Wikipedia Ambassador Program growing, adjusting
- User:Sross (Public Policy) is Sage Ross, the Online Facilitator for the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. As a volunteer, he edits as User:Ragesoss.
- User:Sadads is organizing Wikipedia Ambassador activities at James Madison University and is a member of the Ambassador Program's Steering Committee.
The Wikipedia Ambassador Program—which started in July as part of the Public Policy Initiative—is wrapping up its first term of working with students and professors. Currently we are preparing for a much larger wave of classes in January, with as many as 500 students assigned to improve Wikipedia articles.
We began the first term of the Ambassador program working with 13 classes. The contributions of these classes, documented at the leaderboard Frank Schulenburg has been developing, have taught us many things and given us a glimmer of the potential of a Wikipedia Ambassador program. Across these classes, students have generated 20 "Did you know?" entries, started many other new articles, and made improvements to existing articles that range from minor additions to major overhauls. Overall, 207 students in these classes contributed more than 2 million bytes of new content to articles—an average of more than 10,000 bytes each to articles.
Each of these classes worked with two different sets of Wikipedia Ambassadors. The first set was the Campus Ambassadors, who provided in-person support to the professors and students consulting on the design of the Wikipedia writing assignments, presenting Wikipedia and its policies to the students, running workshops to help with Wikipedia editing, and providing office hours and feedback on the article content which the students developed. The second group was the Online Ambassadors, who provided online support via IRC and feedback on talk pages throughout the semester. These Online Ambassadors helped the students figure out the markup, provided support on navigating the various Wikipedia policies, reviewed new content, and generally welcomed them to the community. You can read more about how the first term went, and what the plans are for the second half of the Public Policy Initiative, in the November progress report for the Stanton Foundation.
Lessons learned and changes made
For the next term, we're giving much more guidance to instructors about how to create assignments and communicate with Wikipedians. We'll be granting the title of Wikipedia Teaching Fellow to instructors who commit to major assignments according to our new memorandum of understanding and whose plans meet the course design requirements.
We learned a lot in the first term about how to make Wikipedia assignments work for both instructors and Wikipedia. The major changes include requiring introductory exercises, spacing editing milestones throughout the term, and having students start small and move out of sandboxes into main space early on (rather than posting full articles all at once). Mentorship by Online Ambassadors will also be much more central; students will be matched with mentors early on and use on-wiki discussion, with mentors and other editors, as the first option when problems arise.
The Wikipedia Ambassador Program is also making the transition from an experimental Wikimedia Foundation-led project to a scalable volunteer-run project. The first major change to volunteer leadership has been the Wikipedia Ambassador Steering Committee. The Steering Committee is composed of a combination of Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and Foundation staff; its role is to develop proposals for the future of the program. The Committee has also taken a central role in the recruitment and selection of future Ambassadors, as well as—with other Ambassadors and Wikimedia staff—developing training materials and teaching resources. For subsequent terms, the Steering Committee will be coordinating the recruitment of instructors as well.
The training program for Campus Ambassadors for next term is being revised to prepare Ambassadors to take multiple roles at their universities. In addition to facilitating Wikipedia writing assignments in university classrooms, Campus Ambassadors will be creating student clubs and conducting other outreach activities, such as workshops for the faculty and making connections with cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. In early January, five training events will happen across the United States: in San Francisco; Washington, DC; New York City; Baton Rouge; and Indianapolis.
What to expect and how you can help
The enthusiasm and goodwill on the part of both instructors and Wikipedia supporters who aren't regular editors is very strong. The challenge is how to apply it, and how to get the community looking outward enough to work with outsiders effectively. Next semester, we expect to work with about 500 students under primarily public policy professors in the United States; expanding the program to additional disciplines and geographies in the future will be a major scaling hurdle. But there are many topic areas where Wikipedia coverage is relatively weak, despite heavy representation in college and university courses: literature, non-military history topics, anthropology, sociology, etc. We expect to start recruiting in all of these disciplines for future semesters. Also, we have begun discussion with some volunteers from other Wikipedia language versions to begin developing Campus Ambassador Programs in their countries.
To effectively mentor the 500 students for this next term, we will need at least 100 Wikipedians, and ideally 175, who can help the students as Online Ambassadors. Currently there are about 30. These Ambassadors will need to be friendly and flexible, helping students adapt to the culture and processes of Wikipedia—helping students avoid having articles deleted as they are getting started, navigating the "Did you know" process, getting article suggestions and reviews, article formatting, and general good encyclopedic writing. If you're a friendly, active Wikipedian who is comfortable giving detailed feedback on articles in progress and you agree with the Ambassador Principles, you can fill out a short questionnaire to apply to be an Online Ambassador.
The program can continue only if Wikipedians creatively and energetically help build and maintain the program. To keep up with the Wikipedia Ambassadors program on a week-to-week basis, you can subscribe to the weekly email newsletter. And if you have ideas or would like to get involved in other ways, talk to an Ambassador or leave a message on a relevant talk page.
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Director of Technical Operations hired; South Korean mayor sues; brief news
Director of Technical Operations hired
On December 23, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the hiring of C.T. Woo as its first Director of Technical Operations. Woo will be responsible for providing "a stable, secure, documented, scalable and responsive systems environment." He will also be involved in the assessment of system processes and technical infrastructure, providing failsafe and redundancy solutions, and "mentoring" the operations team.
C.T. Woo is the founding member of Freshbrain.org, a "non-profit entity with the mission to enhance the education and the enrichment of teens in the areas of business and technology through its community building website." Prior to this, he worked at SurfControl Plc., an Internet filtering company, and held various positions at Sun Microsystems. Woo had actually begun working for the Foundation on December 1; the announcement had to be delayed due to "extensive travel schedules". He is reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, Danese Cooper.
South Korean mayor sues Wikipedians for defamation
As reported by PuzzletChung, a bureaucrat from the Korean Wikipedia, the mayor of Incheon (the third-largest city of South Korea) has brought charges of defamation against up to four Korean Wikipedians. PuzzletChung writes:
- According to the contributors, the prosecution is upon [mayor Song Young-gil's] own request, and is going to be over publicizing a fabricated sex scandal in the article about him and (semi-)protecting it. The text in question is merely a sum-up of various reports about the speculations eventually found to be a hoax. Non-logged-in user(s) from various IP addresses have tried to remove the whole controversy section, including not only the scandal but other arguments about him, replacing it with personal contrary comments and legal threats. The edits are consequently reverted by some users and rollbacked by one administrator. The admin, ko:User:Kys951, is also accused of being an abettor just because he is an admin.
- In the South Korean legal system, criminal defamation is partially a "crime upon complaint," (친고죄/親告罪) which becomes irrelevant to be a crime when the complainant chose to withdraw the case. (Note that I'm not a specialist of law, especially in English terminology.) The police of Southeastern Incheon thought the case itself is too insignificant to be a criminal case and tried to persuade him to withdraw it, only to be declined.
- Song has reportedly demanded the admin to remove the paragraph in exchange for fixing the charge, which is definitely not the way how Wikipedia works.
PuzzletChung also warned that "every bit of contribution to the project" might be open to such litigation, pointing to recent censorship efforts of the South Korean government in connection with the tensions with North Korea. Restrictive Internet laws in South Korea, where the Wikimedia Foundation used to operate a server cluster donated by Yahoo!, had been a concern in the past.
Briefly
- Ukrainian Wikipedian milestone: The Ukrainian Wikipedia reached 250,000 articles last week, as highlighted in a posting by Moka Pantages from the Wikimedia Foundation communications team on the official Wikimedia blog. Started in 2004, the Ukrainian Wikipedia has since grown steadily; it added 50,000 articles within the last 9 months alone and is currently the 16th largest wikipedia. The milestone article, about a Soviet bus design, was created at 8:45pm on December 21 (Kiev Time) by Anatoliy-024, the 110th most active Wikipedian on the site. The wiki has experienced a 64% surge in page views this year.
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Designing Wikipedia and the origin of page histories; brief news
Jimmy Wales on "community design" and introducing page histories
A recent book titled "Designing Media", by Bill Moggridge, contains interviews "with thirty-seven people who have made significant creative contributions to the design and development of media", among them one with Jimmy Wales. As summarized in a Guardian article last week, "Wales actually describes what he does as 'community design'. ... Wikipedia is not just an anarchic piece of crowd-sourcing: it's a carefully designed eco-system. ... It's often described as 'democratic', but Wales himself thinks of it more as a monarchy, with the writers overseen by moderators who are in turn overseen by the king – King Jimbo, as he's known." Wales also talked about how he introduced permanent page histories to Wikipedia's wiki: "In the early days, when I first set up Wikipedia, I really thought we were going to have to lock everything down very quickly", but then, after noticing that most edits were benign,
| “ | Very quickly I changed the software to keep all of the old versions because I realized that eliminates a major vulnerability. When the software was first installed, I think it kept five revisions. So people sometimes ask, 'What was the first article in Wikipedia?' and nobody knows because for the first few weeks or so we only kept the first five revisions, so the very earliest history got lost. I know what the first words were. I typed, 'Hello World,' which is an old thing programmers always do. | ” |
The interview was conducted in October 2008, before the recent rediscovery of early Wikipedia revisions. A PDF version of the book, as well as video files of the interviews, are available for free download.
Briefly
- Wikipedians Request Donation from Billionaire: A December Forbes.com blog post entitled "Wikipedia Fans Use Facebook And Twitter To Ask Billionaire Eike Batista For Help" reports that four Wikipedians have started a social networking campaign (Campaign website) urging billionaire Eike Batista, one of the ten richest men in the world, to donate to Wikipedia. According to the blog post, "the campaign has already garnered national media attention in Brazil but the social pickup seems to be lukewarm".
- Leak or donation?: The news website Brisbane Times reported on the State Library of Queensland's donation of 50,000 images (see last week's Signpost: "Christmas gift to Commons from the State Library of Queensland"). The title of the article – "State's history 'leaked' to Wikimedia" – provoked some critical reader reactions (see also Wikipedia: WikiLeaks is not part of Wikipedia).
- Are featured articles read more often?: A paper by four Spanish researchers, announced last month, looked at the articles that were awarded featured article status in the month of October 2009 on the six largest Wikipedias, and examined their pageview numbers (based on log data from the Wikimedia Foundation's Squid servers) in the months of September, October and November 2009. According to the announcement, "the results show that the featured article mechanism only increases visits to articles in the English Wikipedia, while in other top editions of Wikipedia the level of visits does not change when the articles are marked as featured" – with the exception of the Polish Wikipedia, where readership numbers rose in the month after promotion, while on the English Wikipedia they fell back to the September levels, too.
Wikipedians at the Kolkata meetup on December 11 - Bengali meetup: The first meetup of Bengali Wikipedians in Kolkata, India on December 11 was covered by the Hindustan Times ( "Making Wikipedia popular in Bengali" [1], December 15, Kolkata edition) and Oneindia.in ("Wikipedia enhances its Bong connection").
- Artists illustrate Wikipedia: At Wikipediaillustrated.org, artist/illustrator Galia Offri and designer/educator Mushon Zer-Aviv have started a blog "to share the process of creating 26 illustrations to 26 Wikipedia articles (alphabetically ordered)." The project is planned to involve a workshop and a panel discussion at the Transmediale Festival in Berlin in February 2011.
- Wikipedia lists entertain: Takepart.com, a website of US company Participant Media, has published "TakePart's List of Amazing Wikipedia Lists", highlighting several list articles with unusual topics.
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WikiProject National Basketball Association (NBA)
- ArticleAlertbot has been replaced by AAlertBot and article alerts have resumed for participating WikiProjects. Check out last week's Signpost coverage for more details.
- This is your last chance to participate in the December Wikification Backlog Elimination Drive sponsored by WikiProject Wikify. The drive ends Friday!
- The Guild of Copy Editors will be hosting a Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive in January. Sign up today!
- Editors are keen to revive WikiProject Music Theory and WikiProject Louisiana Tech. If interested, add yourself to the project's membership list and head to the project's talk page to get started.
WikiProject National Basketball Association, started in July 2005, has 6 Featured articles and 66 Good articles. We interviewed Yellow Evan (talk · contribs) and Coulraphobic123 (talk · contribs) in this week's WikiProject Report.
First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject National Basketball Association.
- Yellow Evan (prefers to be called YE): I am a user with a bad reputation and bad spelling in another project. I mostly edit tropical cyclone articles, but due to recent conflicts I am trying to decease my activity. I first joined in August 2008 as an IP. I am currently helping out in a drive to improve LA Lakers Featured articles.
- Coulaphobic123: I'm a sports enthusiast, predominantly basketball, and am also a mathematician. I enjoy keeping track of statistics: observing patterns, comparing current players with past players, and all-in-all, just working with numbers. Nightly, after each NBA game is done, I update the eight career statistical pages (points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, 3-point field goals, and free throws). I also wish to embark on the ultimate game logging project: BAA/NBA games played. Pages for some teams' seasons don't exist (mostly the very early seasons), but I want to get some people together to show the game logs for each team and each season.
When did you first join WikiProject National Basketball Association? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?
- YE: : I joined in October 2008, but did not pay much attention for a while. I became active in the project (or its sub projects) in 2009. One issue is vandalism as IP's often remove all content and replace it with "Kobe Sucks". As a result, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Talk:Kobe Bryant, Rajon Rondo, Dwayne Wade, and Kevin Garnett are all semi-protected. We also made a move to remove depth charts for NBA articles, which resulted in minor discussion. Most notably, I started doing the same for FIBA (which is like FIFA, except it is basketball, not football/soccer) that resulted in two edit wars, both on the same article. The first debate involved a user and the second involved the user's sock. Because the user was blocked, I got my way, and the depth charts were removed from that article.
- Coulraphobic123: I joined this WikiProject in late November 2010, but actually have been updating aforementioned career statistical pages for the past two seasons. The challenges that I've come across are random users (usually just IP users) editing/updating statistics for their favorite active players when they reach milestones without making other changes on other pages. Predominantly, my biggest problem has been with people updating Ray Allen's information on the 3-point field goals page, (usually just adding in 3-pointers made without updating the attempts and/or average). I run into similar problems every so often on the other pages.
What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
- YE: The most special thing about this project is our number of FL's and to some extent our FA's. I have also noticed that we do not have very high standards compared to some other projects, WP:TROP in particular.
- Coulraphobic123: I believe what makes this project successful is the number of dedicated editors and it keeps growing.
Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
- YE: No, we have been fine. I am trying to create an NBA IRC channel and it appears that this is going to be unsuccessful, but my efforts are not finished.
- Coulraphobic123: Since I've only been a member for about a month, I have yet to discover many initiatives that have or have not failed. As I said before, I want to try to organize several editors to make game logs for each team and season, so I hope that doesn't fail.
The project maintains several "Year-by-Year chronicles" like 2009 NBA Playoffs. What unique challenges do these kinds of articles present compared to normal articles and lists?
- YE: Those article tend to be stub class (exceptions do apply), so it hurts the project. However, these articles get vandalized less (until the Lakers/Celtics/Heat win the championship), and thus there are no major challenges.
- Coulraphobic123: I would agree with YE's statement. Really, the only vandalism will be by those opposing certain teams or dynasties.
What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
- YE: Any article within the scope of biography falls into WikiProject Biography.
- Coulraphobic123: This is my first WikiProject that I'm actively involved in.
What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and future improvements to basketball?
- YE: The future of WikiProject National Basketball Association looks bright, and I hope that by the time the NBA seasons ends, every proposed article on the FA list will have become an FA.
- Coulraphobic123: I too hope to have each proposed article become featured. Also, I want to make it a database of basketball statistics and information that is easily accessible and navigable.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- YE: The LA Lakers article is currently at peer review.
- Coulraphobic123: If anybody would like to join me in recording game logs for each team and season, contact me on my talk page.
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The best of the week
Featured articles
- Norwich Market (nom), which visits the lost world of whifflers, dick fools, mass public executions, and "a girl of sixteen with no bones". Nominator Iridescent says, "Norwich Market is one of the few institutions of Norman England to survive substantially unchanged through the intervening 900 years, although Norwich has dwindled from one of Europe's great port cities to something of a backwater." The Signpost thought "whifflers" might refer to something lewd, but learned from the article that this was far from the case. (picture at the right)
- Evelyn Waugh (nom) (1903–66), the English novelist. Nominator Brianboulton says, "The critic Clive James considered Waugh to be the culmination of centuries of English prose development. Sharpness of wit was his trademark; when told that Randolph Churchill had had a non-malignant growth surgically removed, Waugh remarked that it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." (Picture at the right)
- William Cragh (nom), the story of a 13th-century Welsh rebel who was hanged twice, pronounced dead, and then brought back to life by the intercession of a saint (Malleus Fatuorum and Ealdgyth)
- Speed of light (nom), a physical constant important in many areas of physics. Think of whizzing around the equator a little more than seven times a second; that is the speed of light. Going that fast, you'd arrive at the Moon in just over a second, and the Sun in about eight minutes (TimothyRias).
- Buffalo nickel (nom), the fifth in nominator Wehwalt's numismatic series. The Buffalo nickel, he says, is considered beautiful by many people, "but it had its problems in production, and was replaced after the minimum 25 years, leaving only the questions: Who is the Indian on the front, and who is the bison on the back? We may never know for sure."
- SMS Kronprinz (1914) (nom) fought at the Battle of Jutland in the front of the German line, but emerged completely unscathed, while her three sister ships directly ahead were the most damaged German battleships in the engagement. Kronprinz engaged and forced the retreat of the Russian battleship Tsarevitch during the Battle of Moon Sound in 1917, and was ultimately interned in Scapa Flow at the end of the war and scuttled by her crew (Parsecboy).
Featured sound
Featured pictures
Six images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
- Stephen Merchant (nom and link to a related article), a British writer (co-creator and co-writer of The Office and Extras), director, radio presenter, and comic actor. Nominator Nehrams2020 said "after contacting Merchant's publicist for an image to support his article, I received this great portrait. I also reached the author of the image and she acknowledged it was able to be released under the CC-BY-SA (created by Carolyn Djanogly).
- Tasmanian Devil (nom and link to a related article), the only high quality shot we seem to have. The photo was taken in captivity. There are many devils in captive breeding programs in an attempt to provide some insurance from the Devil facial tumour disease (created by Noodle snacks).
- Portolan chart by Jorge d'Aguiar (nom and link to a related article, The oldest-known signed and dated chart of Portuguese origin. This photograph at full resolution is a massive 5,016 × 3,878 pixels, which shows in exquisite detail the features of this almost Tolkein-like map. The original is held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven (tip—at that link, the pictures of the Library's architecture are worth checking out). Image created by Alvesgaspar; picture at the top.
- Dusky Robin (nom and link to a related article), a brown-plumaged bird of the open woodlands in Tasmania, not related to robins of Europe and North America (created by Noodle snacks).
- Bay of Kotor (nom and link to a related article), in south-western Montenegro (formerly part of Yugoslavia) is a winding bay on the Adriatic Sea; the bay is sometimes called Europe's southernmost fjord (created by Ggia).
- 3D glass molecular model (nom and link to a related article), of value for demonstrating refraction, Fresnel reflections, caustics, and other effects achieved by ray-tracing and photon mapping (created by Purpy Pupple; picture below).
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Widespread issues on Christmas Day
Considerable editing issues presented themselves to users around the world for more than an hour on December 25 (wikitech-l). Between 18:50 and 20:20 UTC, edits were lost on a number of Wikimedia sites, although the problem was resolved cleanly on most, including the English Wikipedia. Only the Hebrew Wikipedia suffered lasting problems beyond the 90-minutes within which most problems were resolved on almost all sites. The glitch highlights the challenges of maintaining the stability of a website with as many visitors as Wikimedia sites over holiday periods when volunteers are few on the ground.
Another, unrelated issue, also came to light on Christmas Day. Bug #26429 ("Fatal error: PPFrame_DOM::expand") blocked a number of actions on the English Wikipedia, and quickly generated reports from a number of WMF wikis. Fortunately, the error only temporarily blocked editing and was worked around by reloading the page; it was reported as fixed on the afternoon of 26 December (UTC).
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.
- With the resolution of bug #26412,
[edit]links are no longer shown alongside the header on search pages, which are not editable by their very nature. - A new module has been added to the MediaWiki API.
QueryPage; it allows users to generate the output of certain "query"-based special pages in a machine-readable format, rather than via HTML screen-scraping (bug #14869).
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