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22 October 2014

 

2014-10-22

Admiral on deck: a modern Ada Lovelace

14 October was Ada Lovelace Day, a day honoring women's contributions to sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This portrait of mathematician and computer scientist Rear Admiral "Amazing Grace" Hopper was promoted to featured picture.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 12 to 19 October 2014. Anything in quotation marks is taken from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.

Four featured articles were promoted this week.

Frederic Leighton's Cymon and Iphigenia is a new featured picture.

Four featured lists were promoted this week.

Star of the Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order.

Fifty-three featured pictures were promoted this week.

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig on fire
Sarah Goodridge's somewhat unusual self-portrait, Beauty Revealed
The Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe's Still life: apples and jar
A very different still life to Peploe's: Adriaen van Utrecht's Banquet Still Life.
In 1880, the $500 United States Note featured a portrait of General Joseph K. Mansfield, killed in the Battle of Antietam of the American Civil War.


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2014-10-22

Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution—a wiki-protest

Protesters occupied Harcourt Road, a highway in downtown Hong Kong, on 29 September

Three weeks ago, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong have made headlines around the world, including on Wikipedia's own front page in ITN. A lot of attention has been given to the sheer significance of the showdown, likening it to David and Goliath[1] and worrying that neither side had an exit strategy.[2] However, amidst this binary portrayal of the protests as democrats versus the government, only the most sharp-eyed reports spotted that this "Umbrella Revolution" is actually a highly inhomogeneous movement with a social hierarchy that is similar to none other than our dear Wikipedia.

Nobody is in control

Police dispersed crowds on Harcourt Road with tear gas shortly after midnight of 29 September

Benny Tai, leader of the Occupy Central movement, admitted to media that he had lost control of the protests.[3] This is an accurate description, except that Benny Tai himself had never wanted to take full control of the movement anyway. As the idea of Occupy Central brewed beneath the surface over the past year, Benny Tai stressed repeatedly that he advocated deliberative democracy within the movement,[4] and that he's merely serving as a figurehead for the movement.[5] Much like Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia, the protest leaders are influential figureheads in the movement, but to say they have control is both an overestimation of their power and a misrepresentation of the movement's nature.

This is examplified on the fearful night of 28 September when police first deployed tear gas canisters against the peaceful demonstrators and threatened the use of gunfire if the crowds didn't disperse. The protest leaders pleaded all demonstrators to leave in order to avoid bloodshed. Most left, but about 10,000 recongregated shortly after and endured 87 rounds of tear gas.[6] The next morning, a stronger movement emerged which isn't even afraid of tear gas anymore.

Bottom-up collaboration

Volunteer-organized recycling station on Harcourt Road, inside the Admiralty protest zone, as seen on 2 October. The occupied zone in Admiralty is known affectionately as "Harcourt Village" and "Umbrella Square".

On Wikipedia, editors debate on decentralized talk pages associated with each article and organize themselves into WikiProjects to collaborate on particular topics. People volunteer as they see fit and there is no need for a central authority.

Same for Hong Kong. As the protests unfolded, they became an organic movement that organized itself. Communication was entirely decentralized, with messaging applications and social media widely used to spread the latest news and plan actions. Both physical and online noticeboards were used to advise supporters on what to bring to the protest site. With the threat of the police interrupting mobile communications, the crowds turned to FireChat to secure their information flow.[7] Teams of volunteers emerged spontaneously from the crowds, some to defend the barricades, some to transport food and equipment, some to update the rest of the world by social media, and even some to do the recycling.[8] They went on ad-hoc shifts so that some would keep the protest running smoothly while others can go back to their day jobs or go home and rest.

Common principles

Joshua Wong, convenor of student activist group Scholarism: "The hero of the movement is every single Hong Kong citizen."[9]

Wikipedia editors come from all walks of life. We disagree and fight over many things, but we are all united by one vision: to make knowledge freely available to all. We work together under a few common principles and regulate ourselves, occasionally exercising the tough love of banning those who don't follow the rules.

The demonstrators are also, surprisingly, a disparately inhomogeneous bunch. They come from the economic right and left. There are patriotic democrats who want to use Hong Kong to democratize China, and regionalists who simply want to seal off Hong Kong from Beijing. There are even some who joined the protests simply because they were enraged by the police's disproportionate use of force against the demonstrators.[10] But they are united by a common goal and a few common principles. They have all taken to the streets to demand genuine democracy in Hong Kong, and they all adhere staunchly to the principle of non-violence. When the police charged at them with shields, sticks, and pepper spray, they stood still and turned the other cheek, restraining each other from striking back.[11]

And this is why the Umbrella Revolution is so powerful: Because nobody is in control, the arrests of leaders such as Joshua Wong didn't curtail their efforts, instead provoking more people to take to the streets and join their cause. Because their collaboration was bottom-up and spontaneous, there wasn't a weakest link which could be exploited to bring the movement down. Because of their belief in non-violence in the face of a violent crackdown, the movement had caught the world's sympathy.

Nobody knows how long the protests will last and demonstrators are settling in for the long fight.[12] But what is certain is that the Umbrella Revolution has already revolutionized political activism in the same way Wikipedia revolutionized knowledge dissemination a decade ago.

Deryck Chan has been a Wikipedian since 2004. He is originally from Hong Kong and is currently working in London as an engineer.
The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds at our opinion desk or through email.

References

  1. ^ Carrie Gracie (24 September 2014). "Hong Kong's David and Goliath democracy battle". BBC.
  2. ^ "Hong Kong protests: no exit". The Economist. 4 October 2014.
  3. ^ Joyce Ng; Jeffie Lam; Gary Cheung (29 September 2014). "How Occupy Central leaders lost grip on protest". South China Morning Post.
  4. ^ Tania Branigan (6 March 2014). "Occupy Central gives downtown Hong Kong a taste of disobedience". The Guardian. UK.
  5. ^ John Foley (1 October 2014). "Hong Kong harmony hits Beijing's worst fears". Reuters.
  6. ^ "Hong Kong protests: a peaceful night of singing in 'umbrella revolution'". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 29 September 2014.
  7. ^ "#BBCtrending: Hong Kong's 'off-grid' protesters". BBC. 29 September 2014.
  8. ^ Samanthi Dissanayake (30 September 2014). "Things that could only happen in a Hong Kong protest". BBC.
  9. ^ Tania Branigan (1 October 2014). "Joshua Wong: the teenager who is the public face of the Hong Kong protests". The Guardian. UK.
  10. ^ Tania Branigan; Jonathan Kaiman (28 September 2014). "Tens of thousands join pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong". The Guardian. UK.
  11. ^ Tom Grundy (21 October 2014). "VIDEO – Smoking Gun: Police Blindly Beat Peaceful Protesters With Batons". Hong Wrong.
  12. ^ "Hong Kong protest: Mong Kok camp retaken from police". BBC News. 18 October 2014.


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2014-10-22

The story of Wikipedia; Wikipedia reanimated and republished; UK government social media rules; death of Italian Wikipedia administrator

The story of Wikipedia

Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson
Ward Cunningham
Ward Cunningham
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger

The Daily Beast (October 19) ran a long excerpt called "You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story" from Walter Isaacson's new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Isaacson begins by describing how Apple's HyperCard inspired Ward Cunningham to create a visionary application for the Internet that he called the WikiWikiWeb, after Honolulu's Wiki Wiki airport shuttle. Cunningham had learned that wiki means quick in the Hawaiian language, and that wiki wiki thus means doubly quick. He released WikiWikiWeb as open-source software in early 1995, and it became familiar to software engineers over the next several years, although it was largely unknown to the public.

Next, Isaacson writes about the early life of Jimmy Wales, from his childhood fascination with the World Book Encyclopedia his mother had bought for him, to his post-graduate involvement with user-generated content such as Multi-User Dungeon games, electronic mailing lists, web directories, and web rings. In 1996, Wales and two partners founded a company, Bomis, to promote and make money from these ventures. In early 2000, Bomis underwrote Nupedia, a free, volunteer-written, online encyclopedia. Wales hired a philosophy graduate student, Larry Sanger, to help develop Nupedia, but the extensive peer-reviewed process that they devised proved to be "painfully slow" and "not a lot of fun." After the first year, Nupedia only had a dozen articles.


After covering the disagreements over who brought what inspiration to the project, and the philosophical differences between Nupedia and Wikipedia, Isaacson then brings us to the main event: the launch of Wikipedia in early 2001.


By then, Wales had let Sanger go. A year later, after Wikipedia had accumulated 100,000 articles and a critical mass of editors, Nupedia met its demise when Wikipedia subsumed it.

Having recounted Wikipedia's beginnings, Isaacson moves on to describe his own experience as a Wikipedia editor and being part of the crowdsourcing. He waxes enthusiastic about Wikipedia's mechanisms of collaboration and consensus as it applies to both the development of articles and the governance of the project. He particularly stresses the principle of neutral point of view in producing articles. He notes the tremendous growth ("Wikipedia was able to spread like kudzu") into hundreds of languages and tens of millions of articles.

He speculates on why editors contribute, and concludes it is more than giving people free access to knowledge, that most contribute out of the sheer joy of sharing what they know.


On this last point, he gives a shout out to now-departed editor User:Lord Emsworth, whose moniker comes from the P. G. Wodehouse character. Lord Emsworth's "articles on the British aristocracy ... were so insightful about the intricacies of the peerage system that some were featured as the article of the day, and Lord Emsworth rose to become a Wikipedia administrator. It turned out that [he] was actually a 16-year-old schoolboy in South Brunswick, New Jersey. On Wikipedia, nobody knows you're a commoner."

Wikipedia reanimated and republished

A toggle clamp, one of the animated GIFs used by Roth in No Original Research

Wired highlights (October 8) the newest project of artist Evan Roth, called No Original Research, which was commissioned by the Alingsas Konsthallen as part of their exhibition Snel Hest. Roth took eleven animated GIF files from Wikipedia and combined them with unrelated Wikipedia audio files.

Roth writes:


Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert (right)

Widely admired Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert was a Wikipedia editor who made 22 edits from 2004 to 2009 as User:Rebert. Though there is little in the way of direct evidence that he was User:Rebert, the quality of his edits and the frequent references and links to Ebert's work in those edits have led editors to conclude that the account belonged to Ebert. The account was also used to upload a picture of Ebert with director Russ Meyer which was released into the Creative Commons and verified by OTRS. Following Ebert's death in 2013, the account's user page became an impromptu shrine dedicated to Ebert's life and work.

The Atlantic features (October 9) the newest Wikipedia tribute to Ebert. Quenton Miller created an artist's book collecting all of Ebert's Wikipedia edits in a single volume, complete with the picture of Ebert with Meyer as the author's photo on the book jacket. Miller only created a single copy of the book and it is not currently for sale. Miller told The Atlantic:


New UK government social media rules

The Liverpool Echo reports (October 20) that the UK has released updated employee rules for social media. The document, called "Social Media Guidance for Civil Servants", follows a controversy this summer that caused a government employee to be sacked for posting "slurs" on the Wikipedia article for the Hillsborough disaster and related pages. The new guidelines read


In brief

Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014

News

  • Death of former Wikimedia Italia treasurer Wikimedia Italia announced on the Wikimedia-l email list that Italian Wikipedia contributor Cotton, also known as Alessio Guidetti, has died. Cotton was the treasurer of Wikimedia Italia from 2009 to April 2014, an administrator on Italian Wikipedia, and a frequent translator of Wikipedia content. Cotton was noted for his sense of humor, his trustworthiness, and his pragmatism. Following Wikipedia customs, users are leaving memorials on his talk page.


Former Wikimedia Italia treasurer and Italian Wikipedia administrator Cotton, second from left, has died.

Note to readers

We want "In the Media" to be as comprehensive as possible, but we need your help. Even if you can only contribute one or two short items occasionally, that would help immensely. Editors familiar with languages other than English and Spanish are especially sought-after. Please contact Gamaliel if you wish to contribute.

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2014-10-22

War, Pestilence, Death... Movies and TV

The first transmissions of the Ebola virus in the United States sent the numbers spiralling to near-record levels, but not even War (which just missed the list at #12) or Death (who re-entered the top 10) let alone Pestilence, could distract the human race from what really mattered: the fall TV and movie seasons. 4 of the top 10 (and 10 of the top 25) articles this week concerned currently running films or television shows, numbers that are sure to increase as the year draws to a close.

For the full top 25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of October 12 to 17, 2014, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Ebola virus disease B-class 8,267,784
Thanks to the ongoing and unprecedented outbreak in West Africa, this notoriously fatal disease has topped the list for three weeks running. This week, however, the first two confirmed transmissions on US soil occurred within days of each other, causing numbers to nearly double.

Note: includes views from the Ebola redirect page.

2 The Walking Dead (TV series) Good Article 922,674
The show's fifth season premièred on 12 October.
3 Ebola virus Start-class 908,196
See #1.
4 Facebook B-class 864,835
A perennially popular article.
5 American Horror Story: Freak Show Start-class 789,206
The fourth season of the American Horror Story series debuted on 8 October.
6 Gotham (TV series) C-class 778,351
This televisual reboot of the Batman franchise debuted on 22 September 2014, and has remained in the top 10 for three out of the last four weeks.
7 Gone Girl (film) C-class 683,924
This 2014 American mystery film starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (both pictured at left) and directed by David Fincher has been the lucky recipient of a dose of controversy, with many feminists decrying it for perpetuating myths about rape accusation. The filmmakers are pleading innocent all the way to the bank, with the movie earning $170 million worldwide in its first 15 days.
8 Elizabeth Peña Start-class 664,389
This accomplished Cuban-American actress, best known for her films in the late 80s/early 90s such as *batteries not included, La Bamba and Jacob's Ladder, died this week at the age of 55.
9 Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa C-class 592,426
The worst epidemic of this hideous virus in history has so far killed nearly 5000 people and infected nearly 10,000, and shows no signs of slowing. The world is belatedly waking to the implications, particularly since the disease has now spread to the US.
10 Deaths in 2014 List 549,853
The list of deaths in the current year is always a popular article.


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2014-10-22

De-orphaning articles—a huge task but with a huge team of volunteers to help

Have you ever come across an orphaned article (an article with no links to it) on Wikipedia, and decided to add some incoming links to it and make the world a little bit better? There's a massive backlog of over 123,500 articles needing this treatment. Even if you don't do this very often, there is a project to help. The subject of the report for this week is WikiProject Orphanage, an organised group of editors dedicated to clearing that backlog. Of course, there is no real way of measuring this project's success; we can't count Featured articles, editor participation, or tell how much of any reduction in the backlog was due to these editors. There's not really very much more I can say about them at this point, so we had an interview to find out more. Here to talk us through it are PaintedCarpet, MrLinkinPark333 and Otr500.

What motivated you to join the project?

  • PaintedCarpet: Linking orphaned pages was a good way for me as a new editor to get used to the workings of Wikipedia.
  • MrLinkinPark333: I like going through the backlog of things to be done. Joining WikiProject Orphanage is a simple, and sometimes challenging, way to help.
  • Otr500: I joined because I saw (Dec. 2010) there was a need to address a problem of related articles not being linked. I have not been as active as I would like but I was invited to participate in a backlog drive. It is certainly a challenge that any new editor should consider. I actually received my first and so far only Barnstar that was a Barnstar for de-orphaning articles. That was a nice bonus.

Can you explain precisely what this project does and its scope?

  • PaintedCarpet: WikiProject Orphanage aims to connect all Wikipedia pages, so that pages can be found and read more easily.
  • MrLinkinPark333: The project aims to link related pages that haven't been connected to each other.
  • Otr500: This WikiProject helps link related articles and in research this is important. It is also important to the average reader to be able to find the ladder (up or down) to other articles.

Does WikiProject Orphanage collaborate with any other projects?

  • PaintedCarpet: I use it in conjunction with WikiProject Islands. For example, recently WP:ISLANDS deorphaned every island listed on its cleanup page.
  • MrLinkinPark333: Some of the WikiProjects I work with intersect with orphaned pages. For example, if I am working with Wikiproject Stub Sorting, I can stumble upon a orphaned page that needs to be worked on.
  • Otr500: Collaboration by association. I am not sure on direct collaboration. I work on stub articles also and run into a lot of tagged stubs and I always try to work linking into my edits.

How would you rate this project's success and participation?

  • PaintedCarpet: It's a Herculean task, especially since many new articles don't get linked right away. There's always a need for more help.
  • MrLinkinPark333: Over 100+ people are currently active in the WikiProject. This project is successful because [without] this project, these pages would still be orphaned.
  • Otr500: A whole lot of names were added since I joined and I like that. The more help the more can get done and that makes the project successful and improves Wikipedia.

What are WikiProject Orphanage's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

  • PaintedCarpet: I recommend checking out the cleanup listing of your favorite Wikiproject and see which of its articles are also listed as orphaned articles. In my case it narrowed my editing scope and made the task much smaller and easier to digest.
  • MrLinkinPark333: A new contributor can help by looking at the Orphaned articles category and focus on the older backlog, primarily from 2008-2011. The orphanage would benefit with created tools that would help deorphan articles more quickly.
  • Otr500: Hands down it is helping with the backlog. I have seen a lot of projects, that are to me less important than this one, gain great results from a diversity of editors.

Anything else you'd like to add?

  • PaintedCarpet: Deorphaning articles is fun; everyone should give it a try.
  • MrLinkinPark333: WikiProject Orphanage can be challenging, but it is a good way to help with the backlog. It's quick, easy, and fun to do.
  • Otr500: You don't have to be a new editor to help. This project can benefit from experienced editors as well as new editors with a drive to make a difference. It is an important project that enhances the Wikipedia experience. Give it a try and you might find it rewarding.
  • Gbawden: Page creators need to try link their new article to at least one page to better integrate the article. If your article is an orphan no-one is likely to see it!

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