Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-01-31
Blogosphere reacts to Wikipedia after Harvard conference
In the aftermath of the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference (wikinews coverage), the credibility of online information sources was again a topic in the media over the past week. A lot of discussion in the press and among bloggers came out of the conference, and while much of it focused on blogging and its relationship to journalism, or debated the merits of the conference itself, Wikipedia also continued to receive attention along with the fledgling Wikinews project.
The conference itself was held at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on January 21-22. In spite of its title, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was among those invited, partly because of the relationship between Wikinews and the concept of blogs as citizen journalism. As a result, quite a bit of the discussion as it involved Wikipedia was on the relationship between blogs and wikis.
With respect to issues about what people need to disclose about themselves and their activities, something that has been a hot topic in the blogosphere recently, several people noted the ability of Wikipedians to be completely anonymous if they wish. In contrast with the Wikipedia system, where credibility and trust are developed in group editing, Dave Winer observed that authority among blogs worked differently, often based on how one blog tends to be spawned from another.
Positive and negative reviews
While media coverage of the conference centered on the "blogging and journalism" portion, the blogs themselves did take some note of Wikipedia's involvement. Posting last Wednesday, conference participant Jay Rosen focused the last section of his three-part summary of the event on Wikipedia and "the Wiki Buzz," collecting the reactions other participants had provided for him.
In response to Rosen's request for "one thing you changed your mind about," Zephyr Teachout said she had reversed her opinion about Wikipedia's goals: "I thought that Wikipedia was a community dedicated to openness first, product second. And I learned that they are first and foremost a purpose-based community, with openness as a critical principle, but a secondary one."
Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon noted that they found less conflict between blogs and wikis than they expected. Zuckerman commented that both shared a fundamental amateur quality (not to be equated with unprofessionalism, however), while MacKinnon said she was no longer as skeptical about NPOV as applied to journalism.
Rosen himself noted shared ideals between Wikipedians and journalists: "The professional community of journalists, like the Wiki community, is a bunch of people who, strange as it sounds, believe strongly in the virtues of neutral description." The difference he found was in the nature of the working environment: "The Wiki people are learning how neutrality works when there are "open" conditions, rather than the closed ranks of a profession."
Not all opinions were quite so favorable. Participant Karen Schneider, a librarian and blogger representing the conference co-sponsor American Library Association, noted in her blog that she rejects NPOV as a concept. She also apparently misheard some of Wales' comments, quoting him as saying Wikinews was "not exactly neutral," when he actually said this about Indymedia.
The one mention of Wikipedia in traditional print media to come out of the conference was in a column by Ed Cone (another conference attendee) of the Greensboro News & Record, a North Carolina newspaper that has gained attention for its efforts to incorporate community participation and blogging. In his column, "Making inside of newsroom as big as outside," Cone said of Wikipedia, "The free encyclopedia is trustworthy, huge, multilingual and growing, and is produced for only a fraction of what gets spent by traditional competitors."
Other notes
In talking about Wikinews at the conference, Wales emphasized a recent incident involving civil unrest in Belize starting 20 January, where Wikinews "scooped" the major news agencies on the story. With respect to the reliability of the story, he pointed out the effort put into confirming this story after the firsthand reports of Belizian, noting that there had initially been an edit war on Current events (one of the participants was even blocked briefly) because of concerns over whether the reports were reliable.
Perhaps the most eagerly endorsed idea from the conference, and one which could be of significant benefit to Wikipedians researching historical matters online, was the suggestion that newspapers could make more money off their archives through advertising than by charging for access. Rosen has been one of those pushing for this access, and Dan Gillmor advocated its feasibility after the conference in an extensive economic analysis called "Newspapers: Open Your Archives."
Enforcement against personal attacks proposed
Hoping to find a more receptive atmosphere for his ideas, Snowspinner announced last Thursday a renewed effort to push through several policy proposals to address conduct on Wikipedia.
In all, Snowspinner offered three policies, an enforcement proposal to support the No personal attacks policy, a definition of trolling, and a page called Wikipedia:Don't be a dick. The last of the three he called "a joke with serious content", specifically mentioning that it deliberately had no means of enforcement.
The personal attacks amendment to the blocking policy was previously discussed and voted on last August. Meanwhile, the "What is a troll" page was part of an earlier effort to establish a policy that would have allowed administrators to block "obvious trolls" (see Wikipedia:Dealing with trolls). According to Snowspinner, this authority was no longer contemplated, as he explained, "The sole use of this policy, in its new form, would be to allow the arbitration committee to, should they be inclined, sanction users for trolling."
At the time, both previous proposals had majority support from those participating in the discussion, but each also had significant opposition, either on principle or based on the particular formulation. Since they lacked consensus support, they were placed into the category of semi-policy instead.
For this attempt at authorizing blocks for personal attacks, the proposed policy was revised to bring it more into line with existing policies such as three revert rule enforcement. The original proposal, which could have allowed for blocks of up to a week in some situations, was revised to no more than 24 hours, and language was added emphasizing the need for warnings before imposing a block.
No timetable was set for any kind of voting or ratification process for the two serious proposals. Instead, plans are to allow for a period of discussion before deciding how to proceed.
The "Don't be a dick" policy struck some people as being juvenile, however, and the page got nominated for deletion on Friday. The response was decidedly mixed, with a number of people who appreciated the message and wanted to keep it, but many others didn't find it particularly funny or worthwhile. At the suggestion of Mindspillage, along with Jwrosenzweig, who noted that similarly wry humor with a serious undertone existed on the Meta site, the page was ultimately moved there.
Indian Ocean quake inspires collaboration targeting Tangshan
In an attempt to catch up with Wikipedia's much-publicized coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, the Collaboration of the Week project spent last week focused on the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China, perhaps the most comparable disaster to occur in recent history.
The Collaboration of the Week (or COTW) aims to turn nonexistent or stub articles into content that can qualify as a featured article, and has in fact produced several featured articles through these efforts. Nominees for the main COTW article are selected based on votes from project participants, and must achieve increasing levels of support over several weeks before they are chosen. The article is then featured on the Community portal and the group works on it together for the week (some development may also happen while the article waits to become the main COTW).
Coverage gap
On 27 December, the day after the Indian Ocean earthquake, Violetriga observed on the COTW page, "I looked for the biggest natural disaster of modern times and found our coverage quite lacking." At the time, no article on the Tangshan earthquake existed at all, only a brief paragraph in the Tangshan article.
Violetriga created a tiny new article based on this paragraph, and over the next few weeks a small handful of paragraphs was added. Meanwhile, its nomination to be the COTW article continued to gather support, and it finally became the featured collaboration on 23 January.
Over the course of the week, Tangshan earthquake underwent a significant transformation, with a number of editors participating and even a bit of vandalism. The text expanded, an image from the earthquake was added, and the article was organized into sections. Even so, by the conclusion of its week as the COTW, the article had barely 50 edits.
Uncertain counts
Like the Indian Ocean earthquake, the death toll in Tangshan remains uncertain. As a result, one matter that comes up for consideration is which is the greater disaster (in Moment magnitude, however, the Indian Ocean quake is clearly greater).
The official figures for the Tangshan earthquake are lower than some of the estimates that have been reached for the Indian Ocean earthquake. As a result, at one point the COTW excerpt on the Community portal page was changed to say that it "was the largest earthquake to hit the modern world in terms of the loss of life", rather than is. However, the Tangshan earthquake article itself was never changed to match this.
Which is more appropriate to say is probably open to question in any case. The official Tangshan death toll from the Chinese government is widely considered to be too low, and many estimates would place it significantly higher than that of the Indian Ocean quake. Since it may be that neither earthquake will ever have its ultimate toll fully determined, the question may remain forever open.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
After several weeks of clearing out a backlog of cases, the Arbitration Committee actually saw its caseload increase last week due to several new requests. However, the Arbitrators did manage to close their oldest outstanding case, along with two others.
The Arbitration Committee also reached a minor milestone last Friday by closing its 50th case (the Rienzo matter), almost one year after it began hearing its first cases.
A sock under every rock
The case brought against Libertas, like that of Alberuni, involved a number of sockpuppets, of which Ollieplatt was actually the main account at the end. After finding a number of offenses, including personal attacks, NPOV violations, and three-revert rule violations, the arbitrators imposed a one-year ban on all of the accounts based on the general disruptive behavior. Once the ban is over, the user may not use sockpuppets but only one primary account, which would presumably be Ollieplatt unless designated otherwise.
As the dispute developed, Ollieplatt accused a number of his opponents of being sockpuppets of each other as well (usually he said they were sockpuppets of Radicalsubversiv who brought the request for arbitration). One of those so accused, Davenbelle, opined that he did this "mostly to cause trouble and to parrot the same terms used about him."
In voting to close the case on Thursday, arbitrator mav introduced a new device of delayed voting, which some of his colleagues also adopted. The way this worked is that in voting, mav indicated his vote would not take effect until 24 hours after the initial vote cast. This new practice was applied to the Arbitration Committee's time-sensitive votes that might be awkward to reverse, such as accepting and closing cases or issuing temporary injunctions.
The Swedish sock invasion
Additional use of sockpuppets was at issue in the the case of Rienzo. Rienzo was accused of directing personal attacks at CheeseDreams and other users. The attacks involved multiple accounts and evidence regarding sockpuppets was presented from the Swedish Wikipedia as well as English.
Although the developers did not find evidence to clearly connect all of these accounts, the arbitrators did determine that all had engaged in personal attacks. Moreover, they noted the common element of "abusive posts aimed at a particular user with no sign of previous conflict", and concluded that it was likely all of these users had other accounts, whether or not one person was operating all of them.
For the personal attacks, the ruling imposed a three-month ban on all of the accounts, followed by a one-year personal attack parole. Significantly, a violation of the parole by any of the accounts would lead to a block on all of the accounts.
An IP address included in the case was determined to be a public computer probably used by more than one person, so the ruling left the question of blocking this IP to the normal blocking policy.
Finishing old business
Also, on Tuesday the arbitrators finally closed their oldest case, involving 172. This case had been open since 30 August 2004, and was actually even older than that, as the initial request was left hanging for a month while the Arbitration Committee handled the case of Lir (who made the initial request against 172).
At various points over the course of this long-drawn-out case, 172 made promises such as limiting his use of the rollback feature to "cases of obvious vandalism", and in joining the Harmonious editing club, whose members pledge to "only revert once." As a way to hold 172 to these commitments, the Arbitration Committee incorporated them into a one-month parole.
New cases
The first request to come in was from Neigel von Teighen, acting as an advocate for Vfp15. The dispute centered around Vfp15's attempts to add a mention in the Charles Darwin article of the fact that he shares a birthdate with Abraham Lincoln, although the arbitration request was focused on conduct during the dispute rather than the content. In response, Cyrius added the incident to the list of lamest edit wars ever.
The remaining cases to be accepted were somewhat weightier. On Tuesday, the arbitrators voted to hear a second case involving edits related to Lyndon LaRouche, and two days later issued a temporary injunction barring the major participants from editing LaRouche-related articles while the case remains open.
Another long-running dispute, over circumcision and related subjects, led to a request brought against Robert the Bruce by Exploding Boy. Questions were raised about whether the dispute resolution process had been exhausted before requesting arbitration, but newly appointed mediator and Mediation Committee chair-apparent Jwrosenzweig noted that the mediation process was not currently fully functional. A temporary injunction followed that prohibited Robert the Bruce from editing articles related to sex generally, with particular reference to the circumcision-related articles.
Finally, an urgent request from Angela over the Gzornenplatz block war (related story) gave the Arbitration Committee its fourth new case of the week. An injunction was immediately issued to prohibit further blocks of Gzornenplatz as a reincarnation of Wik, as in this emergency situation the arbitrators dispensed with the 24-hour delays mav had suggested earlier.
Administrators fight over two controversial blocks
Wikipedia administrators became involved in two separate block wars last week, one of which had to be stopped by taking the underlying matter before the Arbitration Committee.
Rumsfeld, the Stalinist?
The first incident began with a relatively common situation, where an editor without an account was making inflammatory edits to a highly controversial article. A user identifying himself as "Tamas Feher from Hungary", but editing from the IP address 195.70.48.242, surfaced to make two edits last Wednesday to Joseph Stalin. The edits, which Gadfium described as "pushing a POV", were promptly reverted by other users.
In response to the reverts, Feher proceeded to post on the talk page, where Everyking responded and tried to explain the Neutral point of view policy. Feher responded to this with another post, which Everyking described as "a rather extended screed about me being an apologist for Stalinism." (It also compared Everyking to Donald Rumsfeld.)
This second message of Feher's on the talk page was soon noticed by 172, another editor active on the Stalin article. Rather than giving a warning, at 20:41 (UTC) on Wednesday (five minutes after Feher's post), 172 blocked the IP address for a week, citing as his reason, "Trolling, personal attacks, ranting".
Fred Bauder intervened to reverse the block, saying that 172 was involved in the dispute and the block was improper. For his part, 172 contended that the block was appropriate and supported by the precedent of other blocks applied for similar behavior. He restored the block the following day at 19:22 (UTC), after which the cycle repeated itself four times in under ten hours before 172 finally gave up trying to impose the block.
While this was the most active block/unblock war, the situation arose from nowhere and soon dwindled in significance. By comparison, the blocking of Gzornenplatz attracted a lot more attention and discussion, as the question of his identity with Wik finally came to a head.
Background
Wik was the subject of two arbitration cases focused on excessive reverting and failure to discuss the reasons for reverts. After being placed on revert parole in the first case, which he violated several times, the second case resulted in a one-week ban, issued 21 May 2004.
In response to the ban, Wik indicated that he was leaving Wikipedia permanently. Many users left goodbye messages on his talk page, ranging from sad to hostile and gloating. This, along with vandalism to Wik's user page and subpages, apparently prompted the appearance of a vandalbot, which retaliated with vandalism against some of Wik's tormentors.
The appearance of the vandalbot produced a major escalation, as it subsequently went on to rapidly create throwaway accounts and use these for page move vandalism, and wreaked havoc by moving frequently edited pages with lengthy histories such as Vandalism in progress and the Village pump. Administrators spent several days trying to protect pages being targeted, block the accounts, and undo the page moves before the vandalbot finally stopped.
Wik apparently claimed responsibility for the vandalbot in an email to Jimbo Wales, and developer investigation supported this claim. Comments by Wales and others seemed to suggest that Wik was considered permanently banned at this point, but since it was assumed that Wik had departed once the vandalbot episode ended, no explicit announcement of a formal ban was made.
Gzornenplatz
As things quieted down, Gzornenplatz, who had made a few contributions before Wik was banned, increased his pace of editing. He eventually also ended up involved in an arbitration case, and as part of the evidence there, Yup commented, "There is a striking similarity between Gzornenplatz's edit pattern and behavior and that of Wik." The similarities mentioned included involvement in identical edit wars and opposition to some of the same administrator candidates as Wik. (Yup, incidentally, has never made any other contributions to Wikipedia.)
The issue was never actually addressed further, although subsequent comments from arbitrators Raul654 and Fred Bauder indicate that they believed Gzornenplatz and Wik to be the same person, as do a number of other people familiar with both users.
The block war
One of the disputes connected to Gzornenplatz's arbitration case involved dueling image uploads with Simonides (the two were fighting over how to show Jammu and Kashmir on the various map images for the states and territories of India). When this continued after the arbitration ruling was issued in December, Simonides first sought page protection, then on 23 January asked on the administrators' noticeboard that Gzornenplatz be blocked.
At this point the issue again came up of whether Gzornenplatz was the same person as Wik, and whether he should be blocked for that reason as well. After some discussion, Silsor imposed an indefinite block of Gzornenplatz on Friday at 18:08 (UTC). Supporters of the block argued that Wik was permanently banned after the vandalbot incident, either by the community itself or based on Jimbo's comments.
Here 172 stepped in, this time to unblock, arguing that Gzornenplatz should not be blocked as a reincarnation of Wik because the Arbitration Committee had decided not to deal with that question in previous cases. Two other admins, Snowspinner and RickK, then tried to reimpose the block over 172's objections.
172 speculated that the timing of the block, which he called "random", might have been chosen because Danny, one of Gzornenplatz's supporters, had announced he was taking an indefinite break from Wikipedia, but Silsor responded that Danny's departure did not come until after the initial block.
Arbitrators called in
The matter moved into arbitration when Angela made a request to have the underlying issues addressed - whether previous statements about Wik amounted to a formal ban, and whether the rejection of previous arbitration requests meant that Gzornenplatz was not covered by such a ban. The arbitrators immediately accepted Angela's request (waiving their newly instituted 24-hour delay), and followed with a temporary injunction that Gzornenplatz was not to be blocked as a reincarnation while the case was open.
With that, arbitrator Neutrality removed the latest block and things settled down to await the Arbitration Committee's deliberations (see related story).
Heavy metal umlaut made into blog movie
Jon Udell, a columnist for InfoWorld, posted a Flash-based movie about Wikipedia on his blog on 22 January. The movie shows the history of Heavy metal umlaut, one of Wikipedia's quirkier featured articles.
Udell has been posting short movies centering on computer software (or screencasts, as he calls them) on his blog for several months. He indicated that he was inspired to create this particular movie when Tim Bray and David Weinberger both mentioned the Heavy metal umlaut article in their blogs. He wrote, "Creating this animated narration of a document's evolution was technically challenging, but I think it suggests interesting possibilities."
As you watch the progressive revisions pass by, which Udell calls "hypnotic", he narrates and discusses the development of the article. He focuses particularly on two aspects: a passage in the lead section explaining the reason for this use of umlauts, and the visual representation of the n-umlaut in Spinal Tap. The introductory passage goes from suggesting that heavy metal umlauts evoke Nazi Germany, to calling them Gothic, and finally more generically referring to "a tough Germanic feel." Meanwhile, the highly unusual n-umlaut goes through various attempts to render it typographically, until finally the Spinal Tap logo is used instead.
A rapid sequence of vandalism came when the article was featured on the Main Page on 26 June 2004. Udell notes the vandalism and spends some time discussing it, noting how quickly the vandalism comes and goes. He says that he assumed the vandal self-reverted because it happened so fast, and expresses surprise that it actually proved to be different editors reverting the vandalism. Apparently he is unaware of how closely the daily Main Page featured article is watched while it appears there.
Over the next few days after Udell posted his movie, several attempts were made to put a link to the movie in the "External links" section of the Heavy metal umlaut article itself. Other users reverted this, since it arguably violates policies about references to Wikipedia within articles, which are generally avoided. At last check, the link had been restored, but the text accompanying the link no longer mentions specifically that the movie is about the Wikipedia article itself.
Other bits of amusement
Joichi Ito remixed some of the audio from Jimmy Wales' appearance at the Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility conference (see related story) with a soundtrack that you can listen to on his blog.
Also, Stirling Newberry posted a piece on The Blogging of the President recreating the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Written in the style of a Wikipedia talk page (specifically Talk:Declaration of Independence), replete with votes to keep or remove certain passages, it showed some of the Declaration's signatories debating various passages. It shows that Wikipedia did not invent the collaborative writing process after all, but this is still fairly unusual for a historical document in that we have fairly detailed stories about how it was drafted, even if it lacks a complete revision history.
Developer Tim Starling leaves Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundation developer liaison Tim Starling quit Wikipedia cold turkey last Tuesday. On the heels of this, he was banned by Jimbo Wales as well.
Indicating that his work in his Ph.D. program was suffering, and frustrated by constant demands for developer attention to matters he didn't want to be working on, Starling said he would leave Wikipedia entirely. However, he did not swear never to come back, and Wales was quite sure he would return eventually. (The "ban" was imposed so Starling would "get things straightened out" with his obligations outside of Wikipedia. Wales added, "Now, if only someone would ban me.")
Recently, of course, Starling and other developers spent a difficult few weeks struggling to restore Wikipedia performance to acceptable levels. At one point, he commented, "I discovered over Christmas that I could work 40 hours per week on Wikipedia system administration, and I wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand".
Developer payment?
As the website recovered, there was renewed pressure for filling developer tasks requested by various people. Some of the discussion focused especially on the idea of paying individual developers for handling particular requests, a controversial issue that several of the developers are reluctant to see implemented.
The only use of the system so far has been a proposed payment to set up member registration software for the Wikimedia Foundation. Starling did actually offer to program this at one point, but hasn't yet gotten around to it, and nobody else has tried so the proposal remains in limbo.
Starling's offer came despite his opinion that "paying me to work for Wikimedia would only change my priorities, not encourage me to do more work overall", which he and some other developers thought would be an inefficient use of resources. Nevertheless, other users have continued trying to influence developer priorities with financial incentives. In his departure, Starling cited in particular an IRC discussion with GerardM, one of the proponents of the Wikispecies project started last September over some vocal objections.
GerardM began pushing last week to have part of a $40,000 grant from the Lounsbery Foundation, awarded a few weeks ago, directed towards additional data functionality he considered necessary to boost Wikispecies. The grant application included launching the Wikispecies project along with covering regular operations cost, but it remains to be seen how some of the money will be used to help Wikispecies. Developer Jamesday questioned whether GerardM's idea was feasible, pointing out that "in practice, money doesn't talk when it comes to volunteer developers, and $20,000 doesn't talk very far when it comes to non-volunteer developers." After some further discussion of the idea, Starling then decided it was time to announce his departure.
Given extra time, Cambodia becomes featured article
After waiting on the featured article candidates page for almost two weeks, and getting a significant overhaul in the process, Cambodia was finally promoted to featured article status last Sunday.
This was the second attempt to make Cambodia into a featured article. The first nomination, made in December, was universally opposed by those who commented on it. After some additional work, it was resubmitted 17 January.
Again, the first responses were all objections, but the nominator, Squash, tried to tackle these objections point-by-point. (For example, the lead section neglected to mention two things Cambodia is particularly famous for, Angkor Wat and the Khmer Rouge.) A great deal of work went into additional improvements, as the article received an impressive 178 edits while it was nominated, coming out substantially changed by the end.
Particularly active in polishing up the article were Squash and Markalexander100, who was raising most of the objections. At Markalexander100's request, the time for considering it as a featured article candidate was extended, as he commented on Thursday, "I'm optimistic of having this knocked into shape before the end of this week." Looking back on the effort, Ambi commended them both, saying, "This has improved so much since it was nominated."
Other new featured articles and pictures
One of the other new featured articles last week was Battle of Alesia, one of the winners in the second edition of Danny's contest. Also promoted were Roe v. Wade, The Supremes, Weight training, and Hrafnkels saga.
All of the photographs designated as new featured pictures last week were taken by Wikipedians, in contrast to previous weeks, where many of the pictures were from government sources. Take a look:
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