Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2014-12-31. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Featured content: A bit fruity (722 bytes · 💬)

Remarkably good choice of pictures. Thank you. Tony (talk) 03:24, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

I agree -- well done. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 03:35, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

It must be said: We had a lot of great stuff to work with. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 03:36, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

In the media: Study tour controversy; class tackles the gender gap (1,131 bytes · 💬)

We should sponsor a trip by Indian Wikipedians to research anti-graft initiatives for Chandrigah, then cut and paste their report onto lamposts. Gareth E Kegg (talk) 22:43, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
It seems to me verging on the unethical to encourage students to write for Wikipedia without managing their expectations on the likely outcome. Moreover it certainly does not help Wikipedia to proceed in that manner. A Happy New-Year! Rich Farmbrough, 23:49, 2 January 2015 (UTC).
- For articles on subjects where there are no customary expectation at AfD, even the most experienced editor cannot fully predict the result. What the students meed to be prepared for is the realization that WP processes are not always satisfactory. DGG ( talk ) 19:38, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

News and notes: The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers (2,873 bytes · 💬)

Wow! Harej (talk) 03:06, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
No one can see the future, but my impression of this project is that if it achieves moderate success then it could be the start of the most consequential societal contribution that Wikimedia projects make.

My reading of this is that it is talking about the Semantic Web. It discusses making technical information accessible and readable to people outside of any given field. A lot of this proposal presumes open access to writings and more importantly to the data behind research, which is an excellent demand made more persuasive by hosting a Wikimedia community who can work with the data when and if it is made free, and who will note when data is and is not being made available.

This project has the potential to bring a lot of professionalism to Wikimedia projects because it provides a data sharing environment on neutral, non-profit grounds when no obvious alternative exists. I can imagine subject matter experts using Wikidata to host their datasets here, even if only to mirror it here, and if that gets anyone to interact with it even one time in a period of years then the cost of mirroring here is so low that it could become standard for people to do this.

I see this project as the start of making Wikimedia projects more personally customized, in the sense that it seeks to make available highly specific information in a narrow range which could be generated by calling only certain parts of multiple datasets which are of interest to the individual who requests them, but which are not otherwise published. For lots of reasons, and especially the layman access to databases, this project seems like a radical intervention to me. This is why Wikidata was introduced. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:57, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

I think you've summarized my sentiments rather aptly, Blue Rasberry; these are very heartening developments, though I think it will be years yet before people truly begin to appreciate how monumental the impacts could be. I don't think it's in the least overblown to say that using Wikimedia's framework for collaboration could prove to be an absolute revolution in many areas of research, so to have my attention brought back to Wikidata in the light of these developments has me quite excited. Snow talk 05:54, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Op-ed: My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation (16,693 bytes · 💬)

Chris has been a great volunteer, and one who has done tremendous work with students and staff. I agree with Chris that in-person support makes Wikipedia editing more approachable and understandable. And I agree that in an ideal world, classes would function like the ones Chris has supported so well, where an active Campus Ambassador engages the instructor and student editors, and Wikipedia gets more good content in areas where we have content gaps. As my colleague wrote in the email she sent to Chris alerting him to the shift we're making to the support structure for Wiki Ed-supported classes,"If we could copy and paste you into every university, there would be no need for the changes."

The problem is the ideal world isn't reality; we supported 98 classes last term, and only a handful had active Ambassadors like Chris. Community members rightly objected when course pages weren't filled out and when students edited medical topics without understanding WP:MEDRS. Both of these objections are things Wiki Ed staff should have been able to head off, but we didn't, because our processes didn't work well. Thus we need to make structural changes to ensure courses follow our best practices, which are based on our experience of working with more than 600 classes over the last four and a half years.

The old model was a one-size-fits-all "Ambassador" role, where the volunteer was supposed to have a variety of skills, from onboarding instructors to teaching students how to edit, to giving feedback on student work, to wikifying and adding images to articles, to serving as the liaison between the editing community and the class. While some volunteers, like Chris, were great at all of these roles, few had the interest to do all of them, and most were really interested in Wikipedia's content. That meant courses fell through the cracks, weren't following our best practices, and led to problematic student edits on Wikipedia — and the Ambassador unfairly became the recipient of blame for what went wrong. At the end of the day, that's not okay: Wiki Ed's goal is to improve content on Wikipedia, and we need to make sure our structure and processes work toward making sure all courses are having a positive impact on Wikipedia.

The new model makes Wiki Ed staff accountable for the non-content pieces. We will be onboarding instructors, so we can be sure that all assignments meet our current understanding of best practices. We will be responsible for sending students through our online training, so we know students are getting an overview of how to edit and important policies. We will be in contact with instructors so we can alert them quickly if there are problems. We will be the ones the community holds accountable for fixing problems, so volunteers don't feel blamed when things go wrong. Structural problems are ours to fix, and one way we can do that is to take responsibility for ensuring volunteers, then, are free to do the specific content-related task they like most: copyediting, wikifying, checking sources, giving feedback, etc. (although staff will be also helping out with the tasks as well). You can see these task-based categories here: Wikipedia:Education program/Tasks. This also means any Wikipedia editor — not just those approved "Ambassadors" — can help out with student articles, making the entire process more Wikipedia-like.

That doesn't mean, though, that the Ambassador Program is going away. For several years, Ambassador applications have been processed by community members on the Education noticeboard; they will continue to be. The discussion about the userright seems to be leading to enacting what was initially planned, to enable the Education Program Extension (and thus the userright) to be used for a variety of purposes. And, as we communicated to Chris and the other still-active Ambassadors, we encourage them to continue supporting classes as they have in the past; the major change here is that we want Wiki Ed staff to oversee the non-content elements to the class, so we can ensure the course is following our best practices, and we are held accountable for any problems. We believe this will result in a better experience for everyone: instructors, volunteers, student editors, and the general Wikipedia editing community.

The suggestion that Wiki Ed will be restricting course participation, banning students or instructors, or mass-reverting their edits, is simply not true. Our goal isn't to ban student editors; on the contrary, our goal is to make sure what students are asked to do will actually help Wikipedia, and that the student editors are taught enough about Wikipedia policies to understand how to contribute effectively. Do we want to discourage 1,000-student classes? Yes. Do we want to discourage instructors who want students to write analytical essays on Wikipedia? Yes. And we can do that best by being responsible for onboarding those classes, when we can call a professor and say, "As a Wiki Education Foundation staff member with experience supporting 600 classes, your assignment will harm Wikipedia. But here's an alternative you could consider that would still achieve your learning objectives and actually help Wikipedia." In no way do we want to end the program; instead, we want to make sure the classes that are editing are filling Wikipedia's content gaps with high-quality content. And we think the best way to do that is through this process change. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:12, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much for commenting and providing an alternate perspective, LiAnna. --Pine^✉ 22:15, 2 January 2015 (UTC)

Thank you for the op-ed and the reply. I am a Wikimedian in Taiwan. My observation on the open source community's effort to the campus has similar situation as above. The rate of good Wikimedian transfer into a good liason is not 100 percent. The discussion makes us can reflect on our strategy deeper. --shangkuanlc (talk) 15:28, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

I read the above with much interest (as an active Wikipedian, instructor, and ambassador). I guess WEF did not announce its plans very well - I suggest you work more on communication. The few active and valuable ambassadors (more or less the few that will read this article) are a treasure you don't want to lose by looking like you don't care about them. At the same time, I agree that it's high time that a more professional and accountable force takes over - too often I've seen Campus Ambassadors who had next to no edits on Wikipedia, who hardly knew anything more than the students they were supposed to help, and who became inactive and unreachable as soon as the class ended, creating a false impression that there were volunteers to support a given (regional) area. The system needs a reform, but I'll stress once again - don't break what's not broken, i.e. try not to loose the few really active and dedicated Campus Ambassadors. Recruit them, hire them, make them part of the process. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 17:01, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Chris troutman I have been an "ambassador" in the education program since 2011 and I follow the education noticeboard. I support classes which do medicine. I have a different perspective on what you say.

My criticism of the WEF has been that it never made an effort to manage those volunteer ambassadors

I regret that there is no process for managing volunteer ambassadors. It is true that WEF made almost no effort to manage them. I would like them managed. I do not agree that WEF should manage them, and rather wish that a community process could.

I think that the WEF never managed ambassadors because managing Wikipedians is difficult, and in hindsight, I think it is a bad idea for any organization to propose to manage a distributed network of online volunteers to do in-person outreach on behalf of the larger community. If WEF would have tried to manage volunteers, then personally I would have been fearful of the powergrab, and I think many others in the Wikimedia community are hesitant to support the granting of on-wiki authority by anything other than the Wikimedia community. The low-level support that the WEF used to give was, in my opinion, the limit of what the Wikimedia community would tolerate from an off-wiki authority. I expect that if the Wikimedia community had developed its own education program ambassador training, then the WEF would have supported that program and the WMF would have funded anyone who wanted to develop it. I still think the WMF would fund such a program at meta:Grants:IdeaLab, especially if it could be tied to meta:Wikimedia movement affiliates. Considering the cost of trying to wrangle general volunteers, and considering that after years of education program only a few people volunteered for this role, I do not recognize how the WEF could have spent resources to increase the impact of ambassadors or scale up their recruitment to justify the cost.

I still would like to see "ambassadors" managed and there is discussion about the userright on the education noticeboard. I just do not want the authority and prestige of the userright to come from the WEF, and I think it empowers the Wikimedia community to give this userright authority in another way.

Unless a Wikimedia chapter subsidized these activities no money was being allocated to support ambassador activity

I personally would love to see university outreach managed by local geographic groups. I live in New York City and all ambassadors which I know here are affiliated with the local chapter, meta:Wikimedia New York City. There is funding available for ambassadors, particularly in the form of travel and training support, and I would like to see more individuals request aid from any chapter if they want to participate in the education program or any other outreach program. Again, I hesitate to encourage people to seek this kind of funding from groups like the WEF, because that is not a community-managed group, and I fear empowering anything other than community groups within Wikimedia projects. For people who want grants and funding, the most common process is to discuss it with a chapter, and if the chapter likes the proposal, they endorse the proposal. They request WMF funding, pay the community member, and send the community members receipts and project report back to the WMF as part of their annual reporting. I would be fearful to hear that community members are taken out of oversight of the funding process.

What is the community's remaining education program in the US and Canada after all of its functions had been subsumed into the WEF?

The Wikimedia community has hardly had an education program. In my opinion, now that the WEF has abandoned the ambassador program, now there are more tools available for the community to manage itself. I would like for "ambassador" designation to be something that the community regulates itself without oversight from an off-wiki group. I like that the WEF does not give pretense to organizing community volunteer ambassadors to manage classes, because previously when things went wrong in classes, some people assumed that the Wikimedia community was supposed to clean the mess. This is at odds with the WEF which encourages professors to have their classes contribute content, because any time students come their contributions are often troublesome. In the new model, the WEF staff personally contact every United States and Canadian professor coming to Wikipedia and they take more responsibility for clean up, leaving no responsibility to any ambassador. If anyone in the community wants to help, then great, but with paid staff off-wiki being at hand to talk to professors on phone and by email, now the WEF is more obligated to have good outcomes any time they bring a professor into Wikimedia and encourage their class to contribute. The standardized training and consistent communication by phone and the rest is not something which the Wikimedia community has historically been able to manage well.

I do not want to obligate the WEF to take more responsibility for ambassador oversight than they have had in the past. They used to claim some oversight, but the ambassador program never was well established. Now instead of them promising almost negligible support for ambassadors, they have abandoned the userright entirely and it can become anything. I would love to talk with anyone about opportunities to regulate "ambassadors" for all kinds of outreach, including to universities, nonprofit organizations, government offices, and coffeehouse meetups, because I still worry about people representing the Wikimedia community when they do public relations, and would like for anyone who is doing outreach and public relations to have all the support that they want. There are some interesting software and social tools here with a history of use and it would be great to see the community use some of these. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:48, 5 January 2015 (UTC)

Chris (and Blue, and some others) were really effective ambassadors, but I think the general view is that they were in the minority. In my personal view, the solution for inadequately trained and supervised ambassadors the WEF has adopted (apparently without outside consultation) seems to be having people act as ambassadors without any training and any support, which does not seem likely to provide more effective work. Opening criticism of student edits to the general community without screening will quite possibly have the same effect it did at AfCs , where eventually screening of those approving AfCs was introduced--though it seems possible that the requirements for this should have been set considerably higher. It is not clear to me if the proposed drafts will be on Wikipedia, and in what space they will be. If on enWP, where to put them and how to work on them needs to be discussed on-wiki and decided by consensus-- the community controls its own WP. And if they are on enWP, the community can then if necessary form a consensus to exert its role when confronted with bad editing, and require qualification for editing in that space using its own procedures. No matter where they are put, at least the accepted material will need to be put on enWP and undergo its usual criteria for improvement or deletion, just as at present.

There is after all perhaps an advantage in having the WEF separate--although they are not under the control of enWP or even the WMF, they are also no longer in any sense the owners of material on enWP or the supervisors of its editing. Their role will be threefold: providing advice and training and dissemination; providing some degree of organization for those courses that wish to use their system; and, apparently, indicating problems with articles--which I understand will in particular include checking for copyvio--an area where certainly help is needed.

If the material is on enWP, the WEP staff will at present have the same right to add tags that any editor will have, and of course any other editor may do so also, or remove them, in the usual manner. If they do this well, and I think they will, then we are the gainers. If they do not, the same possibilities for community control exist as for other editors.

And any WP chapter can play whatever role its people wish, as in the past. I hope they will coordinate with the WEF, but they can work independently of them if needed, as some of them have been doing. Perhaps the most useful thing the current effective ambassadors could do is to organize active chapters at their locations. DGG ( talk ) 19:33, 9 January 2015 (UTC)

Recent research: Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting (10,553 bytes · 💬)

I found it interesting that in 95% of the cases presented to Spanish ArbCom were dismissed in 2008. Tutelary (talk) 00:05, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Sichler and Prommer address an important question, unfortunately they overstate its role saying

However, none of the studies has focussed on the communication style of the collaborative network in order to answer the question why and how this female underrepresentation could be explained and ideally balanced.

Firstly I am not certain that this is a valid reading of the existing research.

However laying that aside, it is important to realise that gender gap can be categorically stated to require more to explain it than "the communication style of the collaborative network". This basically is a variation the naive response of many years ago that "men are rude, therefore women don't edit". We have established to a reasonable degree that what is perceived as a "hostile editing environment" is as discouraging to males as to females. The reasons that we have the gender gap we do are primarily that females do not start editing, and secondarily that when they do edit, they edit less, and for a shorter period. While the communication style is important, given what other research has established, it can only be expected to explain a relatively small part of the secondary problem, and hence changing it will by no means "balance" the gender gap.

Sadly the substantive part of the paper is (as the authors put it) "exemplary" (I would rather say "anecdotal", but maybe they actually meant "exemplary", though in which of its senses would be hard to divine) - and examines a couple of threads for conformance to other authors' characterisations of male and female discourse, with mixed results. It then draws some conclusions out of thin air for example: "She obviously felt offended or did not believe that the conversation would come to an amicable or at least reasonable end."

By the discussion section the paper is falling apart. It starts with a 108 word sentence that even the users of agglutinative languages might recoil at - it has been split into two paragraphs, by some sensitive copy-editor perhaps, in the middle of the phrase "prevents Wikipedia". It continues with the delightful "Gender diversity should be understood as a chance to spread up Wikipedia’s angle..." Most of the rest of the discussion is taken up with more literature review, there are attempts to propose solutions, but these are based upon arguments from someone who's biography got deleted, rather than the results of the analysis presented by the authors.

For reference the conclusion seems to be "Thus, not only women need to be trained to survive the hostile environment, maybe the competitive concept of knowledge production needs to be changed." - the "competitive concept" here seems to be the tactic of out-waiting a disputant.

The final sentence of the paper is so abominably written that it almost defies understanding.

The authors promise - that "Our findings will be analysed with regard to the impact that Wikipedia has as a source of knowledge on its users and producers considering the public discourse" is not redeemed.

How anyone can believe that analysis of two talk-page conversations can lead to robust scientifically based proposals to improve the gender gap, or indeed anything other than a list of research questions is beyond me. Even more so, given the effort that must have gone into producing a 17 page paper, merely in terms of literature review and typing, is why anyone would publish such a paper without asking a native English speaker to at least read through and pick out the solecisms.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:14, 3 January 2015 (UTC).

Anecdata and data based on small samples is very common within anthropology and ethnography, and is a perfectly valid approach to research. I'm not actually sure what the point of most of your message is, however; it seems to be railing against the injustices of runon sentences in the paper. Unless the researchers read the signpost (or frankly, even if they do), this is just...heh. "instruction and discrediting statements". Ironholds (talk) 15:54, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

@Ironholds: You may find my few lines more tiring to re-read than I found the original 17 pages, so I will summarize.

The authors do not appear to be familiar with existing research that is relevant to theirs.
They make promises that they don't fulfil
They pluck conclusions out of thin air
They base arguments on random comments from opinion pieces
No one proof read the paper, and the English is appalling, leading to ambiguities of meaning.

One item that may have been of interest (and of use) had it been phrased as a RQ, and applied to a significant amount of data

RQ1 To what extent do talk page contributions of gender identifiable editors on Wikipedia follow existing models of gender differentiation of on-line communication?

Questions of this subtlety are regularly answered by other researchers.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:58, 3 January 2015 (UTC).

Is reciprocity an extrinsic motivation?

Reciprocity isn't actually an extrinsic motivation: "reciprocity is significantly stronger when extrinsic motivation can be ruled out." EllenCT (talk) 08:58, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

The extrinsic/intrinsic motivation talked about in that paper is the apparent motivation for the first act. [T]he effect that the motivation of an agent has on the reciprocating behavior of another agent. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:07, 3 January 2015 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: do you agree with the implication in [1] that reciprocity is an extrinsic motivation? I think the senses of justice and fairness are often considered intrinsic because third parties are usually in agreement about such scenarios when they have the same information. EllenCT (talk) 00:26, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure. It seems to me that reciprocity can be concrete or abstract - examples from The Gift Relationship might be "I received blood and I want to give back" where the blood received is certainly extrinsic, and abstract "I (or my family) might need blood" - there is in neither case any legal obligation, though one might consider a stronger moral obligation in the first case. Whether a moral code is intrinsic or extrinsic is hard to say - certainly bushido is extrinsic. Conversely in American cases recipients of blood have been required to give (or find donors for) an equal or more often greater amount of blood. This is clearly a form of mandated reciprocity, which is extrinsic. I should, I suppose, read the full paper if I can find a copy. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 00:45, 4 January 2015 (UTC).

Gender split in 2012 Wikipedia Editor Survey?

As Tbayer (WMF) is one of the authors of this piece, and Maximilianklein's report covers gender issues, this seems as good a place as any to ask Tilman once more what the gender split in the 2012 Editor Survey was. The survey's talk page is full of community members asking for this data, yet all inquiries directed at Tilman over the past half year have been ignored. Can we please have this data – just the simple gender split: x% male, y% female, z% other? It is now over 2 years since the survey ran, and this simple piece of data should take less than a minute to report. Thank you. Andreas JN 466 11:57, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

This is an extremely important data point. If there are methodological issues, I am sure we can address them. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:17, 3 January 2015 (UTC).

I agree that it is an extremely important data point, Rich, all the more since the WMF has not done an editor survey since then. So, if it is ever published, this will be the last data point on the gender gap for the foreseeable future. What do you suggest can be done to get the Foundation to release it? I am at my wits' end: I have asked about it on two mailing lists, I and others have left talk page messages for Tilman in three projects, there are enquiries from John Vandenberg and numerous other editors on the survey talk page in Meta dating back almost two years, yet the only answer I ever got was from Phoebe last month, who said, "I looked through my papers the last time you asked, and I don't think I have it. I'd send it to you if I did." This is an absurd situation: donor money paid for this survey. Yet for years now, the gender split has been shut in some drawer at WMF that nobody wants to open. --Andreas JN 466 12:35, 4 January 2015 (UTC)

R

Suggested tweaks: point to the CRAN libraries rather than the GitHub ones, and note that WikipediR was released in April 2014. That's not a particularly new thing (or a particularly recent thing - if you've tried writing API client libraries before httr you'll know how much of a pain it was). Ironholds (talk) 15:52, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Traffic report: Surfin' the Yuletide (655 bytes · 💬)

Why is "Christmas" #5 when its views are lesser than #6 to #10? Can someone fix this? Nahnah4 (talk | contribs | guestbook) 03:34, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

fixed Serendi ^pod ous 08:10, 3 January 2015 (UTC)