Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2008

The first round of voting has begun for the annual Wikimedia Commmons Picture of the Year Contest, and Wikimedians of all kinds are invited to help select the winner for 2010. If you created an account before January 1, 2011 and have made at least 200 edits to any Wikimedia project, then you’re eligible to vote for your favorite pictures. All 784 images that reached Featured Picture status in 2010 are in the running.

A volunteer-led contest, Picture of the Year is run by an organizing committee of Wikimedians. Since its inception in 2006, thousands of photos from people all over the world have been selected as Featured Pictures, and all of them are free for anyone in the world to reuse, remix and share.

The first round of votes will conclude Wednesday, May 4 at 11:59PM UTC  and the top photo in each category in addition to the top ten photos across the board will advance to Round 2 during the third week of May.

In 2008, a record of 994 voters participated and last year, 742 Wikimedians showed up to vote. This year, the committee is hoping to beat that record and recruit at least 1,500 Wikimedians to participate.

The Picture of the Year Contest is just as much about celebrating talented photographers and beautiful images as it is about celebrating those who have contributed to the cultural commons and inspiring more people to do the same. If you missed the deadline this year, please consider contributing your work today.

Moka Pantages, Global Development

As you may know from Sue’s March 2011 update, the Wikimedia Foundation has made it one of our highest priorities to improve the experience of new editors, and we thought we’d start right at the beginning: from when a potentially new editor makes an account.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Department has been studying how we can more effectively invite users who create new accounts to actually start editing. Since February, the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP) has been experimenting with different user interface messages and landing pages in the account creation flow (see their results and testing content to-date).

We didn’t have an A/B testing infrastructure that supported this work, so while ACIP has performed the first tests sequentially, we’ve now deployed a modification to our ClickTracking extension to English Wikipedia which will allow us to run multiple tests in parallel and record the results.

You’ll notice the “Log in/create account” link on the English Wikipedia will send you to several possible randomized log in screens, recognizable by the “ACP” identifier in the address.  This is from the newly created CustomUserSignup extension. Over the next few months, we’ll be varying the look and messaging of these screens to see what kind of impact that has on new editors, and sharing our findings. Our testing framework will allow us to bucket-test small tweaks to the interface and measure the number of accounts created and edits made by users (in aggregate or on a per-session basis) who have gone through different flows.

What data we are storing

We are storing a new cookie upon visiting the “Log in/create account” page, with a lifetime of three months.  This cookie will be used to track the following information:

• Which account creation messaging group the user was placed in (identified as ACP1, ACP2 or ACP3 for now)
• What version of the account creation campaign they recieved
• Whether the particular user made it to the end of the account creation process, or whether they dropped off after reaching the login screen or the account creation screen
• If (and only if) the user creates a new account, the number of edits or previews during the course of the trial

The information is associated with browser sessions (each of which has an individual unique identifier), not with an individual user or user account.

Anyone visiting the login page or the account creation page for English Wikipedia will have this
cookie set.  This is to make sure that we always provide the same wording to a particular visitor, so as not to invalidate our test.  We will stop setting this cookie at the conclusion of this work, though we will likely perform other similar tests in the future.

Because of the privacy-sensitive nature of the system, we have a limit on the level of granularity of our findings. For example, we won’t be able to create a plot of users vs edits, because we don’t have user-level data.

We look forward to the findings of the Account Creation Improvement Project, which will ultimately help us create a better sign-up experience for all users. Independent of this project, the CustomUserSignup extension may also prove useful to other outreach projects, by making it possible to create customized sign-up forms (e.g. for student workshops or e-mail invitations).

Nimish Gautam

The “Wikipedian in Residence” project has gone from strength to strength. Beginning last year at the British Museum (prior blogpost) there are now residency projects in cultural institutions in several countries and in very diverse cultural institutions.

Children’s Museum, Indianapolis
The longest-serving Wikipedian in Residence, Lori Phillips (HstryQT) has been working at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since September and has recently published an extensive update. This museum has a broad collection, with exhibitions focused on family learning, so for them collaborating with the non-commercial, educational online encyclopedia is a logical way to reach their audience.

Museum Apprentice Program students researching their Wikipedia articles

Some of Lori’s projects have included:

• Working with Wikipedians to increase the quality of articles for some of the museum’s objects, including the Broad Ripple Park Carousel, which was recently honoured with “featured article” status;
• Uploading images of their objects to Wikimedia Commons, their first foray into Creative Commons licensing;
• Embedding Wikipedia articles into their own website, such as with the historic locomotive Reuben Wells;
• Running “backstage pass tours” for local Wikipedians;
• Using Wikipedia to teach research and writing skills to 13-18 year old students in the “Museum Apprentice Program”, resulting in five new articles for the museum’s most iconic artifacts.

One Wikipedian who grew up in the area and visited as a child was so impressed with the museum’s collaboration with Wikipedia that he made a financial contribution to the museum:

It’s great to hear that the Children’s Museum has a Wikipedian in residence. I remember all sorts of class and family field trips to the museum… You’ve just inspired me to make a financial contribution to the museum, and if the museum higher-ups ever doubt the usefulness of a Wikipedian in residence, know this: Without that article and the memories it brought back, helping out wouldn’t have crossed my mind.
- JKBrooks85

Château de Versailles
Meanwhile at the court of French kings, Benoît Evellin (Trizek) is now a couple of months into his residency project (prior blogpost). The Château de Versailles is a completely different kind of museum, focused on a specific place and all the people, politics, history and culture that has swirled around it. The Château is excited to be working with Wikipedia as it is an effective way to contextualise this diverse range of subjects – from Marie Antoinette’s farm to any one of the ten Versailles treaties – and to bring its heritage and its specialists’ publications to a wider audience.

Photographing hard to reach paintings in the "cabinet des Dépêches" at Versailles

The two main components of Benoît’s work are providing training to the hundreds of museum staff on the theory and practice of Wikipedia and making connections between these experts and interested Wikipedians all over the world. His other specific projects include:

• Arranging special tours for photographers, to take free-licensed photographs to illustrate Wikipedia articles. Others – such as Salle du Sacre – were created directly as a result of the photographs becoming available.
• Sharing digitised copies of the Château’s collection of original books with Wikisource, and original and maps of the castle with Wikimedia Commons.

Future activities will include an international article writing contest, a “featured article in 24 hours” challenge and translation drives.

Derby Museum
Across the Channel in England, the newly elected chair of Wikimedia UK Roger Bamkin (Victuallers) has been working with Derby Museums. Compared to the other institutions the Derby museums are small, with a special focus on the 18th Century painter Joseph Wright of Derby and the first factory. However, this is an experiment to see what effect we can have on a smaller institution.

Recently the Derby museum hosted its own “backstage pass tour” at which two innovative projects were unveiled. The first, the Wright Challenge, is a multilingual project aimed at creating articles related to the museum and its subject in as many Wikipedia language editions as possible. The second is the use of Wikipedia QR Codes for the museum exhibits. QR codes have been used in museums before but these QRpedia codes – a tool created as a direct result of the Derby collaboration – are a cost effective way for the museum to cater to international visitors as they are able to detect the preferred language of the visitor and direct them to the appropriate Wikipedia edition.

Coming soon…
Very soon three new cultural institutions will join the list of those with an in-house Wikipedian. The US National Archives (NARA) have announced Dominic McDevitt-Parks (Dominic) who will be working to link their unique collections of documents with the myriad Wikipedia articles about American history. Meanwhile, Sarah Stierch (Missvain) will be undertaking similar projects at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Finally, the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) has advertised a similar position, jointly funded by Wikimedia Germany, to work across several diverse institutions at once.

From small to large, old to new, archives to museums, every cultural institution can have a proactive relationship with Wikipedia because, after all, we’re working in the same field for the same reason, and for the same people. If you would like to follow updates on the residents and other culture-sector activities you can subscribe to the “This month in GLAM” newsletter on wiki or by RSS or visit glamwiki.org

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow

We received more than 25 proposals for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and several mentors put many hours into evaluating project ideas, discussing them with applicants, and making the tough decisions.  Our final choices, the Google Summer of Code students for MediaWiki for 2011:

• Akshay Agarwal‘s “Account Creation, Login Screens and AJAX-ification of everything” (mentor: Brandon Harris)
• Kevin Brown’s “Working Archival for Web References/Citations,” “to facilitate the archival of external links used as references in the English Wikipedia” (mentor: Neil Kandalgaonkar)
• Devayon Das‘s “Improving Semantic Search/Semantic Query usability issues in SMW” (mentor: Markus Krötzsch)
• Ankit Garg‘s “Semantic Schemas extension” (mentor: Yaron Koren)
• Salvatore Ingala‘s “AMICUS: Awesome Monolithic Infrastructure for Customization of User Scripts” (mentors: Brion Vibber and Max Semenik)
• Aigerim Karabekova‘s “Extension Release Management” (mentors: Sam Reed, Priyanka Dhanda, and Chad Horohoe)
• Yuvi Panda‘s “Making Offline Wikipedia Article Selection Easier with Mediawiki Extensions” (mentor: Arthur Richards)
• Zhenya Vlasyenko‘s “MediaWiki Extension: SocialProfile – UserStatus feature” (mentor: Jack Phoenix)

You’ll be hearing more about each of these projects in the next few weeks!

Congratulations to this year’s students, and thanks to all the applicants, as well as MediaWiki’s many mentors, developers who evaluated applications, and Google’s Open Source Programs Office.  The accepted students now have a month to ramp up on MediaWiki’s processes and get to know their mentors (the Community Bonding Period) and will start coding their summer projects on or before May 23rd.  As organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s GSoC participation, I’ll be keeping an eye on all eight students and helping them out.

Good luck!

About a month ago Wikimedia Sweden started Projekt Internet in Sverige (Project Internet in Sweden) on the Swedish Wikipedia, aiming to improve articles concerning the Internet in Sweden.

Funded by Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur (The Foundation for Internet Infrastructure) best known for handling the .se top-level domain, Wikimedia Sweden hired me to conduct meta work related to the project from March to July 2011. As far as we know, this is the first time someone has been employed to work specifically on the Swedish-language version of Wikipedia.

“]

Jan Ainali (left), who has leads the project, and me (right).

So, what do I do? I try to find articles dedicated to topics covering the Internet in Sweden. I put them on an importance scale and assess for quality — the point being to find articles that are central to the Internet, but need more work. I analyze the work to see if what we’re doing is actually helping. We hope the project will inspire more people to get involved in Wikipedia and make contacts between experts in the field and Wikipedia editors. Even better, we hope these experts will begin editing articles themselves. In a nutshell, my job is to bring attention to the relevant Swedish-language articles (the good, as well as the bad ones), be of as much help as possible to make them better, and hopefully educate people about Wikipedia in the process.

So far, working on the project has been great fun. A little bit too much so, perhaps. I spend my day doing Wikipedia-related things and afterwards, in the evenings, I continue editing articles as a volunteer. I’ve been an editor for almost seven years now, so it’s been great to have the opportunity to think about Wikipedia during the day as my “real job” and then continue editing as part of the community.

At Wikimedia Sweden, we hope, of course, our work will help bring focus to articles about the Internet in Sweden and making them easier to find, clarifying where we need more help and inspiring editors to make them better. The public could certainly use it: Swedish Wikipedia might be the eleventh Wikipedia by article count, but compared to the really large language versions, such as German, English or French Wikipedia, our number of active users is fairly small, and many of the articles related to the Internet in Sweden seem to have gone on without the love and attention they need.

But not only that, this project might also help different sorts of organizations realize that this is a way for them to assist in sharing knowledge. Support us. Help us. Free up what Wikipedia demands most: time.

Johan Jönsson

User: Julle

Wikimedia Sweden

On Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation will launch its first semi-annual survey (2011) of Wikipedia editors. A notification will be sent through Wikipedia to all registered editors, as everyone is eligible to participate. The Foundation urges feedback and participation as a way to get your voice heard. For more information, you can read the FAQ we’ve posted detailing the survey.

Using our community’s help, the survey was translated into 21 languages in addition to English, including: Chinese (traditional, Hong Kong), Chinese (simplified), Serbian, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Macedonian, Italian, Hungarian, Croatian, Hebrew, French, Finnish, Spanish, German, Danish, Welsh, Catalan, Bulgarian and Arabic. The Foundation will conduct the survey in languages for which translations are available, and for the remainder of Wikipedia language projects the survey will be available in English. With the exception of the UNU-Merit survey, this is the first time the foundation will conduct a survey of Wikipedia editors, with plans to continue surveying systematically and regularly from this point forward. A retooled version of the survey will debut in late 2011.

The current survey is being conducted with the following goals in mind:

• Create a demographic profile of contributors to Wikipedia: We will collect data on age, gender, education, employment history, etc. This will help us refresh the data from the UNU-Merit editor survey data, and we are hoping that the use of cookies within the central notice will ensure that the survey is not biased towards more frequent editors. It is imperative to use this technique to ensure we collect reliable and valid demographic data.

• Create an online technology ecology of contributors: We will collect data to understand what other online activities contributors pursue, as well as how contributing to Wikipedia fits into their specific online technology ecology.

• Gain a deeper understanding of both editing activities and histories of contributors: This will allow the foundation to segment editors based on tenure and editing activities.

• Understand editor interactions: The survey features a section designed to gain insight on interactions between editors. The foundation will use the data to inform interventions and increase editor retention. As we found in the editor trends study, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to retain and recruit new editors, and we are interested in hearing from editors about their experiences with their peers.

• Perceived discrimination and its effects: The survey aims to understand whether editors perceive any kind of discrimination based on gender, race, nationality etc. The data collected will help the foundation inform interventions to increase retention and diversity.

• Funding and feedback about chapters and foundation: Lastly, we will gather data to understand who supports the foundation through funding, and elicit feedback from editors about both chapters and the foundation in order to increase engagement.

We’re looking forward to participation from editors all around the world while the survey is active. Please spread the word, and thanks for taking the time to contribute your views!

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

Does a constant stream of new editors really make Wikipedia better? Increasing participation is one of the top five priorities in our strategic plan. But when we talk about retention of newly registered editors, some readers and experienced editors rightfully wonder exactly how many edits by newbies actually improve the free encyclopedia.

In the Community Department, we’re facilitating the WikiGuides pilot program on the English Wikipedia to reach out to new contributors and mentor them. To do that successfully, we must quickly identify which new editors are actually doing good work.

So one of our working questions is: How many contributions by new editors are made in good faith and are worth retaining or improving?

We took a randomly selected batch of 155 new registered users on the English Wikipedia who made at least one edit in mid-April of this year. We looked at their first edit and ranked it on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being pure vandalism and 5 being an edit that is excellent, meaning it adds a significant chunk of verified, encyclopedic content and would be indistinguishable from a very experienced editor. Here’s what that composition looks like:

So you can see that even with a very high standard for quality — we only handed out a single “5” edit — most new editors made contributions worth retaining in some way, even if they weren’t perfect. More than half of these first edits needed no reworking to be acceptable based on current Wikipedia policy. Another 19% made good faith edits but needed additional help to meet standards defined in policy or guideline.

In order to investigate whether this has changed over time, we took a similar cohort from the same period in April 2004 and made the same qualitative assessment.

The key thing to note in comparing the two samples is that the percent of acceptable edits made by newbies did not dramatically decrease from 2004 to 2011. That’s despite the fact that the bar for quality has been raised over time, and that there are arguably fewer obvious contributions to make now that Wikipedia has grown by millions of articles.

Another relevant fact to consider is that while both cohorts are of 155 new editors, it took several days for that many new editors to join Wikipedia in 2004. In 2011, our sample is a tiny slice of the new editors arriving every month. For example: on Monday of this week more than 1,800 editors joined English Wikipedia and made at least one edit. On the equivalent day in 2004 there were only about 60.

Our sample strongly suggests that thousands of new editors still join Wikipedia every month with valuable contributions to make. Ensuring that we welcome these newcomers and show them the ropes is a top priority for ensuring Wikipedia’s continued success in our second decade.

(This is the first in what will be a new series of blog posts coming out of the Community Department at the Wikimedia Foundation. Starting now and continuing through the summer, we will be sharing the questions, experiments, and fresh data that currently drive our work. While you’ll get an inside look at what we’re doing, our numbers and analysis are still evolving and should be taken with a grain of salt.)

Steven Walling
Wikimedia Foundation Fellow, on behalf of the Community Dept. – especially Philippe Beaudette, James Alexander, and Maryana Pinchuk.

MediaWiki 1.16.4 is a second security release this week.  Shortly after previous release (1.16.3), Masato Kinugawa discovered that one of the XSS problems that the 1.16.3 release was designed to address hadn’t been fully addressed, and reported bug 28507.  As a consequence, Internet Explorer 6 users visiting a site running 1.16.3 will still be vulnerable to an XSS attack.  After more thorough testing (thanks Roan Kattouw!), we’re releasing 1.16.4.

Full details are in Tim Starling’s 1.16.4 release announcement.  Sorry for the inconvenience of a second release, and thank you everyone involved in getting this fixed!