Over the last few weeks, we’ve set up a test environment on Wikimedia Labs to replicate our production cluster and test new software before it’s deployed to Wikimedia sites. This will notably allow us to identify issues with the upcoming version of MediaWiki (1.19) before its deployment — but we need your help.

In case you haven’t heard yet, Wikimedia Labs is a platform aimed to make it easier for developers and system administrators to try out improvements to Wikimedia infrastructure, including MediaWiki, and to do analytics and bot work.

In the past, we’ve used prototype wikis to set up testing environments for upcoming releases of MediaWiki or to test new features. This has been helpful, but has suffered from lack of ongoing maintenance.

Over the holidays, I had the idea — with the upcoming 1.19 release, and the Labs servers newly online and available for non-WMF staff — of using Wikimedia Labs to duplicate the production cluster’s configuration in the Labs environment, and work with volunteers to help maintain this environment.

I particularly want to thank the following people for their work on this project:

• Petr Bena been driving this almost all the way. He started setting this environment, the servers, apache configuration, and has been helping to keep it going on a pretty consistent basis.
• John du Hart came along after Petr had already begun and lent his experience with setting up wiki farms. With his help, we put together a really great configuration that more closely duplicates what is in production.
• Oren Bochman has stepped in to get search working on our micro-cluster. On Wikimedia sites, search has always relied on the help of volunteers. While we don’t yet have search working, Oren has helped us document the search back-end — which will help others set up search like we have on the cluster — and has already started to help us build the next generation of search.

Join in now to identify issues before they reach your wiki

We’ve recently opened this up for the real testing, so now is the time to jump in. Please look at the cluster’s SiteMatrix and find wikis to test. Try reading, editing, using your favorite gadgets, and so on as you normally would; treat it as a giant sandbox. If you find a problem, please report it on the problem reports page.

With your help, we can make the upcoming upgrade smoother.

Mark A. Hershberger, Bugmeister

In a previous blog post, we discussed our readers’ perception of article quality. In addition, we asked our readers to compare Wikipedia as a whole to other prominent websites – Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, Google, YouTube, Yahoo and CNN. Of course, there are several key differences between them, but we wanted to understand how Wikipedia stacks up against other high-traffic websites.

Readers from all 16 countries in our sample compared Wikipedia’s interface and ease of navigation to other Internet properties. If we look at the sample as whole, Wikipedia (8.09 on 10) was rated a close second to Google (8.44) on these measures. What makes this even more interesting is Wikipedia’s relationship with the search engine, which we mention in an earlier blog post. Although ratings varied across countries quite significantly, in most cases there was little deviation in ratings relative to other websites, with some exceptions.

Interface/look and feel

When asked about the Wikipedia interface, readers scored Wikipedia 7.92 out of 10 on average, just behind Google (8.3). About 46 percent of our readers scored the interface 9+ out of 10, compared to 54 percent for Google. We did not find significant deviations across countries or languages, with one exception: Readers in Egypt (and by extension, Arabic speakers) rated Wikipedia lower than YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo. A desire for better right-to-left support is one plausible explanation for the result.

Ease of Navigation

Readers scored Wikipedia 8.27 on this metric, slightly lower than Google (8.59). 53 percent of our readers rated the ease of navigation 9+ out of 10, compared to 63 percent for Google. As above, Arabic/Egyptian readers rated Wikipedia below YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo.

 

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

We recently conducted an online survey of Wikipedia readers, limited to 250 participants each in 16 countries. This is the seventh in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.

Please find below the summary part of the mid-year status report from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department, regarding the 2011-12 annual plan. The full report including the core activity review and priorities for next six months can be accessed on Meta.

Overall, the global development team continues to make progress in building our team, however we are moving more slowly than would be preferred in some areas. I’m happy that we have made a huge amount of progress in Mobile over the past six months. I would like to be further along in deploying pilot programs in India and Brazil as well as in expanding our grants program. The slower than desired pace is a result of our desire to do a better job of working with the communities where we are deeply engaged, a desire to do more upfront consultation and design work, and due to our relatively thinly spread leadership resource (me). We are also actively reflecting on the Pune Pilot and integrating lessons into how we work across the board, not just in the Global Education Project or in India.

WMF Goal #1: Mobile

We are on track to meet our plan for our mobile target of 2 billion page views for 2011/12 and partnerships with mobile operators representing 500 million subscribers. In December 2011, we had 1.534 billion page views to our mobile sites across all Wikipedias as compared with 802 million in June 2011.^[1] We have made excellent progress across the organization on mobile over the past six months and are in a fundamentally better place than we were. Our mobile partnerships team has built a pipeline of partnerships with mobile operators around the world that start launching in January. Our current partnership list covers key markets in Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Turkey and Russia representing over 700 million subscribers. Not every deal will come to fruition, but we are confident that some major ones will and we’ll begin to attract wider interest in partnerships. In most cases, our partners will be offering Wikipedia access for free to their subscribers and we are working on marketing programs that will expand reach.

The Global Development team works closely with engineering on mobile research, product feature decision making and on technical support for partners. Our engineering team has deployed a much-improved mobile gateway and enhanced its functionality, and is working hard to release an Android app, which closes a hole in our portfolio. They are building out our engineering resources to enable continuous improvement of our mobile position. GD/Eng’s mobile research work (we have done two major studies) has helped inform engineering decisions on the product development pathway. Results from the Mobile Readers Survey 2011 are being analyzed, and will be shared soon. Findings from the mobile research work conducted in India and Brazil can be found at Wikipedia Mobile User Research.

WMF Goal #2: Editor growth

Progress on editor growth has been more challenging. We are behind in getting pilot initiatives deployed to really understand the potential for direct impact on editor growth. Our primary effort to date has been the Global Education Program including the Pune Pilot in India. While the program in the US and Canada continues to grow, it has had a small and temporary impact on editor numbers. The program has not been oriented toward creating new Wikipedians, but has added almost 2,000 editors during the Fall 2011 semester, more than thrice the number from Spring 2011 (500+).

The Pune Pilot, which we launched in June, has wrapped up, but was a failure. There were a range of problems involving student plagiarism and the program took on too many students with too few support resources to manage the problems that came up. We also taxed the English Wikipedia community in a way that we had not intended and was regrettable. We learned a lot…and are engaged in a thorough review of the pilot with outside help to ensure we capture the lessons and make better and different mistakes in the future.

We did not have the capacity in place to launch other pilot initiatives in the past six months. We slowed down our plans for Brazil to create space to build a strong relationship with the Brazilian community and conduct some research into the current state of PT:WP. Our India program was at full capacity dealing with the Pune Pilot, supporting the Wikiconference India, and basic program setup requirements. Our India team also took some time to strengthen their links to the community and do a better job of getting early community partnership in program work.

An unplanned for opportunity emerged to accelerate catalyst activities in MENA focused on Arabic Wikipedia. It was not in the annual plan to work in MENA this year, but we took the opportunity presented by the interest of the Qatar Computing Research Institute in supporting Wikipedia. They hosted a small workshop where we met with leading Arabic Wikipedians and laid the groundwork for program work in the beginning of 2012.

Global Development core activity review

see full report

Global Development Priorities for the next six months

see full report

 

Barry Newstead

Chief Global Development Officer

Después de la versión en inglés, abajo, versión en español

Sometimes innovation is the result of being in the right place at the right time as well as being flexible. I am an English as a foreign language teacher in central Mexico and a long time learner of Spanish. Needing intensive Spanish reading practice, I discovered the benefits of writing Wikipedia articles about Mexico (researching in Spanish, writing in English) to both myself and to the encyclopedia. Wanting to share this experience with my students, in Fall 2007, I designed and taught a Wikipedia based class for ITESM-Campus Toluca’s most advanced English students as an experiment with support of my department.

As these students were already well versed in vocabulary and grammar, real world practice or “authentic communication” was more important. As most language learners know, the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in a situation where its use is necessary. Computer technology, especially the virtual world of the Internet, has created a number of virtual “worlds” and social groups, not the least of which is the Wikipedia community. The goal in the Fall 2007 class was to introduce this virtual world of English language Wikipedia and explore ways to participate, culminating in the writing of a complete article from scratch as a final project. Mind you, this was before the advent of many of the programs the Wikimedia Foundation has today, such as the Wikipedia Global Education Program.

The class revolved around intercultural communication – learning about potential differences and strategies for coping. For this aspect of the course, the Wikipedia community was introduced as a culture, a group of people with a shared set of values and means by which they interrelate… something the students would have to adapt to as they learned how to write articles and deal with wiki mark up. As it was very different from any other English class they had ever experienced, almost all the students struggled in some way in the course. However, most improved their English language skills, based on TOEFL test scores taken before and after the semester. These findings were presented to the MexTESOL 2008 conference in León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

In 2008, I transferred to the Ciudad de México (Mexico City) or CCM campus of the same school system to establish and run their self access language learning laboratory (think of a hybrid of a traditional language lab and library). Since that time, I have done smaller Wikipedia-based assignments with students, writing smaller articles in groups and moving to translation exercises – mostly English language Wikipedia articles into Spanish. Translation has proven to be a good introduction to Wikipedia editing for many students. It is one way students can improve Wikipedia in their native language. It is easier to translate from one’s non native language into one’s native language, but it has been noted that the English of the original article still causes transference errors into the Spanish version. This problem has been dealt with through peer review – students doing translation in groups, checking each other’s work and then groups exchanging translated articles for final review. This often leads to interesting discussions about how English and Spanish differ rhetorically, that is, how each writing style prefers to express information. This, too, is part of intercultural communication.

So far, there have been two major lessons learned from the use of Wikipedia. First, the demands of acculturating oneself into the Wikipedia community is a good experience in that many students experience the real frustrations and symptoms of culture shock. But this benefit is not for everyone. It is by far best for students who see the value in the experience, despite whatever frustrations might occur. In the Fall of 2011, I worked with four such students, who led on projects such as creating articles on Mexico’s Festival Internacional Cervantino. Not only did these students research and write articles in both Spanish and English, they also contacted Festival organizers and various international artists to obtain photographs and other assistance. Second, the use of translation assignments is also extremely useful. It provides a template of how Wikipedia articles are generally set up and is a good introduction to technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It allows for learning through imitation, rather than learning abstract rules then guessing how to apply them. It also provides a way to work with Wikipedia which is less intense and easier to incorporate into classes, especially language classes.

ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México continues to be committed to developing working with Wikipedia. The campus library director, Lourdes Epstein has dedicated space in the facility for Club Wikipedia and students working on Wikipedia related assignments. Several departments, including Global Studies, promote involvement with Wikipedia to their students and faculty. For the Spring 2012, a pilot program with the campus’s high school level International Baccalaureate program begins. A select group of students will set up semester-long projects based on their interests and abilities mentored by myself as part of their CAS or social service requirement.

Wikipedia es una cultura extranjera

A veces la innovación es el resultado tanto de encontrarse en el lugar indicado, en el momento indicado, como de ser una persona flexible. Yo enseño inglés en México y hace mucho tiempo que estudio y hablo español. Viéndome en la necesidad de practicar lectura en español de manera intensiva, descubrí los beneficios (tanto para mí como para la enciclopedia) de redactar artículos de Wikipedia sobre México (investigando en español y redactándolos en inglés). Con el deseo de compartir esta experiencia con mis alumnos, en la segunda mitad de 2007, diseñé e impartí, en el Campus Toluca del ITESM, un curso basado en Wikipedia, para los alumnos de inglés más avanzados, con el apoyo del departamento para el que trabajaba.

Como esos alumnos ya habían estudiado vocabulario y gramática en varios cursos, lo más importante, en términos de aprendizaje, consistía en la práctica de situaciones conversacionales auténticas. Como la mayoría de los estudiantes sabe, la mejor manera de aprender una lengua es la inmersión en una situación donde hablar sea imprescindible. La tecnología informática, sobre todo el mundo virtual de la Internet, ha creado muchos “mundos virtuales” y grupos sociales. La comunidad de colaboradores de Wikipedia es una de las más importantes. La meta de aquel curso de 2007 era doble: presentar el mundo virtual de Wikipedia en inglés y explorar las formas de colaboración con ese mundo; y esa meta se conseguía redactando de cero un artículo, como proyecto final. Hay que recordar que esto ocurrió antes del inicio de muchos de los programas actuales de la Fundación Wikimedia, tales como el Global Education.

El curso se centraba en la comunicación intercultural – aprender sobre las diferencias potenciales entre ambas culturas y las posibles estrategias de adaptación. Para cumplir con ese objetivo, se presentó a Wikipedia como una “cultura”; es decir, como a un grupo con valores compartidos y maneras de interactuar…algo que los alumnos debían adoptar mientras aprendían a redactar artículos y se familiarizaban con los aspectos tecnológicos del sitio. Dado que la propuesta difería mucho de cualquier otra clase de inglés que hubieran cursado previamente, casi todos los alumnos experimentaron distintos tipos de dificultades durante el semestre. Sin embargo, la mayoría mejoró su desempeño lingüístico en inglés, como lo mostraron los resultados del examen TOEFL (realizado antes y después del curso). Presenté toda la información recogida entonces en la conferencia de MexTESOL, realizada en León, Estado de Guanajuato (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), en 2008.

En 2008, comencé a trabajar en el Campus Ciudad de México con el fin de establecer y coordinar el laboratorio de aprendizaje autodirigido (self access), que es una mezcla de laboratorio de idiomas tradicional y biblioteca. Desde entonces, junto con mis alumnos, realizo tareas menores para Wikipedia, como redactar en grupos artículos más breves y encomendar la traducción de artículos, principalmente del inglés al español. A muchos estudiantes, la traducción les resultó una buena introducción a la preparación de artículos de Wikipedia. Es una manera de que ellos mejoren Wikipedia en su lengua materna. Es más fácil traducir de otra lengua a la propia, aunque todavía se nota que el inglés de los originales causa errores de transferencia en la versión española. Esta cuestión se resolvió mediante la revisión de las distintas versiones entre los mismos traductores. La traducción se realiza en grupos, revisando cada uno de los traductores los borradores de sus compañeros, y después se intercambian los artículos completos en vistas de una revisión final. Frecuentemente, esto lleva a debates interesantes acerca de las diferencias retóricas entre el inglés y el español; o sea, acerca de cómo, en cada lengua, las figuras retóricas expresan la misma información. Esto, también, forma parte de la comunicación cultural.

Hasta la fecha, se obtuvieron dos lecciones importantes gracias al uso de Wikipedia. Primero, las exigencias de aculturación de cada participante a la comunidad de Wikipedia es una experiencia valiosa, porque así muchos alumnos pueden experimentar las dificultades y los síntomas reales del choque cultural. Sin embargo, no todos se benefician de esto; los que más provecho sacan son los alumnos que perciben el valor de la experiencia a pesar de los obstáculos. En la segunda mitad de 2011, trabajé con cuatro de estos alumnos, que se abocaron a la redacción de los artículos relativos al Festival Internacional Cervantino. Estos estudiantes no solo investigaron y redactaron los artículos en inglés y español, sino que también se comunicaron con los organizadores del festival y con varios artistas internacionales para obtener fotografías y otros tipos de ayuda. En segundo lugar, las tareas de traducción son extremadamente útiles porque proveen un molde para el formato de los artículos de Wikipedia y son buenas también para introducir los aspectos técnicos de Wikipedia. Traducir permite aprender por imitación en lugar de primero aprender reglas abstractas y luego intentar aplicarlas de alguna manera. También muestra un modo de trabajar con Wikipedia que es menos intenso y más fácil de incorporar en las clases, sobretodo en clases de lenguas extranjeras.

El Campus Ciudad de México no ha cejado en su compromiso de colaborar con Wikipedia. Lourdes Epstein, Directora de la Biblioteca del campus, apartó un espacio especial, en el mismo edificio de la biblioteca, para el Club Wikipedia y para otros alumnos que colaboren en tareas afines. Varios departamentos universitarios, como el de Estudios Globales, promueven la participación de sus alumnos y docentes. En el primer semestre del corriente año, dará comienzo un programa piloto en el que participarán los alumnos del Programa del Diploma del Bachillerato Internacional del campus. A fin de cumplir con el requisito de servicio social “CAS”, un grupo seleccionado de alumnos va a idear proyectos, asesorados por mí, de un semestre de duración, basados en sus intereses y habilidades.

Two weeks ago, we submitted the official Wikipedia Android App into Google’s Android Market. Since then, we’ve seen an amazing reaction from our Android users. We’ve had over 500,000 installs, we’ve become #4 in top free books and reference, and we held the #1 trending spot in the whole Android Market last week. Those stats don’t even reflect how great we’ve been doing internationally. Thank you to our users for supporting us.

We wanted to do this blog post sooner, but we had a busy news week helping to protect the Internet and releasing two important updates to fix GPS and performance related issues. Now, we’re excited to talk about it.

Developing the App

Our Android app marks a really important turning point for the Wikimedia mobile projects and the open web in general. Instead of developing a native application as we had done previously with our iOS Wikipedia app, we opted to simplify our development efforts by using PhoneGap. Fully embracing HTML5, CSS3, & Javascript commits us to the open Web technologies of the future. Rather than diving into proprietary frameworks and SDKs, our application has been built on the same foundation as the open mobile web. And not only does this allow us to prepare for the future, it also accelerates our ability to develop across numerous platforms.

Within a short amount of time we’ve already developed a testing version of our iOS app with PhoneGap and we’ve established our first complete community port to the BlackBerry PlayBook. This demonstrates the power of using open tools and communities to improve the Internet as a whole and it is a critical component to our long term goals.

But there is a lot more to do. We’ve received excellent feedback from our reviewers and we’ve started to incorporate it into our roadmap. Future versions of all of our apps will include a lot of what we’ve heard from our users, but we need help to get there. Our code is all open source and its easy to get involved. Fork our code, reach millions, and help educate the world.

The App and our Global Mission

Given Android’s significant smartphone market share, having an Official App may be a “must” these days, but there are additional reasons that this release is important for us.  First, the app is truly international. Unlike our iOS app, which was only localized into four languages, our Android app already has complete localization for 25 languages, nearly-complete localization for over 50 languages, and it can be translated to over 250 languages languages through translatewiki.

As importantly, it opens up new distribution opportunities for people to discover Wikipedia. As we develop mobile partnerships throughout the Global South, (see our recent announcement with Orange), we hope to distribute this app through operators’ local app stores in addition to Android Market. This not only broadens Wikipedia’s reach, it also gives our operator partners a free, unique, and locally relevant offering for their customers, strengthening the overall impact of these partnerships.

Finally, the rise in low-cost Android smartphones is making the web more broadly accessible to people who may not have had Internet access previously. This is in alignment with our mobile mission to reduce barriers to accessing free knowledge.

We’re excited to celebrate this release, both as a development milestone and a mission-aligned achievement. And we are thrilled to get the app into the hands of more people around the world. Now, let’s make some noise.

Tomasz Finc, Director of Mobile and Special Projects
Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

On Saturday 28 January 2012 at 20:00 UTC there will be a workshop on Translation tools. It will take between 60 and 90 minutes and will consist of an introduction of use cases and features, as well as a Q&A. (local times)

The workshop will focus on the use cases covered by the Translate extension on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki for the following user roles:

• writers: those who write texts that need to be translated
• translation administrators: those who mark pages for translations and post-process translations when they have been made

Please put the following page on your watchlist and write your name down if you would like to attend. The workshop is held online using WebEx. I would advise you to log in 15 minutes in advance to ensure you have ample time to set up your computer if you have not used WebEx before. WebEx can be used in desktop environments on Linux, OSX and Windows.

If you would like to familiarise yourself with the technology before the workshop, please take a look at the elaborate documentation, which includes some tutorials. In the next two weeks, the already present documentation for translators will also be completed.

Credit goes to Pete Forsyth for proposing to have this workshop. Hope to see you online Saturday!

Siebrand Mazeland
Product Manager Localisation
Wikimedia Foundation

Yesterday, we deployed a new MediaWiki extension,  FeaturedFeeds, to all Wikimedia wikis. It creates syndication feeds (Atom or RSS) of Wikipedia’s featured content, such as featured articles or pictures of the day, giving the projects a new way to deliver content to readers and users.

For now, links to the feeds only appear in page metadata; in the future, we will add them to the sidebar on main pages, if communities wish so.

FeaturedFeeds integrates with the existing main page infrastructure: it uses data from templates to show content based on the current date.

Because user-generated content is involved, local wiki administrators need to make a few edits to MediaWiki pages to set up the extension. Instructions and a FAQ will guide you through the process. You can also use my edits to set up FeaturedFeeds on the English Wikipedia as an example.

If you have questions, you can ask for help on IRC, in #mediawiki and #wikimedia-mobile; we’ll be happy to help you set up the extension on your wiki.

Max Semenik
Mobile team developer

The Wikimedia Foundation is working to make knowledge freely available to every person in the world, but for many potential readers in developing countries, the only way to access the Internet is by paying for data on a mobile phone. Cost is a barrier that prevents data usage and makes access to a vast repository of knowledge like Wikipedia impossible. In some developing countries, the poorest fifth of the population already spends over 20 percent of their income on mobile phone services [1]. We don’t want people sacrificing their basic human needs to spend money on data, so we decided to do something about it.

Today we are proud to announce [2] a significant step in breaking down barriers to free knowledge: the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange are partnering to offer access to Wikipedia for Orange mobile customers free of charge. Orange has committed to provide this service in twenty countries across Africa and the Middle East, for three years, and has included access to all of Wikipedia’s enormous store of images. We have worked with Orange over the last few years and they have really come to understand the value of our mission. Thanks to their leadership, we will reach tens of millions of people that wouldn’t otherwise have access to Wikipedia — and all for free.

Over the past year, we’ve been urging mobile operators around the world to consider waiving data charges to access Wikipedia, even when we didn’t have the internal capacity to support such an endeavor. Despite not having a full-time mobile developer on staff until eight months ago, we operated in the mode of “if we build it, they will come.” I’ve focused our mobile team to help in developing countries, as we’ve fostered negotiations with operator partners.  And over the last six months we’ve grown our mobile team to six people, with additional contractors (and more hires on the way). Many people on our mobile team have been critical to making this happen including Amit Kapoor, Patrick Reilly, Phil Chang and Tomasz Finc, with special help from tech ops including CT Woo and Asher Feldman – and dozens of volunteers from around the world.

The Orange rollout will begin over the next several months, starting in Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, with four to six more countries including Mauritius and Cameroon and others shortly after.  The first countries will require a lot of testing and if you’re an Orange customer in one of the regions where the rollouts are happening, we’d love your comments. You can read more about this partnership via our Q&A [3]. We’ll keep you updated on our progress in future blog posts.

Orange has helped us get one step closer to making it possible to give everyone free access to the sum of all knowledge. We sincerely thank them for that. This is a really important precedent. Now we need more operators around the world to join in offering Wikipedia to their customers free of data charges. The movement for free mobile for Wikipedia has just begun.

Kul Takanao Wadhwa
Head of Mobile

Consolidation was the name of the game for the past sprint for Wikimedia’s Localisation team. A bug triage, testing, documentation and bug fixes were the activities designed to make our software more stable and more usable. When you read the bug triage report it becomes clear how much the devil is in the details; real native language expertise is needed to understand and assess the issues  we aim to solve. Read the report and you will see how much we rely on our community, on people like Srikanth and Nemo_bis.

Now that we are writing documentation in a central place, like here on the language statistics of the Translate extension, we are now able to provide you with a help text that is specific to the context. For the language statistics it is a help text about “statistics and reporting“. This functionality is ready but will become available in the deployment of January 30. You can help us and yourself by reading and understanding the text. Ask when you have questions and you can translate the text and make the text that much more your own.

Narayam is another extension that has been improved with user documentation. This documentation is completely new and it can effectively replace existing documentation. The existing documentation has the benefit of being written in the local language and we expect that what is written will be similar to the Narayam documentation. It is therefore that it will be the choice of the language communities to decide if they want to point to the local documentation. Like all our software, the Narayam documentation will be available for translation. Having the translation ready may be one of the considerations.

A lot of work is going into the description of the many input methods like the Inscipt layout for Assamese. These descriptions are “must have” help information when you do not know a particular keyboard layout by heart. They also provide a wonderful opportunity to verify if our implementation for a particular keyboard method is correct. This is yet another instance where native speakers can help us a lot.

Testing and getting to grips with the different tools was a major goal for this sprint. PHPunit and Qunit is what is used to test PHP and JavaScript and the tests developed are used in an environment called TestSwarm and Jenkins (respectively for PHP and JavaScript). As our team is so much into language support, we are learning what the limits are for testing for different languages and scripts.

All in all there may have been a slush and we have done a lot of code review, but we also managed to make sure that our functionality has gained stability for this and future releases. Additionally, work was done on grammar support for JavaScript, but the patch for that was stuffed in a bug report because of the slush, as the story was moved to the next sprint. Grammar support is what fills the gap in localisation support between JavaScript and PHP and makes it available to any and all other developers.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

 

Today the Global Journal, a Geneva-based publication focusing on issues facing global businesses, NGOs, and public sector workers announced that the Wikimedia Foundation was at the very top of their list of the 100 best NGOs.

The Journal pointed out that the Foundation is “changing the world with an idea: to create a public space where all people can freely join to collaborate, share and communicate all of our collective knowledge.” The Journal also recognized WMF’s collaborative roots and our movement’s belief that information is a non-profit commodity. Among other global NGOs nominated in the list: Oxfam, International Rescue Committee, Creative Commons, and Habitat for Humanity.

Our thanks to the Global Journal for recognizing the Foundation, but especially for recognizing the work of our 100,000-strong global, volunteer community.

Jay Walsh, Communications

I’ve had ten hours of sleep in the last three days, and I just ate my first proper meal since Saturday. My inbox is clogged with messages I may never read. I am tired, but happy.

The Wikipedia blackout is over. Our goal was to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA and to encourage readers to make their voices heard — and we’ve been successful on both counts. More than eight million people used our look-up tool to find their elected representatives, and millions more made their voices heard on social media. Thousands of journalists wrote news stories featuring the Wikipedia blackout screen.

We’ve made history together, all of us. And I think it’s important we understand what’s happened here, because the ground has just shifted under our feet.

Journalists see this as a conflict between old media and new media. They are wrong.

They see it that way because it fits with how things normally work.

“Right now, if you want effective legislation around your industry, then you need to pay the right lobbyists, make the right campaign contributions, and write the right legislation at the right time in order to get it out of Washington,” says Clay Johnson, formerly of the Sunlight Foundation. “If you had to objectively pick the winning team in Washington, pick the team with deep pockets and great lobbyists, not the team with community organizers and signed petitions. … It sucks, but those are the rules of the game.”

That’s precisely why MPAA chair and former longtime senator Chris Dodd called the blackout an “abuse of power,” and characterized it as “technology business interests resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into corporate pawns.” He can only see the issue as a clash of moneyed interests, because that’s how things normally have worked.

That’s why NPR, the Associated Press, Fox News – all label this fight as Hollywood versus Silicon Valley. It’s why stories like this one from Bloomberg compare how much money television, movie and music companies are spending in Washington, versus what Google and Facebook are spending. People are imagining that post-blackout we are playing the same game, just with new participants.

That’s not what this is.

There’s a lovely Clay Shirky talk floating around the Internet today. In it, Clay says what’s at risk with SOPA and PIPA isn’t just websites, or website owners: it’s our ability to share things with one another, as individual human beings. We are the people, Clay says, that SOPA and PIPA aim to police, because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo. It’s us.

We know that’s true, because the people who led the blackout yesterday weren’t the CEOs of Google or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter. It wasn’t the Wikimedia Foundation. The blackout was led by ordinary Internet users. At its centre were people like Osarius and SiPlus and FT2 and Titoxd and Fluffernutter. These are the people at the forefront of online content creation.

Wikipedia’s involvement in the fight against SOPA proves this wasn’t about powerful interest groups, and it wasn’t about money. Wikipedia is operated, and not controlled, by a non-profit — it’s got no corporate interests to protect and it doesn’t make any money from piracy or copyright infringement. It’s written by ordinary people. Reddit is a bunch of people sharing links and talking about them. Metafilter is the same. Tumblr, Craigslist, the Cheezburger network, The Oatmeal, 4chan, identi.ca. These are not mega-corporations.

The Internet has been giving ordinary people access to the means of production for more than fifteen years. Sometimes we use it to create pictures of cute cats. Sometimes it’s the world’s largest encyclopedia. Sometimes, we bring down corrupt regimes.

What happened yesterday is that around the world, Internet users found their voice — fighting back against people who wanted to threaten their freedoms. It is true that copyright infringement poses a problem, and it’s reasonable that those affected want to get their problem solved. But their problem is not more important than the ability of ordinary people to express themselves, to share and to learn.

It sounded today like Congress is starting to come back to technology firms and their users and ask what they want. What compromises to SOPA and PIPA would be acceptable. Would OPEN work. Do they need to draw up something new.

The message of the Wikipedia blackout, and the other responses to SOPA and PIPA, wasn’t “Let’s talk about how we can combat online copyright infringement.” It was: “Don’t hurt the Internet. It’s too important. Let us do our work. Let us learn and create and share.”

I want to thank everyone involved with the blackout. Below is a quick list of people I worked with, or saw working. If you helped but you’re not named here, please consider yourself thanked :-)

In completely random order: Dario Taraborelli, Lori Phillips, Moka Pantages, Nicholas Bashour, Luke Faraone, Jan Ainali, Puki, André Savik, Dcoetzee, Vituzzu, Stacey Merrick, Dan Rosenthal, Michael Snow, Sumana Harihareswara, Wikitanvir, Jim Redmond, Kaganer, PeterSymonds, Mikołka, ZeaForUs, Spiritia, Iliev, Anubhab91, Ali, Haidar Khan, Joan manel, Davidpar, Cameta, Mormegil, Okino, Sir48, Giftpflanze, Rbmj, Tecsie, BreadMaker, Antonorsi, Mariadelcarmenpatricia, Huji, Tommikovala, Nikerabbit, Lamiot, Seb35, Zetud, Amire80, Rekp, איש המרק, Eranb, עידן ד, Trần Nguyễn Minh Huy, Itzike, Vibhijain, Ruy Pugliesi, Roberta F., Tgr, Kelly Kay, Pagony, Alensha, William Surya Permana, Gombang, Gregorovius, Civvì, Gnumarcoo, Austroungarika, Miya, Whym, Takot, Melberg, Omshivaprakash, Idh0854, Freebiekr, Diagramma Della Verita, RajeshPandey, Mathonius, Romaine, Mwpnl, Whaledad, Wpedzich, Sp5uhe, Przemub, Ency, Przykuta, Teles, Vitor Mazuco, Lvova, OC Ripper, Euriditi, Maduixa, Wikiwind, Јованвб, A1, Олег-літред, Violetbonmua, Prenn, Cheers!, Sameboat, Tbayer (WMF), OhanaUnited, Tom Morris, Wdchk, Sarah Stierch, Risker, Billinghurst, NuclearWarfare, Jimmy Wales, Orionist, Ryan Kaldari, John Du Hart, Aaron Schulz, Kat Walsh, Cherian Tinu, Mike Godwin, Jim Burger, David Gerard, Johnuniq, James Forrester, Prodego, Fluffernutter, Dana Isokawa, Fae, Andrew Lih, Brandon Harris, Jeremyb, Michelle Paulson, DeltaQuad, Pete Forsyth, Fetchcomms, Heather Walls, Rachel Farrand, CMBJ, Erik Moeller, Fifelfoo, James Alexander, Itzik Edri, Katie Horn, Iván Martínez, Matthias Schindler, Ben Hartshorne, Jon Davies, Anthere, Slobodan Jakoski, Victorgrigas, Dimce, Jerry-Yuyu, Patricia Morales, Stephen LaPorte, Varnent, Lennart Guldbrandsson, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Greg Maxwell, Ian Baker, Jeandré, Howie Fung, Ryan Faulkner, Beatriz Busaniche, Philippe Beaudette, Ziko van Dijk, Oliver Keyes, Dimce Grozdanoski, Keegan, André, Guillaume Paumier, Maggie Dennis, Mentifisto, Phoebe Ayers, Arne Klempert, Mike Peel, Gorilla Warfare, Geoff Brigham, Swarm, Peter Gehres, Megan Hernandez, Leslie Harms, Tomasz Finc, Pretzels, Jay Walsh, Whenaxis, Liberaler Humanist, Sam Klein, Andrew Gray, Fifelfoo, Zack Exley, Katie Filbert, Victor Vasiliev, Guy Chapman, Avi, Kenneth/MD, Stu West, Harry, Ryan Lane, Josh Lim, Matthew Roth, Richard Symons, Gayle Karen Young, Yuvaraj Pandian, Evangeline Han, Milos Rancic, James Hare, Adrienne Alix, Samat, Tomasz Ganicz, FT2, Alessio Guidetti, Galileo Vidoni, David Richfield, Alison Wheeler, Siska Doviana, Erlend Bjoertvedt, Анастасия Львова, Steven Walling, Casey Brown, Tim Starling, Patrick Reilly, Arthur Richards, Asaf Bartov, Alolita Sharma, CT Woo – and of course, the 1,800 English Wikipedians who made the decision to black out the site.

I am happy to add new names to this list — if you want to nominate anyone, just say so in the comments :-)

Thanks also to the sister projects that chose to support the enWP blackout with their own protests: the Albanian Wikipedia, Arabic Wikipedia, Bulgarian Wikipedia, Catalan Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia, Croatian Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Georgian Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Greek Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Norwegian Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia, Serbian Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukranian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

Sue Gardner
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Anglická Wikipedie dnes bude poprvé v historii záměrně nepřístupná. Protestuje proti návrhu amerického zákona, který omezuje svobodu Internetu.

Na celých 24 hodin se komunita autorů rozhodla celosvětově vypnout Wikipedii v anglickém jazyce. Bezprecedentní krok je výsledkem diskuse 1800 přispěvatelů, z nichž většina podpořila protest proti kontroverzním návrhům dvou amerických zákonů o regulaci Internetu. Tzv. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) a PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) jsou oficiálně zaměřené na boj s online pirátstvím, ale regulační prostředky, které zavádějí, mohou vést k cenzuře Internetu.

Po bok autorů Wikipedie se v protestu postavila i nadace Wikimedia Foundation, která největší světovou encyklopedii provozuje. Výkonná ředitelka nadace Sue Gardnerová k tomu ve veřejném dopise dodává: „Po celém světě vidíme přípravu zákonů zaměřených na boj s online pirátstvím a na jinou regulaci internetu, které poškozují online svobody. Naše obavy sahají dále než jen k SOPA a PIPA: ty jsou jen částí problému. Chceme, aby internet zůstal svobodný a otevřený, všude, pro všechny.“

Spoluzakladatel Wikipedie Jimbo Wales prohlásil: „Wikipedisté z celého světa dali jasně najevo, že nesouhlasí s touto zničující legislativou. Nemůžeme prostě ignorovat fakt, že SOPA a PIPA ohrožují svobodu slova, a to jak ve Spojených státech, tak i v zahraničí.“

Wikimedia Česká republika se připojila s podporou

Česká Wikipedie se připojuje informační kampaní. Občanské sdružení Wikimedia Česká republika, které propaguje a podporuje Wikipedii v Česku, podpořilo protest oficiálním prohlášením, ve kterému vyjadřuje „znepokojení nad možností cenzurovat Internet ze strany institucí USA a vyjadřuje solidaritu se všemi, kteří vystupují proti schválení zákona Stop Online Piracy Act americkým kongresem.“ Navržené americké zákony mohou podle sdružení negativně ovlivnit rozvoj Wikipedie a mohou se stát vzorem pro podobné snahy v jiných zemích.

Předseda sdružení Michal Reiter k tomu dodal: „Internet dnes na 24 hodin přichází o Wikipedii. Ale stojí za to bojovat proti takovým snahám, nebo by se mohlo stát, že někteří čtenáři někde na druhém konci světa ztratí Wikipedii natrvalo. A raději nedomýšlet, kdyby jednou kvůli rozhodnutí soudu na základě podobného zákona musela vypnout všechny servery nadace Wikimedia, což by dopadlo na celý svět.“

Zákon Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) má vést k omezení internetového pirátství ve Spojených státech. Jak doložil právník nadace Wikimedia Foundation Geoff Brigham, jeho důsledky ale budou patrné i mimo Spojené státy – a to možná ještě intenzivněji. Přestože jsou všechny regulační prvky proti webům, které někdo označí za pachatele nelegálního šíření autorských děl, podmíněné soudním rozhodnutím, může tato praxe být likvidační pro menší a chudší provozovatele a pro provozovatele ze zahraničí, kteří nebudou mít prostředky na soudní řízení v USA, upozornil Brigham.

Členka správní rady nadace Wikimedia Foundation Kat Walshová právě v tom vidí nebezpečí pro svobodu vyjadřování: „Tam, kde můžete promluvit, jen když máte dostatečné zdroje na překonávání právních překážek nebo když vaše názory nejdříve musí někdo s takovými prostředky schválit, tam bude stále stejný úzký výběr už populárních názorů tím jediným, k čemu má kdokoli přístup.“

Wikipedie je encyklopedie tvořená z hlediska autorského práva jako svobodné dílo, které autoři uvolňují pod svobodnou licencí Creative Commons. Komunita projektu dohlíží na to, aby byly všechny články tvořené jako původní díla nebo převzaté s příslušným svolením autora. Pokud je na Wikipedii ukradené dílo objeveno, komunita ho urychleně odstraní.

V nedávné minulosti k podobnému kroku z podobných pohnutek přistoupila italská Wikipedie. Její komunita takto protestovala proti návrhu mediálního zákona, který mj. i pro weby typu Wikipedie vynucoval právo na okamžitou neredigovanou odpověď. Italský parlament ho nakonec neschválil.

Další informace:

• Plné znění vyjádření rady Wikimedia ČR:

„Rada o.s. Wikimedia ČR vyjadřuje znepokojení nad možností cenzurovat Internet ze strany institucí USA a vyjadřuje solidaritu se všemi, kteří vystupují proti schválení zákona Stop Online Piracy Act americkým kongresem. Zákony SOPA a PIPA mohou v případě schválení vést k omezení přístupu k informacím a tím nepochybně negativním způsobem ovlivnit další rozvoj Internetu včetně tvorby největší celosvětové encyklopedie Wikipedie i její českojazyčné verze. Navíc se mohou stát precedentem pro další země, jejichž vlády by podobným způsobem chtěly omezit svobodu na Internetu a zasáhnout tak do jedné ze sfér obecných lidských svobod a práv.“

• http://blog.wikimedia.cz/2012/01/anglicka-wikipedie-bude-na-protest-proti-navrhovanym-protipiratskym-zakonum-18-ledna-odstavena/ příspěvek o protestu na blogu Wikimedia ČR
• http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout otevřený dopis výkonné ředitelky nadace Wikimedia Foundation Sue Gardnerové (anglicky)
• http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how-sopa-will-hurt-the-free-web-and-wikipedia/ blog právníka WMF Geoffa Brighama o možných dopadech SOPA (anglicky)

Kontakt:

• Wikimedia Česká republika (http://www.wikimedia.cz)

Michal Reiter, press@wikimedia.cz

 

16. ledna 2012, San Francisco — Komunita Wikipedie se rozhodla pro bezprecedentní krok, kterým bude jednodenní odstávka anglické verze encyklopedie Wikipedie, a to na 18. ledna, po dobu 24 hodin. Jedná se o protest proti návrhu amerického zákona Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), který projednává Sněmovna reprezentantů a PROTECTIP (PIPA), který je aktuálně předmětem debaty v americkém Senátu. V případě schválení návrhů těchto zákonů budou totiž prosazeny nové nástroje, které poškodí otevřený a svobodný internet a zároveň umožní cenzuru stránek mezinárodního charakteru, provozovaných na území Spojených států.

Správci anglické Wikipedie stvrdili toto rozhodnutí v pondělí odpoledne (pacifického času) veřejným prohlášením:(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action#Summary_and_conclusion):

Během uplynulých 72 hodin se diskuze ohledně připravované akce, kterou by mohli jako komunita v souvislosti s návrhy zákonů SOPA a PIPA provést, zúčastnilo na více než 1800 wikipedistů. Zatím nejživější a nejrozsáhlejší dosud zaznamenaná diskuze mezi jednotlivými uživateli encyklopedie ukazuje, na jaké úrovni je zájem tvůrců Wikipedie ohledně návrhu této legislativy. Většina účastníků diskuze podporuje takovou akci, která může oslovit veřejnost a informovat ji o stavu věci. Ze všech zmíněných návrhů získala možnost dočasně odpojit anglickou Wikipedii (podobně budou odpojeny na tento den i další stránky, jejichž správci odmítají návrhy amerických zákonů) největší podporu.

Jimmy Wales, zakladatel Wikipedie, v souvislosti s tímto uvedl: „Dnes dali wikipedisté z celého světa jasně najevo, že nesouhlasí s touto zničující legislativou. Naše komunita podnikne mimořádnou akci – a i když nás mrzí, když celý svět nemá přístup  k Wikipedii byť jen na jednu vteřinu, nemůžeme prostě ignorovat fakt, že SOPA a PIPA ohrožují svobodu slova, a to jak ve Spojených státech, tak i v zahraničí, a nastavují strašlivý precedent pro světovou cenzuru internetu“.

Vyzýváme proto vás, čtenáře Wikipedie, k tomu, abyste dali váš názor veřejně najevo. Pokud žijete ve Spojených státech, kontaktujte svého voleného zástupce ve Washingtonu (https://www.eff.org/sopacall). Pokud nejste z USA, ozvěte se ministerstvu vnitra, či  zahraničí. Řekněte jim, že nesouhlasíte s návrhy zákonů SOPA a PIPA a chcete, aby internet zůstal otevřený a svobodný.

When there is a code freeze or a slush, the potential for what is to be delivered is curtailed. It is official; you will not deliver new code, you will work towards consolidation of the new MediaWiki release.

One of the objectives for this and the next release is that the time between releases will decrease. Even though the Localisation team works in two week sprints, it can help with getting the release out of the door. The first thing to do is help even more with code review, the other thing is make sure that its code will be optimised for easy coding, testing and use.

When you check out mingle, (user guest, password guest), you will find that the developers of our team are learning about the various testing tools. They are even updating the developer documentation to make it easier to understand how to set up new automated tests.

When you are testing, it is necessary that code provides information about its execution. This realisation means that the code needs to be refactored in order to allow for testing. Documentation is another part of the puzzle that helps stabilise code; you will find a prodigious amount of documentation that is scheduled for this sprint.

All this translates in quite a minimal deployment for the first week. Its highlights are:

Translate:

• Better error checking and handling in Special:Translate
• Translatable page id prefix changed from page| to page-
• Don’t reuse messages from core

WebFonts:

• Fixed download of Vemana Telugu font
• Added font for Ahirani (ahr)

Narayam: Some fixes to Assamese transliteration rules

Core: the cropping of text in level 1 headers is fixed for Indic languages

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Today (January 15) Wikipedia is celebrating its 11th year on the web. Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! Look who/what else you share your birthday with.

Last year was a big one for Wikipedia, rounding out an incredible decade of growth and impact around the world. Over 450 parties took place across virtually every continent, and the world had an amazing story to tell.

Just a year later and we’ve already seen more milestones achieved and records broken. In 2011 Wikipedia blew well past the 20 million article mark, now pushing towards 21 million articles. Wikimedia Commons, the repository of media files for Wikipedia and its sister projects broke 10 million files in 2011. The global page view from unique visitors count leapt up to and over 400 million, and our individual page requests across all Wikimedia projects broke 16 billion per month (see more of our updated stats here). Access on mobile platforms is skyrocketing, and Wikipedia is currently available in 282 languages.

Our global community of volunteers and chapter organizations are also celebrating. Get-togethers are planned around the globe, including meet-ups, hack-a-thons, a bicycle rally, a kite festival in India, and a picnic in Caracas. It’s not too late to host an event in your own neighborhood.

Here in the United States, and certainly in many other parts of the world, Wikipedia Day is also taking on a new meaning and urgency. The US House of Representatives is reviewing a new piece of legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that – if passed – would hurt the free, open, and secure web. This topic has already been explored on our blog – here and here. Wikimedia Foundation is joining a long list of other web organizations in opposition to SOPA, and today the global community of Wikipedia volunteers is talking about a day of protest here in the US against SOPA. You can join the conversation and voice your thoughts. On January 18 – just a few days after Wikipedia Day, make your views on SOPA known.

Wikipedia was born in a free and open web, and its future and success in all parts of the world is at stake. Let’s make sure our project is as strong and free for Wikipedia Day in 2013 as it is today.

Jay Walsh, Communications

 

When you have a message, you use the appropriate language and tools to address multiple people. We do not use our eyes to see how many people we address and we do not use a bull horn to be heard. Our MediaWiki software knows the numbers involved and a plural enabled message will be formed according to the rules of the language.

When we implemented plural support for JavaScript, we checked our new implementation for plural with our implementation in PHP and we checked against the standard for such things, the CLDR.

The Localisation team does not know the language rules for the 280+ languages that have a Wikipedia. We prefer to implement what the standard tells us but we support more languages than the CLDR. We want to channel our need for support through “Language Support teams” and we want them to help us understand  and fix the inconsistencies and add the missing information to the CLDR.

Highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation Report and the Wikimedia engineering report for December 2011, with a selection of other important events from the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Foundation Highlights

Visual editor prototype

The team developing a Visual Editor for Wikipedia and our other projects presented a first prototype for testing on December 13. Its development has been one of the Foundation’s top priorities according to the 2011-2012 Annual Plan. Wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing, and it is hoped that the Visual Editor will make editing easier.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/help-test-the-first-visual-editor-developer-prototype/

Fundraiser ends with record-breaking donations

The 2011 annual fundraiser ended on January 1, 2012 raising a record-breaking USD 20 million from more than one million donors in nearly every country in the world. This year’s campaign highlighted staff and volunteers who help to create Wikipedia. It featured testimonials from volunteer editors in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States ranging in age from 18 to 76.

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/02/wikimedia-fundraiser-concludes-with-record-breaking-donations/

Annual Report published, for the first time with translations

The Wikimedia Foundation’s latest Annual Report was posted in PDF and wiki format in mid-December. This year’s report focusses on the Foundation’s major strategic efforts: supporting growth in India, expanding our mobile reach, improving and simplifying our software, and building our global education program. The report also highlights accomplishments within our community through the last fiscal year, and features a center spread article about the creation of the Arab Spring article on Wikipedia. For the first time, we produced ‘summary’ versions in seven languages.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/17/our-latest-annual-report-how-the-world-tells-its-story/

Collaborative drafting process for Terms of Use update completed

After more than 120 days, the comment period for the proposed user agreement comes to an end with powerful and effective community participation. See the present version of the proposed user agreement and extensive discussion .

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/31/terms-of-use/

Data and Trends

Global unique visitors for November:

474 million (-0.4% compared with October; +15.6% compared with the previous year)

(comScore data for all Wikimedia Foundation projects; comScore will release December data later in January)

Page requests for December:

16.3 billion (-6.2% compared with November; +17.1% compared with the previous year)

(estimate from Server log data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects including mobile access)

Active Registered Editors for November 2011 (>= 5 edits/month):

83,444 (-1.2% compared with September / comparison data for November 2010 currently unavailable)

(Database data, all Wikimedia Foundation projects except for Wikimedia Commons)

Report Card for November 2011: http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2011_11_detailed.html

The report card is currently undergoing a redesign as a more fully-featured dashboard (integrating various statistical data and trends about WMF projects).

Financials

(Financial information is only available for November 2011 at the time of this report.)

All financial information presented is for the period of July 1, 2011 – November 30, 2011

Revenue: $14.5 million

Expenses:

• Technology Group: $3,916,000
• Community/Fundraiser Group: $1,732,000
• Global Development Group: $1,454,000
• Governance Group: $406,000
• Finance/Legal/HR/Admin Group: $2,419,000

Total Expenses: $9,927,000

Total surplus/(loss): $4,573,000

Revenue was ahead of plan due to grants of $2.8 million and additional donations ahead of plan of $2.1 million.

Expenses were below plan at $9.9 million actual versus $11.6 million plan. Expenses were below planned due to lower than planned expenditures in capital expenditures, chapter grants, recruitment cost and other activities due.

Cash of $22.8 million, which is twelve months of cash reserves at current spending levels and ten months of cash per the annual plan.

Other movement highlights

Winter picture of Chiajna Monastery wins Wiki Loves Monuments

A photo by Mihai Petre of the Chiajna Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest is the winner of the 2011 Wiki Loves Monuments contest. During September, participants in 18 European countries had been invited to upload photos of their country’s cultural heritage to Wikimedia Commons, resulting in over 165,000 submissions by over 5000 users, most of them new to the project. A European jury selected the winner from 169 finalists.

German chapter announces winners of free knowledge project contest

Wikimedia Germany has announced the results of the second edition of its “Wissenwert” contest, which supports projects that promote free knowledge with up to 5000 Euro. The five winners will work on the import of media from open access science journals into Wikimedia Commons, the display of historical maps in OpenStreetMap, a game to explore Wikimedia Commons and other free content resources, a platform for the sharing of human genetic information, and on subtitles for educational YouTube videos.

GLAMcamp Amsterdam discusses cultural collaborations

From December 2 to December 4, the GLAMcamp Amsterdam workshop took place at MediaMatic Lab, Amsterdam, hosted by Wikimedia Nederlands. Wikimedians who are active in outreach to cultural institutions (galleries, libraries, archives and museums – “GLAMs”) came together from 21 different countries and met with representatives of such institutions. An overview of the topics covered is available at “This Month in GLAM”.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s partnership with the Brazilian community continued to take shape this past week with my third visit to Brazil in seven months. As previously announced, the Wikimedia Foundation is in the process of engaging a Program Director to lead our work in Brazil. On this visit, I partnered with two community representatives to interview ten shortlisted candidates for the position over two days. I also joined a São Paulo community meetup, Wikisampa 11 and had dinner and drinks with community members on Friday and Saturday.

The interview process is an innovative partnership with the Brazilian community and it is going really well. It is truly a Wiki-community collaboration. User:Castelobranco and User:Everton137 were nominated through a community process to join the interviews. The three of us worked together on the interview plan and met as a panel with each candidate for a little over an hour. We debriefed on the candidates and were in agreement on the candidates who we would like to have continue in the process. It was a valuable experience for the candidates as well and gave them an immediate taste of life in the Wikimedia world.

The innovation doesn’t stop at the interviews. Our finalist candidates will begin a public assignment (designed on-wiki) this week that requires them to work with the Wikimedia community and each other to complete a brief research assignment. We will all have an opportunity to see them work collaboratively in the community. This will provide valuable insights as we narrow to a smaller priority list of candidates who will come to San Francisco for final interviews. Many thanks to the Brazilian community for nominating candidates, suggesting the collaborative approach and for participating actively in the process.

Wikisampa 11 was held on Saturday at the cafe in the very cool Centro Cultural de São Paulo. We had a great group of Wikipedians in attendance along with some interested newcomers and a few candidates from the interview process. Included in the group attending was User:Yanguas who has 98,491 edits and counting in the article namespace (167,469 total) since joining the project on May 31, 2006. That’s over 80 edits every single day for over 5 years! Incredible!

Topics of conversation (those that I was involved in) included the recently launched Grand Prix challenge focused on improving 5,000 articles for an offline version of Portuguese Wikipedia, opportunities to work with higher education to increase contributions to Wikipedia and challenges of being welcoming to newbies in order to expand the Portuguese editing community. I also had a fascinating discussion on the social impacts of technology.

Obrigado!

Barry Newstead leads Wikimedia’s efforts to support the growth of our projects in priority geographies around the world including Brazil. He is the Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Every two weeks a sprint and every week a deployment. The Localisation team aims to bring you new and updated functionality when we have it.

As you can see in the summary below, the focus this sprint has been very much on the Translate extension. Management of translations and the translation process is what we have worked on. When texts are translated in a Wiki, they often are only needed within a specific time frame; it is now possible to mark a text as no longer needing any effort. For many languages there are multiple people involved in the work flow for the creation of a document that is well written in translation. When they are to work well together, it helps when their work changes its state so that it is clear that for instance something has been proofread.

The person who manages the publication and distribution of a page needs work flow states to decide what more needs to be done and what is ready. To do this he can make use of states that already exist or define additional states. These states are available as local messages and are available for translation.

Translate extension features

• Message work flow states help translator translate, review and making ready for publication
• There is now a new message group for recent translations. This message group makes these states possible in translation
• Special:MyLanguage can now be used with language sub pages to be used as the default fall-back instead of providing an untranslated version
• Pages marked for translation can now be marked as “discouraged”. They will no longer show up in the usual places. This prevents translators from translating them needlessly.
• Added {{#translationdialog:title}} for creating a link to the translation dialogue

Translate bug fixes

• The flash of unstylized content effect is reduced
• Made the extension work without legacy JavaScript globals
• The summary row in Special:LanguageStats and Special:MessageGroupStats is no longer sorted with rest of the rows.
• Fixes to the sizing of the translation editor dialogue
• Fixed a fatal error that sometimes occured when translation page title used GRAMMAR and the page was viewed with English UI.

Miscelaneous changes

• Parserfunctions ifexist magic word Italian translation fixed to ‘ifexist’
• Narayam preference wording changes from disable to enable
• The WebFonts icon no longer overlaps with the menu text
• WebFonts preview allows you to preview a text with a font. You can download these freely licensed fonts to your system.
• GENDER and PLURAL support are now available for use in JavaScript.
• Consistence updates for grouppage-* messages, for LocalisationUpdate
• Fixing be-tarask grammar forms

Changes deployed last week

• WebFonts was deployed for the Bishnupria Manipuri language; it uses the Lohit Bengali font
• Support for gendered name spaces was deployed for the Russian wikis.

As always, you are welcome to have a look at our sprint backlog (user:guest password: guest) and bug us in bugzilla with whatever needs fixing.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Major news in December include:

• The deployment of WebFonts to select Indic wikis;
• The first developer prototype of the Visual editor;
• A new version of Article Feedback being tested on the English Wikipedia;
• Progress on the Swift media storage project.

Hover your mouse over the green question marks ([?]) to see the description of a particular project.

Events

Recent events

• Judging for the October 2011 Coding Challenge continued and winners will be announced in January.

Upcoming events

• San Francisco hackathon (21–22 January 2012, San Francisco, California, USA) — Erik Möller and Sumana Harihareswara continued to plan and publicize this outreach-focused developers week-end. Heather Walls developed a more attractive homepage for the event. Sumana began arranging for tutorials and activities for the event, focusing on mobile, the web-accessible API and our framework for JavaScript feature development. Registration opened and more than 70 participants registered.

• Pune hackathon (10–12 February 2012, Pune, India) — Preparation began and registration opened for an outreach-focused developers week-end to take place in Pune, India, and led by Alolita Sharma. Approximately 70 participants are expected, focusing on the gadgets framework, mobile Wikimedia access, and internationalization.

• GLAMcamp DC (10–12 February 2012, Washington, D.C., USA) — Ryan Kaldari and Asaf Bartov plan to attend the technical track of this GLAM conference. Engineers will work on mass upload and analytics functionality.

Personnel

Job openings

Are you looking to work for Wikimedia? We have a lot of hiring coming up, and we really love talking to active community members about these roles.

• Developers and engineers:
  • Interaction Designer
  • Systems Engineer (Data Analytics)
  • Software Developer (Back-end, Data Analytics)
  • Software Developer (Rich Text Editing, Features)
  • Software Developer (Front-end)
  • QA Lead
  • Software Developer (Mobile)
  • Software Security Engineer

• Management & Product:
  • Director of Features Engineering
  • Product Manager

• Requests for proposals:
  • Executive Dashboard – Analytics — Help us improve and centralize the dashboard summarizing the most important data about the Wikimedia movement to understand overall community health.
  • XML Dumps — Help us improve the infrastructure used to build XML dumps of Wikipedia content, for backups and reuse by third parties.
  • Mobile UX — Help us redesign our mobile platform and apps as more and more visitors access Wikipedia and its sister sites via mobile devices.

Short news

• Yuvaraj Pandian and Max Semenik joined the mobile team as contract developers.
• Sara Smollett joined the operations team as a part-time contractor.
• Diederik van Liere, formerly with the Community Department, is now helping the engineering department as a contractor for analytics work.

Operations

Site infrastructure

• Data Centers [?] — The team deployed a new MediaWiki profiling system based on graphite, to track performance across the application stack, and to provide statistics/graphing as a service for MediaWiki within the WMF production environment. Some database servers were moved to newer hardware (including OTRS), and those in the Ashburn data center were upgraded to a new build of mysql-at-facebook. Mark Bergsma refactored our configuration tool (Puppet) to address scalability and performance issues.

• Media Storage [?] — As part of the preparation for the migration of our media service to Swift, a distributed storage back-end, we need to keep the current system afloat a bit longer. We reclaimed some space by purging thumbnails not newly generated and not in use on any of our projects. We also performed Swift thumbnail integration and stress testing. Read performance is about 10x what we need on the performance test cluster so we’re good on that front. Write performance is only 2x what we need, but sufficient to move forward. Tests and research indicates performance drops over a few million objects; the easiest path forward is to shard the Commons container using the existing hashed characters in the URL, splitting the container into 256 containers.

• HTTPS — HTTPS support was added for mobile, for Wikipedia. After an initial testing period, we’ll enable this for further mobile sites. A number of other miscellaneous services also had HTTPS set up or fixed.

Testing environment

• Wikimedia Labs [?] — A server admin log was created for every project, as well as a combined log. OpenStackManager 1.3 and LdapAuthentication 2.0a were deployed to Labs. Live migration of instances has been enabled for the OpenStack Nova infrastructure, allowing updates and upgrade of hardware without bringing instances down. A gluster storage cluster has been ordered for use as volume storage. A number of projects were added or moved to Labs, including adminbot, nagios, Cluebot, testswarm and the reportcard service. There are now 33 projects, 52 instances, and 74 users.

Backups and data archives

• Data Dumps [?] — The end of the year closed out with another full dump of the English language Wikipedia on schedule. More work was done on code to allow restart of the history phase of a dump from a specified point without a long catchup delay. An experimental service was tested this month: a newly formatted file of article content and an accompanying index, more convenient for data analysts and for use with offline readers.

Features Engineering

Editing tools

• Visual editor [?] — The team deployed a developer prototype of the visual editor sandbox to mediawiki.org for public feedback and testing. Trevor Parscal fixed bugs and refactored code. Inez Korczynski worked on the toolbar (text styles), the undo/redo stack, and lists (creating, deleting, and changing indentation). Gabriel Wicke worked on the parser test runner and the parser pipeline, including the tokenizer and its grammar and template expansions. Neil Kandalgaonkar worked on the undo/redo feature and did a lot of refactoring.
• Internationalization and localization tools [?] — The WebFonts extension was deployed to select Indic languages and projects, making it possible to read content in languages using non-Latin fonts without installing fonts manually. The deployment uncovered bugs and issues that were addressed by the team, like cross-site font loading. The team also improved the Narayam and Translate extensions, and the latter was enabled on mediawiki.org to facilitate the translation of software documentation (like the Help:Extension:WebFonts page).

Participation and editor retention

• Article feedback [?] — The team launched three test versions of the new feedback forms on a sample of pages on the English Wikipedia. Aaron Halfaker, Oliver Keyes and Dario Taraborelli are working with the editor community to evaluate comments coming in from feedback forms. Dario also developed a set of dashboards with real-time metrics and a feedback stream surfacing early data collected in the version 5 pilot. Fabrice Florin is leading development on the next round of features, including a new feedback page, special calls to action to engage new editors, and a prominent feedback link, to be implemented by OmniTI, our development partner.
• Feedback Dashboard [?] — Rob Moen added support for wikitext in responses, preview of changes, handling of blocked users, and fixed various bugs. Benny Situ worked on feedback response, notifications and HTML e-mails. Dario Taraborelli developed two sets of charts to visualize data from the FeedbackDashboard and response notification.

Multimedia Tools

• UploadWizard [?] — Users can now choose a default license for all uploads in their user preferences under “Upload Wizard” (bug 24702). All license choices now also link to the legal code of a license. The built-in feedback form more prominently links to Bugzilla.
• TimedMediaHandler [?] — Ian Baker and Neil Kandalgaonkar completed the review of all the code, including the transcoding part. They started to plan a test plan and a deployment to Wikimedia Labs.

MediaWiki infrastructure

• ResourceLoader [?] — Roan Kattouw updated and created tests for PHPUnit. Timo Tijhof fixed layout bugs in the Gadget manager, did some code review, and tested the migration of gadgets on a prototype.

Feature support

• Wikipedia Education Program [?] — Jeroen De Dauw started to work on a MediaWiki extension to support the Wikipedia Education Program; the implementation of course, term and institution management has been completed, and a test wiki is available.

Mobile

• Mobile Research [?] — Mani Pande and Parul Vora consolidated all the research findings from Brazil, India, and the USA into one report. It’s currently being converted to PDF and wikitext to facilitate its publication.

• MobileFrontend [?] — We quietly launched user login alongside better support for tiered JavaScript. We also fixed long-standing issues like the locked viewport, and we updated image description pages. Finally, we deployed HTTPS support on mobile for Wikipedia, with plans to enable it for sister projects soon.

• Android Wikipedia App [?] — Several release candidates were released over the month and we’re nearing completion of the first version of the app, thanks to developers Yuvaraj Pandian and Brion Vibber. Nightly builds are available for testing.

• WikipediaZero — We began work on the infrastructure for zero-rated Wikipedia access. Next month, we’ll start testing with one of our partners to work out the kinks of giving users free data access to Wikipedia.

• GPS Storage/Retrieval — Max Semenik joined the mobile team and began prototying an API to store and retrieve GPS coordinates on our wikis. This will be a critical component of the mobile projects; it will replace our existing use of GeoNames.org and can also supplement GeoHack.

• Featured Article RSS — Max Semenik built the first version of an extension to expose featured articles, In the news, and other main page content so that our partners can better re-use our data.

Special projects

Fundraising support

• 2011 Fundraiser [?] — The DonationInterface extension underwent enhancements to tighten up security. Support was also added for monthly recurring donations for credit cards through our new payment processor, GlobalCollect, and we are working on automating the processing of recurring payments to our instance of CiviCRM. We built custom mass-mailing scripts to e-mail about 1 million past donors to encourage them to donate again. The ContributionReporting extension was enhanced by storing aggregated data in their own tables and updating them periodically, to eliminate the cache stampede problem uncovered last month. We added support for automatic notification of non-credit card payments from GlobalCollect, which allows us to automatically record donor and donation information in our donor database.

Offline

• Kiwix UX initiative [?] — Work continued on the 0.9 release of Kiwix. Lead developer Emmanuel Engelhart released Kiwix 0.9 beta5 for community testing, fixing lots of reported bugs and soliciting testers to get involved.

Platform Engineering

MediaWiki Core

The “MediaWiki Core” team was featured on the Wikimedia Tech blog this month.

• MediaWiki 1.19 [?] — Rob Lanphier continued to coordinate the efforts from Wikimedia engineers to review commits to the MediaWiki codebase, as part of the Wikimedia engineering 20% policy. Mark Hershberger started to send automated reminders to developers whose revisions are marked as “fixme” in Code review. Progress on unreviewed commits is tracked through the 1.19 revision report and the Code review statistics. As of December 31st, about 600 revisions remain to be reviewed in trunk. Brion Vibber proposed a feature freeze in trunk, to catch up on code review, instead of branching the code for release.
• Continuous integration [?] — The TestSwarm package was Debianized and its configuration almost entirely entered into Puppet. Antoine Musso and Daniel Zahn deployed TestSwarm to the production continuous integration portal.
• Git conversion [?] — The rules to convert phase3/ have been finished and a test repository is now available. Chad Horohoe is now working on convert rules for extensions, and on user permissions.
• VipsScaler [?] — VIPS hasn’t proven as effective at saving memory on large PNG files as what was expected, but it has shown improvements for large TIFFs. Deployment to Wikimedia sites is deferred until MediaWiki 1.19 is deployed. Bryan Tong Minh will reach out to upstream developers to include fixes for PNG and JPG files.
• SwiftMedia [?] — Aaron Schulz merged the FileBackend branch into /trunk, and Tim Starling started to review the code. Aaron, Ben Hartshorne, Ariel Glenn discussed sharding the Swift containers at the MediaWiki level, and Aaron started to implement it.
• HipHop deployment [?] — After Facebook announced that they were developing virtual machines for HipHop, Tim Starling indicated that Wikimedia would put their current efforts on HipHop on hold, until the virtual machines can be evaluated. Other performance efforts like Wikitext scripting will take priority instead.

Wikimedia analytics

• Wikimedia Report Card 2.0 [?] — The reportcard 2.0 was moved to the Labs environment, and its source code centralized. The back-end and front-end code of stats.grok.se was rewritten and is being deployed to Labs as well. A renewed effort is expected as new employees come on board in January.

Technical Liaison; Developer Relations

• Bug management [?] — Mark Hershberger followed up on MediaWiki 1.18 bugs, and wrote a FAQ listing issues and offering solutions until 1.18.1 is released. Mark also continued to go through “highest priority” bugs, dealt with bugzilla vandalism, reviewed patches submitted in bugzilla, and held bug triages on MediaWiki 1.18 and Fundraising engineering.
• Summer of Code 2011 [?] — Neil Kandalgaonkar met with the Internet Archive about progress on ArchiveLinks; they are awaiting fixes and improvements in ArchiveLinks before it can go live. Yuvaraj Pandian fixed several issues with his offline article selection project, SelectionSifter, towards getting the code to a deployable state. Roan Kattouw made plans to review and merge Salvatore Ingala’s gadgets project during his ResourceLoader 2 work in February 2012.
• Engineering project documentation [?] — Guillaume Paumier performed perennial maintenance on project pages and the Roadmap (updating, cleaning up and organizing the content as needed), and wrote this report.
• Volunteer coordination and outreach [?] — Sumana Harihareswara continued to follow up on contacts and recruit new contributors to the Wikimedia tech community (especially for commit and patch review), and mentor new contributors. Eleven developers got commit access, all from the non-staff MediaWiki community. Sumana also prepared for the January San Francisco hackathon and the February Pune hackathon, and recruited participants. Partly in preparation for these coding events, Sumana and Guillaume Paumier continued to consolidate training documentation to facilitate the onboarding of new developers.
• MediaWiki architecture document [?] — This project was mostly on hold in December, while the book’s technical reviewers went through the content. They provided a second round of feedback and minor recommendations, that will be addressed in January.
• Wikimedia blog maintenance [?] — Guillaume Paumier continued to fix bugs in the blog’s theme, and started to develop a WordPress plugin to bring functionality specific to the Wikimedia blog independently of the theme (for example, expanding the group of users who can upload files).

Future

The engineering management team continues to update the Software deployments page weekly, providing up-to-date information on the upcoming deployments to Wikimedia sites, as well as the engineering roadmap, listing ongoing and future Wikimedia engineering efforts.

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This article was written collaboratively by Wikimedia engineers and managers. See revision history and associated status pages. A wiki version is also available.

By Professor Juliana Bastos Marques – UNIRIO (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil)

One late night in 2006, while I was struggling with my PhD thesis, I went looking for a quick reference for a Latin author in Portuguese Wikipedia, only to find out that there was nothing about him there (it was the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus). Indignant, I finally decided to register in order to write the new article myself. Soon I realized that was the tip of an iceberg: a lot of work was needed on other history-related topics, and I needed more help.

Wikipedian turned professor some years later, I thought it would be a good idea to recruit my students to write some good content and fix the disturbing mistakes we repeatedly found. Indeed, the state of the Portuguese Wikipedia, while counting more than 700,000 articles, is still usually written by non-specialists; this means several outdated theories and approaches, low-quality references and incomplete information. My other concern was quite practical: I needed to convince my own students that the additional information they used for my classes and exams was NOT to be looked for on Wikipedia, to avoid plagiarism for a start! In fact, all my friends who taught at primary and secondary schools also had the same problem: whether we want or not, Wikipedia is probably the most popular learning material in Brazil – and, in the current state, a bad one.

Serendipity came to my doorstep soon, when I first read an article about the Public Policy Initiative in Inside Higher Ed in September 2010, and later attended an event with Jessie Wild and Kul Wadhwa from Wikimedia Foundation on the following January, only to learn that WMF had plans for the expansion of the Global Education Program in Brazil. I also had the opportunity to attend the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit, last July, in Boston. While I was only a spectator there, for my class would start in August, it was very exciting to see that other professors had already come to similar conclusions as to the value of Wikipedia for the university.

With the course taught, mistakes made and also success achieved, I have some input to share on my experience. First of all, I’d have in mind that the goal of using Wikipedia in class is ultimately to improve weak articles. This works perfectly for the case of the Portuguese Wikipedia, and certainly with dozens of other languages. In the case of more developed Wikipedias such as the English one, I believe this means a careful selection of potential new or stub articles to work with.

The course I taught improved substantially a set of articles related to Roman History, but it was peculiar in the sense that it was an elective course with 25 students. They had a combination of traditional lectures with work in the lab, always with the aid of a Campus Ambassador (who happened not to be a student, but a very proficient and participating member of the Portuguese Wikimedia community), two also very proficient Online Ambassadors and a dedicated mailing list. All students worked in their sandboxes until I graded and revised the content, and the Ambassadors approved the technical Wikipedia format, code and writing. This was crucial in preventing early deletions and distrust from the community, which would certainly discourage the students. Also, I decided to engage the Portuguese-speaking Wikipedia community early on, mostly through the Wikimedia Brasil mailing list, in order to make them aware of what we were planning. The members were very supportive and eventually helped the students in their discussion pages, teaching them to avoid plagiarism and to write with neutrality.

In due time, I realized I should not be concerned whether I was creating a new set of editors, which I believe to be a somehow misleading goal. All Wikipedia editors are volunteers, and their will to contribute will always be beyond a class, a grade or our encouragement as teachers. However, I feel we have created multipliers: even if they never edit again, my students will eventually teach on their own, and they will tell their students about how knowledge is never ready and finished, is never to be trusted without critical reflection, and can be improved through their own learning and work.

The students very soon learned that the set of skills they needed to practice was somehow different from what it was expected in academia. After all, writing for encyclopedias requires strict objectivity, impartiality and anonymity, so that the voice of the writer is not to be distinguished. However, together with other skills such as knowing when and how to use references correctly, or learning how to distinguish and explain different points of view regarding a subject, these abilities helped them understand the subject and their own learning results in a much more clear and precise way than before. For instance, I had to go with them phrase per phrase sometimes, until they could really master what they meant to say – a careful dynamic that all professors know is impossible to follow when grading a pile of papers.

Last but not least, the students ultimately learned that an encyclopedia is a starting point. And it was their own work that could make it a solid starting point for both themselves and any other reader. For the next semester, starting here in Brazil in February, I will continue using the opportunity that Wikipedia gives for professors and students to teach, to learn and to work with quality and rigor, while sharing our knowledge from the often closed corridors of academia to the entire world. I’d easily say that this has been to me the biggest reward of using Wikipedia for teaching.

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

Our annual fundraising campaign reached a successful conclusion today having raised a record-breaking USD 20 million from more than one million donors in nearly every country in the world. It is our most successful campaign ever, continuing an unbroken streak in which donations have risen every year since the campaigns began in 2003.

Wikimedia Foundation websites serve more than 470 million people every month. It is the only major website supported not by advertising, but by donations from readers.

From Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation,

Our model is working fantastically well.

Ordinary people use Wikipedia and they like it, so they chip in some cash so it will continue to thrive. That maintains our independence and lets us focus solely on providing a useful public service. I am so grateful to our donors for making that possible. I promise them we will use their money carefully and well.

The number of Wikimedia Foundation donors has increased ten-fold since 2008 and the total dollar amount raised in the campaign has risen to over $20 million from $4.5 million.

Funds raised in this campaign will be used to buy and install servers and other hardware, to develop new site functionality, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects, and support the large global community of Wikimedia volunteers. The Wikimedia Foundation’s total 2011-12 planned spending is 28.3 million USD. The bulk of that is raised during the annual campaign and the remainder comes throughout the year in the form of grants from institutions (such as the Sloan Foundation) and many other small donations year round.

This year’s campaign highlighted staff and volunteers who help to create Wikipedia. It featured testimonials from volunteer editors in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Kenya, the United Kingdom and the United States ranging in age from 18 to 76, explaining why they edit Wikipedia and why they think readers should support the Wikimedia Foundation. More than 100 volunteers translated the banners and appeals into dozens of languages, reaching hundreds of millions of people.

A special thanks goes to all the contributors who work on the fundraiser year-round, the editors who helped tell their story, the translators who helped spread the message of the fundraiser, Wikimedia foundation employees, and to the readers of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for their support.

With over 20 million articles in 282 languages, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in human history. Over 100,000 volunteers work on Wikipedia and its 10 sister projects (including projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikibooks, and Wiktionary), furthering the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission to freely share the sum of all human knowledge. On January 15, 2012, Wikipedia will celebrate its 11th anniversary.

Jay Walsh, Communications

 

WebFonts is the first extension that gets user documentation served from MediaWiki.org. At the time of writing, the documentation has been written, it does serve people with help text about WebFonts and it is ready for translation. People looking for help will be served help in the language of their user interface if there is a translation.

In a way it seems like a minor thing but consider;

• MediaWiki can serve help texts for its functionality
• this help text may differ based on the language of the user
• the help text can be translated
• a new community for MediaWiki help text translation is needed
• functionality like Narayam will surely get its user documentation in the near future

It will be a challenge to other developers and developer teams to adopt and refine the way assistance to our users is provided. We learned at translatewiki.net that documentation did improve the quality of the localisations. We hope that user documentation will reduce confusion and makes for happy editors and readers.

The WebFonts user documentation was deployed last Tuesday. This and some other changes can be found in the deploy list. As the holiday season is in full swing, sprint 6 has started; it will run into the new year.

In this sprint stories will be developed that will make “Translation review” feature complete. When this is implemented, it will help translators and localisers review each others work and assign a status to their work for further considerations. As you can imagine, the different statuses themselves will become available for translation; card 326 defines this and will make this possible. This is just one of many stories that make up this feature.

For the localisers of the MediaWiki software a long held ambition will be realised; card 206 will see “plural” support implemented for JavaScript. When this functionality is deployed, it will result in a long list of future changes that will see changes to the actual messages.

The new year will bring us many new challenges and opportunities to the many many language communities. The Wikimedia Localisation team will work hard to provide you with the tools to be efficient in any language to get our message out and provide information in any language. For some of us the new year starts at a different moment so it will be very much business as usual; we welcome you to have a look at our sprint backlog (user:guest password: guest) and bug us in bugzilla with whatever needs fixing.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

 

For about ten days in December, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, and I met with various professors, students, and local Wikipedians in Cairo, Egypt. The initial Arabic Catalyst Project trip from October showed that there is potential in working with faculty members and students on improving the Arabic Wikipedia; this December trip made clear that there is a very high level of interest among people at universities in Cairo to do so.

The Cairo pilot project – the newest part of the Wikipedia Education Program – will begin in early 2012. Its primary goal will be to improve the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia, which is currently very small (only about 150,000 articles) even though as the fifth most common language in the world Arabic has about 400 million speakers worldwide (compare this to Japanese, which has about 130 million speakers worldwide but almost 800,000 Wikipedia articles). As part of the Cairo pilot, students from Ain Shams University and Cairo University will contribute new content to the Arabic Wikipedia or translate content from another language into Arabic on Wikipedia. The plan is to have about 4-6 classes in the pilot, and only the top 3-15 students from each of these classes will actually contribute to Wikipedia. We want to keep the pilot very small, to make sure that we’ve figured out what works and doesn’t work before we expand the project to more people and more places.

We were surprised by how many instructors in Egypt were excited about participating in the project. Everybody we talked to was convinced that growing and enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia would be a good idea – in fact, many professors and students told us they felt the responsibility to make free knowledge in Arabic better. We have identified about six professors for participation in the pilot, based on their understanding of Wikipedia, their genuine interest in enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia, and the writing skills of their students. Almost all the students we met also showed genuine interest in learning more about Wikipedia and contributing to it.

We are also very happy to have the support of local Wikipedians. Essam Sharaf – a long-term Wikipedian and a student at Cairo University – connected us with professors and students, helped us maneuver the streets and campuses of Cairo, and enhanced our understanding of Egypt’s social, cultural, and political context. Frank, Moushira, and I also met with an active group of Cairo-based Arabic Wikipedians and went on a photo-walk with them, during which we took pictures of Old Cairo and then uploaded them onto Wikimedia Commons (including the panoramic photo now on this Wikipedia article). We’ve also been communicating with other members of the Arabic Wikipedia community, whom we’ve found to be extremely helpful and inspiring. We feel very fortunate that this group of enthusiastic, smart, and motivated volunteers has expressed genuine interest in becoming Wikipedia Ambassadors (who teach students how to edit Wikipedia) and laying the foundation to make the Cairo pilot a success.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

If you’ve been to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve admired the Milwaukee Art Museum’s building, especially its brise soleil, whose wing-like span closes at night. But until recently, the Wikipedia article on the museum lacked a video of the brise soleil in action.

Katy Lederer changed that in November. Katy is finishing up her final year of school at Alverno College, a women’s college in Milwaukee, and her professor this term joined the Wikipedia Education Program. Professor Jennifer Geigel Mikulay’s Advanced Media Studies course required students to create a video to add to a Wikipedia article. Longtime Wikipedians User:OrangeMike and User:Protonk served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for the class, offering students information about how Wikipedia works and how to add their videos to articles. Katy chose to make a video of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil.

“Ever since the announcement about the addition to the art museum was made I have been captivated by the work. With every stage of its construction I waited anxiously for the next and could not wait to see it finished and working. I am very surprised a video didn’t exist already [on Wikipedia],” Katy says. “I don’t know if Milwaukee understands the magnificence of the brise soleil. I am truly shocked by the number of people–friends, peers, classmates, Milwaukee residents–who told me they had never seen the wings move before watching my video.”

Katy, a lifelong Milwaukee resident, has been thrilled by the reception her video has gotten since she uploaded it in mid-November. The video appeared as the Wikimedia Commons Media of the Day on November 26, leading to hundreds of people viewing her video. Katy says she really enjoyed putting the video together, and she was especially moved that her work for class would appear on a resource like Wikipedia that she uses often.

“I consider myself to be generally non-traditional so doing this assignment was a breath of fresh air. Stressful air, but fresh none the less!” she says. “I am grateful that we had this opportunity. With online resources being so prevalent in our lives today–and Wikipedia being such a valued resource–it’s important to understand how it works.”

Next up for Katy is finishing her degree in Professional Communication, but she says she hopes to create more videos for Wikipedia in the future. She and a classmate are talking about taking a river tour in Chicago of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and Katy’s already scheming to create a narrated video for Wikipedia of the trip.

“I’m drawn to visual work, so the appeal of working with a camera always takes precedence over books,” she says.

With contributions by: Tbayer, DarTar and Jodi.a.schneider

Contents 1 Mental health information on Wikipedia more accurate than Britannica and Kaplan & Sadock psychiatry textbook 2 Psychologists gauge impact of Wikipedia’s Rorschach test coverage 3 Spell-checking the English Wikipedia 4 Wikipedians are “smart but fun”, and have expertise in topics they edit 5 Wikipedia as a database for structured biological data 6 Individual and social drivers of participation in Wikipedia 7 Mining article revision histories for insights into open collaboration 8 Briefly 9 References

Mental health information on Wikipedia more accurate than Britannica and Kaplan & Sadock psychiatry textbook

In an article for Psychological Medicine,^[1] ten researchers from the University of Melbourne conclude that “the quality of information on depression and schizophrenia on Wikipedia is generally as good as, or better than, that provided by centrally controlled websites, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a psychiatry textbook.”

The study focused on ten mental health topics (e.g. “antidepressants and suicide in young people” or “side-effects of antipsychotics”), five each in the areas of depression and schizophrenia. “Using the topic terms (or synonyms) as key words for the searches or through manual browsing, content relating to these topics was extracted from [Wikipedia and 13 other websites selected for prominent Google results for depression and schizophrenia] and from the most recent edition of Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry … and the online version of Encyclopaedia Britannica” by two reviewers. For both depression and schizophrenia, three psychologists with clinical and research expertise in that area evaluated these extracts on accuracy, up-to-dateness, breadth of coverage, referencing and readability, on a scale from 1 to 5 (“e.g. Accuracy: 1 = many errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 3=some errors of fact or unsubstantiated opinions, 5 = all information factually accurate”). As in an earlier study of the quality of health information on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: “Wikipedia’s cancer coverage is reliable and thorough, but not very readable“), readability was also measured using a Flesch–Kincaid readability test, which is calculated from word and sentence lengths.

For both depression and schizophrenia, Wikipedia scored highest in the accuracy, up-to-dateness, and references categories – surpassing all other resources, including WebMD, NIMH, the Mayo Clinic and Britannica online. In breadth of coverage, it was behind Kaplan & Saddock and others for both areas. And “of the online resources, Wikipedia was rated the least readable [by the human reviewers], although some of its topics received an average rating.” Likewise, the Wikipedia content had relatively high Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level indices (around 16 for schizophrenia and 15 for depression – indicating that a tertiary level of education is necessary to understand the content), similar to that of Britannica but higher than most other resources examined.

The authors note that their “findings largely parallel those of other recent studies of the quality of health information on Wikipedia” (citing eight such studies published between 2007 and 2010):

“Despite variability in the methodologies and conclusions of these studies, the overall implication is that Wikipedia articles on health topics typically contain relatively few factual errors, although they may lack breadth of coverage. … Given the number of patients, would-be patients and concerned others using the internet to search for information on health issues, it seems that Wikipedia is an appropriate recommendation as an information source.“

Psychologists gauge impact of Wikipedia’s Rorschach test coverage

A paper in the Journal of Personality Assessment^[2] tried to assess the impact of the Wikipedia article Rorschach test on psychologists’ use of that test. As summarized by the authors, “In the summer of 2009, an emergency room physician [User:Jmh649 - James Heilman, MD] posted images of all 10 Rorschach inkblots on [...] Wikipedia. The images were accompanied by descriptions of “common responses” to each blot. … a fierce debate ensued between some psychologists who claimed that posting the inkblots is a threat to test security and other individuals, including some psychologists and other mental health professionals, who argued that all information should be freely available, including full details of the Rorschach”. (In fact, the debates on whether to display versions of the inkblots in the article go back to at least 2005, at first accompanied by rather spurious copyright claims – Rorschach died in 1922.) The authors note that the inkblots had already been revealed to the general public in a 1980s book and cite an earlier study^[3] that had found “particularly damaging information” about personality assessment tests on the Internet as early as 2000, “including examples of test stimuli from… the Rorschach” (presumably including this site). Still, “Internet coverage of the Rorschach appeared to grow exponentially during” the 2009 debate about the Wikipedia article, which made it to the front page of the New York Times (Signpost coverage: “Rorschach test dispute reported“).

The first part of the study examined the top 50 Google search results for “Rorschach” (excluding “watchmen” in order to filter out results about a comic book and film) and “inkblot test”, coding them into four levels representing the “threat each site presents to test security and the extent to which the content of the site might aid an individual in dissimulating on the Rorschach”. 44% of the sites were classified as Level 0 (“no threat”), e.g. home page of bands with “Rorschach” in their name, and 15% as Level 1 (“minimal threat”). The 22% Level 2 (“indirect threat”) sites which “tended to discuss test procedures more explicitly” apparently included “several ‘official’ Rorschach Web sites, where one is able to register for Continuing Education Rorschach workshops, [and which] also allow visitors to purchase materials that contain sensitive test information. For example, certain training Web sites allow individuals to purchase training texts and instructional media without requiring a license or other professional credentials”. The authors find it “disturbing” that many sites in this threat category “were authored by psychologists”. 19% of the sites were classified as the highest level, “direct threat”, e.g. many that contained depictions of one or more Rorschach inkblots, or specific information about how responses are interpreted. Together with results about the high percentage of Internet users consulting Wikipedia for health information (36% in the US in 2007 according to Pew research), the authors conclude that “we can no longer presume that examinees have not been exposed to this information prior to an assessment”.

The second part of the study likewise starts out with a Google News search for “Rorschach” and “Wikipedia”, noting that “of the 25 news stories reviewed, 13 included one or more of the Rorschach inkblots, with Card I as the most frequently displayed”, and eventually arriving at five media stories about the controversy which allowed readers’ comments ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5]). The altogether 520 comments on these stories were “coded according to the opinion expressed by the writer regarding each of the following categories: (a) the field of psychology, (b) psychologists, and (c) the Rorschach.” While the vast majority did not state a clear opinion on the first two categories, the authors note that “Of those comments that did express an opinion toward psychologists [ca. 16%] most were overwhelmingly negative.” Many more of the commenters on the Wikipedia/Rorschach news stories expressed an opinion about the test itself: “In total, 182 (35%) of comments were classified as unfavorable toward the Rorschach, whereas only 55 (11%) were coded as favorable toward the Rorschach. The remaining 283 (54%) comments were categorized as neutral or not mentioned.” Among those who identified as mental health professionals, 61% expressed a favorable opinion about the test and 15% a negative one.

Asked for his comment on the paper, Heilman said: “My main criticism of their paper is that they seem to take as axiomatic that exposure to these images hurts test reliability without any real evidence to back it up. Otherwise it is an interesting piece.” (The paper includes a section reviewing literature on “the impact of ‘coaching’ on psychological tests”, however it does not mention results pertaining specifically to the Rorschach test, and mostly concerns subjects who deliberately try to “cheat” on such tests, rather than those who have accidentally been exposed to a test’s material before.)

Spell-checking the English Wikipedia

University of Nebraska-Lincoln MBA candidate Jon Stacey reports on the results of a proof-of-concept tool to measure the rate of misspelled words in the English Wikipedia over time.^[4][5] A text parser (code available for download) was applied to a random sample of 2,400 articles. Instead of considering the latest revision, a random revision from the history of each article was used. The final corpus was obtained by stripping markup and non-ASCII characters as well as article sections such as the references and table of contents. Words were matched against a dictionary obtained by manually combining 12dicts and SCOWL (source) with Wiktionary.

The results show that the percentage of misspellings has been growing steadily, reaching 6.23% for revisions created in 2011. Several weaknesses with the method are discussed, including the lack of Unicode support, the high rate of false positives, and the possibility that the rising rate might be associated with a rise in the complexity of content. The concluding remarks speculate on how semi-automated spell-checking may support editorial work at a large scale. (Wikipedians have used lists of common misspellings for many years, also integrated in semi-automatic editing tools such as AutoWikiBrowser.)

In related news, the developers of an open-source multilingual proofreading application called LanguageTool released a beta application for proofreading Wikipedia articles. wikiCheck proofreads articles from the English and German Wikipedias based on a set of customizable syntax and grammar rules. A bookmarklet is available to access the application from a browser.

Wikipedians are “smart but fun”, and have expertise in topics they edit

Three researchers from Stanford University and Yahoo! Research used a novel method to construct “a data-driven portrait of Wikipedia editors”, as described in a preprint currently undergoing review for publication.^[6] While earlier studies relied on Wikipedians participating in surveys (and identifying themselves as such), the authors mined data from users of the Yahoo! Toolbar for Wikipedia URLs containing an &action=submit parameter, thereby arriving at a sample of 1900 editors of the English Wikipedia.

Their first main finding is that “on broad average, Wikipedia editors seem, on the one hand, more sophisticated than usual Web users, reading more news, doing more Web search, and looking up more things in dictionaries and other reference works; on the other hand, they are also deeply immersed in pop culture, spending much online time on music- and movie-related websites.” However, these “entertainment lovers … form only a highly specialized subgroup that contributes many edits”.

Based on the toolbar data, the paper also tries to answer the question “Do Wikipedia editors know their domain?” and related questions, positively: “across all topical domains Wikipedia editors show significant expertise. … We also show that more substantial edits tend to come from experts”, and that logged-in editors show more expertise than IP editors. A final result is that “About half of the click chains culminating in an edit start with a Web search, with the other half originating on Wikipedia’s main page.”

Wikipedia as a database for structured biological data

A special issue of Nucleic Acids Research features 11 articles describing how wikis and collaborative technology can be used to enhance biological databases. A commentary by Robert Finn, Paul Gardner and Alex Bateman^[7] discusses in particular how to leverage Wikipedia, its collaborative infrastructure and large editor community to better integrate articles and biological data entries: the authors argue that the project offers an opportunity for crowdsourcing the curation and annotation of biological data, but faces major challenges for expert engagement, i.e. “how to get scientists en masse to edit articles” and “how to allow editors to receive credit for their work on an article”.

Another article in the same issue^[8] presents the Gene Wiki, an open-access and openly editable collection of Wikipedia articles about human genes. The article describes how structured data available on Gene Wiki articles is kept in sync with the data from primary databases via an automated system and how to automatically compute the quality of articles in the project at word or sentence-level using WikiTrust.

Individual and social drivers of participation in Wikipedia

A thesis entitled Individual and social motivations to contribute to Commons-based peer production was submitted by University of Minnesota student Yoshikazu Suzuki for an MA in mass communication. The thesis presents and discusses the results from a small series of interviews as well as a survey exploring individual and social motivations of Wikipedia contributors, drawing on social identity theory, volunteerism and uses and gratifications theory. The survey, run in July 2011 with support from the Wikimedia Research Committee, collected 208 responses from a random sample of 950 among the top English Wikipedia editors. The results, obtained by applying principal components analysis to the responses, reveal eight distinct motivational factors: providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, concern for others’ well-being, the need to be entertained, the avoidance of negative self-affect, cognitive group membership, career benefits, and social desirability. An analysis of the relative strength of each factor indicates that providing information, the seeking of creative stimulation, and concerns for others’ well-being were the three strongest motivational dimensions. Grouping the eight factors into two macro-categories according to self- and other-focused motivations, the other-focused motivations were found to be significantly stronger than the self-focused motivations. The thesis reviews the implications of these results for the design of incentives for participation and editor retention. The full text of the thesis^[9] and an executive summary are available under open access.

Mining article revision histories for insights into open collaboration

A paper in this month’s edition of First Monday, ambitiously titled “Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia”^[10], reports on a statistical analysis of a complete dump of the English Wikipedia (225 million article edits) with regard to several quantities, starting with two that were introduced in a 2004 paper by Andrew Lih “as a simple measure for the reputation of [an] article within the Wikipedia”: the total number of edits an article has received (“rigor”) and the number of (logged-in and anonymous) users who have edited the article (“diversity”). The First Monday paper cites a 2007 study from the same journal, which found that featured articles tend to have more edits and contributors (while controlling for a few other variables)^[11] as a justification for using “rigor” and “diversity” as proxies for article quality, but includes other quantities such as the article size change for an edit. The paper cites earlier work on evaluating Wikipedia article quality (e.g. dismissing the well-known 2005 Nature study based on the mistaken assumption that it had “only focused on featured articles”), but does not discuss existing attempts at more sophisticated quantitative quality heuristics.

The First Monday paper highlighted that if consecutive edits by the same user are counted as one, the overall number of article revisions drops by more than 33%, “revealing that one in three revisions in Wikipedia consist of users responding to their own edits or continuing an ongoing edit begun by themselves”. “Article diversity” ranged up to 12,437 contributors per article, with a median of 12 and an average of 32. One of the main conclusions is that “rather than reflecting the contributions and expertise of a large group of people, the typical article in Wikipedia reflects the efforts of a relatively small group of users (median of 12) who make a relatively small number of edits (median of 21).”

Supporting the assumption that most edits do not result in significant changes in content, the study finds that 31% of all revisions cause a size change of fewer than 10 characters, and 51% a change of fewer than 30 characters, with an apparently significant peak at a 4-character difference, presumably related to the insertion or removal of the four brackets (“[[ ... ]]”) that generate a wikilink.

The author notes the slight decrease in the overall number of edits since 2008, but tentatively explains it by the increasingly complete coverage of encyclopedic topics, and doesn’t share the widespread concerns about declining or stagnating editor activity: “participation in Wikipedia seems to remain as healthy as ever as revisions made per article created each year has annually increased since 2001 without exception”.

A different paper^[12] from last year’s “Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference” similarly promises far-reaching insights from “Deconstructing Wikipedia” solely based on revision history statistics without analyzing the actual content changes, using a much smaller sample – 30 featured articles from the English Wikipedia, but also including timestamps. The data did not confirm the hypothesis that “the editor who initiated an article would have a high level of involvement in the article’s creation”: for only five of the 30 articles, the initial author was the most frequent contributor.

A second conclusion is that for all of the articles in the sample, “there is a single Wikipedian whose contributions far exceed all others”, ranging from 8% to 82% of the articles with an average of 39% (but the analysis does not seem to have sought to quantify the extent to which this exceeds the contributions of the second most frequent contributor). The author indicates that this supports Jaron Lanier‘s “oracle illusion” criticism of a supposed presentation of Wikipedia as a product of “the crowd”. Somewhat tautologically, the author observes “that the control of an individual editor seemed to be reduced as more editors joined the process”, and points to the need to analyze “a significantly larger number of articles” to answer the question whether “too many cooks spoil the stew” (apparently unaware of the significant body of earlier literature on this subject, starting with a 2005 paper that presented an answer in its title: “Too many cooks don’t spoil the broth“, and including the 2007 study which the above reviewed First Monday paper relied on).

A third result of the paper, which likewise might not surprise those already familiar with Wikipedia’s editing processes, is that “the creation process is continuous and can go on for a very long time”, with even articles about historic events from the distant past continuing to receive edits.

The author, an assistant professor in management and marketing at Virginia State University, concludes the paper by urging his readers to start “thinking about how the wiki platform, itself, is influencing the creation process”.

Briefly

• The Wikimedia Research Committee launched a public consultation on the future data/research infrastructure for Wikimedia, in an effort to understand how to best serve the research and developer community with open data from our projects. The consultation will remain open through January 2012 and the full set of responses will be shared under a CC0 license.
• Semantic enhancements: In “Enhancing Wikipedia with semantic technologies”^[13], Lee et al. review existing interfaces for semantic search and present their own platform for enhancements. Based on small-scale user tests, they find that one of their three enhancements – range-based queries – are strongly preferred by users, who would find them desirable not only in Wikipedia but on the wider web. A longer summary is available on AcaWiki.
• English and Finnish Wikipedias egalitarian, Japanese hierarchical: A paper titled “Analyzing cultural differences in collaborative innovation networks by analyzing editing behavior in different-language Wikipedias”^[14] (from the 2010 Collaborative Innovation Networks Conference, as was the revision statistics paper reviewed above) applied social network analysis to collaboration on featured articles on the English, German, Japanese, Korean, and Finnish Wikipedias. It “found notable differences in the communication behavior among egalitarian cultures such as the Finnish, and quite hierarchical ones such as the Japanese. While the English language Wikipedia shows a distinctive pattern, most likely because it is by far the largest and frequently exploring new concepts copied by others, it seems to follow more the Finnish egalitarian, than the Japanese hierarchical style”.
• User:Emijrp shared a link on wiki-research-l listing 2,596 scholarly references on wikis, obtained by scraping Google Scholar results (on December 22, 2011), as part of a project to build a comprehensive bibliography about wikis – a challenging task that has seen various earlier attempts and was the subject of a workshop at this year’s WikiSym (see the October and April editions of this research report).
• Should doctors use and edit Wikipedia?: An editorial in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine^[15] asks whether doctors should reject the use of Wikipedia. The two page article (one-day access: US$30.00) cites some results about the popularity of Wikipedia among medical students, young physicians and the general public, and for some reason highlights the malicious edits of British journalist Johann Hari as example for the downsides of Wikipedia’s free editability. It contains a review of the literature on the reliability of Wikipedia’s medical information which is less thorough than that of the Psychological Medicine article reviewed above, and comes to a less approving but still somewhat positive conclusion: “Although Wikipedia entries are often poorly structured and difficult to understand, they are comparable in accuracy to some online resources, such as health insurance websites.” In the end, the authors seems to lean towards recommending against ignoring Wikipedia: “One risk of clinicians disengaging from Wikipedia is that only contributors motivated by personal experience (e.g. patient anecdote) or vested interests (e.g. individual clinicians, institutions or companies promoting their own ideas and products) will remain.”

References

You might be asking yourself, “Who are those people in the banners on Wikipedia?  Why are they asking me to ‘please read an appeal?’”  They are members of the Wikipedia community and they believe strongly in the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.  Some are employees of the Wikimedia Foundation and some are volunteers; editors, contributors, and users of Wikipedia without whom Wikipedia would not be what it is today.  The people in the banners asking you for money to support Wikipedia are real people who believe in spreading free knowledge throughout the world.

 

Brandon Harris is a Senior Designer at the Wikimedia Foundation and he has worked at Wikimedia since the Spring of 2010. He was raised in Huntington, West Virginia, and he has spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, CA. He is aggressively passionate about his work and loves feeling like he is making the world a better place. He listens to heavy metal, plays guitar, and hosts an ongoing RPG night.

 

 

 

Susan Hewitt is originally from England and has lived in the US for more than half of her life.  She does volunteer work of different kinds, she loves to write (including Wikipedia articles, of course!) and she loves to teach. She also enjoys doing field research and writing papers on mollusks. She is fond of swimming and being in the ocean. At home you might find her reading a stack of science magazines or studying Buddhism. She thinks the most important thing any of us can do is try to make the world a better place for everyone else.

 

 

Karthik Nadar is from Mumbai, India.  He is a student and he works part-time.  His favorite part of his job is he has enough time to contribute to Wikipedia.  He contributed a lot to the 2011 Mumbai bombings article, including adding a picture he took after a bomb blast. In his free time, other than editing Wikipedia, he enjoys playing the drums and playing cricket.  He also enjoys photography.

 

 

 

User GorillaWarfare is a student at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.  She began editing Wikipedia when she was in high school and currently she mostly focusses on anti-vandalism editing on Wikipedia.  Her main interest is Wikipedia and she considers it to be more of a hobby than volunteer work.  She remarked that some people think it’s a “weird way to spend her time,” but when they see what she is actually doing, especially with anti-vandalism, “they almost see it as kind of a game where I’m reverting the bad guys.”

 

 

 

Bruno Linhares is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  He has a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and a Ph.D. in Practical Theology.  In all of his many activities, he finds research to be the most enjoyable part for him.  He enjoys reading about aviation and 20th Centrury world literature and journey accounts.  He enjoys film and he goes to the movies every week.  He also enjoys walking, hiking, and photography.

 

 

 

 

Dr. Sengai Podhuvanar is fom Chennai, India.  He is currently retired after having many jobs:  he worked on a rural farm, as a school teacher, as a state-appointed journal editor, and as a PhD expert on indigenous Indian games.  He “was born a poor farmer, and still considers [himself] a farmer with a single plow.”  Currently he enjoys his retirement by  reading, writing, taking walks and adding lots of his knowledge to Wikipedia.

 

 

 

Maryana Pinchuk is a Community Organizer at the Wikimedia Foundation. She works with editors to support the growth of all the Wikimedia projects. Her favorite thing about her job is getting to work with an international team of “brilliant, crazy, fearless people who are completely rabid about the goal of sharing knowledge with everyone in the world for free.” She is originally from the Ukraine and has spent time living in many places in the US including Seattle, New Orleans, Boston, and Mississippi. She is a fan of going to bookstores and picking up classics and science fiction, and she likes motorcycle riding.

 

 

Basil Soufi was born in Washington State, spent the first few years of his life in Saudi Arabia, then moved to Canada, and later moved to California.  Basil realized the power of Wikipedia when, in 2004, a high school assignment led him to Google “John Kerry.”  The encyclopedia in his home library was printed in 1993 and did not have much information on John Kerry who was not as notable at the time.  He needed current information that can be found on the Internet but he also needed an encyclopedia, so Wikipedia fit the bill.  Basil speaks several languages including Arabic, French, and English and he owns and operates a diversified media company.

 

 

Alan Sohn grew up in Lawrence, NY, lived for a decade in Manhattan, and then moved with his wife and children to Teaneck, New Jersey. It was the article for Teaneck that was Alan’s first experience with Wikipedia, launching thousands of new articles and over 300,000 Wikipedia edits.  Aside from his passion of editing Wikipedia articles, Alan has a penchant for puzzles, both in his work as a financial systems analyst, and crossword puzzles, namely the famous NYT crossword puzzle.  Alan plays in a softball league with one of his sons, has coached his kids in various sports, and spent 3 years as a bicycle commuter riding 16 miles daily from NJ to NYC.

 

 

 

 

Akshaya Iyengar is from India.  She grew up in Solapur, a city in Maharashtra state.  She moved to the US for graduate school and now lives and works in Seattle, WA.  Akshaya is a Software Developer for a technology company.  She likes the fact that the software she writes is directly used by many, many people.  In her free time she enjoys ballroom/latin dancing, playing the guitar, and solving jigsaw puzzles.

 

 

 

Aniruddha Kumar is from New Delhi, India.  He is is a blind Wikipedia editor who finds it important that Wikipedia remain ad-free because he does not have to waste time listening to advertising text on the site.  He also likes that there is no barrier of nationality, ethnicity, religion, caste, or gender for editors or readers of Wikipedia; it is information for all written by all.  He is a research scholar in Jawaharial University, New Delhi.  He enjoys the art of winning a debate and convincing others to see his point on topics, spreading information, and eating tasty food.

 

 

 

Ward Cunningham is computer programmer and the inventor of the wiki. He is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. (c2.com) and currently resides in Oregon, USA.  Read more about him on Wikipedia.

 

 

 

 

 

Isaac Kosegi Kips is from Kenya and he’s a recent graduate from Egerton University in Nakura, Kenya.  Isaac is a Wikimedia volunteer and his major project is distributing offline versions of Wikipedia to several schools in Kenya that do not have Internet access.  He is also working on improving Wikipedia in Africa’s native languages.  When he is not editing Wikipedia he loves to read, and he loves soccer.

 

 

 

 

 

Stacey Merrick
Social Media Coordinator

(For the Portuguese version, please see the Wikimedia Brazil site.)

It was during Wikimania 2011, in a small restaurant in Haifa, when the news was announced: the largest popular computer manufacturer in Brazil, Grupo Positivo, is interested in installing an offline Portuguese Wikipedia version in their products. All of us from Wikimedia Brazil who were present got excited because of the tremendous potential of such a distribution in spreading the free encyclopedia and its mission around Brazil. In other words, this meant the Portuguese Wikipedia for approximately 13% of the national market of personal computers and with a greater penetration in the lower-income strata.

Despite the good news, a race against time began. It was necessary to prepare the offline version of the Portuguese Wikipedia, with 5000 articles of good quality, within a very short time: March 2012. The challenge was huge and to overcome it we needed to step on the gas.

The list of 5000 articles which were critical to include in the offline version was created in only three months, with the great assistance of Wikimedia Brazil volunteers. But the volunteers found that the quality of these articles still was not high enough: they were in desperate need of improvement before being taken offline. It was then we had the idea of hosting our own “Grand Prix” – like the famous auto race. No cars and no laps, but with articles to be improved and many awards for the “pilots” who accept this challenge. Thus began the “I GP Wikimedia Brazil,” where each improved article is a completed lap.

The take-off will begin in January 2012, and it is very easy to attend! Just subscribe to one of the existing teams or join a new team. The registration will last until January 7. At the moment of publishing this blog, we have 51 subscribers divided into 15 teams, but the goal is to have at least 100 participants. After all, this is a Grand Prix where everyone wins!

Prizes will be distributed as teams improve the quality of the articles included in the list. There are buttons, stickers, notebooks and t-shirts with the brand of Wikipedia, as well as trophies and medals on the userpages of the participants. The rules of the award will be released soon after the formation of the teams, but we know that the biggest prize is the offline version of Wikipedia in Portuguese!

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Imagine, now, a Brazil where thousands of people – some of them even without access to Internet – will share a little sum of this knowledge. This is what we will do. Join a team and participate of this Grand Prix too!

(Written by the Wikimedia Brasil Community)