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2013-08-28

Chelsea Manning, Box-office predictors, and 'Storming Wikipedia'

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By Emily Temple-Wood, Andrewman327, and NickPenguin

Chelsea Manning

Wikipedia's gender identity MOS section and its effect on Chelsea Manning was both praised and emulated in the media this week. The controversy over moving the article from her former name, Bradley Manning, came in the wake of the soldier's announcement of her gender identity after her trial had concluded. The acrimonious debate and move request at Talk:Chelsea Manning was covered. Slate praised Wikipedia's quick shift from the outdated male pronouns and name to her current pronouns and name. The story was also covered by El Comercio, the New Statesman, and TruthDig.

Wikipedia as box-office bellwether

On 21 August 2013, the open access journal PLoS One published the article "Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data". The authors analyzed data about 312 movies that were released in the United States in 2010. They limited their sample to movies listed in Category:2009 films and Category:2010 films and used Box Office Mojo for information on the box office success of the films. They concluded that, even one month before a movie is released domestically, Wikipedia editing activity could accurately predict its success. The paper was covered in myriad news outlets, including The Australian, The Descrier, Gizmodo, The International Business Times, Livescience, Motherboard, the Oxford Mail, Discover Magazine's D-brief, and LifeHacker Australia. Similar research had been published in 2012, and was covered when Forbes expressed concern that the findings could encourage filmmakers to engage in astroturfing and edit articles for their movies in hopes of raising expectations.

Storming Wikipedia

Coverage of the distributed open collaborative course called "Storming Wikipedia" continued this week. Influenced by Jimmy Wales' speech at Wikimania 2013, where he showed that 87 percent of contributors to Wikipedia are men, the effort aims to increase women's participation and coverage on Wikipedia by engaging a network of feminist philosophy and women's studies classes. It is run by FemTechNet, which describes itself on its FAQ page as "an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology".

Researchers have found that Wikipedia's coverage of feminism and issues faced by women is abysmal and that there is a gender gap in both biographies and contributors. The course, run by FemTechNet, will run at 15 institutions and is designed to bridge the gender gap in several ways, including recruiting women to contribute, writing articles about women, and correcting systemic bias by writing about feminist viewpoints and scholarship. The story broke into major news outlets this week, receiving favorable attention for its goals. It was covered by the CBC, Bustle, the Huffington Post, Truthdig, Jezebel, MediaBistro, and Mother Jones.

Following from FemTechNet's idea, OCAD University introduced a new course for this fall called Dialogues on Feminism and Technology, as reported by the CBC. Described as "a first-of-its-kind collaborative digital course for credit in 16 universities all over the world", students will "collaboratively write feminist thinking" into Wikipedia, according to organizers.

In brief

2013-08-28

WikiSym 2013 retrospective

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By Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, Brian Keegan, Dario Taraborelli, and Tilman Bayer

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

WikiSym 2013

WikiSym+OpenSym 2013 group photo (showing around half of the participants at Jumbo Kingdom)

Ninety-eight registered participants attended the annual WikiSym+OpenSym conference from August 5-7 at Hong Kong's Cyberport facility. The event preceded the annual global Wikimania conference of the Wikimedia movement in the same city.

WikiSym was started in 2005 as the "International Symposium on Wikis", and its scope has since been broadened to include the study of other forms of "open collaboration" (such as free software development, or open data), reflected in the adoption of the separate "OpenSym" label. The proceedings, published online at the start of the conference, contain 22 full papers (out of 43 submissions), in addition to short papers, posters, abstracts for research-in-progress presentations, etc. The coverage below reflects the scope of this research report, and complements the pre-conference reviews of some papers in the previous issue.

Episode 96 of the "Wikipedia Weekly" podcast contains some coverage of WikiSym 2013 (from around 10:30-20:00), and some images and media from the event can be found on Wikimedia Commons.

Next year's WikiSym+OpenSym conference will be held in Berlin, on August 27-29, 2014, and call for papers is already out. Conference chair Dirk Riehle announced that the proceedings will continue to be published with ACM, now under its new open access policy.

Full papers

  • Despite policy, only just over half of Wikipedia sources are secondary: "Getting to the Source: Where does Wikipedia Get Its Information From"[1] presents an overall statistics on the sources referred to in English Wikipedia articles to answer this question. The initial seed of source tags is constructed by analysing 30 randomly selected articles, and then all articles in Wikipedia as of May 2012 have been probed to find and classify the references. Some 67 million citations for 3.5 million articles have been found. The classification is performed on a random selection of 500 citations and by two human coders. More than 30% of the citations were classified as primary sources, around 53% as secondary, and around 13% as tertiary. After discussing type, creator, and publisher of the references as well as large scale domain analysis and persistence in time, the paper concludes: "Wikipedia’s content is ultimately driven by the sources from which that content comes. ... Although secondary sources are considered by policy to be the most desirable type, we demonstrate that nearly half of all citations are either primary or tertiary sources, with primary sources making up approximately one-third of all citations."
  • Conflict on Wikipedia as "generative friction": A paper titled "The role of conflict in determining consensus on quality in Wikipedia articles"[2] analyses 147 conversations about quality from the archived history of the English Wikipedia article Australia. Based on this case study and after observing that editors refer to Wikipedia policies and regulation in their discussions quite often, it is claimed that "conflict in Wikipedia is a generative friction, regulated by references to policy as part of a coordinated effort within the community to improve the quality of articles." Although the paper builds on a very strong theory and a fascinating literature review on constructive conflict, generalising the results of the case study on a single article in English Wikipedia to some 29 million Wikipedia articles in more than 280 language editions is not easily feasible. An interesting interview with the author on the article has recently been published in Oxford University's Policy and Internet Blog.
  • Wikipedia home alone without the anti-vandal bot: In "When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes?"[3] Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker analyzed the impact of the temporary downtime of one of the main automated vandal-fighting tools – ClueBot NG – on the quality control processes of the English Wikipedia. They took four historical incidents during which the bot went down for a sustained amount of time as a naturally occurring experiment. They analyze the division of labor between automated, tool-assisted and manual edit revert activity and find that robotic reverts are the most rapidly occurring ones, the vast majority of them happening within one minute of the target edit. During ClueBot NG’s downtime, the authors observe, no other tool was available to perform the same type of early revert work and as a result the median time-to-revert nearly doubled. The paper concludes that Wikipedia's quality control processes are resilient insofar as the same proportion of reverted edits eventually is reached, but at a substantially slower pace than when the bot is available.
  • WikiProjects open to non-members: A paper titled "Project talk: Coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects"[4] finds that depending on activity and size of a WikiProject, different methods and theoretical perspectives may be applicable. While most research has focused so far on the most active WikiProjects, those are usually much larger and much more formally organized than most. A typical WikiProject will have only a few active members, and is very loosely (what this reviewer would describe as adhocratically) organized. The official membership lists are often misleading, as some significant contributors may not even be official "members". The authors dispute some previous findings suggesting that members prefer to work with other members, finding there's little to no bias in members responding to requests by non-members. The authors also find that many WikiProjects are organized in a fashion similar to many small FLOSS projects.
  • WikiProjects are like free software projects: Another paper by the same authors[5] analyzed "788 work-related discussions from the talk pages of 138 WikiProjects", with the results suggesting that "that WikiProject collaboration is less structured and more open than that of many virtual teams and that WikiProjects may function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups."
  • Automatic detection of deletion candidates: A paper titled "Automated Decision Support for Human Tasks in a Collaborative System: The Case of Deletion in Wikipedia" presents a model for identifying English Wikipedia articles deleted via the three main types of deletion process, speedy deletion, proposed deletion and articles for deletion. The model uses a variety of features including properties of the article creator, language-related features (such as the frequency of verbs, adverbs or adjectives) and the actual text of the article. The best model – which combining all sets of features – performs particularly well overall, and reaches a precision of 98% and recall of 97%, in the "easy" case of Speedy Deletions – a level of performance that the authors submit is good enough for the model to be implemented as a decision-support tool for Wikipedia editors. The tool also detects non-encyclopedic articles even when they have remained in Wikipedia for a long time and can therefore be used as a solution to identify older articles that can either be improved or removed from the encyclopedia.
  • "Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings": In this paper,[6] based on the authors' earlier work on implementing a parser for wiki syntax (an effort separate from the Wikimedia Foundation's new "Parsoid" software for MediaWiki wikis), the authors present a framework for wikis that makes it easy to automatically carry out transformations such as the renaming of a category (in all pages that belong to that category). In the talk, Dohrn observed that there are over 100 wiki engines, but none of them use a formally defined syntax, making the content hard to process for computers.
  • "Revision graph extraction in Wikipedia based on supergram decomposition": Similar to an earlier paper by the same authors covered previously in this space ("Unearthing the "actual" revision history of a Wikipedia article"), this research[7] replaces the linear version history of a Wikipedia article with a graph where loops can account for reverts, etc., which is formed by analyzing differences between article revisions by means of "supergram decomposition" of the article text.
  • "The Illiterate Editor: Metadata-driven Revert Detection in Wikipedia"[8] presents "a content-agnostic, metadata-driven classification approach to Wikipedia revert detection. Our primary contribution is in building a metadata-based feature set for detecting edit quality, which is then fed into a Support Vector Machine for edit classification. By analyzing edit histories, the IllEdit system builds a profile of user behavior, estimates expertise and spheres of knowledge, and determines whether or not a given edit is likely to be eventually reverted."

Keynote on applicable Wikipedia research

From Taraborelli's keynote: Topic areas of research publications about Wikipedia, 2001-2012/13 (based on Google Scholar search results, data source)

In reflection of the conference's broadened scope, only one of the three keynotes focused on research about wikis and open collaboration: In his presentation "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research,"[9] Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst at the Wikimedia Foundation (and co-editor of this research report) made the case for Wikipedia research that has the potential to have a positive impact on Wikipedia itself, citing e.g. the opportunities opened by the ongoing user interface development work at the Foundation, and pointing to the ample data resources it offers researchers. (The title alluded to the metaphor of Wikipedia as the Mount Everest of online collaboration researchers, as put forth in the title of a session at last year's CSCW conference: "Scaling our Everest".)

Surveying the existing body of research, he identified the study of Wikipedia's gender gap and of its breaking news collaborations as relatively new research areas, and "Wikipedia and higher education" as a fast-growing topic, while papers which use Wikipedia as a corpus (from the field of Natural language processing, in particular) continue to see steady growth. Areas which have seen successful existing examples of actionable research include:

  • Task recommendation for editors (SuggestBot)
  • Vandalism detection (STiki, ClueBot)
  • Trending topic analysis (Wikipedia Live Monitor)
  • Good-faith newbie detection (Snuggle)

Other presentations

Two research-in-progress presentations by Oxford-based Taiwanese researcher Han-Teng Liao compared the Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike, providing interesting insights from one of the few languages where Wikipedia has serious competition as a user-generated encyclopedia:

  • "How do Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia filter contribution? A case study of network gatekeeping"[10] examined editorial policies and practices on both projects, finding that "In Chinese Wikipedia, filtering copyright-dubious materials and accommodating Chinese geo-linguistic variants are more salient, whereas censoring politically-sensitive content and enforcing a national cultural political framework of People’s Republic China are more salient in Baidu Baike." On Baidu Baike, employees of the hosting company (Baidu) define the basic rules, whereas the Chinese Wikipedia community sets its own editorial policies. Commenting on his statistical analysis of the most cited Chinese sources on both wikis, Liao observed that Baidu Baike is "overrun with spam" from e.g. book review sites, whereas external links appear to be more rigorously curated on the Chinese Wikipedia, resulting in a perhaps surprising prominence of official Chinese government sites. The Chinese Wikipedia community was found to be very politically diverse, with many users declaring an affiliation on their user page, and appeals to the principle that "Wikipedia not censored".
  • It's "search engines favor user-generated encyclopedias", not "Google favors Wikipedia": In "How does localization influence online visibility of user-generated encyclopedias? A study on Chinese-language Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs),"[11] Han-Teng Liao reported on results (some of which previously published on his blog[12]) comparing the ranking of three Chinese-language user-generated encyclopedias (Wikipedia, Baidu Baike and Hudong) on nine Chinese-language search engine variants (by the three companies Google, Baidu and Yahoo, in mainland China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the former two mostly using simplified Chinese and the latter two traditional), for a collection of search terms. He found that the three projects generally dominate Chinese-language search results, alongside other user-generated content. That Baidu Baike ranks highly on the search engine run by its mother company might come as no surprise (in fact, Hudong submitted a complaint to a government body last year about this), but it still ranked the wikipedia.org domain a (distant) second place in four of the seven search term categories studied. Liao also interpreted the results, tentatively, as evidence against the often-voiced (but never substantiated) suspicion that Google artificially favors Wikipedia - in fact, Google as seen in China (in simplified Chinese) tends to rank Baidu Baike above Chinese Wikipedia. Instead, the results appear to indicate a general preference of search engines for user-generated content. (Cf. related earlier coverage: "High search engine rankings of Wikipedia articles found to be justified by quality")
  • Many Swiss GLAM institutions unaware of CC-NC downsides: A survey among Swiss cultural heritage institutions (like museums),[13] presented at WikiSym, found that 11% of responding institutions have staff who contribute to Wikipedia during office hours, and 14% have staff who do so in their free time. More than half of them were unaware that non-commercial (NC) licenses prevent reuse of their content by Wikipedia.

Collective memories in Wikipedia

Researchers Michela Ferron and Paolo Massa expand on their previous work[14] analyzing collective memories on Wikipedia to find statistical evidence that commemorative editing of traumatic events differentiates these articles from other article and talk page contribution patterns.[15] For major recent events such as the 9/11 attacks as well as more historical events such as the Pearl Harbor attack in World War II, there is a significant increase in editing activity on these articles and talk pages (in the English Wikipedia) on the anniversaries of these events compared to the normal day-to-day editing patterns. Qualitative examination of the content of talk page discussions on these dates likewise reveals editors' attempts to make sense of and commemorate traumatic cultural events on their anniversaries. The implications of this research are important because Wikipedia is a commons on which different perspectives about traumatic and historic events are interpreted, co-constructed, and revisited by users. The data used in this analysis was also released by the authors and is available here.

Briefly

  • "Impact of Wikipedia on citation trends":[16] The authors tested an interesting hypothesis: that inclusion of scholarly references in Wikipedia affects the citation trends for those references. The authors do not reach conclusive findings. While the citations to Wikipedia references increase, they do not do so significantly more than for articles which are not cited on Wikipedia. The authors do note, however, that Wikipedia will often list highly cited articles in its references.
  • News portal automatically generated from Wikipedia edits: An ArXiv preprint[17] presents "a news-reader that automatically identifies late-breaking news among the most recent Wikipedia articles and then displays it on a dedicated Web site", called "WikiPulse" (not to be confused with the Wikipulse visualization of recent changes on Wikipedia). Besides pageviews, it analyzes edits, among other things emphasizing edits by the top 50 most active editors, and editors that are classified as "domain experts".
  • Ethnography of bots: In a blog post in the "Ethnographies of Objects" series on group blog "Ethnography Matters,"[18] Wikipedian (bot-operator) and Wikipedia researcher Stuart Geiger offers an ethnographic analysis of how a bot can be socially perceived.
  • English Wikipedia not a huge threat for non-English Wikipedias: An ArXiv preprint titled "Comparing the usage of global and local Wikipedias with focus on Swedish Wikipedia"[19] investigates the question "To what extent (and why) do people from non-English language communities use the English Wikipedia instead of the one in their local language?", finding that "Altogether, we can conclude that access volume for typical Swedish articles decreases by less than a few percent when an English version is created. This is a major result, since it shows that English articles do not draw away much attention from Swedish articles."


References

  1. ^ Getting to the Source: Where does Wikipedia Get Its Information From?[1]
  2. ^ The role of conflict in determining consensus on quality in Wikipedia articles [2]
  3. ^ Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker : When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia’s Quality Control Processes? [3]
  4. ^ Jonathan T. Morgan, Michael Gilbert, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry: Project talk: Coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects [4]
  5. ^ Michael Gilbert, Jonathan T. Morgan, David W. McDonald, Mark Zachry: Managing Complexity: Strategies for group awareness and coordinated action in Wikipedia PDF
  6. ^ Hannes Dohrn, Dirk Riehle: Design and Implementation of Wiki Content Transformations and Refactorings [5]
  7. ^ Revision graph extraction in Wikipedia based on supergram decomposition http://opensym.org/wsos2013/proceedings/p0204-wu.pdf
  8. ^ Jeffrey Segall, Rachel Greenstadt: The Illiterate Editor: Metadata-driven Revert Detection in Wikipedia [6]
  9. ^ Dario Taraborelli: "Descending Mount Everest: Steps towards applied Wikipedia research", WikiSym/OpenSym 2013 keynote, abstract, slides
  10. ^ Han-Teng Liao: "How do Baidu Baike and Chinese Wikipedia filter contribution? A case study of network gatekeeping" (abstract)PDF
  11. ^ Han-Teng Liao: How does localization influence online visibility of user-generated encyclopedias? A study on Chinese-language Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) abstract
  12. ^ Han-Teng Liao:“Wikipedias” (or its copycat) dominate “Chinese” search engine result pages (SERPs)
  13. ^ Beat Estermann: Swiss Heritage Institutions in the Internet Era. Results of a pilot survey on open data and crowdsourcing PDF
  14. ^ "Google Scholar profile: Michela Ferron". Google. Retrieved August 27, 2013.
  15. ^ Ferron, Michela; Massa, Paolo (2013). "Beyond the encyclopedia: Collective memories in Wikipedia". Memory Studies.
  16. ^ [7]
  17. ^ Tobias Futterer, Peter A. Gloor, Tushar Malhotra, Harrison Mfula, Karsten Packmohr, Stefan Schultheiss: "WikiPulse - A News-Portal Based on Wikipedia" http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1166
  18. ^ Stuart Geiger: About a bot: Materiality, multiplicity, and memory in the study of software agents Ethnography Matters, August 13, 2013
  19. ^ Berit Schreck, Mirko Kämpf, Jan W. Kantelhardt, Holger Motzkau: Comparing the usage of global and local Wikipedias with focus on Swedish Wikipedia. http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.1776


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2013-08-28

Loop-the-loop: Amusement Parks

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By Mabeenot
Previous Reports
After too many rides on the Tilt-A-Whirl
Do you want to see your favorite project in a future edition of the WikiProject Report? Post a request at the WikiProject Desk!
Rides and lights at a traveling funfair
The original Ferris Wheel, introduced at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893
Riding the roller coaster Xpress at Walibi Holland
The Poseidon water ride at Europa-Park
A double-decker carousel in Malaysia
Carnival games offer prizes for winning games of skill or chance
Cinderella Castle at Disney's Magic Kingdom

This week, we secured free admission for WikiProject Amusement Parks, the project dedicated to amusement rides, roller coasters, theme parks, traveling carnivals, and funfairs. First opened in January 2007, the project has grown to include 8 pieces of featured material and 72 good articles. The project recently completed a push to assess all articles under the project's scope, although Importance ratings remain under-utilized. The project has several task forces covering roller coasters and an assortment of large amusement park chains. WikiProject Amusement Parks began circulating a quarterly newsletter this year and is experimenting with a collaboration called Operation B&M. We interviewed Dom497, Astros4477, and McDoobAU93.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Amusement Parks? Do you participate in any of the project's task forces? What is your favorite park?
Dom497: My story is kind of weird. I came to Wikipedia with the intention to focus on NHL related articles. At the time, I had hardly any knowledge about amusement parks, ride manufactures, types of rides, etc. Then, when I found the WindSeeker article, that's when my amusement park enthusiast life began. I began looking more and more into theme parks, started joining forums, and finally, WikiProject Amusement Parks. Though I am an enthusiast, I'm not the kind that knows every detail about theme parks, I mainly focus on roller coasters, Cedar Fair and (from time to time) other companies that run amusement parks. And my favourite park? Canada's Wonderland...my home park! Behemoth and Leviathan are awesome roller coasters, they got great flat rides, and have the best water show that I've ever seen in person.
Astros4477: I have been a member of WikiProject Amusement Parks since I joined Wikipedia in November 2011. Similarly to Dom497, I did not know much about amusement parks or amusement rides. I loved them growing up but I never knew more than Disney or my local parks. In 2011, I started to become more interested and join online forums. I live close to Cedar Point, which is one of the most popular amusement parks in the world. As I was researching information on Cedar Point, I became rather disappointed that its Wikipedia pages were pretty weak in content. I started creating new articles about the park that didn't exist then I eventually moved on to Good Articles. As time moved on, I became more and more interested and started contributing in other subject areas in the project. Today, my main interest is in the Cedar Fair and Roller Coaster WP. Both projects have made tremendous progress over the past year and continue to do so.
WikiProject Amusement Parks has been running a collaboration called Operation B&M for the past few months. What are the goals of this initiative? Why were roller coasters manufactured by Bolliger & Mabillard selected as the focus of the collaboration? How successful has the collaboration been?
Dom497: The goal of Operation B&M is to get all articles relating to Bolliger & Mabillard (whether it be their roller coasters or models) to at least Good Article standards. If an article can meet Featured Article standards (as one already has), it counts as a bonus. Regarding why B&M was chosen as the focus of this collaboration is simply because B&M is my favourite manufacture (amusement park enthusiasts tend to have their likes and dislikes about manufactures of rides and because debates on which manufacture is the best often occur, I'm not going to say any more about this). I started this operation as a solo project for my self (hence why I choose B&M) and had never intended it to be part of this WikiProject, but later decided that it would be better to make it a WikiProject effort. Overall, the collaboration has been very successful. Though we are no where near complete, every article that gets promoted moves us one more step closer to the finish line. Also, a major barrier involved with this collaboration is finding reliable information for some of the older roller coasters (I comment on this in more detail in one of the questions below). Only one of the three contributors working on Operation B&M (at this time) has access to some older resources which reduces the pace that we could be working at, but with what we got, I think we are still working at a good pace. And if you really want to get technical, Operation B&M will never be complete as long as Bolliger & Mabillard stay in business as they've manufactured at least one roller coaster every year since the very beginning.
How is notability established for an amusement park or a particular ride? Does the project have to deal with editors attempting to use Wikipedia articles to promote and advertise parks or rides?
McDoobAU93: The very fact that a ride exists makes it somewhat notable, but at the same time, has it received coverage in reliable sources? Has the local news talked about the ride/park in the past, or currently? If it's one of many similar rides, then it probably will be mentioned alongside its cousins, such as you'd see at SkyScreamer, instead of having its own standalone article. Roller coasters, being significant investments, often have lots of coverage and thus make notability much easier to establish. As to promotion, I try to follow the guidelines established regarding conflicts of interest and peacock words in order to keep out undue influence and marketing-type language (i.e., "the biggest so-and-so in the such-and-such").
Dom497: McDoobAU93 pretty much has it right. For non-roller coaster attractions, I believe that any unique attraction is notable. What I mean by this is that if a park were to announce that they are building a new merry-go-round, its not unique and holds almost no value of having its own article. Even if it is a heavily themed merry-go-round, its still not notable enough. If a ride that has never been seen before (or breaks at least one substantial record; something like "Tallest drop tower in the nation", not "Tallest drop tower in the city") is announced and mentioned in the news, I count that as notable enough for Wikipedia. For roller coasters, any roller coaster that has its own unique layout is notable for its own article. For amusement parks, pretty much every park is notable - big or small - as these are the places that house attractions. When talking about using Wikipedia for promotion, I personally have never had to deal with that and don't think it has ever been a problem.
Do articles about roller coasters receive more attention than other types of attractions? What can be done to improve Wikipedia's coverage of all types of amusement park rides?
Dom497: Absolutely. Roller coasters are what make amusement parks attract more people. When you think of a roller coaster you think of going really high into the air and dropping back down really fast, going upside down, and the sensation of flying out of your seat (depending on the roller coaster). Its a tall, fast, and long "machine" that is great for marketing a park, scaring people, and want the public to experience more of it. This is why the news never stops talking about roller coasters (especially the news publishers located around major theme parks such as Cedar Point, Disney World, Universal Orlando, etc). One of the only times where a non-roller coaster attraction may get more attention is when it is has lots of problems that pose a "risk" to riders (ala WindSeeker) or when serious malfunctions happen injuring riders. As an editor, there is really nothing you can do to improve the coverage of an article other than research and hope that there is information about the ride; sometimes you just have to hope that a newspaper publishes info that you need.
Considering how many photographs are snapped in amusement parks, are images easy to find for parks and rides? Are some rides harder to photograph?
Dom497: It all comes down to licensing. Though lots of images are indeed taken, most are copyrighted and cannot be used on Wikipedia. If I think that there needs to be an image to support something and I find one on Flickr, I will (and have done before) contact the photographer asking them to change the licensing of the photo I wish to upload to Wikipedia. To answer the second part of this question, it really depends on the factors that you have to face. Images of most older rides that no longer exist often hard to find no matter what license it is under; however, there are still a lot cases where there are tons of photos of the ride. That's just how it is. With rides that are currently operating, its pretty easy to find a picture though there still may be some barriers restricting the photographer to take a picture from the best angle (due to trees, fences, light poles, etc).
Does the project handle amusement park simulation games and other fictional media set in amusement parks? Are there any collaborations that could be hosted by WikiProject Amusement Parks and the projects that cover books, films, and video games?
Dom497: Personally I have never worked within these areas; however, I do know that simulation games relating to amusement parks are ranked as the least important articles within this WikiProject. Also, I don't want to say that a collaboration involving several WikiProjects will never happen as it could one day. For now, its an option on the table that may be discussed in the future.
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
Astros4477: In my opinion, the park pages are in the most need of help. Most users (from what I've noticed) usually contribute to the attraction articles. Most park articles are poorly sourced and organized. The information is usually outdated and not updated often. The pages contain a lot of un-encyclopedic material, also. This is where I would tell new members to contribute to as a lot of them are in rough shape. Most of the things I see the most is what you see in this section. All it does it list what the park did each year in 2-3 sentences.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Dom497: You don't need to be an amusement park wizard to join this WikiProject. I knew nothing when I first joined and I have since learned way more about amusement parks than I ever thought I would. All you really need is patience to research...with how old some rides are, it can be really hard to find references; but on the other hand, references for rides that have been built in the past decade are easier to find for the most part!


Next week, we'll delve deep into the human mind. Until then, search for your inner demons in the archive.

Reader comments

2013-08-28

Reddit creep

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By Serendipodous

The debt that Wikipedia owes sites like Reddit or Google often goes unacknowledged around here. If the purpose of Wikipedia is to bring knowledge to the world, then it is sites like these that are actually doing it. Whenever a great artist, scientist or humanitarian suddenly becomes an object of public interest, you can bet a Google Doodle was responsible; whenever an obscure event, individual or idea suddenly rises in public awareness, you can bet a thread on Reddit is the reason why. This week saw three such articles in the top 25 (and two in the top 10); the highest since the monitoring project was begun at the year's start. It might raise the issue of how we actually promote our content to our readers.

For a list of the top 25 articles, including exclusions, see: WP:TOP25

For the week of August 18 – 24, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Lee Thompson Young C-class 709,809 The tragic suicide of this young, up-and-coming actor (he was 29) and star of Friday Night Lights and The Famous Jett Jackson unsurprisingly became the prime talking point of the week.
2 Facebook B-class 675,478
A perennially popular article
3 Claude Debussy C-class 619,684
With the possible exception of suicide, nothing guarantees a high Wikipedia view count like an interactive Google Doodle, and this French composer of "Oh yeah, that!" classical pieces like Clair de Lune got one for his 151st birthday on August 22.
4 Breaking Bad B-class 547,047
The final season of this acclaimed chemistry teacher-turned-Scarface TV series began on August 11.
5 Chennai Express C-class 531,746 This Bollywood action-romance has broken records at the Indian box office, becoming the first film to make Rupee1 billion ($16.3 million) in four days.
6 I Am Rich B-class 447,963 A $1000 iPhone app that did nothing except remind its users that they could afford it stimulated a discussion on Reddit this week.
7 Pseudofolliculitis barbae C-class 397,403
Another Reddit discussion was stimulated by this skin affliction, commonly referred to as "shave bumps", because Domino's Pizza was declared in violation of the 1991 Civil Rights Act when it demanded its male employees be clean-shaven, even though roughly a quarter of African Americans are unable to shave without incurring it.
8 Deaths in 2013 List 389,605
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
9 List of Bollywood films of 2013 List 376,515
An established staple of the top 10.
10 The Conjuring (film) C-class 371,391 James Wan's latest ghost story (reportedly based on true events, take that as you will) stormed the US, taking $70 million in its first week, and is now closing in on $200 million worldwide.


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2013-08-28

WikiCup update, and the gardens of Finland

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By Pine and J Milburn
Palm House at the University of Helsinki Botanical Garden, Finland, seen in a new featured picture
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from August 18, 2013 through August 24, 2013.

WikiCup update

The 2013 WikiCup competition is entering its final round. The finalists and information about them are copied here from the longer WikiCup 2013 August newsletter by competition judges J Milburn and The ed17, with assistance from Rschen7754. You can sign up for the newsletter by adding your username to Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send.

  1. Australia Hawkeye7 (submissions), a WikiCup newcomer who has contributed on topics of military history and physics, including a number of high-importance topics. Good articles have made up the bulk of his points, but he has also scored a great deal of bonus points. He has the second highest score overall so far, with more than 3000 points accumulated.
  2. New South Wales Casliber (submissions), another WikiCup veteran who reached the finals in 2012, 2011 and 2010. He writes on a variety of topics including botany, mycology and astronomy, and has claimed the highest or joint highest number of featured articles every round so far this year. He has the third highest score overall, with just under 3000 points accumulated.
  3. Wales Cwmhiraeth (submissions), 2012 WikiCup champion, who writes mostly on marine biology. She has also contributed to high-importance topics, seeing huge numbers of bonus points for high-importance featured and good articles. Previous rounds have seen her scoring the most bonus points, with scoring spread across did you knows, good articles and featured articles.
  4. Canada Sasata (submissions), a WikiCup veteran who finished in second place in 2012, and competed as early as 2009. He writes articles on biology, especially mycology, and has scored highly for a number of collaborations at featured article candidates.
  5. Colorado Sturmvogel_66 (submissions), the winner of the 2010 competition. His contributions mostly concern Naval history, and he has scored a very large number of points for good articles and good article reviews in every round. He is the highest scorer overall this year, with over 3500 points in total.
  6. Wyoming Ealdgyth (submissions), who is competing in the WikiCup for the second time, though this will be her first time in the final. A regular at FAC, she is mostly interested in British medieval history, and has scored very highly for some top-importance featured articles on the topic.
  7. London Miyagawa (submissions), a finalist in 2012 and 2011. He writes on a broad variety of topics, with many of this year's points coming from good articles about Star Trek. Good articles make up the bulk of his points, and he had the most good articles back in round 2; he was also the highest scorer for DYK in rounds 1 and 2.
  8. Scotland Adam Cuerden (submissions) has previously been involved with the WikiCup, but hasn't participated for a number of years. He scores mostly from restoration work leading to featured picture credits, but has also done some article writing and reviewing.
American presidential candidates in 2012 included Congressman Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, seen here campaigning at the Iowa State Fair.
English musician Ringo Starr was the drummer for the Beatles.
A group of all integers, with odd integers on the red line and even integers on the blue line. The parity of zero is even.
South African author Nadine Gordimer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote Burger's Daughter.

Eleven featured articles were promoted this week.

  • Parity of zero nominated by Melchoir. The number zero is an even number. Researchers in mathematics education propose using discussions about the parity of zero to educate students about a variety of concepts in mathematics.
  • Mike Capel nominated by Albacore. Capel (born 1961) is a former Major League Baseball right-handed pitcher. He played 49 Major League games for the Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers, and Houston Astros.
  • HMS Warrior (1860) nominated by Sturmvogel 66. Warrior was an armoured frigate and the named ship of her class. Warrior and her sister ship were the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warships. She became obsolescent in 1871. She was donated to the Maritime Trust in 1979 and received a restoration. She is now a part of the United Kingdom's National Historic Fleet, Core Collection.
  • Pacific Swift nominated by Jimfbleak. The Pacific Swift (Apus pacificus) is a migratory bird which breeds in eastern Asia. It has a wide range and feeds on insects that it catches in flight.
  • Thaddeus McCotter presidential campaign, 2012 nominated by William S. Saturn. Congressman McCotter (born 1965) ran for the Republican Party's 2012 nomination for President of the United States. McCotter's lack of name recognition was a major difficulty in his campaign. When he ended his campaign in September 2011 he endorsed Mitt Romney.
  • Interstate 75 in Michigan nominated by Imzadi1979. Interstate 75 (I-75) runs from Florida in the south to Michigan in the north. In recent times the project to better connect the Ambassador Bridge to I-75 and I-96 has been the subject of legal disputes.
  • Tasha Yar nominated by Miyagawa. Lieutenant Yar was the chief of security for USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) in early episodes of the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Next Generation. The actress who played Yar was Denise Crosby. Yar has been cited as a forerunner to other strong female characters in science fiction.
  • Ringo Starr nominated by GabeMc. Starr (born 1940) is an English performing artist who became famous as the drummer for the Beatles. Starr has been praised by other musicians for his contributions to music composition, and has received numerous honours.
  • Jo Stafford nominated by Paul MacDermott. Stafford (1917 – 2008) was an American pop music vocalist and actress. She trained in opera before her career in popular music. By 1955 her career worldwide record sales surpassed those of any other female artist. She has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
  • Hungarian occupation of Yugoslav territories nominated by Peacemaker67. The military occupation and annexation of regions of Yugoslavia by Hungary occurred during World War II. Thousands of people were killed during the occupation.
  • Burger's Daughter nominated by Bruce1ee. Burger's Daughter is a historical and political novel by Nadine Gordimer. It was first published in 1979. The novel is set in the mid-1970s in South Africa. It received mostly positive reviews and a Central News Agency Literary Award.
A panorama of Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand.
The Skater by Gilbert Stuart

Nine featured pictures were promoted this week.

  • Auckland Panorama (nom) created by Chmehl and nominated by Nikhilb239. Auckland (Māori: Tāmaki Makaurau) is the largest city in New Zealand. Its June 2012 population is approximately 1.3 million people. Economist ranked Aukland 9th in its 2011 list of the World's most livable cities.
  • Edible Frog (nom) created by Commons user Grand-Duc and edited by Commons user Niabot and nominated by Tomer T. The Edible Frog (Pelophylax kl. esculentus) is used for food, especially in France for frog legs. Adults are 5 to 11 centimeters (2.0 to 4.3 in) in length.
  • Maddison Elliot (nom) created by John Sherwell and the Australian Paralympic Committee/Australian Sports Commission and nominated by Crisco 1492. Maddison Elliott (born 1998) has right side cerebral palsy and is classified as an S8 swimmer. She became Australia's youngest Paralypic medallist at the 2012 Summer Paralympics where she won one gold and two bronze medals. She was named a 2012 Australian Paralympic Junior Athlete of the Year.
  • Jalovec (nom) created by Chmehl and nominated by Tomer T. Jalovec is the sixth-highest mountain in Slovenia. This photo was the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day on 26 March 2009.
  • The Skater (nom) created by Gilbert Stuart and nominated by Keraunoscopia. This 1782 painting by American artist Gilbert Stuart (1755 – 1828) is an oil on canvas portrait of a young Scotsman named William Grant. On the day that the portrait was to be painted, Grant remarked on the coldness of the weather and said that "on account of the excessive coldness of the weather ... the day was better suited for skating than sitting for one's portrait". Grant and Stuart went to Hyde Park where the two men skated. After returning to the studio, Stuart painted Grant's head but completed the rest of the composition based on his memory of their time skating. The painting was praised for its originality at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782.
  • Palm House, Botanical Garden of Helsinki (nom) created by Alvesgaspar and nominated by Alvesgaspar. The University of Helsinki Botanical Garden is an institution of the Finnish Museum of Natural History of the University of Helsinki. The greenhouse holds more than 800 species of plants. Palm House was built in 1889. The greenhouses are currently used for exhibitions and research, and the grounds are open to the public.
  • Portrait of Sebastián de Morra (nom) created by Diego Velázquez and nominated by Crisco 1492. Sebastián de Morra was a dwarf and jester at the court of King Philip IV of Spain. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 – 1660) was a leading Spanish painter in Philip's court and a significant figure in the Spanish Golden Age. This painting, circa 1645, is now located at the Museo del Prado, Madrid.
  • Cigarette smuggling (nom) created by High Contrast and nominated by Tomer T. Cigarette smuggling is a common form of tax evasion throughout the world. Cigarettes are purchased in an area with low cigarette taxes and then sold in an area with higher taxes without paying the tax due.
  • Levi Morton (nom) most likely created by Mathew B. Brady though possibly Levin C. Handy, restored and nominated by Adam Cuerden. Levi Parsons Morton (1824 – 1920) served as United States Minister to France, where he was very popular. He later became the 22nd Vice President of the United States, and still later became the 31st Governor of New York.
Jalovec, a 2,645-meter (8,677-foot) high mountain in Slovenia, is part of the Julian Alps


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2013-08-28

Looking ahead to Wiki Loves Monuments

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By The ed17
Participants in 2013; some notable newcomers are Antarctica, China, Cameroon, Venezuela, and the UK.

Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), Wikimedia's annual volunteer-driven and the world's largest photo contest, is gearing up to be conducted throughout September 2013. The event, originally developed in the Netherlands in 2010, has gone global with 34 countries taking part last and over 50 this year.

The tomb of Safdarjung won last year's competition.

In 2012, India—participating for the first time—won the global competition with a new user's photo featuring the tomb of Safdarjung, a prominent 18th-century official of the Mughal Empire. 1,989 WLM files from 2012 have been recognized as "quality images" on Commons, with an additional 62 being "valued", and 57 "featured". In quantitative terms, Europeans were still leading the pack last round. Poland submitted more than 51,000 files, followed by Spain (39,500), Germany (34,000), and Ukraine (33,000). France, with 27,000 submissions, came in fifth place before the first non-European country, the US, with 27,000 files. Taken together, volunteers taking part in WLM 2012 uploaded more than 350,000 photos. Last years' goal to use WLM as a device promoting new user engagement mid term looks less strong. While participation peaked in September 2012 with 4,655 new users and 13,607 contributors with 5+ edits on Commons, numbers returned to normal the following months.

The most notable newcomer to this year's contest is Antarctica, on board thanks to organizational coordination by Wikimedia Argentina and supported by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, located in Buenos Aires. Other notable first-time participants include China, Cameroon, Venezuela, and the United Kingdom; 51 total countries will at this time be participating. Monica Mora, a member of the international coordination committee, told the Signpost the team has high expectations as the community has the opportunity to outdo the last two Guinness World Records recognitions of WLM with even more and better submissions, and the extensive technical infrastructure (including a mobile app, statistics tools, and a jury-judging tool) is complete and ready for use.

To participate in the contest, volunteers must upload their submissions, featuring a monument in a participating country, during September 2013. The six basic rules are listed on Commons. On October first, submissions start going through the national contests, each picking out up to 10 photos for the global round. An international jury of five will select the final winner.

In brief

  • Future of the Wikimedia Conference: The second of two major Wikimedia-centered conferences held each year is facing questions over how it will develop in the future, particularly in pre-planning for who will host the event. Wikimedia Germany created "Future of the Wikimedia Conference" some time ago, but it has seen little attention until nearly simultaneous posts on the public Wikimedia-l and private Chapters-l mailing lists from the Wikimedia Foundation's Asaf Bartov and Wikimedia Germany's Nicole Ebber. Proposed improvements include revamping the host city bidding process, forming a committee (supported by paid staff) to determine conference topics, and changing the funding model to have just a few larger chapters foot the entire bill of the conference (through money received from the Wikimedia Foundation). Open discussion is taking place on Meta.
  • Microfinancing: As reported in RAW, the French-language cousin of the Signpost, Wikimedia France is taking steps to simplify its microgrants program. The process, which aims to supply editors with copies of reference works they need or subsidize travels costs for photographs and interviews, among other things, has been only rarely utilized because of its complex bidding process.

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2013-08-28

Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia

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By Adam Cuerden and Kirill Lokshin

Wikipedia's traditional image gallery format, produced by the <gallery> markup, has remained largely unchanged for years. The resulting layout, seen below, does not adapt well to variations in image size, and has been characterized by some critics as aesthetically unappealing.

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Now, the gallery markup has been enhanced with the addition of several new display modes. For example, changing <gallery> to <gallery mode=packed> produces a gallery with significantly less wasted space around each image, as shown below.

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In addition, the heights parameter becomes very easy to use with the new gallery mode. For example. <gallery mode=packed heights=200px> gives

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Five modes are available: "traditional", which reproduces the classic gallery format; "nolines", which behaves identically to "traditional" but removes the box overlays for each image; "packed"; "packed-hover", which is similar to "packed" but with captions that appear when the mouse pointer hovers over the image; and "packed-overlay", in which the captions are placed atop each image. Some examples of these modes can be seen below.

Packed-hover (move your mouse over the images below)
  • The captions
    The captions
  • appear when
    appear when
  • you
    you
  • mouse over
    mouse over
Packed-overlay
  • The
    The
  • captions
    captions
  • are
    are
  • always there
    always there

It is expected that the "packed" mode will eventually become the preferred layout for article-space galleries on Wikipedia. The "packed-hover" and "packed-overlay" modes are not expected to see significant use in articles, but will probably appear heavily in non-article spaces, such as user pages.

VisualEditor enhancements

  • Faster loading: The VisualEditor continues to improve its loading speed and update speed during editing. If you haven't used VisualEditor in a while, it's a good time to give it another try, to see how it's improved.
  • Enhanced language and script support: Language and script support in VisualEditor has been improved. A number of reported bugs that affected adding text to pages in languages which use non-Latin and non-Cyrillic scripts, such as Arabic or Korean, or Input Method Editors, such as Vietnamese, have now been resolved with a re-write of some of VisualEditor's infrastructure.
  • Efforts to implement cross-page copy-pasting continue: The VisualEditor team has been implementing numerous incremental improvements to VisualEditor's copy-paste infrastructure throughout the past week. Direct copying and pasting between pages through the VisualEditor interface is expected to be fully supported in the near future.

In brief

This video (the 1911 film Little Nemo) will expand out when you click on it, for easy viewing.
  • Expanding video thumbnails: Video files which have been thumbnailed to less than 800 pixels in width will now automatically expand to fill more of the screen when viewed, providing readers a better viewing experience. This feature is currently exclusive to English Wikipedia, but is expected to appear on other projects in the near future.
  • Notifications enabled for mobile users: Support for notifications has been enabled in the mobile interface for all Echo-enabled projects. Mobile users will now have access to additional communication features, such as notification of talk page mentions, that are already available to non-mobile users.
  • Campaign infrastructure improvements planned for Commons: Improvements to the "campaigns" namespace have been proposed for Commons. The proposed infrastructure will allow programs like Wikipedia Loves Monuments to easily preformat file information and document uploads. Although a basic form exists already, the proposed changes should vastly improve the efficiency and usability of the namespace.
  • Syntax highlighting added: Automatic syntax highlighting on JavaScript pages, CSS pages, and Lua modules is now available through the CodeEditor interface. The new feature is not dependent on VisualEditor, and is available for all users through the standard editing window.
  • Improvements made to search implementation: A number of enhancements have been made to the Wikimedia search infrastructure in an effort to make it more reliable. With the backend having been improved, new user-facing features, like the ability to search within a category, are planned. As with many new enhancements, the rollout is gradual, starting with MediaWiki; it is expected to be some time before the enhancements reach the English Wikipedia.
  • Secure login for (nearly) everyone: Following reports that Wikipedia had been used by the National Security Agency as a source for tracking users' behavior, secure login has been enabled for most users. This enhancement should help protect users from monitoring, prevent Wikipedia content being changed by a third party before it reaches them, and stop their edits from being modified before they reach Wikipedia. Users in Iran and China will continue to use unsecure login, as their governments block the secure site.

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