cc by-sa 3.0 Dilly Boase

You’ve probably heard the saying, “In theory, Wikipedia shouldn’t work, but in practice it does.” Three of the things that contribute to make Wikipedia work are topic-specific WikiProjects (“let’s write about a town), Wikimedia chapters (“let’s organize throughout the United Kingdom”), and unique ideas (“let’s use QR codes to share content”). This week these three things successfully came together to create Monmouthpedia, “The World’s First Wikipedia Town” in Monmouth, Wales.

The idea for Monmouthpedia began at a TEDx talk in Bristol when John Cummings, an occasional Wikipedia editor, suggested from the audience that the UK Chapter use QR codes to “do a whole town.” That challenge was handed to Cummings when the Wikimedia UK chapter backed the idea. He then moved to his home town of Monmouth where he assembled an ad hoc group of supporters who wanted to participate, including the local County Council.

Click image for Monmouthpedia video

The project has taken six months of preparation, including a commitment by the town to install a free, town-wide wi-fi network (the first of its kind in Wales). On 19 May the entire town will be bedecked with banners declaring Monmouth as the first Wikipedia Town in the world.

The Monmouthpedia project uses QRpedia to allow visitors to scan QR codes that link directly to the Wikipedia article in their own language. Because of Monmouth’s efforts to provide free wi-fi and implement QRpedia, the town is likely the only place where a visitor can tour in Hungarian, Hindi, Indonesian, Welsh, or numerous other Wikipedia languages using QR codes.

A plaque on Monmouth Shire Hall

Much of the success of Monmouthpedia comes from its ability to capture the imagination of the Wikipedia community, which has embraced the town virtually. Wikipedia volunteers have contributed nearly 500 new articles in over 25 languages, as well as videos on topics such as the historic Chartists movement.

The project also has a long list of partners, including 200 businesses, several universities and nearly every school and community group in the area. Wikipedia has partnered with museums and other institutions before, as in Derby, but in Monmouth you will see over 1,000 QR codes on every school, every important building, and hundreds of shops. The County Council itself has a QRpedia code in its reception that takes you to their Wikipedia article.

Lest you think this is a passing interest, the town of Monmouth is in it for the long haul. Many of the QRpedia codes are printed on ceramic plaques that should last for decades. The information in articles is backed by the Wikipedia community and will be continually improved and expanded. Physical guides and maps will become outdated, but the Wikipedia articles will always be able to be updated. This potential for on-site access to up-to-date information in any language is what makes the Monmouthpedia model so exciting.

How long can Wikipedia defy the theory and continue to deliver free information to the planet in over 280 languages? We think the Monmouthpedia story provides a very optimistic outlook.

If you want to find out more, visit the Monmouthpedia website and take a look at the associated articles on Wikipedia.

- Roger Bamkin, Director of Wikimedia UK (Victuallers)

Malware installed on your computer may inject advertising into a page on popular websites, such as this Wikipedia article. This is an example that we've seen in the wild. Note the tiny text "ads not by this site" immediately below the ad, which may or may not appear next to these types of injected advertisements.

One example that we have seen installs itself as a browser extension. The extension is called “I want this” and installs itself in Google Chrome. To remove it:

• Open the options menu via the “pipe-wrench” icon on the top right, and choose Settings.
• Open the Extensions panel and there is the list of extensions installed.
• Remove an Extension by clicking the Remove button next to an item.

There is likely other similar malware that injects ads into Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and other popular browsers. If you see examples that you can document, please point them out in the comments.

Ads injected in this manner may be confined to some sites, even just to Wikipedia, or they may show up on all sites you visit. Browsing through a secure (HTTPS) connection (which you can automate using the HTTPS everywhere extension) may cause the ads to disappear, but will not fix the underlying problem.

Disabling browser add-ins is a good starting point to determine the source of these types of ads. This does not necessarily fix the source of the problem either, as malware may make deep changes to your operating system. If you’re comfortable attempting a malware scan and removal yourself, there are various spyware/malware removal tools. Popular and well-reviewed solutions include Ad-Aware and Malwarebytes. But be aware that these types of tools may also bundle software, or leave your computer in an unusable state.

If in doubt, have your computer evaluated for malware by a competent and qualified computer repair center.

There is one other reason you might be seeing advertisements: Your Internet provider may be injecting them into web pages. This is most likely the case with Internet cafes or “free” wireless connections. This New York Times blog post by Brian Chen gives an example.

But rest assured: you won’t be seeing legitimate advertisements on Wikipedia.

We’re here to distribute the sum of human knowledge to everyone on the planet — ad-free, forever.

Philippe Beaudette, Director of Community Advocacy
Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development

Campus of Médéa University

As part of the Arabic Language Initiative, I had the chance to visit Algeria in the last week of April, where I had the privilege to speak to students at Médéa University (Médéa Province) about Wikipedia and invite them to contribute to it.

With a size of almost 2,400,000 square kilometers, Algeria is the largest country in Africa and the Arab World, and the tenth-largest country in the world. Algeria has about 4.1 million internet users (12% of the total population of 35 million), however they contribute only 0.08% of the total global edits on Wikimedia projects. While the official language of Algeria is Modern Standard Arabic, French as the ”de-facto” co-official language is still widely used in government, culture, media, and education due to the country’s colonial history. This fact can be clearly noticed in the readership numbers of Wikimedia projects in Algeria: While 52.2% of Wikimedia traffic from Algeria went to French language pages in the first quarter of 2012, Arabic language traffic shared only 30.7%. Having said this, the share of Arabic language traffic has almost doubled in the past three years, from only 17.0% back in mid 2009.

In particular, I could feel the passion for reading and adding content to Arabic language Wikimedia projects during my visit to Médéa University, where I delivered a lecture about contributing to Arabic Wikimedia projects, followed by an editing workshop over two days organized by Dr. Fareh Abdelhak. The introductory lecture laid out the current situation of Wikipedia contributions from Algeria, and a few thoughts on how Wikipedia works, and why is it important to contribute new content to Wikimedia projects. The lecture ended by giving the attendants (about 130, most of them students) a homework exercise: To think of one person they respect and one of their famous quotes, in addition to translating a topic from the English or French Wikipedia or writing an article based other sources that does not exist on the Arabic Wikipedia. Later on, I was informed that the students posted a report in Arabic about the lecture, and shared the homework on Facebook, so more interested people would be able to join the workshop on the next day.

Students attending the editing workshop at Médéa University

Although Friday was a day off at the university, about 30 students managed to come in the morning to attend the editing workshop. Unfortunately, since most of the university facilities were closed, we couldn’t use the PC rooms and provide every student with a PC. However, this situation did not preclude students from joining the workshop using their private portable PCs, where each group of 3 to 4 students had to share one PC with their colleagues.

The session started by registering a user account on the Arabic Wikiquote. Wikiquote was chosen as a start for two reasons, first to raise awareness about Wikipedia’s sister projects, and secondly in order to enable students adding content directly in their first edits without much interference from the larger Wikimedia community. Most students managed to register an account smoothly, and we started adding pages with the texts that most of the students had prepared as their homework. After students had learned the wiki basics on Wikiquote, we moved to the Arabic Wikipedia to start adding new articles there.

The workshop session resulted in creating 8 new articles on Wikipedia and 10 new pages on Wikiquote. At the end of the workshop, most of the students answered positively to a question on whether they will continue to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia. Indeed, in the evening I noticed that some of the students who attended the workshop went back to the Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote and continued improving their previously added articles, and also added new content. Later on, I received a message on my discussion page saying “When we meet next year, I will have already created a number of pages that exceeds yours!”… I really wish you will!

Haitham Shammaa, Editor Growth and Contribution Program consultant

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 April 2012, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation highlights

Expanding fundraising and affiliation models

After the resolutions of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees at its meeting in Berlin, work is ongoing to implement a new model for distributing the money raised via Wikimedia project sites. Except the costs for the core operations and operating reserves of the WMF, all of it (including funds for chapters and non-core operations of the WMF) will be distributed based on the recommendations of the new volunteer-driven Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). Another resolution of the Board recognizes new models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement: “Movement Partners” (like-minded organizations that actively support the movement’s work), “National or Sub-national Chapters” (which includes the existing chapter model), “Thematic Organizations” (non-profits representing the movement and using the Wikimedia trademarks, which are supporting work focused on a specific topic), and “User Groups” (open membership groups which may or may not choose to incorporate).

Indic language outreach

Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead visited India meeting Wikimedians in Bangalore and attending Wikisangamotsavam, the Malayalam community conference, as part of work to support Indic language projects. The India team is working actively with seven Indic language communities on outreach, social media strategy and initiatives to build community momentum.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

Mobile pageviews target reached

At the end of April, the Wikipedia mobile site reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly page views – one of the goals for the 2011/12 WMF annual plan.

Towards a rapid software deployment cycle

Wikimedia engineers have begun switching to a more rapid deployment cycle, starting to deploy the latest MediaWiki software to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites every two weeks.

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

489 million (+2.7% compared with February; +22.3% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for April:

17.3 billion (+0.4% compared with March; +18.2% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for March 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

85.09K (+0.2% compared with February / -4.5% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for March 2012: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

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

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month is $1.9MM vs plan of $3.9MM, approximately $2MM or 53% under plan.

• Year-to-date is $32.1MM vs plan of $28.6MM, approximately $3.5MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month is $2.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $112K or 5% higher than plan.

• Year-to-date is $19.3MM vs plan of $21.1MM, approximately $1.8MM or 8% lower than plan.

• Cash position is $30.6MM as of March 31, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Video of the monthly Wikimedia Foundation metrics and activities meeting covering the month of April (May 3, 2012)

Other movement highlights

“Wikipedian in Residence” model comes of age

The British Library recently became the latest cultural institution to announce (together with Wikimedia UK) a Wikipedian in Residence, supporting connections between the British Library’s staff and the Wikimedia community. At the prestigious 2012 American Association of Museums conference, five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world presented this collaboration model. The April issue of the “This Month in GLAM” newsletter reports open Wikipedian in Residence positions at state institutions in Israel, Germany and Sweden.

The very first screenshot of Wikidata

Wikidata starts working on interwiki links

During its first month, the Wikidata team has started coding for the first phase of the project, which will allow the central storage of interwiki links. Two MediaWiki extensions are being developed as the base for Wikidata: Wikibase Client and Wikibase core. A demo version will be available soon.

Multilanguage contest from Monmouthpedia project

As part of Monmouthpedia – “the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town” – the Charles Rolls Challenge awarded prizes to Wikimedians who had written, improved or uploaded content about Monmouth in multiple languages. Also, the town saw the first ever Welsh meetup in April.

One of the two first prize winning entries from the Tamil contest: A Rekla race (Ox cart race) in Tamil Nadu, India

Tamil media contest

The Tamil Wikimedia community completed its “Tamil Wiki Media Contest“, which led to 15,000 media contributions from 307 individuals.

Database company donates free access to Wikimedians

Over 600 Wikimedians have received free access to the HighBeam Research database for one year, to support their work on Wikipedia and its sister projects. Active editors can still apply at en:Wikipedia:HighBeam/Applications.

2012/05/14: Edited to correct an error in the “Financials” section (changed “5% lower than plan” to “5% higher than plan”)

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 April (May 3, 2012)

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for March:

489 million (+2.7% compared with February; +22.3% compared with the previous year)

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

Page requests for April:

17.3 billion (+0.4% compared with March; +18.2% compared with the previous year)

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

Active Registered Editors for March 2012 (>= 5 edits/month):

85.09K (+0.2% compared with February / -4.5% compared with the previous year)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for March 2012: http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/

Financials

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

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – March 31, 2012.

• Revenue for the month is $1.9MM vs plan of $3.9MM, approximately $2MM or 53% under plan.

• Year-to-date is $32.1MM vs plan of $28.6MM, approximately $3.5MM or 12% over plan.

• Expenses for the month is $2.3MM vs plan of $2.2MM, approximately $112K or 5% higher than plan.

• Year-to-date is $19.3MM vs plan of $21.1MM, approximately $1.8MM or 8% lower than plan.

• Cash position is $30.6MM as of March 31, 2012 – approximately 13 months of expenses.

Highlights

Expanding fundraising and affiliation models

After the resolutions of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees at its meeting in Berlin, work is ongoing to implement a new model for distributing the money raised via Wikimedia project sites. Except the costs for the core operations and operating reserves of the WMF, all of it (including funds for chapters and non-core operations of the WMF) will be distributed based on the recommendations of the new volunteer-driven Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). Another resolution of the Board recognizes new models of affiliation with the Wikimedia movement: “Movement Partners” (like-minded organizations that actively support the movement’s work), “National or Sub-national Chapters” (which includes the existing chapter model), “Thematic Organizations” (non-profits representing the movement and using the Wikimedia trademarks, which are supporting work focused on a specific topic), and “User Groups” (open membership groups which may or may not choose to incorporate).

Indic language outreach

Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead visited India meeting Wikimedians in Bangalore and attending Wikisangamotsavam, the Malayalam community conference, as part of work to support Indic language projects. The India team is working actively with seven Indic language communities on outreach, social media strategy and initiatives to build community momentum.

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

Mobile pageviews target reached

At the end of April, the Wikipedia mobile site reached the milestone of 2 billion monthly page views – one of the goals for the 2011/12 WMF annual plan.

Towards a rapid software deployment cycle

Wikimedia engineers have begun switching to a more rapid deployment cycle, starting to deploy the latest MediaWiki software to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites every two weeks.

Technology

A detailed report of the Tech Department’s activities for April 2012 can be found at:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_engineering_report/2012/April

Department Highlights

Major news in April include:

• Substantial work on Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year;
• The selection of 9 Google Summer of Code students and the start of their work;
• The shift to a rapid deployment cycle;
• A new mobile skin deployed to Wikimedia sites;
• The Wikipedia mobile app for iOS switching to using OpenStreetMap data.

Operations

• Search — After months of preparation and refactoring work with our dated Lucene implementation at the Tampa data center, we are glad to report that Peter Youngmeister (with help from Asher Feldman, Robert Stojnic and Jeff Green) successfully built and deployed the new Search infrastructure at our EQIAD data center. The performance improvement is quite amazing; at the 99th percentile level, search latency dropped from a high of 9 seconds to 1 second, and the average search is only 100ms, down from 700ms. In addition, the new infrastructure addresses some of the previous single point of failures and capacity limitations.

• Wikimedia Labs — Ryan Lane released a new version of OpenStackManager, adding project filters for all interfaces, usability fixes and a number of bug fixes. OpenStackManager and LdapAuthentication were switched to Git, allowing a few more changes to be pushed thanks to being able to keep a stable master branch. Notable changes were per-project sudo management, allowing sysadmins in a project to manage who gets which sudo permissions in a fine grained manner for their projects, and a change in how groups are added to LDAP for projects. Sara Smollett added Per-project ganglia monitoring, displaying resource graphs for instances in projects. Andrew Bogott finished work on a plugin framework for OpenStack Nova, and has added an example plugin for a SharedFS driver, which would allow us to manage gluster volumes via an API.

• Data Dumps — The gluster share with the last 5 or so good dumps for all projects is ready for use by Wikimedia Labs projects. A first copy of uploaded media, accessible via rsync, was announced, and some work was done on the infrastructure to generate downloadable bundles of media per project. We’re working with the Internet Archive to produce media bundles that they can host for download as well. A new version of the dump scripts was deployed with some minor bug fixes. Christian Aistleitner wrapped up work on the PHPUnit tests for the dump maintenance scripts, and discovered a problem with the database schema, which we will need to discuss with the user community in order to find a resolution that works for everyone.

Features Engineering

• Visual editor — Roan Kattouw and Trevor Parscal are rewriting the underlying data model to achieve feature compatibility with the parser and correct a variety of problems that have been previously deferred. Inez Korczynski and Christian Williams have been continuing their work to stabilize and integrate the content editable layer and have been working with Rob Moen, who has focused on getting the user interface elements working with the content editable layer. Gabriel Wicke has been working on improving the parser‘s ability to parse pages more quickly as well as increasing compatibility with existing features such as thumbnails. A template-heavy page like Barack Obama can now be expanded in similar time as the production parser.

• Article feedback — Fabrice Florin worked with OmniTi to develop a range of new features for version 5 of the Article Feedback Tool (AFT5). This month, the team deployed the first versions of the abuse filter and the relevance filter, as well as new monitoring tools for editors, to help surface useful suggestions and reduce the noise on the feedback page where posts are listed for each article. Pau Giner started designing a new look and feel for that feedback page, as well as a final version of the feedback form, with guidance from Brandon Harris. We also finalized a set of special tools for oversighters, as well as new feedback links. Dario Taraborelli, Oliver Keyes and Aaron Halfaker collected and analyzed data on how prominent feedback links impact both volume and quality of user feedback. Roan Kattouw continued to review our code and help deploy weekly releases, and Matthias Mullie contributed new code for this project. We expect to complete feature development by the end of May, with full deployment in the summer.

• Article Creation Workflow — Ian Baker, Benny Situ, Ryan Kaldari and Brandon Harris have developed the Article Creation landing system, while focusing on deploying the New Page Triage (NPT) this month. Oliver Keyes prepared new templates for a proposed ‘Create a Draft’ section. Fabrice Florin created a workflow diagram to illustrate the interdependencies between ACW and NTP. The goal is to collect and analyze usage data on ACW in May with Dario Taraborelli, in order to plan our next steps for this project, which is likely to be deployed alongside NPT in coming weeks. The current ACW prototype is available for testing on Wikimedia Labs.

Internationalization and Editor Engagement Experiments

• Internationalization and localization tools — The team has completed the first round of UI designs for a Universal language selector (ULS) for desktop and mobile. UI/UX team members (Pau Giner and Arun Ganesh) are now implementing a prototype to showcase the first version of ULS. The team also added keymaps for language support to Narayam, added notification support to Translate, fixed bugs, reviewed code for localization support in MediaWiki 1.19, and discussed language support metrics.

Mobile engineering

• Mobile design — The final selection of section styles was supported by user experience testing. We also added switches between Mobile/Desktop view and Images on/off to the footer. These changes have now been deployed as the default view of mobile Wikipedia. The first working prototype of the new navigation UI has been completed in rough form and sent out for feedback.

• Wikimedia Apps — Yuvaraj Pandian released new versions of our Android app and our first ever PhoneGap version of the iOS app. Issues were identified with iOS 4.x and we released a update to fix them. Yuvaraj also continued work on the API move branch. Brion Vibber pushed out a final build of the Wikipedia App to the BlackBerry market, and started experimenting with a Windows mobile version.

• MobileFrontend — Patrick, Arthur Richards and Max Semenik continued work on moving MobileFrontend to MediaWiki core. We’ve updated its skinning, internals, and general architecture to make it more core-friendly.

Platform Engineering

• MediaWiki 1.20 — As of April 2012, core software deployments to Wikimedia sites are done from git (instead of Subversion) through incremental “wmf”-branches. The first deployment of the 1.20 release cycle, labeled 1.20wmf1, was deployed to all Wikimedia sites this month; it notably brought new diff colors for improve readability. The 1.20wmf2 deployment cycle began on April 30. The 1.20.0 stable tarball is expected to be released in fall of 2012.

• Lua scripting — Tim Starling started the implementation of a replacement for MediaWiki markup-based template programming, using the Lua scripting language, embedded via the Scribunto extension. The current roadmap aims for a deployment to Labs in May 2012, then to mediawiki.org; full deployment to Wikimedia sites is scheduled for 2013. Tim will lead tutorial sessions at the Berlin Hackathon 2012.

• Summer of Code 2012 — Wikimedia engineers have chosen nine students for this year’s program. For the next few weeks, until May 21st, the students and their mentors are working together to train the students in MediaWiki development, so that they’ll have all the basic domain knowledge they’ll need to succeed during the summer.

Fundraising

Major Gifts and Foundations

• Secured a sponsorship from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation for Wikimania.
• We began our push to renew Benefactors who gave in FY2010-11, but not yet in FY2011-12 by June 30.

Fundraiser

• Posted a full report from the 2011 fundraiser
• Researched improvements to make for the fundraiser in Spain, Italy and Belgium. Held focus groups with donors to optimize messaging, payment methods offered, donation forms and translations.
• Heavy research on the new payment methods to be added in 2012. Roadmap and timeline to be released soon.
• Held a one hour systems test in the US.
• Continually iterating on forms and landing pages as well as the A/B testing infrastructure.
• Implemented GlobalCollect recurring payments, bringing our recurring monthly income up to approximately $40K/month, nearly a half-million dollars a year.

Global Development

New fellowship launched to focus on EN:WP help pages, good progress on Teahouse projects and welcome Siko and fellows to global development team!

New grants to the community in support of activities in seven countries

Barry attends the Malayalam community conference in Kollam, India and visits with chapter and community in Bangalore (see also general “Highlights” section)

Grants Awarded and Executed

• WM NO/Outreach GLAM
• WikiSangamotsavam 2012:Malayalam_Wiki Conference 2012
• WM AR/Wikigenero GroupLens Participation
• Glam/Batak
• WM US-DC/Events 2012
• WM CA/Quebec Programs 2012
• Sofia Zoo and Bulgarian Wikipedians/Sofia Zoo Powered by Wikimedia
• WM CL/Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit 2012

Fellowships

Updates

Gender Gap – Fellow Sarah Stierch completed wrap-up documentation of outcomes and lessons learned from WikiWomen’s History Month.

New Fellowships

• Peter Coombe was announced and started work this month as our newest Wikimedia Community Fellow. Pete’s fellowship project is piloting a data-driven approach to reorganize and rewrite key help pages on English Wikipedia in order to make them more usable, particularly for new editors. His work can be followed on the Help redesign project page.
• Two new 2012 Fellowships will be announced in May.

Teahouse Project

The Teahouse has been live on English Wikipedia for two months and we’re beginning to see evidence of the project’s impact for participating new editors. Some relevant metrics from April’s report include:

• In April, the Teahouse had an average of 50 questions posted in the Q&A forum per week and served about 20-30 new editors visiting for the first time each week, in addition to repeat visitors (the average guest asks 1.5 questions, 22% of guests asked more than one question, and many guests return to the Teahouse more than once). The median response time for questions is 30 minutes. The project’s greatest challenge continues to be making Teahouse known to all new editors in need of help, as our hosts have capacity to assist more new editors than are making their way to the space via personal invitation.
• Comparing a sample of 75 new editors who participate in the Teahouse with a control group (of equivalent size and similar first-day editing activity) points to Teahouse having a positive impact on new editor engagement: New editors who participate in Teahouse edit 10x the number of articles than the uninvited control group and make on average 6x more global edits. The average participant adds 26x more bytes of content that survive on Wikipedia (i.e. content that isn’t reverted or deleted) than the uninvited control group.
• Among the 224 editors in our three experimental groups, 28% of new editors who participate in the Teahouse were still active on Wikipedia at least 10 days later, compared with 12% of new editors who receive an invitation but don’t actively participate in the Teahouse, and only 5% from a similar uninvited control group.

Editor Growth and Contribution Program

• The Global Development Department launched the Editor Growth and Contribution Program in mid-April, and announced Haitham Shammaa as program consultant. This program will focus on designing, testing, and implementing online programs to attract and retain new editors in small-to-medium sized Wikimedia projects.

Arabic Language Initiative

• Haitham Shammaa visited Algeria to meet Wikipedians and other supporters who can sustain Wikipedia activities in the future. The visit included a lecture and Wikipedia workshop for students of Médéa University in northern Algeria.
• Currently, we are working with a number of associates and NGOs in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia to explore the possibility of supporting Wikimedia program activities with grants.

Brazil Catalyst

Summary: A rich month for outreach and institutional relations, as well as advances in the institutional of scenario establishing the representative office in Brazil: a relatively good start in community engagement process

Brazil background notes

1. Brazil is a huge country with 27 states: São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast have the highest populations, the strongest economies, and stronger infrastructure.
2. São Paulo also has the greatest number of Wikipedia-PT editors, followed by Rio de Janeiro. Minas Gerais curiously doesn’t play a significant role in editorship now, but should be explored.
3. Until now major work has been done with the Wikimedia Brasil community, but plan to increase focus in relationship building with the Wikipedia-PT community.

Brazil outreach

• Trip to São Paulo to talk with community members, investigate locations for the office, meet with lawyers, and meet with potential partners
  • Learnings: need to generate more compelling agendas for community meetings to generate more interest and also need to work with the community to find times/locations that would make it more convenient to increase attendance
  • Recommendations: set up a programatic agenda to organize meetings objectively to highlight their value and in advance and focus on mapping real resources based on what the community will actually do.
• Trip to Uberlândia to participate in event at the Computing College of the Federal University of Uberlândia. Jonas from Recife joined the activity and contacted local editors, but no local editors showed up.
  • Learnings: students don’t know much about free licensing or Wikipedia, bringing volunteers to events like this fosters trustful relationships within the community.
  • Recommendations:follow up to encourage future participation and gather contact details of participants.
• Trip to Goiânia to bring community members together and participate in an event at the Federal University of Goiânia, no community members showed up but the event was successful (popular with students and professors).
  • Learnings: There’s a possibility to develop the education program in the communications college of the Federal University of Goiania. We can’t miss the chance to get local editors’ contacts. Alexandre Guiote (another lecturer in the event), living in Spain, has done very interesting research on Wikipedia.
  • Recommendations: consider developing an education program here and maintain contacts.
• Second trip to São Paulo to attend a community workshop at Casa Fora do Eixo and met with community members, as well as meet with Banco do Brazil Foundation.
  • Learnings: community members have a lot of knowledge (editing, licensing, etc.), but outreach methodologies might be improved to improve results.
  • Recommendations: work with the community to build and share methodologies and build outreach materials.

Brazil program updates

• Possible coworking places have been explored: the Hub in São Paulo seems to be the most neutral, but no decision yet
• Partnerships update: Discussion of partnerships with Fiocruz (institution related to the Ministry of Health for research and development) to develop a validation process based on social participation, the National Library is excited about doing things together on access to books/reading programs and digital archives

India Programs

Indic Languages

• Kannada: Support for translated articles enhancement project and enabling transwiki export
• Assamese: Medicine project outreach support at Jorhat medical college. Ideas for 10th anniversary, Community translated outreach ppt to Assamese, Ideas and inputs for a potential Assamese Wikipedia CD project
• Odia: Helping Odia community for a medical project including outreach at SCB Medical College. Supported 3 outreach events in Odisha
• Hindi: conducted Hindi Wikipedia outreach at Delhi University
• Bengali: support to enable sub pages in bn wikisource, support to enable proof read extension in bn wikisource
• Malayalam: ad hoc support for Malayalam community conference

India Outreach

• Commons outreach handbook that community members can adapt/adopt
• Worked on train-the-trainer program design
• Documented outreach correspondence with all institutes
• Supported outreach in four communities – AS, GU, MR, ML
• Translation work on outreach documents being done by community members. 4 Indic languages have successfully finished translating.

Communications, Wikipatrika

• Work on the Wikipatrika newsletter is in progress
• First set of mails to contact previous issue coordinators
• Received response, initiated GU,NE,OR,AS pages on wiki
• Tech news done, AS,MR done
• Hope to publish it by May first week

Storytelling for community building

• Gujarati WikiSource blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.in/2012/04/04/realizing-the-dreams-of-communities-3-years-6-users-1000-articles-counting-the-source-of-gujarati-wikisource/
• Tamil Wiki Media contest blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/20/postcard-from-the-tamil-community/
• Initiated Digital Outreach plan via Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/wikipediasupport/
• Initiated Social Media pilot plan

Internal communications

• Announcement for Communications + Outreach IRC meeting: India Program#IRC_Meetings
• Supported Malayalam community with press release draft and journalist contacts
• Supported Kannada Translation project with messages for social media
• Started journalist database
• Contacted Indic journalists
• Made brief digest to post on all village pumps
• Supported Ahmedabad meetup with local press contacts
• Worked on train-the-trainer program design for outreach capacity building

Wikimania Scholarships

Scholarship recipients for Wikimania were announced! We have 130 scholars from 57 countries around the world. Chapter scholarships are also being organized now.

For more information, see the blog post: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/25/wikimania-2012-scholarships/

US Cultural Partnerships

• Final preparations for the American Association of Museums conference, which took place April 29 – May 2. Wikimedia will be represented throughout the conference, including in a traditional and a virtual Wikipedian in Residence session, a Wikipedia basics table, a nomination for QRpedia at the MUSE tech awards, and highlights in the Association of Children’s Museum’s session.
• Featured on the Library of Congress blog in the post “Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums with Wikipedia (GLAM-Wiki): Insights Interview with Lori Phillips“
• Coordination and updates to the GLAM/US portal in preparation for the American Association of Museums conference
• Ongoing coordination with US cultural organizations, including support and advisement for early stages of planning processes. (Partnerships not yet publicly announced.)
• Ongoing coordination on recommendations for technical tools from cultural professionals
• Preparations for the Wikipedia Lounge at the MuseumNext conference in Barcelona in May and session proposal writing and coordination for the Museum Computer Network conference

Mobile and Business Development

This month has been primarily dedicated to testing and implementation of our new Free Access to Mobile Wikipedia programs with Orange and Telenor. This has been a very complicated process as we work through bugs and other technical problems but we have made great progress with our first territories. We’ve spent most of this month on working through browser support issues, landing pages, translation, banners, caching issues, etc.

• Orange status update: Tunisia and Uganda are both live, although features still need to be implemented
• Telenor status update: Digi Malaysia is ready from a technical perspective. Currently preparing for a market launch.

Global development research

• Editor Survey: results from the December Editor Survey are available: http://blog.wikimedia.org/tag/december-2011-editor-survey/

Our gender ratio held steady with only 9% of editors being women. We also found that compared to other countries US fares better on the gender divide, 14% of editors from US being women compared to other countries for which we had a significant sample.

Outreach results

• First report from outreach events was delivered to the India team.

Education program research

A quantitative analysis undertaken by Ayush Khanna and Mani Pande from the Global Development Research and Analytics team shows that Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users to the English Wikipedia. The data also shows that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer. Read more on the Wikimedia Foundation blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall-2011/

Wikipedia Education Program

• In order to determine the future of U.S. and Canada education programs, we invited Wikipedia Ambassadors, class instructors, and the Wikipedia community to contribute to an on-wiki application process for joining a “Working Group” that will meet in July 2012 for a kick-off meeting of the planning process. This is the first step in a year-long open and collaborative process to make the U.S. and Canada program more volunteer-driven and to discuss the creation of the Education Program Structure that will be in charge of the day-to-day operations of the program. More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group

• Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the Fall 2011 term. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. See more of the survey results: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/23/students-see-benefits-from-wikipedia-assignment/

• University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor Edward Erikson wrote a post for the Wikimedia Foundation blog explaining why he is glad he is asking students to contribute to Wikipedia. He argues that Wikipedia is part of the classroom whether the professor likes it or not, and by making Wikipedia the destination rather than the route, students have a better learning experience. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/02/wikipedia-in-my-classroom/

• Canadian class adds two Good Articles: University of Alberta – Augustana Psychology Professor Paula Marentette asked her students to expand two articles on course-related topics this year for her Language Acquisition class. The result? The seven students in her class worked together to get two articles, “Vocabulary development” and “Joint attention,” to Good Article status on the English Wikipedia. In a blog post published on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, the students describe their reaction to the assignment, and Dr. Marentette describes the learning outcomes for her students: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/30/psychology-class-collaborates-on-two-good-articles/

• A lot has happened in the Cairo Pilot, with students contributing on-wiki at an increasing pace. Campus Ambassadors conducted several workshops this month, and some outstanding student articles are now live on the Arabic Wikipedia. Updates with the program are documented in detail on the Arabic Wikipedia. Annie is also putting together a document with more updates about the Cairo Pilot as a whole and each class individually (coming soon, in next month’s GD report).

• More than 200 students and faculty members at Ain Shams University in Cairo showed up to an in-person outreach event organized by Wikipedia Ambassadors from the Cairo Pilot and a local student group. Attendees learned how the Arabic Wikipedia works and how they could contribute to it. Check out the group’s photo album to see photos from this successful event

• Brazil education pilot continues with first semester: Report on the current status of the classes we are working with in the first semester of 2012 in Brazil

Communications

No major new projects, announcements, or media issues unfolded in April. Tech press and culture blogs, as well as some main stream media, continued to focus on the Wikipedia blackout and post-SOPA musings.

The communications team, along with the Wikimedia blogging and social media teams have been putting considerable work into an effort to increase the number and quality of Wikimedia blog postings. This month 37 posts hit the blog, including deeper profiles of active Wikipedians and media creators from Wikimedia Commons.

Over the next few months we hope to bring a basic metrics/traffic measurement tool back to the blog, bring in new volunteer contributors, and revise the structure and design of the blog to create a more engaging front page.

Major announcements

No major press releases or announcements in April.

Major stories through March

PRSA on Wikipedia accuracy (April 17, 2012)

In April, The Public Relations Society of America published a study by Marcia W. DiStaso, Assistant Professor of PR at Penn State University, surveying the wide range of views of PR practitioners and their experiences with Wikipedia. The original summary incorrectly asserted that ’60% of Wikipedia articles are wrong’ – an error that was repeated across dozens of global main stream media press (the actual claim was “60% of respondents found errors with their company’s articles”). PRSA, at the urging of Wikimedia community members, revised the study headline and press release (thank you!).

(updated PRSA survey data: http://media.prsa.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=2582)

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/04/60-percent-wikipedia-entries-about-companies-contain-errors/51236/

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2012/04/wikipedia-survey-shows-60-percent-of-entries-have-errors-and-public-relations-people-cant-correct-them/

Wikipedia Zero gaining attention in Africa (April 5, 2012)

February’s announcement from Orange and the Wikimedia Foundation about providing free access to Wikipedia on mobile devices in specific markets is beginning to get positive attention in the region. Regional programs advertising the service are appearing as Orange affiliates expand the program.

http://bikyamasr.com/65057/ugandans-access-wikipedia-for-free-through-orange-uganda/

http://allafrica.com/stories/201204220118.html

Wikipedia mobile switches to OpenStreetMap (April 5, 2012)

A large number of tech press picked up on the fact that a revised Wikipedia mobile app chose Openstreetmaps over Google maps in a recent update.

(original blog post https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/05/new-wikipedia-app-for-ios-and-an-update-for-our-android-app/ )

http://9to5google.com/2012/04/05/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps-for-openstreetmap-marks-industry-trend-to-alternative-service/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57410234-93/wikipedia-dumps-google-maps/

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/7/2931320/wikipedia-updates-mobile-apps-drops-google-maps-for-openstreetmap

Other worthwhile reads

Clips from the Malayalam Wikipedia gathering in April

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/malayalam-wikipedia-could-be-emulated/253196-60-116.html

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/youths-come-forward-to-fill-up-odia-wikipedia/247114-60-117.html

Download all of Wikipedia (from https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/09/download-the-text-of-the-entire-english-wikipedia/)

http://www.webpronews.com/download-wikipedia-in-english-all-9-7gb-of-it-2012-04

Sarah Stierch on bringing women to Wikipedia in the Smithsonian

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2012/04/how-many-women-does-it-take-to-change-wikipedia/

Guardian on the ‘mapping Wikipedia’ project

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/apr/04/wikipedia-world-language-map?newsfeed=true

AllAfrica.com on the recent visit of Jimmy Wales

http://allafrica.com/stories/201204090023.html

The UCLA ‘Daily Bruin’ on the Foundation’s Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2012/04/professors_students_worldwide_work_to_improve_wikipedias_credibility_by_editing_articles

FastCompany also reported on the Wikipedia Education Program

http://www.fastcompany.com/1830315/wikipedia-education-program-college-university

Wikipedia Signpost

• Volume 8, Issue 18 – 30 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 17 – 23 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 16 – 16 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 15 – 09 April 2012
• Volume 8, Issue 14 – 02 April 2012

WMF Blog posts

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/

Media Contact

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#April_2012

Human Resources

“Work with Wikimedia” outreach video produced for the HR department, featuring WMF employees

This month, HR is experimenting with new metrics and presentation styles, depicting better views of Foundation staff and contractor composition as well as beginning to report on recruiting metrics.

On the jobs.wikimedia.org site, we premiered a new video created with the support of the Communications team. Victor Grigas and Matthew Roth did a fabulous job. See http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us

We are still in the midst of implementing our Human Resources Information System (HRIS) system. We are set to complete that by end of June. We completed our bi-annual assessment of exempt/non-exempt employees. In terms of new policy, we initiated out a comprehensive Paid Time Off Policy, with an Immigration policy set to roll out next week. These policies will all be codified in an updated employee handbook. In the arena of benefits delivery, we kicked off a new 401K committee comprised of employees interested in managing and diversifying the retirement options for the organization.

HR is sponsoring the work of a qualitative, anthropological analysis of culture and also leadership profiling. This will support later work in leadership development. We have also initiated a coaching program for WMF managers.

Staff Changes

New Hire

• Renee Bracey Sherman, Development Associate (Fundraising)
• Andrew Otto, Software Developer – Analytics (Engineering)
• Chris Steipp, Security Engineer (Engineering)

New Other Position Hires

• Mathias Mullie, Contractor, Software Developer, Features (Engineering)
• Haitham Shammaa, Contractor, program consultant for the Editor Growth and Contribution Program (Global Development)

Conversions

• Rob Moen, Software Developer Front-end (Engineering)

Promotions

• Sumana Harihareswara, Engineering Community Manager (Engineering)

New Contractors

• Daisy Chen (Legal and Community Advocacy)
• Arun Ganesh (Engineering)
• Faidon Liampotis (Engineering)
• Tauhida Parveen (Engineering)
• Ricardo Saavedra (Fundraiser)
• Sandra Senderovich (Fundraiser)

Contract Extended

• Rayne MacGeorge (IT)

Exit

• Nimish Gautam
• Dana Isokawa

Contract Ended

• Farhan Choudary
• Emmanuel Engelhart

Statistics

Total Requisitions Filled:

Actual: 106

April Plan: 115 April Filled: 6, April Attrition: 2

YTD Filled: 48, YTD Attrition: 16

Remaining open requisitions to fiscal year end: 16

Department Updates

Department Changes, effective April 15, 2012

• Siko Bouterse joins Global Development
• Karyn Gladstone, Ryan Faulkner, Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling join Engineering

Real-time feed for HR updates: http://identi.ca/wikimediaatwork or http://twitter.com/wikimediaatwork

Finance and Administration

Independent contractors traveling on business for the Wikimedia Foundation, outside their home country now have limited medical and travel coverage.

Our search for a Director of Administration is continuing with final interviews in process.

We are beginning to look at the option of doing online expense reimbursements for employee exepenses.

Based on feedback received on her IRC office hours, the Chief Talent and Culture Officer is looking at socially responsible options for investing some of the reserve for the Foundation.

Legal and Community Advocacy

• Updated terms of use becomes effective May 25, 2012.
• Proactive trademark actions (e.g., successful challenge to third-party “Wikimedia UK” use & and winning globe logo in Mexico) and trademark review for Wikidata
• Finalizing decision on appropriate license for Wikidata (probably CC0)
• Kelly Kay, Deputy General Counsel, will represent WMF at the Open Source Initiative.
• Discovered and worked through backlog of trademark requests sent to wrong email address
• Two strong candidates identified for the junior legal counsel, including an active Wikimedian. Final decision: likely by May 15.
• Welcome to the newest Arbitration Committee, English Wikinews
• Working on electronic contract storage and approval process
• Agreed to support the Free Culture Conservacy through endorsement
• After winning signature issue as expected, we decided not to pursue appeal on German Loriot case regarding the stamps and public domain issue.
• Reappointed the ombudsman commission
• Ongoing legal and community work on a wide variety of issues and topics, including AFT5, CC 4.0, litigation, trademark portfolio, new fundraising agreement, template agreements, FDC, Wikipedia town, budget, privacy, internal policies, board issues and governance, etc.
• Daisy Chen joined as a paralegal (temporary contract) to help handle workload.
• New interns expected to start end of May. Our last semester interns have left (except for Stephen), and we wish them well. They did a great job. New full-time summer interns will be from Harvard, Stanford, and University of Minnesota.
• This month’s posted discussions on topics of community interest:
  • CISPA (not yet updated to reflect the final print of the bill)
  • SABAM v. Netlog
  • Copyright status of flags and logos from international organizations
  • Moral right of integrity
  • Copyright on utility items
• Metrics:
  • Number of contracts in April – 14 (159 contracts to date in FY 2011/12)
  • Number of trademark issues in April – 61
    • Number of backlogged trademark issues that were sent through to the team in April (included in above total count) – 50
    • Approved – 7
    • Denied – 8
    • Request Withdrawn – 7
    • Pending – 34
    • Approval not needed – 2
    • No known response – 1
    • Closed due to lack of response – 2

Visitors and Guests

1. Tammy Davidson (Chartis)
2. Jennifer Hills (Chartis)
3. Yanina Budkin (World Bank Senior Communications Officer for Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay)
4. Gabriele Niola (Italian tech journalist for Punto Informatico and Wired Italy)
5. Elisa Manheim (Institute for International Education)
6. Matjaz Panjan (Fulbright scholar, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
7. Cristiano Boccolini (Fulbright scholar, UC Berkeley)
8. Alona Sekan (Fulbright scholar, US Department of Agriculture, Western Research Regional Center, Agricultural Research Service)
9. Phoebe Ayers (board member)
10. Tom Simonite (Computing Editor, MIT Technology Review)
11. Frieder Bronner (writing dissertation on parts of Wikipedia)
12. Matt Zimmerman (Technical Leader of Ubuntu)
13. Craig Newmark (Craigslist founder, visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
14. Dan Perkel (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
15. Megan Finn (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
16. Nick Arnett (visitor for Ushahidi brownbag)
17. Aakash Desai (Product Manager, Mozilla)
18. Raj Ramabadran (Microsoft)
19. John P. Alioto (Microsoft)
20. Randall Benson (Benson Consulting)
21. Aaron Halfaker (WMF Research Analyst)
22. Ryan Merkeley (COO of Mozilla Foundation)
23. Faidon Laimbotis (visiting contractor)
24. Laura Lanzerotti (Bridgespan Group)
25. Libbie Landles-Dowling (Bridgespan Group)
26. Daniel Stid (Bridgespan Group)
27. Meera Chary (Bridgespan Group)
28. Divya Narayanan (Bridgespan Group)
29. Deborah Bezona (D. Bezona & Company)
30. Kelley Cope (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
31. Alice Komarnicki (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
32. Sandy Urgel (Sitzmann, Morris and Lavis)
33. Kate Antonini (First Data)
34. Patricia Brizio (First Data)
35. Thomas Tucker (First Data)
36. Anne Hiaring Hocking (Hiaring Smith)
37. Vijay Toke (Hiaring Smith)
38. David Evan Harris (Global Lives Project and Institute for the Future)
39. Gavin McConnon (BoxPay)
40. Kyle Hitchcox (BoxPay)
41. Aaron Nobles (BoxPay)
42. Tim Otten (CiviCRM)
43. Anand Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
44. Benedikt Lotter (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
45. Brandon Paton (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
46. Brianna Smrke (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
47. Charlie Javice (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
48. Charlie Stigler (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
49. Chris Olah (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
50. Clay Allsopp (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
51. Connor Zwick (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
52. Dylan Field (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
53. Eric Chang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
54. Henry Lui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
55. Ilya Vakhutinsky (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
56. Isaac Dietrich (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
57. Jimmy Koppel (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
58. Jon Lim (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
59. Kettner Griswold (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
60. Kevin Ma (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
61. Lindsay Haskell (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
62. Michael Moore-Jones (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
63. Noor Siddiqui (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
64. Omar Rizwan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
65. Oskar Niburski (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
66. Param Jaggi (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
67. Paul Sebexen (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
68. Rebekah Austin (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
69. Rijul Gupta (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
70. Ritik Malhotra (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
71. Ryan Lelek (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
72. Saku Panditharantne (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
73. Samir Devalaraja (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
74. Semon Rezchikov (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
75. Shai Kiriati (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
76. Spencer Hewett (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
77. Tara Seshan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
78. Taylor Wilson (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
79. Tony Ho (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
80. Vaibhav Kumar (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
81. Vijay Viswanathan (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
82. Wole Idowu (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
83. Yoonseo Kang (Thiel 20Under20 Finalists)
84. Maggie Dennis (visiting staff)
85. Sumana Harihareswara (remote staff)
86. Daniel Phifer and Kevin McCracken (Social Imprints)
87. Christina Dragwidge (Arthur J. Gallagher)
88. Henrik Bennetsen
89. Majd Abbar, Qatar Foundation
90. Ginny Jarrett (AJLI)
91. Alice Gardner-Boreta (AJLI)
92. Jodi Penn (AJLI)
93. Eileen Goodwin (AJLI)
94. Cynthia Foster (AJLI)
95. Olivia Thomas (AJLI)
96. Becker Holland (AJLI)
97. Delly Beekman (AJLI)
98. Sandra Thomas (AJLI)
99. Sarah Berthelot (AJLI)
100. Laurel Lee-Alexander (AJLI)
101. Liz Murley (AJLI)
102. Julie Siebel (AJLI)
103. Karla Wallace (AJLI)
104. Toni Freeman (AJLI)
105. Mary Jo Hunt (AJLI)
106. Kathy Rabon (AJLI)
107. Deann Cook (AJLI)
108. Liz Davis (AJLI)
109. Subha Lembach (AJLI)
110. Gwin Londrigan (AJLI)
111. Karen Miller (AJLI)
112. Terri Nass Reeder (AJLI)
113. Dona Ponepinto (AJLI)
114. Diann Rohde (AJLI)
115. Evelyn Zabo (AJLI)
116. Susan Danish (AJLI)
117. Anne Dalton (AJLI)
118. Maureen Mackey (AJLI)
119. Janine le Sueur (AJLI)
120. Carrie Holmes (AJLI)
121. Heather Mcleod-Grant (AJLI)
122. Rebecca Petzel (AJLI)
123. Kristin Cobble (AJLI)
124. Kat Walsh (Board Member)
125. Arthur Richards (Remote staff)
126. Martin Kalfatovic (Smithsonian)
127. Chris Freeland (Missouri Botanical Garden)
128. Diane Peters (Creative Commons)
129. Marion Strecker (Brazilian journalist)
130. Michiel Minderhoud (Mobile Code Challenge Winner)

2012/05/14: Edited to correct an error in the “Financials” section (changed “5% lower than plan” to “5% higher than plan”)

The Tulip Folly, Jean-Léon Gérôme, from the Walters Museum collection

‪The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, has donated more than 19,000 freely-licensed images of artworks to Wikimedia Commons. The Walters’ collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The images and their associated information will join our collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which serves as the repository for the 285 language editions of Wikipedia. ‬

‪The project began taking shape in February 2012, as part of the GLAM-Wiki initiative (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). During GLAMcamp DC, a three-day conference hosted by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., the Walters Museum worked with several Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. The basic details of the upload procedure were established during the conference, and during the weeks that followed, the uploads were conducted, monitored and tested, while collaboration continued online. ‬

‪”The Walters has gone above and beyond throughout this collaboration with the GLAM-Wiki community, working alongside Wikipedians to serve as a model for our mass image upload process,” said Lori Byrd Phillips, U.S. Cultural Partnerships Coordinator for the Wikimedia Foundation. “The release of these images will not only improve articles in Wikipedia, but will also have the potential to be used freely throughout the web.”

‪The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006. In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license. ‬

Sarasvati image from Walters Museum

‪”By uploading our information in this way, we can share items of cultural heritage from around the globe, directly with people in those parts of the world. Already our images have been used in 48 different languages. The Walters’ collection is well-suited for this project because of its size and its breadth of topic areas,” said Dylan Kinnett, Manager of Web and Social Media for the Walters Art Museum. “By developing documentation and tools for this type of work, we hope that our upload project can serve as a prototype for other cultural institutions.”

‪Already, the museum’s images have had an impact in improving content on Wikipedia, such when they are used as illustrations in entries whose topic is not the artwork itself, but a related idea, such as a mythological figure, or a time or place. The Walters’ painting of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, for instance, has been added to five different language Wikipedia entries about the goddess.‬

We would like to thank to the Walters Museum for their donation and their commitment to promoting free knowledge on Wikimedia Commons, and to the GLAM volunteers who helped make this endeavor possible.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

Wikipedians in Residence prepare to present at the American Association of Museums. cc by-sa 3.0 Sarah Stierch.

Because of the importance of this conference, much preparation went into bringing together five Wikipedians in Residence from around the world to represent the work of the GLAM-Wiki initiative. Liam Wyatt, Sarah Stierch, Àlex Hinojo, and I participated in both a virtual and an on-site panel titled “Wikipedia and the Museum: Lessons from Wikipedians in Residence.” Dominic McDevitt-Parks facilitated a table at the “Marketplace of Ideas” event, which focused on how museums can best share their resources with Wikipedia. Throughout the conference, the GLAM-Wiki US portal was promoted as a new tool for American museums to more easily connect with the Wikimedia community.

Highlights of our outreach included:

• For the in-person Wikipedians in Residence panel, over fifty museum professionals gathered to hear about the GLAM-Wiki initiative, the types of outreach events, the methods for connecting with the Wikimedia community and the resources for helping museums get started with a project.
• The virtual session brought together over fifty museum professionals and GLAM-Wikimedians from around the world to discuss best practices. Event organizers allowed Wikipedians free access to the event and the recorded session is now publicly accessible.
• Due to the high level of interest, all of the Wikipedians in Residence jumped in to assist with the Marketplace of Ideas table. Over a three-hour period we answered questions, shared resources and left with a number of potential new museum cooperations.

As the conference went on, it was abundantly clear that museum professionals were ready to more fully engage with the Wikimedia community. A handful of sessions independently discussed the GLAM-Wiki initiative as a model project within broader topic areas, including global partnerships within children’s museums, transparency in the future of museum ethics and “going beyond digitization.”

The AAM conference was a watershed moment for GLAM-Wikimedia collaboration. We were surprised that many people no longer needed to be convinced of Wikimedia’s relevance within their institution.  Instead, many were eager and ready to take the next step toward connecting with the Wikimedia community. As a museum professional myself, it was inspiring to directly witness the museum field wholly embracing Wikipedia as a serious tool for furthering their missions.

It has been a long time coming.

Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator

(Participation by Wikipedians in Residence in the American Association of Museums conference was made possible through the Wikimedia Participation Grants program.)

But there is a fourth kind of cultural and educational resource within the city that is sometimes overlooked—Washington‘s 170+ embassies and diplomatic missions. These embassies are hidden gems of knowledge, housing cultural artifacts and works of art, and hosting numerous educational and cultural events, particularly in May, which DC Mayor Vincent Gray has declared as the city’s “International Cultural Awareness Month,” in order to showcase the value these embassies bring to the city.

In an effort to capture the intellectual energy and highlight the cultural and educational resources of these international institutions, Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC) last week kicked off its Embassy Outreach Initiative (EOI) with an inaugural event held in partnership with the Washington European Society and the Estonian Embassy in Washington.

The event, hosted at the Estonian Embassy, featured a discussion on global Internet freedom efforts with Danny Weitzner, Deputy CTO for Internet Policy at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy; Chairman Marko Mihkelson, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian Parliament; Ian Schuler, Senior Manager for Internet Freedom Programs at the US State Department; and Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board. Adam Kushner, Deputy Editor of the National Journal, moderated the discussion.

From L to R, Weitzner, Mihkelson, Schuler, and MacKinnon. CC-BY-SA

At the heart of EOI is an effort to foster an international dialogue around Wikimedia DC’s and the Foundation’s vision. In that sense, the choice of the Estonian Embassy as the debut venue for EOI was not coincidental. Estonia currently ranks as the number one country for Internet freedom by the DC-based NGO Freedom House. Not only do tech, Internet companies, startups (think Skype) and knowledge initiatives thrive in Estonia, but so does the Estonian Wikipedia. Its nearly 95,000 articles, and 8.1 million monthly page views, may seem small compared to the English Wikipedia, but considering the country’s population stands at slightly over 1.3 million, these numbers are very substantial.

The global Wikimedia community will be coming to Washington, DC, this summer for Wikimania 2012, providing the city with an opportunity to witness how the world collaborates in pursuit of free global knowledge. Before these international delegates arrive, and long after they have returned home, Washington, DC has always been and will always remain a great place to promote international dialogue in support of shared knowledge. That is the ultimate goal of Wikimedia DC’s outreach and program efforts–like EOI and LibraryLab: they utilize the potential for collaboration that is present within the city and make a positive and lasting impact on global knowledge.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President, Wikimedia District of Columbia

Vol: 2 • Issue: 4 • April 2012 [archives]

Barnstars work; Wiktionary assessed; cleanup tags counted; finding expert admins; discussion peaks; Wikipedia citations in academic publications; and more

With contributions by: Lambiam, Piotrus, Jodi.a.schneider, Amir E. Aharoni, DarTar, Tbayer, Steven Walling, Junkie.dolphin and Protonk

Recognition may sustain user participation

The relative number of edits by Wikipedians who had randomly received barnstars (red) and by the control group whose members hadn’t (blue).

To gain insight in what makes Wikipedia tick, two researchers from the Sociology Department at Stony Brook University conducted an experiment with barnstars.^[1] They were surprised by what they found.

Professor Arnout van de Rijt and graduate student Michael Restivo wanted to test the hypothesis according to which receiving recognition for one’s work in an informal peer-based environment such as Wikipedia has a positive effect on productivity. To test their hypothesis, they determined the top 1% most productive English Wikipedia users among the currently active editors who had yet to receive their first barnstar. From that group they took a random sample of 200 users. Then they randomly split the sample into an experimental group and a control group, each consisting of 100 users. They awarded a barnstar to each user in the experimental group; the users in the control group were not given a barnstar. The researchers found their hypothesis confirmed: the productivity of the users in the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group. What really took the researchers by surprise was how long-lasting the effect was. They followed the two groups for 90 days, observing that the increase in contribution level for the group of barnstar recipients persisted, almost unabated, for the full observation period.

One major factor the experiment did not take into account was whether it mattered who delivered barnstars and whether they were anonymous, registered, or known members of the Wikipedia community. During the experiment, it was noted on the Administrator’s noticeboard/Incidents page that a seemingly random IP editor was “handing out barnstars”, which led to some suspicion from Wikipedians. The thread was closed after User:Mike Restivo confirmed he accidentally logged out when delivering the barnstars. He did not, however, declare his status as a researcher, and the group’s paper does not disclose that the behavior was considered unusual enough to warrant such a discussion thread.

Can Wiktionary rival traditional lexicons?

Wiktionary received an extensive assessment^[2] as a potential rival to expert-built lexicons.

A chapter titled “Wiktionary: a new rival for expert-built lexicons?”^[2] in a collection on electronic lexicography to appear with Oxford University Press contains a description and critical assessment of Wikipedia’s second oldest sister project (which will celebrate its 10th anniversary in December this year) – subtitled “Exploring the possibilities of collaborative lexicography”, which it calls a “fundamentally new paradigm for compiling lexicons”.

The article describes in detail the technical and community features of Wiktionary. Though it is not immediately clear, the article’s focus is on several language editions and not just English (as often happens in research about Wikipedia and its sister projects). The article gives a comprehensive account of the coverage of the world’s languages by the various Wiktionary language editions. There is a critical analysis of Wiktionary’s content, first with what appears to be a thorough statistical comparison with other dictionaries and wordnets, including an examination of the overlaps in the lexemes covered, which the authors found to be surprisingly small.

The article notes an important characteristic of open wiki projects: they allow “updating of the lexicons immediately, without being restricted to certain release cycles as is the case for expert-built lexicons” (p. 18). Though this characteristic is obvious to experienced Wikimedians, it is frequently overlooked. The discussion of the organization of polysemy and homonymy is comprehensive, although limited to the English Wiktionary. Other language editions may do it differently. The article notes that “it is a serious problem to distinguish well-crafted entries from those that need substantial revision by the community”, which is good constructive criticism. The paragraphs about “sense ordering” make some vague claims (e.g. “Although there is no specific guideline for the sense ordering in Wiktionary, we observed that the first entry is often the most frequently used one”) which could be interesting and useful from a community perspective, but offers little actionable evidence and should be investigated further. The paper’s conclusions identify some of the features that enable Wiktionary to rival expert-built lexicons: “We believe that its unique structure and collaboratively constructed contents are particularly useful for a wide range of dictionary users”, listing eight such groups – among them “Laypeople who want to quickly look up the definition of an unknown term or search for a forum to ask a question on a certain usage or meaning.”

On a critical note, the last paragraph says “we believe that collaborative lexicography will not replace traditional lexicographic theories, but will provide a different viewpoint that can improve and contribute to the lexicography of the future. Thus, Wiktionary is a rival to expert-built lexicons – no more, no less”, which sounds a bit contradictory. The authors also note that “Lepore (2006: 87) raised a criticism about the large-scale import of lexicon entries from copyright-expired dictionaries such as Webster’s New International Dictionary”. It would be nice if the authors would write at least a short explanation of the problem that Lepore described. But the actual article^[3] mentions Wiktionary only very briefly. For the most part, the article is a good academic-grade presentation of Wiktionary: it is very general and does not dive too much into details; it makes a few vague statements, but they present a good starting point for further research.

Wikipedia as an academic publisher?

Can Wikipedia integrate with open-access scholarly publishing?

Xiao and Askin (2012) looked at whether academic papers could be published on Wikipedia.^[4] The paper compares the publishing process on Wikipedia to that of an open-access journal, concluding that Wikipedia’s model of publishing research seems superior, particularly in terms of publicity, cost and timeliness.

The biggest challenges for academic contributions to Wikipedia, they found, revolve around the level of acceptance of Wikipedia in academia, poor integration with academic databases, and technical and conceptual differences between an academic article and an encyclopedic one. However, the paper suffers from several problems. It correctly observes that the closest a Wikipedia article comes to a “final”, fully peer-reviewed status is after having passed the featured article candidate process, but makes no mention of intermediary steps in Wikipedia’s assessment project, such as B-class, Good Article and A-class reviews; nor is the the assessment project itself mentioned. Despite its focus on the featured-article process, no previous academic work on featured articles is cited (although quite a few have been published). Crucially, the paper disregards the most relevant of Wikipedia’s policies, no original research. Thus, the study fails to consider whether Wikipedia would want to publish academic articles without their undergoing changes to bring them closer to encyclopedic style – a topic that already has become an issue numerous times on the site, in particular regarding difficulties encountered by some educational projects. In the end, the paper, while a well-intentioned piece, seems to illustrate that university researchers can have a quite different understanding of what Wikipedia is than those more closely connected with the project.

In other news, however, a scientific journal appears to have found a viable way to publish peer-reviewed articles on Wikipedia: The open access journal PLoS Computational Biology has announced^[5] that it is starting to publish “Topic Pages” – peer-reviewed texts about specific topics, which are published both in the journal and as a new article on Wikipedia. It is hoped that the Wikipedia versions will be updated and improved by the Wikipedia community. The first example is about circular permutation in proteins.

Wikipedia citations in American law reviews

Volume 1 of the Harvard Law Review (1887–1888).

The article “A Jester’s Promenade: Citations to Wikipedia in Law Reviews , 2002–2008″ concerns the issue of citations of Wikipedia in US law reviews and the appropriateness of this practice.^[6] The article seems to be well researched, and its author, law reference/research librarian Daniel J. Baker, demonstrates familiarity with the mechanics of Wikipedia (such as the permanent links). For the period 2002–08, Baker identified 1540 law-review articles that contain at least one citation of Wikipedia – most in law reviews dealing with general and “popular” subject matter, with a significant proportion originating from authors with academic credentials.

The article notes that 2006 marked the peak of that trend, attributing it (thereby demonstrating some familiarity with Wikipedia’s history) to a delayed reaction to the Seigenthaler incident and the Essjay Controversy. (Since the article’s data analysis ends in 2008, the question of whether this trend has rebounded in recent years is left unanswered.)

The author is highly critical of Wikipedia’s reliability, arguing that a source that “anyone can edit” – and where much of the information is not verified – should not be used in works that may influence legal decisions. Thus Baker calls for stricter rules in legal publishing, in particular that Wikipedia should not be cited. In a more surprising argument, the paper suggests that if information exists on Wikipedia, it should be treated as common knowledge, and thus does not require referencing (a recommendation that follows a 2009 one – Brett Deforest Maxfield, “Ethics, politics and securities law: how unethical people are using politics to undermine the integrity of our courts and financial markets”, 35 OHIO N.U. L. REV. 243, 293 (2009)). This argument does, however, raise the question of whether no citation at all is truly better than a citation to Wikipedia; if such a recommendation were followed, it could lead to a proliferation of uncited claims in law review journals that would be assumed (without any verification) to rely on “common knowledge” as represented in the “do not cite” Wikipedia.

One in four of articles tagged as flawed, most often for verifiability issues

A paper titled “A Breakdown of Quality Flaws in Wikipedia”^[7] examines cleanup tags on the English Wikipedia (using a January 2011 dump), finding that 27.53% of articles are tagged with at least one of altogether 388 different cleanup templates. In a 2011 conference poster ^[8] (a version of which was summarized in an earlier edition of this newsletter), the authors analyzed – together with a third collaborator – a 2010 dump of the English Wikipedia for a smaller set of tags, arriving at much lower ratio: “8.52% [of articles] have been tagged to contain at least one of the 70 flaws”. Using a classification of Wikipedia articles into 24 overlapping topic areas (derived from Category:Main topic classifications), the highest ratio of tagged articles were found in the “Computers” (48.51%), “Belief” (46.33%) and “Business” (39.99%) topics; the lowest were in “Geography” (19.83%), “Agriculture” (22.57%) and “Nature” (23.93%). Of the 388 tags on the more complete list, “307 refer to an article as a whole and 81 to a particular text fragment”. As another original contribution of the paper, the authors offer an organization of the existing cleanup tags into “12 general flaw types” – the most frequent being “Verifiability” (19.46% of articles have been tagged with one of the corresponding templates), “Wiki tech” (e.g. the “orphan”, “wikify” or “uncategorized” templates; 5.47% of articles) and “General cleanup” (2.01%).

Time evolution of Wikipedia discussions

Kaltenbrunner and Laniado look at the time evolution of Wikipedia discussions, and how it correlates to editing activity, based on 9.4 million comments from the March 12, 2010 dump.^[9] Peaks in commenting and peaks in editing often co-occur (for sufficiently large peaks of 20 comments, 63% of the time) within two days. They show the articles with the longest comment peaks and most edit peaks, and the 20 slowest and 20 fastest discussions.

The authors note that a single, heavy editor can be responsible for edit peaks but not comment peaks; peaks in the discussion activity seem to indicate more widespread interest by multiple people. They find that “the fastest growing discussions are more likely to have long lasting edit peaks” and that some editing peaks are associated with event anniversaries. They use the Barack Obama article as a case study, showing peaks in comments and editing due to news events as well as to internal Wikipedia events (such as an editor poll or article protection). Current events are often edited and discussed in nearly real-time in contrast to articles about historical or scientific facts.

They use the h-index to assess the complexity of a discussion, and they chart the growth rate of the discussions. For instance, they find that the discussion pages of the three most recent US Presidents show a constant growth in complexity but that the rate of growth varies: Bill Clinton‘s talk page took 332 days to increase h-index by one, while George W. Bush‘s took only 71 days.

They envision more sophisticated algorithms showing the relative growth in edits and discussions. Their ideas for future work are intriguing – for instance, the question of how to determine article maturity and the level of consensus, based on the network dynamics. (AcaWiki summary)

APWeb2012 papers on admin networks, mitigating language bias and finding “minority information”

Several of the accepted papers of this month’s Asia-Pacific Web Conference APWeb2012 concerned Wikipedia:

• Prototype tool searches for expert admins: In the article “Exploration and Visualization of Administrator Network in Wikipedia”,^[10] four Chinese authors examine the collaboration graph of administrators on the English Wikipedia (where two of them are connected by an edge if they have edited the same article during the sampled time span from January 2010 to January 2011), and “define six features to reflect the characteristics of administrator’s work from different respects including diversity of the admin user interests, the influence & importance across the network, and longevity & activity in terms of contribution.” The authors observe that the recognition of an admin’s work by other users in the form of barnstars seems to agree with the overall rank they calculate from these quantities: “By analyzing the profiles of the top ranked fifty admin users as a test case, it has been observed that the number of barn stars received by them also follows the similar trend as we overall ranked the admin users.”To extract topics from an admin’s history and define diversity, Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is used. The authors describe a prototype software called “Administrator Exploration Prototype System”, which displays these various quantitative measures for an admin and allows ranking them. In particular, it “will automatically find the expert authors based on the editing history of each admin user”. An example screenshot shows a list of results for a “Search for “Expert Admin User” for the keywords “Music, Songs, Singers”, topped by Michig, Mike Selinker and Bearcat. Analyzing the whole network, the authors find a “decreasing trend of the clustering coefficient [which] can also be seen as a symptom of the growing centralization of the network.” Overall, they observe that “the administrator network is a healthy small world community having a small average distances and a strong centralization of the network around some hubs/stars is observed. This shows a considerable nucleus of very active administrators who seems to be omnipresent.”
• 

  

  Not what the majority of readers search for under “football”: A goalball game

  Detecting “minority information” on Wikipedia: A paper^[11] by two Japanese researchers proposes “a method of searching for minority information that is less-acknowledged and has less popularity in Wikipedia” for a given keyword. “For example, if the user inputs ‘football’ as a majority information keyword, then the system seeks articles having a sentence of “….looks like football….” or similar content of articles about soccer in Wikipedia. It extracts as candidates for minority sports those articles which have few edits and few editors. Then, it performs sports filtering and extracts minority articles from the candidates. In this case, the results are ‘Bandy’, ‘Goalball’, and ‘Cuju’.” The authors constructed a prototype system and tested it.

• Completing Wikipedia articles with information from other language versions: In an article titled “Extracting Difference Information from Multilingual Wikipedia”^[12], four Japanese researchers describe a “method for extracting information which exists in one language version [of Wikipedia], but which does not exist in another language version. Our method specifically examines the link graph of Wikipedia and structure of an article of Wikipedia. Then we extract comparison target articles of Wikipedia using our proposed degree of relevance.” As motivating example, they note that the English Wikipedia’s coverage of the game cricket is much fuller than the Japanese Wikipedia’s, but spread over separate articles beyond just the main one at cricket. The goal is a system where a (Japanese) user can enter a keyword and will receive the “Japanese article with sections of English articles that do not appear in the Japanese article”.

Briefly

• 

  

  The proportion of “good faith” and “golden” editors among new contributors over time has remained constant.^[13]

  Unchanged quality of new user contributions over time. GroupLens PhD candidate Aaron Halfaker (who also collaborates with the Wikimedia Foundation as a contractor research analyst) shared some preliminary results on the quality of new user contributions,^[13] part of a larger study currently submitted for publication. The results, based on an analysis of revert rates in the English Wikipedia combined with blind assessment of a new editor contribution history, indicate that new editors have produced the same level of quality in their first contributions since 2006. Despite the fact that “the majority of new editors are not out to obviously harm the encyclopedia (~80 percent), and many of them are leaving valuable contributions to the project in their first editing session (~40 percent)”, today’s user experience for a first-time editor is much more hostile than it used to be, as “the rate of rejection of all good-faith new editors’ first contributions has been rising steadily, and, accordingly, retention rates have fallen. These results challenge the hypothesis that today’s newbies produce much lower quality contributions than in earlier years.

• Modeling Wikipedia’s community formation processes. An important factor behind the success of Wikipedia is its own internal culture. Like any social group, a community of peer production has its own rules, norms, and customs. Unlike traditional social groups — a recently-defended doctoral dissertation in computer science argues — the process of formation of these traits involves, and often determines, how contents are being produced. The dissertation, defended by former Summer of Research fellow and Wikimedia Foundation contractor analyst Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia,^[14] uses computer simulation to study how the community of Wikipedia may have formed its specific cultural traits and distinctive sociological features. Starting from the distribution of user account lifespan in five of the largest Wikipedia communities (English, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese) this work shows how the statistical patterns of the data can be reproduced by a simple model of cultural formation based on principles taken from self-categorization theory and social judgment theory.
  

  

  Distribution of AFT ratings for articles in different project quality assessment categories.^[15]

  The research finds that an important factor to determine whether a community will be able to sustain itself and thrive is the degree of openness of individual users towards differing points of view, which may be critical in the early stages of user participation, when a newcomer first enters in contact with the body of social norms that the community has devised. The thesis concludes that simulation techniques, when supplemented with empirical methods and quantitative calibration, may become an important tool for conducting sociological studies.

• Matching reader feedback via the Article Feedback Tool to editor peer review: An upcoming presentation at Wikimania 2012^[15] compares data gathered from the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) version 4 on the English Wikipedia over summer 2011 to ratings assigned by various peer review processes, e.g. good and featured articles. As might be expected, articles at any point in the peer review process tend to be rated more highly by reviewers, but this distinction is highly sensitive to the article length. Once length is accounted for (using a variety of methods), the differences between demoted or not promoted articles and unrated articles disappears. The research also offers a broad snapshot of the AFT dataset as well as some suggestions for future AFT design. Future revisions of the draft as well as the presentation will approach the dynamic relationship between peer reviewed status and reader feedback, exploiting entry and exit into various categories for identification.
• Referencing of Wikipedia in academic works is continuing unabated: An article in the “Research Trends” newsletter published by the bibliographical database Scopus, titled “The influence of free encyclopedias on science”^[16] charts the number of papers in Scopus that are either about Wikipedia or cite it. Considering that Wikipedia was only founded in 2001 (i.e. that these numbers have necessarily started from zero right before the observed timespan), the author’s astonishment at the compound annual growth rates for both kinds of papers from 2002 to 2011 (which she calls “staggering” and “unbelievable”, respectively) is somewhat surprising, but the article also gives the growth rates for the five years from 2007 to 2011 (ca. 19% per year for Wikipedia as a subject, ca. 31% per year for Wikipedia as a reference). Interestingly, Scholarpedia is showing itself to be the second most popular online encyclopedia to be cited, if lagging significantly behind Wikipedia (5%).
• Using Wikipedia to drive traffic to library collections: In an article titled “Wikipedia Lover, Not a Hater: Harnessing Wikipedia to Increase the Discoverability of Library Resources”^[17] in the Journal of Web Librarianship, two librarians from the University of Houston Libraries and a former intern report how they had successfully used Wikipedia to drive traffic to the collection of the institution’s digital services department (UHDS), proceeding from merely inserting links into articles to uploading images from the collection to Commons (which still contain such link on the file description pages): “Originally, UHDS intended to contribute exclusively to the External Links section of existing Wikipedia articles. [However, over time] UHDS staff found it was much more effective to match digital items with Wikipedia articles and to share those items in Wikimedia Commons (WMC) rather than (or in addition to) the External Links section of the articles.” While few statistics are given, the authors emphasize the effectiveness of their actions, observed already for the very first attempts: “Within hours of posting external links to existing Wikipedia articles, the digital library received hits to those collections at a surprisingly high rate.” As an example of an article enriched with such images, the entry 1915 Galveston hurricane is named. Among the successful additions to external links section is the article about former US president George H. W. Bush, where the student intern linked a photograph showing Bush shaking hands with former University of Houston chancellor Philip G. Hoffman (as already noted in the Signpost’s April 2011 coverage after the authors had presented their project at the annual meeting of the Association of College and Research Libraries: “Experts and GLAMs – contributing content or ‘just’ links to Wikipedia?“). Much of the paper describes basic technicalities of Wikipedia: The uploading of image, the use of contributions lists, talk pages and watchlists. While Wikipedia’s external links guidelines are not cited in the paper, it notes that “contributing effectively to Wikipedia and WMC entailed a steep learning curve in order to align contributions with the granular and well-enforced Wikipedia guidelines for use”, and among them notices policies against advertising. As one unresolved problem for such institutional usage of Wikipedia and Commons, the paper describes the prohibition “to share an editor username with other editors, and [that] organizational usernames are considered a violation of Wikipedia guidelines forbidding the promotion of organizations. When the pilot project transitioned into a permanent departmental program, UHDS staff struggled to devise a way that others on staff could continue to monitor previous edits and uploads and create new ones”, e.g. due to the lack of shared watchlists.
• Weekly and daily activity patterns discern Wikipedia from commercial sites: Two Finnish researchers analyzed^[18] the distribution of timestamps in the recent changes RSS feed from four different language versions (Arabic, Finnish, Korean, and Swedish – Arabic having been chosen because its speakers are spread over “a very wide range of timezones”, in contrast to the other three), and RSS new feeds from BBC World News “and the leading Finnish daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat“. As the main difference between the activity on those two sites (which the authors describe as “commercial news sites”) and on the Wikipedias, it was found that Wikipedia edits “distribute fairly equally over all days in all cases. The drop of activity on weekends that occurred with the commercial news services is not visible in the Wikipedias, quite the opposite, with Sundays typically seeing the highest average level of activity. Only the Arabic version has a slightly lower activity rate in Sundays, however, we should remember the fact that in Arabic countries the weekend falls on Friday-Saturday or in some countries on Thursday-Friday”. The diurnal patterns are found to be “more spread out” on Wikipedia, where “the activity levels follow natural diurnal rhythms. Interestingly, a great number of changes are made during working hours, which leads us to 2 different, but not mutually exclusive, conjectures about the people who edit Wikipedia. Either, the editors are people with “free” time during the day, e.g., students, or people actually edit Wikipedia during the working hours at work. Our methodology is not able to answer this question”.
  Furthermore, the authors offer a rather far-reaching but (if proven) significant conjecture based on their date: “Cultural and geographical differences in the Wikipedias we studied seemed to have very little effect on the level of activity. This leads us to speculate that the ‘trait’ of editing Wikipedia is something to which individuals are drawn, not something specific to certain cultures.”
  Last year, papers by two other teams (covered in the September issue of this newsletter: Wikipedians’ weekends in international comparison“, but missing from the “Related work” section of the present paper) had similarly examined daily and weekly patterns on Wikipedia, coming to other results – in particular, different language Wikipedias showed different weekly patterns.
• Simple English Wikipedia is only partially simpler/controversy reduces complexity: “A practical approach to language complexity: a Wikipedia case study”^[19] analyzed samples of articles from the English Wikipedia and the Simple English Wikipedia from the end of 2010 with respect to the Gunning fog index as well as other measures for language complexity. Comparing them with other corpora including Charles Dickens‘ books, they observe that “Remarkably, the fog index of Simple English Wikipedia is higher than that of Dickens, whose writing style is sophisticated but doesn’t rely on the use of longer latinate words which are hard to avoid in an encyclopedia. The British National Corpus, which is a reasonable approximation to what we would want to think of as ‘English in general’ is a third of the way between Simple and Main, demonstrating the accomplishments of Simple editors, who pushed Simple half as much below average complexity as the encyclopedia genre pushes Main above it.” However, the number of distinct tokens used (a measure for vocabulary richness) is almost the same on the English and Simple Wikipedia (the samples were chosen to be of the same size). Still “detailed analysis of longer units (n-grams rather than words alone) shows that the language of Simple is indeed less complex”. In another finding, the authors “investigate the relation between conflict and language complexity by analysing the content of the talk pages associated to controversial and peacefully developing articles, concluding that controversy has the effect of reducing language complexity.”
• Contributions from South America. “Mapping Wikipedia edits from South America”,^[20] the latest from a series of studies and visualizations by Oxford Internet Institute researcher Mark Graham and his team, reports that almost half of all edits to Wikipedia from South America come from Brazil, which is unsurprising considering that the largest population of Internet users in South America lives in Brazil. More interestingly, Chile –- a country with only 5-6% of the continent’s Internet population — contributes more than 12% of edits to Wikipedia.
• Deaths generate edit bursts: A student paper titled “Death and Change Tracking : Wikipedia Edit Bursts”^[21] examines the editing activity in nine articles about celebrity actors on the English Wikipedia after they died.
• Searching by example: This month’s WWW 2012 conference in Lyon, France saw a demo titled “SWiPE: Searching Wikipedia by Example”^[22], showcasing a tool where the user can search for articles similar to a given one by modifying entries in that article’s infobox, and also ask questions in natural language.
• Wikipedia in the eyes of PR professionals. A study published in the journal of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA)^[23] surveyed public relations and communications professionals about their perception of Wikipedia contribution and conflict of interest. The online survey was pilot-tested with members of the Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement (many of whom have recently pushed for Wikipedia to let PR professionals edit articles about their clients to a greater extent) and produced 1,284 usable responses after being disseminated via various outlets. The results indicate that “of the 35% who had engaged with Wikipedia, most did so by making edits directly on the Wikipedia articles of their companies or clients”. The response time to issues reported on talk pages was found to be one of the important barriers in the interaction between Wikipedia community members and PR professionals. The author observes that “when the wait becomes too long, the content is defamatory, or a dispute with a Wikipedian needs to be elevated, there are resources to help. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of the respondents in this study had used them and many had never heard of these resources”. As another argument against the “bright line” rule advocated by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales (which says that PR professionals should not edit Wikipedia articles they are involved in), a separate result of the paper has been offered, which has met with heavy criticism by Wikimedians regarding statistical biases and other issues (see e.g. last week’s Signpost coverage: “Spin doctors spin Jimmy’s ‘bright line’“): 32% of the respondents said that “there are currently factual errors on their company or client’s Wikipedia articles”, corresponding to 41% of those respondents who said that such articles existed, or 60% of those respondents who said that such articles existed but did not reply “don’t know” to that question. The press releases of the author’s college and of PRSA interpreted the result as “Sixty percent of Wikipedia articles about companies contain factual errors”, although the latter was updated after the criticism “to clarify the survey findings described in this press release and help prevent any misinterpretation of the data that this release may have caused”.
• Wikipedia coverage of marketing terms found accurate: The proceedings of the recent “International Collegiate Conference Faculty” of the American Marketing Association (AMA) offer a more positive view on Wikipedia from PR professionals: “Is Wikipedia A Reliable Tool for Marketing Educators and Students? A Surprising Heck Yes!”.^[24] The paper chose a more systematic way to examine the quality of Wikipedia articles than the PRSA study and focused on AMA’s area of expertise, starting out from a “random sample of marketing glossary terms [that] were collected from 3 marketing management textbooks and 4 marketing principles textbooks”, and rating corresponding Wikipedia entries from 1 to 3 according to a standard procedure for content analysis: “Each textbook definition was compared to the corresponding Wikipedia definition and rated using a 3-point Likert scale where 1=Correct Definition, 2=Correct but difficult to find the term or the definition was not easy to decipher, or 3=Incorrect definition when compared to the textbook term.”. Of 459 items in the eventual sample only five were rated 3, and “the average score across all textbooks was a 1.18 demonstrating Wikipedia is an accurate source of marketing content.”
• Wikipedia’s osteosarcoma coverage assessed: An abstract published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery^[25] finds “that the quality of osteosarcoma-related information found in English Wikipedia is good but inferior to the patient information provided by the National Cancer Institute”. The abstract refers to a study and results that appear to be identical to the one reported in a 2010 viewpoint article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) (Signpost coverage).
• Wikipedia assignments for Finnish school students: A paper by three Finnish authors^[26] describes course assignments to upper secondary school students (age 16–18) involving “writing articles for Wikipedia (a public wiki) and for the school’s own wiki”, in subject areas including biology, geography and Finnish history. In particular the paper reports that “a carefully planned library [visit] can help to activate students to use printed materials in their source-based writing assignments. [And that our] findings corroborate the generally held view that students tend to copy-paste and plagiarise, especially when exploiting Web sources.”
• Wikipedia as a thermodynamic system – becoming more efficient over time: A paper titled “Thermodynamic Principles in Social Collaborations”^[27] (presented at this month’s Collective Intelligence 2012 conference) applies principles and concepts from Statistical mechanics to the collaboration on (the English) Wikipedia. The analogy is based on interpreting the edit count of a user as the energy level of a particle, positing a “logarithmic energy model” for edits which assumes a “decreasing effort required for a given user to make additional edits in a relatively short period of time (e.g., one month) or to a particular page”. (According to the authors this contrasts with two other theories which also explain the observed power law distribution of edit counts: The “Wikipedia editors are ‘born’” notion, which assumes that different users need to expend different amounts of energy on the same kind of edits due to “an extreme heterogeneity of preference among the potential user population”, and the “Wikipedia editors are ‘made’” notion, which sees positive or negative feedback from other users as the defining influence.) Using the analogy, the authors define the entropy, free energy, temperature, entropy efficiency and entropy reduction of an editing community and their edits during a particular timespan. They then calculate the latter two for each month in the English Wikipedia’s history from January 2002 to December 2009. They conclude that “Wikipedia has become more efficient in terms of entropy efficiency, and more ordered according to entropy reduction. The increasing power-law coefficient causes the shift of the contributions from elites to crowd. The saturation of free energy reduction ratio may cause the saturation of the active editors.” The next section finds that “entropy efficiency is correlated with the quality of the social collaboration”, and one figure is interpreted as implying “that the nature of Wikipedia is a true media of the masses, where pages produced by crowd wisdom will have higher quality and thus more readership compared to that produced by a few elites.”
• Too many docs don’t spoil the broth: Another paper^[28] presented at the Collective Intelligence 2012 conference similarly found “that the number of contributors has a curvilinear relationship to information quality, more contributors improving quality but only up to a certain point” – based on an examination of 16,068 articles in the realm of the WikiProject Medicine.
• The most influential biographies vary depending on the language/culture: Barcelona Media Foundation studied “the most influential characters” in the 15 largest language Wikipedias^[29], by asking which biographies are the most linked to (“central”) from other Wikipedia biography articles. Political and artistic biographies are the most central, and the particular biographies depend on the language. They found, for instance, that Shakespeare’s biography is among the most important for Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Dutch, but not for English. And they estimated the Jaccard similarity coefficient (similarity) between the social networks in different language editions: most similarity can be explained by language-family and geographical or historical ties. One interesting finding is that Dutch “seems to serve as a bridge between different language and cultural groups”. Some social connections are very common,and they produce a graph of the connections found in at least 13 of the language editions. The authors note that articles on people from non-Anglo-Saxon cultures may be missing if they are not known internationally, since the initial list of notable people is extracted from DBPedia. A blog post on Technology Review highlighted the fact that in the paper’s table of most connected biographies (listing the top 5 from 15 language versions), among the 75 entries “only three are women: Queen Elizabeth II, Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher” , which it interprets as one of “The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap“. (Summary at AcaWiki)

Biographical social network of the connections between persons present in at least 13 of the 15 largest language Wikipedias, as described in Aragón et al.^[29]

References

WikiCup image

Wikipedia editors are hardworking volunteers who have created the most extraordinary knowledge resource in history. Many contributors have made tens of thousands of edits. Some have made hundreds of thousands. But sometimes, even the most seasoned editor could do with a bit of motivation.

The WikiCup is one such source of motivation, a friendly editing competition developed by the volunteer community with the goal to improve content and make editing more fun.

The Cup runs annually from January to October, with five rounds of elimination. Points are awarded each round for contributing different types of content, including Featured Articles (FAs), Good Articles (GAs), Did You Know’s (DYKs) and Featured Lists, among other article quality categories. Administration of the event is handled by judges, who also resolve disputes and review talk page discussions. This year’s judges are Josh Milburn (User:J Milburn) and Eddie Erhart (User:The ed17), both of whom started judging in 2009.

While a lot of WikiCup contestants are already prolific editors, Erhart believes the competition is still very effective in driving content creation. “[I enjoy] seeing these editors go out and add boatloads of content to the encyclopedia,” he said. “Many would have been doing this anyway, but the Cup provides an incentive for them to do more. I think the idea of a competition is a strong motivating factor to go out and improve content.”

In this year’s WikiCup, Stefano Magliocco (User:Grapple X) led the first two rounds mostly thanks to his GAs about The X-Files and Millenium television series. He says he initially entered the Cup as a means to keep himself motivated. “I had a lot of stuff planned, but I usually find myself losing focus on things over time,” said Magliocco. “I’ve been doing a lot of work for The X-Files WikiProject, and I had planned out a lot of long-term projects. The Cup seemed like a good means of lighting a fire under my arse to get these done.”

Since Magliocco has entered the Cup, he has noticed an increase in not only the quantity, but also the quality of his contributions. “I’ve generally had a strong burst of activity at the start of each round, where my normal work rate doubles or triples,” he said. “From there, it’s really just a case of the Cup motivating me to edit better, rather than more.”

Magliocco feels that encouraging the creation of GAs is one of the main ways the WikiCup accomplishes its stated mission of improving content on Wikipedia. “I think the level of investment versus reward given for the promotion of GAs has definitely helped the project as a whole,” said Magliocco, who likes to keep track of the ratio of GAs to total articles. “At the minute, about 1 in 275 articles are of GA status, whereas it was 1 in 280 at the start of the Cup.”

Last year’s WikiCup winner, Andrew Hink (User:Hurricanehink), agreed that increasing the number of GAs is an important step in improving the quality of Wikipedia. “I think [having 500,000 GAs] is very much in the realm of possibility in the next 10 years,” he said. “As long as it’s all well-cited, all well-written, that’s a good goal to have, and it’s very doable.”

WikiCup 2011 winner Andrew Hink, playing piano

In addition to improving the quality of content on Wikipedia, the WikiCup can also help foster a sense of community between editors who might not otherwise collaborate.

“I usually stay rather insular inside the Hurricane Project,” said Hink, “so it was good to meet people outside the Project. It sometimes seems like I’m sort of in the minority — a lot of other people in Wikipedia are reviewers, administrators, vandalism fighters — it was good to see how many writers there are out there.”

Hink felt that projects like the WikiCup create a positive feedback loop for editors. “It seems like anytime someone makes a new article, someone else is like, ‘Oh yeah, I feel like writing again!’” said Hink. “When you see that people are editing, are working, are making good articles, it’s really encouraging. It’s a self-sustaining cycle.”

Despite these benefits, the WikiCup also receives its share of criticism, with some critics even calling for the Cup to be shut down. According to Erhart, the WikiCup has encountered problems with the featured article candidate (FAC) review process and the Did You Know (DYK) process. “People at FAC believed that editors motivated by the Cup were disregarding the instructions and nominating unprepared articles, while DYK was being flooded by large amounts of articles nominated by Cup participants,” said Erhart. “I have sympathy for both sides, but I think that the positive effects of the Cup outweigh both.”

According to Milburn, the Cup has evolved considerably since it was founded in 2007 (by User:Finns). It originally started as a “‘who can get the most edits’ challenge,” said Milburn, but it gradually shifted toward a greater focus on audited content. This year, the scoring system was adjusted to incentivize working on articles that feature on non-English Wikipedias, partially in response to the concern that the WikiCup encouraged participants to work on trivial articles rather than highly important ones. Milburn anticipates that in the future, there may be changes to the scoring system which will further motivate collaboration, encourage contribution to review processes, and offer bonus points for countering systemic bias.

Both Erhart and Milburn have seen the project grow considerably since they started, with 113 contestants in 2012 versus only 60 in 2009, their first year judging. Milburn is pleased that the Cup has been able to maintain such high levels of participation, since, he said, many of the more “social” projects on Wikipedia have a tendency to die down.

“The WikiCup alone cannot solve any of Wikipedia’s recurring problems, [like making] Wikipedia respected in academia,” said Milburn. “It can make contributing to the project a little more rewarding and enjoyable, and it can offer a reason to tick something off your to-do list today, rather than ‘at some point soon.’ As a project written by volunteers, this is, surely, a good thing.”

Story and reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern