en.planet.wikimedia

This post is available in 2 languages:

Español  • English

Español

Desde mediados de 2012, José Flores tenía la intención de que el movimiento Wikimedia llegara de forma activa a Puebla, una de las ciudades más relevantes de México por su desarrollo cultural y educativo, y poseedora de una riqueza histórica singular. Tras una planeación de varios meses intercambiando información con Wikimedia México, buscando patrocinadores y gracias al el entusiasmo de varias comunidades locales como Hackers & Founders Puebla y Puebla Capital del Diseño, el pasado 24 de marzo se realizó el Primer Editatón de la ciudad de Puebla.

El maratón de edición se realizó en el HUB Emprendedor, un centro de apoyo a emprendedores de creación reciente, ubicado en las instalaciones del Centro de Innovación y Diseño Estratégico Aplicado (Centro IDEA). Hasta ahí arribaron 25 personas con laptops en mano dispuestas a colaborar con Wikipedia. Luego de una charla introductoria por Carmen Alcázar sobre la filosofía detrás del movimiento Wikimedia y un taller de sintáxis wiki por Iván Martínez, inició el editatón que tuvo como temas propuestos fechas y lugares significativos de la ciudad de Puebla. Si bien no se alcanzó un gran número de artículos nuevos, todos los asistentes presionaron el botón “Editar” y dieron sus primeros pasos en Wikipedia en español.

“Es un poco extenuante, pero es reconfortante. Sentarte a trabajar y que lo que estás publicando lo van a leer miles o decenas de miles de personas y sobretodo a que estas contribuyendo al conocimiento colectivo en español (…) es poner un granito de arena y te deja muy buena sensación”, dijo al respecto José, un blogger de medios como The Huffington Post, director de proyectos de la agencia de medios Astrolabio y que fue el líder de la organización. “El proceso del editatón de Wikimedia México fue muy oportuno para adentrarse en el mundo Wiki desde cero, ya que te llevan de la mano al enseñar la filosofía detrás del proyecto. Mucha gente escucha Wikipedia, Wikimedia y no sabe de que trata”, comenta.

“Me dio mucho gusto ver a la gente que en tres o cuatro horas no se despegó de su computadora y clavados en una aportación que parece pequeña -en mi caso fue de algunos párrafos- pero que ya sumados si contribuye a Wikipedia”.

En opinión de José lo que hacen editatones es sembrar una inquietud, dejan en las personas una semilla que germina. “Al final todos los participantes se van con algo, no solo con un conocimiento técnico y no solo con una buena experiencia, se van con un interruptor encendido de que la próxima vez que entren a Wikipedia y vean un dato erróneo saben que ellos son capaces con ciertos métodos, herramientas y reglas de arreglarlo ellos”.

Al editatón de Puebla asistió público de todas las edades. Es el caso de Lilia Martínez y Torres, originaria de la ciudad de Puebla, fotógrafa e investigadora de fotografía mexicana del siglo XIX y XX. Ella escribió la biografía de Lorenzo Becerril, uno de los pioneros de la fotografía en México y del que es experta, ya que trabaja en el archivo de la capital poblana que lleva su nombre.

Luego de redactar el artículo de acuerdo a convenciones y presionar el botón “Grabar página”, le sorprendió “la inmediatez de que un artículo que ya tenía rato de venir escribiendo, en 20 minutos estaba en la red”, a diferencia de otros sitios en los que es más tardado hacer el proceso. Para Lilia, Wikipedia representa conocimiento inmediato en cualquier tema, de cualquier situación, aunque desconocía que el proceso implicaba no solo leer sino también publicar.

Lilia está dispuesta a seguir colaborando en La enciclopedia libre. “¡Cuidado y me enseñen algo! porque en adelante hay mucho que compartir”. Para ella el proceso de colaborar fue gratificante porque no sólo puede compartir, sino porque le hizo aprender de gente más joven a las que les es más familiar la enciclopedia.

José Flores y la comunidad local están dispuestos a que el movimiento Wikimedia crezca en Puebla, ya que en su opinión los últimos seis a nueve meses Wikimedia México vivió en la Ciudad de México una etapa de crecimiento explosiva y “sería bueno que esa onda expansiva llegue a Puebla, ya que la cercanía con la capital permitiría crear un nuevo núcleo funcionando aquí”. El se ha fijado como meta con la naciente comunidad que a finales de 2013 ya cuente con un proyecto activo haciendo eventos y estableciendo vinculaciones con el sector cultural y gubernamental. “Más que una posibilidad, habria que verlo como una obligación, que Puebla sea el siguiente gran paso en esta consolidación de Wikimedia México”, finaliza.

Ivan Martínez, Wikimédia Mexico

English

Since the middle of 2012, José Flores has wanted the Wikimedia movement to become active in Puebla, one of the most important cities in Mexico for its cultural and educational development, as well as its singular historical richness. Flores spent several months of planning and exchanging information with Wikimedia Mexico (WM-MX), and they worked to get sponsors and support from several local communities like Hackers & Founders Puebla and Puebla Capital del Diseño. Due to this effort, they were able to host the first Puebla City Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which occurred on March 24, 2013.

La investigadora Lilia Martínez y Torres con Noé Domínguez subiendo el artículo sobre Lorenzo Becerril durante el editatón.

The editathon was held in the HUB Emprendedor, a recently created co-working space for entrepreneurs. On the day of the event, 25 people arrived with laptops in hand, ready to contribute to the Spanish Wikipedia. After an introductory talk by Carmen Alcázar on the philosophy behind the movement and a workshop by Ivan Martínez on wiki syntax, the edit-a-thon began. The proposed themes for editing were the significant dates and places of the city of Puebla. In the end, although there weren’t a large number of new articles created, all participants pressed the “Edit” button and took their first steps in Spanish Wikipedia.

“It’s a little tiring, but it’s heartwarming. To sit down to work and know that what you’re posting will be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people and especially by those contributing to the collective knowledge in Spanish — you make a small contribution but it leaves you feeling very good” said José, a blogger who contributes to The Huffington Post and a project manager in Astrolabio media agency. “The process of the edit-a-thon by Wikimedia Mexico was very good for introducing us to the Wiki world and they held our hands and taught us the philosophy behind the project.”

“Many people hear Wikipedia, Wikimedia and they don’t know much about them,” he added. “I was very happy to see people glued to their computers for three or four hours, sometimes working on an even small contribution. In my case I wrote a few paragraphs, but already that was a contribution to Wikipedia.”

He noted that edit-a-thons sow a curiosity in people, leaving a seed that will germinate. “At the end of edit-a-thon all participants will go with something, not only with technical knowledge and not just with a good experience, they leave with a switch turned on. The next time they come to Wikipedia and see something wrong they know they are capable of fixing it with certain methods, tools and rules”.

Public of all ages attended the Puebla editathon. This was the case for Lilia Martínez y Torres, originally from the city of Puebla, a photographer and researcher of Mexican photography from the nineteenth and twentieth century. She wrote the biography of Lorenzo Becerril, one of the pioneers of photography in Mexico. Martínez y Torres is an authority on Becerril and she works in the archive that bears his name.

After writing the article according to Wikipedia conventions and pressing the “Save page” button, she was surprised by “the immediacy of an item that already had just been writing, only 20 minutes later, it was a part of the net.” For Lilia, Wikipedia represents immediate knowledge on any subject, in any situation. She said she was willing to continue working on the free encyclopedia. “Careful, you may teach me something! Onwards because there is much to share,” she said. For her, learning to edit Wikipedia was rewarding not only because she could share knowledge, but also because she learned from younger people, who are more familiar with the encyclopedia.

José Flores and the local community want to foster the growth of the Wikimedia movement in Puebla. In his opinion, over the last six to nine months Wikimedia México has seen explosive growth in Mexico City, so it “would be fine to capitalize on that growth in Puebla, as the proximity to the capital would help create a new Wikimedia user group here.” He set the goal with the recently formed community to have an active project conducting events and establishing links with the government and the cultural sector by the end of this year. “More than a possibility, we should see it as an obligation to make Puebla the next big step in the growth of Wikimedia México.”

Ivan Martínez, Wikimedia Mexico

Nick Poole, CEO of the Collections Trust and Chair of the Europeana Network

Nick Poole is the CEO of the Collections Trust, the UK-based not-for-profit organisation that works with cultural organisations worldwide to open up collections for enjoyment, learning and discovery. He is the Chair of the Europeana Network, a pan-European community of more than 600 museums, archives, libraries, publishers, broadcasters and creators working together to find solutions to the challenges of opening up content on the Web.

These are interesting times for the world’s great museums and galleries. On the one hand, the fundamental principle of public funding for the arts and culture established during the past century is coming into question. On the other, people are flocking to the rich, meaningful experiences we provide in unprecedented numbers.

These two great pressures – openness and financial viability – set the context for how museums see their role, how they operate and how they will present themselves to their audiences, both online and off. It is a tension that is playing out in policies and on websites and in conferences all over the world.

Openness, respect, shared custodianship, the values at the heart of the commons are also encoded into the DNA of museums and galleries. The right of free access to and engagement with culture is at the heart of democracy, transparency and public accountability. It ought to be an inalienable right in a free society, and it is the principle which unites the global Wikipedia community.

The principle is absolute, and the technical capability to open up cultural knowledge as open data is well-established, the challenge is how to pay for it. In the face of economic pressure, there is a temptation to swap out one business model (public subsidy) for another (commercial enclosure). But enclosure runs counter both to the principle of equal access and to the nature of the Web.

The challenge is to look out beyond the culture sector to see how other industries are establishing new models which work natively in the Web ecology, based not on enclosure or copyright but on openness and the addition of value. The prize is the creation of a dynamic, open culture sector that is seen as relevant, empowering and responsive to the needs of society. I am looking forward to exploring the challenge and the opportunity at GLAM-WIKI and to learning from the Wikipedia community how we can move forward together into this bold and exciting future.

Margaret Thatcher in 1981 (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

The recent, sad death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has highlighted an odd juxtaposition of international copyright laws. (Yes, this is yet another copyright post.) Her author page received 95 page views on 8th April, which is about the same traffic it usually gets in an entire month. However, the page only links to two works, one of which I have now tagged as a copyright violation (her famous “the lady’s not for turning” conference speech, which is probably under copyright until the early 2080′s).

The somewhat odd situation being highlighted is due to the other work on that page. I transcribed and added it not long ago. It’s a memcon, a memorandum of a conversation, with President Gerald Ford before Mrs. Thatcher became Prime Minister. This document was made available by the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, part of the American presidential library system. It is in the public domain because all works by officers of the Federal Government of the United States, made as part of their official duties, are in the public domain under United States law. So, it would appear that the only way to read any of the works of Margaret Thatchers, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, on Wikisource is via the government of the United States of America.

Fortunately, there is also a link to the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website, which does have a complete, online collection of all of her speeches, interviews, etc. So they are not lost or hidden but they aren’t free. It is not necessarily a problem, bar potentially limiting distribution and preventing things like crowd-sourced translation. It is, nevertheless, still a very odd position in which to be.

The WMF are currently doing their damnedest to get new people editing the Wikimedia projects. Or – more accurately – they’re trying to get new editors to stay once they’ve signed up. It’s no easy task, though; despite repeated encouragement to not bite newcomers, at times it’s hard to remember that there’s a real person on the other end of that username or IP and that the first message that they’re left on a talk page is often the difference between them continuing to edit, or moving on and forgetting about contributing.

So, while I’m no expert, I’ve put together a list of little things (in no particular order) that individual editors, not the WMF or chapters, can do to help.

1. Assume good faith: When leaving a new user their first message it’s important that they’re welcomed, even if their only action has been what looks like a test – to see if “it really lets me edit”. Thank them for deciding to try out editing and encourage them to get more involved. Do try and avoid either giving them a curt brush-off or hundreds of links to messy introduction pages. Consider whether templates they’re receiving are friendly – and if not, be bold and improve them.
2. Keep your signature under control: While I don’t feel as strongly as some when it comes to user signatures, it’s best to try and avoid making them too fancy. It should at the very least link to your userpage and talk page and, if you’re feeling especially adventurous, your contributions too. It shouldn’t be too wild – signatures should all look uniform. If a talk page features lots of messages with wildly-different signatures at the end it can only make things more confusing.
3. Avoid acronyms when talking to new editors  (or AAWTTNE, for short): Even though experienced editors remember to AGF and are well aware of the 3RR. We know all about DYK and AfD – but do the new users? This is even more confusing if they don’t speak English as a first language and using jargon such as these TLAs can, and does, exclude people.
4. Invite them to the Teahouse: The Teahouse project (named after the “will you have a cup of tea, fathers” guideline, as I refer to it¹) aims to provide a friendly space where new editors can interact on a forum with editors new and old alike and get help. The pilot went really well for several reasons; it was all about human interaction (it’s genuinely worrying how many people’s first talk page message is a warning from a bot) and… it looks like a properly-designed website. A decent interface really matters, huh.
5. Don’t just point them to the bureaucracy – actually help: If they’re contesting a deletion (and they’re not in the wrong), don’t just give them a link to Deletion review. Chances are that if they’re new they have a snowball’s chance in Hell² of working out how to use such a process. Offer to help by letting them do it, but guiding them through the process. Even if the article’s been deleted correctly, explain to them why - maybe they’ll channel their energy into positive things and work on content on wiki (or write about something that is notable!).
6. Adopt them, or help them find an adopter: So there’s this thing on Wikipedia called adopt-a-user where experienced editors “adopt” someone who needs help and teaches them the ropes. It’s helpful to have someone teach you what to do rather than having to trawl through loads of policies and guidelines and such like. More info here.
7. Show them some #wikilove: There’s an extension installed – give it some use; congratulate them when they do something good to encourage them!
8. Encourage them to use Userboxes etc.: Even though “it shouldn’t matter” allowing people to identify with subcultures makes them feel more at home; it makes editing Wikipedia more fun. We know it’s not MySpace, but perhaps we can learn something from social networks.
9. Teach them the tricks of the trade: It’s unlikely that anyone will be able to pick up how stuff works on the English Wikipedia just by reading through page after page of acronyms and general rubbish. I find that WP:42 sums up the citing-your-sources thing pretty well, for instance. It’s worth showing them where the useful places to find information or help.
10. Your suggestions! Please comment below with ways you think that members of the editor community can help newcomers to Wikipedia. It was discussed a lot at Wikimania this year and is a really important issue for the future of the movement.

Footnotes:
¹ “WTF r u on about lol!?!!1″ This should provide some context
² We actually have a policy guideline essay about this on the English Wikipedia: WP:SNOWBALL 

The Smithsonian Institution building

Michael Edson is the Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO. He is also one of the keynote speakers at our GLAM-WIKI conference which takes place this weekend. Here are some of his thoughts on the event.

In the eyes of tradition-bound institutions, Wikipedia has gone from an amusing pop culture sideshow, to a competitor, to a major ally and collaborator in just a few short years. This is thanks to the strength and clarity of Jimmy Wales’ original vision, careful stewardship by Wikipedia’s small staff, but mostly, the credit belongs to the integrity and commitment of thousands upon thousands of “Wikipedians” – individual Wikipedia editors and volunteer organisers. Wikipedians who work on GLAM-related Wikipedia articles are real heroes to me. Through their careful and persistent work they demonstrate the core values of every gallery, library, archive, and museum on the planet: cultural heritage and scientific knowledge belong to all of us, and everyone should be able to partake and benefit.

The Wikipedia community is encouraging and fun, but most people don’t realize how stressful it is to create or edit a Wikipedia article! Wikipedians are pretty brave: people rely on Wikipedia and they trust editors to get things right – and everything an editor does is out in the open, transparent, for all to see. When Wikipedians talk about working with GLAMs, the thing that impresses me the most is their constant, relentless focus on the quality of the articles. Wikipedia isn’t perfect, but it’s striving in that direction. I don’t know of a single museum, archive, or library project that is as dedicated to transparency and quality improvement as the GLAM-WIKI community is. For GLAM-WIKI editors, it’s personal.

Wikipedians are a terrific and intimidating audience. They tend to be well informed, independent thinkers who are hungry for big ideas and practical insights. You can’t get away with much hyperbole with this audience and you’d better have your facts in order. The conference organisers seemed genuinely surprised when I quickly and enthusiastically accepted their invitation. Perhaps they see themselves as a small band of enthusiasts in the shadow of our huge cultural institutions, but I see it the other way around. In just a few years and with a fraction of our budgets, Wikipedia staff and individual volunteer editors have done something no organisation has ever done: created a truly essential global resource for learning and self-improvement. And it just keeps getting better and better. How do they do it? Conference attendees don’t have much to learn from me, and I have everything to learn from them.

At GLAM-WIKI 2013 I’ll be talking about scope, scale, and speed. Scope is about redefining what galleries, libraries, archives, and museums need to accomplish in society; scale is about questioning our preconceptions about how much impact we can have; and speed is about responding to society’s urgent need for results. This moment in human history is full of risk and uncertainty and we need our memory institutions – all of our civic institutions – to be as effective as they possibly can be. The example of Wikipedia and the thriving GLAM-WIKI community reveal a lot about how GLAMs can change to work bigger and faster for the benefit of everyone.

This post is available in 3 languages:

العربية  • српски  • English

This is a guest post from Sanja Pavlović / Wikimedia Serbia Committee for the media

In English

1001 Arabic words

Two participants working together on the Arabic-Serbian dictionary

For the past several weeks, in the office of Wikimedia Serbia, a group of six students of Oriental studies have been working on creating the first online Arabic-Serbian dictionary. Their project, symbolically named “1001 words”, has started on February the 15th, initiated by Wikimedia Serbia and supported by the cultural centre “Nea Pangea”.

Logo of the Serbian Wiktionary

“Working on this project gives me great pleasure, because we can use the knowledge we obtained at the Faculty and turn it into something useful, not only to us, but to anyone who is familiar with the Arabic language, or wants to learn something new about it”, says Lina Aburas; the student who gathered this team. She says since this idea was conceived, everybody showed great interest and enthusiasm. “It was important to find the initiative for a project like this. All team members are good students, team workers and always ready to learn more”, says Lina. Milica Tomović shares Lina’s opinion and adds that working on this dictionary doesn’t mean a simple process of adding words as it may seem at the first glance, but that a lot of hard work stands behind it.

Her colleague Tamara Poletan adds that the dictionary is suitable for everyone since it provides basic information about each word, followed with grammatical features, etymology and examples useful for those who want to approach the subject more professionally. “This project is intended for all groups, both for ones with basic knowledge of Arabic, and for ones that are getting to know this magical language.”

101st word

Last week, after nearly a month, this group of students entered their 101st word. “These first one hundred words were only a warm-up, now it is much easier for us, and I am sure that the next hundred will be covered much faster. This symbolic 101st word gives us more enthusiasm to confidently continue with our entries,” says Tanja Milošević; one of the participants. It takes the participants about 20 to 40 minutes to cover each word, but most of the effort goes into finding synonyms, antonyms and examples. They all agree on the saying “quality over quantity”, therefore they are putting a lot of effort into making each article as complete and detailed as possible, with audio samples and illustrations.

“Arabic language is different from any Indo-European language, therefore we are trying to make a dictionary which will provide a simple and practical version of this language for all users. I know how much I as a student use Wikipedia, so I can guess how our dictionary will be useful to others”, says Tanja.

Lina Aburas explaining how to edit pages

Improving Wiki templates

Their active participation in this project is shown in the initiative by one of the team members, Miroslav Loci, to improve the Wiktionary templates, adjusting them to the needs of the Arabic language: “Arabic language distinguishes only three cases, in comparison to Serbian which has seven. So, we had to make new templates for the cases in the form of tables, customized specially for this language.” In addition, in order to make it closer for the Serbian native speakers, guidelines for the dictionary in forms of articles are being written. “We are writing a short and useful Arabic grammar in Wikipedia followed by short guidelines in the dictionary itself”, adds Tanja.

Teamwork

The team is split into pairs of two, depending on what topic they are covering. After some time, they reverse roles so that the ones that were editing a group of words from biology are now checking the words related to anthropology or culture and vice versa. This way, everyone is covering the area that suits him best, and they all check each other’s work in case of mistakes.

Tamara Poletan says that gathering in the office three times a week is not difficult, but on the contrary: “We are working great as a team even though our work is divided by our area of interests. We consult each other before entering a new word in the dictionary and this way we minimize any possible uncertainties. Besides the value of the project, working here is very fun.”

1001 word as a bottom limit

All agree that their favorite moment was when they finished editing their first word with all of its details and examples. “It was a great moment, and a big relief as well. Seriously, my heart was full”, says Jovana Milošević with excitement. When asked whether 1001 words were enough, Jovana said on behalf of her team: ”This number is our lowest aim. We would love to continue working on the dictionary. Arabic is a very rich language, in a way, without limits. You can always contribute more, so from that point of view you can never have enough. However, we are trying to hit the core that can easily be branched out later.”

“Last year, Wikimedia Serbia revealed in its strategic plan that, besides Wikipedia, it wants to start developing new Wikimedia projects in Serbian. In that period, the wiki-dictionary counted around 15.900 words, but lately the number of new edited words has decreased. Therefore we decided to start this project cooperating with the cultural centre ‘Nea Pangea’,” says Mile Kis, General Secretary of Wikimedia Serbia. “Regarding project ’1001 words’, I am especially glad that it is constantly updated with new ideas with regards to this project, but, also, completely new ideas come up. It gives me great pleasure to say that Wikimedia Serbia has six new members who are already announcing new projects”, adds Mile.

We learned from the participants that besides the forms of singular and plural, Arabic language distinguishes nouns in the form of dual, too. This was once a characteristic of the Slavic languages, but it disappeared over time. Therefore, if you wish to say “book” in Arabic, you will pronounce it “kitab”, but if you are talking about two books, you will use the dual form “kitabani”, which is different from the plural form “kutub”.

• Miroslav: “It is of great pleasure to work on this project with this team.”
• Lina: “This project helps me advance as a linguist.”
• Jovana: “One of the best moments was the feeling when I finished my first word.”
• Tamara: “I am happy that by my participation in this project, my knowledge gets shared.”
• Tanja: “By writing this dictionary, we are helping everyone who wants to learn Arabic.”
• Milica: “Teamwork in the office of Wikimedia Serbia supports me greatly in my work and produces better results rather than when I am working by myself.”

Sanja Pavlović / Wikimedia Serbia Committee for the media

Links

• Project page on sr.wiktionary: Викиречник:Википројекат 1001 арапска реч
• Media files on Wikimedia Commons: 1001 Arabic words

In Serbian

1001 арапска реч

У канцеларији Викимедије Србије протеклих месец дана шест студената арабистике са Филолошког факултета ради на стварању првог онлајн арапско-српског речника на свету. Њихов пројекат, симболично назван “1001 арапска реч”, започет је 15. фебруара и одвија се на иницијативу Викимедије Србије уз сарадњу са Културним центром “Неа Пангеа”.

“Рад на овом пројекту за мене представља велико задовољство јер можемо да користимо знање које смо стекли на факултету и да га преточимо у нешто што касније може да буде од користи не само нама, већ свима који се баве арапским језиком или желе да науче нешто о њему”, каже Лина Абурас, студенткиња која је окупила овај тим. Она каже да су сви учесници од самог предочавања идеје показали велику заинтересованост и ентузијазам. “Било је битно само да се нађе иницијатива за овакав пројекат. Сви који учествују су добри студенти, спремни на тимски рад и спремни да науче нешто ново”, додаје Лина. Исто мишљење дели и Милица Томовић која истиче да рад на речнику није пуко уписивање речи, како се на први поглед то чини, већ иза свега стоји марљив рад.

Њена колегиница, Тамара Полетан, додаје да је речник прилагођен свима јер пружа основне информације о траженом појму, али и граматичку обраду речи, етимологију и примере употребе, за оне који се језиком баве стручније: “Овај речник је намењен свим групама, како онима са мало више предзнања, тако и некоме ко је на самом почетку упознавања овог несвакидашњег и магичног језика.”

101. реч

Протекле недеље, након непуних месец дана, ова група активиста обележила је своју 101. унету реч. “Тих првих 100 речи је на неки начин било само уходавање, сада нам много лакше иде и сигурна сам да ће наредних сто бити доста брже унето. Ова симболична 101. унета реч нам представља додатни ентузијазам да сигурније наставимо са уносима”, сматра Тања Милошевић, једна од учесница.

За сваку унету реч потребно им је 20 до 40 минута, а највише времена им одузима тражење адекватних синонима, антонима и практичних примера употребе. И поред тога, они се слажу са пословицом да квантитет није исто што и квалитет, те се труде да сваки чланак буде што потпунији и детаљнији, са звучним записом и визуелним примером.

“Арапски језик је доста другачији од индоевропских језика, па се трудимо да направимо речник који ће нашим корисницима дати врло једноставну и практичну верзију тог језика. Знам колико ја као студент користим Википедију, те знам колико ће и другима наш речник бити од користи”, сматра Тања.

Унапређење Вики шаблона

Да активно учествују у уносу речи показује и иницијатива њеног колеге, Мирослава Лоција, да се шаблони који се користе за Викиречник унапреде. “Арапски језик има три падежа, за разлику од српског који има седам. Зато смо морали да направимо нови шаблон, односно нову табелу за падеже која је прилагођена конкретно овом језику.” Поред тога, да би корисницима са српског говорног подручја што више приближили речник, овај тим студената пише и чланке на Википедији који ће бити практично упутство за његово коришћење.

“Пишемо корисна граматичка правила арапског језика на Википедији, а краћа упутства на самом Викиречнику”, додаје Тања.

Тимски рад

Учесници су се поделили у групе по двоје, у зависности од тога коју област покривају. Након неког времена се ротирају, те они који су били задужени за речи из културе читају чланке оних који су писали речи из биологије, а они које интересује географија, проверавају оне који су писали о антропологији итд. На такав начин, свако пише о области која га највише интересује, и сви једни другима проверавају чланке, како се не би поткрала нека грешка.

Тамара Полетан каже да окупљања у канцеларији три пута недељно и рад у овом тиму нису напорни, чак супротно: “Као тим функционишемо сјајно. Иако смо подељени по областима, консултујемо се пре уноса сваке речи, а уколико има неких нејасноћа, заједно радимо на отклањању истих. Осим вредности коју има сам по себи, рад на овом пројекту је и јако забаван”.

1001 реч као доња граница

Омиљени тренутак, како је већина учесника рекла, био им је када су у потпуности завршили своју прву реч, са свим детаљима и примерима. “Био је то сјајан тренутак, али и велико олакшање. Заиста, срце ми је било пуно”, са узбуђењем говори Јована Милошевић.

На питање да ли је 1001 реч мало, Јована, у име тима, одговара: “Ова цифра нам је доња граница. Ми бисмо волели да наставимо са дограђивањем речника. Арапски језик је доста богат језик, у неку руку безграничан. Наравно да увек може још, тако да је све у суштини мало, али ми се трудимо да погодимо срж која после лако може да се разграна.”

“Викимедија Србије је прошле године у свом стратешком плану дефинисала да, поред Википедије, жели да покрене и развој осталих Викимедијиних пројеката на српском језику. Викиречник је у том тренутку бројао око 15900 речи, али се у протеклом периоду показао пад уноса нових појмова, те смо одлучили да, у сарадњи са Културним центром “Неа Пангеа”, кренемо са овим пројектом”, говори Миле Киш, генерални секретар Викимедије Србије.

Оно што ми је посебно драго у вези са “1001 арапском речју” јесте да се константно допуњује новим идејама, како у вези са њим, тако и потпуно новим. Зато ми је задовољство да кажем да Викимедија Србије има шест нових чланова који већ сада најављују будуће пројекте”, додаје Миле.

Од учесника смо сазнали и да арапски речник за именице, поред једнине и множине, има и дуални, односно двојни облик, као и да је то била карактеристика и словенских језика која се током времена изгубила. Тако, уколико на арапском желите да кажете књига, рећићете “китеб”, а уколико причате о две књиге, употребићете дуални облик – “китебени”.

Текст испод слика:

• Мирослав: “Задовољство је радити на овом пројекту са оваквим тимом”
• Лина: “Пројекат помаже мени да напредујем као лингвиста”
• Јована: ”Најбољи тренутак који ћу памтити било је осећање по завршетку детаљног уноса своје прве речи”
• Тамара: “Радује ме што учествовањем на овом пројекту делим своје знање”
• Тања: “Речником пружамо помоћ свима који желе да науче арапски језик.
• Милица: “Тимски рад у канцеларији Викимедије Србије даје ми више подршке у раду и боље резултате од индивидуалног”

In Arabic

The winning pictures tour of Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 arrived to Panama on March 5th, 2013.  The Technological University of Panama hosted an opening ceremony with local winners, participants, students, professors and special guests.

22 pictures were exhibited: 10 corresponding to local winners and the 12 winning pictures of the international contest. This exhibition was partially funded by the international organization of Wiki Loves Monuments 2012.

After the opening event, the exhibition was relocated to the main building of the university were it stayed for 2 more weeks. Dozens of students, professors and visitors enjoyed these beautiful pictures, read about the history of the contest and how the pictures were selected (through the jury reports).  It was also a great opportunity to officially announce this year’s national contest. (yes! Panama is participating again).

To see more pictures of the exhibition, please visit the Commons gallery

A view of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

This guest post was written by Lizzy Jongma, Data Manager at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and is part of a series building up to our GLAM-WIKI conference which takes place from 12-14 April at the British Library, London. Lizzy is delivering a keynote presentation at 13:45 on Friday 12 April.

Amsterdam, April 2nd 2013

Tuesday afternoon and I am looking out of my office window. It is situated in one of the 8 towers of the Rijksmuseum and it is one of the old boardrooms. It’s a beautiful room with a nice view on the western part of the museum gardens. The garden gates are still closed and everything looks serene. Silence before the storm. The last days before the museum will reopen after a decade of extensive renovations. My mind wanders off. Flowers, Dutch skies, sculptures. Objects from our collections.

The Rijksmuseum is all about art, about images, about sharing the best quality. So everyone can experience, discover, enjoy, zoom in, use etc. Digitisation and the internet gave us new opportunities to open our collections to a global audience. It gave us new possibilities to share images and information with audiences that can’t access our museum. Because it’s closed, because objects are stored or because they live in another part of the world. Over the last years the Rijksmuseum worked hard to achieve digital quality and openness: high res images on our new website; sharing, downloading and reusing objects in Rijksstudio and technical access for developers through the Rijks API. And ‘en passant’ my head was filled with thousands of hidden treasures.

Amsterdam, April 5th 2013

Friday morning. The day after the press opening. Journalists from all over the world came to see the museum… And they loved it! Images and films of our new galleries were broadcast in dozens of countries. Our website was visited by 54.000 unique visitors, visiting a staggering 421.000 pages. Rijksmuseum was 7th trending topic on twitter.

I am looking out of my window again and thinking about next Friday: GLAM-WIKI UK! Where I will present our digital strategies, projects and results. Share our experiences with online friends and visitors. The new friends we were able to make over the last decade. Just one day before our queen will open the museum on Saturday April 13th at 12 o’clock.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team completed its recent development sprints with a focus on feature completeness of ‘Translate User eXperience’ or ‘TUX’ for deployment and also made preparations for its new community outreach project. Below are some of the highlights from the sprint.

Work is underway on the design of the new main page for translatewiki.net

Translate Editor – TUX, has been deployed: The Language Engineering team has been blogging on improvements to the Translate Extension which has now been deployed to WMF sites and been enabled as the default editor on translatewiki.net. Issues encountered while using the new editor can be reported via Bugzilla. More details about TUX’s design features can be found in our previous blog post.

New Language Outreach Program: A new outreach and support program to facilitate feedback from our language wiki projects is also currently in development. The program would facilitate focused feedback about the tools being developed and reaching out with solutions to the larger communities working on Wikimedia projects in various languages. The pilot phase is scheduled for launch in the coming weeks and an announcement with the details of the program will be shortly made.

Updates to the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB): In other news, Amir Aharoni announced the release of the new version of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB). Besides development updates to TUX, version 2013.3 of MLEB includes bug fixes to the Universal Language Selector (ULS) as well as new fonts for Hebrew, Javanese and Arabic. Last but not least, a Marshallese input method has been contributed to jQuery.ime by Nick Doiron.

Testing plan for language tools: A preliminary outline of a testing plan for all internationalization tools currently maintained by the team was completed. Guided by earlier discussions with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG), the initial draft includes setup of test environment, preparing test scenarios, collecting feedback and analyzing results.

Preparations for visualization of language coverage information: Work also continued on the Language Coverage Matrix, a collection of data about the availability of language tools for different languages in Wikimedia projects. Currently, the focus is to prepare a technical specification for automated presentation and access to this information.

Event participation and other news: Siebrand Mazeland represented the Wikimedia Language Engineering team at the Internationalization and Localization Conference organized by Lingoport in Santa Clara. (More details: presentation slides, and talk recording)

The ongoing development sprint will focus on creating a new design for the translatewiki.net homepage, launch of the pilot phase for Language support outreach program, and publication of the Language Engineering roadmap for the next fiscal year 2013-2014. The Language Engineering team is also looking to hire JavaScript and PHP engineers with deep experience in i18n and l10n technologies. Additionally, a few of the projects that are open for participation have been listed here.

The Language Engineering team is available to answer any technical questions you may have about the tools it develops. You can join us at our monthly office hour scheduled this month on April 10, 1700 UTC and 1000 PDT or find us on irc.freenode.net at #mediawiki-i18n. Logs from the last office hour held on March 13, 2013 can be found here.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

• Australia and New Zealand report: The Sydney Wikipedian-in-Residence story (Part I): where, why, what
• Finland report: Preparing and Planning
• France report: Case study in museum newsletter; Akan; Sèvres; Quai Branly
• Germany report: Caesar and the provinces
• Israel report: Wrapping up a 6-months pilot project at the Haifa University Academic Library
• Italy report: Libraries!
• Mexico report: GLAM Activities in Mexico
• Netherlands report: Wiki loves Monuments and Sound; Hackathon 2013; Hebrew and Jiddish words
• Spain report: GLAM Activities in Spain
• Sweden report: Fashion edit-a-thon; cooperating with the Working life museums
• Switzerland report: Small museums
• Taiwan report: GLAM Activities in Taiwan
• UK report: Workshops: scientists and photographs
• USA report: Chemical Heritage Foundation resident sought; editathons in D.C. and New York
• Open Access report: Topic Pages; Open Access on Wikispecies
• Calendar: April’s GLAM events

The Wikimedia fundraising team relies on A/B testing to increase the efficiency of our fundraising banners. We raise millions of dollars to cover the expense of serving Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites. We don’t want to run fundraising banners all year round, we want to run them for as few days as possible. Testing has allowed us to dramatically cut the number of days of banners each year — from 50 to about nine.

We’re in the middle of reevaluating the statistics methods we use to interpret A/B tests. We want to make sure we’re answering this question correctly: When A beats B by x percent in, say, a one-hour test, how do we know that A will keep beating B by x percent if we run it longer? Or, less precisely, is A really the winner? And by how much?

If you’re not familiar with this kind of statistics, thinking about coin tossing can help: If you flip a coin one thousand times, you’re going to get heads about half the time. But what if you flip a coin only 4 times? Often you will get heads 2 times, but you’ll often get heads 1, 3 and 4 times. Four coin flips are not enough to know how often you’ll really get heads in the long run.

In our case, each banner view is like a coin toss: heads is a donation, tails is no donation. But it’s an incredibly lopsided coin. In some countries, and at certain times of day might only get “heads” one in one hundred thousand “flips.” Think about two banners with a difference: one has all bold type and one only has key phrases in bold. Those are like two coins with very slightly different degrees of lopsidedness. Imagine that, over the course of a particular test, one results in donations at a rate of 50 per hundred thousand, and another at a rate of 56 per hundred thousand.

Our question is: How can we be sure that the difference in response rates isn’t due to chance? If our sample is large enough (as when we flipped the coin one thousand times) then we can trust our answer. But how large is large enough?

We run various functions using a statistical programming language called R to answer all these questions. In future posts, if readers are interested, we’ll get into more details. But today, we just wanted to show a few graphs we’ve made to check our own assumptions and understanding.

The graph immediately below is from an exercise we just completed: We went back to one of our largest test samples, where we ran A vs B for a very long time. In fact, it is the example of “all bold” vs “some bold” I just mentioned, and the response rates across a range of low-donation-rate countries were 56 and 50 per 100,000 respectively. We chopped that long test up into 25 smaller samples that are closer to the size of our typical tests — in this case with about 3.5 million banner views per banner per test. Then we checked how often those short tests accurately represented the “true”(er) result of the full test.

In the graph below, you’re looking at the data showing how much A beat B by in each test (each subset of the larger test actually). The red vertical line represents the true(er) value of how much A beats B based on the entire large sample. Each dot represents A’s winning margin in a different test — 1.1 means A beat B by 10 percent. This kind of graph is called a histogram. The bars show how many results fit into different ranges. You can see that most of the tests fall around a central value. This is good to see! Our stats methods assume the data conforms to a certain pattern, which is called a “normal distribution.” And this is one indication that our data is normal.

Another piece of good news: all of the dots are greater than 1. That means that none of these smaller tests lied about banner A being the winner. What’s sad, though, is how much most of the tests lie about how much A should win by. This isn’t a surprise to us — we know that those ranges are wide — especially when response rates are as low as they were in this test.

One fun thing R can do is generate random data that conforms to certain patterns. The graphs below show what happened when we asked R to make up normally distributed data using the same banner response rates. Compare the fake data graphs below to the real data graph above. First of all, notice how much the three graphs vary below. That’s one simple way of showing that our real data doesn’t need to look exactly like any one particular set of R-generated normal data to be normal.

  
Even so, can we trust that our data is normally distributed? We think so, but we have some questions. Our response rates vary dramatically over the course of a 24-hour day (high in the day, low at night). Does that create problems for applying these statistical techniques? In this particular test, the response rate varies wildly from country to country — and there are dozens of countries thrown into this one test. Does that also cause problems? Tentatively, we don’t think so because the thing we’re measuring in the end — the percentage by which A beats B — doesn’t vary wildly by country or time of day…we think. But even if it did, since A is always up against B in the exact same set of countries and times, we think it shouldn’t matter. One little (or maybe big?) sign of hope is that the range of our real data approximately matches the ranges of the randomly generated normal data.

But those are a few of the assumptions we’re working to check. We’re always reaching out to people who can help us with our stats. We’re looking for people who are Phd level math or stats people who have direct experience with A/B testing or some kind of similar response phenomenon. Email fundraising@wikimedia.org with “Stats” in the subject line if you think you might be able to help, or know someone.

Zack Exley, Chief Revenue Officer, Wikimedia Foundation and Sahar Massachi

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="394" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheetahs_on_the_Edge_(Director's_Cut).ogv?embedplayer=yes" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="700"></iframe>

Wikimedia consists of many projects, Wikipedia most notable among them. However, the name “Wikimedia” suggests a world beyond text. Indeed, Wikimedia Commons, our repository of freely-licensed media files, already contains more than 16 million images, sound files, and videos.

Well, mostly images. Right now, there are fewer than 30,000 video files, and fewer than 170,000 audio files. And while Wikipedia articles are often richly illustrated, they still share the old-school feel of a print-based experience. Projects like Snow Fall by the New York Times show what an immersive reader experience can look like, with video elements prominently featured and blended into the core of the content. In contrast, Wikipedia articles rarely have videos, and if they do, those videos are usually very short and included at the bottom of the article.

Of course, well-written text forms the foundation of most high quality educational content.  Text is versatile, adaptable, accessible, efficient, and relatively easy to collaborate on.  It will form the core of the Wikimedia experience for a long time to come. Still, we can greatly improve the educational value of our sites by empowering everyone to share media, collaborate on improving that media, and using that media well throughout our sites.

In the last three years, Wikimedia has seen some very significant multimedia developments:

• The Wikimedia movement has launched successful photo contests and competitions, notably the “Wiki Loves Monuments” competition, which was recognized as the world’s largest photo competition by the Guinness Book of Records. In the 2012 competition, more than 350,000 photos were taken by volunteers. It was organized by Wikimedia chapters and volunteers in 33 countries (see jury report).
• Wikimedia chapters and volunteers have also formed partnerships into the cultural sector (e.g. museums, galleries, archives), resulting in hundreds of thousands of photographs, reproductions of paintings, and other media being made available on Wikimedia Commons.
• Wikimedia Foundation has developed a number of enhancements and features focused on multimedia:
  • the Upload Wizard, an easy-to-use tool for uploading media files that’s been used to upload more than 2.2 million files to Wikimedia Commons;
  • upload features for the mobile web that make it easy to enrich any article requiring a photograph using a smartphone;
  • a new HTML5 video player with support for the open WebM video format and encoding of videos in multiple resolutions;
  • dedicated upload apps for iOS and Android are in development;
  • a feature to import photographs from Flickr (started as a Google Summer of Code project)
  • an experimental feature to upload files up to 500MB in size.

In combination, these efforts have already borne fruit. The number of contributors to Wikimedia Commons has increased significantly in the last 3 years.  In January 2010, only 13219 users had contributed at least one upload.  That number increased to 20161 users by January 2013.

At the same time, we haven’t invested enough. With the exception of the work of our mobile team, much of the above work has been done by one or two developers at a time, often in between other priorities or by engineers working as volunteers. There has never been a well-resourced team fully dedicated to multimedia engineering work at the Wikimedia Foundation. This is about to change.

The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring at least three engineers and additional product/design support to fully focus on improving the user experience for contributing, curating and reviewing multimedia. Right now, you can apply for the following positions:

• Software Engineer – Multimedia Systems
• Software Engineer – Multimedia User Interfaces

Here are some of the key challenges for the new team:

• further improvements to the upload experience. Contributing an image or video to an article while you’re editing should not require leaving the “edit mode” — it should be integrated with the editing process.
• solidifying experimental features such as large file uploads;
• improving transcoding features for video files to reduce the learning curve for video uploaders;
• improving media search and discovery;
• improving display of images, videos and sound files in Wikipedia articles, including a standard lightbox viewer for media embedded in an article and related media from Wikimedia Commons (building on some of the excellent submissions in our October 2011 Coding Challenge).

As we continue to provide new means for uploading media, we need to ensure that the Wikimedia community is empowered to curate and categorize the images. Curation includes removal of content that is out of scope or incorrectly licensed. To more effectively patrol content, the development of curation tools similar to the Page Curation feature developed for Wikipedia may become necessary.

Beyond Wikimedia’s category system, we will likely want to explore implementation of lightweight tagging systems, possibly in partnership with the Wikidata team.

As if this weren’t enough, the long term frontiers for multimedia include web-based editing of images, video and sounds, improvement for subtitle editing, browser-based audio recording features, and more.

In short, breaking through walls of text and creating a richer media experience for all our projects will keep the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement busy for many years to come. Please help us expand our library of freely-licensed educational media, and help us ensure it gets used effectively on the world’s fifth-most popular website.  Apply today.

Rob Lanphier, Director of Platform Engineering
Erik Möller, Deputy Director; Vice President of Engineering and Product Development

This post was written by Martin Lugton, co-organiser of THATCamp London 2013 –  The Humanities and Technology Camp. It is the first in a week of guest posts related to our GLAM-WIKI Conference, which takes place this weekend at the British Library, London.

I’m excited about THATCamp London 2013 because I’m trying to understand what digital technology might mean for culture.

What are digital’s possibilities for the creation, sharing and experiencing of meaning? How might digital help us understand ourselves and our works, or allow us to challenge and transform our understandings of the world?

My academic background is in ‘non-digital’ history, so I’m still quite new to this area of thought. While I encountered some weighty work with datasets in my time as an undergraduate – for example the work of the Cambridge Population Studies Group – my course did not explore digital humanities. My primary interest was in cultural history, and reading Chartier’s Forms and Meanings started me off thinking about forms, context and meaning. So I’ll be hoping to think about meaning and culture as well as seeing examples of work with large datasets at THATCamp London 2013.

I’ve been developing my skills to better enable me to actively participate in digital culture. In the last year I’ve started learning programming (Python and C), and I hope that THATCamp London 2013 will allow me to get a better idea of the types of projects I might be able to contribute to, and the directions in which I might like to develop these skills.

In addition to participant-run seminars and workshops, as part of THATCamp London 2013 we’re also hosting a Europeana hackathon. So there’s going to be lots of creative activity around the Europeana catalogue of cultural works, using the Europeana API. I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of things people are doing with APIs – or could be doing! It’ll be my first hackathon, so I’m interested to see what sort of scope and scale of activity can feasibly be carried out in such a short sprint.

I’m looking forward to a varied, challenging and exciting day, and to making some connections with other THATCampers.

If you’d like to join us, this free one-day unconference – supported by Wikimedia UK and held at the British Library – is taking place on Sunday 14 April. This comes at the end of the GLAM-WIKI conference, which brings Wikimedians and cultural institutions together to share experience and ideas.

We’d love for you to join us. To register your free place, please head over to the THATCamp London 2013 website.

To learn more about Martin’s work, visit his website here

Mediawiki has a number of humorous bug reports, though not as many as I’d like. Still, they’re quite funny.

I think my favorites are the request for RESOLVED MURDERED, the real reason why MediaWiki runs on MySQL, someone asking where the community consensus is to stop Volcanoes exploding, offers of shamanic help, a ground breaking report on US Government corruption, and a warning about zoning laws required for shipping Ponies,

April’s Proofread of the Month is The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower-Seasons Illustrated (1836) by Louisa Anne Twamley.

Twamley was a British poet, from Birmingham, and the book was her second published collection of poetry. Three years later, she married and emigrated to Tasmania, where she continued to write and paint as Louisa Anne Meredith.

Wikisource’s theme this month is poetry and this work helps to expand the project’s library in that field.  As bonuses, this will also increase the number of works created by women and provide several illustrations, as the book is illustrated throughout with painted plates from the author’s own drawings of flowers.

On the weekend of April 20-21, Students for Free Culture is going to be holding its annual conference, FCX2013, at New York Law School in New York City. As a long-time SFC supporter and member, I am enormously proud to be giving the opening keynote address.

Although the program for Sunday is still shaping up, the published Saturday schedule looks great. If previous years are any indication, the conference can serve as an incredible introduction to free culture, free software, wikis, remixing, copyright, patent and trademark reform, and participatory culture. For folks that are already deeply involved, FCX is among the best places I know to connect with other passionate, creative, people working on free culture issues.

I’ve been closely following and involved with SFC for years and I am particularly excited about the group that is driving the organization forward this year. If you will be in or near New York that weekend — or if you can make the trip — you should definitely try to attend.

FCX2013 is pay what you can with a $15 suggested donation. You can register online now. Travel assistance — especially for members of active SFC chapters — may still be available. I hope to see you there!

Engineering metrics in March:

• Approximately 113 unique committers contributed patchsets of code to MediaWiki.
• The total number of unresolved commits went from about 830 to about 816.
• About 48 shell requests were processed.
• Wikimedia Labs now hosts 154 projects and 1,103 users; to date 1,641 instances have been created.

Major news in March include:

• Open registration for the Amsterdam hackathon, including travel sponsorship;
• Lua scripting launched on all WMF wikis, with implications for performance and structured data use;
• A redesign of the Translate interface and other progress on translation and language-related tools;
• Fresh, friendly instructions on reporting a technical problem and an invitation to help prioritize problems to fix;
• Greater ability to upload images to Commons from mobile phones, allowing you to directly add a photo to a Wikipedia article that has no image;
• Collaboration with the Noun Project towards creating an “Encyclopedia Collection” of free icons;
• A deeper look at Parsoid and the challenge of a better editing interface;
• Wikipedia Zero winning a SXSW Interactive award for activism and gaining a new partner, Axiata.

Note: We’re also providing a shorter, simpler and translatable version of this report that does not assume specialized technical knowledge.

Upcoming events

There are many opportunities for you to get involved and contribute to MediaWiki and technical activities to improve Wikimedia sites, both for coders and contributors with other talents.

For a more complete and up-to-date list, check out the Project:Calendar.

Date	Type	Event	Contact
Apr 1–Apr 7		QA: Fresh bugs triage – Skin and page rendering with a dedicated bugday on April 02nd	AKlapper, Valeriej
Apr 6		QA: Testing Americas focuses in the new Account creation user experience.	Steven Walling, Cmcmahon, Qgil.
Apr 6		Iconathon with The Noun Project (San Francisco, CA, USA)	VBamba (WMF), MAssaf
Apr 8–Apr 14		QA: Browser testing – TBD	Zeljko.filipin, Qgil, Cmcmahon
Apr 11		Meetup: GSoC and other open source internship programs (San Francisco, CA, USA)	Qgil
Apr 14		THATCamp London 2013 and Europeana hackathon (London, UK)	Wikimedia UK
Apr 15–Apr 21		QA: Old bugs triage – topic to be defined	AKlapper, Valeriej
Apr 20		Last day to register for the May Amsterdam hackathon and request travel subsidy	Multichill
Apr 30		Last day to submit a talk for Wikimania in August	Wikimania organizing team

Personnel

Work with us

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We are hiring for many positions, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

In Engineering:

• Director of Analytics
• Software Engineer – Editor Engagement
• Software Engineer – Parser
• Software Engineer – Language Engineering
• Software Engineer – Mobile
• Software Engineer – Multimedia Systems
• Software Engineer – Multimedia User Interfaces
• Software Engineer – Search
• Product Manager – Mobile
• Director of User Experience
• Visual Designer
• Dev-Ops Engineer (SRE)
• Operations Engineer – Database Administrator

We have seven additional openings in other Foundation departments.

Announcements

Two new full-time employees started in WMF engineering in March:

• Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Engineer in the Mobile group (announcement).
• Adam Baso, Senior Software Engineer, Mobile (Engineering) (announcement).

Technical Operations

Site infrastructure

This month we saw a few short site glitches that lasted from about a minute to ten minutes each. The outages did not noticeably affect readers, but editors and contributors experienced intermittent problems.

• The first incident was triggered by a deployment of Article Feedback Tool v5, and once the code was reverted, the site outage ended. The incident lasted for about 10 minutes (incident documentation).
• The other two were jobqueue-related, according to Asher Feldman. The current MySQL jobqueue implementation is far too costly. In analyzing the data during that 24-hour period, we see that 75% of all queries that take over 450ms to run on the English Wikipedia master are related to the jobqueue, and all major actions result in replicated writes. In fact, the jobqueue takes 58% of all query execution time when not limiting the analysis to queries over the slow threshold. If 1 million refresh-links jobs are queued as quickly as possible without paying attention to replication lag, that causes the Apache servers to experience time-out due to the replication lag. MediaWiki depends on reading from slaves to scale, and avoids lagged ones. If all slaves are lagged, the master is used for everything, and if this happens to English Wikipedia, the site falls over. This MySQL jobqueue was identified as a scaling bottleneck a while ago, and thus we will be switching to Redis very soon. We’re currently aiming for that switch to coincide with the release of 1.22wmf1, but we may be able to backport to 1.21wmf12 and get this done in early April.
• On March 12, we experienced a ESAM site outage which was probably caused by packet loss between ESAM and EQIAD. Leslie changed routes from Esams to Eqiad to fix the packet loss, which caused Esams to recover. While we still don’t clearly understand what caused the outage, we did notice it coincided with the news release when the new Pope was elected. The election did trigger a surge in traffic to our web properties.

In March, we had a short security sprint led by Leslie Carr. We patched servers that needed security upgrades. In addition, we continued to work on MariaDB migration, Ceph deployment and fixing Varnish bugs.

TechOps has initiated a biweekly meeting with the engineering teams to drive alignment amongst the various engineering projects and TechOps regarding requirements and expectations. This is also the process to surface potential deployment issues (such as capacity demand, new infrastructure and performance). Meeting minutes are documented on the meeting Etherpad.

Fundraising

Built and deployed new public reporting host samarium.wikimedia.org. Added logging to fundraising deployment scripts.

Data Dumps

Work is continuing on tools for import. Setting up a local copy of a wiki which includes only a subset of the page content has always been problematic, since this requires use of the notoriously slow and finicky importDumpphp maintenance script. Under development is a tool to filter the currently produced SQL table dumps against a list of page IDs of a content subset; these tables could then be imported into a MySQL database, along with tables produced from the content subset, bypassing the need for importDump.php. Additionally, these SQL fles could be shared with other users who are interested in the same content subset. We hope to be able to launch this in April.

Wikimedia Labs

A schedule has been posted for LabsDB. A number of glusterfs stability work has been done. We’ve also begun work on a replacement for project storage. A new feature has been added in support of tool labs: service users and groups. This feature is per-project manageable service users and groups. A number of interface fixes were made, such as adding the admin list to the project page and layout of the instance pages. Network changes were made to the instances and network hosts: the network node has 3 bonded 1GB NICs and all instances were changed to use the virtio network driver, which increases their speed to the speed of the host. Work on tool labs progressed well this month. Most of the necessary infrastructure is available for many tools and bots.

Features Engineering

Editor retention: Editing tools

VisualEditor

In March, the team worked on the major new features that will be added in the coming months. The objective is for VisualEditor to be the default editor for all users, capable of letting them edit the majority of content without needing to use the wikitext editor, in July 2013. This will mean adding support for references, (at least) basic templates, categories and images, each of which is a very large piece of work. This month the primary focus was editing of categories and templates, with draft designs created and initial code developed. The team undertook its first ever “Quarterly Review“, whose slides detail these designs, the work done to date and expectations for the near future. The alpha version of VisualEditor on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia was updated twice (1.21-wmf11 and -wmf12), adding better input and selection support, fixing a number of bugs, and restructuring the back-end so that the new features will be simpler to create.

Parsoid

In March, the Parsoid team continued with improvements to internationalization, serialization, and extension handling.

The parser test framework now supports language-specific tests, which required support for loading language-specific default setting in Parsoid.

The serializer is now fully DOM-based and uses constraint-based newline / white-space separator handling, which will make the serializer less sensitive to newlines and whitespace in HTML. Round-trip test results of 82% (pages without any diffs) and 98% (pages without semantic diffs) indicates that the new serializer is on par with the old serializer currently deployed on production.

Extension content is now parsed all the way to DOM, which enforces proper nesting. The generic support for balanced fragment parsing will later also be applied to templates. Parsing of transclusion directives (includeonly and friends) has also been improved and simplified.

The DOM specification for images and templated / extension content was fleshed out in preparation for full editing support.

Late in March, C. Scott Ananian joined us as a contractor. Welcome!

Editor engagement features

Notifications

In March, the team continued to deploy new features for the Notifications project (code-named Echo) on mediawiki.org. Ryan Kaldari developed a new Thanks notification that lets you express your gratitude to users who make constructive edits by notifying them that they have been thanked (this feature was designed to give positive feedback to new editors during their first steps on Wikipedia). Benny Situ built the User rights notification, which is sent when your user rights are changed (this feature was requested by power users on the English Wikipedia). Luke Welling developed new code to send HTML email notifications, based on designs from Vibha Bamba. Fabrice Florin led discussions about these new features to serve the needs of both new and current users, then updated their feature requirements; he also co-wrote this metrics plan with Dario Taraborelli, as well as a socialization plan and new project pages with Oliver Keyes. We are now completing these final features and are aiming for a first release on the English Wikipedia later this month; in the meantime, you can help us test the current version on mediawiki.org. To learn more, read this project update on the Wikimedia blog.

Article feedback

This month, we released an updated version of Article Feedback v5 (AFT5) on the French and German Wikipedia, for evaluation by their communities. Developer Matthias Mullie completed final features for this release, including a new feedback link, auto-archive and a tool that lets you discuss useful feedback on article talk pages, based on designs from Pau Giner and suggestions from Oliver Keyes. Product manager Fabrice Florin worked with Denis Barthel and Sebastian Peisker on the German release and Benoît Evelin on the French release, and we are very grateful to them and many other community members for their invaluable contributions. A German community vote is expected in May on the German Wikipedia, and in September on the French Wikipedia, when they will decide whether or not to deploy the tool across their entire sites. Due to data caching issues, the tool was temporarily turned off on the English Wikipedia, where we expect to re-deploy it on an opt-in basis as soon as practical, as described on this talk page. After the English Wikipedia re-deployment in April, we plan to monitor community feedback on all three pilots before making any more updates, but other projects interested in the tool are invited to read this this 2013 release plan and contact us if they would like Article Feedback on their sites later this year.

Flow

Design work continued on Flow. We continued creating a “Portal” that will engage discussion about Flow at three locations (mediawiki.org, meta, and the English Wikipedia), and performing research.

Editor engagement experiments

Editor engagement experiments

In March, the Editor Engagement Experiments team largely placed other projects – such as guided tours, EventLogging, and others – on hold to focus on two key initiatives: the “Getting Started” process for onboarding new Wikipedians, and on making the redesign of account creation and login a permanent, internationalized part of MediaWiki core.

For the Getting Started project, the team launched a new version on English Wikipedia, which included a new landing page with additional types of tasks suggested for brand new editors to try. The list of tasks is now generated by a basic recommender system built by Ori Livneh, which gathers, filters, and delivered a fresh list of tasks automatically for every editor. This new backend paves the way for releasing the “getting started” feature on other projects, after we’ve completed data analysis and testing to understand which kinds of tasks are ideal for first time editors. Additionally, Matt Flaschen collaborated with the Editor Engagement Features team to build notifications to welcome new editors and invite them to contribute via the Getting Started.

For the account creation and login work, S Page, Munaf Assaf, and the rest of the team rebuilt our design to work with MediaWiki core, and solicited reviews from outside the team. We currently plan to launch both interface redesigns on an opt-in basis in April, to have editors test the localization and other functional aspects of the forms via a URL parameter, before we enable them as default.

Support

2012 Wikimedia fundraiser

In March, we wrapped up our 2012/13 non-English international fundraising efforts, making approximately 5 million USD over the course of the month. Originally, we had planned to run the non-English international fundraiser continuously until June, but were forced to accelerate our plans due to some potential instability at the beginning of April with one of our crucial payment gateways. At the very end of March, we started publishing aggregate public fundraising data to samarium.wikimedia.org.

Language engineering

Language tools

Highlights for this month’s team progress include:

• The latest translation interface and translation editor improvements for the Translate extension were completed and deployed. The new interface was made default with MediaWiki 1.22wmf1, later enabled on Meta on 2013-04-03; the old translation editor is planned to be removed completely in a few weeks. The user documentation has already been updated.
• The Search improvements were completed as well, with a pilot of the new Special:SearchTranslations (based on a Solr backend) that will be extended to Wikimedia projects in a few days.
• Publication of the language coverage matrix.
• Development progress for the translatewiki.net homepage redesign.

Milkshake

The language engineering team continued adding more input methods and web fonts contributions to jQuery.ime and jQuery.webfonts (Milkshake components). UX designer Pau Giner iterated with Howie Fung and Erik Möller to incorporate UX changes to handle logged-in use cases for the Universal Language Selector (jQuery.uls). ULS deployment is targeted for this fiscal year (by the end of June 2013).

Language community outreach:

The Language Engineering team kickstarted its Language Support Maven plan for getting language tools feedback from Wikimedian community members who are using internationalisation and localisation tools developed by the team. The team also held its regular monthly office hours in March. The team’s outreach coordinator also reported team progress with multiple blog posts on the technology blog. The team plans to restore its bug triage sessions, starting in April 2013.

Mobile

Commons App

Initial version of Commons photo uploader app for Android is available for download in Google Play. iOS version is still in beta, but should be available in the store next month.

Wikipedia Zero

In March we added new telecom partners (such as Axiata Group Berhad) and fixed some bugs, and brought new staff online. We also won an SXSW Interactive “Activism” award for Wikipedia Zero. In April we aim to start improving the code and the IP detection.

OpenStreetMap

Max Semenik, Arthur Richards and Faidon Liambotis held an OSM mini-hackathon at Open Source Days 2013 in Copenhagen. During the event, they agreed on an implementation strategy for the WMF mapping cluster.

Mobile Web Photo Upload

In March, we added the ability to easily upload a lead image to articles that lack one in the stable version of the mobile site. We also deployed a workaround for an issue we discovered with heightened security features in some newer browsers that make logging in to all the projects via CentralAuth impossible in certain circumstances; that had prevented a number of users from being able to upload photos via the mobile site. We are now well on our way to reach our goal of 1000 unique uploaders/month by the end of the fiscal year. Check out the mobile app dashboard to see mobile contributions via the website and via apps. Also of note: we’ve added thumbnails of lead images from articles in the mobile watchlist view, as well as a “last modified” timestamp on articles in the stable version of the mobile site. We are currently focusing on some performance enhancements for the mobile site. In April we will graduate the “uploads dashboard” feature from beta to stable, will further refine our photo upload features, and will expose a feature to identify articles on subjects near your current location to the beta version of the site.

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

MediaWiki 1.21

1.21wmf11 and 1.21wmf12 were deployed to Wikimedia sites in March. We created the REL1_21 branch on March 25, with the goal of a release candidate at the end of the month.

Lua scripting

We launched Lua scripting on all wikis, wrote about the launch’s wider significance, and held IRC office hours. In March we also added frame:callParserFunction() and frame:extensionTag(), improved CPU time accounting, and allowed argument expansion to be excluded. We have patches outstanding for “text” module including unstrip functionality, as well as improved debug output. We’ve also made significant improvements to templates since the launch.

Auth systems

This activity kicked off on March 26. We’re planning a minimal OpenID implementation and OAuth implementation in the coming months. Very tentative target date is end of May.

Search

Search deployed to Beta Cluster. Search code instrumented for better troubleshooting and identification of issues, and work is underway to add PoolCounter support. Plan for April to make search updates more robust.

Wikidata deployment

Phase II deployment will complete on March 27 to several wikis, including Italian, Hebrew and Hungarian Wikipedias. This phase includes a new Lua interface to Wikidata so as to make infobox population from Wikidata possible. The Wikidata section of the monthly report has more details.

Multimedia

Mostly bugfixing this month, as well as hiring for the two multimedia positions. Jan Gerber finished work on an API to rotate images (bug 33186), which needs a little site configuration work to get deployed. Transcoded videos have been moved to their own container in the Swift filesystem in anticipation of video-specific optimizations (bug 43343). Jan also improved the user interface in cases where an embedded media player is too small to display credits and player controls. TimedMediaHandler was extended so that other MediaWiki extensions can render player elements using PHP. The Score extension can now use TimedMediaHandler or OggHandler to render the audio player (see bug 43388), which puts the Score extension one step closer to deployment and music staves one step closer to generation and display in wiki pages (see bug 189).

Site performance and architecture

JobQueueRedis merged, JobQueueAggregatorRedis merged and deployed. These improvements to the jobqueue should help site performance (see Tech Operations section of the monthly report).

Admin tools development

We’ve implemented improved support for blocking users coming in through proxies with GlobalBlocking. Continuing work on identifying accounts that have not been merged with Single User Login, with the goal of merging those accounts starting in April.

Security auditing and response

The fundraising code base review is done. A MediaWiki security release, 1.20.3, was published on March 4. A review is underway for user metrics API.

Quality assurance

Quality Assurance

Finalizing details for new-user features volunteer test event with Weekend Testers on April 6. Tested AFTv5 release to German Wikipedia, French Wikipedia pending. Testing upcoming new features for Echo.

Beta cluster

“Phase 1″ support on beta for Mobile is complete and Mobile is using the beta cluster for testing now. We added search to beta, including Mobile. Lucene instances have been set up to provide search suggestion and … search capabilities, but it’s a rough base which still needs to be improved. More automated tests are now targeting beta cluster, and targeting the test2wiki/production cluster is underway. Jenkins is now upgrading the database schemas on an hourly basis and deploying changes to the MediaWiki configuration just after they have been merged. If you are curious, have a look at the Jenkins dashboard for the beta project.

Continuous integration

Timo Tijhof implemented a Jenkins job to run the QUnit javascript test for MediaWiki core. That will definitely help us catch most of the javascript issues.

The continuous integration site has been moved from integration.mediawiki.org to integration.wikimedia.org and is now always on HTTPS. The index page has been rewritten based on Twitter Bootstrap (see integration.wikimedia.org).

Antoine Musso has given our Zuul status page an overhaul. It features live reloading through ajax and contains direct links to the Gerrit changesets and Jenkins jobs. A big improvement over the plain text version.

Antoine Musso and Timo Tijhof set up the new doc.wikimedia.org portal. The MediaWiki core (Doxygen-generated) PHP documentation has been moved here (svn.wikimedia.org/doc is now a redirect). We’re currently working on packaging jsduck and writing Jenkins jobs to generate JavaScript documentation with JSDuck.

We’ve packaged various Python modules for the Debian project, which will in turn let us simplify deployment. Meanwhile, we’re experimenting with having our Debian/Ubuntu packages built by Jenkins directly.

This month we’ve continued to extend Jenkins coverage for Gerrit repositories. We’re happy to announce that almost all repositories for MediaWiki extensions in Gerrit now have Jenkins integration.

Browser testing

We held an exercise to build the test backlog using Search as an example which did build the test backlog for search; it now contains wide variety of regression tests for automation. But the exercise didn’t attract as many volunteers as we’d like; we’re looking for ways to address that in future exercises. Browser tests continue to identify significant regression issues, with new features in particular. We are extending browser test coverage to move-page functions, PDFs, and Search with a volunteer from the March exercise.

Analytics

Visualization, Reporting & Applications

In order to support mobile initiatives–including the Mobile Website, Mobile Apps, and Wikipedia Zero–we focused our attention on providing data extracts and visualizations with this focus. New visualizations include the Mobile app dashboard.

In addition, we updated the report card for the March Metrics Meeting, improved the robustness of the reportcard infrastructure, added target bars and added links to the metric definitions.

Wikistats

We are currently working on a new mobile pageview report.

Services & Access Points

In March, we saw the launch of the User Metrics API, a service that allows researchers to perform cohort analysis on various data sets, making it easier to measure the effects of programs and platform experiments among discrete sets of users. We are currently working on improving the web-based user interface to make it available for use outside of Wikimedia Foundation staff in the coming months.

Analytics Infrastructure

Our big-data cluster known as Kraken has been undergone no major changes in capability, but we have been working to make it more robust and improve security. Our udp2log monitoring has become more accurate, and Limn can be installed on both production and Labs instances.

Misc: Defects Closed

Fixed the Space characters in pagecounts-raw titles bug.

Misc: Management & Communication

The Analytics team has started to use Mingle to manage its work more effectively day-to-day. Bugzilla remains our primary interface for managing defects with respect to communicating their priority and status.

Finally, we had our Analytics Reboot meeting, where all internal WMF Analytics stakeholders convened and we surveyed what customer opportunities were out there, what Analytics models are currently available, and how to improve inter-team communication.

Engineering community team

Bug management

In Bugzilla, a way to mark bugfixes to copy from the development branch to stable branches was introduced to easier identify important bugfixes to include in tarball releases.

Two bugdays took place as part of the QA Weekly Goals: cleaning up and retesting General MediaWiki reports and a bugday concentrating on the LiquidThreads extension. For the latter, 76 out of 218 open reports received updates. Valerie analyzed which important Wikimedia feedback channels link to each other and Bugzilla, and created a diagram of the current situation. Valerie also published two blogposts explaining how to create a good first bug report and how to help Wikimedia squash software bugs. Andre improved the Bugzilla Weekly Report email to the wikitech mailing list. On most open bug reports with a target milestone set to future MediaWiki version 1.21.0, reminder comments were added for developers. Andre and Valerie also held the first IRC Office Hour on Bugzilla and Bug management for those interested in discussing problems and improvements with Wikimedia’s bug management. In Bugzilla’s internal product and component taxonomy, several Mobile application products were merged into a single “Wikipedia App” product and two Search components were merged, to simplify finding information for developers and reporters.

Also, the bug management task list received a major cleanup, making it clearer what is being worked on and what you can help with.

Mentorship programs

Quim Gil focused on:

• Completing Round 5 of Outreach Program for Women with casual evaluation meetings with the 6 intern/mentors teams. To be summarized with a blog post in early April.
• Wikimedia’s application for Google Summer of Code 2013 and a new round of Outreach Program for Women including 17 common project ideas with mentors.
• Making Possible projects the reference list of big tasks to potential contributors. Featured project ideas must go through a reality check considering project feasibility for newcomers, availability of mentors and community/maintainers buy-in, which we check through related feature requests filed in Bugzilla.
• Announcing a GSoC and other open source internship programs meetup in San Francisco on April 11.

Technical communications

Guillaume Paumier reviewed, published and advertised several tech blog posts, and did communications support for the deployment of Extension:Scribunto; this included reviewing blog posts, organizing IRC office hours, and announcing the deployment on wikis and lists. He modified a template so that events from the MediaWiki calendar show as bulleted items on the home page. He continued to investigate SugarCRM, and expanded Product development to facilitate the involvement of contributors, and redesigned, reorganized and simplified the How to contribute landing page. He added “Open tasks” sections to pages of activities in need of Product help, and linked to them from the Product hub. He also met with Quim Gil to discuss his contributors plan, and followed up on the gerrit tagging proposal. He researched ways to create and maintain translations of the Wikimedia Glossary, and started a discussion on the lists about the best way to move forward with glossaries scattered across wikis. Last, he started to plan for the centralization of mobile documentation, and drafted thoughts about a consolidation of technical communities.

Volunteer coordination and outreach

Quim Gil focused on:

• Drafting Wikitech contributors, a proposal to attract technical volunteers and connect them with interesting people and activities in a single site: wikitech.wikimedia.org. Helping define the proposal for distribution of content between Wikitech and mediawiki.org.
• (Re)defining factors for measuring success in QA activities.
• QA weekly goals: supporting and promoting our first browser automation activity: Browser automation testing for Wikipedia Search. Also the general MediaWiki reports Bug Triage and the LiquidThreads Bug Triage.
• San Francisco meetups: organized Lua meets Wikipedia meetup.
• Helping the Security for developers training meeting and creating a wiki page to be recycled for future editions.
• Drafting criteria to become an official Wikimedia mobile app in sync with Mobile Programs & Engineering teams.

Kiwix

The Kiwix project is funded and executed by Wikimedia CH.

Work on the 0.rc3 release of Kiwix is ongoing, mostly consisting of bug fixing and a few UI improvements. The release date is in around one month. For the first time, a ZIM file of Wikisource (in French) was done, within the scope of the Afripedia project.

Wikidata

The Wikidata project is funded and executed by Wikimedia Deutschland.

Denny Vrandečić and Lydia Pintscher gave a short update on Wikidata’s status at the metrics and activities meeting. A more detailed analysis can be found in our blog post. In addition, Wikidata phase 1 (language links) has been activated on the remaining 282 Wikipedias. This means that all Wikipedias now get their language links from Wikidata. Not too long after that, phase 2 (infoboxes) was activated on the first 11 Wikipedias. They can now make use of shared structured data from Wikidata in their articles. On Wikidata itself we introduced a new data type (string), extended references in statements (they can now have multiple values), and improved the search box.

We have written down how we envision queries on Wikidata and would appreciate your feedback.

As a nice demonstration of the potential of Wikidata we’ve seen two new projects this month: Wiri and a tree of life.

Future

The engineering management team continues to update the Deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.

This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.

We haven’t resolved systemic biases yet, but this is one sign of the value of focusing on neutrality and a common goal:

Being ‘Wikipedian’ trumps party affiliation, study finds

The study results were discussed among researchers back in November.
ᔥ the L.A.Times

The Communicate OER logo

This post was written by Dr Martin Poulter, Wikimedia UK Associate

OER13, a two-day international conference about Open Educational Resources, took place last week in the University of Nottingham. As well as providing a focus for new developments and findings in open education, it addressed overlapping issues such as open access to research, student perspectives and digital literacy. Wikipedia and Wikimedia had a very strong presence.

I attended on behalf of Wikimedia UK, to deliver a presentation, set up a little stall, and offer the How Universities are Using Wikipedia case-study brochure, which went like hot cakes. The presentation explained how Wikipedia and its sister projects can be used as educational platforms. Its main example was the Wikipedia Education Program in which students improve Wikipedia articles for course credit. According to a blog post by Terese Bird of the University of Leicester’s Institute of Learning Innovation, the presentation “made a compelling case” for including Wikipedia-based assignments in formal learning.

Phil Wane, a Nottingham Trent University lecturer and previous speaker at the EduWiki Conference, gave both a paper poster and an electronic poster about the Wikipedia Book Tool and how lecturers can use it to create and customise lists of articles.

The gold star, however, must go to the Communicate OER project, which is bringing together Wikipedians, educators, and support staff to improve articles about open education. The project’s Pete Forsyth and Sarah Frank Bristow attended the conference, and thanks to them all delegates got a copy of the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet. They had a stall, a poster, and two sessions to introduce their project and invite participants to School of Open’s new online course on Writing Wikipedia Articles. As if that weren’t enough, they also ran a post-conference editing session.

The open education genie is well and truly out of the bottle. Open Educational Resources are not a new idea, but there was a sense at the conference that we were all part of a movement that is only just getting started. One discussion group argued that it is now within our reach to have public, open education on the model of the National Health Service: available to everyone, life-long without charge, with both rights and responsibilities for citizens who need it. Wikipedia was mentioned not just as an example of this free global service, but as a way for citizens to contribute back to the common good.

We covered recently on this blog how some educators are resistant to the educational potential of Wikipedia, yet our warm acceptance from the OER community shows that the shared goals between Wikimedians and formal education are impossible to ignore.

Today’s share of well sourced but WTF wikipedia article is the Puppy pregnancy syndrome, a psychosomatic illness in humans that makes them believe that they’re pregnant with a puppy.

On January 18, 2013, Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences launched a unique collaboration. The collaboration was so rare that we had to invent a new position – “Wikipedian in Academy” – in addition to the “Wikipedian in Residence” already prevalent at different GLAM-institutions. Now it is time to take up residency at the universities. Swedish universities have three statutory responsibilities – research, education, and science outreace (in Sweden labelled “den tredje uppgiften” [the third task]). Contributing to Wikipedia is of course the single most effective way to achieve science outreach (fulfill the third task) in higher education; there is simply no other platform which allows you to reach so many readers.

Currently, Wikipedia projects linked to universities are so far based on contributions from students and individual researchers, but to this day there is no project where researchers officially affiliated with a particular university have written about science on Wikipedia in an organized form. Since no university has taken this challenge seriously, SLU collaborated with Wikimedia Sweden to pioneer the scientific community’s commitment to Wikipedia.

This project was launched at a Wikipedia day on January 18, 2013, with invited international key note speakers and will be followed up with development of manuals, workshops, and a help desk run by a project manager (Wikipedian in Academy) during a five-month period. This project will be monitored and reported at a conference a year later with the goal of at least 100 researchers having made a substantial contribution to Wikipedia (defined as part of an article).

The intention is to have an annual Wikipedia day when researchers participate in workshops and training and/or write about their field of research in Swedish and foreign language Wikipedia. We are also initiating and developing a network of Wikipedia Ambassadors at the university, who will continue the work after the project has ended.

This project has been designed, developed and implemented by Arild Vågen and education manager Sophie Österberg from Wikimedia Sweden, and researcher Olle Terenius and head of communications Tina Zethraeus at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Arild Vågen, Wikipedian in Academy at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

I will start posting amusing but fairly well sourced wiki articles here occasionally.

Starting with the article on Toilet related deaths & injuries. I love the caption for the photograph :)

Also has fun part about how Elvis probably died. Highly recommended read :)

Namibia. Just like everywhere in the countryside, schools in Omaheke Region have computer labs but nobody to use them. Polytechnic of Namibia, in cooperation with a number of academic institutions, runs a Knowledge Portal project on six pilot schools in Omaheke, and Wikipedia is on board as one of the possible hosts of local indigenous knowlege.

The Omaheke population is predominantly Otjiherero-speaking but also has a sizeable number of Khoekhoe natives, and it houses several San communities whose languages are almost extinct. Dissemination of indigenous knowledge has for centuries happened out in the field or in the village: Elders tell tales on the fire, healers take youngsters around the savanna and teach them about medicinal plants, herders share their knowledge of ruminant husbandry on the job. This is no longer working because the youth has left the village in search of jobs and a better life. Village elders still tell their tales on the fire at night, but they tell it to each other; there is nobody else left to listen.

To prevent the complete loss of indigenous knowledge in this environment, a group of researchers from several institutions in Southern Africa is investigating how technology can help. We design tablet software that can be used by the functionally illiterate, we investigate non-invasive methods to record audio and video, and we need a portal to store that knowledge. Wikipedia is a logical choice.

On the other hand, Namibia is still underrepresented on Wikipedia, and we want to enable more editors to contribute. The OvaMbanderu, the dominant tribe in rural Omaheke, have no English Wikipedia coverage at all, except a few red links. The Otjiherero (hz) Wikipedia is in the Incubator with less than 50 articles, and so is OshiNdonga (ng) and Khoekhoe (naq). All other native Namibian languages did not even make it that far.

On 26-27 February 2013, I conducted the first Wikipedia training in Gobabis, the capital of Omaheke Region, for teachers from our six pilot schools. Further participants were local government representatives, the community librarian, and a few out-of-school youth. I taught them how to create an account, make edits, use references, and write in an encyclopedic style; “Wikipedia is an encyclopedia” is quite a meaningless statement for people who have never seen one.

Together we expanded one article, Witvlei, from a one-line stub to an acceptable start-class article on the English Wikipedia. The highway from the capital Windhoek to Gobabis leads through Witvlei, so I could even contribute a picture and GPS coordinates. We then went to the OtjiHerero incubator and created a few articles, one for every village the participants came from, by translating the first paragraph from the English Wikipedia.

Progress was slow at first. The lab computers were not working as expected, the participants shared a 56K dial-up connection, and as in every workshop I had so far we ran into the 6-accounts-per-day rule for account creation, this time with the additional trouble that several members never set up an email account in their life, and that there was nobody “at home” at the Account Creation team.

It was not the standard first-world workshop setting. The venue was quite hot and unventilated, fifteen people in a small room with only a tin roof, and the inside temperature about 35°C. Even after 13 years in Namibia I think I haven’t been sweating that much before. The “buffet” consisted of an aluminium pot that contained cheese rolls, and a bucket of artificial fruit juice from which one had to scoop with the only available cup. The petrol station proudly offered yesterday’s newspaper for sale. Alas, the food was tasty, the accommodation as rustic as its name (“Onze Rust”, Afrikaans for our rest), and the relationship among the participants was colleagial.

When the teachers went back to their villages, they did not yet have Internet access there. Telecom Namibia agreed to sponsor this, but it is not in place yet. Let’s hope they really teach their pupils what Wikipedia is, and that everyone is invited to contribute.

Peter Gallert, Polytechnic of Namibia

More so than most other Wikimedia projects, except perhaps Commons, copyright is a big deal for Wikisource.  Obviously we can only host public domain or freely licensed works; which is generally understood.  The problem comes from copyright law itself not being generally understood.  (I can’t claim to be especially knowledgeable about copyright myself but I have picked up a lot as part of the Wikisource community.)

Many people apparently believe certain works must or should be out of copyright without checking or they do check but miss some detail of copyright law.  Wikisource as a project can deal with this by deletion but it still impacts volunteers.

A recent example is the science fiction short story “Time Pawn” by Philip K. Dick, a story that was published in 1954 in an issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.  Under the law of the time, the initial copyright period ended in 1982 when it could have been renewed for another period.  As this didn’t happen it would seem to have entered the public domain.  However, while the short story was not renewed, the issue of the magazine itself was, under renewal registration number RE0000112616 in January 1982 by CBS Publications.  It has been established, in Goodis v. United Artists Television, Inc., “that where a magazine has purchased the right of first publication under circumstances which show that the author has no intention to donate his work to the public, copyright notice in the magazine’s name is sufficient to obtain a valid copyright on behalf of the beneficial owner, the author or proprietor.”  Lacking information to the contrary, we must assume that this applies to Dick’s story; the renewal of the copyright on Thrilling Wonder Stories also renewed the copyright on “Time Pawn” so, unless it was reassigned, CBS currently hold the rights on the story until about 2050.

The real issue here is that another user, not the uploader, completed the proofreading of the entire story in good faith.  At which point it was noticed by yet another user and rightly marked it as a copyright violation.  Now that good-faith user’s effort is wasted and they may be permanently disillusioned with the project.  Everyone loses.

This is actually partly my fault.  I noticed the upload and I tagged a separate, similar upload (“Small Town“) for deletion for the same reason but I didn’t connect the two.

I’m not sure what else can be done to prevent things like this from happening.  Both Wikisource and Commons already have help pages on copyright that should explain the problem.  Constant vigilance (and better awareness on my part, at least) may be the only solution, but that is unlikely to be foolproof.

Note 1: “Small Town” was published in Amazing Stories, which hardly ever had its copyrights renewed, in the very first issue to do so.  Conversely, Thrilling Wonder Stories, along with the entire “Thrilling…” stable of magazines, apparently had consistent copyright renewals across the board.  Ironically, that isn’t true under its earlier incarnation as simply Wonder Stories, a pulp also created by Hugo Gernsback after he lost control of Amazing Stories.

Note 2: A later version of “Time Pawn” (published in Startling Stories, Summer 1955) appears to have been renewed as well, under RE0000190631 in 1983 by Dick’s children.  This may or may not be relevant; a court could declare it close enough.

A QRpedia code in situ in Monmouth, Wales

Wikimedia UK is pleased to announce that Roger Bamkin and Terence Eden are transferring ownership of QRpedia to Wikimedia UK.

As a donation from Roger and Terence, the intellectual property in QRpedia and the qrpedia.org and qrwp.org domains will be transferred to Wikimedia UK, which will maintain and support the development of the QRpedia platform for the future for the benefit of the Wikimedia community. Roger and Terence will act as honorary advisors to Wikimedia UK in this, as well as retaining their moral rights of attribution, but will not receive any financial consideration for this. The transfer of the domains will take place as soon as the remaining legal details have been resolved.

QRpedia is a web tool that uses QR codes placed on or near objects or locations to link mobile users to Wikipedia articles about those objects or locations in their language. The agreement was made as a result of negotiations at our board meeting on 8 February 2013.

Wikimedia UK is grateful for this donation which will allow ongoing technical support for a number of Wikimedia-related outreach projects where QRpedia is already in use, including Wikimedia UK’s work with the Derby Museum and Monmouthpedia, and many others worldwide.

Chris Keating, Chair of Wikimedia UK, said: “I am very pleased that we have reached agreement with Roger and Terence and that Wikimedia UK will support, preserve and improve QRpedia for the benefit of the whole Wikimedia community. QRpedia is a great innovation and already plays an important role in Wikimedia outreach projects not just in the UK but worldwide. I look forward to working with Roger and Terence to develop QRpedia further in future.”

Roger Bamkin, co-creator of QRpedia, said: “Terence Eden and I are thrilled to see the projects in Monmouth, Johannesburg, Gibraltar, Sayada and Fremantle that have inspired volunteers to write about different towns in dozens of different languages. Who would think you could tour Monmouth in Hungarian or Gibraltar in Punjabi?”

This month’s featured text is A Jewish State (Der Judenstaat), a 1917 edition of an 1896 book by Theodor Herzl, translated from the German by Sylvie d’Avigdor and Jacob De Haas.

A Jewish State, subtitled “An attempt at a modern solution of the Jewish Question”, is one of the most important texts of early Zionism; and actually popularised the term “Zionism” itself. Herzl proposed the creation of a Jewish State as a way to solve the widespread anti-Semitism encountered in Europe. He opposed the “gradual infiltration of Jews” into Palestine by immigration, which he felt would be resisted by the native population. Instead, he advocated a diplomatic agreement with either the Ottoman Empire, the colonial rulers of Palestine at that time, or the sparsely-populated republic of Argentina. Herzl’s book does more than present the idea; it also sets out a practical method of accomplishing his goal, through the creation of a Society of Jews and a Jewish Company.

Hertzl was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer who, although Jewish, was not raised in a strongly Jewish environment (for example, his thirteenth birthday was described as a Confirmation rather than a Bar Mitzvah).  He considered himself to be an atheist and looked down on religion as barbaric.  He may have been inspired by the rise of the anti-Semitic Austrian politician Karl Lueger, or other events of the time.  Regardless of the reason, Hertzl came to believe that anti-Semitism could never be solved, only avoided, and changed his mind from an earlier integrationist belief to the new Zionist philosophy.

A Jewish State has been featured to coincide with the 65th Israeli Independence Day on 16th April 2013, celebrating the culmination of the project Herzl envisioned.

Note that this work demonstrates Wikisource’s dynamic layout function.  This allows the typography to be adjusted to meet individual’s preferences and requirements.  In this case, the default layout is Layout Two, based on the scheme used on the French and Italian Wikisources. Other layouts can be cycled through by the layout link under Display Options in the sidebar.

It is astonishing how little insight many of the men who move in the midst of active life possess of the science of economics. Hence it is that even Jews faithfully repeat the cry of the Anti-Semites: “We depend for sustenance on the nations whose guests we are, and if we had not hosts to support us we should die of starvation.” This is a point that shows how greatly unjust accusations may weaken our self-knowledge. But what are the true grounds for this statement concerning the nations which take us in? Where it is not based on limited physiocratic views it is founded on the childish error that commodities pass from hand to hand in continuous rotation. We need not wake from long slumber, like Rip van Winkle, to realize that the world is considerably altered by the production of new commodities. The technical progress made during this wonderful era enables even a man of most limited intelligence to note with his short-sighted eyes the appearance of innumerable new commodities. The spirit of enterprise has created them.

For the last three months I had the pleasure to have an intern for my bugmaster job at Wikimedia, as part of the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for Free and Open Source Software. It is organized by GNOME and the Wikimedia Foundation participated with six positions.

Valerie’s proposal was to create a proposal for a better feedback workflow, to organize public bug days which we now run every other week as part of the QA weekly goals, and to do bug report triaging. Valerie succeeded in all of them and blogged about her experience and progress, but I’d like to summarize and highlight some of her achievements here.

Valerie analyzed which important Wikimedia feedback channels link to each other and Bugzilla and created a diagram of the current situation, and also a bug life cycle flowchart describing the life of a bug report by its status changes over time. That diagram is now also embedded in our wiki documentation making it easier to understand for Bugzilla newcomers “how things work”.

She also wrote and published two blogposts in the Wikimedia Blog explaining how to create a good first bug report and how to help Wikimedia squash software bugs. And apart from co-organizing a number of bugdays, Valerie also participated in Mobile QA by testing the Commons Upload app, helped me with Bugzilla administration (creating new products and components), and taught me about Bugzilla functionality that I had never used before, yay. :)

As this was the first time that I intensively mentored somebody I must say that it went surprisingly well, realizing the presence of all those skills which are helpful for bug triaging: Good analytic skills (what a bug report is about and what not), finding your way to gather information via the query interface, spotting things in the Bugzilla interface and being curious enough to investigate yourself, and a structured approach to testing by using different browsers, coming up with quick testcases yourself, and being aware of MediaWiki’s deployment schedule (basically: which software version is deployed on which server).

So I think we’ve learned a lot from each other, and I’m very happy that Valerie is going to stay involved in our community and bug management.

In general, I’d like to thank Marina Zhurakhinskaya (for GNOME) and Quim Gil (for Wikimedia) for organizing OPW and I am delighted to see more projects planning to join the next round (like KDE, Perl, and more).
The application period for the next round of OPW has already started and its deadline is May 1st. Check out the central wikipage if you’re interested!

Here are a bunch of links!

• Culture and knowledge: Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites -- check out Wikimedia NYC, which collaborates with libraries and other cultural institutions such as the New York Public Library. QuestionCopyright is a nonprofit org that educates artists about alternative licensing and advocates against copyright maximalism. And the Organization for Transformative Works "is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures."
• Data: the municipal government open data sets are available, and are consumed by organizations like local nonprofit OpenPlans. In February, look for Open Data Day, which had a Code for NYC event this year. (And look at New York City in Wikidata!)
• Open formats: Aaron Swartz, honorary New Yorker, was one of the inventors of RSS.
• Software: I mentioned a few organizations that produce open source software. Socialbomb in Brooklyn helps work on the Tornado web server. Brooklyn-based OpenGeo makes the OpenGeo suite of geographic information systems software. 10Gen in Manhattan makes MongoDB. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is working on CollectionSpace, software to help run museums. ProPublica makes tools for data journalism (blog). OpenITP (the Open Internet Tools Project) in Manhattan "supports and incubates a collection of free and open source projects that enable anonymous, secure, reliable, and unrestricted communication on the Internet. Its goal is to enable people to talk directly to each other without being censored, surveilled or restricted." OpenITP is part of the Open Technology Institute, and helps make Tidepools (social wifi).

  I mentioned consumers and users of open source among our neighbors. Drupal and WordPress are pretty useful to consulting shops like Behavior. Google makes some open source software but also uses a bunch; for instance, their servers run on a slight variant of Ubuntu Linux. And an art installation in the New York Times lobby uses the Beautiful Soup screen-scraping library that my spouse wrote.

• Hardware: We have Makerbot in Brooklyn, including Thingiverse, and we have Shapeways in Long Island City. And NYC Resistor is a hacker collective in Brooklyn that has get-togethers all the time.
• Events and meetups: Gosh we have a lot. Python and Ruby and open source data analysis groups, for instance. The Drupal community's hosting a Drupal Ladder sprint on April 7th at Elephant Ventures in west midtown, helping new contributors get started. You can come to Techno-activism Third Mondays at OpenITP. Wikimedia NYC hosts events every few months. And for open hardware, check out Maker Faire in September, and the Shapeways meetup. I should have also mentioned Free Culture Conference 2013, April 20th and 21st at New York Law School, and the New York Linux Users Group.

I hope the people listening understood that I was just offering a sample of the organizations in the five boroughs that work on or use open stuff! I opened and ended my speech with some thoughts about love and sharing (and how being a free software person is like or unlike being a vegan), which I reused from "A Slightly Disjointed (Due To A Five-Day Cold) Musing On Open Source, Fear, Motivation, And Witnessing", where I discuss my experience with the open source GNOME desktop environment.

During the coffee breaks and lunch, I also spread the word about Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code internships available this summer; application deadlines are around May 1st.

Thanks to the sponsors and organizers of Open Tech NYC 2013. I enjoyed it despite getting over a cold, and appreciated the chance to learn from and chat with a variety of people interested in open stuff.

During the past one year I have encountered so many questions regarding license and wikipedia (and other wikimedia projects).In this blog post my aim is to provide a brief information about the licenses that are valid in the wikimedia  projects.

Few frequent queries I encountered were:

• Isn’t the content from sites with (any) Creative Commons License/GNU license is compatible in wikimedia projects?
• Can I use Creative Commons Non-Commercial license  in my webiste so that you (wikimedians) can reuse content in wikimedia projects?
• My site is in Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. Why can’t you (wikimedians) reuse the content in wikipedia?

and so on.

These queries were raised mainly due to the lack of awareness about different type of Creative Commons Licenses and about the Wikimedia Licenses and its policy. Few people have the misconception that content under creative Commons license is free to use like public domain content. I have seen even experienced wikimedians assume that any Creative Commons license is valid in wikimedia and in that assumption they go on and recommend licenses like Creative Commons Non-Commercial or Non-Derivative licenses or GFDL licenses to influence potential content donors to get their copyrighted content into wikimedia projects. In this blog post I am trying to explain what all are the licenses compatible in wikimedia.

A brief history

When Wikipedia started in 2001 it was using the GFDL license. Over the years as the internet evolved both wikipedia and GFDL license also evolved. And with the version 1.3 of GFDL license (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html) things become bit difficult in the wikimedia world. This happened in 2008. Wikimedia Foundation worked closely with FSF and migrated the license from GFDL to GFDL and CC-BY-SA.

The reason for this change is documented in various wikimedia pages. Following are two such links:

• http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update

I am not going into the details of this license migration as it is well documented in the above links and else where. My aim in this blog post is to provide a brief information about the licenses that are valid in the wikimedia world.

Creative Commons Licenses (and GNU licenses) and Wikimedia

From this page http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ you will get information regarding different creative commons licenses. But NOT all Creative Commons or GNU only licenses are valid in the Wikimedia world. For example, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-ND, GFDL, and so on are NOT compatible with the license of wikimedia projects.

From here you will get a list of compatible licenses.

According to this link the only compatible licenses in the wikimedia world are:

• Public Domain
• CC-BY-SA (1.0, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0)
• CC-By 2.0, 2.5, 3.0
• CC-By-US 3.0

Also according to this link, any GNU only license is also NOT compatible in wikimedia projects. Which means, content from sites with GFDL license CAN NOT be copied to wikimedia projects.

GNU only licenses will become compatible only of it uses a dual license. For example, sites that use GFDL & CC-By or CC-By-SA license is compatible. But sites that use only GFDL (or any other GNU license) is not compatible.

Non-Commercial and Non-Derivative licenses

Many people are ready to share their work for free for educational purpose. But they do not want others to make money using that work. Also some of them do not like others to modify their creation. Due to these reasons licenses like CC-BY-NC (Non Commercial), CC-BY-ND (Non-Derivative), CC-BY-NC-ND (Non-Commercial and Non-derivative) are popular among many people whom I am interacted with (mostly academicians).

But as obvious from the previous section, content from sites using these types of licenses are also not compatible in the wikimedia world.

Conclusion

Please be careful when some one is claiming that they are using a creative commons license/GNU license. They might actually referring to a Non-Commercial/Non-Derivative/GNU or similar type of wikimedia incompatible licenses. Also do not recommend these type of licenses to people who want to donate content to wikimedia. It is always better to refer to this page before dealing with license or content migration.

Vol: 3 • Issue: 3 • March 2013 [contribute] [archives]

“Ignore all rules” in deletions; anonymity and groupthink; how readers react when shown talk pages

With contributions by: Amir E. Aharoni, Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, Oren Bochman, Heather Ford, Tilman Bayer, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Daniel Mietchen.

Wikipedia’s “Ignore all rules” policy (IAR) is a double edged sword in deletion arguments

<video class="kskin" controls="" data-durationhint="92.559133333333" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-(Coleoptera-Carabidae)-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv" data-startoffset="0" id="mwe_player_0" poster="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ea/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv/300px-seek%3D1-An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv.jpg" preload="none" style="width:300px;height:200px"><source data-bandwidth="490344" data-framerate="29.97002997003" data-height="360" data-shorttitle="WebM 360P" data-title="Web streamable WebM (360P)" data-width="540" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/e/ea/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv.360p.webm" transcodekey="360p.webm" type="video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis""></source><source data-bandwidth="981992" data-framerate="29.97002997003" data-height="480" data-shorttitle="WebM 480P" data-title="Web streamable WebM (480P)" data-width="720" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/e/ea/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv.480p.webm" transcodekey="480p.webm" type="video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis""></source><source data-bandwidth="999832" data-framerate="29.97002997003" data-height="480" data-shorttitle="Ogg 480P" data-title="Web streamable Ogg video (480P)" data-width="720" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/e/ea/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv.480p.ogv" transcodekey="480p.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis""></source><source data-bandwidth="1183257" data-framerate="29.97002997003" data-height="480" data-shorttitle="Ogg source" data-title="Original Ogg file, 720 × 480 (1.18 Mbps)" data-width="720" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/An-Unprecedented-Role-Reversal-Ground-Beetle-Larvae-%28Coleoptera-Carabidae%29-Lure-Amphibians-and-Prey-pone.0025161.s009.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs="theora""></source>Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser.</video>

A beetle larva ignoring the rules while negotiating deletion with the frog.^{[mediasource 1]}

A paper presented at last month’s CSCW Conference, titled “Keeping eyes on the prize: officially sanctioned rule breaking in mass collaboration systems”^[1] observes that “Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order”, yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization. Rule breaking in bureaucracies is a slippery slope quickly leading to potentially dangerous exceptions, so Wikipedia has a mechanism called “Ignore all rules” (WP:IAR) for officially sanctioned rule breaking. The researchers have considered IAR’s impact within the scope of deletion requests. The results show that the IAR policy has meaningful influences on deliberation outcomes, which rather than wreaking havoc, provides a positive, functional governance mechanism.

This paper is another welcome addition to the growing literature on AfD, examining the effectiveness of rule breaking using WP:IAR within these discussions. It starts with an in depth extermination of rule breaking within collaborative environments. Then these six hypotheses are postulated:

1. Invocation of WP:IAR in support of vote correlates with increased likelihood of the decision that the vote will be on the winning side.
2. This effect is expected to increase with the number of policies cited in the deletion proposal (since they may be contradicting each other).
3. Invoking IAR to override the deletion proposal’s policy citation tends to reduce the proposal’s likelihood of success.
4. When IAR is used together with another policy domain (e.g. Content/Conduct/Legal) as the proposal’s rationale, it will negate the proposal’s success.
5. Increased dissonance between policies arising in the discussion will increase the chance that the IAR argument will be successful.
6. IAR will increase in effectiveness as the policies invoked increase in complexity.

To test these, the researchers scoured AfD discussions starting from April 2006 to October 2008, collecting those where WP:IAR had been invoked. These were then supplemented by randomly drawing a control group from non IAR AfD discussions from the same date. The resulting dataset contained 555 AfD discussions. These were coded by Outcome, for Keep/Delete and IAR usage in Keep/Delete vote, Policy Match and Category Match. Each hypothesis and the control were fitted to a linear regression model. The results were as follows:

H1 was supported only in cases where IAR is used in keep vote, but showed insignificant impact as a delete argument. H2, H3 & H4 look for conditions in which IAR’s impact on the ultimate decision would be strengthened. H2 was supported only marginally; H3 was not supported; H4 was not supported and actually indicated that in the case where a keep voter has invoked IAR with another policy this will only increase the chance of a delete outcome! H5 and H6 consider if IAR fares better when pitted against increasingly contradictory or complicated policies and both of these are supported. Overall, the authors conclude that IAR plays a significant role in Wikipedia’s policies, and recommend its use to other communities. They point out that IAR is also an indicator of where policy is weak in addressing the community’s needs.

Activity of content translators on Wikipedia examined

<audio class="kskin" controls="" data-durationhint="0.82866213151927" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="Melopsittacus_undulatus_imitating_itterashai_-_pone.0038803.s002.oga" data-startoffset="0" id="mwe_player_1" poster="//bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.21wmf12/skins/common/images/icons/fileicon-ogg.png" preload="none" style="width:220px;height:23px"><source data-bandwidth="109198" data-height="0" data-shorttitle="Ogg source" data-title="Original Ogg file (109 kbps)" data-width="0" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Melopsittacus_undulatus_imitating_itterashai_-_pone.0038803.s002.oga" type="audio/ogg; codecs="vorbis""></source>Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser.</audio>

The Japanese phrase “itterashai”, uttered by a budgerigar.^{[mediasource 2]}

This image of the flatworm Pseudorhabdosynochus morrhua has descriptions in currently 29 languages, i.e. 10% of Wikipedia languages.

Another CSCW paper titled “Could someone please translate this?”: activity analysis of Wikipedia article translation by non-experts”^[2] analyzes the work of a volunteer translator of Wikipedia articles. It goes into great detail: it breaks down the big translation task into many sub-activities, such as looking up complicated words in the source language, choosing the right translation, using editing software, etc. It presents all the activities according to the Activity theory methodology. Though there are other papers that deal with translation of Wikipedia content, it is the first paper to examine the actual volunteer translator’s activity.

Interestingly, this paper notes the importance of the Simple English Wikipedia several times, as a tool that may help people translate the content, with the assumption that the language of the main English Wikipedia may frequently be complex and challenging (this assumption is based on another paper, which compared the English and Simple English Wikipedias). It relies on the Simple English Wikipedia a bit too much, though; for example, it cites its main page as a source for some statistics, which would better be obtained directly from stats.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia’s main statistics site.

It has some shortcomings, which should be addressed in future works on the subject:

• It lists several possible definitions of “Wikipedia translation”: Translation of articles, with which it deals, and also translation of talk pages, translation of WikiProject pages, etc. It also mentions several software tools that are related to Wikipedia translation and multilinguality, such as WikiBhasha and Omnipedia. However, it notably omits any mention of MediaWiki’s Translate extension, which is used on the translatewiki.net website for translating of the user interface of MediaWiki and its many extensions, making MediaWiki one of the most thoroughly localized software packages ever, and also for various documents on Wikimedia sites, such as Meta, MediaWiki.org and Wikidata. Though they are certainly not identical, the latter workflow of translating documents is especially similar to the workflow of Wikipedia article translation. (Disclaimer: The reviewer is one of the developers of the Translate extension.)
• It provided pre-selected articles to translate to the subjects of the experiment. This may have been unavoidable in a first small controlled experiment, but it misses an important activity of volunteer translators in Wikipedia: selection of the article to translate. This is done in several ways, among which are:
  • Selection by translators themselves, based on their interests or other factors.
  • Projects such as [Translation of the week]].
  • Requests from other users who speak the target language.
  • Requests from users who speak other languages. Notable examples of these are the Wikipedia articles about Kurów, a town in Poland, and True Jesus Church, a Christian denomination, which are at least partially translated to nearly all languages in which a Wikipedia is available.
• It only deals with translation from English to other languages, but not with translation from other languages into English and other languages. For many reasons, English is not the only source for translation and this must be noted.
• The paper notes that one of the criteria for choosing the articles for the experiment was that the article content is representative of the general Wikipedia article language complexity”. It is not clear, however, how this was measured.
• New users of Wikipedia were chosen and not experienced editors. Testing with new users is valuable, but it would be useful to repeat the experiment with veteran Wikipedians.
• It claims that it found that paraphrasing machine translation can be a more desirable strategy for translating conceptual articles than biographical articles in Wikipedia, even though the English language might be more complex. This may be true, but it is unclear how such a bold statement could be made from such a small sample of source content.

Despite these shortcomings, this paper is valuable for several reasons:

• Opening the topic of close examination of Wikipedia’s translators work is important in itself.
• Its bibliography has many useful pointers to other articles about Wikipedia’s multilinguality and volunteer translation.
• Its high level of detail in analyzing the translators activity is commendable, and with some improvements, this methodology could be useful for people who design translation tools.
• Its particular comments about the special challenges of translation to Chinese should be very useful for optimizing future translation tools for this language. Of course, the experiment should be repeated with other languages, too.

Finally, the article promises further research and suggestions about building tools for translator support, which would be very interesting to read.

Comparison of collaborative editing in OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia

A preprint titled “Has OpenStreetMap a role in Digital Earth Applications?”^[3] studies OpenStreetMap, the wiki-based collaboratively editable map, as a predominant example of Volunteered Geographical Information projects. The paper addresses two main research questions: 1) How successful is the OSM project in providing spatial data and to which extent can it be compared to Wikipedia in this sense, 2) what are the main characteristics of OSM stemming from its crowd-sourced nature? The paper gives a very comprehensive overview of the work-flow of OSM, reviews the main characteristics of its collaborative mapping process very well, and tries to compare these characteristics with those of Wikipedia: In contrast with Wikipedia, the administrative structure of OSM is unknown and not very well defined within the community of its editors; however both platforms show the same Zipfian characteristics among their editors; a few editors are responsible for large numbers of contributions and many editors have only a few contributions. Although the criteria are quite different on the two platforms, the paper finds that the relative population of OSM Featured Objects is evidently larger than the ones of Wikipedia (Featured Articles). In the conclusion, the authors express that they “believe that OSM will continue its growth for the foreseeable future”. However, the route to this conclusion is not very well described in the manuscript.

Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news stories is still a fertile field of research

The Chelyabinsk meteor on February 15 did not just leave its traces in the Ural region, but Wikipedia entries on the event had been started in 29 languages by the end of that day. Today, there are 44.

In MJ no more: Using Concurrent Wikipedia Edit Spikes with Social Network Plausibility Checks for Breaking News Detection^[4] by Thomas Steiner, Seth van Hooland and Ed Summers, the controversial (per WP:Recentism and WP:RS) field of breaking news articles is investigated. Motivated by the overloading of Wikipedia during the breaking of the news of Michael Jackson’s death, researcher Thomas Steiner created an open source exploratory tool called The Wikipedia Live Monitor. This tool allowed his team to examine clusters of related activity based on edit spikes in a 5 minute window within multiple streams fed by Wikipedia’s recent changes; Twitter Feeds; Google+ and Facebook. The main research question posed is: are edit spikes in Wikipedia, clustered with related social network activity, useful indicators for identifying breaking news events, and with what delay? By considering action along multiple streams, they are able to cross-check the plausibility of information being disseminated by many less reliable sources.

Their approach is based on prior work by S. Petrović, M. Osborne, and V. Lavrenko in Streaming First Story Detection with Application to Twitter, who used the document vector space model from classic information retrieval to cluster twitter feeds. But in this case the researchers are clustering multiple streams which can potentially hold far more information when a story breaks and can therefore detect these very quickly. While they could locate breaking news, they may need more work to optimize the timing parameters of the algorithm. Further research is planned into automating the classification of edits, which could reform future use of non-reliable sources.

A WikiSym 2012 paper titled Staying in the Loop: Structure and Dynamics of Wikipedia’s Breaking News Collaborations^[5] looked at the trajectory of article construction which captures the collaboration structure embedded in the creation of breaking news stories. They have shown that these stories, fueled by mass media and social networks, tend to create a social melting pot surrounding the editing of these events. A social network analysis of the relations between editors of breaking news stories located editors in diverse social roles, such as Creators, early contributors, the highly centralized activity coordinators (admins) and the marginal vandals and their tireless opponents, the spam fighting bots and recent changes patrollers. Another result is that most articles – those which are not breaking news stories – lack the dense creation trajectories found in breaking news stories.

Exposing talk page discussions leads to drop in perceived article quality

As once observed by Ward Cunningham, one important feature by which Wikipedians improved his invention, the wiki, was to introduce “a talk page or a discussion page behind every page, so you don’t actually have to see the discussion and it makes a much more finished product”. Yet surfacing this deliberation could engender trust in the process if the deliberation process appears fair, well-reasoned, and thorough. Alternatively, it could encourage doubts about content quality, especially if the process appears messy or biased. In a CSCW ’13 paper titled “Your process is showing: controversy management and perceived quality in wikipedia”,^[6] the researchers report on an experiment in which they found that exposing discussions generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article, especially if the discussion revealed conflict.

Motivated by how university students learn to assess reliability of controversial articles such as Supreme Court decisions or about individuals like Pope Pius XII and Yasser Arafat, the researchers considered how beneficial it would be to reveal the process of articles creation. In wikis the discussions used to produce the articles are hidden from view using talk pages and other coordination spaces. It was believed that when deliberations appear fair, well-reasoned, and thorough it should engender trust in the reader and that a process which appears biased or chaotic should diminish the confidence in the article’s quality. The paper outlines the issues involved in assessing the credibility of online information sources. The paper first considers prior work on article quality but reframes the issues based on an idea presented in the recent best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow by economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The research questions posed are:

• RQ1: What is the effect of exposing discussions about article content on perceived article quality?
• RQ2: Do different kinds of conflict resolution have different effects on perceptions of content quality?
• RQ3: What do participants believe about how viewing the discussion may have changed their perceptions?

These questions are then interpreted using Kahneman’s System 1 (slower deliberative thinking) and System 2 (faster associative thinking). The questions were investigated in an experiment run on Amazon’s mechanical Turk — a crowdsourcing platform allowing micropayments. Beginning with 3500 controversial articles, the researchers selected featured articles, and discarded newsworthy items leaving only 50 articles. Elite Turkers were then shown ten brief vignettes illustrating talk page discussion about a selected controversy, meant to display one of ten forms of editor coordination or conflict activities. They then had to answer a questionnaire, and complete two reading comprehension tasks. The researchers noticed that exposing Wikipedia readers to such discussions with any type of conflict generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article. They point out that the magnitude of the reader’s negative perception depends on the type of editors’ interaction. Finally they note that while participants may have suffered a confidence crisis with respect to specific articles, at the same time they gained respect for Wikipedia in general. A final conclusion is that while the experiment, especially the comprehension task, was designed to engage readers in System 1 thinking, watching the discussions may well have triggered a System 2 critical response.

Briefly

100 million hours spent editing Wikipedia

Edit counts are often used as a measure of the amount of activity on a wiki, but as the work that goes into one edit can vary between mere seconds and many hours or even days, they don’t translate easily into work time. Still, in 2008, Clay Shirky and IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg estimated as a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” that “about 100 million hours of thought” had gone into Wikipedia (a number later featured prominently in Shirky’s book Cognitive Surplus). A CSCW 2013 paper titled “Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia”^[7] calculates work time as the length of edit sessions, defined as “a sequence of edits made by an editor where the difference between the time at which any two sequential edits are saved is less than one hour”. They estimate that a total of 102,673,683 labor hours were spent editing Wikipedia (in all languages) until April 2012 (which was compared to 168 lifetimes of work) and 61,706,883 hours on the English Wikipedia. The paper also contains a list of the 20 editors who (by this measure) spent the most time editing the English Wikipedia in March 2012.

Wiktionary and sign language

In “Between Wictionary [sic] and a Thesaurus : Some Dilemmata of a Sign Language Dictionary”,^[8] apparently an abstract of a paper to be presented at a conference, the author presents the challenges to writing a dictionary of sign language in the world of modern lexicography. In the author’s opinion, Wiktionary in general, and the Czech Wiktionary in particular, is an important example of one of the latest innovations in lexicography: It is based on contributions by volunteers who are not necessarily professional to achieve a work of a volume that would be extremely expensive to produce in traditional professional lexicography, although it sacrifices some of the advantages of the latter, such as a carefully selected glossary and rigorous standardization. The author sees future in using a wiki technology for creating dictionaries for sign languages that will be better than the current dictionaries at least in some characteristics, and makes some suggestions on how to implement it well. Notably, the author discusses displaying the signs as illustrations and videos and does not mention SignWriting – a system of standardized characters for representing signs, which was already used for several dictionaries and websites; it is not encoded in Unicode yet, but experimental support for SignWriting is available for MediaWiki as an extension. A minor nitpick is the misspelling of the name “Wiktionary” – the author writes it with a ‘c’ rather than a ‘k’.

Wikipedia compared to Q&A website in Korea

In South Korea, Wikipedia lags behind several other services in popularity, such as Naver‘s KnowledgeiN knowledge market Q&A service. A new paper^[9] compares the English and Korean Wikipedias to the KnowledgeiN service, and analyzes some of the factors involved in how users perceive quality in wikis and Q&A services. About 200 users of each of the three websites participated in the survey. The authors found that perceived quality helps to determine how useful the users are going to see a given site. Previous research suggesting that community expertise, size and diversity all contribute to quality is confirmed, and those factors are recognized and valued by the general public. As might be expected, the authors find that users of Q&A sites value expertise of contributors more than users of wikis. In turn, wikis rely on the size of their community to achieve quality. Predictably, the authors conclude that the smaller Wikipedias such as the Korean one suffer from small community size, and recommend that to improve the quality and popularity of such Wikipedias, more editors should be recruited. The study notes a number of limitations that affected it; notably it did not take into account any possible cultural differences, and it does not provide any discussion of why Wikipedia’s popularity in Korea is lacking compared to many other websites, such as KnowledgeiN.

<video class="kskin" controls="" data-durationhint="20.75" data-mwprovider="wikimediacommons" data-mwtitle="A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv" data-startoffset="0" id="mwe_player_2" poster="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6e/A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv/220px--A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv.jpg" preload="none" style="width:220px;height:127px"><source data-bandwidth="498976" data-framerate="12.048192771084" data-height="360" data-shorttitle="WebM 360P" data-title="Web streamable WebM (360P)" data-width="622" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/6e/A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv/A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv.360p.webm" transcodekey="360p.webm" type="video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis""></source><source data-bandwidth="1827347" data-framerate="12.048192771084" data-height="475" data-shorttitle="Ogg source" data-title="Original Ogg file, 820 × 475 (1.83 Mbps)" data-width="820" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/A-Secreted-BMP-Antagonist-Cer1-Fine-Tunes-the-Spatial-Organization-of-the-Ureteric-Bud-Tree-during-pone.0027676.s011.ogv" type="video/ogg; codecs="theora""></source>Sorry, your browser either has JavaScript disabled or does not have any supported player.
You can download the clip or download a player to play the clip in your browser.</video>

The development of the ureteric bud in C57BL/6 mice in the absence (left) or presence (right) of the protein Cer1.^{[mediasource 3]}

Wikipedia articles on nephrology reliable, but hard to read

An article^[10] by four Toronto-based medical authors concludes that “Wikipedia is a comprehensive and fairly reliable medical resource for nephrology patients that is written at a college reading level”. Comprehensiveness was measured by coverage of ICD-10 items pertaining to this area of medicine. The reliability of articles was also measured in a purely quantitative way, based on “(i) mean number of references per article, and (ii) mean percentage of ‘‘substantiated’’ references—which we defined as references corresponding to works published in peer-reviewed journals or from texts with an associated International Standard Book Number (ISBN)”. Readability was measured using three standard formulae including the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

Comparing English and Arabic Wikipedia POV differences

Khalid, Schutze and Kantner compare point of view (POV) differences between English and Arabic articles about “international personalities”.^[11] They use Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate sentences as positive, negative and neutral and build a statistical classifier to predict the POV score of a document. The authors find that Arabic articles are generally more positive than their English counterparts and conclude that there are at least two possible reasons for a POV difference: either because of a generally lower or higher level of absolute POV in a language, or because of a genuinely different evaluation of a personality in different Wikipedias. The article also contains rich detail about the challenges of evaluating POV differences using both human and automatic classifiers.

The overrepresentation of cricket on English Wikipedia

This article^[12] for the 2013 edition of The International Journal of the History of Sport analyses 115 English wikipedia articles about Australian sportspeople and finds that a disproportionately large number are cricketer biographies. They find that, instead of reflecting the most popular sports in Australian society (of which cricket is one of the least popular), Wikipedia reflects the interests of a small special interest group. In this case, two Wikipedians are behind the creation and maintenance of almost all the content of the high-quality cricket articles. The authors note that cricket is also generally better represented in literary sources where the sport takes on a nostalgic narrative embodying traditional Australia. They conclude with the question of whether the extensive literature on cricket is reflected in Wikipedia articles and, if so, whether the existence of the same factors that have led to the creation of high-quality articles on Australian cricket – are relevant or whether there are other dynamics at play.

Grumpiness due to a “serious typographical error”

A serious typographical error may have led a 2008 personality study to wrongly claim Wikipedians are close-minded. A blog post for Psychology Today^[13] re-examined a widely quoted 2008 survey among 69 Israeli Wikipedians^[14] that (as summarized by the New Scientist at the time) had concluded that “Wikipedians are grumpy and close-minded” (Signpost coverage). The author found that the paper “contains serious errors and even contradicts itself … [C]ontrary to what was reported, Wikipedia members of both sexes actually had higher mean scores on openness to experience compared to non-members, not lower ones. Perhaps the authors’ were confused by the presence of a serious typographical error that appears in the Results section of their article”.

Wikipedians do not tend to conform more to groupthink when in a less anonymous situation

In a survey,^[15] 106 editors on the English Wikipedia were asked (with approval of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee) how they would act in three real-world scenarios (not involving Wikipedia – e.g. “a group of tenants dealing with a noisy/problematic neighbor”), each “carefully designed so that the individual would have a high incentive to resolve the problem, but would also incur some sort of penalty for voicing a dissenting opinion”, and assuming varying levels of anonymity (e.g. complete anonymity, pseudonymity, or use of real names). The paper’s main hypothesis, “that with higher levels of anonymity the likelihood of not conforming increases as well”, found only weak support, which the author calls “a promising result for online communities and the future of online communication. Given that non-conformity in this study meant ensuring a contribution of alternatives to the group, this is a positive outcome for preventing groupthink.”

Estimate for economic benefit of Wikipedia: $50 million by 2006 already

In a recent article, The Economist examined the question “How to quantify the gains that the internet has brought to consumers”, citing a 2009 paper by two economists that attempted to calculate the monetary value of consumer surplus generated by broadband Internet, focusing on how much value Internet is providing for free (that otherwise people would be prepared to pay). While this paper did not mention Wikipedia, The Economist cited one of the authors (Shane Greenstein, known to readers of this research report for his work on political POV language in Wikipedia articles, reviewed in the January 2012 and February 2012 issues), who “thinks Wikipedia accounted for up to $50m of that surplus” as of 2006 – in other words, Wikipedia provides a good that otherwise people would be willing to buy, spending $50m on it that instead they get to spend on something else. The Economist commented that “such numbers probably understate things” as the paper’s methodology assumed that “internet access meant the same thing in 2006 as it did in 1999.”

Journalists cover many topics.^{[mediasource 4]}
So does Wikipedia.

91% of German journalists use Wikipedia

A survey^[16] conducted by a PR agency among “over 2,600 journalists from France, the UK, America and Germany” asked them about various aspects of their work including Wikipedia usage, finding among other results “91% of the German national media journalists admitting to using Wikipedia to research stories.”

Inserting weblinks on Wikipedia to drive traffic

A case study published in D-Lib Magazine (“the magazine of digital library research”), titled Using Wikipedia to Enhance the Visibility of Digitized Archival Assets^[17] reported on “the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets … by adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles”. In a blog post, Europeana also reported on exposure to its content received via Wikipedia, in a somewhat different approach – by providing the content on Wikipedia itself.^[18]

Case study on “Accommodating the Wikipedia Project in Higher Education”

A 94 page master’s thesis^[19] finds that the University of Windsor, treated as a case study, is torn between two groups: one encouraging the use of new digital tools like Wikipedia, and the other, conservative, opposed to it. There is a general lack of understanding of Wikipedia (a finding similar to a study reviewed in last month’s issue: “UK university lecturers still skeptical and uninformed about Wikipedia“). Many participants (instructors, scholars) use Wikipedia and recognize it has been improving and becoming more convenient, but are mostly unwilling to contribute to it; one participant noted that doing so would be a career “academic suicide”. Nonetheless the study also suggest that there is significant sympathy for Wikipedia, and many interviewees indicated that they would like to contribute, but are stymied by “lack of time, lack of academic credit, and overall lack of resources to do work not directly related to their professional responsibilities.” Wikipedia outreach to academia is seen as noble, but likely not to progress quickly due to those issues.

Wikipedia student club participation

A dissertation titled “Investigation of Disassembling Polymers and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Molecular Gelation, and Implementation of a Class-Project Centered on Editing Wikipedia”^[20] contains some observations on the first ever Wikipedia student club in the US: “the students who enter the Wikipedia community through the student club have a different editing contribution pattern than the general population and the students who enter through a class project. These editors still remain active after a year from creating the account. Although they start at a lower editing efficiency, they peak later in the year and have a more gradual decline in active editing activity.” (p.170)

Monthly edits still on the rise

Erik Zachte, a data analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation, observed in a blog post^[21] that “the overall volume of manual edits by registered users on all Wikimedia wikis combined is still increasing, slowly but steadily” (somewhat different from the number of active editors, which has been slightly decreasing or stagnating over the last few years), generating some discussion on the possible reasons.

How many Wikipedia edits come from locals?

On the “Zero Geography” blog, researcher Mark Graham continued his series about geostatistical aspects of Wikipedia, presenting “A map of edits to articles about Egypt”,^[22] providing an overview article on some earlier results that appeared in a Rwandan magazine^[23] and asking “What percentage of edits to English-language Wikipedia articles are from local people?”.^[24]

New overview page of Wikimedia data for researchers

A new page on Meta-Wiki gives an overview for researchers of various sources of open data published by the Wikimedia Foundation about Wikipedia and its sister projects (Wikipedia dumps, stats, live feeds, etc.)

Wikimedia funding for Wikisym ’13 despite open access concerns

A request for financial support from the Wikimedia Foundation for the 2013 WikiSym/OpenSym conference – as in previous years – was approved this month, but not without serious concerns among the Foundation’s volunteer-based Grant Advisory Committee about the organizer’s choice of the ACM Digital Library as the publication venue of the conference proceedings, which makes them available for download cost-free but not under a free license. The issue had been brought up as early as in 2010, when the contribution of one conference speaker was not included in the proceedings because he had insisted on republishing it under a CC-BY-SA license.

Research newsletter started on French Wikipedia

“Nouvelles du Wikilab” is a new community-written research newsletter on the French Wikipedia, summarizing and sometimes enriching this monthly research report in French. It offers subscription (for delivery to one’s user talk page on the French Wikipedia). There are also ideas for an on-wiki French language research review journal named Wikilogie, to publish original research about Wikipedia which could be useful for the community, and to facilitate dialogue with researchers.

Inferring relationships from editing behavior on Wikipedia

A paper presented at the 8th Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop (January 8 – 10, 2013, link to event) reports on the application of Transfer Entropy, a promising information-theoretic tool originally devised by neuroscientists to study causal connections among biological neurons, to infer a network of “social relationships” among editors of Wikipedia, using only information about their editing behavior.^[25] As Wikipedia lacks explicit information about social ties among editors, the authors needed to define a “ground truth” network using interaction on User Talk pages. The method attains a high level of precision but a very low level of recall. The contribution won the best paper award at the workshop in which it was presented.

Google Research releases the WikiLinks Corpus: 40M mentions to Wikipedia pages collected from 10M web pages

Researchers at Google recently released a Natural Language Processing dataset of 40M terms occurring in 10M pages, obtained by crawling the Web and looking for links that point to Wikipedia articles. According to the blog post about the release, the dataset is the largest set of disambiguated mentions to date, nearly 100 times bigger than the second largest database publicly available. A technical report covers in detail the collection, generation, and curation of the dataset.^[26]

References

Image sources

Some of the many and varied new texts added to Wikisource in March were:

• Spirella Corsets (1913) by Spirella Corsets
• President Ford–Eastern Europe Advocates memcon (1975) by Gerald Ford et al
• Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1854) by John Lloyd Stephens
• Sonnets and poems (1916) by John Masefield
• The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton (1897) by Isabel Burton
• Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (1919) by Rudyard Kipling
• A Reconstruction Letter (1866) by Edmund Clarence Stedman
• The Wonderful Fairies of the Sun (1896) by Ernest Vincent Wright
• The Recluse (1888) by William Wordsworth
• Address on the opening of the Free Public Library of Ballarat East, on Friday, 1st. January, 1869 (1869) by Redmond Barry
• A lecture on the evils of emigration and transportation (1838) by William Ashton
• Suppression of Communism Act (1950) by the Parliament of South Africa
• The Prelude (1850) by William Wordsworth
• Off for Hawaii (1899) by Ralph Bonehill
• Hustler Magazine v. Falwell/Amicus curiae motions granted (1987) by William Rehnquist
• Emancipate your colonies! (1830) by Jeremy Bentham
• Florence Earle Coates (1895) by Jane Campbell
• Secretary Kissinger’s Talks in China (1974) by Henry Alfred Kissinger, Deng Xiaoping et al
• A Century of Roundels (1883) by Algernon Charles Swinburne
• The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1891) by James Anthony Froude
• The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922) by Hugh Lofting
• Quits (1896) by Abbie Farwell Brown
• The Pathway of Roses (1913) by Christian Daa Larson
• The Five Nations (1903) by Rudyard Kipling
• The Story of a Little Gray Mouse (1945) by Dorothy Sherrill
• Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches (1770) by Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune
• James Anthony Froude (1902) by Leslie Stephen
• The fall of Ulysses (1912) by Charles Dwight Willard
• The Dictionary of Australasian Biography (1892) by Philip Mennell
• Issa, Cummings Ask for Briefing on Swartz Prosecution (2013) by Darrell Edward Issa

Exploring the English Wikipedia randomly, I encountered this template used to approximate the current live population of India. It uses the following simple formula:

(1176242 + 42.197260273969 * days_since(2010,1,26)) * 000

It’s based on population at a specific data + projected growth. The ‘update’ is done by (best guess) some bot hitting action=purge every night to re-do the calculation.

And where is this used? After looking at the template’s info page, the only article this seems to be used in is the India article, and that too only for population density statistics, rather than actual population statistics. Weird, since if Density can be calculated based on projection, I guess population could be too.

The machinations that people invent on Wikipedia are very fascinating! I hope to discover more over time. If you’ve suggestions on places for me to look (please, no WPBannerMeta / associated templates!), leave comments!

I had never heard of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy before they started harrassing and legally threatening my friend Mako Hill. But they are clearly an organization that understands neither cross-cultural communication nor diplomacy.

There is also no possible outcome of this dispute that is in their favor. The Streisand effect can’t be reversed by filing law suits. Filing law suits will never make a diplomacy institute look good. And Wikipedia policy isn’t structured in such a way that it could ever have an article about them after this without mentioning the drama in the first place – even if enough editors one day changed their minds about notability.

Update: Cory D. was thoughtful enough to put up a note about the case on Boing^Boing.

Individual Engagement Grant Barnstar

Today we’re announcing the first round of Individual Engagement Grantees. The Wikimedia Foundation makes a variety of types of grants, many of which focus on groups and organizations. Individual Engagement Grants exemplify our commitment to increase support to individual contributors to Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on making online improvements. These grants will support eight Wikimedians working individually and in small teams for 6 months to complete projects that benefit the Wikimedia movement, serve our mission and strengthen our communities.

For this pilot round, which began in February 2013, Wikimedians submitted over 50 ideas and drafts from around the world. WMF grantmaking staff narrowed these down to 22 complete proposals meeting the eligibility criteria for review.

18 Wikimedians formed a volunteer committee, with participants from 12 countries and from Wikimedia projects in 14 languages. Committee members reviewed each proposal carefully, scoring them against a rubric of pre-defined selection criteria and making recommendations based on available funding for this round. WMF grantmaking staff shared aggregated scores and comments with the community, while the committee continued its deliberations to finalize a recommendation to WMF to fund eight projects in total.

All eight projects have been approved for funding by the WMF. In examining the recommendations, we were struck by how varied these projects are in terms of grant size, project methodology and engagement targets. A central aim of Individual Engagement Grants is to foster innovation, with a particular focus on online impact. We think that innovative ideas and the skills that various contributors bring to Wikimedia projects can lead to better online environments for everyone, and we hope to learn a lot from these grantees about how we can support more of this across the movement.

The round 1 selected projects are:

Build an effective method of publicity in PRChina, led by Chinese Wikipedian User:AddisWang, funded at $350. Addis and a small team of volunteers based in mainland China will be experimenting with social media campaigns to grow awareness of Wikipedia in China.

Replay Edits, led by User:Jeph paul, funded at $500. Jeph is building a MediaWiki gadget that creates a visual playback of the edit history of a Wikipedia article, allowing users to see an article changing over time.

The Wikipedia Library, funded at $7500 and The Wikipedia Adventure, funded at $10,000, both led by User:Ocaasi. For the Wikipedia Library, Ocaasi will be building and consolidating partnerships with reference providers donating access to reliable sources for Wikipedia editors, and improving the systems for managing these programs. The Wikipedia Adventure is an on-wiki game that will be piloted on English Wikipedia using the Guided Tours extension to determine whether this type of interactive learning is an effective engagement strategy for new editors.

Consolidate wikiArS to involve art schools, led by Catalan Wikimedian User:Dvdgmz, funded at 7810 Euros. The WikiArS outreach program builds partnerships with art and design schools to teach students to create images for donation to Wikimedia Commons and for use in Wikipedia articles. This grant will support focused experimentation in the existing Catalan program’s models that can allow the initiative to scale and to be sustained as an international program.

Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision, led by Catalan Wikisource User:Micru and Italian Wikisource User:Aubrey, funded at 10,000 Euros. This project brings together the global Wikisource community and other stakeholders to define a vision for the project’s future. They’ll begin work on near-term goals that can be accomplished by volunteers on-wiki, and investigate paths forward for longer-term improvements to Wikisource.

MediaWiki data browser, led by User:Yaron K, partially funded at $15,000 in order to pilot the initial concept. Yaron’s project will create a framework to allow any user to easily generate apps or websites to browse sets of structured data that exist on Wikipedia and other projects running on MediaWiki.

Finally, we’ve provisionally approved an 8th project — MediaWiki and Javanese script, led by User:Bennylin, funded at $3000 — provided that a couple of dependencies can be satisfied. This project will provide technical support using a “train-the-trainers” model that teaches volunteers how to use Javanese script online, facilitating the transcription of Javanese texts to projects like Javanese Wikisource. The newly developed Universal Language Selector extension for MediaWiki makes the use of this script online increasingly possible.

The new grantees will begin work on their projects in the coming weeks and they’ll be sharing progress and learnings with us all along the way. Please visit their project pages for complete project information and updates.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this round!  We look forward to seeing even more of your ideas and input in preparation for round 2, which begins on August 1st.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants, on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and the IEG committee

The various threads around Hypothes.is, the Open Annotation spec, and the campus-wide annotation projects at MIT, Yale, and Harvard are starting to converge. It’s nice to see a future pillar of the global web take shape – with no less friction but a more diverse audience than gathered to create the early Internet specs.

I’m at the Convergence Workshop at Harvard on the topic today, and will be at the iAnnotate workshop in San Francisco in 3 weeks. Consolidating notes on a “Hypothesis XXX” hackpad. [Btw: We dearly need a fully open hackpad equivalent with more reliable uptime than piratepad et al.! I default to HP when I have a doc that needs to sustain heavy editing and be guaranteed available during a narrow window of time at a conference... but I would much rather use a Wikimedia or similarly hosted service, with a more explicit guarantee of ongoing availability, at no cost ever.]

The Nardis Waterfall (Cascate Nardis) in Trentino, Italy, uploaded via mobile.

Wikipedia isn’t just the encyclopedia anyone can edit—it’s also the encyclopedia anyone can illustrate. Starting this week, logged in users browsing the mobile web on smartphones with upload capability will see a new feature: the ability to add images to articles that lack them.

In one easy step, you can upload an image from your phone’s camera or image library and add it directly to an article that has no images. You can also donate images for use on articles that already have images but may need more.

Images enhance the visual appeal of Wikipedia and its sister projects and help bring our content to life, but they’re also a powerful educational tool. There’s no better way to describe a notable building or landmark than with a current photo. Not only will you be illustrating knowledge, you’ll also be sharing your photographs with billions of people around the globe.

An example of an article lacking images on the mobile English Wikipedia.

For example, a quick snapshot from your smart phone’s camera can showcase the beauty of the Nardis Waterfall in Trentino to Wikipedia readers who have never set foot in Northern Italy. With millions of articles on Wikipedia, no matter where you are, it’s likely that you have an important piece of knowledge to illustrate right in your backyard.

Smartphones with cameras are becoming increasingly prevalent, and more mobile sites and apps are focused on getting people to explore and photograph the world around them, so it made sense for our mobile web team to bring this feature to Wikipedia.

Unlike many other image sharing sites on the web, images donated via Wikimedia mobile are released under a free license and can be shared and reused by anyone, anywhere, for free. When you donate images to Wikimedia projects, you’re not just sharing photos with your friends, you’re sharing them with everyone in the world.

Help make Wikipedia more beautiful, vibrant and educational for all our readers! Log in or create an account on any one of the over 280 language Wikipedias or sister projects to try out this feature. And stay tuned for more opportunities to contribute via the mobile web, coming soon.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager
Mobile Web

A month ago, Mark Donfried from the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) — an organization dedicated to promoting open dialogue — sent me this letter threatening me with legal action because of contributions I’ve made to Wikipedia. Yesterday, he sent me this followup threat.

According to the letters, Donfried has threatened me with legal action because I participated in a discussion on Wikipedia that resulted in his organization’s article being deleted. It is not anything I wrote in any Wikipedia article that made Donfried so upset — although Donfried is also unhappy about at least one off-hand comment I made during the deletion discussion on a now-deleted Wikipedia process page. Donfried is unhappy that my actions, in small part, have resulted in his organization not having an article in Wikipedia. He is able to threaten me personally because — unlike many people — I edit Wikipedia using my real, full, name.

Donfried’s letter is the latest step in a saga that has been ongoing since last June. It has been a frustrating learning experience for me that has made me worried about Wikipedia, its processes, and its future.

In Wikipedia, debates can be won by stamina. If you care more and argue longer, you will tend to get your way. The result, very often, is that individuals and organizations with a very strong interest in having Wikipedia say a particular thing tend to win out over other editors who just want the encyclopedia to be solid, neutral, and reliable. These less-committed editors simply have less at stake and their attention is more distributed.

The ICD is a non-profit organization based in Berlin. According to its own website, a large part of the organization’s activities are based around arranging conferences. Its goals — peace, cultural interchange, human rights — are admirable and close to my heart. Its advisors and affiliates are impressive.

I had never heard of the ICD before their founder, Mark Donfried, emailed me in April 2012 asking me to give a keynote address at their conference on “The 2012 International Symposium on Cultural Diplomacy & Human Rights.” I replied, interested, but puzzled because my own research seems very far afield of both “cultural diplomacy” (which I had never heard of) and human rights. I replied saying:

What would you like me to talk about — I ask because I don’t consider myself an expert in (or even particularly knowledgeable about) cultural diplomacy. Did someone else refer you to me?

Donfried replied with a long message — seemingly copy and pasted — thanking me for considering attending and asking me for details of my talk. I replied again repeating text from my previous email and asking why he was interested in me. Donfried suggested a phone call to talk about details. But by this point, I had looked around the web for information about the ICD and had decided to decline the invitation.

Among things I found was a blog post by my friend James Grimmelmann that suggests that, at least in his case, the ICD had a history of sending unsolicited email and an apparently inability to take folks off their email lists even after repeated requests.

I also read the Wikipedia article about the ICD. Although the Wikipedia article was long and detailed, it sent off some internal Wikipedian-alarm-bells for me. The page read, to me, like an advertisement or something written by the organization being described; it simply did not read — to me — like an encyclopedia article written by a neutral third-party.

I looked through the history of the article and found that the article had been created by a user called Icd_berlin who had made no other substantive edits to the encyclopedia. Upon further examination, I found that almost all other significant content contributions were from a series of anonymous editors with IP addresses associated with Berlin. I also found that a couple edits had removed criticism when it had been added to the article. The criticism was removed by an anonymous editor from Berlin.

Criticisms on the article included links to a website called “Inside the ICD” which was a website that mostly consisted of comments by anonymous people claiming to be former interns of the ICD complaining about the working conditions at the organization. There were also many very positive descriptions of work at the ICD. A wide array of pseudonymous users on the site accused the negative commenters of being liars and detractors and the positive commenters of being ICD insiders.

I also found that there had been evidence on Wikipedia — also removed without discussion by an anonymous IP from Berlin — of an effort launched by the youth wing of ver.di — one of the largest trade unions in Germany to “campaign for good internships at the ICD.” Although details of the original campaign have been removed from ver.di’s website, the campaigned ended after coming to an agreement with the ICD that made explicit a set of expectations and created an Intern Council.

Although the article about ICD on Wikipedia had many citations, many were to the ICD’s own website. Most of the rest were to articles that only tangentially mentioned the ICD. Many were about people with ICD connections but did not mention the ICD at all.

As Wikipedia editor, I was worried that Wikipedia’s policies on conflict of interest, advertising, neutrality, and notability were not being served by the article in its state. But as someone with no real experience or knowledge of the ICD, I wasn’t sure what to do. I posted a request for help on Wikipedia asking for others to get involved and offer their opinions.

It turns out, there were several editors who had tried to improve the article in the past and had been met by pro-ICD editors reverting their changes. Eventually, those editors lost patience or simply moved on to other topics.

By raising the issue again, I kicked off a round of discussion about the article. At the termination of that discussion, the article was proposed for deletion under Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion policy. A new Wikipedia editor began working enthusiastically to keep the article by adding links and by arguing that the article should stay. The new user edited the Wikipedia article about me to accuse me of slander and defamation although they removed that claim after I tried to explain that I was only trying to help. I spent quite a bit of time trying to rewrite and improve the article during the deletion discussion and I went — link by link — through the many dozens of citations.

During the deletion discussion, Mark Donfried contacted me over email and explained that his representatives had told him that I was working against the ICD in Wikipedia. He suggested that we meet. We had a tentative plan to meet in Berlin on an afternoon last July but, in the end, I was too busy trying to submit my thesis proposal and neither of us followed up to confirm a particular time within the time window we had set. I have still never met him.

My feeling, toward the end of the deletion discussion on Wikipedia, was mostly exasperation. Somewhat reluctantly, I voted to delete the article saying:

Delete – This AFD is a complete mess for all the reasons that the article itself is. Basically: there are a small number of people who seem to have a very strong interest in the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy having an article in Wikipedia and, from what I can tell, very little else. Hessin fahem, like all the major contributors to the page, joined Wikipedia in order to participate in this issue.

This article has serious problems. I have posted a detailed list of my problems on the article talk page: primary sources, conflict of interest for nearly all substantive contributions and reading like an advert are the biggest issues. My efforts to list these problems were reverted without discussion by an anonymous editor from Berlin.

I have seen no evidence that the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy satisfies WP:ORG but I agree that it is possible that it does. I strongly agree with Arxiloxos that articles should always be fixed, and not deleted, if they are fixable. But I also know that Wikipedia does not deserve this article, that I don’t know to fix it, and that despite my efforts to address these issues (and I’ll keep trying), the old patterns of editing have continued and the article is only getting worse.

This ICD seems almost entirely based around a model that involves organizing conferences and then calling and emailing to recruit speakers and attendees. A large number of people will visit this Wikipedia article to find out more about the organization before deciding to pay for a conference or to join to do an internship. What Wikipedia shows to them reads like an advert, links almost exclusively to of pages on the organizations’ websites and seems very likely to have been written by the organization itself. We are doing an enormous disservice to our readers by keeping this page in its current form.

If somebody wants to make a serious effort to improve the article, I will help and will happily reconsider my !vote. But after quite a bit of time trying to raise interest and to get this fixed, I’m skeptical this can be addressed and my decision reflects this fact. —mako๛ 05:18, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

I concluded that although the organization might be notable according to Wikipedia’s policies and although the Wikipedia article about it might be fixable, the pattern of editing gave me no faith that it could be fixed until something changed.

When the article was deleted, things became quiet. Several months later a new article was created — again, by an anonymous user with no other edit history. Although people tend to look closely at previously deleted new pages, this page was created under a different name: “The Institute of Cultural Diplomacy” and was not noticed.

Deleted Wikipedia articles are only supposed to be recreated after they go through a process called deletion review. Because the article was recreated out of this process, I nominated it for what is called speedy deletion under a policy specifically dealing with recreated articles. It was deleted again. Once again, things were quiet.

In January, it seems, the “Inside the ICD website” was threatened with a lawsuit by the ICD and the maintainers of the site took it down with the following message:

Apparently, the ICD is considering filing a lawsuit against this blog and it will now be taken down. We completely forgot about this blog. Let’s hope no one is being sued. Farewell.

On February 25, the Wikipedia article on ICD was recreated — once again out of process and by a user with almost no previous edit history. The next day, I received an email from Mark Donfried. In the message, Donfried said:

Please note that the ICD is completely in favor of fostering open dialogue and discussions, even critical ones, however some of your activities are raising serious questions about the motives behind your actions and some even seem to be motives of sabotage, since they resulted in ICD not having any Wikipedia page at all.

We are deeply concerned regarding these actions of yours, which are causing us considerable damages. As the person who initiated these actions with Wikipedia and member of the board of Wikipedia [1], we would therefore request your answer regarding our questions below within the next 10 days (by March 6th). If we do not receive your response we will unfortunately have to consider taking further legal actions with these regards against you and other anonymous editors.

I responded to Donfried to say that I did not think it was prudent to speak with him while he was threatening me. Meanwhile, other Wikipedia editors nominated the ICD article for deletion once again and unanimously decided to delete it. And although I did not participate in the discussion, Donfried emailed again with more threats of legal action hours after the ICD article was deleted:

[A]s the case of the ICD and its presentation on the Wikipedia has seriously worsened in recent days, we see no alternative but to forward this case (including all relevant visible and anonymous contributors) to our legal representatives in both USA and Europe/Germany as well as to the authorities and other corresponded organizations in order to find a remedy to this case.

Donfried has made it very clear that his organization really wants a Wikipedia article and that they believe they are being damaged without one. But the fact that he wants one doesn’t mean that Wikipedia’s policies mean he should have one. Anonymous editors in Berlin and in unknown locations have made it clear that they really want a Wikipedia article about the ICD that does not include criticism. Not only do Wikipedia’s policies and principles not guarantee them this, Wikipedia might be hurt as a project when this happens.

The ICD claims to want to foster open dialogue and criticism. I think they sound like a pretty nice group working toward issues I care about personally. I wish them success.

But there seems to be a disconnect between their goals and the actions of both their leader and proponents. Because I used my real name and was skeptical about the organization on discussion pages on Wikipedia, I was tracked down and threatened. Donfried insinuated that I was motivated to “sabotage” his organization and threatened legal action if I do not answer his questions. The timing of his first letter — the day after the ICD page was recreated — means that I was unwilling to act on my commitment to Wikipedia and its policies.

I have no problem with the ICD and I deeply regret being dragged into this whole mess simply because I wanted to improve Wikipedia. That said, Donfried’s threat has scared me off from attempts to improve the ICD articles. I suspect I will not edit ICD pages in Wikipedia in the future.

The saddest part for me is that I recognize that what is in effect bullying is working. There are currently Wikipedia articles about the ICD in many languages. For several years, ICD has had an article on English Wikipedia. For almost all of that period, that article has consisted entirely of universally positive text, without criticism, and has been written almost entirely by anonymous editors who have only contributed to articles related to the ICD.

In terms of the ICD and its article on Wikipedia, I still have hope. I encourage Donfried and his “representatives” to create accounts on Wikipedia with their full names — just like I have. I encourage them to engage in open dialogue in public on the wiki. I encourage them go through deletion review, make any conflicts of interest they have unambiguously clear, and to work with demonstrably non-conflicted editors on Wikipedia to establish notability under Wikipedia’s policies. The result still can be an awesome, neutral, article about their organization. I have offered both advice on how to do this and help in that process in the past. I have faith this can happen and I will be thrilled when it does.

But the general case still worries me deeply. If I can be scared off by threats like these, anybody can. After all, I have friends at the Wikimedia Foundation, a position at Harvard Law School, and am close friends with many of the world’s greatest lawyer-experts on both wikis and cyberlaw. And even I am intimidated into not improving the encyclopedia.

I am concerned by what I believe is the more common case — where those with skin in the game will fight harder and longer than a random Wikipedian. The fact that it’s usually not me on the end of the threat gives me lots of reasons to worry about Wikipedia at a time when its importance and readership continues to grow as its editor-base remains stagnant.

• M512x531S2e508489x504S18600492x470
• <signtext clear=0>M512x531S2e508489x504S18600492x470</singtext>

• <lang=ase-Sgnw>M512x531S2e508489x504S18600492x470</lang>

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to the Wikimedia Foundation’s mailing lists, letting people there know that I’m planning to leave my position as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. The purpose of this post is to get the news out to a somewhat larger group.

Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner

I will not be leaving right away. The Board and I anticipate it’ll take at least six months to recruit my successor, and I’ll be fully engaged as Executive Director all through the recruitment process and until we have a new person in place. And so, this note is not goodbye — not yet.

I want to say that making the decision to leave hasn’t been easy. It comes down to two things.

First, the movement and the Wikimedia Foundation are in a strong place now. When I joined, the Foundation was tiny and not yet able to reliably support the projects. Today we’re healthy, thriving, and a competent partner to the global network of Wikimedia volunteers. If that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t feel okay to leave, and in that sense, my leaving is very much a vote of confidence in our Board and executive team and staff. I know they will ably steer the Foundation through the years ahead, and I’m confident the Board will appoint a strong successor to me.

I feel that although we’re in good shape, with a promising future, the same is not true for the internet itself. (This is thing number two.) Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is not. Last year we at Wikimedia raised an alarm about SOPA/PIPA, and now CISPA is back. Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we are –increasingly, I think– seeing important decisions made by unaccountable, non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based internet to one that’s consumption-based. There are many organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest online — what’s good for ordinary people — but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they are. I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next.

I’ve always aimed to make the biggest contribution I can to the general public good. Today, this is pulling me towards a new and different role, one very much aligned with Wikimedia values and informed by my experiences here, and with the purpose of amplifying the voices of people advocating for the free and open internet. I don’t know exactly what this will look like — I might write a book, or start a non-profit, or work in partnership with something that already exists. Either way, I strongly believe this is what I need to do.

I feel an increasing sense of urgency about this. That said, I also feel a strong sense of responsibility (and love!) for the Wikimedia movement, and so I’ve agreed with the Board that I’ll stay on as Executive Director until we have my successor in place. That’ll take some time — likely, at least six months.

Until then, nothing changes. The Wikimedia Foundation has lots of work to do, and you can expect me to focus fully on it until we have a new Executive Director.

To that end, the Board has appointed a Transition Team that consists of Wikimedia Foundation Chair of the Board of Trustees Kat Walsh, Vice-Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede, Chair of the Board’s governance committee Alice Wiegand, me, my deputy and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Vice-President of Product and Engineering Erik Moeller, Geoff Brigham our General Counsel, and Gayle Karen Young, our Chief Talent and Culture Officer. The Transition Team will be chaired by Jan-Bart, and I will facilitate its work on his behalf.

We haven’t yet defined exactly what the process will look like, although we do know that we will be engaging a search firm to help us. The Transition Team will be meeting informally over the next several weeks, and will have our first face-to-face meeting in mid-April. People who are potentially interested in the Executive Director role should keep an eye on the Foundation’s jobs page, where the position description and contact information for the recruiter will be posted.

Being the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation has been enormously rewarding for me, and I have loved my time with you all. There are many people I am going to want to thank, when we are closer to the date when I’ll be stepping down. For now though, I’ll just say that I love working with you all, I’m enormously proud of everything the Wikimedia movement is accomplishing, and I’m looking forward to our next six months together. I will, of course, always be your friend and advocate.

Thanks,

Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s amazing Executive Director, recently announced plans to step down later this year, and has launched a search for her successor. She is one of the most insightful and collaborative voices in the movement, and a good friend. And she has led some of our most ambitious organizational and financial shifts: our focus on individual fundraising, the transition to a community-led funds dissemination process, and a growing attention to grantmaking. It is hard to imagine the Foundation without her…!!

We have been discussing this internally among the Board for a month now; and the transition planned is gradual: the search is expected to take til the end of this year. But I am still getting used to the idea; it has been a long and wonderful road we have travelled during her tenure. We are also reaching the end of our first round of long-term planning, so this year and next will be a good time for a new ED to help shape the Foundation’s future and how we frame our work.

A rundown of outside news coverage:

(Die deutsche Version dieses Beitrags gibt es hier.)

Today the first 11 Wikipedias got the ability to include data from Wikidata in their articles. These are the Italian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias. If you are curious you can also try it out on test2.wikipedia.org. This means the editors on these Wikipedias are now able to make use of the growing amount of structured data that is available in Wikidata as a common dataset. It includes things like conservation status for a species, ISBN for a book or the top level domain of a country.

There are two ways to access the data:

• Use a parser function like {{#property:p169}} in the wiki text of the article on Yahoo!. This will return “Marissa Mayer” as she is the chief executive officer of the company.
• For more complicated things you can use Lua. The documentation for this is here.

We are working on expanding the parser function so you can for example use {{#property:chief executive officer}} instead of {{#property:p169}}. The complete plan for this is here.

The next step is the deployment on the other Wikipedias. We will carefully monitor performance and if there are no issues they will follow within a week or two.

We have prepared an FAQ for this deployment and are looking forward to your testing and feedback. The best place to leave feedback is this discussion page.

This post was originally published in German on Wikimedia Deutschland’s blog by Nicole Ebber; it was translated by Denise Jansen.

Wikimedia Nederland is going to be host to Wikimedia Hackathon Amsterdam, the international Wikimedia developers conference, on May 24–26, 2013. The Netherlands Chapter invites MediaWiki developers, coders, hackers and other technically-inclined Wikimedians to spend a week-end in Amsterdam.* The event is open to everyone who is involved in areas such as tools, gadgets, bots, bugs, extensions or templates — regardless of how long they have been active.

Proposals for workshops, presentations and sessions are currently being gathered on the event page.

Focal points will be, among others:

• VisualEditor and Parsoid
• Lua
• Design
• Wikidata
• RENDER and Cosyne
• GLAM and Wiki Loves Monuments
• OpenStreetMap
• Outreach and Promotion
• Migration from Toolserver to Labs/Tool Labs
• Cooperation between skilled developers and the project communities

With more than 40 staff members of the Wikimedia Foundation taking part, as well Wikimedia Deutschland staff involved in Wikidata, RENDER and the Toolserver, the Amsterdam Hackathon will provide a great opportunity for exchange and cooperation among organisations and communities.

If you are interested in the Toolserver, or its future alternative Tool Labs, you will get the chance in Amsterdam to meet the entire team that is currently involved in the development of Tool Labs and the imminent migration.

This team will offer a Tool Labs introduction workshop and will be ‘approachable’ in the Hacking area. If you want to try out Tool Labs in Amsterdam, it’ll help if you set up an account beforehand.

Registration for the Amsterdam Hackathon is open until April 20; participation is free. As in previous years, there is a scholarship programme for participants who need support to cover the costs of travel and stay. This scholarship programme is supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland.

* In previous years the Hackathon was hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland. Wikimedia Nederland is thrilled to be able to host the event this year and is cooperating with Wikimedia Deutschland in the preparations.
 

Wikimedia Hackathon in Amsterdam 24-26 mei 2013

Wikimedia Nederland is in 2013 gastheer van ‘Wikimedia Hackathon Amsterdam’. Deze internationale conferentie voor ontwikkelaars vindt plaats van 24 t/m 26 mei 2013. Wikimedia Nederland nodigt MediaWiki ontwikkelaars, codeurs, hackers en overige technische Wikimedianen uit om samen een weekend in Amsterdam door te brengen.* Het evenement is toegankelijk voor iedereen die zich binnen MediaWiki bezig houdt met tools, gadgets, bots, bugs, extensions of templates. De uitnodiging geldt voor ervaren gebruikers én starters.

Op de eventpagina worden op dit moment voorstellen voor Workshops, presentaties en sessies verzameld. Hoofdonderwerpen zijn onder andere:

• Visual Editor en Parsoid
• Lua
• Design
• Wikidata
• RENDER en Cosyne
• GLAM en Wiki Loves Monuments
• Open Street Map
• Outreach en Promotion
• Migratie van Toolserver naar Labs/Tool Labs
• Samenwerking tussen WMF ontwikkelaars en de projectgroepen

Door deelname van ruim 40 medewerkers vanuit de Wikimedia Foundation en de aanwezigheid van medewerkers van Wikimedia Deutschland die zich bezig houden met Wikidata, Render en Toolserver biedt de Hackathon Amsterdam uitstekende mogelijkheden voor uitwisseling van kennis en voor samenwerking tussen organisaties en de gemeenschap.

Geïnteresseerden in Toolserver of het toekomstige alternatief Tool Labs hebben de kans om het team te ontmoeten dat zich momenteel bezig houdt met de bouw van Tool Labs en de op handen zijnde migratie. Het team biedt een Tool Labs introductie workshop aan en is benaderbaar in de Hacking ruimte. Het is ook mogelijk om Tool Labs uit te proberen, daarvoor is het wel noodzakelijk van te voren een account aan te maken.

Registreren voor deelname aan de Hackathon is mogelijk tot en met 20 april 2013, toegang is gratis. Zoals in voorgaande jaren is het mogelijk om een sponsoring aan te vragen voor deelnemers die financiële ondersteuning nodig hebben voor reiskosten en/of verblijf. De Wikimedia Foundation en Wikimedia Deutschland maken deze financiering mogelijk.

* In voorgaande jaren is de Hackathon gehost door Wikimedia Deutschland. Wikimedia Nederland heeft de eer om dit jaar de organisatie te mogen verzorgen. Wikimedia Deutschland ondersteunt Wikimedia Nederland bij de organisatie van deze Hackathon.

Wikimedia Hackathon in Amsterdam am 24.-26. Mai 2013

Wikimedia Nederland ist Gastgeber der internationalen Entwicklerkonferenz Wikimedia Hackathon Amsterdam, die vom 24. bis 26. Mai 2013 stattfindet. Das niederländische Chapter lädt MediaWiki-Entwickler, Coder, Hacker und andere technisch versierte Wikimedia-Interessierte für ein Wochenende nach Amsterdam ein.* Die Veranstaltung ist offen für alle, die sich — egal ob schon lange oder erst seit kurzem — mit Themen wie Tools, Gadgets, Bots, Bugs, Extensions oder Templates im MediaWikiversum beschäftigen.

Auf der Eventseite werden zur Zeit Vorschläge für Workshop, Vorträge und Sessions gesammelt; Schwerpunkte sind unter anderem:

• Visual Editor und Parsoid
• Lua
• Design
• Wikidata
• RENDER und Cosyne
• GLAM und Wiki Loves Monuments
• Open Street Map
• Outreach und Promotion
• Migration vom Toolserver zu Labs/Tool Labs
• Zusammenarbeit der WMF-Entwickler mit den Projektcommunitys.

Aus der WMDE-Geschäftsstelle werden unter anderem Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter aus den Projekten Wikidata (Lydia Pintscher, Katie Filbert, Daniel Kinzler, Jeroen De Dauw), Render (Johannes Kroll) und Toolserver/Tool Labs (Silke Meyer) sowie aus dem Team Communitys und außerdem ich selber vor Ort sein. Sehr erfreulich ist auch, dass mehr als 40 angestellte Entwickler der Wikimedia Foundation teilnehmen. Es bietet sich also eine tolle Gelegenheit für Austausch und Zusammenarbeit mit den Organisationen und den Communitys.

Wer sich für den Toolserver und die zukünftige Alternative Tool Labs interessiert (Kurierbeitrag), hat in Amsterdam die Gelegenheit, das ganze Team kennen zu lernen, das sich jetzt um den Aufbau von Tool Labs und den mittelfristig anstehenden Umzug kümmert.

Dieses Team bietet Tool Labs-Einführungsworkshop an und ist im Hacking-Bereich ansprechbar. Wer Tool Labs dort ausprobieren möchte, sollte sich vorher einen Account besorgen.

Die Registrierung ist bis zum 20. April 2013 geöffnet, der Eintritt ist frei. Wie in den Vorjahren gibt es für Teilnehmende, die ihre Reise nicht aus eigener Tasche oder mit Unterstützung ihres Chapters tragen können, Stipendien für Anreise und Unterkunft. Wikimedia Deutschland unterstützt dieses offizielle Stipendienprogramm, so dass Communitymitglieder aus Deutschland sich direkt dort bewerben können. Wir freuen uns über zahlreiche Teilnahme!

* Und um Spekulationen vorzubeugen (in den Vorjahren war Wikimedia Deutschland Gastgeber des Events): Wir sind hocherfreut, dass Wikimedia NL in diesem Jahr die Gastgeberrolle übernimmt und unterstützen sie bei den Vorbereitungen mit den Erfahrungen und den Materialien der Vorjahre. Für uns ist der Hackathon ein schönes Beispiel für gute Chapterzusammenarbeit und Wissenstransfer.

The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) invites members of the Wikimedia community to comment on the four proposals it has received, until March 31. The four funding requests total over $1.2 million USD and come from Wikimedia Czech Republic ($ 14,085), Wikimédia France ($ 747,259), Wikimedia Hong Kong ($ 211,660), and Wikimedia Norge ($ 235,715). These organizations are requesting funding to support their annual plans, which cover both programs (e.g. community support and outreach) and operations (e.g. staff and office rent).

As many of you know, the goal of the Funds Dissemination Committee is to help the WMF Board make decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve Wikimedia’s mission, vision, and strategy. This is a new process set up last year, following many thoughtful discussions about distribution of money within the movement. It marked a significant devolution of power to the global volunteer community of Wikimedians. The committee consists of seven volunteers from seven different countries, all with significant experience as editors on Wikimedia projects. Among them all, they speak 13 languages, and have founded or have been Board members of five Wikimedia chapters. They were chosen for their experience within and outside of the Wikimedia movement, including familiarity with grantmaking, finance and project management.

In the first round of funding in December 2012, the FDC recommended funding allocations of $8.51 million USD for 12 movement entities. On March 1, the FDC received proposals from four organizations (another one withdrew their proposal) for a second round of funding. Since then, the FDC has invited members of the community to review the proposals, to ask questions, and to share comments. By doing this, they can help ensure that the allocated funding has high potential for impact in reaching the movement’s goals. The FDC especially values comments by community members and will take them into account when they prepare their recommendations.

We’re well into the community review period, but this week there’s still time left for community members to join the conversations. We are seeing a lot of productive dialogue between members of the community and the applying organizations. Good questions and comments are emerging about programs, staffing, language, organizational goals, and much more. We very much appreciate the time and effort that has gone into creating these proposals. We also sincerely appreciate the review efforts and the questions and comments that have been posted so far.

We invite you to add your voice and join the FDC community review, if you have not done so yet. You can do so by examining the four funding proposals and tell us what you think about the proposed plans. After reading them, ask questions or share comments on the discussion page of each proposal. The community review period closes on March 31.

The FDC’s approach is transparent, participatory and community-oriented; those features make it a unique process. As far as we know, there’s nothing quite like this out there in the nonprofit world. So we encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity and have a say in how our movement’s funds are spent.

Katy Love, Senior Program Officer, Funds Dissemination Committee

This post is available in 2 languages:

Português  • English

In English:

In 2005, Professor Ruy de Queiroz of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil was browsing articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia in logic and the theory of computation, his speciality. Ruy found them disappointingly lacking — but when he browsed the same articles on the English Wikipedia, he realized that they were quite good.

So Ruy set out to change the Portuguese Wikipedia’s coverage of these areas, by engaging his students at UFPE in the efforts. Since 2005, he’s asked students in his “Logic for Computer Science” and “Theoretical Informatics” courses to translate or write articles on the topics for extra credit.

“This has worked very well, and we have produced a reasonable amount of articles in Portuguese,” Ruy says. He’s being modest; that “reasonable amount” is more than 125 computer science and technology related articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia contributed through his coursework.

He then assigns his current students to read the Wikipedia articles his students from previous terms have contributed as a supplement to their normal reading.

“The articles were an updated source into the specific areas, with good pointers to the bibliography,” Ruy says.

Ruy says that Wikipedia cannot and should not replace a traditional reading assignment, but it’s a way of keeping students informed with more up-to-date material and accessible explanations of complex topics. He assigned Wikipedia assignments as reading in two courses he taught in the 2005-06 academic year at Stanford University in the United States as well, because they were the perfect supplement to the traditional textbook reading.

The feedback Ruy has received from students and professors has all been positive, and he looks forward to the continuing development of the Portuguese Wikipedia, so that it can be as good of a resource as the English Wikipedia is.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Em Português:

Melhorando verbetes de ciência da computação na Wikipédia em português

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team has been regularly reporting updates about improvements to the Translate editor, as part of the “Translate User eXperience” project, or “TUX”. Pau Giner, the team’s UX expert, has also conducted online sessions to talk about these features. If you have missed these updates, here is a summary of what we are changing about the way the Translate editor is used.

The main editor screen of Translate’s new version, with Spanish translations in List view.

Translate is a MediaWiki extension that is used for translating software and wiki pages. Besides providing translations through the web-based editor and proofreading features, it also supports export and import of gettext files for offline translation. The editor provides various features to assist in translation, such as:

• Message documentation, also known as “context”;
• Suggestions from translation memory and machine translation;
• Checking translations for common syntax mistakes;
• Translation status of messages.

Originally created by Niklas Laxström, this extension has grown in features through contributions made by other contributors, as well as by the Wikimedia Language Engineering team. The extension uses a continuous development model and, if you use the extension on a wiki you administer, you are encouraged to update it periodically using the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle (MLEB).

The workflow and features for Translate were recently redesigned to provide users with an improved experience. The development was done based upon the designs in the workflow specification document. This included changes in navigation, editor look and feel, translation area, filters, search, and color & style. Here are some of the notable new features and changes:

Editing Modes: The translation editor will now provide two translation modes and one proofreading mode. For translation, the user will be able to choose between the ‘List’ view, more suitable for smaller messages, or the ‘Page’ view, designed for longer pieces of text like paragraphs of a wiki page. The proofreading mode will allow users to view translations by other users and mark their accuracy. Although users can view the messages translated by themselves in this mode, they cannot mark them as accepted.

Message status-based filtering: Users will have the option to select and only view messages that match a filter, depending on their status. In the editor, users can choose an appropriate filter to quickly access ‘Translated’, ‘Outdated’ or ‘Untranslated’ messages in translation mode, and ‘Translated’, ‘Outdated’ and ‘Unproofread’ in proofreading mode. Translations marked as ‘Outdated’ (equal to the jargon term “fuzzy”) need attention, for example because the source message has changed.

Message editor and translation aids: The messages in focus are shown within an editing area that is divided into two separate sections: one for translation, and the other for translation helpers, like context documentation, suggestions from previous translation and external translation services. The layout aims to make optimal use of available space and also provides users with the additional option to focus better on a message by expanding the size of the editing area to the entire width of the editor. The navigation to the next message, the ability to save drafts and the display of warnings make the translation process more fluent. Development of some exciting features for improving context-related translation aids is also on the cards.

Search and edits: Users can search translatable strings using the search field at the top of the edit section. The search results are displayed within various categories like ‘source’ or ‘translated’ messages. An additional overview displays the languages and message groups where they occur and users can further filter them based on the sub-groups. Users will be able to directly go into ‘Translation mode’ to make changes to the messages in the search results. A navigation arrow can bring them back to the list of results.

Not all of these features are available on Wikimedia wikis yet, but they will be soon. The current development version is available on translatewiki.net. If the new editor is not visible, appending “&tux=1” to the URL will enable the new features. Appending “&tux=0” will disable them.

While redesigning Translate’s User experience has been a significant project, development is continuously carried out to make the extension even better to use. And for this, we are always looking for valuable feedback from our users. Bugs and features requests can be filed through bugzilla; additionally, one can write to me at runa at wikimedia dot org with their feedback and suggestions.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

John Cummings radio interview

Wikimedia UK is very happy to report that John Cummings, a long-standing and well known Wikimedian, has begun his work as Wikimedian in Residence at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum.

This is a ground-breaking partnership between two of the UK’s most prestigious cultural institutions and the charity that promotes and supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the UK. His role with the museums will last for four months.

John said: “It’s a real privilege to work with institutions with such important places in the history and public understanding of science. I hope I will be able to help the museums in their goals.”

John is the co-founder and project leader for MonmouthpediA and Gibraltarpedia, the world’s first Wikipedia town and city, and he is a Wikimedia UK accredited trainer for communities and institutions.

He is also technical lead for Leaderwiki, a collaborative education resource for emerging leaders from all over the world who want to make a positive contribution in their communities.

There are articles about Chávez in Wikipedias in ninety-six languages. He’s still not dead according to thirteen of them:

1. Cantonese (about the language) – FIXED
2. Central Bikol (about the language) – FIXED
3. Ido (about the language) – FIXED
4. Ladino (about the language) – FIXED
5. Min Nan (about the language)
6. Ossetic (about the language) – FIXED
7. Papiamento (about the language) – FIXED
8. Samogitian (about the language) – FIXED
9. Sicilian (about the language) – FIXED
10. Somali (about the language)
11. Upper Sorbian (about the language) – FIXED
12. Võro (about the language) – FIXED
13. Walloon (about the language) – FIXED

Looking at the different language Wikipedias often brings about other useful things. For example, Chávez’ death date was marked in the Manx Wikipedia, but the name of the month of March was spelled incorrectly, so I corrected it. In the Russian Wikipedia I noticed that the banner that invites people to Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong is translated incorrectly, and I corrected it.

If you know one of the above languages, consider adding the death date of Hugo Chávez to the articles, and writing some other things there, too. Millions of people will appreciate your contribution.

Godwin's feminist corollary: As an online discussion about sexism continues, the probability of a woman who speaks out being called a feminazi approaches 1.

Anita's irony: Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.

I've long been fascinated by the varied "laws" and "rules" of life online. Indeed, in 1999 I compiled an extensive list of quotations that "capture the governance of memes as social norms on the Internet." In 2010, my book about Wikipedia and good faith collaboration made use of Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

In light of the maelstrom of discussion around Adria Richards this past week and the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian last year I've been struck by how gendered the laws and rules are. Many of the aphorisms I collected in 1999 are influenced by the libertarian take on "freedom" that I now question in "Free as in Sexist?". The "Rules of the Internet" emerged from 4chan culture and are written from the perspective of sexually-frustrated young men who have a penchant for (underage) porn. From any other perspective, there are other patterns to online conversation that are seemingly, unfortunately inevitable. Hence, I've coined a few laws of my own (though I'm sure their naming and specification could be improved.) Feel free to tweak or add your own!