en.planet.wikimedia

This past week, we have seen significant coverage of Wikipedia and Gamergate in the press. Because Wikipedia is such a unique resource for the world, and because Gamergate has been the subject of controversy, this issue has been of interest to many people, some of whom may not be familiar with how Wikipedia works. As such, we wanted to share what we know about the issue, and how it has played out on Wikipedia.

The debates on Wikipedia about the Gamergate controversy article have been very heated, drawing participants from many different perspectives, and have gone on for many weeks now. At times, contributors on various sides of the debate have violated Wikipedia’s standards of civility. Civility is an important concept for Wikipedia: it is what allows people to collaborate and disagree constructively even on difficult topics. It ensures people are able to focus their energy on what really matters: building a collaborative free encyclopedia for the world.

A group of trusted, long-term volunteer English Wikipedia editors (known as the Arbitration Committee) is now reviewing the conduct of the editors who participated on the Gamergate controversy article discussions. Their mandate is to review editor conduct, and address disruptions so that Wikipedia can remain a civil, productive place for all editors. They may do so through issuing warnings, bans, or other means. The Committee does not consider the identity or beliefs of contributors, nor do they make editorial decisions on the content or quality of Wikipedia articles.

Several press stories have mistakenly claimed that Wikipedia has targeted and banned feminist or female editors. This is inaccurate. Although the Arbitration Committee may recommend that some editors be prevented from further contribution to this particular topic, they have not banned anyone from Wikipedia. The sanctions they are considering are broad, and affect many people. As of now, the Arbitration Committee is considering issuing some type of warning or sanction to around 150 people, from a range of perspectives, based on their participation and conduct. This is not about a small group of people being targeted unfairly. It is about a very large group of people using Wikipedia as a battleground.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we are guided by our core mission to make the sum of all human knowledge freely available. Although the Wikimedia Foundation does not set editorial policy for Wikipedia, we believe that we can only achieve our mission through the inclusion and respect of diverse voices. We offer resources for programs and outreach with our partners across the global Wikimedia movement and engage people that have been underrepresented in traditional encyclopedias. These include women, people of color, people from the Global South, immigrant communities, and members of the LGBTQ community. They are invaluable contributors to our community and partners in our mission.

Let me close by reiterating what the Arbitration Committee’s decision is not. It is not a statement on who is right or wrong regarding the Gamergate controversy article. It is not a referendum on whether Wikipedia supports or rejects feminists. The Committee’s mandate is to uphold a civil, constructive atmosphere that furthers Wikipedia’s mission. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we support that objective and are taking active steps to create and maintain a civil atmosphere for editors of all backgrounds. We ask all our editors to do the same.

Philippe Beaudette
Director, Community Advocacy
Wikimedia Foundation

In Part 1 of this blog series on Wikipedia ethics, I explored the general principles that guide our work, and how we advise our clients in Wikipedia engagement; and I gave a bunch of links to our past writings, and various relevant web pages. Today, I’ll explore how I handle my responsibilities as a Wikipedia administrator, as relates to my paid work with Wiki Strategies.

A core Wiki Strategies principle, explored in past writings, applies: any influence I may have over Wikipedia content is not for sale. Even as a “regular” Wikipedia contributor, when a client is paying for article composition and publishing, I do not make edits to Wikipedia on their behalf, or advocate for changes on their behalf (either on Wikipedia, or through other communication channels). (On very rare occasions, I might fix a typo on a client’s article, or format a reference; this may arise, for instance, when I’m demonstrating how to do something and inadvertently click the “save” button. Since such edits are clear, uncontroversial improvements, I do not have any ethical concerns about them; but I do strive to keep them to a minimum, in order to maintain a healthy distance from any direct editing that would be ethically suspect. You might want to look at our Statement of Ethics for more about the cases where I take action on Wikipedia in connection with paid work.)

Beyond my status as a Wikipedia contributor and editor — a status anyone can attain by simply making improvements to the site — I am also an elected administrator on English Wikipedia. The community of volunteer editors entrusted me with some extra tools and abilities, and I need to honor that trust. It is especially vital that I don’t do special favors for my clients with my administrator hat on.

But this can be tricky; one of the main reasons the Wikipedia community entrusted me with these tools is precisely so that I can help people. So how do I walk that line? How do I help people as I’m expected to do — including everyday people who want to navigate Wikipedia’s complexities, including my students, including my clients — without giving my paying clients an unfair advantage? In this post I’ll share some of my specific thinking on this topic. In a future post, I’ll reflect on the broader context.

First — what does an admin do? As an admin, I have the ability to do things like:

• Block a user’s account, or an IP address, from editing (or rescind a block)
• Protect an article so that most people can’t edit it (or unprotect)
• Delete articles (or undelete)
• Grant (or rescind) special user rights like “course instructor,” “file mover,” “rollback,” or “confirmed”
• View articles, or versions of articles, that have been deleted

(For more, see this Wikipedia page)

Remember, I don’t typically take action on Wikipedia on a client’s behalf; so the first four rarely intersect with my paid work. There are a very few cases  where I might take administrative action in connection with paid work. One is granting access to special user rights; I might grant these to a colleague or a student in connection with a paying contract, but not directly to a paying client. I also might undelete an article on behalf of a student, but only in a case where I am actively working with them to help them bring it into compliance with Wikipedia’s standards, and/or actively engaging with the administrator who deleted it to reach an agreement about its fate. Above all, any time I act as an administrator in connection with paid work, I am highly transparent about it.

However, I would absolutely never block or unblock a client’s Wikipedia account or IP address, or undelete an article directly on behalf of a client. If such a request were to come up — and it has, in a few cases — I would simply guide my client through making a generic request through ordinary channels. And I would not reach out to another administrator privately to request speedy attention or a favorable outcome. These are all things that would be tempting, because they might really streamline a client engagement; but the conflict of interest involved would be too great.

The final bullet point above — viewing a deleted article or revision — presents a different issue; it does not involve taking action on Wikipedia, but rather accessing and sharing information. Somebody who tried publishing an article on Wikipedia, but then had it deleted, will often want to get their own writing back, or see what others had added to it, before trying again.

As a general rule, administrators are (and should be) very willing to perform this service for any good faith contributor who is trying to improve their article. (See the page on “userfication” for more detail.) There are some cases where content shouldn’t be shared at all — e.g., highly damaging, defamatory text — and others where it’s inappropriate to share it on Wikipedia, but not necessarily a problem to share it privately (e.g., material that might be a copyright violation). But lots of cases simply involve content that was not up to Wikipedia’s quality standards; and there is no harm whatsoever in passing the information along to pretty much anybody who wants it.

As an admin, I consider it my duty to discern problematic requests from unproblematic ones, and to quickly and painlessly honor the unproblematic ones. This holds regardless of whether the person asking is a paying client or somebody I’ve never heard of. It’s not terribly common that a paying client or prospective client would need this (it’s much more typical that a client of mine would have saved their own version of a page prior to publishing it), but when it does come up, I get them the information without hesitation. And I do the same for people who request it through non-business channels.

Next week, I will publish a similar piece about my role as an OTRS agent, i.e. one of the volunteers who responds to emailed requests, and has access to the database that supports that work. The following week, I’ll wrap up with some general reflections on the intersection between paid work and positions of trust in the Wikimedia sphere.

At the end of the fall 2014 term, we distributed a survey to instructors to see what they thought about teaching a Wikipedia assignment. We wanted to share some of those responses, and let instructors speak for themselves about the successes and challenges they encountered.

A key note kept ringing throughout the survey’s free responses, one that explained why we think editing with Wikipedia is so compelling for students and instructors. Writing for an audience improved student work, instructors said. Student editors know they are making a real contribution to the world, and that drives a sense of responsibility for their writing.

Results showed that 92% of instructors would consider teaching with Wikipedia again, including 85% who committed to teaching again. And 88% said they were satisfied with our level of communication and feedback.

We think that’s pretty good.

We asked instructors why they like teaching with Wikipedia. Here’s what they said, in their own words (edited for clarity):

• “It is real work. The things the students do make a difference. The world is a better place for their work. No smart student should do work that ends up in a file.”
• “Two common reasons: Students felt as if their work mattered. Students believed they were making a contribution.”
• “I also liked the way it forces them to interact and to think about how others are reviewing and seeing their work.”
• “I really enjoyed reading their end of term reflections, getting a good idea of how proud they were of their achievements and how far they came (from mostly being afraid of doing the assignment, to being confident in their ability to edit).”
• “I think writing for Wikipedia is an excellent central part of any class where the students are good and committed. I expect they remember, they learn the ins and outs of the main reference they will use for the rest of their lives. They understand copyright; they understand plagiarism; they understand references in ways they could never learn any other way. They also learn to write, get the power of parallel structure, and learn to work in teams.”

We also asked about some of their success stories teaching Wikipedia assignments.

• “It is wonderful to see how engaged the students are when people outside the class discover their work. The best are the positive stories, but it is also very interesting to watch them defend their work when someone challenges it.”
• “Students had an ‘ah ha!’ moment when they learned how easily they could add information to Wikipedia and realized that it was something that they had the authority and autonomy to contribute to.”
• “Several students have remarked that they were proud to show their Wikipedia articles to their parents. Also, since I keep the articles on my watch list, I’ve seen that some students continue to develop their articles after the semester is over. Doubt this happens with many term papers. It has been interesting to see what happens when students from different institutions are working on the same article. Usually they communicate, cooperate.”

Finally, some professors shared notes from course evaluations:

• “Initially, I was reluctant toward the assignment, but after completing it, it gave me a good sense of how to use the scholarly database at [our college library] as well as how to partake in Wikipedia editing. I enjoyed it and actually do enjoy telling my friends I am an actual, contributing Wikipedian. Great assignment!”
• “[This] was the first assignment that made me feel like I did it with an actual purpose.”

Of course, we also heard about challenges instructors faced in launching these assignments. In our next post, we’ll look at some of those problems, and identify some solutions.

Every week we look at some interesting work student editors have done in Wiki Ed-supported classes.

This week we have a collection of contributions from UCLA’s American Working Class Movements course, led by Dr. Tobias Higbie. Student editors from this class contributed articles on many facets of worker’s rights, including social movements and unions. They also contributed a lot of content about labor strikes.

Student editors expanded an article on the 1912 New York City waiter strikes, and created posts on the 1919 Streetcar Strike in Los Angeles and the 1923 San Pedro Maritime Strike.

It’s interesting to follow the progression of industrial actions from the early 1900s Carbon County Strike all the way up to more contemporary strikes, such as the NHL lockout of 1994, or the United Parcel Service strike of 1997. From a global perspective, you can compare those strikes to the largest strikes in South Korean history, which took place in 1997.

Thanks so much to these student editors for their fascinating contributions to an underserved content area of worker’s movements on Wikipedia!

This post was written by Stevie Benton, Head of External Relations

This morning I attended the launch of Open Up! – Report of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy. Having been involved in the work of the Commission I was very interested to hear its recommendations.

The report is a substantial document (PDF) which I need to read in more detail, but there are five key targets and recommendations highlighted in the summary (P3 of the report). Some of these appear to be significant wins for the open knowledge movement. These are quoted below:

• By 2020, the House of Commons should ensure that everyone can understand what it does
• By 2020, Parliament should be fully interactive and digital
• The 2015 newly elected House of Commons should create immediately a new forum for public participation in the debating function of the House of Commons
• By 2020 secure online voting should be an option for all voters
• By 2016 all published information and broadcast footage produced by Parliament should be freely available online in formats suitable for re-use. Hansard should be available as open data by the end of 2015.

It is the final recommendation that is of most interest here, and I’ll address this first. I very much welcome this step to make more of Parliament’s information freely available, especially as this is already paid for from the public purse, although the choice of open license is crucial to the impact this move will have. I encourage Parliament to use the most open license possible. For example, the use of the Open Government Licence would allow for footage of parliamentary debates to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and inserted into appropriate Wikipedia articles. I find this quite exciting and it would enhance Wikipedia as a learning and teaching tool for those interested in Parliament.

The other key recommendation I find particularly noteworthy is the third, the new forum for debate which is tentatively dubbed the “Cyber Chamber”. This is to be created as soon as the 2015-16 session of Parliament opens and will provide the public with opportunities to digitally participate in debates that take place at Westminster Hall. If this experiment is successful, the scheme will extend to include debates in both Houses. If Parliament can find a way to make this workable, with a high “signal to noise” ratio it could be an effective way of increasing engagement between the electorate and those they elect.

Among the other recommendations from the full report there are proposals to simplify parliamentary language (recommendation 4 in the report) and, to my mind more importantly, an encouragement to the Department of Education to improve the provision of political education within schools using digital means (recommendation 3).

The key test will be to see how these recommendations are implemented but so far, the signs are very promising. The desire of Parliament to move the digital democracy agenda onward is laudable and could lead to great progress.

I would be very interested to know what others think of the report so please do share your thoughts, either as comments here or via email – stevie.benton(at)wikimedia.org.uk

In #Dresden they protest against #Islam. In Dresden they killed Khaled Idris Bahray because he was clearly a foreigner and a muslim at that. As a consequence of his death people are terrorised. They are terrorised because they fear for their life and they have every reason to fear for their life.

Many people assume that their right to freedom of speech is paramount and a death like the one of Mr Idris Bahray is inconvenient and a side issue. Their point of view prohibits them to realise how people are terrorised by people they share this point of view with.

I would be totally ashamed, I find it extremely regrettable that some suggested for the German article is to be deleted. They quote a relevant rule as their argument. Wikipedia was about "Ignore all rules". This is certainly one moment to do just that and keep the article.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The good news is, Mr Idris Bahray is not a victim of terrorism. He is dead nonetheless. Mr Idris Bahray was apparently killed by his roommate.

When you read the article in Der Spiegel, you will read that he died in an area where swastikas are painted, with an unresponsive police according to the Wikipedia articles. It is a grim atmosphere were "us and them" thinking prevails.

Such an atmosphere exists not only in Germany, it can be found in so many places including the Netherlands where I live. People are afraid. They are afraid on both sides. It is what terrorism does and intends to do. As a result people are looked at and treated as if they are the enemy. It is done by "us and them" and both sided feel justified in their fear and anger.

Mr Idris Bahray died in Germany, he was not murdered by a terrorist. As we are all terrorised, Mr Idis Bahray's death got the attention it did get.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Mr van der Sanden died. He was a member of the Dutch parliament and, he was both a journalist and a politician. His relevance was mostly in politics and not in journalism.

Adding a date of death is easy. Given that "member of parliament" is mostly used as a meta value, it is obvious that it should be taken away. Adding a new item for "member of the Dutch parliament" is easy as well.

The descriptions I will not touch with a bargepole. For Mr van der Sanden it is not wrong but it is not complete and it will always be in need of more finetuning. It is the one aspect of Wikidata that is without hope of it ever being good enough. Compare the difference with automated descriptions..
Thanks,
     GerardM

By John Cummings, Wikimedia volunteer

I have been working with the Sector for External Relations and Public Information unit at The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to make images from their archive available on Wikimedia Commons, the media site for all Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is the most used educational resource in the world and the Wikimedia projects receive over 21 billion page views per month. This includes users from an amazing project called Wikipedia Zero which provides over 400 million people in 35 countries completely free access with no data charges to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects on their mobile phones.

 

Mobile data costs are a significant barrier to internet usage. We created Wikipedia Zero so that everyone can access all the free knowledge on Wikipedia, even if they can’t afford the mobile data charges.

Wikipedia Zero

 

UNESCO shares many goals with the Wikimedia movement, together we can make available an amazing amount of the world’s significant cultural and educational material available to everyone on the planet – global content for a global audience.

 

UNESCO

In today’s increasingly diverse societies, UNESCO continues to accomplish every day its fundamental humanist mission to support people in understanding each other and working together to build lasting peace.

UNESCO: Learning to Live Together

UNESCO works to create inclusive knowledge societies and empower local communities by increasing access to and preservation and sharing of information and knowledge in all of UNESCO’s domains. Knowledge societies must build on four pillars: freedom of expression; universal access to information and knowledge; respect for cultural and linguistic diversity; and quality education for all.

UNESCO: Building Knowledge Societies

 

Wikimedia

Knowledge should be free: Access to information empowers people to make rational decisions about their lives. We believe the ability to access information freely and without restrictions is a basic human right. Our vision requires that the educational materials we collect and create together be free for others to use and reuse. Our work also depends on free and open formats and technologies.

Share with every human being: The Wikimedia movement strives to include every single human being in our work by making our knowledge resources available and providing the venue for all people to share their knowledge. We prioritize efforts that empower disadvantaged and underrepresented communities, and that help overcome barriers to participation.

 Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary: What We Believe

Open knowledge for all: The vision of Wikimedia UK. We work to make as much open knowledge available as we can and remove barriers to access for as many people as possible. 

Wikimedia UK

  

I am currently applying for a Wikimedia Foundation grant to work as Wikimedian in Residence for UNESCO with the aims of moving further towards making open licensing the standard for scientific, cultural and educational organisations and engagement with Wikimedia common practice. During the residency I will:

• Train UNESCO and its partner organisations staff to contribute to Wikimedia projects including creating and improving content receiving 100,000,000 views per year on Wikimedia projects.
• Making 30,000 images, audio files, videos, data and other content files from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on Wikimedia projects
• Create a model and resources to encourage other UN organisations and their partner organisations to engage with Wikimedia.

You can read about and support the application here.

A full set of images can be seen on my grant application or at Wikimedia Commons in the category: Images from the archive of UNESCO. These images can be used by by anyone for any purpose using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 IGO license.

You are free:

• to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work
• to remix – to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

• attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
• share alike – If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

Many small towns scattered around the United States are virtually unknown to outsiders. To preserve their history, Mark Combs, also known by his Wikipedia handle Coal town guy, has started to document them on Wikipedia.

“My mom grew up in a really teeny, tiny small coal town in Raleigh County, West Virginia … You know most people when they go to a coal town, it’s by accident. So I wanted to start documenting them in a Wikipedia fashion you know, where is it a real place, what county is it in, where its geospatial coordinates is and et cetera. And I do it for the community, that’s a hobby.” says Combs.

For Combs, it was troublesome that these towns were being forgotten, even though they brought up fond memories for many people like him.

“In 2009 and 2010, a lot of the local landmarks were just sort of disappearing and it wasn’t by intent, it was really just the apathy in the area, the lack of — lack of jobs. And it really struck me that I kind of have, either I go out with my camera and take lots and lots of pictures – and not that somebody looks at them – or I have to start documenting things in an encyclopedic fashion.” Combs says. “And no one was really taking a uniform approach and worse yet, no one was really approaching these places with I guess not the respect it deserved, but rather the history that should be associated with them.”

“There are people I know from that place who were totally jazzed that you know their [town is on] Wikipedia. They felt a sense of recognition,” Combs says. “They’re just happy to know that somebody knows their town as a real place and that these are real people.”

Combs says he encountered townspeople who thought he was ridiculing them, but after several years they “loosened up” because they understood he was there to document the town from a historical perspective.

The idea of preserving small towns virtually came to him in 2002 (which Combs describes as “the dark ages of the Internet”), after working with some geospatial data that he had access to. “You could buy a GPS but it was not necessarily reliable and they were really expensive” says Combs. He tested the data that he collected, to see if he could identify small towns like the one his mother grew up in.

“I used my moms’ coal town name. It’s called Whitby. And I spelled it just like Whitby Lancashire in England. And everybody was telling me there’s no such place and that kind of peeved me off, because you know I was a kid, I played there. I used to go fossil hunting there and like it’s real, I know it was real.” says Combs. At the time, it took Combs two weeks to find his mother’s hometown.

Shortly after that experience, Combs drove to Whitby and starting taking photographs and interviewing people, and fell in love with researching and documenting small towns.

“Most people when they look at my preservation work, have no idea why I do it.” Combs says. “I take vacation time from work to drive to a coal town that hasn’t been inhabited for 25 or 30 years.”

In April 2010, Combs started a Facebook group called ‘I miss West Virginia Coal Towns‘. The group started with four members and today it boasts over nine thousand. And with more people in that group, Combs says they all learned more from each other. For instance, Combs would ask for help to identify a fact or a photograph and many people would join the conversation to weigh in on his question. They would then get even more photographs to identify from other users, and the knowledge pool would grow.

“We literally have thousands of photographs. Photographs I would think would’ve never existed, started showing up. Because some woman in Ohio went into her trunk and pulled out a picture of her aunt who stood in front of this building that hasn’t existed in 30 years. And suddenly a lot of people began contributing to knowledge in a way that I never thought possible. But the hard part was going through this pile of data and trying to find out what was real. What could be verified? And for Wikipedia it would almost be insurmountable. I mean you need five or six rows of supercomputers to say is this real or is this not real. But on the other hand if you don’t do that, it can’t grow.”

So far, Combs has created over 2,700 articles on Wikipedia. Many of them, including his mothers’ hometown of Whitby, can show their town’s history with images such as US postmarks on old postcards or coal scrip.

When asked if his work will have a legacy, Combs replied:

“I do not know if mine will. I really do not know. I think the only thing I want is for a few generations of people to be recognized as being just a place, that there was someone there – that people lived there, died there, worked there.”

Combs told us, “If you provide a place where only knowledge is acquired, verifiable, not hate speech, not opinions, but knowledge is acquired – then anybody can benefit.”

Profile by Yoona Ha, Communications Intern and Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller

Interview by Dan McSwain, Wikimedia Foundation contractor

Mr Mason died March 4, 2014. He is one of many who died in 2014 that have not been registered yet. Currently there are 755 people whose death in 2014 is waiting for inclusion in Wikidata.

All these people are notable; they have a Wikipedia article. Mr Mason is notable because he published significantly on the subject of stress. His contribution to the understanding of stress was that the psychological and emotional state of the subjects under study required more careful attention.

You can relieve my stress by registering the deaths of these people. You can find them here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS as far as I am aware we do not register what people were relevant for, on what subject(s) they published.

First Amendment jurisprudence frequently pits societal ideals against free speech. A recent conference at Yale Law School showed that this is no less the case when commercial free speech protections conflict with public health regulatory objectives.

The conference, Public Health in the Shadow of the First Amendment, was co-sponsored by the Information Society Project, the Yale Global Health Justice Partnership, and the Yale Health Law and Policy Society on October 17 and 18, 2014. The event brought together public health advocates, medical professionals and First Amendment scholars to discuss the implications of recent controversial First Amendment case law. The panels highlighted several areas where courts have protected commercial speech in spite of unpopular consequences for public health policy. Hilary Richardson attended the conference on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation legal team, given its interest in free speech law.

This conference was especially relevant to Wikipedia’s coverage of medical or health related topics. Since the content for pages on Wikipedia is entirely user-generated by thousands of volunteer editors, critics may argue that imperfection is inherent in the medical content pages. It is up to our community of editors to strike a balance between maximizing the total sum of freely available knowledge and removing information that could be misleading. If you think this sounds like an impossible task, here is some food for thought: in October alone, the New York Times wrote about how Wikipedia became one of the most trusted sources on the Internet for learning about Ebola, and four Wikipedians published a scholarly article on Dengue fever in a peer-reviewed journal based on a collaboratively edited Wikipedia article. In addition to meticulously curating the Ebola page on Wikipedia, Dr. James Heilman started WikiProject Medicine in order to improve medical and health content on Wikipedia and “benefit the world by giving the general public and health care professionals a text they can all read, appreciate, and respect, free of charge.” Medical schools like UCSF have forged partnerships with WikiProject Medicine so that top medical students can identify gaps in information and update entries using their own knowledge and credible resources.

At the conference, experts on all sides of the debate focused on the regulation of commercial speech, in the wake of United States v. Caronia.^[1] In Caronia, a federal appeals court held that the First Amendment protected a pharmaceutical salesman’s promotion of a prescription drug for a use that was “off label” (not previously approved by the Food and Drug Administration). Prior to Caronia, although doctors were permitted to prescribe pharmaceuticals for off-label uses, pharmaceutical manufacturers and their agents were unable to promote drugs for any use that was not approved by the FDA. This restriction existed to incentivize pharmaceutical companies to adequately test drugs to FDA standards prior to entering the market.

Several public health panelists argued that the consequences of Caronia are catastrophic. To regulators focused on protecting consumers’ health, Caronia opens the floodgates to marketing misinformation that could have dire consequences on consumer choices. Some argued that the severity of the harms resulting from “misleading”^[2] pharmaceutical promotion necessitates an understanding of the First Amendment that would not protect such harmful commercial speech.

On the other hand, as the First Amendment panelist Frederick Schauer noted, “the First Amendment does not protect speech because it is harmless. Rather, it protects it despite the harm it may cause.” In response to the health professionals’ concerns, he and several other the First Amendment scholars argued that the American free speech tradition protects commercial speech that is not false even if it is unpopular.

In addition to Frederick Schauer, the conference featured First Amendment scholars Jane Bambauer, Robert C. Post, and Eugene Volokh. Professor Bambauer argued that courts should actually reserve some power to intervene if an agency’s definition of “misleading” commercial speech goes too far, as regulatory restrictions on pharmaceutical marketing may have done prior to Caronia. Bambauer further contended that the FDA and FTC’s standards for pharmaceutical speech may reject too much information, and that for consumers making decisions some information based on imperfect science is better than no information at all. In Bambauer’s view, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals took a step in the right direction of clarifying the First Amendment’s commercial speech doctrine by requiring the definition of “misleading” to hew more closely to “false.” As she wrote in her paper Is Data Speech?, Bambauer noted that one of the core functions of free speech law is to liberate minds, and so the government should not take on the role of circumventing the free exchange of ideas and information.

Professor Post provided insight into how we theorize the First Amendment and why we understand it to protect commercial speech at all. According to Post, the primary distinction between speech that is covered by the First Amendment and speech that is not comes down to our democratic value of self-governance: speech triggers First Amendment coverage when it participates in the formation of public opinion because we want the government to be responsive to public opinion. Generally, this creates a First Amendment right which is speaker-oriented. However, this changed when the Supreme Court invented the commercial speech doctrine. In Virginia Pharmacy,^[3] the Court gave two rationales: we need efficient distribution of information in order to have efficient markets, and we protect commercial speech because it distributes information which is necessary for citizens to participate in public opinion formation. Post argued that in this sense, Virginia Pharmacy created a First Amendment right of the receiver to hear information rather than speak it. In the context of commercial speech, the Supreme Court conceives of the public as people capable of processing information. This suggests that it is up to the people to decide what information they need.

Professor Volokh echoed Post and Bambauer in his agreement that First Amendment protections are about protecting a free market, so that it is better for people to have more information when making decisions. Volokh stressed that the logic behind the commercial speech doctrine is that even though we may think that patients and doctors may make bad decisions, it is possible that government regulators might as well: “the First Amendment directs us to be especially skeptical of regulations that seek to keep people in the dark for what the government perceives to be their own good.”

Hilary Richardson, Former Legal Intern, Wikimedia Foundation

When BC senior Marie Pellissier was asked to identify figures associated with the “West,” she had a few ideas.

“Most of the class, myself included, listed men like Buffalo Bill Cody or Sam Houston,” she said. The imagination of the American West, it seemed, had been largely shaped by men.

Marie (User:Pellissm) was a student in Professor Marilynn Johnson’s History of the American West course at Boston College, and she would research and write a Wikipedia article about features of this pioneering phase of American history. That first conversation stuck with her.

“So,” Marie explained, “when [Prof. Johnson] handed around a list of possible Wikipedia topics, I wanted to focus on a strong woman who was able to influence life in the West.”

She found her kindred spirit in Susan LaFlesche Picotte. She was a “strong character,” Marie said. Picotte was from the Omaha tribe, and widely considered to be the first Native American woman to become a physician. If that wasn’t enough, she was also a public health campaigner advocating for preventative medicine and battling tuberculosis with limited funding. She was also a defender of her tribe in many ways, including issues of land allotment rights. By all means, a different kind of pioneer, with a real impact on how history had unfolded for her tribe.

To develop Picotte’s article, Marie worked to find books and journal articles in the Boston College Library. They expanded Picotte’s biography well past its starting point. Along the way, Marie was pioneering a trail of her own.

“I didn’t have any experience with editing Wikipedia before beginning this project,” she told us. She knew it was dangerous academic territory, and remembers being warned, all the way back to middle school, against trusting it. But once she settled in, she came out with a different opinion.

She has a better understanding now of what it takes to get content to stick to Wikipedia, “especially after the process of peer review we went through, and the scrutiny I know my article can receive from other users.”

There were some challenges, however.

“It was very difficult to change my thinking from an analytical frame to a more encyclopedic one, and I found myself wanting to add analysis where it was unnecessary,” she said. “I found it really fun, however, to write for a wide audience, because it pushed my thinking about how I write.”

Writing about Picotte helped Marie understand history in a more vibrant way, to find a connection to a time in history that has few female figures to connect with. Now, on Wikipedia at least, there’s one more, which is crucial when you consider that Wikipedia has fewer, or shorter, articles on women than other encyclopedias. It’s one great example of how student editors are bringing quality articles about women to Wikipedia.

Marie graduates in May, and hopes to eventually end up working in museums or another public history setting in either museum education or digital humanities.

 

This post was written by Wikimedia UK volunteer Livia Morarasu

It’s that time of the year! The voting for the annual Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Contest is now open and there is plenty to marvel at.

Last year a total of 981 pictures  were promoted to ‘featured picture’ status in categories ranging from plants and fungi, cities and bridges, panoramic views, interiors and details or vehicles and crafts. All Wikimedians with more than 75 live edits before January 1, 2015 are welcomed to select their favourite shots and, thus, recognize the most remarkable contribution made on Commons in 2014.

We know that selecting just one great snap is a difficult task, and so users may vote for as many images as they like in the first round, ending on January 31, 2015, at 23:59 [UTC]. Only the top 30 pictures will be included in the second round, starting on February 14, 2015. Don’t forget that anyone can become a part of the Commons community by uploading  their work and maybe see their name in the Picture of the Year 2015 competition.

Congratulations to the photographers who shared their work as freely licensed content and good luck to all!

The Wikidata dumps are finally available, Magnus did run his job so we have new statistics for Wikidata.

As we have the statistics for all of 2015, we know how much Wikidata has changed. The two most relevant indicators are labels and statements.

It is great to notice how many items have more than 5 labels. It is great to notice that we have few items with no labels; it is a constant struggle to keep it that way. Amir does a great job.

Statements are doing fine. Many more have been made. The number of items with no statement fell by 15.92%.The number of items with more than 10 statements more than doubled and the high end of this table has increased considerably as well.

It is obvious that in the last year, Wikidata became considerably more relevant.When you have used a tool like Reasonator for a long time, this is obvious. It will be interesting to see what 2015 will bring us in new functionality and data. Wikidata is like Wikipedia in its early days; interesting and showing promise. It is very much in need for collaboration to expose the parts where a Wikipedia does not reach.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Semantic MediaWiki 2.1 released

January 19 2015. Semantic MediaWiki 2.1, the next version after 2.0, has now been released. This new version provides new features most notably adding support for semantic queries in Special:Search, providing contextual help texts on edit pages as well as introducing full support for PostgreSQL as relational database backend. Also further substantial SPARQLStore improvements have been made. Additionally it fixes a lot of bugs and brings many stability improvements and enhancements. Automated software testing was again further expanded to assure software stability. See the page Installation for details on how to install and upgrade.

Today, we launched our 7th Annual Report. Rather than this becoming a standard exercise, we thought it was time to take a step back and reconsider the goals of the report. The result was a complete overhaul. This year’s Annual Report has a whole new format and caters to a much larger audience: everyone who reads Wikipedia.

What has historically been a print and wiki based document sent to donors has now been revamped with a new design and concept meant to have far greater reach — just like Wikipedia itself.

The report shares the vision of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation: the quest to freely share in the sum of all human knowledge. It shares recent stories of community members creating content, improving education, participating in change across the globe, and expanding local language projects all over the world. It includes an edit counter that tracks live changes to Wikipedia and allows readers to Listen to Wikipedia as it is edited in real-time.

While the Annual Report details the financial realities of a top ten website, its focus is the daily human impact of Wikipedia’s free knowledge, from sparking the passion of a retired photographer to nurturing the curiosity of a budding cancer researcher.

The making of the 2013-2014 Annual Report

Discovery
In October, the Foundation’s Communications team sat down with our counterparts in Fundraising and Finance to explore the purpose of the Annual Report — who it’s for, and what it should do. We realized the old, printed format wasn’t telling a clear story of who we are. So we reflected on what we want to accomplish.

We want to help contributors connect to our mission. We want people to understand what it takes to run the world’s largest free-knowledge resource. We’d like to share the value of our impact with various partners and organizations. But most of all, we want to share our identity and our passion, and inspire people.

Concept development
An Annual Report has some practical requirements like donor lists, financial statements, and charity ratings. But it is also an opportunity to tell important stories, and an open door for creativity.

We decided to frame this year’s report around a central defining theme: “knowledge is a foundation.” Our Executive Director, Lila, planted the seed of “foundation” as a multi-faceted word and concept that means a lot to who we are — after all, we are literally the Wikimedia Foundation (pun intended).

But plays on words aside, the concept of foundation allows us to explore aspects of support, collaboration, and empowerment. Importantly, it signals there is more to build.

As the world’s go-to resource for understanding the world, knowledge is absolutely our foundation. That is what drives our community and everyone at the the Wikimedia Foundation. We all devote incredible time and energy to the same mission — to share the sum of human knowledge with the whole world. We do this because we believe in it.

Final product

This Annual Report is a brief, intentionally basic introduction to the ecosystem of Wikimedia, centered around the basic agreement that knowledge is a foundation.

Wikipedia is a foundation for knowledge. With 34 million articles spanning 288 languages, Wikipedia receives 500 million unique visitors every month. Because Wikipedia is written entirely by volunteers — ordinary people — people are the foundation of Wikipedia. And every year, the financial contributions of more than 2.5 million people are the foundation of support and sharing of free knowledge — they are how we keep the Wikimedia projects online and independent.

Our job at the Wikimedia Foundation is to be a foundation for this work. We are here to support the projects and communities. The Annual Report explores each of these elements and illustrates how we have been establishing the foundation for the future of Wikimedia, Wikipedia, and free knowledge.

The Annual Report recounts:

• 250 billion page views.
• 4.5 million new articles.
• 2.5 million financial contributors.
• 77 thousand active editors.
• As well as the work of chapters, groups, developers, countless individual community members, and more.

Thank you for an amazing year of creating, sharing, working, and giving.

Heather Walls, Communications Design Manager

View the Annual Report on this special site — or on this wiki, where you can help translate it.

Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program is focused on improving Wikipedia by having university students in the United States and Canada write high-quality articles that fill content gaps as part of their coursework. And in fall 2014, the program filled more content gaps than ever before, with improvements in subject areas like archaeology (improved by students from Dr. Kate Grillo’s African Archaeology course at University of Wisconsin – La Crosse), women artists (improved by students from Dr. Avery Dame’s Women, Art, and Culture course at the University of Maryland College Park, or Dr. Margo Hobbs’s Women and Art course at Muhlenberg College) or sociology (such as articles on Global Youth, improved by student editors from Dr. Darcie Vandegrift at Drake University).

In sheer numbers of students and courses, the fall 2014 term was our largest term to date, with Wiki Ed supporting 98 courses and more than 2,500 student editors. That’s up from 67 courses and 1,852 student editors in the spring 2014 term.

And what did those students contribute? In volume of content, our students created 455 new articles, and contributed content to 3,000 more. That’s up from 253 new articles and 2,639 articles edited last spring.

Even better, readers are finding more information available on the topics those students edit. In the last month since the term wrapped up, articles students edited have been read by more than 33 million people.

Students added 3 million words, equivalent to 8 days of silent reading, 64 pounds of paper, or 6.5 copies of War and Peace this term! While War and Peace may seem like an arbitrary measure, it’s actually a useful representation of how much content our students have contributed. In the chart below, you can see how this year stacks up over the course of our program’s history.

Our newly hired on-staff Wikipedia Content Experts ensured students and instructors received timely feedback from experienced Wikipedia editors. They’ve also helped us develop a more reactive and responsive team to help instructors, students, and the community when it comes to identifying and resolving problems when they arose. While not every student added high quality content, the vast majority did, and Wiki Ed staff are working hard to ensure courses for spring 2015 add even more high-quality content to Wikipedia.

Helaine Blumenthal
Classroom Program Manager

Are you a basketball fan? If so, you’ve probably seen the incredible shot Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers just hit, with under one second of playing time remaining, to win the first seven-game series of the NBA 2014 playoffs. But if not, you may find this interesting anyway — I’d like to talk about an important standard Wikipedia applies to including historic video footage. (Here’s a little background if you’re just catching up.)

The NBA, of course, provides amazing and historic footage of this feat (the first video clip below — I’ll come back to the other two in a moment.) But you will never see that footage on Wikipedia articles like 2014 NBA Playoffs, Damian Lillard, 2013-14 Portland Trail Blazers season, or History of the Portland Trail Blazers.

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="__youtube_prefs__" frameborder="0" height="118" id="_ytid_41883" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vLAs8A4ewR0?enablejsapi=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;cc_load_policy=0&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;loop=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;autohide=1&amp;theme=dark&amp;color=red&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;vq=&amp;controls=2&amp;" type="text/html" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="210"></iframe> <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="__youtube_prefs__" frameborder="0" height="118" id="_ytid_20413" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fEHcFqTGAPg?enablejsapi=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;cc_load_policy=0&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;loop=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;autohide=1&amp;theme=dark&amp;color=red&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;vq=&amp;controls=2&amp;" type="text/html" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="210"></iframe> <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="__youtube_prefs__" frameborder="0" height="118" id="_ytid_77271" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SaBWMPX8WsU?enablejsapi=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;cc_load_policy=0&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;loop=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;autohide=1&amp;theme=dark&amp;color=red&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;vq=&amp;controls=2&amp;" type="text/html" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="210"></iframe>

This may seem strange — after all, this video clip is all over Facebook, Twitter, sports blogs, TV coverage, etc. So why wouldn’t Wikipedia — which aims to document historic events — publish it? The answer is a little complex, but it’s based on very simple principles, and highlights both the value of Wikipedia and its unique approach, and a kind of opportunity Wikipedia offers to all citizens, to help build lasting and independent historical documents.

For starters, the NBA (and its media and sponsorship partners — like almost all big businesses) are sometimes — and selectively — aggressive in defending their copyright. They published that clip under the “Standard YouTube License,” which doesn’t assert any kind of rights for other people to republish it. For instance, if at some point in the future they decide that a news site like Mashable shouldn’t be able to run that clip, all they have to do is file a simple takedown notice. While it’s possible that Mashable would have a legitimate claim on using the file under Fair Use, that would involve lawyers getting called in, and things would start getting very expensive, very time consuming, and — most significantly — very uncertain.

In this case, of course, it’s very unlikely that the NBA, or Taco Bell, or ESPN would move to suppress the video. But Wikipedia’s policies aim to apply to all situations. And it’s hardly uncommon, in modern society, for corporate or government institutions to object to the existence of video footage. So Wikipedia takes a strong stand: except in very limited circumstances, it will only publish media that is in the public domain, or released under a certain set of free licenses.

So if we want this dramatic moment to be placed in its proper historic context, in the most widely read general information resource in human history — Wikipedia — what can be done? That part is pretty simple: the copyright holder of any of the three videos above could choose to release it under a free license, and have it uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and embedded in the relevant Wikipedia article(s). The NBA is unlikely to do so — but how about the two fans who happened to catch the footage on their own? (Shown above.) They might not have the time or the technical know-how to do the whole thing, but no matter — there are plenty of volunteers who’d be happy to help out. (I’m one.) For a highly desirable video clip like this, all they really need to do is:

• Send a simple email (form letter to copy/paste here).

It would also help a great deal to change the license they’ve chosen for that particular file in their YouTube settings; here’s a video that discusses how to do that.

Of course, if you own the copyright to something like this, and want to do it all yourself, it’s entirely possible — but I can’t cover all the details in one blog post. Let me know in the comments below (or on our contact page) if you’d like to read more on this topic.

Further reading:

• BoingBoing article

#Diversity is a top priority at the Wikimedia Foundation and, rightly so. The argument used is typically more women will ensure more information that is of interest to women. Often it is said that it will improve our community because it will make it more balanced.

The New York times provides a different argument that is equally compelling. It reports on research on intelligent groups. It is part of long running research and the findings of what makes a great group are really relevant:

• a group works well with equal input from all members
• members are adept at reading emotions
• women outperform men

This image of a female blow fly (Chrysomya chloropyga) is part of the Wellcome Library’s medical image collection, now available on Wikimedia Commons.
Drawing by Amedeo John Engel Terzi. From Wellcome Library, licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

The Wellcome Library has donated over 100,000 images on medical history, which have now been uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The high resolution photographs and scans are used to illustrate a wide range of Wikipedia articles such as disease, art history, cartoons, sexuality and biographies.

Wellcome Images provide free public access to their digital collection online, covering topics from medical and social history to current healthcare and biomedical science. Wellcome Images is part of the Wellcome Collection, with an extensive range of manuscripts, archives, paintings, prints and drawings. See http://wellcomeimages.org.

The Wellcome Library are thrilled with the mass upload of the historical Wellcome Images to Wiki commons, and would like to thank Wikimedia UK for its support, and Fae, as an independent Wikimedia Commons volunteer, who has worked on the uploads over the past few months. We are delighted that 100k images from our extraordinarily diverse collection are now visible through the most consulted information resource on the planet.

Robert Kiley, Acting Head of Wellcome Library.

As a longtime Wikimedia Commons supporter, I contacted Wellcome Images with a proposal to upload the entire collection, which Wellcome Images supplied on a hard disk (the collection took 300 gigabytes). The images have proven highly popular, with nearly 500 fellow Wikimedia Commons volunteers helping to categorize and reuse the images in Wikipedia articles, along with significant interest for related projects with Wiki Project Med and Wikimedia LGBT+. The images were released on the Wellcome Library’s website in 2014 with a non-commercial restriction. Following discussion and a workshop with Wikimedia volunteers, they were changed over to a CC-BY license, to ensure that the public can easily reuse the collection for any purpose.

Sample images

Here are some of the 100,000 images from Wellcome Library, now freely licensed under CC-BY-4.0 on Wikimedia Commons:

A corpulent man, his pain from gout shown by a demon. Lithograph by George Cruikshank.		A baby’s teething charm, Roman Empire, 1st to 6th century AD.		Battle at Ta-ping gate in 1911, Nankin, China. Lithograph by T. Miyano.

The collection can be browsed at Category:Files from Wellcome Images on Wikimedia Commons. The mass upload project page with discussion and on-going live reports can be found at Commons:Batch uploading/Wellcome Images.

– Ashley Van Haeften (Fæ, twitter: @Faewik)

There are Wikipedia sites in hundreds of languages. Are you ever interested in the contents of an article in a language you don’t know? Or want to reach somebody who works in a language you don’t know? This simple trick will make it much easier to find your way around:

(The video below is embedded from YouTube; if you prefer to view the video on Commons, here’s the link.)

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="__youtube_prefs__" frameborder="0" height="360" id="_ytid_10398" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/kultIE1CBLg?enablejsapi=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;cc_load_policy=0&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;loop=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;autohide=1&amp;theme=dark&amp;color=red&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;vq=&amp;controls=2&amp;" type="text/html" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe>

Video: How to translate a Wikipedia article in 3 minutes with Content Translation. This video can also be viewed on YouTube (4:10). Screencast by Pau Giner, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team is happy to announce the first version of Content Translation on Wikipedia for 8 languages: Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese and Spanish. Content Translation, available as a beta feature, provides a quick way to create new articles by translating from an existing article into another language. It is also well suited for new editors looking to familiarize themselves with the editing workflow. Our aim is to build a tool that leverages the power of our multicultural global community to further Wikimedia’s mission of creating a world where every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge.

Design

During early 2014, when the design ideas for Content Translation were being conceptualized, we came across an interesting study by Scott A.Hale of University of Oxford, on the influences and editing patterns of multilingual editors on Wikipedia. Combined with feedback from editors we interacted with, the data presented in the study guided our initial choices, both in terms of features and languages. We were fortunate to have met the researcher in person at Wikimania 2014, so we could learn more about his findings and references.

The tool was designed for multilingual editors as our main target users. Several important patterns emerged from a month-long user study, including:

• Multilingual editors are relatively more active in Wikipedias of smaller size. Often the editors from smaller sized Wikipedias would also edit on a relatively large sized Wikipedia like English or German;
• Multilingual editors often edited the same articles in their primary and non-primary languages.

These and other factors listed in the study impact the transfer of content between different language versions of Wikipedia; they increase content parity between versions — and decrease ‘self-focus’ bias in individual editions.

Languages

When selecting languages for the tool’s introduction, we were guided by several factors, including signs of relatively high multilingualism amongst the primary editors. The availability of high quality machine-translated content was an additional consideration, to fully explore the usability of the core editing workflow designed for the tool. Based on these considerations, Catalan Wikipedia, a very actively edited project of medium size was a logical choice. Subsequent language selections were made by studying possible overlap trends between language users — and the probability of editors benefiting from those overlaps when creating new articles. Availability of machine translation to speed up the process and community requests were important considerations.

How it works

Content Translation combines a rich text translation interface with tools targeted for editing — and machine translation support for most language pairs. It integrates different tools to automate repetitive steps during translation: it provides an initial automatic translation while keeping the original text format, links, references, and categories. To do so, the tool relies on the inter-language connections from Wikidata, html-to-wikitext conversion from Parsoid, and machine translation support from Apertium. This saves time for editors and allows them to focus on creating quality content.

Although basic text formatting is supported, the purpose of the tool is to create an initial version of the content that each community can keep improving with their usual editing tools. Content Translation is not intended to keep the information in sync across multiple language versions, but to provide a quick way to reuse the effort already made by the community when creating an article from scratch in a different language.

The tool can be accessed in different ways. There is a persistent access point at your contributions page, but access to the tool is also provided in situations where you may want to translate the content you are just reading. For instance, a red link in the interlanguage link area (see image).

Next steps

Next steps for the tool’s future development include adding support for more – eventually all – languages, managing lists of articles to translate, and adding features for more streamlined translation.

In coming weeks, we will closely monitor feedback from users and interact with them to guide our future development. Please read the release announcement for more details about the features and instructions on using the tool. Thank you!

Amir Aharoni, Pau Giner, Runa Bhattacharjee, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

Highlights

• The fall 2014 term wrapped up, with Wiki Ed supporting more student editors, courses, and instructors than ever before, and the most content added to Wikipedia. While the majority of student editors added high-quality content, a handful of courses encountered challenges adding quality content to Wikipedia, and Wiki Ed’s Programs team is working on improvements to our processes to ensure as many student editors as possible are able to contribute positively to Wikipedia.
• Staff visited with representatives of the American Sociological Association, American Psychological Association, National Women’s Studies Association, and Georgetown University, to develop partnerships with these organizations and educational institutions.
• We kicked off development of our second major technical project, Dashboards, which provides information about what’s happening in courses, including which students complete the online student training, which articles students edit, how much content they add, and how many page views those articles get.

Programs

While the vast majority of the courses Wiki Ed supported this term contributed great content to Wikipedia, we saw a handful of classes contributing problematic content in December. Wiki Ed’s Programs Team spent several days reviewing student work and fixing problems, and we have been reviewing our internal processes to avoid these kinds of problems going forward.

We’ve already made some changes. First, we adjusted the volunteer role from course-based to task-based. Rather than committing to a course, volunteers are committed to types of tasks which are required across many courses. Based on feedback from volunteers, we rolled out a new category system for student work. With this system, articles that need specific kinds of help are tagged with the task they need. Volunteers who enjoy helping out with specific tasks can focus on that task, rather than being asked to help with every problem within a specific course.

Wiki Ed staff will take a larger role in onboarding and monitoring student work in individual classes to ensure they see the same level of support and know our suggested best practices. Volunteers are free to help with what they enjoy doing most. This system is guided by the organic spirit of volunteerism that built Wikipedia. We believe that by providing more staff support for each course, we can ensure the course design meets our best practices, and that our student editors make productive contributions to Wikipedia.

Educational Partnerships

Jami Mathewson and LiAnna Davis traveled to Washington, D.C. to meet with organizations and to finalize details of formal partnerships with Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs). The goal of these MoUs is to establish expectations for each organization, make sure our goals align, and develop a strategy about the best way for our partnership to improve content on Wikipedia and student learning.

We had the following meetings and outcomes:

• American Sociological Association (ASA): We met with the Director of the Academic and Professional Affairs Program and ASA’s Executive Officer to discuss the current status of sociology contributions from student editors, formalize our existing work together as a partnership, and agree on a plan to get more instructors to teach with Wikipedia to help fill this content gap.
• Association for Psychological Science (APS): At APS, we met with our primary contacts and agreed that the spring 2015 term is ideal for us to focus on improving the quality of contributions from student editors rather than the quantity. Alex Kincannon, the Teaching Fellow at APS who has staff time to help support the Wikipedia initiative, is excited about getting more involved with psychology courses and helping identify psychology articles that need improvement and have enough resources that meet the requirements of MEDRS on Wikipedia.
• National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA): At NWSA, we met with the entire staff to report on our experience at their November conference, discuss common goals, and brainstorm ways to encourage more of their instructors to help close content gaps in their field of study.
• Georgetown University, Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS): At CNDLS, we met with our primary contact, Rob Pongsajapan, who supports Wikipedia assignments on campus. With the on-campus support and experience teaching with Wikipedia from CNDLS, we’re both interested in expanding the program to more Georgetown students, so we made a plan for reaching new disciplines and instructors in 2015. Rob’s expertise about programs at Georgetown are crucial in helping us tap into opportunities with instructors who care about pedagogical innovation and using technology in the classroom.
• Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA): COSSA is an organization whose members are academic associations (including ASA!), and they are especially interested in advocacy by way of making quality information available to the masses. In our meeting with the Executive Director, she shared contacts and leads with us about a few of their member organizations who are a great candidate to partner with Wiki Ed, especially because their disciplines are underrepresented on Wikipedia.

In December, Jami and Helaine Blumenthal also presented in a webinar to 25 of ASA’s members, giving Wiki Ed the opportunity to share learning outcomes and best practices with instructors who are interested in bringing Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool.

Classroom Program

In the fall 2014 term, which wrapped up this month, we supported 98 courses, exceeding our goal of 85 for the term, with more than 2,500 student editors contributing to almost 3,500 articles on the English Wikipedia.

This represented significant growth for our Classroom Program. And while this was a record term for us in terms of students and courses, our primary focus is driving top-quality content to Wikipedia. A handful of incidents shed light on some opportunities to strengthen our engagement with instructors, and to improve the communication of best practices for courses. In response to the challenges we faced in scaling our support this term, we announced a new approach to connecting students and professors with volunteers, which complements the launch of our new Assignment Design Wizard. Both of these developments will help ensure more guidance to instructors directly from Wiki Ed staff, based on our continually developing understanding of what works.

To that end, we have expanded the ways in which volunteers can help student editors by creating a new tasks-based system, which encourages volunteers to help in the ways they find most interesting. We are excited about the launch of our Assignment Design Wizard, which will help professors to quickly and easily create plans for their Wikipedia assignments that employ Wiki Ed’s best practices while meeting the individual needs of their courses. We’ve already received very positive feedback on the wizard and are improving it as we see it used.

A standout success for the program came in sheer volume of quality content: student editors contributed more than 3 million words to the article namespace (equivalent to 8 days of silent reading, 64 lbs of paper, or 6.5 copies of War and Peace). And critically, student editors continued to fill important content gaps on Wikipedia, editing more than 150 articles related to issues of gender.

Status of the Classroom Program for fall term 2014 in numbers, as of December 31:

• 98 Wiki Ed-supported courses had Course Pages (42, or 43%, were led by returning instructors)
• 2,749 student editors were enrolled
• 779 students successfully completed the online training
• Students edited 3,434 articles and created 455 new entries.

Student work highlights:

• Three more student editors from Joan Strassmann’s Behavioral Ecology course at Washington University in St. Louis had their work appear on Wikipedia’s main page in the Did You Know section, bringing that course’s total to 19 DYKs:
  • Mischocyttarus mexicanus
  • Polistes apachus
  • Polistes chinensis

We saw some great work from several courses:

• Expanding an underrepresented field on Wikipedia, a student from Louisiana State University created Bacteriovorax stolpii.

Other new articles include:

• Fence Cutting Wars from Boston College’s course on the History of the American West
• River barrier hypothesis from the University of Florida
• Rock art of Uganda and Kariandusi prehistoric_site from a course on African Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

We saw several great examples of article expansions as well from these courses:

• Exodusters Exodusters and Susan La Flesche Picotte from Boston College
• Peat swamp forest from Ecological Factors in Design at the University of Southern California
• Djenné-Djenno, Chibuene, and Hyrax Hill from the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

Communications

With the term coming to a close, we saw a lot of new information about student work coming in this month. Eryk Salvaggio has been gathering that data from across the team and compiling it into improvements for the student training, including working with Sage Ross to add additional modules tackling medical editing for students who need them, and improvements to the course pages of instructors using the Wizard tool.

Those efforts will complement the new print brochures on specific topic editing, which were printed this month, in sociology, medicine, and psychology.

Blog posts:

• Exploring the perks of partnership with Louisiana State University (December 1)
• Welcome, Samantha! (December 2)
• Wiki Ed offers a prescription for medical editing (December 3)
• Did You Know? is abuzz with wasps (December 8)
• Two Quarterly Reports now available (December 10)
• Monthly Report for November 2014 (December 15)
• Changes to Classroom Program for Spring 2015 (December 18)
• Wikipedia: An Amateur’s Adventure in the World’s Biggest Sandbox (December 29)
• A year in review (December 31)

News coverage:

• Darcie Vandegrift and Natalie Jolly, ASA Footnotes, “Using Wikipedia in Sociology Courses: the Faculty Perspective (December 14)
• Virginia Heffernan, “The Lives They Lived: Adrianne Wadewitz” (December 25)

Digital Infrastructure

This month, we started development on our second major technology project: Dashboards. For the upcoming spring 2015 term, the wikiedu.org Dashboards system will provide a new way to see what’s going on in our Classroom Program: how much content student editors from each class have contributed, how many people have viewed the articles those editors improved, which users completed the required training for students, and more. Development is off to a fast start, and you can already see a working prototype – with real data from the Fall 2014 courses. Our goal with the Dashboards is to provide useful information to make it easier for instructors, volunteers, and Wiki Ed staff to stay involved with class activity on a day-to-day basis.

In the longer term, we see Dashboards as the foundation for a whole new course management system. The Dashboards system draws together information about what classes are doing, and presents this information to make it easy to take actions in response. (For example, if several editors in a course haven’t yet completed their training, they may need a reminder.) That same information can also be used to automate some tasks – such as informing a student editor when one of their contributions has been detected as potential plagiarism. We’ll be sharing more about our software ideas for in early 2015.

Research and development

Outreach to high-achieving students

In December, Samantha Erickson began preparation for the spring term launch of the Student Groups Pilot. This meant contacting student groups in universities concentrated along the west coast, with selected universities throughout the rest of the United States. Samantha has communicated with over 100 individual student groups in more than 20 US universities, with the ultimate goal of encouraging students to edit Wikipedia as an extracurricular activity. The research and development project team met and created a high level program plan to create milestones of accountability for the pilot.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

• Month of December expenses are $133,021 versus the plan of $145,218. The majority of the $12k variance is due to the timing of the receipt of invoices and release of payments.
• Year-to-date expenses are $703,692 versus plan of $870,382. Much of the variance of $167k is due to delays and timing of projects ($61k) and fundraising ($27k) trips and events. In addition, timing of staff hires accounts for approximately $58k and another $19k in additional office setup expenses.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:
  • Planning a 6-month strategy process to kick off in early 2015
  • Overseeing the planning for Wiki Conference USA next year

• In December, Frank embarked on planning a 6-month strategy process. The goal of this process will be to position our organization in a way that increases our chances to fulfill our mission. Also as a result, Wiki Ed staff and board will know how to address the issues, forces, and risks that define and drive our organization’s long-term performance. The strategic planning process will be a collaborative endeavor of the senior leadership team, board and staff of our organization. It will kick off in early 2015 and will inform our annual planning process for next fiscal year.
• Also in December, Frank and Renée continued engaging with different stakeholders in planning Wiki Ed’s support for next year’s Wiki Conference USA. With Wikimedia D.C. having agreed to host the event in Washington, we are now jointly setting up an initial meeting with key Wikipedia community stakeholders to take place in early 2015.
• Sara Crouse left our organization in late December. We thank her for what she has done for Wiki Ed and wish her all the best for the future.

Visitors and guests

• Liz Allison
• Aimi Watanabe
• David Peters
• Dahlia Stein
• Josh Van Davier
• Pete Forsyth
• Rand Montoya
• Shreysa Patankar
• Toby Negrin
• Amy Vossbrink
• Bruce Thompson
• Dario Taraborelli
• Jaime Anstee
• Edward Galvez
• Eugene Kim
• Kevin Gorman
• Tanya Mera
• Tom Mayer
• Andrew Lih
• Carolynne Schloeder
• David Harris
• Floor Koudijs
• Naoko Komura
• Puneet Kishor
• Scarlett Camitelli
• Tilman Bayer
• Tomasz Finc

One of our core values at Wiki Strategies is dealing with Wikipedia (and the collaborative Internet in general) in a way that is responsible and ethical. Wikipedia is a project that requires neutral presentation of factual material. Conflicts of interest are inevitable; they can be managed ethically, but it takes a clear focus on transparency and respect, as well as technical knowledge of the policies and functioning of Wikipedia. We guide our clients in maintaining an ethical approach, and we are diligent and explicit in maintaining an ethical approach ourselves.

In this, the first of a short series of blog posts, I’m collecting links to highly relevant pages on Wikipedia, and my own past writing. Wikipedia and Wikimedia are vast, complex, and relatively new in the world; new ideas and situations arise frequently, often with unique ethical dimensions. Watch for new posts in the coming week, exploring some specifics related to my dual identity as a Wikipedian — i.e., a volunteer, and a member of a global community — and as a Wikipedia consultant, who advises clients on how to engage with Wikipedia.

But first, a brief overview of existing pages:

• English Wikipedia’s Conflict of Interest guideline
• The last item in Section 4 of Wikipedia’s Terms of Use (“Paid contributions without disclosure”), which is a minimum requirement
• My blog post (April 2014) on why the complying with the Terms of Use, while worthwhile, is insufficient for ethical engagement
• My related op-ed in the Wikipedia Signpost (February 2014): There are better ways of combating unethical paid editing
• Wiki Strategies statement of ethics (regarding our own work)
• Responsibly managing (COI) (our recommendations for our clients)
• Interview: Jake Orlowitz: Does Wikipedia Pay? The Consultant: Pete Forsyth (April 30, 2012), Wikipedia Signpost.
• Full/unedited transcript from the above interview

Recently I have again looked at a greater number of wikis other than Wikipedia. It struck me that one peticular question is often difficult to answer: what did the makers expect?

Obviously, the founders or owners of a wiki have not always clear goals. They sure have a ‘project scope’ that defines what content is desired and who is the target group. But I rarely see objectives, or often the objectives are hardly clearer than the general scope.

Or I see objectives in the form of ‘milestones’, with regard to some statistical marks. You want your wiki to have 1000 articles? Why? And what articles are we talking about? Quality articles that make your readers happy, or ‘articles’ of any kind, with the minimal definition ‘article = page in the article name space’?

An old joke says:

A politician talks about the goal he can already see at the horizon. Someone looks up the word in the dictionary: Horizon. An imaginary line. When you try to approach it, it will move away from you with the same speed.

If you constantly expand your scope, your goal will be like a horizon. Possibly, a wiki can make its contributors and readers much more happy with a limited scope and with realistic goals.

Every week we take a look at some of the great content student editors have contributed to Wikipedia.

This week, we’re looking at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey’s Feminist Theory course, taught by Dr. Adeline Koh. This course’s content is especially notable for bringing information related to women and women’s issues to Wikipedia.

For example, expanding the stub page for Dorothea Erxleben, the first medical doctor in Germany, or the biography and theories of Simone de Beauvoir. Elsewhere, the article on Mexican human rights activist Norma Andrade now features a drastic expansion of her story.

The course also added diverse perspectives to articles such as slut-shaming, a book on the bacha posh (girls in Afghanistan who are dressed as, and told to act like, boys). Student editors also contributed a stub page on Feminist Digital Humanities, particularly relevant to anyone interested in the gender gap!

It is shocking and awful to find such drivel in a publication like the Signpost in "Featured content". A reaction like "Citation needed" is not appreciating how wrong it is and on how many levels it detracts from the English Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

When a close family friend passed away from pancreatic cancer, a 14-year-old American from Crownsville, Maryland named Jack Andraka wanted to find a better way of detecting the disease. Using the Internet and Wikipedia articles as a starting point for his research, the now 18-year-old high school senior became a cancer researcher who invented a fast, inexpensive test that may eventually be used to detect pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer.

Andraka’s interest in science began when he was very young. His parents would show him experiments involving Diet Coke and Mentos, and how much weight egg shells could hold. As a sixth-grader, he says he started to consider Wikipedia as a research tool after a science fair in middle school.

“That’s really how I started to realize the breadth of science and just how cool it was that you could go anywhere in science and answer some question and help change the world. (…) And that to me was the coolest thing.”

After a family member died from pancreatic cancer, Andraka set out to find a cure to the disease.

“Once I discovered through Wikipedia articles that 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a 2 percent chance of survival, and the current test is this 60-year-old technique that’s incredibly outdated, but also incredibly expensive ($800 per test), missing 30 percent of all cancers, I knew had to do something.” Andraka says.

Armed with a high school level biology education and what he calls “a crash course in molecular biology, material science and a couple of other fields” he set out to improve the current options for pancreatic cancer testing. “I essentially just used the Internet (especially Wikipedia) to get this crash course in all of these fields.”

Jack’s cancer research started online, and continued on for more than two years. He applied to about 200 laboratories and was summarily rejected from every lab — except one. After a lengthy interview process, Jack Andraka was accepted into working in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

“I go in for this big interview clad in sweatpants and hoodie and they’re all dressed in suits of course and I’m feeling really awkward and out of place,” Andraka says. “And then they just throw all these questions at me trying to sink my procedure; I got through that.”

Seven months later, Jack created a small paper sensor that he claims “costs three cents and takes five minutes” to detect various cancer forms.

“The process for making these is pretty much akin to making chocolate chip cookies, which I personally love. (…) All you do is take some water, pour some nanotubes in, add some, like, antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer.”

Andraka likens the process to “something out of a Betty Crocker recipe,” and claims that the easy-to-make detector is extremely effective. According to Andraka, the sensor is 168 times faster, about 26 thousand times cheaper, and 400 times more sensitive than the standard detectors of pancreatic cancer. He claims that his test can detect some forms of cancer in their earliest stages when chances of a patient’s survival are close to 100 percent, and boasts a 90 percent accuracy rate in detection.

“So in the next two to five years, this sensor could lift the survival rates from 5.5 percent to close to a 100 percent for pancreatic cancer and would do similar for ovarian and lung cancers,” Andraka postulates.

“I set out on this wild adventure trying to find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer and that blossomed into me becoming a cancer researcher” Andraka says.

Often, research found in academic and scientific journals can only be accessed after the reader pays a fee. Such fees range from tens of dollars for a single article to several thousand dollars for a subscription. Andraka calls these paywalls “a tax on the curiosity and creativity of youth and the general public.”

“Because of this, a lot of young scientists simply can’t get access to articles they need to do science” Andraka says. He found himself relying on Wikipedia’s free content for his research, because there was no cost associated with access. “To read an article [on Wikipedia], you don’t have to pay a cent and there is no advertising or anything like that. So that’s why Wikipedia is such a crucial part of a young scientist’s career or even an established scientist’s career.”

At last year’s annual Wikimania convention, in London, England (where Andraka was a featured speaker), he opined, “Great ideas don’t only lend themselves to people who can afford articles, they lend themselves to everyone. Seven billion people now – not like a few million people who have PhDs. (…) Everyone can innovate and that’s what we should do with our dissemination of scientific knowledge.”

“For me, Wikipedia is one of the main reasons I was able to do this project because without that open access to information I would have never been able to get the background I needed to understand a lot of these scientific articles,” says Andraka.

(Read more about open access and Wikimedia here.)

Some have questioned Andraka’s research and his claims. His research has yet to be peer-reviewed, and it may take some time and many trials before the results of his research are fully understood and there is an approved test for pancreatic cancer based on Andraka’s work. Nevertheless, Jack Andraka has received a great deal of attention and celebration for his work. He became a 2012 recipient of the Gordon E. Moore award, the grand prize of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Youth Award. He frequently gives speeches about his research, including at the Clinton Global Initiative and TED. He has also been featured by several news sources such as BBC and 60 Minutes and he’s been the subject of short documentaries including “You Don’t Know Jack” and “Just Jack.”

The high school senior says his classmates were stunned by his research.

“They’re like, ‘What, the Jack Andraka, the kid who sat in the back of class reading physics textbooks, did all this stuff?’ (…) And it is kind of like a double life almost — I have a school life and my science career and speaking life.”

He says open access knowledge platforms like Wikipedia have inspired a lot of youth to discover and disseminate knowledge on their own.

“It’s really exciting to see all of these young people being interested in science and being pioneering through this open access. (…) Because without open access and Wikipedia, we certainly wouldn’t be able to do our research.”

Eventually the 18-year-old says he wants to help find the cure for cancer, and wants more scientific knowledge to be accessible to most people.

“People should definitely care about Wikipedia because it allows for almost a democratization of innovation. It allows anyone – regardless of where they are from, who they are, what they look like, it doesn’t matter – they can access that information and come up with a great idea”.

Profile by Yoona Ha, Communications Intern

Interview by Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller

I’m pleased to announce a new hire at the Wiki Education Foundation this week. Ryan McGrady will be the interim Classroom Program Manager this spring while Helaine Blumenthal is on maternity leave.

Ryan earned a masters in digital media studies at Emerson College, and is completing his PhD dissertation with North Carolina State University on the history of encyclopedic knowledge production. Ryan has experience on Wikipedia as a volunteer (User:Rhododendrites) and in his work as a university instructor.

Ryan will be building relationships with instructors, volunteers and Wikipedia editors in support of our program activities, including on-boarding and mentoring instructors teaching Wikipedia classroom assignments. He is also responsible for coordinating with content experts to make sure instructors have the tools and resources they need to be successful.

In his free time, Ryan edits Wikipedia and wonders why he’s not working on his dissertation. Welcome, Ryan!

LiAnna Davis
Director of Programs

A recent article by @monicaMedHist identifies the disease in Royal 6 E VI, f 301, as leprosy: http://t.co/PmatI7obgF pic.twitter.com/ysEb3X9VNA

— Medieval Manuscripts (@BLMedieval) January 13, 2015

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This post was written by Richard Nevell

Mark Twain said “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

The same applies to honest mistakes. The ease with which information spreads across the Internet means the stakes are higher when it comes to getting things right. But with a bit of help, it’s possible to get the genie back in the bottle. Mostly at least.

For several years, many sources – including a wide range of academic websites – described the image on the right as depicting people suffering from the Black Death, the pandemic of plague that swept through most of Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century.  The illustration itself dates from 1360-75 and is from an illuminated manuscript, Omne Bonum by James le Palmer. ¹ In fact, the image shows clerics with leprosy being instructed by a bishop. It’s easy to see how the mistake happened: the Black Death affected a huge number of people across Europe, caused visible physical symptoms, and coincided roughly with when the illustration was produced. But the text itself is about leprosy, and that disease was commonly depicted in the medieval period with red spots like those shown in the image.

The misinterpretation had become so prevalent the issue became the topic of an article in a new academic journal: ‘Diagnosis of a “Plague” Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale’ in The Medieval Globe. Published just a couple of months ago, it didn’t take long before the paper started to have an effect. This is due in no small part to the fact that the article is freely available – in fact the entire volume of The Medieval Globe is open access. The authors approached the British Library to update its Images Online website and its Illuminated MSS Online Catalogue.

When used in print, there’s often not much which can be done until a new edition is printed, but online there’s the chance that a correction can spread just as the original error did. A reverse Google image search means that it’s possible to find out how this image is being used, and even approach those websites to get the image replaced. This has already started, and there have been some positive responses.

The article specifically mentioned Wikipedia’s use of the Omne Bonum image. It was used on 44 pages across 23 different languages, with another two uses on Wikibooks and Wikiquote. This shows how widely and easily Wikipedia can be used to spread information. In March 2014, the English Wikipedia’s page on the Black Death was one of the 400 most-visited pages on Wikipedia; over the course of a year, that page alone managed 4.3 million views.

The English pages were fixed very quickly once the issue was pointed out. On 4th December an anonymous editor mentioned the issue on the discussion page for the Black Death article. The following day another editor replaced the image in the article, and anywhere else on the English Wikipedia if it was being used to illustrated the plague. I chipped in with more edits myself in my free time, however, the further you move from the source language, the more persistent a mistake can be; the image still appears with the incorrect description on at least 28 pages and, with so many languages to take into account, it helps to have as many people joining in as possible.

If you speak and write in a language other than English, please take a look at the pages here (look for the image labelled “Leprosy victims taught by bishop”) and check that the image from Omne Bonum isn’t being used to depict the Black Death. If it is, please replace it! I emailed one of the authors of the paper which brought this issue out into the open, and was told that this image is a good alternative.

Any help would be very much appreciated!

A colleague, Eugene Eric Kim, has increasingly been uploading freely licensed photos to Wikimedia Commons. Excellent!

The more you get involved with Commons, the more you’ll probably want to move files into categories; and if you’re working with more than one or two files at a time, you’ll probably get tired of manually entering category information.

An excellent tool for file categorization is Cat-a-lot. So I made this short video, to demonstrate how to get started with it. (The video below is embedded from YouTube; if you prefer to view the video on Commons, here’s the link.)

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="__youtube_prefs__" frameborder="0" height="360" id="_ytid_92834" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/JR7PeZmN32Y?enablejsapi=1&amp;autoplay=0&amp;cc_load_policy=0&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;loop=0&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;playsinline=0&amp;autohide=1&amp;theme=dark&amp;color=red&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;vq=&amp;controls=2&amp;" type="text/html" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="640"></iframe>

The Mobile Apps Team is excited to release a new mobile experience for the official Wikipedia app. The update, released today on Android with iOS to follow, helps create a more immersive experience that pulls the reader in and makes it even simpler to find relevant information on Wikipedia.

This release features a more image-centric design, improved search functionality, and suggestions for further reading. It is designed to more effectively engage the user in the reading process, starting with a prominently displayed and contextually-relevant “lead image.”

With more than 33.5 million articles in 287 languages on Wikipedia, readers have a vast amount of information at their fingertips via the Wikipedia app. With that in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation strives to ensure that surfacing knowledge on Wikipedia through mobile devices is as accessible as possible.

New features include:

• A prominent, contextually-relevant image at the top of each article (with parallax-scrolling) to engage readers in the topic
• “Read More” feature at the end of each article that includes links to up to three related pages to encourage readers to explore further
• Improved search functionality, including more defined and higher contrast search bar and a list of recently searched topics
• Image viewer that allows users to view a larger version of any image via a pop-up panel (image appears unobscured if tapped on) and swipe left or right to view the previous or next image

These new mobile features were developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Mobile Apps Team, in support of the WMF’s mission to deliver free access to the sum of all human knowledge for every single human being.

With half a billion monthly readers and more than 20 billion monthly page views, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and the largest free knowledge resource. As more and more people around the world access Wikipedia via mobile devices, delivering knowledge in an accessible, easy-to-use way on mobile will continue to be a major priority.

And, if you’ve got experience with Java and the Android SDK, then come work with us! We’re hiring more Android engineers to help make our app even better.

Dan Garry, Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps Team, Wikimedia Foundation

Today, Wikipedia turns fourteen years old. On this day in 2001, a simple idea changed the world: the idea that anyone, no matter who they are or where they lived, had something to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. It was a simple idea, but intensely powerful, and it resonated with hundreds of thousands of people. Together, your contributions have made Wikipedia the most comprehensive repository of free information in the history of humanity.

Erasmus Prize 2015
I’m proud today to be able to share a remarkable recognition of your work. The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation (Dutch, English) in the Netherlands has announced that it will award the Erasmus Prize 2015 to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community. The Erasmus Prize is one of Europe’s most distinguished recognitions, awarded annually to “a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to culture, society or social science.”

On behalf of the Wikimedia community, I thank the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for this recognition.

This is the first time that this prestigious honor has been awarded to a group of individuals for their collective achievement. In the words of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation:

“Wikipedia receives the prize because it has promoted the dissemination of knowledge through a comprehensive and universally accessible encyclopaedia. To achieve that, the initiators of Wikipedia have designed a new and effective democratic platform. The prize specifically recognises Wikipedia as a community — a shared project that involves tens of thousands of volunteers around the world.”

This honor is accompanied by an award of €150,000. In keeping with the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation’s intent to recognize the contributions of the Wikimedia community, we are redirecting these funds towards the community in the form of individual grants and other support for editors and contributors.

Millions of reasons to celebrate
As Wikipedia turns fourteen today, we have millions of reasons to celebrate. The world’s free encyclopedia now includes more than 34 million articles across 288 languages, including Maithili Wikipedia. Maithili Wikipedia is the newest Wikipedia, representing an Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 34 million people in Nepal and India. It is a testament to the global reach of a project that receives half a billion visitors every month, from nearly every country in the world.

In 2014, we saw other major milestones for the Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest resource of freely licensed educational media, celebrated its 10th anniversary and more than 22 million freely licensed images. Wikidata, the Wikimedia structured data project, was awarded Open Data Publisher of the year by the Open Data Institute for its high publishing standards and use of challenging data — and was recognized as a finalist for the Open Data Innovation award, for its use of open data as a tool for innovation.

All this is possible because of you: the more than 75,000 editors who edit more than five times a month, and the countless individuals who stop by to fix a sentence or update a fact. Every person who visits Wikipedia helps sustain and grow our mission and vision in their own way. As many as 6.5 million people have logged in and contributed to English Wikipedia alone over these past 14 years, with many millions more people contributing anonymously. We thank all of you.

If you have never made an edit before, today is a great day to begin! Contributing to the world’s largest free knowledge resource is a powerful recognition of all of the millions of people before you who shared their time and knowledge to build this amazing well of knowledge we use every day.

Lila Tretikov, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia UK is proud to announce that the National Library of Wales has appointed a full time Wikipedian in Residence; this follows a 6-month appointment by the federal Welsh language university ‘Coleg’. The announcement comes on the day that Wikipedia celebrates its 14th birthday.

Wicipedia Cymraeg and the National Library have had a good working partnership since 2008 when they started to pilot the uploading of around 20 images of Wales’ finest photographer of his time – John Thomas. The world didn’t come to an end, and since then nearly 5,000 images have been uploaded.

The Library is one of only six legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland and have more than 5 million books, a million maps, 800,000 photographs and 50,000 works of art. In April 2012, the Library made a policy decision not to claim ownership of copyright in digital reproductions. This meant that the rights information attached to digital representations of works would reflect the copyright status of the original. in 2013, the Library was the winner of the Wikimedia UK ‘GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) of the Year Award’, as being ‘a reliable supporter of the Wikimedia movement aims.’

Both the Library and the Wikimedia movement have many things in common including to enrich the sum of shared knowledge available about Wales online, with a specific interest on the Welsh language Wicipedia.

Robin Owain, Wikimedia UK Manager in Wales said, ‘The Library has opened their doors, and have proven that improving access to their rich resources will benefit not only Wales but the wider world. They have been cutting edge in many ways and I look forward in consolidating our partnership in the coming months. What a great way of celebrating the 14th birthday of Wikipedia!’

Jason Evans has been appointed to the residency and he begins work on 19 January.

_____________________________________________________________

Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru’n Penodi Wicipediwr Preswyl llawn amser

Mae Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru wedi penodi Wicipediwr Preswyl ar eu staff, yn llawn amser am gyfnod o flwyddyn. Mae hyn yn dilyn penodi Marc Haynes fel Wicipediwr Preswyl ychydig yn ôl yn y Coleg Cymraeg.

Ers Awst 2008, cafwyd partneriaeth anffurfiol rhwng Wicipedia a Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, a thros y blynyddoedd sylweddolwyd mai’r un oedd eu nod: rhoi lluniau, sgans o lawysgrifau, fideos a gwybodaeth eraill am Gymru a’i diwylliant ar drwydded agored fel eu bont i’w cael ledled y byd h.y. ehangu’r mynediad i drysorau’r Llyfrgell. Yn y flwyddyn diwethaf mae’r Llyfrgell wedi rhoi tua 5,000 o hen ffotograffau ar drwydded agored Comin creu (Creative Commons).

Mae’r Wicipedia gwreiddiol yn 14 oed heddiw (15 Ionawr) ac yn mynd o nerth i nerth. Wicipedia Cymraeg (sydd bron yn 12 oed!) yw’r wefan Gymraeg fwyaf poblogaidd gyda chyfartaledd o 2.4 miliwn o dudalennau’n cael eu hagor yn fisol. Ceir dros 280 o wicis mewn ieithoedd eraill a bydd y bartneriaeth hon rhwng y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol a Wici Cymru yn cynnig llwyfan arall i drysorau’r genedl.

Dywedodd Elfed Williams, Cadeirydd Wici Cymru, ‘Rydym yn ymfalchio yn y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol am y modd mae wedi cofleidio’r byd digidol a gwybodaeth agored. Ymfalchiwn hefyd yng ngwaith mae Wikimedia UK yn ei wneud yng Nghymru.’ Yn ôl Robin Llwyd ab Owain, Rheolwr Wikimedia yng Nghymru, ‘Mae llawer o lyfrgelloedd yn wynebu problemau enbyd ledled y byd, ond yng Nghatalonia, mae’r genedl gyfan wedi sylweddoli grym Wicipedia ac yn ei defnyddio fel cefnfor fawr o wybodaeth – a llwyfan i’r wybodaeth honno. Braf ydy gweld Cymru hefyd ar flaen y gad – yn datblygu yn hytrach nac yn ffosileiddio – ac mae llawer o’r diolch i weledigaeth pobl fel yr Athro Aled Gruffydd Jones a’r Dr Dafydd Tudur.’

Bydd y Wicipediwr Preswyl, Jason Evans o Aberystwyth, sy’n llyfrgellydd yn y Llyfrgell Genedlaethol yn dechrau yn ei waith ar 17 Ionawr.

As a volunteer, I spend a great amount of time making Wikidata more informative. With currently 1,896,739 edits, it is obvious that I use tools.

What I am looking for in tools is that I can use them. They do not have to be scientific, they just have to be functional. It means that I can use it at home or wherever I happen to be on any computer.

At this time there are two tools for querying Wikidata. One provides us with near real time data and the other has huge prerequisites. It is however the preferred option by people with a scientific bend.

Both approaches have been used to write about diversity. Their outcome is similar. However, I am biased towards the tool that is available to me. If I wanted to, I could run the same queries and will have have similar results. Results that will be different because of the time that has passed.

The other tool requires huge investments of me and it will only provide me with static data. Maybe the results are the same and very scientific but it will not help me improve Wikidata, it is therefore of no use to me. It reflects on data from the past. It does not compare data from the present with data I have elsewhere.

On this blog I did mention gender ratios like the two publications do. My issue with all that information is that it misses on one thing; how Wikidata is becoming more informative about diversity. As it is becoming more informative, it becomes also more useful as a tool to look at diversity in Wikipedia in the past.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Mr Bob Boyd died. At some time they all do. As you can see several of them already did. What you see is in Finnish. This example of disambiguation could have been in any language.

That is very much the point. With Reasonator we disambiguate in any language.

We can when we ignore the effort that goes in adding descriptions. Many of these descriptions are out of date, incomplete or just not available. I do not fix descriptions; I prefer to fix automated descriptions. I do this by adding missing statements. In this way the automated description is fixed in any language.

When people add descriptions with a bot, they could have added statements in stead. It would have been useful and when all the effort had gone into adding statements, Wikidata would be in much better shape.

As it is, there is no convincing argument for having fixed descriptions. They suck. They are mono-lingual where Wikidata is not.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting

With contributions by: Federico Leva, Piotr Konieczny, Maximilian Klein, Tilman Bayer and Pine

Use of Wikipedia in higher education influenced by peer opinions and perception of Wikipedia’s quality

A paper titled “Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education”^[1] uses the technology acceptance model to shed light on faculty’s (of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) views of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. The main factors are shown to be the perception of colleagues’ opinion about Wikipedia and the perceived quality of the information on Wikipedia. As the authors note, while prior studies also pointed to the quality concerns, this study suggests a causal link between colleagues’ views and one’s perception of Wikipedia quality. The authors conclude that the strong peer culture within academia makes the importance of role models very significant, which in turn has implications for the segment of the Wikimedia movement that desires greater ties with the academic world. The authors also note that “despite the lack of institutional support and acknowledgement, a growing number of academics think it is very useful and desirable to publish research results or even intermediate data in open repositories”, an attitude that also correlates positively with positive views of Wikipedia. To quote the authors’ very valid recommendation: “For those faculty members already using Wikipedia as a learning tool, we think it would have greater impact if they publicly acknowledged their practices more, especially to their close colleagues, and explain their own teaching experiences as well as the effects it has had on the students’ academic performance.” The team behind the paper is also partnering in the Wikidata for research project featured in News and notes.

Analysis of two gender-driven talk page conflicts on the German-language Wikipedia

Reviewed by Maximilianklein (talk)

“Gender differences within the German-language Wikipedia”^[2] is a pair of close readings of two gender-driven talk page conflicts on the German Wikipedia from 2006 and 2013, “show[ing] exemplarily that a) the feministic gender discourse in Wikipedia is not appreciated – primarily by male Wikipedians – […] and b) that discussions behind the scenes of Wikipedia can feature an unpleasant and rude nature, that is not very appealing and motivating for female contributors”. The analysis aims to focus on the communication styles of the gendered personalities as viewed under the critical rubrics of Margarete Jäger and Nina Schuppener. In the degenerating arguments around whether or not the welcome message on the German Wikipedia’s main page (2006 thread) and German Wikipedia articles in general (2013/14 straw poll talk page) should use generic male pronouns and nouns, or newer more neutral alternatives, like using parentheses in “Mitarbeiter(in)”, it is highlighted that the male-appearing participants use instruction and discrediting statements; and the female-appearing tend to question intellectual capabilities and give advice. Finally the authors conclude that “the most crucial point is the fact that the female author gave up [first],” stopping responding less than 24 hours into the discussion, and that the change advocated for was not enacted. These deconstructed examples add to an evidence of a hypothesis that minority voices are crowded out in Open Culture, as purported by the “Free as in Sexist” theory.

Briefly

History of the Spanish Wikipedia’s ArbCom

A short recounting by Sefidari and Ortega (pre-print) summarised the history of the Spanish Wikipedia Comité de resolucíon de conflictos (arbitration committee), which existed from 2007 to 2008. It was composed of admins, received complaints which in 80 % of cases involved admins, dismissed nearly all cases presented, ruled against the claimant in a large majority of accepted cases, and was finally dissolved in 2009.^[3]

Two new papers on disease forecasting using Wikipedia

Yet another study (pre-print), considering 5 articles, showed that English Wikipedia page views trends can forecast the peak in influenza-like illnesses in the USA. Essentially, by visiting the articles in question, users are self-reporting their (suspect) disease, some weeks in advance of the data collected centrally by a government agency based on medical practitioners’ reports of the same.^[4] Another study, again focused on some English Wikipedia articles, reached the same conclusion with slightly different (and, notably, fully open source) methods, for 14 diseases, while producing a useful list of some dozens past studies on the matter.^[5]

Wikipedia as a source of health information during salmonella outbreak

A statistically significant survey in the Netherlands assessed with what efficacy the population was informed about Salmonella infection during an outbreak in the country. Nearly all information was received passively (mainly from TV, radio and newspapers, but also social media); of the minuscule minority who actively sought information, most turned to their newspaper website, or ended up (with highest satisfaction among all sources) on official websites or Wikipedia.^[6]

Most MoodBar users became longer-term contributors

A study on one dataset produced by the (mostly discontinued) MoodBar tool showed that the newcomers who gave feedback via the MoodBar were significantly more likely to become longer-term contributors. After six months, 3.6% of editors who were able to use the MoodBar were still editing, compared to 3.3% of those who did not have the option.^[7]

New R libraries for Wikipedia research

A new R programming language library “wikipediatrend”^[8] that facilitates longitudinal page-view analyses has been created. The package is a wrapper on top of long-time service stats.grok.se|Wikipedia:Stats.grok.se|stats.grok.se. This marks an uptick in the popularity of the R language for Wikipedia analysis as WikipediR was also recently released which itself wraps many common mediawiki API calls.

Use of Wikinews to teach journalism students

This paper^[9] discusses an educational project that used Wikinews in an undergraduate journalism course at the Australian University of Wollongong. While the use of Wikipedia in education has dominated the relevant discussions, Wikinews seems like a valuable, yet underused tool for journalists-in-training. Though this essay-like paper seems to describe the experience in a positive fashion, it does not contain any specific conclusions, nor a list of articles edited by the students that would allow for a more-in depth commentary in the context of the Wikimedia learning experience.

“Linking Today’s Wikipedia and News from the Past”

This workshop paper^[10] presents a method to automatically identify articles in the New York Times archive matching a particular event mentioned on Wikipedia (dataset).

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

• “An Empirical Study of Motivations for Content Contribution and Community Participation in Wikipedia”^[11] From the abstract: “The research findings show that content contribution is more driven by extrinsically oriented motivations, including reciprocity and the need for self-development, while community participation is more driven by intrinsically oriented motivations, including altruism and a sense of belonging to the community.”
• “Wikipedia as a Time Machine”^[12] (presented at WWW 2014)
• “Hacking Trademark Law for Collaborative Communities”^[13] (related website: http://collabmark.org/ )
• “The political economy of wilkiality: a South African inquiry into knowledge and power on wikipedia”^[14] (PhD Thesis)
• “Predicting Low-Quality Wikipedia Articles Using User’s Judgements”^[15] From the abstract: “In this paper, we utilize article ratings from Wikipedia users for the first time to assess article quality. We define ‘low-quality’ based on those ratings and design automatic methods to identify potential low-quality articles.”
• “Infoboxer: Using Statistical and Semantic Knowledge to Help Create Wikipedia Infoboxes”^[16]
• “On the Use of Reliable-Negatives Selection. Strategies in the PU Learning Approach for Quality Flaws Prediction in Wikipedia.“^[17]

References

In January 2013, some of the active Wikimedians from the Odia Wikipedia community submitted a request for the approval of the Odia Wikisource. The Odia language is one of the six Indian classical languages, and it is spoken by more than 40 million people worldwide. After two long years of persistent effort by the community, the project finally went live on October 20, 2014. This online library project aims to archive text from early literature and old books now out of print, with a license that allows reproduction, even for commercial use. Odia Wikisource surpassed other conventional archives with its features: lightweight, completely text based and searchable — but accessible on computer and mobile devices. Texts from books are re-typed to make sure that they appear in search engines. With thousands of books printed so far in this language, Odia Wikisource opens up a whole new world to readers and book lovers.

The incubation

Like other new Wikimedia projects, “Odia Wikisource” was first created as an incubator project. No community existed to digitize books for it. Existing Odia Wikipedians doubled their time spent on the wiki to keep the project growing. For someone like Mrutyunjaya Kar, a veteran editor on many Wikimedia projects in four languages, it was never an easy job to devote so much of time balancing life and work.

“	Our language and literature are rich, and I think the Internet is the best place to open them to the entire world. Those who are in need of Odia books often don’t get to accesss the books of their choice. The Odia Wikisource could be a platform for making the valuable texts available to people of all age groups.	”
— Mrutyunjaya Kar

Open Access To Oriya Books (OAOB), a book digitization project launched by Odisha based non-profit Srujanika in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, and literary organization Pragati Utkal Sangha, became even more valuable after Odia Wikisource took off. Currently, OAOB houses more than 200 books, a majority of which are in the Public Domain. A few of these books that were old and far from being put through OCR (Optical Character Recognition, a technique used to create text from images of typed or written text) were retyped in Unicode on Odia Wikisource.

The author has been privileged to be part of this great journey, which took a new shape with the beginning of relicensing copyrighted books under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license initiated by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K). To begin with, thirteen books from three authors in the first phase were relicensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0. This required permission from 67 more books from seven different authors. Needless to say, Mrutyunjaya played a significant role in acquiring permission from two of these authors. This has been the highest number of resources ever relicensed under a Creative Commons license to gear the open access movement in the Odia language.

Digitizing the classic Odia book Bhagabata

Odia Bhagabata is one of the early writings that has reached millions of readers over the centuries with the beginning of Bhagabata Tungi culture in Odisha. Authored by Jagannatha Dasa in the 14th century, this twelve volume work has never before been available in Unicode on the Internet. Bhagabata has gone beyond being just a book, people even read the text to the ears of a dying person. A version typed in several legacy fonts was available on portal Odia.org, which came in handy while looking for a digital version. Many followed the digitization work for the book with an emotional call. Encoding converters were built and old converters were modified to cater to the needs of this voluminous work. After converting encoding, proofreading and formatting by at least eight new Wikisourcers, the classic work was digitized.

Odia Wikisource@campus, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

To engage with the students of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), an institution in the Indian state of Odisha’s capital city, Bhubaneswar, and to enrich Wikimedia projects in South Asian languages, CIS-A2K signed a Memorandum of Understanding in January, 2014. This materialized when a 3 months long campus program was initiated in September 9.

“	Contributing to Odia Wikisource was really helpful for us. This will also help us to document more about our own communities. Stories of our linguistic and cultural heritage has never been told to the world.	”
— Susanta Majhi, student and Wikisourcer, KISS

Faculty under a coordinator were trained about digitizing books on Odia Wikisource. Faculty then formed nine teams with four to five students from undergraduate and masters classes. Most of the students and some of the faculty had never typed in Odia before taking part in the program. Despite holidays and examinations, these nine teams digitized about four books by Odia author Dr Jagannath Mohanty. It is important to note that all the students speak in various aboriginal languages as their native tongues, and Odia is a link language for them, but as it is the official language of the state, they also learn Odia and are educated in Odia. Learning to type in Odia should be beneficial for them for job opportunities in, for instance, state government offices.

Public gathering “Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014″

To educate more people about the Odia Wikisource project, the Odia Wikimedia community from Odisha organized a public gathering, “Odia Wikisource Sabha 2014″, on November 28, 2014. Speaking during the event, poet and thinker Haraprasad Das suggested being selective in accepting books for relicensing and digitization rather than blanket move for accepting all the books. Das also emphasized creating a team of language experts for helping to curate, and having computers in every literary center to teach Odia typing and Wikipedia/Wikisource editing. “Being part of this historical moment of seeing so many aboriginals contributing to Odia language is my good luck,” Das said. Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, founder and editor of Odia daily The Sambad, who joined as the chief speaker, announced a collaborative project for a competition among school students where they will be awarded based on their Odia Wikipedia article writing skills starting this new year. “Language should never be a barrier for anyone. Odia Wikisource is a democratic library — unlike the conventional libraries set up by the government,” Patnaik told the audience.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge.

Recently, @notconfusing has been living up to his name by presenting us with preliminary results from the Wikipedia Gender Inequality Index. For me, that report is also an annoyance, because I was not aware this was going on, and had started to prepare my own research, with intend to publish, about the same topic. Fact is, I’ve been “scooped”, though not intentionally of course. Ah well, bygones. So that my (quite early) work was not entirely in vain, I’ll show some titbits of it here; interested parties, feel free to me for access to the the data and the full Google doc (which is not exactly in a polished state). All data presented here was collected in November 2014-January 2015, using either WDQ or Labs databases. As far as I can tell, my findings correlate well with @notconfusings, which is always nice.

Methods

WDQ was used to retrieve item counts for items marked as human (P31:Q5) on Wikidata, grouped by birth dates (P569) in the ranges of 0-1800, 1800-1900, 1900-1950, 1950-1980, and 1980-today. Item counts were further grouped by gender (P21), using male (Q6581097) and female (Q6581072) only (ignoring intersex, transgender, and genderqueer). Further subgrouping was done for items with identifiers from external catalogs (e.g. ODNB, VIAF), and for nationality (P27).

To compare biographical article sizes in Wikipedias, the replica database for Wikidata in conjunction with the respective language Wikipedia replica database were used. Items that link to either male (Q6581097) or female (Q6581072) items were retrieved. For these items, corresponding Wikipedia articles in a language were interrogated for their size, measured in bytes of Wikitext markup.

Results

Datasets

Wikidata had, at the time of writing, 2,634,209 items tagged as human, of which 2,363,146 (~90%) have a gender (P21) assigned. A total of 1,575,028 items that are human and have a birth date were found on Wikidata, of which 909,075 (~58%) have a nationality assigned.

Total change over time, by country

Starting with the basics, this shows the percentage of male biographical items in the individual time ranges. While there are less male (and, thus, more female) biographies in recent times, the spread (variance by country) increases as well. Notably, there are always “low male” outliers; this seems to be mostly Sweden, for some reason.

 

Change over time by region

These two figures show the male percentage faceted by region and time range. The figure on the right also shows it by country; darker blue means less %men=more %women.

 

Biographical items gender by country

This figure shows the percentage of male biographical items by country, for countries with >= 30 items; blue=more male, red=more female. At a glance, one can see the male-dominated countries in Africa and South America, as well as the South-East Asian countries (which @notconfusing mostly calls “Confucian”, which I find confusing) with a high female percentage. “The West” appears to be stuck somewhere in the middle.

 

 Number of articles per gender

This table shows the number of sitelinks (that is, Wikipedia articles, mostly) by gender. Interestingly, there are slightly more articles about women than men, though women have more items without sitelinks, and less images. This might be due to historical factors; there would be less images (remember, paintings cost serious money!) of women than men from before, say, 1900. Also, items about women are often created for “structural need”; the father and the husband both have an article, but to connect them, a new item about the daughter/wife is created, without sitelinks.

	Male	Female
Total items with sitelinks	1,973,773	367,194
Single sitelink	(~63.1%) 1,245,727	(~62.3%) 228,619
Mean sitelinks per item	2.48	2.55
Items without sitelinks	(~1.2%) 23,600	(~1.5%) 5,454
Items with images	(~9%) 177,993	(~10.7%) 39,287

Size of biographical articles by language

For each wiki with at least 100 biographical articles, this figure shows the size (in bytes) of the article. A few “high-size” wikis were removed from this figure; they appear to make heavy use of unicode, thus increasing the byte size massively, though they roughly adhere to the same “shape”. Each dot represents a wiki; the dot size increases with the number of biographical items on the wiki. The X axis shows the mean bytes per male, the Y axis the mean bytes per female article. Wikis above the line have more bytes per women! The linear fit is surprisingly good (Pearson 0.9955423). According to the distance to the line, Mirandese Wikipedia is the most sexist one biased towards men, whereas Tamil Wikipedia is the most sexist one biased towards women

Comparison to other biographical sources

A quick comparison between biographical items that have both a birth date and an ODNB or VIAF identifier. It seems ODNB (>85% of ODNB entries have a Wikidata item!) is more sexist than VIAF, which is more sexist than the Wikidata per-country mean!

External catalog	Wikidata items	Overall male %
ODNB	29,017	89.6%
VIAF	447,758	85.3%

And as a plot, by time range:

Summary

This would be “Discussion&Conclusion” in a proper publication, but as this is just a blog post…

Strong gender bias towards men exists in the number of biographical items on Wikipedia and Wikidata, however, this bias appears to be to a large degree due to historical and/or cultural bias, rather than generated by Wikimedians. Since our projects are not primary sources, we are restricted to material gathered by others, and so reflect their consistent bias. All the above data points to less bias towards men over time, and in Asian and (to a degree) Western cultures, a trend which is mirrored in other sources. It also shows that we have comparable numbers of articles about men and women, and comparable article sizes on Wikipedia, though the latter depends on the language to some degree; all Wikipedias with over 100.000 biographical items are on the “female side” of the article size distribution (data not shown, though it can be glimpsed in the article size plot), which would indicate to me that, given enough eyeballs, gender bias becomes less of an issue on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

​​​​On December 19-21, the Wikimedia Central and Eastern European Meeting 2014 took place in Kyiv, Ukraine. This was the third annual meeting of Wikimedians from all over the region, this year organized by Wikimedia Ukraine. Around 70 participants from more than 20 countries took part in the conference.

Many countries of Central and Eastern Europe are not only related by their geographical proximity, but also share many traditional and historical issues. The region covers an area that previously experienced a wide cooperation among the different groups of people living there. That’s important because through cooperation, all Central and Eastern European wikis can grow more effectively.

This meeting was a follow-up to meetings held in previous years: 2012 edition in Belgrade, Serbia, and 2013 edition in Modra, Slovakia.

The main goal of this meeting was to bolster interstate and international collaboration between various Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups, and other communities in Central and East Europe and its regions.

Many different topics were discussed in the parallel sessions of the conference. Some of these included:

• Wikipedia Education Program, which uses Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as a teaching tool. This session was moderated by Anna Koval, manager of the Wikipedia Education Program, and was devoted to various education collaborations in CEE countries.
• WikiCamp projects. For example, Susanna Mkrtchyan shared Wikimedia Armenia‘s experience in organizing WikiCamps for school children where they learn to write articles.
• Freedom of Panorama, i.e. having right to take photos of buildings and monuments without permission. Making FoP legal is vital for Ukraine in particular, where its absence interferes with e.g. Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest.
• Gender gap, imbalance of male and female editors in wiki projects. As women contribute less to Wikipedia, different topics particularly connected with them are still covered insufficiently: pregnancy, childhood diseases, women’s vocations and hobbies etc. Meeting participants, Hanna Baradzina from Belarus and Greta Doçi from Albania among them, agreed that the stereotype about Wikipedia being harder for women is only a myth. The number of women participating in CEE Meeting itself did much to dispel this myth.
• GLAM, article contests, making small Wikipedias grow and many other topics besides.

 

Of course, failures and problems received just as much coverage as successful projects. Chapters and volunteers often face lack of understanding from the side of state institutions, difficulties with lobbying amendments to the laws (eg. introducing CC licenses), or lack of volunteers ready to donate their time and efforts. Asaf Bartov from Wikimedia Foundation moderated a separate session on recruiting new volunteers and avoiding delegation trap leading to burnout.

Participants collaborated via Etherpad to document each conference track together. You can read the notes at http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/ceem14. Also, a number of delegates met Wikimedian peers from outside their own community for the first time, and this was the very first time some entire communities were represented at a Wikimedia working conference (e.g. Latvia, Albania, Georgia). One of the results of the conference was the idea of Wikimedia CEE Spring 2015, which is already being prepared by Kaarel Vaidla and Wikimedia Eesti.

Organizers from Wikimedia Ukraine are particularly thankful to Wikimedia Foundation for funding the event, Wikimedia Polska for their invaluable help, Kyiv National Linguistic University for providing the venue, National Cultural-Art and Museum Complex “Mystetskyi Arsenal” for the guided tour and Kyivstar company for offering Internet connection on the sessions for free. We also thank all the volunteers whose work made this event possible.

More photos are available in this Commons category: Wikimedia CEE 2014 photos.

On behalf of the WMCEE 2014 organizing team:

• user:Ліонкінг (Levon Azizian)
• user:NickK (Mykola Kozlenko)
• user:Ilya (Illya Korniiko)
• user:Antanana
• user:Юрій Булка (Yury Bulka)
• user:Visem (Viktor Semeniuk)

 

Vira Motorko, Wikimedia Ukraine

The Bodleian Libraries and Wikimedia UK have joined forces to support a year-long Wikimedian in Residence in Oxford. The post provides the opportunity to work with some of the world’s richest library collections to improve content on Wikipedia and its sister projects and to share with the world the resources held in the Bodleian Libraries.

As Wikimedian in Residence you will engage with staff, the public and researchers to encourage contributions to the development of content on Wikipedia and to make the Libraries’ digitised collections more accessible, with a particular focus on areas currently under-represented on Wikipedia, from women to non-Western collections. You will also undertake academic and public outreach work to encourage understanding and development of Wikimedia projects and improve access to the Libraries’ collections, including events such as editathons and workshops.

This exciting position is ideal for someone with an understanding of Wikimedia’s mission to preserve open knowledge as well as experience of delivering training. You will be an experienced Wikimedian with excellent verbal and written communication skills and an ability to teach and support other users.

The position is part-time (18.75 hours per week/0.5FTE) for a fixed-term of 12 months. The Wikimedian in Residence will work with both the Communications Team and the Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services team.

Applications close at 12pm on Monday 19 January, and interviews are expected to take place on 4 or 5 February. For more information, please visit their website.

Anyone wishing to speak more informally about the position or ask questions is welcome to contact Liz McCarthy by emailing elizabeth.mccarthy(at)bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

The latest fundraiser was a success. It raised all the money needed and then some. The public entrusted us with all this money and the question is now what are we going to do with it all and how.

As a movement we have a mission. This mission is to share in the sum of all knowledge. Our track record is stellar. Never before in history has so little money achieved so much. This is a documented fact; no discussion is needed. We did not achieve our mission fully; no discussion is needed about that either. Wikipedia Zero is just one of our initiatives to achieve more, Kiwix is another.

We are entrusted with all this money. We can put the money to use or put it in a bank. When we are to put in to use, we have to trust that it is spend wisely. The current model is very much one of a benevolent central deity that knows best for all of us. It provides money in a miserly way. It does not trust for the money to be spend wisely; it requires huge amounts of paperwork, reporting. Just as if we are all in business and if business procedures will necessarily produce the best results to achieve our mission.

We have chapters, they are member organisations of Wikimedians. The chapters are accountable to its members. All Wikimedia organisations share the same objective. The chapters are burdened by the requirement of producing reports. Reports that serve little purpose but to satisfy central command. A burden that seriously impacts the effectiveness of the money spend. It is to "prove" that money is spend wisely and effectively.  It results in projects that neatly fit a "best practices" pattern. It does not really allow for experiments, it does seriously hamper potential projects.

It shows how a lack of trust kills us as a movement. It prevents us to use all of our talents, it has us occupied with drudgery.

The alternative is to share the money of this windfall that is the extra money that was raised in the fundraiser with an instruction to the chapters to do good. They can spend it on local projects, on local initiatives. It will certainly be more effective than the current money distribution mechanism. It is not able to cope under the strain of too many requests. Sharing in our excess of wealth will be more effective because in this way more money will be used to achieve our mission.

We should have faith because of our past performance and spend all the money that has been entrusted to us. That is how we shine.
Thanks,
      GerardM

When we announced that we were starting a Wikipedia outreach program aimed at senior citizens, the response was mixed. “Do they even know how to work with computers?” our colleagues asked. Indeed, while more than 10,000 students have participated in Wikipedia education programs worldwide in the last four years, there have only been a few small-scale senior citizen education programs.

This low Wikimedia outreach towards senior citizens is bewildering. Many of them are retired and thus have more free time than their younger student counterparts. Moreover, they are often well-educated and can contribute articles on a range of topics. Most importantly, senior citizens in developed countries are increasingly computer literate. The aim of this blog post is to shed light on what may be the next big thing in the Wikimedia education movement.

Challenges

Although we had extensive know-how from our university education program, we realized that the senior education program could not just copy what we learned from students. First, senior citizens do not regularly visit classrooms every day, as university students do. We needed to establish partnerships with institutions that could replace the schools – municipal libraries, senior citizen learning centers and third-age universities proved to be the most valuable.

Moreover, we needed to find a way to tell senior citizens about our project, so that they could take part in it. We came up with several promotional strategies: some were successful and some not-so-good. Leaflets distributed and e-mails sent out in large quantities were among the least efficient. Featuring our project in the library and senior center newsletters were key to our success. In addition, promotional talks and introductory lectures on Wikipedia to an audience of senior citizens were quite effective: crucially, these were given by professor Jan Sokol (also a Czech Wikipedian), a prominent figure who was able to attract large crowds. Age-targeted ads on Facebook were also a promising way of reaching out to senior citizens who use the Internet, and especially engaged women aged 55 to 65.

Finally, we knew we needed to establish well-organized, regular courses and be as patient and helpful as possible. By designing a course curriculum with approximately 10-12 hours divided into several weekly lessons, we ensured that our participants had enough time to first understand Wikipedia, then learn to discuss and work in a sandbox — and finally edit and write articles. Inevitably, this was time-consuming for the instructor (and program leader) but it led to superior results, as described in the next section.

Outcomes

Three separate weekly classes were held for the senior citizens of Prague, each in a different part of the city. A total of 37 participants registered to the course extension on Czech Wikipedia (although some of them did not finish the courses). A brief visit to their user pages reveals how valuable these participants are as Wikipedians – most of them have a college education, speak various languages, and some of them are former researchers.

Not only did they learn how Wikipedia works and how to edit it, but they already started working on it. Of 201,912 bytes added by the participants in total, 84,828 bytes were made on pages in the main namespace. Some of the participants even created their first articles – a total of 18 new articles were written. About half of the registered senior citizens still continue to edit (i.e. edited in December 2014 after their course ended at the end of October). This retention rate is superior to that of most university education programs, where success rate of new editor recruitment has been estimated as 3% for the US/Canada Education program.

Future directions

As a pilot, the program exceeded our expectations. We demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to run a senior citizen education program and had good results with retention. Promotion to our target group was the biggest challenge – this may get easier once word spreads to more senior citizens, as they talk to each other about this successful program.

We would like to continue with these efforts and scale up the project, if we can get more funding. Our participants often want to keep meeting in real life to improve their grasp of Wikipedia. They want to practice writing articles and gradually become independent editors. Among other things, we try to help them by creating lists of articles which they can easily start or edit. By organizing similar courses in cities other than Prague, the number of participants is likely to increase. We already have interested libraries in regional towns and cities of Moravia who wish to hold lessons for their senior citizens.

The “Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia” project is funded by an IEG grant and runs under the patronage of Wikimedia Czech Republic. The program leader is Vojtěch Veselý, who can be contacted on a Wikipedia discussion page or by e-mail.

Vojtěch Dostál, Wikimedia Czech Republic

With the fall term wrapped up, it’s time to reflect on some of the great content student editors have added to Wikipedia.

This week we were excited by Dr. Kate Grillo’s course at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse on African Archaeology. Student editors contributed articles related to archaeological sites across Africa, and these articles have been viewed 75,000 times since the course started!

Student editors contributed interesting historical information about terracotta figurines to Djenne-Djenno, about trade routes in Chibuene,  and other topics related to Jenini (new!), Mumba Cave (a DYK!) and Kintampo Complex (both four times longer), the Kariandusi prehistoric site (new), Songo Mnara, and the rock art of Uganda (new), to highlight a few.

Thanks go out to these student editors for contributing excellent content for Archaeology enthusiasts!

• Australia and New Zealand report: Trove in the encyclopedia
• Germany report: Out now: GLAM on Tour film; Looking back: WMDE discussion rounds 2014
• Norway report: Seminar at the NTNU University Museum: uploading images to Wikimedia Commons
• Spain report: Edith-a-thon about Spanish scientists in six museums
• Sweden report: Central Museums and Glöggmingel
• UK report: Going for Gold, map tagging and Histropedia
• USA report: Wikipedia in New York City Update
• Special story: Wikidata for cultural heritage
• Open Access report: Wikidata for research; Open Access Media Importer rewritten; JATS-Con
• Calendar: January’s GLAM events

In early December 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team announced the release of the third version of our Content Translation tool, which aims to make it easier to translate Wikipedia articles. Since then, our focus has been to take the tool to the next step and make it more widely available. Encouraged by the feedback we have received in the last 6 months, we are now happy to announce that the tool will soon be available in 8 Wikipedias as a beta feature. Users of Catalan, Danish, Esperanto, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmål), Portuguese, and Spanish Wikipedias will be able to use Content Translation from mid-January 2015. The tool will also be enabled on the Norwegian (Nynorsk) and Swedish Wikipedias, but only to facilitate their use as sources for Norwegian (Bokmål) and Danish respectively.

Users of Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese wikis have already previewed the tool on the Wikimedia beta servers and it was a natural choice to add these three languages in our first set for deployment. The remaining five languages were chosen based on user survey results and community requests. These languages are also available on the Wikimedia beta servers where Content Translation has been hosted since July 2014.

Currently, the Language Engineering team is completing the final phases for enabling Content Translation as a beta feature. After deployment, users will be able to translate Wikipedia articles into the language of their choice (restricted to the above mentioned eight languages) from appropriate source languages available for that language. For most of these languages, machine translation between the source and target language pairs will be made available through Apertium. English will be enabled as a source language for all languages, but without machine translation support except for English to Esperanto, where machine translations from English have been found to be satisfactory.

We will make further announcements as we close in on the deployment date. It’s possible that the beta feature may become available on the wikis for testing, before the announcements are out. Prior to that, the Language Engineering team will also host an IRC ‘office hours’ discussion on January 14th at 1600 UTC on #wikimedia-office.

Meanwhile, we welcome users to try out Content Translation and to bring to our attention any issues or suggestions. You can also help us prepare Content Translation to support more languages by filling in the language evaluation survey.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Language Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

Two muslims, one of them a police officer and one of them an employee of Charlie Hebdo died in an act of terrorism in France. After this major incident by a few deranged men the almost universal mistake is made that these perpetrators represent Islam. They do not.

In Nigeria hundreds of people have been killed by extremists that call themselves Boko Haram. Rumours have it that there may have been thousands of people who died. Apparently this is not a major incident. How can it be when you judge it by the amount of attention it gets. These Boko Haram pretend to represent Islam. They do not.

In the mean time in Amsterdam, men and women going home from work were abused, threatened, even terrorised. Abused, threatened and terrorised by people who pretend to represent western civilisation. I prefer to pretend that they do not. You can read all about this and similar incidents on Facebook and in the history books.

People persist in the mistake that terrorists represent Islam. They persist while they have been invited to learn more about what Islam is really about. It is ever so easy to learn Islam. So many muslims live in every country that it is impossible not to find a local face, a local voice that speaks for an Islam that is starkly different from the travesty called Islam by terrorists.

When you consider Wikipedia its information is not nearly enough to learn the true diversity that is in Islam, its past and its present. It is at times like this that this lack of information is damaging us all.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has grappled with the declining in use of its state language, Kyrgyz. Many reasons have been cited for its declining usage among nationals, including its limited vocabulary for recent state issues and the fact that Russian is widely spoken in Kyrgyzstan. To fight this decline, Chorobek Saadanbekov has been spreading knowledge in Kyrgyz by putting it on Wikipedia.

Saadanbekov has been an active Wikipedian since 2011. With many Kyrgyzstan nationals speaking both Russian and Kyrgyz, Saadanbekov believes that the lack of educational resources in Kyrgyz hinders learning opportunities for those who only read Kyrgyz. Kyrgyzstan’s population is around 5.5 million people, and the Kyrgyz are the nation’s largest ethnic group.

“We need [to] develop free, accessible knowledge for the majority of our country,” says Saadanbekov.

His first open knowledge project involved creating an electronic library of Kyrgyz language books. Saadanbekov and others digitized about 200 books and put them online for free access. But during his first project he realized that putting those articles on Wikipedia would boost the chances that they would actually be read.

Initially, Saadanbekov was unfamiliar with the process of creating articles on Wikipedia. So in 2011, he attended a WikiWeek session by the Soros Kyrgyzstan Foundation where experienced editors trained those who were curious about editing Wikipedia. Since then, Saadanbekov has written more than 600 articles on the Kyrgyz language Wikipedia.

Saadanbekov grew up in the countryside of Kyrgyzstan and attended a Kyrgyz language school in his youth. He then went on to become a historian and archivist after graduating from the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. An avid reader of Kyrgyz culture and history, Saadanbekov has also written numerous articles about the Epic of Manas. Manas tells the story of the Kyrgyz people and is an important part of Kyrgyzstan’s oral tradition, consisting of hundreds of thousands of lines of text. “It’s [the] history of our nation, in epic [form].” says Saadanbekov.

“If I [create a] very good article in Kyrgyz language about Manas, I can translate it into English and place it in English Wikipedia,” says Saadanbekov. “So we can connect our knowledges [in] a good way.”

Despite the rich history of the Kyrgyz people, educational resources in Kyrgyz are in short supply, impacting the quality of education among Kyrgyz students. Saadanbekov says he hopes that Wikipedia can be a good alternative for paper books that are already scarce in many schools.

“Coming of information technologies gives us [a] very good chance of increasing [our] educational quality and quantity,” he says.

Today the Kyrgyz Wikipedia is comprised of 27,471 articles and has come a long way since its start in 2011.

Yoona Ha, Communications Intern, Wikimedia Foundation
Interview by Jonathan Curiel, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia UK received a very encouraging email this morning which highlights the nature of the work of our movement.

In a collaboration between the Wellcome Library, Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia volunteers, around 100,000 images from their collection have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

The message, from Phoebe Harkins of the Wellcome Trust, said: “The Wellcome Library is thrilled with the mass upload of the historical Wellcome Images to Wiki commons, and would like to thank the staff and volunteers of Wikimedia UK who have assisted in getting Wellcome Images into Wiki commons, in particular Fae, who has worked on the mass upload over the past few months. We are delighted that 100k images from our extraordinarily diverse collection are now visible through the most consulted information resource on the planet.”

Projects of this nature highlight all that is best about our movement – the collaboration between chapter, volunteers and collections holders to share this knowledge with everyone, for free, is exactly the kind of work we will be focusing on in 2015. We look forward to you being an important part of it.

The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced that it is donating 100 “RSC Gold” accounts – the complete portfolio of their journals and databases – to be used by Wikipedia editors who write about chemistry. The partnership is part of a wider collaboration between the Society’s members and staff, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia community. The collaboration is working to improve the coverage of chemistry-related topics on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The project recently saw the appointment of Andy Mabbett as the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Wikimedian in Residence. Andy said: “Royal Society of Chemistry journals are the first port of call for many scientists and Wikipedia is the first port of call for both students and lay people. It absolutely makes sense for the two to work together to share knowledge, freely, for the benefit of everyone”.

Stephen Hawthorne, Deputy CEO of the Royal Society of Chemistry, explains that this sort of partnership is part of their vision for the future. He said: “By granting access to our journal content, we are looking to forge stronger links with the volunteers who build those projects and to encourage more chemists to edit Wikipedia.

“Around the world, we invest in educating future generations of scientists, partner with industry and academia and promote collaboration and innovation. And we promote the talent, information and ideas that lead to great advances in science”.

The Wikipedia Library will arrange for donated subscription accounts to journals and online archives to be allocated to Wikipedia editors who have demonstrated a commitment to working on the projects, in relevant topic areas.

Mrs Meyerson, was a beauty; the kind that wins the title of Miss America in 1945. She had brains too and went to university at Columbia University. According to the article about her she was a "an American model, television actress, politician, and civil rights activist".

She was more than just a pretty face. She refused to use a pseudonym; she was proud to be jewish. When she became Miss America, five sponsors withdrew from having her represent their companies as Miss America. At the time people were emerging from the death camps of Nazi Germany and at the time it was normal to encounter "No Jews" signs posted in places such as hotels and country clubs in the United States.

Diversity is in Mrs Meyerson winning the Miss America competition. It is in her campaigning against discrimination. It is in reporting this accurately in Wikipedia and it is in recognising her as a politician in Wikidata as well. When we promote diversity, it is making sure that stories like this are well represented.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Yesterday I was at the mosque for prayers. After the prayers everyone was informed that the police had been around. They urged people to immediately call when people are behaving in a suspect manner, when suspect packages are seen.

To put this in perspective, 70% of the mosques in the Netherlands have had to deal with attacks against the people or the building in the last ten years. Another perspective is in the burning of a mosque in Sweden last week.

Yesterday I went to the hairdressers.. The barber told me that his uncle and aunt had been killed by ISIS. It happened since I was there last. Their children were with another aunt..

Yesterday some crazy people killed 12 people at the office of Charlie Hebdo. The papers, the news is full of it. It is awful.

All of this is what makes terror. The people who threaten to burn mosques are terrorists. The people of ISIS who indiscriminately kill people are terrorists. The people who burn mosques are terrorists. The people who killed the people at Charlie Hebdo are terrorists.

I am angry and upset. I will however not be terrorised.
Thanks,
       GerardM

During 2014, Wikimedia Sverige organized a new series of regular edit-a-thons and workshops focused on the Gender gap issue. This is what we learned from one of these projects.

In March, we started to hold weekly edit-a-thons in Gothenburg, the second largest city of Sweden. The topic was formally “main female characters” (“kvinnliga huvudpersoner”), but we essentially let people write about what they wanted, while trying to gently steer them towards literature and/or women. For example, we tried to steer them toward topics like female authors, or seminal works in women’s literature such as “The Mad Woman in the Attic.” Men and women were all welcome.

Altogether we ran 35 edit-a-thons, each running on a Tuesday from 13.00 onwards. About 15 different Wikipedians edited over 100 different articles. The result was 11 articles reaching “recommended status” (ranking just below Good articles) with more on their way. (We of course want to improve on this for next year.) A full list of articles they worked on, sorted by how far they have come, can be found on our project page.

This initiative was one of the most publicized Wikipedia/Wikimedia events in Sweden during 2014, with two national radio interviews, two podcast interviews and several news articles. We promoted this on flyers and on the large Book Fair in Gothenburg, and have started to gather a very good reputation. We hope to see the same type of regular edit-a-thons get off the ground in other cities in Sweden during 2015.

So, what have we learned?

• We could not have done this without a small group of dedicated people who showed up nearly every time. We were four persons (two women, two men). Being a group of “all volunteers” led to very little bureaucracy during the edit-a-thons themselves and sometimes led to edit-a-thons running over by several hours. Making sure that the edit-a-thons didn’t depend on any one person was an early priority.

• We had access to a free space with wifi and a kitchen. Each time, Wikimedia Sverige sponsored coffee/tea, sandwiches and fruit – and gingersnaps and other seasonal treats. Don’t underestimate the power of “fika” — the Swedish word for “coffee and cake”. All in all, the cost of all 35 edit-a-thons was around 240-250 USD.

• We have two lines of communication: both the project page, and our Facebook group, where we could remind people to come and get them to invite others who aren’t on Wikipedia yet. Personal invitations work much better in the long run – getting people to come back week after week.

• The topic was very well chosen. Many people are interested in literature and the topic is underdeveloped on Wikipedia, so it was easy to explain the need to outsiders. But it has also been good to allow some leeway and not adhere strictly to any predetermined list of articles to edit. Sometimes interesting topics crop up in conversation or a bad article was discovered during fact checking and then we encouraged people to edit that article.

• Some people wished the edit-a-thons were held on other days or at other times. This may have contributed to the sometimes very low attendance rates. We have tried to take that into account, and are thinking about how to manage regular weekend edit-a-thons. We are also considering ways to get the people who are most interested in going to those edit-a-thons to also run them (empowering them, in effect).

• There are always going to be a few people who only come one time, just to see what we’re about. Especially after we put in small weekly ads (for free).

• We took turns doing the introduction and making sure the newcomers made a few edits, so that as many Wikipedians as possible had done the introduction, and also to make sure that the Wikipedians themselves could have time to edit. That’s also what we tried to do with the radio and podcast interviews, in order to prevent any one person becoming “the representative Wikipedian.”

• You also shouldn’t underestimate how helpful this is for stressed Wikipedians with normally very little time to edit Wikipedia to set aside time to do so.

During the winter holiday, when the editathons took a few weeks off, demand for more meetings was so high that we organized a Hangout remote edit-a-thon session, just to relieve our feelings of abstinence. We already look forward to our first edit-a-thon of 2015.

Lennart Guldbrandsson, volunteer on Swedish Wikipedia

Since January 6th, 2015, the Klexikon has more than 100 articles. This is a nice start for a children’s encyclopedia that exists only for one month. Also, the articles are really nice, due to a peticular article creation process.

On Wikipedia, if a new article is created, what follows? If it is a decent article, you will possibly receive no or little response. As someone said: ‘Be happy, if at least nobody complains.’ Or, more likely if you are a newcomer: your article will be deleted immediately, or nominated for deletion, or anyway you will meet a lot of negative feedback.

The Klexikon is different. Articles, from a given expandable list, are first created as drafts in a draft name space. It is public, but not immediately a part of the encyclopedia. People can work on it collaboratively, it may take a day, a couple of days or a week. Taking away tempo out of the process means taking away a lot of stress.

If three collaborators find the draft okay, it can be moved to the article name space. This is a positive experience for the creator, right at the start of the article’s existence. Also, the creator has a motive to deliver a good draft and improve it, because he/she wishes it to become an article.

The result is that our more than 100 articles are looking good and meet a basic standard. Klexikon articles should be easy to understand and suitable for children.

If you are impressed or totally unimpressed, or would like to join, please contact us via [email protected]

I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted the position of Wikimedian in Residence with the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), a learned society and professional body whose roots go back to 1841 (see RSC on Wikipedia).

Over the next year, starting 22 September, I will be helping my new RSC colleagues, and the Society’s members, to understand Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to contribute to making knowledge of chemistry, and related subjects, more freely available. The job is titled “WikiMedian”, because as well as WikiPedia, it covers those other projects, which are run by the Wikimedia community.

Trainees hard at work at a previous RSC editathon, in
Burlington House’s library, at which I volunteered as a trainer.

This follows on from my previous Wikipedia residences with Wildscreen (on their ARKive project), with Staffordshire Archives and Heritage Service, at the New Art Gallery Walsall, and with Lancashire County Council’s Museum Service (at their Queen Street Mill), plus shorter projects with a number of other institutions (including West Midlands Police, The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Black Country Museum, and more). I’ll continue to be Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID. The RSC have already integrated ORCID into their publishing workflow and the two organisations obviously share interests in research and academic publishing.

I’ll be working part time, partly from home, and at the RSC’s Cambridge base one day per week, plus travelling around the UK to various events. I’ll also enjoy spending some days at their palatial London HQ, at Burlington House. My work days will vary to suit the requirements of the post, and my other commitments.

The rest of the time, I’ll still be available, as a freelancer, for other work, not least relating to Wikipedia, and facilitating open space events (for example, I’m MCing GalleryCamp on 23 September). Do drop me a line if you think I can help you with that, or if you have an interest in my RSC work, or if you want to meet socially, after work, in Cambridge.

As you may know, I’m was appointed Wikipedian in Residence at ORCID in June this year.

I’ve previously written a guide to using ORCID identifiers in Wikipedia.

A new tool, ‘Resolver‘, by my friend Magnus Manske, who has awesome coding skills, and is generous with them, allows you to find whether a particular ORCID identifier is used in Wikidata (and thus in one or more Wikipedia projects, in any language).

By entering the property “P496” (the Wikidata property for an ORCID ID) and the ORCID ID value (the short form, e.g. “0000-0003-4402-5296″, not the full identifier, “http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4402-5296″) into Resolver, the relevant Wikidata page, if any, is retuned. At the foot of that page are links to Wikipedia articles (again, if any).

An ORCID identifier query in Resolver

Alternatively, you may compile a URL in the format https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/resolver.php?prop=P496&value=0000-0003-4402-5296 – which will automagically redirect.

Note that this works for articles, but not identifiers used on Wikipedia editors’ user pages, which have no Wikidata equivalent.

Resolver works with other unique identifiers, too, such as VIAF, or BBC Your Paintings artist identifiers, and many more. If you want to know why that’s important, see Andrew Gray’s post, “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“. Resolver is not just for people, though. It will also resolve unique identifiers for other types of subjects, such as BBC programme IDs or ChemSpider IDs for chemical compounds.

A month ago, the Wikimedia Foundation kicked off its year-end contribution campaign on English Wikipedia. Thanks to the generosity of everyday readers from around the world, we’re very happy to share that we’ve surpassed our goal of $20 million. Your support for this critical campaign helps cover operating expenses of the Wikimedia sites and global outreach programs in order to keep the largest free knowledge resource accessible to the world.

In just four weeks, more than 2.5 million people around the world made a gift to Wikipedia and its sister projects. This incredible demonstration of support, along with the continued contributions to Wikimedia content from tens of thousands of editors around the world, is critical to ensuring Wikipedia remains a living, trusted resource that anyone can use to understand, learn, and grow.

We deeply appreciate the generosity of Wikipedia readers. It is this generosity that allows us to maintain our independence while working toward our vision: to make the sum of all human knowledge freely available to everyone in the world.

Wikipedia, together with its sister free knowledge projects like Wikimedia Commons, is one of the most popular websites in the world. It attracts nearly half a billion unique visitors and more than 20 billion monthly page views each month. Volunteer editors collectively create, improve, and maintain its more than 33.5 million articles in 287 languages. In 2014 alone, these editors created more than three million pages and made more than 100 million edits on Wikipedias across all languages. During this time, Wikipedia content was viewed around 250 billion times worldwide.

Unlike other top websites, however, Wikimedia sites survive largely on donations from readers. As the non-profit that supports Wikipedia, its sister projects and a community of volunteers, the Wikimedia Foundation uses reader contributions to cover the costs of operating Wikipedia, including servers, and staff. These contributions also allow us to invest in improvements to the technology behind Wikipedia, ensuring that free knowledge is easily accessible to as many people around the world as possible. We receive contributions of all sizes, but every gift is meaningful: the average donation is just $15.

We are deeply grateful to all our contributors for their support — and to our volunteers who help make these campaigns a widely localized and internationalized effort. We hear from many of our donors throughout the year about why they decided to give. Here are just a few of our favorite quotes from this most recent campaign that show the value of Wikipedia:

“Wikipedia is too valuable to be taken for granted. Donating is for me an act of fairness, responsibility, and gratitude.”

“Going to Wikipedia has become second nature to me. It is synonymous with knowledge – there’s nothing more profound. I support it with the small donations I can afford in the hope of setting an example, and so that others may have the same opportunities I’ve had.”

“Keep doing what you are doing. I love Wikipedia. My most visited site by a mile. Any time I watch a new documentary, nature show, or read a book about a topic I find fascinating, I always Wikipedia the information. Irreplaceable!”

Thank you again to all Wikimedia supporters for your commitment to keeping knowledge free and accessible for the world.

Lisa Gruwell, Chief Revenue Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation

Further to my previous post on finding ORCID identifiers used in Wikidata & Wikipedia, Magnus Manske has released another useful gadget. “Wikidata BEACON” is a new tool that matches individuals’ (or other subjects’) entries in two different authority control systems. One of these, of course, can be ORCID.

For example to find people who are listed in Wikidata, and have an ORCID identifier recorded there, and who also have, say, a VIAF identifier, or a MusicBrainz artist profile, choose one of those properties, then the other, from the two drop down menus, then select “Get BEACON data”.

Screenshot of Beacon, with ORCID and VIAF identifiers selected.

The result is returned as a pipe (“|“)-separated list, with the middle of the three columns being the Wikidata ID (in the format “Qnnn“) of the item concerned. (For the technically inclined, the format is BEACON, used to enable third party data re-users to automate the conversion of identifier values into web links. You can see the part-URLs, to which the values must be appended, at the head of the results page, labelled #PREFIX and #TARGET)

So, Bill Thompson, for instance, appears as:

4426461|Q4911143|0000-0003-4402-5296

showing respectively, his VIAF (4426461), Wikidata (Q4911143), and ORCID (0000-0003-4402-5296) identifiers

A query can also be made in the form of a URL, for example this one:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=496&source=214

in which “496” is from Wikidata’s code for an ORCID identifier and “214” for a VIAF identifier.

Another example is:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=661&source=373

which shows the identifiers of chemicals in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s ChemSpider database and the matching Wikimedia Commons categories.

Similarly:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/beacon.php?prop=827&source=345

matches the BBC and Internet Movie Database (IMDb) identifiers of television programmes.

Beacon is a good illustration of the way in which Wikidata has become a hub linking disparate datasets about people, and other things; as described by Andrew Gray in “Wikidata identifiers and the ODNB – where next?“.