Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-06-28
Board resolution on offensive content
Foundation commissions external recommendations about objectionable material
Following two months of discussions about sexually explicit images and other controversial material, the Wikimedia Foundation has contracted an external consultant to survey opinions on the matter both inside and outside Wikimedia, and to provide recommendations on how Wikimedia projects should deal with potentially objectionable material. The study will include input from "a variety of stakeholders and experts", and will be of broad scope, including possible recommendations for "changes to editorial policies, technical solutions, [and] the development of new projects that are appropriate for children".
As announced on June 24, the Board has passed a resolution asking the Executive Director of the Foundation, Sue Gardner, "to undertake a project studying this issue, and to develop a set of recommendations for the Board". The resolution states that there are many competing interests on the projects, and that the Wikimedia Foundation holds that material on its projects should be educational and not removed simply because a group finds it objectionable. Nevertheless, "[the Board is] concerned about the possibility of people being exposed to objectionable material that they did not seek out." (This appears to be informed by what some participants in recent debates about such material call "the principle of least astonishment", a term used by Jimmy Wales in his recent intervention on the German Wikipedia when that project featured an explicit image on its main page – see Signpost coverage.)
Michael Snow, Chair of the Board, explained in a Q&A about the resolution that Sue Gardner has contracted Robert Harris, a former executive with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as the external consultant to carry out this project. Snow described him as:
- "an experienced Canadian journalist and writer who, over the course of his career, has held responsibility for developing and ensuring compliance with editorial standards and practices at the CBC. We think he's right for this work because he's smart and thoughtful, has decades of experience handling sensitive editorial issues, and is experienced at balancing the interests of multiple stakeholders inside a mission-driven organization designed to serve the general public. Sue worked with Robert for 17 years at the CBC, and is confident he can help us with this issue."
Harris' report and recommendations are due at the fall meeting of the Board of Trustees. According to Snow, Harris plans to gather input from four major sources:
- existing policies and discussion on the projects
- interviews with key project participants such as Board members and community members
- external statements of policy, papers and reports on this topic
- interviews with key experts such as advisory Board members, anti-censorship advocates, and child-protection organizations.
The resolution asks that the study "make an effort to include non-Western perspectives", but the Q&A does not yet contain details about which countries would be involved. Following this process, the consultant:
- "will explore and summarize our particular context: our mission, our production processes, and current relevant policies. He will tell us how other organizations and entities, such as libraries and big user-generated content sites, have handled this challenge. He will lay out possible courses of action, and the pros and cons of each in our context."
The research and recommendations will not be limited to sexually explicit material. The resolution's language appears also to be relevant for recent image controversies such as those about caricatures of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, in which Jimmy Wales recently became involved, and anti-Israeli cartoons (see Signpost coverage). The scope of the resolution includes:
- "material that is violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise disturbing; culturally offensive depictions; profane or vulgar language; depictions of potentially dangerous activities; and exposure of children to material that may be inappropriate for them"
The resolution was approved 8–0, with two abstentions, but according to Board member Sj, it "was the most controversial resolution passed in a few quarters." While there was unanimous support in the Board for the idea of outside research, Sj said that "there are varying views on what organizations are 'similar' to Wikimedia", and that different Wikimedia projects handle different material. "A few specifics of the language were controversial. Some found the focus on children too much emphasis on that particular audience, while others felt it was the primary motivation to prioritize the matter."
The move comes on the heels of a recent highly controversial debate on Commons over sexually explicit photographs, set off in April when Larry Sanger reported the Foundation to the FBI for allegedly distributing child pornography (see Signpost coverage), and escalated the following month with Jimmy Wales' actions to delete some sexually explicit material on Commons and accompanying media stories (most notably a series of articles on Fox News by journalist Jana Winter, who a few days ago followed up with another article alleging that "Pedophiles Find a Home on Wikipedia" – see this week's In the news and previous Signpost coverage).
During the subsequent heated community debate, the Board had already issued a "Statement on appropriate educational content" and several Board members made statements about the issue on the Foundation-l mailing list, with some statements drawing criticism from other community members. The community discussion was wide-ranging about the kinds of content that Commons (or any of the projects) should host; some discussion participants raised ideas about potential technical measures to prevent readers from seeing objectionable content they might not expect.
The Board's resolution and the engagement of Harris do not seem to have drawn the attention of the English-language media, but have been the subject of news articles in German (Heise News[1] "Wikimedia engages moral guardian", Die Presse[2], die Tageszeitung[3]) and Polish (Interia.pl[4][5]).
In related news, Wikimedia Commons is currently drafting Commons:Sexual content, "a proposed Commons guideline, policy, or process."
Reader comments
2010–15 plan, Smithsonian outreach, Teaching Wikipedia, brief news
Foundation's five-year plan materializes
Last week, the minutes for two past meetings of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees were published:
Mostly due to the air travel disruption after the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, only four board members were physically present at the April meeting. The "Strategy Project Update" from that meeting describes a preliminary version of the 2010–15 strategic plan that the Foundation is developing, based on the "Strategic Planning" process started last July (see also the Signpost article about the process by its program manager, Eugene Eric Kim/User:Eekim). The Foundation's Executive Director, Sue Gardner,
- "provided the Board with a list of milestones the Foundation's hopes to achieve over the next five years. Milestones were divided into short-term (12–18 months), medium-term (18–36 months), and long-term (36–60 months). Short-term milestones included such items as building a second data center; providing funding for face-to-face meetings of volunteers; creating systems for communications with readers, editors and donors, including investment in staff facilitation of translations; and launching on-the-ground teams to grow number of editors and accelerate editors' self-organization in India and Brazil. Medium-term milestones included such items as building caching centers to better support Asia and Latin America; and building capacity to support chapter organizational development and chapter fundraising. Long-term milestones included such items as developing features to enable Wikimedians to communicate and connect, in order to facilitate collaboration and production of quality content."
Of the short-term milestones, the plans to open Foundation offices in Brazil and India (see brief Signpost coverage) and to set up a second datacenter in the U.S. (see brief Signpost coverage) have subsequently already been mentioned in public by Gardner.
Based on the plan, Sue Gardner projected the Wikimedia Foundation's staff to grow to as many as 200 full-time equivalents by 2015, with annual spending reaching $40 million. She announced that the Foundation intends to rely mainly on community giving as its primary funding source (a term encompassing smaller donations such as those in the yearly fundraisers, as opposed to large benefactions or major grants). Based on the current growth rate, Wikimedia is estimated to have 59 chapters worldwide by 2015.
A set of statements by the Board including an endorsement of the general direction of the plan was approved by all trustees except two of the three community-elected members (Sj opposed it, while Mindspillage is noted as "absention" [sic] in the minutes). The board will review the final version of the 2010-2015 plan in its fall meeting.
Swedish university course
Wikimedia Washington DC reaches out to the Smithsonian
On June 26, 2010, DC area Wikimedians met with representatives from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of the American Indian. The Wikimedians offered ideas for future collaborations between the Smithsonian and the community. The reception was overwhelmingly supportive. The SI staff is looking forward to future development of Smithsonian-related content and the support of Smithsonian staff and volunteers at workshops about using Wikipedia. The Wikipedians look forward to the use of Smithsonian space and materials for article writing, and other editing activities. The DC editors have started organizing their materials in much the same way as User:Witty lama's work with the British Museum at a Smithsonian Institution page at the Galleries, Libraries Archives and Museums outreach page. Smithsonian employees are now exploring several options for collaboration.
Briefly
- Wikimedia India is the newly approved 29th chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The chapter was officially approved by resolution of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees in June.
- The July 2010 Copyediting Backlog Elimination Drive (see Signpost coverage) starts on July 1.
- June 30 is the target date for the rollout of the new Vector skin to remaining Wikipedia projects. According to Howie Fung, developer on the project, the new skin will be deployed to projects that are over 80% translated (localized). For more, see this week's Technology report.
- The Foundation has hired a backend developer for fundraising, Arthur Richards. (Last month, Ryan Kaldari - User:Kaldari - had been hired as front end developer for fundraising.)
- The schedule for this year's Wikimania (to be held next week in Gdańsk, Poland) was published on June 28. There had been concern about delays in its publication on the Wikimania-l mailing list. In other Wikimania news, the idea of establishing a permanent Wikimania oversight committee was recently discussed on the Foundation-l mailing list (where Sue Gardner observed that "Wikimania in Gdansk this year has had some problems") and in other places.
Reader comments
Wikipedia controlled by pedophiles, left-wing trolls, Islamofascists and Communist commandos?
Wales slams Fox News article about pedophiles and Wikipedia
With yet another "exclusive" report about pedophilia on Wikipedia, Fox News has alleged that a global network of pedophiles is "trying to spin Wikipedia in their favor" and "to lure more people into their world". Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has been sharply critical of the journalistic standards evident in the report: "the story is absolutely scandalously idiotic, and Jana Winter, the author, should be fired from her job. The story is idiotic nonsense from top to bottom."
It appears that the Fox News story draws heavily from a Wikipedia Campaign started by Perverted-Justice (PJFI), a U.S. organisation set up to work against Internet pedophilia and predation. The Wikipedia Campaign is hosted on a wiki called Wikisposure, which is home to a large amount of data on individuals and groups involved in the online pedophile activist community, including their contact details. The PJFI also hosts information on what they describe as "corporate sex offenders". According to CorporateSexOffenders.com, another PJFI site, Wikipedia and YouTube are "moderate" and "aggressive" sexual offenders, respectively. Other sites they have labelled as corporate sex offenders include Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
However, the claim made by Fox News that Wikisposure has identified hundreds of Wikipedia editors who are convicted pedophiles and well-known pedophilia activists appears to be an independent finding not supported by the available information on Wikisposure. Wikisposure contains details of 16 Wikipedia accounts blocked in 2008.
Responding to the Fox News story, Jimmy Wales said:
| “ | ... we have longstanding policies that deal with [such behavior] very effectively, and there is zero evidence for any of the sensationalist and negative claims put forward about Wikipedia. Much of what [Ms Winter] writes is simply transparently idiotic: that some message board has hundreds of links to Wikipedia ought to be no surprise, no matter what the content of the message board. That pedophiles think we are bigots for not allowing them to advocate here is no shocker, but neither is it evidence that we are a haven for pedophiles. Jana Winter is a disgrace to the professional of journalism, full stop, and I will complain about her at the highest levels possible.
I do not mind stories critical of Wikipedia – lord knows there are plenty of sensible criticisms that people can and do make. What I do mind is deeply irrational character assassination based on absolute untruths. |
” |
This is not the first time that Fox News has attacked Wikipedia with claims that it harbours pedophilia. Jana Winter's coverage of Larry Sanger's allegation that Wikimedia projects have been hosting child pornography, and similar articles she recently published (on 7, 10, 14 and 27 May, 2010) appear to have been seriously lacking in standard journalistic practices concerning balance and verification, drawing rebuttals by the Foundation and senior Wikimedia people.
Among the gaps in this coverage has been the fact that Wikipedia has a well-established consensus on how to deal with issues related to pedophile activity on the project, and that while there have been attempts to introduce pro-pedophilia bias in Wikipedia in the past, that such attempts have been contained. Postings on the pro-pedophilia message board "GirlChat" in response to the Fox News story clearly indicate that while there had indeed been an effort by some of its users to "ensure that Wikipedia articles" about pedophiles "contained true and correct information", Wikipedia's present policy does not work in their favour.
The Fox News article made few concrete statements about actual Wikipedia content, among them the criticism that Wikipedia contained links to pro-pedophilia sites: "[The NAMBLA article ] links directly to NAMBLA's website, as do 25 other Wikipedia pages. Wikipedia also has 32 external links to GirlChat, 14 to a Danish pro-pedophile website and 12 to BoyChat." TheDJ examined this assertion and found that "All links that are mentioned are only used in talk pages or in articles very much related to the actual topic".
Wikipedia "overrun by Left-wing trolls"?
James Delingpole, an English journalist and novelist involved in debates about climate change, recently published a column in The Spectator (I feel the need to offer Wikipedia some ammunition in its quest to discredit me) where he charged that his biography on Wikipedia is biased, carries undue weight and had been vandalised. Guy Walters, an author and journalist who like Delingpole writes for The Daily Telegraph, took Delingpole's column as an occasion to ask "Has Wikipedia been overrun by left-wing trolls and junk historians?", on his blog for The Telegraph. Walters also discusses politically motivated vandalism on his own biography article - while acknowledging that "[n]ormally, Wikipedia is quick at restoring vandalised pages", he pointed out that he had to revert one libelous vandalism edit himself. He concludes, "Don’t trust Wikipedia. We all use it, because there’s nothing better online, but be wary."
As described by Walters, Delingpole's complaint about his Wikipedia article centered on the mention of an event (described by The Guardian in a blog post titled Climate sceptic James Delingpole's cheap shot at Newsweek backfires) which does not seem to be factually disputed, but was seen as given "disproportionate emphasis when set against his body of work" (it was given a separate section in the article). On the article's talk page, Jimmy Wales said that "Delingpole's particular complaint here about his entry is without question valid", observing a violation of WP:UNDUE. The section has since been removed.
Last December, Delingpole had published an earlier article about Wikipedia where he accused it of "corruption" for not adequately covering the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, which Delingpole called "the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age", and, reprinting a photo of one of the Wikipedians involved, stated that "some very ugly people" were responsible for this corruption.
Wikipedia accused of "Islamofascist dark side"
Allegations of anti-Israel bias were raised last week in a blog post titled "Wikipedia, an Islamist Hornet’s Nest", on FrontPage Magazine, a conservative website based in California. The article alleges that the State of Israel is incessantly vilified by Jihadists and like-minded anti-Semites in Wikipedia. The allegations revolve around the article on the Battle of Deir Yassin. The author, Ari Lieberman, claims that moving the article to Deir Yassin massacre and the present content of the article show a strong "Islamofascist" bias. Further, he claims that some editors who advocated the insertion of a neutral point of view were blocked indefinitely or topic banned. The author said that he had attempted to edit Wikipedia but was prevented from doing so because his edits were reverted. He found the explanation that his edits read too much like an Israel Defense Forces press release "almost comical".
Wikipedia manipulated by "digital action commandos" operating out of former Soviet spy base
In his recent weekly column in the Miami Herald, Carlos Alberto Montaner, an exiled Cuban author known for his criticism of Fidel Castro, asserts that Wikipedia is "a field of ideological battle where there's no shortage of lies or a biased selection of information to distort the image of the adversary someone wants to destroy". Montaner cited the article about himself, which he says has been a victim of slanderous edits which inserted "delirious fantasies" about him. However, Montaner acknowledged that Wikipedia also has "many collaborators who are healthily devoted to the spread of knowledge" and said that after "the Wikipedia webmasters" were notified of the problems, most of the problematic content was removed and the article was protected.
Montaner stated that "my former student learned that one of the sources of disinformation is the University of Computer Sciences in Havana, built on what was the Lourdes espionage base created by the Soviets in Cuba during the Cold War. There, 'digital action commandos' write and rewrite the biographies of friends and foes according to the script dictated to them by the political police."
The problematic edits happened at a time when Montaner was involved in a public controversy with Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez, and Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, was publishing allegations about Montaner's relationship with the CIA and his involvement in a bombing plot of the Cuban American National Foundation.
Briefly
- In a column for Purdue University's student newspaper ("Wikiwisdom gets reformed, is more highly valued"), the author reported that Wikipedia's reputation had improved considerably since her high-school days, where the mere mention of Wikipedia was met with "cringes" by her teachers. She explained the change as follows: "Wikipedia is now recording anonymous posters’ IP addresses and, thus, forbidding repeat vandalizing offenders from striking again. It also reviews all changes." The author tested this with three well-intentioned and two deliberately destructive edits. Both vandalism edits were reverted, but so were two of the well-intentioned ones.
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Introducing the Public Policy Initiative
- User:Sross (Public Policy) is Sage Ross, the Online Facilitator for the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. As a volunteer, he edits as User:Ragesoss.
The Public Policy Initiative is gearing up now, and I want to explain, in about as much detail as we have pinned down so far, what the project is about. I especially encourage any Wikipedians who care about Wikipedia classroom assignments, reaching out to experts, helping new users, and/or Wikipedia's coverage of American public policy to get involved.
This initiative is an ambitious project: the goal is to take a (frighteningly large) subject area where Wikipedia ought to do better—United States public policy, broadly construed—and find systematic ways to enlist experts to work with the Wikipedia community to improve the coverage.
The on-wiki hub of the Public Policy Initiative will be the new Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy, and we're recruiting now. This will be in part a traditional WikiProject, focused generally on collaboration on and assessment of articles within its scope. But it will also be the site for coordinating work by a number of public policy students whose professors have signed on to work with us to develop and implement major Wikipedia assignments in their courses.
We've seen many very successful Wikipedia classroom assignments in recent years, but the common denominator seems to be that the instructor must be an experienced Wikipedian to make it work. Through a combination of in-person instruction, systematic online assistance and mentoring during courses, and high-quality instructional materials, we hope to change that; even a teacher unfamiliar with Wikipedia's culture and practices ought to be able to run a successful assignment. To fill the gap between the desire many experts have to contribute to Wikipedia and the knowledge required to contribute effectively, we're recruiting Wikipedia Ambassadors—including Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors. These volunteers will help professors and students learn the ropes on Wikipedia. The details of the Wikipedia Ambassadors program are still being worked out, but if you are interested in either role or would like to help plan these programs, please let us know. Contact Annie Lin (the Campus Team Coordinator for the Initiative) if you are interested in being a Campus Ambassador—especially if you live near George Washington University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Indiana University, or Syracuse University. Contact me, or drop by the IRC channel #wikimedia-outreach, if you are interested in being an Online Ambassador.
The plan
The project's first major challenge is to get a baseline for the quality and scope of U.S. public policy coverage. We will be trying to quantify how the broad swath of U.S. public policy coverage changes—hopefully a lot, and for the better—over the course of the project. To do that, we need a fairly robust way to identify the relevant articles, through categories and WikiProject banners. So the first goal will be to add the project banner and assess every article about some facet of United States public policy; there are likely thousands. The next goal will be to think through the categorization of public policy articles, which represent a fairly underdeveloped branch of the category tree. We hope to have these things largely complete by the beginning of August. So if you like working with categorization and/or assessment and want to be part of the project, please, jump right in!
We also plan to do some serious analysis of Wikipedia's standard quality assessment system (stubs, B-class articles, Featured Articles, and so on) to find out how self-consistent it is and how well the ratings correlate with independent evaluations by experts. If you have a strong interest in Wikipedia's rating system itself, how its different permutations work (or don't), and how it could be improved or how useful data can be built from it, you can get in touch with our research analyst Amy Roth or leave your thoughts on the WikiProject discussion page.
Training for Campus Ambassadors will take place this summer, in time for Ambassadors to assist instructors and students at the start of the new school year. Online Ambassadors will be collaborating with the Public Policy Initiative team, and hopefully some of the existing editor groups who work with students and new users, to come up with a system for assisting students as they begin their assignments, try to write or improve articles, and seek community feedback.
During the Fall 2010 semester, WikiProject participants will be working with dozens, possibly more than 100, public policy students (mostly graduate students) and their professors to select articles to work on and to bring them, over the course of the semester, to a high level of quality. Good Article status will likely be the goal for most of these projects, with ambitious students encouraged to shoot for Featured Articles. The strategy here will be to have students work as much like regular editors as possible, using all the normal means for getting feedback and reviews (and reviewing and giving feedback for others), collaborating with each other and whoever takes an interest in any particular article. In this way, we can hopefully avoid overburdening existing processes or putting too much strain on any particular region of the editing community.
At the same time, Annie Lin and the Campus Ambassadors will be working to recruit a new, even larger wave of professors to run Wikipedia assignments for the Spring. We will apply what we learned from the first wave, and try to scale it up.
Between the end of the Spring 2011 semester and September, we'll be analyzing the results and figuring out where to go next: whether it makes sense to continue and expand this kind of content improvement project, or move in other directions; and what kind of support from the Wikimedia Foundation is necessary versus what can be done independently by volunteers.
Broader ideas
Creating sustainable and scalable ways to reach out to experts and help them use Wikipedia in the classroom or contribute in other ways is a high priority for us. We also want to find ways to ease the learning curve for students assigned to edit.
One idea we have for online assistance of new users is what we're calling LiveHelp. Users would be able to click a link from the article they are editing and immediately get help from experienced Wikipedians—basically, a more accessible version of the #wikipedia-en-help IRC channel. At this point, it's just an idea without running code; if you're interested in contributing to the Public Policy Initiative as a developer for something like this, we'd love to hear from you.
Other things on the radar include creating a system to request article reviews from relevant experts and archive them for editors to study and respond to, finding other, independent ways to measure article quality, and starting a program for Wikimedians to create and curate instructional screencasts about the various aspects of contributing to the projects.
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Talking with WikiProject Ships
- Interested in sewing, knitting, embroidering, quilting or other needlework? WikiProject Textile Arts could use your help
- Attention all American politics junkies: Check out WikiProject US Public Policy to see how your knowledge can be put to good use
- WikiProject Futurama is being revived and is welcoming new members
- This Thursday is the start of the Guild of Copy Editors' July Backlog Elimination Drive
This week, The Signpost visited WikiProject Ships. The project started in March 2003 and is now home to more than 40,000 articles, including 79 featured articles, two featured lists, 53 A-class articles, 228 good articles, and over 800 articles featured at Did You Know. It is no accident that the project supports such a hefty portfolio: ships have wide appeal because they embody stories, often as the dramatic or exotic focal points of military action, exploration, and trade—and stories are the backbone of many a popular Wikipedia article. Although the accounts of millions of individual sailors have largely been lost or are unverifiable, ships are critical to the larger canvas of human history. Nowhere has this been the case more than in the English-speaking world, for which maritime power has been a defining historical factor, drawing on technical and cultural knowledge passed first from the Dutch to the English in the 17th century, and then on to the United States in the 20th century. Indeed, the global spread of English and its current status as the international language probably owe much to the mastery of seafaring by the British and Americans. In this dynamic context, it is not surprising that WikiProject Ships on the English Wikipedia has become one of the most important sites on the Internet for organising and presenting maritime information.
We interviewed project members Mjroots, Buggie111, Parsecboy, MBK004, The ed17, White Shadows, TomStar81, Haus, Djembayz and Brad101. These editors joined the project in quite different circumstances, all related to their contact with Wikipedia articles on ships or classes of ships in which they had a particular interest or real-life expertise. Mjroots, for example, began editing ship articles after the sinking of MS Explorer in November 2007, while Buggie111 had come across Operation Majestic Titan in early 2010 and decided to help out. Parsecboy stumbled across a few one-line sub-stubs on German battleships and tried to expand them to decent quality, quickly becoming hooked on improving articles related to the German Imperial Navy, and Haus initially found himself compelled to fix up articles on ships he had worked on, "and to address the dearth of information at Wikipedia on the maritime industry." White Shadows was motivated by "the apparent lack of coverage for very important articles that fall under the coverage of [Wikiproject Ships] such as German submarine U-30 (1936), which sank the first vessel in World War II."
The editors remarked on the consistently high level of discourse at the project talk page. Haus—a second officer in the US Merchant Marine—recalls that in one recent thread, members narrowed down the identity of a ship in a low-resolution submarine periscope image to one of two vessels. Within three days, the US Navy had changed its website to concur with this finding. Often, questions are addressed within an hour, and there are enough administrators in the project to advise on policy issues when they come up. He says the talk page can be a spirited environment: "We've had disagreements, but I can't remember a fight!"
With a massive 40,123 articles in its scope, how does WikiProject Ships keep up? Buggie111 believes that "the various tabs in the navbox for the project, B-class assessments, and an organized review page really help make this move in the way it's supposed to." MBK points out that the members are dedicated to maintaining the quality of the articles and ensuring they don't deteriorate. Patrolling the recent changes for unreferenced additions, vandalism, and advertising, he says, is an important daily task that involves working with an extremely large watchlist. Brad says that running an efficient program of tagging all ship articles with the project banner is one of the keys to organizing the portfolio, and for this task, automated tools and bots such as AlexNewArtBot and AutoWikiBrowser have been invaluable.
In terms of national affiliation, the project's featured articles fall roughly three ways: a third each are UK-, US-, and German-related. Haus says it's not surprising that most project members tend to be from the UK and the US, but a wider membership is sought: "international relations among members have always been warm." Below the GA level, there's a wide coverage of all types of ships, and the project is seeking to expand its coverage of ship types as well as navigation and non-military shipboard operations, topics that often end up on his desk.
The Signpost asked how the project has attained its large number of promoted articles. Parsecboy cited an invaluable partnership with WikiProject Military history through the joint "Operation Majestic Titan"; this, he says, is a key strategy for developing recognized content, enabling small projects to partner with an overlapping project. White Shadows agrees: "The close coordination between the two projects enables us to achieve a large number of FAs, GAs and A-class articles." In fact, the partnership has been behind the promotion of all but three featured articles. TomStar81 mentions another user, Bellhalla, who was responsible for the promotion of articles on about 120 different freighters, U-boats, and other vessels. "This kind of dedication and inspiration is critical in the development of the quality content for any project."
What are the most pressing needs for the project, and how can new contributors help? Mjroots says many ships currently have no article, so we are always looking for new editors to oblige. Another area where they could have a significant impact, he says, is by adding infoboxes to the 2,000-plus articles that lack one." For Ed17, the project needs editors "who will adopt important articles such as Titanic, Lusitania, or Exxon Valdez and rewrite them so they become good or featured; there's more to [WikiProject Ships] than just military ships!". Haus pointed us to a list of important (non-military) articles. Djembayz expressed her surprise at how many articles about clipper ships and sailing merchant ships are yet to be written. Printed books and websites about sailing ships are readily available, she says, and the public-domain materials coming online about the Age of Sail at the Internet Archive / Google Books are suddenly making it possible to pull up many fascinating and unknown stories about the hardships and romance of sail for editors willing to browse by name of ship. Djembayz adds that if anyone reading this has worked in the commercial fishing industry, they will find that the category fishing vessels is waiting for their contributions.
WikiProject Ships has great potential to expand, and new editors are welcome both from within and outside Wikimedia Foundation projects. According to Haus, active ship projects on other Wikipedias are an obvious platform for interwiki collaboration: "The German and French projects are probably the most active. Bulk carrier was a collaboration with the French Wikipedia, that got close to FA status. For several years we had enthusiastic editors who worked on the Scandinavian as well as the English Wikipedias." White Shadows says "there are whole classes of German U-boats just waiting to be cited or copy-edited or even written. For such a large project we need more willing editors. After all, 500 red links on German Type VII submarines are not going to write themselves!"
Get ready to finish up on that summer reading for next week's interview! Until then, feel free to leaf through the archives.
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MS Oasis of the Seas is the world's largest and longest passenger vessel. -
Reader comments
Approved this week
Theleftorium (nom) was promoted to administrator.
The following seven featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article:
- "Jack the Ripper", the best known pseudonym given to an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888
- Raccoon, a medium-sized mammal native to North America
- Ernest Hemingway, an American writer and journalist
- Captain Jack Sparrow, a fictional character portrayed by Johnny Depp introduced in the film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
- Michael Jackson, an American recording artist, entertainer, and philanthropist
- The privilege of peerage, the body of special privileges belonging to members of the British peerage
- Terra Nova Expedition, an expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott with the objective of being the first to reach the geographical South Pole.
Promoted and former featured pages
Five articles were promoted to featured status: St. Michael's Cathedral, Qingdao (nom), Hurricane Carmen (nom), 1975 Australian constitutional crisis (nom), Cryptoprocta spelea (nom) and Tropical Storm Brenda (1960) (nom).
Six lists were promoted to featured status: List of tallest buildings in Dayton (nom), List of Minnesota Twins first-round draft picks (nom), List of FC Barcelona players (nom), Major League Baseball Triple Crown (nom), List of Texas Rangers first-round draft picks (nom) and Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance (nom).
One article was delisted: Israel (nom).
Media features
Two featured sounds were promoted this week:
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| Cat purring | (nom) |
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| The national anthem of the nation of New Zealand, as performed by the United States Navy. | (nom) |
Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status:
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| Mark Rutte | Big White Fog | Baalbek | ||||
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| Morchella elata | Niobium | Elakala falls | ||||
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| Mycena leaiana | Deepwater Horizon oil spill | Skyline of Chicago | ||||
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| Grapefruit | Cologne | Oxalis triangularis exhibiting nastic movement |
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Arbitration Report
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
Open cases
- Climate change (Week 3): Special rules of conduct were put in place for this arbitration; all evidence submissions should be made by today. The case resulted from several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter being merged into one case, and a related request for comment on the matter failing to make headway. Currently in the workshop phase.
- Race and intelligence (Week 4): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. A proposed decision was expected last week but arbitrators failed to meet this expectation. A renewed expectation that the proposed decision would be posted by yesterday was also not met. Therefore, the case is still in the evidence/workshop phase.
Other
- Eastern European mailing list: A request was filed yesterday to lift the remedy that banned Piotrus from the Eastern Europe topic. The filer is arguing that Piotrus edits constructively, while the topic ban is acting as an inefficient burden on WikiProject Poland. However, questions are being raised over the trustworthiness of Piotrus, who over a lengthy period of time, engaged in severe misconduct that disrupted (and was calculated to disrupt) Wikipedia's processes, particularly in relation to the topic.
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Vector rolled-out to more wikis, becomes default
This week saw the implementation of two stages in the replacement of the old default "Monobook" skin with the new "Vector" skin. Firstly, in a blog post the Wikimedia Foundation announced its intention to switch more of its wikis over:
| “ | We began with Wikimedia Commons and have since rolled out the interface to 10 Wikipedias. In the next phase of the roll-out, we are planning to target as many of the remaining Wikipedia projects as we can ... targeting June 30 for deployment. We want to make sure that the Wikipedias ... are adequately translated before the features are introduced, [and those with] at least 80% of their user interface messages translated by June 28 will be included in the next phase of the roll-out. |
” |
The blog stated that as of June 21, some 60 Wikipedias meet that threshold, and that other Wikipedias will receive the new features in the final phase, currently scheduled for the end of July.
In the second stage, rolled out on June 25, all new private (non-WMF) wikis received Vector as their default skin, replacing Monobook. They retain the option to reinstate Monobook or to switch to a different skin altogether.
'RevisionMove' in development
In October last year, User:FT2 commented that:
| “ | With RevisionDelete in action, the only time that delete + partial undelete is needed is for complex history merges and fixing copy/paste moves. It seems cumbersome that admins must repeatedly delete and part-undelete to selectively move revisions and repair cut/paste moves. If there was a "selective revision move" feature that allowed administrators to select various revisions on a page and move them to another page somehow (in line with the needs of page merge and copypaste fixing), this would greatly simplify page merges and copypaste fixing. | ” |
It now seems that a new "RevisionMove" feature is now slowly working its way towards WMF wikis. Still in early development by User:Church of emacs, it is likely to require significant testing before it can be deployed to sites like the English Wikipedia. See bug #21312 for further discussion of the idea.
In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing, and some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- The ability to redact edit filter logs has been added. The filter previously retained details of pages regardless of whether the page in question had ever existed, since been deleted, or even been oversighted (bug #18043).
- Bug #23903 has been fixed, adding the new magic word
{{#pagesusingpendingchanges}}. - With the closure of bug #4597 (an outstanding request from early 2006), users will get the option of filtering contributions lists based on whether or not that edit is still the most recent edit to a page.
- noc.wikimedia.org, which provides up-to-date copies of files not included in the Wikimedia subversion (SVN) repository, now applies appropriate syntax highlighting to many of its files.
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