Jump to content

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-07-27

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Signpost
Single-page Edition
WP:POST/1
27 July 2009

 

2009-07-27

Welcome to the build-your-own edition of the Signpost

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Sage Ross

This week the Signpost has a lot of news to report, but it needs your help. With the ensuing Wikimedia Board elections and the recent events like the Wikipedia Academy at the National Institutes of Health and Wiki-Conference New York, plus the early stages of the Strategic Planning process and a wide variety of community goings-on, there is simply too much to cover and too little time to write it up (much less polish it). And with the board elections starting tomorrow today, it is especially important to publish sooner rather than later. The Signpost asked each board candidate a set of questions, and their answers may be useful to voters.

So, following a very fun—if only modestly productive—session about contributing to the Signpost at Wiki-Conference New York, I'm pleased to present the first "build-your-own" edition of the Signpost. As you browse this issue, you'll find incomplete stories, jumbled messes, even redlinks at first. Please help us to write and polish this week's edition over the coming hours and days. Hopefully it will reach a fairly stable and complete state by 29 July. And if you find that you enjoy working on it, come back next week!

Good luck!

-Sage Ross

Reader comments

2009-07-27

Board of Trustees elections: Voting begins, candidate interviews

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Sage Ross

Elections for three seats on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees are scheduled to begin on Tuesday, 28 July. The board's current structure consists of ten seats, including three community-elected seats and two seats chosen by the Wikimedia chapters, plus four board-appointed "specific expertise" seats (two of which are currently vacant), and one "Community Founder" seat appointed yearly by the board and assumed to be reserved indefinitely for Jimmy Wales.

The field of eighteen candidates includes Wikimedians with a wide range of experience in the projects. Three are current members of the board, several others have run unsuccessfully in previous elections. Most candidates joined the Wikimedia community between 2003 and 2005, although a few joined as late as 2008. The original cutoff for declaring candidacy was 20 July; it was extended to 27 July because of concerns that technical problems with sitenotice had hampered efforts to attract candidates, and six of the current candidates joined the race during this extension period.

All three incumbents who currently hold community-elected seats—Kat Walsh, Ting Chen, and Domas Mituzas—are candidates in the 2009 election. Walsh has served on the board since the 2006 election and was reelected in 2007, Chen joined the board in July 2008 after winning the only seat available in the 2008 election, and Mituzas was appointed to a chapter-selected seat in February 2008 and was moved to a nominally elected seat, which had been vacated mid-term by Frieda Brioschi, as part of the May 2009 board reshuffling that put Arne Klempert in a chapter-selected seat.

Voting

Voting will run from 28 July until 10 August. Voting will be conducted through the SecurePoll page; the voting process—a secret ballot on servers controlled by Software in the Public Interest—will use the Schulze method to determine the winners, based on each voter's ranked preference of candidates.

To qualify to vote, there are a few restrictions. According to the elections page: "You may vote from any one registered account you own on a Wikimedia wiki (you may only vote once, regardless of how many accounts you own). To qualify, this one account must: not be blocked; and not be a bot; and have made at least 600 edits before 01 June 2009 across Wikimedia wikis (edits on several wikis can be combined if your accounts are unified into a global account); and have made at least 50 edits between 01 January and 01 July 2009."

Candidate interviews

The Signpost put a series of questions to each of the candidates to help voters efficiently assess the candidates and their platforms. This is a counterpart to the candidate questions on Meta, which in 2008 generated nearly sixty questions and a potentially overwhelming amount of reading material for voters.

The questions from the Signpost are intended to give the candidates a chance to introduce themselves and then to address some of the significant issues faced by the Wikimedia community and English Wikipedia. The candidates differ significantly on such issues as whether the Board should play a role in reforming the governance of English Wikipedia and other projects and what Wikimedia's strategic planning priorities should be. Readers are encouraged to pose additional questions to the candidates on Meta.

Links to each candidate's answers are listed below:

2009-07-27

Wikimedians and others gather for Wiki-Conference New York

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Staff, Sj, staeiou, GChriss, Izno

More than 100 Wikipedians and observers attended the New York City Wiki-Conference 2009, held on July 25 and 26 at the New York University School of Law. This was the first regional wikiconference held in the U.S., and there was general agreement that one should be held every year. The conference followed the unconference format, leaving much of the job of determining discussion topics to the conference participants. Pharos reported that the only expense was for the food, as the rooms were donated thanks to the Information Law Institute and assistance from NYU Free Culture.

Video and audio of sessions were recorded by GChriss, Bobguy89, and Tom Maaswinkel, to be posted to the Internet Archive. The whole event was tweeted in real time using the #nywikiconference hash tag.

John Britten from Open Everything organized the open space, which made up half of the conference schedule. John Broughton and O'Reilly Media provided copies of the Wikipedia Reader's Guide for all attendees, and one lucky attendee walked away with a copy of How Wikipedia Works.

Sessions

A photo of the open space board at the NYC Wikiconference.

Sessions included keynote speeches by Jimbo Wales and Ira Brad Matetsky, 15 lightning talks, and a few dozen open space sessions, one of which generated this article and other Signpost updates this week. The sessions generated so much enthusiasm that they were extended past the scheduled sessions to add Sunday afternoon sessions.

Keynotes

Two keynotes were presented. Jimbo presented a keynote on Saturday morning, while Ira Brad Matetsky (User:Newyorkbrad) provided the keynote for Sunday morning.

Jimbo Wales at the keynote.
Jimbo (video of Jimmy's keynote)
We are now the 4th largest site in the world. But he expected to soon to be overtaken by Facebook. Jimbo is very much for BLP and against copyfraud. Ann Coulter reminds us that it is ensuring small facts are correct that matters as much as surprising true statements in their bios.
Newyorkbrad
Spoke on "BLPs, Wikipedia, the Internet, and the Future of Privacy", including how Wikipedia's handling of BLP issues relating to privacy issues contrasts with how similar issues have been addressed by other media and by the legal system, with an interesting legal sidelight into the life of William James Sidis.

Panels

Stuart Geiger offered statistical analysis of bot edits.

Five panels, half presentation and half roundtable with the audience, broke up the rest of the schedule.

These included discussions on mapping in MediaWiki, quality and governance (4 out of 5 Wikimedians agree: consensus = 80%), chapters and outreach, collaboration and wikiprojects, and neutrality and activism.

Signpost editors work diligently on the day's edition.

Lightning talks

The most energetic lightning talk demonstrated real-time multiple-participant wysiwyg editing of Wikipedia articles using a development version of Google Wave. Risker talked about the staggering 19-case Arbitration Committee workload, including the War and Peace of date delinking and the Colbertization of Scientology.

An unnamed speaker was voted best lightning talk and received a physical barnstar for his efforts. It is likely that s/he will be rewarded with a metaphysical barnstar in the near future as well.

GreenReaper, Invertzoo and ClockworkSoul covered the creation and growth of WikiProjects.

Open Space

The open space presentations were off the wall. They covered translation (offering interlanguage-mediated adding quality stats by interwiki links), how we make decisions (no consensus reached on how), notability(nn), free culture, art and film (Nina Paley and Commons newbie biting 101), and nonprofits for newbies. Others covered OTRS (), contributing featured content (), strategic planning (public priorities v. reports), Semantic MediaWiki (Yaron holding forth), starting your own wiki (just do it), the NPG (a lot of fun), Wikipedia offline in Peru (slow but widely used in 10k classrooms), and reforming Wikipedia (no consensus). Finally, there was the highways wikiproject, not what Wikipedia is not (?), and the Signpost workshop (simultaneous editing and a gossip column).

Sunday, open space talks included user:Mitchazenia's summary of the WP:DRAMAOUT (136 articles created, 43 DYKs, etc - see Wikipedia:The Great Wikipedia Dramaout/Log).

Reader comments

2009-07-27

Volunteers lead Wikipedia Academy at National Institutes of Health

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Awadewit

On July 16, 2009, the first Wikipedia Academy in the United States was held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland. The aim of the academy was not only to teach NIH employees and scientists about the value of contributing to Wikipedia but also how to do so, with the ultimate aim of making “health and science information more accessible and reliable”.[VolLeadWS27Jul2009 1] In order to achieve this, the organizers spent several months designing presentations specifically for the NIH. For example, they researched the structure of the organization and sent out surveys to the participants in order to learn what their perceptions of Wikipedia were.

Vickers, Wedemeyer, and Broughton preparing for their lectures

The event, which ran from 9 am to 4 pm, consisted of three morning lectures and three simultaneous afternoon workshops. The first lecture, by Tim Vickers, argued that it is important for individuals from the NIH to contribute to Wikipedia because an increasing number of people are turning to the Internet and specifically Wikipedia for health information. He also pointed to Wikipedia's unique ability to update rapidly, focusing on the H1N1 swine flu virus and 2009 flu pandemic articles. The second lecture, by Bill Wedemeyer, explained the structure of the typical Wikipedia article and how to edit collaboratively. He also emphasized that Wikipedia's Featured articles and Good articles in the sciences are largely accurate. Finally, John Broughton discussed some of Wikipedia's quality-control measures, such as counter-vandalism and policies like verifiability. The three afternoon workshop sessions, two of which were aimed at new users and one of which was for intermediate and advanced users, were led by Broughton, Lennart Guldbrandsson, and Adrianne Wadewitz. These were designed to teach, in a hands-on fashion, the details of editing Wikipedia. Four volunteers from the Washington, D.C. area assisted in introducing the new users to Wikipedia.

From the beginning of the event, there was a great deal of enthusiasm in the room. Attendees were generally curious and interested in understanding how Wikipedia worked. As Guldbrandsson wrote in an interview for this story, "When I got there, *they* were equally happy to see us." Not only had the NIH dedicated an entire day to this event, they had, as he pointed out "arranged for video capturing of the entire event, which they were going to closed ca[p]tion afterwards and send out among the thousands of employees." This dedication continued during the afternoon sessions. Both Guldbrandsson and Vickers commented on the palpable excitement from new users making their first edit. Vickers described it as an "outburst of excitement" and Guldbrandsson as “one of my favorite moments: When the group had clicked 'save' and I remarked that they now had made their first edit on Wikipedia, there was the usual amazement: 'Are we really editing Wikipedia live?' 'Yes, you are!'" Marin Allen, NIH Director of Public Information, reported to Wedemeyer that several participants found the workshop "inspirational, a word not often used around here".

Marin Allen, NIH Director of Public Information

The afternoon sessions lasted for two hours, a short time to introduce people to the basics of editing. Broughton was surprised at how few topics could effectively be covered in that time. As he explained, "That's because the participants not only have to be walked through things like creating a user page and subpage, but they also need to have explained the purpose of such things." In his opinion, introductions to editing might be better done over screencasts (perhaps created by Project Bookshelf). The two hours could then be spent showing new users around the site, explaining how to use help desks, demonstrating how to effectively navigate the site, teaching how to discuss issues on talk pages, emphasizing the importance of citations, and other elements of site culture. In fact, Wedemeyer and Wadewitz led an intermediate and advanced session during the afternoon which used a similar technique. They discussed tactics for editing controversial articles such as Legalization of marijuana and MDMA and the how to handle the potential conflict of interest employees of the NIH might have in editing NIH Institute pages. As Wedemeyer wrote, "we did the most good by listening to the participants [and] addressing their concerns".

The organizers have high hopes for the future participation of the attendees and are in communication with them now. One new user began posting suggestions to Vickers' talk page immediately after the event. Wedemeyer commented how important it was that the organizers maintain connections with the participants afterwards, to encourage the NIH to make a real commitment to Wikipedia. The organizers also look forward to more such endeavors. Broughton suggested that the "Foundation should try to do lots and lots of these. We could justifiably have an Academy at every major university and college in the world." However, as Wedemeyer emphasized in an interview for this story, it will, more than likely, be the volunteer organizers who make this happen rather than the Foundation. As he wrote, "based on the experience of this Academy, they don't seem ready to run such workshops themselves at present." He suggested that they "recruit trusted volunteers with specialized knowledge to run the workshop and provide those volunteers with 'infrastructure' support."

Notes

  1. ^ Press release. NIH. July 14, 2009. Retrieved July 27, 2009.


Reader comments

2009-07-27

Goings-on in the Wikimedia world

Contribute  —  
Share this
By JayHenry, TFCforever

Board of Trustees elections beginning

Voting for the Board of Trustees elections for the Wikimedia Foundation is beginning on July 28, and will run until August 10. See story in this issue for more.

Checkuser and Oversight elections

Voting for the August 2009 CheckUser and Oversight elections has begun. Voting will continue until August 10. Five candidates are running for CheckUser:

Twelve candidates are running for Oversight:

An unofficial table of the voting results is maintained here. According to the ArbCom's guidance on these elections, "The successful candidates will be those with the highest percentages of support, subject to (i) their achieving a minimum of 70% support in keeping with the Wikimedia Foundation Oversight Policy, and (ii) a net difference of at least 25 between their support and oppose votes."

Categorization of images from the German Federal Archive completed

As of 22 July 2009, all of the images that the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) donated to Wikimedia Commons in December 2008 have been categorized. The total donation numbered approximately 100,000 images.

Reader comments

2009-07-27

In the News

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Cryptic C62

Tips from PC World

PC World compiled a list of tips to help readers get the most out of their Wikipedia browsing experience. The tips include links to Wikipedia iPhone applications, a Wikipedia screensaver, and instructions on how to customize the browsing skin. The article also encourages readers to try editing articles and to fight vandalism.[ITN27Jul2009 1]

Briefly

References

  1. ^ "Wikipedia Expert Tips: How to Keep the Facts at Your Fingertips," PC World, July 20, 2009
  2. ^ David Williams, "DOC worker edits Wikipedia," The Press (New Zealand), July 27, 2009


Reader comments

2009-07-27

Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Phoebe

Policy

New! Discussion: Like External links, how long should Further reading be?



Reader comments

2009-07-27

WikiProject Oregon

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Cryptic C62

Here at the WikiProject Report, we generally conduct interviews with one interviewer and one interviewee. In this week's issue, we bring to a special group discussion with five active members of WikiProject Oregon. For those readers who live outside the United States, Oregon is a US state in the Pacific Northwest region. Although the state has a population density of only 35.6 people per square mile, the project has more than 50 active members and 15 featured articles. Here to discuss the project are Peteforsyth, Aboutmovies, EncMstr, Steven Walling, and Esprqii.

1. While many projects have weekly or monthly collaborations on singular articles, most of WikiProject Oregon's collaborations feature two or more articles. This process has generated at least 29 DYKs and 4 GAs. Why do you use a double collaboration system, and why does it work so well?

EncMstr: I'm not sure how two was chosen, but it works very well. Usually they are complementary—for example a biography and a piece of legislation—so if one article or task is somehow unappealing then the other is likely to be more interesting. (See here for previous collaborations of the week (COTW).) If the number of active members continues to increase, perhaps the right number would be three at once. I doubt the COTW is responsible for the majority of DYKs and GAs—it's more often something that comes up on the project talk page that strikes a chord with several people. The best examples of this are Johnson Creek (Willamette River) and Cannabis in Oregon.
Esprqii: I think taking a rational approach to the collaborations has been a key part of it. For example, before the weekly collaborations started, we spent a long time rating every single article in the project both in terms of importance and in terms of quality. That left a matrix that showed, for example, which articles were of top importance but were still only stubs. Those were the first articles we collaborated on, and today, if you look at the matrix, there are no articles in that category.
In addition to the rational process, we maintain a wish list of future projects, which inevitably include pet projects of various members of the project. You can't very well ignore it when your pet has the spotlight! Aboutmovies, who manages the whole collaboration process, has been very crafty about mixing up the rational and the irrational to make it fun, get a lot of people involved, and get a lot of good work done.
Aboutmovies: I chose two to begin with, as EncMstr indicates, to allow for maximum participation. Not everyone will be interested in a certain topic, unless you are really broad in choosing the topic. But the broader the topic, usually the less participation (or at least you have difficulty tracking the participation). Choosing two doubles your chances of enticing participation. Then when choosing each time, I also try to make them diverse to further spread the net. I also try to make them geographically disperse where possible, and also try to rotate between areas within the state and general topics, such as transportation or culture or education, etc. so that on a long-term basis (theoretically) more people will stay involved in the collaboration and hopefully the project as well.
As to working well and the GAs/DYKs, I do think the COTW does help. In legal terms I think the COTW is the proximate cause, but not necessarily the but for cause. In that the articles that were created during a COTW would likely eventually be created by the same editor, just not at that time. With those that came via an expansion, I do think those articles likely would not have become DYKs at all except for the COTW process. With the GAs, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Register-Guard I don't see making GA but for the COTW. It had about 30 edits over 3 years until the COTW, and then about 26 during the COTW which led to the GA nom and status. Others, like the Portland Trail Blazers, I think would eventually make it to GA without the COTW, though the COTW likely spurs this along. Johnson Creek and the Cannabis articles that EncMstr mention were not COTWs to my knowledge, they were collaborations within the project outside of the COTW process. Both are great examples of the collaborative spirit within the project in general, and here I would agree with EncMstr that the GA status (FA for Johnson) has to do with the topic being of interest to those who got involved based on the project's main talk page. Which not surprisingly, cannabis was a big "hit" in Oregon. Thank you, thank you very much, I'll be in Vegas all week at the Mirage.

2. There are those Wikipedians who believe that putting a massive amount of effort into a single article is a waste of time considering how many undeveloped, unreferenced, and nonexistent articles we have. The Oregon COTW occasionally features more widespread cleanups, such as Featured Article updates, article creation drives, and disambiguation patrols. Are these broad collaborations designed to cater to those Wikipedians, or was there some other inspiration to break away from the norm?

Pete Forsyth: We do these sorts of broad projects, as well as updates to specific articles, both within and outside the context of COTW. I don't think any of us would buy into the notion that any improvement to the encyclopedia is a waste of time; we all come with our personal aspirations for expanded content, but also with a desire to make sure we're generally moving toward comprehensive coverage of what's important about Oregon. We have some great examples of massive improvement to specific areas: Mtsmallwood has done some really neat articles about the importance of steamships to the state's economic and cultural development, Finetooth has produced several FAs about Oregon rivers and streams, and Emk4ever added some excellent coverage of older political figures related to his university studies. Meanwhile, Tedder has taken it upon himself to bring all high school articles up to a basic level of quality, and the work we've done on the state legislature has earned our work the praise "easily the state legislature best covered here on Wikipedia."
Also, we keep our eyes open for "diamonds in the rough" from inexperienced Wikipedia editors. When new people make contributions, they're often unfamiliar with our vast collection of policies, the Manual of Style, and the culture of the community. We do our best to make everyone feel welcome, and help them make their best possible contribution. And on the (hopefully rare) occasions where we come up short, we are not shy about stepping in and telling each other to cool off or take a breather. That's one of the most gratifying things to me, personally -- developing respectful and productive working relationships, and helping one another become both better editors and better community members and leaders.
Overall, I'd say we take an organic and inclusive approach to content development, rather than trying to make and execute a specific plan for comprehensive coverage. We try to support one another in developing the content we're passionate about, and each of us, in our own way, also tries to make sure we're branching out into new areas some of the time. There are certainly wide topic areas that are not yet covered well, but in general, I think we're making solid progress in the right direction.
Aboutmovies: For a lot of them (I'm speaking about the COTW only), it is simply variety again. Wider net=more fish, in theory. With some others, I'm actually trying to educate/expose some of the newer editors to items they may not have encountered or known about. I know when I first started I had no idea about the "what links here" feature, nor what it was useful for, so the dab patrol COTW was more about exposing the newer users to this feature. It also furthered a useful purpose of helping readers find the correct article, while it was also something anyone could easily do and do with minimal time input. Similar with the twice-yearly photo drives. Helps increase image coverage, but also let people know about the reqphoto feature and the associated categories.
EncMstr: I have encountered Wikipedians who think creating stub articles is a waste of time ("useless" stubs for years), as well as those who think there are significantly diminished returns polishing a GA to an FA. Clearly both types of editing have value, and most editors agree that developing an article up to class B is near the sweet spot of effectiveness. But, thank goodness we're not all the same: an army of automatons cranking out rote sentences to fulfill our destiny of "completing" Wikipedia! There are no two similar personalities among WikiProject Oregon. It stands to reason that the COTW must vary in subject, scope, frequency, skills, topic, etc. or we'd be bored, and probably abandon the project and vanish.

3. With monthly meetups, an active blog, and correspondence with other Oregon-related organizations, WikiProject Oregon is unusual in the amount of activity it has off-wiki. How did this off-wiki activity come about? Do you think this multi-faceted project model would benefit other WikiProjects as well?

Pete Forsyth: Without question, these efforts have been very beneficial. We've reached out to local organizations that have nothing to do with wikis, and also immersed ourselves in the broader wiki culture. These efforts have helped us locally, for instance working with the Oregon Encyclopedia to establish synergy in our work; and they have helped us establish better conditions for Wikipedia editing, like winning an important decision at the state legislature to ensures state law is not entangled in unnecessary copyright protections.
Some efforts have evolved on their own, others have been more carefully planned out. Our group blog, which we've used to support most of our outreach efforts, was an idea Steven Walling and I cooked up as we were driving back from RecentChangesCamp, a wiki conference we attended in 2008. Our monthly WikiWednesday meetups evolved through our individual connections with other wiki-based communities and local luminaries like Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented wikis to begin with.
I look at it like this: in order to serve an audience, it's essential to be engaged with that audience, explain your work to them, and seek their feedback. And in order to continually do better work, it's important to interact with and learn from others who are doing similar kinds of work. With both kinds of outreach, occasionally you inspire somebody enough that they want to contribute to the project themselves -- which is the best payoff of all.
EncMstr: Pete is modestly sidestepping credit for his inspirational role in organizing the blog and advertising the monthly meeting. However, I doubt such a multi-faceted model can easily benefit other WikiProjects—even if Pete worked for them: Our extra-wiki enthusiasm is a manifestation of Oregon attitudes, and that's a lot harder to replicate than simply throwing wiki parties or whatever. My desire to affect the world for the better is reinforced significantly by the huge readership our articles enjoy. WP:ORE had 6,121 articles in the project in June 2008. In May 2008, those articles were viewed a total of 7,843,643 times. (The summary is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Readership/All—the most read were D. B. Cooper, River Phoenix, and Nike, Inc.) Though not in the top 50, Mount Hood attracts 500 to 700 readers per day.
Aboutmovies: I have not been involved with off-Wiki meetings and projects, other than meeting Pete and Katr in person at events where I was able to get some pictures. That said, I have contemplated figuring out a way to reach out to local historical societies. The local county/city level ones are usually small, but very knowledgeable about their local histories. What's more, and I hate to stereotype, but the most are mainly volunteer organizations and the volunteers are usually retired folks. These people (again to generalize) often have free time on their hands/like to tell stories/have access to many sources and in these respects are perfect recruits for WikiProjects that involve history/biographies and the like. But, I have two obstacles to overcome from Wikipedia standpoint (there is also the personal problem of time).
First, since we are all volunteers, I find it difficult to represent Wikipedia. I know if someone came up to me at said "I edit for Wikipedia, want to help us and give us lots of free pictures?" I know my first reaction would be something regarding do you work for them? Then if I find out they are just volunteers with no authority to act on behalf of Wikipedia/The Foundation, I'm going to be a little hesitant to work with them. Sort of like when I get emails about some dead person in Nigeria who happened to have the same name as me and now their lawyer needs help getting their funds out of some other foreign country, and I get a cut! One solution I've thought about is that possibly the Foundation in some way could create unpaid volunteer coordinator positions around the country for these types of recruitments. The Foundation could provide an email account and/or business cards for these people to go out and recruit groups (historical societies/think tanks/professional societies) with a more professional/official looking process. Maybe even higher at The Foundation (if one does not already exist) a coordinator that would work with these recruiters, including mailing out more official correspondence using letterhead (for legal reasons I would hesitate on giving unpaid people letterhead as this can be used to for making binding contracts). Then once groups are recruited, WikiProjects could jump in and work with the groups, allowing the recruiter to move on to new conquests. Just an idea.
Secondly, the abilities/qualifications of these people may not be what we are looking for. The problem with most amateur historians is they are not usually trained in historiography. There is enough mis-information out there in history that we don't need more. Its bad enough when you come across the old professional stuff that is littered with errors, propaganda, boosterism, and myths repeated as facts. We don't need more of that. Now, some of these people are retired academics or used to work in fields related to history and have adequate training, but my interactions with some groups didn't give me that feeling. Additionally, many older folks (my parents included) are not as savvy with computers and the internet. I consider myself a pretty good computer person, but it took awhile to get used to how Wikipedia worked just from a user interface/technical standpoint.
Some obstacles to overcome, but potential for a good return on investment. Though I guess this is a bit tangential to the question.
Steven Walling: Much of this energy for real-world activities has sprung out of our attendance at other wiki and technology-related events, such as RecentChangesCamp, which helped bring us together to create the blog. Personally, I think public outreach is one of the most important things we do. Getting out in our communities, both locally and online, shows the human face of Wikipedia and makes us seem less monolithic. The more people understand about just how Wikipedia works, the more who are willing to engage with us and help build the encyclopedia, rather than just be passive consumers. But the simple fact is that majority of our readers will never edit, and that's okay. If we can invite a few more volunteers and educate a large audience along the way, then that's a success in my eyes.

4. Pete said that "in order to serve an audience, it's essential to be engaged with that audience". The ability of a project to engage its audience is somewhat diminished when its audience is not as geographically confined as yours. In terms of incorporating external social media into the project structure, what have you learned that can apply to any WikiProject?

Pete Forsyth: In my time as an editor, I've come to believe that we do our best work when we view Wikipedia as one thread in the rich fabric of our society. I think there's a tendency -- and I've been as guilty of it as anyone -- to sometimes think of our work here as being separate from the rest of the world. But at the core, we base our work in writing an encyclopedia in high quality secondary sources; and engagement with the world that produces that source material is vital to producing the best and most useful content.
Certainly, there are opportunities with a geographically-based topic in that it's easier to meet with people in person. But that's just one small aspect of what we do. Engaging with non-Wikipedians with similar interests can be done online, by telephone, etc. And there may be excellent opportunities for in-person engagement, too, if you're creative about it. If you're part of a WikiProject on computer programming, you might find opportunities to let your local tech community know that they have a Wikipedian in their midst; or you might find that 2 or 3 other programmer Wikipedians in your area want to get together once in a while to discuss your collective work.
I don't think there's any one winning formula for how to best engage with other Wikipedians or with your community. But if you try to find ways, I'm sure you will succeed, and it will inform the work you do on Wikipedia.
Steven Walling: Being organized around a single state doesn't mean we're all always have it easy coordinating real-world events. Many of the most dedicated members of the project are distributed throughout the state, and have a hard time traveling to Portland for our events. But we still use distributed organization, just like Wikipedia as a whole. Currently, distributed networking tools our most valuable assets as a group. Since that's the case, I don't think it's outlandish to say that say, the military history project could do more off-site organizing. You just need to go where your community is, either virtually or in physical space.
Esprqii: I would just echo that despite the fact we are all in one state--it's a big state. Yes, many of us are in the Portland area, and have the benefit of access to Portland's rich wiki community (hey, what other WikiWednesday group can boast the frequent appearance of wiki inventor Ward Cunningham?). But some of our most prolific contributors are fully engaged in the project without being physically present. Actually, I'd say the biggest social media piece we use is the project talk page. It's a rare day that goes by without some member of the project pointing out an article that needs attention, the discovery of a new resource, or simply the reemergence of a pesky vandal. It seems pretty basic, but the life of a wikiproject really begins to thrive on those talk pages. Until you can get everyone talking there, not much else is going to happen.


5. Finally, to what extent do you think flagged revisions would benefit WikiProject Oregon?

Steven Walling: I do not think WikiProject Oregon is really the target of flagged revisions, in terms of where the need is most dire. The most direct benefit of all our organizing both here and offline is that we have good cohesion as a group, and do very well handling any situations that might arise. In other words, we don't really need a sweeping technical solution, since we've solved most of our problems to date with social innovation. I think most people see flagged revisions as something to solve site-wide problems with biographies of living people and such, and not as something aimed to benefit finite WikiProjects such as our own.
Pete Forsyth: I agree with Steven. The topic of flagged revision saddens me a bit, because I feel that Wikipedians on the whole (and particularly in Oregon) are continually getting better at handling undesirable edits, and the hopeful armchair anthropologist in me wants to see where that goes. I believe that in Oregon, we do a very good (though not perfect) job of monitoring content, and taking care of issues in humane, non-dramatic fashion. This keeps issues away from the noticeboards, and minimizes their demand on administrators and Foundation staff. I hope we continue to grow in our ability to handle conflict in a non-bureaucratic, non-technical manner, so it saddens me that we must consider technical solutions like flagged revisions.
None of that should be taken to mean that I oppose considering technical changes like flagged revisions. While we're conducting our little encyclopedia experiment, real people and situations are impacted by our edits and by our policies; people's biographies are vandalized, and worse. So doing nothing is not an acceptable option.
There are two approaches I'd favor over flagged revisions:
  1. My friend Danny Horn of Wikia has done research and built a strong case that wiki communities generally benefit from disabling anonymous editing. The significant point, I believe, is that requiring account creation makes it much easier to interact with, welcome, and guide new contributors.
  2. I believe we need to do a better job encouraging (but of course not requiring) new editors to use their real names, and to describe their goals and possible conflicts of interest on their user pages. I believe this recent edit, which removed the text "You should strongly consider choosing a username that is not connected to you" from the initial signup screen, will have a strong positive impact on the quality of new contributors' experience with Wikipedia.
A basic tenet of the Wikipedia philosophy is that on the whole, the desire to do good outweighs the desire to vandalize. Therefore, I generally favor policy changes that promote individual transparency and accountability, rather than technical measures that create different levels of ability to contribute to the project. So, I generally prefer the approaches mentioned above, and would rather not see flagged revisions; but there's plenty of room for discussion on this important point.
EncMstr: I've been an administrator for about a year and a half, but soon after acquiring the mop, I desperately felt that registration should be required to edit as it seemed that such a great proportion of vandalism came from IP editors. I've since come to realize that—on balance—helpful anonymous editors contribute more much than IP vandals, particular since about 95% of vandalism is removed with a click or two. Within the scope of WikiProject Oregon, vandals have much less of a chance. Besides each active member having an (apparently) extensive watchlist, we have a group watchlist which shows all changes to pages in our scope. Vandalism is quickly reversed and persistent vandals are quickly recognized and blocked. Flagged revisions are much better suited for lightly watched pages.
Thanks for a very enjoyable interview!

Reader comments

2009-07-27

Approved this week

Contribute  —  
Share this
By seresin

Administrators

One editor was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Tedder (nom).

Twelve articles were promoted to featured status this week: Quark (nom), Silent Alarm (nom), Oxygen toxicity (nom), Tropical Depression Ten (2005) (nom), Helgoland class battleship (nom), Ba Cut (nom), Battle of Bosworth Field (nom), Edgar Towner (nom), Ruffed lemur (nom), Linezolid (nom), Choral symphony (nom) and The Bartered Bride (nom).

Two lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of songs in the Guitar Hero: On Tour series (nom) and List of CMLL World Welterweight Champions (nom).

No topics were promoted to featured status this week.

No portals were promoted to featured status this week.

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Hurricane Ioke, Alien vs. Predator, Benjamin Harrison, Symphonic poems, 1759 Battle of Ticonderoga, Beth Hamedrash Hagadol and Hippocampus.

One article was delisted this week: Lord's Resistance Army insurgency (nom).

Five lists were delisted this week: List of Ashes series (nom), List of Test cricket grounds by date (nom), BAFTA Award for Best Film (nom), List of top-division football clubs in CONMEBOL countries (nom) and List of awards and nominations received by Barenaked Ladies (nom).

No topics were delisted this week.

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Arcus cloud, Bergen, Haile Selassie I, Venus, Operation Crossroads, Monarch butterfly and New River Gorge Bridge.

One featured sound was promoted this week:

Nè gustare m'è dato un'ora...(nom)

No featured pictures were demoted this week.

Twenty-five pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.



Reader comments

2009-07-27

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Contribute  —  
Share this
By seresin

The Arbitration Committee this week announced that they had published a report on Arbitration business since the beginning of the year. They also established, by 8–2 motion, a second mailing list whose purpose is to hold "discussions involving (i) the conduct of an arbcom-l subscriber or (ii) cases, broadly defined, to which an arbcom-l subscriber is a party".

The Arbitration Committee has one open case, plus an open motion:

Motions

  • Geogre: A motion brought against Geogre in regards to his use of Utgard Loki as an undisclosed alternate account used at times for improper purposes.

Evidence

2009-07-27

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Contribute  —  
Share this
By Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.6 (d77bde6), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Bots approved

3 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These were:

Bug fixes

  • Special:Export no longer exports duplicate copies of pages. (r53521, bug 17374)
  • The autogenerated <meta keywords> tag that appeared in the HTML header of pages has been removed, as the tag was not useful and is usually ignored by search engines. (r53482, bug 19761)

New features

  • A new external authentication framework has been added to MediaWiki. This is intended for external, third-party installations of MediaWiki, where it's necessary to streamline authentication with other existing systems. (r53497)
  • A new global variable hook has been added that provides information about third-party software used, such as if ImageMagick or another graphics software is being used. (r53398, bug 14611)

Other news

  • A new branch has been added to the MediaWiki SVN repository that contains the version of MediaWiki and extension code that is currently running on English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
  • An off-site archive is being added to serve as a backup for images and media files on Wikimedia Commons, as well as to store XML snapshots of Wikimedia projects. [1]
  • The .xhtml and .xht extensions have been added to the blacklist for file uploads. (r53487, bug 19355)

    Reader comments
If articles have been updated, you may need to refresh the single-page edition.
The Signpost is looking for new talent.
Retrieved from "http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2009-07-27&oldid=1183891453"