On June 15, 2013, Swedish Wikipedia hit one million articles, joining the club of English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias. The article that broke the barrier was the butterfly species Erysichton elaborata. There is, however, one fact that separates this million article milestone from almost all others.

The one milionth article was not manually created by a human, but written by a piece of software (a “bot”). The bot, in this case, Lsjbot, collects data from different sources, and then compiles the information into a format that fits Wikipedia. Lsjbot has to date created about 454,000 articles, almost half of the articles on Swedish Wikipedia.

Lsj, Sverker Johansson, who runs Lsjbot

Bot-created articles have led to some debate, both before Lsjbot started its run, and currently. First, there was a lengthy discussion on Swedish Wikipedia after the initial proposal by Lsjbot’s operator, science teacher Sverker Johansson. The Swedish Wikipedia community was wary, having learned the lessons from previous conflicts about article-creating bots, including rambot in 2002. But there was also curiosity, so a series of test runs was made to make sure that the articles were acceptable.

After review, the Swedish Wikipedia editor community said okay. Lsjbot started by creating articles about different species of animals and plants – articles that are largely uncontroversial and that can have a similar format without feeling mechanical.

Subsequent criticism has come from prolific article writer Achim Raschka on German Wikipedia’s Kurier. Here the main complaint was that article is short: only 4 sentences long. This is a valid complaint. Even if longer articles are not always better, they tend to contain more information.

Therein lies the rub. The bots use as many datasets as their operators can find, but many sources are behind paywalls or are incomplete across entire taxon (covering only selected species). The upside of this criticism is that each statement in articles created by bots is supported by references, something that doesn’t happen in many other articles. This means that more references are added to Wikipedia by bots than by humans. This is of course not in itself a sign of quality, but it is a start for human contributors to search for more information. As with any article in Wikipedia, the readers can also help make bot-created articles better.

Is this the future for Wikipedia, to let software create articles? With Wikidata, it is certainly becoming easier to use software to create articles, something that can benefit the smaller Wikipedias. But we still need more humans to help make the determination of which sources are high quality, what information is presented correctly and what qualifies as clear writing.

So far, bots have shown that they are much quicker to create articles. In that respect, I, for one, bow to our robot overlords.

Lennart Guldbransson, Swedish Wikipedia editor

The Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) on the English Wikipedia is a group of editors that rules on disputes between editors related to user conduct as a matter of last resort, and when those disagreements cannot be resolved otherwise. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales created the ArbCom in December 2003, when the number of disputes that he was asked to handle grew too cumbersome. Various researchers and academics have analyzed the committee as a conflict resolution body, and it has been covered in mainstream news outlets, most notably the New York Times and The Colbert Report. In total, the English Wikipedia ArbCom has decided 371 cases since it was founded, serving to provide action and guidance on some of the more intractable issues within the Wikimedia community.

We wanted to give members of the committee the opportunity to reflect on their experiences since joining and to share their perspective about the future of Wikipedia. Four Arbitrators participated in an email interview. Their service terms run the gamut on experience with the Committee.

Newyorkbrad has edited English Wikipedia regularly since 2006 and is one of the longest serving members of the ArbCom, starting in January 2008 (and clerking with the committee in 2007). Outside of Wikipedia, he is a practicing attorney and has contributed content on the English Wikipedia, primarily on subjects related to law.

Worm That Turned (WTT) is among the newest members of ArbCom, elected at the end of 2012 and seated in January 2013. He created his account on English Wikipedia in 2008 and has been one of the most active contributors to the English Wikipedia’s “adoption” program, whereby experienced editors mentor newcomers and help them acclimate. Outside of Wikipedia, he works in the Information Technology field.

Risker has edited English Wikipedia since 2005 and first ran for ArbCom in 2008. She was later appointed to the committee in January 2009 and is now serving through her second two-year term. Risker is a list administrator for all ArbCom-related lists, is usually involved in appointment processes for committees and has managed orientation of new arbitrators for several years. Outside of arbitration work, Risker enjoys copy-editing and has worked on a wide variety of articles.

Carcharoth has edited English Wikipedia since January 2005 (over eight years) and was appointed to the ArbCom for the first time following the December 2008 ArbCom elections. He was an arbitrator for two years (2009 and 2010), but didn’t stand for re-election at the end of that two-year term. After spending two years focused more on editing, he again stood in the December 2012 election and was elected to another two-year term.

Read the edited interview below, or read the complete interview transcripts on Metawiki here.

Philippe Beaudette
Director, Community Advocacy, Wikimedia Foundation

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This post is available in 2 languages:

На русском языке  • English

English

Muscovite Aliona Bogdanova’s path to editing Wikipedia came circuitously through her vegetarian diet, a diet, she said, that was at odds with the way most Russians view nutrition.

“When I was a child, I found out that where meat comes from. I decided that it’s not fair to kill animals to get meat,” she said. Her decision was not viewed favorably. “My family, they wouldn’t let me not eat meat because in Russia, people generally believe that it’s impossible not to eat meat and if you stop eating meat, you die!”

Aliona Bogdonova and her son

When she was 20, Bogdanova researched online how to create a proper vegetarian diet and became a vegetarian. She has, however, met resistance along the way, especially when she started her family.

“When I got pregnant, lots of people asked me questions, how can you possibly carry a child and not eat meat because you’re pregnant and you must eat meat?” said Bogdanova. “So I had a breastfeeding consultant who advised me to eat a little piece of meat at least once a week. I didn’t do it because I would, you know, poison myself.”

Bogdanova said she was able to find useful information in Russian about vegetarianism and animal rights on sites like Wikipedia, but, “there’s in general very little information about breastfeeding in Russia, and that has to do with the Soviet school stopping with how people have thought about this.”

Bogdanova has taken passionately to sharing what she’s learned about health and parenting with people seeking information on Russian Wikipedia.

“I wrote several articles about food, about vegetarianism. I edited some articles about parenting, natural parenting,” she said. “But I remember, my first big article is about marzipan because I’m a fan of marzipan. There was only a few words about it and maybe no article at all, and I just knew what I should write.”

To fill the time while at home during her pregnancy, Bogdanova took up soap making as a hobby. Before long it turned into a business. “When you make soap, eventually you end up making too much and eventually comes a point where…you can’t possibly use so much and you can’t find enough friends who you could give it as a gift,” she said. “I use Wikipedia as a research tool (it has so many useful links) and I share things that I learn from my business on Wikipedia, so that everyone can learn.”

Bogdanova is also translating a book about homeschooling, the Teenage Liberation Handbook, into Russian. It’s her first serious translation effort.

Natural curiosity and research drew her to Wikipedia years ago and she credits her upbringing with keeping her in the community of contributors.

“I can’t, you know, pass by something that I can improve,” she said. “Because I grew up in the family of teachers, I was raised on the idea that talking like an encyclopedia is an important scholarly work, and so when I wrote in Wikipedia, I had the sense that I had contributed to this.”

She added, “Once in a while, I find out that somebody has come across this article that I have created about homeschooling, for example, and then I am really proud.”

Profile by Donna Peterson, Communications Volunteer, Wikimedia Foundation

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Pete Forsyth, an early designer of the Wikipedia Education Program, is now teaching a free online course on Wikipedia and Open Educational Resources, along with Wikipedian and education researcher Sara Frank Bristow. The six-week course, “Writing Wikipedia Articles,” recently concluded its first run, and will be offered again starting 14 May (Americas)/15 May (Asia/Australia). You can enroll here.

The course was born of Communicate OER, a project that seeks to activate the Open Educational Resources community to improve and update Wikipedia articles relevant to its field. Accordingly, as students learn about the technical and social aspects of Wikipiedia, they are encouraged to improve such articles as open educational resources, open content, MOOC, and free license. Students successfully completing the course earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge, which is based on English Wikipedia’s “service awards” and Peer to Peer University’s badges. The course is offered through the Peer to Peer University’s recently launched School of Open.

“This course has allowed us to bring together several communities that are passionate about the same things, but not always closely connected,” Forsyth said. “The OER community brings the values and practices that brought Wikipedia into existence to formal and informal learning around the world. The School of Open provides the perfect environment for a course like ours, allowing us to work alongside colleagues from free culture organizations like Creative Commons and Mozilla.”

Students are welcome to enroll regardless of their background; while some familiarity with wikis or OER can be helpful, it is not required.

“The WikiSOO course is exactly the kind of work serious Wikipedians need to be doing not only to make their encyclopedia better, but to make their community a more sane place to collaborate,” said Christine, a student who earned the WikiSOO Burba Badge in the course’s first run. “This course provides a solid primer of the skills needed to navigate the syntax, discourse, and guidelines you will encounter if you want to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia’s audacious mission.”

Enrollment in the course’s second run is open through next week. (The first class will be held Tuesday/Wednesday.) See the course’s page on the School of Open for more information, or to join the 60 students who have already enrolled!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

Last week the New York Times published an Op-Ed from author Amanda Filipacchi headlined Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists, in which she criticized Wikipedia for moving some authors from the “American novelists” category into a sub-category called “American women novelists.” Because there is no subcategory for “American male novelists,” Filipacchi saw the change as reflecting a sexist double standard, in which ‘male’ is positioned as the ungendered norm, with ‘female’ as a variant.

I completely understand why Filipacchi was outraged. She saw herself, and Harper Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Judy Blume, Louisa May Alcott, Mary Higgins Clark, and many others, seemingly downgraded in the public record and relegated to a subcategory that she assumed would get less readership than the main one. She saw this as a loss for American women novelists who might otherwise be visible when people went to Wikipedia looking for ideas about who to hire, to honor, or to read.

In the days following, other publications picked up the story, and Filipacchi wrote two followup pieces — one describing edits made to her own biography on Wikipedia following her first op-ed, and another rebutting media stories that had positioned the original categorization changes as the work of a lone editor.

For me–as a feminist Wikipedian–reading the coverage has been extremely interesting. I agree with many of the criticisms that have been raised (as I think many Wikipedians do), and yet there are important points that I think have been missing from the media discussions so far.

In Wikipedia, like any large-scale human endeavor, practice often falls short of intent.

Individuals make mistakes, but that doesn’t and shouldn’t call into question the usefulness or motivations of the endeavor as a whole. Since 2011, Wikipedia has officially discouraged the creation of gender-specific subcategories, except when gender is relevant to the category topic. (One of the authors of the guideline specifically noted that it is clear that any situation in which women get a gendered subcategory while men are left in the ungendered parent category is unacceptable.) In other words, the very situation Filipacchi decries in her op-ed has been extensively discussed and explicitly discouraged on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a continual work-in-progress. It’s never done.

In her original op-ed, Filipacchi seems to assume that Wikipedians are planning to move all the women out of the American Novelists category, leaving all the men. But that’s not the case. There’s a continuous effort on Wikipedia to refine and revise categories with large populations, and moving out the women from American Novelists would surely have been followed by moving out the satirical novelists, or the New York novelists, or the Young Adult novelists. I’d argue it’s still an inappropriate thing to do, because women are 50 percent of the population, not a variant to the male norm. Nevertheless the move needs to be understood not as an attack on women, but rather, in the context of continuous efforts to refine and revise all categories.

Wikipedia is a reflection of the society that produces it.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and as such it reflects the cultural biases and attitudes of the general society. It’s important to say that the people who write Wikipedia are a far larger and vastly more diverse group than the staff of any newsroom or library or archive, past or present. That’s why Wikipedia is bigger, more comprehensive, up-to-date and nuanced, compared with any other reference work. But with fewer than one in five contributors being female, gender is definitely Wikipedia’s weak spot, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it would fall victim to the same gender-related errors and biases as the society that produces it.

Are there misogynists on Wikipedia? Given that anyone with internet access can edit it, and that there are roughly 80,000 active editors (those who make at least 5 edits per month on Wikimedia projects), it would be absurd to claim that Wikipedia is free of misogyny. Are there well-intentioned people on Wikipedia accidentally behaving in ways that perpetuate sexism? Of course. It would be far more surprising if Wikipedia were somehow free of sexism, rather than the reverse.

Which brings me to my final point.

It’s not always the case, but in this instance the system worked. Filipacchi saw something on Wikipedia that she thought was wrong. She drew attention to it. Now it’s being discussed and fixed. That’s how Wikipedia works.

The answer to bad speech is more speech. Many eyes make all bugs shallow. If you see something on Wikipedia that irks you, fix it. If you can’t do it yourself, the next best thing is to do what Filipacchi did — talk about it, and try to persuade other people there’s a problem. Wikipedia belongs to its readers, and it’s up to all of us to make it as good as it possibly can be.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavor: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

comScore traffic data to Wikimedia sites.

We’re still a long way from realizing that vision, but we’ve recently surpassed an important milestone: as of March 2013, the combined sites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation reached more than 500 million monthly unique visitors, according to the latest comScore Media Metrix data. Our traffic increased to 517 million in March, five percent higher than our previous record: 492 million in May 2012.

While more people are coming to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites, they are also staying longer and reading more. Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views (data). We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.

To reach the entire planet, we will need to not only continue to expand our mobile offerings, but also eliminate barriers to access. With Wikipedia Zero, we’re partnering with mobile providers in the developing world to reduce or eliminate data fees for accessing Wikipedia on a mobile phone. In March, we announced the fifth major Wikipedia Zero partnership, which means that the program will be available to 410 million mobile users around the world.

For those who don’t have an Internet connection at all, Wikimedia movement contributors are enabling offline access to Wikipedia, such as the work by Kenyan volunteers who travel to rural schools and install copies of the encyclopedia on computers there. And now, there’s also an open source application for Android phones and tablets that makes it easy to download and read offline copies of Wikimedia content.

The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever — but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

This post is available in 2 languages:

Italiano  • English

This is a guest post from Maurizio Codogno (Wikimedia Italia).

In English:

Last weekend, Italy held its general elections. It is not important to state who won, after all, Wikipedia is nonpartisan. However, what I do want to talk about holds a certain importance, and it is closely related to Wikipedia. A few days before the elections, Oscar Giannino—a journalist and economist at the head of the list Fare per fermare il declino (“To act to stop the decline”)—resigned as the leader of the movement after it was discovered that the master’s degree in economics he had claimed to have achieved from the prestigious Chicago Booth university was nonexistent. Doubts over Giannino’s master’s degree had been discussed before, but what caused the story to explode was, in all probability, a post written by Wikipedians Jaqen and Tooby. The post made the rounds of social networking sites and contributed to the first public disavowal of Giannino by the co-founder of the movement, Luigi Zingales, ultimately leading to Giannino’s resignation. I recently interviewed the two authors about their scoop.

 

When did you start writing on Wikipedia? Are you also involved in other WMF projects?

Jaqen: I have been an editor on Italian Wikipedia since 2006 and a sysop since 2007. I recently became a sysop on Wikimedia Commons as well.

Tooby: I discovered Wikipedia in 2005, and I became a member of the community almost immediately. My first edit is dated 24 April 2005. I have also been very active on Italian Wikinews, where I still act as an administrator and bureaucrat.

 

Why did you start working on the Wikipedia article about Giannino?

Jaqen: I think I added it to my enormous watchlist after listening to his radio program.

Tooby: I don’t remember if I ever edited the article: I just followed the discussion.

 

Can you describe how you searched for your sources?

Jaqen: When the master’s degree of Giannino was first questioned in 2011, I found sources that I considered reliable, and they confirmed that Giannino had indeed received it from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. One of the sources was the website of the Bruno Leoni Institute. Then a Wikipedia user said that he had written to Chicago Booth, and they could not find Giannino in their database. So I wrote to the school too. I got the same answer, but they also asked when did Giannino had received his master? That made me think that they had an unreliable database. So when a user removed the information I did not oppose, even if there was no published source against it. In 2013, Oscar Giannino came under attention as the leader of the “Act to Stop the Decline” list. Eventually, an anonymous Wikipedia user published an email from the Bruno Leoni Institute admitting that they were wrong, Giannino did not have a master’s degree in economics. I wrote them an email and they confirmed it. They eventually changed the information in his online biography.

Tooby: I limited myself to “professional” and organizational support: I have been a political and economic blogger for five years, and I have conducted other investigations as an amateur, though not with so much media coverage. However, I feel that I have played an especially moral role in this saga. Both of us appreciated the movement led by Giannino, but Jaqen was hesitant, fearing what eventually actually happened. But we are long-time users of Wikipedia, and we know that even if we do not like them, the facts are the facts, and the reader has the right for them to be presented in an objective, neutral way. Also, thanks to the experience gathered with Wikipedia, hesitations quickly disappeared and we decided to publish all of the material as soon as it was ready and supported by the appropriate sources.

 

Did you expect such a reaction to your discovery?

Jaqen: Has there been? :) It was not our discovery that led to the reaction, but rather the fact that Luigi Zingales publicly denounced Giannino and left the party. What did provoke some reaction, however, was the fact that questions over Giannino’s master’s degree were on the Wikipedia talk page since 2011.

Tooby: I expected a good response, but not this much! Even if we cannot be certain, I believe that our article helped to precipitate the events. We know that there was another journalist who was trying to verify the existence of Mr. Giannino’s master’s degree, and around February 14 it seems that Luigi Zingales had some knowledge of that. However we were able to anticipate all with our reconstruction: we published the article on the morning of 18 February, and it was shared very well before the abandonment of Zingales, announced in the early afternoon. In a way, I feel that we popped the cork.

 

How do you think Wikipedia came out from this story? I’ve heard some people say, “Yes, Giannino made a mistake, but the fault was really of Wikipedia who inserted the false news in the first place.”

Jaqen: According to an article someone tried to say this at first, but it was clear to everyone that this was not true. Wikipedia was just reporting what sources were saying.

Tooby: I believe that Wikipedia will come out much stronger than before. Many Italian observers have recognized the work of Wikipedians in search of the facts in this case. The Wikipedians were stubborn, and wanted to look beyond the “pseudo-official” biographies, such as the one by Istituto Bruno Leoni. I wouldn’t say that all of the participants in the discussion were unbiased in their search for the facts—some people were driven by envy and anger at Giannino. But the important thing is the end result. The neutral point of view is necessarily a collective work, where personal views are filtered from those of other users, allowing only what is verifiable and reliable.

Maurizio Codogno
Wikimedia Italia

Italiano:

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If you had just signed up to become a Wikipedia contributor, what kind of experience would you like to have? Would you know exactly where to get started, or would you prefer some suggestions?

For most of Wikipedia’s 12-year history, we have done very little to proactively introduce new participants to tasks that are interesting and easy. Right after account creation, for instance, we merely suggest that you check out your preferences. If you look around, you can find guides like Wikipedia:Tutorial. Most of this documentation is focused on the rules and mechanics of how to contribute, rather than suggesting real tasks to try immediately.

Naturally, the kind of people who have tended to thrive in this environment already know what they want to contribute, or are deeply motivated to go and find it. Unless you’ve spotted an error or a missing piece of information, there is little pointing you in the right direction. That lack of direction is a big part of why only about a quarter of all newly-registered accounts complete an edit.

This phenomenon is far from unique to the site, and in fact it would be surprising to hear of any site where 100% of signups become devoted content contributors. However, when considering the enormous workload we face, the sheer waste of human capital is staggering. In English Wikipedia alone, there are…

• more than 200,000 “citation needed” tags
• 3,000 articles that need basic copyediting
• over 14,000 pages that need more wiki links

The list goes on, and these are just the items that have been explicitly added to the backlog. Wikipedia is in fact bursting at the seams with small problems that need fixing.

So how do we match the thousands of people who sign up every day, eager and willing to help, with tasks that are easy to do? That’s the question we’re attempting to solve with our work onboarding new Wikipedians, at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Editor Engagement Experiments team.

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One of the great strengths of Wikipedia is that community members can employ the same tool used to write the encyclopedia – a wiki – for collaborating on documentation about the project. The downside of this approach is that these pages, written by encyclopedists, tend to be broad and extremely detailed. New contributors to Wikipedia face a daunting list of thousands of help pages, policies, guidelines, and best practices that have developed over our 12-year history.

Today, we’re happy to announce interactive guided tours, a new software feature that will enable Wikipedia editors and readers to learn about the project in a way that is much easier to digest. Wiki-based documentation can now be complemented by concise, step-by-step instructions presented via tooltips. Instead of simply describing a process, we can show you how to complete it yourself, and when you’ve seen enough, you can dismiss a tour instantaneously.

A step from our new tour introducing first time contributors to the mechanics of editing Wikipedia.

Our team, editor engagement experiments, has built two Wikipedia tours to go along with today’s launch. First, a meta-tour to show community members how they operate, and second, a tour associated with our experimental “getting started” workflow, which helps people who’ve just registered make their first edit to the encyclopedia. You can see the test tour for yourself, right now.

We’ll be adding more tours soon, including in languages other than English, but Wikipedians won’t need to wait for us. Using simple JavaScript, community members can build their own tours, empowering each Wikipedia to create content that fits their particular use case. For Wikipedians and developers interested in creating guided tours, be sure to check out our project page. Our implementation of guided tours uses a version of the open source Guiders.js, and we’re happy to say that we’ve contributed back upstream to the original library as we’ve adapted Guiders to our needs.

Today’s release is just the first step toward experimenting with guided tours. We hope that in the weeks to come, we can find more areas of the encyclopedia where these tours can provide simplicity and clarity to the process of learning how to contribute to Wikipedia.

Steven Walling, Associate Product Manager

This post is available in 2 languages:

Deutsch  •  English

(This is a guest post from Dirk Franke, German Wikipedian)

In English:

This Monday, I – Dirk Franke – started a Community Project about the future of paid editing on the German Wikipedia. For one year, as a kind of a fellow of the German Wikipedia community and the German Wikimedia chapter, I will be exploring the risks and opportunities posed by the writing of Wikipedia articles for personal financial gain, and discussing possible policies in dealing with this.

Wikipedia articles are a way to reach many, many people. Most companies have discovered that their clients and business partners look them up on Wikipedia. Many cultural institutions have made this discovery, too. These institutions are actually being guided by several GLAM projects worldwide. Many universities now know that students not only look up their homework on Wikipedia, but also their prospective place of study. Next to the volunteers who edit Wikipedia, the number of PR people, company employees, people working for museums, cultural institutions, universities and the numbers of students working in course assignments has steadily increased. Motivations, incentives and goals of these people are vastly different. But all of their participation changes Wikipedia as we know it.

I am Dirk Franke – Benutzer/User:Southpark – Wikipedia editor since January 2004, Wikipedia admin since February 2004, former member of the board of Wikimedia Deutschland (2005 and 2012), and former member of the German ArbCom. Some of you might know me from my blog iberty.net or from my recent Wikimania presentations about Chiara Ohoven/notability or White Bags/the image filter. And I am the author of about 35 featured and good articles on the German Wikipedia about oceans or strange cultural phenomena. These articles have nothing to do with my present project, but I’m terribly proud of them.

My fellowship project, called “The Limits of Writing Articles for Financial Gain“, was approved by the Community Project Budget. This is a program where Wikimedia Deutschland gives money to the community to spend on their own projects to support free knowledge, and Wikimedia projects in particular. A committee of community members and chapter members determines on what to spend it. Luckily for me, they decided to fund my project. So right now I have a kind of community fellowship to investigate and explain, and to help the community in making up its mind. This special status also means that all opinions I state, mails and texts I write, mistakes and brilliant discoveries I make, will fall solely into my own responsibility and not that of Wikimedia Deutschland.

Opinions on how to deal with these authors differ vastly even within a single Wikipedia. Internal rules are often contradictory. The rules become even more contradictory when one looks at different language editions of Wikipedia. My project is designed to unify discussions, find and detect paid editing already there, talk to GLAMs, companies, and many many Wikipedians, to help Wikipedia to stay a neutral, balanced encyclopedia with a lively community even when facing the money challenge. The fellowship will last a year, and it will involve a lot of talking, writing, listening and most of all reading.

For a lot of reasons like practicality, insider knowledge, and community trust, my project will focus onto the German Wikipedia. But of course the challenges and risks are similar across the language spectrum. As always in wikiworld, collaboration and communication can only help. So I am happy, happy, and happy to hear from any experiences, opinions, best and worst practices or whatever you have to say about this topic.

Right now at the beginning, the acts of reading and listening are even more important. Who has experience with paid editing in Wikipedia? What are your local rules on paid editing? How do the people of your local recent changes patrol deal with conspicuous edits? How do the people of your local quality control react to conspicuous edits? What tools and help do they need? Who has already received offers to write for money? Who has agreed on such an offer? Who has an opinion about or experience with the various cooperations with GLAMs? Who has experiences or opinions about Wikipedians-in-residence at non-profit or for-profit organizations?

Links:

• My user page: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Franke
• Project description: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community-Projektbudget/Limits
• Blog: http://dirkingofranke.tumblr.com/
• E-Mail: dirk.frankewikipedia.de
• IRC: irc://irc.freenode.net/Wikipedia-de User:dirkfranke

P.S.: I try to be as open as possible in this project and to talk in an unbiased way to anybody willing to talk to me. But of course I’m a human being and you may be curious about my own position. On an emotional level I want my Wikipedia from 2004 back and feel that paid editing is eeeeeeeevil. On a rational level I’m afraid the whole subject matter is way more complicated.

Dirk Franke (Southpark)

German Wikipedian

Auf Deutsch:

Community-Projekt zum professionellen Editieren gestartet

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