Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2007-10-08
From the editor
This week, we introduce a new feature, the WikiProject Report. This week's report focuses on WikiProject Biography; suggestions for future projects to profile can be made on the tip line. This report is a work-in-progress, so I invite readers to suggest any changes in the format that you think might make it better.
This report has been added thanks to a suggestion from the survey concluded two weeks ago. We're working on other possibilities based on the responses; currently, I'm in the process of contacting a few key individuals within Wikimedia for another interview. I'll give more information once it becomes available. However, please continue to suggest new features if you think you've got a great idea.
Also, a request to add "previous" and "next" links to all features was added this week; you'll notice a new template at the bottom of each page, replacing the footer. I haven't yet gone through the archives to add the template to archived pages, so the links may not be that helpful for a few days. The design itself isn't set in stone, so if you've got a better idea, please let us know.
Thanks for reading the Signpost.
— Ral315
Study examines Wikipedia authorship, vandalism repair
An academic study combining editing data with page view logs has added some new understanding about the quality and authorship of Wikipedia content. It concluded that frequent editors have the most impact on what Wikipedia readers see, while the effect of vandalism is small but still a matter of growing concern.
The results of the study are reported in a paper titled "Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia" (available in PDF), to be published in the GROUP 2007 conference proceedings. It was put together by a research group in the University of Minnesota department of computer science and engineering. Based on sampled data provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, showing every tenth HTTP request over a one-month period, they created a tool for estimating the page views for a Wikipedia article during a given timeframe.
In the absence of this type of data, previous studies have largely relied on an article's edit history for analysis. Interestingly, the study concluded that there is "essentially no correlation between views and edits in the request logs."
The study estimated a probability of less than one-half percent (0.0037) that the typical viewing of a Wikipedia article would find it in a damaged state. However, the chances of encountering vandalism on a typical page view seem to be increasing over time, although the authors identified a break in the trend around June 2006, late in the study period. They attributed this to the increased use of vandalism-repair bots.
Authorship and value
Addressing the debate over "who writes Wikipedia", whether most of the work is done by a core group or occasional passersby, the study introduced a new metric which it called the "persistent word view" (PWV). This gives credit to the contributor who added a sequence of words to an article, combined with how many times article revisions with that contributor's words were viewed. The study came down largely in favor of the core group theory, concluding, "The top 10% of editors by number of edits contributed 86% of the PWVs". However, it may not necessarily refute Aaron Swartz's contention that the bulk of contributions often comes from users who have not registered an account; the Minnesota researchers excluded such edits from parts of their analysis, citing the fact that IP addresses are not stable.
The study built on previous designs for analyzing the quality of Wikipedia articles, notably the "history flow" method developed by a team from the MIT Media Lab and IBM Research Center and the color-coded "trust" system created by two professors from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In their own way, both earlier approaches focused on the survival of text in an article over the course of its edit history. Refining these with its page view data, the Minnesota study argued that "our metric matches the notion of the value of content in Wikipedia better than previous metrics."
Damage control
Looking at the issue of vandalism, the study focused primarily on edits that would subsequently be reverted. Although the authors conceded this might include content disputes as well as vandalism, their qualitative analysis suggested that reverts served as a reasonable indicator of the presence of damaged content.
Statistically, they estimated that about half of all damage incidents were repaired on either the first or second page view. This fits in with the notion that obvious vandalism gets addressed as soon as someone sees it; even in the high-profile Seigenthaler incident it's unlikely that many readers saw the infamous version of the article at the time, as a previous Signpost analysis indicated. However, the study also found that for 11% of incidents, the damage persisted beyond an estimated 100 page views. A few went past 100,000 views, although the authors concluded after examining individual cases that the outliers were mostly false positives.
Myanmar article renamed to Burma after unrest
In a rare action, the English Wikipedia article about a country was moved to a different name last week — the article "Myanmar" became Burma. After an active debate, the requested move was carried out Tuesday, 2 October; as usual, the impact is more symbolic than real, since a redirect from one location would still always take you to the intended destination.
The immediate impetus for the move came from a surge in international attention being paid to events in Burma beginning last month. (The Signpost will follow the current convention and refer to the country as Burma in this article.) In response, Husond requested the move on 26 September, arguing that Burma is the most common English-language name, and that the Burmese opposition and many other countries do not recognize the name Myanmar. An extensive discussion followed, and after the requisite five days passed, Duja performed the move, concluding that "a significant majority of editors prefer Burma" while conceding that both sides had valid arguments.
Several themes provided the focal points for debate: whether it was appropriate to defer to an "official" name, either the Burmese government's choice of Myanmar or the English-speaking countries that use Burma; if the English Wikipedia should use a foreign-language name when an English one exists (an oft-debated similar situation exists for Côte d'Ivoire); and what the accepted standard is among professional news or academic sources. Even the question of what is the most common name, usually a critical inquiry for naming conventions, led people toward confusing and sometimes contradictory evidence. Many of the attempts to answer this question involved different forms of Google searches, with varying degrees of sophistication.
Burma's prominence in the news developed from mounting protests against the military government, whose legitimacy is not recognized by many Western countries. As the debate over the Wikipedia article was ongoing, coincidentally the media coverage turned to the cutoff of internet access in Burma, as the regime apparently sought to crack down on the circulation of news and images of the protests. Several reports in the press noted that Wikipedia also figured in the strategy of the protesters, with people constantly updating information on articles such as 2007 Burmese anti-government protests.
The country, like many others, is the focus of a WikiProject, where the name also was the focus of a dispute that produced a request for mediation in January. The process resulted in a change from using the name "WikiProject Burma/Myanmar" (also awkward because in the project namespace, it overlaps with subpage syntax) to "WikiProject Myanmar (Burma)". The accompanying category was not changed.
Scanning the interlanguage links shows that in other languages, the name of the corresponding article may use either form (with varying orthography). Myanmar appears to be more prevalent overall, but neither is consistently preferred. Curiously, the Norwegian Wikipedia has Burma in the Bokmål edition and Myanmar in its Nynorsk version (the two written standards for the Norwegian language).
WikiWorld comic: "W"
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "W" and "Bert (Sesame Street)". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Deleted! See discussion Commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:W WikiWorld.png
News and notes
Wikimania 2008 bidding: Conference will be hosted in Alexandria
A decision on the location of Wikimania 2008, the fourth-annual international Wikimedia conference, was announced on Tuesday. Alexandria's bid was declared the winning bid by Cary Bass on behalf of the Wikimania 2008 bid jury via an email to the foundation-l mailing list. Alexandria's bid was chosen from three cities making bids, the other two being Atlanta and Cape Town.
In his announcement, Bass pointed out that Alexandria "was found to be particularly strong in the areas of reflecting the Wikimedia Foundation's roots in geo-diversity and multi-lingualism, of the very exciting nature of the proposed venue and its local facilities, and of the particularly advanced nature of the financial planning." At the same time, he extolled the Atlanta bid for its community outreach and in-facility accommodation, as well as Cape Town's cultural diversity. Bass also pointed out that Cape Town's bid is the first very strong Wikimania bid originating from the Southern Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, no new information on Wikimania 2009 has been announced; as reported last week, official bidding will begin sometime this month, with a final decision expected sometime around December 15, 2007. So far, three unofficial bids have been worked on extensively: Buenos Aires, Singapore, and Perth. An expected bid from Toronto, following the withdrawal of their 2008 bid, has not yet been developed, and other cities have discussed hosting, with no major development of their potential bids. A list of all unofficial bids is also in development.
Free image searching tool developed
Magnus Manske created a tool called WatchFlickr, which runs on the toolserver. It runs through a category, finds articles without images, and searches for relevant free, Creative Commons-licensed images on Flickr. The tool can help with replacing non-free/fair use images, by allowing users to easily find free replacements on many related articles at once.
Bug 9213 fixed
We reported on bug 9213 two months ago (see archived story). The bug caused problems with the 'you have new messages' bar for anonymous users; sometimes it wouldn't come up even though their talk page had been edited, and sometimes it wouldn't disappear even if they visited their talk page, bypassed their cache, or deleted their cookies; one of the implications of this was that when an anon received a warning message, they might not see it even if they had a static IP, and some anons complained about the constant new-messages bar that they had. The onwiki discussion page about the bug is Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism/Bug ID 9213.
This week, User:Tim Starling wrote a code correction (r26357) designed to fix this problem (among others); this was the first real indication that the cause of the problem had been found ("Bug 9213: Fixed the plainly broken user_newtalk updating and caching scheme."). The problem appears to have been with the way that data about users' new-message status was cached by the servers.
It was not clear immediately whether this correction had worked; the correction carried warnings (WARNING! NEEDS CAREFUL DEPLOYMENT and I tried to keep my changes roughly performance-neutral, but the update on Wikimedia should be watched carefully for performance problems.), the relevant bug tracker comment was more mildly worded than normal (Hopefully fixed in r26357.), and the bug was not closed at the same time (as is usual when a fix for a problem is 'committed' so that it will be applied on Wikimedia and other MediaWiki wikis). However, the change was applied at 18:00 UTC on 3 October (brion: scapped update including r26357 which tim warns may introduce performance problems. keep an eye out). In ais523's tests, the anon new-message bar now appears to be working, and the bug tracker entry is now marked "RESOLVED FIXED", indicating that the developers do not believe the bug poses a problem anymore. If the issues caused by this bug continue, they should be reported on bugzilla.
Finnish Arbitration Committee elected
This week, the Finnish Arbitration Committee was elected; five users were elected to a two-year term, while five more were elected to one-year terms. Interestingly, in an election where the winners were determined by the number of support votes, all five of the users elected to one year terms were tied for 6th place, with 50 votes; an 11th user finished just short, with 49 votes. Full results of the election are available.
Briefly
- No new information has been publicly released regarding the expected start of the Wikimedia fundraiser; in August, Wikimedia advisor Sue Gardner suggested a tentative start date of September 23.
- A controversial RFA for former arbitrator and administrator Kelly Martin ended after nearly three days of discussion, without promotion.
- The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 30,000 total pages.
- The Kazakh Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Bengali Wikisource has reached 100 pages.
- The Dutch Wikiquote has reached 500 pages.
- The Piedmontese Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
In the news
Students using Wikipedia
The Wikipedia problem - Apparently, co-founder Jimmy Wales gets about 10 emails a week from "students who end up in trouble because they cited the online encyclopedia in a paper and the information turned out to be wrong", but he has little sympathy for them. Wikipedia is increasingly becoming cited in undergraduate papers, and even professional librarians use it. However, the key is to treat Wikipedia as a starting point, and evaluate it for bias like any other work.
Wikipedia places a warning that using encyclopedias as a source may result in a failing grade at the top of its "Cite this article" page. (See Special:Cite/Abraham Lincoln, for example.)
Focus on Latin Vicipaedia
Veni, Vidi, Wiki: Latin Isn't Dead On 'Vicipaedia' - The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article that covers the Latin Wikipedia, and the difficulty that it faces when writing about modern concepts that do not have native Latin expressions. For example, apart from the expected Roman history, the Vicipaedia contains an article on Britneia Spears (Britney Spears): "There isn't anything that doesn't belong in Vicipaedia", says one editor. As a result of this, battles are often raged to determine the correct formation of the Latin terms. It is said that the site is not used as a reference source as such, but as good practice for Latin practitioners and students.
Other mentions
Other mentions in the online media recently include:
- Yahoo Adds Answers, Wikipedia, Flights To OneSearch - Yahoo will begin including Wikipedia in its oneSearch results for mobile phones.
- Japanese officials chided for editing Wikipedia - Employees at Japan's agriculture ministry were reprimanded after being caught out editing Wikipedia articles on cartoon robots.
- Wikipedia uncovered - This is a short review of the process of creating, deleting and refining content.
WikiProject Report: Biography
WikiProject Biography is a WikiProject devoted to creating and improving Wikipedia's articles about people. The project was started by Ram-Man (talk · contribs) on 24 October 2002. It is now one of Wikipedia's most active projects, and currently has 400 members. Previously, it had a proposal to have project coordinators for all of its departments, but the page was marked as historical by Radiant! (talk · contribs) on 3 April 2007 because there had been no discussion about the proposal for one month.
Current events
- See also: The WikiProject Biography newsletter
The project's Summer 2007 Assessment drive began on 1 June 2007 and ended on 1 September 2007 with the hopes of lessening the project's backlog of around 113,000 unassessed, or unrated articles. As prizes, the top assessors, based on the number of articles they rated using the project's quality scale, received a barnstar for their work. By the end of the drive, over 100,000 articles were assessed, reducing the backlog by over half. 10,440 of the articles were assessed by the first prize winner, Ludahai. For comparison, the Spring 2007 drive, which came to a close on 24 March 2007, rated 40,000 articles; Sapphic assessed the most articles in that drive.
On 13 October, an IRC meeting will be held to help WikiProject members assess how to "revive" areas of the WikiProject that have gone stagnant.
Departments
The Biography project currently has 7 departments in order to split up and organize its workload.
- The assessment department focuses on assessing biography articles to recognize them and also to show which ones need more attention.
- The A-class review department is responsible for reviewing candidates for A-class status on the project's quality scale, and making sure that the project's current A-class articles do not fall below their standards.
- The collaboration department tries to find articles that would require a project-wide collaborative effort, and get users together to improve an article to featured article status. is the current article collaboration.
- The outreach department is the project's center for recruiting new users to the project, and it is in charge of producing a monthly newsletter to highlight the project's current events.
- The peer review department conducts peer reviews of articles when they are requested in order to obtain ideas on how an article can be improved from users who have never read it before.
- The translation department works to translate biographical articles from other languages into English, usually working on foreign language featured articles.
- The vandalism department keeps an eye on biographical articles that are vandalized often.
Descendant projects
Task forces and projects related to WikiProject Biography include:
How to help
While the project has a very large amount of members, it could always use more help. If you want to join it, you can visit its members page and sign up.
Features and admins
Administrators
Five users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: hmwith (nom), JHunterJ (nom), Mtmelendez (nom), Nat (nom), and Samulili (nom).
Bots
Nine bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: SmackBot (task request), Detroiterbot (task request), ChandlerMapBot (task request), COBot (task request), SnakeBot (task request), CohesionBot (task request), CapitalBot (task request), SundarBot (task request), and OrBot (task request).
Featured content
Eleven articles were promoted to featured status last week: Anabolic steroid (nom), Quneitra (nom), William Cooley (nom), Slavery in ancient Greece (nom), Authentic Science Fiction (nom), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (nom), The Apprentice (UK) (nom), Tau Ceti (nom), Brabham BT19 (nom), Golden Sun (nom), and Prince Louis of Battenberg (nom).
Seven lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Powderfinger awards (nom), Prince of Wales Trophy (nom), William M. Jennings Trophy (nom), Lost (season 3) (nom), Timeline of Australian television (nom), List of colleges and universities in Vermont (nom), and List of Fate/stay night episodes (nom).
One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Africa (nom).
No topics or sounds were featured last week.
Four articles were de-featured last week: Henry Fonda (nom), Congo Free State (nom), Countdown (game show) (nom), and Doom (game) (nom).
No pictures, lists, portals, topics, or sounds were de-featured last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Eastern Suburbs & Illawarra railway line, 1981 Irish hunger strike, Kingdom Hearts, Orion, New York City, Pluto, and Guinea pig.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Alluvial Fan, Crater on Mars, Locust, Bougainville campaign, Maslenitsa, Great White Shark, and Einsatzgruppen.
Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
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Front view of female Human skeleton (nom) -
Back view of female Human skeleton (nom) -
Real life Rosie the Riveter (nom) -
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_March_1944.jpg){kind=link}
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Fixed bugs
- Several syntax errors were corrected in Wikimedia's robots.txt file; these errors caused some search engines to ignore some of the instructions in that file (such as the instruction not to index AfD). (bug 11508; fixed with a configuration change)
- The rvendid parameter to the API (example) now works correctly. (r26315, bug 11534)
- Links in edit summaries no longer sometimes mistakenly continue outside the edit summary and into the rest of the page they're on. (r26409, bug 11560)
- The 'you have new messages' bar now appears for anonymous users when and only when they have a new message (see related story). (r26357, bug 9213)
New features
- A new interface message MediaWiki:Loginstart has been added that displays at the start of the login screen. (r26477, bug 11574)
Other technology news
- The Wolof Wiktionary was reopened this week. It had previously been closed, but the information in closed (to be precise, locked in read-only mode) wikis is retained, allowing them to be reopened. (bug 11512)
Ongoing news
- Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee accepted one new case this week, and did not close any cases.
New case
Voting phase
- Giovanni33-John Smith's: A case regarding actions taken with respect to a block of Giovanni33 in a dispute between him and John Smith's. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies restricting the editing of both parties for one year.
- Digwuren: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility by Digwuren and alleged sockpuppets. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies banning and restricting the editing of a number of editors.
- Liancourt Rocks: A case involving alleged WP:NPOV violations on the Liancourt Rocks article. A remedy banning Wikimachine for one year has the support of one arbitrator.
- Bharatveer: A case involving alleged edit-warring, incivility and personal attacks by Bharatveer on India-related articles. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy restricting Bharatveer's editing for one year.
- SevenOfDiamonds: A case involving alleged abusive sockpuppetry and other misconduct by SevenOfDiamonds. SevenOfDiamonds vigorously denies the allegations, and alleges that MONGO has harassed him. Voting on remedies is split.
- Dalmatia: A case involving a dispute between Italian and Croatian editors on articles relating to the Dalmatia region. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies, supported by Fred Bauder, restricting the editing of Giovanni Giove and DIREKTOR.
- DreamGuy 2: A case involving alleged persistent incivility by DreamGuy. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy restricting DreamGuy's editing, which has the support of Fred Bauder and James Forrester
- The Troubles: A case involving a large number of editors on articles related to The Troubles. Some editors attempted to withdraw from the case when its scope was widened at the request of an arbitrator to cover the entire area rather than only the behaviour of Vintagekits, but in accordance with arbitration policy, these attempts, along with other changes to statements after the case opened, were reverted by the clerk. Remedies placing a group of editors on probation have the support of three arbitrators.
- Attack sites: A case involving disputes over whether the attack sites section of WP:NPA should prohibit links from articles in the mainspace to websites which include pages attacking Wikipedia editors. Voting on most remedies is split, but remedies encouraging the community to develop a policy through consensus have a majority.
- THF-DavidShankBone: A case involving alleged POV editing by THF relating to Michael Moore, and alleged harassment by DavidShankBone. Voting on remedies is split.
- Artaxerex: A case involving alleged POV-pushing, incivility and sockpuppetry by Artaxerex. Artaxerex denies the allegations, and alleges that Shervink and others are focusing on getting him blocked, and that certain editors push an Iranian nationalist POV. Remedies banning Artaxerex and reminding parties of the need to adhere closely to WP:NPOV have the support of four arbitrators.
- Allegations of apartheid: This case concerns the conduct of various editors in connection with a group of articles whose titles include the words "Allegations of apartheid". It has been alleged that these articles were created in violation of Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, after several deletion debates concerning Allegations of Israeli apartheid resulted in that article being kept. Issues have also been raised concerning comments made in deletion discussions and reviews. Several users who have created and edited the "Allegations of apartheid" articles have strongly denied any inappropriate conduct. Voting on most proposals is split, but an amnesty for past actions currently has a majority.