Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/Traffic report
The Hürriyet Daily News reports that the Turkish Wikipedia has posted banners on the top of the encyclopedia to warn users that a number of articles are being blocked by the Turkish government. Four articles on human anatomy have been blocked since November 2014 and an article on Turkish politics was blocked this month. The articles are:
Katherine Maher, chief communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, told BirGün that the WMF was working on curbing the censorship, both through legal means and through implementing HTTPS on all its projects (see Signpost coverage). She said, "We are trying to overcome these obstacles in countries where access to information is limited or controlled." She added, "[T]he community of Wikipedia is completely against censorship."
The Turkish government has a history of Internet censorship and issues with Wikipedia in particular. Last March, it briefly banned Twitter after evidence of alleged corruption by high-ranking Turkish government officials circulated in social media. Last September, a cabinet minister used Twitter to complain about how President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was depicted in an article on the English Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage). (June 19) G
On the opinion pages of the Sunday, June 21 edition of the New York Times, Andrew Lih (Fuzheado), professor of journalism at American University, author of The Wikipedia Revolution, and long-time Wikipedia editor, asks "Can Wikipedia survive?"
Lih writes about the challenges facing Wikipedia: the steady decline in editor participation, the low rates of recruitment of new administrators, tensions between the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation, and the rise in the use of mobile devices to access the Internet, which are less likely to be used to edit Wikipedia because "it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex code on a tiny screen." Efforts are being made to address these challenges, such as improvements to Wikipedia mobile apps. Lih highlights some positive developments, such as partnerships between Wikipedia and scientific and cultural institutions like the Wikipedian in Residence program. "These are vital opportunities for Wikipedia to tap external expertise and enlarge its base of editors," he writes.
He concludes:
“ | The worst scenario is an end to Wikipedia, not with a bang but with a whimper: a long, slow decline in participation, accuracy and usefulness that is not quite dramatic enough to jolt the community into making meaningful reforms.
No effort in history has gotten so much information at so little cost into the hands of so many — a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of profit and owners. In an age of Internet giants, this most selfless of websites is worth saving. |
” |
Lih's article prompted discussion on Wikipedia and Wikipedia mailing lists, as well as press coverage, such as a column from The Guardian's Andrew Brown, who concluded that mobile devices were the reason that "Wikipedia editors are a dying breed". G
The New York Times reports on claims of paid editing of Wikipedia by employees of the public relations firm Sunshine Sachs. Sunshine Sachs has represented a number of celebrity clients, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck, Barbra Streisand, Guy Fieri, The Jonas Brothers, and Trisha Yearwood. In 2012, Business Insider listed its CEOs, Shawn Sachs and Ken Sunshine as among the "most powerful publicists in Hollywood".
Paid editing without disclosing a conflict of interest is a violation of the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use. Last year, after much community input and debate, the Terms of Use were strengthened in regards to undisclosed paid editing.
The alleged paid editing by Sunshine Sachs was exposed by Pete Forsyth (Peteforsyth), a Wikipedia editor and paid consultant who runs Wiki Strategies, which "provides consulting services for organizations engaging with Wikipedia and other collaborative communities". (The Signpost interviewed Forsyth in 2012 on the subject of paid editing.) Prompted by a Sunshine Sachs email Forsyth received which read "Sunshine Sachs has a number of experienced editors on staff that have established profiles on Wikipedia. The changes we make to existing pages are rarely challenged," Forsyth paid journalist Jack Craver to investigate and write a story called "PR firm covertly edits the Wikipedia entries of its celebrity clients" for the Wiki Strategies blog. The story focused primarily on edits to the article for Naomi Campbell, a Sunshine Sachs client, by one editor identified as a Sunshine Sachs employee. The editor removed a number of references to the extremely poor critical reception of her 1994 album babywoman and other potentially unflattering information.
Ken Sunshine acknowledged to the New York Times that Sunshine Sachs employees had violated Wikipedia's terms of use, but said that all of their staff have now disclosed their conflict of interest. It is not known how many Sunshine Sachs employees have edited Wikipedia, but the user pages of the three accounts mentioned in Craver's story now all have disclosure notifications. The Signpost also found one other account with such a disclosure notice.
The story attracted further coverage in a number of news outlets around the world, including the Daily Mail, India Today and stuff.co.nz.
Last year, a number of prominent public relations agencies committed to "ethical engagement practices" when editing Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage). Despite this, a number of companies still do not disclose their COI editing. For example, a April Signpost report revealed undisclosed advocacy editing by Sony. (June 23) G
This past week saw the kick-off of the 2015 MediaWiki architecture focus of improving our content platform. The architecture committee identified three main areas needing improvement:
More details are available in the announcement email.
Mark Holmquist, the lead engineer of the Multimedia team, announced this week a change in the strategy of the upload tool they are planning to develop. The new plan involves moving the upload API logic into MediaWiki core and creating an interface for uploading files directly from VisualEditor. A heavily summarized roadmap for the team is:
The GeSHi library used by MediaWiki for syntax highlighting was mostly unmaintained and had a significant performance impact for all page views due to the number of stylesheets it contained. It is being replaced by Pygments, which brings support for 492 new languages, and is more actively maintained. We will lose support for 31 smaller languages, most of which are rather obscure. A full list of language changes is available here. From a performance perspective, this will decrease the amount of time that pages take to load and render (including those that don't use syntax highlighting at all!), but will increase the time it takes to save articles with syntax highlighting by about a tenth of a second. More details are available in the announcement. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/Opinion
The Board of Trustees is the "ultimate corporate authority" of the Wikimedia Foundation and the level at which the strategic decisions regarding the Wikimedia movement are made. This May saw through the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation elections, the biennial community process which elects the members of the Funds Dissemination Committee (including its ombudsman) as well as the three community appointees on the Board of Trustees itself. With this year's election cycle now firmly concluded the Board is now in an ideal position to tender changes to its structure ahead of the next one—something it has now done with the presentation of proposed changes to the Wikimedia Foundation's legally binding bylaws. A discussion about the need to do so was being conducted at the Board level as far back as November 2014; following a February trustees meeting a community consultation was organized, receiving over 200K bytes of community feedback (see also Signpost coverage at the time). The changes being proposed now, six months later, are the result of that feedback and of further institutional rumination by the members of the current Board.
The Wikimedia Foundation was legally incorporated just over 12 years ago, on 20 June 2003. The organization's bylaws were first issued that year, with heavy revisions coming in 2006. The current structure of the Board—ten members, three elected from the community, two elected from the chapters, four elected by the trustees themselves for expertise and one founder's seat—came about as a result of a restructuring in 2008. More minor changes have been made from time to time, with two having occurred since the Board began publicizing these changes in 2013: a vacancy amendment tendered in 2013 and a January 2014 amendment extending voting privileges for the three affiliate-selected seats from "chapters" to "chapters and thematic organizations" (which never really has taken off—Amical Wikimedia remains the only so-called "thorg"). The composition of the Board has nonetheless remained more or less the same in the seven intervening years: three members who were on the Board at the time—now-chair Jan-Bart de Vreede, former treasurer Stu West, and founder Jimbo Wales—are even still there now.
The proposed changes touch upon two themes of definitional importance in the movement today. The first is one of diversity: as the original proposal stated, "Our two different community [election] processes draw from similar pools of candidates, and our searches for appointees have identified few people outside of the US and Europe." Some members of the community have raised concern over this in the follow-up to this years' election, pointing out that despite the publication of a pair of letters calling for diversity in candidacy, the end result was the election of a Board that will become predominantly white and, with current trustees Phoebe Ayers and Maria Sefidari now outgoing, mostly male. The second has to do with chapter representation. Because chapter members get to vote as a part of their chapter (in the chapter elections) and then again as members of the community (in the public community elections), under the current schema they are essentially provided a double voting opportunity; nor is there strong evidence that this complexity-inducing bifurcation in voting rights results in the election of trustees distinguishably different from the ones that would otherwise be elected by the community anyway.
Speaking of the goals of its oncoming reorganization process, back in March the Board had to say:
The text and effect of the changes is presented in full detail on the proposal's meta-wiki page. So far the changes focus on changes related to the proposal's subtitle: "Term Limits". All board terms will now be for three years, though this will not be fully implemented until the 2017 community elections. A six year non-consecutive term limit has been set, with an exception carved out for the founder's seat occupied by Jimbo Wales; Stu West and Jan-Bart de Vreede, who both violate this limit, have both already indicated that their current term (ending in December 2015) will be their last. A technical exception will be made for current trustee Alice Wiegand, who is to satisfy the six-year limit by serving three consecutive two-year terms (her current second term also ends December 2015, and will be renewed). Additionally the terms of service will now be staggered, with elections cycling across all three of the years of a trustee's service: one community-elected seat and two appointed seats one year, two affiliate seats and one appointed seat the next year, and two community-elected seats and one one more board appointment in the last.
Some illuminating comments from the discussion associated with the announcement:
“ | To be clear, this is separate discussion from both the challenges of diversity and the number of seats for specific purposes. This is simply a proposed change on term limits because we want to implement those and it has been on the Agenda of the Governance Committee for quite a while. —Jan-Bart de Vreede | ” |
“ | I do not know where the rationale is written, but this has been discussed for a long time. The main reason for reform is that 2-year appointments are unusual in the nonprofit sector and it would be expected that if the WMF had a stable board, then the appointments should be longer. A major challenge to this idea could be to say that the WMF does not have a stable board. Already the organization has very unusual appointment process through election by organization members, and that is a strong indication that instability should be the norm.
Assuming that the elections are a path to good board appointments, then considering this is a volunteer board and historically has been filled by people without financial means that are commensurate with the responsibility of being on this board, then giving them more time could be a way to increase the chance that they will grow into the position to be effective. Consider any organization which you feel is comparable to Wikipedia, and consider how that organization's board is managed. It will be very different, and this board is very unusual. This board is unusual because of the legacy of unusual circumstances under which it was convened. One of those unusual circumstances was the creation of a founder seat. Wikipedia could have been a one-person project, but then there were concessions granted to the community that there should be several board officers and a lot of instability, then more board officers and more instability, and now there is a trending demand to make this board and WMF governance more like a comparable organization. A problem with this scheme is that it is very difficult to compare the required strange parts of WMF's governance (founder's seat, community elections, chapter seat system) to that of any other organization. —Lane Rasberry |
” |
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/Serendipity
The Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team plans to introduce Content Translation—a tool that makes it easier to translate Wikipedia articles into different languages—as a beta feature on the English Wikipedia.
Content Translation is an article creation tool that allows editors to quickly create an initial version of a new article by translating from an existing Wikipedia page of the same topic in another language. The tool is currently available on 224 Wikipedias as a beta feature, and more than 7,000 articles have been created by more than 1,500 editors since January 2015. For the English Wikipedia, we expect to enable as an opt-in beta feature for logged-in users in early July, after its initial Wikimedia testing in July 2014 and beta deployment to multiple Wikipedias in January 2015.
Content Translation saves translators' time by automating common tasks: it adapts formatting, images, links, categories and references, and it automatically adds an interlanguage link. The translated articles created are otherwise just like any other; the tool simply helps create quality content by allowing editors to focus on translating and expanding articles instead of being consumed with the lengthy manual translation process.
Once the tool is activated on the English Wikipedia, you will be enable to the Content Translation by going to your preferences, you can start a translation in the following ways:
These features will be visible only to the users who enable Content Translation. After doing this, you can start translating by following these steps:
Users do not need to translate the entire article in one session. You can save the translation as a draft within Content Translation and publish it on-wiki when you are satisfied with the results.
Content Translation supports machine translation for a limited set of languages through Apertium, an open-source system. Machine translation is always available for use within Content Translation for any language supported through Apertium and for which we do not encounter any technical blockers. However, it is the user who makes the final choice whether they would like to use machine translation; it is a configurable option that users can choose to deactivate. With an ongoing survey, we are gathering feedback about the quality of machine translations so that we can work with Apertium to improve the service.
Content Translation is a quickly evolving tool, so we attempt to use all of the feedback we receive to improve the everyday experience of our users. Please send us your suggestions, comments and complaints on the Content Translation talk page or through Phabricator. At any time, the number of published pages and other details can be seen on Special:CXStats, the Content Translation stats page—see, for example, fr:Special:CXStats. This page is visible to all users of the wiki.
With the activation of translations into the English Wikipedia, there is a chance that there may be problems that we are not yet aware of. We will be monitoring the tool for these errors, but please do let us know on the Content Translation talk page or through Phabricator if you spot any problems.
Look for Content Translation in July.
For more information, please see the following pages:
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/In focus
Clausewitz' pithy summary of warfare as "politics by other means" seems to be the motto of some Wikipedia editors. On the English Wikipedia this struggle is seldom fought more fiercely and at greater lengths than in articles about American politics.
In an earlier arbitration case, American politics, which ended in July 2014, the Arbitration Committee of the time noted: "this is at least the fourth arbitration case in the past year related to American political and social issues" and that new disputes seemed to spring up on the heels of the old. One edit warrior, Arzel, was placed on 1RR (one revert per edit per 7-day period) with the possibility of appeal after one year and every six months after. A mechanism was set up for adding problem articles to discretionary sanctions without the necessity of opening a new arbitration case. In February 2015, by an amendment to the case following further edit warring and incivility, Arzel was topic banned from all articles relating to American politics.
The chronic culture of bad faith editing in the topic of American politics continued to present a problem for the community. In March 2015, a case was filed against Collect, who had previously been topic-banned in the Tea Party movement case in 2013. The newly filed arbitration involving Collect finished in May 2015, resulting in Collect receiving a revert restriction and a broad indefinite topic ban from American politics articles.
The Arbitration Committee simultaneously elected to revisit last year's American Politics case, as the lightweight mechanism for creating discretionary sanctions had not been used and no improvement was visible.
In this new American Politics 2 arbitration, which closed on June 19, 2015, the mechanism set up in last year's American Politics case was replaced by discretionary sanctions covering "all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people." The cut-off date was the subject of some debate within the Committee: they also publicly voted on versions of the motion with no cut-off and with a 1980 cut-off, and one Arbitrator alluded to private discussion of the possibility of extending the cut-off date back before the Civil War.
In this case, the conduct of Ubikwit and MONGO was found especially disruptive. Ubikwit was topic-banned, the Committee having noted Ubikwit's previous sanction in the Tea Party movement case in 2013. MONGO was admonished. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-24/Humour