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Wikipedia's motto, from its very inception in 2001, has been "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". This emphasizes the openness of the project, which stands today as the greatest example of crowdsourcing on the Internet. With 3.8 million articles, the English Wikipedia alone stands as the largest encyclopedia ever. Yet despite our success, trouble is looming on the horizon. Wikipedia's model, though highly successful thus far, creates an intrinsic conflict between openness, allowing the greatest number of people to edit, and quality, aspiring to clear language and the highest standards of accuracy. Which is more important? In making Wikipedia more open, you risk ending up with poor information, poor writing, and rampant vandalism – turning the project into a big joke. In becoming more restrictive, you gain respect and accuracy but risk alienating users through complex policies, guidelines, and policy creep, which inevitably leads to editor fall-off.
I penned an essay on my experiences with Wikipedia back in December 2009. There I reflected on my early fascination with the project, my experiences with its mechanism, and how editors fit into the overall model of the project. At the time I was optimistic about the future of this project, saying, for instance, that "time in itself solves all problems".
Now, two years later, I'm not so sure. Editor retention is a worrisome topic, and one that has been at the center of the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy Initiative since 2009. The difference between the Foundation's numerical goals through 2015 and what has actually happened is quite stark, and earlier this month the Foundation's Director, Sue Gardner, brought the issue firmly into the limelight again in her presentation at Wikimedia UK (see the video).
Let's take this statement as an axiom: Discussions on Wikipedia naturally lean towards stricter standards.
There are several reasons for this assertion. First is the growth of Wikipedia itself. In earlier times, editors were more concerned with plugging content holes and filling out red links than with specific, focused, well-cited, quality writing. Instances in which such quality was achieved were cataloged in BrilliantProse (note the name), an early version of today's Featured articles. As Wikipedia evolved, there were fewer content holes to fill, and editors began intensively improving articles. Processed by growth and parsed through instruction creep, BrilliantProse eventually became the featured articles we know today, in which high-quality prose is only one of ten criteria.
Second, we're self-conscious about how Wikipedia is perceived by the wider world. Regular editors spend many an hour laboring at prominent articles read by thousands of people every day, but find that outside Wikipedia their work is viewed as unusual. Some are even ridiculed by their peers, who perceive Wikipedia to be unreliable and poorly written. What are these editors to do? They return to their desks vowing to do better, and become protective of article quality. In discussions, some of these editors express the view that one good article is better than several rather poor ones. After all, we humans are social creatures; we seek to improve ourselves by improving our standing, and the standing of our work, in the view of other people. By writing better we hope to improve the public, outside perception of our work.
Third, it's very easy to increase standards incrementally because the repercussions for doing so take a while to appear. If you increase the quality requirements for a particular process, drama fails to occur. The standard becomes a little harder to reach, but the process generates better results. Examine any process following a major standards discussion and you'll see that the numbers will shift little in the short term. Short-term thinking, driven by idealization and natural growth, is at play here, as everyone accepts the current standards and interprets a bump in the upwards direction as a strictly positive thing. New editors have neither the credence nor the awareness to contribute to these kinds of discussions, thus involved parties tend to be veteran editors already familiar and comfortable with the standard.
Now let's look at the graph above, which shows that the active editing population hasn't grown, but has slowly dropped since 2007! Even more telling of this decline is the lack of activity in one of the most vital and most fluctuation-prone areas of Wikipedia— RfA. In November 2011 only two promotions took place; compare this with November 2006, for instance, when 33 candidates were promoted.
It's easy to miss, but every bump in quality we make is damaging to the new editor population. I like to think of Wikipedia as a tree, and editing as a ladder. You climb the ladder to reach different fruits ("articles"). Each time you make a process a tiny bit harder, you move the fruit a step higher up and add one more step to that ladder. That may not seem like such a big deal, but if you apply quality creep and repeat this process 10 times, you get one very daunting ladder—a ladder of such height that a new editor might say not even bother to climb it. The "low-hanging fruit" that should, in theory, account for this do not exist. The lowest prestigious piece of work a writer can achieve is a good article, and that too is daunting for a new editor inexperienced with Wikipedia's style and formatting. This, in a nutshell, is why Wikipedia is looking ill.
The Wikimedia Foundation, however, has been targeting usability as the core of our troubles. To this effect, they've redesigned the editing layout, softened the Wikipedia logo, introduced WikiLove, and done a host of other things to make Wikipedia a more comfortable place. While I agree that the Wikipedia interface should be friendlier, in key ways it's in a far better state today (I never liked Monobook and a new WYSIWYG interface would be much easier to use), in my mind the initiative has missed the point; thus far the Foundation has failed to address why people have been leaving, only giving them a more comfortable place to sit in during their stay.
So you've read my rant and found yourself nodding at every sentence. Or you're completely opposed to everything I said and are already formulating an equally long rant on the talk page about why I'm completely and utterly wrong. Regardless of your take, we need to think about how we can kick Wikipedia back into the era of good feeling that my magical "five years ago" represents? Well, here's the kicker; we don't.
We've had a lot of time to develop and mature, and you may notice that in discussing why editor retention is falling, I never once explained why it is a bad thing—it really isn't. Now don't get me wrong, a growing population of active editors is always a good thing; but there's a limit to how far we can go, and in my mind, we've already passed it. The reason Wikipedia had such a rapidly expanding population in the first place was because we had so many content holes, we needed every hand available to keep our leaky boat afloat, and once our basis was established, there were plenty of idle hands eager to help. With the HMS Wikipedia now seaworthy, there is more quality content to write. With a limited pool of people with enough ability, interest, drive, and spare time to contribute such writing, a saturation limit develops, past which contributors are harder to find. And as standards continue climbing, this pool continues to shrink.
The Wikimedia Foundation should accept that there's a limit to how active a community can be, and that limit has been passed and distanced from. Openness and quality are a very real dichotomy, and one that has been around longer than the Foundation has, starting with the bitter split between Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger. Although we can try various gimmicks to increase our credence among potential contributors, nothing short of creating a culture of forgiveness would push contributions back to the rise; and although Sue Gardner has often stressed the importance of not biting the newcomers, in a public system that sees a good deal of vandalism alongside legitimate contributions, a hard line is needed to keep out the trolls. A Wikipedia in which poor edits are reported upon with a shower of encouragements is an unmaintainable system. If editors have the will needed to maintain a presence in the system, they would appreciate real feedback more than petty encouragements.
The simplest thing you can do to reverse editor loss is this: whenever you come across a discussion on increasing the standards for a particular process, remember what it could mean for new editors, and pitch in by suggesting what it could mean for potential editors in the future. This would serve to remind people about the possible long-term consequences of their actions, regardless of immediate justifications.
Reader comments
The study focused on ten mental health topics (e.g. "antidepressants and suicide in young people" or "side-effects of antipsychotics"), five each in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. "Using the topic terms (or synonyms) as key words for the searches or through manual browsing, content relating to these topics was extracted from [Wikipedia and 13 other websites selected for prominent Google results for depression and schizophrenia] and from the most recent edition of Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry ... and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica" by two reviewers. For both depression and schizophrenia, three psychologists with clinical and research expertise in that area evaluated these extracts on accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability, on a scale from 1 to 5 ("e.g. Accuracy: 1 = many errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 3=some errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 5 = all information factually accurate"). As in an earlier study of the quality of health information on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: " Wikipedia's cancer coverage is reliable and thorough, but not very readable"), readability was also measured using a Flesch–Kincaid readability test, which is calculated from word and sentence lengths.
For both depression and schizophrenia, Wikipedia scored highest in the accuracy, up-to-dateness, and references categories – surpassing all other resources, including WebMD, NIMH, the Mayo Clinic and Britannica online. In breadth of coverage, it was behind Kaplan & Saddock and others for both areas. And "of the online resources, Wikipedia was rated the least readable [by the human reviewers], although some of its topics received an average rating." Likewise, the Wikipedia content had relatively high Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indices (around 16 for schizophrenia and 15 for depression – indicating that a tertiary level of education is necessary to understand the content), similar to that of Britannica but higher than most other resources examined.
The authors note that their "findings largely parallel those of other recent studies of the quality of health information on Wikipedia" (citing eight such studies published between 2007 and 2010):
A paper in the Journal of Personality Assessment [2] tried to assess the impact of the Wikipedia article Rorschach test on psychologists' use of that test. As summarized by the authors, "In the summer of 2009, an emergency room physician [ User:Jmh649 – James Heilman, MD] posted images of all 10 Rorschach inkblots on ... Wikipedia. The images were accompanied by descriptions of “common responses” to each blot. ... a fierce debate ensued between some psychologists who claimed that posting the inkblots is a threat to test security and other individuals, including some psychologists and other mental health professionals, who argued that all information should be freely available, including full details of the Rorschach". (In fact, the debates on whether to display versions of the inkblots in the article go back to at least 2005, at first accompanied by rather spurious copyright claims – Rorschach died in 1922.) The authors note that the inkblots had already been revealed to the general public in a 1980s book and cite an earlier study [3] that had found "particularly damaging information" about personality assessment tests on the Internet as early as 2000, "including examples of test stimuli from... the Rorschach" (presumably including this site). Still, "Internet coverage of the Rorschach appeared to grow exponentially during" the 2009 debate about the Wikipedia article, which made it to the front page of the New York Times (Signpost coverage: " Rorschach test dispute reported").
The first part of the study examined the top 50 Google search results for " Rorschach" (excluding "watchmen" to filter out results about a comic book and film) and "inkblot test", coding them into four levels representing the "threat each site presents to test security and the extent to which the content of the site might aid an individual in dissimulating on the Rorschach". 44% of the sites were classified as Level 0 ("no threat"), e.g. home page of bands with "Rorschach" in their name, and 15% as Level 1 ("minimal threat"). The 22% Level 2 ("indirect threat") sites which "tended to discuss test procedures more explicitly" apparently included "several 'official' Rorschach Web sites, where one is able to register for Continuing Education Rorschach workshops, [and which] also allow visitors to purchase materials that contain sensitive test information. For example, certain training Web sites allow individuals to purchase training texts and instructional media without requiring a license or other professional credentials". The authors find it "disturbing" that many sites in this threat category "were authored by psychologists". 19% of the sites were classified as the highest level, "direct threat", e.g. many that contained depictions of one or more Rorschach inkblots, or specific information about how responses are interpreted. Together with results about the high percentage of Internet users consulting Wikipedia for health information (36% in the US in 2007 according to Pew research), the authors conclude that "we can no longer presume that examinees have not been exposed to this information prior to an assessment".
The second part of the study likewise starts out with a Google News search for "Rorschach" and "Wikipedia", noting that "of the 25 news stories reviewed, 13 included one or more of the Rorschach inkblots, with Card I as the most frequently displayed", and eventually arriving at five media stories about the controversy which allowed readers' comments ( [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]). The altogether 520 comments on these stories were "coded according to the opinion expressed by the writer regarding each of the following categories: (a) the field of psychology, (b) psychologists, and (c) the Rorschach." While the vast majority did not state a clear opinion on the first two categories, the authors note that "Of those comments that did express an opinion toward psychologists [ca. 16%] most were overwhelmingly negative." Many more of the commenters on the Wikipedia/Rorschach news stories expressed an opinion about the test itself: "In total, 182 (35%) of comments were classified as unfavorable toward the Rorschach, whereas only 55 (11%) were coded as favorable toward the Rorschach. The remaining 283 (54%) of comments were categorized as neutral or not mentioned." Among those who identified as mental health professionals, 61% expressed a favorable opinion about the test and 15% a negative one.
Asked for his comment on the paper, Heilman said: "My main criticism of their paper is that they seem to take as axiomatic that exposure to these images hurts test reliability without any real evidence to back it up. Otherwise it is an interesting piece." (The paper includes a section reviewing literature on "the impact of 'coaching' on psychological tests", however it does not mention results pertaining specifically to the Rorschach test, and mostly concerns subjects who deliberately try to "cheat" on such tests, rather than those who have accidentally been exposed to a test's material before.)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln MBA candidate Jon Stacey reports on the results of a proof-of-concept tool to measure the rate of misspelled words in the English Wikipedia over time. [4] [5] A text parser (code available for download) was applied to a random sample of 2,400 articles. Instead of considering the latest revision, a random revision from the history of each article was used. The final corpus was obtained by stripping markup and non-ASCII characters as well as article sections such as the references and table of contents. Words were matched against a dictionary obtained by manually combining 12dicts and SCOWL ( source) with Wiktionary.
The results show that the percentage of misspellings has been growing steadily, reaching 6.23% for revisions created in 2011. Several weaknesses with the method are discussed, including the lack of Unicode support, the high rate of false positives, and the possibility that the rising rate might be associated with a rise in the complexity of content. The concluding remarks speculate on how semi-automated spell-checking may support editorial work at a large scale. (Wikipedians have used lists of common misspellings for many years, also integrated in semi-automatic editing tools such as AutoWikiBrowser.)
In related news, the developers of an open-source multilingual proofreading application called LanguageTool released a beta application for proofreading Wikipedia articles. wikiCheck proofreads articles from the English and German Wikipedias based on a set of customizable syntax and grammar rules. A bookmarklet is available to access the application from a browser.
Three researchers from
Stanford University and
Yahoo! Research used a novel method to construct "a data-driven portrait of Wikipedia editors", as described in a preprint currently undergoing review for publication.
[6] While earlier studies relied on Wikipedians participating in surveys (and identifying themselves as such), the authors mined data from users of the
Yahoo! Toolbar for Wikipedia URLs containing an &action=submit
parameter, thereby arriving at a sample of 1900 editors of the English Wikipedia.
Their first main finding is that "on broad average, Wikipedia editors seem, on the one hand, more sophisticated than usual Web users, reading more news, doing more Web searches, and looking up more things in dictionaries and other reference works; on the other hand, they are also deeply immersed in pop culture, spending much online time on music- and movie-related websites." However, these "entertainment lovers ... form only a highly specialized subgroup that contributes many edits".
Based on the toolbar data, the paper also tries to answer the question "Do Wikipedia editors know their domain?" and related questions, positively: "across all topical domains Wikipedia editors show significant expertise. ... We also show that more substantial edits tend to come from experts", and that logged-in editors show more expertise than IP address editors. A final result is that "About half of the click chains culminating in an edit start with a Web search, with the other half originating on Wikipedia’s main page."
A special issue of Nucleic Acids Research features 11 articles describing how wikis and collaborative technology can be used to enhance biological databases. A commentary by Robert Finn, Paul Gardner and Alex Bateman [7] discusses in particular how to leverage Wikipedia, its collaborative infrastructure and large editor community to better integrate articles and biological data entries: the authors argue that the project offers an opportunity for crowdsourcing the curation and annotation of biological data, but faces major challenges for expert engagement, i.e. "how to get scientists en masse to edit articles" and "how to allow editors to receive credit for their work on an article".
Another article in the same issue [8] presents the Gene Wiki, an open-access and openly editable collection of Wikipedia articles about human genes. The article describes how structured data available on Gene Wiki articles is kept in sync with the data from primary databases via an automated system and how to automatically compute the quality of articles in the project at word or sentence-level using WikiTrust.
A thesis entitled Individual and social motivations to contribute to Commons-based peer production was submitted by University of Minnesota student Yoshikazu Suzuki for an MA in mass communication. The thesis presents and discusses the results from a small series of interviews as well as a survey exploring individual and social motivations of Wikipedia contributors, drawing on social identity theory, volunteerism and uses and gratifications theory. The survey, run in July 2011 with support from the Wikimedia Research Committee, collected 208 responses from a random sample of 950 among the top English Wikipedia editors. The results, obtained by applying principal components analysis to the responses, reveal eight distinct motivational factors: providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, concern for others’ well-being, the need to be entertained, the avoidance of negative self-affect, cognitive group membership, career benefits, and social desirability. An analysis of the relative strength of each factor indicates that providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, and concerns for others’ well-being were the three strongest motivational dimensions. Grouping the eight factors into two macro-categories according to self- and other-focused motivations, the other-focused motivations were found to be significantly stronger than the self-focused motivations. The thesis reviews the implications of these results for the design of incentives for participation and editor retention. The full text of the thesis [9] and an executive summary are available under open access.
A paper in this month's edition of First Monday, ambitiously titled "Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia", [10] reports on a statistical analysis of a complete dump of the English Wikipedia (225 million article edits) with regard to several quantities, starting with two that were introduced in a 2004 paper by Andrew Lih "as a simple measure for the reputation of [an] article within the Wikipedia": the total number of edits an article has received ("rigor") and the number of (logged-in and anonymous) users who have edited the article ("diversity"). The First Monday paper cites a 2007 study from the same journal, which found that featured articles tend to have more edits and contributors (while controlling for a few other variables) [11] as a justification for using "rigor" and "diversity" as proxies for article quality, but includes other quantities such as the article size change for an edit. The paper cites earlier work on evaluating Wikipedia article quality (e.g. dismissing the well-known 2005 Nature study based on the mistaken assumption that it had "only focused on featured articles"), but does not discuss existing attempts at more sophisticated quantitative quality heuristics.
The First Monday paper highlighted that if consecutive edits by the same user are counted as one, the overall number of article revisions drops by more than 33%, "revealing that one in three revisions in Wikipedia consist of users responding to their own edits or continuing an ongoing edit begun by themselves". "Article diversity" ranged up to 12,437 contributors per article, with a median of 12 and an average of 32. One of the main conclusions is that "rather than reflecting the contributions and expertise of a large group of people, the typical article in Wikipedia reflects the efforts of a relatively small group of users (median of 12) who make a relatively small number of edits (median of 21)."
Supporting the assumption that most edits do not result in significant changes in content, the study finds that 31% of all revisions cause a size change of fewer than 10 characters, and 51% a change of fewer than 30 characters, with an apparently significant peak at a four-character difference, presumably related to the insertion or removal of the four brackets ("[[ ... ]]") that generate a wikilink.
The author notes the slight decrease in the overall number of edits since 2008, but tentatively explains it by the increasingly complete coverage of encyclopedic topics, and doesn't share the widespread concerns about declining or stagnating editor activity: "participation in Wikipedia seems to remain as healthy as ever as revisions made per article created each year has annually increased since 2001 without exception".
A different paper [12] from last year's "Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference" similarly promises far-reaching insights from "Deconstructing Wikipedia" solely based on revision history statistics without analyzing the actual content changes, using a much smaller sample – 30 featured articles from the English Wikipedia, but also including timestamps. The data did not confirm the hypothesis that "the editor who initiated an article would have a high level of involvement in the article’s creation": for only five of the 30 articles, the initial author was the most frequent contributor.
A second conclusion is that for all of the articles in the sample, "there is a single Wikipedian whose contributions far exceed all others", ranging from 8% to 82% of the articles with an average of 39% (but the analysis does not seem to have sought to quantify the extent to which this exceeds the contributions of the second most frequent contributor). The author indicates that this supports Jaron Lanier's "oracle illusion" criticism of a supposed presentation of Wikipedia as a product of "the crowd". Somewhat tautologically, the author observes "that the control of an individual editor seemed to be reduced as more editors joined the process", and points to the need to analyze "a significantly larger number of articles" to answer the question whether "too many cooks spoil the stew" (apparently unaware of the significant body of earlier literature on this subject, starting with a 2005 paper that presented an answer in its title: " Too many cooks don't spoil the broth", and including the 2007 study which the above reviewed First Monday paper relied on).
A third result of the paper, which likewise might not surprise those already familiar with Wikipedia's editing processes, is that "the creation process is continuous and can go on for a very long time", with even articles about historic events from the distant past continuing to receive edits.
The author, an assistant professor in management and marketing at Virginia State University, concludes the paper by urging his readers to start "thinking about how the wiki platform, itself, is influencing the creation process".
The Wikimedia Foundation has posted an update on the Wikimedia Foundation's 2011 annual fundraiser. The update featured images and short biographies of twelve faces that were selected for use during this year's fundraiser. As fundraising chief Megan Hernandez explained, "these past few weeks, we’ve rotated through a couple dozen appeals with people from different parts of the world with unique Wikipedia experiences and personal stories to tell. ... Right now and for the next few days, we have all the appeals up live together." As of time of writing, all twelve appeals that made it through the selection process are still in active rotation, along with Jimmy Wales' own personal appeal.
The annual fundraiser is the Wikimedia Foundation's biggest single source of income, and has been growing with the project since early efforts from 2004. As with last year's drive, this year's event kicked off with Jimbo Wales' "personal appeal", which consistently received the highest feedback in previous drives and has again this year (see previous Signpost coverage), with a change to a green banner curiously gathering increased contributions. The appeals featured then shifted their focus to the community, turning the spotlight on appeals from individual Wikimedians. As of 26 December, according to the fundraiser statistics, a total of $16.9 million has been raised, just surpassing last year's goal of $16 million.
This week, we sat down with WikiProject Tree of Life, one of Wikipedia's oldest projects, predating the creation of the WikiProject concept. While WikiProject Tree of Life's current page was formulated in June 2002, the effort to organize Wikipedia's articles on all living organisms dates back to at least late 2001, when Manning Bartlett mentioned the existing Tree of Life project in his proposal for the establishment of WikiProjects. Today, the project's goals remain unchanged, despite the proliferation of descendent projects handling various groups of living things. Among the project's to-do list are creating missing articles for animals and plants, responding to cleanup tags, identifying unknown images of plants on Commons, and monitoring the project's watchlist. We interviewed members Shyamal, Bob the Wikipedian, JoJan, EncycloPetey, and Kevmin.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Tree of Life? Do you have any degrees or experience in biology? Are you a member of any of the kingdom- or species-specific projects under the scope of WikiProject Tree of Life?
As one of the oldest collaborations on Wikipedia, WikiProject Tree of Life was created with an unusually creative name. Please describe for our readers the project's long history and why the project is named after the tree of life. Have there been any attempts to change the name to something related to the project's scope, like "WikiProject Taxonomy"?
How does the project's scope differ from other large umbrella projects? What relationship does WikiProject Tree of Life have with the numerous sub-projects?
Do you feel there are particular kingdoms that are better represented on Wikipedia? Do some living things elicit more enthusiasm and activity from editors?
WikiProject Tree of Life has provided resources for editors to create articles for the numerous living things included in various lists of missing articles. How close is Wikipedia to providing a stub about every known creature? What will be the next step once that goal is achieved?
What are the project's most pressing concerns? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week we'll ring in the New Year by reflecting on the projects we saw in 2011. Get a head start by visiting the
archive.
Reader comments
We interviewed Killervogel5, who this week has had the final list in the Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster promoted. Killervogel5, also known as KV5, has been editing Wikipedia since January 2006 and has contributed 57 featured lists, 4 featured topics, 8 good articles and 83 did you knows. KV5 gives us background information on the featured lists, his plans for the future, and suggestions for those who wish to write featured lists.
On the Philadelphia Phillies roster project: I began the Phillies roster project in May 2010, and it was completed in December 2011, so the project as a whole took me 19 months to finish. Originally, there were 21 articles in the topic, but during the course of the various and sundry FLC nominations, it was reduced to 18 through mergers. The most time-consuming part was definitely the table building. That was the first part of the project that I tackled and it turned out to be a smart move. If I hadn't had all the tables done, it would have been nearly impossible to write the ledes for each list and I probably would have quit somewhere about ... probably letter F or so.
The most difficult part of this project was adjusting to the changing FL standards. At the time that I nominated Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (A) for featured list, a site-wide movement for better compliance with Wikipedia's policies on accessibility was gaining ground at FLC. I offered to make that first list a testcase for successfully implementing the improved accessibility standards, but this occurred after the lists had already been completed in userspace and moved to the mainspace. So I had to go through and change the format of each list. (I have to give a shout-out to RexxS for his help on the ACCESS requirements.)
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the most fun part: all of these lists were moved to the mainspace at the same time, and they became a gigantic DYK. I had a lot of good times developing a good hook for that.
I chose to improve the Phillies' roster lists because it is an intersection of my two big loves on Wikipedia: the Philadelphia Phillies, a team I've followed since I was a young child; and writing featured lists, which gives me great satisfaction. I really do enjoy taking on large list-related projects. Some previous baseball-related list projects of mine include the series of Rawlings Gold Glove Award and Silver Slugger Award lists and several lists of Major League Baseball managers.
On KV5's plans for the future: I haven't quite decided on my next project yet, but rest assured, I'll try to make it something monumental! I have started improving the List of Philadelphia Phillies owners and executives, using a book I received as a gift last Christmas (yes, I asked for a reference book for Christmas just for Wikipedia), but I've gotten away from it so maybe I'll tackle that next.
On writing featured lists: Featured lists require significantly less prose, but there is a lot of specialized mark-up that writers need to know to comply with accessibility standards. For new writers trying their hands at FLC, I always suggest peer review before an FLC nomination. There are so many little things here and there that can hang up an FLC nomination. Always check and double-check the reliability of your sources. We have the reliable source noticeboard or the FLC nomination talk page if you have questions on those, or you can seek out help at an appropriate WikiProject talk page. Finally, always review the appropriate criteria and make sure that, in the case of featured lists, your list meets the standards for prose, the lead, comprehensiveness, structure, style, and stability.
Eleven featured articles were promoted this week:
Seven featured lists were promoted this week:
One featured topic was promoted this week:
Two featured pictures were promoted this week:
This week saw the opening of the Muhammad images case to address which depictions of the prophet Muhammad, if any, were appropriate to display in the respective articles, as community discussion had not rendered a consensus on this. Evidence by multiple users has been submitted, and some workshop proposals have been tabled.
The case regarding TimidGuy's ban appeal proceeded into its second week. The case was opened by TimidGuy to appeal the site ban imposed off-wiki by Jimmy Wales. Part of the case is being conducted off-wiki due to privacy matters. It is one of the most active arbitration cases at present, with substantial activity in both the evidence and workshop pages.
Betacommand 3 proceeded to its ninth week. There has been no activity on the evidence pages this week, though several proposals were made at the workshop, including by drafting arbitrator SirFozzie.
Two new cases were requested this week. The first related to actress Demi Moore and conflicting information in reliable sources and tweets by the actress regarding her birth-name. It was declined due to a lack of prior dispute resolution, with an RFC or mediation suggested as alternatives by the committee.
The other request this week concerned the perceived uncivil conduct by Malleus Fatuorum, and his blocking, unblocking and reblocking by administrators Thumperward, John, and Hawkeye7, respectively. The request aimed to address whether Malleus's conduct was uncivil and warranted blocking, and whether the subsequent unblock and re-block constituted a wheel-war. At the time of writing, more than 100 users had commented on the request, and the case trended towards acceptance by the committee.
The two open requests for clarification regarding the Eastern European mailing list case and the Abortion motion had no activity this week.
Jimmy Wales ceremonially appointed the recently elected eight arbitrators to the committee this week. In his statement, Courcelles, Risker, Kirill Lokshin, Roger Davies, Hersfold, SilkTork, and AGK were appointed to two-year terms, and Jclemens to a one-year term, as determined by both a community RfC last month and a more recent decision by the election coordinators on the matter of the one-year term. Jimmy encouraged the committee to review its history, and strive to find the right balance between being too lenient or too strict in their judgments, to be neither too quick or too slow, and neither inconsistent nor arbitrary in its decisions.
He announced his intention to give up some of his traditional powers, and that to do this in an organised fashion he would form a council of editors to discuss various aspects of the history and state of the wiki, including its governance processes, to come up with ways to delegate these powers to the community. Details as to how such a council will be selected or how it will operate are yet to be announced.
Reader comments
Wikimedia's
domain names (including wikipedia.org
) will no longer be managed by U.S.-based registrar
Go Daddy, it was decided this week following concerns over the registrar's political activities.
The process that led to the decision to ditch the company that has managed Wikimedia's domains since at least 2007 seems to have begun with a December 23 post on the social news website reddit. The post, which has since received 35,000 votes and hundreds of responses, was a simple request directed at Jimmy Wales to "transfer Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy to show you're serious about opposing SOPA". It refers to the registrar's then open support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to which many Wikimedians and redditors are emphatically opposed. Many reddit commenters pledged donations if Wales committed to moving Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy, part of a wider reddit campaign to get organisations to leave Go Daddy.
The response to the post was swift. The same day as the post, Wales committed to a move away from Go Daddy on his Twitter page, although an orderly transition is likely to take some time. (Wales also announced the transfer of Wikia domains as part of the same process.) A twist came shortly after the announcement, when Go Daddy issued a press release stating that it was withdrawing its support for SOPA. The statement, a world away from their earlier description of their opposition to SOPA as "myopic", does not seem to have yet prompted any change of action by Wales or the Foundation.
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 views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the
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Wikipedia's motto, from its very inception in 2001, has been "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". This emphasizes the openness of the project, which stands today as the greatest example of crowdsourcing on the Internet. With 3.8 million articles, the English Wikipedia alone stands as the largest encyclopedia ever. Yet despite our success, trouble is looming on the horizon. Wikipedia's model, though highly successful thus far, creates an intrinsic conflict between openness, allowing the greatest number of people to edit, and quality, aspiring to clear language and the highest standards of accuracy. Which is more important? In making Wikipedia more open, you risk ending up with poor information, poor writing, and rampant vandalism – turning the project into a big joke. In becoming more restrictive, you gain respect and accuracy but risk alienating users through complex policies, guidelines, and policy creep, which inevitably leads to editor fall-off.
I penned an essay on my experiences with Wikipedia back in December 2009. There I reflected on my early fascination with the project, my experiences with its mechanism, and how editors fit into the overall model of the project. At the time I was optimistic about the future of this project, saying, for instance, that "time in itself solves all problems".
Now, two years later, I'm not so sure. Editor retention is a worrisome topic, and one that has been at the center of the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy Initiative since 2009. The difference between the Foundation's numerical goals through 2015 and what has actually happened is quite stark, and earlier this month the Foundation's Director, Sue Gardner, brought the issue firmly into the limelight again in her presentation at Wikimedia UK (see the video).
Let's take this statement as an axiom: Discussions on Wikipedia naturally lean towards stricter standards.
There are several reasons for this assertion. First is the growth of Wikipedia itself. In earlier times, editors were more concerned with plugging content holes and filling out red links than with specific, focused, well-cited, quality writing. Instances in which such quality was achieved were cataloged in BrilliantProse (note the name), an early version of today's Featured articles. As Wikipedia evolved, there were fewer content holes to fill, and editors began intensively improving articles. Processed by growth and parsed through instruction creep, BrilliantProse eventually became the featured articles we know today, in which high-quality prose is only one of ten criteria.
Second, we're self-conscious about how Wikipedia is perceived by the wider world. Regular editors spend many an hour laboring at prominent articles read by thousands of people every day, but find that outside Wikipedia their work is viewed as unusual. Some are even ridiculed by their peers, who perceive Wikipedia to be unreliable and poorly written. What are these editors to do? They return to their desks vowing to do better, and become protective of article quality. In discussions, some of these editors express the view that one good article is better than several rather poor ones. After all, we humans are social creatures; we seek to improve ourselves by improving our standing, and the standing of our work, in the view of other people. By writing better we hope to improve the public, outside perception of our work.
Third, it's very easy to increase standards incrementally because the repercussions for doing so take a while to appear. If you increase the quality requirements for a particular process, drama fails to occur. The standard becomes a little harder to reach, but the process generates better results. Examine any process following a major standards discussion and you'll see that the numbers will shift little in the short term. Short-term thinking, driven by idealization and natural growth, is at play here, as everyone accepts the current standards and interprets a bump in the upwards direction as a strictly positive thing. New editors have neither the credence nor the awareness to contribute to these kinds of discussions, thus involved parties tend to be veteran editors already familiar and comfortable with the standard.
Now let's look at the graph above, which shows that the active editing population hasn't grown, but has slowly dropped since 2007! Even more telling of this decline is the lack of activity in one of the most vital and most fluctuation-prone areas of Wikipedia— RfA. In November 2011 only two promotions took place; compare this with November 2006, for instance, when 33 candidates were promoted.
It's easy to miss, but every bump in quality we make is damaging to the new editor population. I like to think of Wikipedia as a tree, and editing as a ladder. You climb the ladder to reach different fruits ("articles"). Each time you make a process a tiny bit harder, you move the fruit a step higher up and add one more step to that ladder. That may not seem like such a big deal, but if you apply quality creep and repeat this process 10 times, you get one very daunting ladder—a ladder of such height that a new editor might say not even bother to climb it. The "low-hanging fruit" that should, in theory, account for this do not exist. The lowest prestigious piece of work a writer can achieve is a good article, and that too is daunting for a new editor inexperienced with Wikipedia's style and formatting. This, in a nutshell, is why Wikipedia is looking ill.
The Wikimedia Foundation, however, has been targeting usability as the core of our troubles. To this effect, they've redesigned the editing layout, softened the Wikipedia logo, introduced WikiLove, and done a host of other things to make Wikipedia a more comfortable place. While I agree that the Wikipedia interface should be friendlier, in key ways it's in a far better state today (I never liked Monobook and a new WYSIWYG interface would be much easier to use), in my mind the initiative has missed the point; thus far the Foundation has failed to address why people have been leaving, only giving them a more comfortable place to sit in during their stay.
So you've read my rant and found yourself nodding at every sentence. Or you're completely opposed to everything I said and are already formulating an equally long rant on the talk page about why I'm completely and utterly wrong. Regardless of your take, we need to think about how we can kick Wikipedia back into the era of good feeling that my magical "five years ago" represents? Well, here's the kicker; we don't.
We've had a lot of time to develop and mature, and you may notice that in discussing why editor retention is falling, I never once explained why it is a bad thing—it really isn't. Now don't get me wrong, a growing population of active editors is always a good thing; but there's a limit to how far we can go, and in my mind, we've already passed it. The reason Wikipedia had such a rapidly expanding population in the first place was because we had so many content holes, we needed every hand available to keep our leaky boat afloat, and once our basis was established, there were plenty of idle hands eager to help. With the HMS Wikipedia now seaworthy, there is more quality content to write. With a limited pool of people with enough ability, interest, drive, and spare time to contribute such writing, a saturation limit develops, past which contributors are harder to find. And as standards continue climbing, this pool continues to shrink.
The Wikimedia Foundation should accept that there's a limit to how active a community can be, and that limit has been passed and distanced from. Openness and quality are a very real dichotomy, and one that has been around longer than the Foundation has, starting with the bitter split between Jimbo Wales and Larry Sanger. Although we can try various gimmicks to increase our credence among potential contributors, nothing short of creating a culture of forgiveness would push contributions back to the rise; and although Sue Gardner has often stressed the importance of not biting the newcomers, in a public system that sees a good deal of vandalism alongside legitimate contributions, a hard line is needed to keep out the trolls. A Wikipedia in which poor edits are reported upon with a shower of encouragements is an unmaintainable system. If editors have the will needed to maintain a presence in the system, they would appreciate real feedback more than petty encouragements.
The simplest thing you can do to reverse editor loss is this: whenever you come across a discussion on increasing the standards for a particular process, remember what it could mean for new editors, and pitch in by suggesting what it could mean for potential editors in the future. This would serve to remind people about the possible long-term consequences of their actions, regardless of immediate justifications.
Reader comments
The study focused on ten mental health topics (e.g. "antidepressants and suicide in young people" or "side-effects of antipsychotics"), five each in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. "Using the topic terms (or synonyms) as key words for the searches or through manual browsing, content relating to these topics was extracted from [Wikipedia and 13 other websites selected for prominent Google results for depression and schizophrenia] and from the most recent edition of Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry ... and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica" by two reviewers. For both depression and schizophrenia, three psychologists with clinical and research expertise in that area evaluated these extracts on accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability, on a scale from 1 to 5 ("e.g. Accuracy: 1 = many errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 3=some errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 5 = all information factually accurate"). As in an earlier study of the quality of health information on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: " Wikipedia's cancer coverage is reliable and thorough, but not very readable"), readability was also measured using a Flesch–Kincaid readability test, which is calculated from word and sentence lengths.
For both depression and schizophrenia, Wikipedia scored highest in the accuracy, up-to-dateness, and references categories – surpassing all other resources, including WebMD, NIMH, the Mayo Clinic and Britannica online. In breadth of coverage, it was behind Kaplan & Saddock and others for both areas. And "of the online resources, Wikipedia was rated the least readable [by the human reviewers], although some of its topics received an average rating." Likewise, the Wikipedia content had relatively high Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indices (around 16 for schizophrenia and 15 for depression – indicating that a tertiary level of education is necessary to understand the content), similar to that of Britannica but higher than most other resources examined.
The authors note that their "findings largely parallel those of other recent studies of the quality of health information on Wikipedia" (citing eight such studies published between 2007 and 2010):
A paper in the Journal of Personality Assessment [2] tried to assess the impact of the Wikipedia article Rorschach test on psychologists' use of that test. As summarized by the authors, "In the summer of 2009, an emergency room physician [ User:Jmh649 – James Heilman, MD] posted images of all 10 Rorschach inkblots on ... Wikipedia. The images were accompanied by descriptions of “common responses” to each blot. ... a fierce debate ensued between some psychologists who claimed that posting the inkblots is a threat to test security and other individuals, including some psychologists and other mental health professionals, who argued that all information should be freely available, including full details of the Rorschach". (In fact, the debates on whether to display versions of the inkblots in the article go back to at least 2005, at first accompanied by rather spurious copyright claims – Rorschach died in 1922.) The authors note that the inkblots had already been revealed to the general public in a 1980s book and cite an earlier study [3] that had found "particularly damaging information" about personality assessment tests on the Internet as early as 2000, "including examples of test stimuli from... the Rorschach" (presumably including this site). Still, "Internet coverage of the Rorschach appeared to grow exponentially during" the 2009 debate about the Wikipedia article, which made it to the front page of the New York Times (Signpost coverage: " Rorschach test dispute reported").
The first part of the study examined the top 50 Google search results for " Rorschach" (excluding "watchmen" to filter out results about a comic book and film) and "inkblot test", coding them into four levels representing the "threat each site presents to test security and the extent to which the content of the site might aid an individual in dissimulating on the Rorschach". 44% of the sites were classified as Level 0 ("no threat"), e.g. home page of bands with "Rorschach" in their name, and 15% as Level 1 ("minimal threat"). The 22% Level 2 ("indirect threat") sites which "tended to discuss test procedures more explicitly" apparently included "several 'official' Rorschach Web sites, where one is able to register for Continuing Education Rorschach workshops, [and which] also allow visitors to purchase materials that contain sensitive test information. For example, certain training Web sites allow individuals to purchase training texts and instructional media without requiring a license or other professional credentials". The authors find it "disturbing" that many sites in this threat category "were authored by psychologists". 19% of the sites were classified as the highest level, "direct threat", e.g. many that contained depictions of one or more Rorschach inkblots, or specific information about how responses are interpreted. Together with results about the high percentage of Internet users consulting Wikipedia for health information (36% in the US in 2007 according to Pew research), the authors conclude that "we can no longer presume that examinees have not been exposed to this information prior to an assessment".
The second part of the study likewise starts out with a Google News search for "Rorschach" and "Wikipedia", noting that "of the 25 news stories reviewed, 13 included one or more of the Rorschach inkblots, with Card I as the most frequently displayed", and eventually arriving at five media stories about the controversy which allowed readers' comments ( [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]). The altogether 520 comments on these stories were "coded according to the opinion expressed by the writer regarding each of the following categories: (a) the field of psychology, (b) psychologists, and (c) the Rorschach." While the vast majority did not state a clear opinion on the first two categories, the authors note that "Of those comments that did express an opinion toward psychologists [ca. 16%] most were overwhelmingly negative." Many more of the commenters on the Wikipedia/Rorschach news stories expressed an opinion about the test itself: "In total, 182 (35%) of comments were classified as unfavorable toward the Rorschach, whereas only 55 (11%) were coded as favorable toward the Rorschach. The remaining 283 (54%) of comments were categorized as neutral or not mentioned." Among those who identified as mental health professionals, 61% expressed a favorable opinion about the test and 15% a negative one.
Asked for his comment on the paper, Heilman said: "My main criticism of their paper is that they seem to take as axiomatic that exposure to these images hurts test reliability without any real evidence to back it up. Otherwise it is an interesting piece." (The paper includes a section reviewing literature on "the impact of 'coaching' on psychological tests", however it does not mention results pertaining specifically to the Rorschach test, and mostly concerns subjects who deliberately try to "cheat" on such tests, rather than those who have accidentally been exposed to a test's material before.)
University of Nebraska-Lincoln MBA candidate Jon Stacey reports on the results of a proof-of-concept tool to measure the rate of misspelled words in the English Wikipedia over time. [4] [5] A text parser (code available for download) was applied to a random sample of 2,400 articles. Instead of considering the latest revision, a random revision from the history of each article was used. The final corpus was obtained by stripping markup and non-ASCII characters as well as article sections such as the references and table of contents. Words were matched against a dictionary obtained by manually combining 12dicts and SCOWL ( source) with Wiktionary.
The results show that the percentage of misspellings has been growing steadily, reaching 6.23% for revisions created in 2011. Several weaknesses with the method are discussed, including the lack of Unicode support, the high rate of false positives, and the possibility that the rising rate might be associated with a rise in the complexity of content. The concluding remarks speculate on how semi-automated spell-checking may support editorial work at a large scale. (Wikipedians have used lists of common misspellings for many years, also integrated in semi-automatic editing tools such as AutoWikiBrowser.)
In related news, the developers of an open-source multilingual proofreading application called LanguageTool released a beta application for proofreading Wikipedia articles. wikiCheck proofreads articles from the English and German Wikipedias based on a set of customizable syntax and grammar rules. A bookmarklet is available to access the application from a browser.
Three researchers from
Stanford University and
Yahoo! Research used a novel method to construct "a data-driven portrait of Wikipedia editors", as described in a preprint currently undergoing review for publication.
[6] While earlier studies relied on Wikipedians participating in surveys (and identifying themselves as such), the authors mined data from users of the
Yahoo! Toolbar for Wikipedia URLs containing an &action=submit
parameter, thereby arriving at a sample of 1900 editors of the English Wikipedia.
Their first main finding is that "on broad average, Wikipedia editors seem, on the one hand, more sophisticated than usual Web users, reading more news, doing more Web searches, and looking up more things in dictionaries and other reference works; on the other hand, they are also deeply immersed in pop culture, spending much online time on music- and movie-related websites." However, these "entertainment lovers ... form only a highly specialized subgroup that contributes many edits".
Based on the toolbar data, the paper also tries to answer the question "Do Wikipedia editors know their domain?" and related questions, positively: "across all topical domains Wikipedia editors show significant expertise. ... We also show that more substantial edits tend to come from experts", and that logged-in editors show more expertise than IP address editors. A final result is that "About half of the click chains culminating in an edit start with a Web search, with the other half originating on Wikipedia’s main page."
A special issue of Nucleic Acids Research features 11 articles describing how wikis and collaborative technology can be used to enhance biological databases. A commentary by Robert Finn, Paul Gardner and Alex Bateman [7] discusses in particular how to leverage Wikipedia, its collaborative infrastructure and large editor community to better integrate articles and biological data entries: the authors argue that the project offers an opportunity for crowdsourcing the curation and annotation of biological data, but faces major challenges for expert engagement, i.e. "how to get scientists en masse to edit articles" and "how to allow editors to receive credit for their work on an article".
Another article in the same issue [8] presents the Gene Wiki, an open-access and openly editable collection of Wikipedia articles about human genes. The article describes how structured data available on Gene Wiki articles is kept in sync with the data from primary databases via an automated system and how to automatically compute the quality of articles in the project at word or sentence-level using WikiTrust.
A thesis entitled Individual and social motivations to contribute to Commons-based peer production was submitted by University of Minnesota student Yoshikazu Suzuki for an MA in mass communication. The thesis presents and discusses the results from a small series of interviews as well as a survey exploring individual and social motivations of Wikipedia contributors, drawing on social identity theory, volunteerism and uses and gratifications theory. The survey, run in July 2011 with support from the Wikimedia Research Committee, collected 208 responses from a random sample of 950 among the top English Wikipedia editors. The results, obtained by applying principal components analysis to the responses, reveal eight distinct motivational factors: providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, concern for others’ well-being, the need to be entertained, the avoidance of negative self-affect, cognitive group membership, career benefits, and social desirability. An analysis of the relative strength of each factor indicates that providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, and concerns for others’ well-being were the three strongest motivational dimensions. Grouping the eight factors into two macro-categories according to self- and other-focused motivations, the other-focused motivations were found to be significantly stronger than the self-focused motivations. The thesis reviews the implications of these results for the design of incentives for participation and editor retention. The full text of the thesis [9] and an executive summary are available under open access.
A paper in this month's edition of First Monday, ambitiously titled "Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia", [10] reports on a statistical analysis of a complete dump of the English Wikipedia (225 million article edits) with regard to several quantities, starting with two that were introduced in a 2004 paper by Andrew Lih "as a simple measure for the reputation of [an] article within the Wikipedia": the total number of edits an article has received ("rigor") and the number of (logged-in and anonymous) users who have edited the article ("diversity"). The First Monday paper cites a 2007 study from the same journal, which found that featured articles tend to have more edits and contributors (while controlling for a few other variables) [11] as a justification for using "rigor" and "diversity" as proxies for article quality, but includes other quantities such as the article size change for an edit. The paper cites earlier work on evaluating Wikipedia article quality (e.g. dismissing the well-known 2005 Nature study based on the mistaken assumption that it had "only focused on featured articles"), but does not discuss existing attempts at more sophisticated quantitative quality heuristics.
The First Monday paper highlighted that if consecutive edits by the same user are counted as one, the overall number of article revisions drops by more than 33%, "revealing that one in three revisions in Wikipedia consist of users responding to their own edits or continuing an ongoing edit begun by themselves". "Article diversity" ranged up to 12,437 contributors per article, with a median of 12 and an average of 32. One of the main conclusions is that "rather than reflecting the contributions and expertise of a large group of people, the typical article in Wikipedia reflects the efforts of a relatively small group of users (median of 12) who make a relatively small number of edits (median of 21)."
Supporting the assumption that most edits do not result in significant changes in content, the study finds that 31% of all revisions cause a size change of fewer than 10 characters, and 51% a change of fewer than 30 characters, with an apparently significant peak at a four-character difference, presumably related to the insertion or removal of the four brackets ("[[ ... ]]") that generate a wikilink.
The author notes the slight decrease in the overall number of edits since 2008, but tentatively explains it by the increasingly complete coverage of encyclopedic topics, and doesn't share the widespread concerns about declining or stagnating editor activity: "participation in Wikipedia seems to remain as healthy as ever as revisions made per article created each year has annually increased since 2001 without exception".
A different paper [12] from last year's "Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference" similarly promises far-reaching insights from "Deconstructing Wikipedia" solely based on revision history statistics without analyzing the actual content changes, using a much smaller sample – 30 featured articles from the English Wikipedia, but also including timestamps. The data did not confirm the hypothesis that "the editor who initiated an article would have a high level of involvement in the article’s creation": for only five of the 30 articles, the initial author was the most frequent contributor.
A second conclusion is that for all of the articles in the sample, "there is a single Wikipedian whose contributions far exceed all others", ranging from 8% to 82% of the articles with an average of 39% (but the analysis does not seem to have sought to quantify the extent to which this exceeds the contributions of the second most frequent contributor). The author indicates that this supports Jaron Lanier's "oracle illusion" criticism of a supposed presentation of Wikipedia as a product of "the crowd". Somewhat tautologically, the author observes "that the control of an individual editor seemed to be reduced as more editors joined the process", and points to the need to analyze "a significantly larger number of articles" to answer the question whether "too many cooks spoil the stew" (apparently unaware of the significant body of earlier literature on this subject, starting with a 2005 paper that presented an answer in its title: " Too many cooks don't spoil the broth", and including the 2007 study which the above reviewed First Monday paper relied on).
A third result of the paper, which likewise might not surprise those already familiar with Wikipedia's editing processes, is that "the creation process is continuous and can go on for a very long time", with even articles about historic events from the distant past continuing to receive edits.
The author, an assistant professor in management and marketing at Virginia State University, concludes the paper by urging his readers to start "thinking about how the wiki platform, itself, is influencing the creation process".
The Wikimedia Foundation has posted an update on the Wikimedia Foundation's 2011 annual fundraiser. The update featured images and short biographies of twelve faces that were selected for use during this year's fundraiser. As fundraising chief Megan Hernandez explained, "these past few weeks, we’ve rotated through a couple dozen appeals with people from different parts of the world with unique Wikipedia experiences and personal stories to tell. ... Right now and for the next few days, we have all the appeals up live together." As of time of writing, all twelve appeals that made it through the selection process are still in active rotation, along with Jimmy Wales' own personal appeal.
The annual fundraiser is the Wikimedia Foundation's biggest single source of income, and has been growing with the project since early efforts from 2004. As with last year's drive, this year's event kicked off with Jimbo Wales' "personal appeal", which consistently received the highest feedback in previous drives and has again this year (see previous Signpost coverage), with a change to a green banner curiously gathering increased contributions. The appeals featured then shifted their focus to the community, turning the spotlight on appeals from individual Wikimedians. As of 26 December, according to the fundraiser statistics, a total of $16.9 million has been raised, just surpassing last year's goal of $16 million.
This week, we sat down with WikiProject Tree of Life, one of Wikipedia's oldest projects, predating the creation of the WikiProject concept. While WikiProject Tree of Life's current page was formulated in June 2002, the effort to organize Wikipedia's articles on all living organisms dates back to at least late 2001, when Manning Bartlett mentioned the existing Tree of Life project in his proposal for the establishment of WikiProjects. Today, the project's goals remain unchanged, despite the proliferation of descendent projects handling various groups of living things. Among the project's to-do list are creating missing articles for animals and plants, responding to cleanup tags, identifying unknown images of plants on Commons, and monitoring the project's watchlist. We interviewed members Shyamal, Bob the Wikipedian, JoJan, EncycloPetey, and Kevmin.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Tree of Life? Do you have any degrees or experience in biology? Are you a member of any of the kingdom- or species-specific projects under the scope of WikiProject Tree of Life?
As one of the oldest collaborations on Wikipedia, WikiProject Tree of Life was created with an unusually creative name. Please describe for our readers the project's long history and why the project is named after the tree of life. Have there been any attempts to change the name to something related to the project's scope, like "WikiProject Taxonomy"?
How does the project's scope differ from other large umbrella projects? What relationship does WikiProject Tree of Life have with the numerous sub-projects?
Do you feel there are particular kingdoms that are better represented on Wikipedia? Do some living things elicit more enthusiasm and activity from editors?
WikiProject Tree of Life has provided resources for editors to create articles for the numerous living things included in various lists of missing articles. How close is Wikipedia to providing a stub about every known creature? What will be the next step once that goal is achieved?
What are the project's most pressing concerns? How can a new contributor help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week we'll ring in the New Year by reflecting on the projects we saw in 2011. Get a head start by visiting the
archive.
Reader comments
We interviewed Killervogel5, who this week has had the final list in the Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster promoted. Killervogel5, also known as KV5, has been editing Wikipedia since January 2006 and has contributed 57 featured lists, 4 featured topics, 8 good articles and 83 did you knows. KV5 gives us background information on the featured lists, his plans for the future, and suggestions for those who wish to write featured lists.
On the Philadelphia Phillies roster project: I began the Phillies roster project in May 2010, and it was completed in December 2011, so the project as a whole took me 19 months to finish. Originally, there were 21 articles in the topic, but during the course of the various and sundry FLC nominations, it was reduced to 18 through mergers. The most time-consuming part was definitely the table building. That was the first part of the project that I tackled and it turned out to be a smart move. If I hadn't had all the tables done, it would have been nearly impossible to write the ledes for each list and I probably would have quit somewhere about ... probably letter F or so.
The most difficult part of this project was adjusting to the changing FL standards. At the time that I nominated Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (A) for featured list, a site-wide movement for better compliance with Wikipedia's policies on accessibility was gaining ground at FLC. I offered to make that first list a testcase for successfully implementing the improved accessibility standards, but this occurred after the lists had already been completed in userspace and moved to the mainspace. So I had to go through and change the format of each list. (I have to give a shout-out to RexxS for his help on the ACCESS requirements.)
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the most fun part: all of these lists were moved to the mainspace at the same time, and they became a gigantic DYK. I had a lot of good times developing a good hook for that.
I chose to improve the Phillies' roster lists because it is an intersection of my two big loves on Wikipedia: the Philadelphia Phillies, a team I've followed since I was a young child; and writing featured lists, which gives me great satisfaction. I really do enjoy taking on large list-related projects. Some previous baseball-related list projects of mine include the series of Rawlings Gold Glove Award and Silver Slugger Award lists and several lists of Major League Baseball managers.
On KV5's plans for the future: I haven't quite decided on my next project yet, but rest assured, I'll try to make it something monumental! I have started improving the List of Philadelphia Phillies owners and executives, using a book I received as a gift last Christmas (yes, I asked for a reference book for Christmas just for Wikipedia), but I've gotten away from it so maybe I'll tackle that next.
On writing featured lists: Featured lists require significantly less prose, but there is a lot of specialized mark-up that writers need to know to comply with accessibility standards. For new writers trying their hands at FLC, I always suggest peer review before an FLC nomination. There are so many little things here and there that can hang up an FLC nomination. Always check and double-check the reliability of your sources. We have the reliable source noticeboard or the FLC nomination talk page if you have questions on those, or you can seek out help at an appropriate WikiProject talk page. Finally, always review the appropriate criteria and make sure that, in the case of featured lists, your list meets the standards for prose, the lead, comprehensiveness, structure, style, and stability.
Eleven featured articles were promoted this week:
Seven featured lists were promoted this week:
One featured topic was promoted this week:
Two featured pictures were promoted this week:
This week saw the opening of the Muhammad images case to address which depictions of the prophet Muhammad, if any, were appropriate to display in the respective articles, as community discussion had not rendered a consensus on this. Evidence by multiple users has been submitted, and some workshop proposals have been tabled.
The case regarding TimidGuy's ban appeal proceeded into its second week. The case was opened by TimidGuy to appeal the site ban imposed off-wiki by Jimmy Wales. Part of the case is being conducted off-wiki due to privacy matters. It is one of the most active arbitration cases at present, with substantial activity in both the evidence and workshop pages.
Betacommand 3 proceeded to its ninth week. There has been no activity on the evidence pages this week, though several proposals were made at the workshop, including by drafting arbitrator SirFozzie.
Two new cases were requested this week. The first related to actress Demi Moore and conflicting information in reliable sources and tweets by the actress regarding her birth-name. It was declined due to a lack of prior dispute resolution, with an RFC or mediation suggested as alternatives by the committee.
The other request this week concerned the perceived uncivil conduct by Malleus Fatuorum, and his blocking, unblocking and reblocking by administrators Thumperward, John, and Hawkeye7, respectively. The request aimed to address whether Malleus's conduct was uncivil and warranted blocking, and whether the subsequent unblock and re-block constituted a wheel-war. At the time of writing, more than 100 users had commented on the request, and the case trended towards acceptance by the committee.
The two open requests for clarification regarding the Eastern European mailing list case and the Abortion motion had no activity this week.
Jimmy Wales ceremonially appointed the recently elected eight arbitrators to the committee this week. In his statement, Courcelles, Risker, Kirill Lokshin, Roger Davies, Hersfold, SilkTork, and AGK were appointed to two-year terms, and Jclemens to a one-year term, as determined by both a community RfC last month and a more recent decision by the election coordinators on the matter of the one-year term. Jimmy encouraged the committee to review its history, and strive to find the right balance between being too lenient or too strict in their judgments, to be neither too quick or too slow, and neither inconsistent nor arbitrary in its decisions.
He announced his intention to give up some of his traditional powers, and that to do this in an organised fashion he would form a council of editors to discuss various aspects of the history and state of the wiki, including its governance processes, to come up with ways to delegate these powers to the community. Details as to how such a council will be selected or how it will operate are yet to be announced.
Reader comments
Wikimedia's
domain names (including wikipedia.org
) will no longer be managed by U.S.-based registrar
Go Daddy, it was decided this week following concerns over the registrar's political activities.
The process that led to the decision to ditch the company that has managed Wikimedia's domains since at least 2007 seems to have begun with a December 23 post on the social news website reddit. The post, which has since received 35,000 votes and hundreds of responses, was a simple request directed at Jimmy Wales to "transfer Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy to show you're serious about opposing SOPA". It refers to the registrar's then open support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, to which many Wikimedians and redditors are emphatically opposed. Many reddit commenters pledged donations if Wales committed to moving Wikimedia domains away from Go Daddy, part of a wider reddit campaign to get organisations to leave Go Daddy.
The response to the post was swift. The same day as the post, Wales committed to a move away from Go Daddy on his Twitter page, although an orderly transition is likely to take some time. (Wales also announced the transfer of Wikia domains as part of the same process.) A twist came shortly after the announcement, when Go Daddy issued a press release stating that it was withdrawing its support for SOPA. The statement, a world away from their earlier description of their opposition to SOPA as "myopic", does not seem to have yet prompted any change of action by Wales or the Foundation.
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.