The Physics of a WikiProject: WikiProject Physics

WikiProject news

News in brief

• The Guild of Copy Editors' May backlog elimination drive has begun. Join today and earn some barnstars for your efforts!
• The WikiProject Council is discussing redesigning the WikiProject Directory
• WikiProject Unreferenced BLPs could use your help referencing articles tagged since September 2009.

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week we contemplated relativity with WikiProject Physics. The project was started in June 2005 and has grown to include 43 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, and 42 Good Articles. WikiProject Physics maintains four portals covering Physics, Electromagnetism, Gravitation, and X-ray Astronomy. We interviewed Christopher Thomas and Headbomb.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Physics? What area of physics interests you most? Do you have any expertise in physics?

• Christopher Thomas: I was first and foremost interested in writing articles about physics-related topics and improving the quality of existing articles. Working with WikiProject Physics came later. It serves as a very useful meeting ground for getting advice about how best to handle various problems that come up, and getting the attention of a pool of editors who have the expertise to address concerns with any given article.

I am at best an "armchair physicist". While I enjoy the subject and have read a fair bit about many facets of it, my formal training is with electronics and computing. As a result, I consider myself an adjunct member rather than a full member of WP:Phys, and my main function (other than cleaning up obvious problems) is to highlight problem-articles so that those with discipline-specific expertise can address them.

Particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology are the subjects I usually follow. I have work-related expertise with optics, lasers, and semiconductor physics, but rarely end up editing those articles.

• Headbomb: I don't think anything really motivated me to join WikiProject Physics per se. I happened to be editing several physics articles [in particular, list of baryons, circa 2008] and people mentioned the physics project to be a good place to get feedback on it. So I joined, because that seemed to make a lot of sense to be part of the physics-oriented community of editors. It's a great place to coordinate efforts on certain topics, get feedback on some particular issue, or get insights on an area which isn't your area of expertise. Experts and other editors interested in physics should definitely join the project. Likewise for chemists and WikiProject Chemistry and all the other science WikiProjects.

As for expertise, I'm currently a master's student in physics. I've got a fairly good grasp on the history of particle physics, and a pretty good background in solid-state physics and optics (both at the experimental and theoretical levels).

The project is home to 43 featured articles and 42 good articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Do you have any tips for editors attempting to bring a physics article up to FA or GA status?

• Christopher Thomas: I've only tangentially contributed. I've certainly edited articles such as black hole that have been through the process, but not as part of an improvement drive.

If you want to bring an article to GA or FA status, be prepared to put in a very large amount of grunt work, and to have quite a lot of patience. The single most useful task, from my outside impression, is finding and adding references (as unsourced statements seem to be the biggest item picked on during review), but many other tasks are valuable as well. Having the persistence to shepherd an article through its long, slow, and often repeated passage through the review bureaucracy is also important.

Article improvement to GA or FA status is a noble goal, and those with the patience and persistence to accomplish it have my respect.

• Headbomb: Yes, I worked pretty heavily on List of baryons (a featured list), and Quark (a featured article). The best tip, as Christopher Thomas mentioned above, is basically be prepared to do a lot of grunt work, and to reword every sentence 20 times before being truly happy with the end result. I've never really bothered with the Good Articles, mostly because my interests moved from a select group of articles to "large scale gnoming" assisted with AWB, bots, etc.... I do create content from time to time, but I'm pretty happy to bring it something to something that is both well-presented and decent, without going through the hassle of GAs and FAs.

Do you contribute to other science-based projects? Have there been any inter-project collaborations?

• Christopher Thomas: There's a fair bit of crossover between the Physics, Astronomy, and Astronomical Objects projects. At least one long-term IP editor has been very helpful facilitating communication between these groups. Usually joint efforts occur when something either very new or very dubious gets added to an astrophysics or cosmology article.

• Headbomb: Yes, in fact I'm pretty involved with WikiProject Academic Journals (probably created articles on ~100+ Academic journals, many of which related to physics, but several more related to medicine, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, ...) and WikiProject Elements (mostly with regards to individual isotopes), and I take the occasional stroll at WikiProject Astronomy and WikiProject Chemistry. For the non-science WikiProjects, I'm pretty involved with WikiProject Wikipedia Books and from time to time, WikiProject Videogames.

This "inter-project" stuff led me to come up with the concept of Article Alerts. I was getting tired of missing proposed deletions and various other discussion concerning physics-related articles, and it was very tiresome to review every discussion process for articles that interested me. (See the original Signpost coverage of Article Alerts). Currently 700+ WikiProjects and Task Forces subscribe to the Article Alerts, so I think that's a pretty successful project.

Another example of an inter-project collaboration I've led has been Journals Cited by Wikipedia, which is basically a compilation of the various |journal= parameters of citation templates. This tremendously boosted the output of WP:Academic journals by allowing us to see which journal entry were missing, and which were important for Wikipedia (journals which we cite often should have decent articles, mostly because many readers will want to know about the journal's reliability, its history, etc...). I also compiled lists of missing journals for individual projects (Medicine, Biology, Plants...) to let them know how how their field is represented on Wikipedia. Prior to that compilation, we had some journal cited well-over 1000 times without any articles on them. Now all journals which have been cited more than 80 times on Wikipedia have an article. [Well, cited 80 times as as of last year, the compilation is pretty dated since the bot operator is inactive]. So I say that's another successful project.

Does the project have any difficulty recruiting new members? Does the technical nature of some physics-related articles limit contributions from editors without a physics background?

• Christopher Thomas: Some background is needed, but editors don't need to be true experts in order to contribute. The most valuable trait in that regard is to know how far your expertise goes and where it ends, so that you can get others to help with editing on topics where you're out of your depth. I've certainly done that often enough (that's one of the things the WikiProject is very good for).

There's more than enough day to day cleanup work needed for the efforts of non-experts to be very useful. Alerting the project of problem articles or problem edits is also very helpful, and takes minimal expertise.

Our real problem is retaining members. My understanding is that this is endemic to most technical topics on Wikipedia, not just to WikiProject Physics. The problem is twofold. First, editors burn out. The cleanup task never ends, and contrary to the initial goals of Wikipedia, articles don't constantly improve but instead find a balance point where improvement and degradation happen at the same rate. Second, not all editors are able to function in a collaborative environment. Every year or two there's a situation that escalates to ArbCom where an editor (expert or non-expert) has a position against consensus and refuses to drop it. One of the most bitter lessons to learn around here is that there will be times when you feel the position of other editors is just plain wrong, about something important - but that you should back down anyways, for the greater good. When people don't back down, they tend to escalate their actions until they get themselves removed from Wikipedia, and may take a few others with them (due to involvement or just to burnout from dealing with the dispute). This leads to a high turnover rate among experts, in the physics project, at least.

• Headbomb: Well I think we're one of the biggest projects behind WikiProject Biographies, WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Videogames. We're bigger than WikiProject Chemistry and WikiProject Biology for sure, and probably comparable to WikiProject Mathematics. Some people go inactive over time, but there is always new blood, and we don't really make any kind of special efforts to recruit people [at least to my knowledge]. So, at least compared to the other science-projects, I don't think we have trouble recruiting members, as the project is very healthy and very active.

That being said, we could be twice as many people involved and we'd still have work for everyone. In particular, some fields within physics are less well-represented on Wikipedia. I feel our optics and fluid dynamics articles are overall lacking compared to the our articles on other fields, so maybe we do need to do some targeted recruiting.

The project has its own portal. Do you contribute to the portal? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of portals?

• Christopher Thomas: I have never used the physics portal (might have visited it once to see what it was, or might not have). My impression is that it's most useful to users who want to find physics content. I'm more concerned with maintaining the content that I'm already aware of and in a position to help with. Of course, it's possible I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the portal.

• Headbomb: Nope, never used the physics portal; I don't really care about portals in general. I think they make a lot of sense for the smaller topics, like Portal:Lady Gaga, but when you've got something as big a topic as physics, it's very hard to maintain. So I'm pretty much sharing Christopher Thomas' viewpoint on this. Nice for others, but I'd rather spend time on the articles themselves. I think TStein is the one to is the most involved with the portal.

What are the project's most pressing needs and concerns? How can a new member help today?

• Christopher Thomas: Cleaning up vandalism is always useful (everywhere, not just on physics pages). After that, I'd suggest watching for edits that aren't obvious vandalism but that add information that sounds like it might not be correct. At that point, start a thread on the article's talk page to ask about it, and if you don't get people responding within a few days, leave a note at WT:PHYS to bring in additional eyes.

This type of maintenance work is 90% of what WikiProject Physics does. It's pretty draining, so help spreading the load is always appreciated.

• Headbomb: Our Article Alerts report pretty much details the "pressing matters". For the rest, it mostly involved copy-editing, finding references, etc... And of course we always need to watch out for the crank scientists trying to insert weird POVs in articles, or various quacks, pseudo-scientists, etc... and people who mean well but are just plain wrong.

Anything else you'd like to add?

• Christopher Thomas: Remember that you're here to have fun. If you get tired of doing cleanup, take a break from it. If you want to make a really cool figure explaining Bremsstrahlung radiation or what-have-you, make one (just propose its use on the talk page, rather than swapping it in immediately, to avoid stepping on toes). Do what interests you, take a break when you need to, and you'll go a long way towards avoiding burnout. We've already lost far too many editors to that; the wiki will still be standing if you take a week off from vandalism patrol, so always take time to enjoy your editing!

• Headbomb: Pretty much what CT said. Take a stub, expand it. Or find an important historical publication in physics and create an article on it. Or create a book on a topic, and see if there's anything missing. And hey, if you want to help, join the project, and drop on our talk page.

Next week we'll break out the board games. Until then, plan your next move in the archive.

Reader comments

2011-05-02

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87

This week's "Features and admins" covers Sunday 24 – Saturday 30 April

New administrators

There were no new admins last week. At the time of publication there is one live RfA: Catfish Jim and the soapdish, due to finish Wednesday.

Featured articles

No new articles were promoted to featured status.

Featured lists

Nine lists were promoted:

• List of Los Angeles Clippers seasons (nom). (Nominated by Crzycheetah.)
• Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (G) (nom). (Nominated by Killervogel5.)
• List of Ashes series (nom). (Nominated by Harrias.)
• List of international cricket centuries at Brabourne Stadium (nom). (Nominated by AroundTheGlobe.)
• Huskies of Honor (nom). (Nominated by Grondemar.)
• List of armored cruisers of Germany (nom). (Nominated by Parsecboy.)
• List of highest paid Major League Baseball players (nom). (Nominated by Staxringold.)
• List of National Treasures of Japan (writings: others) (nom). (Nominated by Bamse.)
• Mandy Moore discography (nom). (Nominated by Novice7.)

One featured list was delisted:

• List of Super Rugby champions (nom: [referencing, scope, style])

Featured pictures

Eight images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":

• Eleanor of Toledo (nom; related article), the mannerist portrait of Eleanor of Toledo, who wears a heavily brocaded dress slashed with black arabesques, with her son Giovanni by Bronzino, 1545. (Painted by Bronzino; photographed by the Yorck Project.) picture at right
• Vanadium (nom; related article), vanadium crystal bars, showing different crystal textures and a greenish oxidised surface. (Created by User:Alchemist-hp.)
• Rusty chain (nom; related article), heavy rust on the links of a chain near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the surface had been continuously exposed to moisture and salt-laden spray, causing surface breakdown, cracking, and flaking of the metal. (Created by User:WikipedianMarlith.) picture at right
• Curve theatre, Leicester (nom; related article), a theatre in Leicester, England, designed by Rafael Viñoly and opened in 2008. (Created by User:NotFromUtrecht.) picture at top
• Bar-Backed Partridge male (nom; related article), found in South East Asia. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
• Bar-backed Partridge female (nom; related article), a companion to the previous image. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
• Flock of sanderlings (nom; related article), a small wader. It is highly gregarious in winter, sometimes forming large flocks on coastal mudflats or sandy beaches. (Created by User:Mbz1.) picture at bottom
• Wood Sandpiper (nom; related article), showing its characteristic short fine bill, brown back and longer yellowish legs. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)

Featured sounds

• New Zealand Bellbird (nom; related article). Several New Zealand Bellbirds (Anthornis melanura), singing and calling around a bird feeder on Tiritiri Matangi Island. The bellbird's song contributed strongly to New Zealand's loud dawn chorus, now essentially absent from most of the mainland, and best heard on protected islands and other wildlife sanctuaries.
• Seventeen Come Sunday (nom; related article), Percy Grainger's choral arrangement of the folk song "Seventeen Come Sunday", performed by the United States Navy Band Sea Chanters ensemble.
• Keep the Home Fires Burning (nom; related article), a World War I patriotic song by Ivor Novello and Lena Guilbert Ford, performed by Frederick Wheeler for Edison Records in late 1915.
• Marcha Real (nom; related article), the national anthem of Spain, performed by the United States Navy Band.
• Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (February 24, 2009) Barack Obama (video) (nom; related article), in which he discussed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 among other economic-related issues during the late-2000s financial crisis.
• Manhattan Beach (nom; related article); this file and the following two are marches by American composer John Philip Sousa (1854–1932), performed by the United States Marine Corps Band.
• King Cotton (nom; related article).
• The Gallant Seventh (nom; related article).
• Radetzky March (nom; related article), Johann Strauss's magnum opus, performed by the US Marine Corps Band.
• The Circus Bee (nom; related article), a circus march by Henry Fillmore, performed by the US Marine Corps Band.
• RollingThunder (nom; related article), a circus march by Henry Fillmore, performed by the US Air Force Band.
• First Inaugural (January 20, 1993) Bill Clinton (nom; related article): video.
• The foggy dew (nom; related article), a traditional Irish song using a penny whistle and percussion.
• Remarks on the Signing of NAFTA (December 8, 1993) Bill Clinton (nom; related article). NAFTA was the historic North American Free-Trade Agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico.

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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2011-05-02

Two new cases open – including Tree shaping case

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee opened two new cases during the week. Three cases are currently open.

Open cases

Racepacket (Week 1)

This case was opened two days ago after allegations of harassment, outing, sockpuppetry, canvassing, and disruptive editing. The case will address the behavioral concerns surrounding Racepacket (talk · contribs), the subject of this case, and is likely to review the behavior of all editors involved in the GA processes concerning netball articles. During the week, three editors submitted 12 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.

Tree shaping (Week 1)

This case was opened four days ago after allegations of long-term COI editing on the Tree shaping article, and problematic usage of the article's talk page. During the week, four editors submitted 23 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.

Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AEsh) (Week 8)

Further proposals were submitted and voting has continued during the week as to which proposals will form the final decision. More votes are likely to be made in the coming week.

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2011-05-02

Call for RTL developers, varied sign-up pages and news in brief

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By Jarry1250

MediaWiki needs RTL developers

This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger issued a call for more developers routinely using right-to-left (RTL) interfaces to get involved in MediaWiki ("Entries in Life" blog). The main MediaWiki interface in languages which are written right-to-left is virtually a complete mirror-image of that for all other languages (in contrast to the English Wikipedia, the sidebar is on the right, for example, and Vector's search box on the left). This can cause problems when changes are developed and tested solely on left-to-right (LTR) wikis, as is often the case at the moment.

“

Despite [internationalisation] support, MediaWiki and Wikipedia lack in some pretty important areas. One of the areas that this is most obvious is in languages that are written right-to-left (RTL) instead of left-to-right (LTR). We do try to fix these problems, but almost all of our developers work in LTR languages, so we don't notice the problems as quickly. The problems don't stare us in the face every day and wiki users in RTL languages like العربية (Arabic), فارسی (Farsi), and עברית (Hebrew) don't have proper support.

”

He added, "if you're an RTL developer, let me tell you clearly: We want you!".

Account Creation Improvement Project update

On 27 April, the Wikimedia Techblog carried an update from developer Nimish Gautam about the progress of the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP). In particularly, the update included details on some of the technological developments that had accompanied their attempts to buck the (largely) downwards trend in the number of users registering and editing on the English Wikipedia over the past couple of months.

Among these, Gautam noted the deployment of the CustomUserSignup extension on 27 April. The extension allows the destination of the "Log in/create account" link to be varied between visitors, allowing the ACIP team to customise "the look and messaging of these screens to see what kind of impact that has on new editors" more easily than before, when the page had to be changed for all users for two days at a time. In addition to the raw statistics on how many potential editors successfully make it through the registration process, the project is also collecting data on users' activity levels after registering via a tracking cookie associated with a browser session rather than with an individual user or user account. Information collected includes:

“

Which account creation messaging group the user was placed in (identified as ACP1, ACP2 or ACP3 for now) What version of the account creation campaign they received Whether the particular user made it to the end of the account creation process, or whether they dropped off after reaching the login screen or the account creation screen If (and only if) the user creates a new account, the number of edits or previews during the course of the trial.

”

In addition, the project has also utilised an improvement to the ClickTracking MediaWiki extension, which helps to collect anonymous information on users editing habits, to allow multiple tests to be run in parallel, rather than sequentially. As of time of writing, ACP1, ACP2 and ACP3 are identical, but this will be changed shortly.

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. Those interested in the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites should take note of this thread, which suggests a beta release is imminent.

• Developer Brion Vibber blogged about a recent bugfix (involving the patch for bug #26729 going live) that he described as showing that "we’ve got a basically sane setup where issues can be pushed along from confirmation to merging to testing to deployment in a reasonably speedy fashion". In a separate post, he also detailed his plans for adding support for the OEmbed standard to MediaWiki, mainly to improve the ease with which videos hosted on Wikimedia sites can be reused. The standard would need to be expanded slightly to include licence metadata before it met Wikimedia needs, however.
• With the resolution of bug #18682, alternative ("alt") text can now be set for images in image galleries.
• Gerard Meijssen blogged about the limited range of fonts currently supported by MediaWiki's SVG rendering software.
• Sweble Wikitext Parser, the latest in a line of 30 or more attempts to reimplement the MediaWiki parser, has been released, with some remaining bugs. Brion Vibber, the developer now responsible for in-house improvement of the parser, noted that Sweble "should be a good help as we migrate towards a unified canonical parser model" (identi.ca). Such a migration, given the millions of lines of existing wikitext the HTML equivalent of which would need to be accurately reproduced, has long been seen as a Herculean task (see, for example, last year's April Fool's announcement of it finally being achieved).
• The Toolserver's copies of the JIRA (an alternative to Bugzilla) and FishEye software were successfully upgraded and the latest pre-release version of Perl (5.14.0-RC1) is available to Toolserver developers to use (toolserver-l mailing list).
• Mark Hershberger also blogged about a new page he has written for developers about how best to go about getting their custom extensions deployed to Wikimedia sites.
• After a false start, the EmailCapture has been enabled, allowing the email addresses of unregistered users to be provided, validated and then used to send out mailing to potential editors. It has been developed for use, at least initially, with the ArticleFeedback extension (server admin log).
• The MediaWiki projects for this year's Google Summer of Code have been announced. Out of 25 proposals, the proposals of eight students were selected.

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