Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates; analysis of "In the news" discussions; user hierarchy mapped

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

Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia"^[1] doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.

The authors, Pasko Bilic and Luka Bulian from the University of Zagreb, found the main drivers of conflict and consensus were different group identities in relation to the topic (Kosovo) and to Wikipedia in general. Happily, the authors found the dominant identity among users in all three editions was the "encyclopedic identity," which closely mirrored the rules and policies of Wikipedia (e.g., NPOV) even if the users didn't cite such policies explicitly. (This echoes the result of a similar study regarding political identities of US editors, see previous coverage: "Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation".) Other identities were based largely on language and territorial identity. These identities, however, did not sort cleanly into the different language editions: "language and territory [did] not produce coherent and homogeneous wiki communities in any of the language editions."

The English Wikipedia was seen by many users as providing greater visibility and thus "seem[ed] to offer a forum for both Pro-Serbian and Pro-Albanian viewpoints making it difficult to negotiate a middle path between all of the existing identities and viewpoints." The Arbitration Committee, present in the English edition but not in the Serbian or Croatian editions, may have helped prevent even greater conflict. Enforcement of its decisions seemed generally to lead to greater caution in the edition process.

In line with previous work showing some users move between language editions, the authors found a significant amount of coordination work between the language editions. One central focus centered around whether other editions would follow the English edition in breaking the article into two separate articles (Republic of Kosovo and Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija).

review by Kim Osman

Another paper by Bilic, published in New Media & Society^[2] looks at the logic behind networked societies and the myth perpetuated by media institutions that there is a center of the social world (as opposed to distributed nodes). The paper goes on to investigate the social processes that contribute to the creation of “mediated centers”, by analyzing the talk pages of English Wikipedia’s In The News (ITN) section.

Undertaking an ethnographic content analysis of ITN talk pages from 2004–2012, Bilic found three issues that were disputed among Wikipedians in their efforts to construct a necessarily temporal section of the encyclopedia. First, that editors differentiate between mass media and Wikipedia as a digital encyclopedia, however what constitutes the border between the two is often contested. Second, there was debate between inclusionists and deletionists regarding the criteria for stories making the ITN section. Third, conflict and discussion occurred regarding English Wikipedia’s relevance to a global audience.

The paper provides a good insight into how editors construct the ITN section and how it is positioned on the “thin line between mass media agenda and digital encyclopedia.” It would be interesting to see further research on the tensions between the Wikipedia policies mentioned in the paper (e.g. WP:NOTNEWS, NPOV) and mainstream media trends in light of other studies about Wikipedia’s approach to breaking news coverage.

If you were to make an org chart of English Wikipedia, what would it look like? A recent study^[3] presented at the 2014 European Conference on Information Systems examines whether the organizational hierarchy of Wikipedia is as flat and egalitarian as previous research and popular media have claimed in the past. The researchers point out that the degree to which Wikipedia’s actual governance model (and those of other peer production communities) reflect egalitarian principles has seldom been comprehensively examined. Furthermore, a growing body of research has shown that Wikipedia has become increasingly bureaucratic along many dimensions, often in response to new community needs. This suggests that Wikipedia has grown more hierarchical, and less flat, over time.

The researchers develop a taxonomy based on technical user rights and the quality assurance, coordination, and conflict resolution tasks commonly associated with those user rights. They use exploratory factor analysis, least square analysis, and qualitative examination of the user right description pages to distill 19 user rights down to 8 social roles. They assemble these roles into a hierarchy according to their Scope, Granting, Access, and Promotion relationships. For example, in this hierarchy, editors in the Security Force role (checkusers and oversighters) have more power than administrators (sysops and bureaucrats) because being a sysop is an informal prerequisite for checkuser rights, and because oversighters can use the RevisionDelete extension in suppressor mode, blocking access to the content from administrators.

The paper does an excellent job of distilling the complex matrix of technologically mediated power relationships within and across Wikimedia wikis into a relatively simple organizational chart (presented on manuscript page 11). However, other mappings are certainly possible. For example, this analysis excludes the role of bots (and therefore, bot wranglers) within the role ecology. It also does not address the soft power that well-respected veteran community members may wield in some situations.

• Extracting machine-readable data from Wiktionary: Yet another research group recognised Wiktionary as a source of «valuable lexical information» and explored conversion of its full content to a machine-readable format, LMF.^[4] The UBY tools were used as base, but results are not released, probably being in the works (only English, French and German Wiktionaries are mentioned), and seem unaware of DBpedia's Wiktionary RDF extraction. Authors find a big obstacle in seemingly innocuous context labels of the kind "archaic term": this diachronicity would force to split such definitions to separate lexicons by age. Instead, they believe it wouldn't be hard to map all the formats and tags used by the various Wiktionary editions and unify them, apparently, in a single lexicon. If delivered (and open-sourced), such a map could help the perennial discussion on how to unify Wiktionary data, recently revived by the Wikidata plans.
• Wikipedia as a source of proper names in various languages: Another group^[5] managed to automatically extract proper names mentioned in articles of Wikipedias in 18 European languages, collating the different transliterations and attributing certain properties like "given name" and "family name" (similar to what Wikidata does, but without using interwiki links). As in the previous work, the conclusion is that LMF is suitable for storing such information, with an extension of the format. The impression is that LMF's viability is being tested in "real life" to refine said theoretical standard, an effort parallel to Wikidata's process of organic growth by trial and error.
• "Wikipedia and Machine Translation: killing two birds with one stone". This^[6] is a case study about machine aided translation from one language to another. In this case, the researchers made volunteers translate 100 short Computer Science articles from Spanish to Basque Wikipedia, totalling to 50 000 words. They used a rule based machine translation system called Matxin. Volunteers corrected the machine translation output using OmegaT. The machine translation system was adapted by using a collection of Mozilla translations.
  Following a long established Apertium practice, the human corrections were used as source for a tool to make them automatically. They claim 10% increase in accuracy with this tool, but do not report the baseline or corpus for which it was measured. Additionally: they translated wikilinks using Wikidata; they noted that markup complicated things; even a not very good machine translation output was still useful for volunteer translators.
• "Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia: A Systemic-Constructivist Analysis":^[7] In this study of knowledge construction on Wikipedia, the authors focus on the importance of the social system and social structure in influencing the actions of individuals (Wikipedia editors). They analyze the edit history of the German Wikipedia article on Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, arguing that it is a case study of "a regularly occurring situation: the development of new knowledge in a large-scale social setting based on inconsistent information under uncertainty." The author provide an interesting literature review of what they term a "systemic-constructivist" approach, then discuss the evolution of the Wikipedia article through about 1,200 edits, noting the importance of Wikipedia policies, which were often quoted by the editors. The authors also conduced a survey among the editors of the article to obtain additional information. The authors also asked independent experts to review the article; this review concluded that the German Wikipedia article is of high quality. They note that the experts identified some errors, although unfortunately they do not provide details specific enough for the community to address them. They conclude that the Wikipedia editors were not experts in the field of nuclear power plants, yet were able to produce an article that earned favorable reviews from such experts; this, according to the authors, can be explained through the "systemic-constructivist" approach as validating the importance of the social system and structure of Wikipedia, which guided the amateur editors into producing an expert-level product.
• Younger librarians more supportive of Wikipedia: ^[8] A survey of information literacy librarians shows that they provide little Wikipedia instruction, with about 40% of respondents answering that their schools provide no instruction on Wikipedia, and 80%, that they hold no dedicated workshops. Still, the remaining group – 60% which do provide some instruction, and 20% who hold dedicated workshops, suggest that the picture is not so dire, and in fact illuminates an interesting opportunity for reaching out with regards to the Wikipedia Education Programs, which do not usually focus on the libraries instructional programs. Only 3% of respondents indicated that they have students actually edit Wikipedia, and one cited story, about "making edits to lower the quality of an article" and "getting a student blocked", raises a specter of similar incidents in the past (see e.g. previous Signpost coverage of a prominent case at George Mason University), as well as a question of ethics in education with regards to purposefully engaging in vandalism for educational purposes. Unsurprisingly, there was also a negative correlation between librarian's age and views on Wikipedia. Although overall majority of respondents were supportive of the idea that librarians need to educate students in digital literacy skills, they were nonetheless opposed to linking Wikipedia from the pages of their institutions.
• "Preparing and publishing Wikipedia articles are a good tool to train project management, teamwork and peer reviewed publishing processes in life sciences": This is the conclusion in the title of a recently published paper from the 2012 "Improving University Teaching" conference^[9] by two zoologists from the University of Innsbruck.
• "Networked Grounded Theory" analysis of views on the use of Wikipedia in education: A report paper^[10] describes how a Greek PhD thesis studied the use of Wikipedia in Education using the network visualization software Gephi. Empirical data was gathered "from interviews and focus group discussions with students and teachers participating in Wikipedia assignments, from online blog posts expressing students’, instructors’, and Wikipedians’ reflections on the topic and from Wikipedia’s community discussion pages" and analyzed in a grounded theory approach (classifying text statements into codes such as "Need for Wiki Literate Professors", "Valuable Content Added", "You Are Not Listening & Respecting Us" or "Aggressive Community Editors"). Gephi was used to create a visualization grouping these codes (opinions), and grouping them into "communities". Eventually, the author arrived at "Community Resistance, Organization of Intervention, Community Benefit, Educational Benefit, and Acculturation Stress [as] the conceptual blocks of theory for interpreting the utilization of a virtual community in education as an acculturation process."
• "Risk factors and control of hospital acquired infections: a comparison between Wikipedia and scientific literature"^[11] is a paper published in 2013 which analysed Wikipedia content from November of 2010. They looked at 15 articles pertaining to hospital acquired infections (HAIs) of which 8 were B class and the rest were lower. Some of the articles were in this reviewer's opinion only tangentially related, such as necktie. They looked at how well Wikipedia's content in 2010 matched the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) topic on HAIs. NICE writes how to-guides for physicians, while Wikipedians are writing an encyclopedia. The conclusions was thus not surprising that Wikipedia is not a good "how to guide" regarding HAIs (as one editor observed in a discussion about the paper at WikiProject Medicine: "We are criticised for (somewhere) mentioning or recommending signs reminding about hand-washing routines, ... and for not giving all sorts of detailed guidelines about procedures for the use of catheters and the like by medical staff"). Still, a number of specific errors were also found. Most had already been fixed and this reviewer has corrected the last few.
• How a country's broadband connectivity and Wikipedia coverage are related: In 2011, the Oxford Internet Institute began a project to study the online representation of the Arab world online, via Wikipedia. The first peer-reviewed paper from this research became available in preprint form^[12] at the beginning of 2014. As previously observed by these and other researchers, the density of geotagged Wikipedia is highly uneven, and a part of the paper studies its relationship to a country's population, to the number of broadband internet connections in a geographic area, and to Wikipedia's country-level usage statistics over time. Among other things, the authors find that "over three quarters of the variation in geotagged articles was explained by the population of the country, the number of fixed broadband connections and the number of edits emanating from that country." Curiously, the relationship between internet connectivity and Wikipedia coverage was not linear: "those countries with the least and most broadband have more articles than expected, whereas those countries in the middle of the distribution have fewer articles than expected."

2014-03-26

Commons Picture of the Year—winners announced

Contribute  —  

Share this

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

By Tony1 and The ed17

Results for the two-stage 2013 Commons Picture of the Year (PotY) have been announced. This year's winning photograph (above) shows a lightbulb that has been cracked, allowing inert gas to escape—and oxygen to enter, so that the tungsten filament burns. From the flames rise elegant curls of blue smoke.

The picture of the year gained 157 votes in the second round. Filament burns through is by Stefan Krause (home page). The dramatic visual potential of lighbulbs is a subject he has been exploring for some time; readers may remember last year's competition where Stefan's picture Exploding lightbulb, involving an airsoft pistol, won third place.

The Signpost asked Stefan whether his intention was entirely artistic or included a scientific rationale:

I produce photos like this for artistic reasons and for the challenge of making them as perfect as possible. In preparation I used a small pair of pliers to break out a few glass pieces so that interesting openings were created. In my trials, the glass often broke completely so that I'd have to start over. I also needed to use a current regulator to reduce the power supply so that the burning up of the tungsten filament was slow and a beautiful plume resulted. The background was captured with a flash using red foil and "GOBO" (graphical optical blackout). The smoke was illuminated from behind with a flashtube in front of light-blue foil, and the lightbulb with a strip light ("softbox") obliquely from behind. Safety in this work is very important because of the risk of electrocution from uninsulated live parts; it was essential to turn the power off each time I replaced the bulb!

Second by a very close margin (with 155 votes) was Gentle morning light. Taken in the Holy Mountains National Park in Ukraine's Donetsk Province, just north of Crimea, the tranquillity belies recent traumatic events in the region, including the death of a Wikimedian. Photographer Balkhovitin told the Signpost: "When I took this shot I particularly liked the direct sunlight that's shining through the autumn leaves, and the light mist over the water that obscures the opposite shore."

The scene could have been a thousand years away—but for the trace of a hillside roadway on the right, behind a tree.

French Wikipedian Nicholas Sanchez won third place with an extraordinary split-second shot of a swallow in full flight, gliding open-mouthed to drink from the water's surface. Sharp geometries in the bird—a square throat and angled wings—contrast with a subtle layering of background colours. In a mirrored effect, the rippled motion of flight is reflected in the underside of the wings and in the surface ruffles below.

The organisers expressed their delight that more unique editors voted than ever before—4070 in both rounds. 2852 voters participated in the first round, which presented a record 962 images; and 2919 voted for one of the 50 finalists (to rank the top 30 overall and the top two in each of 10 categories, with an average vote per candidate of 58).

Two persistent features of PotY are its domination by continental European photographers and the small proportion of entries that feature people. One highly ranked image embodies both human and global south elements: Varanasi green peas, by Argentinian photographer Jorge Royan, is of a streetseller in that iconic Indian city. Richly symbolic, the composition is lush in its use of colour and texture. This picture is perhaps a reminder of what jurist Heta Pandit said of the field of entries in last year's Wiki Loves Monuments: "I would have also liked to see some more human element. The relationship between monuments, nature and people is so important. ... A lot of the pictures were like tourist brochures."

The Signpost asked Adam Cuerden, a veteran contributor to the English Wikipedia's featured picture forum, to comment on this year's PotY competition. He first raised the matter of "encyclopedic value", which though required at that forum is not a criterion for Commons featured pictures:

We have the awkward situation where the winner is an image that probably shouldn't be used in any Wikimedia project. The image is very well-photographed: It shows a cracked lightbulb plugged into the socket, the loss of vacuum allowing the filament to burn.

Unfortunately, the photographer then manipulated the image in a way that ruins all the encyclopedic value: he removed the lamp fitting and photoshopped the bottom of the lightbulb in its place. We're left with a picture of a lightbulb that has electricity moving through it that gives the appearance of not having any such thing happening.

The focus of every Wikimedia project is education. Were a copy of the image with the lamp fitting available, I'd suggest it be widely used; but if it fundamentally misrepresents the science being demonstrated, it's hard to see how it could be used for anything but discussion of photomanipulation or art.

However, that's not to say that there aren't some excellent images among the finalists, indeed, all of the other finalists are strong images and could easily find wide use. One could, at most, quibble on a few where the photographer took other, equally good images that might be better for some uses.

But, if Picture of the Year is meant to celebrate the work of Commons as an image repository, I find it strange and somewhat shameful that, while the original round divided the images into categories for voting, and the top two images in each category moved on to the second round, we've thrown out the entire reason we divided images into categories in the first place: To make sure the diversity of Commons is recognised. I was one of the people who created the category-based system back in 2009, to replace the previous system of every image being presented at once, which was getting far too clunky. However, when it was invented, it was also intended to help celebrate the diversity of commons: in 2009, the final results included a listing of winner of each category, thus, at least attempting to show the entire diversity of Commons. Why not now? There are inherent biases in this sort of competition, and that's fine. But why use a system designed to give recognition to additional types of content, then not bother to recognise them?

Noetica assisted with the language of the main story.

In brief

• New communications head: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the hiring of Katherine Maher to be its chief communications officer. Maher was formerly the advocacy director for Access, an advocacy group dedicated to a free and open Internet. She will be replacing Jay Walsh, who formally left the position (which was then titled as senior director, communications) in October, though he has continued in a similar role during the lengthy hiring process.

  Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director, stated that "Her experiences advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users and communicating with a large global volunteer community are both rare and directly relevant. She's got a solid understanding of internet technologies. She's a crisp, clear communicator, and an experienced spokesperson." The process to replace Gardner, which has now lasted for more than a year, is still plodding forward; the last update from the transition team gave May 2014 as a possible date: "We are at a point where we have three candidates that we all feel are great. We hope to speak to them in the coming week or two and hope to go into the final process (reference checking, terms negotiation etc.) after that."

• Should university students be allowed to reference Wikipedia?: An Australian and British website asked this tantalizing question last week.
• Typography update: The Foundation has announced upcoming changes to its typography. The alterations were covered by FastCoDesign. Further Signpost coverage can be read in this week's technology report and accompanying op-ed.
• OTRS statistics: The statistics for the Wikimedia-wide Volunteer Response Team have been published on Meta.
• Geography of Fame: A New York Times opinion article this week based its data on a selection of articles on Wikipedia. "The Geography of Fame" stated:

“

With a little coding, I had a data set of more than 150,000 Americans deemed by Wikipedia’s editors to be notable. The data set included county of birth, date of birth, occupation and gender. I merged it with county-level birth data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics. For every county in the United States, I calculated the odds of making it to Wikipedia if you were born there.

”

• Russian Wikipedia statement on Crimea: Reactions to Russia's recent invasion of Ukrainian Crimea have inspired a Facebook post from the Russian Wikipedia. Chief among their concerns: "Russian Wikipedia is Wikipedia in the Russian language, not Wikipedia of the Russian Federation."
  
  Reader comments
  

2014-03-26

Winter hath a beauty that is all his own

Contribute  —  

Share this

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

By Adam Cuerden and Pine

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 16 March 2014 to 23 March 2014.

Featured articles

Four articles were promoted to featured status this week.

• Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties (nominated by Cirt) This book by Ohio State University law professor Christopher M. Fairman was published in 2009. The book discusses the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and other issues relating to freedom of speech, the use of the word "fuck", censorship, and word taboo.
• Poetry of Maya Angelou (nominated by Christine (Figureskatingfan)) Noted African-American author Maya Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of United States President Bill Clinton in 1993. Angelou has been called "the black woman's poet laureate". She is better known for her autobiographies than her poems, although her first book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
• Are You Experienced (nominated by GabeMc) The rock band the Jimi Hendrix Experience released this LP record album in 1967. It was recorded at five locations in London, England. The album peaked at number 2 on the U.K. album sales charts. Rueben Jackson of the Smithsonian Institution wrote: "it's still a landmark recording because it is of the rock, R&B, blues ... musical tradition. It altered the syntax of the music ... in a way I compare to James Joyce's Ulysses."
• Four Freedoms (Norman Rockwell) (nominated by TonyTheTiger) This series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell includes Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The paintings reference the January 1941 Four Freedoms State of the Union address by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For a time, reproductions of the four paintings were often found in public buildings such as post offices and railroad stations. The paintings are Rockwell's best-known works although they met with mixed critical reviews.

Featured lists

Two lists were promoted to featured status this week.

• Silver certificate (United States) (nominated by Godot13) Silver certificates are a kind of representative money. These notes were issued in the United States between 1878 and 1964. Denominations ranged from $1 to $1000. The notes have been obsolete since 1968 but are still valid legal tender. The article says that the notes "were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Fourth Coinage Act, which had effectively placed the United States on a gold standard".
• List of songs recorded by Sophie Ellis-Bextor (nominated by Prism) Ellis-Bextor is an English recording artist. She has recorded songs for five studio albums including collaborations. She issued her first studio album in 2001. Her successful singles include "Mixed Up World", "I Won't Change You", "Young Blood" and "Runaway Daydreamer".

Featured pictures

Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status this week.

• C-class Melbourne tram (created by David Iliff, nominated by Elekhh) Trams – trollies for our U.S. readers – are a type of light rail public transport common in many cities throughout the world. The C-class trams in Melbourne, Australia have low floors for passenger convenience, but have been criticised for swaying and causing driver injuries.
• Arecibo message (created by Norro, after the original by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, et al., nominated by Alborzagros) The Arecibo message was sent into the heavens to commemorate the 1974 remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope, it was, in fact, more of a proof of concept than any real attempt to contact aliens. The stars it was directed towards won't be there when the message arrives in twenty-five thousand years, and whether it could actually be interpreted is dubious.
• Pinctada margaritifera (created by Didier Descouens, nominated by Theparties) Pinctada margaritifera, or the black-lipped oyster, is a member of a genus noted for the mother-of-pearl lining the inside of its shell.
• Coronation of the Virgin (created by Diego Velázquez, nominated by Crisco 1492) Diego Velázquez was one of the most celebrated painters of the Spanish Golden Age. This painting shows the Holy Trinity crowning the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven.
• Wiesen Viaduct (created by David Gubler, nominated by Armbrust) The Wiesen Viaduct in Switzerland is a limestone bridge spanning the Landwasser River.
• Bootes, Canes Venatici, Coma Berenices, and Quadrans Muralis (created by Sidney Hall and Richard Rouse Bloxam, after Alexander Jamieson, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) This plate, from Urania's Mirror (1825) probably shows most clearly the copying of Alexander Jamieson. Compare this plate from A Celestial Atlas. Sometimes, even plagiarized works are quite notable: Urania's Mirror may have borrowed illustrations, but it innovated in having holes punched in the cards, allowing them to be held up to a light to see a representation of the stars.
• Pisces (ditto) Another Urania's Mirror illustration, this one shows the constellation Pisces, one of the thirteen constellations of the ecliptic. We'll hopefully be seeing more of those soon: Urania's Mirror is moving towards featured article, which means a complete set of illustrations is needed.
• Stockholm Central Station (created by Arild Vågen, nominated by Elekhh) The largest train station in Sweden, Stockholm Central Station was built in 1871, and has so many visitors that the heat produced by them is used to heat a nearby office building. This image is a beautiful shot of the station's interior.
• William Sidney Mount (created by Mathew B. Brady, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden) An American genre painter and history painter, William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) is noted for his painting of scenes from what was then everyday life.
• Aularches miliaris (created and nominated by Chris Woodrich) With a variety of names including the coffee locust and the ghost grasshopper, Aularches miliaris is a colourful insect from South and Southeast Asia.
• Hoffmann's two-toed sloth (created by Goeff Gallice, nominated by Tomer T) Choloepus hoffmanni is a species of sloth found in the south part of Central America, and roughly the northwest of South America. Its claw-like hands are used to hold onto trees, where it eats its diet of leaves. As leaves are a poor source of energy, its metabolism is exceptionally slow for its size.
• Treaty of Waitangi (created by William Hobson, James Freeman, and James Busby (English version); Henry Williams and Edward Marsh Williams (Māori translation), nominated by Theparties) A foundational document of New Zealand, this agreement between the British and the āori promised them the rights of British subjects, as well as various other rights. Settlements related the treaty since the 1960s have formed part of the Māori Renaissance, which brought the Māori and their culture back to prominence, resulting in an artistic, cultural, and economic revival.

• 
  The Coronation of the Virgin, by Diego Velázquez, is noted for being particularly naturalistic, particularly for a religious work from the Baroque period.
• 
  The American artist William Sidney Mount was photographed in the early career of Mathew B. Brady, before his famous work in the American Civil War.

Reader comments

2014-03-26

Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia

Contribute  —  

Share this

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

By Jared Zimmerman

Jared Zimmerman is the Wikimedia Foundation's Director of User Experience. The User Experience team is a part of the Engineering & Product Development department at the Wikimedia Foundation. Team members are responsible for the design of new Wikimedia software products—how they look, feel, and behave when used. User experience designers have been integral in the launch of Wikimedia software like Wikipedia's mobile website and apps and the new notifications system, among others.

On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing and four major iterations and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we've arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.

What's changing

First, you'll notice a serif typeface is now used for headers, to more clearly differentiate them from body content. Main body content is displayed in a sans-serif typeface using a very dark grey on true white background, which decreases eye strain for people reading long blocks of text. You also may notice increased leading (the vertical space between lines in a paragraph), to improve readability and create a clean break for the scanning eye.

Why we've updated our typography

Text is our core visual element of Wikimedia projects, whether it's an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, or a smaller project like Wikisource and Wikibooks. We want our users to sense accuracy, reliability, and clarity from our design. We also want to avoid overly flashy typography that detracts from the content. Prior to this typography update, we had more than 20 arbitrarily defined type sizes on desktop alone, which appeared inconsistent for our users. The type size was too small for many readers, and the line height could make reading long form content difficult. We often observed users with visual impairments using text zooming to increase text size, for instance. For headings, these should act as entry points in long pages of text and were styled accordingly to aid readability. We sought to achieve better balance and cohesiveness for users to efficiently scan the page or engage in long form reading.

These changes will be familiar if you have accessed the mobile version of any Wikimedia project, as most of the changes were first trialled there in 2012. Later, with the release of the new Beta Features system for desktop, these changes have been available to desktop users on an opt-in basis since November 2013. We have used Wikimedia mobile as a place to experiment with new features and designs which we continuously migrate to desktop version of our sites. We have extended that process to the desktop beta features to further refine these changes to be appropriate for larger screens. With this typography update, we are taking another step towards a consistent visual experience across desktop and mobile.

Learn more

We are extremely pleased about how well this collaborative process has gone and we look forward to you sharing your experience with the update. The following pieces of documentation may be useful if you have further questions or comments:

• Summary of changes and FAQ
• The typography refresh Talk page, for comments/questions
• Blog post
  
  Reader comments
  

2014-03-26

Why will Wikipedia look like the Signpost?

Contribute  —  

Share this

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

By Edokter

As you have probably read on this week's op-ed, or via various other channels of announcement, 3 April will see the introduction of the Typography refresh (or update) for the Vector skin on all Wikipedias. Other projects like Commons will have this update rolled out a few days before. You may also have tested the beta option. Basically, this means you will see some, and may see other changes on Wikipedia. In short:

1. H1 and H2 headers will show in a serif font.
2. The body font may show on a different font, depending on your operating system and installed fonts.
3. The font size and leading (line height) of body text are increased slightly.
4. The body font color becomes a very dark gray instead of black.
5. Pre-formatted text that is wider then the screen will show a scrollbar. [Removed last minute]

Other features that were in the beta but were not strictly typography-related, such as the restyled table of contents, thumbnail and blockquote styling, have been removed.

For most Windows readers, this means the headers will show in Georgia and the body text will stay in Arial, albeit slightly larger. For most Mac users this will be the same, but where the pages would normally show in Helvetica, it will now show in Helvetica Neue (it may be hard to see any difference).

On Linux, effects may vary. Where several distros and browsers all had their own default font settings, resulting in many different looks, the new typography should equalize them all to use Liberation Sans for body text. The headers may show in Linux Libertine, Georgia or Times, in that order of preference, depending on which of them are installed.

Georgia may look familiar; the Signpost has used it for its headers for some time now. And that is why...

Tech News highlights

VisualEditor news

• You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [1] [2]
• Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [3]
• You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [4]
• You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [5]

Future software changes

• You will be able to use the Hovercards tool as a beta feature on all wikis from March 26.
• You will soon be able to include the Whatlinkshere special page in other pages. [6] [7]
  
  Reader comments
  

2014-03-26

From the peak

Contribute  —  

Share this

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

By Mabeenot

This week, the Signpost interviewed Skookum1 from the Mountains WikiProject.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Mountains? What aspects of mountains interest you the most? Have you ever climbed a mountain?

• Skookum1: Mountain and mountain range articles were actually my first sally into Wikipedia, once I left the Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia/Bivouac Mountain Encyclopedia, bringing what I knew about range structures/organization into Wikipedia was an obvious course of action once I found out about this place. I guess re which mountains those in the Pacific Northwest and of course especially BC, where I'm from are the ones that interest me the most, as I know the turf well. Being from there of course I've hiked mountains, but not as an alpinist; many of the ones in my own area you can drive to the top of...

Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? What challenges are impeding the ascent of other mountain articles to Featured status?

• Skookum1: I'm not sure, maybe re FAs and GAs, I think some of the volcano ones I participated in did. Main challenge? Sources for expansion. Bivouac.com and peakbagger.com are not authoritative sources, especially the former where the siteowner makes up names to suit himself. Also name origin in many cases as BC Names does not have the resources (she's one person, I'm in semi-regular contact with on BC articles) to transfer all her historical/name origin hard copy over into that system.

Are some continents or regions better covered than others? What can be done to improve Wikipedia's coverage of all mountains across the globe?

Skookum1: I'd say North America and the BC/Pacific Northwest; maybe the Alps are covered in more detail and all peaks and ranges are accounted for, maybe the Himalayas too? I'd say for improving global coverage engaging the various national and regional wikiprojects would help a lot, understaffed as they are.

Has WikiProject Mountains taken full advantage of Wikipedia's geographical coordinate system? Are there peaks, ranges, and passes that still need geolocation data?

• Skookum1: Maybe some but not on any of worked on, where if coords weren't there I added them, but mostly they were. Wikipedia should not rely on coords taken from GPS but from official sources (BC Basemap, the NGS/NTS, USGS etc.

Does WikiProject Mountains cover mountain springs or underwater features like seamounts? Are there any ways WikiProject Mountains could partner with WikiProject Rivers and WikiProject Oceans to improve coverage of all mountain-related geological features?

• Skookum1: The area of springs and also geology/mining data is definitely in need of work/expansion. And yes, re seamounts WP:Oceans should be engaged, I'd assumed they already were. I'm not sure how WP:Rivers could fit in but WP:Waterfalls definitely – and WP:Mining and of course WP:Geology. In some cases I've pondered eg. Category:Lakes in the Coast Mountains and similar subcategories.

Have you been involved with any other projects covering geography, geology, or ecosystems? What can be done to improve collaboration between interrelated scientific disciplines on Wikipedia?

• Skookum1: Lots; I worked quite a bit on ecozones/ecoregions and tried to deal with nomenclature problems as some of those names are not actual mountain titles, e.g. Boreal Mountains which is a Canadian ecozone.

What are the most urgent needs of WikiProject Mountains? How can a new contributor help today?

• Skookum1: Expanding articles though if anyone has the knowledge/information access new articles even in the Pacific Northwest which is heavily covered are much in need. Both those apply to new contributor activity also. Oh, and pics where it's possible, if the new contributor or experienced editor are near the mountains/ranges an article is about.

Anything else you'd like to add?

• Skookum1: I get accused of "walls of text" and thereby ignored, so I won't go on. Maybe more conscientious use of primary data sources rather than e.g. GPS or Googlemap coords used in place of them is an important area of concern.
  
  Reader comments
  

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

The Signpost needs your help putting together the next issue.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions