In February, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a survey with support from the Public Library of Science to explore the attitudes and beliefs of the open access scientific community with regard to Wikipedia. The open access movement is dedicated to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge. PLoS and other open access journals publish scientific papers under permissive Creative Commons licenses that allow anyone to download and re-use content. The Wikipedia article about open access, which itself could use some improvement, goes into more detail.

At Wikimedia, we’ve been thinking for a while about ways to directly work with scientists and open access journals. While scientists already contribute to Wikipedia in a self-organized manner (an example being the Gene Wiki effort), we have never made a systematic, large-scale effort to invite them to participate. Our exploratory survey indicates that such an invitation would be welcomed with open arms.

The survey was published on the PLoS website, blog, newsletter and Twitter feed, and the link to the survey was also more widely circulated, most notably in Peter Suber’s open access newsletter. 1,743 self-selected respondents completed the survey. Out of the respondents, 225 identified as PLoS authors. The subsample of authors did not differ remarkably from the general response. In general, respondents expressed a very favorable (58.98%) and somewhat favorable (32.19%) opinion of Wikipedia, and 87.73% indicated they used Wikipedia frequently or occasionally as part of their professional work.

71.03% of respondents supported some form of hyperlinks from open access publications to Wikipedia, and 91.51% supported links from Wikipedia to open access publications. 67.93% of respondents indicated support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, and 24.73% indicated support for limited experiments. 81.82% responded they would participate in such an effort to improve Wikipedia, with roughly half of the respondents indicating they would only do so as part of their professional work.

While the survey is by no means scientific (in spite of the subject of study, it wasn’t intended to be), it indicates that efforts to reach out to more scientists as potential contributors to Wikipedia would be met with enthusiasm and support, particularly in the open access scholarly community. We’ve had some initial conversations specifically with the Public Library of Science, and are looking forward to continuing them, specifically with an eye to scalable approaches to future collaboration.

More information:

• Overview report of survey results (PDF)
• Raw, anonynomous data from the survey (OpenDocument format)

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let everybody know that in a few days I’ll be changing the TorBlock configuration to require explicit block exemption rather than merely being logged in.

While we would rather this weren’t necessary, it seems that the edits coming through tor are mostly unconstructive; and we’ve had all kinds of nasty harassment come through that way — the community feedback we asked for was overwhelmingly that the ideological benefits of allowing truly anonymous editing are outweighed by the pragmatic concerns of
harassment and vandalism.

To facilitate this, I will also be activating explicit IP block exemption on all wikis. Like on English Wikipedia and many other wikis, administrators will be able to add users to an “IP block exempt” group, which exempts its holder from IP blocks, range blocks and autoblocks, but not explicit user blocks. This is a helpful, albeit inaccessible way to defray some of the problems associated with
blocking Tor users carte blanche.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about these changes!

–
Andrew Garrett
Contract Developer
Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikipedia Usability Team has finished up their analysis of the User Experience and Usability Testing conducted this past March with Bolt | Peters!  As noted, please expect a full report on our project page soon.  While we are getting all of our i’s dotted and t’s crossed, we wanted to share with you some of the major themes and findings & successes and failures.

Outstanding

“Usually it’s the most information in the easiest spot to access.  It always looks very well put together….it boggles my mind how many people can contribute and it still looks like an encyclopedia.” – ‘Galen’
“I like Wikipedia because it’s plain text and nothing flashes” – ‘Claudia’
“It’s always one of the first hits on Google” – ‘Grace’

If there was one thing that was consistent and unanimous across our study participants, it was the assessment that Wikipedia is an incredibly valuable information resource whose accessibility is unparalleled.  Aside from its value as a reference, a time and lifesaver, and an up to the minute news resource, participants also praised it’s simplicity, coherence, and breadth.  Also, an extra thanks to Google, for showcasing just how referenced Wikipedia articles are – consistently making their links one of the top hits – our users count on that!

Room for Improvement

“Rather than making a mess, I’d rather take some time to figure out how to do it right.” – ‘Dan’
“Where are the rules?……I don’t really want to read all of this other stuff about what I”m supposed to do.” – ‘Grace’

All of our participants are Wikipedia readers, but had little or no experience with editing.  Generally the editing process was not a warm and welcoming one.  Before subjects even hit the ‘edit’ or ‘edit this page’ buttons, they voiced concerns about the rules, proper etiquette, formatting, and were naturally conscientious of and inhibited by maintaining the community expectations.  When a few of them attempted to find answers to their questions about rules and etiquette, they were overwhelmed with the amount of information and documentation they encountered.

“ [I felt] kind of stupid.” – ‘Galen’
“It looks all jumbled and crazy…I’m going down to the stuff that looks like it makes sense.” – ‘Tito’
“I’m not a programmer.  I know the letters PHP.” – ‘Seamus’

Once within the editing environment, most subjects commented on the illegibility of the hybrid Wiki syntax and article content – the more complex the article, the more exaggerated the response.  When users made it past their initial reactions, navigating around the syntax to perform basic word processing tasks (correcting a typo, inserting a block of text, bold and italics formatting) proved less problematic than finding a particular section, adding references, using tables, creating and naming links.  But not even our youngest and most computer savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease.

“It’d be nice to have a GUI, so you could see what you’re editing.  You’ve made these changes and you’re looking at it, and you don’t know how it’s going to look on the page.  It’s a little clumsy to see how it’s going to look.” – ‘Bryan’
“On a blog it looks like the real page when you look at it.  I have a hard time looking at this and going back to the way it actually is.  I’m trying to correlate what’s on the real page.” – ‘Saurab’

Aside from feeling confused by the “code”, “computer lingo”, and “html”, subjects could not correlate what they were seeing within the edit box to what they saw on the article page.  Most subjects opened a separate browser window to view the static article as they were making their changes and used preview and save before they had finished their work to monitor their editing progress and results.

Fail

“[This is] where I’d give up.”  – ‘Shaun’
“ There sure is a lot of stuff to read.” – ‘Dan’

Yes, we can admit it.  In some ways it seems, we are failing our users.  The tasks that users most often failed to accomplish were adding references, creating a new article, and successfully finding help.  When adding references, users questioned where and how to enter their sources.  Once they established a location, they struggled with both the interface and the complex wiki syntax.  Several users, while scanning pages to try to figure out how to create a new article, saw ‘create a book’ and thought “add a wiki page” was what they were looking for.  In both adding references and new articles, some users consulted help.  Help proved to be quite a labyrinth, where the cheat sheet was one source of shining light.

Check out this highlight video (in English only for now) on Commons:
Editing Wikipedia Makes Me Feel Stupid
Explain the Editing Process to Me
I Can’t Tell What This Really Looks Like

Though we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants brought up, brought to our attention, and validated, it was an eye-opening and learning experience for the whole team.  The study informs us as we take a further look at the most effective changes we can make to lower these barriers for potential Wikipedia editors.  We look forward to sharing our complete report and initial ideas with you – stay tuned!

Parul, Wikimedia Usability Initiative

It’s my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has signed a strategic mobile and web partnership with Orange. Orange is one of the leading wireless and broadband internet providers in the world, and with this agreement we’ll begin integrating trademarked Wikipedia content onto their mobile and web channels. This is not just a way for me to improve my French (although that does need a lot of work. . .) – we’re also working with Orange to co-develop content channels and think about new ways to innovate and expand access to free knowledge. We’ve developed a QA as well dealing with aspects of the partnerships.

This is great news for Orange’s 175 million mobile customers and web users, as they’ll get better access to Wikipedia’s trove of knowledge throughout their daily lives. We’re starting out in the UK, Poland, Spain and France with plans to work together throughout Orange’s European footprint. This gets Wikipedia knowledge in front of more people in new ways, which helps us in our mission to expand knowledge to more people in more places. I especially want to praise all the volunteers who’ve made Wikipedia the world’s leading information resource. This partnership will help showcase their important work in front of more people than ever before.

I’ve been negotiating with Orange for a while, and I have been consistently impressed by their dedication to the Foundation’s mission of spreading free knowledge. They appreciate the importance of our community in everything we do, they’re committed to supporting neutral point-of-view, and they have an increasing interest in open source technology. The Foundation is always interested in business partnerships which understand our culture and help expand our mission, and Orange is an ideal partner for us.

This is an important new revenue stream to build on our successful fundraising campaigns. All the proceeds will go toward Wikimedia Foundation projects, with an emphasis on organizational sustainability and new services to make Wikipedia and our other projects better and easier to use. We’re a very lean nonprofit organization—just 27 of us help maintain the fourth-biggest website in the world—and this partnership will help us better support the vibrant community that makes Wikipedia possible.

Please join me in welcoming Orange as a new partner supporting the Wikimedia community!

Kul Wadhwa, Business Development<

Reposting the announce from Roan’s wikitech-l mailing list post:

Yesterday, the selection of GSoC projects was officially announced. For MediaWiki, the following projects have been accepted:

• Niklas Laxström (Nikerabbit), mentored by Siebrand, will be working on improving localization and internationalization in MediaWiki, as well as improving the Translate extension used on translatewiki.net
• Zhe Wu, mentored by Aryeh Gregor (Simetrical), will be building a thumbnailing daemon, so image manipulation won’t have to happen on the Apache servers any more
• Jeroen de Dauw, mentored by Yaron Koren, will be improving the Semantic Layers extension and merging it into the Semantic Google Maps extension
• Gerardo Antonio Cabero, mentored by Michael Dale (mdale), will be improving the Cortado applet for video playback (I’m a bit fuzzy on the details for this one)

The official list with links to (parts of) the proposals can be found at the Google website; lists for other organizations can be reached through the list of participating organizations.

The next event on the GSoC timeline is the community bonding period, during which the students are supposed to get to know their mentors and the community. This period lasts until May 23rd, when the students actually begin coding.

Starting now and continuing at least until the end of GSoC in August, you will probably see and hear from the students on IRC and the mailing lists and hear about the projects they’re working on. To repeat the crux of an earlier thread on this list: be nice to these special newcomers, make them feel welcome and comfortable, and try not to bite them :)

To the mentors and students: have fun!

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

The start of Volunteer Appreciation Week in the US (April 19 to 25, 2009) seemed an auspicious time for me to introduce myself to the amazing community of Wikimedia volunteers! I started last week in the new position of Chief Program Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation and have received such a wonderful warm welcome. Thank you!

Every minute of every day so far I have been awed by the people behind all the great and nearly innumerable activities going on! My background is in management of volunteer-driven programs. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Central and West Africa, I became passionate about volunteer programs being the answer for long-term sustainable change that is most needed and most appropriate for the beneficiaries they serve.

I also had the chance to see first-hand how access to information, or lack of access could profoundly affect individuals, communities and whole societies. My work at the Wikimedia Foundation will be to help support the volunteer community in achieving their mission. I aim to help strengthen the volunteer support structure, to help provide materials and skill building opportunities for current and potential Wikipedians, and to facilitate the exploration of new projects and strategies to increase participation as well as the quality and reach of our content. I look forward to getting to know more individuals as I advance along this adventure!

Jennifer Riggs, Chief Program Officer

Some readers of the blog who subscribe via RSS may not be seeing the latest posts on the Wikimedia Blog. We switched servers recently and it may have affected how the feeds reach your reader.

You can re-subscribe to RSS feeds with the links on the left-hand menu bar, or visit http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/

Thanks – happy reading!

Jay Walsh, Communications

After some internal discussion on whether opting out of the Phorm user-profiling system in the UK would legitimize it, we’re going ahead and requesting an opt-out for all the domains under the Wikimedia Foundation’s control:

Subject: Phorm opt-out for Wikipedia.org and related domains
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:28:11 -0700
From: Brion Vibber <brion@wikimedia.org>
To: website-exclusion@webwise.com
CC: private-l@lists.wikimedia.org

To whom it may concern --

The Wikimedia Foundation requests that our web sites including
Wikipedia.org and all related domains be excluded from scanning by the
Phorm / BT Webwise system, as we consider the scanning and profiling of
our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their
privacy.

Here is a list of our domains which should be excluded (please exclude
any and all subdomains as well):

wikipedia.org
wikipedia.com
wikipedia.co.uk
wikipedia.cz
wikipedia.fr
wikipedia.info
wikipedia.lt
wikipedia.net
wikipedia.nl
wikipedia.org.br
mediawiki.com
mediawiki.org
quickipedia.net
quickipedia.org
toolserver.org
vikipedio.com
vikipedio.org
wikibook.com
wikibooks.com
wikibooks.cz
wikibooks.org
wikicitaty.cz
wikidata.org
wikidisclosure.com
wikidisclosure.org
wikidruhy.cz
wikifamily.com
wikifamily.org
wikigis.com
wikigis.org
wikijunior.com
wikijunior.net
wikijunior.org
wikiknihy.cz
wikimania2006.org
wikimania2007.org
wikimaps.com
wikimaps.net
wikimediacommons.co.uk
wikimediacommons.de
wikimediacommons.eu
wikimediacommons.info
wikimediacommons.mobl
wikimediacommons.net
wikimediacommons.org
wikimedia.cz
wikimediafoundation.com
wikimediafoundation.net
wikimediafoundation.org
wikimedia.hu
wikimedia.li
wikimedia.lt
wikimedia.org
wikimedia.pl
wikimedia.se
wikimedia.us
wikimemory.org
wikimorial.com
wikimorial.org
wikinews.org
wikipaedia.net
wikipedie.cz
wikiquote.com
wikiquote.cz
wikiquote.net
wikiquote.org
wikislovnik.cz
wikisource.com
wikisource.cz
wikisource.org
wikispecies.com
wikispecies.cz
wikispecies.net
wikispecies.org
wikiversity.com
wikiversity.cz
wikiversity.org
wikiverzita.cz
wikizdroje.cz
wikizpravy.cz
wiktionary.com
wiktionary.cz
wiktionary.org

Thank you for your time.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco
+1 (415) 839-6885

Received autoreply:

Subject: 	Publisher Exclusion Request Autoreply
Date: 	Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:28:30 -0700
From: 	website-exclusion
To: 	Brion Vibber 

Thank you for your submission to the Phorm website exclusion list. If
there are no obvious grounds to doubt the legitimacy of the request the
URL will be blocked as soon as possible, usually within 48 hours.

Requests must be made by the legitimate owner of the domain. If we have
questions regarding your domain Phorm may take a number of steps,
including attempting to contact the domain administrator by email for
confirmation of this request. If the request remains questionable and is
not confirmed within 10 days, the URL will be removed from the exclusion
list and an email will be sent informing you of this decision.

Where applicable, please ensure that the Administrative Contact details
for this domain are up to date. If you need to update them, please
resubmit your request when the amended details are visible in the WhoIs
database - (use a public whois service such as
_http://who.godaddy.com/whoischeck.aspx_ if you are unsure it has been
updated)

We’re encountering some networking problems between our Tampa and Amsterdam data centers, which is breaking access to the sites for people in Europe. Mark’s poking to see if it can be resolved; if necessary we’ll reroute European visitors directly to the Tampa center.

Update: Has been resolved.

At the developer meetup, I announced that Wikimedia Deutschland is offering contracts for a couple of projects we feel are important. We again invite you to apply for any project that interests you.

The DEADLINE for applying is SUNDAY, APRIL 19!

We did not receive any offer for the most urgent project: Evaluate the impact of using flagged revisions on the German Wikipedia. We feel that it would be very helpful to run a full analysis on this before the English language Wikipedia decides on how to implement flagged revisions. It’s a powerful tool, and we should make sure we use it to it’s full potential.

Below, the other projects are listed again:

• Rewrite CatScan, a tool for finding pages in a set of categories recursively, based on various criteria.
• Store interwiki-links in the database, just like we already store interlanguage-links.
• Improve the Gadgets extension to allow for gadgets to be enabled per default, be restricted to specific user groups, etc.
• Implement full support for TIFF files, including multi-page TIFFs, similar to how DjVu is handled.

If you would like to help with any of the above, please contact me at <daniel.kinzler AT wikimedia.de> and provide the information specified at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers

Thank you all for your interest!