A post-mortem on the Indian Education Program pilot
Synopsis
Initiated in the wake of last year's successful Public Policy Initiative, the India Education Program is the latest culmination of the Wikimedia Foundation's stated strategic goals of university outreach and expansion into the Global South. It quickly ran into difficulty, however, when it emerged that a significant proportion of the articles submitted by students in the program failed to show an adequate knowledge of basic editing skills and did not respect Wikipedia's copyright and plagiarism policies. Many students seemed manifestly unfamiliar with rudimentary wiki syntax and fundamental competencies such as sandbox creation and responding to talk page messages, and a minority appeared to lack the English language skills requisite for productive interaction. Furthermore, many of the topics assigned for editing by students were in technical areas traditionally well-served by Wikipedia's native editing community, which made for a difficult time for comparatively inexperienced students trying to improve advanced content. These issues were exacerbated by the impositions of regular academic deadlines that put pressure on students to submit something for fear of failing classes.
As the talkpage of the project shows, the resulting cleanup efforts, including a contributor copyright investigation (CCI), generated much dissatisfaction and questioning of the preparations and management on the Wikimedia Foundation's end. Disgruntled administrators and new page patrollers accused the program leadership of failing to anticipate and pre-empt the enormity of the maintenance task facing community volunteers, and the entrenched cultural differences in understanding of plagiarism between the editing community and the students. They also questioned how it was appropriate for what was ostensibly a pilot program to involve more than eight hundred students. In response, Nitika Tandon, the consultant directly overseeing the project, acknowledged the copyright concerns and outlined the steps that had been taken to address them, including in-class lessons on copyright, requiring students to submit their work in sandboxes prior to ambassador or professorial approval, and one-on-one counselling for offending students. IRC office hours with the IEP team were held on October 12 and October 21. The copyright violations continued unabated however, and some editors went so far as to question why the community was tolerating such an initiative, even suggesting the program should be brought before the Arbitration Committee prior to any future activity.
On October 18, in the light of the continuing onslaught of copyright violations, arbitrator emeritus Wizardman called for the project to be unilaterally shut down, citing it as a net negative for the encyclopaedia. In the ensuing discussion, Kudpung, who had been leading the cleanup efforts, highlighted two unwelcome impacts upon the Wikimedia movement he called "blatantly obvious" but which seemed "to have been totally disregarded" – that students would not be attracted to edit Wikipedia by being put through a stress-inducing deadline-tied program led by highly inexperienced ambassadors, and that the community's administrators and new page patrollers had been demoralised by having been forced to deal with cleanup of problems not of its making. After a further week of problems, Calliopejen1 proposed a wholesale removal of all unsourced text contributed for the project. On November 3, following a meeting with the Director at Pune's College of Engineering, one of the participating institutions, Tandon announced the decision to call for an immediate end to the students' editing of Wikipedia, and for a one-month moratorium on student contributions while the backlog of copyright investigations continued. Students who had added good quality content would be rewarded with marks based on the quality of their edits, those who had either added plagiarized material or had not even started would lose marks, and anyone who continued editing would receive negative marks. As 13 out of 14 classes at the Symbiosis College of Economics had already concluded, only two classes remained active in the program at the time; one each at Symbiosis School of Economics and SNDT Women's University.
Apologising for the massive cleanup effort presented by the initiative, Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program Director Frank Schulenburg expressed 'deep frustration' with the outcome of the program. He admitted fault on the organisers' part in the delay of getting online ambassadors working with the students, an inadequate articulation of the ambassadors' role, and poor communication on the foundation's part, but tried to dispel the notion that any particular group was primarily culpable for the difficulties. Copyright specialist administrator Moonriddengirl, who is the current community liaison for the Wikimedia Foundation, expressed sympathy with beleaguered volunteers exasperated by the perceived lack of assistance from the foundation, but emphasised that staff were handcuffed from intervening officially by the foundation's Section 230-determined legal imperatives not to act as a publisher of content. Nitika Tandon has prepared a draft summary of "findings and learnings" from the program.
The administrator's perspective
The Signpost asked admin Kudpung for his reflections on the experience of dealing with the administrative headache generated by the program:
"My involvement began when I blocked the IP address of one of the faculties in an attempt to stem the massive flow of copyright violations. It was only after my curiosity took me deeper into the issues, that I became fully aware of the scale of the problem. My talk page became for a while the hub of communication – a situation that should never have arisen, but it was very difficult to know who was in charge of various parts of the project and whom to address. I've been teaching here in Asia for many years, and I was also concerned that during the planning stages the American side of the operation may not have taken the challenges of the cultural dichotomy into consideration. I spoke with several members of the US WMF staff in an endeavour to learn if they were aware of the extent of the issues and if anything of consequence was being done. I also spoke with Hisham several times to obtain some reassurance on behalf of the community that something would be undertaken at ground zero, and finally the organisers held discussions in the USA. Some of the things I posted on various talk pages may have been perceived by some as accusatory in tone, but I felt it was necessary that people be galvanised into action."
"I understand the importance of Wikipedia reaching out to other regions, especially to those like India that have strong ties to the English language, but the lesson drawn from this pilot project is that things work very differently in other countries, and careful, long-term preparation with the involvement of the community is essential."
"For future extensions of the project, it is paramount that the Indian Campus Ambassadors are more accurately selected and trained, and have an adequate working knowledge of editing and basic policies. It is equally imperative that new editors can benefit from user friendly page creation tools, and that a much improved system for the control of new pages along with a replacement for CorenSearchBot are made available to page patrollers as soon as possible – the next wave of Indian students and their ambassadors is going to need them. Ironically, if WP:ACTRIAL [Ed. A local initiative to restrict page creation to autoconfirmed editors that the Foundation chose not to implement] had been implemented, it would have spared the students much of their disappointment and embarrassment, and the maintenance community much of the stress they volunteered to be subjected to. Nevertheless, from what I have seen of the new tools already, I am optimistic that the WMF's core philosophies and outreach programs can be further developed and maintained."
The consultant's view
The Signpost interviewed Hisham Mundol, consultant for the Wikimedia Foundation's India Programs, to get an insight into his perspective on the situation and what it might mean for the future of such initiatives. A transcript of the interview follows.
The Signpost: What was the planning process behind the India Education Program, what was the involvement of the different roles (e.g. contractors, foundation staff with prior experience with university outreach, foundation management, Wikipedians, professors, ambassadors), and how did it differ from previous university outreach programs (such as the Public Policy Initiative in the United States)?
Hisham: The Strategy Project, which involved more than one thousand contributors to Wikimedia projects, identified increasing participation in a number of countries as a priority – and India is the largest of these. I head up a team that's tasked with catalyzing this agenda. Given the demographic profile of India (i.e., a relatively young population) and the context of students, an education pilot was planned in India.
The India Education Program pilot grew out of the success of the Public Policy Initiative in the United States during the 2010-11 academic year. I worked closely with WMF Global Education Program Director Frank Schulenburg, Global Education Program Manager Annie Lin and US Campus Ambassador PJ Tabit on designing the pilot. One decision we took early on was to focus the pilot in one city (Pune) because we knew from the U.S. pilot that it was easier to focus on one city. (Pune has a strong heritage for education in India.)
Frank, Annie and a professor from the University of Mississippi named Bob Cummings, who all had experience with Wikipedia in the U.S. higher education system, traveled to Pune, India, to kick off the pilot. PJ stayed over for just under 3 months in Pune to help establish the pilot.
Frank, Annie, and I personally went through 700 applications from people who wanted to be Campus Ambassadors in India, and we chose the best 20 candidates based on their understanding of Wikipedia (even if nascent), their ability to learn, their ability to teach, their commitment and their motivators. As in the US pilot, many had never contributed significant amounts of content to Wikipedia, but all were eager to contribute in other ways - such as teaching students how to edit. (A learning from the US pilot was that Campus Ambassadors with little prior Wikipedia-editing experience did just as well as – and sometimes better than – long-term Wikipedians when it came to performance as Campus Ambassadors, because their role is to introduce students to the basics of Wikipedia on a face-to-face level.)
I also hired Nitika Tandon to focus specifically on the India Education Program, as my role also includes other responsibilities in India.
We had a team of Online Ambassadors (most of whom were experienced Wikipedians) but a failing from the India pilot is that we were unable to bring them on-board early in the semester.
What note did foundation staff take of cultural attitudes specific to India regarding attribution, copyright, responsibility and co-operation?
Nitika and I were both born and live in India. We have an intimate understanding of India cultural attitudes. I personally don't believe that Indian culture had much bearing on this pilot. Some students in India – as elsewhere – are either lazy and plagiarize or they genuinely believe that close paraphrasing means something is no longer plagiarized. Some students in India - as newbies from elsewhere where English is not the first language – find it challenging to write in language appropriate to Wikipedia. And, some students in India – as newbies elsewhere – value responsibility and co-operation but are unfamiliar with Wikipedia culture and were unresponsive to actions & comments from others in the community taken in reaction to their edits or comments left on their talk pages.
Having said this, the real challenges were not cultural but programmatic. It's a pilot, and we've learned many important lessons. There were two that were most important, though. First, engage the community early. When the power of the community is brought to bear on a challenge, we get a huge number of solid ideas and a tremendous amount of help. It follows the open-source adage that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." Second, ensure that all the infrastructure elements are in place and adequate (e.g., Campus & Online Ambassadors), selection of colleges and faculty based on involvement and capability, modifications in training of Ambassadors, faculty and students.
Do you feel you had the support, background briefing, and relationship with Wikipedian volunteers needed to address the issues that arose with the student submissions? What might have made your job(s) more effective?
I think communication with the global Wikipedian volunteer community was amongst the biggest failings of the pilot. While we had invested time and effort with the local community, we can and should have done so much better with and for the global community.
Another aspect, as I mentioned earlier, was that we had a team of Online Ambassadors to provide that crucial on-wiki role of assisting students – but, unfortunately, recruiting and training new India-focused Online Ambassadors took time, and it simply didn't happen fast enough.
We've had a lot of good interactions with the Wikipedia community through this process – we've had two IRC office hours in which we were able to explain our thinking to several editors. And we were blown away when we asked the U.S.-focused Online Ambassadors to help out with the India program cleanup too – more than 20 of them immediately offered to take on extra duties. We're so thankful that we have such a wonderful community of people who love Wikipedia as much as we do.
One point I'd like to emphasize here is that the India Education Program is a pilot program. In pilot programs, you start small (we should have started much, much smaller!), and you try different things to learn what works and what doesn't work. We adapted what had and hadn't worked from the U.S. pilot, but India is a different place, and we had a whole host of issues that the U.S. program didn't have (and we didn't have some problems the U.S. pilot had). The nature of pilot programs is to learn from them, and we've certainly learned a lot from our pilot.
When did it become apparent that there were widespread serious issues with the submissions from students in the program, and what steps or decisions did Foundation staff take in response?
We realized that at the beginning of September when a community member alerted us to the problem. Immediately, we dispatched our Campus Ambassadors to go into the classrooms and teach students about copyright violations and how to avoid doing them; Campus Ambassadors conducted more than 20 in-class sessions about copyright. Nitika and I also conducted about 15 in-class sessions with the faculty members. We pulled up students' copyright violations on the screen and showed them why this was a copyright violation and how they could fix it. Campus Ambassadors reached out to students desk-by-desk in class, by email, by text, by Facebook messages, and any other way they could think of to encourage students to stop adding copyrighted materials to Wikipedia. Our Campus Ambassadors poured their hearts and souls into telling, directing, coaxing, cajoling and begging students to not add copyvios to Wikipedia, but some students simply would not or could not understand.
By early October, we concluded that some students just weren't getting it, no matter how hard or how often we tried. We instructed all students to stop editing directly in the article namespace on Wikipedia; instead, we encouraged them to only edit in sandboxes. While we did not want students to add copyrighted materials to sandboxes either, we wanted to provide a way for us to check the students' work before it went live on Wikipedia. Many students still continued to edit in the live article namespace. Therefore, on 3 November, Nitika and I went into the College of Engineering at Pune (at Symbiosis School of Economics, deadlines had already passed for all but one class so students had stopped editing) and met with the director, who shut down the program and told students they would not be graded on anything they had added to Wikipedia after that date. The students who added good quality content would be rewarded with marks based on the quality of their edits and those who had either added plagiarized material or had not even started would lose these marks. To ensure that the problem was adequately controlled and that students actually stopped editing, the Director also stated that anyone who continues to edit will be given negative marks. (This last point is only for the remaining part of this semester.)
Did staff members feel restricted in responding to the issues by the legal/policy imperative (of the Foundation as a service provider rather than publisher) not to directly address content?
Yes. Of course we do. It breaks our hearts to see copyvios in Wikipedia text and all of us – both in India and back at the Foundation office in San Francisco – want desperately to go in and take them out ourselves, and to join in the large-scale cleanup efforts. Unfortunately, the best advice of our legal team is that we shouldn't do that, because it would be interfering in the content creation role, and could compromise our "safe harbor" immunity. These are constraints that we abide by as a result of working with / for WMF. This is another reason why we are so grateful that members of the community have volunteered to carefully check and correct the work of students.
How would you respond to the idea that it was not clear to Wikipedians who attempted to resolve the issues who was managing the project? And to their frustration as problematic submissions continued?
I'd say that from their perspective, they're probably right. We could have dealt with that using better communication processes. I'm really sorry that we didn't communicate more. This is no excuse but we spend all our time meeting with professors, Ambassadors, and students, trying to resolve issues. I wish we had communicated more with the global Wikipedia community. There were intensive efforts and communications that occurred but these were shared within the limited group of Ambassadors, faculty and students. We should have put out a lot more information on these much earlier. For instance, we could have put every important email sent by us to Ambassadors or from Ambassadors to faculty or students on public wiki pages.
I can understand the frustrations of community members. I share their frustration that some students continue to submit sub-standard material. This was one of the reasons why we decided to suspend the program at the College of Engineering Pune.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank every editor who has helped us address the quality issues coming from the India Education Program.
Do you have any personal thoughts to share on the project, or what it has revealed about the nature of university outreach and Foundation/editing community relations?
I love Wikipedia. I believe this program has considerable potential – if managed effectively – to promote participation and expand the community.
We've made mistakes in this pilot – and we've learned a great deal. While it's the nature of pilots for there to be challenges, there are some we can and should have avoided.
I also want all the issues that we have had not to cloud the wonderful contributions of so many students. We have a bunch of students who a few months ago had never edited Wikipedia, indeed didn't even know that they could edit or how to. Today, there are some remarkable contributions by them. I hope many of these students will become prolific editors going forward.
Conclusion
In light of the Foundation's significant resources, its prior experience of university outreach and the enthusiasm of applicants to become Campus Ambassadors, the failure to adequately prepare students for the task that faced them is troubling. It is not clear, for instance, why exactly the willing input of Online Ambassadors was not incorporated into the program at an early stage. One perhaps compelling explanation could lie in the hypothesis that local conceptions of copyright and attribution were so distinct from those expected on Wikipedia and so entrenched that ambassadorial evangelism could have little effect in the short term. However, Mr. Mundol’s rejection of this hypothesis makes it difficult to explain the wild discrepancy of outcomes of the IEP and the Public Policy Initiative, which only finished up in September. Yet more worrying is Mr. Mundol’s conclusion that the dramatic failings of the project are attributable to programmatic mistakes – a claim which casts doubt on Mr. Schulenberg’s position that there is no single nexus of culpability for the problems which arose and that will not fill the community’s hearts with confidence in the Foundation’s due diligence in project management. The staff members involved can be excused for not yet agreeing upon a clear determination of just what went wrong as the program winds down and focus appropriately remains on the not insignificant cleanup task, but arriving at such an analysis must surely be a strategic priority in the coming weeks.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a young and fast-growing organisation. It is pursuing with intensity laudable and ambitious strategic goals derived from an innovative and volunteer-respectful consultation process. Like its projects, it has pursued these goals with a healthy attitude towards risk, not prone to overcautiousness where gains may be made. The openness to criticism and oft-voiced declarations of appreciation for volunteer assistance of Foundation staff is commendable. This experience of the Indian Education Program, while a setback, should not result in a retreat to conservatism for outreach and expansion efforts.
Yet it is important that the Foundation give due consideration to thorough research and planning in preparation of its initiatives, and ensure these do not take for granted the patience and indulgence of the volunteer community. Failure on the former front would be to squander donor resources; and on the latter would risk fostering resentment and creating a legitimacy deficit in a climate where recent Foundation decisions – such as the non-implementation of the autoconfirmation trial, the roll-out of the Article Feedback Tool and the proposal for an image filter – have met with a difficult reception. Nor can the impact on under-prepared students and academics who were brave enough to implement a challenging and untested metric of assessment be ignored. The Indian experience offers much food for thought for future efforts. In the meantime, it may do well to bear in mind the maxim of Samuel Beckett: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
This special report was made possible by reader research and the co-operation of Foundation staff; if you have an idea for a story or opinion essay, consider informing Signpost editors on the suggestions page, at the opinion desk, or by email at wikipediasignpost@gmail.com.
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Wikimedia Norway awarded, Halloween on the Main Page, Wikimedia UK recognised
A Folkeopplysningsprisen for the Norwegian Wikipedia
Wikimedia Norway received the Folkeopplysningsprisen (Award for Public Education) last week for "...[doing] perhaps more than any other [organization] to promote public education in Norway." Wikimedia Norway supports three major Wikipedia language branches, the Bokmål/Riksmål version, which rounded 300,000 articles and its tenth million edit this year, the Nynorsk version, which is currently nearing 75,000 articles, and Sámegielat (Sami) Wikipedia, a minority language version with 3,700 articles.
The Folkeopplysningsprisen has been awarded by the Voksenopplæringsforbundet (The Norwegian Association for Adult Learning) on an annual basis since 1998, to "celebrate individuals, groups, organizations or institutions that make a continuous effort beyond the ordinary to lay the ground for liberation, cooperation, growth and development through knowledge". The award was presented to Wikimedia Norway in a ceremony in Oslo on October 28, during NAAL's annual conference. "This is the first such recognition Wikipedia Norway has received, and we hope the award will help pave the way for us and others to promote the growth of free knowledge in Norwegian languages," said Wikimedia Norway's chairperson, Jarle Vines, who accepted the reward on behalf of the organization. The award had previously been given to, among others, the paleontologist and popularizer of science Jørn Hurum, the radio station NRK P2, and the television program Schrödingers katt.
Halloween: ghosts, écorchés, and controversy
The Today's Featured Article for Halloween 2011, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) led to one of the hottest debates at the Main Page discussion in October. The article, created and developed by Coolug and just recently promoted to featured status, was the subject of complaints focused on the graphic nature of the blurb, including the image originally included and the use of the term "mouth-to-anus". While the debate was raging, the article received 136,500 hits.
Meanwhile, Did You Know? (DYK) ran fourteen blurbs, on topics including cemeteries, ghosts, murderers, Ghost Frogs, and a wrestler nicknamed Lucifer. One of the articles featured, Eternal Silence, received 71,800 views while on the Main Page. This makes it the third most-viewed DYK article ever, after Paul the Octopus and Euthanasia Coaster. According to article creator IvoShandor, "I really didn't intend on doing an article on the statue when I first went to see it, but when I came across Eternal Silence I was stopped in my tracks, it literally took my breath away. I can only hope that the effect of the article on others was in some way similar to the effect that the sculpture had on me in person." The sets, although initially questioned thematically, were generally well-received.
Further down the page, the Picture of the Day (at right) was of an écorché, or flayed figure, riding a horse; the écorché was prepared by anatomist Honoré Fragonard. The image, created by Julia W as a derivative work of a picture by Jebulon, was viewed by 18,700 readers, but did not attract much commentary.
UK chapter achieves charity status
The UK Wikimedia chapter, which was founded in November 2008 and approved as a chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2009, was awarded charity status by the UK Charities Commission late last week. The chapter, which is particularly active in GLAM and university outreach, recently hired as its first two employees an office manager and CEO, and is currently looking into expanding its outreach programs in Scotland.
Wikimedia UK chair Roger Bamkin (Victuallers) had this to say:
| “ | “Achieving charitable status is the culmination of much hard work by the Board... Wikimedia UK is anticipating another successful year of outreach work, building on the time, dedication and effort of a wonderful group of volunteers in the Wikimedia community.” | ” |
The news came just before the annual fundraiser, during which the UK chapter plans to raise £1 million; the decision is likely to be worth over a hundred thousand pounds a year to the UK chapter as donors who pay UK tax can now have their donation topped up by the tax office via Gift Aid. It also enables the chapter to use other forms of fundraising such as payroll giving. In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation has been busy this week preparing for the fundraiser, as a peek in Special:RecentChanges shows.
The promotion of open access to content and user-generated and -enriched content has not, until now, been recognised as a charitable purpose under UK law. However, the chapter's recognition as a charity marks a significant step forward in changing views in the UK, and developments in modern communications and the evolution of user-generated content.
Brief notes
- New quality study initiated: The Wikimedia Foundation has initiated a small-scale study on article quality on Wikipedia. The study is to be undertaken by the UK e-learning company Epic and academics from Oxford University, and aims to build on an earlier study by Nature, conducted in 2005 (see related Signpost story), by looking at multiple language editions and multiple subjects (instead of only English and scientific ones). According to the Wikimedia Foundation, "Our hope is that the study’s findings will inspire and inform more extensive, independently funded research related to the quality of information found in Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects."
- Annual Arbitration Committee Elections imminent: Following the close of a lengthy Request for Comment, nominations are due to open for the ninth annual Arbitration Committee elections on November 12th. Experienced and dedicated Wikipedians will be invited to run for the six open seats on the Committee this year.
The logo of This Month in GLAM, the newsletter for the GLAM project. - GLAM project publishes October report: The GLAM ("Galleries, 'Libraries, Archives & Museums") WikiProject published its October newsletter this week. The newsletter covers the extensive GLAM activities during October 2011, including image donations from the Archives of American Art and Children's Museum of Indianapolis, the second "Backstage Pass" at the US National Archives, a Backstage Pass event at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in the UK and a new partnership with the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Germany. The calender outlines the coming events for November, including GLAMcamp Amsterdam near the beginning of December and prize ceremonies as part of Wiki Loves Monuments.
- New IRC group contact: Wikimedian Barras was chosen as a new Group Contact this week. Group Contacts are community liaisons with the freenode IRC network, and manage hostname cloaks.
- Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: Meta welcomed its 1 millionth user, the French Wikisource reached 1 million total pages, the Latin Wikipedia reached 60,000 articles, the Malagasy Wikisource reached 800,000 entries, and the Northern Sotho Wikipedia opened its doors (bug 30882), although its 600+ articles have yet to be transferred out of the Incubator.
- Breaking news: The Wikimedia Foundation blog has announced the release of the latest comScore data for Wikimedia projects in the month of September 2011. Visitors to the movement's sites rose 14.2% year on year, outpacing average internet user growth of 9.7%, amounting to 454 million unique visitors. WMF Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead was particularly enthused by the sites' strong growth in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East & Africa regions, although he noted continued obstacles in penetrating the Chinese market.
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The Economist assays the encyclopaedia's challenges, Jimbo speaks on net future, and an inclusionist alternative emerges.
The Economist on the encyclopaedia's growing pains
In anticipation of the imminent resumption of the Wikipedia Foundation's fundraising efforts this month, The Economist profiled the unusual donation drive of what it said had "a good claim to be the world’s most important provider of non-entertainment content". Acknowledging the Jimbo-centricity of previous years' efforts, the newspaper was keen to recognise the success of banners featuring other Wikimedians which had outperformed Mr. Wales', notably that of WMF software designer Brandon Harris. Greater attention was reserved however for the comparably less successful efforts at attracting contributors of time and effort rather than money; the article highlighted WMF chief of global development Barry Newstead's plaintive remarks that 90% of non-editing readers weren't even aware they could edit, and that as an editor he felt like "furniture in the room".
It went on to chronicle the Foundation's efforts at combating editorial decline, emphasising the particular set of skills and circumstances it takes to make a worthy contributor ("a scarce and hardy breed") – a working knowledge of the project's policies, respect from one's peers, the ability to navigate the MediaWiki's sometimes daunting syntax, and the resilience to resist the machinations of special interests and bad faith editors. WMF executive director Sue Gardner's ambition to eradicate the "psychological barrier" dividing reading from editing was noted, as was the Foundation's specific initiatives to tone down warning messages and reform of the editing interface. The articles also lauded as a sensible choice the Foundation's decision to concentrate its global ambitions initially on India, as a stepping stone to the opening of offices in Brazil and in the Arab world. The article characterised the Foundation's greatest ongoing challenges its mobile development, and – ten years on – the constant struggle to articulate its projects' "anyone can edit" ethos. University outreach in the Global South, as exemplified by the Indian Education Program, was singled out as an example of one solution to such problems (although this initiative has not been without its travails – as our "Special report" this week outlines). The article finished on an upbeat note
Wikipedia has suffered in the past from ill-informed criticism from outside, and complacency on the inside. Signs now are that both are diminishing. The idea that an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit can provide high-quality content is increasingly established. Wikipedia entries are rarely perfect, but their flaws are always open to instant remedy; that is a big plus. The outfit also seems to be moving away from its dependence on the charismatic Mr Wales, and from its over-reliance on a narrow caste of Anglophone enthusiasts. Wikipedia’s survival and expansion are also encouraging signs for those that worry the internet is in danger of becoming too commercial and closed off. Wikipedia is not just collating knowledge: it is making news too.
— The Economist, November 5, 2011
Wales outspoken on the future of the net
Right now there are about two billion people online and that’s essentially the bulk of the developed world. In five to 10 years the next billion people are going to come online. Last summer they dropped a cable from Europe into Nigeria that overnight increased the bandwidth to Nigeria by a factor of 10.
Suddenly people’s access to information explodes. And the possibilities for political change are enormous. It means they’re connected, that they can organise revolutions, they can learn what’s going on in other countries.
I think we are going to see in some of these perpetual basket-case countries with one tyrant after another that people are finally going to have the ability to demand change. It’s very exciting.
Jimmy Wales, as quoted by The Telegraph, November 3, 2011.
Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales this week addressed the Free Thinking conference on the topic of "How the internet will keep changing the world", attracting widespread media coverage, from The Guardian, Computer Weekly, Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, BBC News and The Independent. The typically reserved and diplomatic Wales was strident on the topic of Internet freedom and censorship, condemning UK Prime Minister David Cameron's suggestion during the 2011 England riots that the government ought to shut down microblogging service Twitter in times of emergency as a comment that could have come from a Chinese general (a remark that drew spontaneous applause from the crowd).
Wales, who is known for his libertarian political leanings, declared that the chief threat facing the Internet was not cybercrime but repressive governments, and proposed that governments could learn from the social model of Wikipedia, whose administrators "could be seen as the most powerful media barons that have ever lived" and yet are in effect constrained by community-determined rules and scrutiny. He criticised the United States' mooted Stop Online Piracy Act as poorly designed and dangerous legislation which could adversely affect Internet users like Wikipedia volunteers, and went on to pronounce the inevitability of a Chinese Spring to match the Arab Spring of 2011.
Thunkpedia: an inclusionist alternative
At the recent "Books in Browsers" conference held by the Internet Archive and O'Reilly Media, Gordon Mohr (User:Gojomo, former Chief Technologist at the Internet Archive's web archive projects), gave a talk titled "Infinithree: Beyond the Wiki Encyclopedias", where he presented a soon-to-be-launched collaborative website called "Thunkpedia", making good on an announcement from January where he had proposed such a project under the code name "Infinithree" ("∞³") (see Signpost coverage). While acknowledging Wikipedia's success, Mohr cited concern about deletionism and wikilawyering as a motivation for his endeavour. (The talk also contained a small jab at Wikipedia's Article Feedback Tool, calling a Wikipedia article "really the wrong unit for review", being too long.)
Inspired by Richard Feynman's famous 1959 lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, Mohr asked "what is the smallest thing that we could collaborate on" in terms of reference knowledge, dubbing it "thunk", short for "the thing unknown". These are to be collected in "a big pile of disaggregated knowledge" under the tagline "Thunkpedia - the sum of all human knowledge ... that fits", and released under a free license. A demo featured several such entries, some drawn from lead sections of Wikipedia articles. One listener called the concept "a Google-Wikipedia-Twitter hybrid". It bears some resemblance (but also differences) to Twick.it, a user-generated online glossary limiting article lengths to 140 characters, often seen as a mixture between Wikipedia and Twitter, which has received some indirect financial support from the German Wikimedia chapter.
In brief
- New study on Wikipedia accuracy: Networkworld took note of the Wikimedia Foundation's decision (see "News and notes") to commission a new study on Wikipedia's accuracy. The study, which is to be conducted by e-learning company Epic in conjunction with researchers at the University of Oxford, is intended as an update on the widely-cited but contentious Nature study from 2006, which judged Wikipedia's science articles to be comparably reliable with those of the prestigious Encyclopaedia Britannica. An entry on Meta-Wiki will chronicle the developments of the initiative, whose results are expected to be published next April.
- WMUK achieves charitable recognition: Third Sector Online picked up on the decision of the British Charity Commission to recognise Wikimedia UK as a charity on the grounds that Wikipedia's information provision constituted a "public resource" (see "News and notes"). The promotion of open access to educational content had not previously been recognised as a charitable mission, making this a significant landmark in UK charitable law, WMUK's lawyers told the publication. An earlier attempt by the organisation at achieving charitable recognition for having educational activities was rejected by the Charity Commission and HM Revenue and Customs. WMUK's fundraising drive, which aims to amass £1 million in donations, will be helped by the tax advantages its new status confers.
- Canadian university outreach goes from strength to strength: Profiling the ongoing Canadian participation in the Global Education Program, Jordan Press of the Vancouver Sun proposed that Wikipedia was "gaining respect in places of higher learning" since the trailblazing efforts of Jon Beasely-Murray (Signpost interview) in integrating Wikipedia contributions into student coursework. The article went on to chronicle the growth of the university outreach program in North America.
Harold Kroto in front of textbooks (earlier this year at the global Nobel laureate symposium) - Wikipedia gains credence in chemistry but faces significant obstacles: The Reflector, student newspaper of Mississippi State University, recounted a recent address to the college by chemistry Nobel Laureate Harold Kroto, who declared that in his field, Wikipedia was "more reliable than the textbooks". In response, university academics spoke critically of students citing the encyclopaedia in their papers, revealing that it gave an impression of laziness, and maintained that the site faced an uphill struggle with academic recognition: "It's going to take some wholesale adoption," said professor Deborah Lee. "It's going to take people not being penalized for grants when they use it. It's going to take reviewers who are not going to give bad scores to writers when they see these articles in there. So I think you're going to have to see it adopted into the scientific literature stream and then see it become a more acceptable source for others. That may come with time, but my guess is that there's always going to be some people that have a problem with it … So it will really probably never be a primary source for people in terms of information like that."
- Wikipedia: as important as the Pyramids? In the pages of Wired, Jonathon Keats held forth on the ongoing German-led efforts to have Wikipedia recognised as the the first digital World Heritage Site. Criticising UNESCO's dismissal of the bid, Keats illustrated the obscure and dubiously worthy artefacts currently listed (such as the Upper Harz Water Management System), and declared "But however much it may deserve designation, the truth is that Wikipedia doesn’t need the World Heritage List. The World Heritage List needs Wikipedia." Calling for the agency to adapt to the modern world or risk obsolescence, he proposed that its "static concept of physical heritage" was incompatible with a changing world and maintained that Wikipedia, which "protects the past without impeding the future", was a model UNESCO would do well to emulate.
- Signpost editorial causes stir: ReadWriteWeb picked up on last week's opinion essay by the Signpost's own Sven Manguard. The piece, which warned of the need to acknowledge and combat Wikipedia's ever-present administrative backlogs, moved reporter Marshall Kirkpatrick to opine that "it should probably be no surprise that the world's largest and richest encyclopedia struggles with a backlog of editorial refinements and improvements that need to be performed". Nevertheless, Kirkpatrick maintained that "Wikipedia is an awesome world-changing phenomenon that represents a huge net win for humanity. Everyone who works to keep it that way deserves meaningful commendation." A little more sensationalist piece ran in Techleash, from whose title correspondent Radu Tyrsina warned "Be Careful, 700,000 Articles on Wikipedia Are Not Trustworthy!" Tyrsina went on to conclude that "Despite the many problems that threaten Wikipedia’s reliability, the site is still valuable as a cultural barometer for those in the know and a starting place for those who aren’t."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Victorian era poet whose Wikipedia article was the subject of thwarted attempts at vandalism by commedienne Terri Psiakis. - VandalLove: In a remarkable display of journalistic irreverence, unrepentant vandal Terri Psiakis recounted her mischievous Wikipedia contributions in a column for The City Weekly. Psiakis' misinformation, which included inserting into the Elizabeth Barrett Browning article a spurious claim of the poet having a penchant for Ikea meatballs, attracted the swift and diligent attention of the Counter Vandalism Unit, as well as the edit filter. Unabashed, the columnist proceeded to puerile vandalism and targeting of vandalfighter Trusilver with professions of regret and love. She was summarily blocked. Asked to comment, Trusilver remarked "While I can't say I'm happy to see a journalist intentionally vandalizing the encyclopedia, I think it reflects well on the project as a whole. Despite studies repeatedly showing the accuracy of Wikipedia, there are still many professionals and educators that view what we do with derision. Stories like this show our vigilance. They show that despite Wikipedia being the encyclopedia anyone can edit, factual inaccuracies are quickly caught and dealt with".
- Plagiarism study fingers Wikipedia as a key target: A new study from anti-plagiarism outfit Turnitin drew notice from NPR MindShift, the Washington Post Post Local blog and Campus Technology. One of the findings of the study was that Wikipedia tops the list of plagiarized sources among both secondary and tertiary students, being used in 7.99 percent of the cases of matched text by the former and 10.74 percent of cases by the latter. Other oft-abused sources were Yahoo! Answers and Slideshare. The report, which analysed 33 million student papers, is available as a freely downloadable .pdf file
. - New Indian office heralded: Bloomberg.com was among the first news sources to pick up upon the Wikipedia Foundation's opening of its first Asian outpost in New Delhi. The development was also noted by The Chronicle of Philanthropy, TechCircle and The Next Web.
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Special report on the ArbCom Elections steering RfC
Members of the Arbitration Committee are voted into office at the end of each year in elections that are entirely designed, implemented, and overseen by community volunteers. Since the December 2009 elections, each election has elected roughly half of the committee, usually for two year terms. The Wikimedia Foundation has a small number of requirements that candidates must meet because members of the committee have access to non-public data, but other than that, all of the structural and procedural decisions about the election are made by the community. With the 2011 Arbitration Committee Elections approaching, a Request for Comment was opened by MuZemike on September 18 to solicit the opinions of the community, and ended this week after running for 45 days.
Smallest ever general election
A proposal was put forward by sitting arbitrator Risker to reduce the size of the committee from 18 to 15 members on the basis that a larger committee has more difficulty coordinating, and acts more slowly than a smaller committee would. With 37 comments in support, it was one of the more heavily endorsed proposals in the RfC.
As a result of the reduction in size (and assuming no departures from the alpha tranche occur), only six positions will be open for contention in the upcoming election – tying it with that of 2007 for the annual election with the lowest number of seats to be filled. Only a special election in July 2004 (which was held to fill two vacancies for six month terms) has ever had fewer available positions. While the "topping off" method of determining term lengths was reaffirmed by this RfC, since more than half of the positions on committee are not up for election, all six editors elected in 2011 will be granted two-year terms.
Requirements for candidacy set
- The nomination period will run from Saturday 00:01, 12 November until Monday 23:59, 21 November.
- A fallow period in between nominations and voting will take place starting on 22 November and ending on 26 November.
- Qualified editors will be able to cast their votes between Sunday 00:01, 27 November and Saturday 23:59, 10 December.
- Following the closing of the polls, stewards Bencmq, Trijnstel, and Vituzzu will check the votes for irregularities and then certify the results. Although this step has no deadline, the process took 4 days in the 2010 election.
A proposal was put forth by SirFozzie to make the editing requirements for running in the election the same as those for voting in the election. While SirFozzie personally advocated 500 edits as being the threshold for voting, consensus settled on a requirement of 150 mainspace edits.
The community also came out in large numbers to reaffirm two existing policies, set by the Wikimedia Foundation and by ArbCom respectively. 49 editors, the most to endorse any statement in the RfC, supported a statement that all candidates must be willing to identify themselves to the Foundation if elected. Another statement, confirming that candidates are required to meet the Foundation's requirements for access to non-public data, and that they must disclose their prior accounts, also met with strong support.
Election timeline takes form
Dates for the election have been officially set. The election will open with a 10-day-long nomination period, in which candidates will step forward, deliver an introductory statement, and begin answering voter questions. Following the end of the nomination period, a five-day-long fallow period will allow the candidates to finish answering questions, and allow the rest of the community to research the candidates. The voting period itself will follow, and will last for 14 days. The schedule was built around having an end date of December 11, after the community adopted a suggestion that the voting period end no later, to give the Arbitration Committee and the WMF time to ensure that incoming members are ready for the start of their terms on January 1.
Secret ballots return
The upcoming election, like the 2010 election, will be conducted using a secret ballot, and will be run on the SecurePoll MediaWiki extension. Voters will be presented with a list of candidates, in a randomized order, and the ability to select one choice of "Support", "Oppose", or "No Vote" for each candidate, with the "No Vote" option being the default option. To vote in the election, editors must have a registered account that has made over 150 edits to Wikipedia's mainspace by 1 November 2011. Editors may not vote while blocked, however being blocked after voting does not invalidate the vote, and editors who begin the election blocked may still vote if they are unblocked before the election ends. While a proposal was put forward to prohibit candidates running in the election from casting votes, that proposal was closed as unsuccessful. It should go without saying that editors with more than one account, such as bot operators, may only vote with one of their accounts.
More support than opposition required
Candidates will have to attract the support of 50% of non-ambivalent voters to assume positions on the committee this year. Ballots returned with "No Vote" for a candidate will not factor into their support percentage. In the 2010 election, all 12 of the candidates that were seated had more votes in support than they did in opposition.
The RfC was initially closed with the determination that a 60% threshold had the most support, however the administrator who closed that section issued an apology stating that he misjudged the consensus, and set the threshold at 50%.
The question of what to do if fewer than six candidates received 50% support was debated, although participation in the discussion was low. Three options were put forth; that Wikipedia co-founder Jimbo Wales appoint members to the committee, that a supplementary election be held, and that the 2012 term begin with fewer than 15 members on the committee. It was decided by a 4:1 margin that if necessary, the committee will start the year below capacity.
Parody voter guides restricted from election template
Voter guides that are serious and written in good faith may be included in the {{ACE2011}} template, which is attached to every page in the election. In a break from last year, non-serious or parody guides are to be omitted from the ACE2011 template. The community endorsed a suggestion to randomize the order that the guides are listed in the ACE2011 template. Finally, all guides linked to the template area are also now required to transclude the template at the top of the guide pages, to improve navigation through election-related pages.
RfC started on the general questions
While several sets of questions were put forth during the RfC, participation in the discussion on general questions was the lowest out of any of the sections of the RfC, and no lists of questions achieved a consensus. Election coordinator Monty845 took a set of questions from a subpage that was created and linked to during the RfC, and moved those questions to the election's general questions page. Monty845 then initiated a new RfC seeking community input on the questions. The RfC will run until the beginning of the nomination period.
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Booting up with WikiProject Computer Science
- Check out the new Roald Dahl Task Force.
- Editors have created WikiProject Bibliographies to improve bibliographies and encourage their development within Wikipedia.
- WikiProject National Register of Historic Places is holding a Fall Photo Contest. Earn barnstars for posting requested pictures of historic sites or sponsor your own photography challenge. The contest ends 4 December.
- The Guild of Copy Editors November Backlog Elimination Drive is underway. Help improve Wikipedia and earn a barnstar!
- The Counter-Vandalism Unit is being revived. Join in the effort by inquiring on the project's talk page.
This week, we ran diagnostics on WikiProject Computer Science. Started in July 2005, the project has grown to include two Featured Articles, one A-class Article, and eleven Good Articles. The project maintains a style guide, hints for creating sample algorithms to use on Wikipedia, popular pages data, and lists of recent changes. WikiProject Computer Science tends to focus on computer science and computer programming in its broadest sense, leaving specific programming topics to language-specific projects while most hardware and software articles are handled by WikiProject Computing, WikiProject Software, and a variety of subprojects. WikiProject Computer Science is one of several projects involved in ongoing discussions (here and here) about restructuring the many projects that handle computer-related topics. We interviewed project members Cybercobra and Ruud Koot.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Computer Science? How many languages do you know? What was your "first" computer?
- Cybercobra: At university, I majored in Computer Science, so it only seemed natural to join this WikiProject. Programming languages are like natural languages; understanding falls along a continuum rather than being a (excuse the pun) binary condition. I'm into programming language theory, so I've studied a number of languages (~9+) [hence my infoboxing campaign], but would only call myself proficient in 2 of them. The first computer I ever used was an early Apple of some sort in elementary school; I remember using Kid Pix on it.
- Ruud: I'm a graduate student in computer science, currently specializing in topics related to functional programming, type theory and program analysis. A lot of my work on Wikipedia concerns these subjects as well. I've written (at least a few lines of) code in dozens of languages, but consider myself to master only two or three of them. It probably has to be said that computer science concerns itself with much more than programming languages alone (see Areas of computer science).
WikiProject Computer Science is the parent project for many projects. Have you contributed to any of these projects? How much collaboration and overlap is there among all the projects related to computer science? How much do these projects collaborate with WikiProject Mathematics?
- Cybercobra: We're related to many projects, but I don't know that we're parent to all that many. As you might guess, I contribute to WikiProject Programming Languages. Some of the subprojects aren't all that active, and some have scopes that are questionably narrow.
Computer-related topics can occasionally become complicated. How much effort goes into reducing technical jargon and simplifying articles for layperson readers? Does the complexity hinder efforts to recruit new members to the WikiProject?
- Cybercobra: There is so much terminology that I suspect trying to "dumb" it all the way down might be a fool's errand that would result in more parenthetical usage than Lisp, but we could certainly be doing better. The ability to wikilink terms is quite useful, and some of the articles use analogies, examples, and diagrams to good effect, but we're ultimately operating in a jargon-laden field.
- Ruud: In any technical field there is always a tension between writing something that is easy to understand for the layperson and something that is technically correct and precise enough to be useful for the expert. Expert authors should not forget that they are not only writing for their peers, but also for the general public. Readers on the other hand can sometimes have unrealistic expectations, wishing to fully understand a complex topic by only reading the introduction of an encyclopedic article.
The project has many articles that were formerly FAs and GAs. What sunk so many of these articles? Has there been an effort to bring them back up to Featured or Good Article status?
- Cybercobra: Rising standards for GA/FA are likely the cause; referencing and approachability are (rightly) more strictly enforced than they were in earlier days of Wikipedia. Trying to manage programmers is said to be akin to trying to "herd cats"; so unsurprisingly, the project tends to be lacking organized events (typical of e.g. WP:MILHIST) like GA/FA improvement drives, and generally seems to be more just a place to post targeted requests for expert or second opinions.
How difficult is it to illustrate computer science articles with photographs, diagrams, or other media? Are there any specific images you could use help finding or creating?
- Cybercobra: Graphviz seems to be quite useful. Aside from examples, logos, and pix of relevant people, CS articles are often slightly sparse image-wise, but I see no problem with that personally; better than trying to crowbar unnecessary images in.
- Ruud: There are a number of useful tools to create diagrams (for example Graphviz, PGF/TikZ and R). If those don't get the job done then creating a diagram using a custom script or program is also an option. Unfortunately, people often only upload the final image file and neglect to attach the "source code" in some way. This makes it more difficult to modify images at a later date and – also not unimportant – makes it more difficult to learn by example or copy-and-paste. Computer science is a young field, so most biographies concern people who are still alive. I often find photographs by searching for Creative Commons licensed photos taken at computer science conferences on Flickr.
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Cybercobra: Many of the articles are not as well-referenced as they should be; I weep at the fact that such a fundamental concept as Variable (computer science) lacks any citations whatsoever! Most of the information in such articles is correct, but it really ought to be verified via citations. Anyone with spare time and access to the right sources could really make a significant impact.
Next week, we'll check out a large country that will be host to a WikiConference this month. Until then, there's always the archive.
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Slow week for Featured content
Featured articles
No articles were promoted or demoted in an uncharacteristically quiet week at the review desks.
Featured lists
One featured list was promoted this week.
British Film Institute Fellowship (nom), nominated by The Rambling Man; awarded by the British Film Institute, the Fellowship is a title given to individuals in "recognition of their outstanding contribution to film or television culture" and is considered the highest accolade presented by the Institute.
Featured pictures
Two Featured pictures were promoted this week. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:
File:ThermiteReaction.jpg (nom), by Nikthestoned, which illustrates "an aluminothermic reaction with Iron(III) oxide, also known as a thermite reaction." Thermite is a type of pyrotechnic composition of varying metals that burns at a high temperatures over a small area, making it ideal for, among other things, welding.
File:Turkucastle edit.jpg (nom), by Ottojula; "dating from the 13th century, [Turku Castle] is the largest surviving medieval building in Finland, and one of the largest surviving medieval castles in Scandinavia."
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Δ saga returns to arbitration, while the Abortion case stalls for another week
One case was opened this week, making a total of two cases now open.
Arbitration case opened to review editor's status
The Betacommand 3 case was opened this week to review the status of Δ, who previously edited as Betacommand.
Δ has been the subject of both community and Arbitration Committee sanctions in relation to his use of bots. The case grew out of a request for clarification following a discussion about relaxing some of Δ's community restrictions and allowing him to run certain bot tasks where it was realized that there might be relevant Arbitration Committee sanctions as well. The case was opened by motion from there. Arbitrator Coren, who supported the motion, wrote
| “ | I'm really not happy at the prospect of an arbitration case over this matter, but the fact is that Δ is currently under a complicated mishmash of variously interpreted community sanctions, and is the focus of much dispute around many the edits he does (which are also just as varied and impossible to qualify as a whole). It is not entirely clear either how much of those disputes can be attributed to Δ himself. Untangling this to try to solve the problem will indeed require more than a simple clarification or motion work. | ” |
Abortion case continues
It was another slow week for the Abortion case. There was limited activity in the workshop, and even less in evidence.
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Full steam ahead on Visual Editor, the avoidance of lock-breaking and 1.18b1 release
October Engineering Report published
The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for October was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the New Orleans hackathon, the introduction of native https support for all Wikimedia wikis, and the local deployment of MediaWiki 1.18. Also included among the headlines on the report were the deployment of the Translate extension to Meta-Wiki and the completion of the first revision of the MediaWiki architecture document.
As described in brief in last week's "Technology report", progress is being made on a new parser and visual editor combination. The official engineering report documented exactly where that progress was coming from, with at least six developers (Trevor Parscal, Inez Korczynski, Roan Kattouw, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Brion Vibber and Gabriel Wicke, who only joined the team recently) each working on different elements of it concurrently.
Progress in other areas was more restrained but still being made; for example, developer Andrew Garrett worked on a script to convert existing LiquidThreads installations to the new, revised schema. Likewise, the "last critical bugs" in version 0.9 of WMF-supported offline reader Kiwix were fixed, with the release candidate cycle expected to begin shortly. There was also some bad news in the report, however, as it described how data analyst Erik Zachte had discovered inconsistencies in his report card numbers, which were investigated and attributed to packet loss of up to 25%, rendering several figures unreliable.
Scheduled for November are substantive work on the Git conversion and https support on the mobile platform to mirror that available on the non-mobile site.
User script writers grapple with protocol-relative URLs
With the switchover to native https slowly fading into history, the baton for ensuring total security has been passed on to script writers. This is because, although all interface images were switched over to using protocol-relative URLs, many user scripts will also have to be updated to use the new format.
Forcing use of insecure images or dependency scripts negates much of the benefit of using a secure site; as a consequence, browsers are right to show warnings, Ryan Lane explained. And as Brion Vibber described, the warnings are often very obvious: "Firefox can throw up a scary dialog box on every page view... Chrome does the big scary X-ing out of the 'https'... IE in latest versions just ignores any of the content that came over HTTP unless you opt back into it by clicking on a little bar at the bottom of the window" (Words and what not blog).
And so, with increasing numbers of users expected to switch to using the https version of the site, more and more script developers have been working to clear up any warnings; nonetheless, help will be needed within smaller sites to fix code copied and pasted from larger wikis months or even years before the https support went native.
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.
As developer Chad Horohoe explained on the wikitech-l mailing list, the conversion from SVN to Git requires that names and email addresses be input for all contributors to the project. Since SVN had no such requirement, help is needed to pair up the correct names and email addresses with old developer pseudonyms (help now).
- 1.18 beta 1 released: following the successful deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia wikis earlier this month (Signpost coverage), the first "tarball" version of the software has been released (wikitech-l mailing list). Although tarball releases enabled non-Wikimedia wikis to utilise MediaWiki's latest features, the advice for this beta version is to avoid "run[ning] it on any wikis that you really care about". The release is the first to come packaged with extensions, which enables a cleaner "straight out of the box" experience.
- CAPTCHA vulnerabilities exposed: Several publications, among them PC World and CRN.com, picked up on a recent report of efforts by researchers at Stanford University to break the CAPTCHA security measures which form part of major websites' protection against spamming. One in four attempts at cracking Wikipedia's CAPTCHA defences were successful, compared with 43% for eBay, 20% for Digg, 16% for CNN.com and 5% for Baidu. Only Google and reCAPTCHA were invulnerable to infiltration attempts, in an experiment which may raise eyebrows among WMF developers keen to prevent abuse of Wikimedia wikis. Nonetheless, Wikimedians can no doubt take pride in the fact that obvious spamming of the sort orchestrated by bots and normally prevented by CAPTCHAs is, in any case, unlikely to go unnoticed for long.
- Data analytics staffing explained, hiring: Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier this week posted a description of the WMF's data analytics team on the Wikimedia blog. Lanphier explained that the team is responsible for "building out our logging and data mining infrastructure, and for making Wikimedia-related statistics useful to other parts of the Foundation and the movement". He added that it was "hiring for two full-time analytics positions right now, plus a contract opportunity".
- Puppet, LDAP, autofs, and Nova: Ryan Lane, Operations Engineer at the WMF, used two posts on his personal blog to explore the work he has recently been doing for the Foundation. Both "Sharing home directories to instances within a project using puppet, LDAP, autofs, and Nova" and "A process for puppetization of a service using Nova" were targetted at sharing best practice among those responsible for the performance of large websites; in related news, this week's Engineering report highlighted how the WMF were working with the JuJu project to enable the sharing of DevOps practices.
- SMWCon presentation videos available: According to a post on the Semantic MediaWiki website, videos of talks and presentations from SMWCon Fall 2011 have been uploaded to YouTube. The conference had been held on September 21–23 in Berlin, Germany, with approximately forty attendees.
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