Bats and gloves

This week, The Signpost stepped up to the plate with WikiProject Baseball. Formed in 2004, its founding edit read that "if you ever picked up a bat and glove, watched a game, or lost in Little League, this is the place for you". We talked with Go Phightins!, Wizardman, and isaacl.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Baseball?

• Go Phightins! – Baseball is a sport that I really enjoy, and is the namesake of my username, as a matter of fact – the Philadelphia Phillies are known colloquially as the Phightin Phils, which I shortened to the Phightins. Having an opportunity to work with so many great colleagues at WikiProject Baseball is terrific.
• Wizardman – I've been a major fan of baseball throughout my life, and when I joined it was an area that had little in the way of quality (Sandy Koufax was an FA, and I think that was it). I wanted to help improve the area and it was a subject I knew.
• isaacl – Like many editors at WikiProject Baseball, I have a favourite team and a desire to improve the quality of its article led me to contribute to baseball-related articles. Discussions at the project talk page are generally constructive and embody a cooperative spirit, which keeps editors interested.

What kind of upkeep does WikiProject Baseball give to its articles?

• GP! – One of the most crucial aspects of the project is stat updates and vandalism watches to articles, especially on current players. We have an army of dedicated editors – some good SPAs, some IPs, and some long-term contributors – who keep all of the players' infoboxes up-to-date. Also, there is rampant speculation within the media about baseball players and transactions between teams, particularly around the trading deadline (which just passed), so upholding the principle of WP:CRYSTAL by refuting speculative edits while at the same time remaining committed to being an encyclopedia anyone can edit is a time-consuming, but ultimately worthwhile task.
• isaacl – In addition, as new players meet Wikipedia's standards of article notability, new articles are created for them. Some people enjoy creating new stubs for others to fill in; ardent fans of a given Major League Baseball team will typically take on maintenance for new players on that team.

According to the WikiProject's Index, there are 14,981 low importance, stub class articles. How would contributors expand these stubs, and do you believe such articles can acquire good or featured status?

• GP! – Absolutely. Many of our stubs are on players – some current, many retired – all of whom meet WP:BASEBALL/N, but may be difficult to find sources on – it takes some digging, and we have some strong contributors who do a lot of work in that area, and it is great to see the number of GAs they churn out after research. Expanding stubs of current players is something that I do a lot of, and is not particularly difficult, as there is a plethora of media coverage these days of players/teams, so most players have had at least one or two feature stories written about them that shed light into their past, and are useful for article expansion.
• W – Definitely. Low-importance really isn't all that low, as a 6–8 year player would be low-imp, yet would have plenty of sources out there. Realistically, any of the 15k could be good articles, though FA for the one-gamers is a bit much to ask. As for how they can expand them, different eras will have different sources, but any books on team histories are a good starting point for those lesser-known players.
• isaacl – Articles for current-day players are usually fairly easy to expand, with a plethora of online sources available. Looking for information on players from the past is more difficult. One place to look is your local library's web site: an increasing number of libraries are offering Internet access for its patrons to historical archives, which is a great help. Wikipedia's partnership with various online resources is also very useful for contributors seeking sources.

Jim Thome (left) and Harmon Killebrew (right)

Have you contributed to any of WikiProject Baseball's Featured or Good Articles? What contribution or group of contributions are you most proud of?

• GP! – Jim Thome, my one and only featured article, played Major League Baseball for 20+ years, and reached featured status after more than a year of work. I thoroughly enjoyed working on his article, as he was one of my favorite players back when he was a member of the Phillies, and really is a "good guy". I have also made substantial contributions to many articles on Philadelphia Phillies' current players, including elevating Carlos Ruiz, Kyle Kendrick, Cody Asche, Darin Ruf, Cole Hamels, Ben Revere, and John Mayberry, Jr. (as well as a few other current GA nominees). Writing about players while watching games is a fun and rewarding task for me, and the fact that I have been able to get so many to GA status is a testament to the excellence of my fellow editors and colleagues at WP:BASEBALL, who provide thoughtful feedback, much-needed copyediting, and most importantly foster a mutually supportive atmosphere that makes it a pleasure to contribute.
• W – I've contributed several FAs and GAs over my time. Greatest is tough to say, but it would be between Bob Feller, which was already a GA that I completely modified to get through FA, and Harmon Killebrew, which was a stub I suggested as a collaboration that eventually progressed to GA, then FA.

If a new user wanted to immediately help WikiProject Baseball, what should they focus on?

• GP! – Stat updates and vandalism reversion take little skill, but are always needed. Maybe you can "adopt" your favorite team's season article (e.g., 2014 Philadelphia Phillies season), and work on keeping its game log up-to-date. If you are interested in writing articles, pick a player whose article is sub-par, find an article or two about him, and expand it – DYK and GA are very attainable for baseball articles.
• W – The best gateway would probably to pick your favorite team and start on player and season articles there. For example, if you're an Oakland Athletics fan, Josh Donaldson has turned into the team's star in the lineup the past couple years, yet his article doesn't have much on there. That's a guy that we know can be built up with ease. Current ones are much easier to find sources on, and from there you can move on to historical figures or other teams if you wanted to. Don't be afraid to expand articles rather than try to find a redlink to create, since if a guy's important in baseball (barring perhaps a few exceptions), he's got an article already.
• isaacl – To get acclimatized with editing Wikipedia, I suggest first trying a small task. If you're skilled at writing, find an awkward phrase in an article, and re-write it to be stronger. If there is a topic you're very familiar with, such as a particular team or player, have a look at the corresponding articles, and look for an inaccuracy or inconsistency in the text. Then find a reliable source for the correct information, and update the article, complete with a citation to the source you uncovered. Review the talk page for the article and browse through its discussion threads. Place the article you've updated on your watchlist (which you can access from the menu at the top of every Wikipedia page) and see how you can monitor edits to articles and their associated talk pages. Once you are familiar with the mechanics of contributing to Wikipedia, making larger changes should be less daunting. Just be ready to discuss your edits with other editors, and keep an open mind. WikiProject Baseball's talk page is always available for your questions.

Anything else you'd like to add?

• GP! – The editors at WikiProject Baseball are an awesome group of folks with whom to collaborate on articles, but perhaps more importantly, are dedicated to enforcing Wikipedia policy with tact and excellence in dealing with new and clueless contributors (a group of which I was once a member). We are able to snap almost instantaneously from bantering on how matchups of our favorite teams go to complex discussion on esoteric aspects of how we can best convey information to readers. Overall, it is a fun and rewarding group of which I am blessed to be a member, and which you should join too! For more information, check out our monthly newsletter, The Inside Corner. Go Phightins! 19:10, 9 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• W – It's both a great and easy project to get involved in. Even if you like the [rival team] you're still welcome. Wizardman 02:45, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• isaacl – Just to follow up on Go Phightins! comment, WikiProject Baseball's newly-revived newsletter can be found at Wikipedia:WikiProject Baseball/Outreach/Newsletter. With the state of baseball analysis ever-improving, competition in MLB continues to be fierce, and we are the beneficiaries—enjoy the season!
  
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2014-08-20

A new metric for Wikimedia

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By Denny Vrandečić

TL;DR: We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors. A project to measure Wikimedia's success has been started. We can already start using this metric to evaluate new proposals with a common measure.

In the middle of the night, a man searches frantically for something, walking around a streetlamp. Another one passes, and asks if he may help. “Yes, I'm looking for my car keys; I lost them over there,” he says, pointing to the path leading to the streetlamp. Confused, the other man asks: “Then why are you looking for them here, if you lost them there?” “Well, the light is here.”

This is quite a common pattern. Creating and agreeing on measures and metrics that capture what is really important can often be very hard and sometimes impossible. If we are lucky, the numbers and data that are readily available are a good signal for what is actually important. If we're not lucky, there's no correlation between what we can measure and what we should measure. We may end up like the man searching for his keys.

In my humble opinion, the Wikimedia movement seems to be in a similar situation. For a long time we've been keenly looking at the number of articles. Today, the primary metrics we measure are unique visitors, pageviews, and new and active editors. The Wikimetrics project is adding powerful ways to create cohort-based reports and other metrics, and is adding an enormous amount of value for everyone interested in the development of Wikimedia projects. But are these really the primary metrics we should be keeping an eye on? Is editor engagement the ultimate goal? I agree that these are very interesting metrics; but I'm unsure whether they answer the question: Are we achieving our mission?

What would an alternative look like? I want to sketch out a proposal. It's no ready solution, but I hope it starts the conversation.

Wikimedia’s vision is “a world, in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge”. Let’s start it from there. Imagine this to be all knowledge. A few examples are given.

I don’t want to suggest that knowledge is one-dimensional, but it is a helpful simplification. A lot of knowledge is outside the scope of Wikimedia projects, so let’s cut this out for our next step. I suggest something like a logarithmic scale on this line. A little knowledge goes a long way. Take an analogy: a hundred dollars are much more important for a poor person than for a billionaire; a logarithmic scale captures that. But we also have to remember that knowledge can't be arbitrary ordered—it's not just data, but depends on the reader’s previous knowledge. Finally, let’s sort that knowledge so that we use two colors in the line: the knowledge that is already available to me thanks to Wikimedia (here shown in black), and the knowledge that is not (here shown in white). If we do all this, the above line could look like this:

Bear with me—this is just an intuitive estimate, and you might have drawn the line very differently. That’s OK. What is more important is that for every one of us this line looks quite different. For example, a person with a deeper insight into political theories might be able to gain even more from certain articles in Wikipedia than I do. A person who is more challenged by reading long and convoluted sentences might find large parts of the English Wikipedia (or this essay) inaccessible (see, for example, the readability of Wikipedia project or this (German) collection of works on understandability). A person who speaks a different set of languages will read and understand articles that I don’t understand, and vice versa. A person with a more restricted or expensive access to the Internet will have a different line. In the end, we would have more than seven billion such lines—one for every human on the planet.

Let us now take all these seven billion lines, turn them sideways, sort them, and then stick them together. The result is a curve. And that curve tells us how far along we are in achieving our vision, and how far we still have to go.

We can estimate this curve at different points in time and see how Wikimedia has evolved in the last few years.

We can visualize an estimation of the effect of different proposals and initiatives on that curve. We can compare the effect of, say, (1) adding good articles about every asteroid to the Alemanic Wikipedia, with (2) bringing the articles for a thousand of the most important topics to a good quality in Malay, Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese, and with (3) providing free access to Wikipedia through mobile providers in Indonesia, India and China. Note that a combination of (2) and (3) would lead to a much bigger area to be covered! (This is left as an exercise to the readers—maybe a reader will add the answer to the comments section.)

All three projects would be good undertakings, and all three should be done. But the question the movement as a whole faces is how to prioritize the allocation of resources. Even though (1) might have a small effect, if volunteers decided to do it they should be applauded and cherished. It would be a weird demand (but nevertheless not unheard of) if Wikipedia was required to be balanced regarding its depth and coverage, if it was required to have articles on the rise and fall of the Roman empire at least as deep and detailed as about the episodes of The Simpsons. The energy and interest of volunteers cannot be allocated arbitrarily. But there are resources that can: priorities in software development and business development by paid staff, or the financial resources available to the Funds Dissemination Committee. Currently, the intended effects of such allocations seem to be hard to compare. With a common measure—like the one suggested here—diverse projects and initiatives could all be compared against a common goal.

There are many open questions. How do we actually measure this metric? How do we know how much knowledge is available, and how much of it is covered? How do we estimate the effect of planned proposals? The conversation about how this metric can be measured and captured had already started on the research pages on Meta, and you are more than welcome to join and add your ideas to it. The WMF's analytics team is doing an astounding job of clearly defining its metrics, and measuring the overall success of Wikimedia should be as thoroughly and collaboratively done as any of these metrics (see also the 2014 talk by the analytics team).

While it would be fantastic to have a stable and good metric at hand, this is not required for the idea to be useful. The examples above show that we can argue by using the proposed curve intuitively. Over time, I expect us to achieve an improved understanding and intuition about how to derive an increasingly precise curve—maybe even an automatically updated, collaboratively created online version of the curve, based on the statistics, metrics and data available from the WMF. This curve we could just look up, but the expectation already would be that we have a fairly common understanding of the curve, and what certain changes to the curve would mean.

This would allow us to be more meaningful when speaking about our goals, and would free us from volatile metrics that don’t really express what we're trying to achieve; that way, we could stop looking solely at numbers, such as number of articles, pageviews, and active editors. Most of the metrics we currently look at are expected to have a place in deriving the proposed curve, but we have to realize that they're not the primary metrics we need improve if we're to achieve our common vision.

Denny Vrandečić is a researcher and has received his PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. He is one of the original developers of Semantic MediaWiki, was project director of Wikidata while working for Wikimedia Germany, and now works for Google. A Wikipedian since 2003, he was the first administrator and bureaucrat of the Croatian Wikipedia.

Acknowledgements and thanks go to Aaron Halfaker, Atlasowa, and Dario Taraborelli for their comments and contributions this article. You can follow Vrandečić on Twitter.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to propose their own Signpost contribution should email the Signpost's editor in chief.

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2014-08-20

English Wikipedia departs for Japan

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By Adam Cuerden, Dank and Pine

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 10 August through 17 August 2014. Anything in quotation marks is taken from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Featured articles

Ten featured articles were promoted this week.

• The 18 Mahan-class destroyers (nominated by Pendright) earned 111 battle stars for their service in the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. A few of them were devastated by the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; six of them were ultimately lost in combat. In the South Pacific, some of them took part in campaigns to retake the Santa Cruz Islands, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, the Philippine Islands, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and others. [The nominator served aboard USS Mahan and Cone in World War II.]
• Lost Luggage (nominated by Taylor Trescott) is a 1982 video game for the Atari 2600 in which pieces of luggage fall from a carousel, and the player has to catch them before they hit the ground. Reviewers criticized the game's similarity to the Activision game Kaboom!, believing Lost Luggage to be inferior. Programmer Ed Salvo was inspired to make the game when he was waiting for his luggage at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
• California Chrome (nominated by Montanabw) is an American Thoroughbred racehorse who won the 2014 Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes. The chestnut-colored horse was named for his flashy white markings, called "chrome" by horse aficionados. As early as the Santa Anita Derby, dedicated fans—later called "Chromies"—actively supported California Chrome, who was called "the people's horse". He finished fourth in the 2014 Belmont Stakes after another horse at the start caused an injury to one of his heels that no one noticed until after the race.
• Megadeth (nominated by Retrohead) is a Los Angeles thrash metal band, formed in 1983 by guitarist Dave Mustaine and bassist David Ellefson. A pioneer of the American thrash metal scene, the band is credited as one of the genre's "big four" with Anthrax, Metallica and Slayer. Megadeth plays in a technical style, featuring fast rhythm sections and complex arrangements; themes of death, war, politics and religion are prominent in the group's lyrics.
• Portrait of a Young Girl (nominated by Ceoil and Johnbod) (between 1465 and 1470) is a small oil-on-oak panel painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Petrus Christus, now housed in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. The work is both a major stylistic advance in Christus' oeuvre and in that of contemporary portraiture. The subject is placed in an airy, three-dimensional and realistic setting, and stares out at the viewer with an expression that is reserved yet alert and intelligent. The painting is widely regarded as one of the most exquisite Northern Renaissance portraits.
• Fluorine (nominated by Parcly Taxel) is a chemical element, and a highly toxic pale yellow diatomic gas (at standard conditions). As the most electronegative element, it is extremely reactive: almost all other elements, including some noble gases, form compounds with fluorine. Fluorite, the primary mineral source of fluorine, was first described in 1529; as it was added to metal ores to lower their melting points for smelting, the Latin verb fluo meaning "flow" became associated with it. Proposed as an element in 1810, fluorine proved difficult and dangerous to separate from its compounds, and several early experimenters died or sustained injuries from their attempts. Industrial synthesis of fluorine gas for uranium enrichment, its largest application, began during the Manhattan Project in World War II.
• Development of Grand Theft Auto V, (nominated by CR4ZE) a video game for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, began in April 2008. The Rockstar Games development team conducted extensive field research in Southern California while creating the game's open world, set in and around Los Santos, a fictionalised depiction of Los Angeles. Grand Theft Auto V is the first game in the series that allows players to control three protagonists, to distinguish the game from its predecessors and let players explore the open world with fewer constraints. The team used motion capture to record the facial and body movements of the characters.
• Departures (nominated by Crisco 1492 and Curly Turkey) is a 2008 Japanese drama film directed by Yōjirō Takita. The film follows a young man who stumbles across work as a nōkanshi—a traditional Japanese ritual mortician. He is subjected to prejudice from those around him, including from his wife, because of strong social taboos against people who deal with death. Eventually he earns respect through the beauty and dignity of his work. In September 2008 the film opened in Japan, where it went on to win the Academy Prize for Picture of the Year and become the year's highest-grossing domestic film. In 2009, it became the first Japanese production to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The success of Departures led to tourist attractions at sites connected to the film and increased interest in encoffining ceremonies.
• Katsudō Shashin (nominated by Curly Turkey) (between 1907 and 1911) is speculated to be the oldest work of animation in Japan, possibly predating the earliest displays there of Western animation. It was discovered in a home projector in Kyoto in 2005. The three-second film depicts a boy who writes "活動写真" (Moving Picture), removes his hat, and waves.
• Kedok Ketawa (nominated by Crisco 1492) (The Laughing Mask) is a 1940 action film from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Union Films' first production, it was directed by Jo An Djan. The film follows a young couple who fight off criminals with the help of a masked man. Advertised as an "Indonesian cocktail of violent actions ... and sweet romance", Kedok Ketawa received positive reviews, particularly for its cinematography. The film, screened until at least August 1944, may be lost.

Featured pictures

Three featured pictures were promoted this week.

• Neural system of a Placopecten magellanicus (created and nominated by KDS444 (a.k.a. KDS4444)) "Placopecten magellanicus, the Atlantic deep-sea scallop (previously known as Pecten tenuicostatus and as Pecten grandis and once referred to as the "giant scallop") is a commercially important pectinid bivalve mollusk native to the western Atlantic Ocean."
• Glassy carbon (created and nominated by Alchemist-hp) "Glass-like carbon, often called glassy carbon or vitreous carbon, is a non-graphitizing carbon which combines glassy and ceramic properties with those of graphite. The most important properties are high temperature resistance, hardness (7 Mohs), low density, low electrical resistance, low friction, low thermal resistance, extreme resistance to chemical attack and impermeability to gases and liquids. Glassy carbon is widely used as an electrode material in electrochemistry, as well as for high temperature crucibles and as a component of some prosthetic devices, and can be fabricated as different shapes, sizes and sections. The names glassy carbon and vitreous carbon have been introduced as trademarks; therefore, IUPAC does not recommend their use as technical terms."
• Modern color halftoning with CMYK separations (created by Slippens and Pbroks13; nominated by Crisco 1492) "Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous tone imagery through the use of dots, varying either in size, in shape or in spacing, thus generating a gradient like effect. "Halftone" can also be used to refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process. Where continuous tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or greys, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to an image that is printed with only one color of ink, in dots of differing size. This reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion—that these tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye. At a microscopic level, developed black-and-white photographic film also consists of only two colors, and not an infinite range of continuous tones. For details, see film grain. Just as color photography evolved with the addition of filters and film layers, color printing is made possible by repeating the halftone process for each subtractive color—most commonly using what is called the "CMYK color model". The semi-opaque property of ink allows halftone dots of different colors to create another optical effect—full-color imagery."

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