Wikipedia not so novel after all, except to UK university lecturers; EPOV instead of NPOV

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production"^[1] by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past. Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich tradition of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production.

"Compulsive collection" refers to the work of compiling encyclopedias that has traditionally been done by a few dedicated, tireless, detail-oriented individuals. Loveland and Reagle point out that, although Wikipedians share this compulsive behavior with past encyclopedists, the crucial distinction lies in the fact that the vast majority were motivated by money (even if this motive existed alongside more idealistic motivations) whereas Wikipedia editors are unpaid.

Loveland and Reagle use the term "stigmergic accumulation" to refer to the process of production by accretion onto a previous text. Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors, the authors argue, "building on their work and using the cumulative character of texts and knowledge as a ladder of sorts". Examples of existing texts included the use of a previous edition of an encyclopedia that ran into multiple editions, and the practice of borrowing between different encyclopedias that was sometimes illegal but more often viewed as "piratical" i.e. morally wrong.

The category of "corporate production" is used by Loveland and Reagle to describe the process of encyclopedic editing by a group – groups that topped a thousand contributors in the 20th century. Editors of early encyclopedias like Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in the 1700s faced the challenge of trying to coordinate the contributions of about 140 contributors in a similar way to Wikipedia having to confront issues of consistency that result in debates about how important a subject must be to merit an article. In contrast to other encyclopedias, write Loveland and Reagle, Wikipedia settles these debates through community decision-making and in the open. The authors also note that previous encyclopedias didn’t always recruit on the basis of expertise and that some recognized that it would be cheaper and sometimes more accurate to have non-experts summarizing the works of experts.

The authors conclude by writing that although Wikipedia is in some respects unique in terms of its size, its reliance on volunteers and nonprofit nature, the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are "numerous and significant". Their hope is that this paper "will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical material germane to the social scientist’s concerns (such as the motivations of encyclopedia-producers), and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia (such as what exactly should be counted as a contribution) have a lifespan exceeding the past decade."

The collaboration of the two authors began after Reagle had learned (via a summary in this research report) of a review where Loveland had criticized Reagle's 2010 book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization". The resulting paper has received media attention starting with an article in The Atlantic, see the February 4 issue of The Signpost.

A study titled "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions"^[2] analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, through qualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90-minute interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity with Web 2.0 educational tools, and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedia is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) "the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct," 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts about whether the Wikipedia crowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note: but of course...), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research "too easy" for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia's non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as "this is a commercial business; it wants to make money" and "they are obviously doing it from a business perspective", and another concerned about "politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]". All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also found that all five lecturers use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students about. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia's reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) "Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes." 2) "Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge." and 3) "Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff."

A research team from Barcelona Media Lab has put a preprint in arXiv recently,^[3] in which the sistership relation between cities is analyzed. Although the paper has little to say about Wikipedia in itself, the corresponding dataset is extracted from the English Wikipedia, which, according to the paper, hosts "the most extensive but certainly not complete collection of this kind of relationships". Although this statement could be argued, and no evidence is presented in the article to support that claim, it is striking that mass collaboration of Wikipedians can provide such an interesting package of information on a global scale.

After a description of the data extraction process, the paper presents a set of standard Complex Network analysis, e.g., degree distribution, clustering, average separation of nodes on the network, etc. While there is no surprise among the results of the network analysis, the interesting conclusion is about the effects of the geographical distance of sister cities: "the geographical distance has only a negligible influence when a city selects a sister city."

In a paper titled "Towards Content Neutrality in Wiki Systems"^[4] (an extended version of a conference keynote), a German computer scientist criticizes Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" policy as based on "an objectivist point of view" that is prominent in parts of the natural sciences, but is challenged in the fields of quantum physics, psychology and the social sciences, according to the author. He offers differences between language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Osama Bin Laden and the Mossad as further arguments against the NPOV concept. He admits that "two examples, based on machine translation and subjective classification by an author who wants to prove his point do not show anything", but claims that even more systematic studies "would suffer the same objection", proving "that the object under consideration, i.e., a neutral point of view, logically may be considered an ill-defined concept". However, it is still used on Wikipedia, and even ingrained in its architecture where the "linear version history evokes the illusion that there is one 'currently best' version of an article". To explain why so many Wikipedians do not accept his own logical conclusion, the author offers the psychological diagnosis of cognitive dissonance: "Accepting the illusion of NPOV, one does not have to live with never ending edit-wars on the ultimately right article and one does not have to suffer dissonant feelings in every article".

Heading back towards his own area of academic expertise, the author then outlines "a variant-augmented Wiki system" to modifying the linear versioning of usual wikis. He bases it on a proposed concept of "content neutrality" requiring "knowledge management platforms" "to store and provide content without any evaluation of its merit", modeled after network neutrality. He argues that "a collection of every-point-of-view, contradictory, possibly emotionally charged articles may provide a better approximation to reality than a synthetic and illusionary neutral point-of-view" and hopes that such a "content-neutral, EPOV knowledge base [has] a real chance of becoming a truly helpful instrument for science." Various possible problems with such an architecture are outlined, together with some suggested solutions, but the discussion remains brief and without detail ("The formal design and security analysis of low-level protocols are left to a later paper"). To protect against malicious site operators, the concept is extended to "distributed Wiki hubs". The paper mentions the existence of "a preliminary implementation as a MediaWiki plug-in prototype" and ongoing work on a use case "which can be described as a Wiki / Blog merge".

A section on related work cites a few earlier papers discussing distributed wikis or Wikipedia forks (out of many more, see e.g. this reviewer's "Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals").

• Mildly negative feedback makes newbies work harder: A paper^[5] to be presented at the upcoming Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'13) reports on a "field experiment on Wikipedia to test the effects of different feedback types (positive feedback, negative feedback, directive feedback, and social feedback) on members’ contribution." The team from Carnegie Mellon University left user talk page messages for 703 English Wikipedia editors who had recently created a new article. These messages (example) were varied to test the effect of the different feedback types on the user's subsequent activity. To the researchers' surprise, none of these had a significant effect on experienced users. But for new editors, "positive feedback and social messages increase people’s general motivation to work". Negative feedback and directive feedback still increased newbies' edits on the corresponding articles. The researchers note those negative messages (example: "I noticed there are some holes that may need filling: the references in the article do not follow Wikipedia guidelines") "were intentionally designed to be milder than negative feedback messages actually sent between Wikipedia editors" which other research has found to decrease participation. In a 2011 paper, three of the authors had studied similar phenomena in a non-participatory analysis (review: "How different kinds of leadership messages increase or decrease participation").
• Students editing at PhD level in APS Wikipedia initiative: Another conference paper for CHI'13^[6] reports on a project where 640 undergraduate and graduate students edited Wikipedia articles on scientific topics in 36 university courses. This classroom editing project was part of the US Association for Psychological Science's Wikipedia Initiative. The authors found that the "students substantially improved the scientific content of over 800 articles, at a level of quality indistinguishable from content written by PhD experts" (measured in a content persistence metric).
• Students unimpressed by professors' disapproval of Wikipedia: A paper on the factors affecting Wikipedia use,^[7] based on a survey of 184 undergraduate students in Singapore, has a few suggestive findings:

  Female students were more likely to use Wikipedia.

  Believing that authority figures (such as professors) disapprove of Wikipedia use did not affect students' likelihood of using Wikipedia.

  Peer influence—whether or not students think their friends use Wikipedia—was significantly correlated with Wikipedia use.

  Whether these findings hold true for larger and more diverse groups of students is an open question.

• Voting open for most important paper in Wikipedia research: As reported earlier, the French Wikimedia chapter is providing an award for the most influential paper published between 2003 and 2011. Out of more than 30 submissions, a jury of researchers has now selected five finalists, and until March 11 all Wikimedians are invited to vote to select the winning paper among them. Its authors will receive a grant of 2500 Euros.
• Teahouse compared to Help Desk: A workshop paper titled "How to ask questions the n00b way: designing social Q&A for new users^[8], presented at the CSCW 2013 "Workshop on Social Media Question Asking" covers the Teahouse, the support space for new editors launched on the English Wikpedia in 2012. It summarizes results from a longer paper presented at the same conference, which has been covered in the December issue of this research report. These include a survey among participants indicating that the Teahouse was generally well-received, and a comparison of edit rates showing, somewhat unsurprisingly, that newbies who followed an invitation to join the Teahouse tended to make more edits than those who ignored the invitation. (No attempt was made to measure the effect of invitations directly by comparing with non-invited newbies, because of the possible bias caused by Teahouse hosts avoiding inviting editors whose first edits do not seem productive.) Questions in the Teahouse generated more responses than those on the Help Desk, the English Wikipedia's longer-running help forum which is less focused on social elements and new editors.
• Predicting admin elections based on social network analysis: A paper^[9] modeled all admin elections on the Polish Wikipedia (since 2005) based on "multidimensional behavioral social networks derived from the Wikipedia edit history" of candidates and voters, finding that "we can classify the votes in the RfA procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be sufficient to recommend candidates." (See also our review of an earlier paper by the same authors: "What it takes to become an admin: Insights from the Polish Wikipedia")
• "Analysing the Entire Wikipedia History with Database Supported Haskell": Four researchers from Germany describe^[10] a technique that allowed them to scale a quantitative analysis from a Wikisym 2010 paper (that had examined the collaboration on a smaller sample of 4,733 articles and 4,679 users) to the entire revision history of the German Wikipedia.
• Traffic analysis report and research ethics: The Signpost's special report titled "Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles: catalysts, trends, and applications"^[11] gave an overview of several research topics regarding pageviews on the English Wikipedia, including a list "the most viewed pages on Wikipedia in a one hour period" since 2010 that generated media attention, e.g. in the Atlantic ("If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing at the Super Bowl Half-Time Show"). The report also discusses possible causes of such page view spikes, and applications of research on pageviews, such as focusing efforts to improve article quality and assessing the impact of vandalism. The latter idea drew from earlier studies of one of the authors, including an experiment that had generated controversy in 2010 and caused the English Wikipedia's ArbCom to block the author temporarily, as reported in the Signpost at the time: "Large scale vandalism revealed to be 'study' by university researcher". A recent paper about research ethics that the author coauthored with his doctoral advisor and two others^[12] criticized the University of Pennsylvania's institutional review board for its hesitant approval of the 2010 experiment, justified the lack of advance notification of Wikipedia community (because it would have biased the results of the experiment) and also talks about the "extremely mixed" response from reviewers of the resulting paper (reviewed in the September 2011 issue of this research report: "Link spam research with controversial genesis but useful results").
• "Faces of Wikipedia" dataset: Two researchers from the École Polytechnique de Montréal have compiled^[13] a database with facial images of over 50,000 Wikipedia article subjects, used to test facial recognition algorithms.
• Detecting news events from Wikipedia edits: A paper to be presented at the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval^[14] describes the detection of "real-world events such as political conflicts, natural catastrophes, and new scientific findings" from Wikipedia edits. Apart from bursts (peaks) in the editing activity of an article, another indicator used is the appearance of a current or recent date in the diff of an edit.
• Evidence for damage caused by personal attacks and wikilawyering: A preprint titled "Stay on the Wikipedia Task: When task-related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts" ^[15] reported on an analysis of 96 Wikipedia articles and the corresponding talk pages which found "that when group members’ disagreements – originally task-related – escalate into personal attacks or hinge on procedure, these disagreements impede group performance."
• Corpus of 200+ research papers on Wikipedia from 2012: With this monthly research update having completed its second volume recently, we have released a bibliographical dataset listing all of the more than 200 academic publications that were covered in 2012.

2013-02-25

"Very lucky" Picture of the Year

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By The ed17

The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest (POTY) has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. Second place went to NASA's Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, and third place to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert.

The contest

The competition was organized into two rounds, and users who had at least 75 edits on any Wikimedia project before 1 January 2013 were eligible to vote.

The first round consisted of all of the images that ran on the Commons' main page in 2012. Users were allowed to vote for as many pictures as they wanted. With 631 votes, Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 received the most; Darvasa gas crater panorama crop ran a close second with 626.

In the second round, users were only allowed to vote for one picture. The second round's candidates were selected by votes: the top 36 pictures from the first round, along with eight additional images that were in categories not represented by the top 36. With 347 votes, Pair of Merops apiaster feeding not only beat the next-closest competitor by 43 votes, it managed to overcome a 254-vote difference from the first round, where it came in a stunning 24th. The first round winners (Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 and Darvasa gas crater panorama crop) finished in ninth and eighth place, respectively.

The images

Pair of Merops apiaster feeding was taken by Pierre Dalous. Dalous started contributing images to the Commons only last year, and even before this, he had never participated in a photo contest. While he has only 113 edits and uploaded 24 images, 11 are now featured thanks to User:Lemon.

Taking the picture required finding a perch frequented by the European bee-eater, but the location and time windows were limited: the bird will normally frequent rivers so that it has a steady source of food (e.g. dragonflies) and a place to construct a nest, which it likes to do in eroded banks and slopes near rivers. In addition, the birds are migratory and only present in France from roughly April to September; this time was further limited by the 22 hours a day with inadequate light, leaving only two where Dalous could take the shot.

Dalous captured the birds with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 7D camera with an f/4 Canon EF 300mm lens. He told us that the birds do not take long to enjoy their prey, so his major challenge was to catch both birds in the act while keeping them in focus. Dalous called the eventual result, which won him the POTY, "very lucky".

A senior Commons editor told the Signpost:

“

In my view some of the technical aspects of the image were achieved with great skill. While the right side of the branch is a bit out of focus and the under chin of left bird is shadowed, the action frame and the composition of the birds are excellent. I particularly like the forked shape on the branch that mirrors the beak. And there's inadvertently an almost human look in the bird about to catch the insect: look at its eye.

”

The second place image, Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, was published by the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It shows a coronal mass ejection leaving the Sun at over 900 miles per hour (1,400 km/h). Capturing this image required NASA to record it in the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. One Commons reviewer commented that "the wow factor is great here! ... I thought this was an artist's impression."

Third place went to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert. Krause, a German Wikipedian, told the Signpost that he has uploaded many images in the past—roughly 120 this year alone—and has 17 featured pictures to his name. In addition, he had two finalists in the 2010 POTY contest alone (Schwappender Wein, in eighth place; Eilean Donan Castle Panorama, in fifteenth). He also participates in German Wikipedia photo-related WikiProjects, like Projekt Fotoflüge.

Krause's third place picture was inspired by one of his earlier images, Glühwedel brennt durch. This image highlights the gas coming out of a cracked light bulb. From this grew the idea of making a light bulb 'explode' with the help of an airsoft gun.

Capturing this image was no small feat, though. Krause remarked that getting the photo right required fine-tuning his flashes to 1/4000 seconds to "freeze" the scene. In addition, a trigger was required, so that when the gun was fired, the camera would capture the moment soon after impact. Krause constructed a full photo set in about an hour, taking care to account for flying glass fragments from the exploding bulbs. Finding the perfect combination then took nine lightbulbs, frequent corrections to the gun and trigger, and experimenting with the voltage supplied to the bulbs. In all, Krause said that it took him about three hours to take the photo.

The camera used was a Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 70mm-200 2.8 VR1 set at a 160mm focal length. The bulb was 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) away.

Aftermath

The POTY contest organizers were very proud of this year's competition. The Signpost emailed User:Mono, User:Miya, and User:Beria, all members of the POTY organizing committee, for their opinions on the competition. Mono and Beria told us that the participation in the contest was far higher than previous years: this year, roughly 3200 and 4000 people voted in rounds one and two (respectively), as opposed to 2011's 1393 and 1178, and 2010's 1722 and 2400. The members also highlighted the growing difficulty of winning the contest. Miya pointed to this post, while Mono said that "It's always been a dilemma when some people are disappointed that certain unique and valuable images were left out. It's a delicate balance between preserving the popular vote and ensuring that everything gets a fair shake in the competition."

According to Beria, the competition was also much easier to run this year, as much of the coding was done last year, and the contest was translated into 29 languages. Mono emphasized the early timing of this year's contest when compared to previous years. Last year's competition (see Signpost coverage) ended in June; this year's ended in February. The difference was in when the preparations for holding the contest began. For this, Mono told us that the organizing team started in November 2012, whereas in past years they have started in March or April of the following year.

In addition, a 2014 calendar comprised of the top 12 images from this year's POTY will be published by the Wikimedia Store. Those interested in being notified when it comes out may sign up here.

Overall, the organizers believed that this was at the least a highly successful contest. Mono said "we're very pleased with this year's contest. ... I'm proud to say that this was the most successful contest we've ever had", while Miya thanked the users who either contributed or voted in the competition.

Arbcom good governance and WMF ties

User:Coren, an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, has disclosed that he has accepted a position with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Tools Lab Operations Engineer beginning 25 February 2013. His duties will revolve around the upcoming widely debated transition of the traditional Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs. Coren acknowledged the potential conflict-of-interest between arbitrating and his new job, but he "anticipate[d] no interaction between that position and my responsibilities to the Arbitration Committee, and [could] think of no plausible scenario where [his] work with the Foundation would ever constitute a conflict of interest."

Reaction to the news was initially tentatively positive, with some opposition developing later. Overall, supporters saw no problem with Coren's dual roles, so long as he took care to recuse himself in any possible conflict of interest. Snowolf recalled past WMF employees who "have served in highly sensitive volunteer positions in the past without major problems that I'm aware of (Bastique and Guillom as Stewards, I believe)". The most prominent dissent came from fellow arbitrator User:Risker, who stated:

“

There is an ongoing perception that the Committee is heavily influenced by the WMF, and that the WMF and its Board are in turn significantly influenced by the Arbitration Committee. Sometimes, there is at least some truth to that perception. We had one case in the past year where interactions between the Committee and WMF staff played a key role; this came to light only in the voting phase, where it would have been too late for Coren to recuse had he been an arbitrator at the time, and would have adversely affected the outcome of the case no matter what it turned out to be. Just within the past week, the Board of Trustees has cited an Arbcom decision to explain in part their reason for withholding support of a fairly significant movement organization, and there was discussion and concern about that possibility even at the time of the decision. ... Do I think Coren has a genuine conflict of interest on a daily basis? Not at all. Do I think that his concurrent employment with the WMF and membership on the Arbitration Committee will be distracting and drama-inducing, laced with periodic conflicts of interest? That's extremely likely. The work of the Arbitration Committee is challenging enough without getting sidetracked by a constant need to address perceived conflicts of interest. I don't see WMF employment and Arbitration Committee membership as a good match.

”

Comments are still being made on Coren's disclosure page, though it was nominally closed on 18 February

In brief

• Chapters Association: Nominations for the new chair of the proposed chapters association are open. The election will begin on 6 March. Ashley Van Haeften, the outgoing chair, stated that the election was being held early due to pressure from the Wikimedia Foundation trustees regarding his ban from the English Wikipedia, something which caused much controversy in the wake of his election last July. He hopes that this election will be different than his, which was unopposed: "I strongly recommend that this is a contested election ... I was uncomfortable that my appointment [was] without contest. In my view, this was a weak demonstration of our democratic process."
• Quarterly review: Notes from the second quarterly review, focusing on the Wikipedia Zero team, have been published.
• Term limits for trustees?: The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has decided to not enact term limits for trustees, but reiterated a commitment to "implement better and more transparent processes to assess appointed Board members (without compromising the privacy of those board members)."
• Wikizine revival: Wikizine, a newsletter formerly published by User:Walter, has been revived by User:Mono. Its first edition is available at wikizine.org.
• New English Wikipedia administrators: User:Secret passed RfA with 109 in support to 35 against, and User:West.andrew.g passed with 106 in support to 10 against. The four successful RfAs in January, combined with the three in February, make seven administrators promoted so far in 2013. This figure is 25% of the administrators promoted last year (28), and if the trend continues, would make a 50% increase in administrators over the full year of 2013.
• US government moves on open access: The Access2Research movement appears to have produced tangible results (see Signpost background), with the US government's new directive "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research" (PDF). This states, in part, that "The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) hereby directs each Federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the Federal Government."
• Ombudsman commission: The Ombudsman commission, which investigates complaints about violations of the privacy policy, is being flown to San Francisco to discuss the role the commission will play in project processes, among other topics. There is also a call for opinions on the remit of the commission on the English Wikipedia.
  
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2013-02-25

Wikivoyage links; overcategorization

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By J36miles

Proposals

WebCite proposal

Link rot is a problem for references on Wikipedia. WebCite is currently used to prevent linkrot by providing archives of the links. However, WebCite will stop accepting links if its fundraising goals aren't met, so concerned editors started a proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation to take over the WebCite service. There is also a suggestion to revive the dormant ArchiveLinks extension.

Adjusting "Era style" section in MOS:NUM

An adjustment to the dates and numbers section of the manual of style is under discussion. This adjustment would aim to end the editwarring that occurs due to confusing wording.

Wikivoyage links

It was suggested that Wikivoyage links be added to articles about cities and countries. This would be used to increase traffic towards Wikivoyage. While these articles already contain links near the bottom of the article, these articles tend to be long which stops some readers from getting to the bottom of the article.

R4 Speedy deletion criteria

This new criterion would include any redirect that points to a non-English page on a different wiki.

Requests for comment

Request for Adminship reform

The request for adminship process is currently under discussion. The current round of voting, Round Two, will end a few days early, this Saturday. After that, everyone is invited to attempt to determine what compromise proposal will get the broadest support, based on the results of Round Two. Round Three will be a one-week up-or-down vote on that compromise.

Recurring items in the news

Currently there is a notable Recurring items list for the In the news section. This contains a list of pre-approved notable events that would be included in the news section. However, users believe that the list no longer serves its original purpose.

Community-imposed sanctions

A request for comment was started to try and come up with a framework for how sanctions imposed by the community are handled.

Overcategorization

It had been suggested to review 3 related categorization guidelines (WP:DEFINING,WP:COP#N and WP:BLPCAT) and to clarify them better and to add links to them.

Gibraltar-related DYKs

It has been suggested that the previous restrictions placed on Gibraltar-related DYKs be lifted.

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2013-02-25

Blue birds be bouncin'

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By Crisco 1492

Blue birds, by JJ Harrison

Black-naped Monarch

Siberian Blue Robin

White-rumped Shama

This edition covers content promoted between 17 and 23 February 2013.

Featured articles

Six featured articles were promoted this week:

• Rakoto Frah (nom) by Lemurbaby. Frah (1923–2001) was a flutist and composer from Madagascar who is one of the most acclaimed sodina players. Born to a poor family, he received national recognition in 1958. In the 1980s he began to go international, recording ten albums and performing in collaboration with numerous artists. He lived simply and died having earned little from his lifetime of musicianship.
• California State Route 52 (nom) by Rschen7754. State Route 52 is an American state highway that extends east–west from La Jolla, San Diego, to Santee. This 17 mile (27 km) stretch began construction in 1958 and received an official designation in 1964, but owing to funding issues was only completed in 2011.
• Andrew Johnson (nom) by Wehwalt. Johnson (1808–1875) served as President of the United States from 1865 to 1869, coming to office after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who had already spent 20 years in politics, he worked towards the quick restoration of the former Confederate States to the Union and ignored former slaves' rights. This led him to often come into conflict with the majority-Republican congress, and he was impeached and almost removed from office.
• Battle of the Bismarck Sea (nom) by Hawkeye7. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea lasted from 2 to 4 March 1943 and was part of the Pacific War of World War II. US and Australian aircraft attacked a 16-ship Japanese convoy intended to reinforce troops in New Guinea, sinking most of it. The Japanese suffered more than 2,890 casualties – with several thousand more troops saved from the water – while the Allies lost only 13 aircrew. Ultimately, the Japanese could not hold New Guinea.
• United States v. Lara (nom) by GregJackP. United States v. Lara was a US Supreme Court case which held that both the State and a Native American (Indian) tribe could prosecute an Indian for the same acts that constituted crimes in both jurisdictions, as they were held to be separate sovereigns. As such, separate tribal and federal prosecutions did not violate the Double Jeopardy Clause. In this case Billy Jo Lara pleaded guilty to tribal charges but claimed double jeopardy for the Federal charges.
• Dobroslav Jevđević (nom) by PRODUCER and Peacemaker67. Jevđević (1895–1962) was a Bosnian Serb politician and soldier in Yugoslavia during World War II. After the Axis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, Jevđević appointed himself Chetnik commander and worked together with the occupying forces against the Yugoslav Partisans. During Operation Alfa in 1942, Jevđević and other other Chetnik forces were responsible for killing over 500 civilians. In the spring of 1945, he fled to Italy where he resided until his death.

Featured lists

Three featured lists were promoted this week:

• List of international cricket centuries by AB de Villiers (nom) by The Rambling Man and Sahara4u. South African cricketer Abraham Benjamin de Villiers has scored 15 centuries at One Day Internationals and 13 at tests. His most recent was on 3 February 2013.
• Lou Gehrig Memorial Award (nom) by Bloom6132. The Lou Gehrig Memorial Award is given annually to a Major League Baseball player considered to best exhibit the character and integrity of Lou Gehrig. The award was established in 1955.
• List of counties in West Virginia (nom) by Coal town guy. The US state of West Virginia consists of 55 counties; all but five had already been formed when the state was admitted to the Union in 1863. Kanawha County is home to the most people, while Randolph County is the most spacious.

Featured pictures

Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:

• Euphorbia canariensis (nom; related article), created by Cayambe and nominated by Tomer T. E. canariensis is a plant endemic to the Canary Islands. Although it resembles cacti, it is actually a spurge.
• Curiosity (rover) (nom; related article), created by NASA and nominated by Crisco 1492. Curiosity is a car-sized robotic rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission (MSL).
• Marsh Sandpiper (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The Marsh Sandpiper (Tringa stagnatilis) is a small wader. It is a rather small shank, and breeds in open grassy steppe and taiga wetlands from easternmost Europe to central Asia.
• Pacific Golden Plover (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The Pacific Golden Plover (Pluvialis fulva) is a medium-sized plover.
• Curlew Sandpiper (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The Curlew Sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea) is a small wader that breeds on the tundra of Arctic Siberia. It is strongly migratory, wintering mainly in Africa, but also in south and southeast Asia and in Australasia.
• Kikin Hall (nom; related article), created by Florstein and nominated by Alborzagros. The Kikin Hall, commissioned in 1714, is one of the oldest buildings in Saint Petersburg, Russia. It now houses a music school.
• Menier Chocolate factory (nom; related article), created by Myrabella and nominated by Tomer T. This factory, belonging to Menier chocolate, was designed by Jules Saulnier and often cited as the first true skeleton structure, with exterior walls needing only simple infill.
• HMS Hood (nom; related article), created by Allan C. Greens, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden. HMS Hood was the last battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy. Commissioned in 1920, it was ultimately sunk by the Bismark in 1941.
• X-10 Graphite Reactor (nom; related article), created by Ed Westcott and nominated by James086. The X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was the world's second artificial nuclear reactor. It was used during the Manhattan Project.
• Black-naped Monarch (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The Black-naped Monarch (Hypothymis azurea) is a slim and agile bird found in South and Southeast Asia. This specimen, a male, was found in Thailand.
• Siberian Blue Robin (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The Siberian Blue Robin (Luscinia cyane) is a small passerine bird found in Asia. Although adult males are very bright, others are quite drab.
• White-rumped Shama (nom; related article), by JJ Harrison. The White-rumped Shama (Copsychus malabaricus) is a small passerine bird native to South and Southeast Asia. Although shy, it is very territorial.

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2013-02-25

How to measure a WikiProject's workload

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By Mabeenot

Your source for

WikiProject News

• Editors are seeking help to revive WikiProject Dutch Municipalities
• This is the last week of the February Wikification Drive, so earn your barnstar today!
• Sign up for the March Copy Edit Backlog Drive and earn a barnstar when the drive begins this Friday
• A new issue of the WikiProject NASCAR Newsletter has been released
• Curious about WikiProjects? Ask us a question at the WikiProject desk and you could see the answer in a future issue of the Signpost!

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

As the editor of the WikiProject Report, one of the most common questions I receive from readers (and a frequent inquiry at Database Reports and the WikiProject Council) asks how WikiProjects can be measured. The most visible way of measuring WikiProjects is the article assessment system which provides the total number of articles tagged with a project's banner as well as breakdowns of how many articles have received various class and importance ratings. Other metrics include rankings of WikiProjects by their total number of articles, the number of edits to the project's pages, and how many editors are watching the project's talk page. But how can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Luckily, several prominent projects have been doing that for years. Their answer: WikiWork.

WikiWork is a concept originally developed in April 2007 that approximates how many classes or "steps" a project's articles need to ascend for all of the project's articles to reach Featured status. WikiWork encompasses several formulas that can provide different views of a project's workload, but the most used formula and the best way to compare WikiProjects of different sizes is called "relative WikiWork" or the average workload per article. This involves adding up the number of steps all of the project's articles must pass to reach Featured status (with A-class articles considered one step, Good Articles two steps, B-class three steps, etc.) and then dividing this number by the total number of articles under the project's scope, including articles that have already reached Featured status. The resultant number will be between zero and six with lower numbers considered more desirable. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject Aircraft is 4.693, meaning that the average article about aircraft is between C-class and start-class. By comparison, WikiProject Elements has a less daunting workload with a relative WikiWork rating of 3.600 while WikiProject Olympics is bogged down with relative WikiWork of 5.829.

In addition to comparing WikiProjects, WikiWork can be tracked over time to gauge a project's productivity. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject U.S. Roads has decreased from around 5.6 in 2008 to about 4.5 today (see graph to the right) showing that the project has had some success in improving articles to higher classes and/or trimming unnecessary stubs. A helpful calculator is available to determine the various WikiWork statistics for your WikiProject.

As with all statistical data, there are some caveats that should be taken into account. Among these caveats are ensuring that the project is large enough for any statistical analysis to be significant and checking that the project's article assessments are accurate before using them to determine WikiWork. Furthermore, WikiWork focuses on articles, excluding lists and portals which typically do not receive comparable ratings other than being Featured or not. To learn the full details about how WikiProjects use WikiWork and the limits of WikiWork data, we interviewed Scott5114 who originated the concept of WikiWork, Hurricanehink who uses WikiWork at WikiProject Tropical Cyclones, as well as Fredddie and Rschen7754 from WikiProject U.S. Roads.

What inspired the concept of WikiWork? How was this metric originally intended to be used? Have the formulas been altered over the years to take into account any changes in Wikipedia's assessment system?

Scott5114: The U.S. Roads project was feeling somewhat inadequate at the time that the WP:1.0 assessment scheme was first introduced. Our stats looked worse than the tropical cyclone project, but we had no way of easily comparing them. I originally created WikiWork as a five-point scale; since FA status is considered the "end goal" of sorts for each article, that was assigned a score of zero, and then each class below that was assigned a score that represented the number of classes to get to FA, so for A-class it was one, GA-class, it was two, and so on, down to stubs being five (there was no C-class yet). This gives you the total WikiWork score (ω), which is the number of classes that a project must improve by in order for all articles to be FA. Divide that by the number of articles in the project, and you get the relative WikiWork score (Ω), which represents the project's average article. This latter number is the one that is used most frequently, as you can use it to easily compare one project to another, and also compare the state of your project to how it stood in the past. The scale has been altered once, to address the addition of C-Class to the WP:1.0 scheme. C-Class was assigned a value of 4, start was bumped to 5, and stub went to 6. Other specialty classes that have been added since then, like the list, template, future, and project classes, have been left out of the WikiWork formula, since it is intended to only represent the state of a project's assessed articles.

How can the WikiWork metrics be applied to the everyday operation of a WikiProject? What kinds of goals or initiatives can use WikiWork as a measure of success?

Hurricanehink: For the tropical cyclone Wikiproject, we mainly use WikiWork in terms of our storms and season articles, since those are easy to quantify and compare from year to year. Using a Google documents file that various project members routinely edit, we compare the various tropical cyclone basins' overall quality. I use it to emphasize Atlantic seasons from 1950 to present, since those are, in general, the most commonly viewed articles in the project. There, we can see which seasons need the most work, and where we should focus.

Scott5114: In the U.S. Roads project, we often use WikiWork to compare the progress of different state task forces relative to one another. We have a "leaderboard" that lists out the WikiWork statistics for each state, and there is a lot of friendly competition surrounding this leaderboard that motivates people to improve articles. For 2013, we are working on a goal of getting the entire project to a WikiWork of 4.400.

Fredddie: One way to look at relative WikiWork is that it's a snapshot of what the project's average article looks like. This works great for the U.S. Roads project because we assess our articles based on the presence and quality of content. I can look at the project's relative WikiWork (currently 4.545, between a C and a Start) and know that the average article has X or Y and parts of Z. If they haven't already, other projects can do the same by defining what an article within their scope should look like at each class and then conduct an assessment audit to make sure articles are falling in line.

Rschen7754: The U.S. Roads project also produce many charts and graphs on a regular basis that are based largely off these numbers and are regularly updated. They can be found at WP:USRD/A/VA.

Does the size of a WikiProject impact the usefulness of WikiWork? How can editors use the WikiWork metrics to compare the workload and productivity of WikiProjects?

Hurricanehink: I think WikiWork is better in a larger project with subdivisions, since you can see the quality levels among various topics. If it's too small, then I don't think the comparisons would work.

Scott5114: WikiWork can be used by both large and small projects, but in different ways. In large projects with many task forces and subdivisions like U.S. Roads, you can create competition between the task forces that serves as a motivation tool. You can't do that so much in smaller projects, but you can compare your stats to Wikipedia as a whole or other WikiProjects, and for any project it is a great way to track your progress over time. It is a lot easier to keep slugging away at the seemingly never-ending article expansion treadmill when you can see progress being made by the relative WikiWork number going down.

Fredddie: I agree with Scott. One thing I like about the U.S. Roads WikiProject's use of WikiWork is that we break down stats by state task force. Like Scott said, we can then compare the different task forces against each other or we can compare a task force against the entire project. If you were to look at the project's "leaderboard", you can see where most of our editors are working as those state task forces are at or near the top of the page. Areas that get low editing traffic tend to be towards the bottom of the page. Then it is up to the project to incentivize working on articles in those lower reaches of the project.

What assumptions does the WikiWork formula make about the state of a project's articles? How does this limit or caveat the use of WikiWork data?

Hurricanehink: Projects have to actively use A-class and B-class for it to be effective. In the hurricanes project, we don't often use it, so every so often (as we did last night, incidentally), we go through articles and upgrade them to either of the two. Since Wikiwork evenly distributes points based on each class, it can be unrepresentative if a project doesn't actively use those classes.

Scott5114: Projects have to keep on top of their article assessments in order for the statistic to reflect reality—editors need to adjust the assessment when they expand the article, or else you will end up with inaccurate assessments, and thus an inaccurate WikiWork. It helps to have a more specialized guideline for what puts each article in each class so that you can reduce subjectivity in the assessments.

Fredddie: WikiWork assumes that every article is assessed. If a project has 50 assessed articles and a relative WikiWork of 2.0 (let's assume they're all Good Articles), but has 30 articles awaiting assessment, you are not getting the full picture. If 29 of those unassessed articles are Stubs and the other is a List, the project's real relative WikiWork is 3.468 (between B and C). On the other hand, knowing that there are 116 class improvements, that is, moving from Stub to Start to C, etc., before those 29 articles become Good Articles gives editors a clear goal with a magic number.

To date, WikiWork is actively incorporated into the initiatives of only three WikiProjects. What has prevented this concept's spread? Is it adaptable to the unique needs of other WikiProjects? Are there any tools available to simplify the calculation of WikiWork metrics for mathematically challenged editors?

Hurricanehink: I personally love it, since it's the sabermetrics of Wikipedia articles (or, more lamely put, a statistical geek's delight). People not as into statistics might be apprehensive at using it, particularly with how detailed the numbers can get. However, like ERA or RBI, it's a pretty basic stat that I think only needs a little education to be spread, provided it's used for a sufficiently large project.

Scott5114: I think it's mostly a publicity thing—most people never happen across it unless they're in a project already using it, since the U.S. Roads Project's WikiWork stuff is buried a couple levels down in our project page structure. A lack of calculation tools probably limited it initially—it was a chore to keep up with because we had to manually calculate everything with a spreadsheet and update the tracking pages by hand. Now that we can have the server calculate it with use of expr functions, and we have the WP:1.0 bot generating a WikiWork table for us whenever we get assessment updates, it is a lot easier. The formula is simple enough that anyone can make a basic calculator in their favorite spreadsheet program. There is also an online calculator available.

In what ways does the information gleaned from WikiWork complement or supplement Wikipedia's other metrics of WikiProject performance? What additional metrics are needed to give editors a clearer picture of the activity, productivity, and anticipated needs of a WikiProject?

Fredddie: This may be an assumption, but I think most people who would be interested in implementing WikiWork in their project are familiar with their regular editors and know in what areas they edit. No one tool is definitive, but WikiWork can show if Wikipedia is improving as a result of an editor or editors in a certain task force.

• For instance, if the Useractivity tool shows an editor has 70,000 edits and WikiWork shows that editor's area is around 4.850 (just above Stub class), maybe that's a sign to give that editor some help. But then again, that editor may be more involved elsewhere.
• Popular pages, if your project is lucky enough to have it currently, is great because it shows where our readers are going. Ultimately, what we're doing here is for our readers, so it's good to know where our energy should be spent. Then it's up to the project to coordinate working on the articles at the top of the list.
• The HotArticles tool shows where the project's energy is being spent. It probably isn't the best tool to compare with WikiWork for that reason. Looking at HotArticles for the U.S. Roads project, out of the 20 articles listed, 6 of them were at the project's A-Class Review and WP:FAC at some point in the last year. Three other articles were contentious for various reasons, so it shows the good and the bad.

The best metric to WikiProject performance, I think, is healthy discussion on the project's talk page. It doesn't have to be edited continuously, but if a talk page is fairly active, only then will WikiWork and the other metrics used together give a clear picture of what is needed and where.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Scott5114: Projects looking into adopting WikiWork should be warned that it is pretty easy to abuse the system. You can manipulate it easily by failing to tag poor articles, having them deleted, doing bad merges, improperly tagging articles as lists, etc. Editors have to remember that the statistic exists to improve the encyclopedia, and not just for its own sake, and avoid the perverse incentives that statistic create. Anything that makes the stats look better but hurts the project shouldn't be done. We have had a few critics of the WikiWork concept who say that it has turned our project into a "role-playing game" concerned only with putting up a good score and resulted in a reluctance for editors to add new articles or to edit outside of their favorite task force. I feel that these concerns are off-base in our particular project, but they could certainly become an issue elsewhere.

Rschen7754: I think that with the current attitude of many editors that a lot of our content is not of high quality over 12 years into the project, WikiWork can be a useful tool if adopted more widely. This will give people clear direction as to where to go with an article and in a subject area, concentrating their efforts. It doesn't work for everyone or every project, but for some places it would be helpful.

Next week, we'll change the channel. Until then, grab your remote and tune in to our previous reports in the archive.

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2013-02-25

Wikidata development to be continued indefinitely

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By Jarry1250

German chapter commits to further Wikidata development

German chapter Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) committed itself this week to funding the Wikidata development team past the original 31 March deadline, ending fears that the delays the project suffered during its first phase would translate into phase three being abandoned.

By the time of the switchover, phase one will be all but complete and a framework phase two is likely to be in place on some if not all wikis. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly clear that its third phase (dynamic lists) will still be in the design phase on that date. According to the blog post accompanying WMDE's decision, one of the goals of the new development phase will be to rectify that and to 'flesh out' the phase 2 implementation to support other data types, most notably co-ordinates. A further goal sees Wikidata deployed on projects other than Wikipedias. Throughout, commentators will be watching to see if the self-described "biggest technical project that a chapter of the Wikimedia movement has ever undertaken" can be brought to proper fruition in a reasonable timespan.

The big question that remains is financial. The first year of Wikidata's development was funded by grants from donors interested in its potential role as a general data repository, including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (approximately €600,000), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (~€300,000) and Google (~€300,000). That €1.3 million (equivalent to US$1.6 million) supported eight full-time developers and four support staff for a year; the plan now is for "a team of eight", implying a cost of around €850,000 euros per annum. The chapter say they will raise that "by means of donations", from "additional partners" if necessary. If the number of Wikidata enthusiasts is anything to go by, it'll be money well spent.

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.

• Onboarding profiled: The Wikimedia Foundation's "Onboarding" project, which aims to get more registered users editing, was profiled in a post on the Wikimedia blog. The scheme initially focusses on welcoming users and providing them with ideas on how and where to contribute. The results were modest but positive, the post recalls: "users given the new interface were significantly more likely to try to edit (+4.3%), and more of them also completed their first edit to content (+1.8%) within a day of registration". In related news, Wikimedia Commons is to become one of the first wikis outside the English Wikipedia to install code generated by the WMF's E3 team. Following a user request, it will gain post-edit feedback ("Your edit was saved.") and the newer Guided Tours facility.
  
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