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2012-03-26

Controversial content saga continues, while the Foundation tries to engage editors with merchandising and restructuring

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By Jan Eissfeldt and Tilman Bayer

Controversial content saga continues

A common calligraphic representation of Muhammad's name, currently used to illustrate the infobox of the article Muhammad

A new chapter opened in the controversial content saga this week, as fallout from an ArbCom ruling earlier this year regarding the handling of images of Muhammad (Signpost coverage). Among other parts of its decision, the committee approved by a 6–4 vote a remedy requesting the community to establish a final consensus on the content issue, which is beyond the authority of ArbCom. This request for comment (RfC) opened on March 20.

Request for comment

The discussion centers around ten questions and options for how to balance Wikipedia's policies and guidelines – which themselves require interpretation – with a view widely held in significant parts of Islam that prohibits the display of images of Muhammad.

To facilitate the process of reaching a decision, the RfC provides a short summary of historical facts – for example, the differences between Shia and Sunni views on the matter, and how Wikipedia has handled the case until now. The relevant key policies to be reconciled with any decision taken are verifiability and the neutral point of view.

Transwiki debates

The renewed discussion was quickly noticed by the German Wikipedia community, which has traditionally been very skeptical of the controversial content issue, and the Kurier picked up the story within hours. The resulting discussions focused on the different tools employed by the English and German communities to deal with controversies, and how widespread problems are in relation to aniconism. It was quickly pointed out that this view is not only held in Islam but in other religions as well.

The RfC came shortly after debates on another controversial content issue: allegations of child porn. The debate had taken center stage since allegations on March 7 on Commons and the wide-ranging transwiki discussions, in which Germans also played a prominent part, led to office action against one editor, Beta M, and shifts in Meta policy.

Next step

The request for comment will close at 23:59 on April 19, after which a team of three uninvolved administrators are set to perform the task of consensus analysis. Editors interested in taking part should take into account that ArbCom has authorized the use of discretionary sanctions on "all pages relating to Muhammad, broadly interpreted."

New Wikimedia shop

Foundation employees were drafted as models for the new merchandise shop, with photos taken in the streets around the WMF office in San Francisco

The Wikimedia Foundation has begun the "community launch" of the new official Wikimedia merchandise store, offering Wikipedia T-shirts, hoodies, pins etc., with the goal "provid[ing] affordable high-quality merchandise to the project volunteers and the general public to reward its volunteers and spread the Wikimedia and project brands around the world", according to the FAQ by James Alexander, who recently became merchandise manager at the Foundation (moving from the Community Department).

Wikipedians have expressed the wish to be able to show their affiliation with the project by means of a Wikipedia T-shirt as early as 2001, and around the time of Wikipedia's first anniversary in January 2002, a T-shirt design vote was held (with one suggested slogan proudly proclaiming "20,000 articles created in one year"). A CafePress store was set up, but is now being discontinued in favor of the new outlet, because there "we had low-quality merchandise and made basically no money (while Cafepress made quite a lot and had rights to use our trademarks)", as Alexander explains. The new shop currently uses the Shopify platform and has a San Francisco–based contractor help with order fulfillment and shipping, but is hosted on a wikimedia.org domain.

Back in 2001, merchandise had been thought of as a possible source of income to cover the costs of hosting Wikipedia, but the annual fundraising has long been found to be a more effective means of achieving this, and the FAQ makes it clear that the shop is "not intended to become a profit center. The proceeds go back into the shop to keep costs low, subsidize shipping and help provide merch specifically to community members."

Other than through the old CafePress store, "the only normal way to get merchandise was specific real life events (Wikimania, Wiki10 etc.) or doing something special with the WMF or a chapter", says Alexander, referring to the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia last year, which – like the first anniversary – provided another impulse for the development of global Wikipedia merchandise: the Foundation developed "party packs" consisting of T-shirts, buttons and other items designed for the celebrations, and mailed them to Wikimedia chapters or other affiliated groups worldwide, gaining experience in the global delivery of such items (Signpost coverage). Affordable global shipping and the involvement of Wikimedia chapters continue to be objectives of the new shop.

James Alexander illustrates the outreach power of Wikipedia merchandise with an anecdote: "At a GLAM event late last year in NYC, four or five Wikimedians were outside the museum after meetings, talking. One of them had an old Wikipedia bag that was recognized by a girl walking by. She ran up and asked them if they 'really edited Wikipedia'. When they said yes she 'giggled', asked if she could hug them (and did), and then just said that they had no idea what the project meant for her, and ran off." To expand the current choice, community members' design ideas are being solicited, in particular for merchandise for Wikipedia's sister projects.

Foundation restructures to focus on editor retention

Steven Walling and Maryana Pinchuk, pictured at WikiSampa 12 earlier this month, are two members of the Foundation's new editor engagement experiments team, having worked on user warning message testing on the English Wikipedia over the past year.

On March 21, Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director, announced a change in the structure of WMF departments and the creation of a new editor engagement experiments team to look at new options to tackle declining participation in Wikimedia projects.

The shake-up notably sees the disintegration of the current Community department, from which the new team's members are mostly drawn. The unit, created in June 2010 to engage with and support an expansive vision of the Wikimedia community that included readers and donors (Signpost coverage), will in the future focus on fundraising. Some of its remaining staff members will be moved to the Engineering and the Global Development departments.

The announcement sparked discussions on foundation-l, questioning whether it is wise to focus primarily on quantifying wiki activities rather than widening the focus to include the quality of new contributors and the costs of experimentation in the area. The departmental changes as such are aimed at pooling resources on issues related to projects such as the Visual Editor, a context in which the new team is supposed "to conduct many quick experiments", and will take effect on April 16.

Brief notes

2012-03-26

WikiProject Rock Music

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By Mabeenot
WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Current selected picture at the Rock Music Portal featuring Metallica live in London in 2003
A street sign reading "U2 Way" was added to 53rd Street in Manhattan during the promotion of U2's album No Line on the Horizon
Phil Campbell of Motörhead in New York City in 2011

This week, we rocked it out with WikiProject Rock Music. Started in June 2006, the project has grown to include 62 Featured Articles, 45 Featured Lists, and 213 Good Articles. Project members maintain a to-do list and work on reducing rock-related unreferenced biographies of living people. The project has two task forces and a variety of sub-projects covering sub-genres and individual bands. We interviewed Sabrebd.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Rock Music? Do you prefer a specific sub-genre of rock music? What is your favorite band?

I joined the project because I realised that a lot of my editing would be in the area of rock music and wanted to be able to respond to requests from other users and to be able to ask for help if I needed it. As I get older I find it harder and harder to say what my favourite act or genre is, as I have listened to so many. I also edit [articles about] bands and particularly acts that I have very little vested interest in: you don't have to love them to give them a good article and it may actually help if you are not a committed fan to adopt a neutral point of view.

How active do you feel the project has been over the past few months? Do efforts to improve rock articles tend to be decentralized? Are there any obstacles that may be preventing the project from growing?

The project is not very active. I am not sure what very active would look like as most of the projects to which I belong operate on a relatively low level. This may be unavoidable, they are, after all not forums for chatting with friends or having abstract arguments and I am not sure members would want that even if it were offered as the internet is full of that sort of thing. I rarely decide what I am doing by going through lists of work that needs to be done, as after several years of editing I probably know that as well as anyone else. I also try to make sure that Wikipedia remains my hobby and therefore avoid being too systematic, as strange as that may seem. Nevertheless the project is useful when some issue that affects several articles comes up, or where an article or debate needs some additional input and for keeping a check on how Wikipedia is progressing. I also think that the size of Wikipedia now makes it hard for these projects to function as they once did. Getting all the rock related articles to GA or FA status would be more than a lifetimes work for one individual.

The project is home to 62 Featured Articles, 45 Featured Lists, and 209 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? What are some challenges to improving rock music articles to FA or GA status?

I have contributed to making a grand total of four rock related articles to GA status, including Rock music and Led Zeppelin; the latter is currently being assessed for FA status. That does not sound like much, but it was quite a lot of work. I also do not particularly pursue status awards: it is usually enough for me to know I have improved an article and I look to those processes more for getting comment on further improvement. Most of time the GA process works well, but because it is an individual assessment feedback can be a bit idiosyncratic. Usually it just takes some focused time and patience to implement the suggestions to get the status.

How frequently do you deal with a band's fans, publicists, or detractors adding puffery or vandalism to articles? How do you typically respond? Have any editors you've dealt with for point of view (POV) or conflict of interest (COI) issues later become productive members of the project?

Drive-by vandalism is probably a large part of this, but it is usually easily dealt with. There are sufficient regular editors that mean that, normally, if I do not catch some vandalism, someone else will. Drive-by puffery is less of a problem, but we do get the odd determined fan. If they are simply adding and re-adding puffery, that can be dealt with as long as there enough editors around to support a neutral point of view. The hardest editors to deal with are those that carry out bad edits but with good intentions: they tend to keep coming back and it is almost impossible to explain to them that information must be neutral, sourced and encyclopedic. These editors can take up a lot of time and effort. I would like to think that offering help and guidance to problematic editors has produced some useful and productive members, but I cannot remember a single one. Most of the difficult editors simply stop editing; the ones that prove positive in the long run tend to be positive at the start.

How much does the membership of WikiProject Rock Music overlap with projects for other music genres? Does WikiProject Rock Music collaborate with any other projects?

A lot of personnel belong to other related projects such as projects on music or music genres. Collaboration between projects is not really how it works. It is more that editors will tend to assemble themselves on an article or talkpage for a specific purpose. That is probably just inevitable given the way Wikipedia works.

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Since there is a regular turnover of editors on Wikipedia the project always needs new members, particularly if they will take on some of the many stubs and starter articles and try to expand and improve them. My feeling is that someone will always add articles for new bands and trends, but in Wikipedia's second phase improving and expanding those articles is the major challenge. We also need editors that are aware of current trends and bands to keep adding articles on these things or the whole thing will ossify. It would be even better if these articles conformed to Wikipedia guidelines, but if they do not someone will eventually make them do so.

Anything else you'd like to add?

I count on a nucleus of committed editors to get feedback, occasional support (sometimes productive disagreement) and to correct my errors. Many of these are members of the project. So if it didn't exist we would probably need to invent it.


Next week, we'll report about the reporters. Until then, explore Signpost history in the archive.

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2012-03-26

Malfunctioning sharks, toothcombs and a famous mother: featured content for the week

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By Mathew Townsend and Crisco 1492
This edition covers content promoted between 18 and 24 March 2012
An orange-red flowered cultivar of Xerochrysum bracteatum, a newly featured article

Featured articles

A photograph by Allan Warren of Georg Solti, the subject of a new featured article. Solti was an orchestral and operatic conductor who worked with orchestras in three countries during his sixty-year career; he also made more than 250 recordings.
The sublingua is a secondary tongue below the primary tongue used to remove hair and debris from the toothcomb of lemuriforms. From the new featured article Toothcomb.
The new featured article Jesse L. Brown shows the acclaimed aviator in the cockpit of his F4U Corsair during the Korean War in late 1950. Brown died from his wounds after it crashed. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart Medal and the Air Medal.
All four members of Coldplay wrote "Princess of China", on which Rihanna appears as a featured vocalist. Additional songwriting was contributed by Brian Eno. From the new featured List of songs recorded by Rihanna
A new featured picture of a KIM-1 computer, released in 1976 and on display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL, Lausanne.

Nine featured articles were promoted this week:

  • Xerochrysum bracteatum (nom) by Casliber. Xerochrysum bracteatum, commonly known as the golden everlasting, is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae native to Australia. Described by Étienne Pierre Ventenat in 1803, it was known as Helichrysum bracteatum before being transferred to a new genus Xerochrysum in 1990. It grows as a woody or herbaceous perennial or annual shrub up to a meter (3 ft) tall with green or grey leafy foliage. Golden yellow or white flower heads are produced from spring to autumn; their distinctive feature is the papery bracts that resemble petals. The species is widespread, growing in a variety of habitats, from rain forest margins to deserts and sub-alpine areas.
  • Georg Solti (nom) by Tim riley. Sir Georg Solti, KBE, (1912–1997) was a Hungarian orchestral and operatic conductor, best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Hungary, he studied in Budapest with Béla Bartók, Leo Weiner and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis, and as a Jew he fled the increasingly restrictive anti-semitic laws in 1938. Known in his early years for the intensity of his music making, Solti was widely considered to have mellowed as a conductor in later years. He recorded many works two or three times at various stages of his career, and was a prolific recording artist, making more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets.
  • Thurman Tucker (nom) by Wizardman. Thurman Lowell Tucker (1917–1993) was an American center fielder in Major League Baseball. Born in Gordon, Texas, Tucker first played baseball professionally with the Siloam Springs Travelers beginning in 1936. In 1937, he suffered a back injury which left him benched for most of the season; he returned in 1939 with the Clarksdale Red Sox. After four years, often changing teams, Tucker was signed by Chicago White Sox; five years later he was traded to the Cleveland Indians. In 1951 Tucker retired, having spent the previous two years as a backup outfielder. In 701 career games, Tucker recorded a batting average of .255 and accumulated 24 triples, 9 home runs, and 179 runs batted in (RBI).
  • Toothcomb (nom) by Maky. A toothcomb (tooth comb, dental comb) is a dental structure most commonly known in lemuriform primates (a group which includes lemurs and lorisoids). Similar dental structures can be found in other mammals, including colugos, tree shrews, and some African antelopes, but these structures were evolved independently through convergent evolution. Toothcombs vary in dental composition and structure. The toothcomb of lemuriform primates include incisors and canine teeth that tilt forward at the front of the lower jaw, followed by a canine-shaped first premolar. The toothcombs in other animals usually include incisors only.
  • Jaws (film) (nom) by Igordebraga and DocKino. Jaws is a 1975 American thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg about a man-eating shark that attacks beach-goers on Amity Island, New England, and the townspeople's efforts to kill it; the film is based on Peter Benchley's novel of the same name. Because of trouble with the mechanical sharks, to show the shark's presence Spielberg used representative props and a minimalistic music theme—a theme that has entered popular culture. The film was widely released, promoted with aggressive marketing, and became the highest grossing film of all time to that point.
  • Capcom Five (nom) by Axem Titanium. The Capcom Five is a set of five video games unveiled by Capcom in late 2002 and published from March 2003. The five games were P.N.03, a futuristic third-person shooter; Viewtiful Joe, a side-scrolling action-platformer; Dead Phoenix, a shoot 'em up; Resident Evil 4, a survival horror third-person shooter; and Killer7, an action-adventure game with first-person shooter elements. Of the five games, Dead Phoenix was canceled and only P.N.03 retained its status as a GameCube exclusive, despite being a critical and commercial failure. Viewtiful Joe and Killer7 sold modestly yet gained a significant cult following.
  • Jesse L. Brown (nom) by Ed!. Jesse LeRoy Brown (1926 – 1950) was the first African-American naval aviator in the United States Navy, and the first naval officer killed in the Korean War. At the outset of the war, the Leyte was ordered to the Korean Peninsula, arriving in October 1950. Brown, an ensign, flew 20 combat missions before his F4U Corsair aircraft came under fire and crashed on a remote mountaintop on 4 December 1950 during a mission supporting ground troops at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. Brown died of his wounds in spite of efforts by wingman Thomas J. Hudner, Jr., who intentionally crashed his aircraft attempting a rescue.
  • Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (nom) by Yllosubmarine. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 nonfiction narrative book by American author Annie Dillard. Written in the first-person, the book details an unnamed narrator's explorations and contemplations on nature and life. The title refers to Tinker Creek, which is located outside Roanoke in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. Dillard began writing Pilgrim in the spring of 1973, using her personal journals as inspiration. Separated into four sections that signify each of the seasons, the narrative takes place over the period of one year and records the narrator's thoughts and scientific observations on flora and fauna.
  • James G. Blaine (nom) by Coemgenus. James Gillespie Blaine (1830–93) was an American Republican politician who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, United States Senator from Maine, and twice as Secretary of State. He was nominated for president in 1884, but was narrowly defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland. As Secretary of State, Blaine was a transitional figure, marking the end of an isolationist era in foreign policy and foreshadowing the rise of the American century that began with the Spanish-American War. An expansionist, Blaine's policies led to the United States' acquisition of Pacific colonies and dominance of the Caribbean.
Delisted featured article
  • Héctor Lavoe (review) was delisted on the basis of concerns about comprehensiveness, quality of the sources, and quality of prose.

Featured lists

One featured list was promoted this week:

  • List of songs recorded by Rihanna (nom) by Calvin999. Barbadian singer Rihanna has recorded material for her six studio albums and has collaborated with other artists for duets and featured songs on their respective albums and charity singles. Since her career began in 2005, Rihanna has recorded more than 100 released songs, some on her own and some in collaboration with artists such as Jay-Z, J-Status, and Maroon 5; she has also recorded six unreleased songs, four of which have leaked.

Featured pictures

Eight featured pictures were promoted this week:

  • Pope Nicholas V (nom; related article), created by Peter Paul Rubens and nominated by Crisco 1492. The new featured picture, an oil on panel painting that dates from the early 1600s, depicts Pope Nicholas V. Nicholas V reigned for eight years, from 1447 to 1455, in which time he promoted humanism, was a patron of the arts, and permitted the slavery of non-Christians. The Pope was well-received in his time.
  • [[:|Jesse Owens in Berlin]] (nom; related article), creator unknown and nominated by Tomer T. Held by the US Library of Congress, it shows Jesse Owens at start of his record-breaking 200 metre race during the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. The African-American Owens won four medals at the Berlin games, which distressed the German leader Adolf Hitler, who had intended to showcase Aryan superiority. Owens' success brought him international fame. The original picture has been lightened and some preferred the original.
  • Queen Christina (film poster) (nom; related article), created by Employee(s) of MGM, with some cleanup by Crisco 1492 and nominated by Crisco 1492. The new featured picture is a film poster for the 1933 Greta Garbo vessel Queen Christina, a historical costume drama based on the life of Christina, Queen of Sweden. The film, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, has had generally favorable reviews.
  • Amplexus (common toad) (nom; related article), created by Bernie Kohl and nominated by Crisco 1492. The new featured picture depicts a 65-millimetre (2.6 in) long male common toad and a 95-millimetre (3.7 in) long female toad in a state of amplexus. Amplexus, a form of pseudo-copulation in which a male amphibian grasps a female with his front legs and releases sperm, can last for several days and is usually done in water, although it can be done on land as well.
  • Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (nom; related article), created by James Whistler and nominated by Crisco 1492. James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, a 60.3 cm × 46.6 cm (23.7 in × 18.3 in) painting depicting fireworks in London, was critically derided at its unveiling; critic John Ruskin likened it to "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face"). In response, Whistler brought a court case for libel against Ruskin. Although Whistler won, the case bankrupted him.
  • Saturn Devouring His Son (nom; related article), created by Francisco Goya and nominated by Crisco 1492. This untitled painting, often called Saturn Devouring His Son, is one of Goya's Black Paintings, which were painted onto the walls of his house near Madrid and later transferred to canvas. It depicts the god Saturn (or Chronos) eating one of his children. To quote reviewer Enthdegree, "If [shock and provocation] is the emotion the artist meant to provoke, I can't say he didn't accomplish that."
  • MOS KIM-1 (nom; related article), created by Rama and nominated by Tomer T. The new featured picture depicts an MOS KIM-1 computer, on display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL, Lausanne. The KIM-1 was a small, relatively inexpensive computer which was easily expandable; it sold well after being launched in 1976. Among other features, the computer included a Terminal Interface Monitor and a 24-key calculator-type keypad.
  • Whistler's Mother (nom; related article), created by James McNeill Whistler and nominated by Crisco 1492. An iconic image of American art, Whistler's 1871 masterpiece Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (better known by the colloquial name Whistler's Mother) was promoted to featured status this week. The painting, which is housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and rarely shown in the United States, depicts Whistler's mother, Anna McNeill Whistler; it is rumored that another model may have been intended.
Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, otherwise known as Whistler's Mother, a new featured picture, is said to be the most famous American painting housed outside the United States.


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2012-03-26

Race and intelligence review at evidence, article titles closed

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By Whenaxis

The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving one open.

Closed cases

Article titles and capitalisation (Week 9)

This case was brought to the Committee by SarekOfVulcan to "break the back" of a long-running dispute involving pages governing article naming and the Manual of Style (MoS). The case was closed on March 24 after a week of voting by arbitrators. Passing principles include a statement on the status of the MoS guideline, addressing how it is not "a collection of hard rules" and how changes to MoS pages should reflect consensus.

Beyond the principles in the decision, arbitrators found that Pmanderson has had a long history of conduct issues and had abused an alternate account in the course of the dispute, and that Born2cycle's behaviour in the topic area has hindered attempts to resolve the dispute. As a result, Pmanderson was indefinitely restricted from engaging in discussions and edits relating to the Manual of Style or policy concerning article titles, and Born2cycle was warned to be more open to compromise. In addition, discretionary sanctions have been authorised for all pages relating to MoS and article titles policy.

Open cases

Race and intelligence review (Week 2)

A review was opened of the Race and intelligence case as a compromise between opening a new case and ruling by motion. The review is intended to be a simplified form of a full case and will cover conduct issues that have purportedly arisen since the closure of the 2010 arbitration case. The evidence phase is expected to close soon, to be followed by the posting of the proposed decision by next week.

Other requests and committee action

2012-03-26

Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature

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By Tilman Bayer, Dario Taraborelli, Jodi.a.schneider, Nicolas Jullien and Piotr Konieczny
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee and republished as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

How editors evaluate each other: effects of status and similarity

A team of social computing researchers based at Stanford and Cornell University studied how users evaluate each other in social media.[1] Their paper, presented at the 5th ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM '12), focuses on three main case studies: Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Epinions. User-to-user evaluations, the authors note, are jointly influenced by the properties of the evaluator and the target; as a result, differences in properties between the target and the evaluator should be expected to affect the evaluation. The study looks specifically at how differences in topic expertise and status affect peer evaluations. The Wikipedia case focuses on requests for adminship (RfAs), the most prominent example of peer evaluation in Wikipedia and a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the literature (Signpost research coverage: September 2011, October 2011, January 2012). Similarity is measured based on article co-authorship, and status as a function of an editor's number of contributions. Previous research by the same authors showed that the probability an evaluator will evaluate a target user positively drops dramatically when the status of the two users is very similar, and there is general evidence that homophily and similarity in editing activity have a strong influence on peer evaluation in RfAs. The study identifies two effects that jointly account for this singular finding:

  • “Elite” or high-status users are more likely to participate in evaluations about other users who are active in their areas of interest or expertise.
  • Low-status users tend to be judged differently than those with moderate or high status

In a direct application of these results, dubbed ballot-blind prediction, the authors show how the outcome of an RfA can be accurately predicted by a model that simply considers the first few participants in a discussion and their attributes, without looking at their actual evaluations of the target.

Sociological analysis of debates about flagged revisions in the English, German and French Wikipedias

Icon for accepted
At the center of debates on "Coercion or empowerment": Icons signifying accepted (left) and not yet accepted (right) revisions under a flagged revisions scheme

In an article to appear in Ethics and Information Technology, Paul B. de Laat analysed debates occurring in the English, German and French Wikipedias about the evolution of the rules governing new edits.[2] As noted by the analysis of the English Wikipedia's rules, by Butler et al., 2008,[3] these rules are numerous and have increased in number and complexity; they range from the more formal and explicit (intellectual property rights) to the more informal.

De Laat's work is based on a study of the discussions around the proposal to introduce a system of reviewing edits before they appear on screen (flagged revisions, discussed on English Wikipedia at Wikipedia:Flagged revisions). It focuses on the perennial debate around the construction of knowledge commons theorized by Elinor Ostrom:[4] being a collective, open project, it must be accessible to most, but as its production becomes important for its "owners" (readers and producers), boundaries have to be set to protect its integrity. De Laat's article describes and analyzes the tensions and permanent adjustments needed to manage these apparently opposed goals.

In a Weberian analysis of bureaucracy, applicable to Wikipedia policies, he shows that two views can be invoked to explain the intensity of the discussions. He summarizes the debate as a clash between (i) those who saw the flagged revisions as "a useful tool for curbing vandalism", enabling and empowering users and editors, and (ii) those who denounced it as "a superfluous bureaucratic device that violates egalitarian principles of participation", designed to introduce a more controlled and hierarchical environment. He muses that "an intriguing question that remains to be answered, of course, is: What brought the three language communities to ultimately choose or reject such a review system? Why is it that, each in their own ways, the Germans voted for acceptance, the French for rejection, while the English have been wavering all the time between acceptance and rejection"? (p. 11) This question, and Wikipedians' views of flagged revisions, can shine light onto what kind of community Wikipedia should be, according to various factions of editors. As De Laat answers it, "many of those who reject the system of review do so from a vision of Wikipedia as an unbounded community that shares knowledge without mutual control and suspicion, while many of those who embrace the review system do so because they have a vision of Wikipedia as an organization producing reliable knowledge that keeps vandalism outside its borders". De Laat suggests that further research is needed to fully understand the factors affecting the decisions on different Wikipedias taken with regard to flagged revisions, postulating a hypothesis to be tested in further research that "those whose mother tongue is German may possibly be more deferential to hierarchy than those who speak either French or English, and therefore may prefer the order and respectability introduced by a system of reviewing".

Understanding collaboration-related dialog in Simple English Wikipedia

In a paper published by the European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics,[5] Oliver Ferschke and coauthors describe a study of talkpages on the Simple English Wikipedia. This paper uses speech act theory and dialog acts as a theoretical framework for studying how authors use discussion pages to collaborate on article improvement. They have released a freely downloadable corpus of 100 segmented and annotated talk pages, called the Simple English Wikipedia Discussion Corpus and based on a new annotation schema for coordination-related dialog acts. Their schema uses 17 categories, grouped into these four top-level categories: article criticism, explicit performative announce, information content, and the interpersonal. The authors use their corpus to develop a machine-learning-based UIMA pipeline for dialog act classification, which they describe but which is not freely available. They provide a useful discussion of conversational implicature theory and good pointers to seminal and new research in dialog acts. (A longer, editable summary is available on AcaWiki.)

Majority of UK academics prohibit students from using Wikipedia, but use it just as frequently themselves

An article appearing in "Teaching in Higher Education"[6] "discusses the use of Wikipedia by academics and students for learning and teaching activities at Liverpool Hope University, [considering] the findings to be indicative of Wikipedia use at other British universities". Having sent email invitations to all staff and students at the university, they received responses from 133 academics and 1222 students. 75% of the student respondents said they used Wikipedia for "some purpose", which according to the authors indicates that Wikipedia use "has risen appreciably in a short period of time" among British university students, citing a 2009 study[7] which had put that number at only 17.1%. "However", they cautioned, usage was "significantly lower than usage in the USA."

Among the surveyed teaching staff, almost the same percentage (74%) used Wikipedia "for some purpose" as their students—but just 24% of them "tell their students to use Wikipedia for Learning and Teaching purposes, with 18% having not mentioned it to students and 58% having expressly told them not to." The independence of academics' answers to these two questions is highlighted by the authors as

"a key finding of the survey: there is little difference between academics that permit their students to use Wikipedia and those who do not in respect to their own use. In particular, amongst both groups, academics that used Wikipedia ‘frequently’ seem to exhibit similar usage profiles. It was indicated in the commentary that the critical difference was that they have the scholarly expertise to determine what material on Wikipedia was ‘correct’ and that which was not."

In the conclusion the authors observe that "a significant proportion of what we would see as enlightened academics at Liverpool Hope and no doubt elsewhere realise that it is pointless to try to hold back the online tide of Wikipedia. Instead, they try to give guidance in the way that students consult it: for clarification, references, comparison and definitions."

A systematic review of the Wikipedia literature

"The people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia"[8] is the title of a working paper which promises to be a major milestone in Wikipedia research. It is an attempt to synthesize a broad-based literature review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. The task of creating a comprehensive database of such publications has seen several efforts before and its difficulties were explored in a well-attended workshop at last year's WikiSym conference (see the October issue of this research report).

The authors intend to release their findings in a "Web 2.0" format through their wiki by the end of May 2012. The current paper is impressive in scope, but at 71 pages badly in need of a table of contents (the current version does not seem to adhere to any consistent manual of style, with headings using different font sizes and even colors) and clarifications (the current distinction between findings on p.12 and discussion on p. 19 seems somewhat arbitrary; the authors at one point promise a discussion of over 2,000 articles and in other places talk of a sample of 139) – perhaps due to its genesis (see below). Keeping in mind this is just a draft paper, we hope the final paper will have an improved flow and transparency. The presented methodology is useful for those interested in learning how to analyze large, thematic bodies of work using online databases. In one of their major contributions, the authors intend to present an overview of Wikipedia research grouped by themes (keywords), such as for example discussing research done on "vandalism reversion", "thesaurus construction" or "attitude towards Wikipedia". While the current draft is not yet comprehensive, it shows much potential, and in practice their wiki, which already groups the content with categories, may prove more useful as a reference work.

As explained by one of the authors, the paper merges two existing efforts, both of which already published drafts last year. And by choosing wikilit.referata.com as their platform, they embrace the work of a third party, Wikimedian User:Emijrp's "Wikipapers" wiki on the same domain. This follows discussions between the three parties reported in the January issue of this research report ("New effort at comprehensive wiki research literature database"). On the wiki, the authors acknowledge the modest efforts of a fourth party, namely this research report (which just released a dataset of all publications covered until the end of 2011): "We do not include any items published after June 2011, after which the Wikimedia Research Newsletter was formally inaugurated; we're letting them pick up from where we stop."

Briefly

  • External links in the English Wikipedia: A short paper by a team of Greek researchers presents statistics on the nature and quality of external links in the English Wikipedia, based on the October 2009 XML dump.[9] The analysis, although based on an outdated dataset, reveals insights into the distribution of links per article, the relation between external links and article length, and the proportion of dead links, which they quantify as 18% of the links in their corpus.
  • Wikipedia articles on StumbleUpon: Two short papers which are to be presented at a workshop titled "Searching 4 Fun!" collocated with the upcoming European Conference on Information Retrieval concern Wikipedia: "Serendipitous Browsing: Stumbling through Wikipedia"[10] examines which Wikipedia articles are being featured by users of the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. Based on a sample consisting of a random selection of half of the articles from the October 2011 dump, 15.13% of the articles of the English Wikipedia are contained in StumbleUpon's index (as opposed to less than 1% of both the French and the German Wikipedia, according to an initial investigation). The 100 articles with the most views by StumbleUpon users contained only one featured article, but twelve lists – among them the number one, the list of unusual deaths, which belongs to the "Bizarre/Oddities" category on StumbleUpon, as do four of the other top ten articles. A second position paper is titled "Searching Wikipedia: Learning the Why, the How, and the Role Played by Emotion"[11] proposes to examine users' search behavior, employing diary studies and a custom-built Firefox extension asking Wikipedia readers to record details about their informational requirement and the motivating situation driving the search.

  • Citations of open access articles in Wikipedia: An ArXiv preprint by researchers based at UNC-Chapel Hill and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, studying "indicators of scholarly impact in social media" (or "altmetrics"), reports on the number of citations to the open access scholarly literature that can be found in Wikipedia.[12] The study suggests that 5% of all 24,331 articles ever published until November 2010 in the seven journals of open-access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) are cited in Wikipedia. More statistics on the number of scholarly citations in Wikipedia by language and by publisher are available via the Wikipedia cite-o-meter.
  • First results from Article Feedback v5: The Wikimedia Foundation reported new results from the first stage of experiments with a fully redesigned article feedback tool.[13] The full report indicates that 45% of all reader suggestions (sampled from a random list of AFT5-enabled articles) were considered useful via a blind assessment performed by Wikipedia editors. The report also identifies differences in the overall volume of feedback posted via different designs and finds that asking readers to suggest what they were looking for outperforms comments with ratings.
  • Augmenting Wikipedia articles with Europeana items: A paper titled "Enabling the Discovery of Digital Cultural Heritage Objects through Wikipedia"[14] proposes a mechanism that allows users "to browse Wikipedia articles, which are augmented with items from the cultural heritage collection. Using Europeana as a case-study we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for encouraging users to spend longer exploring items in Europeana compared with the existing search provision."
  • Semantics for genes: Biochemists from the Gene Wiki project on Wikipedia report on "Building a biomedical semantic network in Wikipedia with Semantic Wiki Links".[15] Among other things, the paper mentions the introduction of {{SWL}}, an attempt to emulate some aspects of Semantic MediaWiki using Wikipedia's existing (non-semantic) MediaWiki version.
  • Live version of DBpedia: A paper[16] by the team behind the DBpedia project (which extracts structured data from Wikipedia) promises to explain the techniques behind a recent improvement, avoiding lags caused by infrequent updates. According to the abstract, "Wikipedia provides DBpedia with a continuous stream of updates, i.e. a stream of recently updated articles. DBpedia-Live processes that stream on the fly to obtain RDF data and stores the extracted data back to DBpedia."

References

  1. ^ Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Leskovec, J. (2012). Effects of user similarity in social media. Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining - WSDM '12(p. 703). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI • PDF Open access icon
  2. ^ de Laat, P. B. (2012). Coercion or empowerment? Moderation of content in Wikipedia as 'essentially contested' bureaucratic rules. Ethics and Information Technology, 1–13. Springer Netherlands. DOI Open access icon
  3. ^ Butler, B., Joyce, E., & Pike, J. (2008). Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: The nature and roles of policies and rules in Wikipedia. Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual CHI conference on Human factors in computing systems – CHI '08 (p. 1101). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI • PDF Open access icon
  4. ^ Hess, Charlotte and Ostrom, Elinor (2006) A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons, in Hess, C., & Ostrom, E. (Eds.). Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. MIT Press, 2006, pp. 41–81 Closed access icon
  5. ^ Ferschke, O., Gurevych, I., & Chebotar, Y. (2012). Behind the Article: Recognizing Dialog Acts in Wikipedia Talk Pages. Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2012). PDF Open access icon
  6. ^ Knight, C., & Pryke, S. (2012). Wikipedia and the University, a case study. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–11. Routledge. DOI Closed access icon
  7. ^ Hampton-Reeves, S., Mashiter, C., Westaway, J., Lumsden, P., Day, H., Hewertson, H., & Hart, A. (2009). Students' Use of Research Content in Teaching and Learning Behaviour. JISC, PDF Open access icon
  8. ^ Okoli, C., Mehdi, M., Mesgari, M., Nielsen, F. Å., & Lanamäki, A. (2012). The people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. SSRN eLibrary. SSRN. HTML Open access icon
  9. ^ Tzekou, P., Stamou, S., Kirtsis, N., & Zotos, N. (2011). "Quality assessment of Wikipedia external links." In J. Cordeiro & J. Filipe (Eds.), WEBIST 2011, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (pp. 248-254). PDF Open access icon
  10. ^ Hauff, C., & Houben, G.-J. (2012). Serendipitous Browsing: Stumbling through Wikipedia. In D. Elsweiler, M. L. Wilson, & M. Harvey (Eds.), Proceedings of the “Searching 4 Fun!” workshop, collocated with the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR2012) Barcelona, Spain, April 1, 2012. (pp. 21-24) PDF Open access icon
  11. ^ Knäusl, H. (2012). Searching Wikipedia: Learning the Why, the How, and the Role Played by Emotion. In D. Elsweiler, M. L. Wilson, & M. Harvey (Eds.), Proceedings of the "Searching 4 Fun!" Workshop, collocated with the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR2012) Barcelona, Spain, April 1, 2012. (pp. 14-15). PDF Open access icon
  12. ^ Priem, J., Piwowar, H. A., & Hemminger, B. H. (2012). Altmetrics in the Wild: Using Social Media to Explore Scholarly Impact. ArXiV. PDFOpen access icon
  13. ^ Florin, F., Fung, H., Halfaker, A., Keyes, O., & Taraborelli, D. (2012). Helping readers improve Wikipedia: First results from Article Feedback v5. Wikimedia Foundation blog. HTML Open access icon
  14. ^ Hall, M. M., Clough, P. D., Lopez de Lacalle, O., Soroa, A., & Agirre, E. (2012). Enabling the Discovery of Digital Cultural Heritage Objects through Wikipedia. PDF Open access icon
  15. ^ Good, B. M., Clarke, E. L., Loguercio, S., & Su, A. I. (2012). Building a biomedical semantic network in Wikipedia with Semantic Wiki Links. Database : The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, 2012, DOIOpen access icon
  16. ^ Morsey, M., Lehmann, J., Auer, S., Stadler, C., & Hellmann, S. (2012). DBpedia and the Live Extraction of Structured Data from Wikipedia. Program: Electronic library and information systems, 46(2), 2. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. PDF Closed access icon


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2012-03-26

Universities unite for GLAM; and High Schools get their due

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By Davidpar, Kippelboy, Thelmadatter, and Pharos

Wikischools: High schools outreach for Catalan Wikipedia

by Davidpar and Kippelboy

While the Wikipedia Ambassador Program has worked with college-level courses, pre-college education has been the focus of the Viquiescoles project ("Wikischools") at the Catalan language Wikipedia, with the 2012 edition already underway. This is an initiative promoted by Amical Viquipèdia (an association of Catalan-speaking Wikimedians) that gathers teachers for an editing workshop that shows both the basics of using Wikipedia, and the advantages of using it in classrooms. This teachers' workshop is later complemented with a competition where the teachers' students draft Wikipedia articles on a separate wiki, qualifying for various prizes. The best articles are then transferred to Catalan Wikipedia.

Wikischools exhibits peculiarities that make it a unique project: it combines teachers from different parts of the Catalan-speaking territories (and thus encourages the exchange of views and experiences); moreover it includes elements of reflection that go beyond a simple technical workshop to make the program an opportunity to discuss issues such as shared knowledge, the role of students in class, the actual use of new technologies in education and the promotion of critical thinking, among others.

In this year's edition, 16 teachers from 15 high schools are participating in the program. Teachers from both secondary schools and vocational schools are represented.

The program began in 2010 in the Balearic Islands, and in 2011 a test phase was conducted simultaneously in several territories, with the result that around 70 articles were included on Wikipedia. This year, the organisers expect to exceed those numbers, and hope to be attentive to the evolution of the newcomers into the next generation of full Wikipedians, whose contributions you will soon be able to read in the Catalan Wikipedia.

Universities unite for Mexico GLAM Editathon

by Thelmadatter
Students Jeanny Mos and Brass3a4 along with ProtoplasmaKid, Correogsk and a reporter for Radio México.

On 3 March 2012, Mexico had its first ever edit-a-thon, held at the Museo de Arte Popular (Popular Art Museum) in the historic center of Mexico City. While numerous edit-a-thons had been held in various institutions, one important element of the success of this event was the involvement of two of Mexico’s major institutions of higher education.

Students from ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México and the newly formed student group at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa joined with Wikimedia México to create six new articles, five in Spanish and one in English: Palo fierro (ironwood carving), Carlomagno Pedro Martínez (ceramicist), Colorantes naturals (natural dyes) (a translation from the English Wikipedia), Cerámica de Mata Ortiz (Mata Ortiz ceramics), Familia Soteno (Soteno family) and (in English) Alfeñique in Mexico.

This collaboration among Wikipedia groups not only made the event a success, but also allowed for members of said groups to connect face-to-face and discuss future events with mutual support.

Notes in chalk

2012-03-26

A busy week: Git switchover, mobile site upgraded, and still time for three security releases

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By Jarry1250 and Josh Parris

MediaWiki core and WMF extensions now using Git; new code review system kicks in

“ I want to thank *everyone* for being so totally awesome with this process. I've put a lot of work into trying to do this right and the feedback (positive and negative) has been immensely helpful and at times nearly overwhelming :) ”

—Developer Chad Horohoe, who oversaw the migration

As scheduled, on March 21 ("Git day"), MediaWiki was officially switched over from the older version control system Subversion to the newer competing system Git. As a result, developers ceased to be able to use Subversion to contribute to core MediaWiki code or over 100 of its WMF-deployed extensions. The switchover went remarkably close to plan, although the preceding code review backlog meant that some 100 revisions had to be initially reverted and then reintroduced afterwards as new-style patchsets. Developers are also now rapidly getting acquainted with the new code review system Gerrit, the Git-friendly replacement to the MediaWiki-based Subversion code review system that had been in use for years. Non-WMF-deployed extensions remain Subversion-based, though many will be moved over to Git in the coming weeks.

The changes sparked numerous threads on the wikitech-l mailing list as developers started to come to grips with the issues arising from the switch. Such issues ranged from working out the changes a developer made when amending a patchset to creating naming conventions and figuring out how to download MediaWiki releases and other snapshots directly from the central Git repository. A separate thread addressed problems in assigning ChangeIds (a vital new identifier used for code review) during merges and part-merges, whilst the question of managing Gerrit user permissions (such as the ability to approve code) was described in significant detail in another thread by Volunteer Development Co-ordinator Sumana Harihareswara. Overall, there seemed to be a sense of cautious optimism among the developer community that all the glitches and performance bottlenecks could be resolved in time.

Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier described the way ahead: "In the short term, we're still deploying [to Wikimedia wikis] from Subversion... [so] all non-urgent deployments should hang on until we finish the work here ... We're currently planning security releases [see In brief] for 1.17, 1.18, and 1.19, which will be released from Git. In the medium term, we plan to have far more frequent deployments, starting as early as April 9. ... With the combination of Git and the workflow changes it enables, we're pretty excited by our new ability to deploy code more frequently, and we're pretty optimistic that we'll be able to actually get that benefit sooner rather than later".

Beta-enabled visitors to mobile site to receive significant upgrade

An example screen from the mobile site, showing the "in place" citation display system in operation

The latest features developed for Wikipedias' mobile site variants will be going live to beta users immediately, it was announced this week. The updates being deployed include "changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience", the announcement revealed.

One new feature that has the potential to make it in some form into the desktop site is the inclusion of an "in place" citation display system. Under the new system being introduced, [1][2][3]-style links on the mobile site will prompt a simple dismissible overlay of the content of the citation (pictured right), rather than scrolling the browser down to the applicable references section. The WMF team behind the update are keen to receive as much feedback as possible on this and all other aspects of the update, according to Software Developer Jon Robson, who made the announcement. He asked users interested in testing out the new features to opt-in to using them and then to try browsing their Wikipedia's mobile site (e.g. http://en.m.wikipedia.org), reporting any problems to a dedicated page on MediaWiki.org.

Improving performance of Wikimedia wikis on handheld devices was targeted as an area of "high strategic significance" in March 2011's product whitepaper, with the particular aim of expanding Wikimedia's audience in areas of the world with comparatively few desktop computers. The latest available statistics show that the mobile site – not to be confused with either the official Wikimedia Android app or its iOS counterpart (both of which attempt to take advantage of device-specific feature sets) – now accounts for over 10% of all Wikipedia page view requests.

In brief

Signpost poll
3rd Party Auth

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

  • Security releases fix five loopholes: MediaWiki 1.19.0beta2, MediaWiki security and maintenance release 1.18.2 and MediaWiki security and maintenance release 1.17.3 were all released this week, each targeting the same collection of five security loopholes (the 1.19 release also included numerous other bugfixes as part of the standard beta-release programme). The loopholes included problems with cross-site scripting and the ability of the password reset function to stand up to a dedicated and well-resourced attack. No evidence has emerged to suggest that any of the five have been exploited on Wikimedia wikis; non-Wikimedia wikis are advised to upgrade immediately to avoid lingering security concerns.
  • Replag problems hit Toolserver, resolved soon: The enactment on the English Wikipedia of a schema change brought in with MediaWiki 1.19 earlier this month (aimed at allowing identical wikitext to be identified far easier than before) caused numerous problems this week with the Toolserver, where replication lag graphs started to indicate that no replication was in fact happening. This prompted numerous bots and tools (not all relating directly to the English Wikipedia) to automatically shut down, a situation preserved by the need for the Toolserver copy of the English Wikipedia to receive the same schema change (and the unfortunate fact that one such part of that schema change was reset partway through by a full hard disk). Toolserver performance is expected to improve on Friday.
  • Release candidates for Wikimedia apps released: Release candidates for the latest version of the Wikipedia App (v1.1 for Android and v3.1 for iOS) have now been released (mobile-l mailing list). The builds, which should have no major bugs and therefore be of a releasable quality, can both be downloaded from http://dumps.wikimedia.org; the Android version can be installed immediately, whilst those wishing to test the iOS release need to pre-register. Though early indications suggest that a second release candidate will be needed, the occurrence of the builds is an indication that the numerous improvements included will be finding their way onto hundreds of thousands of devices soon.
  • SEO Watch questions Wikipedia rankings: A post on SEO Watch bemoaning the fact that "the presence of Wikipedia in such prominent positions means one less spot on both search engines" sparked angry responses from Wikimedia bloggers. For example, WMF Director of Community Advocacy Philippe Beaudette led the charge, arguing that Wikipedia achieves good rankings because of strong and voluminous content. SEO Watch also showed that Bing prioritises Wikipedia results more than Google.
  • Four bots approved: Four BRfAs were recently approved:
    1. RscprinterBot's 4th BRfA, to remove article categories from user pages
    2. AnomieBOT's 61st BRfA, to replace or remove instances of templates that "expire" ({{show by date}} or {{citation needed by}} for example)
    3. BattyBot's 9th BRfA, to remove article categories from user pages
    4. YFdyh-bot's BRfA, another interwiki bot, this one concentrating on English<->Chinese
At the time of this writing, 20 BRfAs are open. As always, community input is encouraged.

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