Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2014-02-26

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Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?

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Odin salutes you

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Racking brains with neuroscience

Special report
Diary of a protester: Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest

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Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy

Traffic report
Snow big deal

Recent research
CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism

 

2014-02-26

Should Wikimedia modify its terms of use to require disclosure?

By Smallbones and Pete Forsyth

About a week ago, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' terms of use to require disclosure of an editor's employer, client, and affiliation if they are being compensated for making the edits. We have asked two users, one in favor of the measure (Smallbones) and one opposed (Pete Forsyth), to contribute their opinions on the matter.

The views expressed in these op-eds are those of the authors only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor.

Smallbones: no commercial editing

Smallbones has been an English Wikipedia editor since 2005 and contributed thousands of photos to the Wikimedia Commons.

A week ago it looked like paid editing was ready to take over Wikipedia. The public relations firm Wiki-PR had been banned for employing hundreds of editors, possibly including our own administrators, to make thousands of edits, taking in perhaps a million dollars. But several editors argued that such a ban could not be enforced, and that we must "assume good faith," even of obvious advertisers. They argued that the problem was simply "point of view" editing, and that it could be dealt with easily, by just editing out the bias. Some even argued that we should get rid of our Conflict of Interest guideline.

The situation has now completely changed, with a proposed addition to the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use, which says that all paid editors must disclose their paid edits and who paid for the edits. It does not ban paid editing, require the outing of paid editors, or allow harassment of paid editors. How could anybody disagree with that? Whether you agree or disagree, your opinion is welcome on Meta.

The proposed amendment would stop future edits by Wiki-PR and similar firms by letting volunteer editors know which articles the advertisers edit, thereby making it easier to check whether the paid edits follow our rules, and change or remove those edits if necessary. The advertisers would have to identify their paid edits to avoid legal action. The only people directly affected would be unethical advertisers who would no longer be able to slip in advertisements on the sly. Paid editors would be indirectly affected as their pool of customers dries up.

Still, I would like the requirements to be stricter, including prohibiting commercial editing of articles by or on behalf of businesses. There would be little difficulty in enforcing this ban. An advertisement, however indirectly, almost always suggests that a specific business placed it. These businesses, including the clients of the Wiki-PRs of the world, would be responsible for the editing of their agents.

Ads are already prohibited on Wikipedia and have been from almost the beginning. First we prohibited link-spam, editing by organizations, and meat-puppetry. Then we prohibited advertising and promotion, and finally marketing and public-relations content. The firm MyWikiBiz was banned in 2006. Every six months or so a new firm is found to be advertising and is usually banned.

Advertisers have often ignored our policies and guidelines. The conflict-of-interest guideline is scoffed at as "unenforceable". Apparently, these rules are too vague and changeable to be taken seriously. Enforcement of the rules by administrators and the Arbitration Committee has been shamefully lax.

By putting the prohibition in the Terms of Use, rather than in each project's policies and guidelines, enforcement is possible by the Foundation's legal team. The prospect of a slam-dunk legal decision going against them will remarkably improve advertisers' understanding of our rules.

The worst aspect of paid editing is how it changes our community. Paid editors are notoriously difficult to work with, ganging up on volunteers, defending their biased edits to the bitter end, wiki-lawyering until our policies and guidelines seem to have no meaning. Paid editors don't engage in collegial discussions of their edits. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" As paid editors increase, they change the rules to make paid editing easier, which encourages new paid editors and drives volunteer editors away.

I'm not a lawyer but let's cover some legal basics. Advertising and marketing include any communication from a business to a potential customer that may result in a sale. Omitting the source of the communication is deceptive advertising, which is illegal almost everywhere. A German court ruled that editing on Wikipedia by a firm was illegal, even though the firm disclosed the edit, because the disclosure on the article's talk page wasn't conspicuous enough. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates most advertisements in the U.S., prohibits any business communication that may result in a sale unless there is clear and conspicuous disclosure of the advertiser. The FTC is now explaining and enforcing their rules on Internet advertising, as are the European Union and the U.S. states of New York and California.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Paid advocacy 2012–14 These governments would likely prefer not to have to enforce their rules directly in an environment as complicated as Wikipedia, but I'm sure they will if we don't enforce our rules ourselves and provide guidance to advertisers. "No advertising, no paid editing of articles by businesses" would be remarkably good, concise guidance. It would be best if the individual Wikimedia projects were to enforce the rules, taking into account the quirks of each individual project, but enforcement by the Foundation is better than no enforcement or enforcement by a government agency.

It's up to us, Wikipedia's volunteer editors. Let's get rid of commercial editing and advertising on Wikipedia.

Pete Forsyth: there are better ways of combating unethical paid editing

Pete Forsyth is the principal of Wiki Strategies, a company that "provides consulting services for organizations engaging with Wikipedia and other collaborative communities." He has been editing Wikipedia since 2006.

An effort is underway for Wikimedia to codify a principle that has been a cornerstone of my Wikipedia training and consulting practice, Wiki Strategies, since our launch in 2009: essentially, that certain conflicts of interest must be publicly disclosed.

Focused community consideration of this principle is long overdue, and I applaud this effort. Undisclosed conflicts of interest pose a significant threat to Wikipedia. Action is needed. Why? Because of things like this:

Last month, a company offering Wikipedia services proposed establishing a business relationship with me. The founder spoke at length about the importance of dealing with Wikipedia ethically; he proudly contrasted his approach with his less scrupulous competitors, like Wiki-PR, who use sock puppets. But then he described his international network of Wikipedia editors: 20% disclose their role.

80% do not disclose that they are under contract.

While he may sincerely wish to treat Wikipedia ethically, this person is dead wrong to believe his approach is ethical. He fails to see the dissonance. Adopting a new policy would highlight that problem in an unambiguous way, supporting the Wikipedia community's efforts to confront and fend off unethical approaches. So the proposal, at its core, reflects a good idea.

But a TOU amendment is not the way to accomplish those goals. While it may be a good fit for Wikipedia, it may not fit other projects, like Commons or Wikisource, as well. If a museum were to pay someone, for instance, to upload their CC-licensed files to Commons, does a lack of disclosure constitute a real problem? Perhaps; but I'm inclined to say it doesn't. I'm skeptical about a provision that would define worthwhile contributions to our shared vision as violations. We should avoid outlawing good behavior.

The better path is to establish local policies on projects that need them, such as English Wikipedia. A Board-passed amendment is an unnecessarily top-down approach. If the problem mainly pertains to Wikipedia, why wouldn't the Legal department simply propose to Wikipedia (in various languages) that it adopt local policies? The discussion would be healthy; I believe policies would pass. Why ask users to go straight to the Board of Trustees? The proposed action is out of step with Wikimedia's system of governance; I don't see any compelling reason for it to be done this way.

Regardless of how a policy is established, the way we announce it is important and delicate. We owe much of our success to our broad invitation to participate in the Wikimedia vision. Our concerns about conflict of interest are justified, of course; but we should keep in mind that we frequently benefit from alignments of interest. For instance, museums sometimes upload thousands of public domain images. Companies sometimes draw attention to articles about themselves that have become badly outdated. Such efforts bring us closer to fulfilling our vision. Any announcement of a transparency amendment must be worded in a way that respects the good faith and the contributions of many independent organizations.

Finally, although it is stated that disclosure is a minimum requirement – that is, a necessary condition for ethical engagement with Wikipedia – some readers will incorrectly conclude that disclosing a financial interest is sufficient, putting too much stock in this minimal step. We must not take too much satisfaction in a policy change like the one proposed, but remain attentive to the need to articulate Wikimedia's ethical needs in a wide variety of scenarios.

Regardless of whether this amendment passes, undisclosed conflicts of interest are toxic to the Wikipedia community, and make it difficult for us to fulfill our vision. What can we do to address the problem?

What should the Wikimedia Foundation do?

• The Board of Trustees should refer the proposal to project communities like English Wikipedia, with a recommendation to pass local policies. Any TOU change should happen after, and in support of, local policy changes.
• The WMF should redouble efforts to keep its own house in order. It has the ability to influence its staff, contractors, service providers, funders, and business partners. There is much room for improvement. To wit:

Staff members have been hired into positions that require engagement on Wikipedia, with minimal ethical or practical guidance on how to go about it. This includes me (in 2009), and the problem remains: in 2014 a WMF employee prominently left her position after a dispute over her Wikipedia editing. While many facts of that dispute are (properly) invisible to public review, surely the organization must bear final responsibility for such a substantial misunderstanding.

In addition, WMF has at times given bad advice to other organizations about how to engage ethically with Wikipedia. That should never happen, given the wealth of resources and expertise available to them in our community.

Maintaining an ethical approach to Wikipedia engagement demands constant vigilance and diligent self-inquiry, going far beyond mere disclosure. WMF has great influence over the thought and behavior of its staff, contractors, funders, service providers, and business partners. That influence should be consistently put to good use.

What should the English Wikipedia community do?

• Whether or not the TOU amendment passes, Wikipedia should create a local policy requiring this kind of disclosure.
• Wikipedia should document best practices, and implement processes that allow non-disclosed paid editors to progress smoothly toward compliance.
• Wikipedia should ban editors who do not engage with that process in good faith.

What should people paying or earning money around Wikipedia do?

Many of us are passionate about Wikipedia's success, and also spend or earn money relating to Wikipedia. We should be proactively building a shared understanding of Wikipedia ethics.

• We should create and publish our own statements of ethics. Mine is here: http://wikistrategies.net/statement-of-ethics/
• We should read each other's statements, share reflections, and look for patterns. As of today, I am turning on the "comment" feature on my statement; I welcome commentary, public or private.
• In the long run, we should establish ethical codes that can be voluntarily adopted by those working in the Wikipedia sphere -- similar to the way we adopt a free license when we choose to edit Wikipedia.
  
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2014-02-26

Odin salutes you

By The Herald and The ed17

This portrait of SMS Odin firing a salute is a new featured picture

This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 16 February 2014 through 22 February 2014.

Featured articles

Eight articles were promoted to featured status this week:

• SMS Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm (Nominator: Parsecboy) was an early battleship of Germany's Imperial Navy. Constructed at the end of the 19th century, it served as the national fleet's flagship for several years before being deployed to China during the Boxer Rebellion. The ship was sold to the Ottoman Empire in 1910 and served in the Balkan and First World Wars before being sunk in 1915.
• Josiah Willard Gibbs (Nominator: Eb.hoop) was an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics: his work on thermodynamics was instrumental in transforming physical chemistry into a rigorous deductive science, and he independently invented modern vector calculus.
• Profumo affair (Nominator: Brianboulton) was a British political scandal that originated with a brief sexual liaison in 1961 between John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, and Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old would-be model.
  

  

  $1 Gold coin

• Gold dollar (Nominator: Wehwalt) was a coin struck as a regular issue by the United States Bureau of the Mint from 1849 to 1889. The coin had three types over its lifetime, all designed by Mint Chief Engraver James B. Longacre. In terms of diameter, the Type 1 issue was the smallest United States coin ever minted.
• Interstate 470 (Ohio–West Virginia) (Nominator: Admrboltz) is a 10.63-mile-long (17.11-kilometer) auxiliary Interstate Highway of I-70 that bypasses the city of Wheeling, West Virginia, in the United States. The portion of the highway in West Virginia is named the USS West Virginia Memorial Highway.
• Billy Joe Tolliver (Nominator: Wizardman) is a former American football quarterback who played in the National Football League and Canadian Football League for twelve seasons. He played for six teams and appeared in 79 games, completing 891 of 1,707 passes for 10,760 yards, 59 touchdowns, and 64 interceptions.
• Gods' Man (Nominator: Curly Turkey) is a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward, first published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush.
• Thirty Flights of Loving (Nominator: Hahc21) is a first-person interactive fiction adventure video game developed by Blendo Games. The game is a non-direct sequel to Gravity Bone (2008).

Featured lists

Three lists were promoted to featured status this week:

Muttiah Muralitharan has taken the highest number of wickets in Test cricket.

• List of New York Islanders players (Nominator: Gloss) The New York Islanders are a professional ice hockey team based in Uniondale, New York.
• List of bowlers who have taken over 300 wickets in Test cricket (Nominator: The Rambling Man) is a feat, first accomplished by Englishman Fred Trueman in 1964, that has only been achieved by twenty-seven players in the history of the game.
• How I Met Your Mother (season 1) (Nominator: Haha169) is an American sitcom. Its first season of 22 episodes ran in the US from 19 September 2005 to 15 May 2006.

Featured pictures

Nine pictures were promoted to featured status this week

• SMS Odin (Nominator and restorationist: Adam Cuerden, art by Hugo Graf.) was a late 19th century coastal defense ship built for Germany's Imperial Navy. While the ship was active at the beginning of the First World War, it was quickly reduced to a reserve status to allow its crew to work on other ships.
• Nils Torvalds (Nominator and photographer: Diliff) is a Finnish-Swede broadcast journalist, writer and politician, MEP. Torvalds is the son of the poet Ole Torvalds, and the father of the computer programmer Linus Torvalds of Linux kernel fame.
• Willow Tit (Nominator and photographer: Baresi franco) is a passerine bird in the titfamily Paridae. It is a widespread and common resident breeder throughout temperate and subarctic Europe and northern Asia.
• Self-Portrait with Physalis (Nominator: Crisco 1492.) is the self portrait of a Austrian painter Egon Schiele. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century.
• Kasubi Tombs (Nominator: Theparties, photographed by not not phil.) in Kampala, Uganda, is the site of the burial grounds for four kabakas (kings of Buganda), and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
• Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem (Nominator: Adam Cuerden, art by Rembrandt) was one of the major prophets of the Hebrew Bible. Jeremiah is traditionally credited with authoring the Book of Jeremiah, 1 Kings, 2 Kings and the Book of Lamentations. The picture depicts him in his one of the famous postures.
• Edward Gibbon (Nominator: Yerevantsi, art by Henry Walton.) was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. The Decline and Fall is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open criticism of organised religion.
• Paris Street; Rainy Day (Nominator: Crisco 1492, art by Gustave Caillebotte.) is a large (212.2 cm x 276 cm) 1877 oil painting by the French artist Gustave Caillebotte. The piece depicts the Place de Dublin, an intersection near the Gare Saint-Lazare, a railroad station in north Paris. One of Caillebotte's best known works, it debuted at the Third Impressionist Exhibition of 1877 and is currently owned by the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Alexander Dumas (Nominator: Crisco 1492, art by Nadar.) was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors.

This painting of Edward Gibbon, the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is a new featured picture

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2014-02-26

Racking brains with neuroscience

By Mabeenot

Your source for

WikiProject News

• The Guild of Copy Editors March Backlog Drive begins Saturday. Be sure to sign up, have fun, and earn a barnstar. All are welcome.
• The Tyop Contest is underway, but you can still join and eliminate spelling and grammatical errors on Wikipedia

MRI animation of a human brain

This week, we found three Ph.D.s willing to give us a crash course on WikiProject Neuroscience. The project began in September 2005 and grew to encompass 14 Featured and 16 Good Articles out of a mere 1,655 total articles. WikiProject Neuroscience maintains a list of open tasks, a stub sorting initiative, a popular pages tracker, and a watchlist. We picked the brains of Looie496, Mark viking, and Tryptofish.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Neuroscience? Do you have an academic or professional background in neuroscience? Have you contributed to any of the project's Good or Featured Articles?

Looie496: I have a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and have been maintaining WPNEURO since 2008. My first motivation was the poor condition of the article on the hippocampus, the brain area that I worked on. I started editing it very tentatively, and then when nothing bad happened, I ended up doing more and more, until eventually the article was completely rewritten. I've contributed to most of the articles in this project -- brain, nervous system, consciousness, hippocampus, and cerebellum are primarily my work.

Mark viking: I have a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and have worked in computational neuroscience for some years. I joined WP Neuroscience due to interest in the field, but am not a core member driving the project. I have only contributed to neuroscience GAs and FAs in minor ways.

Tryptofish: Like Looie496, I'm a Ph.D. with a lot of experience as a professional neuroscientist in academia. Looie has always been the biggest contributor to the project, but I'd like to think I've added a lot, as a sort of "second-fiddle". In the real world, the field of neuroscience is, I think, one of the most exciting areas of human investigation. A couple of years ago, the Society for Neuroscience started an initiative to get more of its members to become editors here. A couple of us spoke at their convention, and I created Template:User Soc Neurosci (a userbox and category). I wish we could get more editors in that way, but most academics either don't have the time to edit, or only want to make edits about themselves.

Has the interdisciplinary nature of the neuroscience field benefited or complicated your efforts? What other disciplines could benefit from collaborating with WikiProject Neuroscience?

Looie496: I would say a benefit, primarily because of the overlap with medicine. Our medicine-related articles (Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, etc.) tend to see a lot more activity than the more academic-related articles. We also have some beneficial overlap with Psychology.

Mark viking: I'll second that collaborations with editors active in WikiProject Medicine have benefited this project. A complication with WP Medicine is that they have different standards for articles, in the form of WP:MEDMOS, and sometimes discussions need to happen to determine which articles need to be held to a MEDMOS standard and which do not. Many of the articles on molecular neuroscience have benefited from keen pharmacology editors. It is a bit presumptuous to declare that other disciplines could benefit from our input. Historically, there have been significant collaborations among computer scientists, neuroscientists, physicists and statisticians at conferences like NIPS; I suspect that collaborations on articles of common interest among the respective WikiProjects could be of mutual benefit.

Tryptofish: Yes, absolutely a benefit. Unlike most academic fields, it's really in neuroscience's blood to be interdisciplinary. I can add that we get a lot of editing help from editors who are psychiatrists. For that matter, some of my most interesting editing experiences have come from working with editors who have schizophrenia.

The discipline of neuroscience has a wide variety of branches. Are all of these subdisciplines covered equally by Wikipedia? Why has WikiProject Neuroscience refrained from dividing responsibility for these fields with task forces? What can be done to improve neglected neuroscience topics?

Looie496: We don't have enough participation to think of dividing responsibility. Our strongest coverage is in (a) core neuroscience topics, and (b) pharmacology, i.e., drugs and the mechanisms that make them work. There are many articles that could benefit from contributions. Really the only way to improve neglected topics is to increase the number of contributors. We have made several efforts to do that, but with limited success. Several university neuroscience classes have done Wikipedia-editing projects, with valuable results for a number of topics, but our experience has been that they have limited value for the broad topics that are most important.

Mark viking: It is true that we don't have enough active editors, but dividing into reductive task forces also seems against the culture of the field. The nature of neuroscience is such that one needs knowledge across many branches to understand the context of a particular topic. For instance, a molecular neurotransmitter like dopamine might seem the province of molecular neuroscience, but to understand why it is important, one would want to understand behavior of the neural circuits in which it acts and to understand its impact, one would need to take an integrative neuroscience approach to look at where it acts in the brain, how it affects behaviors such as the reward system, and how it figures in diseases such as Parkinson's disease. Little in neuroscience can truly be studied in isolation.

How detailed are Wikipedia's articles about neuroscience? Has it been challenging to write articles that are substantive yet accessible to the layperson?

Looie496: Some of our articles are detailed and comprehensive, many are not. A few, such as action potential, are actually too detailed and would benefit from trimming. On the whole, the medicine-related articles are in the best shape. Other areas are hit-and-miss -- for example, hippocampus and cerebellum are pretty good, but basal ganglia is not good at all. Brain is pretty good, but human brain needs a lot of work. And so it goes.

Tryptofish: It's easy to fall into the trap of writing as though one were writing for other scientists, rather than for the general public. I try, where I can, to make content more accessible.

Is it difficult to find images suitable for neuroscience articles? What sorts of figures and photographs would be appropriate for articles about neurological concepts and conditions?

Looie496: Finding images is probably the greatest challenge for article-writing and has generally been my greatest frustration. The copyright rules make it difficult to find things that are usable, and Wikipedia's special rules are so baroque that you practically have to be a lawyer to know whether an image will survive, or will just abruptly vanish at some point. Anyway, we are still lacking some very basic things, such as a good electron micrograph of a chemical synapse.

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

Looie496: That's easy. We need contributors with enough knowledge of neuroscience topics to work on article-writing, and an interest in doing so. New contributors can help by working on whatever interests them. There is no difficulty in finding articles that need work.

Tryptofish: That's exactly right. We periodically get an influx of student editors through the Education Program, and some of my happiest editing experiences have been interactions with student editors who decided that editing was fun. Too few students stick around after a class is over, and I wish that more of them would.

Next week, we'll throw a life preserver to some floundering articles. Until then, save the world by reading our old reports in the archive.

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2014-02-26

Diary of a protester: Wikimedian perishes in Ukrainian unrest

By The ed17

Ihor Kostenko on his 22nd birthday, 31 December 2013.

Ukraine, which has been an independent country in Eastern Europe since the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has been gripped by widespread protests over the past three months. Due to a decision by former president Viktor Yanukovych—at Russia's urging—to abandon integration with the European Union, the country was (and in many ways still is) split between the Europe-favoring Ukrainian-speaking western half and the Russian-speaking east and south.

In recent weeks the violence was growing worse. The government sent snipers into the streets to fire at demonstrators, while the opposition blocked roads and took members of the police hostage. By mid-February the country was edging closer to a full-blown civil war: thousands of protesters were advancing on the parliamentary building, both sides shooting each other, and a presidential decree passed that authorized the use of live ammunition on protesters. While Yanukovych was impeached on 22 February, the tension has continued to swell as a Russian intervention looks increasingly possible.

Hundreds have died during the unrest, leaving thousands of family members and friends to bury their loved ones. This week our Wikimedian colleagues in Ukraine are facing that challenge after the death of one of their own: Ihor Kostenko, who edited with the username Ig2000, died on 20 February. He is survived by both parents and a sister. Ihor was 22.

His life

Ihor Kostenko was born on the last day of 1991, just a few short months after Ukraine's parliament approved a declaration of independence and mere weeks following a 92.3% vote to confirm that decision. He was born in the town where his grandparents still reside: the rural village of Zubrets, located in the Buchach region of Ternopil and home to 1800 people.

After high school, Ihor was admitted to Lviv University, the oldest and one of the most prestigious universities in Ukraine. He majored in organizational management in the university's geography department and was evidently an outstanding student; the dean of geography posthumously named him as one of his best student geographers. Ihor was also a journalist with a sports news outlet Sports Analysis (Спортаналітик), where he had written more than 6000 pieces.

Ihor was a notable editor on the Ukrainian Wikipedia, writing articles on several wide-ranging topics. Of note was his article on the Fidonisy-class destroyer Nezamozhnik, which he shepherded through a "добра стаття" (good article) peer review. According to Ihor's article, Nezamozhnik was a Russian warship that was left unfinished after the First World War, completed in the 1920s, and during the Second World War conducted 120 combat missions, sailed 45,856 nautical miles, and shot down three planes.

Including his first edit in 2011, Ihor edited the Ukrainian Wikipedia more than 1600 times and created 280 articles. His interests on the site extended from soccer—he was a fan of FC Karpaty Lviv—to Formula One racing, economics, geography, and the history of the Ukrainian military. On the Ukrainian Wikinews, Ihor created six new articles on a variety of topics, including NATO's plans to intervene in Syria, the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix, and Earth Hour.

Ihor bolstered his on-wiki work with real-life promotion of the site. He founded and administrated the Ukwiki Facebook group, which has nearly 500 members, and advanced the idea of a "Wiki Flashmob", where Ukrainians from all walks of life would be invited to write and create new articles for the Ukrainian Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Ihor planned this for 20 January 2014, so the event had to be called off amid increasingly violent protests. As related by Wikimedia Ukraine, "Ihor believed that the flashmob would help fill Wikipedia with thousands of new articles in the course of a day and proposed a strategy to realize his dream".

“ Some would say it's selfish, but understanding the facts, watching the bloody statistics, and hearing about the terrible events in the country is one thing. To realize that your friend fell there is another. ” — Galya Stakhiv-Berezyuk

On 18 February, Ihor joined with other students in traveling to the capital to participate in the protests. Holding a shield, Ihor placed himself on the front line. Two days later, Ihor was marching near the October Palace when he was shot twice by an unknown sniper, once in the chest and once in the head. He was laid to rest on 23 February as part of a massive funeral with hundreds of cars and streets lined with people holding candles.

This terrible news was first related to the Wikimedia community in a blog post, later translated by Maryana Pinchuk. The Ukrainian Wikipedia community added a black ribbon to their logo in memory of Ihor, and tributes from around the world poured into a dedicated Wikipedia page. Many never knew Ihor, but editing Wikipedia transcends language and national barriers; as Cimbail stated, "And there are those who spread the truth, the knowledge, in whatever language. There are those who care for a better future, who stand up for their freedom and for the freedom of others. Igor took part in spreading the knowledge, as an author of Wikipedia".

After the death of Aaron Swartz in January 2013, I wrote a special report for the Signpost that began with a few simple words: "Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How, then, can an entire community be comforted?"

I'm still looking for the answer.

Mykola Kozlenko contributed research for this story.

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2014-02-26

Wikimedia chapters and communities challenge Commons' URAA policy

By The ed17

Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act. In part, it reads:

Volunteers from Argentina have been among the most affected by the policy adopted by Wikimedia Commons administrators regarding images that could fall under URAA copyright provisions. Argentine copyright law provides that images enter the public domain “only” 25 years after their production and 20 after their first documented publication. This relatively generous criterion has enabled unaffiliated volunteers and we as Wikimedia Argentina to enrich Commons with hundreds of thousands of historical images that are absolutely free under Argentine law: images of the political and every day life of the country, of its culture, of its popular idols, of its joyful and dark days, of its customs and architecture.

However, over the last months certain Wikimedia Commons administrators have conducted massive deletions of these contents, in many cases involving entire categories. The burden of proof has been inverted: instead of having to justify the deletion of a certain file, things go that volunteers have to devote their time trying to justify the validity of their efforts. This has caused great damage, not only by way of our readers losing access to free educational contents, but also de-motivating many editors and volunteers by making them feel that their efforts are ultimately vain and that our goal of free knowledge for everyone is being replaced by a certain legal fetishism whose reason gets lost in processes and misses the outcome.

In an effort to comply with the Berne Convention, the URAA regranted copyright protection to some works that had been previously free to use. Unsurprisingly, it quickly faced vociferous legal challenges; the largest, Golan v. Holder, failed on the steps of the US Supreme Court in 2012. The conflict on Commons stems from the location of the Wikimedia Foundation's servers, which are used to host all of Commons' images and are in the US, making them subject to US laws. Compounding this are the several Wikipedias—including four of the top nine by article count—which outsource their local image hosting to Commons.

Argentina (flag pictured) has very liberal copyright laws—photographs enter the public domain just 25 years after creation and 20 years after first being published—and has therefore been been hit harder than other countries by the URAA deletions.

The issuing of the open letters prompted a response from the Foundation's Board of Trustees. Under "on content", the board's chair Jan-Bart de Vreede stated that "The WMF does not plan to remove any content unless it has actual knowledge of infringement or receives a valid DMCA takedown notice. To date, no such notice has been received under the URAA. We are not recommending that community members undertake mass deletion of existing content on URAA grounds, without such actual knowledge of infringement or takedown notices." An impromptu vote to restore all images deleted to comply with the URAA is currently underway, with a majority in support as of publishing time.

One oppose vote came from Lupo, who wrote that "The WMF has told us several times that all files hosted must be free in the U.S. And now we should ignore the URAA? A U.S. law, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court? Just because the WMF doesn't like it?" Odder, who also opposes the proposal, called back to Commons' core principles: "... files have to be released under a free licence or be in the public domain both in the country of origin and in the United States. Undeletion of files that are unfree in the US will be in direct contradiction to this core principle of ours." In supporting, ליאור wrote that "6.7 billion non-American people should not be affected by an extremist interpretation of an intra-American affair." Supporters have also suggested adding a URAA-specific disclaimer to affected images that would warn US content reusers that they could face legal action.

Discussion is continuing on Commons, and Wikimedia Israel's Spain's, and Venezuela's open letters are available on Meta.

In brief

• Picture of the Year: The Commons' annual Picture of the Year competition has moved into round two, which will end on 7 March.
• New media viewer: The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) is inviting users and readers to beta test a new media viewer that will allow users to view larger images on Wikimedia sites. According to Fabrice Florin, the Product Manager for Multimedia at the WMF, "... you can click on any image thumbnail to see it in large size, without visual clutter. You can see the file name and author credits at the bottom of the screen, and view more information in an expandable panel below the image. You can also expand the image to full screen, for a more immersive experience, or browse through all images in an article or gallery by clicking on the next and previous arrows."
• Wikimedia Conference: Wikimedia Germany has published an updated version of the programs scheduled for the upcoming Wikimedia Conference.
• WMF and advertising?: An article in the Economist, "WikiPeaks?", delves into where Wikipedia goes from here now that it has seemingly plateaued. In paragraphs on the Foundation's future executive director, the piece stated: "Last year [the WMF] raised $50m from donations and grants. The average reader donated 11 cents. [Sue Gardner's] replacement will have to decide whether to establish an endowment to help ensure future financial stability." An off-the-cuff remark from the WMF's Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Seitz Gruwell followed "And what about selling ads? 'I would never say never, but no,' [said Gruwell]." When asked about the quote, Jay Walsh, the Foundation's communications specialist, told the Signpost that this was a product of the article's editing process: "Lisa's comments were obviously pruned down from a wider discussion that covered a range of topics. ... This came after a discussion about the success of the current online fundraising model, and that the Foundation is successfully meeting its fundraising targets—another reason why advertising is not on the table. She also discussed and recognized the fact that advertising is entirely inappropriate for the project, given the Foundation's mission and the community's values."
• Wikimania deadline approaches: The deadline to submit an official bid for Wikimania 2015 has been extended to 14 March 2014. As of publishing time, there are five unofficial bids, including Esino Lario, a small village in Italy; Bali, Indonesia; Cape Town, South Africa; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Monastir, Tunisia.
• WikiProject clears backlog: In its monthly contest, the English Wikipedia's Disambiguation WikiProject has managed to clear February's top thousand most-linked disambiguation pages, making over ten thousand corrections in that time. The contest has been ongoing since November 2005. One comment on the Signpost's suggestion page praised the project's members: "So many of the problems with Wikipedia seem intractable and too large to tackle, but this is a great example of finding a way to make solving a problem fun and chipping away at it over years and having a truly meaningful effect."
• WMF publishes monthly report: The Foundation's monthly report for December 2013 has been published on Meta, with highlights appearing on a separate page.
• Program Evaluation Community Coordinator: The WMF is calling for applicants for the position of Program Evaluation Community Coordinator. The person hired for the position will "act as an entry point for a global community of program leaders to get answers to questions about program evaluation in the context of Wikimedia programs, the process of getting to consistent and meaningful measures of success, and how to use program evaluation in order to improve program results and to drive longterm impact."
  
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2014-02-26

Snow big deal

By Serendipodous

The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list. Other topics of interest for the English-speaking world this week include Facebook's purchase of the mobile messager WhatsApp and the new trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, which from the looks of things could spell another hit for Marvel Studios.

For the full top 25 report, including exclusions, see WP:TOP25

For the week of 16 to 22 February, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	2014 Winter Olympics		819,448		The 2014 Winter Olympics drew to a close this week. Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws and roundly condemned political imprisonments, this has become, whether it wanted to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest.
2	House of Cards (U.S. TV series)		768,302		The second season of this political thriller series was released in its entirety on Netflix on 13 February.
3	Curling		690,932		The first major event at the Olympics, competitive ice resurfacing (sorry, curling) remains one of the quaintest and most intriguing.
4	WhatsApp		652,803		The mobile messaging service, which has a reputation as the site kids use to avoid their parents snooping on their Facebook pages, exploded into the public sphere when people wondered why on Earth Facebook would pay $19 billion for it.
5	True Detective (TV series)		544,945		This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey.
6	Facebook		511,120		A perennially popular article
7	Guardians of the Galaxy (film)		507,948		In the great Hollywood high-dive, Marvel Studios has no time for the safety cord. The phenomenal success of their current run of films was built on risk, and this is their riskiest project yet; a $100 million-plus space opera mega-epic about a bunch of guys you've never heard of, including a talking raccoon and a walking tree, directed by a guy who worked for Troma, and whose last film's lifetime theatre gross was exactly $327,716. Well, its first trailer was released on the 18th, so how did it do? Judging by its social media impact, spectacularly. Or at least better than Man of Steel.
8	Ice hockey at the 2014 Winter Olympics – Men's tournament		502,792		A surprisingly specific article for the top 10, an indication of the event's popularity. Incidentally, Canada won gold; the US barely missed the podium. There will be some rowdy bars in Ottawa tonight.
9	Playboy Bunny		487,854		Wearers of the first service uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office became a topic on Reddit this week.
10	Deaths in 2014	List	454,253		The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.

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2014-02-26

CSCW '14 retrospective; the impact of SOPA on deletionism; like-minded editors clustered; Wikipedia stylistic norms as a model for academic writing

By David Ludwig, Morten Warncke-Wang, Maximilian Klein, Piotr Konieczny, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Dario Taraborelli and Tilman Bayer

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

CSCW '14 retrospective

The 17th ACM Conference on Computer-supported cooperative work and Social Computing (CSCW '14) took place this month in Baltimore, Maryland. The conference brought together more than 500 researchers and practitioners from industry and academia presenting research on "the design and use of technologies that affect groups, organizations, communities, and networks." Research on Wikipedia and wiki-based collaboration has been a major focus of CSCW in the past. This year, three papers on Wikipedia were presented:

Unique editors per quarter in conventional and alternative WikiProjects, 2002-2012	Edits per quarter in conventional and alternative WikiProjects, 2002-2012
Slides from Editing beyond articles

• The rise of alt.projects in Wikipedia. Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation and collaborators from the University of Washington analyzed the nature of collaboration in alternative WikiProjects, i.e. projects that the authors identify as not following "the conventional pattern of coordinating a loosely defined range of article creation and curation-related activities within a well defined topic area" (examples of such alternative WikiProjects include the Guild of Copy Editors or WikiProject Dispute Resolution). The authors present an analysis of editing activity by members of these projects that are not focused on topic content editing. The paper also reports data on the number of contributors involved in WikiProjects over time: while the number of editors participating in conventional projects decreased by 51% between 2007 and 2012, participation in alternative projects only declined by 13% in the same period and saw an overall 57% increase in the raw number of contributions.
• Categorizing barnstars via Mechanical Turk. Paul Andre and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University presented a study showing how to effectively crowdsource a complex categorization task by assigning it to users with no prior knowledge or domain expertise. The authors selected a corpus of Wikipedia barnstars and showed how different task designs can produce crowdsourced judgments where Mechanical Turk workers accurately match expert categorization. Expert categorization was obtained by recruiting two Wikipedians with substantial editing activity as independent raters.
• Understanding donor behavior through email. A team of researchers from Yahoo! Research, the Qatar Computing Research Institute and UC Berkeley analyzed two months of anonymized email logs to understand the demographics, personal interests and donation behavior of individuals responding to different fundraising campaigns. The results include donation email from the Wikimedia Foundation and indicate that among other campaigns, email from a wikimedia.org domain had the highest score of messages tagged for spam over total messages read, which the authors attribute to spoofing. The paper also indicates that the Wikimedia fundraiser tends to attract slightly more male than female donors.

Clustering Wikipedia editors by their biases

review by User:Maximilianklein

Building on the streams of rating editors by content persistence and algorithmically finding cliques of editors, Nakamura, Suzuki and Ishikawa propose a sophisticated tweak to find like- and disparate-minded editors, and test it against the Japanese Wikipedia. The method works by finding cliques in a weighted graph between all editors of an article and weighting the edges by the agreement or disagreement between editor. To find the agreement between two editors, they iterate through the full edit history and use the content persistence axioms of interpreting edits that are leaving text unchanged as agreement, and deleting text as disagreement. Addressing that leaving text unchanged is not always a strong indication of agreement, they normalize by each action's frequency of both the source editor and the target editor. That is, the method accounts for the propensity of an editor to change text, and the propensity of editors to have their text changed.

To verify their method, its results are compared to a simplified weighting scheme, random clustering, and human-clustered results on seven articles in the Japanese Wikipedia. In six out of seven articles, the proposed technique beats simplified weighting. An example they present is their detection of pro- and anti-nuclear editors on the Nuclear Power Plant article. An implication of such detection would be a gadget that colours text of an article depending on which editor group wrote it.

Monthly research showcase launched

The lifetime of deleted articles by year of creation

The Wikimedia Foundation's Research & Data team announced its first public showcase, a monthly review of work conducted by researchers at the Foundation. Aaron Halfaker presented a study of trends in newcomer article creation across 10 languages with a focus on the English and German Wikipedias (slides). The study indicates that in wikis where anonymous users can create articles, their articles are less likely to be deleted than articles created by newly registered editors. Oliver Keyes presented an analysis of how readers access Wikipedia on mobile devices and reviewed methods to identify the typical duration of a mobile browsing session (slides). The showcase is hosted at the Wikimedia Foundation every third Wednesday of the month and live streamed on YouTube.

Study of AfD debates: Did the SOPA protests mellow deletionists?

Wikipedia's SOPA blackout

A paper titled "What influences online deliberation? A wikipedia [sic] study" studies rationales used by participants in deletion discussions, in the larger context of democratic online deliberation. The authors reviewed in detail deletion discussions for a total of 229 articles, listed for deletion on three dates, one of them being January 15th, 2012, three days before the the English Wikipedia's global blackout as part of the Wikipedia:SOPA initiative. The authors looked into whether this event would influence rationales of the deletion discussions and their outcome. They also reviewed, in less detail, a number of other deletions from around the time of the SOPA protest. The authors display a good knowledge of relevant literature, including that in the field of Wikipedia studies, presenting an informative literature review section.

Overall, the authors find that the overall quality of the discussions is high, as most of the participants display knowledge of Wikipedia's policies, particularly on the notability and credibility (or what we would more likely refer to as reliability) of the articles whose deletion is considered. In re, notability far outweighs the second most frequent rationale, credibility (reliability). They confirm that the deletion system works as intended, with decisions made by majority voters.

Interestingly, the authors find that certain topics did tend to trigger more deletion outcomes, said topics being articles about people, for-profit organizations, and definitions. In turn, they observe that "locations or events are more likely to be kept than expected, and articles about nonprofit organizations and media are more likely to be suggested for other options (e.g., merge, redirect, etc.) than expected". Discussions about people and for-profit organizations were more likely to be unanimous than expected, whereas articles about nonprofit organizations, certain locations, or events were more likely to lead to a non-unanimous discussion. Regarding the SOPA protests' influence on deletion debates, the authors find a small and short-lived increase in keep decisions following the period of community mobilization and discussion about the issue, and tentatively attribute this to editors being impacted by the idea of Internet freedom and consequently allowing free(er) Internet publishing.

The authors sum up those observations, noting that "the community members of Wikipedia have clear standards for judging the acceptability of a biography or commercial organization article; and such standards are missing or less clear when it comes to the topics on location, event, or nonprofit organization ... Thus, one suggestion to the Wikipedia community is to make the criteria of judging these topics more clear or specific with examples, so it will alleviate the ambiguity of the situation". This reviewer, as a participant of a not insignificant number of deletion discussions as well as those about the associated policies, agrees with said statement. With regards to the wider scheme, the authors conclude that the AfD process is an example of "a democratic deliberation process interested in maintaining information quality in Wikipedia".

Word frequency analysis identifies "four conceptualisations of femininity on Wikipedia"

Girl with Cherries by Ambrogio de Predis (the current lead illustration of the article femininity)

In a linguistics student paper at Lund University, the author reviews the linguistic conceptualisation of femininity on (English) Wikipedia, with regards to whether language used to refer to women differs depending on the type of articles it is used in. Specifically, the author analyzed the use of five lexemes (a term which in the context of this study means words): ladylike, girly, girlish, feminine and womanly. The findings confirm that the usage of those terms is non-accidental. The word feminine, most commonly used of the five studied, correlates primarily to the topics of fashion, sexuality, and to a lesser extent, culture, society and female historical biographies. The second most popular is the word womanly, which in turn correlates with topics of female artists, religion and history. Girlish, the fourth most popular world, correlates most strongly with the biographies of males, as well as with the articles on movies and TV, female entertainers, literature and music. Finally, girly and ladylike, respectively 3rd and 5th in terms of popularity, cluster together and correlate to topics such as movies and TV (animated), Japanese culture, art, tobacco and female athletes. Later, the author also suggests that there is a not insignificant overlap in usage between the cluster for girlish and the combined cluster for girly and ladylike. He concludes that there are three or four different conceptualisations of femininity on Wikipedia, which in more simple terms means, to quote the author, that "people do indeed represent women in different ways when talking about different things [on Wikipedia]", with "girly and girlish having a somewhat frivolous undertone and womanly, feminine and ladylike being of a more serious and reserved nature".

The study does suffer from a few issues: a literature review could be more comprehensive (the paper cites only six works, and not a single one of them from the field of Wikipedia studies), and this reviewer did not find sufficient justification for why the author limited himself to the analysis of only 500 occurrences (total) of the five lexemes studied. A further discussion of how the said 500 cases were selected would likely strengthen the paper.

Wikipedia and the development of academic language

Ursula Reutner’s article “Wikipedia und der Wandel der Wissenschaftssprache” discusses Wikipedia's linguistic norms and style as a case study of the development of academic language.

The article is divided into three main sections. After providing some historical context about Wikipedia and the history of encyclopedias (section 1), the article focuses on linguistic norms in Wikipedia and their relation to linguistic norms in academic language (section 2). Reutner identifies five crucial linguistic norms in Wikipedia: (1) non-personal language such as the avoidance of first- and second-person pronouns, (2) neutral language as expressed in the policy of a “neutral point of view”, (3) avoidance of redundancies, (4) avoidance of unnecessarily complex wording, and (5) focus on simple syntax and the use of short independent clauses. Although Reutner mentions many well-known differences between Wikipedia and traditional forms of academic writing (e.g. the dynamic, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia), she stresses that the policies of Wikipedia largely follow traditional norms of academic writing.

The third section focuses on case studies of Wikipedia articles (mostly fr:Euro and it:Euro) and finds a large variety of norm violations that suggest a gap between linguistic norms and actual style in Wikipedia. Reutner's examples of biased, clumsy, and long-winded formulations hardly come as a surprise as these quality issues are well-known topics in Wikipedia research. However, Reutner's analysis is not limited to quality problems but also addresses further interesting features of Wikipedia articles. For example, she points out that Wikipedia differs from many print encyclopedias in Romanic languages such as the Grande Dizionario Enciclopedico (1964) or the Enciclopedia Treccani (2010) through a focus on accessibility as illustrated by the use of copular sentences at the beginning of articles and the repetition of crucial ideas and terms. Furthermore, Reutner argues that Wikipedia differs from other forms of academic writing through narrative elements and a generous use of space.

Reutner's findings raise general questions regarding the relation between Wikipedia and the development of academic language and her short conclusion makes three suggestions: First, Wikipedia's policies largely follow traditional norms of academic writing. Second, the digital, collaborative, and partly non-academic character of Wikipedia leads to “emotional and dialogic elements that are surprising in the tradition of encyclopedias“ (p.17). Third, the focus on accessibility follows an Anglo-American tradition of academic writing (even in the Italian and French language versions). Although Reutner's conclusions seem well-justified, they leave the question open whether Wikipedia reflects or even influences the general development of academic language. For example, one may argue that many of Reutner's findings are effects of the partly non-academic character of Wikipedia and therefore not representative of the development of academic language. Other linguistic features are arguably effects of collaborative text production and it would be interesting to compare Reutner's findings with other collaborative and non-collaborative forms of academic writing. Finally, one may worry that some of Reutner's findings are artifacts of a small and biased sample. For example, Reutner only considers articles (de:Euro, en:Euro, es:Euro, fr:Euro, and it:Euro) that are created by large and diverse author groups but does not discuss more specialized articles that usually only have one or two main authors. However, it is well-known that the style and quality of Wikipedia articles depends on variables such as group size and group composition and diverse forms of collaboration patterns. It would therefore be interesting to discuss Reutner's linguistic findings in the context of a more diverse sample of Wikipedia articles.

Briefly

• Wikipedia's assessability. A paper to be presented at the upcoming Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14) by Forte, Andalibi, Park, and Willever-Farr introduces a vocabulary for "assessable design". Their framework considers social and technological approaches to information literacy in combination with consumption and production. From interviewing Wikipedians, librarians, and novices about their understanding of Wikipedia articles, the authors identify two important concepts of assessable design: provenance and stewardship. The authors then test these concepts in an experiment, finding that exposing readers to these can have large effects on their assessment of not only articles but Wikipedia as a whole. Considering whether their framework can be generalized to the assessability of content on other informational websites, the authors caution that "Wikipedia is a remarkably conservative resource given its reputation as a renegade reference. Policies surrounding citation defer to well-established publishing processes like scientific peer review and traditional journalism and prohibit the production of personalized content."
• "Finding missing cross-language links in Wikipedia" is the title of a paper in the Journal of Information and Data Management. Using a combination of feature extraction and a decision tree classifier, the authors seek to discover missing inter-language links (ILL) between the English and Portuguese Wikipedia editions. The authors hypothesise that there are roughly 165,000 missing ILLs in each of the Wikipedias, but do not appear to take previous research on the overlap of Wikipedia content into consideration. Two novel features are introduced: category linking and ILL transitivity. Performance is evaluated using a dataset of known connected and disconnected articles where the French, Italian, and Spanish Wikipedias are used as intermediate languages for discovering link transitivity. Category linking is identified as a useful way of discovering candidate articles for linking, while link transitivity is the key feature for correctly identifying links. Today, Wikidata's central repository of ILLs makes link transitivity mostly a moot problem, but that is not addressed by the authors.
• "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content". A discussion paper by economists at the Centre for European Economics Research (ZEW) reports an analysis of content curation and consumption under spikes of attention. The authors analyzed 23 examples of pages that underwent a sudden surge of attention, either because they were featured on the main page of the German Wikipedia, or because of a real-world news event (e.g. earthquakes). The result is that an increased exposure predictably leads to increase of both consumption and curation on neighbouring pages, as measured in terms of page requests (for consumption) and edits (for curation), though the author reports that content generation is small in absolute terms.
• New papers on the use of Wikipedia in education, by practitioners. In a Portuguese-language conference paper, Brazilian Wikipedian and professor Juliana Bastos Marques "presents an experience with critical reading and edition of Portuguese Wikipedia articles in the university, in extension activities, conducted at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (Unirio), in 2012", according to the English abstract. In an essay for the sociology journal Contexts, Wikipedian and sociologist (and contributor to other parts of this research newsletter) Piotr Konieczny, who has also made Wikipedia the subject of his own teaching, discusses the benefits of Wikipedia use in academia, citing the view that "a primary reason for academic reservations about Wikipedia is [a] philosophy of knowledge based on the control and management of intellectual capital".
• "World’s largest study on Wikipedia: Better than its reputation" is the title of the Helsinki Times' English-language summary of a study of the Finnish Wikipedia's reliability, carried out by journalists and published in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.. Participating researcher Arto Lanamäki explained on the Wiki-research-l mailing list that the superlative referred to the fact that the study had "the biggest sample of articles (134) of all studies that have assessed Wikipedia content quality/credibility." Not too dissimilar to the approach of the landmark Nature study from 2005, the authors recruited "a university-level researcher with knowledge on the subject matter to be an evaluator" for each article in their sample. As summarized by the Helsinki Times, the result was that "the Finnish Wikipedia is largely error-free. The lack of errors is the area in which Wikipedia clearly got its best score. ... No less than 70 per cent of the articles were judged to be good (4) or excellent (5) with respect to lack of errors. According to the indicative evaluation scale a four means that the article has only 'scattered small errors, no big ones'." (See also earlier coverage of studies that systematically evaluate the reliability of Wikipedia articles: "Pilot study about Wikipedia's quality compared to other encyclopedias", "90% of Wikipedia articles have 'equivalent or better quality than their Britannica counterparts' in blind expert review")

References

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