A technologist's Wikimania preview

As the start of Wikimania proper on 8 August approaches, the Signpost looks ahead to what its dozens of presentations might offer the technologically inclined, whether attending in person or taking advantage of what promises to be a strong digital offering.

Featured speaker: Lydia Pintscher, Project Manager Wikidata (10:30, Barbican Hall)

Highlights: Two themes dominate the pick of Friday's programme. The first is interface design, a key area in which the Foundation's ambitions are yet to be realised (Interface Vision, 16:30, Auditorium 1). In particular, prototypes for a new skin – codenamed Athena – which caused a splash when aired at Wikimania 2012 (see Signpost Op-Ed) make a return in a talk by WMF Senior Designer Brandon Harris (The Athena Project: Where are We?, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Not only do such design proposals intimately affect readers and editors alike, the five years since the creation of Vector (see previous Signpost coverage) have seen dramatic changes in the web design landscape, not least those stemming from the responsive web design ("mobile first") initiative that Athena seeks to build upon.

The second theme is multimedia, another area where progress has been tantalisingly slow. Fresh from recent controversy over the Media Viewer (see previous Signpost coverage), WMF Product Manager Fabrice Florin gives an overview of where the Foundation's plans are heading (Multimedia Overview, 11:30, Auditorium 2). Florin and Andrew Lih then focus in specifically on video, and Brion Vibber on video and audio (The State (and Fate) of Video in Wikimedia, 12:00, Auditorium 2; Freedom in motion: the state of open video and audio at Wikimedia, 12:30, Auditorium 2), a fascinating area as Wikimedians – but Wikipedians in particular – struggle to break free from their original text-centric paradigms.

Also available: Structured Wikiquote • CirrusSearch: How we've replaced a great search engine with an awesome search engine • Human-centered design for free knowledge • Fixing grammar errors semi-automatically • Machine aided article translation

Featured speaker: Brandon Harris, WMF Senior Designer (14.30 Barbican Hall)

Highlights: No such unifying themes dominate Saturday's offering. In the morning, Ask the developers (10:30, Auditorium 2) will rightly prove a popular favourite as the tech-savvy crowd take advantage of the annual opportunity to quiz the WMF's development team, here represented by Siebrand Mazeland and a yet-to-be-announced lineup. In the afternoon, one of the Foundation's biggest success stories, Wikipedia Zero – providing free Wikipedia access to hundreds of millions of people across the globe – arguably deserves more attention than it gets (Access to Knowledge and Wikipedia Zero, 14:30, Fountain Room). The relatively uncontroversial nature of the Zero project contrasts sharply with the VisualEditor team's experience. But such controversy should not occlude what could be a very productive avenue for all involved, especially new editors (VisualEditor — helping users edit more easily, 16:30, Auditorium 1; for a more technical discussion see also VisualEditor — engineering against the odds, 12:30 Sunday, Frobisher 123).

Looking further into the future, an extension of the VisualEditor to real-time collaboration of the sort found on Google Docs or Etherpad is the subject of a talk by WMF Deputy Director Erik Moeller (It's Alive! The Joy of Real-Time Collaboration, 17:00, Auditorium 1; see also Real-time Collaborative Editing with TogetherJS, 17:30, Auditorium 1). Although it is unlikely to be deployed any time soon, the continued interest in the project by senior developers hints at its future adoption by the WMF; Moeller's talk should at least prove sufficient to whet the tastebuds. Those feeling more overwhelmed may want to try another of his contributions, Join the technical community - an introduction for absolute beginners (09:30, Barbican Hall).

Also available: Replaying Edits & Visualising Edit History • Finding and fixing software bugs for the Wikipedias • Showcase ALL the (cool) things! • Unmasking anonymous editors on Wikipedia • Parsoid: Dealing with Wikitext so you don't have to™ • FastCCI: Taming the Commons Category Tree • Testing internationalized applications for Wikimedia content

Highlights: For those who miss Lydia Pintscher's featured address on Friday morning, Wikidata - current state and Q&A (09:30, Frobisher 123) could provide a useful introduction to one of a handful of truly successful chapter-led development projects, though Pintscher suggests the latter talk is likely to be targeted at an audience more familiar with the site. With often very significant communities, bot-related talks always prove popular, a trend set to continue with Bots and Pywikibot (11:30, Fountain Room) given its onwiki support. Staying in the Fountain Room yields two other talks (What’s this volunteer support all about anyway?, 12:00, and The Wikimedia open source project and you, 12:30), which may also prove of interest.

Walking around a conference so dominated by Wikimedians, it is easy to forget that the work of volunteer – and sometimes staff – developers need not be focussed on Wikimedia projects. In How about a MediaWiki Consortium?, Markus Glaser and Mark Hershberger discuss the options for ensuring reusers of the MediaWiki platform (of which there are hundreds), though often far from developers' minds, remain represented at the negotiation table (11:30, Hammerson Room). Likewise, Wikisource technical infrastructure: what we have done and what we could do (15:30, Fountain Room) promises to give a flavour of the technical support smaller projects receive, well away from the controversy and hubbub of the larger Wikipedias.

Also available: A data and developer hub for Wikimedia • How we've grown mobile into something that everyone does • Big in Japan: Combating Systemic Bias Through Mobile Editing • Context visualization for Wikipedia articles • Wikidata Toolkit: A Java library for working with Wikidata • JavaScript and long-term relationships • User interface: Consistency • Tech news • Open Scholarship Tools - a whirlwind tour. • The Full OA Stack - Open Access and Open Source

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. "In brief" incorporates text from Tech news, a global community-led publication prepared by tech ambassadors (subscribe or unsubscribe).

• MediaWiki updated: The latest version of MediaWiki (1.24wmf16) was added to test wikis and MediaWiki.org on July 31. With deployments delayed because of the heavy developer presence at Wikimania, it will only go live to non-Wikipedia wikis on August 12, and will be deployed to all Wikipedias on August 14 (calendar). Users are unlikely to notice any significant changes.
• VisualEditor updated: Users can now create, edit, and view HTML comments in VisualEditor (bug #49603). In unrelated news, the cancel button in VisualEditor toolbar has also been removed. Users can still use the Read tab and the Back button in their browser to cancel their edit (changeset #147682). Recent work focusses primarily on bug resolution, the team reports.
• Badges heading to Wikidata: Wikidata will soon be able to store data about article status, for example "good article" or "featured article". If their wiki has highlighted content, please make sure it is on Wikidata's list. bug #40810
• Empty pages made possible: It will soon be possible to directly create empty pages, for example in the user namespace. bug #57238 [1]
• New PDF renderer heads into beta: Users can now test a new tool to render wiki pages as PDF files (wikitech-ambassadors mailing list). The new renderer promises particular improvements for non-Latin and right-to-left scripts.
• Commons mobile uploads curtailed: In an attempt to improve the quality of uploads from mobile sources, new users using the mobile Commons site now need to make 75 edits before they can upload a file (bug #62598).
• Watch-on-revert: In the resolution to a long-standing bug report, users will soon have a user option to watch pages after they revert edits (bug #4488)
• Wikivoyage wikis broken: Wikivoyage wikis were broken for about 45 minutes on July 29 because of a configuration problem (bug #68815). In an unrelated event, some users were not able to log in on test wikis and MediaWiki.org between July 31 and August 1 (bug #69007).

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Opinion

2014-08-06

"History is a human right"—first-ever transparency report released as Europe begins hiding Wikipedia in search results

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By The ed17

The Wikimedia Foundation has published its first transparency report, covering from July 2012 to June 2014. The move comes on the same day the organization announced that Google, in order to comply with a recent court order upholding the "right to be forgotten", has removed a number of Wikipedia articles from their European search results.

Transparency report

The transparency report reveals that the WMF has given out users' personal data on eight out of 56 occasions. There are few details given about the specific circumstances, but all of the granted requests were the result of US civil or criminal subpoenas; of note, the WMF granted every instance of the latter. Eleven different accounts were affected.

The data revealed can include the IP address used by the editor, regardless of whether they are using an account or not, or their proxy server and user agent.

The WMF states that the eight requests abided by their requirements for requesting such information. Excepting emergencies, these stipulate that the demands fully comply with US law, must be reasonable and not overly broad, and note that there is "generally" a 30-business-day waiting period so that the affected user has time to reply.

However, most press coverage of the report focused on the amusing aspects of the other half of the report: content alteration and takedown requests. This page featured examples, including a photographer's request to remove a "monkey selfie", featured at right. According to the WMF, "A photographer left his camera unattended in a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. A female crested black macaque monkey got ahold of the camera and took a series of pictures, including some self-portraits. The pictures were featured in an online newspaper article and eventually posted to Commons. We received a takedown request from the photographer, claiming that he owned the copyright to the photographs.

"We didn't agree, so we denied the request."

Also of note were the 24 Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests that were granted, out of a total of 58. As with user data, the vast majority of these were from the US; unsurprisingly, then, the largest target was the English Wikipedia, followed closely by Commons.

European Union's "right to be forgotten"

The WMF also announced that it has received notice that over 50 Wikimedia pages have been removed from Google searches in Europe. On the English Wikipedia, these include Gerry Hutch, an Irish cab driver and the prime suspect in several crimes, and File:Tom_Carstairs_In_Concert.jpg, which will likely be deleted shortly. The Italian Wikipedia was also subjected to two removals, while over 50 pages on the Dutch Wikipedia were removed; all relate to the amateur chess player Guido den Broeder, who has been the subject of numerous discussions.

Press attention on the matter coalesced after a press conference at Wikimania with the WMF's executive director Lila Tretikov, general counsel Geoff Brigham, and co-founder Jimmy Wales resulted in a flood of quotable remarks. Chief among them was Wales, who stated "History is a human right, and one of the worst things that a person can do is attempt to use force to silence another.

"I've been in the public eye for quite some time; some people say good things and some people say bad things. That's history and I would never ever use any kind of legal process like this to try to suppress the truth. I think that's deeply immoral." (Telegraph)

Right behind was Tretikov, who wrote in a blog post that "The European court abandoned its responsibility to protect one of the most important and universal rights: the right to seek, receive, and impart information. As a consequence, accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review and no appeal process. The result is an internet riddled with Orwell's 'memory holes'—cases where inconvenient information simply disappears."

The New York Times wrote that Brigham spoke against the "right to be forgotten" and likened it "to a law that required libraries to remove records from the card catalog while leaving the offending books on the shelves. 'We don't think that makes any sense,' he said. 'It has delegated the protection of the right of freedom of expression to private search engine companies.'"

Aside from these concerns, it is impossible to know how many Wikimedia pages are actually affected. Search engines are not legally obligated to inform the WMF, and Google is currently the only company who has sent these notices to them.

In brief

• Wikimedia blog redesign: The WMF has relaunched the Wikimedia blog with an entirely new design from Heather Walls and a revamped logo that drops the word "foundation". Automattic, the company best known for WordPress, is the WMF's partner in hosting the blog.
• Wikimania: Retrospective coverage of Wikimania 2014, which is being held in London this weekend, will come in next week's edition.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-06/Humour

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