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English  • Polski • Español

English

A Polish national railways class EU07

Wikimedia Polska, the Polish Wikimedia Chapter, is about to organize a Railways Expedition in collaboration with the Polish Railways Company. The photography expedition is devoted to train infrastructure in Poland and will give participants unprecedented access to sites they wouldn’t otherwise see so closely.

Polish Railways has offered the opportunity to teach Wikipedians to navigate the railway premises, after which they will receive ID cards entitling them to enter and photograph objects normally inaccessible to the public. Polish Railways will provide us with free monthly railway tickets for all participants and special passes to legally enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway stations and museums belonging to Polish Railways. Wikimedia Polska will cover the costs of accommodation and food.

We are looking for people interested in this form of Wikiexpedition. We want to form 2-3 person teams, with Polish-speaking leaders and participants from other countries. We’d like to underscore the fact that you will not need to speak Polish to participate; we’re happy to help you navigate the language. Teams would be moving independently, both in terms of time and location. We think it would be useful to organize several teams that could work in different areas of Poland. The Wikiexpedtion will take place this summer, sometime between June and September, 2013.

If you want to join the railways expedition, just add yourself to the list on the Wikimedia Polska wiki. Basically, the only requirements are that you a) have an obsession with trains and railways and b) that you are excited to spend around a week (or more) traveling in slow trains that stop at all manner of tiny stations around Poland.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

Polski

Wikiekspedycja kolejowa

Wikimedia Polska organizuje wikiekspedycję kolejową we współpracy z PKP. Wyprawa ta ma na celu wykonanie dokumentacji fotograficznej dworców, składów kolejowych i infrastruktury kolejowej w Polsce.

PKP zaoferowało możliwość przeszkolenia chętnych Wikipedystów z poruszania się po terenach kolejowych, po którym dostaną oni legitymacje uprawniające do wchodzenia i fotografowania obiektów normalnie niedostępnych publicznie. Zainteresowane osoby otrzymają też darmowy bilet kolejowy open na okres 1 miesiąca. Wikimedia Polska funduje uczestnikom wyżywienie i nocleg w trakcie trwania ekspedycji.

W związku z tym szukamy ludzi zainteresowanych taką formą Wikiekspedycji. Zespoły kolejowe poruszałby się niezależnie od siebie, zarówno jeśli chodzi o czas, jak i miejsce. Rozważamy 2-3 międzynarodowe zespoły składające się z 2-3 osób, które mogłyby działać w różnych obszarach Polski. Polscy uczestnicy wspieraliby językowo zagranicznych, stąd przynajmniej jedna osoba w zespole powinna mówić po polsku i angielsku. Wikiekspdycja odbyłaby się w okresie lipiec-wrzesień 2013.

Jeśli chcesz dołączyć do ekspedycji kolejowej dopisz się na wiki Wikimedia Polska [2]. Od kandydatów oczekujemy jedynie aby: a) byli fascynatami kolejnictwa, b) byli gotowi poświęcić ok tygodnia (lub więcej) na podróżowanie lokalnymi pociągami.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

Español

Wikiexpedición por tren en Polonia

Wikimedia Polska, el capítulo polaco de Wikimedia, está organizando una expedición ferroviaria en colaboración con la Compañia de Ferrocarriles Nacionales Polacos. La expedición fotográfica está dedicada a la infraestructura ferroviaria de Polonia y permitirá a los participantes un acceso sin precedentes a sitios que de otro modo no podrían ver tan de cerca.

La Compañía Polaca de Ferrocarriles ha ofrecido a wikipedistas voluntarios la oportunidad de entrenarse en las instalaciones ferroviarias, después de lo cual recibirán una credencial que les permitirá entrar y fotografiar lugares y objetos que normalmente son inaccesibles para el público. La Compañía entregará boletos de tren mensuales para todos los participantes de forma gratuita y pases especiales que les permitirá tener acceso de manera legal y fotografiar vías, talleres, estaciones de carga y museos pertenecientes a la Compañía de Ferrocarriles. Wikimedia Polonia cubrirá los costos de alojamiento y comida.

Estamos buscando gente interesada en esta clase de expedición. Queremos formar equipos de 2 a 3 personas, incluyendo un líder que hable polaco y participantes de otros países. Nos gustaría destacar que no necesita hablar polaco para participar; estaremos encantados de ayudarle con el idioma. Los equipos se moverán independientemente, tanto en términos de tiempo y lugar. Pensamos que sería útil organizar varios equipos que podrían trabajar en diferentes regiones de Polonia. La Wikiexpedición se llevará a cabo este verano, entre junio y septiembre de 2013.

Si deseas unirte a la expedición ferroviaria sólo agrega tu nombre a la lista en la página wiki de Wikimedia Polska: [3]. Básicamente, los únicos requisitos son a) estar obsesionado con los trenes y los ferrocarriles, y b) estar emocionado de pasar una semana (o más) viajando en trenes lentos que paran en todo tipo de estaciones pequeñas alrededor de Polonia.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska
Traducción por Justin Duranboger

Vol: 3 • Issue: 4 • April 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Sentiment monitoring; Wikipedians and academics favor the same papers; UNESCO and systemic bias; How ideas flow on Wikiversity

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Oren Bochman, Taha Yasseri, Jonathan T. Morgan and Tilman Bayer

Too good to be true? Detecting COI, Attacks and Neutrality using Sentiment Analysis

Traditional methods for detecting sentiment are less objective

Finn Årup Nielsen, Michael Etter and Lars Kai Hansen presented a technical report^[1] on an online service which they created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies. It performs sentiment analysis of edits, filtered by companies and editors. Sentiment analysis is a new applied linguistics technology which is being used in a number of tasks ranging from author profiling to detecting fake reviews on online retailers. The form of visualization provided by this tool can easily detect deviation from linguistic neutrality. However, as the authors point out, this analysis only gives a robust picture when used statistically and is more prone to mistakes when operating within a limited scope.

The service monitors recent changes using an IRC stream and detects company-related articles from a small hand-built list. It then retrieves the current version using the MediaWiki API and performs sentiment analysis using the AFINN sentiment-annotated word list. The project was developed by integrating a number of open source components such as NLTK and CouchDB. Unfortunately, the source code has not been made available and the service can only run queries on the shortlisted companies which will limit the impact of this report on future Wikipedia research. However, it seems to have potential as a tool for detecting COI edits that tend to tip neutrality by adding excess praise or attacks which tip the content in the other direction. We hope the researchers will open-source this tool like their prior work on the AFINN data-set, or at least provide some UI to query articles not included in the original research.

“A Comparative Study of Academic impact and Wikipedia Ranking”

A paper^[2] with this title investigates the relation between the scientific reputation of scientific items (authors, papers, and keywords) and the impact of the same items on Wikipedia articles. The sample of scientific items is made of the entries in the ACM digital library including more than 100 k papers, 150 k authors and 35 k keywords. However, only a tiny subset of these could be found in English Wikipedia pages (the authors considered all Wikipedia pages in the English edition which contain at least two mentions of any of the scientific items in the sample). The academic reputation is calculated based on three criteria: frequency of appearance, number of citations each item receives from the others, and PageRank calculated on the citation network. The Wikipedia ranking is based on three popularity measures of all the pages that have mentioned the item: number of mentions, sum over PageRank of all the mentioning pages, and sum over in-degrees of all the mentioning pages in Wikipedia’s hyperlink network.

These 3 times 3 choices give 9 combinations of academic ranking and Wikipedia ranking for 3 types of scientific entities (authors, papers, keywords). All these 27 pairs are shown to be correlated according to Spearman’s Rank Correlation, indicating that in general Wikipedia mentions are non-randomly driven by scientific reputation. However, most of the combinations are less significant. Surprisingly, the most relevant Wikipedia ranking criterion turns out to be the pure total number of mentions, compared to the more sophisticated ones, i.e., PageRank and in-degree measures.

In a separate part, authors define two sets of scientific items, those which are mentioned in Wikipedia, and those which are not mentioned at all (the latter is larger in size by a factor of 2 for keywords, 100 for authors, and 300 for papers). They show that for all 3 types, the set of items which are mentioned in Wikipedia have a better academic rank on average.

1970s UNESCO debate applied to Wikipedia’s systemic bias in the case of Cambodia

According to the author, the Angkor period dominates Cambodian historiography as well as tourist attention in the country, corresponding to an unevenness in the quality of Wikipedia articles

An article^[3] in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology rated the quality of Wikipedia articles on the history of Cambodia (defined as those linked in the corresponding navbox, using four measures: 1) the article’s ratio of the number of citations per the number of words, 2) the number of editors who have commented on its talk page, 3) the quality of the cited sources, rated in five categories (“traditional reference” like print encyclopedias, “news reports” including both newspapers and news websites such as CNN, “academic periodicals”, “books”, and “miscellany” like reports by governments or NGOs, or personal websites) and 4) “the number of unique authors cited”, assuming that articles which are based on a larger variety of perspectives are of higher quality. The findings are summarized as follows:

The early history of Cambodia is represented by an extremely weak article, but there is an improvement in the articles dealing with the early kingdoms of Cambodia. The improvement ends abruptly with articles on the ‘dark age’ of Cambodia, the French Protectorate, the Japanese occupation, and early postindependence periods being of a much lower quality. Afterward, the quality picks up again with especially good articles on the American intervention in Cambodia, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, and the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. However, the quality does not last; as we near contemporary times, the articles take another turn for the worse.

From this, the author concludes that “the Wikipedia community is unconsciously mimicking the general historiography of the country”, in particular a glorification of Angkor and other early kingdoms at the cost of later periods, and observes a “continuing dominance of the traditional historiographical narrative of Cambodian history in Wikipedia.” The subsequent section of the paper tries to put these results into the context of the historical debates in the late 1970s and early 1980s about the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), a suggested remedy for problems with the under-representation of the developing world in the media, put forth by a UNESCO commission in the MacBride report (1980):

Wikipedia provides access—it is free to use by anyone with an Internet connection, and print versions can also be distributed. But the whole thrust of the NWICO argument is that content matters and those who create content matter perhaps even more, with the commission stressing that countries needed to ‘achieve self-reliance in communication capacities and policies’ … Contrary to popular belief, in the new ‘information age’ content is, once again, the preserve of the few, not the many, and a geographically concentrated few at that.

The author’s argument is somewhat weakened by asserting erroneously that “there exists no Cambodian-language Wikipedia”, but generally aligns with other quantitative research that has found a geographic unevenness of coverage in Wikipedia. The author is an information studies professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and previously published a related paper in the same journal examining the Wikipedia article History of the Philippines, reviewed in the August issue: “The limits of amateur NPOV history“.

Reasons why wikilinks are added and removed

Julia Preusse, Jerome Kunegis, Matthias Thimm, Thomas Gottron and Steffen Staab investigate^[4] mechanisms of changes in a wiki that are of structural nature, i.e., which are a direct result of the wiki’s linking structure. They consider if the addition and removal of internal links between pages can be predicted using just information about the network connecting these articles. The study’s innovation lies in considering the removal of links, which account for a high proportion of removals and reverts. The authors performed an empirical study on Wikipedia, stating that traditional indicators of structural change used in the link analysis literature can be classified into four classes, which indicate growth, decay, stability and instability of links. These methods were then employed to identify the underlying reasons for individual additions and removals of knowledge links.

The network created by links between articles in Wikipedia is characterized by preferential attachment. Prior work on social networks has identified a phenomenon called “liability of newness”, in which new connections are more likely to be broken than older ones. To provide a better predictive model of link evolution the team considered five hypotheses:

1. Preferential attachment: The number of adjacent nodes is a good indicator for link addition.
2. Embedding : The embeddedness of a link is suitable to predict the appearance of links and the non-disappearance of existing links.
3. Reciprocity: The presence of a link makes the addition of a link in the opposite direction more likely and the removal of a reciprocal link less likely.
4. Liability of Newness: Old age of an edge or a node is a good indicator for link persistence.
5. Instability The less stable two nodes are, the less stable the link connecting them is, or would be if it does not exist.

To test these hypotheses, they created networks based on the history of the mainspace articles till 2011 of the top five Wikipedias after the English one. For example, in the French Wikipedia, 41.7 million links were added and 17.3 million removed during that time. The data was used to create a link creation predictor and a link removal predictor. These were then evaluated using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve.

The results were that Preferential attachment and Embedding are good indicators of growth. Liability of Newness did not turn out to be a good indicator of link removal, but more of article instability. Reciprocity is also an indicator of growth, but is not as significant since most links in a wiki are not reciprocated.

Generation Z judges [[Generation Z]], questioning role of amphetamines

An article^[5] in the Journal of Information Science, titled “Understanding trust formation in digital information sources: The case of Wikipedia”, explores the criteria used by students to evaluate the credibility of Wikipedia articles. It contains an overview of various earlier studies about credibility judgments of Wikipedia articles (some of them reviewed previously in this space, example: “Quality of featured articles doesn’t always impress readers“).

The authors asked “20 second-year undergraduate students and 30 Master’s students” in information studies to first spend 20 minutes reading “a copy of a two-page Wikipedia article on Generation Z, a topic with which students were expected to have some familiarity”, and answer an open-ended question explaining how they would judge its trustworthiness. In a subsequent part, the respondents were asked to rank a list of factors for trustworthiness in case of “either (a) the topic of an assignment, or (b) a minor medical condition from which they were suffering”. One of the first findings was a “low pre-disposition to use [Wikipedia], possibly suggesting a propensity to distrust, grounded on debates and comments on the trustworthiness of Wikipedia” – possibly to the fact that the example article contained an example of vandalism, a fact highlighted by several respondents (e.g. “started off as a valid entry … due to citations strengthening this … however came to the last paragraph and the whole document was marred by the insert of ‘writing articles on Wikipedia while on amphetamines’ [as purported hobby of Generation Z members]… just feels that you can’t trust anything now”).

Among the given trustworthiness factors, the following were ranked most highly:

authorship, currency, references, expert recommendation and triangulation/verification, with usefulness just below this threshold. In other words, participants valued having articles that were written by experts on the subject, that were up to date, and that they perceived to be useful (content factors). … Interestingly these factors all seemed more or less equally important for both contexts, with the exception of references, which for predictable reasons were seen as having greater importance in the context of assignments.

Visualizing the “flow of ideas” on Wikiversity

In a conference paper titled “Analyzing the flow of ideas and profiles of contributors in an open learning community”^[6] (see also audience notes from the presentation), the authors construct a graph from the set of revisions of a set of Wikiversity pages, with two kind of edges: 1) “Update edges”, linking a page’s revision to the directly subsequent revision. These are understood as representing “knowledge flow over the course of the collaborative process on a single wiki page”. 2) “Hyperlink edges” between two revisions of different pages with a wikilink between them – but pointing in the opposite direction, because the idea is that they indicate knowledge flowing from the linked page to the linking page. By requiring the source node of a hyperlink edge “as the latest revision of the hyperlinked page at the moment of creation of the target revision”, both kinds of links point forward in time, resulting in a two-relational directed acyclic graph (DAG), which is “depicting the knowledge flow over time.” After filtering out “redundant” hyperlink edges and attaching authorship information to each node (page revision).

The authors apply this procedure to a set of Wikiversity articles in the area of medicine, starting with v:Gynecological History Taking. The results are interpreted as follows:

the beginning, short after the category medicine was founded, the authors in this category built up the basic structure of the knowledge domain. The main relations and idea flows between the learning materials were established early in the development of the domain. After that the authors have been focusing on elaborating the articles without introducing new important hyperlinks. The overall picture of the learning process in this domain suggests a divergent evolution of ideas after an initial period of mutual fertilization between different topics. This conforms to the idea of groups of learners that followed different interests in the medicine domain with little inter-group collaboration on the creation of new shared learning resource.

The method is subsequently applied to profile the activities of various users.

The authors have integrated these algorithms, including visualization tools, into a “network analytics workbench … used in the ongoing EU project SISOB which aims to measure the influence of science on society based on the analysis of (social) networks of researchers and created artifacts.”

In brief

“Wikipedia Vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis”

The authors review^[7] how Wikipedia and Britannica coverage of topics related to several major corporations has changed in the past 6 years. They find unsurprisingly that Wikipedia coverage is usually much more detailed than that of Britannica; more interestingly, they note that one of the key differences is that Wikipedia focuses more on issues such as corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues, whereas Britannica will focus more on traditional aspects such as financial results. They note that both encyclopedias, while striving towards some form of neutrality, contain non-neutral (“positively and negatively framed”) content, although it is more common to find it in Wikipedia. They also note that this content seemed to peak around 2008–2010, and attribute it to the negative views of major corporations common among the general public around that time, whose view was more likely to be represented on Wikipedia than on Britannica, also correlating this with the economic recession. The authors note that increasingly, knowledge available to the general public comes from social media collaboration projects such as Wikipedia, and are doubtful whether more traditional models like that of Britannica have a future. See also earlier coverage of a related paper by the same authors: “Are articles about companies too negative?” and of another where one of them (controversially) argued against the “bright line” rule on conflict of interest editing: “Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals“.

“Wikipedia uses in learning design: A literature review”

An article with this title^[8] presents a relatively useful literature review of publications about the “teaching with Wikipedia” approach. The authors analyzed several scholarly databases (not explaining, however, why the selected ones were chosen and others were not), finding 30 works on related themes, and selecting 24 of those. They provide a number of useful breakdowns (2/3 of the works deal with higher education, 1/3 with secondary, none with primary) and analyze expected learning outcomes (the most popular being learning research methodology), knowledge fields that the papers represented (mostly fields of social science), and an overview of student tasks. While containing few revelations, the paper is a solid example of a literature review of an emerging field, and contains a valuable observation that more research is needed on how Wikipedia is used by elementary school students.

Wikipedia assignment has positive impact on students’ “research persistence”

A paper by two Californian librarians, titled “From Audience to Authorship to Authority: Using Wikipedia to Strengthen Research and Critical Thinking Skills”^[9] and presented at the recent conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), describes the results of two case studies “in which Wikipedia was used as the platform for assignments” for students, one of which “had, overall, a positive impact on research persistence” of the students.

Co-authorship patterns around Pope Francis, and Boston bombing views

In his blog,^[10] Brian Keegan (known to readers of this research report for his previous research of Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news events) provides a refreshing preview of his upcoming research with visualization of Co-authorship patterns around the Pope Francis article. The Social network analysis produced by factoring edits from 607 editors who worked on the new pope’s article and then adds all other articles they collaborated on since. The results which look like an abstract art masterpiece show a number of complex pattern in the data. However we will have to wait until the publication of the paper for these to be explained. Keegan does provide a number of teasers but you will have to visit his blog to read these. In another blog post,^[11] Keegan examines pageviews of various articles related to the Boston marathon bombings.

Mining content removed from articles on breaking news events.

A short paper^[12] accepted to the 2013 WWW conference describes a new tool designed for mining the information removed from Wikipedia articles during breaking news events. The Wikipedia Event Reporter identifies “bursts” of editing activity in an article, then uses machine learning techniques to identify sentences from the revision history of the article that were added during these bursts but which are not contained within the current version, and finally displays this information to the user—all in real time! The designers of the tool state that the Event Reporter will be useful for “a journalist or a student studying about history [who wants] a comprehensive view of an event, and not only the socially accepted final interpretation”. While Event Reporter looks to be both useful and intriguing, this reviewer challenges the assumptions behind the authors’ intended scenario of use. On Wikipedia, information about breaking news events is often removed because it is factually incorrect, not for the “sake of brevity”, out of considerations of political correctness, or other (possibly nefarious) social motives. The authors do not address the issue of determining factual accuracy in their paper—hopefully their intended audience (journalists!) will keep that issue in mind if they decide to re-publish the mined information. The reviewer would also like to have seen a performance evaluation of their Vector Machine Classifier, which relies on hand-labelled training data, included in the paper. Nonetheless, this seems to be a fascinating and very powerful piece of software. One cool future direction for the Event Reporter team might be to mine the content of the article talk page during and directly after these bursts as well, and employ the same classification technique to provide the end user with a better sense of why certain content was revised or removed.

Spam on the rise as reason for user blocks

User:Ironholds examined^[13] the English Wikipedia’s block log from 2006 to 2012 for the stated blocking reasons, and found “spam” being used more and more frequently.

10k birth places and 40k almae matres from Wikipedia biographies, human-vetted

Google has published^[14] “a human-judged dataset of two relations about public figures on Wikipedia: nearly 10,000 examples of “place of birth”, and over 40,000 examples of “attended or graduated from an institution”. Each of these was judged by at least 5 raters, and can be used to train or evaluate relation extraction systems.”

How Wikipedia’s Google matrix differs for politicians and artists

Continuing the authors’ research on the Google matrix of Wikipedia articles and links between them (earlier coverage: ‘Wikipedia communities’ as eigenvectors of its Google matrix“), an ArXiv preprint studies the “Time evolution of Wikipedia network ranking”^[15], finding among other things that “PageRank selection is dominated by politicians while 2DRank, which combines PageRank and CheiRank, gives more accent on personalities of arts”.

A Wikipedia search algorithm that emphasizes serendipity

A two-page paper to be presented at the upcoming WWW 2013 [2] conference explores algorithms for “Searching for Interestingness in Wikipedia and Yahoo! Answers” ^[16], or “Serendipitous search” – defined as “when a user with no a priori or totally unrelated intentions interacts with a system and acquires useful information”. The authors modify some standard information retrieval metrics by including sentiment analysis and a measure of a page’s quality – in the case of Wikipedia, “the number of dispute messages inserted by editors to require revisions”, which may be seen as questionable. The resulting two algorithms for ranking search results on both sites are tested for some popular search terms (drawn from the Google Zeitgeist lists), by asking test subjects to rank the results “for relevance, interestingness to the query, and interestingness regardless of the query”. In the end, the authors suggest that they be combined into a hybrid system.

Usability study recommends 18-point font for Wikipedia

An “experi­ment with 28 participants with dyslexia [comparing] reading speed, comprehension, and subjective readability” found “that font size has a significant effect on the readability and the understandability of the text, while line spacing does not”. On that basis, the four researchers from Barcelona “recommend using 18-point font size when designing web text for readers with dyslexia.^[17]

OpenSym, Wikisym, ClosedSym?

This year the WikiSym conference will be co-located with OpenSym. This marks a step forward from a conference focused mostly on CSCW application of wiki technology to a broader investigation of OpenCulture. This year the conferences will be collocated with Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The WikiSym conference is funded in part by a grant by the WMF. However, as reported last month (Wikimedia funding for Wikisym ’13 despite open access concerns), there has been debate about the tension between the requirements of WMF on supporting open access research and the fact that the conference papers will be published by the ACM – a closed access provider. In two subsequent blog posts, the organizers explain why they have not been able^[18] to find an open publisher with a reputation comparable to the ACM for the 2013 proceedings, but formulate requirements for a suitable publisher for next year ^[19].

Wikimedia France research award winner announced

The French Wikimedia chapter has announced the winner of its research award: “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past”,^[20] an influential 2006 essay by the historian Roy Rosenzweig, which received the most votes among the jury-selected five finalists. The prize money of € 2,500 will go to the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, founded by the paper’s late author.

Provenance graphs

A conference paper by two computer scientists from the University of Newcastle^[21] presents code to convert metadata from Wikipedia revision history and user contribution pages (e.g. the author of a particular revision, or articles edited by an editor) into provenance data in the W3C‘s PROV-DM data model. The graph of revisions and editors is visualized. Code and examples are provided on Github.

References

For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia’s technical contributors

On March 13, Lua was enabled for templates on all Wikimedia wikis. The existing syntax for wikitext templates is complicated and limited: it does not offer loops, for example. With Lua, editors can now use a real programming language, in which they can also contribute to programming projects outside Wikimedia. For Wikimedia wikis, Lua means a big performance gain in widely used templates, such as citations. For example, 300 citations on an English Wikipedia article now render in 3 seconds instead of 18 seconds.

The new image upload button in an article on the mobile version of the English Wikipedia

Mobile uploads launch for apps and the mobile web

On the mobile version of Wikipedia, smartphone users can now easily upload a lead image to Wikipedia articles that lack one. Also in March, the Mobile team released a dedicated app for Wikimedia Commons, allowing media uploads from Android and iOS devices.

First Individual Engagement Grants awarded to innovative community projects

The recipients of the first Individual Engagements Grants were announced on March 29. These grants fund projects by individuals or small teams for a duration of six months. Among the largest of the eight funded grants are “The Wikipedia Library” ($7500), which aims to give editors access to reliable sources, donated by publishers, “The Wikipedia Adventure” ($10,000), an on-wiki game for new editors, and a project to collaboratively define a vision for the future of Wikisource (10,000 Euros).

Wikipedia Zero wins award, reaches new users

Wikipedia Zero, which gives people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, won the 2013 SXSW Interactive “Activism” award, beating four other finalists. Also in March, Wikipedia Zero became available to more than 55 million additional subscribers in Russia, as part of a partnership with Beeline (VimpelCom). This was the biggest launch for the Wikipedia Zero team to date. The same month, a new Wikipedia Zero partnership with Axiata Group was announced, which will expand the program in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh this year.

Four of the Ombudsmen during their visit at the WMF office

Ombudsmen meet, might expand mandate

In March, the Foundation’s LCA team hosted five out of seven members of the Ombudsmen Commission in San Francisco, where these community members from around the world met with each other in person for the first time. They consulted with various WMF departments and provided input regarding privacy topics and the work of administrators. Formed in 2006, the Ombudsmen Commission is currently tasked with investigating complaints of alleged Privacy policy violations on behalf of the Board of Trustees. It has been proposed that the Commission should also be allowed to handle complaints about the global CheckUser policy and Oversight policy. An RfC (request for comment) about this is being prepared.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

483 million (-1.12% compared with January; +1.53% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release March data later in April)

Page requests for March:

21.5 billion (-1.1% compared with February; +24.8% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for February 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

78,083 (-7.53% compared with January / -2.43% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for February 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of February 28, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of February 28, 2013

(Financial information is only available through February 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date February 28, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of February is $1.89MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $1.61MM or 585% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $35.65MM vs plan of $30.46MM, approximately $5.19MM or 17% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of February is $4.25MM vs plan of $4.03MM, approximately $215K or 5% over plan, primarily due to higher capital expenses offset by lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, and grant expenses.

• Year-to-date expenses is $21.96MM vs plan of $25.94MM, approximately $3.98MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants executed, WMF project grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $40.68MM as of February 28, 2013.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of March (April 4, 2013)

Other movement highlights

Phase 2 of Wikidata is becoming available on Wikipedia

The Wikidata logo

On March 27, Wikidata‘s central data repository became available for use on the first 11 Wikipedias. Example: In a Wikipedia article about Yahoo!, the wikitext “{{#property:p169}}” will return “Marissa Mayer”, as she is the chief executive officer of the company. A launch on the English Wikipedia and all other language versions is expected later in April.

Vyšenské kopce, a national nature reserve area in the Czech Republic

Evaluating the success of the “Mediagrant” project to document nature reserves

Wikimedia Czech Republic has published an evaluation of the success of its “Mediagrant” project, which is financed by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2011, this project been funding the travel expenses for photo trips of volunteer Wikimedians to protected nature areas in the Czech Republic. The purpose is to document rare plants or animals, and the area itself. 74 such trips have taken place so far, to 298 localities, and the chapter calculates the average funding cost per photo as 3.08 Kč (around US$0.16 / 0.12 €).

The WikiAfrica space in Douala, Cameroon

WikiAfrica offers physical space for Wikimedia contributions in Cameroon

In an art centre in Douala, Cameroon, a computer room with high-speed internet has been set up for local people who want to contribute to Wikimedia projects. A lack of computers and online access are believed to be a reason for the low coverage of African topics in Wikipedia. Visitors to the WikiAfrica space are assisted in editing Wikipedia by trained staff. The WikiAfrica Cameroon project also involves a Wikimedian in Residence and various workshops, and is supported by the Orange Foundation.

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of March (April 4, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for February:

483 million (-1.12% compared with January; +1.53% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release March data later in April)

Page requests for March:

21.5 billion (-1.1% compared with February; +24.8% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for February 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

78,083 (-7.53% compared with January / -2.43% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for February 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of February 28, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of February 28, 2013

(Financial information is only available through February 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date February 28, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of February is $1.89MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $1.61MM or 585% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $35.65MM vs plan of $30.46MM, approximately $5.19MM or 17% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of February is $4.25MM vs plan of $4.03MM, approximately $215K or 5% over plan, primarily due to higher capital expenses offset by lower personnel expenses, internet hosting, and grant expenses.

• Year-to-date expenses is $21.96MM vs plan of $25.94MM, approximately $3.98MM or 15% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, FDC grants executed, WMF project grants, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $40.68MM as of February 28, 2013.

Highlights

Lua speeds up pages and empowers Wikimedia’s technical contributors

On March 13, Lua was enabled for templates on all Wikimedia wikis. The existing syntax for wikitext templates is complicated and limited: it does not offer loops, for example. With Lua, editors can now use a real programming language, in which they can also contribute to programming projects outside Wikimedia. For Wikimedia wikis, Lua means a big performance gain in widely used templates, such as citations. For example, 300 citations on an English Wikipedia article now render in 3 seconds instead of 18 seconds.

The new image upload button in an article on the mobile version of the English Wikipedia

Mobile uploads launch for apps and the mobile web

On the mobile version of Wikipedia, smartphone users can now easily upload a lead image to Wikipedia articles that lack one. Also in March, the Mobile team released a dedicated app for Wikimedia Commons, allowing media uploads from Android and iOS devices.

First Individual Engagement Grants awarded to innovative community projects

The recipients of the first Individual Engagements Grants were announced on March 29. These grants fund projects by individuals or small teams for a duration of six months. Among the largest of the eight funded grants are “The Wikipedia Library” ($7500), which aims to give editors access to reliable sources, donated by publishers, “The Wikipedia Adventure” ($10,000), an on-wiki game for new editors, and a project to collaboratively define a vision for the future of Wikisource (10,000 Euros).

Wikipedia Zero wins award, reaches new users

Wikipedia Zero, which gives people around the world mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges, won the 2013 SXSW Interactive “Activism” award, beating four other finalists. Also in March, Wikipedia Zero became available to more than 55 million additional subscribers in Russia, as part of a partnership with Beeline (VimpelCom). This was the biggest launch for the Wikipedia Zero team to date. The same month, a new Wikipedia Zero partnership with Axiata Group was announced, which will expand the program in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh this year.

Four of the Ombudsmen during their visit at the WMF office

Ombudsmen meet, might expand mandate

In March, the Foundation’s LCA team hosted five out of seven members of the Ombudsmen Commission in San Francisco, where these community members from around the world met with each other in person for the first time. They consulted with various WMF departments and provided input regarding privacy topics and the work of administrators. Formed in 2006, the Ombudsmen Commission is currently tasked with investigating complaints of alleged Privacy policy violations on behalf of the Board of Trustees. It has been proposed that the Commission should also be allowed to handle complaints about the global CheckUser policy and Oversight policy. An RfC (request for comment) about this is being prepared.

Engineering

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for March 2013 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/March

Department Highlights

“A Sneak Preview of the Wikipedia VisualEditor”, narrated by Trevor Parscal (uploaded March 1, 2013)

VisualEditor

(Accessible introduction to what the Visual Editor is)

In March, part of the team worked on infrastructure for the major new features that they’ll be adding in the coming months. We aim for VisualEditor to be the default way all users edit our sites by July 2013, so it needs to let everyone edit the majority of content without needing to use the usual “wikitext” editor. This will mean adding support for references, (at least) basic templates, categories and images, each of which is a very large piece of work. This month the team primarily worked on draft designs and initial code to ensure users can edit categories and templates.

Slides from the VisualEditor/Parsoid quarterly review (see also slides from the monthly metrics meeting)

The VisualEditor team undertook its first ever “Quarterly Review” (minutes), whose slides detail these designs, the work done to date and expectations for the near future. The alpha version of VisualEditor on mediawiki.org and the English Wikipedia was updated twice, adding better input and selection support, fixing a number of bugs, and restructuring the back-end so that the new features will be simpler to create.

The Parsoid team (who are creating the parsing program that translates plain wikitext into HTML annotated for easy editing, and vice-versa) continued writing specifications, fixing bugs, and improving how Parsoid deals with different human languages, newlines and whitespace, and transclusion. They wrote a blog post explaining their challenges. And late in March, C. Scott Ananian joined us as a contractor. Welcome!

Editor engagement

Fabrice Florin presenting about Notifications (slides)

In March, the editor engagement features team worked on three projects: Notifications, Article Feedback and Flow.

For Notifications (formerly code-named ‘Echo’), we developed a range of new features, including: the ‘thanks’ and ‘user rights’ notifications, as well as HTML email notifications. We also started to collect our first metrics and prepared a socialization plan for our upcoming release on the English Wikipedia later this month.

For Article Feedback, we deployed a new version of the tool on the French and German Wikipedias, for evaluation by their communities. Final features include ‘discuss on talk page’ and ‘auto-archive. The tool was temporarily turned off on the English Wikipedia, where we expect to re-deploy it on an opt-in basis as soon as practical.

Design work continued on Flow. We continued creating a “Portal” that will engage discussion about Flow at three locations (mediawiki.org, meta, and the English Wikipedia), and performing research.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team largely placed other projects – such as guided tours, EventLogging, and others – on hold to focus on two key initiatives: the “Getting Started” process for onboarding new Wikipedians, and on making the redesign of account creation and login a permanent, internationalized part of MediaWiki core.

For the Getting Started project, the team launched a new version on English Wikipedia, which included a new landing page with additional types of tasks suggested for brand new editors to try. The list of tasks is now generated by a basic recommender system built by Ori Livneh, which gathers, filters, and delivered a fresh list of tasks automatically for every editor. This new backend paves the way for releasing the “getting started” feature on other projects, after we’ve completed data analysis and testing to understand which kinds of tasks are ideal for first time editors. Additionally, Matt Flaschen collaborated with the Editor Engagement Features team to build notifications to welcome new editors and invite them to contribute via the Getting Started.

For the account creation and login work, S Page, Munaf Assaf, and the rest of the team rebuilt our design to work with MediaWiki core, and solicited reviews from outside the team. We currently plan to launch both interface redesigns on an opt-in basis in April, to have editors test the localization and other functional aspects of the forms via a URL parameter, before we enable them as default.

Maryana Pinchuk presenting mobile image uploads (slides)

Mobile

We have a stable version of the mobile-optimized website, which everyone on a smartphone uses by default, and we have a beta version that logged-in Wikimedia users can opt to use to see features we’re still building. When functionality is polished enough, we promote it from the beta site to the stable site. In March, we added the ability to easily upload a lead image to articles that lack one in the stable version of the mobile site. We also helped users by giving them a temporary fix to an issue we discovered that made logging in hard or impossible for some users of newer mobile web browsers; that problem had prevented a number of users from being able to upload photos via the mobile site. We are now well on our way to reach our goal of 1000 unique uploaders/month by the end of June 2013. Check out the mobile app dashboard to see mobile contributions via the website and via apps.

Also: we’ve added thumbnails of lead images from articles in the mobile watchlist view, as well as a “last modified” timestamp on articles in the stable version of the mobile site. We are currently focusing on some performance enhancements for the mobile site. In April we will graduate the “uploads dashboard” feature from beta to stable, will further refine our photo upload features, and will let beta site users see and use a feature to identify articles on subjects near your current location.

The Mobile team that makes dedicated Wikimedia mobile apps have created an initial version of the Commons photo uploader app for Android; it is available for download in Google Play. The iOS version is still in beta, but should be available in the Apple app store next month.

In March, Wikipedia Zero added new telecom partners (such as Axiata Group Berhad), fixed some technical problems, and onboarded new staff. We also won an SXSW Interactive “Activism” award for Wikipedia Zero. (see also the general “Highlights” section)

Max Semenik, Arthur Richards and Faidon Liambotis held an OpenStreetMaps mini-hackathon at Open Source Days 2013 in Copenhagen. During the event, they agreed on an implementation strategy for a future WMF mapping cluster. The cluster would serve OSM “tiles” and thus help integrate OSM functionality better into Wikimedia sites, and help with our mobile apps which already make use of OSM data.

Other engineering news

• Lua scripting has launched on all WMF wikis, making templates faster and making pages more flexible. You can read that post to understand what to do on your wiki to take advantage of this, and you can also read about the implications for Wikimedia’s future (see also general “Highlights” section)
• We redesigned the Translate interface and made other progress on translation and language-related tools.
• We have fresh, friendly instructions on reporting a technical problem and invite you to help prioritize problems to fix.
• Our designers are collaborating with the Noun Project towards creating an “Encyclopedia Collection” of free icons.
• Our Operations group (the systems administrators who keep our servers running) has started a twice-monthly meeting with other engineering teams, to keep communication flowing about requirements and possible upcoming problems or infrastructure needs.
• The User Metrics API launched; it’s a service that allows researchers to perform cohort analysis on various data sets, making it easier to measure the effects of programs and platform experiments among discrete sets of users. The Analytics group, which works on software to make statistics about Wikimedia available, is currently working on improving the web-based user interface, to make it available for use outside of Wikimedia Foundation staff in the coming months.

Fundraising

Department highlight

• The fundraising team ramped up testing in languages and countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign, raising approximately $5 million USD.

Major Gifts and Foundations

• Received a $250,000 grant from Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing.

Annual Fundraiser

• The fundraising team ran banners in languages and countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Switzerland, Germany). Approximately $5 million USD was raised from this campaign in the month of March. Banners were taken down on March 31, 2013. Any future testing will be announced on the Fundraising 2013 page on Meta.
• Patricia Pena visited India and researched user feedback and possible opportunities for local processing in the country. We interviewed roughly 20 donors and networked with over 20 Indian payment providers.
• The fundraising tech team continued to add new payment options including Boletos for Brazil and Direct Debit for Spain, Netherlands, and Austria. In addition, the team added the option to make a recurring credit card donation for countries where this was not previously offered.
• Megan Hernandez, Katie Horn, and Bryony Jones visited Japan, a top donor country, and met with 3-5 Japanese donors every day during the week of March 11. The team tested 10 different messages and designs and developed a high performing fundraising banner.
• Victor Grigas produced brief video introductions to the VisualEditor (see above) and the Wikipedia Education Program (see below).

Grantmaking and Programs

Department Highlights

• Launched Wikipedia Zero with Beeline (Vimpelcom) in Russia, largest single operator to date (55+ million subscsribers)
• First round of Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) approved and announced!
• Round 2 2012-2013 proposals to the Funds Dissemination Committee were submitted on 1 March 2013 and have been open to community review from 1 March to 31 March.

Strategic Goals Metrics

Metric	Value	MoM	MoM%	Chart
Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace)	15.5k	-317	-2.0%	[1]

Grantmaking

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

• Proposals for Round 2 2012-2013 were submitted on 1 March 2013. 4 proposals were submitted (presented alphabetically) :
  • Wikimedia Czech Republic
  • Wikimédia France
  • Wikimedia Hong Kong
  • Wikimedia Norge
• Community review: From 1 March until 31 March, members of the Wikimedia community commented on the four funding proposals submitted to the FDC (Wikimédia France, Wikimedia Hong Kong, Wikimedia Norge, and Wikimedia Czech Republic) during the one-month open comment / community review period. Comments and questions were submitted for each proposal: each proposal discussion page had at least 20 distinct authors and at most 34 distinct authors. 111 was the maximum total number of edits made on the discussion pages of any proposal, and 79 was the minimum total number. The comments addressed many topics, including expressing overall support or concern for a proposal, questioning the specifics of financial tables, stating concerns about an entity’s plans to hire staff, and requesting more information about specific programs. Questions and comments from the community will be summarized and reflected in the FDC staff assessments published on April 8, and will be considered by the FDC when it deliberates in Milan in late April.
• The Progress report form was finalized and made ready for use by entities funded in 2012-2013 Round 1, who will submit their first progress reports before 30 April 2013. Entities may submit their reports from their proposal hub pages in the FDC portal.

WMF Grant requests approved in March 2013

• Grants:WM IN/Program Grant Quarter 1 2013: Grant to support the activities of Wikimedia India during the first quarter of 2013.
• Grants:WM Wikisym/2013 WikiSym OpenSym Conference: Grant to support the annual WikiSym conference.
• Grants:Jackson Peebles/Video and Interactive Tutorials: Jackson will use screen capture software to author video tutorials with potential interactivity for certain Wikipedia tools and processes.
• FF portal/Recommendations/Fotofahrt im Heißluftballon: Flow funding request to support aerial photography projects in Germany.
• FF portal/Recommendations/Faculty of Economics Skopje: Flow funding request to support Wikipedia education activities at the Faculty of Economics in Skopje.

WMF Grant reports accepted in March 2013

• Grants:Abbas Mahmood – Creative Commons Community in Kenya/CC Kenya Formative Meeting/Report
• Grants:WM US-DC/Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 USA/Report
• Grants:WM US-DC/Events 2012/Report
• Grants:WM ZA/Wiki Loves Monuments/Report
• Grants:WM IN/Bootstrap Grant/Report
• Grants:WM HU/Annual Program Plan 2012/Report/Q4
• Grants:WM NL/Annual Program Plan 2012/Report/Q4
• Grants:WM SE/Annual Program Plan 2012/Report/Q4

Contractor Kevin Gorman has published a review of the Wikimedia Foundation’s grants program from fiscal year 2009-2010 through fiscal year 2011-2012.

Participation Support requests approved in March 2013

• Participation:SarahStierch/NMLA Conference
• Participation:Thelmadatter/Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials
• Participation:Umbrellas000/US OpenGLAM Launch Weekend, Open Knowledge Foundation
• Participation:Bdcousineau/US OpenGLAM Launch Event
• Participation:Hlong-lib/US OpenGLAM Launch Weekend, Open Knowledge Foundation
• Participation:Tedder/Legislative Data and Wikipedia Conference
• Participation:Cryptic C62/Legislative Data Workshop
• Participation:Lpagola/LibreGraphicsMeeting

Individual Engagement Grants

The IEG Committee completed its review, and WMF announced that all 8 recommended projects have been selected for round 1 funding.

The selected projects are:

• Build an effective method of publicity in PRChina, led by zh:User:AddisWang, funded at $350. Addis and a small team of volunteers based in mainland China will be experimenting with social media campaigns to grow awareness of Wikipedia in China.
• Replay Edits, led by w:User:Jeph_paul, funded at $500. Jeph is building a MediaWiki gadget that creates a visual playback of the edit history of a Wikipedia article, allowing users to see an article’s change over time.
• The Wikipedia Library, funded at $7500 and The Wikipedia Adventure, funded at $10,000, will both be led by w:User:Ocaasi. For the Wikipedia Library, Ocaasi will be building and consolidating partnerships with reference providers donating access to reliable sources for Wikipedia editors, and improving the systems for managing these programs. The Wikipedia Adventure is an on-wiki game that will be piloted on English Wikipedia using the Guided Tours extension to determine whether this type of interactive learning is an effective engagement strategy for new editors.
• Consolidate wikiArS to involve art schools, led by w:User:Dvdgmz, funded at 7810 Euros. The WikiArS outreach program builds partnerships with art and design schools to teach students to create images for donation to Wikimedia Commons and for use in Wikipedia articles. This grant will support focused experimentation in the existing Catalan program’s models that can allow the initiative to scale and to be sustained as an international program.
• Elaborate Wikisource strategic vision, led by User:Micru and User:Aubrey, funded at 10,000 Euros. This project brings together the global Wikisource community and other stakeholders to define a vision for the project’s future. They’ll begin work on near-term goals that can be accomplished by volunteers on-wiki, and investigate paths forward for longer-term improvements to Wikisource.
• MediaWiki data browser, led by User:Yaron K., partially funded at $15,000 in order to pilot the initial concept. Yaron’s project will create a framework to allow any user to easily generate apps or websites to browse sets of structured data that exist on Wikipedia and other projects running on MediaWiki.
• MediaWiki and Javanese script, led by User:Bennylin, has been provisionally approved for funding at $3000, provided that a couple of dependencies can be satisfied. This project will provide technical support using a “train-the-trainers” model that teaches volunteers how to use Javanese script online, facilitating the transcription of Javanese texts to projects like Javanese Wikisource.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

Logo of the Editor Growth and Contribution Program

A landing page for Geo-targeted Editors Participation was created on English Wikipedia, and an invitation to edit was displayed using the geo-targeted centranl notice to readers from the Philippines, where readers were encouraged to registed an account and were surfaced random stub articles about local topics to improve.

Wikimania Support

• Hired Ellie Young, Contractor to take the lead on orchestrating Wikimania! Welcome, Ellie!
• Finalizing review of Wikimania Scholarship applications. Over 1200 applicants with 660 who made it into round 2 of the review process (i.e., non-spam). Committee of 9 voting members thoroughly reviewed and scored applicants. Anticipated ~100 scholarships through WMF.

Brazil

Institutional Partnerships

A debate on governance with Ação Educativa, WMF and a member of the community took place, to trigger a debate on meta. The report on the meeting has been published and is now open for debate.

Hirings

• Job positions of the Brazilian Wikipedia Education Program for substituting the current contractor opened! (with coverage by big media, thanks to Tom)

Data & Experiments

• Translation of the Meta Page Research:Data into Portuguese is ongoing.
• Prototype of the Data Center has been developed and is being debated: the proposal is to have a central page with data and tutorials for anyone to work on data creation and analysis.
• IRC meetings to debate proposals for Analyses and Data Center page
• Henrique’s onboarding in SF: Henrique attended the Python conference and various meetings in SF as part of his onboarding.
• An initial proposal for data analyses and experiments has been published on Meta and is being debated.

Wikipédia na Universidade – FGV SP (direito)

Education

Partnerships with universities

• FGV SP (Getulio Vargas Foundation): A lecture at FGV Law School in São Paulo for about 70 people has taken place, with the participation of a WMF team and one volunteer. The university has tried to implement actitivies at Wikipedia but faced difficulties in having the content accepted. They’re restructuring the project with our support now.
• Gama Filho: several videos to invite students from the University to engage in the translation course/partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation have been produced.

Online tutorials

We’ve catalyzed and provided a first translation version for online tutorials. The community has imported the pages and is customizing the material.

Communications

• The community has approved the recreation of communications channels as blogs – though the br.wikimedia claims it should be under their website. We should run a test on the Correio da Wikipédia for one month and check the signpost distribution system and would publish that on br.wikimedia too, for customization.
• Catalyzed initiative of a journalist volunteer who started interviewing volunteers to write stories about them

Medicin Wikiproject

• Bot: improvements have been made and it’s ready to be tested on the real environment by the community (request for bot approval)

Community and High School

• The bridge reported last month built between the community and High School Peretz became the subject of an article in Folha de S.Paulo. The newspaper has also produced an online tutorial.

Programs

Wikipedia Zero

(see also general “Highlights” section)

• Launched Wikipedia Zero with Beeline (Vimpelcom) in Russia, largest single operator to date (55+ million subscribers)
• Completed partnership contract and announcement with Axiata, expanding partner base of Wikipedia Zero to 410 million subscribers
• Wikipedia Zero received the 2013 SXSW Interactive Award for “Activism”

The Wikipedia Education Program, in video form! (narrated by Annie Lin and LiAnna Davis)

Rod Dunican presenting about the impact of the Education Program (slides)

Global Education

Highlights:

• Egypt term wrapped up with a celebration conference in Cairo.
• Classes started in Egypt, Jordan, and Algeria, as part of the Wikipedia Education Program Arab World.
• Volunteers proposed new thematic organization to run U.S. and Canada Education Programs, the Wiki Education Foundation.

Egypt program celebrates end of second term

The second term of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt wrapped up with a celebration conference at Cairo University. Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez, a professor of Spanish from Cairo University, opened the conference and spoke about the spirit of the program and its importance in the lives of students and teachers in terms of skills development and new experiences. Faris El-Gwely, the education program consultant who runs the program in Egypt, shared results from the second term, and the best students and Ambassadors from the program received certificates recognizing their hard work. Students and professors also shared information about their experiences in the program. Check out photos from the event.

U.S. student shares special Wikipedia story

Jacqueline McCrory

University of San Francisco master’s student Jacqueline McCrory wrote the Wikipedia article on habitat conservation plans for her class with Professor Aaron Frank in spring 2012 — and was then astonished to discover that she’d been assigned to read the article in a different class in fall 2012! Jacqueline talks about how her Wikipedia article experience gave her additional responsibility at work and kudos from professors in her department in a post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Read the post.

Quebec professor’s work featured in WMF blog

Simon Villeneuve’s students

Professor Simon Villeneuve of physics and astronomy at Cégep de Chicoutimi, a college in Quebec, has been using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in his classroom since 2008. Overall, his students have created more than 150 articles on the French Wikipedia on topics related to astronomy and physics, and Simon has learned a lot about the best ways of doing Wikipedia assignments. Read a post he wrote for the Wikimedia blog about his work.

News coverage highlights Poland, Ukraine programs

An article in the Global Post highlights the work being done in Poland and Ukraine related to the Wikipedia Education Program. The Ukraine program ran a pilot last term that produced 23 improved articles. The Poland program is working with a university to replace a bachelor’s thesis with a Wikipedia article. Learn more by reading the article.

Education project improves Catalan Wikipedia

Sagrada Familia nave roof detail, an example of modernism in Barcelona.

Esther Solé from Amical Viquipèdia wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog about the “Viquimoderisme” project to improve articles related to modernism on the Catalan Wikipedia. Around 100 art history students at the University of Barcelona are working with researchers to create new articles on Catalan modernism, a topic important to the cultural history of Catalonia. Esther’s report highlights their learnings from the initial phase, and they’re currently embarking on the second phase, in which a museum in Barcelona will also offer students access to resources they can use in their articles. Read more about the project.

Online student trainings deemed a success

A post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog highlights the successful development of an online training for students piloted on the English Wikipedia with the United States and Canada programs. In the post, author Sage Ross describes how early feedback and user testing has led to iterative improvements to the content of the training. This term, more than 400 students (about one third of all students participating in the program) have successfully completed the training. Read more about the online training.

Education Program featured in video

Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager LiAnna Davis and former Program Manager Annie Lin were featured in a video describing the basics of the education program. In the short video, Annie and LiAnna describe how the program works and talk about the impact the program has had in the last three years. Watch the video.

Professor Ruy de Queiroz

Brazil professor featured on Wikimedia blog

Professor Ruy de Queiroz of Brazil is one of the pioneers of using Wikipedia in his classroom. In 2005, he was browsing the Portuguese Wikipedia in logic and theory of computation — his study areas — and found the Portuguese version lacking in comparison to the English version. Over the last seven years, he and his students have added content to more than 125 articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia in an effort to improve access to information. Read more about his work.

Learning & Evaluation

• Working with the Analytics and E3 teams to expand the UserMetrics API tool to address the needs of the G&P partners at large
• Plagarism study along with the Wikipedia Education team, working on tools to be able to query based on article categories, editor type, and contribution types
• Program mapping study, creating database of all funding mapped to programs. Thanks to volunteer Rosie Lewis for this awesome work!

Human Resources

Gayle Karen Young presenting about hirings in the first quarter (slides)

In March, HR has made some changes to our benefits providers, namely a broker change and a flexplan provider change. HR also hosted the second remote employee task force meeting with a focus on improving in-office technology for better remote participation, which Office IT has been assiduously improving. We have also been working on analyzing our compensation structure, and our 401k committee has been working to add new low fee index funds and find a new plan advisor.

Staff Changes

New Requisitions Filled

• Adam Baso, Senior Software Developer (Engineering)
• Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Developer (Engineering)

New Contractors

• Dan DeJarnatt (HR)
• Kristan Johnson (Fundraiser)
• Meron Kristos (Finance)
• Andrey Valkov (Fundraiser)
• Ellie Young (Grantmaking & Programs)

Contract Extended

• Oona Castro (Grantmaking & Programs)
• Jeroen DeDauw (Engineering)

Departures

• Peter Gehres (continuing as contractor)
• Svetlana Istrati
• Patrick Reilly

Contracts Ended

• Zoe Bernard
• Darrin Fox
• Aaron Halfaker
• Ian Poirier
• Jawad Qadir
• Mike Wang
• Anita Whites

New Postings

• A/P Clerk
• Communications Volunteer
• Development Associate
• Software Engineer | Language Engineering
• WordPress Developer (Contract)

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled

March Actual: 134

March Total Plan: 175

March Filled: 2, Month Attrition: 3,

YTD Filled: 43, YTD Attrition: 21

6 Position canceled for FY

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end

34 (8 of which are on hold)

Department Updates

Real-time feed for HR updates

http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

• Review of FDC round 2 proposals for the FDC.
• Completed Wikimedia Argentina site visit report which will be presented to the WMF Audit Committee at their summer meeting.
• Completed Version 1 of the WMF annual plan, which is now being reviewed by the WMF Senior Level Team and the WMF Board of Trustees.
• Reviewing options for Foreign Exchange management beyond the big international banks to receive and distribute funds for the global movement.

Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

LCA Report, March 2013

Contract Metrics

• Submitted : 17
• Completed : 20

Trademark Metrics

• Submitted : 26
• Approved : 2
• Pending : 20
• Denied : 3
• Approval not needed : 1

Domains Obtained

• wikipedia.us
• wikipedia.is
• softwarewikipedia.com
• wikispecies.org
• wikimedia.gr

Coming & Going

• Two legal interns’ spring internships are coming to an end. Thanks to Ava Miller and Megumi Yukie for all of their help this semester!
• One of our contract attorneys, Ian Poirier, left the Foundation for a permanent opportunity and we wish him the best in his new job!
• We welcome Elaine Wallace, a talented and experienced attorney who will be volunteering her time with us over the next few months.

Other Activities

• Community Advocacy hosted a meeting in the office of 5 out of 7 of the Ombudsman Commission both to facilitate their work with each other and their assistance with various staff on WMF initiatives (see also general “Highlights” section)
• Community Advocacy set up the first of a series of phone calls for WMF management with highly connected community members around the world.
• Legal continues to work through the trademark registration process to protect our marks around the world.

Communications Report, March 2013

In March we successfully issued another major announcement for Wikipedia Zero, highlighting a partnership with Axiata that will bring WP Zero to countries in Southeast Asia. We also worked closely with the executive team on news of Sue Gardner’s upcoming departure from the Foundation. The team is also rotating our group of Communications volunteers, and hoping to bring in about four new volunteers to help us with day to day media monitoring and reporting.

Major announcements

Axiata partners with the Wikimedia Foundation to offer free mobile Wikipedia access through Wikipedia Zero

18 March 2013 – Axiata Group Berhad and the Wikimedia Foundation today announced a partnership to offer Wikipedia on mobile devices free of data charges to Axiata customers throughout Asia.

Major Storylines through March

WMF ED Sue Gardner to leave Foundation (Mar 27, 2013)

This month’s major news story focused on Sue Gardner’s announcement that she would be stepping down later this year once a successor for her position has been identified, to focus on defending the free and open Internet. Mostly positive-tone coverage of the news largely followed a highly visible story published by the NY Times shortly after Sue made the announcement on the WM Blog and on public and community mailing lists.

(blog post) https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/27/sue-gardner-departure-announcement/

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/a-driving-force-behind-wikipedia-to-step-down/

http://www.stern.de/digital/online/fuehrungssuche-beim-online-lexikon-wikipedia-chefin-sue-gardner-tritt-zurueck-1990466.html

http://www.webpronews.com/sue-gardner-to-depart-wikimedia-foundation-uncomfortable-with-where-internet-is-heading-2013-03

BP Edits to WP make headlines (Mar 20, 2103)

A flawed CNET story from mid-March sparked substantial coverage of a BP staffer’s presence on English Wikipedia. The original story accused the staffer of rewriting a number of BP related articles. Subsequent coverage was mostly critical of BP for its actions. Some coverage speculated that the BP staffer may have operated within the approved ‘policies’ around COI editing.

http://prweek.tumblr.com/post/45989772176/wikipedia-editors-have-accused-a-bp-spokesman-of

http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/bp-accused-of-rewriting-wikipedia-records/15556

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/21/bp-wikipedia-page_n_2923363.html

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/21/bp_edited_its_own_environmental_record_on_wikipedia/

Wikipedia Zero / Axiata / SXSW (Mar 8, 2013)

In early March Wikipedia Zero was honored with its first major accolade, the SXSW Interactive award. Later in March Wikipedia Zero launched its first major initiative in southeast Asia, further extending the number of global customers who will be able to access WP without data charges into the hundreds of millions.

http://www.informationweek.in/Mobile/13-03-21/How_Wikipedia_plans_to_use_mobile_phones_for_empowering_knowledge_seekers.aspx

http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/sxsw-wikipedia-for-non-smartphones-is-brilliant-here-s-why-15189767

Other worthwhile reads

How Jimmy Wales’ Wikipedia Harnessed the Web as a Force for Good | Wired | March 2003

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/jimmy-wales-wikipedia/

Jane Goodall apologizes for plagiarizing Wikipedia | March 22

http://www.dailydot.com/culture/jane-goodall-plagiarized-wikipedia/

Wikipedia, meet Lua! | March 18

(blog post) https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/14/what-lua-scripting-means-wikimedia-open-source/

http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/18/wikipedia-crowdsourcing-site-performance-speeding-up-488731-templates-with-a-little-lua-to-go/

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Wikimedia-adopts-Lua-for-page-generation-1825268.html

WMF Blog posts

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/

Thirty-two blog posts in March, with bilingual posts in German, Dutch, Portuguese, Catalan, Czech, and French. Some highlights:

• Parsoid: How Wikipedia catches up with the web

• WikiAfrica project welcomes and trains Cameroonians to contribute to Wikimedia sites

• Evaluating the success of Wikimedia Czech Republic’s Mediagrant

• The recent UK report and movement governance

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#March_2013

Wikipedia Signpost

For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for March 2013:

• Volume 9, Issue 9, 04 March 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 10, 11 March 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 11, 18 March 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 12, 25 March 2013

Office of the Executive Director

Sue Gardner announced that she plans to leave her position as Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, to focus on defending the free and open Internet. She will remain fully engaged as Executive Director until her successor has been recruited, which is expected to take at least six months.

Visitors and Guests

Visitors and guests to the WMF office in March 2013:

1. Teemu Leinonen (Aalto University)
2. Ken Collier (Thoughtworks)
3. Dan Garry (Ombudsmen Commission)
4. Lev Gloukhenki (Ombudsmen Commission)
5. Leif Larsen (Ombudsmen Commission)
6. Thomas Goldammer (Ombudsmen Commission)
7. User:Erzbischof (Ombudsmen Commission)
8. Erin Reading (NPS)
9. Gershon Bialer (EventLogging Workshop)
10. Mlitn (EventLogging Workshop)
11. Piotr Bablok (EventLogging Workshop)
12. Jonathan March (EventLogging Workshop)
13. Valerie Ball (KPMG)
14. Gour Lentell (BiNu)
15. Ton Chookhare (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
16. Franzi Mare (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
17. Nikita Kiselev (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
18. Thomas Malec (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
19. Julio Santil (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
20. Joseph Zhou (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
21. Vishel Shah (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
22. Lauren Fernandez (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
23. Abigail Feuer (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
24. Sarah Walker (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
25. Adi Rubinovich (UC Berkeley Haas MBA Tour)
26. John McLear (Etherpad Project)
27. Idoia Valencia (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
28. Mikel Garcia (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
29. Borja Pinedo (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
30. Patrizia Varela (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
31. Eneko Sieso (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
32. Asier Lopez (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
33. Beñat Egaña (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
34. Lucia Vazquez (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
35. Goio Arana (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
36. Tomas Tamayo (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
37. Jon Jimenez (Mondragon Unibertsitatea)
38. Kim Dodson (consultants)
39. Randall Benson (consultants)
40. Mark Oppenheim (m|Oppenheim)
41. Mikel Gazzia (SMASH co-op)
42. Christine Cavanaugh-Simmons (CCS Consulting Inc)
43. Deb Wolter (Red Bamboo Consulting)
44. Mary Gardiner (TAI)
45. Simon Turkalj (Simon Turkalj Associates)
46. Patrick Dippery (COO and Co-Founder, Collabriv)
47. Nimish Gautam (visitor)
48. Thomas Shaffer (Change.org)
49. Patrick Chen (Change.org)
50. William Adams (Full Circle Group)
51. Glenn Turner (Advanced Mobile Notary)
52. Simon Cross and guest (Praekelt foundation)
53. Drew Paroski (Facebook)
54. Grant Joung (Thoughtworks)
55. Brian Bocchino (Gravity People)
56. Roman Garcia (User:Blurpeace)
57. August Wissmath (volunteer)
58. Philip Steele (Pension Architects)
59. Michael Rom (Pension Architects)
60. Kunal Mehta (User:legoktm)
61. Brian Behlendorf (Cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation and Board Member of the Mozilla Foundation)
62. Liliana Bounegru (DataDrivenJournalism.net, European Journalism Centre)
63. Mat Dryhurst (Director of Public Programming, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts)
64. Jonathan Gray (Director of Policy and Ideas, Open Knowledge Foundation)
65. Jay Nath (SF Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer)
66. Timothy Vollmer (Manager of Policy and Data, Creative Commons)
67. Gregg Servis (Full Circle Group)
68. Brett Victor (guest speaker)
69. Andrew Lih (Author and guest speaker)
70. Doug Hessel (Johnson & Dugan)
71. Virginia Sutton (Johnson & Dugan)
72. Linda Lam (Johnson & Dugan)
73. Andrea De Ville (Radford)
74. Zachary Osman (Radford)

Vol: 3 • Issue: 3 • March 2013 [contribute] [archives]

“Ignore all rules” in deletions; anonymity and groupthink; how readers react when shown talk pages

With contributions by: Amir E. Aharoni, Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, Oren Bochman, Heather Ford, Tilman Bayer, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Daniel Mietchen.

Wikipedia’s “Ignore all rules” policy (IAR) is a double edged sword in deletion arguments

A beetle larva ignoring the rules while negotiating deletion with the frog.^{[mediasource 1]}

A paper presented at last month’s CSCW Conference, titled “Keeping eyes on the prize: officially sanctioned rule breaking in mass collaboration systems”^[1] observes that “Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order”, yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization. Rule breaking in bureaucracies is a slippery slope quickly leading to potentially dangerous exceptions, so Wikipedia has a mechanism called “Ignore all rules” (WP:IAR) for officially sanctioned rule breaking. The researchers have considered IAR’s impact within the scope of deletion requests. The results show that the IAR policy has meaningful influences on deliberation outcomes, which rather than wreaking havoc, provides a positive, functional governance mechanism.

This paper is another welcome addition to the growing literature on AfD, examining the effectiveness of rule breaking using WP:IAR within these discussions. It starts with an in depth extermination of rule breaking within collaborative environments. Then these six hypotheses are postulated:

1. Invocation of WP:IAR in support of vote correlates with increased likelihood of the decision that the vote will be on the winning side.
2. This effect is expected to increase with the number of policies cited in the deletion proposal (since they may be contradicting each other).
3. Invoking IAR to override the deletion proposal’s policy citation tends to reduce the proposal’s likelihood of success.
4. When IAR is used together with another policy domain (e.g. Content/Conduct/Legal) as the proposal’s rationale, it will negate the proposal’s success.
5. Increased dissonance between policies arising in the discussion will increase the chance that the IAR argument will be successful.
6. IAR will increase in effectiveness as the policies invoked increase in complexity.

To test these, the researchers scoured AfD discussions starting from April 2006 to October 2008, collecting those where WP:IAR had been invoked. These were then supplemented by randomly drawing a control group from non IAR AfD discussions from the same date. The resulting dataset contained 555 AfD discussions. These were coded by Outcome, for Keep/Delete and IAR usage in Keep/Delete vote, Policy Match and Category Match. Each hypothesis and the control were fitted to a linear regression model. The results were as follows:

H1 was supported only in cases where IAR is used in keep vote, but showed insignificant impact as a delete argument. H2, H3 & H4 look for conditions in which IAR’s impact on the ultimate decision would be strengthened. H2 was supported only marginally; H3 was not supported; H4 was not supported and actually indicated that in the case where a keep voter has invoked IAR with another policy this will only increase the chance of a delete outcome! H5 and H6 consider if IAR fares better when pitted against increasingly contradictory or complicated policies and both of these are supported. Overall, the authors conclude that IAR plays a significant role in Wikipedia’s policies, and recommend its use to other communities. They point out that IAR is also an indicator of where policy is weak in addressing the community’s needs.

Activity of content translators on Wikipedia examined

The Japanese phrase “itterashai”, uttered by a budgerigar.^{[mediasource 2]}

This image of the flatworm Pseudorhabdosynochus morrhua has descriptions in currently 29 languages, i.e. 10% of Wikipedia languages.

Another CSCW paper titled “Could someone please translate this?”: activity analysis of Wikipedia article translation by non-experts”^[2] analyzes the work of a volunteer translator of Wikipedia articles. It goes into great detail: it breaks down the big translation task into many sub-activities, such as looking up complicated words in the source language, choosing the right translation, using editing software, etc. It presents all the activities according to the Activity theory methodology. Though there are other papers that deal with translation of Wikipedia content, it is the first paper to examine the actual volunteer translator’s activity.

Interestingly, this paper notes the importance of the Simple English Wikipedia several times, as a tool that may help people translate the content, with the assumption that the language of the main English Wikipedia may frequently be complex and challenging (this assumption is based on another paper, which compared the English and Simple English Wikipedias). It relies on the Simple English Wikipedia a bit too much, though; for example, it cites its main page as a source for some statistics, which would better be obtained directly from stats.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia’s main statistics site.

It has some shortcomings, which should be addressed in future works on the subject:

• It lists several possible definitions of “Wikipedia translation”: Translation of articles, with which it deals, and also translation of talk pages, translation of WikiProject pages, etc. It also mentions several software tools that are related to Wikipedia translation and multilinguality, such as WikiBhasha and Omnipedia. However, it notably omits any mention of MediaWiki’s Translate extension, which is used on the translatewiki.net website for translating of the user interface of MediaWiki and its many extensions, making MediaWiki one of the most thoroughly localized software packages ever, and also for various documents on Wikimedia sites, such as Meta, MediaWiki.org and Wikidata. Though they are certainly not identical, the latter workflow of translating documents is especially similar to the workflow of Wikipedia article translation. (Disclaimer: The reviewer is one of the developers of the Translate extension.)
• It provided pre-selected articles to translate to the subjects of the experiment. This may have been unavoidable in a first small controlled experiment, but it misses an important activity of volunteer translators in Wikipedia: selection of the article to translate. This is done in several ways, among which are:
  • Selection by translators themselves, based on their interests or other factors.
  • Projects such as [Translation of the week]].
  • Requests from other users who speak the target language.
  • Requests from users who speak other languages. Notable examples of these are the Wikipedia articles about Kurów, a town in Poland, and True Jesus Church, a Christian denomination, which are at least partially translated to nearly all languages in which a Wikipedia is available.
• It only deals with translation from English to other languages, but not with translation from other languages into English and other languages. For many reasons, English is not the only source for translation and this must be noted.
• The paper notes that one of the criteria for choosing the articles for the experiment was that the article content is representative of the general Wikipedia article language complexity”. It is not clear, however, how this was measured.
• New users of Wikipedia were chosen and not experienced editors. Testing with new users is valuable, but it would be useful to repeat the experiment with veteran Wikipedians.
• It claims that it found that paraphrasing machine translation can be a more desirable strategy for translating conceptual articles than biographical articles in Wikipedia, even though the English language might be more complex. This may be true, but it is unclear how such a bold statement could be made from such a small sample of source content.

Despite these shortcomings, this paper is valuable for several reasons:

• Opening the topic of close examination of Wikipedia’s translators work is important in itself.
• Its bibliography has many useful pointers to other articles about Wikipedia’s multilinguality and volunteer translation.
• Its high level of detail in analyzing the translators activity is commendable, and with some improvements, this methodology could be useful for people who design translation tools.
• Its particular comments about the special challenges of translation to Chinese should be very useful for optimizing future translation tools for this language. Of course, the experiment should be repeated with other languages, too.

Finally, the article promises further research and suggestions about building tools for translator support, which would be very interesting to read.

Comparison of collaborative editing in OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia

A preprint titled “Has OpenStreetMap a role in Digital Earth Applications?”^[3] studies OpenStreetMap, the wiki-based collaboratively editable map, as a predominant example of Volunteered Geographical Information projects. The paper addresses two main research questions: 1) How successful is the OSM project in providing spatial data and to which extent can it be compared to Wikipedia in this sense, 2) what are the main characteristics of OSM stemming from its crowd-sourced nature? The paper gives a very comprehensive overview of the work-flow of OSM, reviews the main characteristics of its collaborative mapping process very well, and tries to compare these characteristics with those of Wikipedia: In contrast with Wikipedia, the administrative structure of OSM is unknown and not very well defined within the community of its editors; however both platforms show the same Zipfian characteristics among their editors; a few editors are responsible for large numbers of contributions and many editors have only a few contributions. Although the criteria are quite different on the two platforms, the paper finds that the relative population of OSM Featured Objects is evidently larger than the ones of Wikipedia (Featured Articles). In the conclusion, the authors express that they “believe that OSM will continue its growth for the foreseeable future”. However, the route to this conclusion is not very well described in the manuscript.

Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news stories is still a fertile field of research

The Chelyabinsk meteor on February 15 did not just leave its traces in the Ural region, but Wikipedia entries on the event had been started in 29 languages by the end of that day. Today, there are 44.

In MJ no more: Using Concurrent Wikipedia Edit Spikes with Social Network Plausibility Checks for Breaking News Detection^[4] by Thomas Steiner, Seth van Hooland and Ed Summers, the controversial (per WP:Recentism and WP:RS) field of breaking news articles is investigated. Motivated by the overloading of Wikipedia during the breaking of the news of Michael Jackson’s death, researcher Thomas Steiner created an open source exploratory tool called The Wikipedia Live Monitor. This tool allowed his team to examine clusters of related activity based on edit spikes in a 5 minute window within multiple streams fed by Wikipedia’s recent changes; Twitter Feeds; Google+ and Facebook. The main research question posed is: are edit spikes in Wikipedia, clustered with related social network activity, useful indicators for identifying breaking news events, and with what delay? By considering action along multiple streams, they are able to cross-check the plausibility of information being disseminated by many less reliable sources.

Their approach is based on prior work by S. Petrović, M. Osborne, and V. Lavrenko in Streaming First Story Detection with Application to Twitter, who used the document vector space model from classic information retrieval to cluster twitter feeds. But in this case the researchers are clustering multiple streams which can potentially hold far more information when a story breaks and can therefore detect these very quickly. While they could locate breaking news, they may need more work to optimize the timing parameters of the algorithm. Further research is planned into automating the classification of edits, which could reform future use of non-reliable sources.

A WikiSym 2012 paper titled Staying in the Loop: Structure and Dynamics of Wikipedia’s Breaking News Collaborations^[5] looked at the trajectory of article construction which captures the collaboration structure embedded in the creation of breaking news stories. They have shown that these stories, fueled by mass media and social networks, tend to create a social melting pot surrounding the editing of these events. A social network analysis of the relations between editors of breaking news stories located editors in diverse social roles, such as Creators, early contributors, the highly centralized activity coordinators (admins) and the marginal vandals and their tireless opponents, the spam fighting bots and recent changes patrollers. Another result is that most articles – those which are not breaking news stories – lack the dense creation trajectories found in breaking news stories.

Exposing talk page discussions leads to drop in perceived article quality

As once observed by Ward Cunningham, one important feature by which Wikipedians improved his invention, the wiki, was to introduce “a talk page or a discussion page behind every page, so you don’t actually have to see the discussion and it makes a much more finished product”. Yet surfacing this deliberation could engender trust in the process if the deliberation process appears fair, well-reasoned, and thorough. Alternatively, it could encourage doubts about content quality, especially if the process appears messy or biased. In a CSCW ’13 paper titled “Your process is showing: controversy management and perceived quality in wikipedia”,^[6] the researchers report on an experiment in which they found that exposing discussions generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article, especially if the discussion revealed conflict.

Motivated by how university students learn to assess reliability of controversial articles such as Supreme Court decisions or about individuals like Pope Pius XII and Yasser Arafat, the researchers considered how beneficial it would be to reveal the process of articles creation. In wikis the discussions used to produce the articles are hidden from view using talk pages and other coordination spaces. It was believed that when deliberations appear fair, well-reasoned, and thorough it should engender trust in the reader and that a process which appears biased or chaotic should diminish the confidence in the article’s quality. The paper outlines the issues involved in assessing the credibility of online information sources. The paper first considers prior work on article quality but reframes the issues based on an idea presented in the recent best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow by economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. The research questions posed are:

• RQ1: What is the effect of exposing discussions about article content on perceived article quality?
• RQ2: Do different kinds of conflict resolution have different effects on perceptions of content quality?
• RQ3: What do participants believe about how viewing the discussion may have changed their perceptions?

These questions are then interpreted using Kahneman’s System 1 (slower deliberative thinking) and System 2 (faster associative thinking). The questions were investigated in an experiment run on Amazon’s mechanical Turk — a crowdsourcing platform allowing micropayments. Beginning with 3500 controversial articles, the researchers selected featured articles, and discarded newsworthy items leaving only 50 articles. Elite Turkers were then shown ten brief vignettes illustrating talk page discussion about a selected controversy, meant to display one of ten forms of editor coordination or conflict activities. They then had to answer a questionnaire, and complete two reading comprehension tasks. The researchers noticed that exposing Wikipedia readers to such discussions with any type of conflict generally led to a drop in the perceived quality of the related article. They point out that the magnitude of the reader’s negative perception depends on the type of editors’ interaction. Finally they note that while participants may have suffered a confidence crisis with respect to specific articles, at the same time they gained respect for Wikipedia in general. A final conclusion is that while the experiment, especially the comprehension task, was designed to engage readers in System 1 thinking, watching the discussions may well have triggered a System 2 critical response.

Briefly

100 million hours spent editing Wikipedia

Edit counts are often used as a measure of the amount of activity on a wiki, but as the work that goes into one edit can vary between mere seconds and many hours or even days, they don’t translate easily into work time. Still, in 2008, Clay Shirky and IBM researcher Martin Wattenberg estimated as a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” that “about 100 million hours of thought” had gone into Wikipedia (a number later featured prominently in Shirky’s book Cognitive Surplus). A CSCW 2013 paper titled “Using Edit Sessions to Measure Participation in Wikipedia”^[7] calculates work time as the length of edit sessions, defined as “a sequence of edits made by an editor where the difference between the time at which any two sequential edits are saved is less than one hour”. They estimate that a total of 102,673,683 labor hours were spent editing Wikipedia (in all languages) until April 2012 (which was compared to 168 lifetimes of work) and 61,706,883 hours on the English Wikipedia. The paper also contains a list of the 20 editors who (by this measure) spent the most time editing the English Wikipedia in March 2012.

Wiktionary and sign language

In “Between Wictionary [sic] and a Thesaurus : Some Dilemmata of a Sign Language Dictionary”,^[8] apparently an abstract of a paper to be presented at a conference, the author presents the challenges to writing a dictionary of sign language in the world of modern lexicography. In the author’s opinion, Wiktionary in general, and the Czech Wiktionary in particular, is an important example of one of the latest innovations in lexicography: It is based on contributions by volunteers who are not necessarily professional to achieve a work of a volume that would be extremely expensive to produce in traditional professional lexicography, although it sacrifices some of the advantages of the latter, such as a carefully selected glossary and rigorous standardization. The author sees future in using a wiki technology for creating dictionaries for sign languages that will be better than the current dictionaries at least in some characteristics, and makes some suggestions on how to implement it well. Notably, the author discusses displaying the signs as illustrations and videos and does not mention SignWriting – a system of standardized characters for representing signs, which was already used for several dictionaries and websites; it is not encoded in Unicode yet, but experimental support for SignWriting is available for MediaWiki as an extension. A minor nitpick is the misspelling of the name “Wiktionary” – the author writes it with a ‘c’ rather than a ‘k’.

Wikipedia compared to Q&A website in Korea

In South Korea, Wikipedia lags behind several other services in popularity, such as Naver‘s KnowledgeiN knowledge market Q&A service. A new paper^[9] compares the English and Korean Wikipedias to the KnowledgeiN service, and analyzes some of the factors involved in how users perceive quality in wikis and Q&A services. About 200 users of each of the three websites participated in the survey. The authors found that perceived quality helps to determine how useful the users are going to see a given site. Previous research suggesting that community expertise, size and diversity all contribute to quality is confirmed, and those factors are recognized and valued by the general public. As might be expected, the authors find that users of Q&A sites value expertise of contributors more than users of wikis. In turn, wikis rely on the size of their community to achieve quality. Predictably, the authors conclude that the smaller Wikipedias such as the Korean one suffer from small community size, and recommend that to improve the quality and popularity of such Wikipedias, more editors should be recruited. The study notes a number of limitations that affected it; notably it did not take into account any possible cultural differences, and it does not provide any discussion of why Wikipedia’s popularity in Korea is lacking compared to many other websites, such as KnowledgeiN.

The development of the ureteric bud in C57BL/6 mice in the absence (left) or presence (right) of the protein Cer1.^{[mediasource 3]}

Wikipedia articles on nephrology reliable, but hard to read

An article^[10] by four Toronto-based medical authors concludes that “Wikipedia is a comprehensive and fairly reliable medical resource for nephrology patients that is written at a college reading level”. Comprehensiveness was measured by coverage of ICD-10 items pertaining to this area of medicine. The reliability of articles was also measured in a purely quantitative way, based on “(i) mean number of references per article, and (ii) mean percentage of ‘‘substantiated’’ references—which we defined as references corresponding to works published in peer-reviewed journals or from texts with an associated International Standard Book Number (ISBN)”. Readability was measured using three standard formulae including the Flesch-Kincaid grade level.

Comparing English and Arabic Wikipedia POV differences

Khalid, Schutze and Kantner compare point of view (POV) differences between English and Arabic articles about “international personalities”.^[11] They use Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate sentences as positive, negative and neutral and build a statistical classifier to predict the POV score of a document. The authors find that Arabic articles are generally more positive than their English counterparts and conclude that there are at least two possible reasons for a POV difference: either because of a generally lower or higher level of absolute POV in a language, or because of a genuinely different evaluation of a personality in different Wikipedias. The article also contains rich detail about the challenges of evaluating POV differences using both human and automatic classifiers.

The overrepresentation of cricket on English Wikipedia

This article^[12] for the 2013 edition of The International Journal of the History of Sport analyses 115 English wikipedia articles about Australian sportspeople and finds that a disproportionately large number are cricketer biographies. They find that, instead of reflecting the most popular sports in Australian society (of which cricket is one of the least popular), Wikipedia reflects the interests of a small special interest group. In this case, two Wikipedians are behind the creation and maintenance of almost all the content of the high-quality cricket articles. The authors note that cricket is also generally better represented in literary sources where the sport takes on a nostalgic narrative embodying traditional Australia. They conclude with the question of whether the extensive literature on cricket is reflected in Wikipedia articles and, if so, whether the existence of the same factors that have led to the creation of high-quality articles on Australian cricket – are relevant or whether there are other dynamics at play.

Grumpiness due to a “serious typographical error”

A serious typographical error may have led a 2008 personality study to wrongly claim Wikipedians are close-minded. A blog post for Psychology Today^[13] re-examined a widely quoted 2008 survey among 69 Israeli Wikipedians^[14] that (as summarized by the New Scientist at the time) had concluded that “Wikipedians are grumpy and close-minded” (Signpost coverage). The author found that the paper “contains serious errors and even contradicts itself … [C]ontrary to what was reported, Wikipedia members of both sexes actually had higher mean scores on openness to experience compared to non-members, not lower ones. Perhaps the authors’ were confused by the presence of a serious typographical error that appears in the Results section of their article”.

Wikipedians do not tend to conform more to groupthink when in a less anonymous situation

In a survey,^[15] 106 editors on the English Wikipedia were asked (with approval of the Wikimedia Foundation Research Committee) how they would act in three real-world scenarios (not involving Wikipedia – e.g. “a group of tenants dealing with a noisy/problematic neighbor”), each “carefully designed so that the individual would have a high incentive to resolve the problem, but would also incur some sort of penalty for voicing a dissenting opinion”, and assuming varying levels of anonymity (e.g. complete anonymity, pseudonymity, or use of real names). The paper’s main hypothesis, “that with higher levels of anonymity the likelihood of not conforming increases as well”, found only weak support, which the author calls “a promising result for online communities and the future of online communication. Given that non-conformity in this study meant ensuring a contribution of alternatives to the group, this is a positive outcome for preventing groupthink.”

Estimate for economic benefit of Wikipedia: $50 million by 2006 already

In a recent article, The Economist examined the question “How to quantify the gains that the internet has brought to consumers”, citing a 2009 paper by two economists that attempted to calculate the monetary value of consumer surplus generated by broadband Internet, focusing on how much value Internet is providing for free (that otherwise people would be prepared to pay). While this paper did not mention Wikipedia, The Economist cited one of the authors (Shane Greenstein, known to readers of this research report for his work on political POV language in Wikipedia articles, reviewed in the January 2012 and February 2012 issues), who “thinks Wikipedia accounted for up to $50m of that surplus” as of 2006 – in other words, Wikipedia provides a good that otherwise people would be willing to buy, spending $50m on it that instead they get to spend on something else. The Economist commented that “such numbers probably understate things” as the paper’s methodology assumed that “internet access meant the same thing in 2006 as it did in 1999.”

Journalists cover many topics.^{[mediasource 4]}
So does Wikipedia.

91% of German journalists use Wikipedia

A survey^[16] conducted by a PR agency among “over 2,600 journalists from France, the UK, America and Germany” asked them about various aspects of their work including Wikipedia usage, finding among other results “91% of the German national media journalists admitting to using Wikipedia to research stories.”

Inserting weblinks on Wikipedia to drive traffic

A case study published in D-Lib Magazine (“the magazine of digital library research”), titled Using Wikipedia to Enhance the Visibility of Digitized Archival Assets^[17] reported on “the use of Wikipedia by the Ball State University Libraries as an opportunity to raise the visibility of digitized historic sheet music assets … by adding links to specific items in this collection to relevant, existing Wikipedia articles”. In a blog post, Europeana also reported on exposure to its content received via Wikipedia, in a somewhat different approach – by providing the content on Wikipedia itself.^[18]

Case study on “Accommodating the Wikipedia Project in Higher Education”

A 94 page master’s thesis^[19] finds that the University of Windsor, treated as a case study, is torn between two groups: one encouraging the use of new digital tools like Wikipedia, and the other, conservative, opposed to it. There is a general lack of understanding of Wikipedia (a finding similar to a study reviewed in last month’s issue: “UK university lecturers still skeptical and uninformed about Wikipedia“). Many participants (instructors, scholars) use Wikipedia and recognize it has been improving and becoming more convenient, but are mostly unwilling to contribute to it; one participant noted that doing so would be a career “academic suicide”. Nonetheless the study also suggest that there is significant sympathy for Wikipedia, and many interviewees indicated that they would like to contribute, but are stymied by “lack of time, lack of academic credit, and overall lack of resources to do work not directly related to their professional responsibilities.” Wikipedia outreach to academia is seen as noble, but likely not to progress quickly due to those issues.

Wikipedia student club participation

A dissertation titled “Investigation of Disassembling Polymers and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Molecular Gelation, and Implementation of a Class-Project Centered on Editing Wikipedia”^[20] contains some observations on the first ever Wikipedia student club in the US: “the students who enter the Wikipedia community through the student club have a different editing contribution pattern than the general population and the students who enter through a class project. These editors still remain active after a year from creating the account. Although they start at a lower editing efficiency, they peak later in the year and have a more gradual decline in active editing activity.” (p.170)

Monthly edits still on the rise

Erik Zachte, a data analyst for the Wikimedia Foundation, observed in a blog post^[21] that “the overall volume of manual edits by registered users on all Wikimedia wikis combined is still increasing, slowly but steadily” (somewhat different from the number of active editors, which has been slightly decreasing or stagnating over the last few years), generating some discussion on the possible reasons.

How many Wikipedia edits come from locals?

On the “Zero Geography” blog, researcher Mark Graham continued his series about geostatistical aspects of Wikipedia, presenting “A map of edits to articles about Egypt”,^[22] providing an overview article on some earlier results that appeared in a Rwandan magazine^[23] and asking “What percentage of edits to English-language Wikipedia articles are from local people?”.^[24]

New overview page of Wikimedia data for researchers

A new page on Meta-Wiki gives an overview for researchers of various sources of open data published by the Wikimedia Foundation about Wikipedia and its sister projects (Wikipedia dumps, stats, live feeds, etc.)

Wikimedia funding for Wikisym ’13 despite open access concerns

A request for financial support from the Wikimedia Foundation for the 2013 WikiSym/OpenSym conference – as in previous years – was approved this month, but not without serious concerns among the Foundation’s volunteer-based Grant Advisory Committee about the organizer’s choice of the ACM Digital Library as the publication venue of the conference proceedings, which makes them available for download cost-free but not under a free license. The issue had been brought up as early as in 2010, when the contribution of one conference speaker was not included in the proceedings because he had insisted on republishing it under a CC-BY-SA license.

Research newsletter started on French Wikipedia

“Nouvelles du Wikilab” is a new community-written research newsletter on the French Wikipedia, summarizing and sometimes enriching this monthly research report in French. It offers subscription (for delivery to one’s user talk page on the French Wikipedia). There are also ideas for an on-wiki French language research review journal named Wikilogie, to publish original research about Wikipedia which could be useful for the community, and to facilitate dialogue with researchers.

Inferring relationships from editing behavior on Wikipedia

A paper presented at the 8th Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Workshop (January 8 – 10, 2013, link to event) reports on the application of Transfer Entropy, a promising information-theoretic tool originally devised by neuroscientists to study causal connections among biological neurons, to infer a network of “social relationships” among editors of Wikipedia, using only information about their editing behavior.^[25] As Wikipedia lacks explicit information about social ties among editors, the authors needed to define a “ground truth” network using interaction on User Talk pages. The method attains a high level of precision but a very low level of recall. The contribution won the best paper award at the workshop in which it was presented.

Google Research releases the WikiLinks Corpus: 40M mentions to Wikipedia pages collected from 10M web pages

Researchers at Google recently released a Natural Language Processing dataset of 40M terms occurring in 10M pages, obtained by crawling the Web and looking for links that point to Wikipedia articles. According to the blog post about the release, the dataset is the largest set of disambiguated mentions to date, nearly 100 times bigger than the second largest database publicly available. A technical report covers in detail the collection, generation, and curation of the dataset.^[26]

References

Image sources

This post is available in 2 languages:

català  • English

In English

Catalan Wikipedia is especially active with GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects, but beginning in summer 2012, we started developing “Viquimodernisme“, an unprecedented wikiproject in Catalonia. For the first time, a research group on contemporary design and art history — Universitat de Barcelona’s GRACMON — and around 100 art history students at the same university have made a combined effort to improve Catalan Wikipedia’s content related to their area of expertise, Catalan modernism.

A preliminary audit (in Catalan) revealed that from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, modernism articles on the Catalan Wikipedia needed serious improvement. And we took other key factors into account. First, Wikipedia’s prominent position among the main reference sources when information is sought on the Internet makes it reasonable to work to provide Wikipedia readers with high quality content. Second, Catalan modernism is one of the main assets of our artistic heritage, and Wikipedia is a very useful tool to explain Catalonia to the world. Also, we cannot forget that free knowledge projects in public education entail an important social return, which makes them even more valuable. Finally, plunging on such a wikiproject involved adopting a new paradigm of academic work: assignments became an open task, a permanent, free and widely available work in progress.

The wikiproject planning was based on data provided by the preliminary audit, and once devised, it was presented to students enrolled in several subjects related to Catalan modernism (plastic arts, theatre, design…). Each student commited to edit a Wikipedia article related to the subject they were learning, aiming to obtain or get as close as possible to a featured article. We reached a lucky crossroads: students acquired new knowledge and improved their command of references; professors — members of the research group — provided the needed criterion to assess the assignments and also optimised their research by providing Wikipedia with new data, while the community had an active participation by helping inexperienced editors and intervening when it was necessary. Despite that the experience was positive, several tense situations arose among students and the community, mainly due to a lack of knowledge of Wikipedia’s working dynamics by novice editors. Also, this experience helped us to spot a flaw we need to improve as soon as possible: the need to clarify Wikimedia Commons’ operation and special features, as their command was one of the most difficult issues students had to cope with.

Currently, we can only provide preliminary results of this wikiproject, as we have just started phase 2, which will last until June 2013. During this second semester we will be glad to welcome a fourth actor, Barcelona’s Museu de les Arts Escèniques, which will participate of the wikiproject by offering students a backstage pass to high quality references. But we can state that the results of the first phase of the wikiproject have been very satisfactory and have exceeded even the most optimistic estimates. The signs determined in the preliminary audit show an astonishing growth of Catalan modernism-related articles in Catalan wikipedia, either by number and quality.

Most assignments involved creating new articles, and Catalan wikipedia currently has 416 articles about Catalan modernism available, while in late summer 2012 there were 372! Also, a survey among phase 1 students revealed they were mainly satisfied with the project and their results. Among the most interesting comments, we must stress their willingness to take part again in a similar experience and their satisfaction to know that their assignment has been something useful to the society since the very beginning.

Viquimodernisme is a milestone-setting project among GLAM wikiprojects. Once finished, we will be able to determine protocols and mechanisms that will serve as a reference for future similar experiences. This unprecedented collaboration between academia and Wikipedia has revealed an amazing potential, but we are only on the tip of the iceberg: things are changing, and this is a shared success!

Esther Solé (User:ESM), Amical Viquipèdia

en català

Viquimodernisme, no només un altre viquiprojecte GLAM

La viquipèdia en català és especialment dinàmica a nivell de GLAM. Els projectes s’han multiplicat en els darrers anys, i des de l’estiu de 2012 s’està duent a terme un viquiprojecte pioner en aquest àmbit a Catalunya, anomenat viquimodernisme.

Per primer cop, un grup de recerca sobre història de l’art i del disseny contemporanis, el GRACMON de la Universitat de Barcelona, i prop d’una centena d’alumnes del grau d’història de l’art de la mateixa universitat han unit esforços per tal de millorar el contingut existent a Viquipèdia relacionat amb el seu camp d’expertise, el modernisme català.

La proposta del viquiprojecte no fou gratuïta: una auditoria prèvia va revelar que tant a nivell quantitatiu com qualitatiu, els articles sobre el modernisme català disponibles a la viquipèdia precisaven una millora important. A aquesta realitat calia afegir-hi diversos factors: en primer lloc, la posició destacada que ocupa la viquipèdia entre les principals fonts consultades quan es cerca informació per internet. Així doncs, sembla raonable vetllar i esforçar-nos per a que els continguts que es poden trobar a la viquipèdia siguin de la màxima qualitat possible. En segon lloc, cal no oblidar que el modernisme català és un dels principals valors del patrimoni artístic del nostre país, i que la viquipèdia és una eina que ha resultat de gran utilitat per donar a conèixer Catalunya al món. Finalment, no es pot obviar el valor de retorn social que entranyen els projectes de coneixement lliure en l’àmbit de l’ensenyament públic, com tampoc es pot deixar de banda el fet que endinsar-se en el viquiprojecte suposava un veritable canvi de paradigma del treball acadèmic, el qual deixa de ser eclusivament de l’alumne que l’elabora per esdevenir una tasca oberta, un work in progress permanent, lliure i a disposició de tothom.

Així doncs, després de planificar les actuacions a partir de la informació extreta de l’auditoria, es presentà el viquiprojecte a l’alumnat, repartit en assignatures relacionades amb diverses facetes del modernisme català (arts plàstiques, teatre, disseny…). Cadascú s’encarregava d’editar un article relacionat amb el programa de l’assignatura que cursava amb la intenció d’obtenir o d’aproximar-se al màxim a un article de qualitat. S’esdevenia una cruïlla afortunada: els alumnes adquirien nou coneixement i milloraven el domini i maneig de les fonts; el professorat —els membres del grup de recerca— proporcionava el criteri necessari per valorar la qualitat dels articles treballats a la vegada que optimitzava la pròpia recerca feta tot aportant dades noves a la viquipèdia; i la comunitat participava activament del viquiprojecte tot acompanyant els nous editors i intervenint sempre que fos necessari. Tot i que en termes generals l’experiència fou positiva, van esdevenir-se algunes situacions de tensió entre l’alumnat i la resta de la comunitat, la gran majoria d’elles propiciades pel desconeixement de les dinàmiques de funcionament de la viquipèdia per part dels editors novells. A més, aquesta experiència va posar de manifest de manera molt clara un dels aspectes que cal millorar amb certa urgència en vista a properes edicions: la necessitat de clarificar el funcionament i les particularitats de Wikimedia Commons, una de les facetes més dificultoses de l’experiència en general.

Ara per ara només estem en condicions d’aportar resultats preliminars d’aquest projecte, ja que tot just estem iniciant-ne la segona fase, que es desenvoluparà fins el juny de 2013. Durant aquest segon quadrimestre un quart actor, el Museu de les Arts Escèniques de Barcelona, s’incorporarà al viquiprojecte tot aportant un backstage pass a fonts d’alta qualitat pels participants. De totes maneres, ara ja podem afirmar que els resultats de la primera fase del viquiprojecte han estat molt satisfactoris i han superat les expectatives més optimistes. Els indicadors emprats en l’auditoria prèvia ens permeten observar un creixement espectacular dels articles sobre el modernisme català a la viquipèdia, tant en quantitat com en qualitat. Tanmateix, una part important del treball s’ha dut a terme a partir de la creació d’articles nous, de tal manera que de 372 articles sobre el modernisme català disponibles a la viquipèdia a finals d’estiu de 2012, avui ja en comptem 416! A més, una enquesta facilitada als alumnes participants del primer quadrimestre evidencia una satisfacció generalitzada de l’experiència. Entre les observacions més destacades cal mencionar la predisposició generalitzada a repetir l’experiència i la constatació que la feina feta ha passat a ser quelcom d’utilitat pública, a disposició de tothom des del primer dia.

Viquimodernisme és un projecte que ens permetrà establir una fita dins el conjunt de viquiprojectes GLAM, tot determinant protocols i mecanismes de treball que serviran de referència per a experiències futures de caràcter similar. El potencial que s’ha observat en aquesta experiència pilot sobre la col·laboració entre acadèmia i viquipèdia és fantàstic, però tot just estem a la punta de l’iceberg: les coses estan començant a canviar, i ho estem aconseguint entre tots!

Esther Solé (User:ESM), Amical Viquipèdia

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for February 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Legal victory for Wikivoyage and free knowledge

The Wikimedia Foundation’s legal team announced a settlement in the legal proceedings between the Foundation and Internet Brands, relating to issues stemming from the creation of Wikivoyage, our community’s newest free knowledge project.

Last year, Internet Brands (owners of a for-profit wiki-based travel project) sued two Wikimedians involved in supporting the travel wiki project. The Foundation supported the legal defense of the volunteers and the court ultimately dismissed Internet Brands’ lawsuit.

The Foundation also went on the offensive and filed its own separate lawsuit against Internet Brands seeking a declaration from the court that Internet Brands had no proper basis to block the travel wiki project. That suit was resolved in an out of court settlement on February 14, 2013. In that settlement, Internet Brands released the Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V. (the German non-profit organization who worked hard to make the travel project a success) from all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project. In return, the Foundation agreed to dismiss its suit.

Screenshot of the new mobile watchlist

Mobile watchlist available

Facilitating contributions to Wikipedia on mobile devices is an important goal for the Foundation’s mobile team. As one of the first results of these efforts, mobile Wikipedia users are now able to log into their account, and to view and modify their watchlist. On the mobile version, the star symbol for the watchlist is shown to all users, to encourage them to log in or create an account. Experienced contributors can use the watchlist as usual: To track changes to the selected pages and fix problems if necessary. But to make the watchlist more newbie-friendly, the mobile version also offers a full view of all selected pages, which can function as a reading list.

Language Engineering team attends open source conferences in India

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team participated in two conferences in Pune, India: GNUnify 2013, a major open source conference, and the Second Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Foundation with Red Hat. The team aims to make Wikipedia a website that can be used by anyone on the planet in their own language. India’s many different languages make it a natural location for the team to see the effect of their work. At the Language Summit, the engineers from the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with attendees from Red Hat, KDE, Google and other groups. The work areas included the following:

• Input methods (enabling typing in a certain language), bringing the number of supported languages to 140.

• Translation tools, including a demonstration of the new design and features for the translation editor in MediaWiki’s Translate extension

• The “Language Coverage Matrix”, a detailed overview of language support in different projects and platforms (with 285 languages currently supported by Wikimedia, and more than 100 in the Fedora Linux distribution)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for January:

488.5 million (+3.37% compared with December; +1.31% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March)

Page requests for February:

21.8 billion (-2.1% compared with January; +20.2% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for January 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

84,848 (+8.60% compared with December / +2.03% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for January 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of January 31, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of January 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available for January 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date January 31, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of January is $2.84MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $2.56MM or 927% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $33.76MM vs plan of $30.19MM, approximately $3.57MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of January is $2.26MM vs plan of $4.13MM, approximately $1.87 or 45% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and outside contract services.

• Year-to-date expenses is $17.72MM vs plan of $21.90MM, approximately $4.18MM or 19% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $41.47MM as of January 31, 2013.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of February (March 7, 2013)

Other movement highlights

#8 in the Picture of the Year contest: Panorama of the “Door to Hell“, a burning natural gas field in Turkmenistan

The 2012 Picture of the Year

Commons Picture of the Year 2012 contest results announced

After 3990 Wikimedians had voted, the results of the seventh annual Picture of the Year contest on Wikimedia Commons were announced on February 22. The winning photo (right) features two birds of the species Merops apiaster (European Bee-eater). The photographer explained that it shows a mating ritual: The male bird, on the right, is about to feed the bee to the female, on the left. The photo had been provided by “Project Phoebus”, a collaboration between the museum of Toulouse and Wikimédia France.

New ombudsman commission

The members of the 2013 Ombudsman commission have been announced:

• User:Deskana from the English Wikipedia
• User:Erzbischof from the German Wikipedia
• User:FloNight from the English Wikipedia
• User:Huji from the Farsi Wikipedia
• User:Levg from the Russian Wikipedia
• User:Sir48 from the Danish Wikipedia
• User:Thogo from the German Wikipedia

The ombudsman commission investigates complaints about violations of the privacy policy (in particular concerning the use of CheckUser tools) on any Wikimedia project for the board of trustees.

Open database of public art in Sweden

Wikimedia Sweden has started work on a freely licensed database on public art in Sweden, populated with data from public institutions and municipalities. The project is funded by a grant from the government agency Vinnova. The database was motivated by the international Wiki Loves Public Art photo contest, planned for May 2013.

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations of the “Highlights” excerpts.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of February (March 7, 2013)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for January:

488.5 million (+3.37% compared with December; +1.31% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release February data later in March)

Page requests for February:

21.8 billion (-2.1% compared with January; +20.2% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for January 2013 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

84,848 (+8.60% compared with December / +2.03% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for January 2013:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of January 31, 2013

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of January 31, 2013

(Financial information is only available for January 2013 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date January 31, 2013.

• Revenue for the month of January is $2.84MM vs plan of $276K, approximately $2.56MM or 927% over plan.

• Year-to-date revenue is $33.76MM vs plan of $30.19MM, approximately $3.57MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month of January is $2.26MM vs plan of $4.13MM, approximately $1.87 or 45% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and outside contract services.

• Year-to-date expenses is $17.72MM vs plan of $21.90MM, approximately $4.18MM or 19% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, capital expenses, internet hosting, timing of FDC grants disbursement and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses and bank fees.

• Cash position is $41.47MM as of January 31, 2013.

Highlights

Legal victory for Wikivoyage and free knowledge

The Wikimedia Foundation’s legal team announced a settlement in the legal proceedings between the Foundation and Internet Brands, relating to issues stemming from the creation of Wikivoyage, our community’s newest free knowledge project.

Last year, Internet Brands (owners of a for-profit wiki-based travel project) sued two Wikimedians involved in supporting the travel wiki project. The Foundation supported the legal defense of the volunteers and the court ultimately dismissed Internet Brands’ lawsuit.

The Foundation also went on the offensive and filed its own separate lawsuit against Internet Brands seeking a declaration from the court that Internet Brands had no proper basis to block the travel wiki project. That suit was resolved in an out of court settlement on February 14, 2013. In that settlement, Internet Brands released the Foundation and Wikivoyage e.V. (the German non-profit organization who worked hard to make the travel project a success) from all claims related in any manner to the creation and operation of the travel wiki project. In return, the Foundation agreed to dismiss its suit.

Screenshot of the new mobile watchlist

Mobile Watchlist available

Facilitating contributions to Wikipedia on mobile devices is an important goal for the Foundation’s mobile team. As one of the first results of these efforts, mobile Wikipedia users are now able to log into their account, and to view and modify their watchlist. On the mobile version, the star symbol for the watchlist is shown to all users, to encourage them to log in or create an account. Experienced contributors can use the watchlist as usual: To track changes to the selected pages and fix problems if necessary. But to make the watchlist more newbie-friendly, the mobile version also offers a full view of all selected pages, which can function as a reading list.

Language Engineering team attends open source conferences in India

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team participated in two conferences in Pune, India: GNUnify 2013, a major open source conference, and the Second Open Source Language Summit, co-organized by the Foundation with Red Hat. The team aims to make Wikipedia a website that can be used by anyone on the planet in their own language. India’s many different languages make it a natural location for the team to see the effect of their work. At the Language Summit, the engineers from the Wikimedia Foundation collaborated with attendees from Red Hat, KDE, Google and other groups. The work areas included the following:

• Input methods (enabling typing in a certain language), bringing the number of supported languages to 140.
• Translation tools, including a demonstration of the new design and features for the translation editor in MediaWiki’s Translate extension
• The “Language Coverage Matrix”, a detailed overview of language support in different projects and platforms (with 285 languages currently supported by Wikimedia, and more than 100 in the Fedora Linux distribution)

Engineering

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for February 2013 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2013/February

Major news in February include:

• The Wikipedia Zero project got a Knight News Challenge grant.
• Additional input methods were made available for jQuery.IME.
• The Translate extension introduced a new iteration of the Translation Editor.
• The Wikimedia mobile web team launched the ability to view or add pages to watchlist — all from mobile devices (see also general “Highlights” section)
• Echo is A new notification system for Wikipedia.
• The Technical Operations team found ways to stop problems in their tracks.
• Wikipedia Mobile hit 3 billion monthly page views.

VisualEditor

VisualEditor is on schedule to become the default editor for Wikimedia users by July 2013. The alpha version of the VisualEditor on the English Wikipedia and mediawiki.org was updated twice, adding support for Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 9 and above), improving the support for multiple languages, preparing the backend for upcoming features and fixing several issues reported by the community. Software engineer and Commons contributor Ed Sanders joined the team to work on the VisuaEditor data infrastructure.

In the backend, Parsoid is going through intense activity focusing on performance improvements. New contributor volunteer contributor C. Scott Ananian improved its performance by switching the DOM library from JSDom to Domino. He also improved image handling and contributed numerous other patches. The team wrote a blog post explaining the technical challenges.

User notifications in the new “Echo” system

Editor engagement

Brandon Harris presenting the “Flow” project (slides)

The Notifications project (codenamed Echo) is preparing its beta release to English Wikipedia by the end of March. This new set of features, already enabled at mediawiki.org, was summarized for the Wikimedia community through a blog post. New features are being developed: bundling notifications, dismissing types of notifications and defining user preferences.

Article Feedback v5 (AFT5) is now feature complete, and a new release is being prepared for interested Wikimedia projects. English Wikipedia will use it as an optional feature, while French and German Wikipedia projects are planning to enable it for all articles. The new features include simpler moderation tools, better filters, new feedback link, auto-archive and discuss on talk page. We posted a usability study report about the effectiveness of the new moderation tools.

The Editor Engagement Experiments team continued testing Guided tours as part of the onboarding new Wikipedians experiences currently enabled on English Wikipedia. GuidedTour extension was enabled on Wikimedia Commons and six Wikipedias (including French, German, and Dutch). See also the slides from the monthly Metrics and Activities meeting. The GettingStarted extension is being enhanced to include a wider variety of task types offered to new editors.

Mobile

Mobile web uploads functionality went out of beta and is now enabled in all Wikimedia projects. All registered users have now the ability to upload and add images to articles lacking them. We also explored two new upload workflows: adding a call to action to articles that appear in the Nearby and Watchlist view, and allowing users to quickly see articles near them that may need an image. Lastly, we began collaborating with the Fundraising team to enable CentralNotice on the mobile web, giving us the ability to deliver targeted banners to mobile users.

The new Commons app beta for Android and iOS got a first wave of users ([mw:Mobile QA/Commons uploads/Setup installation instructions) and feedback, leading to many updates during the month. The Android app is in Google Play. iOS users need to go through a process for testers until the app is stable and available at the Apple App Store.

Fundraising

"What's a Love Dart?" video for Valentine's Day

Major Gifts and Foundations

• Received a $250,000 anonymous gift
• Received a $50,000 gift from Graham Weston

Annual Fundraiser

• The fundraising team began testing in February in various languages and countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign. Nearly $2 million USD was raised from this testing in the month of February. For additional details, please see the Fundraising 2013 page on Meta
• The fundraising tech team implemented new local payment methods for various countries that were not included in the year-end 2012 campaign.
• Produced "What's a Love Dart?", a short video interview with Wikipedian Susan Hewitt about the article 'Love Dart', that she helped to write. The video was emailed to 150,000 U.S.-only donors on Valentine's Day. It was designed to educate viewers that they can write Wikipedia articles. The video received many positive responses. One example: "I found the video to be quite engaging, and the people in it utterly delightful. Quite truthfully, I haven't a clue how Wikipedia "works." I've known it was non-profit and largely volunteer... And, I donated because I've felt guilty not donating based on how much I use it as a resource. But, I'm fully ignorant of how articles get into Wiki and the degree of collaboration that it takes to refine them. So, these videos that give me glimpses into the people and the process are fascinating..."

Grantmaking and Programs

Department Highlights

• Individual Engagement Grants committee forms and request for round 1 proposals closes. Decisions for the first round will be announced by the end of March.
• FDC staff confirms eligibility and prepares for 2012-2013 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 March.
• Siko Bouterse takes the lead on the Participation Support Program (previously run by Asaf Bartov).

Strategic Goals Metrics

Metric	Value	MoM	MoM%	Chart
Global South Active Editors (5+ edits in main namespace)	15.8k	+6	+0.0%	[1]

Grantmaking

Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC)

Katy Love presenting about the FDC round 2 (slides)

• WMF announces eligibility for 2012-2013 Round 2 of funding.
• FDC staff prepares for 2012-2013 Round 2 proposal deadline on 1 March.
• Proposal form and hubpage templates are updated for the second round; policy documents and Frequently Asked Questions page are updated to reflect current policy and relevant dates.

WMF Grants approved in February 2013

• Wikimedia Espana’s Conferences and meeting for tenth anniversary of the Galipedia: Grants:WM ES/Conferences and meeting for tenth anniversary of the Galipedia
• Wikimedia Italia’s Wikimedia Conference 2013: Grants:WM IT/Wikimedia Conference 2013

WMF Grant Reports accepted in February 2013

• Grants:WM SE/Annual Program Plan 2012/Report
• Grants:Consumer Reports/Wikipedian in Residence/Report
• Grants:WM NO/christmas seminar and wlm ceremony/Report
• Grants:WM CA/In person meeting/Report

Participation Support requests approved in February 2013

• Participation:Raystorm/2013 IPC Alpine Skiing World Championships La Molina
• Participation:SarahStierch/ARLIS 2013
• Participation:Bathlander/US OpenGLAM Launch
• Participation:Wittylama/Brisbane Library conferences

Individual Engagement Grants

Siko Bouterse presenting on Individual Engagement Grants (slides)

• Over 50 project ideas and proposal drafts have been submitted for Individual Engagement Grants and 22 complete proposals were confirmed eligible for round 1 review which began on February 15th.
• An IEGrants committee has been formed. 18 community members from 12 countries, with experience in 14 different Wikimedia projects were selected to review and recommend grant proposals for WMF funding in this round.
• The first round of grantees will be announced at the end of March.

Fellowships

• The fellowships program has ended but some projects live on. The Wikipedia Teahouse celebrated its first birthday and increasing growth with metrics demonstrating impact and cupcake badges.

Programs

Brazil

Institutional Partnerships

A research on possible partners for the Wikimedia Foundation Brazil Catalyst Program has been carried out since October. This is part of the narrowing focus strategy and implies the Brazil Catalyst program is to shift into the grantmaking model.

Ação Educativa and Coletivo Digital were considered the most likely institutions for the Wikimedia Foundation to set up an institutional partnerhsip and host the development of the Catalyst project in Brazil. Anasuya Sengupta, consultants from Brazil and two community volunteers visited those institutions during her trip to Brazil. The meetings were good and clarifying. The results can be checked here:

• Meeting with Ação Educativa
• Meeting with Coletivo Digital

Next steps include: developing a medium term strategy with partners and community and Skype meetings to make final decisions and define terms and governance of this partnership.

Hirings and positions

• Arriving: Hiring and onboarding of Henrique Andrade and Jonas Xavier
• Leaving: Everton announced he’ll be leaving WMF for Open Knowledge Foundation soon. We’re working on the transition (he’ll be working part time for WMF until May or June) and on the opening of the job position. More in March.

Analysis

Data & Experiments

• Data analysis: Comparison year-over-year from 2009 to 2012. The Portuguese Wikipedia is still seeing a decrease in editors, active editors and edits, but the descrease in 2012 was lower than in 2011. We may be reverting the decrease trend (except for very active editors), little by little, but it’s hard to say yet. One more year is key to analyze it.

Staff & Community work

• Henrique’s and Jonas’ onboarding: access to data, tools, Toolserver, guidance on the use of them, how tos, introducing to people, sharing plans, targets etc. Both worked on a draft execution detailed plan to be published and discussed by the community.

• IRC with community: agenda covered Toolserver-Wikimedia Labs transition, methodologies to work on measures in Wikipedia, data portal (ideas, objectives, structure and target), demand for data on editors and edits per regions.

Workshop Surveys

• Creation of survey forms to be sent to every participant of offline activities developed by us and by the community.

Education

Partnerships with universities

• FGV SP (Getulio Vargas Foundation): group of professors developing a methodology in collaboration aiming at the second semester of 2013. Professors plan to have class assignment activities as well as a group of students who will be working throughout the semester on Wikipedia.

• UGF – Gama Filho University: partnership with the coordination of translation courses post graduation. Great part of their students are in their e-learning/distance learning program. Professors in the course are expected to assign students with translations of Wikipedia articles in English and Spanish into Portuguese. Oona and Everton have recorded a video interview in the University with Sanchez (the coordinator), to invite students to participate in the program and engage in Wikipedia activities. Activities will start in April.

• UFBA – Federal University of Bahia: Presentation to professors and to the university publisher: potential involvement in the Education program and potential partnership on Wikibooks, Wikisources and Commons through open educational resources.

Class assignments

• Everton contacted professors who will continue the program in their courses: Iara (Faculdades Integradas Rio Branco), Rafael (UFRGS), Yury (UFES), Rubens (UNESP), Maria Paula (UNESP), Sanchez + 4 professors (UGF), Regina (USP), and to be finalized during this semester: Edivaldo (UFRJ), Juliana (UNIRIO), Viktor (UFF), Ricardo (UFPR), Leni (UFES)

Medicin Wikiproject

• Bot: Jonathan has finalized the bot to invite new contributors to edit the Medicin Wikiproject and Everton submitted the request for approval by the Portuguese community. Jonas has worked on final developments customizing categories and criteria for trigger.

Community and High School

• Making bridges between and engaging in conversation with 2 high school teachers who looked for WMF and community volunteers who are developing a project to be deployed in high schools.

Meet-ups

• Digitalia 2013 (Jan/Feb): Digital Culture debate and Wikipedia editing workshop with 20 new editors. Usuário:Eduardofeld led the workshop and has adopted 10 new users. Oona and Everton organized, promoted and led the activities on the mission of Wikimedia projects. Oona was also one of the speakers in the opening session (pictures).

• Wiki meetup in Bahia: participation of 3 editors from Bahia and one editor from Natal, who adopted 10 new users from the Workshop to mentor them.

• 2 Wiki meetups in São Paulo: Feb 02 (fully community driven), and Feb 23 (on the occasion of Anasuya’s visit).

Slides from the quarterly review meeting for Wikipedia Zero

Mobile

• Launched Wikipedia Zero in a new country — Botswana — with Orange.
• We’ve started testing with Vimpelcom for an upcoming launch in March.
• Made Improvement to the partner dashboard which tracks Wikipedia Zero usage
• Kul Wadhwa & Amit Kapoor traveled to Barcelona, Spain to attend Mobile World Congress to meet with many current and potential partners. The trip also involved attending talks on mobile usage in developing countries and investigating potential pilots for Wikipedia’s USSD/SMS (text) service.
• Kul also wrote a blog post that was jointly posted on our funder’s site — the Knight Foundation — that explains our mobile strategy and how we will use their grant to accelerate our mobile programs: “Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most“
• The Wikipedia Zero team held its quarterly review meeting. Minutes are available.

Global Education

Slides from Sage Ross’ presentation about the Education Program MediaWiki extension

Highlights:

• Fall 2012 data showed students in WMF-run programs contributed 12.1 million bytes to Wikipedia, putting us on track for our goal of 25 million bytes in 2012-13.
• More than 350 students in the U.S. and Canada program have completed the online student training, at en:WP:STUDENT, so far. That means half of the students who have created user accounts and signed up on course pages thus far have completed an online training about how to edit Wikipedia.
• So far, 60 courses are using the Education Program Extension on the English Wikipedia.
• Planning is underway to kick off a pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Jordan.

U.S. professor shares student experiences

“New Media and Development Communications,” Columbia University, Fall 2012

Anne Nelson, a professor from Columbia University participating in the Wikipedia Education Program United States, contributed a post to the Wikimedia Foundation blog last week on her experiences with the program. Many of her students are English as a second language learners, and she asked those students to contribute to Wikipedia in both their native languages and English, leading to a unique multilingual learning experience for both Anne and her students. Read more of her reflections on the project.

Spanish Wikipedia’s art coverage grows thanks to professor

Lila Pagola, a professor at the National University of Villa María in Argentina, started teaching with Wikipedia back in 2007. The lack of good information on the Spanish Wikipedia on topics related to art, her specialty, spurred her to work with her students to add articles on Latin American photography to Wikipedia, and she’s been hard at work using Wikipedia in her classroom ever since. Read about her project in Argentina.

Swedish program shares learnings

Sophie Österberg, the education program leader in Sweden, contributed a long post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog talking about her experiences so far as she has been having workshops with professors and launching the Wikipedia Education Program in Sweden, Wikipedia i utbildning. Sophie’s post explains some of the mistakes she has made, and what she has learned from them. Her post encourages people worldwide to share learnings so we can ensure we are not repeating mistakes in different geographic regions. Read her post.

Egyptian student becomes active Wikipedia editor

Walaa Abdel Manaem, a master’s student in Spanish at Cairo University, learned how to edit Wikipedia through the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program — and shortly after she started translating articles from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia, Walaa was hooked. Less than one year later, Walaa has more than 8,500 edits on the Arabic Wikipedia. She’s created 68 articles, and is steadily climbing the list of the 100 most active editors on the Arabic Wikipedia. She’s also assisting the education program as a Campus Ambassador at Cairo University. Read more about Walaa’s experiences.

Students in Greece add photos to Commons

Mina Theofilatou, an instructor at Argostoli Evening High School in Kefalonia, Greece, wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog explaining her project to add photographs to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository project. Mina and her students have embarked on two projects: one to catalog edible species on the island of Kefalonia, and one to photograph every village on the island. Learn more about Mina’s project by reading the blog post.

Teaching assistant works to improve Arabic Wikipedia

Doaa Seif, a teaching assistant at Ain Shams University’s faculty of Al-Alsun, is an active Wikipedia Ambassador in the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt. Doaa was featured on the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog in a post explaining her desire to improve the availability of information on the Arabic Wikipedia. The two courses that Doaa is a teaching assistant for both participated in the Egypt program last term, and she’s also organized workshops teaching students how to edit. Read the profile on Doaa.

Program leaders invited to workshop in Milan

Wikimedia chapter members and other volunteer leaders who are already running education programs in countries around the world are invited to attend the first Education Program Leaders Workshop, aimed at building a global community to share learnings and help each other overcome challenges. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Wikimedia Chapters Meeting in Milan, Italy, on April 18. If you are a program leader, you’re encouraged to check out this page for more information.

Farewell, Annie!

Annie Lin, who’s been with the Wikipedia Education Program since its beginning in 2010, left the Wikimedia Foundation on February 22 to pursue other opportunities. The entire Wikipedia Education Program team will miss her tremendously. Annie is sad to leave, and she says she is very grateful to have had the opportunity to work with so many brilliant, inspiring educators and volunteers.

Learning & Evaluation

• Facilitated G&P annual planning process and helped formalize goals and success metrics
• Experimented with servicing analytics requests using a 1 week sprint methodology
• Built bot to automate various steps in the Individual Engagement Grants program [2]
• Built bot to automate certain tasks around the Brazil Education Program
• Built tool for analysis of category graphs [3]
• Built tool for analysis of cumulative user contributions to a page by converting page history into Git repository [4]
• Investigated sources of error in our geolocation technology, MaxMind (mw:MaxMind_Evaluation)
• Participated in Analytics Reboot Workshop led by ThoughtWorks consultant in preparation for WMF Analytics reorganization

Human Resources

Primary HR activities for the month include:

• modeling staffing projections in preparation for the WMF annual planning process
• conducting the second segment of a three-part series in the WMF pilot leadership development program for directors and managers
• co-hosted an event with the Op-Ed Project in mutual support of the aim to shift the gender gap in media
• commissioned a study on Wikimedia Foundation salaries with Radford as follow-up to the board-sponsored executive salary study conducted last year
• Chief Culture and Talent Officer Gayle Karen Young was profiled on the Wikimedia blog (“Gayle Karen Young: Supporting Wikimedia’s dynamic culture“)

Staff Changes

New Requisitions Filled

• Henrique Andrade, Data Analyst & Experiments (Grantmaking and Programs)
• Greg Grossmeier, Release Manager (Engineering)
• Ed Sanders, Software Engineer, Visual Editor (Engineering)
• Luis Villa, Deputy General Counsel (Legal and Community Advocacy)
• Amy Vossbrinck, Executive Assistant to the Chief Finance & Administration Officer (Administration)

New Volunteer

• Anita Whites (Fundraiser)

New Contractors

• Kraig Parkinson (Engineering)
• Marc-Andre Pelletier (Engineering)
• Jonas Xavier (Grantmaking & Programs)

Contracts Extended

• Michael Beattie (Fundraiser)
• LaTrisha Holliness (Finance)
• Rebecca Neumann (Legal and Community Advocacy)
• Joseph Seddon (Fundraiser)

Departure

• Annie Lin

Contracts Ended

• Peter Coombe
• Susan Walling

New Postings

• Partner Solutions Engineer
• Program Evaluation Community Coordinator
• Program Evaluation Specialist
• Senior Program Manager – Mobile
• Software Engineer – Multimedia User Interfaces
• Software Engineer – Parser

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled

February Actual: 135

February Total Plan: 173

February Filled: 5, Month Attrition: 1

YTD Filled: 41, YTD Attrition: 18

1 Position canceled for FY

Remaining Open positions to fiscal year end

38 (10 of which are on hold)

Department Updates

Real-time feed for HR updates

http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

We have begun active work on the Annual Plan, including setting a baseline for annual expenditures.

The first financial review site visit occured with Wikimedia Argentina. Our thanks to Osmar – Executive Director of Wikmedia Argentina for hosting a sucessful site visit. A full report of the site visit will be submitted to the FDC. The financial review portion of the site visit showed that WMAR has good internal controls and is managing it financial matters well.

Legal, Community Advocacy, and Communications Department

LCA Report, February 2013

Contract Metrics

• Submitted : 28
• Completed : 20

Trademark Metrics

• Submitted : 21
• Approved : 1
• Pending : 11
• Denied : 4
• Request withdrawn : 3
• Approval not needed : 2

Domains Obtained

wikinews.de

Coming & Going

• Luis Villa, Deputy General Counsel, has joined the Legal Department.  :)

Other Activities

• We announced a settlement in the legal proceedings between the Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Brands relating to issues stemming from the creation of Wikivoyage (see general “Highlights” section).
• The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK announced the release of the final report and recommendations regarding the governance of the Wikimedia UK chapter. The report was completed by Compass Partnership, consultants in non-profit management based in the UK. The report was commissioned jointly by the Foundation and Wikimedia UK in October 2012 following important Wikimedia community discussions about potential conflicts of interest arising from a series of wiki outreach projects.
• After critical and extremely helpful community input and changes, we proposed to the Board new guidelines on the disclosure of conflicts of interests when requesting movement resources.
• We are drafting a template user group agreement (with appreciated comments from members of AffCom) to serve our partnership with independent groups of Wikimedian volunteers.
• We finalized the template for the organizational grant agreement for use by the WMF Grants Program.

Communications Report, February 2013

February was a relatively quiet month for the Foundation and projects from a media relations perspective. Major media outlets were focused on the news of the successful conclusion of the Internet Brands lawsuit as well as a measured increase in coverage and requests related to Wikipedia Zero.

Major announcements

No major press announcements in February.

Major Storylines through February

Richard Fidler interviewing Sue Gardner

‘’WMF’s ED Sue Gardner in Brisbane, Australia’’ (Feb 17, 2013)

During a visit to Brisbane, Australia to speak at the ALIA conference at the State Library of Queensland, Sue Gardner spent time with a number of Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio programs. Conversations covered the Foundation’s work to recruit new editors and diversify our community, including a lengthy discussion with Australian radio personality Richard Fidler.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/wikipedia–dealing-with-success-and-adversity/4518876

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2013/02/15/3691244.htm

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/pacific/2013-02-13/wikipedia-flush-with-funds-short-on-volunteers/1087966

‘’A Victory for Free Knowledge and Wikivoyage’’ (Feb 15, 2013)

After five months of legal activity, the Foundation announced settlement of litigation with Internet Brands. The announcement was made on the Foundation’s blog and was followed by positive media coverage that repeated the mission and focus of the non-commercial Wikivoyage project.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57569807-93/wikimedia-internet-brands-settle-wikivoyage-lawsuits/

http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/16/3995358/wikimedia-internet-brands-lawsuit-settled

http://pandodaily.com/news/wikimedia-foundation-and-internet-brands-reach-settlement/

‘’Mobile Wikipedia and Wikipedia Zero: 3 billion pageviews and free Wikipedia by SMS’’ (Feb 23, 2013)

A trio of blog posts and coverage relating to the Foundation’s mobile work made positive headlines in February. The push past 3 billion page views on our mobile WP site, coupled with coverage of our push for free Wikipedia via SMS attracted significant interest, particularly from tech and mobile industry blogs.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/23/wikipedia-expects-to-offer-sms-based-access-within-months/

http://www.ibtimes.com/wikipedia-reaches-3-billion-monthly-mobile-views-amid-concerns-about-contributor-content-1057556

http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/02/02/driven-by-developing-countries-wikipedia-passes-3bn-monthly-mobile-page-views-aims-for-4bn-by-june/

Other worthwhile reads

Infographic: An Amazing, Invisible Truth About Wikipedia | Fast Co. Design | Feb 11

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671833/infographic-an-amazing-invisible-truth-about-wikipedia

Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most | Knight Foundation | Feb 22

http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/2/22/getting-wikipedia-people-who-need-it-most/

The Biggest Wikipedia Traffic Spikes Since 2010 Prove We’re All Morbid | Gizmodo | Feb 11

http://gizmodo.com/5983295/the-biggest-wikipedia-traffic-spikes-since-2010-prove-were-all-morbid

WMF Blog posts

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/

Forty-three blog posts in February, with bilingual posts in Arabic, Spanish, Greek, Ukrainian and Portuguese. Some highlights from the month:

How the Technical Operations team stops problems in their tracks

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/05/how-the-technical-operations-team-stops-problems-in-their-tracks/

Engaging the local community in a school project on Commons

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/21/education-program-greece/

Egyptian student creates 68 new articles on the Arabic Wikipedia in less than a year

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/25/walaa-wikipedia-education-program-egypt/

Wikipedia Teahouse Celebrates its First Birthday

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/02/27/wikipedia-teahouse-celebrates-its-first-birthday/

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2013

Wikipedia Signpost

For lots of detailed coverage and news summaries, see the community-edited newsletter “Wikipedia Signpost” for February 2013:

• Volume 9, Issue 5, 4 February 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 6, 11 February 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 7, 18 February 2013
• Volume 9, Issue 5, 25 February 2013

Sue Gardner giving a keynote at the ALIA Online Conference

Office of the Executive Director

Sue Gardner traveled to Australia in February, giving keynotes at two library conferences in Brisbane: The Sixth New Librarians Symposium (co-sponsored by Wikimedia Australia) and the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) Online Conference. She also did several interviews with Australian media (see the Communications Report section above), in particular a long discussion with Richard Fidler, and had productive meetings with Australian Wikimedians.

Visitors and Guests

Visitors and guests to the WMF office in February 2013:

1. Samantha Gaskin (Helms Briscoe)
2. Shannon Farley (Spark)
3. Amanda Brock (Spark)
4. Alex Wong (AAPIP)
5. Chris Cavanaugh (CCS Consulting Inc.)
6. Yvonne Ortmann (Reporter, t3n)
7. Eugene Eric Kim + guests (Consultant)
8. Kellie Brownell (TAI)
9. Erik Qualman (edx.org)
10. Abhishek Suryawanshi (Wikipedian)
11. Iara Camardo (Professor, Wikipedia Education Program Brazil)
12. Rosa Jiménez Cano (Reporter, El Pais)
13. Debra Wolter (CCS)
14. M. McCarthy (RDI)
15. J. Uppal (RDI)
16. Mike Chavet (Felice)
17. John Engers (Felice)
18. Kraig Parkinson (Thoughtworks consultant)
19. Marc Chenn (Salt Stack)
20. Thomas Hatch (Salt Stack)
21. Julie Jarratt (Cathay Pacific)
22. Maziebelle Riece (Cathay Pacific)
23. Valerie Aurora (TAI)
24. Kathy Ramsey (TAI)
25. Virginia Sutton (J&D)
26. Doug Hessel (J&D)
27. Linda Lam (J&D)
28. Ron Waliczek (JP Morgan)
29. Mike McKindey (JP Morgan)
30. Ryan McNeill (JP Morgan)
31. Paul Cardoso (Sequoia)
32. John Gaffney (Sequoia)
33. Melissa Sharp (Sequoia)
34. Jed Cloern (Sequoia)
35. Sheldon Renan (Video crew)
36. Mark Oppenheim (m|Oppenheim)
37. Stephany Kirkpatrick (LearnVest)
38. Denny Vrandecic (WMDE)
39. Daniel Kinzler (WMDE)
40. Galen Cranz (Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley)

Vol: 3 • Issue: 2 • February 2013 [contribute] [archives]

Wikipedia not so novel after all, except to UK university lecturers; EPOV instead of NPOV

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Taha Yasseri, Heather Ford, Sage Ross, Daniel Mietchen and Tilman Bayer.

Wikipedia in historic context: “Stigmergic accumulation” is not new

Page with the entry Encyclopédie from Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. The work was the result of the collaboration of more than 100 contributors.

“Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production”^[1] by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past. Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich tradition of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production.

‘Compulsive collection’ refers to the work of compiling encyclopedias that has traditionally been done by a few dedicated, tireless, detail-oriented individuals. Loveland and Reagle point out that, although Wikipedians share this compulsive behavior with past encyclopedists, the crucial distinction lies in the fact that the vast majority were motivated by money (even if this motive existed alongside more idealistic motivations) whereas Wikipedia editors are unpaid.

Loveland and Reagle use the term ‘stigmergic accumulation’ to refer to the process of production by accretion onto a previous text. Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors, the authors argue, ‘building on their work and using the cumulative character of texts and knowledge as a ladder of sorts’. Examples of existing texts included the use of a previous edition of an encyclopedia that ran into multiple editions, and the practice of borrowing between different encyclopedias that was sometimes illegal but more often viewed as ‘piratical’ i.e. morally wrong.

The category of ‘corporate production’ is used by Loveland and Reagle to describe the process of encyclopedic editing by a group – groups that topped a thousand contributors in the 20th century. Editors of early encyclopedias like Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in the 1700s faced the challenge of trying to coordinate the contributions of about 140 contributors in a similar way to Wikipedia having to confront issues of consistency that result in debates about how important a subject must be to merit an article. In contrast to other encyclopedias, write Loveland and Reagle, Wikipedia settles these debates through community decision-making and in the open. The authors also note that previous encyclopedias didn’t always recruit on the basis of expertise and that some recognized that it would be cheaper and sometimes more accurate to have non-experts summarizing the works of experts.

The authors conclude by writing that although Wikipedia is in some respects unique in terms of its size, its reliance on volunteers and nonprofit nature, the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are ‘numerous and significant’. Their hope is that this paper ‘will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical material germane to the social scientist’s concerns (such as the motivations of encyclopedia-producers), and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia (such as what exactly should be counted as a contribution) have a lifespan exceeding the past decade.’

The collaboration of the two authors began after Reagle had learned (via a summary in this research report) of a review where Loveland had criticized Reagle’s 2010 book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia for having “one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization”. The resulting paper has received media attention starting with an article in The Atlantic, see the February 4 issue of The Signpost.

UK university lecturers still skeptical and uninformed about Wikipedia

Work has been ongoing for a while along the lines of recommendation 3: a brochure by the Wikipedia Education Program explains how to assess Wikipedia article quality. A number of similar materials exist on how to use Wikipedia in educational contexts, some also in other languages.

A study titled “Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions”^[2] analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, through qualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90-minute interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity with Web 2.0 educational tools, and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedia is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) “the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct,” 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts about whether the Wikipedia crowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note: but of course…), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research “too easy” for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia’s non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as “this is a commercial business; it wants to make money” and “they are obviously doing it from a business perspective”, and another concerned about “politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]“. All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also found that all five lecturers use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students about. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia’s reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) “Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes.” 2) “Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge.” and 3) “Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff.”

Saint Petersburg has more sisters than any other city in the world

Connections between twin cities. Brighter colours indicate shorter distance.

A research team from Barcelona Media Lab has put a preprint in arXiv recently,^[3] in which the sistership relation between cities is analyzed. Although the paper has little to say about Wikipedia in itself, the corresponding dataset is extracted from the English Wikipedia, which, according to the paper, hosts “the most extensive but certainly not complete collection of this kind of relationships”. Although this statement could be argued, and no evidence is presented in the article to support that claim, it is striking that mass collaboration of Wikipedians can provide such an interesting package of information on a global scale.

After a description of the data extraction process, the paper presents a set of standard Complex Network analysis, e.g., degree distribution, clustering, average separation of nodes on the network, etc. While there is no surprise among the results of the network analysis, the interesting conclusion is about the effects of the geographical distance of sister cities: “the geographical distance has only a negligible influence when a city selects a sister city.”

“Distributed Wiki” proposal to replace NPOV with “every point of view (EPOV)”

In a paper titled “Towards Content Neutrality in Wiki Systems”^[4] (an extended version of a conference keynote), a German computer scientist criticizes Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy as based on “an objectivist point of view” that is prominent in parts of the natural sciences, but is challenged in the fields of quantum physics, psychology and the social sciences, according to the author. He offers differences between language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Osama Bin Laden and the Mossad as further arguments against the NPOV concept. He admits that “two examples, based on machine translation and subjective classification by an author who wants to prove his point do not show anything”, but claims that even more systematic studies “would suffer the same objection”, proving “that the object under consideration, i.e., a neutral point of view, logically may be considered an ill-defined concept”. However, it is still used on Wikipedia, and even ingrained in its architecture where the “linear version history evokes the illusion that there is one ‘currently best’ version of an article”. To explain why so many Wikipedians do not accept his own logical conclusion, the author offers the psychological diagnosis of cognitive dissonance: “Accepting the illusion of NPOV, one does not have to live with never ending edit-wars on the ultimately right article and one does not have to suffer dissonant feelings in every article”.

Heading back towards his own area of academic expertise, the author then outlines “a variant-augmented Wiki system” to modifying the linear versioning of usual wikis. He bases it on a proposed concept of “content neutrality” requiring “knowledge management platforms” “to store and provide content without any evaluation of its merit”, modeled after network neutrality. He argues that “a collection of every-point-of-view, contradictory, possibly emotionally charged articles may provide a better approximation to reality than a synthetic and illusionary neutral point-of-view” and hopes that such a “content-neutral, EPOV knowledge base [has] a real chance of becoming a truly helpful instrument for science.” Various possible problems with such an architecture are outlined, together with some suggested solutions, but the discussion remains brief and without detail (“The formal design and security analysis of low-level protocols are left to a later paper”). To protect against malicious site operators, the concept is extended to “distributed Wiki hubs”. The paper mentions the existence of “a preliminary implementation as a MediaWiki plug-in prototype” and ongoing work on a use case “which can be described as a Wiki / Blog merge”.

A section on related work cites a few earlier papers discussing distributed wikis or Wikipedia forks (out of many more, see e.g. this reviewer’s “Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals“).

Briefly

• Mildly negative feedback makes newbies work harder: A paper^[5] to be presented at the upcoming Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’13) reports on a “field experiment on Wikipedia to test the effects of different feedback types (positive feedback, negative feedback, directive feedback, and social feedback) on members’ contribution.” The team from Carnegie Mellon University left user talk page messages for 703 English Wikipedia editors who had recently created a new article. These messages (example) were varied to test the effect of the different feedback types on the user’s subsequent activity. To the researchers’ surprise, none of these had a significant effect on experienced users. But for new editors, “positive feedback and social messages increase people’s general motivation to work”. Negative feedback and directive feedback still increased newbies’ edits on the corresponding articles. The researchers note those negative messages (example: “I noticed there are some holes that may need filling: the references in the article do not follow Wikipedia guidelines”) “were intentionally designed to be milder than negative feedback messages actually sent between Wikipedia editors” which other research has found to decrease participation. In a 2011 paper, three of the authors had studied similar phenomena in a non-participatory analysis (review: “How different kinds of leadership messages increase or decrease participation“).
• Students editing at PhD level in APS Wikipedia initiative: Another conference paper for CHI’13^[6] reports on a project where 640 undergraduate and graduate students edited Wikipedia articles on scientific topics in 36 university courses. This classroom editing project was part of the US Association for Psychological Science‘s Wikipedia Initiative. The authors found that the “students substantially improved the scientific content of over 800 articles, at a level of quality indistinguishable from content written by PhD experts” (measured in a content persistence metric).
• Students unimpressed by professors’ disapproval of Wikipedia: A paper on the factors affecting Wikipedia use,^[7] based on a survey of 184 undergraduate students in Singapore, has a few suggestive findings:

  Female students were more likely to use Wikipedia.

  Believing that authority figures (such as professors) disapprove of Wikipedia use did not affect students’ likelihood of using Wikipedia.

  Peer influence—whether or not students think their friends use Wikipedia—was significantly correlated with Wikipedia use.

  Whether these findings hold true for larger and more diverse groups of students is an open question.

• Voting open for most important paper in Wikipedia research: As reported earlier, the French Wikimedia chapter is providing an award for the most influential paper published between 2003 and 2011. Out of more than 30 submissions, a jury of researchers has now selected five finalists, and until March 11 all Wikimedians are invited to vote to select the winning paper among them. Its authors will receive a grant of 2500 Euros.
• Teahouse compared to Help Desk: A workshop paper titled “How to ask questions the n00b way: designing social Q&A for new users^[8], presented at the CSCW 2013 “Workshop on Social Media Question Asking” covers the Teahouse, the support space for new editors launched on the English Wikipedia in 2012. It summarizes results from a longer paper presented at the same conference, which has been covered in the December issue of this research report. These include a survey among participants indicating that the Teahouse was generally well-received, and a comparison of edit rates showing, somewhat unsurprisingly, that newbies who followed an invitation to join the Teahouse tended to make more edits than those who ignored the invitation. (No attempt was made to measure the effect of invitations directly by comparing with non-invited newbies, because of the possible bias caused by Teahouse hosts avoiding inviting editors whose first edits do not seem productive.) Questions in the Teahouse generated more responses than those on the Help Desk, the English Wikipedia’s longer-running help forum which is less focused on social elements and new editors.
• Predicting admin elections based on social network analysis: A paper^[9] modeled all admin elections on the Polish Wikipedia (since 2005) based on “multidimensional behavioral social networks derived from the Wikipedia edit history” of candidates and voters, finding that “we can classify the votes in the RfA procedures using this model with an accuracy level that should be sufficient to recommend candidates.” (See also our review of an earlier paper by the same authors: “What it takes to become an admin: Insights from the Polish Wikipedia“)
• “Analysing the Entire Wikipedia History with Database Supported Haskell“: Four researchers from Germany describe^[10] a technique that allowed them to scale a quantitative analysis from a Wikisym 2010 paper (that had examined the collaboration on a smaller sample of 4,733 articles and 4,679 users) to the entire revision history of the German Wikipedia.
• Traffic analysis report and research ethics: The Signpost’s special report titled “Examining the popularity of Wikipedia articles: catalysts, trends, and applications”^[11] gave an overview of several research topics regarding pageviews on the English Wikipedia, including a list “the most viewed pages on Wikipedia in a one hour period” since 2010 that generated media attention, e.g. in the Atlantic (“If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing at the Super Bowl Half-Time Show“). The report also discusses possible causes of such page view spikes, and applications of research on pageviews, such as focusing efforts to improve article quality and assessing the impact of vandalism. The latter idea drew from earlier studies of one of the authors, including an experiment that had generated controversy in 2010 and caused the English Wikipedia’s ArbCom to block the author temporarily, as reported in the Signpost at the time: “Large scale vandalism revealed to be ‘study’ by university researcher“. A recent paper about research ethics that the author coauthored with his doctoral advisor and two others^[12] criticized the University of Pennsylvania‘s institutional review board for its hesitant approval of the 2010 experiment, justified the lack of advance notification of Wikipedia community (because it would have biased the results of the experiment) and also talks about the “extremely mixed” response from reviewers of the resulting paper (reviewed in the September 2011 issue of this research report: “Link spam research with controversial genesis but useful results“).
• “Faces of Wikipedia” dataset: Two researchers from the École Polytechnique de Montréal have compiled^[13] a database with facial images of over 50,000 Wikipedia article subjects, used to test facial recognition algorithms.
• Detecting news events from Wikipedia edits: A paper to be presented at the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval^[14] describes the detection of “real-world events such as political conflicts, natural catastrophes, and new scientific findings” from Wikipedia edits. Apart from bursts (peaks) in the editing activity of an article, another indicator used is the appearance of a current or recent date in the diff of an edit.
• Evidence for damage caused by personal attacks and wikilawyering: A preprint titled “Stay on the Wikipedia Task: When task-related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts” ^[15] reported on an analysis of 96 Wikipedia articles and the corresponding talk pages which found “that when group members’ disagreements – originally task-related – escalate into personal attacks or hinge on procedure, these disagreements impede group performance.”
• Corpus of 200+ research papers on Wikipedia from 2012: With this monthly research update having completed its second volume recently, we have released a bibliographical dataset listing all of the more than 200 academic publications that were covered in 2012.

References

You are more than welcome to edit the wiki version of this report for the purposes of usefulness, presentation, etc., and to add translations.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for January 2013, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Logo of the IdeaLab

New program offers financial support for projects by individual Wikimedians

The Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants program launched on January 15. While most WMF grants have so far gone to organizations like chapters, the new program will finance initiatives by individual Wikimedians or small teams to improve Wikimedia projects. The first application period lasts until February 15. During the first two weeks, 31 ideas, drafts, and proposals were submitted. An “IdeaLab” has been set up where draft proposals can be discussed, and applicants can get help to turn their ideas into complete proposals.

Wikimedia Foundation servers

Successful migration to new data center

On January 22, Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia sites were migrated to the Foundation’s new primary data center in Ashburn, Virginia (US). The prior data center in Tampa, Florida had been the main hosting site since 2004; it will remain on standby to take over in case the new data center experiences an outage. The switch worked nearly without any problems. The Operations Team attributes this success to the careful preparation since 2011. This involved reviewing, improving and documenting the configuration of the servers (currently about 885) in a way that has already improved stability in 2012, and will make it possible to set up new data centers much faster.

New partnership grows the reach of Wikipedia Zero to 330 million mobile users

VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, joined the Wikipedia Zero program in January, raising the number of mobile users who are eligible to access Wikipedia without data fees by 100 million, to 330 million worldwide. Among the countries serves by VimpelCom are Russia, Ukraine, Armenia and other countries of the former USSR.

Wikivoyage logo

Wikivoyage becomes newest Wikimedia project

On January 15, the 12th anniversary of Wikipedia, Wikivoyage was officially launched as the newest project of the Wikimedia Foundation. The free travel guide that anyone can edit is already available in nine languages – Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish – with more being added. There are more than 50,000 articles, which are edited and improved by a core group of approximately 200 volunteer editors.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for December:

472.6 million (-2.46% compared with November; +3.39% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release January data later in February)

Page requests for January:

22.2 billion (10.3% compared with December; +23.4% compared with the previous year)

(Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for December 2012 (>= 5 mainspace edits/month, excluding bots):

78,536 (-1.04% compared with November / +0.09% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects. Note: We recently refined this metric to take into account Wikimedia Commons and activity across several projects.)

Report Card (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects) for December 2012:

http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

(Definitions)

Financials

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Revenue and Expenses vs Plan as of December 31, 2012

Wikimedia Foundation YTD Expenses by Functions as of December 31, 2012

(Financial information is only available for December 2012 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the Month-To-Date and Year-To-Date December 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month of December is $14.30MM vs plan of $14.41MM, approximately $109K or 1% under plan.
• Year-to-date revenue is $30.92MM vs plan of $29.91MM, approximately $1.01MM or 3% over plan.
• Expenses for the month of December is $2.70MM vs plan of $3.14MM, approximately $433K or 14% under plan, primarily due to lower personnel expenses, capital expenses, and travel expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and outside contract services.
• Year-to-date expenses is $15.46MM vs plan of $17.78MM, approximately $2.31MM or 13% under plan, primarily due to personnel expenses, internet hosting, travel expenses, and capital expenses partially offset by higher legal expenses, bank fees, and awards and grants.
• Cash position is $41.17MM as of December 31, 2012.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of January (February 7, 2013)

Other movement highlights

The orbit of 274301 Wikipedia

Asteroid named after Wikipedia

A committee of astronomers has decided to give a recently discovered asteroid the name 274301 Wikipedia. The name had been proposed by Andriy Makukha, a board member of Wikimedia Ukraine. Wikipedia orbits the sun every 3.68 years, and its diameter is estimated to be about 1–2 kilometers (around 1 mile).

Screenshot of the “Article Statistics and Quality Monitor” tool on the German Wikipedia

EU-funded RENDER project releases editor support tools

RENDER (REflecting kNowledge DivERsity) is a three-year research project begun in 2010 and funded by the European Union. Wikimedia Germany is one of the project partners. At the end of January, RENDER released two tools to support the work of Wikipedia editors: The Task List Generator (TLG) lists articles in a given category that are marked with a cleanup template or have other flaws, such as lacking images. The Article Statistics and Quality Monitor (ASQM) “offers a brief overview about the quality and the current status of any Wikipedia article”. It integrates data such as the number of references in the article, its pageviews, and a comparison of its wikilinks with other language versions of the article, possibly indicating information that it missing from one language version of Wikipedia but is present in another.

Wiki Loves Monuments posters in the main hall of the Warsaw Central railway station

Wiki Loves Monuments exhibition in Polish railway station

The winning pictures from the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo contest were presented in a three-week exhibition at Warsaw Central, Poland’s largest railway station. The exhibition was organized by Wikimedia Poland, in cooperation with an initiative of Polish State Railways that presents open cultural events at selected train stations in Poland.

Review of management and conflict of interest issues at Wikimedia UK

In January, work wrapped up on a report by Compass Partnership, a group of UK-based consultants in non-profit management, about the management structure of the UK Wikimedia chapter and its handling of conflict of interest issues. The report was commissioned jointly by the Foundation and Wikimedia UK in October 2012 following community discussions about potential conflicts of interest arising from a series of outreach projects, including Gibraltarpedia and Monmouthpedia. The report makes various recommendations on how to improve policies and procedures.