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26 March 2014

 

2014-03-26

A foolish request

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By Sven Manguard
Sven Manguard has been editing Wikipedia since 2010 and is an administrator on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. He had a "Did you know?" on the April Fools' Day main page in 2013 and put forth a candidate for the April Fools' Day Featured Picture this year, but is opposed to joke edits outside of the Main Page and user pages. The author would like to thank Go Phightins! for copyediting this piece.
The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.


April Fools' Day is rapidly approaching. Every year, members of the community pull pranks and make (or attempt to make) humorous edits to pages across the project. Every year, the community follows April Fools' Day with a contentious debate about what whether or not it is necessary to impose limits on April Fools' Day jokes for future years. It is a polarizing issue. On one side, people view the levity that April Fools' Day edits bring as a key component to community building and editor retention. Others view April Fools' Day edits as an embarrassment that undermines Wikipedia's professionalism and thus its credibility. While most people fall somewhere between those two extremes, April Fools-related discussions have a propensity to become heated.

Last year a request for comment was held on the issue, which Salvidrim and I closed. The result was a fair compromise; those that wish to partake in April Fools' Day festivities are free to do so, however restrictions are in place that address most of the concerns of those opposed to April Fools' Day edits. In the interest of making April Fools' Day as fun as possible for participants, while also preserving community sanity, I would ask that those interested in pulling pranks on April 1 follow the consensus of that RfC. I have summarized the key points of the RfC below, and also provided some guidance of my own. Being a responsible fool is the best way to ensure that the tradition is allowed to continue in future years.

Guidelines from the RfC

April Fools jokes must stay out of article space

Of all of the proposals in the RfC, this had the largest margin of support. To quote Kilopi, "First rule of April foolery: Do no harm. Pranks interfering with readers ability to use this site as an encyclopedia aren't funny." The main page is specifically excluded from this prohibition, but all other pages in the article namespace are off limits. While there was a proposal at the RfC to treat April Fools' Day jokes harshly, it was unsuccessful. Instead, joke edits in the article space will be treated as they are treated on all other days; they will be reverted as disruption, a talk page warning will be issued, and after four such warnings, the offending editor will be blocked.

It's worth noting that this does not prohibit filing fake Articles for Deletion (AfD) requests, but it does require that you remove the red box announcing the AfD from the top of the article. For editors that are not familiar with the navigating Articles for Deletion pages and want to view the festivities, all AfDs filed on April Fools' Day will be listed on this page. While not addressed by the RfC, it is also a good idea to remove the deletion notice from the talk page of the article's original creator. If you're using Twinkle, you can uncheck the "Notify page creator if possible" box to prevent a message from being sent in the first place.

You must tag your jokes with a humor template

While it should be obvious that putting Earth up for deletion is a joke, not every joke that is made is immediately obvious as such. The use of the {{Humor}} or {{April fools}} templates makes jokers' intentions clear. While this may seem like unnecessary bureaucracy, it's what the community wants. Since all of the processes that serve as forums for jokes do still have serve their intended functions on April Fools' Day (there are legitimate AfDs filed that day, for example), drawing a clear line as to what is and is not a joke saves everyone time comes April 2, when all the jokes have to be cleaned up.

Additional recommendations

Be lighthearted and original

Please do not nominate Earth for deletion. It's been done eight times already, and the sixth was the last time that anyone even bothered joining in on the "debate". Additionally, the community has shown that it has run out of patience for poop jokes and similar low-brow humor. Misdirection, cleverness, and wit will get you much more acclaim and appreciation than rehashing old jokes, be they AfD traditions or jokes of the scatological variety.

Additionally, it should go without saying that April Fools' Day is not an excuse to attack other people or their beliefs. Nominating Russia or Barack Obama or Christianity for deletion and then claiming that it was only a joke isn't going to go over well, especially if the deletion rationale carries political or social undertones. If it would be insulting on March 31, it's still going to be insulting on April 1. Likewise, vandalizing another user's user page and then claiming that it was a prank is also not going to be viewed kindly. If you're leaving silly messages for friends, no one is going to bat an eye. If, however, a reasonable person would view your edits as malicious, the date on the calendar isn't going to save you from a block. In short, the user conduct guidelines don't go away just because it's April Fools.

Tolerate the madness

Not everyone that pulls April Fools' Day pranks on Wikipedia is going to be a regular editor. Not every regular editor is going to abide by the resolution of the RfC or heed my advice above. There will be non-constructive edits (jokes to some, vandalism to others) in the article space, and some of those edits will come from longtime editors. Historically, some vandalism fighters have viewed April Fools' Day jokes by established editors as tantamount to a betrayal, and have responded with vitriol. Conversely, some longtime editors have responded poorly to having their jokes reverted or deleted by other users. In short, for a day of levity, April 1 can often be stressful for those involved.

To those making jokes: First, please keep in mind that if your jokes are removed, it's not meant to be a personal affront against you. You are not editing in a vacuum; most of the people that will be reverting edits on April Fools' Day will be reverting a lot of edits, the vast majority from throwaway accounts and IPs. Alternatively, it could just be that the joke you thought was hilarious ... wasn't, and someone else cleared it out to make room for other attempts. Either way, take it in stride; there's always next year. Secondly, please clean up after yourself. One of the major issues that opponents of April Fools' Day jokes complain about is the amount of time that the community has to waste cleaning up after said jokes. While closing a few dozen joke deletion nominations and a half dozen fake requests for adminiship isn't a terrible burden, especially now that the cleanup no longer involves removing deletion notices from articles, removing your jokes once April Fools' Day is over is still the responsible thing to do. Finally, if an editor expresses a desire to be left out of the festivities, or to have their user and user talk pages left out of the festivities, respect that choice.

To those reverting jokes: First, please keep in mind that many of the people that are making joke edits on April 1 aren't doing it out of malice. If you see an established editor making non-constructive edits in the article space, drop them a polite talk page message linking to the section on the RfC that addresses this. Secondly, as tempting as it might be to do so, don't rush off to shut down all of the jokes the moment that the clock strikes 00:00, April 2, 2014 (UTC). It will still be April Fools' Day for a substantial number of editors for several hours after the day changes over in UTC. On that note, dropping the hammer on someone that makes a joke edit an hour or two into April 2 UTC isn't constructive. Finally, if an editor wants to have their fun on April 1, don't give them a hard time about it, or hold it against them in the future, unless they are truly disruptive. Ultimately, comes April 2 these are people that you will have to go back to working with, and this is not something worth burning bridges over.

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2014-03-26

Down to a simmer

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By Serendipodous

After a flood of traumatic, perplexing and complex events, users took time to digest the material confronting them, with topics such as the 2014 Crimea crisis or the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 easing down the list, making way for such traditional topics as St Patrick's Day, Reddit threads and even Google Doodles, which have reappeared after a long absence.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation for any exclusions.

For the week of 16 to 22 March, the ten most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Saint Patrick's Day C-Class 1,604,355
Sometimes I have to admit making a mistake, and my previous assumption that people weren't interested in arguably the world's most popular saint's day turned out to be due to mistiming; as it happens, people are very interested in it – on the day itself. Interest wanes pretty quickly in the days leading up to and from it. Given the long association of this holiday with binge drinking, perhaps there's a reason it fades in the memory so quickly.
2 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 B-class 1,075,269
We still don't know precisely what happened to this flight, or to its 239 passengers and crew, but, gradually, a drip of hard facts is beginning to replace occasionally wild speculation. The most significant development (the Malaysian government's declaration that the plane was lost in the southern Indian Ocean) occurred after this time period, but even before then, leads had already begun to coalesce around that isolated, violent region of the sea off the coast of Australia.
3 Crimea C-class 949,876
In recent decades, the map of the world has only changed to reflect the rise of new independent nations. One country deliberately annexing part of another is not something our generation is used to. Case in point: over the last few days, Wikipedia's maps of Russia first absorbed this fragment of Ukraine, then excluded it, then finally included it in an indecisive shade of mint green, indicating it is in dispute. Given the nature of Wikipedia, that is likely as far as the argument will go; other organizations (such as Russia Today) have not been nearly as accommodating.
4 Spite house B-Class 863,608
This unique form of architecture, in which usual considerations such as aesthetics, functionality or even livability are abandoned in favour of annoying the neighbors, usually by blocking sunlight, became a topic of interest on Reddit this week.
5 L'Wren Scott Start-class 658,411 The tragic suicide of this famously tall former model (she was 6'3''), stylist and fashion designer at just 49 caused a great deal of lurid coverage in the British tabloids, particularly regarding her longterm relationship with Mick Jagger.
6 Agnes Martin Start-class 457,187 The Canadian abstract painter got a Google Doodle for what would have been her 102nd birthday on 22 March.
7 Deaths in 2014 List 448,266
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
8 Saint Patrick B-Class 443,567
The man himself naturally drew interest on his day.
9 Facebook B-class 443,413
A perennially popular article.
10 Fred Phelps B-Class 433,520
It is either ironic or fitting, depending on your point of view, that a man who achieved fame in life by leading pickets of innocent people's funerals would receive so much attention upon his own death. For all his fury and "GOD HATES FAGS" bombast, there is tragedy in a man beginning his career as a civil rights lawyer yet ending it in a morass of bigotry and hate.


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2014-03-26

Wikipedians' "encyclopedic identity" dominates even in Kosovo debates; analysis of "In the news" discussions; user hierarchy mapped

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By Federico Leva, Computermacgyver, Kim Osman, Jonathan Morgan, Piotr Konieczny, Niklas Laxström, Tilman Bayer and James Heilman

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Cross-language study of conflict on Wikipedia

Have you wondered about differences in the articles on Crimea in the Russian, Ukrainian, and English versions of Wikipedia? A newly published article entitled "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia"[1] doesn't address Crimea, but nonetheless offers insight into the editing of contentious articles in multiple language editions through a heavy qualitative examination of Wikipedia articles about Kosovo in the Serbian, Croatian, and English editions.

The authors, Pasko Bilic and Luka Bulian from the University of Zagreb, found the main drivers of conflict and consensus were different group identities in relation to the topic (Kosovo) and to Wikipedia in general. Happily, the authors found the dominant identity among users in all three editions was the "encyclopedic identity," which closely mirrored the rules and policies of Wikipedia (e.g., NPOV) even if the users didn't cite such policies explicitly. (This echoes the result of a similar study regarding political identities of US editors, see previous coverage: "Being Wikipedian is more important than the political affiliation".) Other identities were based largely on language and territorial identity. These identities, however, did not sort cleanly into the different language editions: "language and territory [did] not produce coherent and homogeneous wiki communities in any of the language editions."

The English Wikipedia was seen by many users as providing greater visibility and thus "seem[ed] to offer a forum for both Pro-Serbian and Pro-Albanian viewpoints making it difficult to negotiate a middle path between all of the existing identities and viewpoints." The Arbitration Committee, present in the English edition but not in the Serbian or Croatian editions, may have helped prevent even greater conflict. Enforcement of its decisions seemed generally to lead to greater caution in the edition process.

In line with previous work showing some users move between language editions, the authors found a significant amount of coordination work between the language editions. One central focus centered around whether other editions would follow the English edition in breaking the article into two separate articles (Republic of Kosovo and Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija).

The social construction of knowledge on English Wikipedia

review by Kim Osman

Another paper by Bilic, published in New Media & Society[2] looks at the logic behind networked societies and the myth perpetuated by media institutions that there is a center of the social world (as opposed to distributed nodes). The paper goes on to investigate the social processes that contribute to the creation of “mediated centers”, by analyzing the talk pages of English Wikipedia’s In The News (ITN) section.

Undertaking an ethnographic content analysis of ITN talk pages from 2004–2012, Bilic found three issues that were disputed among Wikipedians in their efforts to construct a necessarily temporal section of the encyclopedia. First, that editors differentiate between mass media and Wikipedia as a digital encyclopedia, however what constitutes the border between the two is often contested. Second, there was debate between inclusionists and deletionists regarding the criteria for stories making the ITN section. Third, conflict and discussion occurred regarding English Wikipedia’s relevance to a global audience.

The paper provides a good insight into how editors construct the ITN section and how it is positioned on the “thin line between mass media agenda and digital encyclopedia.” It would be interesting to see further research on the tensions between the Wikipedia policies mentioned in the paper (e.g. WP:NOTNEWS, NPOV) and mainstream media trends in light of other studies about Wikipedia’s approach to breaking news coverage.

User hierarchy map: Building Wikipedia's Org Chart

If you were to make an org chart of English Wikipedia, what would it look like? A recent study[3] presented at the 2014 European Conference on Information Systems examines whether the organizational hierarchy of Wikipedia is as flat and egalitarian as previous research and popular media have claimed in the past. The researchers point out that the degree to which Wikipedia’s actual governance model (and those of other peer production communities) reflect egalitarian principles has seldom been comprehensively examined. Furthermore, a growing body of research has shown that Wikipedia has become increasingly bureaucratic along many dimensions, often in response to new community needs. This suggests that Wikipedia has grown more hierarchical, and less flat, over time.

The researchers develop a taxonomy based on technical user rights and the quality assurance, coordination, and conflict resolution tasks commonly associated with those user rights. They use exploratory factor analysis, least square analysis, and qualitative examination of the user right description pages to distill 19 user rights down to 8 social roles. They assemble these roles into a hierarchy according to their Scope, Granting, Access, and Promotion relationships. For example, in this hierarchy, editors in the Security Force role (checkusers and oversighters) have more power than administrators (sysops and bureaucrats) because being a sysop is an informal prerequisite for checkuser rights, and because oversighters can use the RevisionDelete extension in suppressor mode, blocking access to the content from administrators.

The paper does an excellent job of distilling the complex matrix of technologically mediated power relationships within and across Wikimedia wikis into a relatively simple organizational chart (presented on manuscript page 11). However, other mappings are certainly possible. For example, this analysis excludes the role of bots (and therefore, bot wranglers) within the role ecology. It also does not address the soft power that well-respected veteran community members may wield in some situations.

Briefly

  • Extracting machine-readable data from Wiktionary: Yet another research group recognised Wiktionary as a source of «valuable lexical information» and explored conversion of its full content to a machine-readable format, LMF.[4] The UBY tools were used as base, but results are not released, probably being in the works (only English, French and German Wiktionaries are mentioned), and seem unaware of DBpedia's Wiktionary RDF extraction. Authors find a big obstacle in seemingly innocuous context labels of the kind "archaic term": this diachronicity would force to split such definitions to separate lexicons by age. Instead, they believe it wouldn't be hard to map all the formats and tags used by the various Wiktionary editions and unify them, apparently, in a single lexicon. If delivered (and open-sourced), such a map could help the perennial discussion on how to unify Wiktionary data, recently revived by the Wikidata plans.
  • Wikipedia as a source of proper names in various languages: Another group[5] managed to automatically extract proper names mentioned in articles of Wikipedias in 18 European languages, collating the different transliterations and attributing certain properties like "given name" and "family name" (similar to what Wikidata does, but without using interwiki links). As in the previous work, the conclusion is that LMF is suitable for storing such information, with an extension of the format. The impression is that LMF's viability is being tested in "real life" to refine said theoretical standard, an effort parallel to Wikidata's process of organic growth by trial and error.
  • "Wikipedia and Machine Translation: killing two birds with one stone". This[6] is a case study about machine aided translation from one language to another. In this case, the researchers made volunteers translate 100 short Computer Science articles from Spanish to Basque Wikipedia, totalling to 50 000 words. They used a rule based machine translation system called Matxin. Volunteers corrected the machine translation output using OmegaT. The machine translation system was adapted by using a collection of Mozilla translations.
    Following a long established Apertium practice, the human corrections were used as source for a tool to make them automatically. They claim 10% increase in accuracy with this tool, but do not report the baseline or corpus for which it was measured. Additionally: they translated wikilinks using Wikidata; they noted that markup complicated things; even a not very good machine translation output was still useful for volunteer translators.
  • "Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia: A Systemic-Constructivist Analysis":[7] In this study of knowledge construction on Wikipedia, the authors focus on the importance of the social system and social structure in influencing the actions of individuals (Wikipedia editors). They analyze the edit history of the German Wikipedia article on Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, arguing that it is a case study of "a regularly occurring situation: the development of new knowledge in a large-scale social setting based on inconsistent information under uncertainty." The author provide an interesting literature review of what they term a "systemic-constructivist" approach, then discuss the evolution of the Wikipedia article through about 1,200 edits, noting the importance of Wikipedia policies, which were often quoted by the editors. The authors also conduced a survey among the editors of the article to obtain additional information. The authors also asked independent experts to review the article; this review concluded that the German Wikipedia article is of high quality. They note that the experts identified some errors, although unfortunately they do not provide details specific enough for the community to address them. They conclude that the Wikipedia editors were not experts in the field of nuclear power plants, yet were able to produce an article that earned favorable reviews from such experts; this, according to the authors, can be explained through the "systemic-constructivist" approach as validating the importance of the social system and structure of Wikipedia, which guided the amateur editors into producing an expert-level product.
  • Younger librarians more supportive of Wikipedia: [8] A survey of information literacy librarians shows that they provide little Wikipedia instruction, with about 40% of respondents answering that their schools provide no instruction on Wikipedia, and 80%, that they hold no dedicated workshops. Still, the remaining group – 60% which do provide some instruction, and 20% who hold dedicated workshops, suggest that the picture is not so dire, and in fact illuminates an interesting opportunity for reaching out with regards to the Wikipedia Education Programs, which do not usually focus on the libraries instructional programs. Only 3% of respondents indicated that they have students actually edit Wikipedia, and one cited story, about "making edits to lower the quality of an article" and "getting a student blocked", raises a specter of similar incidents in the past (see e.g. previous Signpost coverage of a prominent case at George Mason University), as well as a question of ethics in education with regards to purposefully engaging in vandalism for educational purposes. Unsurprisingly, there was also a negative correlation between librarian's age and views on Wikipedia. Although overall majority of respondents were supportive of the idea that librarians need to educate students in digital literacy skills, they were nonetheless opposed to linking Wikipedia from the pages of their institutions.
  • "Preparing and publishing Wikipedia articles are a good tool to train project management, teamwork and peer reviewed publishing processes in life sciences": This is the conclusion in the title of a recently published paper from the 2012 "Improving University Teaching" conference[9] by two zoologists from the University of Innsbruck.
  • "Networked Grounded Theory" analysis of views on the use of Wikipedia in education: A report paper[10] describes how a Greek PhD thesis studied the use of Wikipedia in Education using the network visualization software Gephi. Empirical data was gathered "from interviews and focus group discussions with students and teachers participating in Wikipedia assignments, from online blog posts expressing students’, instructors’, and Wikipedians’ reflections on the topic and from Wikipedia’s community discussion pages" and analyzed in a grounded theory approach (classifying text statements into codes such as "Need for Wiki Literate Professors", "Valuable Content Added", "You Are Not Listening & Respecting Us" or "Aggressive Community Editors"). Gephi was used to create a visualization grouping these codes (opinions), and grouping them into "communities". Eventually, the author arrived at "Community Resistance, Organization of Intervention, Community Benefit, Educational Benefit, and Acculturation Stress [as] the conceptual blocks of theory for interpreting the utilization of a virtual community in education as an acculturation process."
  • "Risk factors and control of hospital acquired infections: a comparison between Wikipedia and scientific literature"[11] is a paper published in 2013 which analysed Wikipedia content from November of 2010. They looked at 15 articles pertaining to hospital acquired infections (HAIs) of which 8 were B class and the rest were lower. Some of the articles were in this reviewer's opinion only tangentially related, such as necktie. They looked at how well Wikipedia's content in 2010 matched the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) topic on HAIs. NICE writes how to-guides for physicians, while Wikipedians are writing an encyclopedia. The conclusions was thus not surprising that Wikipedia is not a good "how to guide" regarding HAIs (as one editor observed in a discussion about the paper at WikiProject Medicine: "We are criticised for (somewhere) mentioning or recommending signs reminding about hand-washing routines, ... and for not giving all sorts of detailed guidelines about procedures for the use of catheters and the like by medical staff"). Still, a number of specific errors were also found. Most had already been fixed and this reviewer has corrected the last few.
  • How a country's broadband connectivity and Wikipedia coverage are related: In 2011, the Oxford Internet Institute began a project to study the online representation of the Arab world online, via Wikipedia. The first peer-reviewed paper from this research became available in preprint form[12] at the beginning of 2014. As previously observed by these and other researchers, the density of geotagged Wikipedia is highly uneven, and a part of the paper studies its relationship to a country's population, to the number of broadband internet connections in a geographic area, and to Wikipedia's country-level usage statistics over time. Among other things, the authors find that "over three quarters of the variation in geotagged articles was explained by the population of the country, the number of fixed broadband connections and the number of edits emanating from that country." Curiously, the relationship between internet connectivity and Wikipedia coverage was not linear: "those countries with the least and most broadband have more articles than expected, whereas those countries in the middle of the distribution have fewer articles than expected."

References

  1. ^ Bilic, Pasko & Bulian, Luka (2014). "Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia". iConference 2014.
  2. ^ Bilic, Pasko (2014). ""Searching for a centre that holds" in the network society: Social construction of knowledge on, and with, English Wikipedia". New Media & Society. doi:10.1177/1461444814522953. ISSN 1461-4448. Closed access icon
  3. ^ Arazy, Ofer; Oded Nov; Felipe Ortega (2014). The [Wikipedia] world is not flat: On the organizational structure of online production communities (PDF). Twenty Second European Conference on Information Systems.
  4. ^ Collaborative Tools: From Wiktionary to LMF, for Synchronic and Diachronic Language Data. Chapter written by Thierry DECLERCK, Pirsoka LENDVAI and Karlheinz MÖRTH. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118712696.ch12/summary
  5. ^ Global Atlas: Proper Nouns, From Wikipedia to LMF. Chapter written by Gil FRANCOPOULO , Frédéric MARCOUL, David CAUSSE and Grégory PIPARO.
  6. ^ Alegria I., Cabezon U., Fernandez de Betoño U., Labaka G., Mayor A., Sarasola K. and Zubiaga A.: Wikipedia and Machine Translation: killing two birds with one stone. Workshop on 'Free/open-source language resources for the machine translation of less-resourced languages' at LREC 2014. https://ixa.si.ehu.es/Ixa/Argitalpenak/Artikuluak/1395737124
  7. ^ Oeberst, Aileen; Iassen Halatchliyski; Joachim Kimmerle; Ulrike Cress (2014-02-21). "Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia: A Systemic-Constructivist Analysis". Journal of the Learning Sciences. doi:10.1080/10508406.2014.888352. ISSN 1050-8406. Closed access icon
  8. ^ Zlatos, Christy (2014-03-12). "Still Not Ready for Prime Time: Academic Librarian Attitudes towards Wikipedia in a Networked Age". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ^ Schwerte, Thorsten; Stefan Stolz. "Preparing and publishing Wikipedia articles are a good tool to train project management, teamwork and peer reviewed publishing processes in life sciences". 2012 Proceedings. Improving University Teaching. The University of British Columbia.
  10. ^ Alexios V. Brailas: Networked Grounded Theory. The Qualitative Report 2014 Volume 19, How To Article 3, 1–16 http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR19/brailas3.pdf
  11. ^ Maggi, Elisa; Luca Magistrelli; Marco Zavattaro; Marta Beggiato; Fabio Maiello; Cristina Naturale; Margherita Ragliani; Marco Varalda; Maria Sofia Viola; Diego Concina; Elias Allara; Fabrizio Faggiano; et al. (Avogadro Wikipedia and HAI Group) (2013). "Risk factors and control of hospital acquired infections: a comparison between Wikipedia and scientific literature". Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Public Health. 10 (1). ISSN 2282-0930.
  12. ^ Graham, Mark; Bernie Hogan; Ralph K. Straumann; Ahmed Medhat (2014-01-21). Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. SSRN 2382617. to appear in Annals of the Association of American Geographers


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2014-03-26

Commons Picture of the Year—winners announced

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By Tony1 and The ed17
Picture of the year: Filament burns through, the scientific art of Stefan Krause, from Saarland in Germany. "Photography is my passion," he says. "It all started in 1981 with the purchase of a Canon AE1. The fascination of photography has not left me to this day."

Results for the two-stage 2013 Commons Picture of the Year (PotY) have been announced. This year's winning photograph (above) shows a lightbulb that has been cracked, allowing inert gas to escape—and oxygen to enter, so that the tungsten filament burns. From the flames rise elegant curls of blue smoke.

The picture of the year gained 157 votes in the second round. Filament burns through is by Stefan Krause (home page). The dramatic visual potential of lighbulbs is a subject he has been exploring for some time; readers may remember last year's competition where Stefan's picture Exploding lightbulb, involving an airsoft pistol, won third place.

The Signpost asked Stefan whether his intention was entirely artistic or included a scientific rationale:


I produce photos like this for artistic reasons and for the challenge of making them as perfect as possible. In preparation I used a small pair of pliers to break out a few glass pieces so that interesting openings were created. In my trials, the glass often broke completely so that I'd have to start over. I also needed to use a current regulator to reduce the power supply so that the burning up of the tungsten filament was slow and a beautiful plume resulted. The background was captured with a flash using red foil and "GOBO" (graphical optical blackout). The smoke was illuminated from behind with a flashtube in front of light-blue foil, and the lightbulb with a strip light ("softbox") obliquely from behind. Safety in this work is very important because of the risk of electrocution from uninsulated live parts; it was essential to turn the power off each time I replaced the bulb!


Gentle morning light by Ukrainian photographer Balkhovitin won second place.

Second by a very close margin (with 155 votes) was Gentle morning light. Taken in the Holy Mountains National Park in Ukraine's Donetsk Province, just north of Crimea, the tranquillity belies recent traumatic events in the region, including the death of a Wikimedian. Photographer Balkhovitin told the Signpost: "When I took this shot I particularly liked the direct sunlight that's shining through the autumn leaves, and the light mist over the water that obscures the opposite shore."

The scene could have been a thousand years away—but for the trace of a hillside roadway on the right, behind a tree.

French Wikipedian Nicholas Sanchez won third place with an extraordinary split-second shot of a swallow in full flight, gliding open-mouthed to drink from the water's surface. Sharp geometries in the bird—a square throat and angled wings—contrast with a subtle layering of background colours. In a mirrored effect, the rippled motion of flight is reflected in the underside of the wings and in the surface ruffles below.

The organisers expressed their delight that more unique editors voted than ever before—4070 in both rounds. 2852 voters participated in the first round, which presented a record 962 images; and 2919 voted for one of the 50 finalists (to rank the top 30 overall and the top two in each of 10 categories, with an average vote per candidate of 58).

"Hirondelle en plein vol, qui boit dans une piscine"—the French description as stylish as the picture itself, by Nicholas Sanchez
Jorge Royan's Varanasi green peas was ranked equal ninth.

Two persistent features of PotY are its domination by continental European photographers and the small proportion of entries that feature people. One highly ranked image embodies both human and global south elements: Varanasi green peas, by Argentinian photographer Jorge Royan, is of a streetseller in that iconic Indian city. Richly symbolic, the composition is lush in its use of colour and texture. This picture is perhaps a reminder of what jurist Heta Pandit said of the field of entries in last year's Wiki Loves Monuments: "I would have also liked to see some more human element. The relationship between monuments, nature and people is so important. ... A lot of the pictures were like tourist brochures."

The Signpost asked Adam Cuerden, a veteran contributor to the English Wikipedia's featured picture forum, to comment on this year's PotY competition. He first raised the matter of "encyclopedic value", which though required at that forum is not a criterion for Commons featured pictures:


We have the awkward situation where the winner is an image that probably shouldn't be used in any Wikimedia project. The image is very well-photographed: It shows a cracked lightbulb plugged into the socket, the loss of vacuum allowing the filament to burn.
Unfortunately, the photographer then manipulated the image in a way that ruins all the encyclopedic value: he removed the lamp fitting and photoshopped the bottom of the lightbulb in its place. We're left with a picture of a lightbulb that has electricity moving through it that gives the appearance of not having any such thing happening.
The focus of every Wikimedia project is education. Were a copy of the image with the lamp fitting available, I'd suggest it be widely used; but if it fundamentally misrepresents the science being demonstrated, it's hard to see how it could be used for anything but discussion of photomanipulation or art.
However, that's not to say that there aren't some excellent images among the finalists, indeed, all of the other finalists are strong images and could easily find wide use. One could, at most, quibble on a few where the photographer took other, equally good images that might be better for some uses.
But, if Picture of the Year is meant to celebrate the work of Commons as an image repository, I find it strange and somewhat shameful that, while the original round divided the images into categories for voting, and the top two images in each category moved on to the second round, we've thrown out the entire reason we divided images into categories in the first place: To make sure the diversity of Commons is recognised. I was one of the people who created the category-based system back in 2009, to replace the previous system of every image being presented at once, which was getting far too clunky. However, when it was invented, it was also intended to help celebrate the diversity of commons: in 2009, the final results included a listing of winner of each category, thus, at least attempting to show the entire diversity of Commons. Why not now? There are inherent biases in this sort of competition, and that's fine. But why use a system designed to give recognition to additional types of content, then not bother to recognise them?
Fourteenth place: the Science Library of Upper Lusatia in Görlitz, Germany, by Ralf Roletschek, who has 875 "quality images" on Commons (homepage).
Noetica assisted with the language of the main story.

In brief

  • New communications head: The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the hiring of Katherine Maher to be its chief communications officer. Maher was formerly the advocacy director for Access, an advocacy group dedicated to a free and open Internet. She will be replacing Jay Walsh, who formally left the position (which was then titled as senior director, communications) in October, though he has continued in a similar role during the lengthy hiring process.

    Sue Gardner, the outgoing executive director, stated that "Her experiences advocating for the rights of ordinary internet users and communicating with a large global volunteer community are both rare and directly relevant. She's got a solid understanding of internet technologies. She's a crisp, clear communicator, and an experienced spokesperson." The process to replace Gardner, which has now lasted for more than a year, is still plodding forward; the last update from the transition team gave May 2014 as a possible date: "We are at a point where we have three candidates that we all feel are great. We hope to speak to them in the coming week or two and hope to go into the final process (reference checking, terms negotiation etc.) after that."

  • Should university students be allowed to reference Wikipedia?: An Australian and British website asked this tantalizing question last week.
  • Typography update: The Foundation has announced upcoming changes to its typography. The alterations were covered by FastCoDesign. Further Signpost coverage can be read in this week's technology report and accompanying op-ed.
  • OTRS statistics: The statistics for the Wikimedia-wide Volunteer Response Team have been published on Meta.
  • Geography of Fame: A New York Times opinion article this week based its data on a selection of articles on Wikipedia. "The Geography of Fame" stated:
  • Russian Wikipedia statement on Crimea: Reactions to Russia's recent invasion of Ukrainian Crimea have inspired a Facebook post from the Russian Wikipedia. Chief among their concerns: "Russian Wikipedia is Wikipedia in the Russian language, not Wikipedia of the Russian Federation."

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2014-03-26

Winter hath a beauty that is all his own

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By Adam Cuerden and Pine
The Wiesen Viaduct in Switzerland is the subject of this beautiful new featured picture.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 16 March 2014 to 23 March 2014.
The Anglo-American band The Jimi Hendrix Experience produced the album Are You Experienced

Four articles were promoted to featured status this week.

  • Fuck: Word Taboo and Protecting Our First Amendment Liberties (nominated by Cirt) This book by Ohio State University law professor Christopher M. Fairman was published in 2009. The book discusses the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and other issues relating to freedom of speech, the use of the word "fuck", censorship, and word taboo.
  • Poetry of Maya Angelou (nominated by Christine (Figureskatingfan)) Noted African-American author Maya Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of United States President Bill Clinton in 1993. Angelou has been called "the black woman's poet laureate". She is better known for her autobiographies than her poems, although her first book of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
  • Are You Experienced (nominated by GabeMc) The rock band the Jimi Hendrix Experience released this LP record album in 1967. It was recorded at five locations in London, England. The album peaked at number 2 on the U.K. album sales charts. Rueben Jackson of the Smithsonian Institution wrote: "it's still a landmark recording because it is of the rock, R&B, blues ... musical tradition. It altered the syntax of the music ... in a way I compare to James Joyce's Ulysses."
  • Four Freedoms (Norman Rockwell) (nominated by TonyTheTiger) This series of four oil paintings by American artist Norman Rockwell includes Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The paintings reference the January 1941 Four Freedoms State of the Union address by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. For a time, reproductions of the four paintings were often found in public buildings such as post offices and railroad stations. The paintings are Rockwell's best-known works although they met with mixed critical reviews.
This $2 silver certificate with Robert Fulton and Samuel B. Morse is not only part of one of our largest sets of featured pictures, but is also part of a new featured list!

Two lists were promoted to featured status this week.

  • Silver certificate (United States) (nominated by Godot13) Silver certificates are a kind of representative money. These notes were issued in the United States between 1878 and 1964. Denominations ranged from $1 to $1000. The notes have been obsolete since 1968 but are still valid legal tender. The article says that the notes "were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Fourth Coinage Act, which had effectively placed the United States on a gold standard".
  • List of songs recorded by Sophie Ellis-Bextor (nominated by Prism) Ellis-Bextor is an English recording artist. She has recorded songs for five studio albums including collaborations. She issued her first studio album in 2001. Her successful singles include "Mixed Up World", "I Won't Change You", "Young Blood" and "Runaway Daydreamer".

Twelve pictures were promoted to featured status this week.

Sloth isn't just a deadly sin – it's a featured picture!
The interior of Stockholm Central Station.


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2014-03-26

Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia

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By Jared Zimmerman
Jared Zimmerman is the Wikimedia Foundation's Director of User Experience. The User Experience team is a part of the Engineering & Product Development department at the Wikimedia Foundation. Team members are responsible for the design of new Wikimedia software products—how they look, feel, and behave when used. User experience designers have been integral in the launch of Wikimedia software like Wikipedia's mobile website and apps and the new notifications system, among others.
The old typography (above) and the new (below) on Ubuntu using Firefox

On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing and four major iterations and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we've arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.

What's changing

First, you'll notice a serif typeface is now used for headers, to more clearly differentiate them from body content. Main body content is displayed in a sans-serif typeface using a very dark grey on true white background, which decreases eye strain for people reading long blocks of text. You also may notice increased leading (the vertical space between lines in a paragraph), to improve readability and create a clean break for the scanning eye.

The old typography (above) and the new (below) on OS X using Chrome
Why we've updated our typography

Text is our core visual element of Wikimedia projects, whether it's an encyclopedia like Wikipedia, or a smaller project like Wikisource and Wikibooks. We want our users to sense accuracy, reliability, and clarity from our design. We also want to avoid overly flashy typography that detracts from the content. Prior to this typography update, we had more than 20 arbitrarily defined type sizes on desktop alone, which appeared inconsistent for our users. The type size was too small for many readers, and the line height could make reading long form content difficult. We often observed users with visual impairments using text zooming to increase text size, for instance. For headings, these should act as entry points in long pages of text and were styled accordingly to aid readability. We sought to achieve better balance and cohesiveness for users to efficiently scan the page or engage in long form reading.

These changes will be familiar if you have accessed the mobile version of any Wikimedia project, as most of the changes were first trialled there in 2012. Later, with the release of the new Beta Features system for desktop, these changes have been available to desktop users on an opt-in basis since November 2013. We have used Wikimedia mobile as a place to experiment with new features and designs which we continuously migrate to desktop version of our sites. We have extended that process to the desktop beta features to further refine these changes to be appropriate for larger screens. With this typography update, we are taking another step towards a consistent visual experience across desktop and mobile.

Learn more

We are extremely pleased about how well this collaborative process has gone and we look forward to you sharing your experience with the update. The following pieces of documentation may be useful if you have further questions or comments:

2014-03-26

Why will Wikipedia look like the Signpost?

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By Edokter
Old and new typography on Windows (with free fonts installed)
Old and new typography on Ubuntu with Firefox

As you have probably read on this week's op-ed, or via various other channels of announcement, 3 April will see the introduction of the Typography refresh (or update) for the Vector skin on all Wikipedias. Other projects like Commons will have this update rolled out a few days before. You may also have tested the beta option. Basically, this means you will see some, and may see other changes on Wikipedia. In short:

  1. H1 and H2 headers will show in a serif font.
  2. The body font may show on a different font, depending on your operating system and installed fonts.
  3. The font size and leading (line height) of body text are increased slightly.
  4. The body font color becomes a very dark gray instead of black.
  5. Pre-formatted text that is wider then the screen will show a scrollbar. [Removed last minute]

Other features that were in the beta but were not strictly typography-related, such as the restyled table of contents, thumbnail and blockquote styling, have been removed.

For most Windows readers, this means the headers will show in Georgia and the body text will stay in Arial, albeit slightly larger. For most Mac users this will be the same, but where the pages would normally show in Helvetica, it will now show in Helvetica Neue (it may be hard to see any difference).

On Linux, effects may vary. Where several distros and browsers all had their own default font settings, resulting in many different looks, the new typography should equalize them all to use Liberation Sans for body text. The headers may show in Linux Libertine, Georgia or Times, in that order of preference, depending on which of them are installed.

Georgia may look familiar; the Signpost has used it for its headers for some time now. And that is why...

Tech News highlights

VisualEditor news

  • You can now double-click or press the ↲ Enter key on an image or template to change its settings. [1] [2]
  • Pages that don't exist will now show as red links in the edit mode. [3]
  • You will no longer be able to try to use VisualEditor on pages translated using the Translate extension, and you will see a warning if you try to edit pages marked for translation. [4]
  • You will now see a full warning, including the most recent log entry, when you try to edit protected pages with VisualEditor. [5]

Future software changes

2014-03-26

From the peak

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By Mabeenot

This week, the Signpost interviewed Skookum1 from the Mountains WikiProject.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Mountains? What aspects of mountains interest you the most? Have you ever climbed a mountain?
  • Skookum1: Mountain and mountain range articles were actually my first sally into Wikipedia, once I left the Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia/Bivouac Mountain Encyclopedia, bringing what I knew about range structures/organization into Wikipedia was an obvious course of action once I found out about this place. I guess re which mountains those in the Pacific Northwest and of course especially BC, where I'm from are the ones that interest me the most, as I know the turf well. Being from there of course I've hiked mountains, but not as an alpinist; many of the ones in my own area you can drive to the top of...
Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured or Good Articles? What challenges are impeding the ascent of other mountain articles to Featured status?
  • Skookum1: I'm not sure, maybe re FAs and GAs, I think some of the volcano ones I participated in did. Main challenge? Sources for expansion. Bivouac.com and peakbagger.com are not authoritative sources, especially the former where the siteowner makes up names to suit himself. Also name origin in many cases as BC Names does not have the resources (she's one person, I'm in semi-regular contact with on BC articles) to transfer all her historical/name origin hard copy over into that system.
Are some continents or regions better covered than others? What can be done to improve Wikipedia's coverage of all mountains across the globe?
Skookum1: I'd say North America and the BC/Pacific Northwest; maybe the Alps are covered in more detail and all peaks and ranges are accounted for, maybe the Himalayas too? I'd say for improving global coverage engaging the various national and regional wikiprojects would help a lot, understaffed as they are.
Has WikiProject Mountains taken full advantage of Wikipedia's geographical coordinate system? Are there peaks, ranges, and passes that still need geolocation data?
  • Skookum1: Maybe some but not on any of worked on, where if coords weren't there I added them, but mostly they were. Wikipedia should not rely on coords taken from GPS but from official sources (BC Basemap, the NGS/NTS, USGS etc.
Does WikiProject Mountains cover mountain springs or underwater features like seamounts? Are there any ways WikiProject Mountains could partner with WikiProject Rivers and WikiProject Oceans to improve coverage of all mountain-related geological features?
  • Skookum1: The area of springs and also geology/mining data is definitely in need of work/expansion. And yes, re seamounts WP:Oceans should be engaged, I'd assumed they already were. I'm not sure how WP:Rivers could fit in but WP:Waterfalls definitely – and WP:Mining and of course WP:Geology. In some cases I've pondered eg. Category:Lakes in the Coast Mountains and similar subcategories.
Have you been involved with any other projects covering geography, geology, or ecosystems? What can be done to improve collaboration between interrelated scientific disciplines on Wikipedia?
  • Skookum1: Lots; I worked quite a bit on ecozones/ecoregions and tried to deal with nomenclature problems as some of those names are not actual mountain titles, e.g. Boreal Mountains which is a Canadian ecozone.
What are the most urgent needs of WikiProject Mountains? How can a new contributor help today?
  • Skookum1: Expanding articles though if anyone has the knowledge/information access new articles even in the Pacific Northwest which is heavily covered are much in need. Both those apply to new contributor activity also. Oh, and pics where it's possible, if the new contributor or experienced editor are near the mountains/ranges an article is about.
Anything else you'd like to add?
  • Skookum1: I get accused of "walls of text" and thereby ignored, so I won't go on. Maybe more conscientious use of primary data sources rather than e.g. GPS or Googlemap coords used in place of them is an important area of concern.

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