The Wikimedia Foundation published the 2011–12 Annual Plan. Three of the seven stated goals for the year ahead relate to increasing editor numbers: overall, increasing active editors from 90,000 in March 2011 to 95,000 by June 2012. Over the same period, the Foundation seeks to increase the number of editors from the Global South from 15,700 to 19,000 and the number of female editors from 9,000 to 11,700. The plan includes a target to increase the number of page views from mobile devices from 726 million to two billion. Other planned improvements include increasing read uptime from 99.8% to 99.85%, creating a new development sandbox, and developing the visual editor for initial test deployment in December 2011. Full details are available on the Foundation wiki.
In unrelated news, the Foundation blogged about the new Article Feedback tool, advising that it is now in the process of being rolled out to all articles on English Wikipedia. The tool was first set up in September and has been slowly rolled out, being added to a total of 100,000 articles in May before the latest expansion. Now 370,000 articles will be added every day until all articles have been covered. According to research findings published in the blog post, one of the benefits of the tool is its increase in the number of people editing. The tool appears to provide a useful measure of quality for the criteria "completeness" and "trustworthiness", despite concerns that the system might be gamed by partisan editors or just misused by people to express their love or contempt for the topic rather than the quality of the article itself. Marshall Kirkpatrick at the technology blog ReadWriteWeb sums up the case for the change: "Rating articles looks like an even easier way for people to give feedback - and once you've started contributing that much, why not go a step further and improve the article you just rated?"
In the aftermath of the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit held in Boston two weeks ago (see previous Signpost coverage), editor Adam Hyland ( User:Protonk) wrote a retrospective on his experiences over the past year as an ambassador in the university outreach program. He highlighted the importance of the project in repairing the rift between the Wikimedia movement and the traditional educational establishment of libraries and universities, saying of the encyclopaedia's early days: "Wikipedia was a triple threat: a new technology, a potential competitor for traditional silos of information and a shorthand for what professors thought the web was doing to their new cohorts of students". Adam proposed that not only had Wikipedia become a complementary educational project to such institutions, but that with the outreach program had "engage[d] students with the production of knowledge itself ... [s]tudents who write these articles know that they face a critical audience and that quality matters." This was highlighted by one student's creation, the National Democratic Party of Egypt, a "homework assignment" which this year so far has drawn the attention of 100,000 pairs of eyes.
At the recent LocalGovCamp unconference in Birmingham, Wikipedia editor Andy Mabbett spoke about the GLAM-WIKI project, the relevance of Wikipedia for local government, his challenge to local councils to start articles about themselves, his interest in becoming a GLAM Ambassador or Wikipedian-in-residence (he's since been appointed Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive) and a certain dead pigeon – The King of Rome, whose Wikipedia article he wrote as a result of a GLAMDerby backstage pass event in April. The King of Rome was a famous racing pigeon, the only one to survive a 1000 mile race; its skin is preserved in Derby Museum and the bird is also the subject of a folk song made famous by June Tabor. Tom Phillips, who attended the event, later wrote an impassioned account of the session in an Amazon book review. The Wright Challenge has two months to go, and it's hoped that the 800 articles about objects in Derby Museum can be far surpassed in that time.
The U.S. National Archives GLAM project has announced a featured content contest aimed at increasing the online profile of and educating the public about the Archives' core documents. Editors who succeed in getting to featured status any of the three articles relating to the Charters of Freedom: United States Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, or United States Bill of Rights (in any language), will be rewarded with a gift package.
In other GLAM news, the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art will be holding a special backstage pass event for a select group of 10 Wikimedians on July 29. The initiative, which is being coordinated by Wikimedian-in-Residence Sarah Stierch, will offer a behind-the-scenes insight into the original documents and untold stories housed by the world’s largest and most widely used research center dedicated to the history of visual arts in America. In Baltimore, Maryland, the Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Heritage are sponsoring a gathering of the Wiki and GLAM minds from July 22–23. The weekend will launch with the Young Preservationists Happy Hour where Sarah Stierch is presenting about GLAMWIKI, and is followed by an afternoon of talks by Sarah and Aude followed by break out sessions with GLAM representatives and Wikimedians.
This week, the Foundation's Jimmy Wales, Jay Walsh and Liam Wyatt were interviewed for FineArtViews, a blog that describes itself as covering "Selling Art, Marketing, Inspiration & Fine Living". The interview, led by blogger Brian Sherwin, touched on a number of topics, including the notability of artists, the difficulty of applying reliable source-based rules to cultures where artists have little or no access to the Internet, and the ever-present issue of copyright law. Many of Sherwin's questions focused on specific criticisms of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement, including references to "deletion debates" that Sherwin had personally observed.
Sherwin's other questions focused on Wikipedia's general role within the art world, to which Wales gave his view that "the art community should welcome the Wikipedia community ... [it] serves a major role in bringing art to the public". Wikipedia's co-founder was also asked to comment on criticisms that Wikipedia articles on artists were "dull", to which he replied that "Wikipedia is not an art magazine. It is a place for encyclopedic writing", but one that did "not prohibit nor inhibit interesting and lively writing". In his final statement, Wales added that he hoped readers of big name artists' articles "will be inspired to explore other artists who are not so famous".
Wikimedia Foundation volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara was interviewed by independent feminist broadcaster Bitch Radio on issues concerning gender, reader engagement and social justice within Wikimedia and the broader open source community. Discussing the issues raised concerning the difficult environments Wikimedia communities can be for women, and for those with little technological fluency to contribute (see previous Signpost coverage), Harihareswara stressed the impact of unintentional barriers to participation as opposed to intentional hostility from established contributors.
The Foundation's intention to extend the movement's coverage in the Global South was highlighted as an important social justice initiative, stressing the need to empower local communities to develop the content relevant to their culture in their own languages. Harihareswara tied the Foundation's work in usability improvements and facilitating the reading and editing of Wikimedia projects on mobile phones as a key step in advancing the Global South initiative, pointing out that computer-based broadband access, so common in the Western world, was far rarer in places like Africa and the Indian subcontinent relative to Internet-accessible mobile phones.
I think it’s fairly obvious that these are generally good things: truthfulness, meritocracy. But when practiced by people unaware of their own privileges, race privilege, class privilege, male privilege, and so on, you run into situations like a person practicing a kind of bluntness and insensitivity and misreading it to themselves as honesty. You see honesty unleavened by sensitivity, compassion, or mentorship. And you might see people defining merit very narrowly, because the things they’re good at specifically may be the thing that they value, and they would find any other kind of contribution scornworthy and find themselves dismissive of it without even realizing what they’re doing.
— Sumana Harihareswara
The interview progressed to a discussion of the prevalence in open source communities of kyriarchy, a concept in feminist theory which extends the analysis of oppression of women in patriarchy to all forms of oppression of marginalized people. While praising many values of open source communities such as honesty and openness, Harihareswara maintained that lack of diversity often leads to a "layer of blindness and privilege" that proves an obstacle to broader participation. Harihareswara stressed the necessity of an open platform inviting all to contribute, a technologically facilitated meritocracy, saying that "an attitude of hospitality and accessibility in the way that you do things; if the default is open rather than closed, is welcoming rather than intimidating, then it makes a different world". The interview ended on an upbeat note, with Harihareswara asked to give advice to a Wikipedia newcomer and re-iterating in response the virtue of the open meritocratic model: "Be bold, and know that because Wikipedia is about individuals, you have as much right to be there as any jerk who you might run into. And if you make useful edits and contribute, you will gain reputation, and you will have made the world a better place."
In their newly released social media guidelines (PDF), the British Broadcasting Corporation counselled staff not to "surreptitiously sanitise Wikipedia pages about the BBC". British newspaper The Telegraph noted that the new guidelines follow revelations that BBC employees had anonymously edited the Criticism of the BBC article in order to remove references to an internal report in which the corporation was described as being thought of as "out of touch with large swathes of the population".
Despite not being a for-profit, the broadcaster had also made headlines in 2005 for appearing to have attempted to use the encyclopaedia as part of a marketing campaign for an alternate reality game ( see previous Signpost coverage). The new rules come at a time when the BBC is looking to restore a perception of trust among the British public after it was hit by damaging revelations over the amount it pays its big name stars.
![]() | This page contains material that is kept because it is considered
humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously. |
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Spam. The project describes itself as a "voluntary Spam-fighting brigade" which seeks to eliminate the three types of Wikispam: advertisements masquerading as articles, external link spam, and references that serve primarily to promote the author or the work being referenced. WikiProject Spam applies policies regarding what Wikipedia is not and guidelines for external links. The project received some help in February 2007 when the English Wikipedia tagged external links as "NOFOLLOW", preventing search engines from indexing external links and limiting the incentive for many spammers to use Wikipedia as a search engine optimization tool. The project maintains outreach strategies, detailed steps for identifying and removing spam, a variety of search tools, several bots for detecting spam, and a big red button to report spam and spammers. The project was started by Jdavidb in September 2005 and has grown to include 371 members. One of the project's most active members, MER-C, agreed to show us around.
How much time do you typically devote each week to fighting spam?
WikiProject Spam is the most active project by edits (including bots) and the second most watched project on Wikipedia. What accounts for this high activity and interest by the Wikipedia community?
What type of wikispam do you come across most often? Do you use any special tools to detect spam or do you simply remove spam you notice while reading and editing articles?
wikipedia-en-spam
(don't go there yet, it's not currently working) and others.
User:XLinkBot, a spam reversion bot, and
User:COIBot use this channel as their source of link additions. Reports are triggered when a small group of users are responsible for a large fraction of link additions to a particular site or can be requested through IRC or
User:COIBot/Poke (administrators and trusted users only).Have you had any heated conversations with spammers after removing spam from an article? What are some strategies you've used to resolve these conflicts?
Has your experience fighting spam resulted in any humorous stories? Have you heard any amusing excuses and special pleading from spammers trying to defend their edits?
Next week, we'll look at the
social construct of
naming a rose a "rose". Until then, think deep thoughts in the
archive.
Reader comments
One featured article was delisted:
Six lists were promoted:
Four images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
This week, the Arbitration Committee opened no new cases, and closed one case. One case is currently open.
(See earlier Signpost coverage for the background to this case.) An additional 4 kilobytes was submitted in on-wiki evidence.
See last week's Signpost coverage for a summary of the case, the effect of the decision, and what it tells us.
The process of reviewing all those revisions set to be part of the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, is drawing to a close, at least numerically. Data published this week show that the number of unchecked and potentially problematic revisions has fallen from a high of 1500 to under 100. Given that these are likely to be large, difficult to check revisions, a new page has been created on MediaWiki.org to list those that still need to be checked for errors. As of time of writing, some 90 revisions are listed, divided into several categories based on priority.
Despite this prioritisation of reviewing, developer Robert Lanphier emphasised in a post to the wikitech-l mailing list that zero remained the target, writing that "we want to get through everything anyway... we're all looking forward to seeing this list shrink to zero". After the code review backlog is substantially reduced, 1.18 will undergo a period of being tested for bugs, before being pushed live to Wikimedia wikis. It is unlikely to be made available to external sites in packaged form until it has demonstrated its stability on Wikimedia wikis.
Subversion (full name Apache Subversion but usually shortened to simply "SVN") is the software that handles the collaborative development of MediaWiki. By and large, it handles this in much the same way as contributing to a wiki; developers grab copies of the files they want to edit from a central repository, change them, and then "commit" their changes back to the central repository. (Developers can also get edit conflicts; Subversion provides only basic protection against them and this is one of the reasons why a move to software seen as more conflict friendly, such as Git, has been suggested in the past—for context, see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2.)
The nature of Subversion ultimately defines the current development workflow for MediaWiki in many key respects. The majority of coding is done on local copies of the bleeding edge "trunk" code, but Subversion also allows for a process known as "branching", where elements within the repository are duplicated, allowing for a developer to choose to which copy his or her changes are applied. As a general rule, new features will continue to be added to trunk, whilst bug fixes will end up in both branch and trunk code. This process allows for the branch to "bake": that is, to become free of bugs by maintaining a fixed feature set. These branches, when stable, then form MediaWiki releases.
As of time of writing, 1.18 is currently baking; on 18 July it was re-branched from trunk, whilst a branch made some three months was renamed and put on hold. 1.18 will therefore take advantage of the ongoing improvements in the stability of trunk code; if 1.19 is still to be branched soon, it would therefore be more of a stability rather than a feature-oriented release. A second strategy would be to delay 1.19 to allow for new features to be incorporated before release.
The Wikimedia Foundation published the 2011–12 Annual Plan. Three of the seven stated goals for the year ahead relate to increasing editor numbers: overall, increasing active editors from 90,000 in March 2011 to 95,000 by June 2012. Over the same period, the Foundation seeks to increase the number of editors from the Global South from 15,700 to 19,000 and the number of female editors from 9,000 to 11,700. The plan includes a target to increase the number of page views from mobile devices from 726 million to two billion. Other planned improvements include increasing read uptime from 99.8% to 99.85%, creating a new development sandbox, and developing the visual editor for initial test deployment in December 2011. Full details are available on the Foundation wiki.
In unrelated news, the Foundation blogged about the new Article Feedback tool, advising that it is now in the process of being rolled out to all articles on English Wikipedia. The tool was first set up in September and has been slowly rolled out, being added to a total of 100,000 articles in May before the latest expansion. Now 370,000 articles will be added every day until all articles have been covered. According to research findings published in the blog post, one of the benefits of the tool is its increase in the number of people editing. The tool appears to provide a useful measure of quality for the criteria "completeness" and "trustworthiness", despite concerns that the system might be gamed by partisan editors or just misused by people to express their love or contempt for the topic rather than the quality of the article itself. Marshall Kirkpatrick at the technology blog ReadWriteWeb sums up the case for the change: "Rating articles looks like an even easier way for people to give feedback - and once you've started contributing that much, why not go a step further and improve the article you just rated?"
In the aftermath of the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit held in Boston two weeks ago (see previous Signpost coverage), editor Adam Hyland ( User:Protonk) wrote a retrospective on his experiences over the past year as an ambassador in the university outreach program. He highlighted the importance of the project in repairing the rift between the Wikimedia movement and the traditional educational establishment of libraries and universities, saying of the encyclopaedia's early days: "Wikipedia was a triple threat: a new technology, a potential competitor for traditional silos of information and a shorthand for what professors thought the web was doing to their new cohorts of students". Adam proposed that not only had Wikipedia become a complementary educational project to such institutions, but that with the outreach program had "engage[d] students with the production of knowledge itself ... [s]tudents who write these articles know that they face a critical audience and that quality matters." This was highlighted by one student's creation, the National Democratic Party of Egypt, a "homework assignment" which this year so far has drawn the attention of 100,000 pairs of eyes.
At the recent LocalGovCamp unconference in Birmingham, Wikipedia editor Andy Mabbett spoke about the GLAM-WIKI project, the relevance of Wikipedia for local government, his challenge to local councils to start articles about themselves, his interest in becoming a GLAM Ambassador or Wikipedian-in-residence (he's since been appointed Wikipedia Outreach Ambassador to ARKive) and a certain dead pigeon – The King of Rome, whose Wikipedia article he wrote as a result of a GLAMDerby backstage pass event in April. The King of Rome was a famous racing pigeon, the only one to survive a 1000 mile race; its skin is preserved in Derby Museum and the bird is also the subject of a folk song made famous by June Tabor. Tom Phillips, who attended the event, later wrote an impassioned account of the session in an Amazon book review. The Wright Challenge has two months to go, and it's hoped that the 800 articles about objects in Derby Museum can be far surpassed in that time.
The U.S. National Archives GLAM project has announced a featured content contest aimed at increasing the online profile of and educating the public about the Archives' core documents. Editors who succeed in getting to featured status any of the three articles relating to the Charters of Freedom: United States Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, or United States Bill of Rights (in any language), will be rewarded with a gift package.
In other GLAM news, the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art will be holding a special backstage pass event for a select group of 10 Wikimedians on July 29. The initiative, which is being coordinated by Wikimedian-in-Residence Sarah Stierch, will offer a behind-the-scenes insight into the original documents and untold stories housed by the world’s largest and most widely used research center dedicated to the history of visual arts in America. In Baltimore, Maryland, the Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Heritage are sponsoring a gathering of the Wiki and GLAM minds from July 22–23. The weekend will launch with the Young Preservationists Happy Hour where Sarah Stierch is presenting about GLAMWIKI, and is followed by an afternoon of talks by Sarah and Aude followed by break out sessions with GLAM representatives and Wikimedians.
This week, the Foundation's Jimmy Wales, Jay Walsh and Liam Wyatt were interviewed for FineArtViews, a blog that describes itself as covering "Selling Art, Marketing, Inspiration & Fine Living". The interview, led by blogger Brian Sherwin, touched on a number of topics, including the notability of artists, the difficulty of applying reliable source-based rules to cultures where artists have little or no access to the Internet, and the ever-present issue of copyright law. Many of Sherwin's questions focused on specific criticisms of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement, including references to "deletion debates" that Sherwin had personally observed.
Sherwin's other questions focused on Wikipedia's general role within the art world, to which Wales gave his view that "the art community should welcome the Wikipedia community ... [it] serves a major role in bringing art to the public". Wikipedia's co-founder was also asked to comment on criticisms that Wikipedia articles on artists were "dull", to which he replied that "Wikipedia is not an art magazine. It is a place for encyclopedic writing", but one that did "not prohibit nor inhibit interesting and lively writing". In his final statement, Wales added that he hoped readers of big name artists' articles "will be inspired to explore other artists who are not so famous".
Wikimedia Foundation volunteer development coordinator Sumana Harihareswara was interviewed by independent feminist broadcaster Bitch Radio on issues concerning gender, reader engagement and social justice within Wikimedia and the broader open source community. Discussing the issues raised concerning the difficult environments Wikimedia communities can be for women, and for those with little technological fluency to contribute (see previous Signpost coverage), Harihareswara stressed the impact of unintentional barriers to participation as opposed to intentional hostility from established contributors.
The Foundation's intention to extend the movement's coverage in the Global South was highlighted as an important social justice initiative, stressing the need to empower local communities to develop the content relevant to their culture in their own languages. Harihareswara tied the Foundation's work in usability improvements and facilitating the reading and editing of Wikimedia projects on mobile phones as a key step in advancing the Global South initiative, pointing out that computer-based broadband access, so common in the Western world, was far rarer in places like Africa and the Indian subcontinent relative to Internet-accessible mobile phones.
I think it’s fairly obvious that these are generally good things: truthfulness, meritocracy. But when practiced by people unaware of their own privileges, race privilege, class privilege, male privilege, and so on, you run into situations like a person practicing a kind of bluntness and insensitivity and misreading it to themselves as honesty. You see honesty unleavened by sensitivity, compassion, or mentorship. And you might see people defining merit very narrowly, because the things they’re good at specifically may be the thing that they value, and they would find any other kind of contribution scornworthy and find themselves dismissive of it without even realizing what they’re doing.
— Sumana Harihareswara
The interview progressed to a discussion of the prevalence in open source communities of kyriarchy, a concept in feminist theory which extends the analysis of oppression of women in patriarchy to all forms of oppression of marginalized people. While praising many values of open source communities such as honesty and openness, Harihareswara maintained that lack of diversity often leads to a "layer of blindness and privilege" that proves an obstacle to broader participation. Harihareswara stressed the necessity of an open platform inviting all to contribute, a technologically facilitated meritocracy, saying that "an attitude of hospitality and accessibility in the way that you do things; if the default is open rather than closed, is welcoming rather than intimidating, then it makes a different world". The interview ended on an upbeat note, with Harihareswara asked to give advice to a Wikipedia newcomer and re-iterating in response the virtue of the open meritocratic model: "Be bold, and know that because Wikipedia is about individuals, you have as much right to be there as any jerk who you might run into. And if you make useful edits and contribute, you will gain reputation, and you will have made the world a better place."
In their newly released social media guidelines (PDF), the British Broadcasting Corporation counselled staff not to "surreptitiously sanitise Wikipedia pages about the BBC". British newspaper The Telegraph noted that the new guidelines follow revelations that BBC employees had anonymously edited the Criticism of the BBC article in order to remove references to an internal report in which the corporation was described as being thought of as "out of touch with large swathes of the population".
Despite not being a for-profit, the broadcaster had also made headlines in 2005 for appearing to have attempted to use the encyclopaedia as part of a marketing campaign for an alternate reality game ( see previous Signpost coverage). The new rules come at a time when the BBC is looking to restore a perception of trust among the British public after it was hit by damaging revelations over the amount it pays its big name stars.
![]() | This page contains material that is kept because it is considered
humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously. |
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Spam. The project describes itself as a "voluntary Spam-fighting brigade" which seeks to eliminate the three types of Wikispam: advertisements masquerading as articles, external link spam, and references that serve primarily to promote the author or the work being referenced. WikiProject Spam applies policies regarding what Wikipedia is not and guidelines for external links. The project received some help in February 2007 when the English Wikipedia tagged external links as "NOFOLLOW", preventing search engines from indexing external links and limiting the incentive for many spammers to use Wikipedia as a search engine optimization tool. The project maintains outreach strategies, detailed steps for identifying and removing spam, a variety of search tools, several bots for detecting spam, and a big red button to report spam and spammers. The project was started by Jdavidb in September 2005 and has grown to include 371 members. One of the project's most active members, MER-C, agreed to show us around.
How much time do you typically devote each week to fighting spam?
WikiProject Spam is the most active project by edits (including bots) and the second most watched project on Wikipedia. What accounts for this high activity and interest by the Wikipedia community?
What type of wikispam do you come across most often? Do you use any special tools to detect spam or do you simply remove spam you notice while reading and editing articles?
wikipedia-en-spam
(don't go there yet, it's not currently working) and others.
User:XLinkBot, a spam reversion bot, and
User:COIBot use this channel as their source of link additions. Reports are triggered when a small group of users are responsible for a large fraction of link additions to a particular site or can be requested through IRC or
User:COIBot/Poke (administrators and trusted users only).Have you had any heated conversations with spammers after removing spam from an article? What are some strategies you've used to resolve these conflicts?
Has your experience fighting spam resulted in any humorous stories? Have you heard any amusing excuses and special pleading from spammers trying to defend their edits?
Next week, we'll look at the
social construct of
naming a rose a "rose". Until then, think deep thoughts in the
archive.
Reader comments
One featured article was delisted:
Six lists were promoted:
Four images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
This week, the Arbitration Committee opened no new cases, and closed one case. One case is currently open.
(See earlier Signpost coverage for the background to this case.) An additional 4 kilobytes was submitted in on-wiki evidence.
See last week's Signpost coverage for a summary of the case, the effect of the decision, and what it tells us.
The process of reviewing all those revisions set to be part of the latest version of MediaWiki, 1.18, is drawing to a close, at least numerically. Data published this week show that the number of unchecked and potentially problematic revisions has fallen from a high of 1500 to under 100. Given that these are likely to be large, difficult to check revisions, a new page has been created on MediaWiki.org to list those that still need to be checked for errors. As of time of writing, some 90 revisions are listed, divided into several categories based on priority.
Despite this prioritisation of reviewing, developer Robert Lanphier emphasised in a post to the wikitech-l mailing list that zero remained the target, writing that "we want to get through everything anyway... we're all looking forward to seeing this list shrink to zero". After the code review backlog is substantially reduced, 1.18 will undergo a period of being tested for bugs, before being pushed live to Wikimedia wikis. It is unlikely to be made available to external sites in packaged form until it has demonstrated its stability on Wikimedia wikis.
Subversion (full name Apache Subversion but usually shortened to simply "SVN") is the software that handles the collaborative development of MediaWiki. By and large, it handles this in much the same way as contributing to a wiki; developers grab copies of the files they want to edit from a central repository, change them, and then "commit" their changes back to the central repository. (Developers can also get edit conflicts; Subversion provides only basic protection against them and this is one of the reasons why a move to software seen as more conflict friendly, such as Git, has been suggested in the past—for context, see previous Signpost coverage: 1, 2.)
The nature of Subversion ultimately defines the current development workflow for MediaWiki in many key respects. The majority of coding is done on local copies of the bleeding edge "trunk" code, but Subversion also allows for a process known as "branching", where elements within the repository are duplicated, allowing for a developer to choose to which copy his or her changes are applied. As a general rule, new features will continue to be added to trunk, whilst bug fixes will end up in both branch and trunk code. This process allows for the branch to "bake": that is, to become free of bugs by maintaining a fixed feature set. These branches, when stable, then form MediaWiki releases.
As of time of writing, 1.18 is currently baking; on 18 July it was re-branched from trunk, whilst a branch made some three months was renamed and put on hold. 1.18 will therefore take advantage of the ongoing improvements in the stability of trunk code; if 1.19 is still to be branched soon, it would therefore be more of a stability rather than a feature-oriented release. A second strategy would be to delay 1.19 to allow for new features to be incorporated before release.