Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-07-26
New collaboration checks biographies across 71 Wikipedias for consistency
One of the sad facts about biographies of living people is that eventually one has to update the biography because the subject has died. Sometimes we are not as quick at that as we'd like to be, but as many notable people have bios on multiple language versions of Wikipedia, there is an opportunity to share information between different Wikipedia projects. Hence the creation of meta:Death_anomalies_table in June 2010. This table and set of lists enables any project that has a category equivalent to Category:Living people to feed in data, and request a report out.
The en.wiki report is at Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis. User:Merlissimo has a bot that updates it daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.
While data is now being fed in from over 70 different languages, reports are only being generated for the German and English Wikipedias. However, initial results on en.wiki are encouraging: well over a hundred anomalies have been resolved, with probably more out-of-date biographies fixed than incorrect wikilinks corrected. As the number of contributing Wikipedias and interwiki links increases, we anticipate that the number of anomalies this finds will increase.
| “ | I'm excited to see this kind of machine-assisted editing. In the foreseeable future, it will not be possible for machines to actually make judgment calls about editorial matters, but it is entirely possible for this type of work, as well as more advanced semantic analysis, to provide useful assistance to human editors, particularly in finding contradictions and anomalies. Merlissimo is a rock star! | ” |
| — Jimbo Wales, 26th July 2010 | ||
Briefly
- As reported previously by The Signpost, the Wikimedia Foundation's recently formed Community Department wants to fill several positions. It is specifically inviting Wikimedians to apply (a page inviting submissions has been up for more than three weeks). A post on the Foundation's blog on July 17 explained the motive for trying a different kind of job advertisement: "At Wikimedia we are always looking to innovate – to try new things and see how they work.... Rather than focus on traditional resources for hiring new talent, we have decided to put out a call to the broad, global audience that visits our projects. We’re focused on casting our net widely – in many languages and countries. Our goal is to find interesting people; people who have unique experience and skills and are interested in working with us." It was also announced that banners with a link to the submissions form would be posted on Wikimedia projects.
- The log for the July 15 IRC office hour, a public chat with Frank Schulenburg, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Public Outreach, has been posted.
- The log for the July 22 IRC office hour, a public chat with Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, has been posted. Among the topics covered were the Foundation's plans for Africa, community hiring (see above), the concept of chapter-selected members of the Board of Trustees, and the geographical distribution of chapters. Gardner said she hoped she would be able to do IRC office hours more often – every two weeks – because the Foundation's shift to a "community giving" revenue strategy, away from large grants to small donations, means that she has more time to interact with community members instead of major benefactors.
- In June, Wikipedia – now (usually) the seventh most popular website in the world – was surpassed on Alexa world site traffic statistics by the Chinese search engine Baidu.com, which took the sixth position [1] and [2].
- Wikipedia researcher Felipe Ortega (User:GlimmerPhoenix) has posted summaries of Wikimania 2010 and Wikisym 2010, and was interviewed on the CPOV blog, commenting on his research (including the WikiXRay tool) and on the future of Wikipedia.
- Robert Harris, the consultant who was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation last month to provide recommendations to the Board later this year for the handling of objectionable content on Wikimedia projects (see Signpost coverage), has now invited Wikimedia communities to comment on a list of ten Questions for Discussion.
- In a nine-minute interview recently posted on YouTube, students from Colgate University (as Nbenfield, Mrobson1987 and Kblum201) reflected on an assignment to edit certain Wikipedia articles, part of a senior history seminar held by professor Noor Khan (apparently not yet listed at Wikipedia:School and university projects).
- In a blog post last month titled The art of editing Wikipedia, an employee of the European Commission asked "should the European Commission edit EU-related Wikipedia pages?" She started by recalling a case where the staff of the Commission's Vice-President Antonio Tajani had tried to correct what they considered to be wrong information (a "euromyth" stemming from a UK newspaper) in the article about him, reviewed Wikipedia policies and help pages such as the Organizations FAQ as well as general Wikipedia advice from PR experts. She concluded "all things considered, monitoring and editing Wikipedia entries related to the EU would be risky, time-consuming and would require substantial human resources".
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High Wikipedia customer satisfaction explained by user interface stability and non-profit nature
The American Customer Satisfaction Index, a monthly report by a Michigan-based company that measures customer satisfaction scores on a scale of 0 to 100 for many companies in the U.S., included Wikipedia.org for the first time in its survey. The results have just been published: Wikipedia scored 77 out of 100, the highest among the four sites in its category of "Internet Social Media", while YouTube was second with a score of 73. Against entries from the "Internet News & Information" category – which may have been a better categorization for Wikipedia – we also do well, tying for second place with USAToday.com. First place for informational websites was FoxNews.com, with 82 points, five more than Wikipedia. Each result is based on 250 telephone interviews with customers in the U.S.
In a commentary on the results, Claes Fornell, a professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan and the founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, explained Wikipedia's good result ("more satisfying than most of the ACSI-measured news and information websites") as follows:
- Like Google, Wikipedia’s user interface has remained very consistent over the years, and its nonprofit standing means that it has not been impacted by commercialization and marketing unlike many other social media sites.
Fornell contrasted this with the poor results for the bottom two in the social media category, Facebook and Myspace, which he said are due to "controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization" on these sites.
Wikipedia, Google Translate and Wikimedia's India strategy
As reported in last week's News and notes, the recent Wikimania conference saw a presentation by Google that described the company's effort to increase the content in various smaller Wikipedia versions – "Arabic, Indic languages, and Swahili" – mostly using its Google Translate machine translation service.
In addition to the coverage and reactions mentioned last week, by CNet, The New York Times and a Wikipedian from the Tamil Wikipedia, the topic was examined at length in a front-page story in Indian newspaper The Telegraph, titled Wiki learns a lesson in Bengali. The paper focused on the reaction of the Bengali Wikipedia, which "took great umbrage and deleted Google-generated content because the translated material simply did not meet its standards." It cited two of the project's administrators (Ragib and Jayantanth) and Bishakha Datta, the Foundation's Board member from India.
Another recent blog post "What happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia", by Muddyb Blast Producer, a bureaucrat on the Swahili Wikipedia who is based in Tanzania, looked back at the company's "Kiswahili Wikipedia Challenge", in which university students were awarded prizes for submitting articles written using Google Translate (see earlier Signpost coverage). Muddyb appreciated the intentions behind the contest and its quantitative success ("we’ve got a huge number of [new] articles"), but had concerns about the quality of the added content which were quite similar to those of the Bengali and Tamil Wikipedians. He expressed disappointment that the contestants hadn't turned into sustained contributors, and were not responding when asked to help in correcting their articles:
- Nearly all of them are gone now and left a lot of articles which often are not really state of the art formally and also linguistically ... they don’t care because they were there for laptops and other prizes (no need to be rude, but it hurts me pretty bad).
Such concerns about Google's and other projects assisted by machine translation was briefly mentioned in an article titled "The state of the Wiki in India" (a guest post on GerardM's blog last week), by Salmaan Haroon, another Wikipedian from India who had also recently attended Wikimania: "India currently provides the fourth largest traffic to Wikipedia according to Alexa.com, behind United States, Japan and Germany", with much more potential as "India is poised for exponential growth in terms of internet users". Based on a description of the country's language diversity and the role of English as a "lingua franca", he argued that the Wikimedia Foundation should aim at "establishing a strong user base first and getting a high visibility rate in India" (which might involve the English language Wikipedia more than those in smaller languages) "before a diverse base could be nurtured".
An article about Wikimania published by The Indian Express (Wikipedia, growing local) made a similar recommendation. The author, Gautam John, is involved in the process to establish an Indian Wikimedia chapter (which was already approved last month by the Foundation). He wrote that "the emphasis needs to be on boosting contributions in all Indian languages, including English – rather than just an 'Indic languages vs English' paradigm". Apart from the presentations about Google's translation projects, the article reported on Wikimania talks relevant for India, including Jimmy Wales' keynote and a presentation by Achal Prabhala, a Wikimedia advisory board member from Bangalore.
Citizendium still in transition after one year
An article in the Times Higher Education (THE) last week (University may be given the keys to Citizendium) reported that Larry Sanger, the sole founder of the free online encyclopedia Citizendium, was considering "handing the reins to a university or a scholarly press" as "one possible future model for governing the project" after his planned departure as its editor-in-chief. Sanger reported "interest from major universities in both the US and the UK", but also mused on the possibility of a department within a university or a non-profit think-tank as Citizendium's "sponsoring or parent organisation".
Around the time of the project's inception in 2006, Sanger had announced that he would step down after two or three years. In July 2009, after he had become largely inactive as editor-in-chief, Sanger recalled that promise and reiterated his intention to step down after a sustainable governance structure was set up. This prompted a journalist from The Financial Times to declare "Citizendium founder ready to jump ship", and to report that Sanger was "looking for a suitable institution to take over management of his pet project" at that time already.
According to the recent THE article, Sanger's "executive committee [is] in the process of finalising a charter for how to proceed." The THE also mentioned criticism of Citizendium, from claims that "the site had progressed too slowly" to "suggestions that the articles are less scholarly than they purport to be"; however, Sanger said he believed it is "just a matter of time before we become a leading online community and reference work". (See also earlier Signpost coverage: Role of experts on Wikipedia and Citizendium examined)
The article prompted Wikimedia Board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj) to reflect in a blog post (Citizendium: failure to thrive, in search of peace) on Citizendium's difficulties, while still expressing "hope for a proliferation of cousin projects, all competing to find the best way to spur collaboration around free knowledge". In particular, Sj wrote about the problem of article verification (called "approval" on Citizendium), asking whether full academic qualifications should be demanded from reviewers, or whether the academic field of Law in the U.S. could provide inspiration, where "the most distinguished reviewed publications" are law reviews that are run by students without degrees, instead of being peer reviewed.
Larry Sanger had last made headlines after reporting the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI and to his political representatives for "knowingly distributing child pornography" (see Signpost coverage).
Jimbo named as 47th most powerful person in media
British newspaper The Guardian last Monday named Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, to be the 47th most influential person in media in 2010 in their annual MediaGuardian 100 list, for which a panel of judges pick the 100 most influential media personalities of the year.
"Rather than writing about Wales we could simply point you to his Wikipedia entry – but beware of using the website as a single source. Its great strength – that its articles can be written and updated by anyone – can also be its weakness, although inaccuracies, both accidental and deliberate, tend not to last for long. Alabama-born Wales, who made his fortune as a Chicago futures trader, described Wikipedia as a 'charitable humanitarian effort to create and distribute a free high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet', one in which 'any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any topic'".
— The Guardian MediaGuardian 100 2010. Monday 19 July 2010
Briefly
- In a satirical blog post, Gary Marshall of Techradar joked that several movies were to be made regarding Internet sites, one of them Wikipedia. "Written, directed and acted entirely by volunteers, the Wikipedia movie is an incomprehensible pile of old tosh featuring bearded men arguing", the post read.
- In a post on sync-blog.com, freelance journalist Marc Saltzman stated why he does not trust Wikipedia: "Consider it a communal work-in-progress project that blurs the lines between surfer and publisher. As such, many teachers and professors won’t allow Wikipedia to be cited as a source for essays, book reports or other assignments. Despite that, many students frequent the site for quick, easy-to-read explanations on a wide range of subjects.... with so many millions of Wikipedia.org visitors, many of whom make slight alterations and tweaks on entries, it could be argued the information is whittled down to the 'truth' over time."
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- With the release of StarCraft II on July 27, the StarCraft Task Force could use new members to help improve articles about the series' characters, species, locations, reception, and cultural influences.
- The new Unreferenced BLP Rescue Project aims to eliminate unreferenced BLPs from Wikipedia by concentrating on one month's tagged articles at a time
- This is the final week of the Guild of Copy Editors' July Backlog Elimination Drive. Help the project clear out their backlog and earn yourself a barnstar along the way.
- Interested in mysterious creatures like Bigfoot, Yeti, and Chupacabra? WikiProject Cryptozoology is getting revamped and needs more editors to help!
- Help improve the July WikiProject Universities Collaborations: University of Wales, Lampeter and the Annapolis Group.
This week, we explored WikiProject Star Trek. Started in October 2004, the project has grown to include over 100 members who create and improve articles about the Star Trek franchise. WikiProject Star Trek is a child of WikiProject Television and grandchild of WikiProject Entertainment. The project maintains a portal, article guidelines, a to-do list, and a recent changes watchlist. We interviewed project members David Fuchs, pd_THOR, and EEMIV.
David Fuchs, a self-described "full-time Star Trek geek" and Wikipedia admin, built the Starship Enterprise out of cardboard in art school. He says "it's only natural that I'd like to write about it online as well." To pd_THOR, his love for Star Trek has to be balanced with his love for Wikipedia. He writes that "I don't want Star Trek content to look like a fanboy wet dream on Wikipedia; I feel very strongly that the real world probably has enough verifiable, reliable sourcable content to legitimately and encyclopedically discuss Star Trek topics." EEMIV stumbled into Wikipedia one day to edit an article about a club he was part of in college. Poking around, he ran into the Star Trek content and jumped right in. EEMIV confesses that his initial efforts were made under the assumption that Wikipedia could be "another repository for lots of in-universe, trivial information" but he "got shaken of that soon enough."
The project is home to 7 featured articles and 2 good articles, all of which David Fuchs has worked on. He shared with us that "getting the directors' edition DVD of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was the springboard for me to start on a mission to create a featured topic out of all eleven (probably twelve by the time I finish) Star Trek feature films." He's also worked on an episode and character FA as well. pd_THOR had praise for Fuchs, stating that David Fuchs "has done more for our project alone than I feel I've done for the whole of Wikipedia in six years. We're blessed to have such a tenacious quality-oriented editor." pd_THOR refered to his own edits with modesty, stating that he had "made a few edits to Star Trek: First Contact when it was being improved to FA-quality, but I don't know if anything stuck." EEMIV describes his contributions as "gnome-ish" and based on a "fix-small-things attitude." He has edited "small, picayune details" for FA and GA nominations, but he has also taken a leadership role on one occasion and looks forward to the day "when James T. Kirk meets the GA threshold, having kickstarted the overhaul of that one."
With a wide range of information from the multiple television series, movies, and other media, we asked the project members: "How does the project determine notability for the characters, locales, and technologies in the Star Trek canon? Does the project frequently deal with cleaning out in-universe language or fancruft?" Each of our interviewees had a few things to say:
- David Fuchs: I think that aside from the Star Wars universe, Star Trek has the most enduring and complex science-fiction universe ever represented. Fortunately from an editor's standpoint, most of the expanded universe materials—Star Trek books, comics, et cetera—are not considered canon, so that cuts out a large sphere of potential article issues other projects might wrestle with. That said, there's more than 500 hours of Trek out there, and deciding what stays and goes can be difficult. Wikipedia has articles on pretty much every single episode of Trek ever produced, most of them fairly shoddy, but the fact that there is a huge heap of Trek scholarship out there that could be used to source them, when we get around to it, means that merges are generally a bad idea. It's safe to say that while the project recognizes fancruft and deals with it pretty well, there's still lots of in-universe articles that are languishing for lack of attention and energy.
- pd_THOR: Just as it is for any fandom subset of articles on Wikipedia, once upon a time there were articles made for EVERYTHING, and there's a lot of Star Trek to mine for content. We're aware that there's a lot of Star Trek on Wikipedia right now that probably doesn't warrant an article or inclusion. That being said, with Star Trek having produced content for nigh half-a-century, there's almost an equal amount of ancillary content from which to derive appropriate real-world context for a lot of that "cruft"; the problem is simply finding it all and implementing it appropriately. Personally, I have no qualms about merging and deleting articles that aren't up to stuff (policy- and guideline-wise) because I think (a) that's the community agreed-upon process, and (b) if it can—"eventually"—be sourced providing the right editor finds the right material, it can always rise from the grave. That's one of the wonders of a wiki.
- EEMIV: Sublimely, one of my first Star Trek-related edits at Wikipedia was to create Cellular regeneration and entertainment chamber, which months if not years later was redirected because it failed the notability guideline. Early, I also got involved in editing articles about Star Trek ranks and ships, often adding plot trivia. At some point, someone hit me in the head with WP:WAF, which shook up my perspective about what's appropriate for Wikipedia. I later discovered the contentious WP:FICT and broader WP:GNG. As David Fuchs says, there's a wealth of source material out there -- never mind 500 hours, there are tens of thousands of pages, gigabytes of games, spindles of CDs -- and not all of it warrants inclusion here. The writing about fiction and general notability guidelines are my guideposts and occasional bludgeons in looking at articles. I'm a fan of the franchise (something I try to point out during contentious AfD and even redirect discussions), which I usually think puts me in a good position to gauge how well an article can or might meet those thresholds. Ultimately, I want content that can meet those two to be the best Wikipedia can offer, and for that content not to be diluted by stuff better hosted at e.g. Memory Alpha, a Wikia site that loooooves minutiae and fosters the kind of speculation that creeps into Wikipedia's too-in-universe content. I feel comfortable nominating content for deletion, or redirecting questionable content, because I'm confident that users looking for that information will find it either elsewhere at Wikipedia or at the excellent Memory Alpha site. As a side note, I think the Star Trek and Star Wars communities are fortunate to have such excellent Wikia support; I've backed away from pursuing deletion and culling of other franchises because I'm not sure their content that would get culled here would be accessible elsewhere.
Another wiki, Memory Alpha, serves as a vast repository for Star Trek lore. pd_THOR "actually came across Wikipedia after finding Memory Alpha in late 2004. Memory Alpha satisfied the almost OCD-level of Star Trek knowledge I was looking for when StarTrek.com, The Star Trek Encyclopedia, nor even Wikipedia could. That, I think, is the singular difference between the two Wikis, and one I took a while to learn at first; Memory Alpha covers anything in Star Trek canon (consisting of the published TV series and the films), requiring only a reference to the episode or film... [including an] article for Alvanian brandy, an alcohol that's only referenced once in all of Trekdom, and is only on screen for a few seconds. In contrast, Wikipedia's article for the episode in which Alvanian brandy appeared is nominally a stub on Wikipedia; consisting only of the episode's plot, airing minutae, and one "reference" to StarTrek.com. Wikipedians would be hard-pressed to argue for inclusion of [Alvanian brandy]."
EEMIV adds that "Memory Alpha is an excellent complement to what Wikipedia offers. There have been a few times, actually, when Memory Alpha has had superior sourcing: I definitely turned to many of their real-world citations when revamping James T. Kirk. I am disappointed that MA limits its content to "canon," although I think perhaps they permit "in this non-canon book, X happens" to be included -- maybe not. Regardless: it's a great site. Community connection? I don't know: I've edited MA only a handful of times, and have no sense of whether people jump between the two."
When asked how WikiProject Star Trek handles fanon, the "decanonized" Star Trek: The Animated Series, and inconsistencies within the official canon, pd_THOR refered us to the project's detailed section dedicated to dealing with Star Trek canon. EEMIV opined that the "definitions of "canon" are themselves WP:OR -- a few years at TrekBBS.com rehashing that debate cemented that for me." His attitude toward canon is that it doesn't matter as long as third-party sources provide appropriate and thorough coverage. "There's a lot of information about elements of The Animated Series, and certainly fan productions garner a lot of ink -- but BobKirk1701's latest diagram of the Uber-class war-destroyer probably won't wind up at Wikipedia."
Not surprisingly, the members of WikiProject Star Trek are involved in other projects that focus on sci-fi franchises, like WikiProject Star Wars. EEMV mentions that "certainly there are a lot of familiar names across both projects, and talk-page discussions often draw in folks more heavily involved with Fiction-at-Wikipedia in general."
David Fuchs reviewed several old Star Wars GAs as part of Sweeps, and relates that "like many early articles they were rather shoddy." EEMIV's work on Wikipedia actually leans more toward Star Wars-related material than Star Trek. He states that "I've done heavy lifting for a few GAs, and also do the same kind of category clean-up and redirect action I do with Star Trek. I notice the Star Wars venue's similar struggle with trivia and minutiae, although I think for the most part they're further along in trimming that -- except when it comes to the printed material, esp. comics, still laden with material I don't have the comfort level and know-how to clean-up. David Fuchs feels that "a cross-collaboration of media franchise projects would greatly help the accessibility of our articles. Too often are articles about fiction solid and well-referenced, but utterly impenetrable to non-fans of the series. By having each other checking our work, we might see some of those issues disappear."
As far as the project's current initiatives and goals, David Fuchs took the lead in inviting new members to help with his personal project at WikiProject Star Trek. "Well, as part of my mission to improve all the Trek films, User:Erik sorted through his research databases and posted a list of possible sources to use on the talk page of every article. Anyone with good LexisNexis or interlibrary loan resources can find these and add the relevant information to the articles for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis. Aside from that, helping to demonstrate the notability of individual Star Trek episodes, as well as improving the main Star Trek page and top-priority articles would be hugely beneficial."
Next week's project is a photographer's delight. Until then, flip through our previous snapshots of various projects in the archive.
Reader comments
The current issue and the next will cover only six-day periods as we transition our coverage from Mondays–Sundays back two days, to Saturdays–Fridays. This is important to our need to meet the weekly publication deadline of 03:00 UTC Mondays.
After last week's tsunami of 15 featured article promotions, this week saw no changes to the featured article logs. However, the list of candidates undergoing scrutiny for promotion now numbers 55 articles, so readers can look forward to what will probably be a feast next week. FAC and other content-review processes always welcome more reviewers (see previous Signpost coverage).
Featured lists
Nine lists were promoted:
- List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement (nominated by ARTEST4ECHO, Ecjmartin, and Surv1v4l1st), referring to the "group of sects that follow some portion of the teachings and revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr."
- 2006 boys high school basketball All-Americans (TonyTheTiger), the best high-school basketball players in 2006. "All-American team" is an honorary term for the best amateur players of a specific season for each team position; it is usually bestowed by members of the national media. Notable All-Americans include former number-one draft pick Greg Oden and NBA All-Stars Derrick Rose and Kevin Durant.
- List of former and unopened London Underground stations (DavidCane), which were closed or never opened for a variety of reasons. One station, St Mary's, was used as an air-raid shelter during World War II.
- List of museums in Somerset (Rodw), containing exhibits about topics ranging from plastics to cricket to dolls.
- Paolo Nutini discography (Mister sparky). Nutini's album Sunny Side Up peaked at number one on the UK and Ireland charts.
- List of New York Yankees first-round draft picks (Wizardman and Muboshgu). Four of the picks have won World Series with the team, including three who are currently with the Yankees: Derek Jeter, Phil Hughes, and Joba Chamberlain.
- 3,000 hit club (Staxringold), a select group of baseball players who have recorded at least 3,000 hits. According to the list, "membership in the 3,000 hit club is often described as a guarantee of eventual entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame."
- 1980 Winter Olympics medal table (Courcelles). In those Olympics, the Soviet Union won the most gold medals, while East Germany won the most medals overall.
- Hugo Award for Best Short Story (PresN), given by the World Science Fiction Society for works of fiction that have fewer than 7,500 words.
Choice of the week. We asked Courcelles, author of three featured lists and regular reviewer, for his favorite: "In a subject that offers such potential for high-quality lists, I notice we only have ten FLs related to Christianity, and just a few more on other religions. Seeing one come through FLC is a nice treat, and we got a good one this week: List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement is a well referenced, well illustrated, neutral account of a subject that is familiar only in passing to many. This is one of the highest-quality lists I've seen come through FLC recently, and I hope more are forthcoming."
Featured topics
One topic was promoted: Transandinomys (nominator Ucucha), with two featured articles and one good article. Transandinomys is a genus of rodents found in forests from Honduras in Central America down to the coastal regions of Ecuador and northwestern Venezuela in South America. They are distinguished by their very long whiskers.
Featured pictures
This week was quiet compared with last week's 23 promotions, although this is partially because of the six-day period we're using to give our commentators a bit more time.
Five images were promoted:
- Black-headed Bunting, a bird from Southeast Europe and the Middle East, by Mark S Jobling
- French cyclist Léon Georget in 1909. Photo by Bain News Service, restoration by Jujutacular
- Brandenburg an der Havel, a panoramic image of a town in Brandenburg, Germany, by Mathias Krumbholz
- Mating wheel of the Common Blue Damselfly, by L. B. Tettenborn.
- An odd-eyed cat, with one eye yellow and the other blue, by Keith Kissel.
Choice of the week. TonyTheTiger, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "My choice this week is French cyclist Léon Georget. It is a timely choice since the 2010 Tour de France concluded yesterday. I consider the restoration work to be tremendous. I am also excited to see an interesting non-taxonomy of life image get promoted."
Main Page featured highlights
Selections from our favourite articles and images to reach the main page this week.
Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. Internationally he is known for his opera The Bartered Bride, and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land. A gifted pianist, Smetana studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. In 1866 his first two operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, were premiered at Prague's Provisional Theatre, the latter achieving great popularity. Factions in the city's musical establishment interfered with his creative work, and may have hastened his health breakdown. By 1874, Smetana had become completely deaf but, freed from his theatre duties and the related controversies, he began a period of sustained composition. His contributions to Czech music were increasingly recognised and honoured, but a mental collapse in 1884 led to his incarceration in an asylum and his subsequent death. Smetana's reputation as the father of Czech music has endured in his homeland, where advocates have raised his status above that of his contemporaries and successors. (more...)
The Mary Rose was a warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII in the first half of the 16th century. During four decades of service in wars against France, Scotland and Brittany, she was one of the largest ships in the English navy and one of the earliest ships specially built for warfare. The Mary Rose is well-known today due to the fact that she sank intact on 19 July 1545 in the battle of the Solent north of the Isle of Wight, while leading an attack on French galleys. The wreck of the Mary Rose was rediscovered in 1971 and salvaged in October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology. Though much of the ship has deteriorated, the surviving section of the hull, with thousands of artefacts, is of immeasurable value as a time capsule of the Tudor period. The excavation and salvage of the Mary Rose has since become a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable only to the raising of the Swedish 17th-century warship Vasa in 1961. The finds include weapons, sailing equipment, naval supplies and a wide array of objects used by the crew, providing detailed knowledge of the era in which the ship was built, in peacetime as in war. Many of the artefacts are unique to the Mary Rose and have provided insights into topics ranging from naval warfare to the history of musical instruments. While undergoing conservation, the remains of the hull and many of its related artefacts have been on display since the mid-1980s in the Mary Rose Museum in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. (more...)
Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions, independently of whether they are true. As a result, people gather new evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military and political contexts. (more...)
Administrators
There were no promotions to adminship.
Reader comments
- RfC on Username policy: Should the username policy be reworded, to tolerate the innocent use of obscure company, group or product names?
- Should user books be always NOINDEX?
- Rfc: Wording of the SOCK policy regarding clean starts and prior blocks
- RFC on Consensus: To what extent and under what circumstances can contributors/Projects customize article appearance with individual styles that deviate from site-wide style guidelines?
- RFC: Should Wikipedia:Notability (criminal acts) be merged with Wikipedia:Notability (events) and Wikipedia:Notability (people)?
Wikipedia continually sees heated discussions over issues large and small. The Signpost chooses the most important debates, RFCs, discussions and AfDs each fortnight, so you don't have to!
You have new messages
On Saturday, David Spector suggested a new feature be made available as an option for all users: in addition to the orange banner telling a user that another Wikipedian had edited their talk page, the user would be sent an e-mail informing them of this.
It soon emerged that such a feature was available on MediaWiki, but it had been disabled on the English Wikipedia because of performance issues. Dougweller said, "I'd hate it. I don't want that much email. Vandals might love it."
TreasuryTag was the first to object. "I simply do not see the point. If anybody is interested in the collaborative side of Wikipedia, then they will most likely use the site. Even if they do not keep an eye on their watchlist, the orange 'new messages' banner will always alert them if anybody wishes to get in touch, no matter what page is being viewed at the time." He said it would be "irritating" for active editors to receive an e-mail every time a message was left on their talk page. He concluded that "any needless drain on the Wikimedia Foundation's (charitable) resources should not be contemplated" if developer time were needed to fix the performance issues.
However, Sadads thought it was a good idea: "if I didn't spend every waking moment plugged into Wikipedia I would want to get e-mails when I [had] something on my talk. It would be like what I do with Facebook."
Following TreasuryTag's comments on potential performance issues, David Spector, "a semi-retired software engineer with about 40 years' experience working with computers", said he did not think such a system would have any impact on performance. "I can't see how sending an email to those who want one whenever their Talk page changes would create a performance problem ... this is a Proposals page", he said. "I assume that means that every proposal will be considered for implementation on its merits, not on some memory of 'they already rejected that' ... of course, if there really would be a performance problem, or this proposal turned out to help vandals significantly, then this proposal should not be implemented."
TreasuryTag countered this, saying that the feature had been disabled by "a team of dedicated experts to make such judgements." David Spector responded that "I've designed and implemented improvements on a time-series, multidimensional OLAP business database system for Dun and Bradstreet. I improved the runtime performance of the Multics linker by 27%. I currently do database development for another startup of mine. I understand performance issues well. What I don't understand is the unnecessary but pervading atmosphere of viciousness here at WP." TreasuryTag told Spector that "We have developers to make decisions about performance. If you consider this apportionment of functions according to expertise to be 'vicious' then perhaps Wikipedia is not the right environment for you."
The proposal discussion continues.
No consensus for article "pretending to be something that it isn't"
Cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster was nominated for deletion by Rodhullandemu who thought the article had "become a repository for unsourced trivia of the worst kind. There is no encyclopedic treatment or commentary, it's just a list of mentions."
Colonel Warden disagreed, pointing to a book chapter on the cultural impact of the disaster. Themfromspace supported the nomination: "an article on this topic may be acceptable if written in prose and compiled through material found in reliable sources which discuss the cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster."
SummerWithMorons thought the article should be kept and that the AfD was invalid. "Arguments for deletion must be based on the notability of the subject itself. The supposed inadequacy of the content of current version of the article may be an argument for other changes, not for deletion."
Mandsford replied: "honestly, does anyone see anything here that describes the 'cultural impact' of the Chernobyl disaster? This one really was called 'Chernobyl in popular culture' until last year, and it's possible that someone hit the panic button when i.p.c. articles were being nominated, but this article is definitely not about the cultural impact of the Chernobyl disaster. We have lots of good articles that use the conventional 'in popular culture' name, and perhaps it's time for this one to go back to calling itself what it is, rather than to be pretending to be something that it isn't."
Courcelles closed the AfD more than a week after the nomination was posted. The result was no consensus.
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The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
Open cases
- Climate change (Week 7): Special rules of conduct were put in place for this arbitration. The case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Although the case is still technically open, the workshop phase has been closed to give a break to all participants while arbitrators think about a proposed decision.
- Race and intelligence (Week 8): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The proposed decision that was drafted by Coren has sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants. After last week's Signpost was published, Signpost readers have also made on-wiki comments about the proposed resolution of the case (example). The case remains in the proposed decision phase.
Motion
- Eastern European mailing list: A motion was passed: the case remedy that banned Miacek from the Eastern Europe topic was lifted.
Other
- The Committee took the unusual step of posting a statement regarding an unsuccessful ban appeal earlier this week, but explained that it was taken in this case because the text of the email appeal was "publicly posted...on an external website" by the subject, Ottava Rima, and because "multiple editors have posted on Ottava Rima's talk page" in relation to the same ban.
The statement on the ban appeal by Ottava Rima provided background surrounding the original case findings and remedies, separate remedies imposed at other Wikimedia Foundation projects close to the date of the ban appeal, Ottava Rima's "correspondence" with the Committee, as well as the focus of his appeal. The statement also provided the decision which "denied" Ottava Rima's ban appeal on the grounds that "he has not yet come to understand the collaborative nature of this project"; this outcome means that the next possible unban request may not be made earlier than 15 January 2011. The last part of the statement, which concerned the act of importing content written by banned users, was clarified by an arbitrator: "ArbCom isn't making any comment on how to transfer in content beyond what already exists in policy, we're just saying that we don't consider legitimately importing content written by a banned editor to be the same thing as proxying for a banned editor."
Note: Last week's Arbitration report coverage of ArbCom announcements regarding the selection of CheckUser and Oversight candidates has drawn some concern by FT2, who provided a reworded version. Here, both versions can be compared. As always, readers are welcome to leave informed comments about the Signpost's coverage and to express their general expectations of the Signpost.
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Proposed changes to category sorting
Last week saw a significant discussion on the wikitech-l technology mailing list about the future of category sorting. The discussion was prompted by Aryeh Gregor (User:Simetrical) announcing that he would be working on the area. Among the outstanding bug requests being targeted was the ability to paginate sub-categories, pages and files separately. Of particular interest to non-English wikis is the development of a system to allow custom category sort-orders, instead of relying on the Unicode specification. For example, this would allow the sorting of "é" straight after "e" in languages that use such a diacritic, rather than at the end of the alphabet as at present. Discussion on how best to fix these bugs is ongoing.
Multimedia upload wizard: preliminary test results promising
As User:TheDJ wrote, last week Guillaume Paumier (User:Guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability team published some results on his blog from the first testing done of the usability of the Wikimedia Commons upload process, and the first prototype for the new upload wizard currently under development. Paumier noted of the tests:
| “ | Long story short: the current interface is a nightmare, and the prototype is way better, even if there are some minor things to improve. The good news is, all the items to improve were already planned features at the time of testing, and they have either already been added, or will be before the upload wizard is released.
Namely, one of the main remaining issues is the fact that users don’t really understand copyright and free licenses. That’s why we've been working on a licensing tutorial at the same time, to be released jointly with the new upload wizard. |
” |
He added, "we don't want to make a lot of publicity about our prototype yet. If you happen to know about it and you want to share your opinion, that's fine. But we'll officially invite the community later to try it out."
In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- Edits to extensions are now more likely to be (auto-)"deferred" in the CodeReview process for centrally managing improvements to the MediaWiki software. The hope is to save time for reviewing edits to the MediaWiki core (wikitech-l mailing list post).
- The
page_propsdatabase table will now include the displaytitle value, allowing its far quicker retrieval via the API (bug #23936). - With the resolution of bug #24398, new projects will be automatically announced on a special mailing list.
- Cassia, one of the Toolserver servers, is currently experiencing problems. Some services may be affected (toolserver-announce mailing list post).
- XML-format dumps were halted temporarily to allow for the removal of several bad dumps and the implementation of improved creation processes.
- Guillaume Paumier also reported about his participation in a recent conference about KDE: Wikimedia at KDE Akademy 2010 (including video and slides for his presentation about the UX program, together with fellow Wikimedia developer Parul Vora)
- Domas Mituzas has published a blog post about MySQL versions at Wikipedia.
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