Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Traffic report
Hoaxes draw media attention; Sue Gardner's op-ed; Women of Wikipedia
Wikipedia hoaxes draw media attention: Bicholim conflict, Legolas2186
| “ | Up until a week ago, here is something you could have learned from Wikipedia:
From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India's massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim Conflict. Named after the northern Indian region where most of the fighting took place, the conflict ended with a peace treaty that would later help cement Goa as an independent Indian state. Except none of this ever actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian's imagination. It's a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years. |
” |
This is how, on New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax.
Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by User:ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day. Of course, the Internet and Wikipedia being what they are, the article is still present on dozens of websites that had copied it from Wikipedia. It also remains included in a number of Wikipedia-based books available from Barnes & Noble.
The Daily Dot's report was quickly picked up by other publications: PC World, Yahoo News, then The Daily Mail, UPI and TechCrunch. Over the first two weeks of 2013, the story spread from publication to publication, from country to country, reaching all the way back to South Asia, where it was reported by the Times of India and the Indian Express, as well as Republika in Indonesia. Last of all, it arrived in Japan, with the Japanese TechCrunch site carrying a translation of the story.
The original article in the Daily Dot, written by chief reporter Kevin Morris, has to date received close to 1,000 tweets. On 18 January 2013, Morris followed up with another, far longer piece; titled "How vandals are destroying Wikipedia from the inside", it began with a review of the recent indefinite block of User:Legolas2186.
Legolas2186 was indefinitely blocked by administrator Georgewilliamherbert in the wake of the Bicholim conflict story, following a discussion at AN/I. Inactive since February 2012, he had in previous years written close to 100 GAs along with several FAs, including the Featured Article on Madonna. Subsequent sourcing investigations initiated by User:Binksternet however showed that Legolas2186 had an alarming tendency to falsify or invent quotes and sources, and the Madonna FA (promoted in 2010) was demoted as a result in 2012. It may be significant that Legolas2186 had received multiple warnings about adding unsourced information in 2009. As Morris said in the Daily Dot,
| “ | ... like his parallels in news media, Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, Legolas was weaving together a portfolio of success with a web of cleverly constructed lies, false sources, and invented quotes. An investigation led by an enterprising team of Wikipedia editors dug up dozens of fabrications perpetrated by Legolas, who was later banished from the site.
Legolas2186 is hardly the first hoaxster to fool Wikipedia. But his case shows the urgency with which the encyclopedia needs to modernize and adapt, as the editorial core it relies upon to fend off the Internet's unrelenting wave of trolls and liars grows ever smaller. |
” |
Morris consulted Doctor Charles Ford, a professor of psychology at the University of Alabama, to find out what might motivate a person to lie repeatedly. Emphasising that he was speaking generally, rather than about this specific editor, whom he did not know, Ford stated that compulsive lying is usually due to a learning disability, or narcissism. The ability to fool people might give a person an enhanced sense of power. Others, Ford said, genuinely feel that they are at the centre of the universe: "They then define what is real and not real."
Morris argues that Wikipedia's internal structure and communications tools are too decentralised and outdated, and that this "doesn't just slow down the discovery of hoaxes, it scares people away. And meanwhile, pranksters like Legolas strain the time the site's editors do have—all of which only exacerbates Wikipedia's unprecedented editorial crisis." While the number of articles has risen, the number of editors has dropped.
William Henderson on the Telegraph website chimed in on 23 January, explaining "Why we're about to discover more Wikipedia hoaxes". Henderson drew particular attention to the "tens or even hundreds of thousands of articles that no one is keeping an eye on".
On 25 January, even the Sun, a British tabloid, covered the topic with "Trickipedia", featuring its own run-down of Wikipedia hoaxes based on Wikipedia:List of hoaxes on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, the people's encyclopedia, by Sue Gardner
The Los Angeles Times published an upbeat op-ed by Sue Gardner on 13 January 2013. Titled "Wikipedia, the people's encyclopedia", the piece celebrated the first 12 years of Wikipedia's existence, and the diversity of the more than 1.5 million people who have contributed to the Wikipedia project:
| “ | ... An encyclopedia is one of humankind's grandest displays of collaborative effort, and Wikipedia takes that collaboration to new levels, with contributors from pretty much every ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic background, political ideology, religion, sexual orientation and gender. The youngest Wikipedian I've met was 7, a boy in Tel Aviv who makes small edits to articles about animals and children's books. The oldest I've met was 73, a retired engineer who writes about the history of Philadelphia, where he's lived for half a century. | ” |
Gardner characterised Wikipedians as, "almost without exception, ... ridiculously smart, as you might expect of people who, for fun, write an encyclopedia in their spare time." Many of them are very young: "There's a recurring motif inside Wikipedia of preteen editors who've spent their lives so far having their opinions and ideas discounted because of their age, but who have nonetheless worked their way into positions of real authority on Wikipedia. They love Wikipedia fiercely because it's a meritocracy: the only place in their lives where their age doesn't matter."
Wikipedians are geeky, she said, and nine out of ten of them are male—Gardner's theory is it's because "some of the constellation of characteristics that combine to create a Wikipedian—geeky, tech-centric, intellectually confident, thick-skinned and argumentative, with the willingness and ability to indulge in a solitary hobby—tend to skew male." They also tend to live in affluent parts of the world.
Reviewing Wikipedia's strengths and weaknesses, Gardner stated that Wikipedia's fundamental ideals—neutrality, lack of judgment, verifiability—and many attentive eyes had made well-visited articles like the one on Obama neutral and accurate, while Wikipedia's articles on obscure topics were weakest—places "where subtle bias and small mistakes can sometimes persist for months or even years."
| “ | Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world's information infrastructure. It's a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don't think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love. | ” |
Women of Wikipedia
On 24 January 2013, the Daily Dot published an article on "The women of Wikipedia: Closing the site's giant gender gap", featuring interviews with Sarah Stierch and Joseph Reagle. The story was picked up the next day by feminist blog Jezebel, under the title "Wikipedia's editors are 91 percent male because citations are stored in the ball sack" (with illustration):
| “ | Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia that's edited by you (if you're a dude), me (if I were a dude), and all the dudes you know, launched in 2001 and quickly became the place to find quick info on pretty much any topic under the sun. Remember writing research papers before Wikipedia? Man, we were all such chumps with our "books."
Despite being one of the most heavily visited sites on the web, women comprise just 9 percent of all Wikipedia editors. |
” |
The Daily Dot commented that according to researchers, Wikipedia's well-known gender gap is a "byproduct of established gender biases in society, the male-oriented aesthetics of technology, and Wikipedia's sometimes-abrasive culture. These factors have all coalesced to reinstitute a familiar pattern." This is all the more remarkable as there are many social media where women are actually in the majority.
Sarah Stierch said it's partly due to Wikipedia's software design, and its "cold, technical and argumentative" atmosphere: "It's aesthetically very masculine in its design. Its community, like so much of the early Internet, has been male dominated, and I think when a lot of people—men or women—look at Wikipedia these days, they see it as a source for information but have little interest or excitement in contributing to it." The traditional gender gap in higher education might also play a role, she added. "The average Wikipedia editor is a well-educated white male. Well-educated white males have been writing history and the story of the world since ancient times." Efforts to create a more inclusive community in Wikipedia would be helped if more women "came out" as women on the site, rather than staying gender-anomymous.
Joseph Reagle, whose study "'Free as in sexist?' Free culture and the gender gap" appeared recently in First Monday, warned, "The ideas of freedom and openness can be used to dismiss concerns and rationalize the gender gap as a matter of preference and choice. That is, 'if there are no women in our project, it must simply be their choice.' Women may have made a choice, but it was not based on whether they find the project interesting or have a contribution to make, but by the 'brogrammer' locker-room type of environment." According to Reagle, reducing the gap is important for Wikipedia as a whole: a male-dominated culture leads to more biased articles, and research has shown that the "collective intelligence of a group goes up with increased social sensitivity, conversational turn-taking, and female participation."
In brief
- Presidential library gets Wikipedian in Residence: On 17 January 2013, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced the appointment of a University of Michigan student as the Wikipedian in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library: "Michael Barera, a master's student in Michigan's School of Information, has been selected for the new internship position and charged with increasing and enhancing the library's presence on Wikipedia." Michigan website AnnArbor.com initially stated that the position was paid, but later corrected its entry to state that "Barera is not being compensated for his work." The university's news service published its own announcement of the collaboration on 17 January, pointing to the WikiProject's page on Wikipedia, Wikipedia:WikiProject Gerald Ford.
- Looking back at the SOPA blackout: The Boston Review published a retrospective on the 2012 SOPA blackout on 18 January 2013, "The Day Wikipedia Went Dark—Did It Save Internet Freedom?", arguing that "What the Wikipedia blackout teaches is that the preservation of the free Internet will rise or fall on the involvement and ingenuity of the people, not on courts or lawmakers. Wikipedia is a Web site, but it is also a community of thousands of volunteer writers around the world—so-called Wikipedians—who decided a year ago today to take a political stand for the first time in its existence. The decision ran counter to the site's apolitical stance and was in considerable tension with its overriding mission to spread free knowledge to the world. Nevertheless, they risked Wikipedia's position of neutrality, not to mention its reputation, to fight for the freedoms on the Internet they hold dear." The article concluded, "Even if the Internet blackout of 2012 is never repeated, it stands as an important lesson for generations to come: the Internet can't stop the next SOPA, but people can."
- Mormonism Wikipedia articles: The Latter-Day Saints website Meridian Magazine—sporting a yellow fundraising banner remarkably similar to Wikipedia's own—published a set of two articles critiquing Wikipedia's biography of Mormon figure Martin Harris on 22 and 23 January 2013, titled "Wikipedia's Deconstruction of Martin Harris" and "Wikipedia Attacks Martin Harris' Faith". The author, Roger Nicholson, stated, "In an attempt to abide by the Wikipedia guidelines to be unbiased and represent all sides of a story, the representation of Martin Harris has gone awry. An unbalanced mixture of facts and details taken out of context, have painted a picture of a man almost unrecognizable to Mormons. A better understanding of the misused quotes and the history of the region, as well as a desire to see the bigger picture, brings Martin Harris back into focus." The articles followed up on an earlier piece by Nicholson, "The Gospel Online: Who Should Define Mormonism on Wikipedia?", published last month.
- Lance Armstrong: On 24 January 2013, the Huffington Post published an article about the editing of the Lance Armstrong biography in the wake of the disgraced cyclist's interview with Oprah Winfrey, discussing his use of performance-enhancing drugs. Reviewing the to and fro the article had undergone since the doping scandal first hit the press, Huffington Post writer Sam Oakley concluded, "I find it quite comforting that this is the new way that history is being written. The number of edits to Armstrong's entry is slowing down and it seems that the apologists and the hardliners are reaching some sort of uneasy consensus that chronicles both his rise to, and fall from grace. In the place of a model where one or two historians decide how Armstrong is remembered we have what looks to have been a pretty well informed debate resulting in what looks to have been a pretty equitable solution."
- Deletion nomination receives attention: The Sydney Morning Herald and the Age were among Australian newspapers reporting on 27 January 2013 that the article Death of Jill Meagher was at risk of deletion, noting that "Ms Meagher's death created global headlines and resulted in two peaceful protests in Brunswick that attracted more than 30,000 people." (The AfD has since been closed as keep.)
Developers get ready for FOSDEM amid caching problems
Data centre migration and caching problems
As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia ("eqiad") took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida ("pmtpa") on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.
The main bug driving anonymous users' difficulties, bug #44391 ("old revisions of pages are shown when not logged in and also revision history is outdated"), was finally declared fixed at around 05:00 UTC on 28 January, although only time will tell if further fixes will be needed. After the migration, other miscellaneous problems with the cache for images and other uploads (both originals and thumbnails) appear to worsen and new ones emerge, mixed up with them. WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier shared an update on the current situation.
The data centre in Tampa will continue to be maintained as a "hot failover", with servers in standby mode, ready to take over should the primary site experience an outage. Additionally, the Signpost understands that the Tampa data centre will continue to be used for image scaling in the short term, before that too is migrated to Ashburn.
MediaWiki and Wikimedia developers prepare for conference
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At least a dozen volunteer and staff developers and technically-inclined Wikimedians are making their way to European conference FOSDEM this weekend, records show. The Belgian-led conference brings together open-source developers and advocates from around the world.
Right after that, the WMF Language engineering team will be flying to India for a two-week marathon of MediaWiki development and internationalization outreach, including attendance at the 2013 GNUnify conference. WMF developers will also be staging their own workshops at the Quark '13 conference on February 1 and 2 and at the Pune LanguageSummit on February 12 and 13, aiming to better take advantage of the rapidly growing Indian software development scene, which is already one of the largest in the world.
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 several weeks.
- SVN set to read-only: Most of the WMF-operated Subversion (SVN) was set to read-only this week, marking the penultimate step in the switchover to Git initiated in March last year. Internationalisation support for the extensions which used the repository had already been discontinued; virtually all extension developers have now switched over to Git or found alternative hosting, though a number of unmaintained extensions, none of which are deployed on Wikimedia wikis, are yet to be transferred. Some areas targeting non-extension-related projects such as pywikipedia remain writeable and there are no plans to delete any files for the foreseeable future (wikitech-l, server admin log).
- Re-enabling of disabled SpecialPages trialled: As of time of writing, tests are being run to evaluate the feasibility of the various solutions for bug #15434 ("Periodical run of currently disabled special pages"). Particularly observant readers may therefore come across occasional updates to reports, the data for which was previously between 4 and 9 years out of date.
- Job queue still imperfect: After weeks of wild variation, the job queue (which handles the processing of low priority tasks – "jobs" – such as updating category membership lists) grew once this week, up to a few million jobs for all wikis (rather than the usual few thousand), but may be getting better. Unfortunately no data can be shown because access to the site tracking portal ganglia.wikimedia.org is restricted for security reasons.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Opinion
Khan Academy's Smarthistory and Wikipedia collaborate
To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
Smarthistory started as a separate website that aimed to "emphasize the experience of looking at art by using unscripted conversations recorded in front of the work of art whenever possible, by incorporating numerous images and video, and by curating links to high-quality resources on the web." They joined the Khan Academy in October 2011 as a natural extension of their mission.
Collaboration between Smarthistory and Wikipedia was stimulated through the most unlikely forum, a Twitter conversation. According to Beth Harris, one of Smarthistory's co-founders, it started when she tweeted about the general public's tendency to almost exclusively go to Wikipedia instead of museums, if museums do not put their content online. Liam Wyatt, who is a pioneer in the GLAM-Wiki initiative, told the Signpost that he replied saying that the two could work together, even if Smarthistory's non-commercial Creative Commons license could not be changed to suit Wikipedia's more permissive CC-by-SA. Through subsequent emails, the idea of a limited collaboration developed.
Smarthistory shared with Liam a spreadsheet that juxtaposed Smarthistory's videos against their relevant Wikipedia articles. When this was posted on the cultural-partnerships-l mailing list, Peter Weis jumped in to wikify the spreadsheet and put it on-wiki, thus beginning the public partnership.
The Signpost asked Smarthistory's co-founders (Beth Harris and Steven Zucker) and Smallbones, who also played a major role in forming the project, what the goals of the Smarthistory–Wikipedia collaboration are, and where the results of this might be applied in other areas. From the Smarthistory side, Harris and Zucker are looking for a complement to the "critical, interpretive method that is central to our work"; they point out that Wikipedia's style and content meet that perfectly, fulfilling their goal. They said they are far from the only ones providing these sorts of open educational resources, and that there are many GLAMs out there with excellent text and video content that are ripe for collaboration. The problem, of course, is that not all GLAMs see the value in distributing their content around the Internet, though Harris and Zucker are confident that they will come around.
Smallbones, replying from the Wikipedian perspective, said that the project was about improving Wikipedia by using the reliable content uploaded by Smarthistory, and he hopes the project will move beyond simple {{external media}} links and will use Smarthistory as a reference within articles. To Smallbones, this is an especially important area in which to collaborate:
| “ | Reliability and expert opinion are especially important in art-related articles, where opinion and interpretation are always needed, but where ["no original research"] prevents an "ordinary editor" from offering his own interpretation. For example, while I may know that Grant Wood's American Gothic is a humorous, even mocking, painting, it can sometimes be amazingly difficult to go through the available academic literature (generally written for other academics) for a reference and find something so obvious to be clearly stated. Smarthistory gives us expert opinion with video that starts from the basics and moves through context, history, and interesting detail, all in 5 or 10 minutes. | ” |
There are pitfalls, though. Both Liam Wyatt and Smallbones told the Signpost that the challenge is to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Wyatt said he made clear that there was "no 'deal' or promise to link" to any Smarthistory videos, and Smallbones said that even the potential of being seen as "spamming" the videos is something to watch. He believes that the way around this is to encourage participants to consider including a Smarthistory video as a citation in place of a [citation needed] tag, or as the referenced cornerstone of a new article.
Looking forward, Smallbones said that there is much relatively easy work left to do, and "anybody can take the basic concept of using Smarthistory resources and run with it as far as they want to go." Harris and Zucker expressed similar feelings, as they look for the collaboration to grow as they continue to produce new videos and essays each week. As this content is being translated into many different languages, they are hopeful that other Wikipedias will join the Smarthistory–Wikipedia collaboration.
In brief
- Wikimania scholarships: Applications for scholarships to Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong are now being accepted. Both full and partial scholarships are available—covering airfare, lodging, and registration; and up to half of the estimated airfare, respectively. Applicants will be rated on their Wikimedia activity (both on- and off-wiki), their open-source activity more broadly, their interest in both Wikimania and the Wikimedia movement, and their grasp of English. Applications will be accepted until 23:59 UTC on 22 February.
- Monthly reports: The Wikimedia Foundation Report and Wikimedia Highlights from December 2012 have been published.
- Chapters association: The job of Secretary-General of the chapters association is now open for applications. The Secretary-General will be in charge of running the operational side of the association. In an unrelated development, the proposed name of the planned association ("Wikimedia Chapters Association") has run into problems, since the use of the name Wikimedia was inconsistent with the Wikimedia Foundation's trademark policy.
- Cultural Partnerships coordinator: Wikimedia DC has announced that Dominic McDevitt-Parks will be joining the chapter as its cultural partnerships coordinator.
- IdeaLab: The Wikimedia Foundation has opened up its IdeaLab, which in the words of Individual Engagement Grants Siko Bouterse, "is an incubator on meta for people to collaboratively build grant proposals, and get help and input from the community on ideas for new projects that could be developed into grant proposals." The community feedback aspect is strongly emphasized, as the foundation plans to take it into account in every proposal.
- Wikipedia Zero: The Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia Zero initiative has expanded again with a partnership with VimpelCom. The agreement means that at least 100 million new mobile users will be able to access Wikipedia for free.
- GLAM
- New Wikipedian-in-Residence: Michael Barera, a master's student at the University of Michigan's School of Information, is now the newest Wikipedian-in-Residence. He will serve as an intern at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. See this week's "In the media" coverage.
- Wikimedian-in-Residence opportunity: The British Natural History Museum and Science Museum, in company with Wikimedia UK, have jointly announced an opening for a Wikimedian-in-Residence.
- English Wikipedia
- New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the newest administrator, Lord Roem, who passed with 138 in support to 13 opposed. One request for adminship remains open, with 80% in support as of publishing time.
- Adminship reform: The newest request for comment (RfC) on the request for adminship process is in full swing, with the first round open for votes.
- Article feedback: The RfC on the article feedback tool is still open, with the majority view being (as of publishing time) that the tool should be removed from the English Wikipedia.
- Popular pages: The newest Top 25 report, a curated list of the most popular articles on the English Wikipedia, is available. In addition, a statistical analysis of the data behind the most popular pages will come out in the Signpost next week.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/In focus
Doncram continues
The Doncram case continues.
Open cases
Doncram (Week 3)
The case was filed in an attempt to remedy what was perceived as Doncram's continued unconstructive editing after the failure of previous community discussions and long-term blocks. (cf. SarekOfVulcan's statement)
In his response, Doncram stated that it was a combination of past encounters with other users, a host of ANI and AFD submissions, and perceived uncivil and bully-like behaviour directed at him that contributed to what he perceived as a "battleground atmosphere". He believes that the only way to remedy these issues is by addressing them through an arbitration case.
In light of the evidence present, among the remedies proposed in the workshop are those calling for a topic-ban or outright ban for Doncram, an interaction ban between Doncram and Orlady and SarekOfVulcan, and SarekOfVulcan's desysopping for "gross edit-warring". Workshop submissions and the posting of proposed decisions have been postponed until February 11. Evidence submissions have closed to all uninvolved parties. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-28/Humour