The Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums initiative ( GLAM for short) organized and executed GLAMcamp Amsterdam this week, on December 2–4. The event, which took place at the MediaMatic Lab in Amsterdam, was "a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project." The meeting was attended by over 40 Wikipedians from 22 different countries, and was hosted by Wikimedia Nederland.
GLAMcamp Amsterdam is the second such workshop of its kind, and follows on the heels of GLAMcamp NYC earlier in May of this year (see Signpost coverage). According to the organizers, "Rather than [being] an open community conference like Wikimania, this is a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project. Attendees will also include key representatives of GLAM (and related) institutions who have a strong relationship with Wikimedia already."
After an opening address by Wikimedia Nederland's Jessica Tangelder, the first major event was the Mass Upload & Metrics project, led by Maarten Dammers, in which participants discussed how mass-uploading images to Commons, especially from museum repositories, works. A public workshop and an announcement of a free content search interface from developer Thijs de Boer followed.
Next came the three keynote speeches. The first was from Dr. Margriet Schavemaker, Head of Collections and Research at the Stedelijk Museum on "Tricks and traps of sharing modern collections online". Next, David Haskiya, a product developer for Europeana, discussed the compatibility of the Europeana strategic plan with Wikimedia, and Frank Meijer closed off the workshop with a presentation on the collaboration of Wikimedians and the Tropenmuseum, where he is Project manager of Museum digitization.
Saturday began with a set of lightning talks on topics ranging from the GLAM newsletter to freedom of panorama (or lack thereof) in France and archaeology and its compatibility with Wikimedia. Parallel sessions during the day included how to initiate a GLAM program in a new country, how to improve internal communication, and drafting a "freedom declaration". There were also sessions on QRpedia, development of glamwiki.org and Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 in 2012. In the evening Wikimedians were given a backstage tour of the Amsterdam Museum. The final day of the event saw the last few lightning talk submissions before breaking out for the penultimate parallel sessions, which covered improving documentation, best practices, statistics and metrics. The evening was spent on a guided tour of the Rijksmuseum.
</noinclude>
In a post for social media professionals' review Socialfresh, marketer David King set forth a case for "Why Wikipedia Needs Marketers". Beginning from the observation that both numbers of new and active contributors are flagging while articles continue to grow in size and number, King pitched the idea that the encyclopaedia needs the content curating skills of paid marketing professionals "with the right policies, guidance and expertise". "[V]andalism, bias, outdated information and blatant factual errors will run even more rampant" should current growth patterns prevail on the site, King proposed, arguing that marketers inducted into the ranks of encyclopaedians with proper understanding and appreciation of the site's goals and guidelines would be highly motivated and capable contributors to the struggle to sustain and improve quality of coverage.
Acknowledging the editing community's antipathy to marketers who have hitherto tended to ignore policy, legal and social norms of the collegial contribution of neutral encyclopaedic content in their persistent drives to introduce promotional material on their clients' behalf, King asserted that his colleagues had lost the good faith that the project's policies had proffered to them, that they had never deserved it, and yet that it was in the interests of both the editing community and marketers that they earn this faith back. Citing the exorbitant costs of editorial combat between gatekeepers and marketers, and the latter's interpretation of the nuanced Conflict of interest policy as an all-out ban, King sought to establish that "Wikipedia doesn’t have anything against marketers, just against marketing content". His plea to marketing professionals intent on editing was to "Be humble, learn, listen and follow the rules. Take your time. Invest in Wikipedia. Earn our good faith back." To Wikipedians, his call for truce invoked the metaphor of prohibition of widely practiced activities, arguing that Wikipedians, like sensible regulators elsewhere, must come to realise that outlawing such behaviour is countereffective, and that the solution lies in tolerance, oversight and policing of it. He proposed as potential ideas to embrace certification schemes, conduct accords, and even a donations-for-participation program. Legions of frustrated and antagonistic outsiders under the status quo, he imagined marketers as a "most knowledgeable and motivated group of contributors" in this brave new world.
The Signpost asked King to elaborate on his proposal to the perhaps yet-wary volunteers of the editing community:
Today Wikipedia's most ethical COI contributors are literally fearful of Wikipedia, handcuffed by their legal department, scared of what the community might do. Maybe they should be. Meanwhile, our worst contributors are often rewarded with salvaged advert. On Wikipedia the system for COI appears to work, yet offline I see another story.
I see multi-billion dollar companies with some of the most ethical business practices in the world and a well-respected product getting slammed on Wikipedia by opinionated garbage and speculation written by a customer blowing steam four years ago. I see an angry ex-employee writing "next in line for chapter 11" on the article of a profitable multi-billion dollar company that's doing just fine. That fictional chapter 11 statement stayed up for weeks, was un-addressed by the community and read by thousands. I see a place where controversy and criticisms are well-covered, but stories of growth, culture, leadership and success are not. Where Apple and Google get quality articles, but other notable organizations are victimized by a community that breaks the rules for neutrality, verification and encyclopedic tone. A place where few notable organizations have the quality full-length article they deserve and the party most motivated to write it is afraid. Where community members with a negative COI against the organization are effective, but positive COIs are not.
COI contributors introduce bias, but I'm also concerned of the bias without them. Some of our most knowledgeable and motivated contributors are COIs. Does that mean we open the doors wide? Absolutely not. COIs are like political lobbyists. We're needed but our participation needs to be a delicate and well regulated one. But through teamwork, education, awareness, process, a better ecosystem we could change the tides. We can get more ethical contributions and less advert. We can improve the quality, completeness and balance of articles while reducing the volume of issues on COI noticeboards.
Most COI contributions are unhelpful, frustrating, require policing and drag the community into angry, venom-spitting conversations. The system is designed to police those edits after the fact. How can we make those edits better in the first place? I have some ideas and I think Wikipedia can become a better, more accurate, balanced, updated Wikipedia that will retain more quality volunteer editors if we discussed it and came up with ways to reward positive COI, punish bad COI, get more of the good and less of the bad.
An illustration of this theme came this week in Britain, with an exposé of London lobbyists Bell Pottinger Group by The Independent. The investigation revealed that among the 'dark arts' of the firm – one of the United Kingdom's largest lobbying outfits – was clandestinely sanitising negative coverage of clients in Wikipedia. Reporters from the newspaper posing as representatives of the reviled Uzbekistani regime succeeded in capturing on video executives of the firm describing the online reputation management services that they were willing to provide for the nation's president, Islam Karimov. Whether the episode lends weight to King's assertion that underhanded public relations operatives are thriving while their ethical colleagues are punished, or confirmation of the wisdom of a firm line on prohibiting interested contributions of any kind, remains an unanswered question.
Cambridge University Press took a bold step towards opening up academic journals to public access this week as they announced a scheme to rent access to individual articles for as little as £3.99/$5.99/€4.49, Ars Technica reported. Although this access is to be restricted to one viewing session with no facility to save, copy from or print an article, it represents an 86% decrease in the cost of accessing journal articles for laymen without university or library affiliations. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog elaborated on the publisher's motivations, which were principally concerned with improving the dismal 0.01% conversion rate of views from unaffiliated researchers to pay-per-view downloaders. Such viewers accounted for 20%, or 12 million hits, of pageviews for journal article abstracts on the publisher's Cambridge Journals Online site in 2010.
In another development that will warm the hearts of Wikipedia's article writers, BBC News showcased the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, an ambitious new initiative from the British Library in partnership with brightsolid to digitise for the online perusal of its readers its vast store of newspapers, periodicals and journals. Over one million pages of pre-20th-century publications are already available, with that number expected to rise to 40 million in the next ten years as the archive hopes to make available on the internet "every single newspaper, periodical and journal ever printed".
Vandalism fighters and casual readers alike have relied on Wikipedia's recent changes feed to give them a general idea of all the encyclopaedia's edits. However, there are several drawbacks to this method, most notably the need to refresh the page to display new information. Enter Wikistream, an external service streaming every single Wikipedia edit in real time, heralded this week as an "absolutely amazing" tool by The Next Web. Including changes to every Wikipedia project, the stream is often too busy for a viewer to note a single edit. The stream is filterable, able to display edits from a single project, or a certain namespace on said project. The website supports a "pause" function, accessible by pressing 'P' on the keyboard, for users who feel overwhelmed by the content. The development was also noted by Geeky Gadgets and Ubergizmo.
A request for comment was started on November 28 seeking consensus to begin a three-month trial of the tool apprenticeship program, developed by Dcoetzee. The program would allow experienced users to apply for access to a specific tool or set of related tools currently accessible only to administrators, such as blocking or deleting pages. Successful applicants would receive that set of tools on a short term, probationary basis. Early support for the proposal was strong, with many of the initial opposers having struck their votes after their concerns were responded to by Dcoetzee, but later input was less supportive, leaving a significant yet tenuous plurality in favour of the idea.
Concern was raised on the talk page of WikiProject Articles for creation that the template used when project members rejected submissions was too negative, and had the potential to discourage future contributors. A good portion of the discussion dealt with the balance between a desire to give personalized responses to each submitter and the massive volume of submissions that AfC receives. As a result of the thread, the background color to the template in question was lightened, and WikiProject user warnings began exploring friendlier options for AfC templates.
Three proposals were recently put forth to modify the user watchlist feature. The first proposal, written on November 30 by Fred Gandt, would allow users to choose to watch a specific page, but not its corresponding discussion page, or vice versa. The idea was brought up before in both 2005 and 2008, on each occasion with minimal community feedback. Support and opposition for the current proposal are roughly split at the time of writing.
A second proposal was made later that same day by Czarkoff that would allow users to mark a specific item in their watchlist as "read". Under this proposal, after a change is marked as "read", the next time the watchlist was viewed, that change, and all changes made to the same page that took place before the edit marked as "read", would not show up in the watchlist. The idea received some discussion before branching off into a third proposal by Edokter that would add a "show changes since last visit" function to the watchlist. This function is already built into MediaWiki, as the $wgShowUpdatedMarker option, and is enabled on Commons and Meta already. The proposal has received strong support thus far.
The last issue of the Signpost for 2011 comes out on December 26, and we are planning on running a special issue of the discussion report that week detailing the most important discussions of the year. A thread was started at the
village pump seeking suggestions, however it has thus far only received two comments (for which the Signpost thanks Jayron32 and Chzz). Further submissions are needed for this issue to be viable, so we ask readers to make suggestions either in the comments below or at the village pump, where details of what is being sought are available. The Signpost is grateful for any assistance, and we thank you in advance.
Reader comments
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Disambiguation, a very enthusiastic project started in July 2005. The project's 150 members help Wikipedia's readers find information by pointing the links in the body of articles to their correct destination and improving Wikipedia's collection of disambiguation pages. We interviewed PamD, BD2412, Woohookitty, R'n'B, France3470, Night of the Big Wind, and Doncram.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Disambiguation?
What are some common mistakes people make when creating or adding to disambiguation pages? What does a good disambiguation page look like? Should Wikipedia have quality ratings for disambiguation pages?
How frequently do you add or reformat hatnotes to articles? Are hatnotes leading to a disambiguation page preferred over hatnotes that point to specific articles? Do you feel the larger Wikipedia community generally understands the use of hatnotes?
Are disambiguation pages and hatnotes vulnerable to neutral point of view and notability issues? How does the project handle disagreements about the primary topic associated with a specific name or phrase?
Does WikiProject Disambiguation collaborate with any other projects? Have there been any drives or other initiatives to clean up disambiguation pages?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Next week, we'll trek across the frigid expanses between
Karelia,
Irkutsk, and
Kamchatka. Before we set out, be sure to chart a path across the
largest country in the world by consulting our
archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes back JJ Harrison, previously interviewed in August. Four of JJ's pictures were promoted this week, and he shares a little of what it takes to shoot featured pictures.
"Lighting, position, exposure and composition are a few things that are worth considering when out and about with a camera. Where the light at any given time is and how best to approach a subject are important considerations. Getting to your subject’s horizontal level usually looks better, and can also help to throw the background out of focus. As far as exposure goes, I recommend checking the exposure/histogram every few shots and adjusting the exposure compensation if needed. I use fill flash a lot, particularly in bright sunlight, and I adjust the flash exposure compensation as necessary. I often use aperture priority (Av) mode, except for birds in flight or when I use flashes and other techniques where manual exposure (M) is better."
A single featured topic was (re)promoted this week. The new topic ( nom) consists of four good articles and four featured articles related to the Song Dynasty, which ruled China from 960 to 1279 AD. The topic, previously a featured topic ( previous Signpost coverage), had been delisted in March 2010 (pictured on left).
No featured articles were promoted this week.
Seven featured pictures were promoted this week:
Featured pictures is proud to present this 12th-century illustration of Guanyin, promoted after nearly two months in limbo:
The voting stage of the 2011 Arbitration Committee Elections is scheduled the finish on Saturday, 10 December at 23:59 UTC, with the announcement of the winners tentatively taking place approximately a week after the close of voting. It is recommended that votes be cast at least one hour before the close of the polls, to ensure that they are processed by the server before the cutoff time.
No new evidence was presented in the case this week, but there was some activity in the workshop, mostly by arbitrators SirFozzie and Risker commenting on proposals. In response to a question asked in the talk page of the Proposed decision section, drafting arbitrators SirFozzie and Elen of the Roads both stated that the proposed decisions would be posted soon.
ARBPIA 3, a request for a third case on the topic of Palestine and Israel, was unanimously declined this week. Arbitrator Roger Davies wrote "the normal processes should be given a chance to work here before ArbCom intervention. If, after that, the parties feel that a motion would be helpful, I suggest a fresh, more focused, request for amendment, preferably with some well considered draft language".
A request for arbitration surrounding user behavior on the scientific realism article was declined, with arbitrators suggesting an RFC as an alternative solution.
There are no requests outstanding.
The Ban Appeals Subcommittee have announced the release of statistics covering their activity in the April – October 2011 period. Of the 56 appeals by banned editors, 11 were successful, and a further 7 dealt with by the community.
The Abortion case, whose conclusion drew scrutiny from administrators questioning a remedy which appeared to call for mandatory semi-protection of over a thousand pages,
was amended by motion to instead authorise administrators to semi-protect pages in the topic area at their discretion, provided that these actions are logged.
Reader comments
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for November was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the India and Brighton hackathon, the end of the Coding Challenge, and progress on the Visual Editor project. Other activities mentioned in the report were the ongoing infrastructure work to improve performance and reliability, the Wikimedia Labs project, as well as very recent developments such as the final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0 and an update to the Feedback Dashboard (see In Brief for coverage).
Following the previous successful hackathons, the report also noted preparations for a possible San Francisco hackathon to be held in January and at which "experienced staff and volunteer developers will participate, teaching new developers about MediaWiki, the API and our framework for JavaScript feature development".
Among developments to have received less publicity, there was also news on work to improve database dump functionality, with the unveiling of "a new experimental service this month, daily adds/changes dumps for all projects. No information about deleted/undeleted/moved pages from previous dumps is included, but it does include all new content since the run of the previous day". The WMF is also "talking with another organization interested in mirroring them".
The Commons Upload Wizard also received "important improvements" during the month, including "multi-file selection for browsers which support it, custom wikitext licenses, an improved licensing workflow, basic support for location data extraction, and more", the report described. VIPS, a new scaler that handles large PNG files and TIFF files much more efficiently than the existing ImageMagick scaler was also tested during the month.
Scheduled for December are substantial code review work for 1.19 (which has already crept substantially behind that forecast) and the deployment of the WebFonts extension, which will fix character displays of scripts for which there is no native browser support.
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.
The Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums initiative ( GLAM for short) organized and executed GLAMcamp Amsterdam this week, on December 2–4. The event, which took place at the MediaMatic Lab in Amsterdam, was "a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project." The meeting was attended by over 40 Wikipedians from 22 different countries, and was hosted by Wikimedia Nederland.
GLAMcamp Amsterdam is the second such workshop of its kind, and follows on the heels of GLAMcamp NYC earlier in May of this year (see Signpost coverage). According to the organizers, "Rather than [being] an open community conference like Wikimania, this is a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project. Attendees will also include key representatives of GLAM (and related) institutions who have a strong relationship with Wikimedia already."
After an opening address by Wikimedia Nederland's Jessica Tangelder, the first major event was the Mass Upload & Metrics project, led by Maarten Dammers, in which participants discussed how mass-uploading images to Commons, especially from museum repositories, works. A public workshop and an announcement of a free content search interface from developer Thijs de Boer followed.
Next came the three keynote speeches. The first was from Dr. Margriet Schavemaker, Head of Collections and Research at the Stedelijk Museum on "Tricks and traps of sharing modern collections online". Next, David Haskiya, a product developer for Europeana, discussed the compatibility of the Europeana strategic plan with Wikimedia, and Frank Meijer closed off the workshop with a presentation on the collaboration of Wikimedians and the Tropenmuseum, where he is Project manager of Museum digitization.
Saturday began with a set of lightning talks on topics ranging from the GLAM newsletter to freedom of panorama (or lack thereof) in France and archaeology and its compatibility with Wikimedia. Parallel sessions during the day included how to initiate a GLAM program in a new country, how to improve internal communication, and drafting a "freedom declaration". There were also sessions on QRpedia, development of glamwiki.org and Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 in 2012. In the evening Wikimedians were given a backstage tour of the Amsterdam Museum. The final day of the event saw the last few lightning talk submissions before breaking out for the penultimate parallel sessions, which covered improving documentation, best practices, statistics and metrics. The evening was spent on a guided tour of the Rijksmuseum.
</noinclude>
In a post for social media professionals' review Socialfresh, marketer David King set forth a case for "Why Wikipedia Needs Marketers". Beginning from the observation that both numbers of new and active contributors are flagging while articles continue to grow in size and number, King pitched the idea that the encyclopaedia needs the content curating skills of paid marketing professionals "with the right policies, guidance and expertise". "[V]andalism, bias, outdated information and blatant factual errors will run even more rampant" should current growth patterns prevail on the site, King proposed, arguing that marketers inducted into the ranks of encyclopaedians with proper understanding and appreciation of the site's goals and guidelines would be highly motivated and capable contributors to the struggle to sustain and improve quality of coverage.
Acknowledging the editing community's antipathy to marketers who have hitherto tended to ignore policy, legal and social norms of the collegial contribution of neutral encyclopaedic content in their persistent drives to introduce promotional material on their clients' behalf, King asserted that his colleagues had lost the good faith that the project's policies had proffered to them, that they had never deserved it, and yet that it was in the interests of both the editing community and marketers that they earn this faith back. Citing the exorbitant costs of editorial combat between gatekeepers and marketers, and the latter's interpretation of the nuanced Conflict of interest policy as an all-out ban, King sought to establish that "Wikipedia doesn’t have anything against marketers, just against marketing content". His plea to marketing professionals intent on editing was to "Be humble, learn, listen and follow the rules. Take your time. Invest in Wikipedia. Earn our good faith back." To Wikipedians, his call for truce invoked the metaphor of prohibition of widely practiced activities, arguing that Wikipedians, like sensible regulators elsewhere, must come to realise that outlawing such behaviour is countereffective, and that the solution lies in tolerance, oversight and policing of it. He proposed as potential ideas to embrace certification schemes, conduct accords, and even a donations-for-participation program. Legions of frustrated and antagonistic outsiders under the status quo, he imagined marketers as a "most knowledgeable and motivated group of contributors" in this brave new world.
The Signpost asked King to elaborate on his proposal to the perhaps yet-wary volunteers of the editing community:
Today Wikipedia's most ethical COI contributors are literally fearful of Wikipedia, handcuffed by their legal department, scared of what the community might do. Maybe they should be. Meanwhile, our worst contributors are often rewarded with salvaged advert. On Wikipedia the system for COI appears to work, yet offline I see another story.
I see multi-billion dollar companies with some of the most ethical business practices in the world and a well-respected product getting slammed on Wikipedia by opinionated garbage and speculation written by a customer blowing steam four years ago. I see an angry ex-employee writing "next in line for chapter 11" on the article of a profitable multi-billion dollar company that's doing just fine. That fictional chapter 11 statement stayed up for weeks, was un-addressed by the community and read by thousands. I see a place where controversy and criticisms are well-covered, but stories of growth, culture, leadership and success are not. Where Apple and Google get quality articles, but other notable organizations are victimized by a community that breaks the rules for neutrality, verification and encyclopedic tone. A place where few notable organizations have the quality full-length article they deserve and the party most motivated to write it is afraid. Where community members with a negative COI against the organization are effective, but positive COIs are not.
COI contributors introduce bias, but I'm also concerned of the bias without them. Some of our most knowledgeable and motivated contributors are COIs. Does that mean we open the doors wide? Absolutely not. COIs are like political lobbyists. We're needed but our participation needs to be a delicate and well regulated one. But through teamwork, education, awareness, process, a better ecosystem we could change the tides. We can get more ethical contributions and less advert. We can improve the quality, completeness and balance of articles while reducing the volume of issues on COI noticeboards.
Most COI contributions are unhelpful, frustrating, require policing and drag the community into angry, venom-spitting conversations. The system is designed to police those edits after the fact. How can we make those edits better in the first place? I have some ideas and I think Wikipedia can become a better, more accurate, balanced, updated Wikipedia that will retain more quality volunteer editors if we discussed it and came up with ways to reward positive COI, punish bad COI, get more of the good and less of the bad.
An illustration of this theme came this week in Britain, with an exposé of London lobbyists Bell Pottinger Group by The Independent. The investigation revealed that among the 'dark arts' of the firm – one of the United Kingdom's largest lobbying outfits – was clandestinely sanitising negative coverage of clients in Wikipedia. Reporters from the newspaper posing as representatives of the reviled Uzbekistani regime succeeded in capturing on video executives of the firm describing the online reputation management services that they were willing to provide for the nation's president, Islam Karimov. Whether the episode lends weight to King's assertion that underhanded public relations operatives are thriving while their ethical colleagues are punished, or confirmation of the wisdom of a firm line on prohibiting interested contributions of any kind, remains an unanswered question.
Cambridge University Press took a bold step towards opening up academic journals to public access this week as they announced a scheme to rent access to individual articles for as little as £3.99/$5.99/€4.49, Ars Technica reported. Although this access is to be restricted to one viewing session with no facility to save, copy from or print an article, it represents an 86% decrease in the cost of accessing journal articles for laymen without university or library affiliations. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog elaborated on the publisher's motivations, which were principally concerned with improving the dismal 0.01% conversion rate of views from unaffiliated researchers to pay-per-view downloaders. Such viewers accounted for 20%, or 12 million hits, of pageviews for journal article abstracts on the publisher's Cambridge Journals Online site in 2010.
In another development that will warm the hearts of Wikipedia's article writers, BBC News showcased the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, an ambitious new initiative from the British Library in partnership with brightsolid to digitise for the online perusal of its readers its vast store of newspapers, periodicals and journals. Over one million pages of pre-20th-century publications are already available, with that number expected to rise to 40 million in the next ten years as the archive hopes to make available on the internet "every single newspaper, periodical and journal ever printed".
Vandalism fighters and casual readers alike have relied on Wikipedia's recent changes feed to give them a general idea of all the encyclopaedia's edits. However, there are several drawbacks to this method, most notably the need to refresh the page to display new information. Enter Wikistream, an external service streaming every single Wikipedia edit in real time, heralded this week as an "absolutely amazing" tool by The Next Web. Including changes to every Wikipedia project, the stream is often too busy for a viewer to note a single edit. The stream is filterable, able to display edits from a single project, or a certain namespace on said project. The website supports a "pause" function, accessible by pressing 'P' on the keyboard, for users who feel overwhelmed by the content. The development was also noted by Geeky Gadgets and Ubergizmo.
A request for comment was started on November 28 seeking consensus to begin a three-month trial of the tool apprenticeship program, developed by Dcoetzee. The program would allow experienced users to apply for access to a specific tool or set of related tools currently accessible only to administrators, such as blocking or deleting pages. Successful applicants would receive that set of tools on a short term, probationary basis. Early support for the proposal was strong, with many of the initial opposers having struck their votes after their concerns were responded to by Dcoetzee, but later input was less supportive, leaving a significant yet tenuous plurality in favour of the idea.
Concern was raised on the talk page of WikiProject Articles for creation that the template used when project members rejected submissions was too negative, and had the potential to discourage future contributors. A good portion of the discussion dealt with the balance between a desire to give personalized responses to each submitter and the massive volume of submissions that AfC receives. As a result of the thread, the background color to the template in question was lightened, and WikiProject user warnings began exploring friendlier options for AfC templates.
Three proposals were recently put forth to modify the user watchlist feature. The first proposal, written on November 30 by Fred Gandt, would allow users to choose to watch a specific page, but not its corresponding discussion page, or vice versa. The idea was brought up before in both 2005 and 2008, on each occasion with minimal community feedback. Support and opposition for the current proposal are roughly split at the time of writing.
A second proposal was made later that same day by Czarkoff that would allow users to mark a specific item in their watchlist as "read". Under this proposal, after a change is marked as "read", the next time the watchlist was viewed, that change, and all changes made to the same page that took place before the edit marked as "read", would not show up in the watchlist. The idea received some discussion before branching off into a third proposal by Edokter that would add a "show changes since last visit" function to the watchlist. This function is already built into MediaWiki, as the $wgShowUpdatedMarker option, and is enabled on Commons and Meta already. The proposal has received strong support thus far.
The last issue of the Signpost for 2011 comes out on December 26, and we are planning on running a special issue of the discussion report that week detailing the most important discussions of the year. A thread was started at the
village pump seeking suggestions, however it has thus far only received two comments (for which the Signpost thanks Jayron32 and Chzz). Further submissions are needed for this issue to be viable, so we ask readers to make suggestions either in the comments below or at the village pump, where details of what is being sought are available. The Signpost is grateful for any assistance, and we thank you in advance.
Reader comments
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Disambiguation, a very enthusiastic project started in July 2005. The project's 150 members help Wikipedia's readers find information by pointing the links in the body of articles to their correct destination and improving Wikipedia's collection of disambiguation pages. We interviewed PamD, BD2412, Woohookitty, R'n'B, France3470, Night of the Big Wind, and Doncram.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Disambiguation?
What are some common mistakes people make when creating or adding to disambiguation pages? What does a good disambiguation page look like? Should Wikipedia have quality ratings for disambiguation pages?
How frequently do you add or reformat hatnotes to articles? Are hatnotes leading to a disambiguation page preferred over hatnotes that point to specific articles? Do you feel the larger Wikipedia community generally understands the use of hatnotes?
Are disambiguation pages and hatnotes vulnerable to neutral point of view and notability issues? How does the project handle disagreements about the primary topic associated with a specific name or phrase?
Does WikiProject Disambiguation collaborate with any other projects? Have there been any drives or other initiatives to clean up disambiguation pages?
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Next week, we'll trek across the frigid expanses between
Karelia,
Irkutsk, and
Kamchatka. Before we set out, be sure to chart a path across the
largest country in the world by consulting our
archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes back JJ Harrison, previously interviewed in August. Four of JJ's pictures were promoted this week, and he shares a little of what it takes to shoot featured pictures.
"Lighting, position, exposure and composition are a few things that are worth considering when out and about with a camera. Where the light at any given time is and how best to approach a subject are important considerations. Getting to your subject’s horizontal level usually looks better, and can also help to throw the background out of focus. As far as exposure goes, I recommend checking the exposure/histogram every few shots and adjusting the exposure compensation if needed. I use fill flash a lot, particularly in bright sunlight, and I adjust the flash exposure compensation as necessary. I often use aperture priority (Av) mode, except for birds in flight or when I use flashes and other techniques where manual exposure (M) is better."
A single featured topic was (re)promoted this week. The new topic ( nom) consists of four good articles and four featured articles related to the Song Dynasty, which ruled China from 960 to 1279 AD. The topic, previously a featured topic ( previous Signpost coverage), had been delisted in March 2010 (pictured on left).
No featured articles were promoted this week.
Seven featured pictures were promoted this week:
Featured pictures is proud to present this 12th-century illustration of Guanyin, promoted after nearly two months in limbo:
The voting stage of the 2011 Arbitration Committee Elections is scheduled the finish on Saturday, 10 December at 23:59 UTC, with the announcement of the winners tentatively taking place approximately a week after the close of voting. It is recommended that votes be cast at least one hour before the close of the polls, to ensure that they are processed by the server before the cutoff time.
No new evidence was presented in the case this week, but there was some activity in the workshop, mostly by arbitrators SirFozzie and Risker commenting on proposals. In response to a question asked in the talk page of the Proposed decision section, drafting arbitrators SirFozzie and Elen of the Roads both stated that the proposed decisions would be posted soon.
ARBPIA 3, a request for a third case on the topic of Palestine and Israel, was unanimously declined this week. Arbitrator Roger Davies wrote "the normal processes should be given a chance to work here before ArbCom intervention. If, after that, the parties feel that a motion would be helpful, I suggest a fresh, more focused, request for amendment, preferably with some well considered draft language".
A request for arbitration surrounding user behavior on the scientific realism article was declined, with arbitrators suggesting an RFC as an alternative solution.
There are no requests outstanding.
The Ban Appeals Subcommittee have announced the release of statistics covering their activity in the April – October 2011 period. Of the 56 appeals by banned editors, 11 were successful, and a further 7 dealt with by the community.
The Abortion case, whose conclusion drew scrutiny from administrators questioning a remedy which appeared to call for mandatory semi-protection of over a thousand pages,
was amended by motion to instead authorise administrators to semi-protect pages in the topic area at their discretion, provided that these actions are logged.
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The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for November was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the India and Brighton hackathon, the end of the Coding Challenge, and progress on the Visual Editor project. Other activities mentioned in the report were the ongoing infrastructure work to improve performance and reliability, the Wikimedia Labs project, as well as very recent developments such as the final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0 and an update to the Feedback Dashboard (see In Brief for coverage).
Following the previous successful hackathons, the report also noted preparations for a possible San Francisco hackathon to be held in January and at which "experienced staff and volunteer developers will participate, teaching new developers about MediaWiki, the API and our framework for JavaScript feature development".
Among developments to have received less publicity, there was also news on work to improve database dump functionality, with the unveiling of "a new experimental service this month, daily adds/changes dumps for all projects. No information about deleted/undeleted/moved pages from previous dumps is included, but it does include all new content since the run of the previous day". The WMF is also "talking with another organization interested in mirroring them".
The Commons Upload Wizard also received "important improvements" during the month, including "multi-file selection for browsers which support it, custom wikitext licenses, an improved licensing workflow, basic support for location data extraction, and more", the report described. VIPS, a new scaler that handles large PNG files and TIFF files much more efficiently than the existing ImageMagick scaler was also tested during the month.
Scheduled for December are substantial code review work for 1.19 (which has already crept substantially behind that forecast) and the deployment of the WebFonts extension, which will fix character displays of scripts for which there is no native browser support.
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.