About a thousand Wikimedians journeyed to Hong Kong this week for the annual Wikimania conference, the annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement. Wikimania, which has been held since 2005, serves as the principal physical meetup for Wikimedians around the world. This year marked the first Wikimania in East Asia since 2007, when it was held in nearby Taiwan. Locations since then have been in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.
Wikimania 2013 was planned by Wikimedia Hong Kong and held in Hong Kong's Polytechnic University. While it was nominally only three days long, it was preceded by a two-day pre-conference where the Chapters Association imploded (and is now "on life support", according to one Wikimedian), the Education Program held a successful planning session, and developers met to discuss their projects and strenuously avoid using the term "hacking" (see Signpost coverage).
Conference-goers attending the opening day were treated to a traditional Chinese dragon dance before being welcomed by Hong Kong's Chief Information Officer Daniel Lai in his opening keynote. A notable address was given by Makoto Okamoto, who explored an area many Wikimedians had never heard of, especially given the near-total lack of interaction from Japan with the wider movement. Okamoto was a key figure in founding saveMLAK, an ongoing effort to document damage to Japanese museums, libraries, archives, and Japan's great " kominkan" cultural centers. The saveMLAK site was formed in April 2011 from the merger of four websites, each of which had covered one of these four topics. Three languages are used: English, Japanese, and Chinese. Each page is supposed to include a fact sheet about the location, a list of damage, and its operational status, along with information for victims, supporters, institutions, and various ways of how outside individual can assist.
saveMLAK has 300,000 total edits, 30,000 pages, and 300 editors. Looking at these statistics, 80% of the articles were created by bots—more than the Swedish Wikipedia, which the Signpost reported on in June. Of the editors, 38 edited more than 100 times, and 90% had previous experience with MediaWiki-based sites.
Jimmy Wales' traditional "State of the Wiki" address focused on journalism in the context of global relations and Edward Snowden's revelations (see this week's Signpost special report). Items relevant to the Wikimedia movement came at the beginning of his speech, where he highlighted the milestones reached in the past year; there are now 28 million articles and 286 language editions, of which 120 have more than ten thousand articles, 46 have more than a hundred thousand, and eight have more than a million. Those eight are a doubling of the four million-article club a year ago, with the addition of the Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish Wikipedias. Wales also covered the election of the new chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede.
Wales awarded his annual "Wikipedian of the Year" award to Rémi Mathis, the chair of Wikimedia France and, until April 2012, a volunteer administrator on the French Wikipedia. Mathis was called into the offices of France's interior intelligence service, DCRI, to delete an article that allegedly contained classified information (see Signpost coverage).
The topic in question is a military radio station in south-central France. It was and still is unclear just what parts of the original article were classified, given that it in large part followed a publicly available video (made with full cooperation of the French Air Force), and DCRI refused to give the Wikimedia Foundation any indication as to what was problematic. In any case, the article, after being restored by a Swiss administrator, became a textbook example of the Streisand effect, where attempting to censor an item leads to it getting far more publicity than it would have otherwise.
Just last week, the DCRI refused to answer a question about the Wikipedia debacle from a French Assembly member.
Charles Mok, an Internet entrepreneur and holder of Hong Kong's Information Technology legislative seat, used his keynote speech on the second day to speak about China's relationship with the Internet. More Chinese people use the Internet than one might think; out of 2.7 billion Internet users in the world, just over 20% (or 591 million) of them are Chinese. That staggering number is at just 44.1% penetration, and is nearly double the United States' entire population. There are also 461 million mobile users.
These numbers come with a caveat, in that regular Chinese citizens outside of Hong Kong and Macau face Internet censorship. Mok examined how this censorship has changed in recent years, from heavyhanded blocking to subtle methods that can emulate a 404 error. The Chinese government is also less concerned about blocking every single offending website. Mok theorized that they realize that some information must get through to sate the public's demand for it, so they concentrate on stopping the largest problems before they go viral. Should this fail, they have a well-oiled system of message control and downplaying sensitive news to fall back upon.
Mok stated that new regulations are coming into effect that will make it more difficult for Chinese citizens to freely post their opinions. The Chinese government will begin implementing a real-name policy in June 2014, where contributors to online forums will be forced to register with their real names. There are also new Internet privacy regulations coming that were announced in April 2013, though the notion of such rules when the government is also pursuing content monitoring and mandatory reporting of state secrets is a rather unsettling prospect.
Currently, it is possible to skirt the edge of the firewall and get your messages across. Animated GIFs, which cannot be blocked by an automated text search, are commonly used alongside coining new, unique terms to describe a nominally filtered politician or incident.
This can be juxtaposed against the unfiltered Internet in Hong Kong, which is relatively legally free. There are freedom of communication and privacy laws, which are tempered by a broad provision that bans accessing a computer with a criminal or dishonest intent. This law has snared offenders ranging from hacking, cyber attacks, putting out fake government press releases, and under-the-skirt photographs of women. Also of interest are Hong Kong's Internet statistics, which show that there is 229% mobile penetration, also known as many people having second, third, and even fourth phones.
Mok believes that there are several positive directions in which Hong Kong's Internet law is evolving: there is a movement to protect the rights of parodies, satires, and derivative works, and the government is releasing a transparency report that reveals the extent of its user data and content removal requests. Mok stated that the "public has a right to know how government actions affect their privacy and free flow of information."
Sue Gardner's closing plenary focused on four major areas: editor engagement, grantmaking, VisualEditor, and mobiles.
Gardner envisions that Wikimedia sites will be more welcoming and friendly to new editors. To this end, the Foundation has redesigned the landing page on which new users land when they register. Such a simple move yielded 2% more editors, from 20 to 22%. While Gardner acknowledged that this was a small increase, she noted that it was an equally small change that, in hard numbers, has resulted in 2600 additional new editors per month on the English Wikipedia.
Gardner also briefly mentioned Flow in this category, which will revolutionize how talk pages work on Wikimedia projects. In the words of Brandon Harris, from an earlier presentation, Flow will be a modern discussion system that will be a "controlled, flexible workflow engine" allowing data to come to the user, rather than needing to find it. The current designs, according to him, are an "anti-pattern for the [Wikimedia] mission" with their colon indents, tilde signatures, and requirement to edit source code. Gardner remarked on much the same issues: "sometimes people don't even realize that someone is talking to them."
Next up was grantmaking. The Wikimedia Foundation's new grantmaking system, which was described by Gardner as a "massive leap forward", is composed in large part by the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). This was formed by a Foundation board resolution at Wikimania 2012 and launched last August. In the 2012–13 fiscal year, the FDC gave recommendations as to how US$5.65 million should be distributed to applicants. 95% of the resulting awards went to the global north (a majority of that going to Wikimedias Germany, France, UK, and Switzerland). Now that the infrastructure has been formed and tested, Gardner is hopeful that they will be able to give a sharper focus on the effectiveness of the money. This will be important, given that the FDC will give recommendations on up to US$8 million in 2013–2014.
On the VisualEditor, which was certainly the most controversial topic in her speech among English-language Wikipedians, Gardner made the case for an improved version of it by saying that people are "deterred by wikisyntax." She backed this up with a 2009 video of "ideally we would have wanted as editors"—i.e. those with a college education or extensive life experience. These people were asked to click the edit button, and their responses were recorded (56:05 in the public video) The first reaction was "nahhhhh", while another remarked that she felt "kinda stupid!"
Gardner's last listed topic was mobile. The Foundation's plan, which focused on reading in 2011–12 and uploading in 2012–13, is now concentrating on editing in 2013–14. Mobile Wikimedia readers have increased faster than the global web's benchmark since they started focusing on them, and in the first week mobile editing was enabled, 3014 editors used it. Gardner held this, alongside its accompanying 1% higher revert rate, as a success, especially because more than half were made by new people.
Also of relevance to mobile is Wikipedia Zero, the Foundation's initiative to give free access to Wikipedia to people in developing countries through partnerships with local phone companies (see related Signpost coverage). Gardner said that "we don't want to be written by people in rich countries for people in poor countries."
Gardner closed her speech by looking back on her tenure at the Foundation, which will end at some point in this year. When she joined, the Foundation and its projects were "shaky" and "often the butt of jokes", particularly from academics (her words). She does not believe that is true anymore: the Global Education Program is engaging students and professors all around the world, and students in South Africa are begging their telecom companies to offer Wikipedia Zero. Gardner will be leaving at a point where she can look at the movement and say "you're safe". However, she does not feel she can do the same thing for the rest of the Internet, and she wants "to make sure that the Internet does not become a commercialized wasteland." She closed by declaring that she would "always be [the movement's] friend and supporter" before receiving a standing ovation.
Wikimedian attendees thought that the conference was a qualified success. Many praised the prime organization of the conference, and the over 300 volunteers who came to assist—a total far more than previous conferences—were icing on the proverbial cake. Board trustee Sj called it a "beautifully smooth Wikimania", while the Wikimania-l mailing list was quickly filled with comments like "a wonderful conference", "great", "special", and "wonderful."
The only major issues observed by the Signpost both occurred outside of the conference itself—at both the Sky100 welcome and Shek O Beach closing party, food and alcohol ran out. This cannot be fully attributed to poor planning; at the welcome party, far more people attended than indicated with RSVPs, and at the closing party, several regular beachgoers joined the Wikimanians. At the very least, the quality of the food at the welcome party was highly praised.
Aside from those minor hiccups, the conference was very well-done. Michael Jahn wrote:
“ | ... it really is us attendees who are grateful for all your work. I've been able to fully concentrate on presentations and meeting inspiring people from all over the world. Whenever that works and you don't need to worry about details, then you know that the conference organizers did a great job. And you did. | ” |
Wikimania was heavily covered in the international press this week (see " In brief", below). One major story that came out of the conference was Jimmy Wales’ statements that he would prefer to have Wikipedia banned entirely in mainland China than censored as it is currently.
Wales was interviewed by the The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog (and later covered in the same paper's China Realtime Report blog) during Wikimania. The comments came about during a discussion on access to the secure version of Wikimedia projects—in China, the uncensored, encrypted version of Wikipedia is blocked completely by the Great Firewall, but the unencrypted version is available with keyword filtering.
The Chinese government's censorship and occasional banning of Wikipedia has meant that Wikipedia is not the dominant online encyclopedia on the mainland; rather, competitors like Baidu Baike and Hudong predominate. Though activists have asked Wikipedia to make the encrypted version the default version of the site, to force Beijing's hand, Wales and the Foundation say that this is not currently technically feasible. Also stating that he opposed any efforts by the Chinese government to force editors to register under real names, Wales concluded that "We don’t approve of filtering, but there is nothing we can do to stop it."
The interview was covered in Tech2 ( Will not comply with China's censorship diktat, insists Jimmy Wales), BoingBoing ( Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia won't surveil users for China), The Diplomat ( Wikipedia Refuses to Comply with China's Censorship), Shanghaiist ( Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales refuses to comply with Chinese censors), the International Business Times ( Wikipedia Assures It Will Not Bow Down to ANY China Censorship Demands), Policymic ( Wikipedia's Co-founder is Ready to Call China's Bluff), Firstpost ( Would prefer no Wikipedia in China than follow censorship laws: Jimmy Wales), the Washington Post Worldview ( Wikipedia largely alone in defying Chinese self censorship demands), and the China Digital Times ( Wikipedia Co-Founder Refuses to Comply with Censorship).
Seven featured articles were promoted this week.
Four featured lists were promoted this week.
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week.
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and its public face to most of the media, has declared that media organizations are missing out on the "opportunity of the century" by not conducting true investigative reporting into American surveillance practices, a debate kindled by information leaked by Edward Snowden.
Wales has given a keynote at every Wikimania, an annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement held since 2005. These speeches have typically focused on topics directly related to the movement, such as 2011's editor retention and complexity in the English Wikipedia, and 2012's look at why Africa is one of the keys to the movement's future.
This year was different: Wales used the opportunity to speak on privacy in the digital age, a topic inspired by the recent Snowden-led and Guardian-published revelations about the extent of online spying conducted by the United States National Security Agency, and the news media's reporting of the event, which he believes lacks depth, detail, and scope. The media, Wales believes, is not explaining these technical challenges to readers as it should.
Technical literacy is a hurdle that many people have not been able to jump over. In one of the simplest areas, using a password to secure an Internet account, many users persist with simple passwords such as "password", "123456", "12345678", or "abc123", despite ample evidence that these strings are easily hacked. So it is unsurprising that knowledge of more complex tools—like encryption and virtual private networks—is even less commonplace.
Wales claims that when the media receives a juicy yet complex technical topic like the Snowden extravaganza, its treatment tends to gravitate towards the easier, less expensive, more understandable, and more popular human interest stories. In the Snowden case-study used by Wales, the obvious diversions were Snowden's girlfriend, who happens to be a presentable former ballet dancer and a current member of an acrobatic show team, and his attempts to gain asylum in Latin America and Russia. These tendencies may play a role in the near-historic lows in American public polling of attitudes towards the media: just last week, Pew Research rated journalism's accuracy (and its willingness to admit mistakes), independence, and neutrality at anemic levels. A majority of surveyed people said that journalism is more important than in the past because it "help[s] make sense of all of the info that is available", and an even larger group believe that the media "focus on unimportant stories."
In downplaying the technical dimensions of wide-ranging government surveillance programs in favor of human-interest stories, however trivial compared with the deeper significance of the Snowden case, Wales is charging the mass media with missing out on the "greatest journalistic opportunity of the century"—the chance to convey to a non-technical audience the important details they need if they are to understand how governments are using the Internet to pry into their lives.
According to Wales, we are living in "serious times" that require "serious journalism". What, then, are we to do about it?
Wales referred to Wikipedia as a strong area of the web, one that typically constrains itself to facts rather than "tabloid nonsense". His point is underpinned by one of the encyclopedia's core principles, verifiability, which prevents article writers from analyzing any topic without drawing on a reliable source. Limiting Wikipedia in this way may prove to be more beneficial than negative overall, but it means that if a topic is not covered in an academic work or by the mass media, it cannot be included in a Wikipedia article.
In addition, Wales sees the Wikipedia model, built on the backs of volunteer labor, as insufficient for a news organization. While it works well for article writers who have academic sources on their bookshelves, journalism on serious topics requires a great deal of funding for full-time employees, to enable them to devote as much time as possible to undertake investigative reports and travel, to name two. Volunteers, like those working on the nominally globally scoped Wikinews, are seldom able to accomplish or do either.
Wales called for ideas on a new news-oriented website, which would be built from the ground up as an alternative to traditional and web-based outlets. He imagined that it could feature a hybrid community–paid journalist model, where community members and journalists are either equal or the former as a whole is in charge of the latter. It seems doubtful that this would be a community of Wikimedians, given his call for a brand-new site.
Will anything come of Wales' hopes? The jury is still out. His pronouncement received little attention in his maligned mass media, although there was some coverage from CNN, the South China Morning Post, and the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.
Such attention will be needed if Wales' proposed site is to attract contributors and readers. The Internet is full of failed news sites like the
Rocky Mountain News, and he is entering a relatively crowded market with an idea that is not very different from what is already out there—the difference between community-written news, like CNN iReports, and the type of community–journalist partnership he proposes may not be large. The idea that journalists will be happy writing in this model is also debatable—NewsTilt failed because its journalists were quickly
alienated. One wonders if history would repeat itself if paid professional journalists had to answer to a cantankerous, Wikipedia-like community.
Reader comments
This is mostly a list of Non-article page
requests for comment believed to be active on 14 August 2013 linked from subpages of
Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
This week, we collected the thoughts of WikiProject Philately, the project dedicated to postage stamps, revenue stamps and postal history around the world. WikiProject Philately began in November 2003 and grew to include nearly three thousand articles, lists, and categories with a daunting relative WikiWork score of 5.29. The project's single Featured Article and four Good Articles focus on elements of the postal services in Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. The project's small but dedicated team works on a variety of different types of articles, including "country studies" for postage issuers past and present. We interviewed Rahman.safwan, Philafrenzy, ww2censor, BlackJack, and Ecphora.
Next week, we'll
improve an article every day. Until then, check out other nifty initiatives in the
archive.
Reader comments
The Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds case has closed, with a unanimous decision to desysop a Wikimedia Foundation employee and indefinitely ban another editor. The Tea Party movement case has stalled yet again, in the wake of a controversial proposal to ban 14 editors. A proposed decision in the Infoboxes case was scheduled to be posted on 14 August.
In a unanimous decision, the committee voted to indefinitely ban Kiefer Wolfowitz and desysop Ironholds, the original account of Wikimedia Foundation employee Oliver Keyes. The case involved a dispute between the two that began on-wiki and escalated in off-wiki forums, ending with statements that could be interpreted as threats of violence.
The committee passed findings of fact that Ironholds has "a history of making highly inappropriate remarks both on-wiki and off-wiki on the various IRC channels, where he has often used violent and sexual language (evidence for this has been submitted and discussed in private). Moreover, on at least two occasions, he also logged out to engage in vandalism and to make personal attacks on other editors on other Wikimedia projects."
ArbCom concluded that Kiefer.Wolfowitz "has an extensive history of making comments which are below the level of civility that is expected on Wikipedia, which include personal attacks, often made in an attempt to belittle other editors ... and carefully worded remarks which insinuate misconduct on the part of others without actually asserting it openly. He has also made on-wiki allegations that other editors may have violated the policy on the protection of children."
The following remedies were passed:
“ | 1) For conduct unbecoming an administrator, and for bringing the project into disrepute, Ironholds is desysopped and may regain the tools via a request for adminship.
2.2) For his history of incivility, which includes logging out to engage in vandalism and to make personal attacks on other editors on other Wikimedia projects, Ironholds is strongly admonished. 3) For numerous violations of Wikipedia's norms and policies, Kiefer.Wolfowitz is indefinitely banned from the English Language Wikipedia. He may request reconsideration of the ban twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every six months thereafter. |
” |
Stronger remedies against Ironholds for a fixed-term or indefinite ban failed to gain traction, in spite of the noted severity of the infractions. Various arbitrators pointed out that getting the Ironholds account unbanned at a later date "would not be much of an uphill battle", and that reviewing such a contentious request would set up a difficult situation for a new committee. Others noted that the committee "lacks the authority to tell the Foundation how to manage their personnel" and that previous cases have established that "interference in real-world employment is grounds for removing editors from the project for extended periods if not permanently".
Some concern was expressed that not addressing the issue of Ironhold's second account might be misunderstood, but it was claimed that the lack of support for any banning motions was not so much a wish for Ironholds not to stay off en.WP as much as not to run afoul of the WMF.
The Tea Party movement case has stalled again after a contentious proposal (see last week's Arbitration Report) was put forward to ban 14 editors. The vote on the "Motion for a final decision" which last week appeared to be passing, is now tied, with five arbitrators voting to support and five arbitrators voting to oppose, after Carcharoth returned from wikibreak and added himself to the list of active arbitrators, and Newyorkbrad voted against the proposal he had co-authored, writing: "... within the past couple of days, some of my colleagues have stated, both here and on our mailing list, that they believe they can complete the preparation of a more traditional decision including specific findings and remedies against specific editors who have behaved poorly."
The case has had a tumultuous history. It was initiated by KillerChihuahua on February 25, 2013, after an acrimonious ANI degenerated into incivility, and concerns were expressed over WikiProject Conservatism being "canvassed for backup support for disruptions" on other articles and the possibility of "the same editors finding their way into the same conflicts over U.S. politics, religion, and homosexuality".
The case was accepted March 6, but faltered briefly as the initial ANI was re-opened and re-closed with no resolution. A proposed final decision was posted on May 6, but by the end of the month, only three of the eleven active arbitrators had voted on findings regarding any individuals. With the proposer of the case now participating from a hospital bed, the case was officially suspended for one month, from June 1 to July 1, to allow for an attempted moderated discussion on the talk page, with arbitrator SilkTork acting as moderator. After the month-long hiatus, voting resumed on the proposed decision, but there was little headway.
To break the impasse, arbitrator AGK put forward the "Proposed motion to close", naming 14 editors in a ban proposal that he described as "draconian". SilkTork, one of the co-drafters of the case, paradoxically added his own name as a party to the case. While the stated reason for this was an attempt to assert that inclusion on the list of banned editors did not reflect misconduct, the addition of an arbitrator's name to the list may have served as a poison pill—as one arbitrator wrote: "I don't think it is appropriate to include an arbitrator in such a motion."
This case, brought by Ched, involves the issue of who should make the decision to include an infobox in an article and to determine its formatting (right margin, footer, both, etc)—whether the preferences of the original author should be taken into consideration, if the decision should be made by various WikiProjects to promote uniformity between articles, or whether each article should be decided on a case-by-case basis after discussion. It also involves what is perceived by some to be an aggressive addition or reverting of infoboxes to articles without discussion by some editors, in areas where they do not normally edit. Areas that have seen disputes over infoboxes include opera, the Classical Music and Composers project, and featured articles.
The evidence and workshop phases of the case have closed, and a proposed decision was scheduled to have been posted 14 August 2013.
About a thousand Wikimedians journeyed to Hong Kong this week for the annual Wikimania conference, the annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement. Wikimania, which has been held since 2005, serves as the principal physical meetup for Wikimedians around the world. This year marked the first Wikimania in East Asia since 2007, when it was held in nearby Taiwan. Locations since then have been in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.
Wikimania 2013 was planned by Wikimedia Hong Kong and held in Hong Kong's Polytechnic University. While it was nominally only three days long, it was preceded by a two-day pre-conference where the Chapters Association imploded (and is now "on life support", according to one Wikimedian), the Education Program held a successful planning session, and developers met to discuss their projects and strenuously avoid using the term "hacking" (see Signpost coverage).
Conference-goers attending the opening day were treated to a traditional Chinese dragon dance before being welcomed by Hong Kong's Chief Information Officer Daniel Lai in his opening keynote. A notable address was given by Makoto Okamoto, who explored an area many Wikimedians had never heard of, especially given the near-total lack of interaction from Japan with the wider movement. Okamoto was a key figure in founding saveMLAK, an ongoing effort to document damage to Japanese museums, libraries, archives, and Japan's great " kominkan" cultural centers. The saveMLAK site was formed in April 2011 from the merger of four websites, each of which had covered one of these four topics. Three languages are used: English, Japanese, and Chinese. Each page is supposed to include a fact sheet about the location, a list of damage, and its operational status, along with information for victims, supporters, institutions, and various ways of how outside individual can assist.
saveMLAK has 300,000 total edits, 30,000 pages, and 300 editors. Looking at these statistics, 80% of the articles were created by bots—more than the Swedish Wikipedia, which the Signpost reported on in June. Of the editors, 38 edited more than 100 times, and 90% had previous experience with MediaWiki-based sites.
Jimmy Wales' traditional "State of the Wiki" address focused on journalism in the context of global relations and Edward Snowden's revelations (see this week's Signpost special report). Items relevant to the Wikimedia movement came at the beginning of his speech, where he highlighted the milestones reached in the past year; there are now 28 million articles and 286 language editions, of which 120 have more than ten thousand articles, 46 have more than a hundred thousand, and eight have more than a million. Those eight are a doubling of the four million-article club a year ago, with the addition of the Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish Wikipedias. Wales also covered the election of the new chair of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, Jan-Bart de Vreede.
Wales awarded his annual "Wikipedian of the Year" award to Rémi Mathis, the chair of Wikimedia France and, until April 2012, a volunteer administrator on the French Wikipedia. Mathis was called into the offices of France's interior intelligence service, DCRI, to delete an article that allegedly contained classified information (see Signpost coverage).
The topic in question is a military radio station in south-central France. It was and still is unclear just what parts of the original article were classified, given that it in large part followed a publicly available video (made with full cooperation of the French Air Force), and DCRI refused to give the Wikimedia Foundation any indication as to what was problematic. In any case, the article, after being restored by a Swiss administrator, became a textbook example of the Streisand effect, where attempting to censor an item leads to it getting far more publicity than it would have otherwise.
Just last week, the DCRI refused to answer a question about the Wikipedia debacle from a French Assembly member.
Charles Mok, an Internet entrepreneur and holder of Hong Kong's Information Technology legislative seat, used his keynote speech on the second day to speak about China's relationship with the Internet. More Chinese people use the Internet than one might think; out of 2.7 billion Internet users in the world, just over 20% (or 591 million) of them are Chinese. That staggering number is at just 44.1% penetration, and is nearly double the United States' entire population. There are also 461 million mobile users.
These numbers come with a caveat, in that regular Chinese citizens outside of Hong Kong and Macau face Internet censorship. Mok examined how this censorship has changed in recent years, from heavyhanded blocking to subtle methods that can emulate a 404 error. The Chinese government is also less concerned about blocking every single offending website. Mok theorized that they realize that some information must get through to sate the public's demand for it, so they concentrate on stopping the largest problems before they go viral. Should this fail, they have a well-oiled system of message control and downplaying sensitive news to fall back upon.
Mok stated that new regulations are coming into effect that will make it more difficult for Chinese citizens to freely post their opinions. The Chinese government will begin implementing a real-name policy in June 2014, where contributors to online forums will be forced to register with their real names. There are also new Internet privacy regulations coming that were announced in April 2013, though the notion of such rules when the government is also pursuing content monitoring and mandatory reporting of state secrets is a rather unsettling prospect.
Currently, it is possible to skirt the edge of the firewall and get your messages across. Animated GIFs, which cannot be blocked by an automated text search, are commonly used alongside coining new, unique terms to describe a nominally filtered politician or incident.
This can be juxtaposed against the unfiltered Internet in Hong Kong, which is relatively legally free. There are freedom of communication and privacy laws, which are tempered by a broad provision that bans accessing a computer with a criminal or dishonest intent. This law has snared offenders ranging from hacking, cyber attacks, putting out fake government press releases, and under-the-skirt photographs of women. Also of interest are Hong Kong's Internet statistics, which show that there is 229% mobile penetration, also known as many people having second, third, and even fourth phones.
Mok believes that there are several positive directions in which Hong Kong's Internet law is evolving: there is a movement to protect the rights of parodies, satires, and derivative works, and the government is releasing a transparency report that reveals the extent of its user data and content removal requests. Mok stated that the "public has a right to know how government actions affect their privacy and free flow of information."
Sue Gardner's closing plenary focused on four major areas: editor engagement, grantmaking, VisualEditor, and mobiles.
Gardner envisions that Wikimedia sites will be more welcoming and friendly to new editors. To this end, the Foundation has redesigned the landing page on which new users land when they register. Such a simple move yielded 2% more editors, from 20 to 22%. While Gardner acknowledged that this was a small increase, she noted that it was an equally small change that, in hard numbers, has resulted in 2600 additional new editors per month on the English Wikipedia.
Gardner also briefly mentioned Flow in this category, which will revolutionize how talk pages work on Wikimedia projects. In the words of Brandon Harris, from an earlier presentation, Flow will be a modern discussion system that will be a "controlled, flexible workflow engine" allowing data to come to the user, rather than needing to find it. The current designs, according to him, are an "anti-pattern for the [Wikimedia] mission" with their colon indents, tilde signatures, and requirement to edit source code. Gardner remarked on much the same issues: "sometimes people don't even realize that someone is talking to them."
Next up was grantmaking. The Wikimedia Foundation's new grantmaking system, which was described by Gardner as a "massive leap forward", is composed in large part by the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC). This was formed by a Foundation board resolution at Wikimania 2012 and launched last August. In the 2012–13 fiscal year, the FDC gave recommendations as to how US$5.65 million should be distributed to applicants. 95% of the resulting awards went to the global north (a majority of that going to Wikimedias Germany, France, UK, and Switzerland). Now that the infrastructure has been formed and tested, Gardner is hopeful that they will be able to give a sharper focus on the effectiveness of the money. This will be important, given that the FDC will give recommendations on up to US$8 million in 2013–2014.
On the VisualEditor, which was certainly the most controversial topic in her speech among English-language Wikipedians, Gardner made the case for an improved version of it by saying that people are "deterred by wikisyntax." She backed this up with a 2009 video of "ideally we would have wanted as editors"—i.e. those with a college education or extensive life experience. These people were asked to click the edit button, and their responses were recorded (56:05 in the public video) The first reaction was "nahhhhh", while another remarked that she felt "kinda stupid!"
Gardner's last listed topic was mobile. The Foundation's plan, which focused on reading in 2011–12 and uploading in 2012–13, is now concentrating on editing in 2013–14. Mobile Wikimedia readers have increased faster than the global web's benchmark since they started focusing on them, and in the first week mobile editing was enabled, 3014 editors used it. Gardner held this, alongside its accompanying 1% higher revert rate, as a success, especially because more than half were made by new people.
Also of relevance to mobile is Wikipedia Zero, the Foundation's initiative to give free access to Wikipedia to people in developing countries through partnerships with local phone companies (see related Signpost coverage). Gardner said that "we don't want to be written by people in rich countries for people in poor countries."
Gardner closed her speech by looking back on her tenure at the Foundation, which will end at some point in this year. When she joined, the Foundation and its projects were "shaky" and "often the butt of jokes", particularly from academics (her words). She does not believe that is true anymore: the Global Education Program is engaging students and professors all around the world, and students in South Africa are begging their telecom companies to offer Wikipedia Zero. Gardner will be leaving at a point where she can look at the movement and say "you're safe". However, she does not feel she can do the same thing for the rest of the Internet, and she wants "to make sure that the Internet does not become a commercialized wasteland." She closed by declaring that she would "always be [the movement's] friend and supporter" before receiving a standing ovation.
Wikimedian attendees thought that the conference was a qualified success. Many praised the prime organization of the conference, and the over 300 volunteers who came to assist—a total far more than previous conferences—were icing on the proverbial cake. Board trustee Sj called it a "beautifully smooth Wikimania", while the Wikimania-l mailing list was quickly filled with comments like "a wonderful conference", "great", "special", and "wonderful."
The only major issues observed by the Signpost both occurred outside of the conference itself—at both the Sky100 welcome and Shek O Beach closing party, food and alcohol ran out. This cannot be fully attributed to poor planning; at the welcome party, far more people attended than indicated with RSVPs, and at the closing party, several regular beachgoers joined the Wikimanians. At the very least, the quality of the food at the welcome party was highly praised.
Aside from those minor hiccups, the conference was very well-done. Michael Jahn wrote:
“ | ... it really is us attendees who are grateful for all your work. I've been able to fully concentrate on presentations and meeting inspiring people from all over the world. Whenever that works and you don't need to worry about details, then you know that the conference organizers did a great job. And you did. | ” |
Wikimania was heavily covered in the international press this week (see " In brief", below). One major story that came out of the conference was Jimmy Wales’ statements that he would prefer to have Wikipedia banned entirely in mainland China than censored as it is currently.
Wales was interviewed by the The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog (and later covered in the same paper's China Realtime Report blog) during Wikimania. The comments came about during a discussion on access to the secure version of Wikimedia projects—in China, the uncensored, encrypted version of Wikipedia is blocked completely by the Great Firewall, but the unencrypted version is available with keyword filtering.
The Chinese government's censorship and occasional banning of Wikipedia has meant that Wikipedia is not the dominant online encyclopedia on the mainland; rather, competitors like Baidu Baike and Hudong predominate. Though activists have asked Wikipedia to make the encrypted version the default version of the site, to force Beijing's hand, Wales and the Foundation say that this is not currently technically feasible. Also stating that he opposed any efforts by the Chinese government to force editors to register under real names, Wales concluded that "We don’t approve of filtering, but there is nothing we can do to stop it."
The interview was covered in Tech2 ( Will not comply with China's censorship diktat, insists Jimmy Wales), BoingBoing ( Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia won't surveil users for China), The Diplomat ( Wikipedia Refuses to Comply with China's Censorship), Shanghaiist ( Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales refuses to comply with Chinese censors), the International Business Times ( Wikipedia Assures It Will Not Bow Down to ANY China Censorship Demands), Policymic ( Wikipedia's Co-founder is Ready to Call China's Bluff), Firstpost ( Would prefer no Wikipedia in China than follow censorship laws: Jimmy Wales), the Washington Post Worldview ( Wikipedia largely alone in defying Chinese self censorship demands), and the China Digital Times ( Wikipedia Co-Founder Refuses to Comply with Censorship).
Seven featured articles were promoted this week.
Four featured lists were promoted this week.
Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week.
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and its public face to most of the media, has declared that media organizations are missing out on the "opportunity of the century" by not conducting true investigative reporting into American surveillance practices, a debate kindled by information leaked by Edward Snowden.
Wales has given a keynote at every Wikimania, an annual gathering of the Wikimedia movement held since 2005. These speeches have typically focused on topics directly related to the movement, such as 2011's editor retention and complexity in the English Wikipedia, and 2012's look at why Africa is one of the keys to the movement's future.
This year was different: Wales used the opportunity to speak on privacy in the digital age, a topic inspired by the recent Snowden-led and Guardian-published revelations about the extent of online spying conducted by the United States National Security Agency, and the news media's reporting of the event, which he believes lacks depth, detail, and scope. The media, Wales believes, is not explaining these technical challenges to readers as it should.
Technical literacy is a hurdle that many people have not been able to jump over. In one of the simplest areas, using a password to secure an Internet account, many users persist with simple passwords such as "password", "123456", "12345678", or "abc123", despite ample evidence that these strings are easily hacked. So it is unsurprising that knowledge of more complex tools—like encryption and virtual private networks—is even less commonplace.
Wales claims that when the media receives a juicy yet complex technical topic like the Snowden extravaganza, its treatment tends to gravitate towards the easier, less expensive, more understandable, and more popular human interest stories. In the Snowden case-study used by Wales, the obvious diversions were Snowden's girlfriend, who happens to be a presentable former ballet dancer and a current member of an acrobatic show team, and his attempts to gain asylum in Latin America and Russia. These tendencies may play a role in the near-historic lows in American public polling of attitudes towards the media: just last week, Pew Research rated journalism's accuracy (and its willingness to admit mistakes), independence, and neutrality at anemic levels. A majority of surveyed people said that journalism is more important than in the past because it "help[s] make sense of all of the info that is available", and an even larger group believe that the media "focus on unimportant stories."
In downplaying the technical dimensions of wide-ranging government surveillance programs in favor of human-interest stories, however trivial compared with the deeper significance of the Snowden case, Wales is charging the mass media with missing out on the "greatest journalistic opportunity of the century"—the chance to convey to a non-technical audience the important details they need if they are to understand how governments are using the Internet to pry into their lives.
According to Wales, we are living in "serious times" that require "serious journalism". What, then, are we to do about it?
Wales referred to Wikipedia as a strong area of the web, one that typically constrains itself to facts rather than "tabloid nonsense". His point is underpinned by one of the encyclopedia's core principles, verifiability, which prevents article writers from analyzing any topic without drawing on a reliable source. Limiting Wikipedia in this way may prove to be more beneficial than negative overall, but it means that if a topic is not covered in an academic work or by the mass media, it cannot be included in a Wikipedia article.
In addition, Wales sees the Wikipedia model, built on the backs of volunteer labor, as insufficient for a news organization. While it works well for article writers who have academic sources on their bookshelves, journalism on serious topics requires a great deal of funding for full-time employees, to enable them to devote as much time as possible to undertake investigative reports and travel, to name two. Volunteers, like those working on the nominally globally scoped Wikinews, are seldom able to accomplish or do either.
Wales called for ideas on a new news-oriented website, which would be built from the ground up as an alternative to traditional and web-based outlets. He imagined that it could feature a hybrid community–paid journalist model, where community members and journalists are either equal or the former as a whole is in charge of the latter. It seems doubtful that this would be a community of Wikimedians, given his call for a brand-new site.
Will anything come of Wales' hopes? The jury is still out. His pronouncement received little attention in his maligned mass media, although there was some coverage from CNN, the South China Morning Post, and the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.
Such attention will be needed if Wales' proposed site is to attract contributors and readers. The Internet is full of failed news sites like the
Rocky Mountain News, and he is entering a relatively crowded market with an idea that is not very different from what is already out there—the difference between community-written news, like CNN iReports, and the type of community–journalist partnership he proposes may not be large. The idea that journalists will be happy writing in this model is also debatable—NewsTilt failed because its journalists were quickly
alienated. One wonders if history would repeat itself if paid professional journalists had to answer to a cantankerous, Wikipedia-like community.
Reader comments
This is mostly a list of Non-article page
requests for comment believed to be active on 14 August 2013 linked from subpages of
Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
This week, we collected the thoughts of WikiProject Philately, the project dedicated to postage stamps, revenue stamps and postal history around the world. WikiProject Philately began in November 2003 and grew to include nearly three thousand articles, lists, and categories with a daunting relative WikiWork score of 5.29. The project's single Featured Article and four Good Articles focus on elements of the postal services in Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the United States. The project's small but dedicated team works on a variety of different types of articles, including "country studies" for postage issuers past and present. We interviewed Rahman.safwan, Philafrenzy, ww2censor, BlackJack, and Ecphora.
Next week, we'll
improve an article every day. Until then, check out other nifty initiatives in the
archive.
Reader comments
The Kiefer.Wolfowitz and Ironholds case has closed, with a unanimous decision to desysop a Wikimedia Foundation employee and indefinitely ban another editor. The Tea Party movement case has stalled yet again, in the wake of a controversial proposal to ban 14 editors. A proposed decision in the Infoboxes case was scheduled to be posted on 14 August.
In a unanimous decision, the committee voted to indefinitely ban Kiefer Wolfowitz and desysop Ironholds, the original account of Wikimedia Foundation employee Oliver Keyes. The case involved a dispute between the two that began on-wiki and escalated in off-wiki forums, ending with statements that could be interpreted as threats of violence.
The committee passed findings of fact that Ironholds has "a history of making highly inappropriate remarks both on-wiki and off-wiki on the various IRC channels, where he has often used violent and sexual language (evidence for this has been submitted and discussed in private). Moreover, on at least two occasions, he also logged out to engage in vandalism and to make personal attacks on other editors on other Wikimedia projects."
ArbCom concluded that Kiefer.Wolfowitz "has an extensive history of making comments which are below the level of civility that is expected on Wikipedia, which include personal attacks, often made in an attempt to belittle other editors ... and carefully worded remarks which insinuate misconduct on the part of others without actually asserting it openly. He has also made on-wiki allegations that other editors may have violated the policy on the protection of children."
The following remedies were passed:
“ | 1) For conduct unbecoming an administrator, and for bringing the project into disrepute, Ironholds is desysopped and may regain the tools via a request for adminship.
2.2) For his history of incivility, which includes logging out to engage in vandalism and to make personal attacks on other editors on other Wikimedia projects, Ironholds is strongly admonished. 3) For numerous violations of Wikipedia's norms and policies, Kiefer.Wolfowitz is indefinitely banned from the English Language Wikipedia. He may request reconsideration of the ban twelve months after the enactment of this remedy, and every six months thereafter. |
” |
Stronger remedies against Ironholds for a fixed-term or indefinite ban failed to gain traction, in spite of the noted severity of the infractions. Various arbitrators pointed out that getting the Ironholds account unbanned at a later date "would not be much of an uphill battle", and that reviewing such a contentious request would set up a difficult situation for a new committee. Others noted that the committee "lacks the authority to tell the Foundation how to manage their personnel" and that previous cases have established that "interference in real-world employment is grounds for removing editors from the project for extended periods if not permanently".
Some concern was expressed that not addressing the issue of Ironhold's second account might be misunderstood, but it was claimed that the lack of support for any banning motions was not so much a wish for Ironholds not to stay off en.WP as much as not to run afoul of the WMF.
The Tea Party movement case has stalled again after a contentious proposal (see last week's Arbitration Report) was put forward to ban 14 editors. The vote on the "Motion for a final decision" which last week appeared to be passing, is now tied, with five arbitrators voting to support and five arbitrators voting to oppose, after Carcharoth returned from wikibreak and added himself to the list of active arbitrators, and Newyorkbrad voted against the proposal he had co-authored, writing: "... within the past couple of days, some of my colleagues have stated, both here and on our mailing list, that they believe they can complete the preparation of a more traditional decision including specific findings and remedies against specific editors who have behaved poorly."
The case has had a tumultuous history. It was initiated by KillerChihuahua on February 25, 2013, after an acrimonious ANI degenerated into incivility, and concerns were expressed over WikiProject Conservatism being "canvassed for backup support for disruptions" on other articles and the possibility of "the same editors finding their way into the same conflicts over U.S. politics, religion, and homosexuality".
The case was accepted March 6, but faltered briefly as the initial ANI was re-opened and re-closed with no resolution. A proposed final decision was posted on May 6, but by the end of the month, only three of the eleven active arbitrators had voted on findings regarding any individuals. With the proposer of the case now participating from a hospital bed, the case was officially suspended for one month, from June 1 to July 1, to allow for an attempted moderated discussion on the talk page, with arbitrator SilkTork acting as moderator. After the month-long hiatus, voting resumed on the proposed decision, but there was little headway.
To break the impasse, arbitrator AGK put forward the "Proposed motion to close", naming 14 editors in a ban proposal that he described as "draconian". SilkTork, one of the co-drafters of the case, paradoxically added his own name as a party to the case. While the stated reason for this was an attempt to assert that inclusion on the list of banned editors did not reflect misconduct, the addition of an arbitrator's name to the list may have served as a poison pill—as one arbitrator wrote: "I don't think it is appropriate to include an arbitrator in such a motion."
This case, brought by Ched, involves the issue of who should make the decision to include an infobox in an article and to determine its formatting (right margin, footer, both, etc)—whether the preferences of the original author should be taken into consideration, if the decision should be made by various WikiProjects to promote uniformity between articles, or whether each article should be decided on a case-by-case basis after discussion. It also involves what is perceived by some to be an aggressive addition or reverting of infoboxes to articles without discussion by some editors, in areas where they do not normally edit. Areas that have seen disputes over infoboxes include opera, the Classical Music and Composers project, and featured articles.
The evidence and workshop phases of the case have closed, and a proposed decision was scheduled to have been posted 14 August 2013.