Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2015-05-13

Swedish Wikimedia chapter organizes simultaneous Wikidata contests; FDC election results

This week has been a busy one for the Wikidata project, with nearly simultaneous Wikidata contests, both organized by Wikimedia Sweden, now underway.

The first contest is the Menu Challenge: in a post to the Wikimedia Blog project manager John Andersson recounted that "we are aiming at a list of vegetables, meat, fruits and other ingredients and cooking related terms that 30 restaurants will be serving at a food festival in Stockholm, Sweden in June. Wikimedia Sverige will be there to highlight how open data and crowdsourcing can benefit nearly every aspect of society." The idea is to create and to maintain experimental digital restaurant menus, based on a mock-up prepared by Wikidata user Denny some time ago. The challenge will be based around translations of Wikidata labels and the addition of images and pronunciations for ingredient items, and will take place between May 8 and 27. "Let’s get some #tastydata!"

The second of the two is the Wikidata visualization challenge, a competition meant to "make it easier to understand the value of Wikidata, what is in there, and/or how it is being created ... [by] visualizing interesting representations of the data in the database". As examples of what the competition organizers are looking for and of what the Wikidata dataset makes possible project manager points to the Listen to Wikipedia application, an aural visualization of editing activity throughout the projects; and to the Wikidata tempo-spatial display, a geographic visualization of event histories. More details on the competition, as well as the grand prize, a travel scholarship, are available here.

In related news, an update to the Reasonator tool on Wikimedia Labs this week now allows the tool, a primary visualization tool of the Wikidata project, to be used on mobile. R

• Election update
  • FDC and ombudsperson election results: The results have been announced: Lorenzo Losa (with 48.7% of voters supporting), Liam Wyatt (33.5%), Michał Buczyński (30.5%), Itzik Edri (28.1%), and Michael Peel (25.0%) were elected members of the FDC for two-year terms. Kirill Lokshin was elected ombudsman for the same term, with 31.5% of voters supporting, against 30.2% for Mykola Kozlenko. Of 1101 voters, 72 updated their choices within the voting period. You can also see last week's FDC candidate review and our earlier election overview for details.R and T
  • Board election: The last and nominally most important stage of the election—the election of the three community seats on the Board of Trustees, the "ultimate corporate authority" of the Wikimedia Foundation—will begin on May 17 and close on May 31. This year's Signpost board election is now available. R and E

Signpost Publications by the Years

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. Updates on reimplementing the Graph extension, which will be known as the Chart extension, can be found on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

• Graph extension live everywhere: Extension:Graph, a previously experimental MediaWiki extension allowing for the creation of visually appealing on-wiki graphs and graphics, has now been enabled across all wikis. The feature had previously been present only on Meta and MediaWiki. The Signpost is looking to take advantage of the new feature; a quick reproduction of its capacities is shown at right. More demonstrations can be found on the extension's demo page. Even though the graph definition cannot yet be shared between wikis, the data itself can be stored on Commons. The extension implements the Vega visualization grammar on top of the D3 engine. The documentation has many even more technically impressive and complex visualizations available and now build-able on-wiki. A detailed tutorial should help you get started quickly. The new extension's capacity will hopefully help bring Wikipedia more in line with the capacities of the modern web—your correspondent, for one, is extremely excited to test it out. R
• Community tech: A job posting has been made for experienced developers interested in joining the Wikimedia Foundation as part of an intriguing new forthcoming team, the Community Tech team. Two team member positions have been opened: for Community Tech Developer and for Community Tech Engineering Manager. Both have the following to say about their purpose: R

In his mailing list message, director of analytics Tony Negrin stated: "[we] have identified this gap in our community support and have made resources available to address it." The moves seem well-aligned with the Foundation's recently-evident desire to align more closely with the needs of the editing community, a central theme from this year's State of the WMF report. R

• Language translations: An engagement experiment in the translation of core MediaWiki messages was completed this week to good results. The steps taken were to take languages with priority interfaces that were 80–99% translated (~60), list active users using those languages (~600), and send them a short talk page message asking for their help with translation tasks (example). In two months of organized work the number of 99–100% systematically translated languages jumped up from 17 to 60, following the creation of a list of 500 most-used MediaWiki messages at the translatewiki. More details on movements in the project-translation effort are available. R
• Commons batch download tool: In still another piece of tech news this week community developer McZusatz released a new tool called Imker ("beekeeper" in German) that allows for batch downloads of large numbers of files from Wikimedia Commons, either by page or by category, via an easy-to-use cross-platform (written in Java) graphical interface. Extensive toolsets exist for the opposite process—batch uploading to Commons, an important capability for GLAM activities—but this is the first tool to allow for the opposite process to occur. R
• Metrics and activities: This week saw this month's iteration of the Wikimedia Foundation's monthly metrics and activities meeting, the full video of which has now been made available on Commons. R
• Wiki Loves Monuments evaluations: A discussion of interest occurred this week on the wikimedia-l mailing list about last month's publication of the Wiki Loves Monuments evaluative report. As the Signpost reported two weeks ago, the report, under "peer review" until May 20, was not uncritical of the program—pointing out, for instance, that its funding cost an average of $25 per participant, yet had only a 0.3% twelve-month editor retention rate. Some initial discussion occurred at the time at the Signpost, and now editors involved in the program have taken their response to the mailing list, with discussion between program coordinators, community mailing-list members, and elements of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Discussion is now ongoing at the evaluation's talk page. R
• Wikipedia Library: A number of additional resources came online this week in the Wikipedia Library program. Account spaces have been made available for MIT Press Journals, Loeb Classical Library, RIPM, SAGE_Stats, and HeinOnline. Other journal efforts and account partnerships continue at WP:TWL/Journals. R
• whoColor and whoVis: A pair of advanced edit review tools came online this week with the publication of the whoColor and whoViz edit review tools. These technically impressive tools are still in alpha and have not yet been fully optimized for routine use, but already provide a wealth of useful visualized information. The latter of the two can be tested out online with no installation required (though it is very slow to load). R
• Early registration for Wikimania 2015: "Early-bird" registration has been opened for this year's Wikimania, taking place July 14–19 this year in Mexico City. R
• Wikimedia Germany fundraising report: Wikimedia Germany released their 2014 fundraising report, summarizing key points and take-aways in a post to the Wikimedia Blog. Employing approximately 60 staff the organization is by far the largest of the chapters associated with the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as only one of two (along with Wikimedia Switzerland) that handles part of its fundraising separately from the Wikimedia Foundation. R
• New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Ritchie333. R

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-13/Serendipity

2015-05-13

What made Wikipedia lose its reputation?

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By TParis

There is a public misconception of Wikipedia: that any anonymous editor can edit Wikipedia at any time, and the person behind them cannot be tracked or identified. This is essentially a decade-old narrative, yet it is persistent and embedded in the public consciousness.

I most recently came across it in a March 31 Quora answer, published in response to a question about why Wikipedia is not allowed in official research. Many journalists ignorant of the deeper workings of Wikipedia simply read the headline "anyone can edit" and make an assumption that there are no controls in place: see, for example, Finding Dulcinea, the Economist, or the Guardian.

Many old-timers still remember the 2005 Seigenthaler incident: an anonymous editor inserted a hoax about John Seigenthaler, a prominent and then still-living journalist, and made a reference to his suspected involvement in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The subject of the article read his biography and characterized this insertion as "internet character assassination". The anonymous troll was later unmasked as Brian Chase, an operations manager in Kentucky. The current biographies of living persons policy was implemented in response shortly thereafter, but the damage was done; the Seigenthaler incident spawned widespread criticism of Wikipedia among educators.

Since then, Wikipedia has made tremendous efforts to reach out to academia and build a foundation of trust. Jimmy Wales recently replied to a question on Quora on this very subject, writing that "if the recommendation is to not use Wikipedia at all, I think that's silly and naive advice—all students use Wikipedia a lot! ... If the Professor has a more nuanced view that Wikipedia should not be cited 'as a source' by university students, then I agree completely!" Jimmy Wales explains what many people already know: that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and that it has a systemic bias in favor of white, male, young, and educated individuals.

The Seigenthaler incident happened right as Wikipedia's popularity was beginning to explode. Wikipedia had about 12,000 active editors in October 2005, a number that has climbed to close to 137,000 now. Hundreds of these editors participate in new page patrol and recent changes patrol, the main purpose of which is to review nearly every single edit. They use sophisticated tools like Huggle, page curation, Cluebot, edit-protection, pending changes, and edit filters to watch for and roll back vandalism and dubious editing, or to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

Despite these safeguards, Kent Fung cites the 2014 U.S. Congressional staff edits to Wikipedia as one of his prime examples of Wikipedia's unreliability. Yet this episode in Wiki-history sprung the development of tools to catch these kinds of changes. The case he specifically refers to sparked the creation of over a dozen Twitter bots that still catalog edits from the governments of Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, The Netherlands, North Carolina, Norway, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States.

None of this ensures the trustworthiness of Wikipedia—it simply demonstrates that the environment that allowed "anonymous editors" to create the aforementioned incidents has long since dissipated. Yet that hasn't stopped a Quora "Top Writer '14" from propagating such a viewpoint. There are plenty of reasons not to cite Wikipedia in a college paper, mind you. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written by, for the most part, laypeople. Despite everyone having the title "editor", there is no actual editorial fact-checking process for most articles whose sources are generally filled with journalism, not academia. The most active demographic group is white, young men. Many of its best 'quality' articles face a bias towards recentism or cover topics in pop culture of questionable encyclopedic interest.

Kent, though, mentions none of this. Though he is right in the premise, he is entirely wrong in the details. In my view, Kent overlooks the actual real and pressing problem with Wikipedia: like Quora, Wikipedia suffers from an entrenched elitist attitude which celebrates the ignorant shut-out of ideas that the elites don't like. It's human nature, really. Wikipedia is willing to sacrifice information if it threatens the integrity of a well-known persona. Despite essays like "No Angry Mastodons" and the philosophy that adminship is "No big deal", our administrative noticeboards have an automatic knee-jerk reaction to support a veteran editor over a novice editor. Tools like page histories, a tool that provides indisputable proof of previous edits, are not utilized while investigating concerns. Editors quickly measure their opinion of the two editors and then draw out terms such as "WP:BOOMERANG" that have become Wikipedia buzz words. It's quite easy to predict a boomerang on ANI these days—one must only count the number of the user's edits.

Quora has compounded the elitism issue even further. As a forum similar to Wikipedia's reference desk, Quora is a forum where questioners ask the public about a particular topic and users vote on the best answer, Yahoo! Answers-style. The difference between Yahoo! Answers and Quora is that the latter has a handy threaded reply feature with a block button. The particulars matter: when one editor blocks another it also hides the comments made by the blocked editor, in this case hiding from public view my criticism of Kent's position—as though it never happened. It's an interesting tool that I know hundreds of politicians wish they had.

"Now, what does this have to do with Wikipedia?", you ask.

I believe Quora represents a larger issue: the number of authorities in the general public who are ignorant of the differences between 2005 Wikipedia and 2015 Wikipedia, and whose assumptions are never challenged because the public is unaware. Authorities in a subject are generally regarded by the average Joe to be authorities in all subjects. It becomes a sort of intellectual jack-of-all-trades. Their authority gives the misinformation legitimacy. And while I would never make the argument that Wikipedia is reliable, it is important to know why it isn't. Until you get to the real reason Wikipedia is unreliable, you'll never know what to actually be wary of. And in the end, you'll be unreliable to yourself.

TParis is an administrator on the English Wikipedia. He has edited the site since 2008.

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should use our opinion desk.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-13/In focus Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-13/Arbitration report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-13/Humour

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