Cross-language editors, election predictions, vandalism experiments
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Cohort of cross-language Wikipedia editors analyzed
Analyzing edits to the then 46 largest Wikipedias between July 9 and August 8, 2013, a study[1] identified a set of about 8,000 contributors (labeled multilingual) with a global user account who have edited more than one of these language versions (excluding Simple English, which was treated separately) in that time frame. It tested five hypotheses about cross-language editing and editors and looked, for instance, at the proportion of contributions that any of these Wikipedias receives from multilingual editors versus contributions from those only editing one language version. The research found that Esperanto and Malay stick out with a high proportion of contributions from multilinguals, and on the other end, that Japanese has few contributions from multilinguals. Overall, in terms of edits per user, multilingual users made more than twice the number of contributions to the study corpus than monolinguals did; they often work on the same topics across language; and in any given language, they are frequently editing articles not edited by monolinguals during the one-month period analyzed here. They thus serve a bridging function between languages.
Two existing write-ups are good starting points to putting the study in context.[supp 1][supp 2] In the long run, it would be interesting to extend the research to (a) cover a longer time span, (b) include contributions from non-registered users, despite technical difficulties, (c) include smaller Wikipedias, and (d) explore the effects of that bridging function in more detail, perhaps in search for ways to support its beneficial effects while minimizing the non-beneficial ones. It would also be interesting to focus on some aspects of those multilingual users (e.g. how do the languages they edit in match with the languages they display on their user pages) or their contributions (e.g. how do their contributions to text, illustrations, references, links, templates, categories or talk page discussions differ across languages, or how contributions from multilinguals differ across topics or between pages with high and low traffic – or to entertain ideas for a multilingual version of editing tools like User:SuggestBot. The paper is one of the first to make use of Wikidata; comparing such cross-lingual Wikipedia contributions with contributions to multi-lingual projects like Wikidata and Commons may also be a fruitful avenue for further research. (See also earlier coverage of a CSCW paper about a similar topic: "Activity of content translators on Wikipedia examined")
Attempt to use Wikipedia pageviews to predict election results in Iran, Germany and the UK
A new paper on arXiv asks the question "Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data?"[2] Operating on the assumption that "sentiment data is implied in information seeking behaviour," the authors Yasseri and Bright compare Wikipedia page views and Google search trends to election outcomes in Iran, Germany and the UK. In Iran and the UK, where the researchers were able to use the articles of individual politicians, the page view and search trend data correctly pick the winners of the elections. In the UK, the data polled even correctly picks the orders of the runners-up, but the same is not true for Iran. In the German case, no correlation is found between search data and election results. Yasseri and Bright defer to the argument from previous studies on Twitter prediction that conclude that the sample data is too self-selecting. Overall, it is shown that "people do not simply search in the same proportions that they vote." Still the researchers note that these techniques react "quickly to the emergence of new 'insurgent' candidates."
Integrity of Wikipedia and Wikipedia research
A book titled Confidentiality and Integrity in Crowdsourcing Systems contains a chapter on the integrity of the English Wikipedia as a case study of integrity management in crowdsourcing systems.[3] To test the integrity of Wikipedia, they first tried to start a new article with "invalid content" (it got deleted) and then turned to vandalizing pages systematically, both of which violates Wikipedia policies (cf. Wikipedia:Vandalism). They noted that simple cases were caught by automated counter-vandalism tools (ClueBot and XLinkBot, whose user pages – one of them with a typo – are the only references cited in the chapter), whereas more subtle cases ("incorrect information containing words related to the page’s topic" or adding external links present in related Wikipedia articles) were not. No indication was given as to whether these inappropriate edits had later been removed (by the authors themselves or by other users), nor what the affected pages were or what IP address(es) they had used to make those edits.
In a next step, the authors went through dumps of the English Wikipedia from 2001 to 2011 and analyzed revision histories for "100 good and featured articles" (which refers to Wikipedia:Good articles and Wikipedia:Featured articles – later, they call this set "high-quality articles") and "100 non-featured articles" (by which they mean neither good nor featured – later, they refer to this set as "low-quality articles"). In this sample (of which no further details are given), they observed that the number of contributions to high-quality articles is about one order of magnitude higher than that of low-quality articles and "that there is a highly active group of contributors involved from the creation of high quality articles until present", while most editors to low-quality articles never contributed to those pages again. They then looked at revert rates, at the overlap between sets of top contributors to a given article across years, and at the range of topics edited by top contributors to an article, observing that "the top contributors have become the owners of high quality articles and their engagement has increased" (which runs contrary to WP:OWN), "[T]his results in higher quality for a small portion of articles in Wikipedia" and "[T]op contributors of high quality articles are more like- minded than the top contributors of low quality articles", concluding "that the main difference between low quality and featured articles is the number of contributions."
From that, they venture into extrapolating to crowdsourcing systems more generally: "[w]e observe that to have higher integrity in crowdsourcing systems, we need to have a permanent set of contributors who are dedicated for maintaining the quality of the contributions to the articles. For systems with open access such as Wikipedia, this can be a huge burden for the permanent editors. Therefore, we need new mechanisms for coordinating the activities in a crowdsourcing information system." No discussion of these new mechanisms is offered.
The chapter has a few simple tables and plots but no link to the underlying data nor the code used for the analysis, nor links to relevant literature or Wikipedia policies, but it is paywalled behind a price tag of $29.95 / €24.95 / £19.95. Given that the experimental edits to Wikipedia actually damaged the project, it is hard to imagine that an ethical review panel involving Wikipedians might have approved the study in that form. In fact, such a panel does exist in the form of the Research Committee, which had not been contacted about the project. Considering further that the conclusions of the study are not new, their possibly interesting implications for crowdsourcing more generally are not discussed and neither the paper nor its materials are available to those concerned about the integrity of Wikipedia, it is hard to see any benefit of this study that would outweigh the damage it caused (cf. earlier coverage: "Link spam research with controversial genesis but useful results", "Traffic analysis report and research ethics").
Briefly
- "How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia": The abstract[4] of a keynote talk with this title at the upcoming FOSDEM conference reports on the application of "Language Tool", an open source grammar-and-style error checker for multiple languages – including English, German and Polish – that has been in development since 2003, to Wikipedia articles (example). Its method is like regular expressions except it takes into account parts-of-speech. When it was applied to 20,000 English Wikipedia articles, 37,000 errors were found. However, the false positive rate was high, as only 29 of 200 manual inspections were human validated. This raises a question: does Wikipedia need to be grammar and style checked differently from other texts?
Villi in the small intestine. - "Evaluation of gastroenterology and hepatology articles on Wikipedia" – In this paper,[5] the author was concerned about "the tendency of medical students to use Wikipedia as their preferred learning resource", so he and his assistants assessed 39 articles on topics related to gastroenterology and hepatology for a number of quality indicators (e.g. length, depth, accuracy, readability, number of tables or illustrations, topicality of listed references, missing important references). He concludes that "Wikipedia is not suitable for medical students as a learning resource for gastroenterology and hepatology topics" and suggests they turn to the peer-reviewed literature instead. The study is hidden behind a paywall, which reflects current practice in the field and is one of the reasons why some of the articles in the study do not contain suitable illustrations. The article has been discussed at WikiProject Medicine but taking concrete action is difficult, as the details of the assessment are hidden further away in an appendix not available "ahead of print".
- Overview of research on FLOSS and Wikipedia: A draft paper titled "Peer Production: A Modality of Collective Intelligence"[6] co-authored by one of the pioneers of peer production/collaborative intelligence research, Yochai Benkler, discusses some of the developments in this field, using Wikipedia as one of several case studies, alongside free software (FLOSS). The paper, in essence, is a literature review of the fields of "organization, motivation, and quality" of peer production.
- In battle over Walt Whitman's sexuality, Wikipedia policies "tamed the mass into producing a good encyclopedia entry": The revision history and talk page of the Wikipedia article on American poet Walt Whitman are examined closely in a paper[7] by three scholars, two of whom have previously published research on Whitman themselves, and another who was the main contributor to the Wikipedia article on Whitman. The authors focus on how Wikipedians covered Whitman's sexual orientation, which "has been settled in a particularly ambiguous way" in the academic literature. The paper examines the talk page discussions on this aspect and how they were influenced by Wikipedia policies on e.g. original research, neutrality and verifiability, and concludes: "Significantly, and perhaps ironically, Wikipedia’s evolving editorial codes have resulted in a Whitman page that, while curtailing open accessibility, or at least free-form contributions [the article has been semi-protected since 2008], generally reflects the nuance and complexity of the scholarly consensus regarding Whitman's sexuality. In this regard, Wikipedia has instituted something like the professional standards to which all scholars are subject: peer review, citations, and at least an affected tone of neutrality. Contrary to its democratic origins, Wikipedia has, at least in this case, tamed the mass into producing a good encyclopedia entry".
- Elinor Ostrom's theories applied to Wikipedia: A French-language paper[8] in Management et Avenir (Management and Future) by two researchers from the University of Montpellier applies Nobelist Elinor Ostrom's analysis of self-organizing systems to the governance of Wikipedia.
- New dissertation on Wiktionary: Wiktionary, "currently the largest collaboratively constructed dictionary project", is the subject of a dissertation at the TU Darmstadt[9] (cf. earlier coverage of publications by the same author and his doctoral adviser: "Can Wiktionary rival traditional lexicons?", "Wiktionary and OmegaWiki compared")
References
- ^ Hale, Scott A. (2013). "Multilinguals and Wikipedia Editing". Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science - Web Sci '14. pp. 99–108. arXiv:1312.0976. doi:10.1145/2615569.2615684. ISBN 9781450326223.
- ^ Taha Yasseri; Jonathan Bright (2013). "Can electoral popularity be predicted using socially generated big data?". arXiv:1312.2818 [physics.soc-ph].
- ^ Ranj Bar, A.; Maheswaran, M. (2014). "Case Study: Integrity of Wikipedia Articles". Confidentiality and Integrity in Crowdsourcing Systems. SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology. p. 59. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-02717-3_6. ISBN 978-3-319-02716-6.
- ^ https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/how_we_found_600000_grammar_errors/ (abstract only)
- ^ Azer, S. A. (2014). "Evaluation of gastroenterology and hepatology articles on Wikipedia". European Journal of Gastroenterology & Hepatology. 26 (2): 155–63. doi:10.1097/MEG.0000000000000003. PMID 24276492.
- ^ Benkler, Yochai, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. "Peer Production: A Modality of Collective Intelligence". (draft paper) http://mako.cc/academic/benkler_shaw_hill-peer_production_ci.pdf
- ^ Jason Stacy, Cory Blad, and Rob Velella. "Morbid Inferences: Whitman, Wikipedia, and the Debate over the Poet's Sexuality". Polymath: An Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4, Fall 2013 https://ojcs.siue.edu/ojs/index.php/polymath/article/view/2857
- ^ Bernard Fallery, Florence Rodhain. "Gouvernance d'Internet, gouvernance de Wikipedia : l'apport des analyses d'E. Ostrom". Management et Avenir, 65 (2013) 168–187, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/92/05/08/PDF/2013_RMA.pdf (in French, with English abstract)
- ^ Meyer, Christian M. Wiktionary: "The Metalexicographic and the Natural Language Processing Perspective". Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt Ph.D. Thesis], (2013) http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/3654/
- Supplementary references:
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Drunken birds and treasonous kings
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Featured articles
- Charles I of England (nom) by DrKiernan. Charles was the monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles believed in the divine right of kings and thought he could govern according to his own conscience. Charles was tried, convicted, and executed for high treason in January 1649.
- Bohemian Waxwing (nom) by Jimfbleak. A starling-sized passerine bird that breeds in the northern forests of Eurasia and North America, it has mostly buff-grey plumage, black face markings and a pointed crest. They can metabolize alcohol found in fermenting fruit, but can still become intoxicated, sometimes fatally.
- Nigersaurus (nom) by FunkMonk. A genus of rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur that lived during the middle Cretaceous period, about 115 to 105 million years ago. It was discovered in the Elrhaz Formation in an area called Gadoufaoua, in the Republic of Niger.
- Roxy Ann Peak (nom) by Little Mountain 5. A 3,576-foot (1,090 m) tall mountain in the Western Cascade Range at the eastern edge of Medford, Oregon, the majority of the peak is of volcanic origin and dates to the early Oligocene. The mountain is Medford's most important viewshed, open space reserve, and recreational resource, and is protected by the 1,740-acre (700 ha) Prescott Park.
- Mughal-e-Azam (nom) by Bollyjeff. A 1960 Indian film directed by K. Asif and produced by Shapoorji Pallonji, the historical epic follows the love affair between Mughal Prince Salim (who went on to become Emperor Jahangir) and Anarkali, a court dancer. The film is widely considered a milestone of its genre, earning praise from critics for its grandeur and attention to detail.
Featured lists
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- List of Welsh Premier League clubs (nom) by ChrisTheDude. The Welsh Premier League is an association football league based in Wales. Formed in 1992 as the League of Wales, a name it retained until 2002, it was the first national football league in the country. In its inaugural season 20 teams played in the league, but it has since been significantly restructured and has 12 member clubs in the 2013–14 season.
- Arsenal F.C. league record by opponent (nom) by Lemonade51. Arsenal Football Club is an English professional association football club based in North London. The club was formed in Woolwich in 1886 as Royal Arsenal before being renamed as Woolwich Arsenal in 1893. Arsenal have recorded more league victories against Everton than against any other club, having beaten them 90 times out of 185 attempts.
Featured pictures
- Muscles of the face (nom, related article) by Dr. Johannes Sobotta and nominated by CFCF. The muscles of the face play a prominent role in the expression of emotion, and vary among different individuals, giving rise to additional diversity in expression and facial features.
- Fortress of Guaita (nom, related article) by Max Ryazanov and nominated by Tomer T. The Guaita fortress is the oldest of the three towers constructed on Monte Titano, and the most famous. It was built in the 11th century and served briefly as a prison. It is one of the three towers depicted on both the national flag and coat of arms of San Marino.
- Jefferson Memorial (nom, related article) by Jovianeye and nominated by Tomer T. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial is a presidential memorial in Washington, D.C. dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, an American Founding Father and the third President of the United States. The neoclassical building was designed by the architect John Russell Pope and built by the Philadelphia contractor John McShain.
- NGC 4565 (nom, related article) by Ken Crawford and nominated by Planet Herald. NGC 4565 (also known as the Needle Galaxy or Caldwell 38) is an edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The 10th magnitude galaxy sits perpendicular to our own Milky Way galaxy and is almost directly above the North Galactic Pole (in the same way Polaris is located above the Earth's North Pole).
- Self-Portrait, Yawning (nom, related article) by Joseph Ducreux and nominated by Crisco 1492. Joseph, Baron Ducreux was a French portrait painter, pastelist, miniaturist, and engraver, who was a successful portraitist at the court of Louis XVI of France, and resumed his career after the French Revolution. Ducreux made several well-known self-portraits in the 1780s and 1790s, including one (now in the collection of the Getty Center in Los Angeles; c. 1783) in which he painted himself in the middle of a large yawn.
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Draft namespace, VisualEditor meetings
This is mostly a list of non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 22 December 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The last 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 merger of "Family name" into the "Surname" article
- Article splitting policies and the "Hungarian passport" article
- Choice of colors in "The Walking Dead (TV series)" article; use of rollback privilege
Policies and guidelines
- Reliable sources regarding gun control
- Review of username policy and enforcement
- "Pseudo-namespace shortcut redirects" in mainspace
- "Creating a guideline for graphs and charts on articles"
- Do not automatically protect Today's featured article?
- Where Wikipedia should discuss identity policy
WikiProjects and collaborations
Technical issues and templates
Proposals
- Use of the Draft namespace
- Create a new namespace for template documentation?
- Change the duration of BLP proposed deletion discussions from 10 days to 7 days?
English Wikipedia notable requests for permissions
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
Meta
- "A new draft of the trademark policy is proposed, and discussion begins on its talk page."
- Scope of the Ombudsman Commission
- Draft Privacy Policy – comments accepted until 15 January 2014
Upcoming online meetings
- "VisualEditor", 2014-01-15 23:00 UTC
- "VisualEditor", 2014-01-22 23:00 UTC
- "VisualEditor", 2014-02-15 17:00 UTC
- "VisualEditor", 2014-02-16 00:00 UTC
- "New draft feature provides a gentler start for Wikipedia articles"
- "November notes from Brussels"
- "OpenDyslexic font now available on Polish Wikipedia"
- "New Individual Engagement Grantees to engage community with tools and outreach"
- "Sue Gardner to receive first Knight Innovation Award"
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More Great WikiProject Logos
- The next Guild of Copy Editors backlog elimination drive begins New Years Day.
- The Articles for Creation drive continues into January, so get busy!
- This is your last chance to get in on the December backlog elimination drives held this month by WikiProject Good Articles and WikiProject Wikify
We saved one last special report for 2013. After our well-received review of great WikiProject logos a couple years ago, it was only a matter of time before we collected a new batch of interesting iconography that showcases the creativity of the Wikipedia community. Hopefully, these logos will also inspire other projects to liven up their drab pages.
Before we begin, it is important to note that gilded pages do not guarantee a project's success. Slapping a new coat of paint on a flailing WikiProject won't eliminate the project's deeper flaws. We have special reports on reviving WikiProjects, learning from dead projects, and other kernels of knowledge that can help struggling projects.
The list below presents interesting designs that stood out among the many projects surveyed by one Report writer. This list is in no particular order and is by no means exhaustive. For great logos we may have overlooked, we invite our readers to post their favorite WikiProject's logo in the comments section of this report.
Award winning project
WikiProject Wikipedia Awards, home to barnstars and other bits of WikiLove, had a logo purpose built by Antonu, the editor who remastered most of Wikipedia's barnstars and creates new ones for WikiProjects upon request. The logo in its entirety has been translated into Korean and Urdu. The golden barnstar with a laurel wreath, created specifically for the WikiProject Wikipedia Awards logo, was refashioned for the "2.0" version of the WikiProject Barnstar which is awarded to "someone who makes great strides in improving WikiProjects."
Interwoven fossils
The logo for WikiProject Palaeontology is simple yet distinctive, with a Plesiosaurus macrocephalus fossil wrapped around the project's name. The fossil image looks pretty good for a hundred-year-old sketch.
Practice what you teach
Like the project's dual pursuits, WikiProject Heraldry and Vexillology has dual identifiers. On the left, the "Wikipedia coat of arms" which is described thusly: Or, on a puzzle piece gules a flag waving Or on a flagstaff bendwise argent; for the crest, a flag waving Or on a flagstaff palewise argent issuing from an escutcheon Or issuing from a wreath Or and gules. To the right, the WikiProject Heraldry and Vexillology seal which would look mighty fine on a flag or letterhead.
For our next trick
WikiProject Magic has a logo calling to mind the carnivals, circuses, and other traveling shows where magicians and soothsayers once made a living. While today's illusionists and escape artists demand flashier events, this call-back to a bygone era fits the project's extraordinary members.
That's so yesterday
What better way is there to identify WikiProject Fashion than with an outfit that's hopelessly out of fashion? This 1920s postcard should remind everyone that some day your children and grandchildren will be laughing at how ridiculous you looked back in 2013.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...
WikiProject Sharks doesn't need anything flashy. While many sea creatures have dorsal fins, a simple fin-shaped-object poking out of the water immediately brings sharks to mind (often to humorous effect). The morale of this story is that you don't need a DFA to design a decent logo. All it takes is an idea and a little motivation.
Just when you thought it was safe to jaywalk...
The WikiCops are coming for you. WikiProject Law Enforcement has an intricately crafted badge mixing a sheriff star, cop shield, and bobby crown with a laurel wreath and some rays of chivalric order starshine.
In all seriousness
The folks at WikiProject Editor Retention mean business. Attracting and keeping editors is a huge challenge for Wikipedia, so it's reassuring to know that the professionals at WikiProject Editor Retention are on it.
On the road again
The vast array of roadway projects and task forces have something in common that tie them all together: vectorized road signs unique to their corner of the world. If you don't have the time or know-how to create something from scratch, just use the resources that are already at your project's disposal. Logos going left to right are from: WikiProject U.S. Roads, Auto Trails Task Force, U.S. Territories Task Force, WikiProject Canada Roads, and WikiProject Australian Roads.
Full circle
We ended the first Great WikiProject Logos with a simple yet effective logo from the folks at WikiProject Zoo. Since then, they've updated their look with a wild image clearly inspired by edgy advertising buffers for some televised wildlife programs. The Wikipedians of WikiProject Zoo are clearly excited about their subject.
Did any of these stand out to you? Did we forget your favorite project's icon? Do you have something new you've been working on that you'd like to share? Post it to the comments section below!
Next week, we'll ring in the New Year with our annual retrospective. Until then, revisit years past in the archive.
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IEG round 2 funding rewards diverse ambitions
A significant move by the Wikimedia Foundation has been the broadening of the types of activities it funds. To this end, the Foundation has developed several quite different forums for allocating that funding, setting up volunteer committees that conduct initial assessments of competitive applications. The most recent of these programs was the individual engagement grants (IEG) scheme, launched last January. The scheme awards funds to individuals or teams of up to four people to produce high-impact outcomes for the WMF's online projects. The IEG scheme favours innovative approaches to solving critical issues in the movement. This arm of WMF grantmaking is different from the Funds Dissemination Committee, which started more than a year ago and judges applications for annual operating grants by eligible afilliated organisations.
The IEG committee has just announced the results of its second twice-yearly round. There are seven successful applications for projects that are striking for their reach and diversity, underlining the complex and multidimensional nature of the Wikimedia movement. The allocations—some of them based on applications of impressive quality—involve on-the-ground social, cultural, and technical innovations. Individuals from Cameroon, Uganda, India, Israel, France, Italy, Germany, and the US will begin their projects in the new year, most of which will run from January to June.
Increasing participation and engagement
A surprisingly large proportion of our editors are under 18, according to Temple-Wood. She and Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi) have also been provisionally funded to pilot a week-long summer conference, Generation Wikipedia, for young Wikipedians and Wikimedians from around the globe to connect, share skills and build leadership and community capacity among the youngest generation of editors. The conference, for which $20K may be allocated, would stress the particular needs of minors for safety, privacy, and liability protection in such an environment.
The Mbazzi Village writes Wikipedia has its origins in the meeting of two people from very different countries who crossed paths in an exchange program for their students: Paul Kiguba, deputy head at a primary school on a small peninsula that juts into the massive Lake Victoria in Uganda; and Dan Frendin, a teacher in Sweden. Together, they founded the Luganda Wikipedia to serve the local language. An empty house owned by Paul Kiguba in the village of Mbazzi will become a new Wikipedia centre, emphasising the writing of articles on health and agriculture. The project, funded at nearly $3K, will be assisted by Sophie Österberg, who was the WMF's Global Education Manager.
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Technical innovations
A further three projects involve technical innovations. Wikimaps Atlas is designed to address a problem many editors are aware of: creating maps for WMF online projects is a labour-intensive process that fails to meet the demand for accuracy and updating. The current system has left us with a large messy pool of locator and other base maps with varying styles, accuracy, and formats. The project will automate the creation of SVG base maps in a well-researched cartographic style using the latest and most accurate open geographic data. Put simply, it will systematically generate a free atlas of the world with well coded SVG files. Arun Ganesh, Hugo Lopez and collaborators will receive $12.5K to achieve this.
VisualEditor, the system of WYSIWYG editing in display mode, has had a controversial start, but will be an inevitable feature of editing on WMF projects. A key challenge is to create a centralised register of all gadgets, with a programmatic understanding of how each relates to editing and an assessment of its popularity across projects. Grantees Eran Roz and Ravid Ziv, have received $4.5K to accomplish this preparatory task and on that basis to integrate high-priority gadgets into VisEd.
Wikidata Toolkit, proposed by Markus Krötzsch, a researcher at the University of Oxford and data architect for the Wikidata project, has been awarded $30K, the highest amount in this round. He will lead a small team of researchers and students at Dresden University of Technology to address a key problem surrounding Wikidata. Wikidata, a relatively new project largely supported by Wikimedia Germany, aims to create a free knowledge base about the world—names, dates, coordinates, relationships, URLs, and references—that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. However, in Krötzsch's words, "understanding this data requires technical means for querying and analysis that are not currently available. Even skilled developers have hardly any basis for working with Wikidata." The goal is to develop technical components to simplify "query answering" of Wikidata data; in technical terms, a robust and flexible query backend will be created to provide an API for running a variety of queries. The two main outcomes will be a Wikidata toolkit and a query web service.
The next round of IEG proposals will open on 1 March 2014.
In brief
- British Library follow-up: With the British Library's release of over one million digitized, free images, the Wikimedia Commons community is spearheading an effort to create an index of the full collection.
One of many images released by the British Library this month - Virtual internship openings: The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), with its Wikipedian in Residence and Digital Content Specialist Dominic McDevitt-Parks, has created a new virtual internship for Wikipedians. Two tracks are available—technical and community. Being a technical intern could include scripting an upload bot for the Wikimedia Commons or analyzing NARA's Wikimedia-related activities, while community interns would coordinate WikiProjects, act as NARA's point of contact, and communicating NARA initiatives to the relevant Wikimedia communities. Requirements for these positions are available on NARA's website.
- In the media
- FDC chair endorses paid editing: Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), the chair of the Funds Dissemination Committee, has authored an article in the Daily Dot arguing that paid editing is something that cannot be controlled. Jemielniak continued, "Paid edits do and will take place on Wikipedia. Just ignoring this phenomenon will not make it go away. ... Wikipedia is too important and too valuable to let this threat grow."
- Indian languages receive attention: The Indian broadsheet Daily News and Analysis published a short article on the 20 Indian-language Wikipedias.
- English Wikipedia Portal drive: An effort to bring all of the Main Page's portals, which are intended to serve as landing pages for specific topics but tend to be rarely edited, to featured portal status has been completed. The biography, mathematics, science, arts, geography, history, society, and technology portals are now featured.
- Commons video deleted: The acrimonious saga of a video which documented the making of a penis-drawn portrait of Jimmy Wales has come to a close with its deletion. The video and accompanying portrait laid bare a sharp divide in the greater Wikimedia community over the Wikimedia Commons' policies in regard to explicit or pornographic media, going so far as to be part of the impetus for a new resolution from the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The six administrators closing this deletion discussion—the unusual number due to the oddly high-profile page—declined to publish their votes, saying only that "The principal determining factor in our choice was that the video can be reasonably interpreted as (sexual) harassment of an editor. Files which have the implication of attack (of which harassment is a form) are outside of Commons' scope."
- Ombudsman Commission applications due: Those wishing to apply for the Ombudsman Commission, which investigates complaints about violations of the Wikimedia privacy policy, must do so by 1 January of any timezone.
- Arbitration report: The "Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute" case was closed. The evidence phase for both the Kafziel case and the Nightscream case will close on 29 December 2013.
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OAuth: future of user-designed tools
Last month, the OAuth extension was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. OAuth is a standard used for allowing users to authenticate third-party applications, also known as consumers, to take actions on their behalf.
In the past, tools were forced to use systems like TUSC to authenticate users, or store a separate authentication database like UTRS. Now, these applications can take actions using your account without you having to give them your password. For example, you can use the CropTool tool to crop an image on Commons, and the cropped image will be uploaded using your own account with a tag showing that CropTool was used.
Instructions for getting your application set up to use OAuth can be found on mediawiki.org. Currently Dan Garry, the product manager for OAuth, is approving each application before it can be used. That role will transition over to the Stewards after the guidelines for OAuth consumers, which are currently being drafted, are finalised.
More information:
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
- Deployments on hold: There are no planned deploys for the week of December 23rd due to holidays.
- Edit visualization tool: Jeph paul has created a tool which visualizes an article's history. More information about the IEG.
- Any updates to a file on Commons will be reflected in pages that use it faster (bug 22390).
- Improvements to Drafts namespace: Steven Walling and Pau Giner published a blog post about what drafts might look like in the future.
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