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3 June 2015

 

2015-06-03

Three new community-elected trustees announced, incumbents out

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By Tony1 and Resident Mario
Dariusz Jemielniak
James Heilman
Denny Vrandečić

The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer election committee has announced the election results for the three vacant seats on the Board of Trustees. Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), James Heilman (Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (Denny) are set to take up their two-year terms on the Board. They will replace the three incumbents, all of whom stood this time unsuccessfully: Phoebe Ayers (phoebe), Samuel Klein (Sj), and María Sefidari (Raystorm).

Dariusz is a steward, and a bureaucrat and checkuser on the Polish Wikipedia, and has chaired the WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee, which recommends the allocation of annual operating grants for eligible affiliates, since its inception in 2012. He is a full professor of management at Kozminski University in Poland, and researches open collaboration projects such as Wikipedia and F/LOSS, narrativity, storytelling, knowledge-intensive organizations, virtual communities, and organizational archetypes, using interpretive and qualitative methods. He is a native speaker of Polish, and has near native-speaker fluency in English.

James has a significant track-record in advocating for the improvement of Wikipedia's health-related content. He is an active contributor to WikiProject Medicine and is the president of Wiki Project Med. Last October, the Signpost reported the publication of the first Wikipedia article as a peer-reviewed academic journal article, in Open Medicine ("Dengue fever: a Wikipedia clinical review"), for which James was first author. James is a Canadian hospital emergency physician, and is a clinical assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. He is a native English speaker.

Denny was the first administrator and bureaucrat on the Croatian Wikipedia. He studied at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, and gained his PhD in computer science and philosophy from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology—both prestigious institutions. He joined Wikimedia Germany to launch the Wikidata project in 2012, and now works at Google. He counts himself as a double native speaker of Croatian and German, and speaks English at a professional standard.

The electorate

The election saw a sharp increase in the number of voters, nearly tripling from just 1809 in the previous community election two years ago to 5167 this time. The Foundation's James Alexander has posted two interesting statistical tables. One is on the voter turnout over the course of the two-week election, which shows signs of increased voter interest at a few points in time. The other is on turnout by wiki as a proportion of total voters and in relation to the total eligible voters on each wiki.

The English Wikipedia was home to the largest proportion of voters (31.6%), followed by the German (12.0%), French (6.9%), Italian (5.8%), Russian (5.7%), and Spanish (4.8%) versions. Together, these six sites accounted for almost two-thirds of the total votes cast. Aside from some of the smaller sites, the proportion of eligible voters who actually voted was highest in the Ukrainian Wikipedia (25.2%), followed by the Arabic (17.7%), Italian (16.1%), Farsi (15.1%), and Polish (12.5%) versions. Of those eligible on the English Wikipedia, 8.3% voted; other large Wikipedias managed better: German (11.0%), French (10.8%), Italian (16.1%), Russian (10.8%), and Spanish (11.2%). Retiring trustee Phoebe did point out to the Wikimedia mailing list that some editors are active on more than one site, which may affect the fine resolution of these data.

The results in detail

The results of the Board election mean that there has been a clean sweep of positions by white males in all three WMF elections: FDC, FDC ombudsperson, and the Board. After the announcement of the three trustees, this was the cause of heated discussion on Facebook, among thanks and compliments to the three incumbents: "So now 2/10 Board members will be women, and only one from outside Europe or North America?" Phoebe Ayers replied: "Yes, the new appointees are great but I was proud of us for having a gender-balanced board, which is so rare in both nonprofits and corporations. The current trustees have already discussed making this a priority for future appointed seats."

It was Andrew Lih (Fuzheado) who pointed out that "the two female candidates had the 1st and 3rd most votes in this election, but the oppose votes countered this. ... I have to say this year's elections were a bit odd in that the voting method wasn't well publicized or easily discoverable until the ballot box opened. Previous elections used the Schulze method (amended: though last year was also S/S+O)." Dariusz Jemielniak wrote: "Gender diversity took a major hit. ... opposing votes are highly controversial, also because different cultures may be more or less averse to them". Current Board chair Jan-Bart de Vreede (Jan-Bart) wrote that "the Q&A is heavily slanted towards the English speaking community and a few were able to dominate (also issues we have to fix)." He continued: "we really should look at changing the election system so that it will go towards solving [the diversity problem]".

For years, the Signpost's coverage has emphasised the support votes rather than the full data generated by the ternary support–neutral–oppose system (apparently imported from the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee elections in 2013). Among other issues, the S/(S+O) formula greatly inflates the appearance of electoral "percentage" support for the candidates. Thus we have set out the numbers of support votes in the table below, with the percentage of all voters who supported each candidate, and the orders of voting strength both in terms of support votes alone and the formula that counts towards electoral success or otherwise. Red shows candidates whose ranking was reduced by the formula, and blue shows those whose ranking was increased by the formula. This appears to be the second election in which the S/(S+O) system has made a substantive difference to the outcome; two candidates' positions on the success–failure boundary were inverted in the 2013 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election.

Candidate Ranking based on "support" Adjusted ranking: "support–oppose" formula No. of support votes Percentage of voters supporting
María Sefidari 1 ↓4 2184 42.3%
Dariusz Jemielniak 2 ↑1 2028 39.2%
Phoebe Ayers 3 ↓5 1955 37.8%
James Heilman 4 ↑2 1857 35.9%
Denny Vrandečić 5 ↑3 1628 31.5%
Tim Davenport 6 ↓9 1571 30.4%
Mike Nicolaije 7 ↑6 1524 29.5%
Peter Gallert 8 ↑7 1467 28.4%
Cristian Consonni 9 ↑8 1381 26.7%
Samuel Klein 10 10 1330 25.7%
David Conway 11 11 1192 23.1%
Ali Haidar Khan (Tonmoy) 12 ↓13 1134 21.9%
Mohamed Ouda 13 ↓15 1112 21.5%
Edward Saperia 14 14 1109 21.5%
Josh Lim 15 ↑12 1969 20.7%
Sailesh Patnaik 16 16 1010 19.5%
Syed Muzammiluddin 17 17 816 15.8%
Nisar Ahmed Syed 18 18 735 14.2%
Houcemeddine Turki 19 19 590 11.4%
Francis Kaswahili Kaguna 20 ↓21 386 7.5%
Pete Forsyth (withdrew) 21 ↑20 108 2.1%

Gregory Varnent, of the election committee, has linked people to the post-mortem page for ideas and discussion.

The new trustees' views

In our coverage before voting began, we presented numerical displays and analysis of the candidates' views on five propositions and ten "priorities" we had put to them. A 1–5 Likert scale for the propositions ranged from "strongly agree" (1) to "strongly disagree" (5), with a neutral/opt-out "3". We received responses from all but Francis Kaguna, and Houcemeddine Turki got back to us after copy-deadline; we have now included Houcemeddine's data in the averages for candidates who were unsuccessful, and compare those averages with those of the three new trustees.

As expected, the individual trustees track differently from the averages. Dariusz and Denny are more favourable than the average towards merging the two affiliate-selected with the three community-elected Board seats in future elections. Given his background in computer science, Denny is relatively keen to appoint more tech experts as trustees, while Dariusz and James are yet to be convinced of this notion. All three new trustees favour using the $27M in Foundation reserves to seed-fund the new endowment, two of them strongly so. Dariusz and Denny are strongly against the idea of completely forbidding paid editing, whereas James is neutral on this, perhaps given his experience in discovering large amounts of plagiarism and paid editing both on- and off-wiki. (He has written about his experiences with paid editors and plagiarism in Signpost op-eds.)

Counterintuitively, the shorter the bar, the stronger the candidate's agreement: 1 is "strongly agree", 5 is "strongly disagree". The initial grey hatched bars are the averages of the 17 candidates who responded to the Signpost's survey and did not succeed; the solid colours are the individual scores for the three new trustees.

Comparing the trustees' rankings from 1 to 10 of the 10 priorities we had put to them against average rankings by the other candidates revealed sometimes-stark differences between each of them, and between them and the others. Dariusz and James rate increasing global-south participation significantly lower (7th and 6th) than the average, while Denny rates it above the average (2nd). James and Denny score increasing editor retention at 2nd and 1st, above the average of nearly 4th, while Dariusz scores it only 6th. Investing in mobile tech attracts favourable rankings from Dariusz and James (3rd and 4th), but interestingly, Denny ranks it below average, at 6th. Investing more in collecting data is a significantly lower priority for Dariusz (9th)and Denny (8th) than the average for the other candidates and for James (around the 5th priority). All three trustees spurn the notion of funding more offline meetups, with straight 10s, against an average of a little higher than 7th. Implementing VisualEditor gains favour from Dariusz (4th, against the average of lower than 7th), but James rates this 9th and Denny is close to the average. Denny is strong on reducing the gender gap (3rd), but James is not (9th), and Dariusz tracks the average at 5th. Advocating internet freedom is 7th, 8th, and 9th among the new trustees, against an average of about 7th.

The other candidates rate allocating resources to the engineering challenge between 5th and 6th priority. Here the new trustees beg to differ in greater favour of the notion. Dariusz rates engineering to improve readers' experience as his very top priority; it is James' 3rd priority, and unexpectedly Denny's 5th, close to the average. Dariusz rates engineering to improve editors' experience a little lower than he did for readers' experience—2nd, while James and Denny are keener on this aspect (3rd becomes 1st, and 5th becomes 4th, respectively). This might make for interesting conversations with the WMF's executive director, Lila Tretikov.

The shorter the bar, the higher the priority: grey hatched is the average for 17 unsuccessful candidates who responded to our questions, and the solid colours are individual trustees' rankings.

Contacting your representatives

We asked the three community-elected trustees whether they are happy for their constituents to contact them as their representatives on the Board, and if so, what mode of communication they would prefer. Dariusz wrote: I think that on-wiki method of communication is best for most cases, and for delicate matters email may be preferred (I can be reached through "email this user" feature, and my email is also publicly available). Denny says "obviously" he is happy to communicate: "For now, my talk pages would be best—either on the Croatian, German, or English Wikipedias, or Wikidata or Meta." James nominated his talkpages on Meta or the English Wikipedia, or email function (his email address is also widely known). "Twitter is not as good. And I don't check Facebook."

Brief notes

2015-06-03

How Wikipedia covered Caitlyn Jenner’s transition

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By Ed Erhart
The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.

Caitlyn Jenner—the American hero of the 1976 Olympics, a film actor, and prominent member of Keeping Up with the Kardashians—may now be the most famous openly transgender person in the world. She began her transition from Bruce in April; on June 1, she premiered her new name in Vanity Fair with a 22-page article and cover shot by famed photographer Annie Leibovitz.

As befitting someone with Caitlyn's fame, the news has quickly gone viral around the Internet. There has, however, been conflict over how to address her. National Review Online asked “who won Bruce Jenner’s OIympic medals?” and questioned how individuals should write about a new gender identity set against Jenner’s extensive history in a gendered sport.

By comparison, there has been little conflict on the English Wikipedia over Caitlyn Jenner. The first update was made just 21 minutes after Vanity Fair‍ '​s tweet, and the page was moved after just over an hour. In part, this is thanks to more concrete guidelines after US Army soldier Chelsea Manning announced her own transition in August 2013. In that case, a Wikipedia administrator quickly moved the article to her new name. While this action received many accolades in the press—such as from Slate, Buzzfeed, the Daily Dot, and Market Watch—after a series of moves between the two names, the article was returned to its original title nine days later. It took more than a month to move it to the name Chelsea desired, time taken up with an extensive vote that saw 226 editors make over 2,000 edits, and an arbitration case before Wikipedia's highest adjudicating body,

During and after this conflicted period, Wikipedia editors hammered out guidelines for how to deal with future cases. After thousands of bytes of text, a subsection of Wikipedia’s Manual of Style called "Identity" was edited to read, as of 1 June 2015:

An exception ... is made for terms relating to gender identity. In such cases, Wikipedia favors self-designation, even when usage by reliable sources indicates otherwise. Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns (for example "man/woman", "waiter/waitress", "chairman/chairwoman") that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise.

This new guideline was applied to Caitlyn Jenner's article and, in part, is the reason that her Wikipedia article has seen a comparative lack of controversy. The page was moved during a short, uncontentious discussion, and a subsequent move request was quickly closed with a unanimous consensus to keep the article under its new name (Editor's note: The author of this blog post, in his separate and volunteer role of administrator on the English Wikipedia, assessed the consensus and closed the requested move.) The article even uses Leibovitz's Vanity Fair cover under the US' fair use doctrine, quoting the Washington Post's interpretation of it: "After all the magazine covers that featured the former athlete ... [this] photograph will be the most meaningful. Looking directly at the camera, Jenner is finally herself for the first time publicly."

Those opposed to the move cited Wikipedia's common name policy, a commonly cited page which stipulates that an article title be the name most used in reliable sources on the topic. This is why the article on Bill Clinton is not "William Jefferson Clinton," for example.

Those in favor refuted these arguments with the identity guideline. One editor with the concluding comment in the main discussion section (as of the time of writing) wrote:

I'm just going to say that if someone out there has access to wikipedia (aka: has internet), they clearly are not living under a rock. Even with mainstream media only covering her name change as of today, without living under a rock, there's just no way the common public at large doesn't already know that Bruce Jenner is now Caitlyn Jenner. So long as there's a Bruce Jenner re-direct linking to this Caitlyn Jenner article (which there is), I really don't understand why this conversation is even being had?

The new title of Jenner's Wikipedia biography, and the way Wikipedia has handled the situation, has garnered positive press attention from the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Bustle, Yahoo! UK, Zeleb, and Vocativ. Reactions on Twitter from users like Geeta Dayal and Hiro were also broadly supportive. Discussion is, however, continuing on whether links to Caitlyn's biography should be from Bruce or Caitlyn.

A litany of frequently asked questions, and how the English Wikipedia deals with gender identity, have been laid out in a gender identity essay.

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2015-06-03

The deprecation of Persondata; RfA – A broken process; Complaints from users on Swedish Wikipedia

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By Jonatan Svensson Glad

The deprecation of Persondata

Wikidata's logotype
Wikidata's logotype

Since the dawn of Wikipedia, or at least since 22 December 2005, the template named Persondata has existed. At first, it was an early attempt to incorporate structured metadata. Later it served to provide automatic extraction of key information about people, such as birthnames and dates. However, since the creation and growth of Wikidata the need for this template has become non-existent, since all the functions which it provides, and more, are now offered by Wikidata.

Wikidata allows users to add statements to Wikidata items (which are connected to Wikipedia articles) such as "birthdays", "occupations", "family members" etc. These statements rely on other Wikidata items and are therefore completely internationalized. There is no need to translate a person's occupation into multiple languages, since they are connected already to articles on other language Wikipedias. The template Persondata, however, is not internationalized and only provides services to the English Wikipedia. Therefore, having all this information on Wikidata makes it accessible in multiple languages and it can be used in articles on different wikis in the remote future.

All |SHORT DESCRIPTION=s had been copied over to Wikidata by the bot PLbot. With that in mind, plus that all other information in the Persondata template had been exported to statements on Wikidata, there is no real need for the template any more. This is at least what Msmarmalade was trying to communicate to the community with a proposal to deprecate the template.

The template had been discussed over many months and now an RfC had been created to settle once and for all the question of whether or not anyone was actually using it, or will use it in the future.

During this RfC many viewpoints and opinions were brought up and discussed.

The big problem with WikiData is that its "impossible" to edit and watch changes to articles (from enwiki). […] [H]ow do we suppose editors to figure out how to change any wrong data?

— Christian75

To this, users responded that it is possible to see all related Wikidata changes on your watchlist if you enable that gadget in your preferences.

Another issue was if usage of Persondata should be replaced with Wikidata, and to that Pigsonthewing responded:

This would only be true if we were talking about using [use of content from Wikidata on this Wikipedia] to replace [use of content from Persondata on this Wikipedia]. Since the set of articles in which the latter applies appears to be zero (do feel free to correct me), it's irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

— Pigsonthewing

There were also questions over how reliable statements moved by bots are, since Wikidata does not support free-text in their data fields, some dates become malformated. To this Technical 13 noted:

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 136#Wikidata date errors indicates that persondata is likely still more reliable than Wikidata. So, still going to have to go with "Wikidata is not stable and ready yet".

— Technical 13

While this link to the technical villlage pump did not have anything to do with humans, it raised an interesting point that all date formats can not be handled on Wikidata.

Users noted that since these data can not be used in infoboxes due to their potential inaccuracy, Persondata should not be deprecated just yet, but to this Alakzi had a witty while still accurate point:

The reliability (accuracy) of the data and reliability (availability) of the service are two completely different things. (For God's sake, why are people using Module:Wikidata in mainspace? Whoever's said that it's ready for primetime?) Persondata cannot even be used in this manner, so what point are you trying to make?

— Alakzi

Persondata was not in use anywhere and was therefore deprecated with a 32-to-8 !vote. After this consensus had been reached, Magioladitis did not waste any time and requested for approval of his bot Yobot's 24th task: to "Remove {{Persondata}}". This has been met with some resistance. GoingBatty asked two questions; if this should wait until AWB (which Magioladitis is a developer of) had been programmed to stop adding the template, and if the policy WP:COSMETICBOT would apply, since it was an edit which wouldn't be visible or noticeable to the readers. The bot Rjwilmsi had once received permission to add Persondata as its only task and therefore there is precedence of fixing Persondata, despite the policy in question.

We already have consensus for the removal of Persondata. If the addition of Persondata by automated tools hasn't been a breach of COSMETICBOT, then neither should be its removal.

— Pigsonthewing

The user Dirtlawyer1 was also a bit sceptical to the removal of the template, despite the consensus, stating:

[…] This immediate removal without transfer of new input persondata to Wikidata violates the conditions upon which the RfC was approved. […]

— Dirtlawyer1

If a persondata template with a short description has been added after PLbot transferred all the current once at the time, this might cause some problems with losing some information added by someone. However:

The outcome of the RfC is "deprecate and remove", not "deprecate and remove with caveats".

— Pigsonthewing

Author's note: The request for permission is currently being discussed while writing this report, hence no conclusion can be written, since it has yet to happen.

RfA – A broken process

After years of granting fewer and fewer users adminship and desysoping more and more of our current admins, you can naturally calculate that we are starting to reach a shortage of admins. At least that's what the current discussion on the Administrators' noticeboard is saying. As a result of this, backlogs on noticeboards such as Wikipedia:Administrator intervention against vandalism are bound to happen from time to time.

Users are reporting to feel discouraged to run for adminship, for two major reasons. One being that RfAs are like hell, with the scrutiny so intense you lose interest and want to go and hide somewhere. The other reason being that it is a broken process:

I know exactly how to become an admin. Stop getting involved in discussions at AN, ANI, RSN, etc., stop mediating at DRN, pick a poor-quality, uncontroversial article that nobody seems to be editing or watching and create high-quality content, withdrawing and moving on if anyone disagrees with me in any way, and repeat that pattern for at least a year. In other words, avoid anything that in any way resembles what an administrator is asked to do. Again, I do want to help but the price is too high.

— Guy Macon

In briefs

Style and naming

Policies and guidelines

WikiProjects and collaborations

2015-06-03

It's not over till the fat man sings

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By The ed17, Xanthomelanoussprog, Gamaliel, Adam Cuerden, and Juliancolton
The west end of Karang Bolong Beach. You should see the other end!
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 24–30 May.

Two featured articles were promoted this week.

An engraving by Ettore Tito of the original production of Falstaff
  • Falstaff (opera) (nominated by Tim riley) Falstaff was the last of 28 operas from the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, featuring the Shakespearian character Sir John Falstaff. From the nomination: "This nomination is a valediction to the late John Webber, who edited WP as Viva-Verdi. He and I worked separately and then together on upgrading the article, and I assumed he and I would co-nominate it for FAC. But I am sad to say that John died in March. He knew a hundred times more about Verdi than I ever shall, but I take it on myself to nominate the article in both our names. It had a very thorough and helpful peer review, and I hope it will be judged worthy of promotion to FA."
  • "A Quiet Night In" (nominated by Josh Milburn) There seem to be two wildly different reactions to this 2014 British TV episode, part of the anthology series Inside No. 9. A critic in The Times wrote that it was "the funniest, cleverest, most imaginative and original television I have seen for as long as I can remember." A viewer, however, emailed the critic to give her reaction; she wrote that she'd never be able to forget the sight of a small dog being stabbed to death with an umbrella. We'll leave it to you to decide.

Ten featured pictures were promoted this week.

All hail the queen.
If you have one of these in your attic, you may be the only one.
Look, it's a bird. Not all the captions can be witty.
  • Karang Bolong Beach (created and nominated by Crisco 1492) A white coral beach, at the western end of the island of Nusa Kambangan. Seven prisons were built by the Dutch on the island, with an eighth added in 1950 after independence. Nusa Kambangan has been used to concentrate Communist prisoners and members of the Free Aceh Movement. In 2007, a new Super Maximum Security Prison was opened to house prisoners sentenced for involvement in the drugs trade. The island is also used for executions, most recently for some of the Bali nine.
  • Girl in White (created by Vincent van Gogh, nominated by Crisco 1492) Van Gogh painted Girl in White whilst he was under the care of homeopath Dr. Gachet. The painting is one of two portraits he painted of an Arlesian woman wearing a large yellow hat. She is brought close to the viewer by Van Gogh's "dramatic use of the picture plane", although her downcast expression gives a sense of emotional distance. Her apparent tallness, and the large and rather odd hands, which are also present in the second portrait, suggest that she has Marfan syndrome.
  • Polistes dominula (created and nominated by Alvesgaspar) A stunning photograph by Alvesgaspar of a young paper wasp queen and her nest. Having mated the previous year, the queen has emerged from hibernation in the spring to construct a nest in which she lays her offspring. These will hatch into daughter workers, who will be employed in maintaining the colony. Males are produced later in the year; some daughters may mate with them and leave the colony to become future foundresses of other colonies.
  • Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (created by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, nominated by Crisco 1492) This is Talleyrand, famous French statesman, who was prevented from following a military career by a congenital lameness. Although ordained a bishop, Talleyrand supported the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution. He was sent on covert diplomatic missions to Britain, and remained there when the French National Convention issued a warrant for his arrest. Expelled from Britain, he left for the United States, from where he returned to France in 1796. As the newly installed foreign minister of the Republic, Talleyrand "talent spotted" Napoleon when the latter was campaigning in Italy; the two planned an invasion of Britain. After two months of cogitation, Bonaparte gave up the plan and invaded Egypt instead. Boney made Talleyrand his foreign minister, and then his Grand Chamberlain of the Empire, but by 1807 Talleyrand had lost confidence in the Emperor, and believed that he was leading France to ruin. He was one of the chief architects in the process of transition from the Empire to the Bourbon monarchy.
  • 1960 Opel Olympia Rekord P1 1500 Caravan (created by Berthold Werner, nominated by Alborzagros) Known as the "peasant's Buick" (Bauern-Buick), the Opel (Olympia) Rekord P1 had a wraparound windscreen- the "P" in the name stands for "Panorama", describing the view out of the window- or the view into the car. No-one ever lost anything on the back seat of an Opel Rekord, at least not without a running commentary from bystanders. With an engine powered by Z-Stoff and T-Stoff, it could quickly reach speeds of up to 959 km/h at an altitude of 12,100 metres (60.14871 furlongs), climbing at a rate of 50 metres per second. Of course, once the fuel tank emptied, it became a Bauern-Brick.
  • Mochtar Lubis (created by Rob Bogaerts/Anefo, restored and nominated by Crisco 1492) This photograph of Indonesian author and journalist Mochtar Lubis comes from the Nationaal Archief, the national archives of the Netherlands. Described as a "renaissance man par excellence," Lubis co-founded the Indonesia Raya in 1949, a newspaper that was banned by successive Indonesian governments until it shut down in 1974. He also wrote a number of novels, including Senja di Jakarta ("Twilight in Jakarta"), the first Indonesian novel to be translated into English. As far as we know, it doesn't have any vampires in it.
  • SG-1000 (created by Evan-Amos, nominated by Armbrust) Years before Sonic the Hedgehog showed up, there was the SG-1000, the first home video game console from Sega. It was an unfortunately timed release, the same day as the wildly successful Nintendo Entertainment System and coinciding with North American video game crash of 1983. The SG-1000 made little impact, with one observer noting "Few have heard of it, even fewer have played it, and the games weren’t that great anyway."
  • Ksitigarbha (creator unknown, nominated by Crisco 1492) A 600 year old scroll painting from Korea, depicting Ksitigarbha, an enlightened being. The Korean prince Kim Gyo-gak came to be regarded as a reincarnation of Ksitigarbha by his fellow monks at the monastery of Mount Jiuhua. The prince visited Tang dynasty China and became a Buddhist monk on returning to his native land. He returned to China in 719 CE, and remained at Mount Jiuhua until his death at the age of 99.
  • Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga (created by Francisco Goya, nominated by Zeete) Goya was hired to paint portraits of the Count of Altamira and his family; this "Red Boy" is the Count's youngest son, Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zunica, at the age of three. Sadly he was to die five years later. The animals and birds in the painting have inspired many interpretations of their apparent symbolic meaning. For example the cats are supposed to be an evil force, intently watching the magpie, who has in its beak Goya's calling card. Kathryn Bache Miller, known as "Kitty", fell in love with the painting when it was exhibited by Joseph Duveen at his Parisian gallery in 1926. Her father purchased it for $275,000 (about $3,500,000 at today's prices) to hang in her living room. A copy appeared in the 1944 film The Curse of the Cat People, named by The Moving Arts Film Journal as the 35th best film ever made. Maybe they meant the 35th best film made about cats. Maybe not… who knows with these intellectual types?
  • Collared whitestart (created by Cephas, nominated by Crisco 1492) Myioborus torquatus is a New World warbler found in Costa Rica and Panama. This photo was taken in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in northwest Costa Rica. It's commonly known as a collared whitestart or collared redstart, but it is actually bright yellow and black, with a chestnut crown. It eats insects, and will often follow livestock and humans to feed on the insects that are disturbed by their passage.


Mobilitäts-Konzept für Bauern! Vorsprung durch die Rübenfeld.


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2015-06-03

Things are getting SPDYier

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By Legoktm
Happy Brion Vibber Day!

Over the past few weeks, developers have been working on improving Wikimedia's performance when users connect to it using SPDY, which is a faster network protocol that was developed by Google and adopted as a formal standard through HTTP/2. It is supported by most major browsers[1] over HTTPS. Part of this work included deprecating and removing usage of the "bits" cluster that previously served resources like stylesheets, JavaScript, and other miscellaneous items. These resources are now served by the same domain; for the English Wikipedia it would be: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php>. Previously using HTTP 1.1, using multiple subdomains was a performance advantage due to a limit of the number of concurrent requests per domain. With SPDY, a domain can have an unlimited number of connections, but each individual domain has the same connection overhead. Users may still notice resources downloading from bits.wikimedia.org due to on-wiki user scripts and gadgets, which should be updated.

In other news:

  • The "WikiGrok" project to send microcontributions to Wikidata has been put on hold ([2])
  • The breaking change planned for the API's default continuation format has been scheduled for the 1.26wmf12 branch, and a list of the most affected bots has been provided. Please contact bot operators on the list to make sure they update their code! ([3])
  • The Pywikibot team has published a first release candidate for the new 2.0 version for initial testing ([4])

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2015-06-03

Towards "Health Information for All": Medical content on Wikipedia received 6.5 billion page views in 2013

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By James Heilman and Andrew West
Editor's note: this article originally appeared on the blog of The London School of Economics and Political Science. It is reprinted here with the permission of the authors.


Recently we published “Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language” in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). Some of the key-findings include:

  1. Medical content received about 6.5 billion page views in 2013. This was extrapolated from empirical per-article “desktop” traffic data plus project-wide mobile estimates.
  2. Wikipedia appears to be the single most used website for health information globally, exceeding traffic observed at the NIH, WebMD, WHO etc.
  3. Wikipedia’s health content is more than 1 billion bytes of text across more than 255 natural languages (equal to four times the size of the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica).
  4. Nearly 1 million references support this content and the number of references has more than doubled since 2009, with citation density outpacing raw byte growth.
  5. Article access patterns are heavily language-dependent, i.e., most topics show substantially differing popularity ranks across Wikipedia’s different natural language versions.
  6. The core community of editors numbers less than 300, having shrunk significantly over the last 5 years.
  7. The core community is about 50% health care providers; 85% have completed a university degree; 50% have more than one university degree.

The paper contains many more data-driven insights we encourage readers to investigate. Equally important, this evidence provides us further motivation to expand translation of medical content across natural languages, continue to improve the quality of medical content, and identify partnerships and fundraising opportunities that will allow us to overcome current challenges.


Single most used website for health information – Figure 1: Health care site traffic comparison. Light blue portions represent official Wikimedia Foundation data.


Translating medical content

Structured translation efforts for medical topics have been ongoing since 2012 as a collaboration between WikiProject Medicine (WPMED) and Translators Without Borders (TWB). Naive approaches like using Google Translate fail because of their inaccuracy (especially with technical medical content) and limited language scope. In contrast, the current WPMED-TWB collaboration operates in 100+ languages and has translated more than 4 million words to date. This work may be useful for those developing translation engines.

One highlight is exemplified by the recent West African Ebola Outbreak, when the team was able to help quickly increase the number of languages with an “Ebola” article from 40 to more than 110. This work was additionally aided by a for-profit translation company, Rubric, freely donating their services. Data from Microsoft shows that Wikipedia was the single most used source of Ebola information in the 3 most affected countries (Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea), ahead of CNN, CDC, and the World Health Organization (WHO) during the worst part of the outbreak.

Partnerships to improve core/English content

A number of organizations have now partnered with WikiProject Medicine to improve English medical content, including the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), Mount Sinai, the Cochrane Collaboration, the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance, and the National Institutes of Health. Discussions are ongoing with WHO regarding a collaboration involving vaccine-related content.


Nearly 1 million references support medical content – Figure 2: Citations/references appearing in the medical content of English Wikipedia and all Wikipedia languages based on year-end snapshots.


Notably, the UCSF collaboration began in 2012 after James Heilman presented lectures on “Wikipedia and Medicine” at the institution. This was a catalyst for Amin Azzam, a professor at the school, to assemble an elective course that provided Wikipedia training, followed by a four-week period where students actually edited and improved medical articles. Review and guidance was provided by librarians and faculty at UCSF, as well as core members of WikiProject Medicine.

Another interesting experiment was performed where a high-quality Wikipedia article was submitted to the journal Open Medicine and underwent peer review (See previous Signpost coverage). While there are expenses associated with this form of review and dissemination, the eventual publication of the article serves as proof that Wikipedia can support professional-quality medical content. Additionally, it is an opportunity for authors of Wikipedia to receive academic recognition for their work. Work is ongoing to develop an internal peer-reviewed medical journal which is PubMed indexed.

Barriers to growth

Despite supporting 6.5 billion page views in 2013, the authors/translators/contributors to medical content are all volunteers. The project did receive a small amount of funding ($12,000) via the Indigo Foundation to support the development of content in East African languages. This funding allowed content to be developed significantly more quickly than in other comparable languages.

It is also encouraging that Wikipedia as a whole has secured free and unlimited data access to its content via cellphone partnerships, enabling a knowledge resource for 400+ million people in the developing world. While this has enormous potential for the consumption of content, the form factors of mobile-devices which are pervasive in these regions render it very difficult for readers to also contribute content. Partly because of this, it remains difficult to find translators for languages of the developing world.

Expanding efforts

While the above points highlight some successes of WikiProject Medicine and its partners, the challenges also indicate there is much work to be done. Data points to the enormous potential of these efforts, and further data analysis can help us understand how to focus this work and make it more impactful. Human volunteers will undoubtedly continue their tireless contributions and further volunteers are needed, but greater funding has the potential to greatly speed our progress. Paid staff could enable experts to focus on content instead of administrative work.

Additionally, more universities are interested in engaging with Wikipedia. However, programs that familiarize potential contributors with Wikipedia norms, like that at UCSF, involve a steep learning curve and the time-intensive involvement of existing experts. At current, these factors inhibit the scalability of the initiative. Expanding the program will require provisioning “online teaching assistants”, whose funding beyond a June 2015 pilot remains unclear.

Funding could also be used to expand translation centers around the world. If such assistance is obtained, it will also allow faster broadening of our scope of emphasis. Initial translation efforts focused on major medical disease (HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, etc.) and we are expanding slowly into topics such as women’s health, sanitation matters, and items from the WHO List of Essential Medicines; however, work moves slowly.

James Heilman is a Canadian emergency room physician and clinical faculty at the University of British Columbia. He is a founding member of the Wiki Project Med Foundation.
Andrew West is a Senior Research Scientist at Verisign Labs. He completed his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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2015-06-03

Anonymous Australian editing targets football player, shooting victim

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By Gamaliel

Anonymous Australian editing targets football player, shooting victim

Sydney Swans Adam Goodes Presser.jpg
Adam Goodes

The Sydney Morning Herald reports (May 30) that the Wikipedia article of Australian rules football player Adam Goodes was the target of racist vandalism after he performed an Indigenous Australian war dance after scoring a goal during a May 29 game. The game was part of the Indigenous Round, an annual event celebrating the contributions of Indigenous football players, Goodes, whose mother is of Adnyamathanha and Narungga descent, said he was inspired by the Flying Boomerangs, the Indigenous under-16 AFL team, and it was "just a little bit of a tribute to those guys ... proud to be Aboriginal and represent." Despite this, many reacted negatively to the display. Goodes said: "Is this the lesson we want to teach our children, that when we don't understand something we get angry and put our back up against the wall [and decide] that's offensive?". Goodes, who has been in the AFL since the 1997 AFL draft, has previously been the target of racist remarks from fans and even other sports figures.

The Brisbane Times reports (June 1) that IP addresses assigned to the Victoria Police have edited the article Death of Tyler Cassidy 17 times. Cassidy was a teenager shot by the Victoria Police in 2008. The edits removed and altered material which appears to cast the Victoria Police in an unfavorable light, such as the sentence "The incident was blamed on a lack of training and information gathering performed by Victoria Police." A spokesperson initially denied the IP addresses belonged to the Police, but they later confirmed the edits were made from their IP addresses and said they were considering a policy regarding Wikipedia editing. In March, a news story revealed a similar pattern of editing from IP addresses belonging to the New York Police Department (see Signpost coverage).

In brief

A map of the London Underground created by Sameboat
Number 8: The Cat House in Riga, Latvia
Jacob Zuma
  • Wikimedia profile: The Hindu talks with (June 4) Wikimedian and scientist Shyamal Lakshminarayanan.
  • Mapping the metro: CityMetric favorably compares (June 1) a map of the London Underground found on Wikipedia to the official map, of which it writes "it's cramped, it’s unclear, and it just isn't very pretty." The Wiki map, which it calls "far better than the real thing", was created by Sameboat and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in August 2014. Sameboat has also created maps of a number of other transit systems for cities around the world.
  • Picture puzzle: The Guardian claims (May 31) that the Wikipedia article for English journalist Rod Liddle actually featured a picture of MP Michael Fabricant. An examination of the edit history of Liddle's article for the last two years reveals no image of anyone in the article.
  • Minding the gender gap: The May 28 episode of the Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 discussed gender bias on Wikipedia. The episode featured journalist Jenny Kleeman, author of a recent New Statesman article on the topic (see previous Signpost coverage), and Daria Cybulska, Programme Manager at Wikimedia UK. Kleeman said "This is not just about Wikipedia, this is also about Google, because Wikipedia quite often is the first result when you google something. It's where politicians, journalists, and academics go to first brief themselves even though they pretend that it's not. So this is about the most important portal to information in the 21st century. If it is skewed in this way, it has massive repercussions." Cybulska offered the Gender gap page on Meta-Wiki as a resource for those who wish to help address the issue.
  • Building on Fire: The Sowetan reports (May 29) that the controversy regarding the cost of security upgrades to Nkandla, the private residence of South African president Jacob Zuma, has reached Wikipedia. The expensive improvements, including a helipad, amphitheatre, and swimming pool have cost millions of rand and attracted widespread criticism, including from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Police minister Nathi Nhleko presented a report, also widely criticized, which justified the upgrades and cited the Wikipedia article amphitheatre. An editor later added to the article a statement about how the report noted an amphitheater's potential "use as a secure assembly meeting point." The swimming pool was dubbed a "firepool" from which water could be drawn for firefighting. This prompted the creation of a Wikipedia article for firepool, which is currently under discussion at Articles for Deletion. MyBroadband urges readers to "Save the Firepool Wikipedia page" (June 3).



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.


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2015-06-03

A rather ordinary week

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By Milowent

The traffic report is nothing unusual this week, with a Google Doodle for astronaut Sally Ride topping the list, the accidental death of famous mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. at #2, and the normal fare of recent popular American movies and television, though Eurovision's finale, where Australia (?!) took 5th, made it to #9. And FIFA "President for Life" Sepp Blatter (#7) won re-election to a fifth term, though he subsequently announced he intends to resign, at some point in the future.

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see [5]. (The most edited article was Elimination Chamber (2015).)

For the week of May 24 to 30, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Sally Ride C-class 2,007,493
As with Inge Lehmann two weeks ago, a Google Doogle, celebrating what would have been the 64th birthday of the first American female astronaut in space, tops the chart this week. Ride is also the youngest American to have gone to space, at age 32.
2 John Forbes Nash, Jr. C-class 1,065,181
A winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in non-cooperative game theory, creator of the Nash equilibrium, and the inspiration for the book and film A Beautiful Mind which explored his life and history of mental illness, Nash and his wife died on May 23 in New Jersey in a taxicab accident.
3 Mad Max: Fury Road C-class 1,015,622
Down from #1 and 1.5 million views last week. This action film starring Tom Hardy debuted on Australia on May 14 and in the United States the next day. As of May 31, the film has grossed $283 million worldwide.
4 Stephen Curry B-Class 636,375
Up from #8 and 636,375 views last week. On May 23, during a Western Conference Finals game against the Houston Rockets, the basketball player for the Golden State Warriors broke the record for the most three-point shots in a playoffs, in just 13 games. His team will play in the NBA finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers starting on June 4.
5 Memorial Day C-Class 902,107
The last Monday in May (which was May 25 this year), the day that the United States chose to honour its war dead, is perhaps better known as the traditional beginning of US summer vacation, and is thus eagerly anticipated by millions of people too young to serve but old enough to stand in line for action movies. Hopefully those who looked up this article learned more about its true intent.
6 Game of Thrones (season 5) C-class 820,076
Numbers for this popular television program are up again this week, by about 100,000 views.
7 Sepp Blatter C-Class 786,824
Americans learned that FIFA has a virtual president-for-life this week, as Blatter was elected to a fifth term as president on May 29, despite the pending FIFA corruption case arising out of a recent FBI investigation. On June 2, Blatter announced he would resign after a successor was elected.
8 Chris Kyle B-class 738,896
The titular American Sniper is back on the list for a second week after a near-three month hiatus. The film was released on DVD on May 19.
9 Eurovision Song Contest 2015 C-class 618,779
Views are down from 752,700 last week, but still good enough for the Top 10. The song "Heroes" by Swedish pop singer Måns Zelmerlöw (pictured), a perfectly bland pop song right at home in 2015, won. And what's this about Australia being a part of Eurovision this year? I looked up their entry "Tonight Again" on YouTube sung by Guy Sebastian, and the comments there inform me in no uncertain terms that Australia is not in Europe. But they came in fifth, so it was a shrewd marketing move, no doubt.
10 Avengers: Age of Ultron C-Class 581,327
The latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe crossed the banner $1 billion worldwide mark last week. Down from 717,191 views last week.


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