Nominations for the ninth annual elections to the Arbitration Committee have now opened, and will remain so for approximately a week (closing 23:59 UTC Monday, 21 November). Any editor is eligible to run as a candidate provided they meet the requirements for voters (at least 150 mainspace edits with their registered account by 1 November 2011), are in good standing and not subject to active blocks or site-bans, meet the Wikimedia Foundation's criteria for access to non-public data, and are prepared to identify to the Foundation if elected, and disclose any alternate accounts (barring those which have been declared to the Arbitration Committee prior to the close of nominations) in their nomination statements. At the time of writing, four eligible candidates have stepped forward, two of whom have served multiple terms on the Committee: AGK, Coren, Hersfold, and Kirill Lokshin.
The elections are run by the community independent of the Committee and its clerks; editors interested in helping to organise the elections are encouraged to sign up as volunteer coordinators. Election pages have been created, incorporating nomination statements, a guide to the candidates, questions for those running, links to individual voter guides and discussion pages. The 10-day nomination period (12–21 November) will be followed by five "fallow" days (up from two last year) to ensure all election pages are complete and accurate, to configure the SecurePoll voting interface, and to allow voters additional time to research, discuss and pose questions to candidates.
The voting period will last 14 days (27 November – 10 December), up from 10 days last year. The vote will then be audited for up to a week by independent scrutineers drawn from the ranks of non-native stewards, to ensure the election is free of double-voting, sockpuppetting, and other irregularities. The results will be announced on the election page. Jimbo Wales is expected to ceremonially announce the appointments shortly after.
A well-attended community RfC established the Committee's numbers as 15 (down from 18 in 2011 and 2010), with a uniform two-year term for incoming arbitrators. Due to an extraordinary last-minute motion by the Committee to remove a sitting arbitrator, Iridescent, for inactivity, eight arbitrators are due to continue their service in 2012 without re-election. Seven vacant seats are expected to be filled by this year's election, with terms starting on 1 January 2012.
The RfC determined that the minimum level of support necessary for a successful candidacy will be 50%, and that a shortfall in successful candidacies would be acceptable, opening the door to the possibility that the Committee will begin the new year with fewer than 15 arbitrators. Another conclusion of the RfC was that that unlike last year's election, there will be no limit on the number of questions voters may ask of candidates (although replying is not mandatory), and that any serious voter guide will merit inclusion in the election navigational template.
The Arbitration Committee is a critical institution of the English Wikipedia; experienced and committed editors are urged to seriously consider standing for election.
Asaf Bartov, head of Global South Relationships, announced the finalization of a Wikimedia Participation Grants Program this week. In his post, Bartov explained that "Wikipedians can often make additional progress toward our vision of free knowledge freely available for everyone in the world, by participating in physical meetings, events, or conferences. Such participation often entails travel costs, and sometimes accommodation, visa, and other costs too. These costs are often prohibitively expensive for a volunteer’s personal budget, who is already donating valuable time and effort."
The new program, funded jointly by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany (see the German chapter's post), aims to alleviate this cost by providing Participation Grants for community members to "cover travel, accommodation, registration, and other costs associated with participating in an event or activity, in furtherance of the Wikimedia Mission." Other self-sustaining Wikimedia chapters (ie. not funded by the Foundation) are also invited to contribute to the community "pool."
This program is similar to the general grant program, which funded 44 projects in 2010–2011 totaling $300,000. To receive a Community Grant, members must apply at Grants:Participation by creating a subpage with a description of their planned participation, background information about themselves, and the expected impact of their participation. The submissions are evaluated on a weekly basis by a special committee; in addition to the open process outlined on the page, participants must also send an e-mail to participation at wikimedia dot org with their full legal name. If their request is accepted, participants are also expected to write an open report describing their experiences with the program. A list of current and closed requests, from when the process was still in the works, can be found here.
In a continuation of its analysis of this year's Readers Survey, the Wikimedia Foundation has posted its results on reader perceptions of quality on Wikipedia. The overall quality of Wikipedia was graded based on five individual measures on a 10-point scale:
These results were then compiled into a Quality Perception Index, shown above. The global QPI average (the survey was administered in 16 countries) is 7.92 out of 10. Readers in predominantly English-speaking countries (US, Canada, UK, South Africa, Australia and India), where 94% or more of respondents used the English Wikipedia, were above average with an 8.02; as compared to other areas, with 7.85. Japan "was a definite exception, with only 16% of the readers reporting similar ratings." How readers compared Wikipedia to other top websites is next on the agenda.
Stephen Chapman, a search engine optimization and internet marketing expert and a self-professed Wikipedia fan, has written a piece for ZDnet, where he suggests that Wikipedia run ads to support itself instead of relying on donations. The article focuses on Jimbo Wales' personal appeal, about which he says "it just seems ridiculous to me that he’s so adamant about not implementing ads". Chapman decries Wales' aversion as "an extremely misplaced endeavor" in the light of the ability of popular sites to monetise their userbase and the significant costs of running a popular site. He proposed that it is not immoral to generate revenue from providing a facility useful to the public, and rejects the notion that running ads is necessarily at odds with a non-profit website's mission of providing free access to information, or with Wales' stated desire to keep the Wikimedia Foundation "lean and tight".
The “free encyclopedia”, ... is only really free to the people who don’t donate.
— Stephen Chapman
He dismisses the backlash that the introduction of ads might provoke as the short-lived and overwrought posturings of a loud minority. Arguing that ads need not be intrusive or a major annoyance to users, to fulfill the needs of revenue generation, Chapman argues "there is so much flexibility with ads these days, it’s crazy to continue writing them off". Those diehards who would fiercely object to seeing ads, he reasons, could easily employ blocking software such as the Adblock Plus browser extension.
So powerful does Chapman believe the site's hold is over its audience, he maintains it would not need to collaborate with advertising middlemen such as Google AdSense; companies would be queuing up to advertise directly on-site. Chapman takes Wales to task for the precociousness of the declaration that "Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others". In Chapman's view, this takes for granted the project's position; if Wikipedia ran into financial difficulty, he says, it could be easily copied, improved on and dramatically monetised by others with more sustainable business plans. He concludes:
“ | Overall, I’m not asking Wikipedia to stop accepting donations. By all means, keep the donations flowing. But at this rate, as a frequent Wikipedia user, I would very much appreciate the consideration of alternate monetization models. Maybe it’s not a big deal to others, but I’d like to see Wikipedia move from a needy entity to one that’s able to sustain itself primarily through means that ask nothing of its users. Naturally, no one’s visiting Wikipedia to see or click an ad, but if your ads present something that’s relevant to the content of a page and potentially enriching for the life of the viewer of that page in some way, then you’re simply providing added value to their experience. | ” |
The article has been somewhat poorly received. In the first day after publication the article received three comments in favor of Chapman's proposal and 15 critical of it. The official launch of the 2011 Fundraiser is expected some time this week.
The Indian media, as well as the online tech media, took note this week of the impending commencement of WikiConference India 2011, the first nation-wide wikiconference, to be staged at the University of Mumbai from November 18 to 20. The Times of India noted organisers' ambition that the conference become an annual flagship event for Indian Wikimedians, particularly to encourage contributors to build projects in their native language rather than in English. The Indo-Asian News Service greeted the news as "a boost to India’s increasing net community", and revealed that the conference had attracted 7,000 applications for scholarships and participation, as well as more than 550 papers submitted for presentation.
Daily News & Analysis revealed that South India accounted for half of the scholarships awarded, remarking that "even though the conference is being held in Mumbai, the current lack of awareness about Indian language Wikipedias in western India has seen just over 15% of application awards go to this region, principally Gujarat and Maharashtra." In another story, the broadsheet commented on the opportunity for youth to get involved, noting the presentation of 10-year-old Achu Kulangara from Kochi on how his peers were regular contributors to the Malayalam Wikipedia.
A report by Agence France-Presse focused on the growth of internet and particularly mobile phone use in India, and the potential this has for generating readers and contributors to Wikimedia projects. The agency noted that the Indian operation has the Wikimedia Foundation's first office outside the United States. Topics addressed at the conference are to include "Usage of Ajax and Jquery in Wiki", "WikiBhasha: Our Experiences with Multilingual Content", "Legal Aspects of Wiki Culture", and "WikiWomenWeb: Bridging the Gender Gap", reported EFYtimes.com.
Techcircle.in noted the formal approval of Wikimedia India in June 2010 and its becoming the 29th Wikimedia chapter. Techcircle payed special attention to the keynote of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, as did CNBC-TV18's Moneycontrol.com, which said that the event "will see Jimmy Wales, the man himself who's the founder, open-source evangelist and Chairman Emeritus of Wikimedia foundation [ sic] make a touchdown!" See this week's "WikiProject report" for an interview with WikiProject India members ahead of the conference.
On the Zero Geography blog, Dr. Mark Graham, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute revealed the latest attempt to map the geographic distribution of Wikipedia's coverage. The maps created by the Institute's researchers show every geotagged article in the November 2011 versions of the Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian, and Swahili Wikipedias. The map of the English Wikipedia, which had nearly 700,000 geotagged articles, is visible to the right.
Of the varying emphases on different parts of the globe in each of the language versions, Graham commented: "...if your primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world inevitably looks very different to you than if you were accessing knowledge through the English Wikipedia. There are far more absences and many parts of the world simply don't exist in the representations that are available to you." The post was picked up by The Guardian's Datablog, where it attracted much commentary, as well as by Gizmodo and The Huffington Post.
WikiProject India is a ginormous project, started in July 2006 by Ganeshk. It has 55 FAs and 162 GAs under its scope. The project was featured in one of the WikiProject Report's earliest issues, so be sure to take a look at our 2007 article for a brief overview of the project's structure. With the recent surge in activity regarding India, from the creation of a Wikimedia Chapter in India earlier this year to the 2011 WikiConference India being held this weekend (see "In the news"), we felt this would be a nice time to revisit the project. We interviewed RegentsPark and AshLin.
First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject India.
When did you first join WikiProject India? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?
What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and future India-related findings, creations and news?
Are you planning to attend WikiConference India? Do you plan to discuss the WikiProject at the conference? How well do members of WikiProject India stay connected on and off the wiki?
Anything else you'd like to add?
We thank this week's interviewees for taking the time out of their day to answer our questions. Next week, we'll work on our
literature review. Until then, browse for articles in the
archive.
Reader comments
To give our readers a "sporting" chance at writing featured content, here are some suggestions from Sturmvogel 66, who has written or co-written 16 pieces of featured content and 28 A-class articles, including this week's HMS Eagle (below), since becoming a Wikipedian in 2007.
This week, five featured articles were promoted:
No featured pictures were promoted this week. Readers interested in participating are invited to acquaint themselves with the featured picture criteria and join the discussion at the candidates page.
This week was a good week for sports fans everywhere. Of the nine featured lists promoted this week, eight were sports-related, involving college football, association football, county cricket, and Major League Baseball. The sole non-sports list promoted this week, however, really took root in the brains of the the Featured List reviewers.
Two cases remain open:
Three requests for cases are also outstanding:
However at this time it looks like all of them will be declined. No clarification or amendment requests were finalized this week, with the possible exception of the Russavia-Biophys request that has been refiled as request for case.
This week also saw the opening of nominations in the
ninth annual elections to the Arbitration Committee (see "
News and notes").
Reader comments
“ | They [mobile screens] really require us to do something that we haven't had to do as much on desktops: they require us to focus. | ” |
— Director of Mobile and Special Projects Tomasz Finc |
This week saw the unveiling of some preliminary designs for Athena (named after the Greek goddess of "wisdom, courage [and] inspiration"), a new skin likely to sit at the heart of the revamped mobile site, but with possible connotations for the desktop site as well.
With the new mobile site rapidly becoming as feature rich as the desktop versions, there was a need for a design that could accommodate them in a usable fashion; the existing Vector skin, designed primarily with high resolution screens in mind, is largely unsuitable for this application. It is on this basis that Athena was created; if successful, it may even prove a successor to Vector on the desktop too.
The slick design (illustrated right) aims to pare down the number of features immediately offered to users in order to creating a page with a high usability factor on smaller screen sizes. When a device signals it has some additional capability, such as a larger screen, the design will then automatically adjust to provide a more useful display: a process being described as " graceful enabling" in contrast to the traditional model of " graceful degradation".
The new design for the mobile site would therefore follow an increasing trend among websites (such as YouTube) and programs (such as Mozilla Firefox) to group important actions together whilst hiding lesser used actions by default, particularly on mobile devices. The design, which is likely to be revised on the basis of user comments in the coming weeks, also aims to give greater visual focus to the edit button to encourage contributions.
With submissions closing on 9 November, the results of the first Wikimedia Coding Challenge (see previous Signpost coverage) are in. Five submissions met the submission requirements for the mobile uploading challenge; ten entries were accepted for "making Wikipedia appear more alive" challenge; and eight for the slideshow challenge. A further three submissions were rejected solely on the grounds of not providing enough supporting evidence in the form of a readme ( full list of accepted submissions).
Reporting on the submissions, Erik Möller noted that there were "definitely a few that are worth a closer look". Nonetheless, there will no doubt be at least a little feeling of anticlimax about the contest, which had seen 500 potential entrants sign up within the first 24 hours. Even among submissions, quality varied, and there were a handful that looked as if little or no development work had been done to tailor standard code to the intricacies of the competition requirements. Nonetheless, developers and non-developers alike will take heart from both the high quality of a number of submissions, and the fact that so many potential coders signalled an interest, yielding many possible contacts when it came to expanding the developer base in future.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
Nominations for the ninth annual elections to the Arbitration Committee have now opened, and will remain so for approximately a week (closing 23:59 UTC Monday, 21 November). Any editor is eligible to run as a candidate provided they meet the requirements for voters (at least 150 mainspace edits with their registered account by 1 November 2011), are in good standing and not subject to active blocks or site-bans, meet the Wikimedia Foundation's criteria for access to non-public data, and are prepared to identify to the Foundation if elected, and disclose any alternate accounts (barring those which have been declared to the Arbitration Committee prior to the close of nominations) in their nomination statements. At the time of writing, four eligible candidates have stepped forward, two of whom have served multiple terms on the Committee: AGK, Coren, Hersfold, and Kirill Lokshin.
The elections are run by the community independent of the Committee and its clerks; editors interested in helping to organise the elections are encouraged to sign up as volunteer coordinators. Election pages have been created, incorporating nomination statements, a guide to the candidates, questions for those running, links to individual voter guides and discussion pages. The 10-day nomination period (12–21 November) will be followed by five "fallow" days (up from two last year) to ensure all election pages are complete and accurate, to configure the SecurePoll voting interface, and to allow voters additional time to research, discuss and pose questions to candidates.
The voting period will last 14 days (27 November – 10 December), up from 10 days last year. The vote will then be audited for up to a week by independent scrutineers drawn from the ranks of non-native stewards, to ensure the election is free of double-voting, sockpuppetting, and other irregularities. The results will be announced on the election page. Jimbo Wales is expected to ceremonially announce the appointments shortly after.
A well-attended community RfC established the Committee's numbers as 15 (down from 18 in 2011 and 2010), with a uniform two-year term for incoming arbitrators. Due to an extraordinary last-minute motion by the Committee to remove a sitting arbitrator, Iridescent, for inactivity, eight arbitrators are due to continue their service in 2012 without re-election. Seven vacant seats are expected to be filled by this year's election, with terms starting on 1 January 2012.
The RfC determined that the minimum level of support necessary for a successful candidacy will be 50%, and that a shortfall in successful candidacies would be acceptable, opening the door to the possibility that the Committee will begin the new year with fewer than 15 arbitrators. Another conclusion of the RfC was that that unlike last year's election, there will be no limit on the number of questions voters may ask of candidates (although replying is not mandatory), and that any serious voter guide will merit inclusion in the election navigational template.
The Arbitration Committee is a critical institution of the English Wikipedia; experienced and committed editors are urged to seriously consider standing for election.
Asaf Bartov, head of Global South Relationships, announced the finalization of a Wikimedia Participation Grants Program this week. In his post, Bartov explained that "Wikipedians can often make additional progress toward our vision of free knowledge freely available for everyone in the world, by participating in physical meetings, events, or conferences. Such participation often entails travel costs, and sometimes accommodation, visa, and other costs too. These costs are often prohibitively expensive for a volunteer’s personal budget, who is already donating valuable time and effort."
The new program, funded jointly by the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany (see the German chapter's post), aims to alleviate this cost by providing Participation Grants for community members to "cover travel, accommodation, registration, and other costs associated with participating in an event or activity, in furtherance of the Wikimedia Mission." Other self-sustaining Wikimedia chapters (ie. not funded by the Foundation) are also invited to contribute to the community "pool."
This program is similar to the general grant program, which funded 44 projects in 2010–2011 totaling $300,000. To receive a Community Grant, members must apply at Grants:Participation by creating a subpage with a description of their planned participation, background information about themselves, and the expected impact of their participation. The submissions are evaluated on a weekly basis by a special committee; in addition to the open process outlined on the page, participants must also send an e-mail to participation at wikimedia dot org with their full legal name. If their request is accepted, participants are also expected to write an open report describing their experiences with the program. A list of current and closed requests, from when the process was still in the works, can be found here.
In a continuation of its analysis of this year's Readers Survey, the Wikimedia Foundation has posted its results on reader perceptions of quality on Wikipedia. The overall quality of Wikipedia was graded based on five individual measures on a 10-point scale:
These results were then compiled into a Quality Perception Index, shown above. The global QPI average (the survey was administered in 16 countries) is 7.92 out of 10. Readers in predominantly English-speaking countries (US, Canada, UK, South Africa, Australia and India), where 94% or more of respondents used the English Wikipedia, were above average with an 8.02; as compared to other areas, with 7.85. Japan "was a definite exception, with only 16% of the readers reporting similar ratings." How readers compared Wikipedia to other top websites is next on the agenda.
Stephen Chapman, a search engine optimization and internet marketing expert and a self-professed Wikipedia fan, has written a piece for ZDnet, where he suggests that Wikipedia run ads to support itself instead of relying on donations. The article focuses on Jimbo Wales' personal appeal, about which he says "it just seems ridiculous to me that he’s so adamant about not implementing ads". Chapman decries Wales' aversion as "an extremely misplaced endeavor" in the light of the ability of popular sites to monetise their userbase and the significant costs of running a popular site. He proposed that it is not immoral to generate revenue from providing a facility useful to the public, and rejects the notion that running ads is necessarily at odds with a non-profit website's mission of providing free access to information, or with Wales' stated desire to keep the Wikimedia Foundation "lean and tight".
The “free encyclopedia”, ... is only really free to the people who don’t donate.
— Stephen Chapman
He dismisses the backlash that the introduction of ads might provoke as the short-lived and overwrought posturings of a loud minority. Arguing that ads need not be intrusive or a major annoyance to users, to fulfill the needs of revenue generation, Chapman argues "there is so much flexibility with ads these days, it’s crazy to continue writing them off". Those diehards who would fiercely object to seeing ads, he reasons, could easily employ blocking software such as the Adblock Plus browser extension.
So powerful does Chapman believe the site's hold is over its audience, he maintains it would not need to collaborate with advertising middlemen such as Google AdSense; companies would be queuing up to advertise directly on-site. Chapman takes Wales to task for the precociousness of the declaration that "Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others". In Chapman's view, this takes for granted the project's position; if Wikipedia ran into financial difficulty, he says, it could be easily copied, improved on and dramatically monetised by others with more sustainable business plans. He concludes:
“ | Overall, I’m not asking Wikipedia to stop accepting donations. By all means, keep the donations flowing. But at this rate, as a frequent Wikipedia user, I would very much appreciate the consideration of alternate monetization models. Maybe it’s not a big deal to others, but I’d like to see Wikipedia move from a needy entity to one that’s able to sustain itself primarily through means that ask nothing of its users. Naturally, no one’s visiting Wikipedia to see or click an ad, but if your ads present something that’s relevant to the content of a page and potentially enriching for the life of the viewer of that page in some way, then you’re simply providing added value to their experience. | ” |
The article has been somewhat poorly received. In the first day after publication the article received three comments in favor of Chapman's proposal and 15 critical of it. The official launch of the 2011 Fundraiser is expected some time this week.
The Indian media, as well as the online tech media, took note this week of the impending commencement of WikiConference India 2011, the first nation-wide wikiconference, to be staged at the University of Mumbai from November 18 to 20. The Times of India noted organisers' ambition that the conference become an annual flagship event for Indian Wikimedians, particularly to encourage contributors to build projects in their native language rather than in English. The Indo-Asian News Service greeted the news as "a boost to India’s increasing net community", and revealed that the conference had attracted 7,000 applications for scholarships and participation, as well as more than 550 papers submitted for presentation.
Daily News & Analysis revealed that South India accounted for half of the scholarships awarded, remarking that "even though the conference is being held in Mumbai, the current lack of awareness about Indian language Wikipedias in western India has seen just over 15% of application awards go to this region, principally Gujarat and Maharashtra." In another story, the broadsheet commented on the opportunity for youth to get involved, noting the presentation of 10-year-old Achu Kulangara from Kochi on how his peers were regular contributors to the Malayalam Wikipedia.
A report by Agence France-Presse focused on the growth of internet and particularly mobile phone use in India, and the potential this has for generating readers and contributors to Wikimedia projects. The agency noted that the Indian operation has the Wikimedia Foundation's first office outside the United States. Topics addressed at the conference are to include "Usage of Ajax and Jquery in Wiki", "WikiBhasha: Our Experiences with Multilingual Content", "Legal Aspects of Wiki Culture", and "WikiWomenWeb: Bridging the Gender Gap", reported EFYtimes.com.
Techcircle.in noted the formal approval of Wikimedia India in June 2010 and its becoming the 29th Wikimedia chapter. Techcircle payed special attention to the keynote of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, as did CNBC-TV18's Moneycontrol.com, which said that the event "will see Jimmy Wales, the man himself who's the founder, open-source evangelist and Chairman Emeritus of Wikimedia foundation [ sic] make a touchdown!" See this week's "WikiProject report" for an interview with WikiProject India members ahead of the conference.
On the Zero Geography blog, Dr. Mark Graham, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute revealed the latest attempt to map the geographic distribution of Wikipedia's coverage. The maps created by the Institute's researchers show every geotagged article in the November 2011 versions of the Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian, and Swahili Wikipedias. The map of the English Wikipedia, which had nearly 700,000 geotagged articles, is visible to the right.
Of the varying emphases on different parts of the globe in each of the language versions, Graham commented: "...if your primary free source of information about the world is the Persian or Arabic or Hebrew Wikipedia, then the world inevitably looks very different to you than if you were accessing knowledge through the English Wikipedia. There are far more absences and many parts of the world simply don't exist in the representations that are available to you." The post was picked up by The Guardian's Datablog, where it attracted much commentary, as well as by Gizmodo and The Huffington Post.
WikiProject India is a ginormous project, started in July 2006 by Ganeshk. It has 55 FAs and 162 GAs under its scope. The project was featured in one of the WikiProject Report's earliest issues, so be sure to take a look at our 2007 article for a brief overview of the project's structure. With the recent surge in activity regarding India, from the creation of a Wikimedia Chapter in India earlier this year to the 2011 WikiConference India being held this weekend (see "In the news"), we felt this would be a nice time to revisit the project. We interviewed RegentsPark and AshLin.
First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject India.
When did you first join WikiProject India? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?
What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and future India-related findings, creations and news?
Are you planning to attend WikiConference India? Do you plan to discuss the WikiProject at the conference? How well do members of WikiProject India stay connected on and off the wiki?
Anything else you'd like to add?
We thank this week's interviewees for taking the time out of their day to answer our questions. Next week, we'll work on our
literature review. Until then, browse for articles in the
archive.
Reader comments
To give our readers a "sporting" chance at writing featured content, here are some suggestions from Sturmvogel 66, who has written or co-written 16 pieces of featured content and 28 A-class articles, including this week's HMS Eagle (below), since becoming a Wikipedian in 2007.
This week, five featured articles were promoted:
No featured pictures were promoted this week. Readers interested in participating are invited to acquaint themselves with the featured picture criteria and join the discussion at the candidates page.
This week was a good week for sports fans everywhere. Of the nine featured lists promoted this week, eight were sports-related, involving college football, association football, county cricket, and Major League Baseball. The sole non-sports list promoted this week, however, really took root in the brains of the the Featured List reviewers.
Two cases remain open:
Three requests for cases are also outstanding:
However at this time it looks like all of them will be declined. No clarification or amendment requests were finalized this week, with the possible exception of the Russavia-Biophys request that has been refiled as request for case.
This week also saw the opening of nominations in the
ninth annual elections to the Arbitration Committee (see "
News and notes").
Reader comments
“ | They [mobile screens] really require us to do something that we haven't had to do as much on desktops: they require us to focus. | ” |
— Director of Mobile and Special Projects Tomasz Finc |
This week saw the unveiling of some preliminary designs for Athena (named after the Greek goddess of "wisdom, courage [and] inspiration"), a new skin likely to sit at the heart of the revamped mobile site, but with possible connotations for the desktop site as well.
With the new mobile site rapidly becoming as feature rich as the desktop versions, there was a need for a design that could accommodate them in a usable fashion; the existing Vector skin, designed primarily with high resolution screens in mind, is largely unsuitable for this application. It is on this basis that Athena was created; if successful, it may even prove a successor to Vector on the desktop too.
The slick design (illustrated right) aims to pare down the number of features immediately offered to users in order to creating a page with a high usability factor on smaller screen sizes. When a device signals it has some additional capability, such as a larger screen, the design will then automatically adjust to provide a more useful display: a process being described as " graceful enabling" in contrast to the traditional model of " graceful degradation".
The new design for the mobile site would therefore follow an increasing trend among websites (such as YouTube) and programs (such as Mozilla Firefox) to group important actions together whilst hiding lesser used actions by default, particularly on mobile devices. The design, which is likely to be revised on the basis of user comments in the coming weeks, also aims to give greater visual focus to the edit button to encourage contributions.
With submissions closing on 9 November, the results of the first Wikimedia Coding Challenge (see previous Signpost coverage) are in. Five submissions met the submission requirements for the mobile uploading challenge; ten entries were accepted for "making Wikipedia appear more alive" challenge; and eight for the slideshow challenge. A further three submissions were rejected solely on the grounds of not providing enough supporting evidence in the form of a readme ( full list of accepted submissions).
Reporting on the submissions, Erik Möller noted that there were "definitely a few that are worth a closer look". Nonetheless, there will no doubt be at least a little feeling of anticlimax about the contest, which had seen 500 potential entrants sign up within the first 24 hours. Even among submissions, quality varied, and there were a handful that looked as if little or no development work had been done to tailor standard code to the intricacies of the competition requirements. Nonetheless, developers and non-developers alike will take heart from both the high quality of a number of submissions, and the fact that so many potential coders signalled an interest, yielding many possible contacts when it came to expanding the developer base in future.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.