Sex and drug tourism—Wikivoyage's soft underbelly?

• Wikivoyage on Tijuana, Mexico: "The primary purpose of most visits to the Zona Norte involves prostitution. ... The usual rate is 200 Mexican pesos (sometimes 150 pesos, especially for locals) for a 20-minute session, with rooms costing 40-70 Mexican pesos. ... [The Hong Kong bar's] major attraction (besides the ladies themselves) is that they regularly have shows where two ladies perform lesbian acts while covered in shaving cream. Occasionally there will also be a show where a male audience member is brought onto the stage where two ladies perform sex acts on him."
• Wikivoyage on Vietnam: "prostitution is abundant in Vietnam, ... Many massage parlours and other businesses provide sex services at very low rates".
• Wikivoyage on Cambodia: "Heroin is very high grade in SE Asia and foreigners requesting cocaine are sometimes provided with it instead. ... enforcement tends to be on the lax side and many guesthouses are permanently shrouded in purple haze ... Marijuana in Cambodia is also often of much higher quality than elsewhere in SE Asia and sold for extremely low prices. While not overtly advertised, a quick ask at most bars, restaurants, or guest houses can generally get you what you need with little hassle."
• Wikivoyage on the Netherlands: "alcohol and weed can be a very nice and trippy experience, especially for people who don't feel enough from just smoking weed."
• Wikivoyage on Amsterdam: "Regardless of the strength, your first experience [with cannabis] can be quite a sensation at first, but will quickly decrease in intensity. You may want to plan to return to your hotel and "hole up" for a couple hours until you become comfortable with the feeling. ... The first time you try [magic mushrooms] should always be in a familiar and trusted environment, not on the streets of an unfamiliar city. Never take more than one packet of mushrooms—usually half is good for your first time."

The Signpost has frequently covered the Wikimedia Foundation's newest sister project, Wikivoyage. Among the coverage have been reports on the complicated and expensive migration of the site from the commercialised WikiTravel.org site and the non-profit German site that forked from it, which has given its name to the new WMF project. We have brought to you reports on the legal action taken by the corporate owners of WikiTravel.org, Internet Brands, against two editors (also covered in the mainstream press), and the Foundation's legal "victory" in the matter. Wikivoyage now has 15 language sites, although all but the English and German versions are small and only marginally active.

In January we raised several potentially troublesome issues for the Wikimedia movement in taking on Wikivoyage, including the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage sex-tourism policy, hurriedly strengthened against mention of child sex after our inquiries. However, both sex-tourism and illegal-activities policies remain equivocal about how the site should treat entries about sex tourism more generally, and drugs that are classed as illicit in almost every country. The Signpost has found it remarkably easy to locate material in Wikivoyage that violates both the spirit and the letter of these policies.

The sex-tourism policy states:

Back in January, Wikivoyager Pashley told the Signpost that these policy areas are "tricky", that Evan Prodromou "was really uneasy about allowing this sort of material on the site at all" when he came up with the sex-tourism policy ten years ago. "There have been arguments for both a looser and a stricter policy." DerFussi, chairman of the German non-profit that hosted Wikivoyage until two years ago, told us: "The community has an eye on all edits."

The companion piece to Wikivoyage's sex-tourism policy is its illegal-activities policy:

The policy concedes that the site "needs to tread a fine line about giving information. The test is that information should be provided for a traveller's safety, rather than solely to promote illegal activities. When writing about safety issues with illegal activities, Wikivoyage articles must always emphasise that that activity is a crime when mentioning safety issues. ... Wikivoyage articles should avoid giving information about illegal activities that is useful only to those seeking it and which is not motivated by safety concerns."

The policies themselves reflect the sometimes contradictory aims of the travel site to provide free, balanced information to people in a wide range of demographics who are engaged in a highly consumerist leisure pursuit. The ambiguity underlines the blurred interface between informing, warning, and encouraging on the site. Whether by design or accident, many edits appear to introduce information about prostitution and drugs with a formulaic "warning" added. Random examples of the mixed messages that result are:

• "Always ask for an ID from the prostitute to confirm her age." "... If you intend to be a patron of the Red Light District, be wary of women who beckon you towards their kamers and invite you in without discussing a price." (Antwerp)
• Prostitution is illegal in Vietnam. The age of consent is 18. Vietnamese penal law proscribes penalties of up to 20 years in prison for sexually exploiting women or children", but then, "prostitution is abundant in Vietnam, ... Many massage parlours and other businesses provide sex services at very low rates." (Vietnam)
• "As with any other sex destination, there are some tourists that hire minors. Prostitution with minors (less than 18 years old) is considered a crime in Costa Rica." (Costa Rica)
• "The age of consent in Cambodia is 15. Prostitution is theoretically illegal but widespread. ... Cambodia has gained some notoriety as a destination for paedophiles", but then, "under Cambodian law the penalty for sex with minors can be up to 30 years in prison" (Cambodia)
• "Too much alcohol or 'special' or 'happy' shakes which can contain cannabis, magic mushrooms or any manner of substance are not a good idea if you plan on going back in the river. ... Consuming these drugs on the premises is fairly safe, although drugs are illegal in Laos and nothing is totally safe. ... Aside from the drugs already mentioned it is inadvisable to attempt to purchase any other substances not freely available on the 'magic menus' around town. The dangers of most drugs should be well known to travelers, and additionally there is also a police presence." But then: "Southeast Asian 'crystal meth' is known as yabba and is available in both pill and smokeable forms. ... Yabba is an epidemic due to its highly addictive qualities. Manufactured locally, the drug can be cut with any number of substances." (Vang Vieng, Laos)
• "Cannabis possession in this city outside of University of Michigan property is only a 25 dollar fine, making this one of the most liberal cities in Michigan." (Detroit)
• "The scenery is best experienced while not high on cannabis ..." (Monahans, Texas)

It is an open question whether these warnings actually function to caution travellers' behaviour beyond providing eligibility for inclusion under the policies.

Another issue raised by the material is its potential to be perceived as treating women with a casual objectification, under an implicit assumption that readers are not women ("Classy little hostess bar ... A place for single men and loose ladies ... no pool table or food to distract you from the lovely ladies" ... "There are dozens of girlie bars ... Freelance girls are picked up at establishments like [several names provided]").

There is occasionally evidence that some contributors have taken offence, and that there has been an element of push and pull over the years about the inclusion of sexual content (e.g. "Sorry, but I thought the comment comparing Downtown Eastside prostitutes to cheap parking prices was a little offensive. I didn't realize this article was a guide for sex tourists"; and "Isn't there a Wikivoyage policy against including 'sex tourism' related topics on Wikivoyage? If so, why is there a section of this article titled, 'Prostitution'?").

However, on the other side, as one Wikivoyage administrator wrote in February: "Policing travelers' personal moral choices is not one of Wikivoyage's goals". The Signpost believes that there are only two or three female editors on the English Wikivoyage, not all of them active.

A number of articles link to external pages that deal explicitly with drugs such as cannabis. Among these are Utrecht where "mainly psychedelics, cannabis and energetic herbs" in the "Buy" section contains a link to a Dutch-language advertisement "Cooking with dope". Seattle gives good airtime to the annual two-day cannabis festival, with an external link that beckons readers to "become a member" and "party with hempfest all year!" Similarly, Ann Arbor provides an external link for its annual Hashbash that advertises ancillary products and asks for political donations.

Whether directly in breach of the site’s policies or just deserving of deep community discussion, some material on the English Wikivoyage suggests that—contrary to Fussi's claim—Wikivoyagers don't "have their eye on all edits". But does Wikivoyage have the editorial resources to police the input of sex- and drug-related information? And just as central to the site's use of the Wikimedia Foundation's trademark and brand reputation is its ability to monitor commercial spamming. Of 56 listed admins who migrated from WikiTravel at the start of the year, only 23 are active; the list includes seven bureaucrats, of whom only two are active. Edits to Wikivoyage have declined by almost a third since June, from more than 34,000 to just over 18,000 in October (the latter figure is the Signpost's estimate from sampling the "Recent changes" list. This compares with more than 25,000 for Wikitravel.

One editor, who spoke to the Signpost on condition of anonymity, said:

The Signpost has noted an upswing in the creation of increasingly strange articles at Wikitravel, still a heavily commercial site in which google advertisements appear as side-bars on every article. Recent examples of such articles, which display thematically related advertisements, are Hair dryer tips and tricks for problematic hair, Bridging loans and its advantages [sic], and Jailbreak iPhone and its benefits. There are virtually no active admins on WikiTravel. Despite the lack of proper administration and evidence of the fusing of editorial and commercial content, WikiTravel is now ranked 2417 globally, up from 3162 in late July. Wikivoyage is a disappointing 20,451, even though up from 32,586 in late July. Its page views have dropped 12% from the levels in January when the new site was launched. Yet given the poverty of the competition, there appear to be many opportunities for Wikivoyage to boost its presence in the crowded market for online travel advice.

• Bounty, Reward boards: The English Wikipedia's long-lasting Bounty and Reward boards have been proposed for deletion.
• Wikimedia LGBT: A proposed thematic organization that would revolve around content of interest to the LGBT community is currently canvassing for members, although the invitation was initially removed from the Wikimedia Ukraine page by Ahonc. Ahonc, who is an administrator and OTRS agent on the Wikimedia Commons, gave as his edit summary "у нас ніби всі нормальні". By a rough Google Translate, that comes across as "we all like normal."
• Foundation report: The Wikimedia Foundation's monthly report for September 2013 has been published on Meta.
• Wikimedia contributor's Kickstarter: A prolific photo contributor to the Wikimedia Commons has been given coverage for his attempt to use Kickstarter to fund his exploits, which include many of the top-listed images of video game consoles.
• Wikimania jury: Applicants are needed for the Wikimania 2015 jury, which will decide where the conference will be held.
  
  Reader comments
  

2013-10-30

Wrestling with featured content

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Cdtew, Hahc21, and Pine

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from October 20, 2013 through October 26, 2013.

WikiCup finish

This year's WikiCup competition has finished. Cwmhiraeth won for the second consecutive year. The top scorers were:

1. Cwmhiraeth (submissions)
2. Hawkeye7 (submissions)
3. Sasata (submissions)
4. Sturmvogel_66 (submissions)
5. Casliber (submissions)
6. Adam Cuerden (submissions)
7. Miyagawa (submissions)
8. Piotrus (submissions)
9. Ealdgyth (submissions)

Cwmhiraeth's 5th round submissions included contributions to the featured articles Sea and Atlantic Puffin, 13 good articles, 79 did you knows, and 2 good article reviews. Congratulations to all the finalists.

There were some controversies in this year's competition. Next year Miyagawa will be a third judge, joining J Milburn and The ed17. Next year's competition will begin on January 1.

Featured articles

Three featured articles were promoted this week.

• Francis Nash (nom) by Cdtew. Nash was one of five Continental Army generals from North Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, and was the only one of the five to die from wounds suffered in battle, which he received at the Battle of Germantown in 1777. George Washington and most of the Continental officers present attended his funeral, and the modern city of Nashville, Tennessee is named in his honor. (N.b.: This article was primarily edited and nominated by the author of this report)
• Niels Bohr (nom) by Hawkeye7. This Danish physicist and 1922 Nobel Prize laureate made substantial contributions to atomic theory and quantum mechanics. Bohr's model of the atom is perhaps the best-known model of atoms among the general public, and the element bohrium is named in his honor. Aside from his purely scientific work, the physicist aided refugees from Nazi Germany, escaping Nazi-occupied Denmark himself in 1943. Bohr would then go on to work on a number of projects relating to nuclear weapons development, including the Manhattan Project, and his suggestions would serve as the basis of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
• Si Tjonat (nom) by Crisco 1492. Interestingly, this article is about a film that you will likely never see. That's because this 1929 silent "bandit" film from the Dutch East Indies is one of many pre-1950 Indonesian films that are considered lost. The plot follows a young Sundanese man who kills a friend and escapes to what is now Jakarta, where he robs his employer, seduces his employer's mistress, and goes off to live the life of a bandit. Many of the film's martial arts fighting scenes were inspired by Hollywood westerns.

Featured lists

Five featured lists were promoted this week.

• Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series Directing Team (nom) by SoapFan12. This award is given annually at the Emmy Awards ceremony, to honour the performances of the entire directing team participating in a form of a daytime drama. First given in 1974 as "Outstanding Individual Director for a Drama Series," the award has only been won more than once by Richard Dunlap, for his directorial work on The Young and the Restless.
• List of international cricket centuries by Nathan Astle (nom) by Vensatry. Former international cricketer Nathan Astle has scored centuries in Test cricket and One Day Internationals on 11 and 16 occasions respectively. As of 2013, he is the second-highest run-scorer for New Zealand in international cricket. Astle represented his country between 1995 and 2007.
• List of municipalities in Manitoba (nom) by Hwy43. Manitoba is the fifth-most populous province in Canada, with 1.2 million residents as of 2011. It has 197 municipalities covering only 20% of the province's land mass, although they are home for 94% of its population. 79 of these are urban municipalities, 116 are rural municipalities and 2 are local government districts. However, half of Manitoba's population resides in Winnipeg, the provincial capital.
• List of international cricket centuries by Shivnarine Chanderpaul (nom) by Vensatry and Harrias. Shivnarine Chanderpaul has played for the West Indies since 1994, scoring centuries on 28 occasions in Test cricket and 11 times in One Day International matches. He is West Indies' second-most prolific batsman in international cricket, after Brian Lara, having accumulated almost 20,000 runs. As of 2013, he is joint tenth—with Mohammad Yousuf—among all-time century makers.
• List of Indian Premier League captains (nom) by Vibhijain. The Indian Premier League, a professional league for Twenty20 cricket in India, has been captained by 34 players in at least one match during the six seasons it has played. Mahendra Singh Dhoni has played the most number of matches as a captain, leading the team in 96 matches. James Hopes has captained the most number of matches without registering a win.

Featured pictures

Six featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Wrestlers (painting) (nom, related article) created by Thomas Eakins and nominated by Crisco 1492. This 1899 oil painting by Eakins depicts two wrestlers in the foreground locked in combat, with one wrestler holding the other in a half nelson and crotch hold. Painted from live models, this work now resides in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
• Maxima clam on a dome coral (nom, related article) created by Alex.vasenin and nominated by Tomer T. This underwater photograph depicts the Maxima clam, a species of bivalve that inhabits the Indo-Pacific. Found living primarily in sand, on rocks, or in coral, this "small giant clam" requires sunlight, based in part on its symbiotic relationship with photosynthetic algae.
• Benoit Peeters (nom, related article) created by Georges Seguin and nominated by J Milburn. This portrait depicts writer and academic Benoît Peeters, whose work has largely focused on comics and graphic novels, such as his work in 1983's Les Cités Obscures. Having ventured into cinema and biography, Peeters has authored three short films, several documentaries, and the first biography of Jacques Derrida.
• Epirus Water Frog (nom, related article) created by Benny Trapp and nominated by J Milburn. This photograph of the Epirus water frog was elevated to featured status with one reviewer remarking on the "wicked" green stripe running down the subject's back. Found in western Greece and southern Albania, this amphibian is classified as vulnerable due to habitat loss. The frog's vulnerability doesn't stop locals from hunting it for culinary purposes.
• Muhammad Ali (nom, related article) created by Ira Rosenberg, restored (lightly) and nominated by Crisco 1492. This portrait taken by a photographer for the New York World-Telegram and the Sun in 1967 serves as the principal photograph for the immensely prominent subject's article. During its nomination, several reviewers expressed opposing opinions regarding the photograph's blank background. Ali, born Cassius Clay, was named "Sportsman of the Century" by Sports Illustrated and "Sports Personality of the Century" by the BBC (referring, of course, to the 20th century).
• Bacchus and Ariadne (nom, related article) created by Titian and nominated by Crisco 1492. The companion picture to the featured article L'Arianna from the October 16th edition of the Signpost, this painting by Titian was completed between 1520 and 1523 for the palazzo of the Duke of Ferrara. The work depicts the god Bacchus encountering Ariadne on the beach at Naxos, where she had been abandoned by Theseus. Despite her initial fear of the god, Ariadne would go on to become his consort, according to legend.

Reader comments

2013-10-30

User influence on site policies: Wikipedia vs. Facebook vs. YouTube

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Han-Teng Liao, Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, and Tilman Bayer

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

User influence on site policies is highest on Wikipedia, compared to YouTube and Facebook

Laura Stein, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has concluded^[1] that, based on her comparison of user policy documents (including the Terms of Service) of YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers the highest level of participation power overall. Using Arnstein's ladder of participation to begin a theoretical discussion on participation and power, Stein carefully proposed a typology of policy and participation (Table 1, p. 359), from the maximal power of "dominant control over site content and governance", "shared control", the minimal power of "consultation", "choice", and "informing", to the no power of "deceptive or inadequate information" and "nonparticipation". She applied this typology across the five policy areas: "permitted content and its use", "content ownership/copyrights", "user information/data", "modifying software" and "user policy formation & consent") for the three websites, and found that Wikipedia beats other websites in all areas. In the first and last policy areas of "permitted content and its use" and "user policy formation & consent", Wikipedia gives users the "dominant control" of participation power; for the remaining areas, Wikipedia gives user "shared control over site content and governance".

In contrast, YouTube and Facebook only provide the minimal power of "informing" in three policy areas: "permitted content and its use", "content ownership/copyrights", "modifying software" and provide slightly better minimal power of "choice" for the "user information/data area". Although Wikipedia is not widely agreed on to be a "social media" website, Stein nevertheless presented a simple typology for evaluating the levels of participation power given to users by platforms. Also, it would be useful to apply this topology in other policy areas including fund dissemination and organizational governance in the near future.

Wikipedia's coverage of academics

Anna Samoilenko and Taha Yasseri from the Oxford Internet Institute released an arXiv preprint titled: "The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics".^[2] In this study the notability of academics in the English Wikipedia is examined. The ground truth is taken to be the citation records of the scholars under study and the h-index in particular, although the authors admit that the quantity of publications and citations are not the best proxies for evaluating the quality and scientific impact of researchers. Based on the results of the paper, scientists covered in Wikipedia (which are taken from a sample of 400 scientists in 4 different fields of physics, computer science, biology and psychology) do not appear to statistically have a higher impact than the average scientists of their respective field, as long as the citation records are considered. Wikipedia article metrics (such as number of edits to the articles, unique editors, article length, number of wikilinks to the article) are only very weakly correlated with scientometrics such as number of publications, number of citations, citations per publication, [h-index], number of co-authors.

In the second part of the article, the researchers investigate the Wikipedia coverage of "Highly Cited Researchers" based on the list published by Thomson Reuters in 2010. In all the four fields under study, the coverage of Wikipedia is well below 50%. This not only indicates that those scientists featured in Wikipedia are no more highly cited than the rest, but many scientists with a high citation-based impact are left out of Wikipedia. Finally, the authors compared the inclusiveness of each of the four categories by size in terms of number of articles; they reported that more populated categories do not necessarily have a better coverage. The authors submit that the growth of Wikipedia alone will not resolve the problem of its incompleteness at least in categories related to scientists bibliographies, and that new policies are required if Wikipedia is to be more balanced in featuring academics.

Briefly

• Wiki Research Hackathon: The Wikimedia Foundation's Research and Data Team announced the inaugural "Wiki Research Hackathon" – a global event hosted by Wikimedia Foundation researchers, academic researchers and Wikipedians from around the world on Saturday, November 9, 2013. The hackathon will be held both as a series of local meetups (Perth, Mannheim, Oxford, Rio de Janeiro, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, etc.) and virtual meetups (Asia/Oceania, Europe/Africa & The Americas) for those who can’t make it to the local events. Wikipedia editors are explicitly welcome.
• About half of medical editors are health professionals: A poster titled "Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study",^[3] presented at last month's "Medicine 2.0" conference in London, contains interesting findings: 47% of the 32 surveyed volunteers were currently working in a health-related field (mainly as clinicians); among the rest, students and individuals with health problems formed significant groups. Motivations were divided into helping, education, a sense of professional responsibility, fulfillment, and support for Wikipedia's mission. Conflict with and hostility from other editors was identified as a factor that negatively affects motivations. 220 users were drawn from the revision history of a random sample of medical articles on the English Wikipedia, and invited on their talk page (example) to participate in an in-person interview. 31 of the 32 who responded were male.
• Wikipedia perceived as "fairly credible, fast updated and neutral" among Swedish students: A master's thesis^[4] studied "the perceived credibility of Wikipedia" among Swedish university students, using a qualitative approach based on interviews with nine participants in their twenties. From the conclusions: "The assumption, that students are aware of being source criticizing and not directly citing Wikipedia in academic works, was confirmed by the participants in this study. The perceived credibility of the information on Wikipedia among the students was that it is fairly credible, fast updated and neutral."
• Analysis of cross-wiki discussion on embassy pages: A draft paper ^[5] contains a quantitative analysis of the exchanges on embassy pages on Wikimedia projects, where users from another project, who might not know the local languages, can ask questions and post requests. As the most frequent topics, the authors identify "requests for translations, change of user names, copyright violations, and vandalism".
• "Trust evaluation mechanisms for Wikipedia": A conference paper with this title^[6] consists of a short literature overview of methods to assess the quality of Wikipedia content.
• Award for paper about the effect of talk page messages on participation: The US-based Human Factors and Ergonomics Society has awarded their 2013 Human Factors Prize (which includes a cash award of $10,000) to a 2012 paper titled "Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities"^[7] The three authors from Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 4 million user talk page messages on the English Wikipedia, classifying them into four different kinds of "leadership" behavior: "transactional leadership" (positive feedback), "aversive leadership" (negative feedback), "directive leadership" (providing instructions) and "person-focused leadership" (indicated by "greeting words and smiley emoticons"). They then assessed the effect that each kind of message had on the subsequent participation of the recipient. See the more detailed review in our February 2012 issue: "How different kinds of leadership messages increase or decrease participation"
• Reconstructing 3D models of tourist sites annotated with Wikipedia information: A paper^[8] by five researchers from the University of Washington and Intel Labs, to be presented at the SIGGRAPH Asia Conference, describes a method to automatically generate annotated 3D models of popular tourist sites solely based on Wikipedia content combined with other online text and photos. A video demo shows how objects in the 3D model are linked to the correct object descriptions in the Wikipedia article, e.g. the words "Holy Child" in the sentence "On the altar is a statue of St Joseph and the Holy Child by Vincenzo de Rossi" in the article Pantheon, Rome. (See picture at bottom.)
• What the Library of Congress can learn from Wikipedia: An article in "Library Philosophy and Practice"^[9] argues that the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH, a controlled vocabulary of subject headings for use in bibliographic records, maintained by the United States Library of Congress) should start using the disambiguation style developed on Wikipedia (where terms in brackets are added to distinguish articles about different subjects with the same name).
• VIAFbot tripled traffic of VIAF.org: An article titled "VIAFbot and the Integration of Library Data on Wikipedia"^[10] reports on the implementation and impact of VIAFbot, linking Wikipedia articles to the corresponding entry in the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), an international authority file operated by the US-based Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Started on the English Wikipedia, the project expanded later to other language Wikipedias and Wikidata. Coauthored by the Wikipedian-in-Residence at OCLC who implemented VIAFbot and a university librarian, the paper highlights the benefits to the visibility of the VIAF data "and by extension, libraries as an institution": "Since VIAFbot launched on Wikipedia, VIAF.org has seen a threefold increase in traffic."

References

1. ^ Laura Stein: Policy and Participation on Social Media: The Cases of YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Communication, Culture & Critique, Volume 6, Issue 3, pages 353–371, September 2013 doi:10.1111/cccr.12026
2. ^ A.Samoilenko, T. Yasseri (2013). "The distorted mirror of Wikipedia: a quantitative analysis of Wikipedia coverage of academics". arXiv:1310.8508.
3. ^ Nuša Farič, Henry W W Potts: Motivations for Contributing to Health-Related Articles on Wikipedia: An Interview Study. Medicine 2.0’13, London 23-24 September 2013 PDF
4. ^ Robin Mattebo: Citation needed – the perceived credibility of Wikipedia among high education students. Master’s Thesis, Uppsala University August 2013 http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:655924/FULLTEXT01.pdf
5. ^ Pnina Fichman and Noriko Hara: Knowledge Sharing on Wikimedia Embassies http://eprints.rclis.org/20334/1/Knowledge%20Sharing%20on%20Wikimedia%20Embassies.pdf
6. ^ Imran Latif, Syed Waqar Jaffry: Trust Evaluation Mechanisms for Wikipedia. Proceedings of the IJCNLP 2013 Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Social Media (SocialNLP). https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W13/W13-42.pdf (p.48)
7. ^ Zhu, H., Kraut, R., & Kittur, A. (2012). Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities. Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW ’12 (p. 407). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. PDF • DOI
8. ^ Bryan C. Russell, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Daniel J. Butler, Steven M. Seitz, and Luke Zettlemoyer: 3D Wikipedia: Using Online Text to Automatically Label and Navigate Reconstructed Geometry, ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2013), Vol. 32, No. 6. [1]
9. ^ CannCasciato, Daniel, "Wikipedia-type Disambiguation Functionality in LCSH: a Recommendation" (2013). Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal). Paper 1022. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/1022
10. ^ Maximilian Klein and Alex Kyrios: VIAFbot and the Integration of Library Data on Wikipedia. code4lib Issue 22, 2013-10-14 http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8964

Reader comments

2013-10-30

Special: Lessons from the dead and dying

Contribute  —  

Share this

•  E-mail
•  Facebook
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Reddit
•  Digg

By Mabeenot

Your source for

WikiProject News

• The Wikipedia Library has a new newsletter: Books and Bytes
• WikiProjects are requested to test the first release of Flow, a new discussion and collaboration system for all Wikimedia projects. If you'd like your project to be included in the Flow pilot this December, please contact Maryana.

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

With Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and other gloomy celebrations this week, we're taking a look at Wikipedia's dead and dying. For some dead WikiProjects, the sole purpose of their life was simply to serve as a warning to others. Some of these projects may still be salvageable, but for most, a revival is unlikely. Here are some projects that never got off the ground and the lessons that can be gleaned from their follies:

Set clear, attainable goals and follow through

WikiProject Contents had a simple goal when it was created: build a useful table of contents for a book that has no page numbers and is still being written. The project was spawned from comments in 2001 by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger and other editors calling for a way to organize Wikipedia's content from a top-down approach. Should articles be organized by topic or discipline? Should Wikipedia catalog material using the Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress Classification, or Open Directory Project? Should content be navigable through category lists, topic maps, or an old-fashioned alphabetical list of every Wikipedia article? To be fair, Wikipedia had a much smaller collection of articles back then, so the idea of sifting through lists of articles didn't seem as absurd as it does today with the English Wikipedia sporting over 4 million articles. WikiProject Contents made for an interesting discussion board, but no plan of action or timetable for changes ever materialized.

As they talked, other projects sprouted and made their own decisions. Topic-specific WikiProjects categorized their own articles, created portals to serve as gateways to their unique fields, and introduced a variety of templates and metadata to make it all navigable. Meanwhile, the internet continued to evolve, leaving WikiProject Contents stuck in the past. Users simply searched for the information they needed rather than scrolling through long lists of articles. People discovered new things by following wikilinks rather than hunting through a complex classification system. An article's traffic was affected more by current events, social media posts, and Google Doodles than by people trying to read everything about Zoology by starting from the most general article and moving to specifics.

To stay relevant, WikiProject Contents tried to take up other pursuits like improving infoboxes and series templates, duplicating the efforts of other projects. It became unclear exactly what WikiProject Contents was intended for, leading one editor to mistakenly merge the project with Wikipedia's main page, resulting in the inactive WikiProject Contents becoming Wikipedia's most-watched project, an odd distinction that remains to this day.

Not every subject needs a project

At first glance, WikiProject Life on Mars appears to be way ahead of its time... since we have yet to discover life on Mars. But the project has nothing to do with the red planet. WikiProject Life on Mars was created to focus on a short-lived television series, its spinoff, and foreign adaptations. But can a scope this narrow support life at a full-fledged WikiProject? Apparently not.

This is where task forces come into play. Initially devised by WikiProject Military History as an organizational tool (hence the military term), task forces are now widespread and serve as subdivisions within WikiProjects that allow for editors to focus on a narrower topic while still tapping the resources and user-base of the larger WikiProject.

In the realm of television, there are dozens of dead projects covering programs past and present. The larger, more active projects tend to cover television programs and franchises that have been going for many years, if not multiple generations. Wikipedia does not need a WikiProject for every television show that has ever been aired, nor is it beneficial for dead projects to sit around giving the illusion that the articles under that project's scope are being watched and maintained. Collaborating at WikiProject Television or WikiProject British TV will get more attention and if Wikipedia really needs a space for your favorite television show, it should really be a task force.

WikiProjects are not a joke

Let's talk about WikiProject Nudity. The project's flesh-colored page was created in 2008 on April Fools Day. The first two editors listed on the project's membership page noted beside their names "no, it is not a joke! :)" and "this is the best april fools wikiproject ever." That's about as close as the project got to collaboration. The project's page has remained essentially unchanged since that first day.

Despite the lack of committed editors, WikiProject Nudity is actually a fairly well constructed project. The project's scope "aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of nudity and naturism related topics," with a respectable 219 articles tagged under the project's scope, including 2 Good Articles. The project's templates and categories remain functional. Clear connections were created between the project and Wikipedia's policy of rejecting censorship, meaning that the project had the potential to serve as a forum for discussion of Wikipedia policies rather than just a collection of articles about a single topic. Sadly, new editors have been posting questions on the project's talk page for years without any replies. Had WikiProject Nudity been created by a dedicated group of mature editors, it might have actually served a purpose. Ultimately, a WikiProject is not a page, nor is it a grouping of articles. A WikiProject is a community of editors working together to make Wikipedia better.

Don't form a clique

The history of Esperanza is best told by those who lived through that turbulent time in Wikipedia's past. But since few people want to talk about it today, editors unfamiliar with Esperanza should check out what remains of this project's page and the decent synopsis of the project's demise published by the Signpost in 2007. Esperanza's story is one of good intentions gone awry. A thriving community where members could interact and grow became embroiled in internal politics, incivility, and secretive associations. Called a clique and a cabal (among other things), Esperanza was torn apart to form a variety of independent initiatives, most of which have failed over the past few years.

As noted in the above discussion of WikiProject Nudity, a true WikiProject is a community of editors, just like Esperanza aspired to be. However, Wikipedians have expectations as to how a community conducts itself. Wikipedia's communities are dedicated to openness and transparency. Anyone can contribute and discussions are not hidden behind closed doors. If a project grows large enough to need elected leadership, it is important that these leaders serve as coordinators for their communities rather than rulers of a fiefdom. Additionally, the programs sponsored by a WikiProject should in some way benefit Wikipedia's efforts toward building an encyclopedia, rather than serving merely as chat rooms and miscellaneous diversions. This doesn't mean that all WikiProjects are devoid of fun and friendship, but those pursuits must not become a project's overriding purpose.

Don't be all talk and no action

Articles should be articles. Essays should be essays. WikiProjects should be WikiProjects. When someone gets confused, you end up with something like WikiProject Common Sense.

The project began with the noble goal of bringing common sense to all the articles and talkpages of Wikipedia. That's before they defined exactly what they meant by "common sense." The project's goals reads more like an essay covering senseless bickering on talkpages, treating people with respect, and not claiming that one's side is the truth. Rather than spreading common sense, WikiProject Common Sense became an essay about dispute resolution. But that's as far as the project got.

It's fine for a project to describe their ideal world, but the project won't go anywhere if they don't have a plan to achieve it. Join WikiProjects to improve Wikipedia. If you just want to vent, consider jotting your ideas in user space and then share them with WikiProject Essays.

Next week's article should be accessible to all. Until then, navigate our extensive archive.

Reader comments

If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.

The Signpost needs your help putting together the next issue.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions