Wikipedia in Academe – and vice versa
Mike Christie has been editing Wikipedia since he was stuck in a hotel in South Korea with jetlag in early 2006. He works primarily on featured articles, and has been involved for about a year with WMF initiatives related to education. He attended the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in Boston in July 2011. He would like to thank all the editors who gave helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.
The views expressed are those of the author only, and do not necessarily represent those of The Signpost or its staff. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.
What we're good at – and what we're not
Wikipedia has come a long way by relying on self-organized volunteer labour. It's hard for most current editors to imagine what it was like years ago, when pages like Neurology consisted of just two sentences, and browsing the encyclopedia frequently led you to articles so weak they could be improved in a few seconds without sources, just by typing in information you knew off the top of your head. There's still an enormous amount of work to do, but it's now rarer to randomly stumble across articles that can be improved without significant research.[1]
One result of this change is that you can get a sense of what interests Wikipedians by looking at which areas have good coverage. It's not just video games and military history; there are specialists – some professionals in their field and some who are pursuing a hobby interest – who focus on highly detailed areas, such as Banksia, lemurs, or early English ecclesiastical history. You can also get an idea of what doesn't particularly interest Wikipedians by looking to see what areas are poorly covered: psychology, for example, or major topics in art.[2]
We'd all like to see Wikipedia's coverage improve in the areas where it's weakest, but we're all volunteers. Not everyone focuses on content; and those who do generally have areas of expertise. With standards for sourcing higher than they used to be, it's no longer enough just to be interested; you also have to have access to good sources. For topics such as Architecture, or History of Sweden, it's not even enough to have good sources; to do the job right you have to have a truly broad understanding of the literature – which sources are fundamental to the subject, which theories are regarded as mainstream, the ideas that need to be covered in the main articles, and what can be relegated to subarticles or ignored completely. In other words, there are many articles that a non-expert simply can't improve above a certain point. This doesn't appear to be a problem caused by poor editor retention. It's certainly true that we need to do a better job of keeping new editors engaged, but simply increasing editor participation won't automatically focus attention on underserved areas.[3]
Wikipedia needs academics
How can we attract experts in these topics to edit Wikipedia? A professor of physics who spends time improving an article on weak isospin isn't going to get a publication credit that will help his or her career. And Wikipedians don't respond well to a display of credentials; an editor who says "I'm a professor and I know this is right" is going to be met with "show me the citation", which they may find hostile, particularly when the fact in question is something they regard as so basic as to need no evidence. On the other hand, a dispute may arise not because a reviewing editor ignores credentials but because they lack expertise: broad statements can be hard to source, and it may be that only an expert can judge accurately whether a source fully supports a given assertion.[4] These are real concerns, but despite this, some academic groups are already beginning to take the initiative in improving these topics. The Association for Psychological Science (APS), for example, recently launched an initiative to ensure, among other things, that Wikipedia's "articles about psychological research and theory are accurate, up-to-date [and] complete".[5] The American Sociological Association included a "Call to Duty" in their November 2011 newsletter, with two goals: "first, to improve the sociology entries in Wikipedia by making it easier for sociologists to become involved in writing and editing them, and second, to facilitate professors giving Wikipedia-writing assignments to students in their courses”.[6] This is a promising start, but it would be sad if the experts who might arrive as a result of these initiatives are driven away, as many new editors are driven away, by the difficulty of learning how to engage with Wikipedia.
In addition to proposals such as the APS's initiative, there is an ongoing project by the Wikimedia Foundation to get academics to engage with Wikipedia – the Global Education Program (GEP). This grew out of a project called the Public Policy Initiative, in which academics in public policy programs were recruited to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool – they asked their students to improve Wikipedia articles in the area of public policy. Existing editors were recruited to help the students, and the result was a success – the students added nearly nine million bytes of data to the encyclopedia,[7] and a statistical analysis of the quality of the added material showed that the average article worked on improved dramatically.[8] The next step was to expand beyond public policy: the USEP (the US branch of the Global Education Program) now recruits academics in all areas of study, and matches them with Wikipedians who are willing to act as ambassadors, to teach and guide the students and instructors. There has been a good deal of interest in the program, and the fall 2011 semester saw 77 classes signed up as part of the USEP – so many, in fact, that it's straining the ability of the limited number of volunteer ambassadors to effectively assist the students.[9] In addition to the USEP, there is a signup page for school programs that did not form via the USEP that lists another 55 classes, and there are also active classes that do not declare themselves at either page.
One of the goals of the USEP is to recruit new editors,[10] but I would be very surprised if it's turning out to be a cost-effective recruitment method. The students edit because they have to, so the retention rate is abysmal. We do have some successes at turning students into editors, but they are rare – too rare to justify the significant resources that the WMF and the community are putting into the program. It could also be argued that the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool is a contribution to the public good, and a demonstration of the value of Wikipedia. Both these things are true, but neither point should be allowed to preempt the primary goal of improving our encyclopedic content. I believe the USEP's significance lies instead in the fact that it is the first time that there has been an attractive way for academics to engage with Wikipedia. It is the academics who can make the investment in the USEP worthwhile for the encyclopedia.
The future of the education programs
Right now, the US program is focused on scaling: recruiting large numbers of classes, increasing ambassador recruitment to support those classes, and training campus support staff to teach students and instructors as much as possible about editing so that they don't cause more harm than good. I want to be very clear that "more harm than good" is not a theoretical problem; the Indian EP (which has the potential to be an even bigger asset to the encyclopedia than the USEP) required a great deal of cleanup work, as reported recently in the Signpost, and it is easy to find editors complaining about individual students or classes making a mess of articles this past semester. This sort of impact on the community is only worthwhile if we are gaining significantly from the program – and the biggest return on investment we can get here is the academics, not the students. In fact, the current focus on growth is actively harmful – as supervision by ambassadors becomes more and more stretched, we will have thousands of students contributing to Wikipedia without truly understanding it. The burden of coping with this will fall on new page patrollers, recent changes patrollers, and the editors who already have the students' articles on their watchlists. Even initiatives such as the Association for Psychological Science's call to action are likely to end up using the USEP approach, rather than having the professors edit directly, partly because the template for using Wikipedia in the classroom exists and is being widely publicized.[11] There are other education programs for the English-language Wikipedia, such as the Canadian program, and as far as I can tell the WMF regards growth as a high-priority goal for all such programs.
The USEP, and any other similar programs, need to change their focus. Instead of trying to scale the program to the largest possible number of classes, we should be focusing all our resources on working with academics who are receptive to the idea of becoming editors. We can provide a good deal of support to their classes, but in return we should be asking for them to participate, as part of the Wikipedia editing community, in curating the articles in their specialities. Writing a good article or featured article on Wikipedia requires more than knowing a topic inside out; you have to understand what the experienced editors here understand about what makes a good encyclopedia article. We have that, and the academics have knowledge – and now, finally, thanks to the global education program, we have something they want – an innovative and productive way for them to teach their students. Any instructor who gets a couple of good articles under their belt will understand Wikipedia well enough that they will be a much better instructor for their students, and will in turn reduce the burden for the ambassadors supporting their class. We need more subject matter experts, and we need the education programs in the US and elsewhere to help us acquire them.
How do we do this? Here's my prescription.
- The community needs to engage with the Global Education Program, and particularly with the USEP, the largest of the country EPs. These programs are largely driven off-wiki, since they are WMF operations rather than community initiatives. Two key WMF staff members are Frank Schulenburg, the Global Education Program Director, and Annie Lin, the Global Education Program Manager. I suspect the best place to discuss these programs with the WMF is the USEP talk page.
- The quality metrics which were put in place for the Public Policy Initiative need to be restarted for the USEP and other programs. The USEP will have a cost to the community in terms of support, and we need to understand the benefit to article quality to be sure that it's worthwhile. Currently metrics for quantity exist, such as pages that measure student editing statistics; these aren't inherently harmful but anyone who has spent time reverting poor student contributions this semester will appreciate that a quality metric is at least as important.[12]
- The USEP should change its focus in two ways: from growth to quality, and from students to academics.
- Growth without support will lead to stress on the community and poorer quality. Instead we should work out what it means to support a class properly – there are far too few active online ambassadors to properly review and help with the current class load; the ratio currently seems to be about one ambassador to two classes, which means many students will never hear from an ambassador at all.
- Students will disappear after a single year; academics, if we help them, will return year after year. Any academic can run a class using Wikipedia, with or without formal involvement with the USEP, but the USEP should focus its resources on instructors who show willingness to engage with editors on Wikipedia; who participate in reviewing and managing their own students' contributions; and most of all who show interest in working on articles themselves. In return we can supply ambassadors as teaching assistants – mentors, in Wikipedia terminology.
If we manage the influx of academic interest correctly, Wikipedia will acquire an institutional connection to academia that will be a source of new content for our articles and an intellectual resource to assist with long-term growth. Wikipedia does not need to beg for respectability any more; it is already widely used by academics as a starting point for research, and sometimes for more than that.[13] We need to accept our respectability, and plan to learn from – and teach – the academic community.
Notes
- ^ I'm talking about content here – it's easy to find articles that need copyediting or formatting.
- ^ Recent quotes by editors at the Featured Article Candidates talk page include "the quality across the board in psychology is horrific ... most of the psych articles we could consider "important" on any scale in the psych realm are utterly dismal." and "in my area of the visual arts ... most articles on major topics are crap (Indian art, Italian Renaissance sculpture, in fact anything to do with sculpture, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic art etc etc)" (diff). For the psychology articles you can get an idea of the assessed quality from the Psychology articles quality chart.
- ^ See the Editor Trends Study for more background on editor retention.
- ^ For example, a Wikipedian who is a professional neuroscientist recently commented that "For topics with a large literature, where most of the statements synthesize dozens if not hundreds of sources ... it is simply futile to demand that readers with no subject matter knowledge be able to verify articles on large topics – only an expert reviewer can properly do it. I seek [...] an acknowledgement that referencing requirements should be tuned to the breadth of a topic -- the larger a topic, the lesser the need for detailed page-referencing of every line, and the greater the need for reviewers with enough expertise to have a good sense of whether an article is accurate and comprehensive without having to consult sources regarding every line."
- ^ See the APS's Wikipedia Initiative page.
- ^ See the November 2011 issue of Footnotes.
- ^ See the wrap-up blog entry for details.
- ^ See the statistical analysis of the PPI for details; you may also be interested in looking at the assessment rubric or an example assessment page.
- ^ See, for example, some extended discussion on this topic at the USEP talk page.
- ^ See the "increase participation" goal at the strategy wiki; that page is linked from one of the USEP project pages.
- ^ See this response to the APS initiative for an example of an instructor's response. The drive to expand the USEP was visible at the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit, held this summer in Boston.
- ^ The PPI quality metric was quite labour-intensive, which may make it more difficult to implement. The Foundation does acknowledge that quantity metrics are inadequate.
- ^ Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed recently remarked on the use of text plucked from a Wikipedia article in a symposium paper by the president of the American Sociological Association.
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Research project banner ads run afoul of community
CentralNotice research project taken down over community opposition
For several hours on Thursday of this week, 10,000 experienced editors and 30,000 new contributors were exposed to a CentralNotice message advertising a 25-minute survey of Wikimedia participants. Put together by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Sciences Po in Paris, the study, aimed to "better understand the dynamics of interactions and behavior in online social spaces", was sanctioned by the Wikimedia Foundation, and had been on the CentralNotice calendar for the past month.
Nonetheless, as Wikimedia Foundation Senior Research Analyst Dario Taraborelli explained on the foundation-l mailing list, the banner was poorly received by Wikimedians, who found it confusing and reminiscent of a commercial venture. It was taken down hours later, having incited much discussion at the Administrators' noticeboard, the village pump, foundation-l and internal-l mailing lists, and even an RfC.
The study's research team first approached the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedians in January 2010, proposing to post messages on user talk pages; editors suggested they scrap the method, and make a minimally invasive CentralNotice banner to registered editors instead. The proposal went through a review by the Wikimedia Research Committee in July of this year, which resulted in the project's current parameters, namely, only for logged in users, only on the English Wikipedia, and only for at most a week.
Soon after, the Wikimedia Foundation invested in added functionality for the CentralNotice extension; the new backend now extends to editor databases, allowing its users to target specific subsets of users. Using this functionality, the banner was created, put on the CentralNotice calendar a month ahead of launch, and finally launched on 8 December at 11:00 UTC, garnering 800 responses before being shut down.
While the notice was live, it garnered both negative and positive response from the Wikipedia community. According to ErrantX, "One of the criticisms was the lack of discussion/input the English Wikipedia community was granted – and the lack of notification prior to the launch. Feedback on the mailing lists seems to suggest that the Foundation and various committees are not aware of the communities preferences regarding Central Notices, partly because it has not been discussed before."
As explained by Taraborelli, "We realize that despite an extensive review, the launch of this project was not fully advertised on community forums. We plan to shortly resume the campaign ...after a full redesign of the recruitment protocol in order to address the concerns raised by many of you over the last 24 hours." The Foundation is now moving to provide better information on the project, by creating an FAQ and linking to the study directly from the banner, redesign the banner to be less "ad-like", and make privacy terms more transparent, as participants were not aware that they were sharing their usernames, edit counts, and user privileges with the study team.
Brief notes
- US Cultural Partnership Coordinator announced: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the hiring of Lori Byrd Phillips as United States Cultural Partnership Coordinator for 2012. With this new position within the Global Development department, Phillips will "lead the charge" in building the infrastructure and support needed to accommodate growing interest in Wikimedia partnerships among cultural institutions in the United States; her ultimate goal is to make the process self-sustaining by 2013.
Phillips had previously served as the Wikipedian in Residence at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since August 2010, as part of the GLAM-wiki initiative; cultural partnerships between Wikimedia and cultural institutions have generated much interest in the United States, most significantly a dedicated panel discussion at the upcoming American Association of Museums annual conference and Museum Expo.
- Call for Wikimedia Fellowships open: The Wikimedia Foundation is now seeking applicants and ideas for its Wikimedia Fellowships program. The program is open to all members of the Wikimedia community, and applicants are encouraged "to focus on the theme of improving editor retention and increasing participation in Wikimedia Projects." Applications for Spring 2012 are open through the 15 January deadline. Those selected as fellows will receive financial and logistical support from the Foundation towards their projects.
- Wikimedia Foundation Report for November published: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its report for November, 2011, covering all of the activities of the Foundation for the month. "Highlights" (linked to relevant Signpost articles) include the WikiConference and Hackathon in Mumbai, India, the new Feedback dashboard, the ongoing annual fundraiser, and Sue Gardner's annual European trip.
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes The Blade of the Northern Lights to the ranks of Wikipedian administrators.
- Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones this week: the Russian Wikipedia has reached 800,000 articles with Постолюк, Александр Павлович, the Afrikaans Wiktionary has reached 100,000 page edits, the Hebrew Wikiquote has reached 100,000 page edits, and the Dutch Wikipedia has reached 900,000 entries.
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Bell Pottinger investigation, Gardner on gender gap, and another plagiarist caught red-handed
The Bell Pottinger affair
Bell Pottinger, a public relations company headquartered in London, UK, has taken heat after coming under scrutiny for several possible conflicts of interest. The group has admitted to editing articles, but strongly stressed that it "[hasn't] done anything illegal." The investigation centers around Wikipedia user Biggleswiki, exposed by blogger Tim Ireland, for actively contributing biased information to several of its client's articles. In a letter to the company, Ireland points out the irony in the situation stating, "[the account accuses others] of being biased and/or of having a hidden agenda, when all along he/she was making edits according to a hidden bias/agenda dictated by money."
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has published a list of some of the articles edited by Bell Pottinger, asserting that it has "evidence [which shows] the company made hundreds of alterations to Wikipedia entries about its clients in the last year". Among those included in the list are Chime Communications, the parent company of Bell Pottinger, and Naked Eye Research, the latter of which was edited after Bell Pottinger purchased 55 percent of the company. Biggleswiki, the source of the biased edits, has apparently made edits without being logged in, resulting in the standard publicity of their IP address. The WHOIS report shows the address is indeed held by Bell Pottinger Communications.
Lord Bell, the chairman of the parent company Chime Communications, stated "If we’ve done things that are not in the spirit of the site, we’ll say so and acknowledge it, and improve our processes." Bell also is quoted by the London Evening Standard as saying, "On the basis of what has been reported so far, I can see no example of people behaving improperly, though perhaps behaving indiscreetly." As a cautionary measure, led by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, a sockpuppet investigation, stemmed from the account Slaine1, blocked multiple accounts believed to be operated by Bell Pottinger, as well as its parent company Chime Communications.
Gardner reiterates call to close the gender gap
This week Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, discussed with news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) the importance of attracting more female editors to the site. At present only one in ten editors is thought to be female, a fact highlighted repeatedly by the Foundation as a cause for concern.
Gardner told the agency that women have different interests from men, and to ensure that the quality of Wikipedia is not compromised by gaps in coverage, it is necessary for Wikimedia's websites to attract more women. She pressed the idea of a rich text editor to enable those without knowledge of wiki syntax to edit more easily, explaining that a beta phase of the software should be made available to "experienced Wikipedia users" by early next year. A full roll-out of the software "need[s] to be developed in collaboration with the editing community and [the Foundation] aspire[s] to achieve consensus", she said.
She also noted that efforts to attract new editors will not specifically target women, that any attempt to attract editors will have to be a "general outreach" achieved by creating "an environment where people want to help."
In brief
My question is, then, who are these Wiki-worker ants cobbling together nearly four million articles in English alone?
Are there communes somewhere in the backlands of the US — log cabins barricaded in by books and home to red-eyed scholars in front of scores of MacBooks? Perhaps they have momentous beards and resemble Socrates in a checked shirt.
Or perhaps these are the true pioneers of knowledge because they are the ones without any desire or hope for recognition in some unending quest for amassed learning.
— Christopher Lord lauds Wikipedians in the pages of The National
- Another writer plagiarizing Wikipedia? Der Bund and other Swiss newspapers carried an article (in German) reporting that Swiss writer Michael Theurillat reused the German language Wikipedia's description of Hawala, a traditional Islamic money transfer system, in his novel Rütlischwur without attribution. The article recalled similar allegations of plagiarism previously leveled against French novelist Michel Houellebecq, involving the French language Wikipedia, and German writer Helene Hegemann.
- Journalist tangles with whitewashers: Jeremy Sear of Australian politics magazine Crikey found himself caught up in an edit war as he attempted to restore information apparently "whitewashed" by a number of anonymous IPs. He raised concern over the edits of one editor, whose articles all related to media figures based in Melbourne but appeared "bereft of independent sources".
- Wikipedia apps reviewed: The BBC's Click programme had a look at Wikitude, a free smartphone app using augmented reality to link to Wikipedia articles; BlackBook tried WikiMaze, which automatically turns Wikipedia articles into quizzes; and global positioning system Toozla announced that it has added over 125,000 articles from the Portuguese, Turkish and Greek Wikipedias into its system.
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Spanning Nine Time Zones with WikiProject Russia
- The December issue of the WikiProject United States Newsletter has been published.
- WikiProject Wikify invites editors to participate in its December 2011 Wikify Drive. As always, barnstars are awaiting those who help reduce the backlog.
- The December 2011 Good Article Nomination Backlog Elimination Drive has begun. There are barnstars to be earned!
- The Wiki Guides could use your help introducing new editors to Wikipedia.
- The Guild of Copy Editors will be accepting nominations for their third tranche of coordinators. The nomination period will run from December 5 to 15, and the election will be held from December 16 to 30. Self-nominations are accepted.
- 'Tis the season to revive the Christmas Task Force for its yearly flight around the world.
- WikiProject Images and Media is holding a drive in January to move free images to Commons. There are lots of prizes to earn. Sign up now!
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This week, we interviewed members of the grand WikiProject Russia. Started in November 2006, the project has grown to include 80 members maintaining over 32,000 articles, including 66 featured articles and lists. There are 15 task forces, 5 portals, and a variety of subprojects covering some of Russia's regions and historical periods. We interviewed Ymblanter, Ezhiki, Greyhood, Artem Karimov, and Buggie111.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Russia? Do you speak Russian? Have you contributed to the Russian Wikipedia?
- Ymblanter: Russian is my mothertongue, and I was involved for four years with Russian Wikipedia, where I created about 600 articles, was an admin for three years and twice served in the Arbitration Committee. In May 2011, after a sequence of events, I decided that the environment over there became too hostile for me and left. By chance, I knew that in English Wikipedia there was no article on Yakov Bukhvostov, a renowned 17th century Russian architect. I created the article and got a welcome message from Ezhiki, which contained a link to WikiProject Russia. Out of curiosity, I followed the link, found the list of articles for improvement, expanded the recommended article on the town of Solvychegodsk, and quickly discovered that many articles on related topics are in a pitiful state. Since then, I improve (or create where missing) articles on Russian topics which I find important, mostly on physical and human geography and history. I am moving geographically, having created articles pertaining to Arkhangelsk Oblast and currently doing Vologda Oblast. My estimation is that if I still work alone, I will need ten more years to improve/create articles.
- Ezhiki: Russian is my first language, but I've been living in the United States for many years now. I've been involved with WikiProject Russia in one form or another since its creation in 2006, occasionally helping with various aspects as it developed. I toyed with the idea of contributing to the Russian Wikipedia in 2004 (the year I discovered Wikipedia), but it was still in the nascent state then, which made contributing pretty much anything quite a challenge. Eventually, I confined all my activities to the English Wikipedia where I remain to this day. And since 99% of the topics I work on Wikipedia is related to Russia, it'd be surprising if I didn't end up being involved with this project at some point. The project, to me, is a focus point where people sharing their interest in Russia can congregate and coordinate efforts.
- Greyhood: I speak Russian, and the language is a part of my professional interests. My Wikipedia experience started 3.5 years ago, while I was fascinated with the lists of countries and created many of them, or transferred from other resources to the English Wikipedia with the help of my modest programming skills. I also collected these lists into templates. When all the on-wiki available lists were gathered and most important missing lists created, I realized that there was little to nothing else for me to do in the country rankings area. I attempted moving to the Russian Wikipedia and creating lists there, but it turned out to be of little fun for me to repeat the same work with the language being the only difference. On that point my activities on the Russian Wikipedia mostly ended. By that time, however, I was deeply fascinated with Wikipedia itself, its reading and editing, and so I just went to the topic I knew best, Russia, and started improving the article. I noticed that many key articles and topics about Russia were in a poor state or missing. To fill the gaps quickly and according to my list-crazy habits, I started creating and improving Russia-related lists and templates: List of Russian people, Russian explorers, artists, scientists, inventors, inventions, souvenirs, World Heritage sites, major economical projects and others. In order to make these things, I had to pass over and to check thousands of articles, and soon I acquired a better and more detailed knowledge on the state of Russia-related topics, on which things were missing or needed improvement. I made a huge to-do list for myself, containing the articles about Russian economy and technology to be created or improved. Then I realized that I won't be able to create and improve all those articles in my to-do myself, unless I work hard for many decades. So I decided to join WP:RUSSIA and share my experience, knowledge and tasks with other editors. Together with Ezhiki, an extremely nice and helpful editor, we set up the thematic task forces for the WikiProject Russia early this year, and provided various bot instruments for them (popular pages lists, featured content updating, article alerts, assessment statistics). We are finishing the assessment of all WP:RUSSIA articles with task force parameters, and I'm filling the task forces' to-do lists with the names of most important articles to create or improve.
- Artem Karimov: My native language is Russian. I have contributed to Wikipedia since 2006 both in English and Russian-language editions. Although most of my edits lie in the area of the neighbouring WikiProject Metros of the former Soviet Union rather than that of WP:RUSSIA directly, my edits are still aimed at improving articles about Russia. In my opinion improving articles about Russia helps bridge the gap between English-language readers and us, Russians. Feeling that because of your very edit the foreigner comes to know your homeland better and the stereotypes get broken is what has motivated me to participate in building an encyclopedia for these 5 years.
- Buggie111: As half my family is Russian, I have strong ties to it and speak it fluently. My main Russia-edits here are on Russian battleships, the Moscow Monorail and the city of Bronnitsy. I have waded through ru.wiki a bit, but only for some maintenance work and a poorly accepted GAR.
The project is home to 56 Featured Articles, 9 Featured Lists, 25 A-class articles, and 183 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges faced by editors trying to improve articles related to Russia? Do you have any tips for editors bringing articles through the FA or GA process?
- Ymblanter: No, I was not involved in any of these. The problem is that the majority of editors in the project are ethnic Russians, and we sometimes have troubles creating flawless prose (like correct placement of "the" or using correct tenses and so on). Every such editor would need to seek help of native speakers in copyediting and review.
- Ezhiki: The majority of those articles cannot, unfortunately, be credited to WikiProject Russia. While they all fall into this project's scope, most of them became featured via the efforts of other WikiProjects or individual editors not connected to WikiProject Russia.
As far as my contributions go, I have one featured list under my belt (List of administrative and municipal divisions of the Republic of Adygea), and I made a lot of minor contributions to a good number of other FAs, FLs, GAs, and regular articles alike.
Thinking about the major challenges this WikiProject faces, I would have to say that the main one is the lack of manpower. The WikiProject has existed for five years now, but at no point of time did the number of active contributors exceed half a dozen, and even those participants tend to stick to one or two subject areas they are particularly interested in. Needless to say, collaboration in such an environment is difficult, and everyone is all too often left to their own devices. The project also lacks a good organizer, a person who can motivate other participants, develop a strategic plan of growth, and coax others to act. The scope of the project is huge—Russia has over a thousand years of history, a vast territory, and a rich cultural heritage—there is a potential there for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of articles. However, only a very small portion of this potential is presently covered in the English Wikipedia in any form, and even a smaller portion is of acceptable quality.
I also agree with Yaroslav that the language barrier is an issue. Editors knowledgeable about Russian topics and possessing a good command of the English language are a rare breed indeed, but the language barrier also works in reverse—native English speakers interested in Russia have access only to a very limited set of sources in English; doing more requires a good command of Russian, which isn't exactly a popular language to learn in the West. - Greyhood: I have contributed to several good and featured articles, but mostly when they were already GA and FA, with an exception of the Renewable energy in Russia. As Ezhiki has correctly said above, the majority of WP:RUSSIA featured content exists thanks to work by other, often related, WikiProjects or individual editors. Unfortunately, WP:RUSSIA currently lacks manpower and procedures for major collaborative works of many editors. But we are fulfilling different kinds of tasks now, and personal collaboration between two or three editors is commonplace. Lack of manpower and organization are major issues, but I hope we will be able to overcome them in future, just as currently there is progress in other areas, such as project's infrastructure, article assessment and access to illustrative material. The latter used to be quite serious issue in the past, but the situation has significantly improved in recent years and months. Thanks to user Russavia, who managed to procure a permission from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's press secretary Natalya Timakova to use images and media from the presidential website Kremlin.ru, now we have a lot of free illustrations for articles about Russian politics. Thanks to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which started donating images for Wikipedia this year, now we have some free high quality documentary photos to illustrate the articles about World War II, Soviet history and Russian economy, and hopefully will have more if RIAN continues donations.
- Buggie111: I am able to take credit for one FA and have helped out on other FA's and GA's. The words above are true, since my addition to the project, I've see very little talkpage action compared to WP:MILHIST or WP:FOOD.
The project is the parent of 15 task forces. Are you involved with any of them? How active are these groups in general? What are some tasks that WikiProject Russia has delegated to the task forces?
- Ymblanter: No, I am not involved, and my impression is that the project now is so much understaffed that basically the same people are running the project and all task forces. In this sense, nothing has been delegated.
- Ezhiki: The task forces are a brainchild of User:Greyhood, who's been instrumental to the revival of the whole project in the past year or so. I've been involved with the technical side of setting them up, while Greyhood is the one primarily responsible for their content and structure. The idea is that having well-defined task forces will help new participants (or old and bored participants) to easily identify the areas which are in need of most work, as well as to provide some ideas to those looking for something to do and not knowing where to start. The task forces were only recently implemented, so it's still early to judge whether they are a success, but there have already been several occasions when articles were found and improved using the task force infrastructure. As the number of participants increases, the benefit of having the task force infrastructure already in place should become even more pronounced.
- Greyhood: The task forces are a recent innovation, their pages are still in the process of construction, and many WP:RUSSIA participants have not yet been notified about this new development. However, by now most of the work on the task force to-do lists is done; some 90% of WikiProject Russia articles are assessed with task force parameters (sorted into subtopics), and an additional 19,000 articles have been added to the project since the start of assessment campaign this year, almost doubling the size of the project's article inventory. I hope that when the assessment and the task force pages are 100% ready, and when more editors are made aware of the task forces and join them, we will be able to delegate some tasks and organize collaborative work better.
Does the project collaborate with the projects of neighboring countries or with projects that focus on historical countries like WikiProject Soviet Union?
- Ezhiki: We are certainly open to collaboration with any such projects; unfortunately, the ones which have most overlap with ours are also the ones which are mostly inactive. Those which aren't face the same problem of the lack of manpower as WP:RUSSIA.
- Greyhood: Some of the project's task forces are incorporated into the WikiProject Soviet Union assessment template, and the overlap between the articles' scopes of WP:RUSSIA and WP:USSR is great, so much of the work done for one project serves to the purposes of another one. There is also a certain potential of collaboration with WikiProject Kazakhstan, WikiProject Belarus, WikiProject Ukraine and other neighboring countries, and there is a possibility, that following the examples of WikiProject Central Asia (which oversees all Central Asian countries) and WikiProject Africa (which oversees all African countries), we may create some kind of unified wikiproject for the post-Soviet countries. Given the recent developments in the real life, such as the Eurasian Union, the integration of the relevant Wikipedia projects seems a reasonable perspective.
The project oversees 5 portals on Russia in general, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, Moscow, and Chechnya. Why were these topics chosen to serve as the subject of portals? Do you have any plans for increasing the visibility of the existing portals or creating more portals?
- Buggie111: I created Portal:Moscow from scratch, mainly because other capital city portals were in existence. I don't think there was any clear-cut plan, however.
- Ezhiki: Buggie111 is right—there is currently no plan to do anything about the existing portals or to create new ones. The ones which already exist were created by individual enthusiasts, not as a part of a WikiProject initiative. That said, if someone is itching to do some portal work, they are most welcome to join and do so!
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Ymblanter: We just need more manpower. In my opinion, the best help would be to systematically identify important missing articles/stub and just to create/improve them. It does not currently happen on a regular basis.
- Ezhiki: We don't just need more manpower, we need a lot more of it. The project is presently fairly well-organized and makes a number of useful tools available to the editors, but it takes people to use those tools and to act on the findings. My advice to a new contributor would be to find the task force closest to his/her talents, and just start working on the articles identified as needing work.
- Artem Karimov: As Steve Balmer walked around shouting "developers, developers", we need editors, editors, editors. For example, when we design a change in the layout of Moscow Metro stations articles, it is not possible to implement all of them immediately. Why? There are more than 150 of them. If we had 150 editors, work would be much easier.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Ymblanter: I try to avoid by all means any disputable topics, but I know that some of the project members are involved in these. It would be good to have an opinion from them on how these disputable issues are handled.
Next week, we'll try to find a solution to the global financial mess. Until then, bring your entrepreneurial spirit to the archive.
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Wehwalt gives his fifty cents; spies, ambushes, sieges, and Entombment
This week, the Signpost interviewed Wehwalt, who has made significant, often critical contributions to 60 featured articles and numerous good articles. Wehwalt, who began editing in 2005, shares some of his experiences on the encyclopedia.
- Featured articles. I first edited Wikipedia in 2005, and I think, like most of us, they were minor edits at first; I remember it took me some time to get the hang of referencing. I got into FAs quite accidentally. I saw the Borat movie and not surprisingly looked it up on Wikipedia and did some editing work. Lenin and McCarthy at the time was pushing it forward and eventually got it through FA and TFA; I was along helping him out. I really didn't understand what FA was yet, but it was a good apprenticeship. Then I started working with AuburnPilot and Kww to push Natalee Holloway through FA, which was not easy. FA is famously not easy to break into and there were definitely some difficult moments, but it all worked out and I think the article has held up to time quite well. We keep it updated. I then did my first solo article, Jena Six, which perhaps has not held up as well due to relatively few articles that allow me to update it. I think the next one, Albert Speer was my first really good article on my own. It is very difficult to write neutrally about Hitler's best friend.
- Ensuring the quality of older featured articles. The major problem I have with my oldest articles is deadlinks. I've never had a FAR, but if I see there's a high number of deadlinks, I go back and take care of them. I find the writing in my older articles a bit more stiff than I do today and I go back and modify where I can.
- Important things for new editors to learn. The social aspect of Wikipedia is important—I don't see how it would work without it—but the tendency towards endless time-wasting drama is very unfortunate. That being said, it was probably inevitable that it would happen, as we build a social structure "backstage" at Wikipedia, and as that structure becomes increasingly important to editors.
Featured articles
Five featured articles were promoted this week:
- Walking Liberty half dollar (nom), nominated by Wehwalt. The Walking Liberty half dollar, a US coin first minted in 1916, came to life after director of the US mint Robert W. Woolley misunderstood the law, believing he was required to replace all coin designs that were more than 25 years old. After a competition, Adolph A. Weinman was selected to design the 50-cent piece. It was initially feared that his complex design, difficult to strike, would have to be replaced by a simpler one. Although this did not come to pass, the Walking Liberty was replaced by the Franklin half dollar in 1948.
- Battle of Kaiapit (nom), nominated by Hawkeye7. The Battle of Kaiapit, between Australian and Japanese forces, took place from 19 to 21 September 1943. The Australian 2/6th Commando Squadron, under the command of Captain Gordon King, assaulted the Japanese-held town of Kaiapit in what is now Papua New Guinea. After capturing the town to use the area as an airfield, the Australian forces defeated a much larger Japanese assault; when the battle was over, the Japanese had lost at least 214 men, while the Australians lost 14. As a result of the battle, the 7th Division was able to be flown in and reinforce the area, preventing further Japanese assault on nearby Australian-held towns.
- The Entombment (nom), nominated by Ceoil and Truthkeeper88. The Entombment (pictured on right) is a glue-size on linen painting by Dirk Bouts, an Early-Netherlandish painter. Probably completed between 1440 and 1455, the painting began its life as a wing panel for a large hinged polyptych altarpiece and may have been part of a series showing the life of Jesus and his crucifixion specially commissioned for export to Venice. One of the few remaining glue-sizes from the 15th century, it is now located in the National Gallery in London after being aggressively acquired in the mid-to-late 1800s.
- Persoonia levis (nom), nominated by Casliber. Commonly known as the broad-leaved geebung, Persoonia levis is a shrub that is endemic to the eastern states of New South Wales and Victoria. Reaching 5 metres (16 ft) in height, the plant can live for up to 60 years and produces yellow flowers in summer and autumn, later followed by fruit (known as drupes). Living in a fire-prone environment, P. levis propagates using epicormic buds and ground-stored seed banks.
- USS Arizona (BB-39) (nom), nominated by Sturmvogel 66 and The ed17. The USS Arizona, an American battleship, was completed during World War I yet did not see action during that war. After escorting President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, it was sent to Turkey in 1919 and, several years later, joined the US Pacific Fleet. Spending most of its time participating in training exercises, the Arizona moved to Pearl Harbor in 1940. In the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941, the ship was sunk while berthed, killing 1,177 officers and crewmen; the Japanese attacks led to the US entering World War II. Over the Arizona's wreckage, there is now a floating memorial, dedicated in 1962.
Featured lists
One featured list was promoted this week:
- List of James Bond films (nom), nominated by SchroCat. The James Bond series, based on Ian Fleming's series of the same name, consists of 22 canon and 2 non-canon films, with another in production. The series, the second-highest-grossing of all time, has featured seven actors in the titular role. The highest-grossing of these, Thunderball, earned four times as much as the lowest-grossing Licence to Kill, adjusted for inflation (right).
Featured pictures
Two featured pictures were promoted this week:
- Capri Centre Belvedere (nom; related article), by Paolo Costa. The new featured image shows a 180-degree view of the Italian island of Capri, which has been inhabited since prehistory and was once connected to the mainland. Visible in the picture are the belvedere in Capri centre (much frequented by tourists), as well as the luxury yacht A (below).
- Three countries bridge (nom; related article), created by Taxiarchos228 and nominated by Crisco 1492. After previously failing in May by half a vote, the image passed narrowly this week. It depicts the Three Countries Bridge, which connects France and Germany and is located 200 metres (660 ft) from Switzerland. The world's longest single-span pedestrian and cyclist bridge, it was officially opened in 2007 (right).
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Betacommand 3 workshop revived, two cases set for acceptance and the ArbCom elections finish on a whimper
There is but one case open at the time of writing: Betacommand 3, which proceeded into its seventh week with substantial activity in the workshop.
Two requests for cases were submitted this week. TimidGuy, who was banned by Jimbo Wales in September for conflict of interest, is appealing his ban to the committee, which looks set to accept it (the specifics of the case are private), and a large dispute over Muhammad Images also looks to be trending towards acceptance.
The big issue of the week was the conclusion of the annual elections for the Arbitration Committee. Results will be released pending confirmation from the election scrutineers of the integrity of the voting process. A "rather low" voter turnout was noted, with 734 editors participating this year compared to 854 in 2010 and 994 in 2009, a decline of approximately 14% year-on-year.
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Trials and tribulations of image rotation, Article Feedback version 5, and new diff colours
Image rotation change mishandled?
Questions were asked this week about the handling of a bug fix, deployed weeks ago with MediaWiki 1.18 (and reported at the time), that aimed to correct MediaWiki's display of photographs taken with the camera upside-down or sideways.
It has now been calculated that the number of images which had been relying on the previous behaviour numbered in the tens of thousands, according to lists generated on 4 December. Human tagging followed up on by a bot has since been able to reduce the number substantially, leaving approximately 3000 at the time of writing, although many more may still be tagged. Although the potential for this kind of problem had been discussed since deployment, it only attracted great attention after thumbnail deletions begun earlier this month revealed the issue on hundreds more images. One Commons contributor commented that they had "trouble thinking of any single act of vandalism we've ever suffered that rivals the amount of damage to Wikimedia done by this [change]".
The criticism has prompted suggestions that greater care should be taken with future fixes to any problematically large existing corpus such as photographic images. Proposals include relying on future projects such as the parser rewrite to "ancestor" existing pages and images, that is, leaving them untouched by fixes until they can be dealt with at a later date. Developer Bryan Tong Minh admitted on the wikitech-l mailing list that it looked like "automatic image rotation [was] not as good an idea as Brion and I originally thought".
ArticleFeedback version 5
Later this week, version 5 of the ArticleFeedback extension will be deployed to approximately 10,000[1] articles on the English Wikipedia. The version differs from its predecessor insofar as it moves away from an emphasis on participation and quality, and instead is set to focus on "finding ways for readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia".
Visitors to the 10,000 articles will, after deployment, no longer see the existing interface for "star rating" pages, but instead find alternative designs at the bottom of articles. The four such designs being trialled include a freetext suggestion field, an invitation to edit, and a series of more directed text fields that the user can select between. Visitors to the pages will be allocated at random to one of the four designs and the designs compared.
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.
- Visual Editor testing begins: A sandbox version of the new WYSIWYG visual editor will be created on MediaWiki.org later this week. The testing period allows users to get a feel for the interface and to try out its handling of various formatting structures, but does not support the saving or loading of existing wikitext. In future, it is hoped that the Visual Editor will be able to take advantage of the new parser currently in development to render and edit increasingly complex wikitext structures.
- New diff colours: The default colours presented in diffs are going to be changed from green (added) and yellow (removed) to blue (added) and green (removed). The new colours, which have been in place on the French Wikipedia for some time, are believed to be easier to read for those suffering from certain types of colour blindness (revision #105280). The change is likely to go live when MediaWiki 1.19 is deployed to Wikimedia wikis and can be overridden via a gadget.
- Internationalisation developer needed: Bugmeister Mark Hershberger appealed this week for a developer to take on the task of internationalising the SpecialUploadLocal extension. The extension is beta-graded and promises easier mass image imports for both Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia wikis. In unrelated news, the Wikimedia Android app received its first interface translations this week, courtesy of translatewiki.net, based on the language the user has chosen to view the rest of the Android interface in (Words and What Not blog).
- WebFonts soft launched: As discussed in a post on the Wikimedia blog by internationalisation team member Gerard Meijssen, the WebFonts extension was soft launched on 12 December to wikis particularly in need of it. As Meijssen explained, the extension "ensures that the readers of our wikis will always see the intended characters on their screen" despite the fact that "many devices do not provide the necessary fonts" by default. Although the launch itself was successful and the extension was deployed to "virtually all" the intended wikis, several bugs quickly became apparent and will now need to be fixed before the extension can be deployed further. A major upgrade to the Narayam extension was also deployed.
- Mobile browsing improvements in the pipeline: Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber devoted a series of posts on his blog to noting his work to improve the rendering of various Wikimedia pages when displayed on narrow screens such as those used by mobile devices. These included file description pages and portals, with the latter changes live already.
- TIFF thumbnailing filesize limit to be lifted: Work on integrating a new image scaler to handle particularly large TIFF files will see the upper filesize limit abolished this week, according to the WMF software deployments page. Upcoming deployments also include a version of the "timed text" media handler, which allows for better subtitling of videos and a host of other improvements to video integration, the deployment of which has now been scheduled for January after months of development work.
Corrections
- ^ An earlier version of this article gave an earlier estimate of 100,000; the number of articles affected has since been reduced.
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