Working on a term paper with WikiProject Academic Journals

WikiProject news

News in brief

• The new WikiProject Dispute Resolution seeks to improve Wikipedia's coverage of dispute resolution, and they're looking for members.
• WikiProject Motto of the Day needs you! Show your support by showing today's motto on your userpage or nominating the next motto of the day.
• This is the last full week of the Guild of Copy Editors November Backlog Elimination Drive. It's not too late to get involved, so help improve Wikipedia and earn a barnstar along the way!
• WikiProject Articles for Creation has been inundated with submissions now that the userspace draft option was removed from the Article wizard, placing greater responsibility upon Articles for Creation. Please help the project approve and improve articles submitted by new users.
• 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 new Roald Dahl Task Force is looking for editors.

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

We're pulling an all-nighter in the university library with WikiProject Academic Journals. Started in February 2007, the project has grown to include a long list of participants maintaining over 9,000 pages covering academic journals, publishers, societies, conferences, prizes, and monographs. To help fill holes in Wikipedia's coverage, the project keeps lists of missing journals and missing journals that have been cited in Wikipedia articles. In addition to creating and improving articles, the project tries to promote the use of citations, particularly the {{cite journal}} template. We interviewed Headbomb and DGG.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Academic Journals? Do you specialize in a specific academic field?

Headbomb: I honestly don't remember. I think I was doing some citation tidying up and noticed that journal wikilinks tended to be red. So I decided to be pro-active about the issues, and started creating journal stubs and joined the project around the middle of 2009. I tend to keep around physics-related fields, as I am a physicist, but my personal interests include pretty much all of academia, so I end up touching a little bit of everything. I wrote and rewrote several hundred articles on journals such as Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and Nuovo Cimento.

DGG: It's the main thing I worked on during my career as a librarian. At Wikipedia, I started writing some missing academic bios and noticed the journals were missing also. In my first year or so many very notable journals were deleted at AfD through lack of understanding, which led to the present informal guidelines. They're more or less accepted, because almost all the people who care about the subject agree with them. Getting formal guidelines adopted in Wikipedia is a generally futile endeavor, because in practice it can be stonewalled by one stubborn individual.

What are some of the difficulties of improving articles about academic journals? Has the project struggled with promoting articles to FA and GA status? Are some academic disciplines better covered on Wikipedia?

Headbomb: The main difficulties is mostly finding out something to write about journals. It's quite the endeavour to find out the history of a journal such as e.g. Naturwissenschaften (especially if you don't speak German), but things get incredibly hard with newer or lesser-known journals. There is very often not a lot to say about the journal, so most of our articles tend to peak at a certain length which other projects would consider "start"-class. Luckily, over the years, we developed WP:JWG (Journals Writing Guide), which gives great guidance on how to make the most of what little there is available.

In terms of coverage, I would say that Math, Physics, and Astronomy are ahead of the curve, but Medicine, Psychology, and Biology are severely lacking. I haven't paid attention much to Law journals, but I suspect they get "average-ish" coverage.

DGG: Very few articles on journals will ever reach FA or GA, except those famous ones with very long and complicated histories. My own guide is here; I think it's still accurate. As with all other articles on academic subjects, the humanities are the worst covered. Even the sciences mentioned by Headbomb as being poorly covered are covered very well relative to the traditional humanities.

How frequently does the project deal with issues about notability and conflict of interest? How easy is it to show that an academic journal has received substantial coverage in other publications?

Headbomb: We run into that fairly often. Unlike other fields on Wikipedia, COI (Conflict of Interest) editors are rather easily converted into productive editors. "COI editors", in my experience, tend to be interns hired by publishers to create Wikipedia entries on their journals. The undesirable behaviour is usually curbed by familiarizing the editor with our Journal Writing Guide and notability guidelines for journals. Most of the newcomers are happy to hear the advice, and adjust accordingly. We'll often babysit them through one article so they get the hang of it, and then they can create articles on a series of (notable) journals. Those who don't listen usually end being blocked rather quickly.

Also unlike in several other areas on Wikipedia, I think WikiProject Journals is more welcoming of those "COI editors" because several of them end up saving us massive amounts of work with article creation, updating articles with the latest information (impact factors, editors, etc.), and so on. So if we have an intern from e.g. Cell Press taking care of Category:Cell Press academic journals, then that's 11 journals we don't need to monitor for vandalism, outdatedness, etc.

DGG: Conflict of Interest is a continuing problem, as everywhere else in Wikipedia. However, a proper journal article according to our guideline is purely objective and can be written by anyone, so Conflict of Interest should make no difference—but in practice almost nobody from a publisher has gotten it right initially. Some can be taught. There's one frequent copyright problem: the promotional statement of purpose and coverage on the journal website, but it is usually so meaningless – saying, in essence, we cover everything that might possibly be in our subject, that there's no reason to rewrite or get permission – it isn't needed at all; I don't know why public relations people bother. The concept of notability according to the general notability guidelines (GNG) does not apply easily to academic journals. The only ones normally written about in a substantial way are the dozen or so most famous. We've been getting the GNG to fit by saying that the listings in the major selective databases are third party statements of importance.

In addition to improving articles about journals, the project supports and recommends that Wikipedians use the {{cite journal}} template. How widespread have these citations become? What kinds of citation mistakes do you find yourself correcting most frequently?

Headbomb: Well the answer to that is pretty much "look at the usage stats". That template is used 271,000+ times apparently. So it's pretty widespread, especially in sciences. As for citation mistakes, it's usually typos, bad formatting, or someone simply not filling them properly (like using |volume=33 p.58 rather than |volume=33 |page=58). Luckily AWB and bots such as CitationCleanerBot help a lot with those tasks.

DGG: The way I suggest to use the template is with the Cite gadget, which greatly simplifies problems with citations, though it cannot deal with all cases.

The project maintains a massive list of red links for missing journals. Have you had any success reducing this list? What kind of resources does the project need to tackle a task of this magnitude?

Headbomb: Most definitely. Back when the list started in 2009, we had journals (or abbreviations) cited several thousand times without corresponding articles or redirects. That list (and WP:JCW in general) has been one of the biggest drives behind article creation at the project. Now our most-cited "missing" journal is cited 100 times (as of writing). So we've improved things by two orders of magnitude over two years. It is by all measures a resounding success.

DGG: The idea behind the list is that if a journal is used as a Wikipedia reference, there should be some information about the journal so readers can check the nature and standing of the journal.

Is there substantial crossover membership with other academic or literary projects? Does WikiProject Academic Journals collaborate with any other projects?

Headbomb: We do collaborate with other projects, usually in the form of compiling lists of missing journals for individual WikiProjects. Some projects are very responsive to this (especially Astronomy, Physics, and Math in my experience); others seem to completely ignore them (Biology, Psychology, and Medicine come to mind). This is a real shame because right now, most of our highly-cited missing journals tend to be in those fields (especially medicine). So WP:MEDICINE people et al., get to work! But really anyone that wants such lists for their project (or even for themselves) just needs to drop us a note at WT:JOURNALS, and I (or someone else) will compile a list of missing journals for that project.

DGG: Since being an editor of a major journal is one of the criteria that meets WP:PROF, the notability guideline for researchers, there's an overlap with WikiProject Biography, especially the Science and Academia Work Group. If a journal article can include all the names of the editors-in-chief, past and present, the names should be linked—if there are not articles already, the red links will be an indication that they should be written. (This doesn't include assistant editors, or members of the editorial board—that's much less of a distinction.) Inversely, if this information is added to biographical articles, it should be linked to the journals; if there's no entry, it's reason for one to be written.

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

Headbomb: We really need more people from the medicine fields to get involved in writing articles on their big journals (all fields of medicine, neurology, virology, pediatrics, oncology, etc...). We have a great guide at WP:JWG to make things easy for you! Of course other non-medicine fields journals need attention too, so really whatever your interest there is always something to do. But medicine is really the field with the worse coverage as far as journals are concerned.

DGG: They're really easy to do. The project suggests starting with an infobox, and then transcribing the information, which is really all there is to it. You don't even need actual access to the text of the journal, except for a few titles. The only problem is Journal Citation Reports, which is needed in the sciences and social sciences, and which only people in large universities can access—but the people at the project will gladly look up the numbers. These articles are usually so mechanical, actually, that the work isn't necessarily very interesting all by itself, certainly not in large numbers, and most of us do it as an auxiliary to other things. If more people filled in a few when they noticed them missing, we would get there quickly.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Headbomb: It's all summed up in our journal writing guide. And if you like numbers and tables, you really need to check out Journals Cited by Wikipedia.

DGG: The principle of having articles for the journals used as references should be extended to newspapers and popular magazines, and then, probably to books and other sources also—either in articles about the books, or about their authors, or their sponsors.

Next week, we'll toot the horn of a military publication. In the meantime, get some R&R in the archive.

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2011-11-21

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Crisco 1492

This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 13 – Saturday 19 November

Featured portal

The Napoleonic Wars (nom) were a series of wars declared against Napoleon's French Empire by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the French Revolution of 1789, they revolutionised European armies and played out on an unprecedented scale, mainly due to the application of modern mass conscription. The portal includes rotations of selected battles, pictures, and biographies. pictures above and at the bottom

Featured articles

Four articles were promoted to featured status:

Australian cattle dog (nom), a breed of herding dog originally developed in Australia for driving cattle over long distances across rough terrain. A medium-sized, short-coated dog, it has either brown or black hair distributed fairly evenly through a white coat, which gives the appearance of a "red" or "blue" dog. It has been nicknamed red heeler and blue heeler on the basis of this colouring and its practice of moving reluctant cattle by nipping at their heels. Mdk572 coordinated the work of many editors in preparing the article, and shepherded it through the FAC process. The Signpost asked her how she became interested in the breed:

"I grew up on a cattle station in central Queensland in the north-eastern part of the continent, and Australian cattle dogs have always been part of my life. Over the years I've collected all of the books, articles and pamphlets on the breed that I stumbled across or could search out.

"Robert Kaleski was influential in establishing the breed, but many of his explanations of breed characteristics are not supported by modern science. His theories continue to be circulated as fact, so researching the article involved cross-checking all published information against independent sources; this involved topics as apparently disparate as the history of the Hunter Valley and the canine genome project.

"Contributing to the article gave me a new understanding of Kaleski; self-schooled in a Sydney library in his teens, he was a thinker, writer, inventor, and environmentalist, and like me a fan of the Australian cattle dog."

Amundsen's South Pole expedition (nom). Nominator Brianboulton says, "Almost 100 years ago a team of Norwegian explorers led by Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole, narrowly preceding a British expedition led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen's party returned safely, Scott's men died on their return journey. This tragedy overshadowed Amundsen's achievement for decades; many thought that he had stolen an unfair march on Scott by being less than honest about his expedition's objectives. Here is the story of his expedition".

Epsilon Eridani (nom), a star with an orange hue only 10.5 light years away – the third closest of the individual stars or star systems visible to the naked eye and the closest star known to host a planet. Its age is estimated at less than a billion years, compared with the Sun's 5 billion years. Despite being smaller and less massive than Sol, its stellar winds are up to 30 times stronger. (RJHall)

Persoonia lanceolata (nom), created and expanded by Casliber. Commonly known as lance-leaf geebung, it is a shrub native to the mid-eastern region of the Australian continent. The plant lives in sandstone-based nutrient-deficient soil in the dry sclerophyll forest. After a fire, it can regenerate itself using seed banks stored on the ground.

Featured list

One list was promoted: Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children (nom) (nominated by Albacore). This is an honour presented at the Grammy Awards – a ceremony that was established in 1958 and was originally called the Gramophone Awards – to recording artists for works containing quality "spoken word" performances aimed at children. Among the recipients are former US President Bill Clinton, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and actor Sophia Loren, for their work on the album Wolf Tracks and Peter and the Wolf. The award was given to Audrey Hepburn in 1994, just after her death. By coincidence, a famous image of the actor was promoted to featured status this week. picture at right

Featured pictures

Three images were promoted. Please click on "nom" to view medium-sized images:

Audrey Hepburn (nom; related article) (1929–93), the great British actor in her 20s, by an unknown photographer. This was a publicity shot for the 1957 film Love in the Afternoon. As nominator J Milburn said, "a striking photo of a striking woman". picture at right

Qasr Kharana in Jordan (nom; related article), close to the border with Saudi Arabia. It is believed to have been built sometime before the early 8th century, and is one of the earliest examples of Islamic architecture in the region. Reviewer Materialscientist wrote that this is a "remote historical jewel". Its purpose remains unclear today. "Castle" is a misnomer as the building's internal arrangement does not suggest a military use, and slits in its wall could not have been designed as balistraria, or arrow slits. It could have been a caravanserai or a resting place for traders, but lacks the water source such buildings usually had close by and is not on a major trade route. It is well-preserved, whatever its original use. The photographer, Wikimedian High Contrast, took this picture in 2009.

Patrouille de France (nom; related article), the French Acrobatic Patrol, is the precision aerobatic demonstration team of the French Air Force. Established in 1931, it is one of the world's oldest and most skilled demonstration teams, and is noted for the presence of women in the team of pilots. In this image, the pilots are captured flying the Dassault-Breguet/Dornier Alpha Jet in full formation. (created by Wikimedian Łukasz Golowanow).

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2011-11-21

End in sight for Abortion case, nominations in 2011 elections

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By Jorgenev

Two cases remain open, Abortion and Betacommand 3.

End is in sight for Abortion case

After several weeks of low activity, Abortion entered the voting phase this Tuesday when the drafting arbitrators, Jclemens and Coren proposed 17 principles, 11 findings of fact and 16 remedies. Some of these appear to be quite unusual, notably a mandatory three year semi-protection for the relevant articles (including even the talk pages) and the opening of a structured discussion co-ordinated by the Committee with the intent of resolving the naming dispute once and for all. Many users, including several very established ones, are also set to receive bans of various sorts. Stay tuned to next week's arbitration report for the final results!

Nominations near closing in annual elections

Nominations for candidates wishing to stand in the 2011 elections to the Committee are due to close by midnight tonight UTC. At the time of writing, sixteen candidates had stepped forward (see "News and notes").

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2011-11-21

Mumbai and Brighton hacked; horizontal lists have got class

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By Erwin Dokter, Andy Mabbett and Jarry1250

Mumbai, Brighton Hackathons

Two hackathons were held simultaneously over the weekend, one in Mumbai, India, and another in the British seaside town of Brighton. The former was designed to coincide with WikiConference India, a major meetup for editors interested in the expansion in Wikimedia's presence in India (see "In the news").

The Mumbai Hackathon featured work on the Narayam extension, allowing editors to work with non-Latin scripts more easily within MediaWiki. The WebFonts extension, set to be deployed to several wikis on 12 December and aimed at eliminating the "square box" character phenomenon by taking advantage of the latest web technologies, was also tested. Unfortunately, the typeface used for a number of Indic scripts was found to be lacking for certain characters, prompting a number of bug reports to be sent to its maintainer Red Hat.

Mumbai also saw work on the Kiwix reader, India-MobileFrontend tie-ins and, more broadly, the hackathon helped to share knowledge among the large number of potential developers and contributors at the event. Overall, internationalisation team member Gerard Meijssen was led to comment that "the [India] hackathon proved as always that when you bring great people together special things can and do happen." Among others, the hackathon was attended by WMF Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara and staff developers Brandon Harris, Tomasz Finc and Patrick Reilly.

The smaller Brighton Hackathon had fewer participants, with work on creating a standalone version of MediaWiki within the Vagrant framework and on bugsmashing (approximately 25 bugs were resolved), among other projects. In attendance were staff developers Roan Kattouw, Antoine Musso and Sam Reed, along with a number of other volunteer developers, Wikimedians and members of the wider free culture movement (notes from Saturday, notes from Sunday).

Horizontal lists have got class

In March 2007, a method for having horizontal lists – especially those in navboxes – rendered as proper, semantically-correct, standards-compliant and more accessible HTML lists was proposed by Andy Mabbett. The following month, he created the {{flatlist}} template for this purpose. In those days, however, support for the necessary CSS styling was severely lacking in some browsers. In March this year, Andy again asked for help to resolve the outstanding issues, but poor CSS support in older Microsoft browsers was still a problem. Despite this, editors increasingly began to add the flatlist template to navboxes.

This November, discussion resumed, prompting Erwin Dokter to do a complete overhaul, using CSS that is supported by all modern browsers, along with a few lines of JavaScript to extend support to older browsers, to achieve horizontal lists without recourse to the previous method of using resource-hungry templates such as {{nowrap}} and {{•}}. This method quickly gained the consensus needed to roll out the revised format for horizontal lists en masse. Currently, several editors are in the process of converting navboxes to use the new hlist class, replacing most inline templates. A bot to complete the task has also been requested.

The advantages extend to both readers and editors. In addition to easier editing of navboxes and speedier page-load times, users of screen readers will no longer hear the confusing sequence "one dot two dot three dot..." and instead hear just the list items. Any type of list is permitted, and nested lists are also supported. For more details, see WP:HLIST.

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.

• Page text storage centralised onto dedicated servers: "The Technical Operations team has just completed behind-the-scenes work that will likely never be noticed by our readers." So began a post this week on the Wikimedia blog. That work related to moving away from a mishmash where revision text was stored on many different servers (sometimes with conflicts between them) and towards a configuration of eight dedicated page text servers. The work improves page load time slightly in some cases, but, for the most part makes the configuration much more reliable and easier to maintain in future.
• MediaWiki 1.18.0rc1: The first release candidate for MediaWiki 1.18 was released on 17 November (wikitech-l mailing list). Release candidates normally signify the "beginning of the end" of the release cycle, with a full release to external sites expected imminently. In related news, code review statistics for MediaWiki 1.19 are now available, though they appear to show an unexpectedly large backlog of revisions needing to be checked before 1.19 can be deployed to Wikimedia wikis (also wikitech-l).
• Can an app store cope?: Gerard Meijssen used a post on his personal blog to muse on whether or not app stores were designed to cope with programs likely to change as regularly as translatewiki.net supported ones, which can be updated with new translations as regularly as every day. Virtually all app stores operate a heavy scrutiny app pre-review process for all new apps and, crucially, updates to those apps.
• TL;DR: WMF Director of Platform Engineering, Rob Lanphier, posted on the Wikimedia blog about the Technical Liaison; Developer Relations (TL;DR) team at the Foundation. "While everyone in Engineering is responsible for those things to some extent, the team helps fortify our commitment to this" wrote Lanphier. According to the post, the grouping current consists of three staff all well known to Signpost readers: Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara, bugmeister Mark Hershberger, and Technical Communications Manager Guillaume Paumier – who writes (among other things) the WMF's monthly engineering reports. As Lanphier also admitted, one incentive to blog was "because we’re hiring, and we (still) want to get the word out [about that]". In unrelated news, the analytics team blogged about the tools currently available for supporting volunteers analysts and researchers.
• New Wikimedia map-pack released: Data analyst Erik Zachte reported this week how he had recently made two new maps of Wikimedian activity available on the stats.wikimedia.org site. The two maps (number 4 and 5 on the display) illustrate page view distribution and mobile penetration respectively.
  
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