journal) some months ago, Dr Oliver Sander from the Bundesarchiv had taken a largely positive view towards the collaboration. Apart from the improved person metadata, he noted the following benefits for the Bundesarchiv:

He also remarked that "interestingly, for many photographers and rights holders, the cooperation of the Bundesarchiv with Wikimedia is a positive, sometimes even decisive criterion when signing a contract with the Bundesarchiv!".

In the announcement two years ago, Wikimedians had expressed their hope "that this is only the start of a long lasting relationship that might serve as an example to other archives and image databases". Indeed, many other institutions and organizations in the cultural sector have followed suit with similar large-scale image donations, such as the Deutsche Fotothek, Antweb, the Mary Rose Trust, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tropenmuseum (case study) and National Archives from the Netherlands.

However, according to "Archivalia", Dr Sander announced at a conference this month that the Bundesarchiv won't donate more images as part of the collaborations, citing two main reasons: first, a 230% increase in research requests without an increase in staff; and second, a disregard of the CC license in re-use outside Wikimedia projects, with increasingly "criminal traits", such as a sale of more than 3,000 images from Commons on eBay. In his "Archivar" article, he had already described such license violations as one of the problems of the project, noting that the Bundesarchiv had sent invoices to several re-users who had violated the license by not naming the photographer. In the case of a vendor who had offered 104 of the images as "vintage postcards" in a militaria marketplace, the Bundesarchiv had him excluded from that marketplace and charged him 4,000 euros in fees.

Criticism by Wikimedians had included the low resolution of the donated image versions (at maximum 800 pixels on the longer side), the unclear licensing status of some images (a few had to be deleted) and the attachment of metadata inside each image itself, as a small strip of text on one side (which was often removed, according to Commons:Watermarks. Sander acknowledged that this was allowed under the CC-BY-SA license, but claimed it contributed to the problems of missing attribution and an increase in time-consuming research requests to the archive).

Last week, Archivalia interviewed Mathias Schindler about the subject, the Wikipedian who had been involved in the 2008 negotiations and is now employed as the project manager for "content liberation" at the German Wikimedia chapter. Schindler emphasized that the Bundesarchiv had put a lot of effort into proper rights clearance, but noted that archives' not holding sufficient rights to release the material in their collections under a free license was a frequent and fundamental problem. He expressed regret at the Bundesarchiv's decision but hoped that changing conditions would result in more donations from the agency.

Dutch and German chapters award prizes

As reported earlier, Wikimedia Nederland held a photo contest in September, called "Wiki loves monuments", to photograph as many as possible of the country's 50,000 rijksmonuments (national monuments). On the occasion of the Dutch chapter's "Wikiminiconferentie 2010" last week (English-language report by Ziko), the winners among the more than 12,000 submissions were announced, the top three of building exteriors and interiors:

One of the Zedler medals

Also last week, the award ceremony for the "Zedler-Medaille contest, held by the German Wikimedia chapter in collaboration with an academic publisher and a scholarly society, took place in connection with the Wikipedia Academy at the Goethe University Frankfurt. The medals are named after Johann Heinrich Zedler, publisher of the 18th-century German encyclopedia Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon. This year, they were awarded for the best encyclopedia articles in two categories, with prize money of €2000 each. In the humanities section, the winner was Dagobert Duck, an article by Tobias Lutzi about the German language version of the Disney cartoon character Scrooge McDuck. In the sciences section, the award went to de:Besselsche Elemente – about Besselian Elements, used in astronomy to calculate solar eclipses – whose main author, Jürgen Erbs, acknowledged the collaboration of an anonymous (IP) editor who had not wanted to be identified.

Illustration of the focus stacking technique

For the first time, the Zedler medals also involved a photo contest, which however did not receive enough high-quality submissions, according to the jury. A third prize was awarded to the best entry, an illustration of the focus stacking technique by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, who was unable to attend the awards ceremony in person, but will have his prize (a camera and books) sent to India. (See also last May's Signpost interview with Muhammad and other photographers.)

Preparations for Wikipedia's tenth anniversary gearing up

"Wikipedia 10" mark, created by design consultant David Peters for the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia on January 15, 2011

The preparations for Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15, 2011, which started around April (when a separate mailing list was set up), have recently intensified. As reported last week, collaboration on the preparations was moved from the Outreach wiki into a new, separate wiki at ten.wikipedia.org. (While "ten" is also the ISO language code for the extinct Tama language, this coincidence is not considered to be a concern, because a Wikipedia version in this language is unlikely to be created.) A FAQ has been set up for the anniversary celebrations. According to Steven Walling, the Community Fellow tasked with facilitating the preparations, the priorities at this point are to set up a single list of events "that we can point interested people to," integrating the celebration across the community, providing resources for organizers, and setting up and documenting the project's "first double digit anniversary" on the ten wiki. Design ideas (based on a concept by a design studio that has also done other work for the Foundation) and preliminary merchandise kits, consisting of sets of 50 shirts and other memorabilia to be handed out to organizers, have been created.

Jimmy Wales is expected to attend various events in the UK on the occasion, one of them at the University of Bristol on January 13. A writer of the local Ignite Bristol blog seemed rather excited about the opportunity: "for me this is akin to getting the chance to see Gutenberg 10 years after he made his first printing press".

In brief

2010-11-22

Jimbo Wales interviewed and parodied; Wikipedia in politics

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By Strange Passerby and Tilman Bayer

Jimbo Wales on Wikipedia and WikiLeaks (again)

BBC News weekly technology programme Click interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales this week on a variety of topics, including Wikipedia's early days, Wikipedia and censorship, and WikiLeaks (earlier coverage). Wales also spoke about the possible future of the project.

In the interview, Wales recalled the strategy Wikipedia could have taken in its early days, in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst, "had we had $10 million in funding". Wales said that there were suggestions at the time that Wikipedia could have "ended up with a system that requires 500 paid moderators monitoring everything", and reflected on how Wikipedia adopted the current system of having administrators and community-based rules.

On being filtered, Wales stated that "we will never compromise on or participate in censorship ... we've faced a lot of problems in China, for example" (Signpost coverage from 2006). However, on the existence of WikiLeaks, Wales repeated his previously reported comments that WikiLeaks could "put innocent lives at risk". Telling the BBC he favoured a concept that there should be "avenues in society for whistleblowing", he warned WikiLeaks that "there is no reason to dump everything on the Internet all the time".

Wales made similar remarks in a separate interview this week on Charlie Rose, summarised here by TechCrunch. Wales said he was "a little" acquainted with WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, having previously corresponded via email, mostly about domain names relating to WikiLeaks that are currently still registered to Wikia (an issue that he clarified at WP:WIKILEAKS last month). However, when asked if he therefore had the power to stop WikiLeaks, Wales pointed out that the word "wiki" was a generic term, and that he "wouldn't necessarily want to stop" Assange.

Earlier in that interview, Wales spoke about the upcoming 10th anniversary of the foundation of Wikipedia, the upcoming opening of a Wikimedia Foundation office in India (earlier coverage), and Wikipedia's relationship with museums (earlier coverage).

Fundraising banners mocked

After the official start of the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraiser on November 15 (see last week's News and notes), the near-ubiquitous presence of photos of Jimmy Wales on Wikimedia sites, accompanying his personal appeal to donors (the ad form which had proven by far the most effective in testing) continued to provoke amused and annoyed reactions, including numerous parodies. The Wikimedia Foundation reacted in good humor, collecting a "list of the best, or rather the most amusing, tidbits" from news and social media in a November 16 blog post (some of them already mentioned in last week's "In the news"). A few days later, William Beutler (User:WWB) also collected some media coverage on his "The Wikipedian" blog.

Other reactions included the release of a helpful browser extension for Google Chrome, enabling the surfer to see a banner with Jimmy Wales on every website instead of only those of the Wikimedia Foundation, a visual comparison of Wales' gaze with that of puppies, and a Faking News report that "the begging mafia in Delhi" was exploiting the success of the fundraiser for their advantage: "After using pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses to extract money from the believers, beggars are now using pictures of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and swindling money from internet savvy residents". Bill Forman, writing in a blog for the Colorado Springs Independent ("The Seven Faces of Wikipedia"), joked about the different pictures of Jimmy Wales featured across the seven versions of the fundraising banner.

However, a more serious article on Philantrophy.com ("Wikipedia Puts New Fund-Raising Model to the Test") quoted Philippe Beaudette, the head of the fundraising team, as saying that "we tested another banner from a young woman in Jakarta, Indonesia, and her banner did almost as well [as those featuring Jimmy Wales]. She had one memorable line, 'If you have knowledge, you must share it' ". According to the banner history page on Meta, such banners featuring Wikipedian Kartika (example: [1][2]) were tested on some projects on November 15, but otherwise, the Jimmy Wales banners appear to have been used almost exclusively.

Briefly

  • Speed of light hinders participation in India: Adding to media coverage of Jimmy Wales' visit to a Wikipedian meetup in Mumbai last month (see November 1 "In the news"), technology blog OnlyGizmos last week published a summary of his talk at the meetup, combined with an interview. Wales explained a technical problem that he said is "part of what we need to solve in order to increase participation" in India, namely that while reading Wikipedia is fast for Indian Internet users, editing it is slow. According to Wales, the reason is that "when you are reading you are actually pulling a page typically from our [caching] servers in Amsterdam, which is closer. When you are editing you have to change the core databases in Florida, so you have to go all the way to Florida ... the speed of light actually matters, it's a small piece of the overall puzzle, but it is a piece of the puzzle." For solving this issue, Wales said that "one of the simplest things to do, potentially, is to move the Indian languages database, as a separate database, into servers that are closer [to India]". Responding to another interview question, Wales explained how Wikipedia is dealing with racism and bias in its community.
  • Wikipedia censoring truth about Obama?: American conservative commentator Diana West, writing in The Washington Examiner ("Obama's paltry paper trail raises serious questions"), questioned the decision taken on Wikipedia to redirect Terrence L. Lakin (and earlier Terry Lakin) to the article on Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories. Both articles were redirected after being nominated for deletion (first AFD; second AFD).
    West charged that "unknown, unknowable site authorities" removed the article through a memory hole; which she quoted from the Wikipedia article on the subject as being a "mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records ... particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened", and said the decision to remove the article reflected Wikipedia's point of view that Obama was born in the United States (and is therefore eligible for president). For the record, the first AFD was closed and the original article redirected by User:Courcelles in September, with the second closed and the subsequent article redirected by User:NawlinWiki on November 12.
  • Michael Moore asks readers to edit PR firm's Wikipedia article: In a Huffington Post article titled "How Corporate America Is Pushing Us All Off a Cliff", US filmmaker Michael Moore discussed the recent revelation that in 2007, the health insurance industry's PR firm APCO Worldwide had internally described possible efforts to counter the impact of his film Sicko as "Pushing Michael Moore off a cliff". In a PS to the article, he asked his readers to add that fact to the Wikipedia article about the company: "I'm asking everyone interested to write something up that meets Wikipedia's guidelines and help bring the APCO Worldwide entry up to date."
  • Gawker defends itself with Wikipedia article: Gawker, which this week published excerpts from Sarah Palin's new book America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, defended itself against accusations made by Palin and the book's publisher HarperCollins that they had breached copyright by linking to the Wikipedia article on fair use.
  • BLP cited in Philippine House debate: According to the Philippine Daily Inquirer ("Citing Wikipedia, Google, Golez says visiting US doctor an ‘abortionist’"), Roilo Golez, a Philippine Representative from Parañaque, cited his research from Wikipedia and Google regarding Malcolm Potts, a visiting American doctor, to say that Potts "should be deported outright" from the Philippines for being an "abortionist".
  • Advice for parents: Responding to a concerned parent whose "son got a D on a paper because he used only Wikipedia as a source", the Detroit Free Press relayed advice of the founder of the "Internet librarian" site findingDulcinea, who said that "while Wikipedia can be useful for pre-research, Wikipedia itself says it should not be relied upon for a school paper."
  • Student vandalism failed: In a light-hearted article for student newspaper University Observer ("Notes on a Vandal") Irish economics student Cormac Duffy described his attempt "to bring [Wikipedia] down with vandalism", including joining a friend in "a game of my recent invention: Forrest Gump. The rules are simple – insert yourself into as many historical situations as possible before they block your account". However, each of his vandalism edits was reverted, although for some it took "several hours". Nevertheless, Duffy concluded that "it struck me as weird how quickly people respond and repair the damage you’ve done. ... My crusade against Wikipedia has failed."
  • TEDx talk by Sue Gardner: It has been announced that the Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner will give a presentation titled "The People’s Encyclopedia" at a TEDx event in Dubai on December 4th.
  • Trip to "culture of sharing": Irina Gendelman, an Assistant Professor at Saint Martin's University tasked with advising other staff members about teaching tools, wrote a blog post ("Trip to Wikimedia - the culture of sharing") about attending a meeting at the Foundation's offices "to discuss ways that wiki-folks might support professors and students in creating public projects to be shared through the Wikimedia platform", such as those currently being explored in the Public Policy Initiative.

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2010-11-22

The Myth of the Britannica, by Harvey Einbinder

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By llywrch

Harvey Einbinder, The Myth of the Britannica. New York: Grove Press, 1964. 390 pages.

Encyclopædia Britannica

Harvey Einbinder's extended criticism of the Encyclopædia Britannica grew out of an article he wrote for the Columbia University Forum, where he detailed errors and obsolete information in 90 articles he had looked at in depth, which was afterward reprinted in Newsweek and a number of newspapers. The Britannica, which at the time possessed a reputation for quality and accuracy, responded to Einbinder's article in a manner amazingly similar to the comparison Nature made in 2005 to Wikipedia—the management attacked the methodology of the study instead of fixing the problem. Einbinder's response was this book, a far more detailed criticism of Britannica where he not only identifies numerous articles with serious errors in their presentation, factual content and obsolete material, but included a list of 666 articles in the 1958 edition which were unchanged from the earlier ninth and eleventh editions, completed, respectively, in 1889 and 1911.

Einbinder makes a strong case in his book that the quality of this encyclopedia's scholarship and its editorial standards were substandard, and the current edition was not worthy of the name. He convinced Derek J. De Solla Price, then chairman of the Department of Science and Medicine at Yale University, who reviewed Einbinder's work for Science. In his review De Solla Price wrote, "an encyclopedia is not a substitute for conventional learning or for books. We shall have to warn students, and even schools and colleagues with increasing frequency, that not even the Encyclopaedia Britannica is more than a reference source and key to greater or lesser use of a real library."[1]

If you are interested in obtaining the most schadenfreude for the least amount of reading, the first chapter will satisfy said desire: in less than a dozen pages, Einbinder sets forth numerous examples of embarrassing if not serious flaws in this reference work. And if you are still hungry for more scandal, chapters 20 through 22—"The Commercial Influence"; "Bold Advertising and the Hard Sell"; and "Men behind the Britannica"—will provide the ingredients anyone may need to nourish their cynicism about the corrupting tendencies of American business and institutions. Yet beyond a few hour's entertainment, what value would this book, written over 45 years ago, have for any of us today?

The version of the Encyclopedia Britannica he criticizes, which consisted of a collection of articles subjected to continuous revision, no longer exists; it was replaced in the mid-1970s by a thoroughly rewritten model, consisting of a "Propædia", a "Micropædia", and a "Macropædia".[notes 1] One might assume that the only reason Wikipedians might want to read this book would be in the pleasure of dragging some of the skeletons from our competitor's closet.

Commercialisation of Britannica

Although the University of Chicago received two million dollars a year from Britannica, Einbinder notes that it took no responsibility for its contents or sales practices.

Then there is the fact that this work is obsolete in one aspect. Einbinder assumes that many of the flaws with Britannica are due to the heavily commercial emphasis of its management. He cherishes the earlier editions of this encyclopedia before it was transferred across the Atlantic, writing that "the editors of the ninth edition were scholars, and the eleventh edition was directed by a journalist with scholarly ambitions."[3] But when Einbinder turns to its subsequent history, he is clearly more critical, focusing on its commercial nature. Although the University of Chicago received two million dollars a year from Britannica (the institution was the owner at the time), Einbinder notes that it took no responsibility for its contents or sales practices[4]; that in the late 1950s the people who wrote or updated the articles—the product Britannica based its reputation on—were paid two cents a word, "a rate that has remained unchanged, despite war and inflation, since 1929" while "many of the company's salesmen earn up to $20,000 a year, while district sales managers receive about $70,000 a year."[5] His concluding chapter, "Future prospects", is a plea to create a non-profit encyclopedia, perhaps based on a consortium of university presses. The fact that no such encyclopedia existed when Wikipedia took off less than 10 years ago shows his plea fell on deaf ears.

Any Wikipedian who seriously cares about the quality of the material in our creation will find some important insights in this extensively critical look.

What Einbinder did not know then, and we know now only after experience with the economics of writing software code, that even if the Encyclopædia Britannica had no profit incentive and its articles written and edited by the best experts, it would still have many of the same flaws such as obsolete material because of the economic incentives inherent in the product. The fewer revisions made to a product such as software code or a reference work, the less labor has been expended on the product and the greater the bottom line—and even non-profits need to balance the books before they close them at the end of the fiscal year. In maintaining software, bugs that are discovered are graded not only for severity but on the likelihood of uses encountering them and the likely effort required to fix them; due to the limits on resources, some bugs will never be fixed, no matter how egregious they are. And the same process was understandably at work at Britannica, whether as formal as a software bug review or an informal and subjective discussion by management.

Nevertheless, any Wikipedian who seriously cares about the quality of the material in our creation will find some important insights in this extensively critical look. One immediate concern that anyone would have, knowing how thousands of articles were imported from the 1911 Britannica into Wikipedia, often with only stylistic changes, is with countless errors Wikipedia has unknowingly repeated. The errors in those articles live on in Wikipedia, below our awareness. It would be a good use of an editor's time to vet all of Wikipedia's articles, both those taken from Britannica and those written from scratch, against the ones Einbinder criticizes in his book; the most pernicious errors of knowledge are those we are not aware of.[notes 2]

Familiar problems

Once I was well into this book I could not help but see the same problems that Einbinder criticized the Britannica for and the Wikipedia I have contributed to for over eight years now.

But more importantly, once I was well into this book I could not help but see the same problems that Einbinder criticized the Britannica for and the Wikipedia I have contributed to for over eight years now. Einbinder would point out articles that had sat unrevised in a significant way for 40 or 60 years; I thought about the uneven quality of Wikipedia articles; about one half of the graded articles are considered "stubs"—articles lacking sufficient content to be considered useful to readers. Einbinder points out several articles on major literary works where there is ample discussion of its style or the cultural background or the author (even where little is known), yet nothing on the plot or the characters. "The essay on Milton is eight pages long," he says, "but does not discuss his poetry."[6]

Einbinder uses the following excerpt to show the "superficial character" of the Britannica in its single sentence to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: "Shakespeare's second tragedy, Romeo and Juliet (1594–95), written at about the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream, shares that play's tone of youth and hope." [7] Wikipedia's problem is the opposite: we have numerous articles on notable works that consist entirely of a plot summary yet have no discussion of the work's themes, style, or cultural setting. Einbinder mentions several articles—"Jesuit"[8], "Mary Baker Eddy"[9], and "Spiritualism"[10]—which were written by their supporters who imposed an uncritical, if not suspiciously favorable account; Wikipedia is full of articles on controversial subjects which have been overtaken by a single group who enforce their point of view on the matter. Einbinder points out numerous scientific or mathematical articles which are useless to the general reader because they are unnecessarily written in a technical language full of jargon; and Wikipedia has the same problem.

Although the introduction of wiki software doesn't always work, at least it is an improvement over what we did before.

But a more challenging issue he raised in my mind is the simplest to state: how to keep Wikipedia's content reasonably up-to-date. Einbinder points out many embarrassing examples of obsolete information in the science articles—or assertions once thought to be true but since proven false—but all topics gradually become out of date. Articles on the arts, literature, music, and the other humanities may appear to be timeless, but trends and tastes change, new pieces are created, and new interpretations expounded, while old ones either fall by the wayside or receive a more favorable re-evaluation. This is one place where the wiki framework is an improvement over print: articles can be updated with a click followed by typing in the update, then another click to save. Yet this approach leads to the same problem of uneven quality that Einbinder faced when he took a hard look at the 1958 Encyclopædia Britannica. Although the introduction of wiki software doesn't always work, at least it is an improvement over what we did before. And it is capable of more flexibility towards solutions than the work that went into turning a manuscript or typescript into a printed book. The value of any work ultimately lies in how it makes us think about its subject, and I came away from this book thinking about the problems of our encyclopedia in many new ways.

Notes

  1. ^ Einbinder wrote a review of that new version for The Nation.[2] He found many of the same shortcomings in the new version that he did in the old.
  2. ^ This would be a different exercise than what is documented at Wikipedia:Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia. The examples on that page compare Wikipedia's quality of research against Britannica's latest editions. The ninth and eleventh editions are commonly thought to be highly reliable for their time, thus when they were imported into Wikipedia they were not subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

References

  1. ^ Derek J. De Solla Price, "A Great Encyclopedia Doesn't Have To Be Good?", Science, New Series, 144 (8 May 1964), pp. 665–666
  2. ^ Einbinder, "Politics and the New Britannica", Nation, 220, Issue 11 (22 March 1975), pp. 342–344
  3. ^ Einbinder, p. 268
  4. ^ Einbinder, p. 331
  5. ^ Einbinder pp. 266f
  6. ^ Einbinder, p. 83
  7. ^ Einbinder, p. 277
  8. ^ pp. 189–192
  9. ^ pp. 64–66
  10. ^ pp. 241, 284


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2010-11-22

WikiProject College Football

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By Mabeenot
WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

In preparation for the college rivalry games that traditionally occur on Thanksgiving Day in the United States, we sat down with some members of WikiProject College Football. The project started in June 2006 with the aim of improving Wikipedia's coverage of teams, seasons, notable players, famous match-ups, and bowl games at the collegiate level of American football. It is home to 23 featured articles, 36 featured lists, 2 A-class articles, and 145 good articles. The Wikiproject maintains its own style guide, notability guidelines, image guidelines, a collection of reliable sources, a to-do list, and a portal. We interviewed Eagles247, Paul McDonald, Nmajdan, and Jweiss11.

Mizzou versus Nebraska in 2007.
The Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech.
Texas A&M Aggies versus Texas Longhorns in the annual Lone Star Showdown.
Notre Dame Stadium is home to "Touchdown Jesus," a large mural that overlooks the playing field.
Harvard Crimson versus Brown Bears in 2009.
Navy celebrating a victory over Army in 2005.

What motivated you to join WikiProject College Football? Which school(s) do you follow?

Eagles247: I have been a follower of the NFL Draft for five years and it all starts with college football. I became interested in college football players because they are the future of the NFL and I wanted a first look at them before they went pro. I follow Penn State and Northwestern: Penn State is the biggest school near my residence (even though it is still far away), and I started following Northwestern after I created Mike Kafka (a former Wildcat quarterback).
Paul McDonald: I have been more of an avid follower of smaller schools, such as those in the Kansas Collegiate Athletic Conference. Currently in this conference, four of the ten schools are ranked in the top 25 in the NAIA.
NMajdan: I was one of the founding members of the WikiProject and that stemmed from my then-membership is one of the larger college football schools, Oklahoma. I tend to pay close attention to my alma mater and Oklahoma State with occassional glances at other Big 12 schools.

The project is home to 23 featured articles, 36 featured lists, 2 A-class articles, and 144 good articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Are you currently working on bringing an article up to FA or GA status?

Eagles247: I contributed to Mike Kafka and Kevin Kolb, and I am currently working on bringing DeSean Jackson up to GA status.
NMajdan: I created/contributed many featured lists including 2005 NCAA Division I-A football rankings, List of Oklahoma Sooners head football coaches, List of Colorado Buffaloes head football coaches, List of Kansas State Wildcats head football coaches, List of Missouri Tigers head football coaches, and List of Texas Longhorns head football coaches [among others]. I've been on a bit of a hiatus recently, so no current projects are in the works.

All of the project's 25,000 articles have been assessed and the project keeps records of reassessments. Do you have any advice for other projects that struggle to keep up with assessments and eliminate backlogs?

Paul McDonald: A while back I got tired of having a bunch of unassessed articles, so I went to the talk page of one of the articles and clicked on the assessment. It gave me a great big list of all the articles that were "stubs" -- I noticed I could click on each assessment grouping and get that list. So I clicked on the unassessed articles and started just peeling through them to assess those articles.
NMajdan: The project has performed a couple assessment drives that really helped knock down the numbers. Now its more informal; we're just lucky to have many editors who are committed to keeping those numbers down. Getting it down once it the hard part.

How does the project handle determining the notability of players and coaches?

Paul McDonald: We have a notability essay that involved a good amount of discussion for an extended period of time. We are working on a way to maintain a library of AFD discussions to help out. We have editors who are enthusiastic about adding articles and those that are enthusiastic about raising the bar and deleting articles that they deem to be non-notable. Somehow, some way, we manage to arrive at a consensus on each and every case.

Do articles about recent events and players tend to receive greater attention than historical articles? What efforts have been taken to ensure Wikipedia's coverage extends to older subjects?

Paul McDonald: There seems to be a misunderstanding about the history of college football. Sometimes we face arguments that historical articles should be deleted because the player "never played professionally" -- the problem is that college football pre-dates professional football by almost 40 years, and professionall football did not come into prominence until some say the 1960's or even 1970's.
A second issue that we encounter is that many of the prominent issues of college football that occured in the past have not managed to make it onto the internet for effective research and online soucing. One particular example was Andrew Frank Schoeppel, the former football coach at Fort Hays State University for a mere one year with a record of 2 wins and 5 losses. Insignificant? Additional research led us to find that he also was the 29th Governor of Kansas.
Finding and sourcing historic football articles is becoming easier, but it still is something of a battle.

Does WikiProject College Football collaborate with any other projects? Is there significant overlap in membership between WikiProject College Football, WikiProject NFL, and WikiProject American Football?

Jweiss11: WikiProject College Football has probably collaborated most with WikiProject College Basketball. I think this has probably followed naturally from the fact that football and basketball are the two biggest college sports. The two projects use the same or analogous templates for things like infoboxes, yearly records, and standings. The infobox for coaches, Template:Infobox college coach, is generalized to support all sports, which is helpful given that in the first half of the 20th century, coaches often managed multiple sports. This has gone a long way toward standardizing format and layout. By comparison, collaboration with WikiProject NFL has been minimal. There should probably be more given the vast overlap in scope, particularly in biography articles. Virtually anyone who has ever coached or played in the NFL has also coached or played in the college ranks. WikiProject American Football is intended in large part to cover core concepts of the sport that span across levels of play, like "touchdown." But since a lot of these concepts were developed in the arena of college football, there is a lot of cross-over with WikiProject College Football in scope. I'm not sure how much collaboration there has been with WikiProject American Football. I think WikiProject American Football probably hasn't drawn as much attention because it's scope doesn't really include current topics, which naturally draw the most readership and the most frequent editing.

How can a new member help today?

Paul McDonald: Several ways I can think of:
  1. Pictures Probably the most visually important issue is the adding of pictures. We have an essay pointing out different ways to add to articles and the kinds of images and photos that would be helpful. Many of the articles could benefit from a fresh and free-use image.
  2. Deletions We always welcome review of football-related AFDs to help make this encyclopedia better.
  3. Sources There are still a lot of articles that need sources and references added. Some simple web searches could cover most of them. We made a big "attack" on this once upon a time and made good progress, but so many new articles have come online that we've lost control of this aspect of our newer articles.
  4. Wikification face it, the only reason we spend so much time on this project is because we love football. We could all use help with making the content better, using citation templates, or just normal editing.--Paul McDonald (talk) 21:47, 29 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]


While the Americans are lulled into hibernation by their annual Tryptophan overdose, the rest of the northern hemisphere is getting ready for a variety of winter festivities. We'll cover it all next week. Until then, check out the archives for some sweet treats.

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2010-11-22

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
From the newly promoted featured article, Petrified Forest National Park, in north-eastern Arizona. The nominator, Finetooth, photographed The Tepees on 4 October, with their layers of black basalt and white and red sedimentary material. Standing on the edge of the vast badlands, a Spanish explorer is rumoured to have named the area "The Painted Desert".


New administrators

The Signpost welcomes two editors as our newest admins.

  • Sphilbrick (nom), from Connecticut on the east coast of the US, has experience at MFD and Requests for feedback. His contributions to content work include the areas of women's basketball and local history, and he has uploaded more than 170 photographs, mostly from the US National Register of Historic Places, as part of the Connecticut photo contest.
  • PresN (nom), an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Texas, currently works as a software development engineer in Seattle, Washington. He is an active member of the Video Games WikiProject and has made significant contributions to the promotion of 12 featured articles and lists, and of 45 good articles. A particular interest of his is video game music, including the Music of the Final Fantasy series.


The ruins of the castle built at Acton Burnell by Robert Burnell, where it is believed the first parliament of England at which the Commons were fully represented was held, in 1283
Four articles were promoted to featured status. These will be added to next week's promotions for the next Choice of the week.
  • Petrified Forest National Park (nom), is named after its petrified logs. Its 380 km2 (146 sq mi) include the badlands (picture at top), petroglyphs, pueblo ruins, sandy washes, abundant grasslands, and a wide variety of wildlife. (nominated by Finetooth)
  • Robert Burnell (nom), another bad-boy bishop; this advisor to Edward I has a mistress and kids hanging out in the shadows, says nominator Ealdgyth.
  • Aylesbury duck (nom), the story of how the economics, technology and values of the Industrial Revolution intersected with the farming methods of the Middle Ages, and briefly turned an obscure English country town into an early example of large-scale factory farming. The squeamish might well want to stay away, says nominator iridescent.
  • Dendrocollybia (nom), the branched shanklet, is the only mushroom that produces little branches along the length of its stem; these slimy outgrowths allow it to reproduce asexually, on top of its sexual capacity via spores produced on its gills. "Clever or what?", says nominator Sasata.

Two featured articles were delisted:


Four lists were promoted:

Two featured lists were delisted:


Choice of the week, the Venus flytrap sea anemone, which closes its tentacles to capture prey or to protect itself.
This spectacular Grandidier's Baobab tree, probably about 25 m high, is near Morondava on Madagascar. The photo is only the second featured picture of a tree on the English Wikipedia.
Six images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":

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

"I chose Venus flytrap sea anemone for its sharpness and encyclopedic value. The photo was taken on the US Government's NOAA “Expedition to the Deep Slope 2007” at a depth of more than 1,000 m, presenting interesting technical challenges, including the provision of an artificial source of light."


New featured picture, Kabelleger's photograph of the Malmtrafik Iore-hauled train at Torneträsk, a lake in the Lapland close to the northern tip of Sweden, with Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the west.


Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.

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2010-11-22

Candidates still stepping forward

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By Skomorokh and Tony1
The call for nominations for the 2010 elections to the Arbitration Committee will close in little more than 24 hours, at 23:59 UTC Tuesday 23 November. Thus far, 15 candidates have nominated themselves: SirFozzie; Harej; Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry; PhilKnight; Newyorkbrad; David Fuchs; Casliber; Off2riorob; Elen of the Roads; N419BH; Shell Kinney; Xeno; Jclemens; HJ Mitchell; and Sandstein.

The Signpost understands there will be more nominations over the next day. Last-minute nominees are urged to jump into the system running—there is a statement to write and questions to respond to. There will be a two-day fallow period on Wednesday and Thursday for further discussion and Q&A between voters and candidates, as well as for election staff to make technical preparations. Voting will open via the SecurePoll system at 00:01 UTC Friday and will run for 10 days until Sunday 5 December. The four scrutineers—all uninvolved stewards—will take up to a week to announce the tally, and Jimbo Wales will make the formal announcement shortly after they post the tally on the election page. Up to 11 new arbitrators are expected to take office from 1 January. Until the close of voting in two weeks, voters are invited to ask an individual question of each candidate, and may participate in open discussion of the candidates on their respective candidate talk pages, which are collected on a single page for the convenience of voters.

Arbitrator Risker has written a FAQ for current and prospective candidates. Among the issues she addresses for newly appointed arbitrators are the volume of email correspondence, identification requirements, and realistic expectations. The FAQ clarifies that the Committee will provide assistance to successful candidates to move through the identification process (concerning which a Wikimedia Foundation staff member issued a recent statement), to set up email accounts, and to induct them smoothly into the practicalities of being a Committee member.

The candidate's perspective

Related articles
December 2010 ArbCom election
Most members of the community see the election from only the voter's perspective. To learn something of what it is like to stand for office, The Signpost talked with two candidates from last year's election who didn't quite make it over the line: MBK004 is a Military History WikiProject coordinator and is active at WikiProject Ships; Cla68 mainly edits in military history and Japan-related articles, and true to form is a martial-arts enthusiast in real life.

Was it a hard decision to stand? Cla68 says "A little; I think everyone is aware of how demanding time-wise being an arbitrator is, so it factors heavily in the decision as to whether or not to run." MBK had given serious thought to running about six months before the election, but decided to put himself forward only after consulting a few other editors for whom he had great respect, including a few of the then-sitting arbitrators.

The election process itself was challenging for both candidates. MBK says he was overwhelmed by the number of questions, "which did strike me as slightly excessive, and there were several duplicates. I spaced out my responses over a few days and thankfully did not have many extra questions added on top of the standard questions asked of all of candidates." For Cla68, responding to the questions was very time-consuming, and "a few could have been interpreted as somewhat confrontational and hostile." He judged the experience to be "closer to an RFB than an RFA", but concluded it was "probably good practice for being an arbitrator". For both editors, the wait for the release of the tally after the close of voting was a very different experience. MBK says "I wouldn't call it exciting so much as nerve-wracking " while for Cla68, it was "a little suspenseful", although the outcome was "about what I expected".

In retrospect, Cla68 thinks that "overall, it was a positive experience. Even if you don't expect to be elected, the candidacy give a platform for your opinions on different areas of Wikipedia. The few hundred core editors who basically run Wikipedia's administration will read what you say and perhaps be influenced by your ideas. So, even if you aren't elected, you may have had an effect on Wikipedia's present or future governance." A tally of 200 positive to 600 neutral surprised MBK, who thought he'd have been better known. "I've come to realize that on top of the name recognition issue, I did not have an established track record with dispute resolution, except for filing one arbitration case. That probably did not help! Although running unsuccessfully probably raised my name recognition for this year, I decided not to run again, mainly for personal and time-management-related."

Reflecting what MBK said about the experience of being on the Committee, Cla68 thinks the arbitrators are over-tasked. "They should delegate more of their administrative responsibilities to others. They've done more of that lately by setting up sub-committees, and I think they should continue with that." On a more speculative note, he says it would be good if the Committee used its power more broadly to fix Wikipedia in those areas where it really needs fixing. "Perhaps this is outside Arbcom's mandate. If so, I don't care. Someone needs to get some of this stuff done."

What advice do the former candidates have for this year's hopefuls? MBK says, "Good luck, answer the questions to the best of your abilities and be clear and concise with your answers. Your platform needs to be clearly explained, because if people need to ask you to clarify things that is not a good thing." Cla68 suggests, "Keep your cool, but speak your mind. Even if you're not elected, many people will read your opinions and perhaps be influenced by them, for the better of Wikipedia."

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2010-11-22

Brews ohare site-banned; climate change topic-ban broadened

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By Ohconfucius

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving none open.

Closed cases

Speed of light

A request for amendment was initiated by User:Timotheus Canens, seeking to expand the topic ban on physics-related pages and renew the general one-year probation on Brews ohare (talk · contribs) which had recently expired. Following complaints of persistent disruption and edit-warring at mathematics-related articles, Timotheus Canens filed for the remedies to be broadened to cover such articles, where Brews had become active since the physics-related topic ban.

The arbitrators generally agreed with the complainant and other respondents, finding him unrepentant and unable to edit in a collegial manner. The complainant and Arb Roger Davies expressed concern that the disruptive behaviour would resume on the expiry of the site ban. Dissenting, Carcharoth agreed that Brews had been disruptive, but believed a six-month ban would have been more appropriate. The Committee voted 8:1 in favour of banning Brews ohare from Wikipedia for 12 months.

Climate change

In a motion enacted on 9 November, the Committee prohibited the 15 editors already banned from editing articles about climate change and the biographies of living people associated with climate change, together with their talk pages, henceforth from "participating in any process broadly construed on Wikipedia particularly affecting these articles; and ... initiating or participating in any discussion substantially relating to these articles anywhere on Wikipedia, even if the discussion also involves another issue or issues."

A second motion was adopted, that the editors involved may apply for the topic-ban to be lifted or modified no earlier than six months after the close of the amendment, with time-restrictions on additional reviews. The Committee made it clear that to succeed in those applications, they must demonstrate "their commitment to the goals of Wikipedia and their ability to work constructively with other editors".

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2010-11-22

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

"Take me back" is no more

The "Take me back" links, which had been displayed at the top of every page for logged-in users using the Vector skin since its general rollout over six months ago, have been removed with (near) immediate effect. The links, which were designed to allow editors to quickly switch back to the Monobook skin, were originally to be removed in October, but their removal was delayed ("not for any particular reason", says developer Trevor Parscal). The change came into effect after the issue was raised on the English Wikipedia's Miscellaneous Village Pump, though by sheer coincidence it was also scheduled internally to be removed this week (bug #25850).

Account holders can still switch between any of a number of skins available to users – including Vector and Monobook – via their User Preferences. Vector remains the default skin for all non-logged-in users.

Pageview statistics corrected and expanded

A major error with the headline pageview figures for Wikimedia sites – which led to the accidental counting of a number of (largely US-based) web robots as though they were humans – has now been fixed. In addition to artificially increasing the total number of visitors per month from 10,658,000,000 to 13,100,000,000/month, "the share of page visits from the US was considerably overreported", noted analyst Erik Zachte on his blog. He added that "for many Wikipedia's readership from the US moved several steps down in rank. Example of a massive shift: before the fix 21% of page views for Hungarian Wikipedia came from the US, after the fix a mere 0.6%."

Zachte also announced the availability of additional reports grouping all languages spoken in a particular geographical region (Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, India, and Oceania) and one for artificial languages.

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.

  • A brief technical outage left visitors unable to access the sites for a significant period of time on Tuesday evening (UTC). The problem, caused by a surge in traffic related to "a complex interaction of factors" including the Fundraiser launch, particularly affected the European cluster of servers, and then overspilled onto the Florida cluster as traffic was redirected (Wikimedia Techblog). The Foundation is working on a five year plan to increase uptime from 99% (87.6 hours downtime / year) to 99.999% (5.256 minutes/year). On Monday November 22nd, an outage affected users accessing Wikimedia sites over the "esams" server in Amsterdam, according to CTO Danese Cooper.
  • The team working on an update to the Mac OS X operating system say they have fixed their Dictionary.app to correctly interpret Wikipedia articles once again, after several months of its being broken (bug #bugzilla:23602).
  • With the fixing of bug #25940, it is now possible for developers to comment on, and change the revision status of, code revisions via the API.
  • A deployment of the latest version of the Pending Changes extension is scheduled for Tuesday. It will have a new reject button, some diff page load optimizations and many "under-the-hood code improvements" (Wikimedia Techblog).

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