Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-06-20
From the editor
The Signpost has a new feature this week, although you won't notice it if you're simply reading the articles. But a number of people have inquired about getting an RSS feed for The Signpost, and thanks to Alterego we now have one available. Alterego is providing the RSS feed through his website at www.qwikly.com, where he has both the direct RSS feed and the same thing in HTML output. So now you can choose how you want to be alerted when a new issue of The Signpost comes out, either by tracking the page in your watchlist or by using your RSS reader. We're still working on getting the bugs out, so please let us know of any problems.
We also appreciate the people stopping by the newsroom to leave notes about items we might be interested in mentioning. This helps keep us informed on a lot of things we might not know to pursue otherwise. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to cover every item that gets passed on, and regret that there may be interesting news that not everybody hears about. To help with this, we could still use more help from people interested in writing articles for The Signpost. As with the encyclopedia itself, the best way to make sure something gets included is to write about it yourself.
--Michael Snow
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Abortive wikitorial project sparks more debate on Wikipedia's merits
The new concept of "wikitorials", recently introduced by the Los Angeles Times, has directed renewed media attention at Wikipedia, led by a critical New York Times column. The actual launch of the wikitorials drew some participation from Wikimedia circles, but amid all the publicity the project was soon aborted and its return is uncertain.
The wikitorial experiment
Wikitorials, which would allow readers to edit the paper's editorials online (see archived story), were first mentioned a week ago as part of a general plan to revamp the LA Times editorial page. In an editorial accompanying the inaugural effort, the paper described the wiki concept and said of Wikipedia that it "works bewilderingly well."
The wikitorial wiki used MediaWiki software, although creating an account was required in order to edit. Among those participating were Jimbo Wales and Wikinews administrator Ilya Haykinson. When the original wikitorial was moved to an inappropriate title, this was reverted and the offender blocked within five minutes. Wales then tried to launch a counterpoint page to provide an outlet for opposing views; however, this mostly drew sarcastic additions from those sympathetic to the original editorial's stance.
Other than the one block, however, the LA Times staff seemed to merely be observing developments and made little effort to get involved in guiding or developing the process. The plan as outlined by Michael Kinsley, the editor of the newspaper's editorial page, was to "filter it very lightly". This minimal level of supervision apparently left the wiki unprepared for the effect of being featured on Slashdot, as happened Saturday.
The effect of Slashdot items that link to wiki pages is fairly familiar on Wikipedia. A flurry of new edits is a certainty, quite a bit of which will be vandalism, and the article must be reverted frequently and often protected from editing. Similarly, the wikitorials project was hit with several vandalism attacks within a few hours of appearing on Slashdot, and the wikitorials were taken down on Sunday. The statement left behind read: "Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material."
Editorializing on wikitorials and Wikipedia
The wikitorial experiment also prompted commentary in the media on the merits of such collaborative efforts. On Wednesday, The New York Times published an op-ed piece entitled "The Interactive Truth", written by author Stacy Schiff filling in for columnist Maureen Dowd. Schiff used the opportunity to lament the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, suggesting that in today's society "the illusion of facts will suffice."
Schiff pointed to the wikitorials and their ultimate model, Wikipedia, as examples of this trend. She cited an anonymous teenager who dismissed Wikipedia's disclaimer as legal boilerplate, and quoted him as saying of the content, "It's all true, mostly." The column drew an analogy to instances in modern culture where authority was being conferred upon things that were intended as entertainment.
Blogger Ernest Miller responded that the Wikipedia approach was at least honest, and that traditional methods do not necessarily have a better claim on truth than newer models. Miller pointed out that the standard of "It's all true, mostly" is about as much as could be claimed for other supposedly authoritative information sources, like books.
Techdirt criticized Schiff for missing the point that wikitorials, just like normal editorials and even Schiff's own column, are about opinions and not facts. The LA Times acknowledged this difference between wikitorials and Wikipedia in its introductory comments, observing that "encyclopedias and newspaper editorials are very different literary forms." The Techdirt post also highlighted that Schiff's use of "the oh-so-popular single-source anonymous anecdotal story" was not necessarily representative of how people approach Wikipedia as an information source.
Featured status removal still being discussed as license policy hits images
Demotion of content that previously received the designation of featured status continues to be a sensitive matter, as the process for removing featured articles is still being debated. With the new emphasis on enforcing policies against images with restrictive licenses, the issue is now coming up for featured pictures as well.
There were 4 new admins, 13 new featured articles, 2 new featured lists, and 4 new featured pictures this week.
Featured article removal rules
Debate continues over the featured article removal policy, after the new procedure suggested by Nichalp was eliminated and other users suggested alternatives that would decrease the number of unfair nominations for removal of featured article status.
Neutrality removed the rules added last week to featured article removal candidates by Nichalp after a straw poll showed opposition over support in a two to one ratio. Piotrus and Nichalp suggested other methods of encouraging users to clarify their reasons for nominating an article to be demoted, but their proposals have not received the same amount of attention that was given to the straw poll. While the discussion continued, no featured article removal candidates were demoted this week.
New admins
4 requests for adminship were approved last week: Kbdank71 (nom), Sjakkalle (nom), JeremyA (nom), Kelly Martin (nom).
Featured content
After a slow week last week, the number of new featured articles jumped to 13 this week. The featured article candidates that passed inspection were Architecture of Windows 2000 (with Windows 2000 already having achieved this distinction earlier), the late George F. Kennan, Geography of India, Isaac Brock (the general, not the musician), Yom Kippur War, United States Senate, BC Rail, Gangtok, Vanilla Ninja, Island Fox, Anschluss, RMS Titanic, and David Helvarg.
Two featured list candidates, List of countries where UN peacekeepers are currently deployed and List of Presidents of the United States, were promoted this week. This brings the total number of featured lists to five.
Featured pictures and licensing
Four featured picture candidates were promoted this week, and Eastern Yellow Robin was demoted over concerns over licensing. The image, created by Tannin, carries one of the more restrictive types of Creative Commons licenses, which have been declared unacceptable for Wikipedia (see archived story). Discussion took place on Tannin's talk page over the defeaturing of the image and the possible future deletion of his images. Tannin explained that he does not release his images under the GFDL because it allows the images to be used for "naked commercial sleaze and greed", which, he argues, is not in the best interest of Wikipedia.
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Teller-Ulam device
Technical change in voter eligibility announced while candidates trickle in
A minor change was announced in the election process for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees last week. Meanwhile, with some new candidates added to the roster, it appears that the election will in fact be competitive, rather than simply a matter of approving two candidates for two positions.
The change in the process, announced last Wednesday by election official Bjarte Sørensen, is a technical matter with respect to eligibility to vote. Rather than requiring that voters have 400 total edits on all Wikimedia Foundation projects, the change means that voters must have at least 400 edits on the project from which they cast their vote.
The reason for this is that eligibility will be verified by the software program used for the Board of Trustees election. The program can check the number of edits for the account being used to cast the vote, as well as the date of its first edit (the voter must have been active for at least 90 days), but it cannot confirm that edits from other accounts belong to the same voter. As a result, this is the only way voter eligibility can be determined in the absence of some kind of universal login system that applies across all languages and projects, a feature the developers are still debating how to implement.
Candidates so far
Until recently, it appeared that the election, which will choose two trustees for two-year terms (rather than the previous one-year term), might only have two candidates. Until Sunday, the only candidates who had signed up were Florence Nibart-Devouard, one of the current elected trustees, and Arno Lagrange, who had run in last year's election as well.
These two were finally joined by Francis Schonken, a Belgian architect who has been active in the project for about a year and mostly contributes to the English and Dutch Wikipedias. The remaining elected trustee, Angela Beesley, announced her candidacy on Sunday as well.
Although a week remains for new candidates to present themselves, the level of activity in this election seems to have declined from last year. The previous election featured a total of twelve candidates (even after several others withdrew), and the members of the community had also engaged the candidates in more discussion about election issues. It is not clear if the decreased activity is due to a lower level of community interest in Wikimedia Foundation issues, or simply due to a general expectation that the incumbents will be reelected, as some have suggested should happen.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed only one case last week, but also decided to start a second mentorship experiment in response to Everyking's appeal of his previous case. Two new cases appear to have been accepted, although they and others have yet to be formally opened.
One case was closed last week involving Internodeuser, who had gotten involved in a dispute over the Port Arthur Massacre. The arbitrators found that Internodeuser had made threats of legal action as well as various personal attacks, and decided to ban him for a period of one year (as with a similar previous case, the ban runs until a year "after his most recent legal threat").
An attempt to close the long-running climate change dispute, currently the committee's oldest outstanding case, was opposed due to the lack of a remedy regarding JonGwynne. This user was added to the case, originally involving Cortonin and William M. Connolley, after it was already well underway (see archived story). As a result, the proposed decision did not address the additional issues adequately, and some additional proposals are now being considered in order to bring the case to a conclusion.
Two more of the outstanding requests for arbitration picked up a fourth vote to accept and now wait to be opened. One of these involves a conflict between Guy Montag and Yuber, with charges from both sides of combative editing and violations of the neutral point of view policy. The other matter is a complaint by Rhobite about personal attacks by JuliusThyssen.
Appeal leads to mentorship
Finally, the arbitrators found a way to grant, on a trial basis, Everyking's longstanding wish to again be able to edit articles related to Ashlee Simpson. After having been banned from those articles in April for a period of a year, Everyking appealed to have the ban lifted at the earliest date allowed, two months after the decision.
In response to the appeal, arbitrator Raul654 negotiated an agreement in which the ban would be suspended in exchange for Everyking agreeing to submit his editing to the supervision of a mentorship team. The terms of the mentorship are essentially identical to those of a similar arrangement made with Netoholic (see archived story), with the primary difference being their scope — Netoholic's mentorship focuses on templates and the Wikipedia namespace, while Everyking's is focused on content dealing with Ashlee Simpson. Everyking's mentors will be Silsor, Tony Sidaway, and Rhobite.
100 Wikipedias have 100 articles
Wikipedia achieved an interesting milestone in its multilingual development last week — there are now 100 different language versions of Wikipedia that have at least 100 articles apiece.
The Nahuatl Wikipedia was the 100th to reach the 100-article mark, after Nauruan crossed the threshold with a flurry of new articles earlier in the week. The hundredth article was an (illustrated) stub on the coyote, created at 23:47 (UTC) on Saturday, 18 June, by Chamdarae. Chamdarae actually created three articles to bring Nahuatl up to 100 articles, but activity there remains sporadic, as these were the first new articles created since May.
Nahuatl is the first purely Native American language to achieve 100 articles. As yet, no purely indigenous African languages have reached this mark, although it appears that some may do so in the near future. (It should be noted that among languages native to Africa and America, two have already passed 100 articles, but both of these are partially of European origin — Afrikaans and Haitian Creole.) Among African languages, Swahili is currently in the lead, although Bambara has seen considerable recent growth thanks to funding and support from Geekcorps.
Commenting on trends in the development of new language Wikipedias, Tuf-Kat noted, "Recent growth in new languages has mostly been in South Asian languages like Gujarati, Kannada, Urdu, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali, as well as regional minority languages in Europe, like Corsican, Cornish, Breton and Sicilian." Yann has been particularly active in promoting languages from the Indian subcontinent, and Node ue has tried to encourage work on many new Wikipedias, including the smaller European languages.
Biased editing on podcasting turns into public spat
Removal of information from a popular Wikipedia article has led to a public flap, after the person to whom this information pertained aired his complaints about the incident.
The dispute in this case centered around the entry on podcasting, which lately has been one of the Wikipedia articles that gets cited most often in the media. Perhaps not surprisingly, having demonstrated its value as a source of information, the article has also been targeted by people trying to push an agenda.
Dave Winer protests
On 11 June, noted blogger and software developer Dave Winer complained on his blog about being expunged from the Podcasting article. (Interestingly, he was content to link to the article without further comment last year.) Winer added that the entry for RSS "has been rewritten to be an ad for a competitive format."
Following up on the issue last Monday, Winer reported that the issue had provoked an extensive debate on a Harvard mailing list about Wikipedia generally. He tied the discussion to the concerns of information professionals with Wikipedia, saying, "Researchers and librarians are not happy, but don't dare say so publicly." (One blogger pointed out that this was at least not true of all librarians, as several previous stories reported here might prove.)
Responses to Winer
In general, Winer has become a controversial figure, known for his reputed personality conflicts as well as his innovative software. Sympathetic voices quickly expressed their support of his complaint. Geek News Central commented, "This is beyond a travesty". As Bill Riski put it, "the history of podcasting without Winer is like the history of Apple without Wozniak - incomplete and uninformative."
Jon Udell, creator of the Heavy metal umlaut movie (see archived story), responded by comparing the revisions that produced the erasure (Winer, by comparison, showed no awareness that he could use the history function, since his post relied on an Internet archive version of the article someone had sent him). Udell determined that the article had first been edited to say, "Creator of RSS2, and true godfather of Podcasting, David Winer helped former NPR host Christopher Lydon...", so that the removal was effectively prompted by the attempt to paint the situation in a tone that is clearly inappropriate given the neutral point of view policy.
What really happened
However, it appears that Udell also missed the full story, as he mistakenly identified edits that happened in a brief edit war after Winer had already posted his initial criticism. The editing Winer was referring to actually took place in May, although it is not clear what motivations were involved. The first edit involved was pure vandalism, removing a paragraph containing the link to Winer's own article and replacing it with junk text. This left Winer mentioned only by surname, and incidentally affected Adam Curry in exactly the same way. DavidWBrooks restored Winer and Curry's given names, but because he used "David Winer", his attempt to link to the article on Winer failed, leaving only a red link.
The reference to Winer was later removed, and one might suppose that the editor erroneously concluded that if Winer didn't have an article about him, he wasn't significant enough to mention at all. However, since someone using the same IP address also made the subsequent edit removing Winer's name (this was the change found by Udell, after Winer had already complained), it seems reasonable to believe that this was a person with an anti-Winer agenda.
In his comments, Udell went on to emphasize the transparency of Wikipedia, which in this case extended to the addition of a dispute template at the top of the article. He said the dispute was "inevitable" but praised Wikipedia's framework for its ability "to mediate the social construction of knowledge, advocate for neutrality, accommodate dispute, and offer a path to its negotiated resolution." Udell even gushed that Jimmy Wales deserved a Nobel Prize for it.
Blogger Robert Cox noted that this last comment was made "without any apparent sense of hyperbole", although he observed that Udell did not specify which particular Nobel Prize. Adding his own evaluation of the situation, Cox concluded, "seems to me Dave has identified the Achilles Heel in Wikipedia."
Media focus on collaboration includes Wikipedia
The dedication of two major stories in the media this week to the intersection between technology and collaboration brought some incidental coverage to Wikipedia as well. The recent Iranian election spurred more use of Wikipedia as a source, and the practice of citing Wikipedia has even spread to the British government.
Wikipedia figured as a part of the cover story for BusinessWeek's 20 June issue, entitled "The Power Of Us", a story about online collaboration in general. The article cited Wikipedia as "the most breathtaking example" of online production of information content. It went on with the common approach of featuring a point-counterpoint between Jimmy Wales and a representative of Encyclopædia Britannica.
A very similar piece appeared in The Observer on Sunday, focusing in a parallel fashion on user-generated innovations in content and design. A sidebar to this article also mentioned Wikipedia as an example of "people power".
Also in the press
The Bermuda Sun paid a visit to Wikipedia in its Wednesday edition, calling it "an incredibly rich source of cross-referenced material in scores of languages". At the same time, it noted the paucity of Wikipedia's coverage related to Bermuda itself. The article also pointed to other Wikimedia Foundation projects, and even included a mention of the upcoming Wikimania conference.
The accumulated good work of Welsh Wikipedians was acknowledged by the Western Mail, the national newspaper of Wales, on June 14, when an article called Wikipedia "the first Welsh language encyclopaedia to be published in more than 100 years." The newspaper further provided brief praise of the early diversity of the encyclopedia: There are now 3,000 entries, on diverse subjects ranging from Cyngor Cefn Gwlad Cymru to Pol Pot, which can be consulted, amended and added to by any other user.
In other coverage related to Wikimedia projects, Steve Outing cited Wikinews as an example of the 11th (and final) layer of citizen journalism in a detailed guide to the subject for Poynter Online. Meanwhile, citizen journalism site OhmyNews was citing Wikipedia as a source last week for a definition of the MP3 format. But although the story was about podcasting, it did not actually mention that article, popular though it is.
Other citations
Recent election activity in Iran was a popular reason for press sources to use Wikipedia. The Daily Telegraph, in a June 15 article about Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, encourages readers to read more about the likely future president of Iran by visiting the Wikipedia link. Similarly, an Economist article covering the elections directed users to the Wikipedia overview article for more information [1]. The Commercial Appeal, the Memphis daily and regular consumer of Wikipedia, cites Wikipedia in a June 16 information inset as the primary source for their profile of Iran.
The Inquirer turned to Wikipedia as its source for the origins of the zero [2]. The Honolulu Advertiser found it useful in explaining how two local professors were inspired by the Diggers movement [3]. The Newport News-Times led off its story about tikis in American pop culture by quoting the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article [4]. Wikipedia was also popular for its information about various measurements: the weight of the Mark 82 bomb, and the amount of floor space used by the UNIVAC [5] [6].
The practice of linking to Wikipedia has even extended to government sites, as the United Kingdom now has such a link, which appears on a webpage for Key facts about the United Kingdom. It was promptly observed that the page incorrectly links to Uk, however, which is a redirect to the real article.