Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-02-21
Jimmy Wales misses out on Rave Award, settles for magazine article instead
The March 2005 issue of Wired Magazine hit newsstands last week with a lengthy article about Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia. The magazine also announced the winners of its Rave Awards, but Wales, who had been nominated, was not among them.
The article, written by Daniel H. Pink, was entitled "The Book Stops Here"[1], and a line on the magazine cover billed it as "Wikipedia: The self-organizing library of the future". It mixes brief sketches (both verbal and visual) of individual Wikipedians with a discussion of the project's history, objectives, and challenges.
Pink discusses a variety of Wikipedia phenomena in the article. He describes Wikipediholism as a four-step process: a chance encounter with the site, followed by curiosity, experimentation, and finally addiction. Also considered is the "power pyramid" of Wikipedians, with "God-King" Jimbo at the top, which he paints as an evolutionary response to the problems caused by "those who have difficulty playing well with others."
Also included is an analysis of how Wikipedia compares to other models for creating an encyclopedia. Pink slots in Wikipedia as a new model, following the classical model in which encyclopedias are written by great minds, and the more managed and organized system used by Encyclopædia Britannica and other modern examples. As he puts it, this model creates something "alive" rather than something "finished". He wraps up the article with some passages quoted from former Britannica editor Charles Van Doren, who says, "the ideal encyclopedia should be radical."
Part of Pink's research for the article was conducted at the Wikipedia Meetup in New York City on 12 December of last year. Out of the Wikipedians who were specifically mentioned in the article, four besides Wales attended the meetup — Danny, Ram-Man, Raul654, and Angela. Pink did feature a few additional users, including Carptrash, Bryan Derksen, Kingturtle, and Lord Emsworth, and also contacted Larry Sanger for his input.
Commenting on the piece, Sj gave it a generally positive review but said, "The one glaring omission in the article is an acknowledgement of the project's unparalleled multilinguality." Only one sentence mentions it, and its initial words, "Tack on... [other languages]", reflect how the subject is being treated in the article. One can also observe that of the Wikipedians mentioned, all are residents of North America but for Angela (along with Solitude and Ahoerstemeier, who get the briefest of mentions for reverting vandalism to Islam back on 17 November 2004 - though Pink doesn't specify the date).
Rave Award winners revealed
Also included in this issue were the winners of Wired's annual Rave Awards. Wales had been nominated for one of these awards in the Tech Innovator category (see archived story), but did not end up getting it. The winner of the award for the category was Mark Fletcher, CEO of the news aggregator website Bloglines. Apparently, not having a Wikipedia article about himself or his company was not an insurmountable handicap.
The nominees in this category also changed midway through the process, as Scott Maccabe, vice president and general manager of Toshiba's Storage Device Division, replaced Bill Healy, a senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technology, as the person associated with the microdrive. It seems that perhaps Wired decided it made little sense to give a marketing guy credit for innovation in technology.
Perfect storm: article created, then featured after only two weeks
Natural disasters continued to be popular topics among featured article candidates last week, and one such article completed the journey from creation to becoming a featured article impressively in just two weeks.
From fresh to featured in a fortnight
This singular accomplishment was by the Great Lakes Storm of 1913 article, which deals with a gale and blizzard that devastated the region that year. The article didn't even exist until 3 February, when Brian0918 started it with a few paragraphs, a table of the vessels destroyed in the storm, and various references and external links. Already as a new article, it earned a spot on the Did you know section of the Main Page on 6 February, which noted that it was the deadliest natural disaster ever to hit the Great Lakes.
Over the following days, Brian continued to work steadily on the article. On 9 February, he submitted it to peer review with the comment, "This is my first attempt at putting together an entire article". When Maveric149 responded that very little needed improvement, Brian went ahead and submitted it as a featured article candidate.
When the nomination was made, a few issues cropped up with image copyright tags, along with layout problems in several different browsers. After some discussion, the shipwreck table that was causing the layout problems was removed.
However, none of this dented the article's progression to featured status, as the only objections were easily handled. It was designated a featured article last Thursday, barely two weeks into its existence. Several supporters of the nomination urged its author, having produced such an impressive specimen, to please write more articles.
Since its creation, the article has accumulated 200 edits, 90% of which were made by Brian0918. It has even spun off several related articles — the original table is now a separate article on Shipwrecks of the 1913 Great Lakes storm, a list of individual victims is at Wikisource, and there is also an image gallery.
Lisbon earthquake article seeking redemption
The fate of another disaster article, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, remained uncertain as discussion went back and forth over several objections. In response to some concerns that the philosophical ramifications were inadequately covered, an expanded section on the earthquake's impact on Enlightenment thought was added.
Another objection raised was based on the article being publicly criticized as a source of misinformation, because the Washington Post apparently relied on it in saying that after the earthquake, priests went about hanging suspected heretics, whose sins they believed had caused the disaster (see archived story). This was withdrawn, however, after several people pointed out that the inaccuracy was no longer present in the article and it seemed unfair to deny featuring on these grounds.
Meanwhile, Markalexander100 found a possible explanation for the earlier mistake in an engraving of the aftermath, part of the description for which on About.com read, "criminals are being hanged under the supervision of soldiers and priests". To this he observed, "I suspect that the crimes involved were looting and suchlike rather than heresy, however." An image of the engraving was added to the article, but with an accurate caption this time.
Finally Sandover, who had nominated the article originally, reconsidered and said "it should be made much better on a number of levels, including the historical and philosophical." This was in spite of the fact that most of the other objections had already been resolved. His ultimate goal remained, however, to improve the article further and have it ready in time for the 250th anniversary of the event on 1 November this year.
New featured articles and pictures
A total of ten articles, including the Great Lakes storm article, received featured article status last week. Former Collaborations of the Week League of Nations and Space Race succeeded on their second and third try, respectively. The others were cricket recordholder A. E. J. Collins, Sikkim, Names of God in Judaism, Michel Foucault, Nafaanra language, War of the Spanish Succession, and the computer game BZFlag.
Activity returned in featured pictures last week, as two new images were so designated. One of them happens to be a very famous photograph taken by Dorothea Lange; the other is by Wikipedian Chris 73.
 |
 |
Significance of Wikipedia growth explored on NPR
On Sunday, National Public Radio's Weekend Edition included a five-minute report from Laura Sydell focused on Wikipedia. The broadcast briefly discussed Wikipedia's size and growth and provided perspectives from librarians, participants, and even competitors.
Introducing the segment, host Liane Hansen talked about Wikipedia's growth and potential as a research resource. Sydell also noted the breadth of information covered (including the existence of an article about herself — created, as it turns out, by Sj, one of her interviewees).
The report began with an interview with Jacquie Henry, a high school librarian in New York. Henry expressed concern about Wikipedia as a resource based on the inability of young students to properly evaluate information for themselves, and also mentioned the problem with instances of vandalism. To balance this, NYU professor Clay Shirky was presented arguing that concerns about vandalism were overstated due to the size of the community watching articles.
Sydell next addressed Wikipedia's open source roots and introduced Jimmy Wales to explain how the concept applies to the writing of an encyclopedia. For a contributor's perspective, she turned to Sj, who described his excitement at having somebody else expand an article he had started.
Response from Britannica
For the competition's take on Wikipedia, Sydell went finally to Dale Hoiberg, editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, who characterized it as "too much information". He questioned the usefulness of Wikipedia by alluding to the Jorge Luis Borges short story On Exactitude in Science, which refers to an Empire that created a map of itself, on a one-to-one scale. In contrast, Hoiberg argued that Britannica offered its users assurance that facts have been checked, and that it had the ability to sort through the "morass of information" available—particularly on the internet—and condense this down to the truly important material.
After the story aired, mav commented that Britannica's rhetoric "looks to me like they are giving up and declaring their much smaller size and long time between updates to be 'features.'" While this may be a curious argument, it probably has a better chance of being right than the chances of Britannica adopting the wiki model.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee issued rulings in two cases last week where longstanding disputes have slowed the progress of entire sections of articles dealing with a particular topic. Having disposed of these, however, the arbitrators still ended up having to deal with a number of new requests, as well as unusual developments in existing cases.
Herschelkrustofsky not banned outright, but leaves anyway
In their second case involving Lyndon LaRouche and related articles, the Arbitration Committee found Herschelkrustofsky aligned against a new group of editors, as his previous opponent, Adam Carr, had stopped working in that subject area. This time the request also involved another account, Weed Harper, which had a similar editing focus.
The arbitrators concluded that Herschelkrustofsky and Weed Harper are in fact the same person, although an argument was raised that they were two separate people using the same computer. (The technical evidence with respect to a third account, C Colden, was not as conclusive but the arbitrators also incorporated it into the ruling due to a similarity in editing patterns.) Their ruling ordered that he limit himself to using only one account, as well as not editing anonymously. They also banned him from editing all articles relating to LaRouche for one year, and placed him on a one-year parole for edits that violate the Neutral point of view policy.
Saying he would rather not be associated with Wikipedia if it allowed "the demonization of LaRouche and his movement" by his opponents, Herschelkrustofsky indicated last Tuesday, before the ruling was finalized, that he would stop editing entirely. On the other side, the participants seemed satisfied that his departure would solve the problem and allow normal Wikipedia editing to resume. Cberlet, who in his professional career has been highly critical of LaRouche, said, "I have no doubt that Willmcw and SlimVirgin and even I will do our best to treat LaRouche fairly".
Circumcision editors criticized
In an attempt to restore civility to the long-running debate over articles related to circumcision, the Arbitration Committee banned one of the offenders, Robert the Bruce, for a period of one year, and further prohibited him from editing "any articles which relate to sex or gender" for an additional year. The arbitrators determined that Robert the Bruce was responsible not only for "a large number of personal attacks", but also that he had removed information from articles even though it had supporting references.
Noting that the dispute over circumcision involved a failure on both sides to follow the Neutral point of view policy, the arbitrators also warned several of Robert the Bruce's opponents about their editing. Walabio, DanP, and Robert Blair, were told as part of the ruling that they were "expected to improve their editing habits and reminded that any future cases will consider seriously any failure to heed this warning." The same instruction was also applied to Jakew, who generally sided with Robert the Bruce in these disputes.
Password leak
The CheeseDreams case took an unusual turn when it was discovered that CheeseDreams had revealed her account password on the talk page of one of her opponents (the currently-banned Rienzo). This also proved to be the password for a number of CheeseDreams' sockpuppet accounts. Using this password, Jguk went in and changed it, then reported the incident on the admin noticeboard by making an edit to prove he had access to the account.
Once the information became known, the arbitrators quickly issued an injunction banning all of the sockpuppet accounts, whether they were being used by CheeseDreams or merely impersonating her. CheeseDreams herself was restricted to editing only her own user and user talk pages, along with the relevant arbitration pages. Of course, she wouldn't be able to do even that after her password had been changed, so the injunction provided that CheeseDreams could email Sannse with any evidence she wished to present, and the new password for her account would be released to her if she could satisfactorily prove her identity.
New (and old) cases opened
Several new requests for arbitration were accepted last week as the caseload began to rise again. Snowspinner's request for a case involving Xed, alleging various disruptive and inflammatory behavior, including personal attacks, after an exchange with Slrubenstein led to Xed being blocked briefly. Another request, brought by Xtra against PSYCH also involved personal attacks. On Sunday, the arbitrators also accepted a case involving JonGwynne, regarding failure to abide by NPOV on articles related to global warming.
The arbitrators were also called upon to revisit an old case when RK returned after a four-month ban. In that case, he had also been given a one-year ban from editing articles related to Judaism, but due to errors in providing notice, RK was not informed on his talk page about this part of the ruling until after he had already been blocked. When he returned expecting to have full editing privileges, some confusion resulted, and RK appealed the previous ruling to the current Arbitration Committee once he was informed of the restriction. As a temporary injunction, the arbitrators voted to stay the subject-matter ban while they considered the issue.
A vote has been started on Talk:Gdansk/Vote to resolve the multi-year, multi-article dispute about the naming of Gdansk/Danzig, a city with a rich history shared between Poland and Germany. The discussion and dispute on Gdansk is nearly as old as Wikipedia itself, with the edits about the dispute reaching back even beyond the first history entry on December 2001. The dispute caused frequent edit wars on the article, and extended discussions on Talk:Gdansk were unable to find a compromise. Over time these edit wars have also spread to many articles that refer to this city, fighting over the name to be used.
In a way, this article epitomizes the many places in this area of Europe that have changed from one country and language to another. Similar disputes have happened regarding other places that also changed ownership between Poland and Germany, and frequently an edit war regarding one would spill over to affect others. Collectively, the issue is arguably the largest and longest-running article content dispute on Wikipedia.
Organization of the vote
To resolve this dispute, a major vote has been organized on Talk:Gdansk/Vote by Chris 73 and John Kenney, with help from Szopen. In order to deal with the subtleties of the issue, the vote is broken down into 10 separate questions.
The first six questions deal with the naming of the city during different periods of its history, corresponding to changes in political control of the city. The next question handles the naming of locations in biographies of Polish and German persons, asking if the national language name is to be used, with a cross reference to other languages. Two more questions ask if a cross reference to other names should be given at the first mentioning of one name in an article, not only for Gdansk/Danzig but also for other locations that share a history between Poland and Germany.
The last question aims to gather support to enforce the voting results, allowing users to revert changes to place names that do not conform to community consensus. It proposes that persistent edits of this nature may be treated as vandalism, with the implication that reverts of such edits are not subject to the Three revert rule.
The vote started three days ago on Friday, February 18 0:00, but already has a pretty good turnout, with over 50 voters so far. The interim results show a strong preference to use Gdansk before 1308 and after 1945, and a strong preference for Danzig for 1308 to 1466 and 1793 to 1945. Only the period from 1466 to 1793 is about evenly matched, probably due to the German speaking city being under Polish overlordship. Related to this uncertain period, a discussion at the end of the vote page was started that points out that English language sources generally use Danzig when referring to the city at this time. The votes on naming for biographies, and the cross naming for Gdansk/Danzig and other location names so far received the majority of the support, with some users additionally preferring the Polish name only after 1945.
However, the vote runs for almost two more weeks till Friday, March 4 0:00, and the results may change from the interim results. Interested users may vote till then on Talk:Gdansk/Vote.
Media speculation and debate about Google and Wikipedia continues
Media discussion of the possible deal between Wikipedia and Google (see archived story) continued last week, with both skeptics and supporters weighing in on the implications of the relationship.
John C. Dvorak wrote an opinion column Monday for PC Magazine called "Googlepedia: The End is Near". Since it was an editorial rather than a news report, Dvorak didn't present any news that hadn't already come out, but simply presented an analysis based on existing reports. He speculated that Google might be "trying to corner the all the world's information" in order to sell it, or that they might take advantage of controlling access in order to lock out web crawlers from competing search engines like Microsoft.
Dvorak also drew a comparison to Google's acquisition of the Deja News Usenet archive, criticizing Google for contributing to the decline of Usenet and concluding, "This sort of collapse and sudden loss of interest does not bode well for Wikipedia ending up in bed with Google, or anyone else for that matter." He argued that even if the "nice guys" at Google didn't want to ruin Wikipedia, the fact of being a public corporation made it more or less inevitable.
Reactions to Dvorak
As with the original reports connecting Google with Wikipedia, Dvorak's column prompted a lengthy Slashdot discussion of the subject. Posters frequently argued that Dvorak was simply trying to write a provocative article, and some pointed out his failure to mention legal impediments to the idea that Google could "acquire" Wikipedia or its content.
Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield responded in his blog by calling the piece "a conspiracy column that makes no sense". He concluded that the need for any outside supporters to work with the Wikipedia community and its culture would encourage Google to act responsibly.
Mayfield also related that last year, as concerns were mounting that Wikipedia's Tampa-based servers would be vulnerable during the 2004 Atlantic hurricane season, Jimmy Wales contacted him to find out if Socialtext could help provide hosting in case of an emergency. Mayfield said he would have been glad to, "but it was a bigger operation than us at the time."
Once these exchanges had passed, discussion of a Wikipedia-Google alliance died down, as no new information came out that could fuel additional speculation. It seems that further debate may have to wait until any official announcements are made.
Fundraising drive off to successful start
The Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its first-quarter fundraiser last Friday, with a goal of raising $75,000 (all figures US dollars) over the next three weeks. While this marked an increase from the $50,000 target in the previous fundraising drive, the first wave of donations had the Foundation well on its way toward its goals.
Preparations for the fundraiser were discussed last Tuesday during an open Board meeting, after which the final details were arranged. As usual, the drive relies on sitewide notices to appeal for donations, with links to a fundraising letter drafted by Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer (with a little help from other Wikipedians). Mayer was also providing regular reports to the mailing list with each day's results.
At press time, the progress bar on the fundraising page showed that the amount needed to reach the goal had already dropped below $50,000. In just over three days, donors had come up with more than 35% of the desired amount. The initial pace of donations was nearly $10,000 per day, and seemed to be holding fairly steady at this rate at least over the first few days. By comparison, only a single day of donations even approached that level during the fourth-quarter fund drive Archived 2005-04-04 at the Wayback Machine in 2004.
The three-week period is also longer than the previous fundraiser, which only lasted for two weeks. However, a note added to the fundraising letter indicated that if the $75,000 target was reached early, which seems possible, the sitewide messages could be removed so as to reduce the intrusion. (They will be up for one week at minimum, but even at the current pace it would take somewhat over a week for the fundraiser to reach its goal.)
In response to complaints about reliance on PayPal, Mayer indicated that plans to handle credit card donations directly were underway, and would hopefully be in place by the next fundraiser. He said PayPal would remain available as an alternate source of payment.
Wikipedia gets double coverage at Harvard
College newspapers seem particularly prone to write about Wikipedia, as interest among students continues to contribute to its press coverage. In fact, The Harvard Crimson had not one but two articles last week referring to Wikipedia, one of them a full-length review of the project.
The first mention came from Alex McPhillips, who used the law of averages as the theme for a sports story last Monday about the university's women's basketball team. Leading off the article with a reference to Wikipedia as "that quintessentially laissez-faire website", the reporter then made the quintessential mistake of identifying Wikipedia as a .com rather than a .org. McPhillips went on to the law of averages article, commenting, "I... got, more or less, what I expected". (What those expectations were isn't clearly stated, but it may at least be satisfying to know that Wikipedia lived up to expectations.)
On Tuesday, however, the Crimson published a thorough review of Wikipedia by Matthew A. Gline, entitled "Citing Riots". This article takes a more obviously positive approach (and gets the .org part right), while still acknowledging some of the questions about Wikipedia's reliability.
Gline starts off his article with the question of the name for a 77-sided polygon, which is apparently heptacontakaiheptagon, as he learned from Wikipedia. Curiously enough, that article was submitted to Votes for deletion only a few days earlier, along with several other articles dealing with many-sided polygons, though Gline may not have known this, as he could have simply gotten the name from the polygon article. The submitter, Curps, argued that mathematicians would actually refer to it as a 77-gon, or an N-gon for any polygon with N sides. All of the votes have been to delete the article or merge it back into polygon.
Gline says many laudatory things: "To Wikipedia's credit, it looks, and in most cases is, fantastic. Its coverage on even the most obscure topics generally stands up to extensive critical scrutiny". In support of its trustworthiness, he mentions the many writers who have given it "de facto support" by using it as a reference, while also citing some of the critics of this trend.
Like a few other journalists, Gline discusses the possibility of errors in Wikipedia by mentioning one that he introduced himself. He relates that he changed the founding year of Harvard's rival, Yale University, from 1701 to 1702. It appears that he committed this act of vandalism back on 5 February, and did not even wait one minute to see if someone else would revert it, but did so himself. He keeps the reader in suspense somewhat longer, but clears it up at the close of the article.
In his conclusion, Gline comes out in favor of healthy skepticism and an admonition to "know thy sources." But he still ends up by encouraging the reader to use, and even correct, Wikipedia, saying that the project's momentum is too valuable to lose and people need not shy away from it.