On 13 February 2013, PR Report, the German sister publication of PR Week, published an article announcing that PR agency Fleishman-Hillard was offering a new analysis tool enabling companies to assess their articles in the German-language Wikipedia: the Wikipedia Corporate Index (WCI).
The free analysis tool was developed by a team led by Arne Klempert, Director Digital at Fleishman-Hillard Germany, who also served as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board from May 2009 to July 2012. According to PR Report, the tool is designed to help PR professionals improve the way their company is described in Wikipedia—as well as to make transparent how well competitors are presented. Klempert said he wants to give PR professionals "a deeper understanding of how Wikipedia works, and the quality indicators for company articles in Wikipedia". An English-language article on Fleishman-Hillard's German website explains—
“ | Despite the significance of Wikipedia corporate entries, no suitable analytical tool has been developed to date that evaluates the presence of one's own company or that of competitors. Yet, the quality of such entries is of major importance. Corporate Wikipedia entries are also always included among the top hits in Google. Articles on prominent companies can easily have more than 100,000 hits per month.
Arne Klempert, Director Digital at Fleishman-Hillard Germany: "With the Wikipedia Corporate Index there is now finally a standard for evaluating company articles on Wikipedia. At the same time, we want to use this kind of analysis to create a deeper awareness among communications officers of how Wikipedia works." |
” |
The WCI covers approximately 15,000 company entries in the German-language Wikipedia, evaluating about 40 article characteristics categorised in four areas: authors and edits, content and structure, links, and page views.
Klempert also wrote an article published by German PC Magazin last year, now reproduced in slightly altered form on the WCI website, advising companies on how best to edit Wikipedia. He noted that some Wikipedians categorically reject the involvement of company representatives, and said that this attitude is particularly marked in the English-language Wikipedia, while the German-language Wikipedia is more open to paid editors.
Klempert said company representatives could always use the discussion page and above all should edit transparently, identifying themselves, and should not try to change an article in one fell swoop—such changes would usually be reverted. Instead, they should start with small, non-critical changes to their article, demonstrating to editors that they understand the principles of Wikipedia collaboration. This included such things as updating company data, or providing images to be used as illustrations. Klempert also advised companies to monitor their own articles, to anticipate communication crises and be able to prepare for press enquiries.
According to the Kurier, a German-language Wikimedia news outlet that is somewhat analogous to the Signpost, a Wikipedia Corporate Index for the English-language Wikipedia is in the planning stages at Fleishman-Hillard. The version for the German-language Wikipedia has been nominated for a special PR Report award in the category "research, analysis and evaluation".
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" [1] by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past. Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich tradition of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production.
"Compulsive collection" refers to the work of compiling encyclopedias that has traditionally been done by a few dedicated, tireless, detail-oriented individuals. Loveland and Reagle point out that, although Wikipedians share this compulsive behavior with past encyclopedists, the crucial distinction lies in the fact that the vast majority were motivated by money (even if this motive existed alongside more idealistic motivations) whereas Wikipedia editors are unpaid.
Loveland and Reagle use the term " stigmergic accumulation" to refer to the process of production by accretion onto a previous text. Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors, the authors argue, "building on their work and using the cumulative character of texts and knowledge as a ladder of sorts". Examples of existing texts included the use of a previous edition of an encyclopedia that ran into multiple editions, and the practice of borrowing between different encyclopedias that was sometimes illegal but more often viewed as "piratical" i.e. morally wrong.
The category of "corporate production" is used by Loveland and Reagle to describe the process of encyclopedic editing by a group – groups that topped a thousand contributors in the 20th century. Editors of early encyclopedias like Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in the 1700s faced the challenge of trying to coordinate the contributions of about 140 contributors in a similar way to Wikipedia having to confront issues of consistency that result in debates about how important a subject must be to merit an article. In contrast to other encyclopedias, write Loveland and Reagle, Wikipedia settles these debates through community decision-making and in the open. The authors also note that previous encyclopedias didn’t always recruit on the basis of expertise and that some recognized that it would be cheaper and sometimes more accurate to have non-experts summarizing the works of experts.
The authors conclude by writing that although Wikipedia is in some respects unique in terms of its size, its reliance on volunteers and nonprofit nature, the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are "numerous and significant". Their hope is that this paper "will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical material germane to the social scientist’s concerns (such as the motivations of encyclopedia-producers), and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia (such as what exactly should be counted as a contribution) have a lifespan exceeding the past decade."
The collaboration of the two authors began after Reagle had learned (via a summary in this research report) of a review where Loveland had criticized Reagle's 2010 book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization". The resulting paper has received media attention starting with an article in The Atlantic, see the February 4 issue of The Signpost.
A study titled "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions" [2] analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, through qualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90-minute interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity with Web 2.0 educational tools, and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedia is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) "the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct," 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts about whether the Wikipedia crowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note: but of course...), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research "too easy" for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia's non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as "this is a commercial business; it wants to make money" and "they are obviously doing it from a business perspective", and another concerned about "politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]". All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also found that all five lecturers use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students about. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia's reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) "Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes." 2) "Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge." and 3) "Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff."
A research team from Barcelona Media Lab has put a preprint in arXiv recently, [3] in which the sistership relation between cities is analyzed. Although the paper has little to say about Wikipedia in itself, the corresponding dataset is extracted from the English Wikipedia, which, according to the paper, hosts "the most extensive but certainly not complete collection of this kind of relationships". Although this statement could be argued, and no evidence is presented in the article to support that claim, it is striking that mass collaboration of Wikipedians can provide such an interesting package of information on a global scale.
After a description of the data extraction process, the paper presents a set of standard Complex Network analysis, e.g., degree distribution, clustering, average separation of nodes on the network, etc. While there is no surprise among the results of the network analysis, the interesting conclusion is about the effects of the geographical distance of sister cities: "the geographical distance has only a negligible influence when a city selects a sister city."
In a paper titled "Towards Content Neutrality in Wiki Systems" [4] (an extended version of a conference keynote), a German computer scientist criticizes Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" policy as based on "an objectivist point of view" that is prominent in parts of the natural sciences, but is challenged in the fields of quantum physics, psychology and the social sciences, according to the author. He offers differences between language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Osama Bin Laden and the Mossad as further arguments against the NPOV concept. He admits that "two examples, based on machine translation and subjective classification by an author who wants to prove his point do not show anything", but claims that even more systematic studies "would suffer the same objection", proving "that the object under consideration, i.e., a neutral point of view, logically may be considered an ill-defined concept". However, it is still used on Wikipedia, and even ingrained in its architecture where the "linear version history evokes the illusion that there is one 'currently best' version of an article". To explain why so many Wikipedians do not accept his own logical conclusion, the author offers the psychological diagnosis of cognitive dissonance: "Accepting the illusion of NPOV, one does not have to live with never ending edit-wars on the ultimately right article and one does not have to suffer dissonant feelings in every article".
Heading back towards his own area of academic expertise, the author then outlines "a variant-augmented Wiki system" to modifying the linear versioning of usual wikis. He bases it on a proposed concept of "content neutrality" requiring "knowledge management platforms" "to store and provide content without any evaluation of its merit", modeled after network neutrality. He argues that "a collection of every-point-of-view, contradictory, possibly emotionally charged articles may provide a better approximation to reality than a synthetic and illusionary neutral point-of-view" and hopes that such a "content-neutral, EPOV knowledge base [has] a real chance of becoming a truly helpful instrument for science." Various possible problems with such an architecture are outlined, together with some suggested solutions, but the discussion remains brief and without detail ("The formal design and security analysis of low-level protocols are left to a later paper"). To protect against malicious site operators, the concept is extended to "distributed Wiki hubs". The paper mentions the existence of "a preliminary implementation as a MediaWiki plug-in prototype" and ongoing work on a use case "which can be described as a Wiki / Blog merge".
A section on related work cites a few earlier papers discussing distributed wikis or Wikipedia forks (out of many more, see e.g. this reviewer's " Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals").
The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest (POTY) has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. Second place went to NASA's Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, and third place to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert.
The competition was organized into two rounds, and users who had at least 75 edits on any Wikimedia project before 1 January 2013 were eligible to vote.
The first round consisted of all of the images that ran on the Commons' main page in 2012. Users were allowed to vote for as many pictures as they wanted. With 631 votes, Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 received the most; Darvasa gas crater panorama crop ran a close second with 626.
In the second round, users were only allowed to vote for one picture. The second round's candidates were selected by votes: the top 36 pictures from the first round, along with eight additional images that were in categories not represented by the top 36. With 347 votes, Pair of Merops apiaster feeding not only beat the next-closest competitor by 43 votes, it managed to overcome a 254-vote difference from the first round, where it came in a stunning 24th. The first round winners (Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 and Darvasa gas crater panorama crop) finished in ninth and eighth place, respectively.
Pair of Merops apiaster feeding was taken by Pierre Dalous. Dalous started contributing images to the Commons only last year, and even before this, he had never participated in a photo contest. While he has only 113 edits and uploaded 24 images, 11 are now featured thanks to User:Lemon.
Taking the picture required finding a perch frequented by the European bee-eater, but the location and time windows were limited: the bird will normally frequent rivers so that it has a steady source of food (e.g. dragonflies) and a place to construct a nest, which it likes to do in eroded banks and slopes near rivers. In addition, the birds are migratory and only present in France from roughly April to September; this time was further limited by the 22 hours a day with inadequate light, leaving only two where Dalous could take the shot.
Dalous captured the birds with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 7D camera with an f/4 Canon EF 300mm lens. He told us that the birds do not take long to enjoy their prey, so his major challenge was to catch both birds in the act while keeping them in focus. Dalous called the eventual result, which won him the POTY, "very lucky".
A senior Commons editor told the Signpost:
“ | In my view some of the technical aspects of the image were achieved with great skill. While the right side of the branch is a bit out of focus and the under chin of left bird is shadowed, the action frame and the composition of the birds are excellent. I particularly like the forked shape on the branch that mirrors the beak. And there's inadvertently an almost human look in the bird about to catch the insect: look at its eye. | ” |
The second place image, Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, was published by the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It shows a coronal mass ejection leaving the Sun at over 900 miles per hour (1,400 km/h). Capturing this image required NASA to record it in the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. One Commons reviewer commented that "the wow factor is great here! ... I thought this was an artist's impression."
Third place went to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert. Krause, a German Wikipedian, told the Signpost that he has uploaded many images in the past—roughly 120 this year alone—and has 17 featured pictures to his name. In addition, he had two finalists in the 2010 POTY contest alone ( Schwappender Wein, in eighth place; Eilean Donan Castle Panorama, in fifteenth). He also participates in German Wikipedia photo-related WikiProjects, like Projekt Fotoflüge.
Krause's third place picture was inspired by one of his earlier images, Glühwedel brennt durch. This image highlights the gas coming out of a cracked light bulb. From this grew the idea of making a light bulb 'explode' with the help of an airsoft gun.
Capturing this image was no small feat, though. Krause remarked that getting the photo right required fine-tuning his flashes to 1/4000 seconds to "freeze" the scene. In addition, a trigger was required, so that when the gun was fired, the camera would capture the moment soon after impact. Krause constructed a full photo set in about an hour, taking care to account for flying glass fragments from the exploding bulbs. Finding the perfect combination then took nine lightbulbs, frequent corrections to the gun and trigger, and experimenting with the voltage supplied to the bulbs. In all, Krause said that it took him about three hours to take the photo.
The camera used was a Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 70mm-200 2.8 VR1 set at a 160mm focal length. The bulb was 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) away.
The POTY contest organizers were very proud of this year's competition. The Signpost emailed User:Mono, User:Miya, and User:Beria, all members of the POTY organizing committee, for their opinions on the competition. Mono and Beria told us that the participation in the contest was far higher than previous years: this year, roughly 3200 and 4000 people voted in rounds one and two (respectively), as opposed to 2011's 1393 and 1178, and 2010's 1722 and 2400. The members also highlighted the growing difficulty of winning the contest. Miya pointed to this post, while Mono said that "It's always been a dilemma when some people are disappointed that certain unique and valuable images were left out. It's a delicate balance between preserving the popular vote and ensuring that everything gets a fair shake in the competition."
According to Beria, the competition was also much easier to run this year, as much of the coding was done last year, and the contest was translated into 29 languages. Mono emphasized the early timing of this year's contest when compared to previous years. Last year's competition (see Signpost coverage) ended in June; this year's ended in February. The difference was in when the preparations for holding the contest began. For this, Mono told us that the organizing team started in November 2012, whereas in past years they have started in March or April of the following year.
In addition, a 2014 calendar comprised of the top 12 images from this year's POTY will be published by the Wikimedia Store. Those interested in being notified when it comes out may sign up here.
Overall, the organizers believed that this was at the least a highly successful contest. Mono said "we're very pleased with this year's contest. ... I'm proud to say that this was the most successful contest we've ever had", while Miya thanked the users who either contributed or voted in the competition.
User:Coren, an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, has disclosed that he has accepted a position with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Tools Lab Operations Engineer beginning 25 February 2013. His duties will revolve around the upcoming widely debated transition of the traditional Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs. Coren acknowledged the potential conflict-of-interest between arbitrating and his new job, but he "anticipate[d] no interaction between that position and my responsibilities to the Arbitration Committee, and [could] think of no plausible scenario where [his] work with the Foundation would ever constitute a conflict of interest."
Reaction to the news was initially tentatively positive, with some opposition developing later. Overall, supporters saw no problem with Coren's dual roles, so long as he took care to recuse himself in any possible conflict of interest. Snowolf recalled past WMF employees who "have served in highly sensitive volunteer positions in the past without major problems that I'm aware of ( Bastique and Guillom as Stewards, I believe)". The most prominent dissent came from fellow arbitrator User:Risker, who stated:
“ | There is an ongoing perception that the Committee is heavily influenced by the WMF, and that the WMF and its Board are in turn significantly influenced by the Arbitration Committee. Sometimes, there is at least some truth to that perception. We had one case in the past year where interactions between the Committee and WMF staff played a key role; this came to light only in the voting phase, where it would have been too late for Coren to recuse had he been an arbitrator at the time, and would have adversely affected the outcome of the case no matter what it turned out to be. Just within the past week, the Board of Trustees has cited an Arbcom decision to explain in part their reason for withholding support of a fairly significant movement organization, and there was discussion and concern about that possibility even at the time of the decision. ... Do I think Coren has a genuine conflict of interest on a daily basis? Not at all. Do I think that his concurrent employment with the WMF and membership on the Arbitration Committee will be distracting and drama-inducing, laced with periodic conflicts of interest? That's extremely likely. The work of the Arbitration Committee is challenging enough without getting sidetracked by a constant need to address perceived conflicts of interest. I don't see WMF employment and Arbitration Committee membership as a good match. |
” |
Comments are still being made on Coren's disclosure page, though it was nominally closed on 18 February
Six featured articles were promoted this week:
Three featured lists were promoted this week:
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:
As the editor of the WikiProject Report, one of the most common questions I receive from readers (and a frequent inquiry at Database Reports and the WikiProject Council) asks how WikiProjects can be measured. The most visible way of measuring WikiProjects is the article assessment system which provides the total number of articles tagged with a project's banner as well as breakdowns of how many articles have received various class and importance ratings. Other metrics include rankings of WikiProjects by their total number of articles, the number of edits to the project's pages, and how many editors are watching the project's talk page. But how can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Luckily, several prominent projects have been doing that for years. Their answer: WikiWork.
WikiWork is a concept originally developed in April 2007 that approximates how many classes or "steps" a project's articles need to ascend for all of the project's articles to reach Featured status. WikiWork encompasses several formulas that can provide different views of a project's workload, but the most used formula and the best way to compare WikiProjects of different sizes is called "relative WikiWork" or the average workload per article. This involves adding up the number of steps all of the project's articles must pass to reach Featured status (with A-class articles considered one step, Good Articles two steps, B-class three steps, etc.) and then dividing this number by the total number of articles under the project's scope, including articles that have already reached Featured status. The resultant number will be between zero and six with lower numbers considered more desirable. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject Aircraft is 4.693, meaning that the average article about aircraft is between C-class and start-class. By comparison, WikiProject Elements has a less daunting workload with a relative WikiWork rating of 3.600 while WikiProject Olympics is bogged down with relative WikiWork of 5.829.
In addition to comparing WikiProjects, WikiWork can be tracked over time to gauge a project's productivity. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject U.S. Roads has decreased from around 5.6 in 2008 to about 4.5 today (see graph to the right) showing that the project has had some success in improving articles to higher classes and/or trimming unnecessary stubs. A helpful calculator is available to determine the various WikiWork statistics for your WikiProject.
As with all statistical data, there are some caveats that should be taken into account. Among these caveats are ensuring that the project is large enough for any statistical analysis to be significant and checking that the project's article assessments are accurate before using them to determine WikiWork. Furthermore, WikiWork focuses on articles, excluding lists and portals which typically do not receive comparable ratings other than being Featured or not. To learn the full details about how WikiProjects use WikiWork and the limits of WikiWork data, we interviewed Scott5114 who originated the concept of WikiWork, Hurricanehink who uses WikiWork at WikiProject Tropical Cyclones, as well as Fredddie and Rschen7754 from WikiProject U.S. Roads.
Next week, we'll change the channel. Until then, grab your remote and tune in to our previous reports in the
archive.
Reader comments
German chapter Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) committed itself this week to funding the Wikidata development team past the original 31 March deadline, ending fears that the delays the project suffered during its first phase would translate into phase three being abandoned.
By the time of the switchover, phase one will be all but complete and a framework phase two is likely to be in place on some if not all wikis. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly clear that its third phase (dynamic lists) will still be in the design phase on that date. According to the blog post accompanying WMDE's decision, one of the goals of the new development phase will be to rectify that and to 'flesh out' the phase 2 implementation to support other data types, most notably co-ordinates. A further goal sees Wikidata deployed on projects other than Wikipedias. Throughout, commentators will be watching to see if the self-described "biggest technical project that a chapter of the Wikimedia movement has ever undertaken" can be brought to proper fruition in a reasonable timespan.
The big question that remains is financial. The first year of Wikidata's development was funded by grants from donors interested in its potential role as a general data repository, including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (approximately €600,000), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (~€300,000) and Google (~€300,000). That €1.3 million (equivalent to US$1.6 million) supported eight full-time developers and four support staff for a year; the plan now is for "a team of eight", implying a cost of around €850,000 euros per annum. The chapter say they will raise that "by means of donations", from "additional partners" if necessary. If the number of Wikidata enthusiasts is anything to go by, it'll be money well spent.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
On 13 February 2013, PR Report, the German sister publication of PR Week, published an article announcing that PR agency Fleishman-Hillard was offering a new analysis tool enabling companies to assess their articles in the German-language Wikipedia: the Wikipedia Corporate Index (WCI).
The free analysis tool was developed by a team led by Arne Klempert, Director Digital at Fleishman-Hillard Germany, who also served as a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board from May 2009 to July 2012. According to PR Report, the tool is designed to help PR professionals improve the way their company is described in Wikipedia—as well as to make transparent how well competitors are presented. Klempert said he wants to give PR professionals "a deeper understanding of how Wikipedia works, and the quality indicators for company articles in Wikipedia". An English-language article on Fleishman-Hillard's German website explains—
“ | Despite the significance of Wikipedia corporate entries, no suitable analytical tool has been developed to date that evaluates the presence of one's own company or that of competitors. Yet, the quality of such entries is of major importance. Corporate Wikipedia entries are also always included among the top hits in Google. Articles on prominent companies can easily have more than 100,000 hits per month.
Arne Klempert, Director Digital at Fleishman-Hillard Germany: "With the Wikipedia Corporate Index there is now finally a standard for evaluating company articles on Wikipedia. At the same time, we want to use this kind of analysis to create a deeper awareness among communications officers of how Wikipedia works." |
” |
The WCI covers approximately 15,000 company entries in the German-language Wikipedia, evaluating about 40 article characteristics categorised in four areas: authors and edits, content and structure, links, and page views.
Klempert also wrote an article published by German PC Magazin last year, now reproduced in slightly altered form on the WCI website, advising companies on how best to edit Wikipedia. He noted that some Wikipedians categorically reject the involvement of company representatives, and said that this attitude is particularly marked in the English-language Wikipedia, while the German-language Wikipedia is more open to paid editors.
Klempert said company representatives could always use the discussion page and above all should edit transparently, identifying themselves, and should not try to change an article in one fell swoop—such changes would usually be reverted. Instead, they should start with small, non-critical changes to their article, demonstrating to editors that they understand the principles of Wikipedia collaboration. This included such things as updating company data, or providing images to be used as illustrations. Klempert also advised companies to monitor their own articles, to anticipate communication crises and be able to prepare for press enquiries.
According to the Kurier, a German-language Wikimedia news outlet that is somewhat analogous to the Signpost, a Wikipedia Corporate Index for the English-language Wikipedia is in the planning stages at Fleishman-Hillard. The version for the German-language Wikipedia has been nominated for a special PR Report award in the category "research, analysis and evaluation".
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" [1] by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past. Loveland and Reagle criticize characterizations of Wikipedia that they believe to be ahistorical and exaggerated, laying special blame with authors who compare Wikipedia’s anonymous production to Encyclopedia Britannica’s production by named experts, and thus ignore the rich tradition of encyclopedic production through the centuries. The authors then set about characterizing the history of encyclopedic production as composed of three overlapping forms: compulsive collection, stigmergic accumulation, and corporate production.
"Compulsive collection" refers to the work of compiling encyclopedias that has traditionally been done by a few dedicated, tireless, detail-oriented individuals. Loveland and Reagle point out that, although Wikipedians share this compulsive behavior with past encyclopedists, the crucial distinction lies in the fact that the vast majority were motivated by money (even if this motive existed alongside more idealistic motivations) whereas Wikipedia editors are unpaid.
Loveland and Reagle use the term " stigmergic accumulation" to refer to the process of production by accretion onto a previous text. Even those responsible for a singly authored encyclopedia were relying on predecessors, the authors argue, "building on their work and using the cumulative character of texts and knowledge as a ladder of sorts". Examples of existing texts included the use of a previous edition of an encyclopedia that ran into multiple editions, and the practice of borrowing between different encyclopedias that was sometimes illegal but more often viewed as "piratical" i.e. morally wrong.
The category of "corporate production" is used by Loveland and Reagle to describe the process of encyclopedic editing by a group – groups that topped a thousand contributors in the 20th century. Editors of early encyclopedias like Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in the 1700s faced the challenge of trying to coordinate the contributions of about 140 contributors in a similar way to Wikipedia having to confront issues of consistency that result in debates about how important a subject must be to merit an article. In contrast to other encyclopedias, write Loveland and Reagle, Wikipedia settles these debates through community decision-making and in the open. The authors also note that previous encyclopedias didn’t always recruit on the basis of expertise and that some recognized that it would be cheaper and sometimes more accurate to have non-experts summarizing the works of experts.
The authors conclude by writing that although Wikipedia is in some respects unique in terms of its size, its reliance on volunteers and nonprofit nature, the continuities between Wikipedia and past encyclopedias are "numerous and significant". Their hope is that this paper "will help scholars avoid ahistorical claims about Wikipedia, identify historical material germane to the social scientist’s concerns (such as the motivations of encyclopedia-producers), and show that contemporary questions about Wikipedia (such as what exactly should be counted as a contribution) have a lifespan exceeding the past decade."
The collaboration of the two authors began after Reagle had learned (via a summary in this research report) of a review where Loveland had criticized Reagle's 2010 book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia for having "one major weakness, namely in historical contextualization". The resulting paper has received media attention starting with an article in The Atlantic, see the February 4 issue of The Signpost.
A study titled "Exploring the Cautionary Attitude Toward Wikipedia in Higher Education: Implications for Higher Education Institutions" [2] analyzes the attitudes of five British university lecturers towards Wikipedia, through qualitative analysis. The methodology consisted of 90-minute interviews with the lecturers who declared their familiarity with Web 2.0 educational tools, and analysis of university documentation, primarily in the form of “unofficial policy” regarding the use and evaluation of Wikipedia by students, as no official policy on Wikipedia existed. The author finds that Wikipedia is still treated with suspicion by the educators interviewed, due to 1) a lack of understanding of Wikipedia, 2) a negative attitude toward collaborative knowledge produced outside academia, and 3) the perceived detrimental effects of the use of Web 2.0 applications not included in the university suite. Some factors of particular concern included 1) "the difficulty of knowing if an article is correct," 2) doubts regarding the quality of information produced by anonymous contributors, 3) doubts about whether the Wikipedia crowdsourcing model of knowledge production can really outperform the experts (reviewer note: but of course...), 4) concerns that Wikipedia makes research "too easy" for students and 5) misunderstanding of Wikipedia's non-profit nature, with two interviewees suspicious of Wikipedia, expressing concerns such as "this is a commercial business; it wants to make money" and "they are obviously doing it from a business perspective", and another concerned about "politics and motivation behind [Wikipedia's dominant position on the Internet]". All the interviewed teachers hoped that the library staff would be able to provide guidance to students regarding evaluating when to use Wikipedia; however correspondence with the library staff showed that their guidelines are mostly inapplicable to Wikipedia, and they do not address Wikipedia during their literacy teaching sessions. The research also found that all five lecturers use Wikipedia in personal life, and four, in professional research, with two of them commenting that they feel a bit hypocritical using the same tool they warn the students about. None of the interviewed lecturers contributed to Wikipedia, and only one was aware of any outreach from Wikipedia to academics. As the author notes, Wikipedia is still alien to the academic culture, and while the attitudes are shifting, there is still much misunderstanding about Wikipedia's reliability, quality and non-profit mission. The author concludes that Wikipedia should address those concerns through the following recommendations: 1) "Increase understanding of Wikipedia, its policies and processes." 2) "Increase understanding of the nature of open and free collaboratively produced knowledge." and 3) "Make available Wikipedia guidance and evaluation criteria to students and teaching staff."
A research team from Barcelona Media Lab has put a preprint in arXiv recently, [3] in which the sistership relation between cities is analyzed. Although the paper has little to say about Wikipedia in itself, the corresponding dataset is extracted from the English Wikipedia, which, according to the paper, hosts "the most extensive but certainly not complete collection of this kind of relationships". Although this statement could be argued, and no evidence is presented in the article to support that claim, it is striking that mass collaboration of Wikipedians can provide such an interesting package of information on a global scale.
After a description of the data extraction process, the paper presents a set of standard Complex Network analysis, e.g., degree distribution, clustering, average separation of nodes on the network, etc. While there is no surprise among the results of the network analysis, the interesting conclusion is about the effects of the geographical distance of sister cities: "the geographical distance has only a negligible influence when a city selects a sister city."
In a paper titled "Towards Content Neutrality in Wiki Systems" [4] (an extended version of a conference keynote), a German computer scientist criticizes Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" policy as based on "an objectivist point of view" that is prominent in parts of the natural sciences, but is challenged in the fields of quantum physics, psychology and the social sciences, according to the author. He offers differences between language versions of the Wikipedia articles on Osama Bin Laden and the Mossad as further arguments against the NPOV concept. He admits that "two examples, based on machine translation and subjective classification by an author who wants to prove his point do not show anything", but claims that even more systematic studies "would suffer the same objection", proving "that the object under consideration, i.e., a neutral point of view, logically may be considered an ill-defined concept". However, it is still used on Wikipedia, and even ingrained in its architecture where the "linear version history evokes the illusion that there is one 'currently best' version of an article". To explain why so many Wikipedians do not accept his own logical conclusion, the author offers the psychological diagnosis of cognitive dissonance: "Accepting the illusion of NPOV, one does not have to live with never ending edit-wars on the ultimately right article and one does not have to suffer dissonant feelings in every article".
Heading back towards his own area of academic expertise, the author then outlines "a variant-augmented Wiki system" to modifying the linear versioning of usual wikis. He bases it on a proposed concept of "content neutrality" requiring "knowledge management platforms" "to store and provide content without any evaluation of its merit", modeled after network neutrality. He argues that "a collection of every-point-of-view, contradictory, possibly emotionally charged articles may provide a better approximation to reality than a synthetic and illusionary neutral point-of-view" and hopes that such a "content-neutral, EPOV knowledge base [has] a real chance of becoming a truly helpful instrument for science." Various possible problems with such an architecture are outlined, together with some suggested solutions, but the discussion remains brief and without detail ("The formal design and security analysis of low-level protocols are left to a later paper"). To protect against malicious site operators, the concept is extended to "distributed Wiki hubs". The paper mentions the existence of "a preliminary implementation as a MediaWiki plug-in prototype" and ongoing work on a use case "which can be described as a Wiki / Blog merge".
A section on related work cites a few earlier papers discussing distributed wikis or Wikipedia forks (out of many more, see e.g. this reviewer's " Timeline of distributed Wikipedia proposals").
The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest (POTY) has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. Second place went to NASA's Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, and third place to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert.
The competition was organized into two rounds, and users who had at least 75 edits on any Wikimedia project before 1 January 2013 were eligible to vote.
The first round consisted of all of the images that ran on the Commons' main page in 2012. Users were allowed to vote for as many pictures as they wanted. With 631 votes, Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 received the most; Darvasa gas crater panorama crop ran a close second with 626.
In the second round, users were only allowed to vote for one picture. The second round's candidates were selected by votes: the top 36 pictures from the first round, along with eight additional images that were in categories not represented by the top 36. With 347 votes, Pair of Merops apiaster feeding not only beat the next-closest competitor by 43 votes, it managed to overcome a 254-vote difference from the first round, where it came in a stunning 24th. The first round winners (Ponte Vasco da Gama 25 and Darvasa gas crater panorama crop) finished in ninth and eighth place, respectively.
Pair of Merops apiaster feeding was taken by Pierre Dalous. Dalous started contributing images to the Commons only last year, and even before this, he had never participated in a photo contest. While he has only 113 edits and uploaded 24 images, 11 are now featured thanks to User:Lemon.
Taking the picture required finding a perch frequented by the European bee-eater, but the location and time windows were limited: the bird will normally frequent rivers so that it has a steady source of food (e.g. dragonflies) and a place to construct a nest, which it likes to do in eroded banks and slopes near rivers. In addition, the birds are migratory and only present in France from roughly April to September; this time was further limited by the 22 hours a day with inadequate light, leaving only two where Dalous could take the shot.
Dalous captured the birds with a tripod-mounted Canon EOS 7D camera with an f/4 Canon EF 300mm lens. He told us that the birds do not take long to enjoy their prey, so his major challenge was to catch both birds in the act while keeping them in focus. Dalous called the eventual result, which won him the POTY, "very lucky".
A senior Commons editor told the Signpost:
“ | In my view some of the technical aspects of the image were achieved with great skill. While the right side of the branch is a bit out of focus and the under chin of left bird is shadowed, the action frame and the composition of the birds are excellent. I particularly like the forked shape on the branch that mirrors the beak. And there's inadvertently an almost human look in the bird about to catch the insect: look at its eye. | ” |
The second place image, Magnificent CME Erupts on the Sun - August 31, was published by the NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It shows a coronal mass ejection leaving the Sun at over 900 miles per hour (1,400 km/h). Capturing this image required NASA to record it in the 304 and 171 angstrom wavelengths. One Commons reviewer commented that "the wow factor is great here! ... I thought this was an artist's impression."
Third place went to Stefan Krause's Glühlampe explodiert. Krause, a German Wikipedian, told the Signpost that he has uploaded many images in the past—roughly 120 this year alone—and has 17 featured pictures to his name. In addition, he had two finalists in the 2010 POTY contest alone ( Schwappender Wein, in eighth place; Eilean Donan Castle Panorama, in fifteenth). He also participates in German Wikipedia photo-related WikiProjects, like Projekt Fotoflüge.
Krause's third place picture was inspired by one of his earlier images, Glühwedel brennt durch. This image highlights the gas coming out of a cracked light bulb. From this grew the idea of making a light bulb 'explode' with the help of an airsoft gun.
Capturing this image was no small feat, though. Krause remarked that getting the photo right required fine-tuning his flashes to 1/4000 seconds to "freeze" the scene. In addition, a trigger was required, so that when the gun was fired, the camera would capture the moment soon after impact. Krause constructed a full photo set in about an hour, taking care to account for flying glass fragments from the exploding bulbs. Finding the perfect combination then took nine lightbulbs, frequent corrections to the gun and trigger, and experimenting with the voltage supplied to the bulbs. In all, Krause said that it took him about three hours to take the photo.
The camera used was a Nikon D700 with a Nikkor 70mm-200 2.8 VR1 set at a 160mm focal length. The bulb was 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) away.
The POTY contest organizers were very proud of this year's competition. The Signpost emailed User:Mono, User:Miya, and User:Beria, all members of the POTY organizing committee, for their opinions on the competition. Mono and Beria told us that the participation in the contest was far higher than previous years: this year, roughly 3200 and 4000 people voted in rounds one and two (respectively), as opposed to 2011's 1393 and 1178, and 2010's 1722 and 2400. The members also highlighted the growing difficulty of winning the contest. Miya pointed to this post, while Mono said that "It's always been a dilemma when some people are disappointed that certain unique and valuable images were left out. It's a delicate balance between preserving the popular vote and ensuring that everything gets a fair shake in the competition."
According to Beria, the competition was also much easier to run this year, as much of the coding was done last year, and the contest was translated into 29 languages. Mono emphasized the early timing of this year's contest when compared to previous years. Last year's competition (see Signpost coverage) ended in June; this year's ended in February. The difference was in when the preparations for holding the contest began. For this, Mono told us that the organizing team started in November 2012, whereas in past years they have started in March or April of the following year.
In addition, a 2014 calendar comprised of the top 12 images from this year's POTY will be published by the Wikimedia Store. Those interested in being notified when it comes out may sign up here.
Overall, the organizers believed that this was at the least a highly successful contest. Mono said "we're very pleased with this year's contest. ... I'm proud to say that this was the most successful contest we've ever had", while Miya thanked the users who either contributed or voted in the competition.
User:Coren, an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, has disclosed that he has accepted a position with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Tools Lab Operations Engineer beginning 25 February 2013. His duties will revolve around the upcoming widely debated transition of the traditional Toolserver to the new Wikimedia Labs. Coren acknowledged the potential conflict-of-interest between arbitrating and his new job, but he "anticipate[d] no interaction between that position and my responsibilities to the Arbitration Committee, and [could] think of no plausible scenario where [his] work with the Foundation would ever constitute a conflict of interest."
Reaction to the news was initially tentatively positive, with some opposition developing later. Overall, supporters saw no problem with Coren's dual roles, so long as he took care to recuse himself in any possible conflict of interest. Snowolf recalled past WMF employees who "have served in highly sensitive volunteer positions in the past without major problems that I'm aware of ( Bastique and Guillom as Stewards, I believe)". The most prominent dissent came from fellow arbitrator User:Risker, who stated:
“ | There is an ongoing perception that the Committee is heavily influenced by the WMF, and that the WMF and its Board are in turn significantly influenced by the Arbitration Committee. Sometimes, there is at least some truth to that perception. We had one case in the past year where interactions between the Committee and WMF staff played a key role; this came to light only in the voting phase, where it would have been too late for Coren to recuse had he been an arbitrator at the time, and would have adversely affected the outcome of the case no matter what it turned out to be. Just within the past week, the Board of Trustees has cited an Arbcom decision to explain in part their reason for withholding support of a fairly significant movement organization, and there was discussion and concern about that possibility even at the time of the decision. ... Do I think Coren has a genuine conflict of interest on a daily basis? Not at all. Do I think that his concurrent employment with the WMF and membership on the Arbitration Committee will be distracting and drama-inducing, laced with periodic conflicts of interest? That's extremely likely. The work of the Arbitration Committee is challenging enough without getting sidetracked by a constant need to address perceived conflicts of interest. I don't see WMF employment and Arbitration Committee membership as a good match. |
” |
Comments are still being made on Coren's disclosure page, though it was nominally closed on 18 February
Six featured articles were promoted this week:
Three featured lists were promoted this week:
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:
As the editor of the WikiProject Report, one of the most common questions I receive from readers (and a frequent inquiry at Database Reports and the WikiProject Council) asks how WikiProjects can be measured. The most visible way of measuring WikiProjects is the article assessment system which provides the total number of articles tagged with a project's banner as well as breakdowns of how many articles have received various class and importance ratings. Other metrics include rankings of WikiProjects by their total number of articles, the number of edits to the project's pages, and how many editors are watching the project's talk page. But how can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Luckily, several prominent projects have been doing that for years. Their answer: WikiWork.
WikiWork is a concept originally developed in April 2007 that approximates how many classes or "steps" a project's articles need to ascend for all of the project's articles to reach Featured status. WikiWork encompasses several formulas that can provide different views of a project's workload, but the most used formula and the best way to compare WikiProjects of different sizes is called "relative WikiWork" or the average workload per article. This involves adding up the number of steps all of the project's articles must pass to reach Featured status (with A-class articles considered one step, Good Articles two steps, B-class three steps, etc.) and then dividing this number by the total number of articles under the project's scope, including articles that have already reached Featured status. The resultant number will be between zero and six with lower numbers considered more desirable. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject Aircraft is 4.693, meaning that the average article about aircraft is between C-class and start-class. By comparison, WikiProject Elements has a less daunting workload with a relative WikiWork rating of 3.600 while WikiProject Olympics is bogged down with relative WikiWork of 5.829.
In addition to comparing WikiProjects, WikiWork can be tracked over time to gauge a project's productivity. For example, the relative WikiWork for WikiProject U.S. Roads has decreased from around 5.6 in 2008 to about 4.5 today (see graph to the right) showing that the project has had some success in improving articles to higher classes and/or trimming unnecessary stubs. A helpful calculator is available to determine the various WikiWork statistics for your WikiProject.
As with all statistical data, there are some caveats that should be taken into account. Among these caveats are ensuring that the project is large enough for any statistical analysis to be significant and checking that the project's article assessments are accurate before using them to determine WikiWork. Furthermore, WikiWork focuses on articles, excluding lists and portals which typically do not receive comparable ratings other than being Featured or not. To learn the full details about how WikiProjects use WikiWork and the limits of WikiWork data, we interviewed Scott5114 who originated the concept of WikiWork, Hurricanehink who uses WikiWork at WikiProject Tropical Cyclones, as well as Fredddie and Rschen7754 from WikiProject U.S. Roads.
Next week, we'll change the channel. Until then, grab your remote and tune in to our previous reports in the
archive.
Reader comments
German chapter Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) committed itself this week to funding the Wikidata development team past the original 31 March deadline, ending fears that the delays the project suffered during its first phase would translate into phase three being abandoned.
By the time of the switchover, phase one will be all but complete and a framework phase two is likely to be in place on some if not all wikis. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly clear that its third phase (dynamic lists) will still be in the design phase on that date. According to the blog post accompanying WMDE's decision, one of the goals of the new development phase will be to rectify that and to 'flesh out' the phase 2 implementation to support other data types, most notably co-ordinates. A further goal sees Wikidata deployed on projects other than Wikipedias. Throughout, commentators will be watching to see if the self-described "biggest technical project that a chapter of the Wikimedia movement has ever undertaken" can be brought to proper fruition in a reasonable timespan.
The big question that remains is financial. The first year of Wikidata's development was funded by grants from donors interested in its potential role as a general data repository, including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (approximately €600,000), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (~€300,000) and Google (~€300,000). That €1.3 million (equivalent to US$1.6 million) supported eight full-time developers and four support staff for a year; the plan now is for "a team of eight", implying a cost of around €850,000 euros per annum. The chapter say they will raise that "by means of donations", from "additional partners" if necessary. If the number of Wikidata enthusiasts is anything to go by, it'll be money well spent.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.