Reciprocity and reputation motivate contributions to Wikipedia; indigenous knowledge and "cultural imperialism"; how PR people see Wikipedia

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

Wikipedia works on the efforts of unpaid volunteers who choose to donate their time to advance the cause of free knowledge. This phenomenon, as trivial as it may sound to those acquainted with Wikipedia inner workings, has always puzzled economists and social scientists alike, in that standard Economic theory would not predict that such enterprises (and any other community of peer production, for example open source software) would thrive without any form of remuneration. The flip-side of direct remuneration – passion, enthusiasm, belief in free knowledge, in short, intrinsic motivations – could not alone (at least as standard theory goes) convincingly explain such prolonged efforts, given essentially away for free.

Early on the dawn of the Open Source/Libre software movement, some economists noted that successfully contributing to high-profile projects like Linux or Apache may translate in a strong résumé for a software developer, and proposed, as a way to reconcile traditional economic theory with reality, that whereas other forms of extrinsic motivation are available, sustained contribution to a peer production system could happen. But what about Wikipedia? The career incentive is largely absent in the case of the Free Encyclopedia, and is it really the case that intrinsic motivation such as pure altruism cannot be really behind the prolonged efforts of its contributors?

To understand this, a group of researchers at Sciences Po, Harvard Law School, and University of Strasbourg (among others) designed a series of online experiments with the intent of measuring social preferences, and administered them to a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors to understand whether contribution to Wikipedia can be explained by any of the main hypotheses that economists have thus far formulated regarding contribution to public goods.^[1][2] The researchers considered three hypotheses, two for intrinsic and one for extrinsic forms of motivation: pure altruism, reciprocity, and social image motives.

In more detail, the researchers asked a number of Wikipedia editors and contributors (all with a registered account) to participate in a series of experimental games specifically designed to measure the extent to which people behave according to one or more of the above social preferences – for example by either free-riding or contributing to the common pool in a public goods game. In addition to this, as a proxy measure for the “social image” hypothesis, they checked whether participants ever received a barnstar on their talk pages and whether they ever chose to display any of these on their user page (coding these individuals as “social signallers”). Finally, they matched each participant with their history of contribution of the participants, and sought to understand which of these measures can explain their edit counts.

The results suggest that reciprocity seems to be the driver of contribution for less experienced editors, whereas reputation (social image) seems to better explain the activity of the more seasoned editors, though, as the authors acknowledge, the goodness of fit of the regression estimates is not great. The study was at the center of a heated debate within the community about the usage of site-wide banners for recruitment purposes. On December 3, one of the authors gave a presentation about the results at Harvard, which is available online as an audio and video recording. According to the Harvard Crimson, he remarked "that the study is still in progress and more data needs to be collected". The results are so far available in the form of a conference paper and as an unpublished working paper.

A draft chapter^[3] of a book to be published in early 2014 presents the issue of incorporating into Wikipedia "Indigenous Knowledge" (IK) – human knowledge that is not a part of the codified and peer-reviewed Western-style publishing, but is rather transmitted orally in other parts of the world. The problem is not new; perhaps most notably, it was described in the 2011 documentary "People are Knowledge", which was produced by Indian Wikimedian Achal Prabhala and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation as a fellowship project. The general problem is that Wikipedia relies on written reliable sources for verifying its materials. This article describes Wikipedia's policies and editing practices that are relevant to the problem of incorporating Indigenous Knowledge. In describing these it makes a rather problematic claim — that "the 'currency' of Wikipedia is edit count". Many Wikipedia editors will find this claim wrong and even offensive, as quality, rather than quantity, counts for an editor's reputation, and in any case the content is more important than the creator.

The article presents several valuable and thought-provoking examples of how the rigid referencing rules of the English Wikipedia go to extremes and do not necessarily reach the goals of ensuring notability, verifiability and reliability. It notes, for example, that because many of Wikipedia's editors are laymen who want to work quickly and fill the gaps that interest them, they are likely to cite sources partially without reading them completely and deeply — thus undermining the sources' reliability. Another example is Gi-Dee-Thlo-Ah-Ee, a Cherokee woman who was the subject of a book that was included in the Library of Congress. An article about her was deleted from the English Wikipedia, the main reason being that the book was not deemed an independent reliable source, because it was published by the Cherokee Nation. The case of the article Makmende ("the first Kenyan Internet meme") is also cited, although the validity of this example has been questioned (Signpost coverage: "Essay examines systemic bias toward African topics, using disputed deletion example").

This work on oral citations by Achal Prabhala, as well as Prabhala's practical attempts to challenge the English Wikipedia's citation policy is the subject of a large part of this article. It shows that until now Prabhala's attempts have mostly failed, because the editor community found his citation practices unacceptable. The article analyzes the typical responses of the people who are opposed to oral citations and shows some problems with them. However, it doesn't yet give any useful resolution to the issue and labels the opposition to oral citations as "cultural imperialism".

Despite its shortcomings, this article is a good presentation of the issues at hand, as well as of their importance, and it is a good summary of the work done in the field until now.

The second author, Maja van der Velden, had published another article on the same subject some months ago,^[4] also referring to Achal Prabhala's oral citation project and comparing it to two other initiatives, Text, Audio, Movies, and Images (TAMI), and the Brian Deer Classification (BDC). TAMI is a database on Australian Aboriginal culture, BDC a library classification system in use at the Xwi7xwa Library, which specializes in Canadian Aboriginal culture. Indigenous communities were involved in the design of both, resulting in some marked differences from Western (and Wikipedia) design habits, e.g. a flat hierarchy of only four categories in TAMI (those represented in the acronym), or the lack of a "Canada" class in BDC ("United States" exists, at the same level as "Maoris").

She criticizes the merger of the indigenous knowledge entry on the English Wikipedia into traditional knowledge on principle grounds, adds that the merger did not actually merge content from the former into the latter, and takes issue with the focus of the traditional knowledge entry being so much on intellectual property, to the point that she added a screenshot of the article's table of contents (much like the one pictured here).

After outlining how matters of design are handled on Wikipedia, van der Velden discusses whether fulfilling its mission of providing access to the sum of human knowledge might benefit from decentralizing design decisions, which brings her to the regularly recurring ideas of decentralizing Wikipedia and to a discussion of interwiki links that manages not to mention Wikidata.

Overall, the article is an interesting and in parts thought-provoking contribution to the activities around increasing diversity within the Wikimedia community (see, for instance, the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, held in Berlin earlier this month). It would have benefited from a more detailed description of TAMI and BDC and from suggestions as to how their respective community engagement experiences could be transferred and adapted to cross-cultural collaboration in Wikimedia projects.

In light of the recent increase in for-hire editing on Wikipedia, often carried out by PR professionals, another timely study has been released,^[5] a survey among PR professionals, as a followup to one covered in the April 2012 edition of this research report ("Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals"). The surveys examine how familiar the PR professionals (working not only for for-profit organizations, but also for non-profits, educational institutions, government institutions, and others) are with Wikipedia rules. 74% of respondents noted that their institution had a Wikipedia article, a significant (5%) increase over the 2012 survey, though over 50% of the PR professionals do not monitor those articles more often than on a quarterly basis. The study confirms that there is a steady but slow increase in PR professionals who have made direct edits to Wikipedia; 40% of the 2013 survey respondents had engaged with Wikipedia through editing (with about a quarter of the respondents editing talk pages, and the remainder directly editing the main space content), compared to 35% of the 2012 survey respondents. Over 60% agree that "editing Wikipedia for a client or company is a common practice", a slight but statistically significant decrease from 2012. While "posing as someone else to make changes in Wikipedia" is not seen as a common practice, it is nonetheless supported by ~15% of respondents in the US and almost 30% elsewhere (though the latter number should be taken tentatively, as 97% of the survey respondents came from the US).

At the same time, approximately two thirds of the respondents do not know of or understand Wikipedia rules on COI/PR and related topics (defined in this study as Wales' 2012 "Bright Line" policy proposal, linked to his comment in a Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (CREWE) from January 10, 2012, 5:56 am (accessible here – Facebook login required). Of those who had experience editing Wikipedia directly, thus breaking the rule, over a third (36%) did so knowing about it, thus knowingly violating the site's policy.

The significant breadth of ignorance about Wikipedia rules reinforces the point that even a decade after Wikipedia's creation, most of its users do not even realize that it is a project "anyone can edit", much less what it means: 71% respondents replied that they simply "don't know" "How Wikipedia articles about their clients or companies are started", which presumably indicates that they do not understand the basic function and capabilities of the article history function. A majority of other respondents (24% total) admit to writing it themselves; 3% hired a PR firm specializing in this task, 1% hired a "Wikipedia firm" (a concept unfortunately not defined in the article), and only 2% note that they "made a request through Request Article Page"). When it comes to existing articles, only 21% of the respondents wait for the public; the vast majority of the rest make edits themselves, with 5% outsourcing this to a specialized PR or "Wikipedia firm".

Respondents who had directly edited Wikipedia for their company or client said their edits typically “stick” most of the time. Over three quarters noted that their changes stick half the time or more often; only 8% said they never stick, always being reverted. This raises the question about the efficiency of Wikipedia COI-detection practices, as well as of their desirability (are we not reverting those changes because we don't realize they are COI-based, or are they reviewed and left alone as net-positive edits?).

60% of the respondents note that the articles about their clients or companies have factual errors they would like to correct; many observed that potentially reputation-harming errors last for many months, or even years. This statistic poses an interesting question about Wikipedia responsibility to the world: by denying PR people the ability to correct such errors, aren't we hurting our own mission?

The majority of respondents were not satisfied with existing Wikipedia rules, feeling that the community treats PR professionals unfairly, denying them equal rights in participation; even out of the respondents who tried to follow Wikipedia policies and who raised concerns on the article's talk page rather than directly editing them, 10% noted that they had to wait weeks to get any response, and 13% said they never received a response.

Regarding to the new editors' experience, it is also interesting to note that only a quarter of PR professionals felt that making edits was easy; the majority complained that editing Wikipedia is time-consuming or even "nearly impossible".

On November 9, 2013, a group of Wikimedia Foundation researchers, academics and community members hosted the inaugural Labs² Wiki Research Hackathon: the first in a series of global events meant to "facilitate problem solving, discovery and innovation with the use of open data and open source tools" (read the full announcement from the Wikimedia Blog). The event brought together attendees from local meetups in Oxford, Mannheim, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco and a number of remote participants. Participants began the groundwork around new projects studying Wikipedia including a study of newcomer retention focused on females, explorations of using Wikipedia as a multilingual corpus, an examination the effectiveness of helpdesks on Wikipedia and several others. A series of presentations were given and streamed during the event, including:

• a brief tutorial by Dario Taraborelli on how to access Wikimedia database replicas via Tool Labs.
• a presentation by Stephen LaPorte on Wikimedia's RecentChanges IRC feeds (slides).
• a presentation by Maximilian Klein on retrieving and manipulating structured data from Wikidata (video and companion blog post).
• a demo by Mahmoud Hashemi of the wapiti library – a MediaWiki API wrapper written in Python "to simplify data retrieval from the Wikipedia API without worrying about query limits, continue strings, or formatting".
• a presentation by Haitham Shammaa on Wikipedia community graph visualization using Gephi (video and research page on Meta).

The organizers are planning to host a new hackathon in Spring 2014 and are actively seeking volunteers to host local and virtual meetups. (wrh@wikimedia.org)

• "Iron Law of Oligarchy" (1911) confirmed on Wikia wikis: An empirical study^[6] of 683 Wikia wikis (rather than WMF projects — but with significant implication for them as well) found support for the claims that the iron law of oligarchy holds in wikis; i.e. that the wiki's transparent and egalitarian model does not prevent the most active contributors from obtaining significant and disproportionate control over those projects. In particular, the study found that as wiki communities grow 1) they are less likely to add new administrators; 2) the number of edits made by administrators to administrative “project” pages will increase and 3) the number of edits made by experienced contributors that are reverted by administrators also grows. The authors also note that while there are some interesting exceptions to this rule, proving that wikis can, on occasion, function as egalitarian, democratic public spaces, on average "as wikis become larger and more complex, a small group – present at the beginning – will restrict entry into positions of formal authority in the community and account for more administrative activity while using their authority to restrict contributions from experienced community members".
• Twitter activity leads Wikipedia activity by an hour: Journalists have long speculated that after a breaking news event, users follow a "Twitter-to-Google-to-Wikipedia" path to seek information.^{[supp 1]} Researchers at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa published a paper at the DUMBMOD workshop at CIKM 2013 comparing the trending named entities on Twitter to pageview requests on Wikipedia.^[7] The research uses entity linking to connect concepts extracted from 260 million tweets collected in November 2012. Analyzing the time series of mentions on Twitter with pageview requests on Wikipedia,^{[supp 2]} the researchers found the cross-correlation from Twitter to Wikipedia peaked at −1 hour, indicating Twitter topics lead Wikipedia requests by 1 hour. However, entity resolution is difficult for some generic names which results in spurious correlations.
• "Google loves Wikipedia". Why? And how about other search engines? This is the question posed by a study^[8] announced in a blog post titled "General or special favouritism? Wikipedia-Google relationship reexamined with Chinese Web data", an updated version of research covered previously in this research report after it was presented at WikiSym 2013 ("It's 'search engines favor user-generated encyclopedias', not 'Google favors Wikipedia'"). Back then, only an abstract of the paper and an earlier blog post were available; now a draft paper can be accessed. Han-Teng Liao presents interesting data backing up his claim that neither Google nor Wikipedia are unique, rather we are seeing a more generic rule that "search engines favor user-generated encyclopedias". His study's valuable contribution, beside methodology, is the data from the Chinese Internet, though as he notes we need further research on "the cases of Russia (where Yandex dominates) and South Korea (where Naver and other dominate)".
• New article assessment algorithm scores quality of editors, too: A paper^[9] presented at the recent Conference on Information and Knowledge Management describes a novel method for identifying the quality of article content based on the implicit review of editors who choose not to remove the content. The authors argue that similar strategies employed by systems like WikiTrust (content persistence) suffer from a critical bias – their algorithms assume that all content removals are equal. Suzuki & Yoshikawa's method uses an iterative strategy to compute the mutual quality of editors and the articles that they edit together (similar to PageRank). To evaluate their predictions, they pit their algorithm vs. WikiTrust in predicting Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment ratings and human (grad student) judgement for a sample of articles, showing that their approach is more accurate in predicting both quality assessments. While they admit that this algorithm is computationally intensive, they also suggest that PageRank-like algorithms like theirs can easily be adapted to run on a MapReduce framework.
• "How do metrics of link analysis correlate to quality, relevance and popularity in Wikipedia?": A paper with this title^[10] presented at the Brazilian symposium on Multimedia and the web examines how on the Portuguese Wikipedia, data from some Link analysis methods (indegree, outdegree, PageRank and its variants) correlates with assessments by the community on the quality and importance of articles, and also with access data from [1], using the Kendall tau rank correlation coefficient. Using data from Brazilian Internet domain sites and from the Portuguese Wikipedia, the study observed that link analysis results are more correlated to quality and popularity than to importance, and demonstrates that the outdegree method (which is based on the number of links that a page has) is the one more correlated to quality. It is pointed out that this method is moderately related to the length of the article, suggesting that length can be a criterion of the community quality evaluation. This article also showed that "simple metrics" (such as indegree and outdegree) can give results that are competitive with more complex metrics (such as PageRank), and reinforced that web links play a different role in Wikipedia pages than in the rest of the web.
• Usage of images and sounds is related to the quality of Wikipedia articles: Another paper from this conference (coauthored by the same authors with a fourth researcher)^[11] likewise uses the Kendall tau rank correlation coefficient to look for relations between the quantity of media files in an article and its quality as evaluated by the community and by robots in the Portuguese Wikipedia. The paper separately compares articles with images and with sounds, and discovers a moderate correlation between the count of images and the evaluation made by both the community and robots and a low correlation when the articles ratings are compared to the number of sound files. These results cannot be considered conclusive because of the small number of articles in Portuguese Wikipedia with media content, and the experiment could be performed in a larger Wikipedia to find more solid conclusions.
• Student perception of Wikipedia's credibility is significantly influenced by their professors' opinion: A poster^[12] presented earlier this month at the ASIST 2013 conference of the Association for Information Science and Technology reports on the results of a 2011 web survey among US undergraduate students with 123 usable responses. In an earlier paper (review: "The featured article icon and other heuristics for students to judge article credibility") the author had found that students perceive Wikipedia's credibility as higher than their professors do, and that this judgment is influenced by their peers. Still, the new results show "that the more professors approved of Wikipedia, the more students used it for academic purposes. In addition, the more students perceived Wikipedia as credible, the more they used it for academic purposes", indicating "that formal authority still influences students’ use of user-generated content (UGC) in their formal domain, academic work."
• Non-participation of female students on Wikipedia influenced by school, peers and lack of community awareness: Another poster^[13] from the same conference describes a "preliminary study on non-contributing behaviors among college-aged Wikipedia users", based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 university students who had not contributed to Wikipedia before, 11 of them female. Participants had been using Wikipedia since middle school, and generally observed that school was "the most influential source" of information about negative sides of Wikipedia "such as reliability and credibility issues." Another result is that respondents felt disconnected from the community behind Wikipedia, being "generally unaware of the presence and interaction between contributors and readers of Wikipedia", attributed by one participant and the author to the fact that these students "did not observe the traces of how and who has changed information they were reading. This lack of visible interactions within the system affected them to ignore the role of participation among contributors or Wikipedia community, and failed to cultivate the culture of contribution among its users." Some participants also cited a lack of confidence in their ability to contribute.
  Overall, the author concludes that "the participants’ lack of intention for contributing to Wikipedia can be explained by [their own experience with Wikipedia and interactions with their social groups]. Negative attitudes toward Wikipedia prevailing in the past and new social environment (i.e., high school and college) influenced participants to shape negative images about Wikipedia. Participants did not have social groups that can trigger contributing behaviors, nor identified themselves as a potential member of Wikipedians. Rather, their descriptions of Wikipedians showed that female students’ cognitive distinction from Wikipedians was remarkable, which were related to their devaluations of Wikipedians or works of Wikipedians among their social groups."
  While cautioning about the small sample size of her study, the author suggests possible solutions: "Highlighting profiles and works of young contributors and exposing their contributing activities on social network sites (i.e., Facebook)" and that "interfaces should be changed to invite engagement of these casual users."
• Gender gap coverage in media and blogs: An article in the Journal of Communication Inquiry^[14] studies how Wikipedia's gender gap concern has been treated in the news, based on a qualitative analysis of 42 articles from US news media and blogs, and 1,336 comments from online readers. The authors argue that this discussion can be seen as an example of a "broader backlash against women, and particularly feminism" in the U.S. news media and blogs. Reading the article, it appears that the views of this gap in the media represent the variety of views about feminism, from the most concerned and documented to the most stupid and misogynist. However, the synthesis of these opinions and the discussions the authors had with some leaders at Wikipedia/Wikimedia Foundation (among them Sue Gardner) let them argue that this problem has not yet been properly addressed, because of its complexity, but also because of a clear political decision from the management of the project to tackle it.
• German Wikipedia articles become static while English ones continue to develop: A conference paper titled "Identifying multilingual Wikipedia articles based on cross language similarity and activity"^[15] examines the content and the development of articles on the same subject in English and in German using static dumps of Wikipedia. It is quite limited in scope — it only compares two languages out of almost 300 that Wikipedia supports — but it suggests several interesting analysis methodologies, among them using different machine translation using the freely-licensed Moses engine as well as Microsoft Bing Translate and Google Translate, and finds that Moses compares favorably in its usefulness for this kind of work. One of the article's conclusions is that in general, articles in German tend to become static after initial development, while the English articles tend to continue to develop more over time.
• New sockpuppet corpus: An arXiv preprint^[16] announces "the first corpus available on real-world deceptive writing": A set of talk page comments made by users suspected of sockpuppeting in 410 English Wikipedia sockpuppet investigation (SPI) cases (305 where the suspicion was confirmed by a checkuser or other investigating administrator, and 105 where it was not), plus a control set of 213 cases that were created artificially from editors not previously involved in SPI cases. The resulting dataset of 623 cases is being made available online under a Creative Commons license, which could help foster research by others.
  In a longer paper published earlier this year (review: "Sockpuppet evidence from automated writing style analysis"), the authors had developed a machine learning based sockpuppet detection method and tested it on a smaller dataset of 77 cases. In their brief (4 pages) new preprint, they report that they successfully tested the method on the new, larger dataset, slightly improving the sockpuppet detection accuracy (F-measure) from 72% to 73%. (As one of the authors pointed out, in practice the method would be used alongside other evidence to yield a sufficiently certain proof of sockpuppetry.)
• Workshop on "User behavior and content generation on Wikipedia": A workshop with this title took place at the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany on November 8–9, jointly organized with the Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien based in Tübingen. The research presented took a broad range of approaches towards the study of Wikipedia, including the one on the "Iron Law of Oligarchy"^[6] discussed above. These were complemented by several presentations from the Wikimedia end — on the multitude of interactions between the Wikimedian and research communities, on a wishlist of research that may be beneficial to the Wikimedia community, and on the recently finished research project RENDER, in which Wikimedia Deutschland was a partner. The discussions at the workshop centered around ways in which interaction between the research and Wikimedia communities could be broadened and rendered more mutually beneficial. This research report (published both as the Wikimedia research newsletter and as the Signpost's Recent research section), the Research namespace on Meta-Wiki and Wikimedia Labs were mentioned in this regard. Also discussed was the issue that most papers in the field, along with tools and associated data, are not freely accessible, even though the openness of the Wikimedia ecosystem accounts for a significant portion of the motivation to study it.

Supplementary references:

2013-12-04

Musical scores, diversity conference, Module:Convert, and more

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By Pine

This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 28 November 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.

Style and naming

• "Proposed amendment to MOS:COMMA" for dates and places
• Use of horizontal lines on date pages

Policies and guidelines

• Where Wikipedia should discuss identity policy
• PROD proposal
• "Should the website of a known trolling and hacking group be included in this article ...?
• In the album infobox, "add a "format" parameter to the albums template"?
• "Should this proposal, Wikipedia:Conflict of interest limit, be made into a policy?"

WikiProjects and collaborations

• "Should we eliminate cash rewards?" on the Reward board?

Technical issues and templates

• "...migrate convert to use the module Module:Convert"?
• In the "Infobox television" template, "Should the website parameter be renamed to official_website and production_website parameter renamed to official_website_2?"

Proposals

• Allow only autoconfirmed users to create AfD requests?
• Location blacklist for articles for creation
• MassMessage user right
• Use of the "Orphan" tag

English Wikipedia notable requests for permissions

(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)

• "Voting is now open to elect new members of the Arbitration Committee. Voting will close on Monday, 9 December at 23:59 UTC. (Important note: Votes made prior to 00:01 26 November 2013 were discarded due to a technical error)"
• Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Callanecc

Meta

• "Wikimedia Central and Eastern European Meeting 2013 opens in Modra, Slovakia."
• "The first Wikimedia Research Hackathon takes place in cities around the world." on 9–10 November 2013
• "Wikidata celebrates its first birthday. Thanks to all who made this possible!"
• Trademark practices
• Scope of the Ombudsman Commission
• Draft Privacy Policy – comments accepted until 15 January 2014

Upcoming online meetings

• "VisualEditor", 2 December 19:00 UTC
• "VisualEditor", 3 December 1:00 UTC
• "Engineering Community Team", 17 December 17:00 UTC

Wikimedia blog posts

• "German war cemetery photo wins special award in Wiki Loves Monuments 2013"
• "Adding musical scores to Wikimedia"
• "Konkani Vishkawosh encyclopedia released under free license"
• "In Wikipedia, a roadmap to life"
• "Creative Commons releases version 4.0: Congratulations!"
• "Diversity Conference brings Wikimedians to Berlin"
• "Introducing the Wikidata “Concept Cloud”"
• "OAuth now available on Wikimedia wikis"
• "Developing Distributedly, Part 2: Best Practices for Staying in Sync"
• "Wikisource organizes proofreading contest for its 10th anniversary"
• "Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Vice President of Engineering"
• "How to make a Wikipedian angry"
• "Learning from patterns: a new way to share important lessons"
• "Wikimedia Foundation sends cease and desist letter to WikiPR"
• "Saudi students join the Wikipedia Education Program"
• Call for input on the new trademark policy"
• "On Consortium-Based Wikipedian in Residence Positions"
• "Wikimedia Highlights, October 2013"
• "Wikimedia Foundation Report, October 2013"
  
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2013-12-04

One decade of Wikisource; FDC recommendations raise serious questions

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By The ed17 and Tony1

Editor's note: last week's issue, which would have been published on 27 November, was skipped.

Wikisource turns ten

The sister project Wikisource, the digital library that hosts free-content primary sources, is now a decade old. Wikisource, which now has versions in 63 languages, is the sixth type of project to reach its ten-year milestone and will be the last until 2016.

Working on Wikisource is fundamentally different from Wikipedia. Most editors first start by uploading a pdf or djvu file of a source work; there is no notability standard required beyond it having been professionally published, and the Proofread Page extension gives Optical character recognition-based text that has to be proofread. Translations of these works and author bibliographies are also accepted, while original writings are delegated to Wikibooks. The project also offers interwiki links to relevant articles in the Wikimedia-verse, annotation, different editions of the same works, metadata, and ease of classification.

Highlights on the English Wikisource include items as varied as poetry, laws, constitutions, US Supreme Court decisions, modern novels, short stories, children’s literature, science fiction, and scientific papers. Wikisource also has extensive author indexes and featured texts such as A Jewish State (1896; 1917 translation).

Project Sourceberg, as Wikisource was first known, arose in 2003 because of edit wars on the English Wikipedia over the inclusion of primary sources. The name did not last long; several subdomains and a vote later it was renamed "Wikisource". The project has since developed its own community and has forged collaborations in its own right with prestigious institutions such as the US National Archives and Records Administration and organized the transcription of major portions of very large works like the Dictionary of National Biography and Popular Science Monthly. There are 61 active wikisource projects, and two closed projects. Haitian was closed because it was a tiny jumbled mess. Old English Wikisource closed because it is a dead language.

John Vandenberg has had an active presence on the English Wikisource for many years. He told the Signpost that among the strengths of Wikisource are its simplicity of use for new contributors, and that disputes are rarely about content, the bane of Wikipedia politics. "Instead, community debates tend to have concerned stylistic faithfulness to the original—or more technically, the provenance of the material."

Vandenberg says that many contributors are dedicated librarians and archivists. "Some ten multilingual users travel between the main versions—the English, the French, and the German Wikisources—providing at least some cohesion between the sites", he points out. The French site has historically emphasised reader-friendliness, with much attention given to the look of the pages. The German site has been more concerned about faithfulness to sources, and it was that project that first introduced the technology Proofread Page, in 2008, which allows much more control over the uploading of text and images of a range of file-types; at the same time, the German community banned what had become the mainstay of Wikisource uploads on all language versions: what is colloquially known as "dumping". The English site still allows dumping, but encourages the use of the new technology. Interestingly, he says, this occurred at around the same time that the main Wikipedias started insisting on the proper verification of claims in articles.

A significant challenge nowadays, says Vandenberg, is textual criticism—adding annotations to a text—which needs developer input to integrate it into the wiki system. "There's a good application called TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for academics that allows contributors to add a semantic layer on top of raw text; but it needs to be made compatible so that it maintains the features of a wiki and at the same time doesn't become too complicated for new users."

Having met the major milestone of a ten-year anniversary, Wikisource editors have been commemorating it with a proofreading contest; this includes prizes for the winners funded by the UK Wikimedia chapter. Over this long period of time, lessons have been learned, and there have been major accomplishments—but what does this achievement mean to the editors who work there, and where will they go from here?

AdamBMorgan points to the Dictionary of National Biography and Popular Science Monthly transcriptions as major victories for Wikisource, but believes that the site must "de-mystify" itself to the general public. Inductiveload added the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as a major achievement, though that gigantic reference work is also not fully transcribed yet. Acélan, from the French Wikisource, noted that all 16,000 pages of the famous Encyclopédie are completely transcribed there, only needing to be validated.

The future of Wikisource appears bright. Tpt sees the coming introduction of the VisualEditor as a potential point of success for the small project, noting that it will "make very easy for anyone to proofread" and facilitate the introduction of an export tool with "the adoption of a powerful metadata management system based on technologies built for Wikidata". Zyephyrus put it more succinctly: he sees the future as whether or not the project will complete its mission of "the complete library accessible to all humans on Earth."

In addition, the new Wikisource Community User Group was recently approved by the Affiliations Committee. The group plans "to support the Wikisource community in international communication tasks, outreach to external groups, coordination of software tools development, and facilitate fundraising according to its member needs", but what do regular users of the site think? Remarking on one of Wikisource's largest stumbling blocks, Viewer2 wonders if in trying to help and "inject some kind of sanity into the copyright strait-jacket", the organization "might just [be] occupied forever". John Carter hopes that it can help publicize the little-known site; if new editors come in bringing transcriptions of, for example, local and regional histories, that could be just the niche that Wikisource can fill and thrive in.

The site's contributors are upbeat, too: Maury, who is retired in real life, told us that it was a question of doing good for others, not just yourself. "Why carry knowledge to the grave when it, like real life itself, can be applied to building to better the world?" And has the site reached its full potential? As Carter stated, "The scope of this site is, really, only limited to the scope of the printed word and other historic works."

FDC recommendations raise questions about clarity of metrics, rationale

The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations to the Board of Trustees on 11 new applications for annual grants by 11 WMF-affiliated organisations. The announcement comes after the FDC-related staff revealed their assessments and comments on the applications last month. The maximum total budget for the current and upcoming March rounds is US$6M. In this round $4.4M has been recommended, leaving a maximum of $1.6M for the second and final round in 2013–14. The FDC reports that a total of $1.4M is likely to be requested in March.

Most returning applicants received significant increases over last year's allocations, despite the FDC's concerns about rapid growth in budgets and staffing, underspending, and planning. In particular, the staff ratings in this round were sharply reduced compared with those a year ago for four returning chapters—the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Israel—the first three of which are large European entities. There has been debate about value for money in the traditional chapter model, with warnings by the Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, that the FDC is "disproportionately chapters-centric", and her questioning of the cost–benefits of "setting up bricks-and-mortar institutions ... alongside sometimes difficult dynamics between staff and community".

Evolving context

The current round is occurring in a changing environment for funding. This is throwing up challenges for a multilayered, intricate system that is little more than a year old and is likely to factor into how the FDC, and WMF grantmaking more broadly, evolve over the next few years. Affiliated organisations are now returning for a second annual grant, which was always going to bring into serious play what is known as the "guardrails" guideline. Spelled out in the FDC's framework, this specifies that from year to year an applicant's funding should be within the range of 80–120% of their previous year's funding; this is for the sake of stability in both affiliate organisations' finances and FDC outlays. In the FDC's first year, the guideline was loosely based on the amount of WMF funding applicants had received in the previous year through other means. Likewise, this year the benchmarks for Serbia and India, newcomers to the FDC process, were established on the basis of non-FDC Foundation grants for the 2012–13 financial year.

At a high-profile WMF Metrics Meeting just before the deadline for applications, FDC support staff raised concerns that most of the bids for the current round were well over the maximum 20% increase allowed under the guardrails guideline; only the Netherlands' bid was within the allowed increase, at a full 20%. Our reporting of these figures prompted one chapter to email complaints to the Signpost's editor in chief that the cited increase in their application bid was distorted by fluctuations in the US dollar exchange rate; we understand that these complaints were taken up with FDC staff.

A turbulent year for some chapters has also called into question how accountable FDC funding should be in relation to standards of governance and transparency. There have been further conflict-of-interest issues for the WMUK board, despite the joint WMF–WMUK inquiry into governance in the chapter last year in the wake of Gibraltargate. There appear to be electoral irregularities and conflict-of-interest problems concerning the board of the Indian chapter. And the management of the German chapter received a scathing report by the chapter's auditors concerning financial procedure and a lack of detail in the annual plan.

Complications: the guardrails, exchange rates, and underspending

The Signpost faced difficulty in comparing how the chapters had been treated in relation to each other, to last year's funding, and to the FDC's written assessments. It appears that the figures are complicated by two factors. The first is the exchange-rate issue. The FDC's statement about this is unclear—that recommended funding is now "in requested currencies; the amount in US dollars is for comparative purposes only (using recalculated conversion rates from 1 October 2013)". When we queried what this means, FDC member Anders Wennersten confirmed that local currencies were used in applying the guardrails guideline. The figures supplied to the Signpost—in local currencies—do not include the exchange rates used to arrive at last year's funding as the benchmark, and seem to involve other factors as well.

The second complication is that several applicants significantly underspent their FDC allocation in the 2012–13 financial year—the subject of repeated criticism in the assessments (the word "underspend" and varieties appear 10 times in the FDC's recommendations). The FDC's comments about the German chapter (WMDE), for example, are highly critical: "WMDE does not propose any clear solution to the fact that it has a significant carry-over of $675,000 from its 2013 budget. Briefly stating that it plans to allocate this amount to software development in 2014 is insufficient. The amount proposed is equal to the annual budget of several Wikimedia organizations combined and cannot be treated lightly. ... [WMDE] often chooses to rely on a more general and enigmatic overall outcomes assessment, which is somewhat problematic for an organization this size". ... This large requested amount of two million US dollars ["$2.4 million" in the next sentence] does not have a clear rationale."

The Signpost initially assumed that WMDE's funding has been cut by 2.2% from last year's grant of in straight US$ terms ($1.75M vs $1.79M). In contrast, the FDC's recommendations cited "an effective increase of 20% over the previous FDC allocation". Information provided to us by the FDC cites a change of −6%. Wennersten told us that "we have an unresolved issue with operating reserves". Last year, for example, Wikimedia Germany underspent FDC funding by US$225,000 (a calculation that had to be teased out of the chapter's total underspend from all sources of $665,000). In practice, Wennersten said, the FDC expects WMDE to finance their 2013–14 activities partly from that $225,000; however, it is still unclear how this was factored into the chapter's allocation this year.

We put it to FDC chair Dariusz Jemielniak that the Committee had been staunchly critical of WMDE and that this did not seem to match the funding allocation to the chapter. His response was twofold:

“

I would not say we are in staunch criticism of WM-DE. On the contrary, we appreciate the outstanding work WM-DE does and the innovativeness and leadership in some areas (e.g. wiki-data). ... / ... [WMDE's] very heavy underspending and overestimating the budget last year played a role in the allocation this time ... However, we expect an entity with a budget roughly 10x larger than others to be a paragon in strategic planning, SMART goals setting, precise budgeting, and flawless execution, and while WM-DE is not doing worse than many other chapters, it is not immediately clear that it does significantly and astonishingly, qualitatively better. We generally have higher standards and expectations for WM-DE and WMF (the only entities exceeding 1m).

”

The underspend situation is yet more complex, according to FDC member Sydney Poore, who told the Signpost that:

“

the FDC separated the underspend into different types. One type is a general type of underspend that exact amount will be unclear until the end of their fiscal year. Another type is funds that are identified to be held for use in the next year. ... / ... Many organizations applying to the FDC will have a general underspend for a variety of reasons. WMDe will have both types of underspend. We considered this when figuring their allocation and came to working understanding that 225 k USD would be carried over by WMDe instead of being returned. ... / ... The issue of reserves is a related but separate issue that the FDC is aware of and plans to address comprehensively jointly with all involved stakeholders.

”

Given the multiple factors involved, we are unable at this stage to provide a graph showing how each applicant's funding related to the 80–120% guideline.

In brief

• Hong Kong Wikimania financial statement. Deryck Chan of the organising team for the August 2013 Wikimania has told the Signpost that the statement is still in preparation: "I think they're still at the stage of collating detailed income and spending data from various section leaders." For our advance coverage of the event, the organisers declined to comment on three questions we put to them about the financial model for this year's Wikimania, which was heavily funded by the WMF.
• German chapter election results. Nicole Ebber, Wikimedia Germany's head of international affairs, has announced the results of the recent chapter election at the annual general assembly in Berlin. Nikolas Becker will succeed Ralf Liebau as president of the board (uncontested); Anja Ebersbach and Tim Hector will be the vice presidents; Steffen Prößdorf will be treasurer; and the ordinary members will be Jürgen Friedrich, Markus Glaser, Sebastian Wallroth, Ralf Bösch, Robin Tech, and Jens Best. The chapter's four auditors were all re-elected. All terms are for one year. The general assembly approved the chapter's annual plan, which we reported was the subject of unusually sharp criticism by the auditors.
• German appellate court ruling. A ruling regarding Wikipedia content and legal liability prompted media coverage and a WMF blog post
• Arbitration Committee elections: Voting for candidates is open until Monday, 9 December at 23:59 UTC. As of 02:58 UTC, 5 December, 707 valid votes have been cast, with four days until the close of voting. The 2012 election attracted a total of 824 voters.
• GLAM: a Google hangout for the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums initiative, a "GLAMout", will be held on Friday, December 6 at 20:00 UTC
• New education program noticeboard: A new noticeboard has been started to help address student-specific editing issues.
  
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2013-12-04

Electronic Apple Pie

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By Mabeenot

Your source for

WikiProject News

• The December Wikification drive begins this Sunday
• Wikipedia's Motto of the day project is asking editors to nominate a motto today!
• WikiProject Good articles is holding a special backlog drive this month
• Today's article for improvement is asking editors to consider nominating an article today!
• Articles for Creation is holding a two-month backlog drive from now through January 31

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

This week, we returned to WikiProject Apple Inc. for a peek at their newest articles about the latest in gadgets and software. The last time we took a bite out of WikiProject Apple, they had just finished merging WikiProject Macintosh and WikiProject iPhone OS. Today, the project is hard at work rewriting their primary article, improving the subject's outline, and adding to the project's list of 25 Good Articles and 6 Featured Articles. We interviewed Zach Vega.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Apple Inc.? Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles?

I joined WikiProject Apple Inc. in 2011 to edit Apple-related articles, being under self-inflicted pressure at the time to join a WikiProject. I don't really participate in collaboration, as there haven't been that many, however the talk and resource pages are really handy when working on articles. In my opinion, the iOS and Mac task forces could be utilized much more effectively, considering the scope of topics is more focused. I've contributed to articles on the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad 2, 3rd generation iPad, and 4th generation iPad, all of which reached GA status.

With the recent release of the iPad Air, refreshed iPhones, and new versions of iOS and OS X, how is the project handling the influx of new information? What sections of these articles could use some help?

The articles are handling the new information inconsistently. For example, the iPhone 5S article is more developed than the one on the 5C. The iPad Air and 2nd generation iPad Mini articles are in need of expansion, especially the design, hardware, and commercial reception sections. One article needing help is the OS X Mavericks article, which is basically Start class at this point, whereas the OS X Mountain Lion is in the process of a Good Article nomination.

Does the project deal with Apple's fans gushing over Apple products or Apple's detractors bashing the latest gadgets in the project's articles? How often do new editors try to add rumors and speculation to articles prior to an expected release? What efforts does the project undertake to deal with sourcing and neutral point of view?

We deal with this from time to time, but it hasn't made a major impact. The most major debate was a decision to capitalize the "S" in iPhone 5S, which was drawn out over an extended period of time. A more major problem is the addition of rumors. Before the release of the iPad Air, an entire article was created about the Apple A7X, which was expected to be used in the iPad Air. The tablet revealed to have an Apple A7 processor when released. Sourcing isn't a problem that often, only for underdeveloped articles; it's just that people sometimes add information too early.

The project's members have been hard at work on the Outline of Apple Inc. article. What value do outlines provide to Wikipedia's readers and editors? Have outlines received less attention these days than they did in Wikipedia's early years?

The outlines allow readers and editors to easily access articles related to a general topic. They make subjects faster to navigate than portals, which is where topics on subjects tend to be located. Outlines have somewhat been replaced with navigation boxes, however they are still preferred for large topics such as Apple.

What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?

The project could certainly use help on the newer articles, such as the iPad Air and OS X Mavericks. The task forces, while a minor part of the project, could be more effective if they had more contributors. The WikiProject often collaborates with similar topics, such as WP Computing and WP Technology, however this is not deliberate.

Next week, we'll imbibe the finest fermented fruit. Until then, stomp grapes in the archive.

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2013-12-04

F*&!

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By The ed17 and Dank

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 17 November 2013 through 30 November 2013.

Featured articles

Seventeen featured articles were promoted over the last two weeks.

• Fuck (film) (nom) by Cirt. Fuck is an American documentary film by director Steve Anderson, providing perspectives on the word from linguists, lexicographers and journalists, as well as celebrities and comedians. Anderson was inspired by comedian George Carlin's monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television". The documentary was first shown at the 2005 AFI Film Festival, and received mixed reviews.
• Melbourne Castle (nom) by Jimfbleak. From the early fourteenth century, this castle in Derbyshire was mainly in the possession of the Earls and Dukes of Lancaster or the crown. John I, Duke of Bourbon, was kept at Melbourne for 19 years after his capture at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. All that remains today is a section of wall and some foundations.
• Fakih Usman (nom) by Crisco 1492. Fakih (1904–1968) was an Indonesian Islamic leader and politician with the Masyumi Party. Per the nominator, he is "pretty much forgotten in most histories of Indonesia that I've read. He gets more mention as the chairman of [the modernist Islamic organisation] Muhammadiyah – a position he held for less than a week before his death."
• Homer Davenport (nom) by Montanabw and Wehwalt. A US political cartoonist and writer, Davenport (1867–1912) satirized figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Although he had no formal art training, he became one of the highest paid political cartoonists in the world. Davenport was also one of the first major American breeders of Arabian horses.
• Spanish conquest of Petén (nom) by Simon Burchell. Per the nominator: "In the late 17th century ... the last independent Maya kingdoms were still practising human sacrifice upon pyramid temples, as their ancestors had done for many hundreds of years. They had been aware of the encroaching Spanish Empire since 1525, when Hernán Cortés had made an epic journey across their territory. ... With the [Mayan] Itza alternating between diplomatic overtures and the ambushing of Spanish expeditions, soldiers and friars alike fell beneath the spears and sacrificial knives of the Maya, although the outcome was perhaps inevitable."
• Elgin, Illinois, Centennial half dollar (nom) by Wehwalt. This coin was issued by the United States Bureau of the Mint in 1936. Intended to commemorate the centennial of the founding of Elgin, it was designed by local sculptor Trygve Rovelstad. Art historian Cornelius Vermeule considered the Elgin coin among the most outstanding American commemoratives.
• Paul Henderson (nom) by Resolute. Born in 1943, Henderson is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player best known for leading Team Canada to victory at the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union. Played at the height of the Cold War, the series was viewed as a battle for both hockey and cultural supremacy. Henderson scored the game-winning goal in the sixth, seventh and eighth games, the last of which was voted the "sports moment of the century" by the Canadian Press. He was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in 2013.
• Lionel Palairet (nom) by Harrias. Palairet (1870–1933) was an English amateur cricketer who played for Somerset and Oxford University. His obituary in The Times described him as "the most beautiful batsman of all time". He was selected to play Test cricket for England twice in 1902, but an unwillingness to tour during the English winter limited Palairet's Test appearances.
• No. 33 Squadron RAAF (nom) by Ian Rose. This Royal Australian Air Force strategic transport and air-to-air refuelling squadron has supported operations in Namibia, Somalia, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan; now it operates tanker transports from RAAF Base Amberley, Queensland. The squadron was first formed in February 1942 for service during World War II.
• The Unnatural (The X-Files) (nom) by Gen. Quon. This X-Files episode, first aired on April 25, 1999, was written by lead actor David Duchovny. It has been critically examined for its use of literary motifs, its fairy tale-like structure, and its themes concerning racism and alienation.
• Jethro Sumner (nom) by Cdtew. During the American Revolutionary War, Sumner (c. 1733 – 1785) served in both the Southern theater and Philadelphia campaign between 1779 and 1783 as one of five brigadier generals from North Carolina in the Continental Army. He helped to establish the North Carolina Chapter of the Society of the Cincinnati, now the oldest lineage society in North America, and became its first president.
• Interstate 196 (nom) by Imzadi1979. The second freeway in the US state of Michigan to bear this number, I-196 is an auxiliary Interstate Highway that runs for 81 miles (130 km). It links Benton Harbor, South Haven, Holland, and Grand Rapids.
• Redback spider (nom) by 99of9 and Casliber. Latrodectus hasseltii is a "widow" spider indigenous to Australia. The redback is one of only a few arachnids that usually display sexual cannibalism while mating, and also one of the few spiders that can be seriously harmful to humans; it has been responsible for the large majority of serious spider bites in Australia.
• The Sinking of the Lusitania (nom) by Curly Turkey. This silent animated short film from 1918 by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay was a work of propaganda, a re-creation of the never-photographed 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania. At twelve minutes it has been called the longest work of animation at the time of its release. The film is the earliest animated documentary and serious, dramatic work of animation to survive.
• Weather Machine (nom) by Another Believer. Variously described as "bizarre", "playful", "unique", and "wacky", this tourist attraction in Portland, Oregon (US) displays a two-minute weather prediction each day at noon.
• Dromaeosauroides (nom) by FunkMonk. This Danish dinosaur had sentimental value to the nominator, being a self-described "dinosaur geek" from the country. This shows in the care given to the article, which evolved with assistance from one of the discoverers of fossilized remains.
• Japanese battleship Mutsu (nom) by Sturmvogel 66. This battleship was an irritant to diplomats negotiating the Washington Naval Treaty, as the Japanese government refused to scrap the incomplete ship, claiming that it had already been commissioned. Mutsu served into the Second World War, but only fired its guns in anger once before being destroyed in an ammunition magazine explosion in 1943.

Featured lists

Four featured lists were promoted in the last two weeks.

• List of international cricket five-wicket hauls by Curtly Ambrose (nom) by Sahara4u. This former West Indian cricketer has taken 26 five-wicket hauls at international level. (A five-wicket haul refers to a bowler taking five or more wickets in a single innings, and is regarded as a notable achievement in cricket.) His final one was taken against Australia in 1999.
• List of works by Kwee Tek Hoay (nom) by Crisco 1492. This Chinese-Indonesian author wrote over sixty books or serials throughout the 20th century. Some were fiction, while others were on topics such as the teachings of Laozi, Zhuangzi and Confucius. He also authored plays, essays and other works.
• List of Olympic men's ice hockey players for the United States (nom) by Giants2008. The United States has participated in 21 of 22 Olympic ice hockey tournaments, and has sent 42 goaltenders and 271 skaters to compete. They have won two gold medals, eight silver medals and one bronze medal since 1920.
• Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (nom) by Ben MacDui. Written in 1549, this early account of the islands of Scotland's west coast has become one of the most widely quoted works on the subject.

Featured pictures

Twenty-eight featured pictures were promoted in the last two weeks.

• Woman playing a large suspended drum (tsuridaiko) (nom, related article 1/2/3) created by Yashima Gakutei, uploaded by DcoetzeeBot, and nominated by I JethroBT. From the Google Art Project, this Japanese surimono was created c. 1827.
• Coiled Galaxy (nom) created by NASA and nominated by Planet Herald. This galaxy, named NGC 1097, is 50 million light-years away from us on Earth. It is similarly shaped to the Milky Way. This color-coded infrared image shows a black hole in the center of this galaxy as blue and the outer stars as white.
• Downtown Tampa (nom) created and nominated by Alvesgaspar. The skyline of this American city was taken from the Embassy Suite Hotel, looking north.
• US Federal Reserve Bank Note (FRBN) type set by denomination (nom) taken and nominated by Godot13. Part of a larger series from the US' National Numismatic Collection that have all been digitized by the nominator.
• Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève reading room (nom, related article) created by Marie-Lan Nguyen and nominated by Elekhh. This French library holds about two million documents and encloses a very large reading room, seen in the image.
• David Faiman (nom, related article) created by David Shankbone and nominated by Elekhh. Israeli engineer and physicist Faiman is the director of the Ben-Gurion National Solar Energy Center and a world expert on solar power. He lives in a passive solar house that heats and cools itself without any mechanical assistance.
• Lichtbringer ("Bringer of Light") on the Böttcherstraße (nom, related articles 1/2) created by Bernhard Hoetger and photographed/nominated by Godot13. This sculpted relief was intended to emulate "victory of our Führer over the powers of darkness", but was rejected by Hitler as being part of the "entartete Kunst", or degenerate art.
• Freestyle Motocross (nom, related article) created by Kadellar and nominated by Tomer T. Freestyle Motocross is a variation of off-road motorcycle racing where the riders instead perform tricks, which are graded by judges. This image is of a Spanish rider performing "Rock Solid".
• Zürich Opera House (nom, related article) created by Roland zh and nominated by Tomer T. This Swiss opera house has been home to the city's opera since 1891. Built after a previous theater burnt down, the building was restored amid harsh local opposition, which the Wikipedia article on it describes as "street riots".
• Al-Aqsa Mosque (nom, related article) created and nominated by Godot13. This mosque is the third-holiest site in Islam and is located in Israel.
• Gold certificates (nominations 1, 2, 3) photographed by Godot13. Part of the National Numismatic Collection series mentioned above, these notes were printed for the 1882 and 1934 series. The $10,000 note is illegal to own as it was never circulated.
• The Day the Earth Smiled (nom, related article) created by NASA and nominated by Crisco 1492. The US' Cassini unmanned spacecraft was sent to Saturn in 1997 and has captured Saturn and its entire ring system during a solar eclipse three times. The third took place on 19 July 2013, and the public was asked to mark the day "to celebrate life on planet Earth and humanity's accomplishments in the exploration of the solar system." The photograph's final post-processing form and this featured picture were released to the public on 12 November and quickly went viral on the Internet; it was also featured on the New York Times' front page on the following day.
• Sukhoi Superjet 100 over Italy (nom, related article) created by Superjet International, uploaded by Russavia, and nominated by Nikhil. As Sukhoi's attempt to break into the regional jet market, the company claims that the plane has both a lower purchase price and lower operating costs than its direct competitors. According to the Wikipedia article, it currently has built or has orders for 284 planes, with options for a further 107, but a Reuters article shows that the company hopes that the program will at least break even only by 2015.

Disclaimer: Summaries on this page borrow shamelessly from the articles cited; see the article histories for attribution.

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2013-12-04

Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute case opens; New discretionary sanctions draft proposal available for review

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By Neotarf

The Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute case has opened. The second draft of the discretionary sanctions proposal is now open for review.

Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute

The Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute case was brought by TomStar81 on behalf of the coordinators of the Military History Project. The case involves a long-standing pattern of edits and reverts in articles associated with the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, and difficulty over a consensus to use "Turkish" to refer to soldiers from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War.

Discretionary sanctions review

The Arbitration Committee has announced that the latest update of the draft for new discretionary sanctions procedures has been posted and is open for comment. The update would replace the current version of the procedures. Discretionary sanctions evolved from "article probation", which authorized administrators to issue topic-bans within problematic topics.

Among other provisions, the proposed procedure would remove the provision that "Prior to any sanctions being imposed, the editor in question shall be given a warning with a link to the decision authorizing sanctions; and, where appropriate, should be counseled on specific steps that he or she can take to improve his or her editing in accordance with relevant policies and guidelines." It adds three appeal options, including a provision that "To obtain a clear and substantial consensus to annul the sanction of either (a) uninvolved participating administrators at the AE noticeboard, or (b) uninvolved editors at the administrators' noticeboard."

Currently 27 topic areas are under discretionary sanctions and 713 pages are under article probation.

Other requests and committee action

• Clarification request: Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): An amendment request was initiated by Fram; the named party was encouraged to appeal the topic ban to the Committee.
• Clarification request: Argentine History: A clarification request was made by MarshalN20 regarding his Latin American history topic ban. An editor who had previously requested an interaction ban with the filer asked if he was allowed to comment and was subsequently blocked for one month in a separate action at arbitration enforcement.
• Clarification request: Kiefer.Wolfowitz banned: An amendment request was initiated by John Cline regarding a voter guide posted by a banned user. The voter guide was removed, as was talk page access.
• Clarification request: Amendment request: Macedonia 2: A clarification request was initiated by Red Slash regarding naming discussions. The committee agreed that no amendment was necessary for naming discussions to take place.
  
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