For Wikimedia Commons contributor George Chernilevsky, the appeal of his Picture of the Day lies in its simplicity. “I liked the colors and very simple composition,” he said. “All the beauty of the world can be seen in very simple things.”

Chernilevsky, who lives in Ukraine, was visiting the Black Sea with his wife Natali and his two sons, Artem and Vyacheslav, when he took this picture. His younger son Vyacheslav, who turns 16 today, found this shell belonging to a species of scallop (Flexopecten glaber ponticus) believed to have been extinct since 1990. Chernilevsky took the picture using his point-and-shoot camera, and he is happy the photo turned out so well and that it was able to gain recognition on Commons.

“I am glad that the photo will be seen by people in different countries,” he said, explaining his main motivation for donating his images to the public domain. “It is pleasant to me that the whole world can see what I saw, and that my photos can benefit people.”

He has been active on Wikimedia Commons since 2007, when he started uploading pictures for articles on Russian Wikipedia. “It is a fine project in which it is pleasant to participate,” he said.

Chernilevsky was born in 1967 in Makhachkala, located in the Caucasus region of what was at the time the Soviet Union. His father was a lieutenant colonel in the military, so Chernilevsky moved around a lot when he was growing up, and his experiences helped shape his later photographic style.

“Living conditions were very simple, ascetic,” said Chernilevsky, who tends to favor simplicity in his photographs. In addition, he developed a strong interest in wildlife and nature. “[I got] to see a lot of beautiful and wild places,” he said, “the heated sand of the desert, ice tundra, the mountains and permafrost of the extreme Siberian North, huge woods and transparent lakes.”

He has been interested in photography since the age of 12, and at 14, he even enrolled in painting and drawing classes at university, hoping the knowledge would help him advance his shooting. However, Chernilevsky has only ever pursued photography as a hobby, not professionally. He attended Saint Petersburg State University where he studied in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Control Processes, and he currently works in software development.

Chernilevsky hopes that his photographs will communicate “a special message” to viewers: “Life is fine and unexpected–simple things can surprise and give emotions.”

(View more of Chernilevsky’s featured pictures)

Elaine Mao, Communications Intern

Respondents to the December 2011 Editor Survey reported that lack of time and poor interactions with other editors were the biggest obstacles in their way. Editors that primarily worked on more established Wikipedias (for instance English and German) also talked extensively about the abundance of rules and policies.

In an effort to better understand how we can make editing easier for Wikipedians, we asked them two questions in the survey, about the biggest obstacle that prevents them from making a contribution and about one thing they would like to see changed in order to contribute more effectively.

Word cloud of open ended responses to Q26: "What is the single biggest obstacle that you face in making an important contribution to Wikipedia?"

Many respondents spoke of unpleasant interactions with fellow editors, in many cases involving reverts to content they had added. One noted: “if an editor reverts with snotty comments or reverts a major contribution with no detailed explanation, I feel like saying ‘what’s the use?’  so far, I’ve come back after those experiences, but maybe someday I won’t“. Another respondent talked about the problems arising from a few editors assuming ownership of major articles: “… This makes just jumping in and doing significant rewrites feel almost like an act of aggression and one tends to hesitate to do so despite the ability to write well and knowledgeably about the subject.”

When asked what they would like changed, a large part of the respondents talked about a better editing interface: “Simpler editing interface, replacement of markup language with word processor-esque click and go interface – otherwise editing is too time consuming” (a goal the Foundation is pursuing with the development of the Visual Editor). Another noted: “Easier interface. Editing is difficult and if one is not careful, it’s easy to mess the article up.“ Many respondents also mentioned that dealing with complicated expressions (for instance, mathematical equations) and language intricacies (for non-English Wikipedias) is difficult with the current interface. Some also felt that the Wikipedia community needed to do a better job of recognizing people by merit: “Merit should be given to the quality of edits contributed rather than vehement assertions…“, “People can cherry pick or misrepresent sources with impunity, as long as they are polite“.

Word cloud of open ended responses to Q27: "What is the single biggest obstacle that you face in making an important contribution to Wikipedia?"

We plan to use these responses to inform the continuing improvement of Wikipedia.

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

In December 2011, we conducted an online survey of Wikipedia editors in 17 languages. This is the sixth and final in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.

Banner for Assamese Wikipedia celebrations

I made a short weekend trip to Guwahati, Assam (India) to attend the 10th anniversary celebrations of the Assamese Wikipedia on 10th June. Assam is known as the ‘gateway state’ to the North East of India and is home to people of diverse ethnic and linguistic origins. Including the Ahom, Bodo, Dimasa and Tai-Aiton, people of more than 10 tribes who all speak different languages inhabit Assam. However, since India’s independence and the formation of the state of Assam, Asssamese has been the official language, largely spoken by all. The Assamese language has over 1.3 crore (13 million) native speakers spread across Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland and pockets of Bhutan. Currently, the Assamese Wikipedia has over 1000 articles and around 30 active editors. Interestingly, started in 2002, it was the first Indian language Wikipedia ever.

Assamese Wikipedians at the tenth anniversary celebrations

To mark ten years of Assamese Wikipedia, community members organized a workshop in Cotton College, Guwahati which was attended by over 60 people including students, linguists, journalists and prize winners of the article writing and photography contest. Machumi Bordoloi won the first prize for her article on “Malita” (a folk ballad) and Akashdip Goswami won the first prize for his photograph of “Kolia Bhomora Setu” – a bridge in Tezpur, Assam.

Presentations and talks explained what Wikipedia is (Gitartha Bordoloi), how one can contribute in Assamese (Bishnu Saikia), why one should contribute to Wikipedia (Uddip Talukdar), and gave lessons on community building (Jyoti Prakash Nath) and font support (by Bonojit Pathak). Their community is a perfect example of a well-knit family with one guiding another. The community’s warmth and openness to go that extra mile to welcome new members is admirable – they make sure that new users understand that editing is actually your contribution to your culture and knowledge preservation!

First prize winning entry in the photography contest

As a community that went from almost 0 to 30 members in a year, Assamese Wikipedians have some important lessons to offer. Jyoti, one of the most active Assamese editors, told me over dinner, “I contribute to Assamese Wikipedia so that people know about our culture and progress. Most newspapers and magazines don’t give you an objective picture of a place or its people. Wikipedia is my best bet.” I asked them how they went about getting more members. Most of them actually got acquainted on the Facebook group they run for as-wp. That’s where they asked questions, discussed and paired up for Wikiprojects. And looking at their discussions, many more were inspired.

What do they plan for the future? Get more editors, encourage the winners of photography and article contests to continue writing. The first step in this direction is the Wikiproject ‘Districts of Assam’. Writing about one’s own district, cities and towns could definitely be a great start for any new editor. They are also one of the first communities to use social media effectively for outreach. This structured way of community building that has led to the fantastic growth of the Assamese community could serve as a great example for smaller Wikipedias striving to get more editors on board. Especially for Indian language Wikipedias, a multi-pronged approach such as this (offline outreach, social media and pilot projects) might be the most sustainable way to progress.

Every little drop fills the ocean. In the Wikiverse, where many an editor has created hundreds of articles, imagine what a 30 member community could do for its Indic Wikipedia! Here’s hoping for a successful year to the Assamese community with more editors, articles and workshops!

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program, Wikimedia Foundation

This post is available in 2 languages:

português  • English

In English

Wikipedia contributors take many paths to become editors and their motivations are as varied as their stories. For Messias Soares Cavalcante, it started in a mechanical workshop in São Paulo, Brazil, and it culminated with the largest collection of cachaça bottles in the world.

Messias Soares Cavalcante

When Cavalcante was 16, he had an epiphany. He worked as an operator of lathe and planer and he wasn’t happy with his job. He was sitting in the workshop, looking at an older mechanic friend and mentor, when he had a premonition. “In 30 years I will be him,” Cavalcante said to himself. “I’ll be here in this or other workshop and I’ll be him.”

Seeing education as his best opportunity out of the life he led, he started taking night classes and he worked as an office boy in a bank, and later as lab tech to pay his way through school. After graduation he became a senior researcher in the field of biological deterioration of wood. Half a century later, Cavalcante has three degrees, including a PhD from the University of Portsmouth in England, and he is the author of several books, including two on cachaça, the sugar cane spirit popular in Brazil and other parts of Latin America.

Cavalcante began collecting cachaça bottles 25 years ago at local markets simply for amusement. Over time, his hobby evolved as he attended fairs and meetings to learn more about the spirit. Early on he found that the discovery of cachaça was heavily disputed and largely unknown, due to lack of physical documents and historical records. The incertitude over its discovery led Cavalcante to seek out books and articles, where he found many inconsistencies and obvious mistakes.

“No one knows when or where it was discovered,” said Cavalcante. “Brazilians say that it was discovered here in Brazil but there are people from other countries, mainly from South America, that claim it was discovered in their respective countries.”

Cavalcante sought to rectify these inconsistencies by sharing his research. He set up a website to collect his findings and, at his son’s suggestion, he formed an FAQ section to answer the many questions readers asked of him. His research was so extensive and so in depth, he realized that he had enough information to publish a history on the topic. His first book, Cachaça: A Verdadeira História da Cachaça (The True History of Cachaça), attempted to dispel the many inconsistencies around cachaça’s origins. In his second book, Todos os Nomes da Cachaça (All the Names of Cachaça), Cavalcante covered the wide range of synonyms for the drink, including over 2,000 names that Brazilians use. Some names are lyrical, such as “refreshment of philosophy (refrigério da filosofia),” and “nectar of the gods (néctar dos deuses).” Others describe the physical effects of cachaça on its imbiber, such as “amnesia (amnésia)” and “burning throat (queima goela).” And still others — which we won’t print here — verge toward the indelicate.

Cavalcante holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest collection of cachaça bottles, with a current total of 15,446 bottles, and he hopes to be the leading expert on the subject. With over 25 years of collecting bottles of cachaça, one would imagine he has indulged in his fair share of the spirit. “Only on Saturdays,” he said when asked.

After using Wikipedia for many years as a reference tool, Cavalcante began editing the cachaça article in early December, 2011, adding detail to what was then a much shorter article. “When I looked at the article about cachaça in Wikipedia, it was okay but it was very small article, little information,” he said. “So as I knew something about that, I intended to collaborate to improve the article and so that’s why I started to be a collaborator of Wikipedia.”

Cavalcante acknowledges a debt to “the knowledge of many people” that he has gleaned from Wikipedia and he’s happy to give back so others can benefit from his learning. “I know how difficult it is to get the right information, accurate information, and Wikipedia gives that to you,” he said. “Wikipedia is a way to get information quickly. You go to Wikipedia and say exactly what you need and so you go for what is very, very important.”

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This post is available in 2 languages:

français  • English

In English

Signing the partnership agreement for Afripedia

In mid June, Rémi Mathis, chairman of Wikimédia France, signed a partnership with the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (Association of Universities of the Francophonie – AUF) and the Institut Français (IF) to support a project called Afripedia. This initiative supports the development of Internet access in countries where, for now, the network is not stable and affordable enough. In French-speaking Africa, where most people have limited, expensive and poor quality access to the Internet, the goal is to encourage contribution and access to free knowledge. Wikimédia France intends to support future local contributor communities to move Wikipedia forward in French and in local languages.

The partnership is facilitated by the work of Kiwix developers, who for several years have been facilitating offline versions of Wikipedia in various languages. Utilizing the Kiwix platform, content from Wikipedias in different languages can be downloaded and shared all over the world to be used in diverse ways.

For Afripedia, Wikimédia France –working with Kiwix, the AUF and IF — will establish offline WiFi systems in areas where internet is not prevalent. The system essentially works like an Intranet. We will install small computers (Plug Computers) without screens or keyboards, which are very energy-efficient. Then we will connect a flash drive with the content of Wikipedia (and maybe other Wikimedia projects, like Wiktionary, etc.) and all the content will be shared by WiFi with all the computers that receive the WiFi network. To update content, you just have to update the original flash drive and every computer will receive the new information. We think that this system is better than the traditional sharing of content with flash drives or DVD, because it allows for easier and more accessible updates.

In a lot of countries, the AUF has a network of digital campuses near universities. We are in partnership with the AUF in order to benefit from that network and logistical help. We will start by setting up the project in about 20 universities in 15 countries in West-Africa and by training the staff to use Wikipedia, especially for educational use.

But we also want to encourage contribution by African people on African topics, given that there is too little coverage of those on Wikipedia. For this purpose, while we develop the offline dissemination of Wikipedia, we will organize tutorials and workshops to make it easier to contribute and collaborate with the Wikipedia community. With this training, we’re hopeful users will be able to contribute more easily when their internet connection allows them to do so.

If the project goes well, we intend to develop it further in 2013 with help from the AUF and IF. We’re starting with universities, but we can consider sharing Wikipedia content this way in schools, cultural centers and even (with wireless repeaters) in residential areas and villages.

This is a particular and unique experience for us to take part to this kind of project. It is very interesting to work with institutions with extensive experience in educationnal and cultural development. Since we have announced this partnership, and based on coverage in African media outlets, we have received several contacts from associations or people involved in cultural development. This should allow us to support new communities of contributors (and maybe future wikimedia chapters?) in these countries.

We look forward to updating you on our progress as the initiative proceeds.

Adrienne Alix, Director of programs, Wikimédia France

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When Victor Grigas first noticed Wikipedia, it was 2005 and it kept coming up in his search results. The only problem, he said, was that he hit too many dead ends. “Those were the red-link days, when English Wikipedia had a lot less content than it has now. At first I thought it was kind of annoying that my Google searches kept getting cluttered with this website that had bad information on it,” he said. “That kind of motivated me to press buttons and see what happens.”

Victor Grigas interviewing Dr. Sengai Podhuvan

Grigas was raised in Chicago and worked a number of jobs in construction and property management, before he switched paths completely and went to film school. On Wikipedia, he started editing articles related to Chicago and found that uploading pictures was a very effective way to make contributions. “I found myself taking photos of things that I thought might have some encyclopedic value even if it was on a bad 2G cell phone,” he said. “If I was passing by a monument and there was no photo of it on Wikipedia, I would say, I’ll take a shot. It’s better than nothing, and at any point somebody can come by and make it better.”

Grigas carried this spirit of iterative collaborations to other topics, including articles on graffiti, one of his passions and a form of communication he compares with editing. “Wikipedia in a lot of ways is an encyclopedia by graffiti: the good stuff stays up, and the bad stuff gets erased,” he said. “And even sometimes the good stuff gets erased too, but then the beauty of Wikipedia is, you can always come and replace it again; it’s two clicks away.”

Storyteller

As part of the 2011 Wikimedia fundraiser, the Wikimedia Foundation created three positions for Storytellers and Grigas was hired for the team (full disclosure: I was also one of the Storytellers in 2011). The Storyteller role combined interviewing with fundraising, copywriting and photography in an effort to diversify and improve the content of the banners and landing pages that make up the annual drive for donations. Grigas said the position fit with everything he cared about.

“I have my job acceptance PDF framed in my house — it was just the most triumphant thing in the world,” he said. “It involves all the things I believe in, to my core. It embodies transparency, education, I mean, my mother is a schoolteacher, my father found his way out of the gutter with education.”

As a Storyteller, Grigas combined his expertise in audio and video production with a fair bit of improvisation, given that this was uncharted territory for the Foundation. He interviewed as many Wikipedia editors, contributors and readers as possible to chronicle the community that makes Wikipedia flourish. In the beginning, Grigas said the process was a bit “chaotic” and involved a lot of trial and error. “We just asked a bunch of questions, but didn’t quite know [what would work],” he said. “Sometimes you go into an interview kind of blind. Sometimes I’ll meet somebody with a reference and I don’t have very much background information.”

Grigas said that one particular documentary project he worked on, “I am Chicago,” prepared him for the challenge. The project was a photo documentary where he and the team retrofitted a moving truck as a portrait studio, parked it at intersections around the city, and tried to get passersby to participate in the project. “We’d roll out a red carpet and hang out on the intersection all day trying to get people to sign a consent waiver and come into the truck to get a full body portrait,” he said. “You have to go into it with a sense of adventure, Chicago can be a wild place sometimes. You learn a lot about people and how to convince them to come in to be recorded.”

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To keep up with the growth of Wikipedia and its community, one goal of the engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation for this year is to establish a Quality Assurance (QA) practice for software development, including MediaWiki itself, extensions, and also projects like Article Feedback and Editor Engagement. But how do you establish a QA & Testing practice for a development process that involves so many contributors, with code coming in from so many sources and projects?

In software development, QA is often conflated with software testing, but testing is only a small part of QA in general. The goal of modern software testing is not only to discover defects, but also to investigate software in order to provide valuable information about that software from every point of view, from the user experience to how the software is designed. On the other hand, Quality Assurance is process work, examining the process by which the software is created, from design to code to test to release and beyond.

Dozens of (volunteer and paid) developers contribute code to Mediawiki every month, in areas as varied as MediaWiki’s core, MediaWiki extensions, and localization. Thousands of power users on Wikimedia’s wikis can also contribute code directly on the sites, in the form of JavaScript “gadgets”. With so many entry points for fast-paced development, starting a QA/testing practice is challenging. Our strategy is to focus on two areas: test automation; and building a testing community. We’re hiring people to coordinate these two areas.

As QA Lead, I have created an example of what I believe to be the best available test automation “stack”, to pave the way and start the process of what I intend to be a reference implementation, an industry standard for high-quality browser test automation. We’re now hiring a QA Engineer whose primary responsibility will be to create and maintain browser-level test automation. In the course of creating those automated tests, we will be improving our use of the source code repository recently migrated from Subversion to git, we will be improving the beta labs test environment, and we will be expanding the use of our Continuous Integration in Jenkins.

But test automation isn’t everything, and we also have an opportunity to apply the Wikimedia community’s expertise in online volunteer collaboration to software quality. We’ve already started to explore this path with success: in May, we collaborated with Weekend Testing to validate the new frequent release schedule of MediaWiki to Wikimedia sites. Weekend Testing is an established global group of professional software testers who gather online every month for a different testing project, and testing Mediawiki versions on Wikipedia was a complex effort, executed well. In June, we collaborated with OpenHatch.org to test a near-final version of the new Article Feedback system that will be released to all of Wikipedia in the coming weeks. OpenHatch is an organization
dedicated to matching interested participants in open source software to projects that need participants. This was the first testing project for OpenHatch, and it went well; Article Feedback is much improved because of it.

We are now hiring a Volunteer QA Coordinator, who will be working to create a culture of quality testing and investigation of software related to Wikimedia, both within the Wikimedia community itself, and in collaboration with the greater software testing culture. And we are already planning future activities with both Weekend Testing and OpenHatch.

My first few months as QA Lead at the Wikimedia Foundation have been devoted to creating an environment where the QA Engineer and the Volunteer QA Coordinator will thrive. I am really looking forward to collaborating with the talented people we will hire for these roles. My own role will be shifting as these new practices start to take hold. I will be looking to the future, to bring in innovative and creative approaches to software QA and testing of the highest possible quality.

Chris McMahon
QA Lead Engineer

Winner of the 2011 Picture of the Year: A view of Lake Bondhus in Norway, and in the background of the Bondhus Glacier, part of the Folgefonna Glacier.

Wikimedia Commons is an online repository of media freely licensed and available for anyone to use and repurpose. Every year the Commons community highlights the best media submitted over the course of the previous 12 months, in what has become the Picture of the Year Contest. This year, German Wikipedian Heinrich Pniok is the winner of the Sixth Annual contest for his picture of Lake Bondhus in Norway. You can read the complete story behind the 2011 Picture of the Year in this excellent article by User:Tony1 from the 25 June 2012 issue of the Wikipedia Signpost.

The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year voting process consists of two Rounds: Round 1 includes pictures promoted to Featured Picture status during the contest period and leads to the final pool of 32 images to be voted for in the next round. Round 2 voting determines the winner from the pool of 32 finalist pictures. Wikimedia Commons currently contains over 13 million freely licensed files and these 3 finalists for Picture of the Year provide us a glimpse of some of the best work available on the database. Anyone can contribute to Wikimedia Commons and you are encouraged to upload your own work to our ever-growing database. Who knows? Maybe your picture will be featured in a blog post like this one next year!

Jordan Hu, Communications Intern

Second choice: Tracy Caldwell Dyson on the International Space Station

Third choice, water reflections in The Verdes' Cave, Canary Islands

Vol: 2 • Issue: 6 • June 2012 [archives]

Edit war patterns, deleters vs. the 1%, never used cleanup tags, authorship inequality, higher quality from central users, and mapping the wikimediasphere

With contributions by: Tbayer, Piotrus, Evan and Daniel Mietchen

Dynamics of edit wars

Controversy about Michael Jackson as quantified on the basis of reverted edits to his Wikipedia article. A: Jackson is acquitted on all counts after five month trial. B: Jackson makes his first public appearance since the trial to accept eight records from the Guinness World Records in London, including Most Successful Entertainer of All Time. C: Jackson issues Thriller 25. D: Jackson dies in LA.

“Dynamics of Conflicts in Wikipedia”^[1], develops an interesting “measure of controversiality”, something that might be of interest to editors at large if it was a more widely popularized and dynamically updated statistic. The authors look at the patterns of edit warring on Wikipedia articles, finding that edit warriors are usually prone to reaching consensus, and the rare cases of never-ending warring involve those that continuously attract new editors who have not yet joined the consensus.

Regarding methodology, the authors’ decision to filter out articles with under 100 edits as “evidently conflict-free” is a bit problematic, as articles with fewer than 100 edits have been subject to clear, if not over-long, edit warring (a recent example: Concerns and controversies related to UEFA Euro 2012). One could also wish that the discussion of the “memory effects” – a term mentioned only in the abstract and lead, which the author suggests is significant to understanding the conflict dynamic – was explained somewhere in the article (the term “memory” itself appears four times in the body and does not seem to be operationalized anywhere).

A press release accompanying the paper is titled “Wikipedia ‘edit wars’ show dynamics of conflict emergence and resolution“, while an MSNBC tech news headline summarized it as “Wikipedia is editorial warzone, says study“.

Who deletes Wikipedia

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An invitation to “edit this page” is shown after users post feedback on Wikipedia (‘Call to Action 1′)

Since December 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation has been testing a new version of the Article Feedback Tool, a feature first introduced on the English Wikipedia in 2010. The goal of version 5 (AFTv5) is to engage Wikipedia readers to become more active contributors, by inviting them to provide feedback on articles they read, and encouraging them to become editors over time. 

Early tests of AFTv5 helped us answer the question of what design of the tool produces a desirable balance between volume and usefulness of the feedback collected. In this post we report results from two additional experiments designed to answer the following questions:

1. Does a prominent invitation to use the tool affect the usefulness of submitted feedback?
2. How does an invitation to leave feedback affect the conversion of readers into editors?

Our findings suggest that a prominent invitation to post feedback converts a significant number of readers into editors. These new editors appear less productive than other first-time Wikipedians; but their feedback appears just as useful, as below. These findings suggest that article feedback can increase the number of new editors on Wikipedia and can also help existing editors improve the encyclopedia based on reader feedback.

Prominence of Feedback Invitation

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