Open Wiki Blog Planet

iPad Handles Content More Like Paper, Less Like Computer

2010-03-13T05:50:45+00:00

Cameron Daigle of Griffin Technology, on iPad:

Here’s a (possibly tremendously important) thought: the iPad is a portrait-oriented personal computer. Everyone has been so caught up with the touchscreen, whiz-bang look, and thinness (of Jobs and iPad both) that they’ve failed to be properly stunned at the realization that Apple is about to release the first natively portrait-oriented personal computer to hit the market in decades.

Another thought: The New York Times viewed on an iPad is arguably closer to print design than web design.

Landscape (widescreen) is good for video, and that’s a major reason why displays have gotten wider over the past several years. But portrait is good for text – that’s why most books are portrait-oriented. The iPad’s ability to handle – and seamlessly switch between – both modes is one of the most important design considerations that pushes it ahead of the status quo.

(Via Daring Fireball)

SXSW 2010 Day 1

2010-03-12T19:51:49+00:00

Great blue sky weather greets attendees today coming to Austin, TX for South by Southwest 2010. The interactive, film and music festival has gained the reputation for being the most interesting conference around for creative folks of all stripes.

Ties and suits are frowned upon here, while Chuck Taylor sneakers, scruffy beards and muted T-shirts rule the scene. Attendees find any electrical outlet they can, plop themselves on the ground, open what is typically an aluminum Mac laptop and start searching away:

Where’s the best party? What’s the next interesting session? Where’s the best party? Who’s at what bar? Did I mention, where’s the best party?

Some reflections before things get fully underway:

This Sunday I’ll be giving a talk on Wikipedia, one year after I launched my book at SXSW 2009 (The Wikipedia Revolution). The title: Can Wikipedia Survive Popular Success and Community Decline? Not exactly the most optimistic topic, but it’s a necessary look at the significant statistical shift in contributor numbers, and perhaps introduces a new phase of Wikipedia’s existence.

Even though the SXSW sessions haven’t started yet, there are some interesting trends just from people-watching:

This year is the coming of age for Digital SLR HD video. The number of “rigs” being carried around SXSW is pretty impressive: Canon EOS 5DMkII full frame and EOS 7D crop frame video systems are prevalent, often with external audio recorders to capture better audio than the auto-level input allows on the camera. I’m eager to hear from filmmakers at SXSW how much DSLR HD video is changing their industry. Just think, for less than $3,000 you can get a jaw-dropping 1080/24p quality video. In the past, you would have to start in the five figures to get access to the same type of lenses at that resolution. This is a rather interesting twist in the DSLR wars — for a while it seemed Nikon finally had found its edge over Canon, by creating better professional gear at reasonable price points (ie. D300). But with my experience at last week’s Venice, CA, Philip Bloom meetup which paraded an amazing array of Canon video gear setups, I’m convinced long term Canon’s experience in video (and Nikon’s lack of it) will lead Canon’s comeback punch in this area. It could very well be why Canon dominates again.
There’s a more commercial feel this year. Pepsi, Chevy and AOL are taking up the premier spots in the lobby area where attendees tend to hang. Not bad on its own, but Chevy’s displaced the legendary LEGO Pit! What used to be front and center, entertaining kids and adults alike, is now a lounge with leather seats and power plugs. Each day the Lego Pit used to be the meeting point for folks to go to dinner. No longer. SXSW has always been about play — last year there were spontaneous fusillades of elastic foam finger rockets in the hallways. I hope it keeps that character. The LEGO Pit has been spotted elsewhere, but not nearly as central to the “freeway” of SXSW.
Lego Pit always a crowd pleaser at SXSW. It's been moved to lower traffic location.
FourSquare maturity. The location-based, game-themed social networking service is now fully entrenched as a way to find out where the good parties are. Many bars and hotels here show over 100 “other” people there, and you can get an instant readout as to how long lines are at the popular places. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud calls FourSquare old news at SXSW, with last year being the big splash. Other mainstream outlets are just catching on. Gowalla is making a play in this space too, and I’ve seen more than a few references to it by users here.
Badges at SXSW now carry a QR code (2D matrix code) so you can quick scan someone’s badge with an iPhone or Android app and it will save it to your my.SXSW list of folks you met. So you should be able to do away with business cards, says SXSW. In theory, at least. It scores a FAIL since it uses a service called DUB in between, and requires a user to enter a username/password to my.SXSW before it works. Most people will likely just give up because it’s too much of a hassle. I did. Not a good user experience to present a blank white screen with username/password. As I told CNET’s Dan Terdiman, at least some basic user info should show up to spark that “Aha!” factor to convince you it’s worth your while. I predict the abandonment rate will be quite high, and few will use the QR scanning feature. The tactility of business cards, especially among creative types, still has resonance.
Example of a QR code on the badges of SXSW attendees

That’s just from walking around before the conference starts.

More to come as the day goes on.

The British Museum

2010-03-12T18:40:00+00:00

Liam Wyatt, Wikipedian-in-residence at the British Museum has an awesome ring to it. When I heard about it yesterday, I did not blog about it. I am happy I did not because how awesome it is, becomes clear when you read what Liam has to say about it.

Kingdom of Ife exhibition

When you visit the website of the British Museum, you will find so many gorgeous images, images from all over the world, from so many era, from so many cultures. You have access to their 1,500,000 objects in their collection database, you will find that they are working on an on-line catalogue..

One way of learning how HUGE the British Museum is, is by looking at the map. Another is by going there, you are spoiled for choice and there is too much to take in. Reserving a day for the BM is just not enough.

Liam will be Wikipedian-in-residence and, it is awesome. He will have five weeks and I am sure that he can only scratch the surface.
Thanks,
GerardM

The British Museum and Me

2010-03-12T16:21:37+00:00

Yesterday it was officially announced by Matthew Cock, the Head of Web, that the British Museum will be bringing me in-house as the “volunteer Wikipedian in Residence”! It will be a five week pilot project in June in the leadup to Wikimania 2010.

Let me restate this to emphasis its awesomeness: Arguably the world’s most significant museum, 257 years old, with countless treasures from all civilisations, has decided to be the first GLAM in the world to incorporate a Wikipedian as an official member of the volunteer team. And I get to be that lucky person!

The Great Court. Photo by Andrew Dunn, CC-by-SA.

This is built on the idea by the same name that I’ve previously blogged about and I think this is extremely significant as it represents a new way for cultural organisations to harness the educative and collaborative potential of the internet in a way that directly speaks to their mission as public collections to teach and share. Equally, it is a great opportunity for the Wikimedia community to get access to best-practice and expertise to help improve its projects and ways of doing things.

Not surprisingly, I am honoured and very excited to be able to undertake this, in my opinion, the WORLD’S BEST JOB. What better combination could there be than the museum that bills itself as “free to the world since 1753” and “the free encyclopedia [since 2001]“!

Extract from the announcement:

[The British Museum is] one of the broadest-ranging cultural collections
in the world. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is the most consulted
and largest compendium of knowledge ever compiled. By harnessing the
expertise of the British Museum and the reach of Wikipedia, this project
aims to bring mutual benefit to both organisations.

Liam’s underlying task will be to be to build a relationship between the
Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both
internally and public-facing. These will include: creating or expanding
existing articles about notable items or subjects of specific relevance to
the collection and the Museum’s expertise; supporting Wikipedians already
editing articles related to the British Museum both locally and internationally;
and working with Museum staff to explain Wikipedia’s practices and how
they might be able to contribute directly.

(William Blake, Ancient of Days, 1794. Public Domain.
BM ref. AN38787001)

Potential activities - how can I help you?
The “Wikipedian in Residence” role is not about monopolising or owning articles about British Museum topics, but is about providing an added resource for the existing editors to improve the speed and quality of their work.

First and foremost, we will be collaborating with Wikimedia-UK to organise a “backstage pass” tour for Londonpedians some time in early June. This will be built on the experience of a similar event held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney which proved to be a very good way for each community to meet the other to break down some barriers and share expertise. There are many things that I could also do in this role. The British Museum will bring their wishlist but equally you may have ideas of your own. Is there anything I can do to help? Check out their book Masterpieces of the British Museum and Wikipedia’s Category: Collections of the British Museum for some ideas.

Please contact me by my Wikipedia user talkpage, on twitter @wittylama, or any of the methods listed in the “contact” section of my website if you have any projects with which you think I might be able to help. Potentially I could do some research for you or put you in touch with an expert; find you a reference or collaborate on an article. The range of activities is quite dauntingly large - everything from new stubs and featured articles to translations, training and tours - I’m sure if five weeks is not enough, there’s many lifetimes’ work in this! On the other hand, if you owe me a wiki-favour expect to have it called in

(Replica of one of the 12th Century Lewis Chessmen. Photo by Andrew Dunn, CC-by-SA.
BM ref. AN236174001

Out of scope
Matthew and I have tried to be careful in designing the project so that it does not step on any toes either in the Wikimedia community or the British Museum. The whole point is to build a relationship of trust, so it is important to not wade into areas that will just end up being a world.of.pain. Therefore, aside from that which comes under Wikipedia’s “non-controversial edits” guideline, I will not be working on the article about the British Museum itself nor on any contentious topics such as restitution of disputed items in the collection. Certainly, I would try to answer questions and research things that were asked of me on the talkpage.

Equally, although I will probably end up placing external links in articles back to the British Museum website, this is not the principal purpose of the exercise. It must be noted that the project is being run out of the “Department of Learning and Audiences” in collaboration with the curatorial staff. It is not a marketing campaign.

Just as the British Museum will not be asking me to undermine Wikipedia’s policies, I will be at pains not to undermine theirs. So, whilst I will be discussing various projects with staff and will continue to advocate for free-licences, I will be not be acting like the “content liberation army of the People’s Republic of Wikimedia”. Please see my previous blog post, Content Liberation for my views on this behaviour.

(the Rosetta Stone. Photo by Hans Hillewaert, CC-by-SA.
BM ref. AN16456004)

Measures of Success
As this is a pilot project the scope and scale of the activities will necessarily change as the project progresses. The whole thing will also be reviewed at the end of the five weeks. In the future the position may even become a regular one, with a new volunteer every six months coming on-site to work on “their thing”, thereby giving the chance to many people to get this experience. We’ll just have to see how this pilot works out.

As mentioned, the endpoint of the pilot period will be marked with the 6th annual Wikimania conference to be held in Gdansk, Poland (I note there’s an awesome London-Gdansk roadtrip planned of which I’ll definitely be part). I expect to be making a presentation on the success (or otherwise) of the project using qualitative and quantitative measures. Some things that will be important to track throughout this project could include:

aggregate pageviews for Wikipedia pages in Category: Collections of the British Museum etc. over time;
the quality of these articles over time and whether higher quality Wikipedia articles produces increased pageviews and/or increased clickthroughs;
the state of content in Wikipedia editions other than English (such as the 10 languages the Museum already caters for via its audioguides);
whether an on-site volunteer has a flow-on effect to other Wikipedians which helps increase their effectiveness and satisfaction;
the self-reported level of confidence that curatorial staff have with concepts of editing a wiki, free-licences and crowdsourcing;
the self-reported level of confidence local/remote Wikipedians have in using the British Museum’s resources (publications and expertise) for their research;
…and many others, no doubt!

(The Great Dish of the Mildenhall Treasure. Photo by Litlnemo, CC-by-NC-SA.
BM ref. AN9971001)

See you there?
I will be starting the role in the first week of June. At the very least I’ll be able to meet a bunch of new people at the 13 June London Wikipedia meetup. As I’ll be temporarily moving to London from Sydney to undertake this unpaid role, I hope someone at the meetup can shout me a beer! I really care about GLAM-WIKI relations so I think you could say this represents me putting my money where my mouth is

Stay tuned for more announcements of BM-WP awesomeness!

Languages of the Indian subcontinent

2010-03-12T14:43:00+00:00

Shiu Alex compiled excellent information about the Wikipedias in languages of the Indian subcontinent for the month of Februari 2010. The information is based on the material that is prepared and maintained by Erik Zachte.

This is the list of languages with a Wikipedia; there are many more languages.. The languages marked with an "X" have completed their localisation for mobile Wikipedia. Some of the languages are not spoken in India, I really appreciate it that the languages are selected based on them being part of the Aryan or Dravidian language family.

What I would like to know is which of these Wikipedias have problems showing their text because of problems with their fonts / scripts. I would like to know this both for computers and mobile phones.
Thanks,
GerardM

WikiReader update

2010-03-12T13:12:00+00:00

WikiReader, the gizmo that allows you to read Wikipedia off line, is being localised at translatewiki.net. It is doing really well with 17 languages completely localised and 8 more localisations under way.

On the WikiReader website, there is nothing yet about the product being available for other languages, for other Wikipedias. This had people of the translatewiki community asking the question: "What is the point.."

It turns out that as WikiReader is a physical product, it needs proper preparation and testing. It turns out that existing customers are using beta software for French, Spanish, German. They are working hard to launch multi-language support and they hope to roll it out by the end of the month.

At translatewiki.net we are ready with 17 languages. The question is how many languages will be ready at the end of the month ...
Thanks,
GerardM

Pictures of the Day - March 12

2010-03-12T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Usain Bolt Olympics Celebration.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Ysangkok

de.wikipedia.org:

DU-Sunset.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Tobias Sieben

en.wikipedia.org:

Military aviary2.jpg from en.wikipedia.org, provided by J.delanoy

UT Dallas History Course Uses Twitter as Study Aid

2010-03-11T22:52:35+00:00

Kim Smith, a graduate student in emerging media and communication at UT Dallas, produced this case study of Twitter use in Dr. Monica Rankin’s US history course:

Students find themselves checking the feed after hours because the public trail of Twitter chatter doubles as an excellent study aid. As one student from Rankin’s class put it, “The significant terms that we’ve talked about in discussions, we’ll tweet that, and you can [go] back [to] that, and it’s a pretty good study aid.” This, in turn, keeps Twitter on their minds, fueling the cycle of involvement.

In Some General Comments on the Twitter Experiment, Dr. Rankin offers her thoughts on the project.

Pace of comments and juggling multiple topics:

By the time a comment was posted and students had a chance to respond to it, several other tweets had gone up and new ideas had been introduced. I suspect that this bothered me more than it bothered the students. I tend to think and process information in a much more structural manner. Most of the students (in their world of intense multi-tasking) seemed completely capable of following several streams of thought at one time.

Increasing student engagement:

Overall, I think the twitter experiment was successful primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not. Even in smaller classes, only a small number of students actively participate in class discussions. Students knew that their class participation grade would be partially determined by their involvement in these discussions and most of them seemed comfortable with using the technology to engage with the reading materials.

(Via Natalie Petouhoff)

Stedman’s Narrative

2010-03-11T17:29:00+00:00

John Gabriel Stedman wrote the book on the war that was waged on the Maroons of Suriname. His book became the standard text of the abolitionist, his book also laid down the foundation on how to fight a jungle guerilla war.

His book and the pictures therein provide some of the best known imagery about slavery. The Tropenmuseum provided a high quality scan of this important picture and Peter Weis did this digital restoration. Both the original and the restoration will be uploaded to Commons as is our best practice for restorations.
Thanks,
GerardM

Handing out Paints

2010-03-11T17:26:57+00:00

Today I presented on a panel session at the “Idea10 Learning futures: technology challenges” conference, down in Melbourne.

This is a technology in education conference with quite a broad scope. Some techies, some government types, some school administrators. My panel, alongside Paula Bray from the Powerhouse museum (@paulabray) and Nicholas Gruen of Gov 2.0 taskforce fame (@nicholasgruen) was there to mix things up a bit and be provocative. I hoped we fitted the bill nicely.

The video of the whole session can be seen here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5351731

and here’s the slidecast of my presentation, entitled “handing out paints”.

Handing out paints

View more presentations from wittylama.

For those wanting a bit of background into some of the references I made… here’s the links to info on the Little red schoolbook, good copy bad copy. I also took ideas from Steven Walling’s recent fantastic presentation and the trailer to the documentary “truth in numbers“.

The Royal Institute for the Tropics celebrates its centenary

2010-03-11T13:48:00+00:00

Today the Royal Institute for the Tropics (KIT) celebrates its centenary. Queen Beatrix and princess Máxima attend the opening ceremony, a commemoration stamp of 44 cent, and many, many festivities will mark this jubilee of this magnificent organisation.

We know KIT best for the Tropenmuseum, they have proven an inspirational organisation who pioneered several approaches on Wikimedia and GLAM cooperation. In the last year they took part in Wiki loves Art/NL, the Maroon exhibition with its images, the images about Indonesia they show how much the Tropenmuseum proves itself as an innovative museum that knows how to provide relevance in this digital age.

To give an extra shine to the celebrations, Durova restored this photo of the opening by Queen Willhelmina, We were very fortunate that it was today that the Indonesian story cloth premièred in all its glory.

If you want to celebrate with us, you can enter something in the "guest book" sharing your comments, anecdotes, congratulations, pictures and videos about KIT and its work.
Thank you KIT and many happy returns !!
GerardM

Pictures of the Day - March 11

2010-03-11T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

F-16 Solo Display Team Radom 2009 b.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Maedin

de.wikipedia.org:

17-Mile Drive Chinarock.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Überraschungsbilder

en.wikipedia.org:

Bareina, Mauritania.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Chin tin tin

Pragmatic Words on Iraq’s Future

2010-03-11T02:21:28+00:00

Thomas Friedman, in a New York Times op-ed piece on the Iraqi national election that took place this past Sunday:

Some argue that nothing that happens in Iraq will ever justify the costs. Historians will sort that out. Personally, at this stage, I only care about one thing: that the outcome in Iraq be positive enough and forward-looking enough that those who have actually paid the price — in lost loved ones or injured bodies, in broken homes or broken lives, be they Iraqis or Americans or Brits — see Iraq evolve into something that will enable them to say that whatever the cost, it has given freedom and decent government to people who had none.

Indonesian story cloth there for you to enjoy

2010-03-11T01:41:00+00:00

When Durova started her work on the Indonesian story cloth for the Tropenmuseum, we knew that we could not show it in all its glory on Commons. It is just too big. In real life it is 15 meters long, the TIFF is 992,4 MB.

Converting it to PNG would reduce its size. JPG compression would make it even smaller but the image would lose much of its appeal if it is to be reduced to less then 100 MB. At this size it would still be unmanageably big.

Djatoka in action

Enter Djatoka, this open source application provides you with the ability to view incredibly big files in a manageable way. I am really grateful to the Los Alamos National Laboratory for hosting the story cloth for us in Djatoka.

Have a look and, enjoy.
Thanks,
GerardM

Mobile #Wikipedia is booming

2010-03-10T20:27:00+00:00

March 9 had a record number of visitors for mobile Wikipedia. There were 20,051,524 page views, the previous record was at 17,662,433. Multiply by 28 (to compare with Februari) gives you 561 M page views; this compares to more traffic then the French and less then the Spanish Wikipedia.

Given that some people expect mobile access to become as big as computer based access, this record will not last :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Ten Years of JetBlue

2010-03-10T18:20:25+00:00

JetBlue is running this poster in the New York Times today to celebrate its tenth year of flying. It’s good to see a company that has paid so much attention to customer service and experience reach this milestone, especially in a decade that has been particularly hard on airlines.

Packing for Berlin

2010-03-10T13:37:40+00:00

I’ll be attending the Developer’s Workshop in Berlin next month. I’m looking forward to meeting some new faces and spending a few days neck deep in MediaWiki internals. I’ve got a couple of things I’m planning to bring with me that I think people will like.

IdeaTorrent

People keep kicking around the idea of using IdeaTorrent for tracking enhancements to MediaWiki. I’d like to give it a shot so I’m in the process of setting up an instance of it for the Wikimedia community to play with. Hoping to have this ready by Berlin (if their website will stop going down!).

New-installer

In whatever shape it’s in, I plan to show off the new-installer branch to MediaWiki. This is a huge overhaul of not only the installation process itself, but the backend supporting it. I’ve also managed to sneak a long-overdue schema abstraction in, which should help with database maintenance in the future. I would like to have this in a slightly more workable state by Berlin, but I’ll be showcasing what I have nonetheless.

Git Transition/Code Review/Bug Tracking

People like Git. Some people think we should move to Git and rid ourselves of Subversion. I’m of mixed opinions, but I’m always open to trying new things. I’ve been working with Ævar to get a working Git copy of our Subversion repository with all of the metadata intact (or as much as we can preserve). People also are looking at alternatives to using CodeReview/Bugzilla for our tracking systems for code and bugs/enhancements. I’m hoping to have an instance of Gerrit up and running by Berlin as well, so people can toy with that and see what they think.

Coming up in April - ACEC & the NLA's Innovative Ideas Forum

2010-03-10T12:44:06+00:00

I have a couple of interesting gigs coming up in April.

First is a Wikipedia editing workshop at the Australian Computers in Education Conference. I gave a talk called ‘Safe wiki’ at the last such conference, in Canberra in 2008. Now it is rolling around to Melbourne and I am doing something a bit more hands-on.

Registrations for ACEC are now open. You can also buy a ticket just for Thursday (to catch the open source stream!) or even just a half-day if you like.

Second is something quite exciting, the National Library of Australia’s Innovative Ideas Forum. It is a national event they hold, one day long, free, but only about 300 attendees. This year they are encouraging the use of Twitter throughout, and will probably podcast it, if last year is any indication. One of the other speakers is Nicholas Gruen, who was head of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. Esteemed company indeed! My talk is called “Is Wikipedia a one-off?: Is mass collaboration all it’s cracked up to be?“

The NLA is a great host for such an event; it doesn’t surprise me that they are encouraging big-thinking and innovation in technology. Their Australian Newspapers site is not only a fine example of making dead-wood products machine readable and comfortably at home amongst the electrons, but it also integrates ‘crowdsourcing’ (OCR correction) in a very natural and, from what I understand, successful manner.

I hear places are filling up quickly so if you are in Canberra, register soon!

Dr. Handel or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia

2010-03-10T11:08:30+00:00

"In 1978, Handel faced another scandal, when one of his laboratory assistants died under suspicious circumstances. Handel never faced any charges in connection with the event, but the tragedy showed, at the very least, that the safety precautions taken in his lab were inadequate, and other, more sinister rumors circulated about the event. The death took place late at night, after 11 PM, at a time when labs are normally closed, leading to suspicions that Handel and the assistant may have been lovers, and opening the possibility that Handel had killed her in order to keep the affair quiet." (Wikipedia) (WebCite).

That paragraph remained in the Wikipedia article Mike Handel for more than three and a half hours last night. Some readers will undoubtedly respond, so what? Vandalism happens all the time on Wikipedia, and much of it is not cleaned up promptly. Well, this one is just a little different. For those 3.5 hours, that article was linked from the main page of Wikipedia, one of the ten most-visited sites on the web (WebCite). During that period, it was almost certainly viewed by a thousand people or more. Second, that lovely paragraph wasn't the only BLP disaster in the article, which also labeled Handel a "murderer" and a "Nazi", and implied that he had been pressured into leaving Israel by Western intelligence agencies. Third, Mike Handel doesn't even exist except in my imagination (and now on Wikipedia).

I created Mike Handel as a test and a demonstration. Wikipedia has a BLP (Biographies of Living People) problem, but many Wikipedians are altogether too happy to ignore it. It would be terrifically unethical to accuse a real living person of murder while he or she was featured on Wikipedia's main page, so I created a hoax to provide more proof (as if more proof is needed) of Wikipedia's BLP problem. This is going to be a long post with a great number of links and details, so if you're not interested in the particulars of the story, you can skip to the section entitled "Successes and Failures" below.

The Story Begins

I created the article on February 19 (Wikipedia)(WebCite). At that time, it didn't have the paragraph on the murder, but it did have a few problematic bits. Even in the early draft, Handel was depicted as leaving behind chemical weapons-related research in Israel "reportedly under pressure from the British and American governments" and reports that he had been labeled a "murderer" and a "Nazi" by animal rights groups were included. The sources cited were weak at best: two articles from The Magdalen College Record, the annual newsletter of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Two minutes after the article was created, Wikipedian MuffledThud appeared to categorize it (Wikipedia)(WebCite). Immediately thereafter, MuffledThud applied the "Unsourced BLP" tag to the article, which was not strictly correct; the article had references, though no footnotes (Wikipedia)(WebCite). 2 minutes later, he removed some of the more serious BLP issues in the article, which was an entirely appropriate response (Wikipedia)(WebCite). In other words, for the first five minutes or so, Wikipedia's response was the best that you could hope for under current conditions.

Then, I came back and removed the unsourced BLP tag. It had been incorrectly applied as the article did have sources, so my action was consistent with Wikipedia's policies (Wikipedia)(WebCite). Three minutes later, MuffledThud applied the "refimprove" tag, which was somewhat more appropriate (Wikipedia)(WebCite). I let the article sit for a few minutes before returning again to add back in the problematic material that he had removed earlier (Wikipedia)(WebCite). In return, I received a BLP warning template on my user talk page (Wikipedia), and he took the material out again. The system, it seemed, was more or less working.

Referencing

Unfortunately for Mr. Thud, while he was busy (and before I actually even received the BLP warning), I began to up the ante. I appended a footnote to the section calling Handel a "Nazi" with a reference to an article in the Oxford Times, a reliable source, to be sure, but one of which there is no digital archive anywhere (Wikipedia)(WebCite). What could he do now? It was referenced to a "reliable source" and therefore untouchable, never mind that no such article had ever been published.

MuffledThud, though, is apparently someone who actually does care about BLP issues (give the man a barnstar) and he removed the sourced material, taking it to the talk page to "discuss verification."(Wikipedia)(WebCite). On the talk page, he let me know that he wanted an archived version online. As that was impossible, he asked for a scanned version of the article. (Wikipedia)(WebCite). He did say "please", so I gave him one.(Wikipedia)(WebCite). It was a quick forgery, but, still, the average vandal probably isn't willing to forge to a 1970s era newspaper clipping, so I paused to think if I was compromising the experiment. I decided that I wasn't really, the serious BLP problems was still to come (and would not be supported with fake clippings). These were just the warmup BLP issues, and I did have to guard the article against charges that it was a hoax. So far as notability went, the article's survival was guaranteed. Handel, the article claimed, had held a named chair at Oxford, making him inherently notable under Wikipedia's guidelines for academics.

The fake clipping more or less sealed the deal. There were a few more changes to the article, but they were mostly aesthetic. The die had been cast, and by February 24 we were looking at a fairly final version of the article. "All right, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my close-up" the article proclaimed with its tidy, though entirely faked references (Wikipedia)(WebCite).

DYK Approaches

As my little hoax grew up, I knew it was time to bring it up at DYK. I nominated it, and at first there was a little resistance to its poorly sourced state, but before long it had been approved. On February 28, it went into the DYK queue (Wikipedia)(WebCite). My little article was all grown up, and scheduled to hit the big time at 0:00 on March (UTC).

Now it was time to move in for the big stuff. Using another account, I appeared on the talk page. Wasn't Mike Handel the guy "who fell in love with one of his research assistants, told her he would leave his wife, and then killed her when he didn't and she threatened to go public with the affair?" I wondered (Wikipedia)(WebCite). No one answered.

The next day, with about 5 hours until the article's main page debut, I emerged again to kick up the level of BLP violations. First, the old accusations of being pressured out of Israel by the British and American governments came back (Wikipedia)(WebCite). A few minutes later, it was time to bring in the murder charges. I wrote: "In 1978, Handel faced another scandal, when one of his laboratory assistants died under suspicious circumstances. Handel never faced any charges in connection with the event, but the tragedy showed, at the very least, that the safety precautions taken in his lab were inadequate, and other, more sinister rumors circulated about the event" (Wikipedia)(WebCite). For good measure, I came back under yet another account and put in a bit of childish vandalism. The vandalism was reverted within a minute, but the charges of murder most foul remained. (Wikipedia)(WebCite)

The Big Time

Mike Handel hit the main page at midnight UTC. Administrator Ucucha performed the update (Wikipedia)(WebCite), but there's no reason to believe he even read the article. If he did, the entirely unsourced rumors of murder surrounding Oxford biologist Mike Handel didn't faze him.

11 minutes after Mike Handel made the main page, I swung back through to ratchet up the accusations one last time, adding the delicious bit: "The death took place late at night, after 11 PM, at a time when labs are normally closed, leading to suspicions that Handel and the assistant may have been lovers, and opening the possibility that Handel had killed her in order to keep the affair quiet."(Wikipedia)(WebCite). The murder allegations had now been in the article for 5 and a half hours without any sourcing at all, so a few minutes later, I came back and tacked on another imagined Oxford Times story for good measure.(Wikipedia)(WebCite).

There was nothing to do now but sit back and wait. A helpful chap named Jackyd101 breezed through a few minutes later to categorize the article, (Wikipedia)(WebCite) but found that the allegations of murder and intrigue were of substantially less importance than making sure that people looking for Berkeley alumni could find Dr. Handel.

The article was vandalized at 0:37, and rather surprisingly the vandalism stuck for 7 minutes before being reverted. Again, all the nasty bits of the article were left untouched. (Wikipedia)(WebCite). Finally, at 2:58, someone came through to do a little light copyediting. Libel, it seems is quite fine, but imperfect style is another matter entirely. (Wikipedia)(WebCite).

Dr. Handel Discovers the Article

At 02:55 UTC, Dr. Handel (played by yours truly) discovered that the article about him was accusing him of an atrocious murder, and wrote to the OTRS system (no one remarked on the strangeness of a 79 year-old retiree from the UK being online at 3 AM, but if challenged Dr. Handel was prepared to claim a late night phone call from his son in New York). His email read as follows:

To whom it may concern;

I am Michael Handel, formerly of Magdalen College, Oxford. I just received a phone call from my son alerting me to the fact that I am mentioned on the front page of your website and that a page exists on your website, purportedly displaying a biography of me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Handel). This biography, however, is flawed and inaccurate. Among many other errors, you allege that I had an affair with my laboratory assistant and then killed her. This is plainly false and your statement is libelous. I demand that you remove this page from your website immediately. If you are unwilling or unable to comply with this request, then I will be forced to seek an alternative remedy.

Mike Handel

OTRS received the ticket, and slightly less than an hour later at 03:43, Wikipedia admin NuclearWarfare removed some of the insinuations of murder, but left the gist, that an assistant had died in the lab late at night, in the article.(Wikipedia)(WebCite). He then semiprotected the article (Wikipedia)(WebCite), and three minutes later, made the right choice and took out all mention of the death. (Wikipedia)(WebCite). He did, however, make sure that some mention of it was preserved on the talk page, asking for better sourcing; after all, we can't be sure that Dr. Handel was as innocent as he says he was.(Wikipedia)(WebCite). At 3:55, Dr. Handel got an email back from OTRS:

I have removed the information for now. A citation was provided for that
information, but I could not access it. Do you know, by any chance, if an article
called "Handel Denies Wrongdoing in Assistant's Death" was published in the Oxford
Times on 20 October 1978? I presume that one was not and that the alleged incident
never happened, from your earlier statement.

I have also locked your page indefinitely from editing by unregistered and new users.

These after-the-fact actions, however, cannot excuse the fact that you encountered
this on our website. I can only offer you our sincere apologies and assure you
that we do all we can to ensure that such malicious edits are repaired quickly.

Many thanks for your kindness in writing about the problem you saw. I shall do my
best to follow up on this. Please tell me if there is anything you would like me
to do.

Yours sincerely,

[Name redacted]

Through all of this OTRS mess, however, the "Nazi" line was allowed to stay as were the bits about chemical weapons and intrigue. At 08:31, after the article had left the main page, MuffledThud, took the bit about Israeli intrigue out again. As of this writing, the article had not changed further. (Wikipedia)(WebCite). Dr. Handel, however, stayed in touch with OTRS. At 13:23, he sent off another email:

Mr. [Name Redacted],

Thank you for removing that particular paragraph. I am still generally unhappy, however, that your website contains a page about me. I am a very private person and have been out of the public eye for many years, and I would prefer not to be mentioned at all on your website.

Secondly, your website devotes too much space to one small incident, the attempted bombing of my laboratory 35 years ago. This was just a single moment in a long career, and I do not appreciate being depicted as if this were somehow my main accomplishment.

Once again, I ask that you remove the page. I do not want to have to seek another remedy.

Michael Handel

Dr. Handel, after all, was very unhappy to be in Wikipedia at all. He wanted out, and in his last sentence he injected the incipient threat of legal action. It took OTRS a while to get back this time, but Dr. Handel received a response at 16:39 (a bit over three hours later).

Requests for deletion of an article are generally not processed by email. There are however, several options you can undertake.

1. You can nominate the article for deletion yourself. This will require you to have a Wikipedia account (which you can sign up for by clicking the link "Sign in/create account" at the top right-hand corner of our site), and then following the instructions at .

2. You can ask us to nominate the article for deletion on your behalf. This will make it public that you have made the request — your communication to date is confidential. If you are sure that you wish to have the article deleted, this is the option I recommend.

3. You can specify what sentences or sections of the article you feel are inappropriate by email response to us. We will then investigate them with a view to removal. Please be specific.

Please note that in the case of options 1 and 2, there is no guarantee that the nomination will result in the article being deleted. Please let me know which of these options you would like to pursue.

Yours sincerely,

[Name Redacted]

Dr. Handel responded promptly to this email. Finally, he had the chance to put things right. Of course, there was one small problem with the email he had received. Option 1 was not viable; the article was semiprotected and there is no way he could have placed an AfD tag on it. He liked Option 2 anyway, though. At 17:07, he wrote:

Mr. [Name Redacted],

Please nominate the article for deletion on my behalf. Who will make the final determination?

Mike Handel

As of this writing, nearly 6 hours later, he has received no response, and the article still sits there. Further more, the revisions accusing him of murder remain available in the page history, neither deleted nor oversighted.

Successes and Failures

The entire saga is, undoubtedly, a great failure for Wikipedia. I consulted an attorney friend, who advised me that the nasty murder accusations were clearly actionable, and that if the person who wrote them could be identified (and Michael Handel were a real person), s/he would face substantial civil liability, greatly compounded by the fact that the article appeared on the main page.

I hope that this whole story makes it clear to people that there is a BLP problem. Let's recap:

A fake BLP made it onto the main page
A BLP included libelous defamation for more than 9 hours, and was not reverted until an OTRS complaint was filed.
During 4 of those hours, that BLP was featured on the main page, receiving a large number of page views (a final number will not be available for a few more hours).
Even after an OTRS complaint was filed, false, negative information remained in the article.
Even after an OTRS complaint, the article still remained prominently in the main page's DYK section.

I'm not going to use this incident to make an impassioned plea for flagged revisions, semiprotection of all BLPs, or anything else like that. Others probably will, but I think the facts speak for themselves. There is a BLP problem.

Despite these tremendous failings, there were a few successes in the affair. Most of the users involved seem to have done their best to clean up a bad BLP while staying within the bounds of Wikipedia's "Assume Good Faith" policy. The fact is, though, that even with good users out there, Wikipedia's institutions, norms, and policies are shaped in a way that makes it very hard to respond to defamation of the kind perpetrated against Mike Handel. Wikipedia doesn't need better editors. It needs better rules.

Then there's the matter of the OTRS response time. An hour is an understandable delay in responding to complaints, but at the same time it is highly regrettable. During that whole hour, the article was still receiving a great amount of traffic as it was featured on the main page. The figures aren't in yet, but it was almost certainly getting several views a minute. Another hour may have meant a few hundred more people reading the vile vandalism.

Finally, let me climb up on the one bully pulpit I will speak from. Wikipedia's "specific" notability criteria are what made all of this possible. Without WP:ACADEMIC, it would have taken a lot of maneuvering to sell the article as passing the general notability guideline, and it may well have been deleted.

The Epilogue

As I said, I think the incident speaks for itself. Whether Wikipedia changes is up to you. You are free to interpret all of this any way you like. You can simply say that one clever and devious blogger managed to, in a one-off incident, slip a BLP nightmare on to the main page, but I'm not really that clever. Everything I did could be repeated by an average person with an internet connection. There wasn't even much wiki-politicking involved and the sockpuppets I used were painfully obvious; all they did was edit the Handel article.

As of this writing, the Handel article stands. I imagine it will soon be deleted. I've saved most of the important stages in its development via WebCite, and linked them all above, but if someone wants to actually cache the whole history and knows how, I'd welcome it. If you do that, send me a link so that I can post it here.

The ball is now in your court.

An Idea: Wikipedia Studies

2010-03-10T10:43:48+00:00

In my opinion, a significant problem today is the lack of an outlet for good, solid research and analysis of Wikipedia. To be sure, a large number of journals have published papers on Wikipedia over the last several years, but most of these papers are not "policy relevant", so to speak, in that they analyze Wikipedia for the profit of a broader discipline or to draw conclusions about computing, information organization, human nature, etc. but do not focus on the issues that are the most relevant to Wikipedia as such. A second problem with these journals is that they move slowly. For example, a recent paper on Wikipedia that I submitted to First Monday in early October, was not accepted for publication until mid-February and is still awaiting final copy-editing. Finally, most Wikipedians seem to not be interested in publishing in these traditional outlets.

To this end, I would like to propose the creation of Wikipedia Studies, an online journal devoted to the publication of interesting research about Wikipedia in a timely manner. My idea is to assemble a knowledgeable editorial board and group of reviewers and then start accepting submissions as soon as is possible. Rather than appearing in a monthly or quarterly form, Wikipedia Studies will publish each piece as soon as it is ready. We will be open to submissions from absolutely anyone, and I hope to highly encourage interesting work from ordinary Wikipedians who would not normally become involved in scholarly publishing. The result would be more formal than something like a blog, but less formal than traditional journals.

Wikipedia Studies will publish work that is interesting and relevant, but might not fit into conventional journals, and we will do it quickly. At the same time, I hope to maintain high and rigorous quality standards. Each piece submitted will be reviewed by two independent referees and held to high standards.

If you're interested in joining this effort as a referee/reviewer, editorial board member, copyeditor, or potential contributor, please let me know. I don't know at this point if this will actually happen or not, but I think it's a good idea, and if there's enough interest in participating, I'd love to see where this goes.

Commons and mobile phones

2010-03-10T10:04:00+00:00

In order to move the process for a strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation forward, there are the so called "strategic office planning hours". People discuss issues, progress.

We talked about the progress for mobile phone support and, it was said that Commons would be the obvious next candidate for mobile phone support. There are several issues that need to be addressed.

traffic to and from mobiles is expensive
there is no standardisation in screen size for mobile phones
our current strategy of downloading the WHOLE picture to a mobile does not work

From this it is obvious that you want to send a picture that is optimised for a particular make of mobile phone and, when a user wants more detail then that, to zoom in and pan right, left up or down downloading the needed image data as required.

The Djatoka software provides such functionality. It is open source software and, as such it allows for great support for mobile phones. It would not only enable the use of Commons for the mobile phone, it would also improve the support of pictures for mobile Wikipedia.
Thanks,
GerardM

writing in women

2010-03-10T08:17:30+00:00

The excellent Flonight points out on Wikipedia’s village pump that along with International Women’s Day this past Monday, March is Women’s History month in the U.S., and the National Women’s History Project theme this year is “Writing Women Back into History.”

The connection to Wikipedia is obvious. Flonight points out just a handful of possible neglected biographies one could work on, featuring female pilots. This is only the tip of the iceberg; everywhere you look on Wikipedia there are biographies of women that need to be better written, sourced, or added in the first place. Articles like the one about Elsie MacGill, one of my favorite articles that I have worked on in Wikipedia. MacGill was the world’s first female aircraft designer, working in Canada during World War II. She was known as “Queen of the Hurricanes” and was somewhat famous during her lifetime, though has been mostly forgotten since. She went on after her engineering career to earn the Order of Canada for working on commissions for improving the status of women.

As I said, I worked on this article a fair amount, spending time over the course of a few months sourcing it, and I am reasonably confident that the Wikipedia article is currently one of the best resources on the web about this remarkable woman. How many other stories are out there waiting to be researched and written up? Let’s write women — even the ones who are not so famous anymore, but who are pioneers, notable scientists, politicians, engineers, soldiers — let’s write them back into history, and back into the encyclopedia.

Pictures of the Day - March 10

2010-03-10T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Nordkirchen-090806-9474-Akt-Venusinsel.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Mbdortmund

de.wikipedia.org:

Gros Morne NP coast2.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Aconcagua

en.wikipedia.org:

Rajpoots 2.png from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Time3000

Thoughts on the Handel Affair

2010-03-10T03:34:03+00:00

David declined to use the post on the Handel affair to put forward too many notions about BLP, but it turns out that the facts don't speak for themselves, so I'd like to respond to some of the things that have been said so far, and issue a few recommendations.

We were very disappointed to see some people descend into ad hominem attacks, one commenter here wrote: "so the moral of the story is, you're a liar, a fraud, and a forger?". Thanks for the support. I was also very unhappy to see how many are dismissing this as a one-off event of no significance; a clever hoax perpetrated by insiders. Most of all, this ignores the real import of the story. We weren't trying to make the point that a hoax could make it onto the main page. That's been done many, many times before. Yes, to solidify the hoax we forged references, etc. But the really bad BLP defamation, the charge of murder, was completely unsourced when it entered the article (and when the article hit the main page), and received extremely poor sourcing only after the article had been on the main page for some time. There was absolutely no cleverness or trickery involved in that part, and that is the true failing here.

Other people have thrown up their hands, and said "What can we do?" This is where my area of interest lies. David wrote, and I agree, that most of the users involved acted in a way that was appropriate and consistent with Wikipedia policy. Generally speaking, they tried to do the right thing, but failed, not because they were incompetent or acting poorly, but because Wikipedia policy is wrong. Here's how the incident could have turned out differently:

1) Flagged revisions: Flagged revisions would not have stopped the hoax from appearing on the main page, but they would have kept out the murder allegations, which were added in without sources by a non-auto confirmed user.
2) Tighter notability criteria: There is literally nothing about Mike Handel on the web (because he doesn't exist), but it's not hard to imagine a real Oxford professor from the 70s and 80s who would have no web footprint whatsoever. Why? Because by any real world standard someone like that is entirely a private person and is NOT notable. There should be no BLPs on Wikipedia about people who don't even exist on Google. It's much harder to defame Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey because good, high-quality sources are readily available for people at that level of notability. The notability guidelines, however, let you put articles on Wikipedia about people who do not belong there, and when the only record of someone's life is in a few clippings from an obscure newspaper, it's much easier to defame him/her.
3) Keep BLPs off DYK: DYK's quality control process is practically non-existent and, by its nature, it brings new, underdeveloped, and often poorly sourced content onto the main page. It is simply irresponsible to put articles on living people in that section.
4) (Added) Check DYK articles between approval and when they hit the main page: This is incredibly common sense. One of the clear problems here is that, apparently, no one looked over the article again once it was in the DYK queue, thus it went on the main page with unsourced, negative information. A quick check probably could've fixed that.

If Wikipedia made these changes, the Mike Handel affair would have been entirely impossible. And remember, everything we did to Mike Handel could very, very easily have been done to a real person. We're nice guys, so we're not going to start defaming real, living people, but we showed just how easily it could be done. If you want to stick your head in the sand, that's your business, but if this isn't yet another BLP wake up call, I don't know what is.

Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 10 – 8 March 2010

2010-03-10T01:47:21+00:00

News and notes: Financial statements, discussions, milestones
In the news: Pentagon shooter used Wikipedia, soon iPhone OS will too
WikiProject report: WikiProject Java
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation

On project management and the Wikimedia Foundation

2010-03-09T19:29:00+00:00

I have been reading the blog of Guillaume Paumier, the project manager for the Multimedia usability project. Reading it, I am of two minds.. it is tagged as his personal opinion but on the other hand, this is the opinion that he promotes. The question is should I analyse and critique it or not and, to what extend and where.

As a blogger, Guillaume is the opposite of me. I do not use bold, I use illustrations. Thinking on projects, I prefer the scrum approach for the Wikimedia Foundation because the WMF has a track record of waterfall projects that have not delivered on time. Main advantages of scrum are more visible results and consequently easier communication with our communities.

In Guillaume's view a project manager decides on what to do when. Having a keen interest in scrum, I have a problem with this, for me it is the customer who decides what gets done when. NB Customer as understood by scrum. There is one KEY problem though; there is nothing in our communities, in our organisation that serves the role of customer. The result is that the WMF may be doing well but it is increasingly seen as an ivory tower.

When I query his blog there are two words missing: language and culture. Given that translatewiki.net supports 327 languages, it is unlikely that anyone can truly appreciate and predict the needs for software that is to accommodate all these languages. I am really looking forward how Guillaume intends to deal with linguistic and cultural issues. This is maybe a good subject for his next blogpost.

The Usability Initiative did a good job by promoting the localisation of its software and setting up test environments for languages in several scripts.

Finally I disagree with Guillaume that there are no people in our community who fulfil a role of project manager. They do not have the title but they have taken the burden of that role.
Thanks,
GerardM

Apple Loves Buttons

2010-03-09T19:10:56+00:00

The running joke every time Apple releases a new product, or removes buttons from an existing one, is that the company hates buttons. Cameron Hunt suggests the opposite:

Would you say to someone, “Wow, you must hate dogs. You only have one. You enjoy his company and playing with him, but seriously, only one? What do you have against dogs?”.

The shallow assumption of Apple’s buttons is they hate buttons, the deeper conclusion is they love the shit out of a few important buttons. I bet they obsess over the placement, color, label, push-back and feel of every single button on every Apple device.

More mobile news (continued V)

2010-03-09T17:30:00+00:00

the new Bengali mobile main page has been configured
a comment in bug 22730: "Though I would care to point out, that I fear that few mobile devices will be capable of the Bengali character set... Unfortunately..."
I called Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Google to ask if they can support the languages we support in Wikipedia
it is not a question to ask when you are located in the Netherlands
Siebrand twittered two days ago: "One month ago, #Wikipedia #mobile had 88 supported languages (35 90%+). Now 104 languages supported with 59 at 90%+ #translatewiki #L10n"
as there are only 25 messages, full localisation is called for because all the messages are in your face
currently there are 52 languages fully localised and 11 languages with one message missing (i.e. 96%)
the product Wikimedia mobile is read only and currently only works for Wikipedia
how do you get your preferred script when a Wikipedia has multiple scripts like the Serbian and the Chinese language Wikipedia ?

I Know…Let’s Blame the Students

2010-03-09T15:00:16+00:00

Sometimes it seems to me that whenever things go wrong in college teaching, the first impulse of the professor is to blame the students. They aren’t prepared for class. They don’t want to grapple with the hard concepts. They don’t want to read what I assign. They do all their work at the last minute.

And now, apparently, laptop computers in class have caused them to stop paying attention.

We’ve all seen it. The student with a laptop who has clearly checked out of lecture. Is he reading his email? Is she chatting with a friend? Is he playing World of Warcraft? And then there are the other students peering covertly or openly at the open screen.

I’m sorry to report that laptops aren’t the problem, nor are students. As Pogo said so many years ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m still not sure how it is that people with advanced degrees that require them to develop sophisticated research skills can so casually ignore mountains of research by serious cognitive scientists that demonstrates unequivocally that lecturing is one of the worst forms of teaching (if the quality of teaching is measured by learning).

A simple summary of that research — and I’ve read a lot of it lately — could be called the 20/20 rule. Study after study shows that when students are lectured at their attention drifts very rapidly and that 20 minutes is about all their brains can tolerate. After 20 minutes, these studies show that the majority of students are somewhere else, with our without the aid of a laptop. And study after study shows that students (even the brightest and most attentive) retain, on average, about 20% of what is told to them in lecture. For a good summary of this research, see Lion F. Gardiner, “Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence,” Thought & Action 14/1 (1998): 71-88.

So instead of blaming our students for wandering away on their laptops, I think it’s time we looked a little more closely in the mirror and asked ourselves why they wander off. That, of course, would require us to admit that too often we (me included more than I’d care to admit) follow the path of least resistance and stand at the front of the room and talk while they take notes. Like any addiction, lecturing is a hard habit to break. If it were easy to stop, I’d have junked all of my lectures by now instead of something like two-thirds. But I’m getting there.

Some like to argue that what I’ve just pointed out is rooted in idealism that can’t be matched by the practicalities of teaching to large classes. Nice try, I say, because plenty of talented educators have figured out how to engage students in active learning even in large lecture halls. Perhaps the best example I know of is Dennis Jacobs, a professor of Chemistry at Notre Dame, whose work on active learning in large lecture classes has earned him many awards, not the least of which is the CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year award. If Dennis can do it in introductory Chemistry, I guess I don’t understand why we can’t do it in the freshman History survey.

So let’s take a step back and stop blaming our students (and their laptops). Doing so will force us to think more carefully about our own teaching practice and how we (as opposed to they) might improve.

The Last Twenty Anonymous Edits

2010-03-09T07:37:36+00:00

First of all, the sample size here is to small for me to even consider calling it representative, but going back to the old, what do IP contributors bring to Wikipedia, I went through the last 20 anonymous edits on Wikipedia (I was planning a larger sample, but something came up). Of these 20 edits, all of which took place at 15:22, 10 (exactly half) were constructive. 9 were destructive, and 1 (vandalizing then reverting it) is best seen as neutral.

Jerry Seinfeld on “Blackberry People”

2010-03-09T06:53:12+00:00

Jerry Seinfeld takes on Blackberry users, rudeness, and dunking his wife’s Blackberry in yogurt: “Oh, it said Blackberry. I guess I got confused.”

(The full stand-up routine runs 7:19, and the Blackberry portion starts at 5:03. To start the video right at this point, I used a fine tool called Splicd.com.)

Pictures of the Day - March 09

2010-03-09T06:03:02+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Inachis io Lill-Jansskogen.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Korall

de.wikipedia.org:

Ise SW.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Bermicourt

en.wikipedia.org:

El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia - Jan 2007.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Diliff

Students and Appropedia

2010-03-09T05:32:25+00:00

Students at universities all around the world represent an enormous, and greatly untapped, potential.

As we learn, we can do work.

As we teach, we can do work.

As a community we can bring challenges, lessons, opportunities and context.

Together we can have impact.

Thank you to the students and teachers already engaged with Appropedia, and thank you to those communities that have made it possible and worth it.

Students And Appropedia

View more presentations from Lonny Grafman.

This is a powerpoint for students and teachers considering using Appropedia in their classes. Please leave comments on what would make it better, e.g. a slide describing what Appropedia is (I learned that twice in the same day, presenting to two different classes).

Someone needs HEEP

2010-03-09T02:20:00+00:00

International Women’s Day 2010

2010-03-09T00:18:09+00:00

Today is International Women’s Day, an event celebrated for the first time on March 19, 1911:

More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events.

International Women’s Day is widely-celebrated around the world, and a national holiday in a number of countries, including Bulgaria, China, Russia, Ukraine, and Vietnam. But women’s rights are still hard-won in many places, and I thought I’d share this article on the challenges and hopes of female candidates in Iraq’s parliamentary elections. Jenan Mubarak, on the right in the photo above, campaigning in Baghdad, is one of those candidates:

Ms. Mubark manages a construction company and runs the Iraqi Center for Women’s Rehabilitation and Employment, a nongovernmental organization that she said gave her a base of support, both male and female. In her walkup office in central Baghdad, she described her agenda in language that has become familiar to political campaigns around the world. “This,” she said, “is the first step for change in our country.”

Photo credit: AP Photo/ Karim Kadim

The Importance of History (Not the Textbook Kind)

2010-03-08T23:32:50+00:00

Hoping for a big hit at the gigantic ~~party~~ conference SXSW, location networks having been launching new features and other incentives to get people using their service. That includes Foursquare, which turns checkins at a venue into a game.

Foursquare’s bid for attracting more signups has been adding a richer history. To our eyes, this checkin history seems inspired by the wiki-style RecentChanges or the personal contribution history AboutUs.org (and thousands of other sites) have.

As TechCrunch put it:

As we noted last week, Foursquare has begun revamping the “history” area of its website….another update makes the history area show not only where you checked-in, and the category of the venue, but also who you checked-in with.

For a look at the new history, you can see a screenshot of my personal checkin history below. But why is this important? What does a wiki-style history have to offer a site that’s not a wiki? Again TechCrunch sums it up:

Basically, Foursquare has just turned on a new layer to your location history data. And this layer is very interesting because it goes back in time to show you who you were with at a certain venue when you were there.

No matter what kind of social site you’re on, having a trail of breadcrumbs that show where you’ve been and what you do extremely important. That’s still true, even if a location network like Foursquare is less transparent for privacy reasons.

Digging into contribution histories has provided some of the most interesting and useful information about what happens on AboutUs. That’s why we kept the wiki-style RecentChanges and user contributions, even though AboutUs left behind the “traditional” wiki engine MediaWiki in favor of a custom architecture.

Philosophical Puzzles Resolved

2010-03-08T20:17:14+00:00

Puzzle 1: Equality and Disability

Daniel Wikler posed to me the following problem he encountered while Staff Ethicist at the WHO.¹ The WHO recommends two principles: first, treat all citizens equally; second, aim to maximize overall quality of life. But imagine two citizens will die without a kidney transplant, one of whom is seriously disabled, but there is only one kidney. The first principle requires that both have an equal chance of getting the kidney. But the second principle requires we give it to the non-disabled person: if the disabled person dies, overall quality of life in the society will be higher, since it will have one less disabled person. (We accept, by definition, that disability lowers quality of life.) What to do?

Response: It seems pretty clear that the first value is simply wrong. We have no interest in promoting the health of the population; the population is simply an abstraction. Our interest is in promoting the health of (the sum of) individual people, who are conscious and therefore have moral interests.

One can see this clearly by looking at the cases where the population changes but people do not: birth, death, exile, and immigration:

Birth: The society has a controlled population growth program and assigns birth permits; birth permits are assigned to parents with the healthiest genes.

Death: The society has a limited number of organs; organs are given to the least-injured.

Exile: Sick people are tossed out of the society.

Immigration: Only healthy people are allowed to immigrate.

In all four such cases, it seems pretty clear to me that the population health position is wrong. (Exile seems particularly cruel.)

Puzzle 2: The Repugnant Conclusion

Derek Parfit poses the following problem. 1: Imagine there are a group of happy people (A). 2: Now imagine that some other people are created in some other completely unconnected place that are happy, but less happy than the previous group (B). 3: Now imagine that both groups are adjusted to be at some equal, but intermediate point of happiness between A and A+. 4: Now imagine these two societies are connected, resulting in C: more people at a lesser degree of happiness.

2 is no worse than 1, since the additional people are happy and do not affect anyone. 3 is no worse than 2, since the people in B are made happier by more than the people in A are made unhappy. 4 is no worse than 3, since we are simply introducing folks to each other. But continue this and you reach the repugnant conclusion: a huge swarm of people who are just barely happy is better than a handful of people who are extremely happy.

Response: The problem is step 2, which is in fact worse than 1. Parfit assumes that simply adding extra people whose lives are worth living cannot make things worse. But that’s ridiculous. Imagine our society, then imagine our society with a bunch more feral people living on the huge island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific, unable to speak except in a growl, with none of the surrounding societies ever noticing. I think the people living in the garbage heap’s lives would be worth living (I wouldn’t want to kill them, nor would they want to be killed), but I distinctly prefer the former society.

Puzzle 3: The Logic of the Larder

Many people say that we shouldn’t eat animals, because that would mean killing them. But for many of these animals, if they aren’t going to be killed and eaten, they would never be born in the first place. What if the animal preferred to have a short, pleasant existence before being consumed as food rather than having no existence at all? Wouldn’t that mean we should breed the animal, give it a nice life, then kill and eat it?

Response: This is a ridiculous hypothetical — you’re suggesting an animal that doesn’t exist yet has a preference about existing. I don’t respect hypothetical creatures’ hypothetical desires to not be hypothetical. If I did, you could get me to do all sorts of absurd things just by hypothesizing them. You could, say, simply hypothesize a utility monster’s very strong desire to exist and I would be morally bound to try to create one. Or perhaps my hypothetical children really want to exist, so I have to hurry to procreate. That’s ridiculous.

I think we should maximize the actual interests of actual people.

Puzzle 4: Addition vs. Subtraction

As a consequentialist, if I support not adding people (as I do in my resolution to 2 and 3), then I must support removing people, since the consequences are identical. If I prefer a society with fewer, happier people, then I must support euthanizing some people to make the rest better off. Sure, there are practical questions with implementing this, but philosophically, I must be in favor of eliminationism.

Response: I am not a consequentialist about societies, I’m a utilitarian: I think we should work toward outcomes that maximize the interests of individuals.

There’s a fundamental disanalogy between addition and contraction. Addition means creating new people with interests that didn’t exist before the addition. Contraction, on the other hand, means getting rid of actually-existing people. I do not respect the hypothetical interests of hypothetical individuals to not be hypothetical, but I do respect real people with real interests right now, who presumably have an interest in not being gotten rid of. Thus, I support not getting rid of people and not arbitrarily creating new ones.

The problem is also discussed in F.M. Kamm, “Disability, Discrimination, and Irrelevant Goods“ ↩

Wiki is a Technology for Capturing Ideas

2010-03-08T19:18:04+00:00

Recently Inc. Magazine published a short but sweet piece with three tips for super productive CEOs. Nearly all three of the tips are useful for anyone (not just CEOs), and we particularly liked the first one.

Garrett Camp, founder of StumbleUpon, said:

“A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki — it’s more valuable than e-mail for running a company — and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.”

That’s great advice. Camp is using his wiki like a personal CRM, and his point that wiki is about capturing ideas is one to remember.

AboutUs.org is a wiki about websites and the organizations attached to them. When you’re editing your AboutUs pages, think about what ideas it captures about you and your business in the description, summary, and tags.

Content Strategy Lifecycle

2010-03-08T18:06:16+00:00

Courtesy Erin Scime, DopeData.com.

(Via Predicate, LLC)

Salutations

2010-03-08T16:42:00+00:00

When I write an e-mail in the English language, I invariably start with "Hoi". Hoi is a Dutch rather informal salutation. Given that I am known for being part of the "Wiki world", this informality is accepted. One of the reasons for using this Dutch word that is generally understood is, that it makes clear that I am not a native speaker of the English language.

At the end of my blogs and e-mails I invariably thank for the effort people take in reading what I had to say. In my appreciation this makes my writing both informal and friendly.

Today I learned that Ivan had blogged about the salutation I use in my e-mails. I used Google translate to understand what he wrote..
Thanks,
GerardM

"Heritage 2.0"

2010-03-08T14:57:00+00:00

Erfgoed 2.0 is a Dutch blog about how GLAM's make use of the tools provided by what is called "Web 2.0". Many of the subjects discussed are fascinating and they help me understand what a GLAM is and how GLAM people think and operate.

Often I wonder how it would be when we used "social functionality", gaming or rewards in projects like Wikipedia or Commons. One project I came across was MapIt1418, this website invites people to geo tag pictures of the Dutch National Archive about the first world war.

As people in many countries have an interest in the first world war, it is a sad omission that the software is only available in Dutch. The good news is that the software is available under an open source license, so the National Archive may invest in the internationalisation and, it may end up being localised at translatewiki.net. Alternatively, other GLAMs can collaborate in making the software internationalised.

MapIt1418 invites people to geo tag the pictures and this makes it into a challenge, every month a prize can be won which is a quality print of one of the photos featuring on the website.
Thanks,
GerardM

Google Library and Commons

2010-03-08T12:48:16+00:00

I've just discovered that Google now allows you to save public domain books into your library. What good are public domain books for Commons, you may ask? Well, in addition to being interesting historical documents, public domain books, by default, are full of public domain images. In other words: Google Books project does not only collect text, but alongside, quietly, it is collecting a vast amount of old illustrations, photos, maps and such. Examples:

[Please note, those images may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States - reason] (PS. And indeed now that I am in Poland I am seeing junk...)

I've saved a few dozens old Polish books into my library, most of them have at least several old illustrations, photos, or maps. I have no idea when I'll have time to move them to Commons, but I wonder if we should create a dedicated project that would catalogue useful books (those that have media) and report on the progress of their assimilation?

It appears Google have scanned lot of duplicates of the same book; they don't seem to have any mechanism on reporting duplicates, and their reports on damaged pages seem somewhat buggy, too. Still, for a free service, it's a great tool!

Some useful tips for working with images from Google Print:
* you can switch to html mode while browsing a public domain book (small link somewhere to the right and middle of a page) and save the resulting image as a jpeg

PS. Surfing the web, I discovered this excellent blog ("Inside Google Book Search") devoted to Google Book Search; note the use of images from Google Book public domain books.

Flickr vs. Wikimedia Commons: why Flickr is doomed

2010-03-08T12:47:46+00:00

I was always puzzled why people prefer to use Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Flickr, after all, has litte to offer compared to Commons: Flickr allows you to upload images, set copyright, tag them, comment on them, and is not fully free - Wikipedia allows you the same, plus is completly free, and comes with a community that will actually IMPROVE your images - by adding missing categories, correcting wrong ones, improving/translating description, etc. As far as I can tell, the only feature that flickr offers that seems useful and is not implemented on Commons, is mapping part of the image and commenting on it. And of course, for those strange people who don't like others using their work, flickr allows the use of non-free licenses...

Yet:

Flickr popularity on Alexa: 33 most popular site online

Wikimedia Commons popularity: 186 most popular site online

What gives? I think that the flickr is more popular because it looks more "cool", and with the snowball effect, it reaches more people. It's also slightly more user friendly, and better integrated with popular networking sites like Facebook. Wikimedia Commons is not that popular outside the Wikipedia crowd. Yet with Commons "wisdom of the crowd" approach, its steadily improving quality of images, and drive to move useful and freely licensed images from Flickr to Commons, while Flickr keeps accumulating more and more crap, I'd predict that in few years, time, Flickr will be relegated to a repository of porn, non-encyclopedic images and copyright violations.

Civil disobedience 1: Chihuly's photos on Commons

2010-03-08T12:46:56+00:00

For a while now I wanted to showcase some interesting images deleted from Wikimedia Commons due to copyright paranoia. For those unfamiliar with our modern copyright laws, not only a lot of photos on the net are copyrighted and you cannot reuse them - but a lot of objects CANNOT BE LEGALLY PHOTOGRAPHED. For example, almost the entirety of modern art, even if it is on public display, cannot be photographed.

First case:

1) Three photos of mine of a decorative sculpture in the foyer of Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, US.

Photos:

Commons deletion discussion: here

Summary: modern art is copyrighted by artists (in this case, Dale Chihuly), that includes photos of it. There is no freedom of panorama in United States. This means that you cannot take pictures of Mr. Chihuly's works and share them with others, no matter how much you'd like to advertise his wonderful creations.

Outcome: photos will be deleted from Commons collection, which will entitle their removal from various articles, such as on Mr. Chihuly and Phipps Conservatory. Note how the copyright that is supposedly protecting the artists is in fact hurting them, in this case limiting the informative content of the primary reference work about them.

Current use examples:

Expect them to disappear soon.

Solution: wait 70 after Mr. Chihuly's death (unless copyright is retroactively extended, again...). Or contact him and ask for permission (assuming he is still the copyright holder and haven't sold the rights to that particular sculpture to the Gardens). Unfortunately, this is quite time consuming, and few Wikimedia volunteers take care of that, when so many other tasks need doing. I have done it myself a few times in the past, and on occasion managed to save an image or two, but it is a time consuming task (communicating with real person, with no guarantee they'll bother to reply, and then having to convince them to give permission to release the photos under a free license - which is likely a concept they've never heard of - and then have fun explaining why Wikimedia needs the commercial-use-allowed one... (because our ethics requires we explain to them what the free license we need entitles in detail...)). Compared to that, categorizing some images or translating descriptions is so much easier... sigh.

So Mr. Chihuly's article on Wikipedia will soon be gutted of all images of his works. Feel free to tell me how this benefits him :)

Note: This blog post is by no means intended as a jibe against Mr. Chihuly (who is almost certainly unaware of how the law is "protecting him"), nor against Wikimedia Commons (which being a non-profit organization on a donation budget cannot really risk being sued by somebody, with all the costs it incurs). It is however intended a a jibe against the current copyright system, showing how it is hurting all of us - artists and the public, both of which it claims to protect.

In the coming months, I intend on covering other media deletions from Commons (and maybe a few examples of when images were saved). Stay tuned,

Measuring linguistic diversity on the Internet

2010-03-08T11:23:00+00:00

Analysing linguistic diversity on the Internet is like and unlike measuring Wikipedia traffic. It is like Wikipedia because its "big" languages have an overwhelming presence and it is unlike Wikipedia in that the smaller languages are hardly noticeable because they are not clearly marked.

A language like Picard is recognised as a language however, software that is in common use, be it proprietary or open source is not configured to establish a document as being in that language. The language recognition software of a Google is not yet able to recognise it by its characteristics. And as a bug keeps the Picard Wikipedia out of the Wikipedia traffic statistics, it can be argued that Picard does not exist on the Internet at all.

Evolution of percentages of
English speaking Internet users and web pages

When research is done about linguistic diversity on the Internet for an organisation like UNESCO, the question is what such research is to achieve. UNESCO aims to preserve and promote linguistic diversity and, the technical ability of languages to manifest itself on the Internet is a key enabler.

The UNESCO research documents the issues measuring linguistic diversity from a traffic perspective on the Internet for a few languages but it does not look into what enables such traffic. It does not explain why it is so hard to extend the research to the long tail of the Internet traffic.

Part of the meta-data of document on the Internet or elsewhere, is an indication what language a document is in. Typically software only knows about a subset of the recognised languages. So one valid metric is, what languages do software allow you to write in. For OpenOffice for instance it is essential that the locale data is known in the CLDR. The CLDR data is public and, statistics can be created from its development. As you can imagine, there is no data for the Picard language ...

When UNESCO includes such statistics in its linguistic diversity report, it will become clear how much needs to be done in order to make support for linguistic diversity a reality.
Thanks,
GerardM

Pictures of the Day - March 08

2010-03-08T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Inde bondo8658a.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Yves Picq

de.wikipedia.org:

Esna 30.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Oltau

en.wikipedia.org:

Aedes aegypti.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Muhammad Mahdi Karim

Obama Condoms in Union Square

2010-03-08T01:47:32+00:00

Not just Obama – this woman was also selling John McCain and Sarah Palin condoms in Union Square today. Yes it was her: the Obamacondoms.com lady. All images licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Possibly related posts

The art of survival exhibition is until May 9

2010-03-07T22:15:00+00:00

If you are able to go to the Maroon exhibition, please consider it, it is well worth it. If you are unfamiliar with marronage like I was, it is one of those uncomfortable subjects that turn out to be completely and utterly foreign. It is however utterly fascinating and the subject grows on you.

I spoke with Peter Weis about a picture and the Maroon. He found me this video.

Intro Marron exhibition from Jurgen Lisse on Vimeo.

We were talking about a digital restoration of this famous picture of John Stedman. His book about a "Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam" is a classic and was very influential in changing the British public opinion against slavery.

Preparing this blog post, I found yet another video new to me about the exhibition. It gives a nice impression of this major exhibition, an exhibition you really should see :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Better properly copied then badly designed

2010-03-07T13:00:00+00:00

At present, the mobile main page for the Swedish Wikipedia is the gold standard. It has this distinction because it is where Hampton and Petter came up with the original best of breed example of how it is to be done.

I like the design; no garish colours, things are where you expect them to be. All in all, being able to copy this is a step in the right direction and, where better for me to do these first steps then on the Dutch Wikipedia

It should be easy; take the design copy it across and you are done. Sadly I am not that good at it because I have no clue why my picture moves to the top.

It is not only ugly, it wastes space on a mobile phone. Given that it uses the same templates as the main page, it is likely that some surgery is needed on the Dutch templates ... hmmm This gets me in template hell with templates within templates. In my understanding it ends here for the Dutch Wikipedia and here for the Swedish Wikipedia.

I need support from someone knowledgeable, someone who has the right bits to get this right. My objective; when I can create a mobile page, I may be able to create a mobile main page once a day and thereby get more traffic for Wikipedia. As I prefer to be lazy, I will document what I learn and be pleasantly surprised when there is nothing for me to do.
Thanks,
GerardM

My friends, the guitar heroes

2010-03-07T10:58:00+00:00

Several friends of mine play Guitar hero. Their skill level in the game is high.. sadly it is a skill that leads to nothing. When I read that the game can be played with a difference ... actual strings, gaining you an actual skill ... I became enthusiastic, people learning to play the guitar for real.

It looks good too.
Thanks,
GerardM

Pictures of the Day - March 07

2010-03-07T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Fomes fomentarius inside 2009 G1.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by George Chernilevsky

de.wikipedia.org:

LatzfonserKreuz.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Cactus26

en.wikipedia.org:

Gephyrocapsa oceanica color.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Richard Bartz

People With Shared Interests Become Your Editor

2010-03-07T03:19:05+00:00

New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller explains five of the most popular uses of Twitter:

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

The other examples – a place to ask questions, organize the people you follow by topical lists, monitor the output of conferences, and get local updates, like a bridge closing or traffic delay – burst the tired stereotype of Twitter as a TMI-laden place to tell everyone the most mundane details of your daily life.

New York City water shots

2010-03-06T23:54:13+00:00

Below are three shots that I think remind the viewer of two things: the immensity of New York City; and that it exists on a series of islands. It’s such a large city that it’s easy to forget those.

All shots taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution. All photos taken with the Samsung Memoir cameraphone.

The famous financial district in lower downtown with the Hudson River. Taken from Jersey City’s Exchange Place train station.

Downtown Brooklyn with the East River seen from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Bridge with the Manhattan Bridge behind it, and the South Street Seaport in the foreground, taken from Pier 11 in Downtown Manhattan. That’s one of the historic boats docked at the seaport’s museum.

Possibly related posts

Wikimedia@MW2010

2010-03-06T17:20:37+00:00

Museums and the Web is an annual conference that brings together the world’s best in this fascinating crossover field. This year, it will be in April in Denver, Colorado. To my great delight, Wikimedia will be playing a big part of the conference - with the entire first day being dedicated to looking at how the two communities can and should work together.

“Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop for exploring and developing policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums. It will bring together leaders in both communities to examine the opportunities for greater synergy between the museum sector and the Wikimedia community and the current barriers to collaboration. Specifically it will address rules, guidelines and examples that can be clarified to order to promote active engagement between the two communities.”

Keynoting the day will be Maxwell Anderson, CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art - one of the most forward thinking GLAMs in the world in terms of information openness. Don’t just take my word for it, check out their Dashboard (that I’ve previously blogged about), public deaccessioning process, and the new ArtBabble project.

Forecourt of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Attending from the WMF staff will be Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and Guillaume Paumier, product manager of the multimedia usability project. The WMF’s Board of Trustees will be represented by Samuel Klein, director of content for the OLPC and Kat Walsh, WMF executive secretary and policy analyst for the American Library Association.

And from across the wonderful wiki-verse, attendees will be:

Mathias Schindler, project manager at Wikimedia Deutschland
Phoebe Ayers, reference librarian at the university of California, Davis and author of How Wikipedia Works
Mark Pellegrini, PhD candidate in Electrical and computer engineering and director of Wikipedia’s Featured Article processes
Richard Knipel, president of Wikimedia New York City and instigator of several innovative Wikimedia outreach projects
Adrianne Wadewitz, graduate student specialising in eighteenth-century British literature and prolific featured article writer.
Maarten Dammers, from Wikimedia Nederland and the technical whiz behind many Wikimedia multimedia projects.
and of course, me.

Furthermore, at least four people from the list of museum-sector attendees are active Wikipedians in their own right so they could potentially sit on both sides of the table.

Richard McCoy and Jennifer Geigel Mikulay respectively from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University who together run the WikiProject Wikipedia Saves Public Art
Thomas Tunsch, from the National Museum of Berlin who presented MediaWiki for a museum at last year’s edition of the conference
Jonathan Bowen, visiting professor at Kings College, London, runs museums.wikia.com and presented Museums and Wikipedia at the 2006 edition of the conference.

Join in the discussion! Even if you aren’t attending Museums and the Web, you can still participate in the discussion. The conference’s web forum is where all preliminary discussion is being held. So if you have a question or opinion about Museum-Wikimedia interaction, please join in: http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010

#Translatewiki.net statistics

2010-03-06T16:14:00+00:00

Every month Siebrand prepares the group statistics in time. These statistics show how five key categories for MediaWiki localisation are doing in time.

This month we added support for one more language; there are now 327, one more language achieved over 98% coverage for the "most often used languages", for the 90% of the core messages things stayed level at 82 languages, and for both the 90% of the "extensions used by the WMF¨ and the 65% of the "extensions" there was one language less that achieved this goal this month.

These statistics show how we are shooting at a moving target; in the project:news and on twitter you will regularly find a message of new messages that became available for localisation. They are one explanation why these numbers grow ever so slowly another is that when a language is added, it becomes harder to raise a percentage.

In the group statistics you find details like the languages who can boast an effort that keeps their language completely localised. You can also find the 165 languages that are still struggling to complete the "most used messages".

These statistics do not really tell the story of translatewiki.net. It does not tell how happy we are with the recent Swati, Yoruba and Hausa effort, we think that this reflects in the traffic statistics for these languages. It does not tell you that on the first day of the localisation for WikiReader it was translated in 19 languages in 17 hours and that currently over 39 languages are completely localised for Wikimedia mobile.

These numbers do not tell you what is most important; in translatewiki we have a vibrant, hard working community that makes a difference in other projects.
Thanks,
GerardM

Off line

2010-03-06T11:36:00+00:00

OmegaWiki is for the moment off line. Our host forgot that OmegaWiki was on their server. It will be available again soon I have been promissed.

It does however mean that we are looking for hosting elsewhere.
Thanks,
GerardM

More mobile news (continued IV)

2010-03-06T11:29:00+00:00

right to left support sadly does not work yet for the mobile main page..
maybe it needs a (div dir="ltr"> blablabla (/div>
it does work properly for any other page
WikiReader is based on Open Moko. Open Moko also produces the FreeRunner mobile phone
how is OpenMoko's support for the languages Wikipedia supports?
The Japanese are known for their love of gadgets.. I wonder if they use the optimised mobile page.. I think they don't.

Praveen Prakash send me annotations on the screen shot of the Malayalam mobile main page taken on an Apple iPhone
Praveen says: "If this happen to Malayalam, then all Indic languages are affected. Our languages and scripts are different, but very similar in script writing rules. Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada may be affected more"

Red underline: broken ligatures
Green underline: misplaced vowel symbols
Blue underline: New unicode 5.1 chillu character

Thanks,
GerardM

#MediaWiki #usability becomes mainstream

2010-03-06T10:48:00+00:00

Some of the best news of the last week was the news of the continuation of the efforts to make MediaWiki more usable. It is now called "UX" or User eXperience.. and a significant part will be based on "community health recommendations".

When the original Usability Initiative comes to an end, the restriction imposed by the original grant will fall away. It will no longer be restricted to improving the usability of the English language Wikipedia; it can now work on improving MediaWiki in general.

In the comments on his announcement, Erik answers ¨Mobile development is one of our strategic priorities, so expect more interesting things coming down the pipeline. :-) " This is welcome news because it becomes aparant that there are a lot of issues to be resolved. Even high end smart phones are not able to render our languages properly and, we want great functionality for less sophisticated systems as well. It may help that several actors in the mobile market are supporters of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
GerardM

Waray-Waray Wikipedia

2010-03-06T06:48:00+00:00

Waray-Waray Wikipedia, started in 2005, welcomed its 15,000th article recently. It had to do with Possibly The End of Life As We Know It.

Pictures of the Day - March 06

2010-03-06T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

William Holman Hunt - The Scapegoat.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Dmitry Rozhkov

de.wikipedia.org:

LatzfonserKreuz.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Cactus26

en.wikipedia.org:

Granny smith and cross section.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Fir0002

why is list_head() defined the way it is ?

2010-03-06T06:01:10+00:00

Recently, a friend of mine asked : Why does the struct list_head in the Linux kernel has no data field ?

In other words, what he means is this:

The way we are introduced to linked lists in high school is
struct linked_list
{
void *data;
struct linked_list *prev *next;
}

And assume, we have a user defined data structure:
struct user_data
{
int a;
char b;
}

The approach we usually use to create a list would be :
struct linked_list head;
struct user_data mydata1;
head.data = (void *)&mydata1
head.next = NULL;
head.prev = NULL;

And to add another node to the list :
struct linked_list newentry;
struct user_data mydata2;
newentry.data = (void *)&mydata2
newentry.prev = &head
newentry.next = NULL;

and so on..

However in the Linux kernel, a linked list structure is defined something like:
struct list_head
{
struct list_head *next, *prev;
}

and to do the same thing as we did above, we do something like :
struct user_data
{
int a;
char b;
struct list_head new_list;
}

/* Create head */
struct user_data head;
head.new_list.prev=NULL;
head.new_list.next=NULL;
...
/* Add a new node */
struct user_data newentry;
newentry.new_list.prev=&head.new_list;
head.new_list.next = &newentry.new_list;
...

So, in one case we have the data embedded into the linked list (high school style) and in the other, we have the linked list embedded into data. So, what's the advantage of the second over the first ?
I actually couldn't find any documentation justifying this design but these obvious reasons come to my mind.

One advantage is that the kernel programmer is relieved from the additional care he has to take during typecasting if she chooses the first approach. As we all know, typecasting is a necessary evil in C, but using it for linked lists that's invariably used almost everywhere in the kernel is likely to double the number of kernel bugs!

Second, with the first case, with each node created, we end up using more space compared to the second approach. This is because struct linked_list has an additional void *data defined thereby making the node larger in size. This is definitely an important issue in embedded systems if not on x86.

Last but not the least, an important advantage that this design offers is flexibility in list walking. For example, if you have the address of newentry (see above example), you can access newentry->new_list and then go back and forth. Then, using the container_of() macros, any of the associated user_data for any node could be accessed! Even if we just have the address of list_head somewhere in the middle of a linked list, we could jump to the associated data structure. With the first design, in order to do list walking and modifications, we always need the address of any of the node. This means that you always have to pass struct linked_list pointers even if all you really wanted to do is manipulate struct user_data.

The impact of sharing data: Beth Noveck at the Long Now

2010-03-05T21:30:59+00:00

If you share it, will they come? If you listen, will you learn? And if you ask, will help arrive? A resounding “yes” was the answer delivered by Beth Noveck last Thursday at her Long Now Foundation lecture, Transparent Government and the Long Now of Democracy (MP3 audio). She shared a wealth of examples illustrating the government’s new progress towards data-sharing, public input, and crowdsourced effort—many of which were equally inspiring for philanthropy. Noveck is the head of Obama’s Open Government Initiative where (she jokes) she has the dubious honor of being assigned to implement her very own theory of “collaborative democracy” from her 2009 book, Wiki Government. Stewart Brand’s snappy summary her talk is on the Long Now site, so I’ll share the three main points that I felt were relevant for the social sector.

1. Sharing data creates new opportunities for impact. You just never know who will find your data interesting and what use they can find for it. Thanks to the USDA making its datasets public, there are now new games in development for reducing childhood obesity. Thanks to the Federal Register being put online, there are now two websites that can guide the public through the shifting maze of federal regulations in an intuitive and accessible way. The aggregated library of raw government data now available at data.gov has had over 64 million hits and countless developers have used that data for web-based projects. Imagine the possibilities if foundations considered themselves libraries of information and analysis on the public problems they try to solve.

2. Even messy public input can become quality ideas. One questioner asked Noveck if she had figured out how to set up the process of public input so that it wasn’t just the “angries and the crazies” who showed up—a common challenge whenever the stakes are high. She shared her reflections on the early public input session that the Open Government Initiative held in order to gather suggestions for how the government could become more transparent. It was a process that some bloggers derided as ineffective since the bulk of the early posts were dominated by demands for Obama’s birth certificate, demands for information about UFOs, and various other questions representing extreme points of view. She noted that while that was a challenge at first, other users of the site were very effective at flagging those posts as “off-topic,” shunting them to the side and clearing the board for productive debate. The result: detailed and thoughtful proposals that a large group composed together using MixedInk, a wiki-like tool for collaborative composition that I blogged about at the time. The effort has now matured into the OpenGov Tracker, an IdeaScale-powered board where (as of today) 1,399 ideas have received 14,576 votes and 2,427 comments that address the prospects of transparency and participation at every federal agency. Foundations might have similar worries about what could happen if they asked the public for input on their choices, but today’s tools are increasingly effective at allowing online crowds to truly be wise.

3. Build your organization around the power of outside experts. Noveck is the inventor of a new system for running the patent office called Peer to Patent which taps the expertise of scientists, engineers, and other experts in relevant fields to help patent officers make the detailed assessments required to evaluate the merit of a given patent claim. The task is not entirely unlike that of evaluating grant proposals: while the decisionmaking power rightly lies in the hands of the institution, the expertise to wield it well is distributed throughout the relevant field, and today’s technology makes it easier than ever to tap this distributed knowledge at will. Imagine if the typical foundation model was to specialize not in certain topics but in the cultivation of trusted expert networks with the right mix of knowledge—a resource that would be equally useful for other funders.

Speak Human

2010-03-05T19:30:25+00:00

Eric Karjaluoto has written a book called Speak Human. It’s all about how to be small and personal in your approach to business. He laments the outsize presence of the very largest corporate brands:

Odd as it may sound, I want Finnish gas stations in Finland. I don’t want a Starbucks in the Forbidden City (others felt similarly, which seemingly influenced its closure in 2007). I dread the notion of boring, homogenized Budweiser being equated as the “king of beers.”

And explains how the quick decision-making in a small company can outmaneuver the bureaucracy likely to slow down large one:

Let’s say you have a little software company that competes with one of Microsoft’s products. Along comes a new innovation that you choose to implement in your application. All you have to do is get down to work. Sure, Microsoft has nearly 90,000 people to do the same, but do you think it’s really that easy? How many meetings, proposals, surveys, and assessments need to happen before a single line of code is written? It’s like arranging a get-together: a dinner for two is easy, a gathering of 12 friends is no big deal, but planning a wedding for 100? That’s a kind of torture.

But what about big companies? Karjaluoto says thinking small can work for them too, but they have their work cut out for them, especially if they need to change negative perceptions.

Buy the paperback or read online for free (a new chapter is published every few weeks).

Find your Trail with GORP and EditMe

2010-03-05T18:55:27+00:00

Great Outdoors Recreation Pages turned to EditMe to build their Trail Finder - a robust, searchable database of hiking and biking trails throughout the U.S. and Canada that is managed by the GORP community.

Jimbo Wales, Mike Handel, and the point of the experiment

2010-03-05T17:37:38+00:00

After it was brought up on his talk page, Jimmy Wales responded to the Mike Handel story thusly (link)

Fascinating and sad. I'm really proud of some aspects of the saga, and obviously not at all happy with others. I think one of the key things that can be done here is a ramping up of the courage of the OTRS volunteers and others who are enforcing BLP policy. I'd like to emphasize that those who did good work here could have been much more firm without any fear of harm coming to them, because they will have my full and complete support up to and including summary desysopping for anyone standing in the way of good BLP work.

Next week I will be running a second round of the informal poll that I started about the German version of Flagged Revisions - I think that's an important piece of this puzzle. But it is worth noting that this particular hoax, because it was deliberate and staged over a long period of time, would not have been prevented by Flagged Revisions.
Empirically, though, I think that most problems of this sort would be caught by flagged revs. The fact that a sophisticated and dedicated person who understands sourcing and is willing to lie and manufacture fake news articles, etc., can hoax people is interesting but likely to be extremely extremely rare in any circumstances. My point here is that we need to think about how to deal with stuff like this (mostly through strong strong support from the "machinery of state" which means admins, ArbCom, and me in defense of BLP enforcers) AND not let this distract us from serious problems that are empirically much more common, which is random driveby attacks that don't get caught quickly enough.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 15:41, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to say that there's some good material in what he had to say, but I'd like to draw attention to an error in it: "But it is worth noting that this particular hoax, because it was deliberate and staged over a long period of time, would not have been prevented by Flagged Revisions." Yes, FlaggedRevisions would not have done anything about the hoax as such, but the point of the experiment was never to show that a hoax could make it into DYK. We knew that already.

The point was to look at what happened to the unsourced murder allegations. The answer? Absolutely nothing until the OTRS ticket. So, there was a second test here. What would happen to a BLP containing libelous defamation and linked from the main page. Wikipedia failed this test. It also failed the BLP hoax test, but that's relevant, and Wikipedia was at a disadvantage there (the faked sources, etc.).

With regard to the murder allegations, however, Wikipedia faced a fairly normal situation. I added the allegations without a source, and the article went into DYK in that form, apparently without anyone checking (though I did later provide a weak source

So far as I am concerned, this is the most significant finding here. Not that a hoax went onto DYK, but rather than an article, which so far as everyone knew was about a real, living person, was linked from the main page while it contained unsourced allegations of murder. My other trickery played no role in this.

More mobile news (continued III)

2010-03-05T17:30:00+00:00

there were 11,598,131 mobile page views on the third of March
multiply this by 28 (number of days for Februari) and you can compare it with the traffic statistics for Wikipedia
mobile would be slightly smaller in traffic then the Polish Wikipedia
it is 0.0278% of the total Wikipedia traffic
the Malayalam mobile Wikipedia looks like this on the Apple iPhone

as you can see the Unicode support is not great (the little blocks)
Apple can help by providing adequate fonts
Wikimedia Foundation can provide an adequate solution by providing web fonts for its mobile customers
This is the bug requesting a Bengali mobile mainpage

Thanks,
GerardM

Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part II: Tools)

2010-03-05T17:05:50+00:00

During the past few weeks, I have been thinking about a more structured way to manage software and product development within the Wikimedia community. The result is a list of ideas and recommendations I have compiled and submitted to the relevant staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am also publishing them here in order to allow for a wider feedback. This article is the fourth and last of a series dedicated to this topic.

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I have previously explained why the current setup of the Wikimedia bug tracker is not ideal. I have also advocated for a more managed & scientific software development strategy. This article aims to discuss an appropriate tool to support this strategy, and at the same time fix what is broken.

Software lifecycle & Project management

Right now, there is little project management of the technical activities at the Foundation. When someone does manage projects, they often use personal desktop applications that don’t allow collaborative work. There isn’t any real development roadmap or product requirements. If we want to be serious about structuring our activities, we need a project management strategy & the appropriate associated tools that allow us to manage things such as project scope, schedule, budget & financial resources, quality assurance, human resources, communications, risks & opportunities, procurement and coordination.

I asked around to see what the needs of the various members of the team were. Naoko Komura, who has been project-managing the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, and is now overseeing all UX programs, is particularly interested in the integration of the Project management platform with calendars & issue tracking. Operations staff members also said they were interested in Project management features such as time and task tracking.

I think it is way past time to have a more organized development process & software lifecycle management. The recent hiring of a new Chief Technical Officer is a step towards a more structured organization of technological activities. Of course, changing our bug tracker alone won’t automatically structure our activities, but it is a step in this direction.

Recommendation: Use tools that allow a better management of, and integration between, the different stages in our product(s) lifecycle.

Requirements

A few months ago, I asked Priyanka Dhanda (our new Code maintenance engineer) to explore open-source collaborative project management platforms that could be easily integrated with bugzilla (or that included a bug tracking system of their own). The Wikimedia tech community was invited to list requirements of such a tool, as well as possible solutions.

From the feedback we received, we can summarize what the required features for an issue tracker are: integration with our Version control system, being FLOSS, multiple projects support and ability to separate between “tasks” and other items such as bugs and feature requests. Additional, “nice to have” features include: ability to import data from existing Bugzilla instance and fined-grained e-mail subscription options

Similarly, the required features for a Project management tool are: being web-based to facilitate collaboration, multiple projects support, calendar/scheduling and roadmap, assignments & resource management and time tracking per task/user/project. Additional, “nice to have” features include: Gantt charts, public/private projects, fine-grained access to projects by user, basic accounting & budget management and requirements management.

Redmine

I haven’t found many Project management softwares that can be easily integrated with Bugzilla. However, I have discovered alternatives to Bugzilla that include project management features like those we’re looking for. Redmine seems to be a good project management software and provides an advanced issue tracking system as well. It supports multiple projects, public/private projects, calendars & Gantt chart, and a lot of other neat stuff. It also offers the ability to distinguish between features/improvements and bugs; this would be particularly useful to prioritize development efforts. We are now considering using Redmine as project management software and taking this opportunity to move our Bugzilla setup to Redmine. Initial research shows that a lot of people seem to praise Redmine compared to Bugzilla; there are migration scripts to import an existing Bugzilla setup into a new Redmine one.

Major projects such as TYPO3 are using Redmine. The software seems to benefit from a dynamic community of developers and it is also possible to sponsor custom development. There are many plug-ins to extend the default core features; popular plug-ins are usually included into the core software at some point.

Priyanka set up a local test instance of Redmine to let us play with it a bit; a public test platform was later made available for wider testing and the Wikimedia Tech community was invited to pitch in. So far, I personally like it and it fits my needs perfectly. Wider testing is now necessary to see if it fits the needs of the tech community.

Because the time I can devote to this change is limited, I haven’t reviewed other alternatives than Redmine, and don’t plan to unless another major alternative is suggested.

Recommendation: Move from Bugzilla to Redmine after careful preparation, especially regarding the organization of the platform.

John Patrick Bedell: Pentagon Shooter, Wikipedian

2010-03-05T16:32:11+00:00

Last evening, about two miles south of the office building where I work, a crazy guy named John Patrick Bedell opened fire at the Pentagon Metro station, wounding two officers before being killed by return fire. While police are still sorting through his motives, bloggers are combing through the trail of his Internet activity. One thing we know already: Bedell was a contributor to Wikipedia.

The website Media Elites was the first to locate his user account, which has since been suspended (reason given: “User is deceased”). The user page for Bedell’s account has been shielded from public viewing; no public explanation was given, but this is almost certainly to prevent Wikipedia from becoming a posthumous soapbox for Bedell’s views (Wikipedia tolerates unorthodox beliefs, but not when they become the impetus for attempted murder). However, Media Elites thought to copy and republish the full text before Wikipedia’s administrators stepped in. Here is an excerpt:

I apologize for the graphic content of some of my contributions, but detailed evidence is sometimes necessary to address important matters. I am very disturbed by the fact that Col. Sabow’s civilian superiors and their successors have been able to continue their narco-mercantilism. For historical comparison, I might resemble the odd German still complaining about the murders of the Night of the Long Knives in 1938(?). Of course, Wikipedia didn’t exist in 1938!

While his User page is gone, Bedell’s Talk page and Edit history remain. From these vestiges of his editing activity, we can learn much about his interests and some about his personality:

As declared in his former User page, Bedell was focused on adding information related to the late Marine Col. James Sabow, whose apparent suicide is apparently believed by conspiracy theorists (which Bedell clearly was) to have been a murder covered up by the U.S. government. Bedell created an article about Sabow on more than one occasion. Said page was deleted on more than one occasion — the deletion debates are still available, here and here — partly for containing original research.

Bedell was an occasional but occasionally very active editor. His edits span 2006 to 2009, although he did not edit (at least from this account) even a single time during 2008. While much of his activity was related to advancing his views, this was not the sum of his activity. His first contribution was in November 2006 with a minor edit to the Bureaucracy article. His last was in August 2009, creating a redirect from one page to another, about the company Inslaw Inc.

Bedell was familiar with Wikipedia conventions, probably as a consequence of being thwarted in his efforts by other editors. Rather than giving up, Bedell studied up on the community, making for what I can best describe as sophisticated weirdness. Here he is commenting on an obscure project page, making a “confession” that only kind of makes sense. Here he is on Jimmy Wales’ Talk page, challenging Wikipedia to approve his Sabow article and “create an environment where wikitruth, wikijustice, and wikilove may prevail.”

Bedell joined a few subcommunities within Wikipedia’s ranks. He listed himself as a member of WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Many of his edits were minor changes, constructive in nature, frequently on esoteric or offbeat topics: Khalistan movement, Basilar skull fracture, Human penis size, Joseph Stalin, David Icke, Vince Foster and so on.

Although his articles on Sabow were deleted twice in February 2007, other articles that he created remain, most prolifically about U.S. government and military officials. Some of these include William G. Thrash, Peter D. Williams, Roger E. Combs and Tony L. Cothron. The article Air Intelligence Officer is also his. In February 2007 — by far his greatest period of activity, he created the article September 11 demolitions. It has since been redirected to World Trade Center controlled demolition conspiracy theories.

While political bloggers argue over whether Bedell was a member of the far-left or the far-right, such arguments are really less about Bedell and more about the participants. As Gawker put it, Bedell was “clearly intelligent” but “nonetheless a certifiable wackjob”.

Likewise, I can imagine some who would depict Bedell as a typically obsessive Wikipedian, although as Media Elites notes, his Internet activity included Facebook, YouTube and Amazon, although it seems not Twitter. Believe me, I have known obsessive Wikipedians, just as I have known people on the far-left and far-right, and they haven’t shot anybody. Bedell’s participation in Wikipedia was as incidental as his politics; the content of his madness and platform for its expression are less important than the fact of it.

Update: It should come as no surprise, now John Patrick Bedell is the subject of a Wikipedia article himself.

On the Dutch local elections

2010-03-05T15:47:00+00:00

Last Wednesday we had local elections in the Netherlands.. In times of recession it is often that the right radicals do well. This time the name for the party is PVV, "partij voor de vrijheid" or "liberty party".

More people then usual voted in my home town.. Sadly the results were as they are. One bright point that day was the cartoon Sigmund by Peter de Wit. He often includes the "Burkaatjes", they are always good for a chuckle.

Well, she is not wearing a scarf

Today Mr Wilders went to the UK to promote his pov. In a way all this is good; it is democracy in action. He showed his film to an audience of 60 people. Sadly he got a welcome with press conferences, mounted police. Things that make him look relevant. If he was left to stew in his own juices, there would only have been the 60 people..

On a lighter note, I would like an illustration for both Peter de Wit's and Sigmund's article in Wikipedia..

Thanks,
GerardM

Registration open for the Developer Workshop in Berlin!

2010-03-05T13:49:43+00:00

Registration for the Developers’ Workshop in Berlin on April 14.-16 is now open: please use the registration form. Registration is required and will be open until March 21., but there are only 50 places available. So, sign up soon!

Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to the Workshop. We have a very nice venue and a cool option for accommodation, details to be announced soon.

For updates and more information, watch meta:Wikimedia_Conference_2010/Developers’ Workshop. You can also get updates via twitter or identi.ca. If you have questions, please contact us at conference@wikimedia.de.

Pushing to a release

2010-03-05T10:38:31+00:00

It’s one of those wonderful times of the year, when we get to branch MediaWiki for a stable release. That’s right, MediaWiki v1.16 has been branched and a release candidate is underway. Those of you following MediaWiki–either as a Wikimedian or for your outside uses–know that 1.16 has been a long time coming. Code reviewing has finally caught up to trunk and it’s high time a release is put forth.

A lot has changed in 1.16 (for the brave, the full RELEASE-NOTES), and I’d like to hit on some of the major things here that I think need mention:

The Metadata editor ($wgUseMetadataEdit) has been split into a separate extension, MetadataEdit
Introduced CDB interface for high-performance constant data
Default output format is now HTML5 instead of XHTML 1.0 Transitional (see $wgHtml5)
Maintenance scripts got a lot of cleanup and reorganization, AdminSettings.php no longer required
New hooks
Major improvements in SQLite support
Test suite is now at least organized (will see more coming here in 1.17)
Many many other bug fixes and new features

Hopefully we’ll see a general update to the Wikimedia cluster coming in the very near future, meaning that non-critical bugfixes that have been “Fixed in SVN” will finally see production deployment. The first 1.16 release candidate will be coming soon as well, which I encourage those of you using MediaWiki to download and test it out for us. See what works, what needs tweaking and what’s downright broken. It’s a big release, so we’d like to get as much feedback as humanly possible.

Remember that all bugs goto Bugzilla (recently upgraded and restyled), and more information is always better than less.

Pictures of the Day - March 05

2010-03-05T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

CtenosauraSimilis.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Chmehl

de.wikipedia.org:

Diamant tropfen.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Jutta234

en.wikipedia.org:

Coles Phillips2 Life.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Durova

#WikiReader supported at #translatewiki.net

2010-03-05T05:43:00+00:00

WikiReader is the latest open source application that finds its language support at translatewiki.net.

The blurp on the project page at translatewiki says:

The WikiReader (homepage) is a device that comes specifically designed to facilitate your focus in a world with constant interruptions. With three simple buttons and three million topics, WikiReader brings the iconic Wikipedia to all generations. The WikiReader software is available under the GPL.

There are 32 messages to translate, so if you think of buying a WikiReader, you can not only check out if there is a localisation, it will take you relatively little effort to help yourself.
Thanks,
GerardM

Minute Video: Managing Links in EditMe

2010-03-04T21:08:06+00:00

This quick video shows how to insert and edit links within EditMe's browser-based editor. It shows how to link to other pages, pages that don't exist, and to anchor locations within a page.

On DIRFAs

2010-03-04T20:50:19+00:00

You are traveling in a strange and foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, when you run into a friendly old man who gestures for you to follow him back to his hut. There he offers you the choice of one of two different kinds of soup that a woman in the kitchen (his wife, you presume) has made. You choose one and he pours you a bowl. It is delicious and you eat the whole thing before bowing deeply and heading for the door. But he blocks you and stares you down. You’re puzzled; what does he want? He removes a coin from his pocket and begins fingering it. He gestures to your own pocket.

You look around and realize you were quite mistaken. This was not a friendly old man inviting you back to his house for supper — this is a barker attracting customers to his restaurant! And now, of course, he wants you to pay.

Now you may pay — perhaps because you feel bad for the old man and woman and don’t want them to be out money on your account, or perhaps because you’ve just noticed the menacing broad-shouldered fellow in the corner with a club — but either way, you pay out of some personal desire: a desire to help the couple, or avoid the club.

Upon return to the States, you relax from your stressful journey by heading to your favorite restaurant. The waiter brings you a menu listing the various options (it is a classy place, so no prices are marked) and you say that you would prefer one. The waiter eventually returns with it, you eat it, and it’s delicious.

Now the situation, despite seeming very similar, is somehow entirely different. You feel an obligation to stay and pay the bill. Not simply because you don’t want to get arrested, or because you want to be able to return to the restaurant later. You have a reason to pay the bill independent of any of your own desires. You must pay the bill because, by sitting down and ordering, you promised you would.

One cannot accidentally promise, which is why the promise didn’t exist in the foreign country, but you knew full well that ordering at the restaurant in the States was a promise to pay full price at the end of the meal. And by promising, you have created a desire-independent reason for action, or, as I put it, a DIRFA.

DIRFAs are surely the most amazing and confounding of all of Searle’s discoveries. It seems crazy to think that there can be some magical realm, independent of any individual human desire, to which we can be called to account. And yet, there it is. We pay at the restaurant not because we want to, or because we want to help certain others, but because we have committed to doing so and that commitment somehow binds us.

In his new book, Making the Social World, Searle shows that, contrary to appearances, DIRFAs (like all social institutions) are merely an outgrowth of language. This is an incredible claim, but Searle makes a convincing case.

Imagine saying, “Barack Obama is president of the United States.” A simple, unexceptional act. But simply by doing it, you have entered into a whole series of social commitments. You have committed that you believe it. If you said it and did not believe it, people could rightly criticize you for lying. And your belief commits you to its truth; if it turned out to be false, people could criticize you for being wrong. You also commit yourself to communicating this belief; if you mumbled and your audience misheard you, you could be criticized for being unclear. If you were speaking to someone who had a friend named Barack Obama and did not know of the other man with the same name who is currently the US President, you could be criticized for being confusing.

A simple statement — the physical act consisting of a few vocal cord vibrations and associated lip movements — has pulled you into a whole web of social attachments and commitments. To communicate presupposes a whole system of social ontology.

It is difficult to overstate the implications. Much of political thought is about why people participate in institutions that do not benefit them. Why don’t the workers rise up and overthrow capitalism if all they have to lose are their chains? Is it because hegemony has persuaded them that the existing order is just and natural? Searle lays the foundations for a much simpler solution.

Kaczynski argued that the left was the result of oversocialization. Leftists took the social constraints they were taught — don’t discriminate on the basis of race, for example — so strongly that they begin applying them much more widely than the others around them. But Searle shows how this is a necessary outgrowth of empathy, the left’s defining traits: social institutions are grounded in a form of collective intentionality, where others count upon you to obey the institutional rules. Someone who can better imagine others’ minds must feel this network of expectations on them to be especially strong.

This book feels like Searle’s last book. It weaves together the entire scope of his career — from speech acts, to consciousness, to politics — in a single, stunning answer to this most vexing question: how can we mere sacks of meat, through brute physical acts, create constructions (like promises, or money, or corporations) that can then turn around and bind us. How glorious to see an entire lifetime of work coming together to answer this question at last.

Buy the book

More mobile news (continued II)

2010-03-04T20:39:00+00:00

#Wikimedia-mobile has its own IRC channel on Freenode
the bugs registered on bugzilla can be found here
One of the new bugs was discovered by the new Malayalam mobile main page
it resulted in questions to Domas about caching
I just got the message from Siebrand that the localisation in Hindi was completed
If you have a profile at translatewiki.net, you can find the localisation for your language here
if you do not have a profile yet, the people at translatewiki.net are quite friendly and welcoming

Thanks,
GerardM

(re)claiming space

2010-03-04T20:38:03+00:00

Edit: this map of actions everywhere is amazing.
The chant of the day here at UCD’s protests and marches — part of the California-based national Day of Public Education protests, held March 4, the locus of a grassroots uprising and protest movement that has quickly gained steam to include all public education institutions affected by California’s massive budget cuts and beyond — the chant has been:

whose university? our university!

as the largest crowds I have ever seen at UCD march around the quad, assembling a kind of street fair on the union patio, and protest against the fee hikes, the corporatization of the university, the growing inaccessibility of college to those who are poor, disenfranchised, struggling — while our administrative structure grows ever larger, glossier, and more focused on private interests. There is also protest against some acts of hate speech that occurred recently on campus — there was a swastika left on someone’s door, and the LGBT center was vandalized — and there is an underlying current of protest at the world we live in, with its brutal recession and heavy movements of global economics and war and environmental and cultural loss that can sweep along an entire generation, unwillingly. These people are protesting for a place and time and space to be young and smart in, a place to act, a place to be.

(And there is a twitter feed, and a few thousand blogs and union sites and news articles, growing by the hour, if you’d like to follow along).

I should add a disclaimer that I’m writing this on my lunch hour. It is a new thing to me to work at a university during a protest — especially in a position where my job is, partly, to spend university money. I have a responsibility to these angry, idealistic kids to do my job well, while living with the consequences of a broken economy myself: our jobs, our book budgets (and in my case) even our buildings are at risk. Without the rights of faculty, staff have to be careful to not violate their union contracts by striking on the one hand, but not disclaim their responsibilities as community members on the other. And at the end of the day, this is about community: building a better educational community, making education more valued in the larger community, making this community accessible to all.

Going forward, I like to think the projects I care about — building open educational resources, building global communities, supporting tools that help people work together, building and sustaining and teaching people how to use information resources — matter, in this larger context of community. If we are to repair our educational economy, we also have to reclaim publishing rights and make research available through open access and open licenses. We have to not wall the fruits of our intellectual labor off, but share them with the world. We have to make sure all kids have a chance, that people far remote from the University of California and its privileged grounds can benefit from our libraries and our work to collect knowledge. Going forward, we have to work on the information infrastructure to support a better, more open world: the infrastructure that will support a university that is truly, our university.

students block the street at UCD

p.s. as of right this minute UCD students are marching out to block the Freeway onramp, and I have no idea why — seems like a terrible idea, and dangerous. With their kind of numbers, they could easily occupy the admin building again. I agree with my friend Mark that a lot of the radical anti-capitalist language that’s being used is alienating to many, and probably not all that helpful: no one’s happy about the current situation. As such, I think protests need to be careful and measured, and with a clear point.

Scaling up Software development for Wikimedia websites (Part I: Human resources)

2010-03-04T19:57:44+00:00

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I am not going to give specific advice about how many developers the Wikimedia Foundation should hire: there are other people more knowledgeable about how many we need, and what they should work on. However, there are other key positions that I think are need to scale up.

Our human resources are currently focusing on what happens after the code has been written: we review it, we try to ensure quality, we try to automate testing, we file bugs, etc. However, there is little preparation before the development is actually done. This has led to a developer-driven design, resulting in an interface based on the implementation model. We need a more systematic approach to User experience and development management if we want to scale up properly.

Product management & Design

In the Software development world, Product managers and Designers are the most common bridges between users and engineers. Product managers identify the needs of users and prioritize features & improvements; their goal is to translate the users’ experience and feedback into explicit requirements to meet the users’ expectations. It is then the role of the designers to create innovative, well-thought solutions to address these issues and meet the requirements. Finally, developers provide feedback about the technical feasibility of these solutions, and implement them the best way possible. This is of course a simplistic summary, but it helps get the point across.

“Designer” can have a lot of different meanings. A lot of people think that “design” is just making things pretty. When I talk about designers, I think mainly of Interaction Designers, i.e. people who design solutions to improve the user experience and the way the product interacts with the user.

The community of MediaWiki users is amazingly large, partly because they include participants from all Wikimedia Websites. Similarly, MediaWiki also benefits from a large base of volunteer developers. Product managers and designers have been the missing piece in this picture; their bridging role is critical, simply because there aren’t any volunteers to take up this task. Admittedly, some users are also developers, and some developers keep themselves informed of the users’ wishes. But without product managers, clear requirements & prioritization are missing. And without designers, the technical solutions created by the developers don’t meet the users’ expectations and mental model.

In my experience, developers prefer to focus on the actual development and rarely enjoy meta-activities related to it. They usually dislike project management and writing product specifications, and rightly so: it is not their job. However, a successful software product strategy cannot rely only on development. We benefit from a large community of volunteer developers, but we lack management & design resources; it is the role of the Foundation to supplement this lack. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expand our development team: our number of paid core developers is ridiculously small. It only means we should also invest where the weakness lies.

Recommendation: Recruit Product managers and Designers to strengthen the development cycle of our technological platform

Research team

The Multimedia usability project has relied heavily on initial research in order to gather as much information as possible about users and their goals. A lot of useful information was already available, but a lot of specific metrics were also missing; collecting and analyzing them took a lot of time and it will still take months to get all the metrics we need. Research is critical in order to make the right decisions, especially about design. Research is the only way know our users in order to make the best design & management decisions. Good research is the best basis on which product managers, designers and developers can then respectively specify, design and build awesome solutions.

Right now the only researcher we have is Erik Zachte as Data analyst, but his job seems to essentially focus on providing operational metrics. While this work is much needed, we also need some more specific data on a case by case basis. I see at least three other positions needed:

A UX research specialist, who would conduct regular in-house low-cost usability testing, and generally manage UX studies
A Metrics engineer, who would develop integrated metrics in the software and be able to extract specific information from the database on a case by case basis.
A Community specialist, with a good knowledge of social psychology and online interaction, who would especially focus on improving the interaction between participants by identifying the community issues and proposing ways to fix them.

Recommendation: Build a Research team to guide design & strategic decisions about our technological platform

Volunteer developers

We benefit from a fantastic community of volunteer developers, but we underestimate their potential; I think we are not doing enough to support their work and engage them into our activities. In 2007, the Foundation hired Cary Bass to try and coordinate the large pool of volunteers willing to help us with meta activities. Similarly, we need a Dev community manager to care for our volunteer developers. We need someone who knows the developer community very well, and knows their strengths and weaknesses in order to find the right person for each job. We need someone who can help orient new volunteers, organize real-life meet-ups and manage projects such as the Google Summer of Code.

Recommendation: Recruit a Community manager to coordinate the efforts of volunteer developers.

Wikimedia User experience programs: a systematic approach

2010-03-04T15:06:55+00:00

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Investing in UX is a Good Idea™

Over the years, the design of MediaWiki has been solely driven by software developers. This has caused an unfortunate technology-based approach of the front-end and the features (implemented or missing), relying mostly on the implementation model. The consequence is that the interface & features are too far from the users’ mental model. The Wikipedia and Multimedia Usability projects have tried to address the most pressing concerns resulting from this hiatus between the software and the users’ expectations.

For all these reasons, I am really happy to see the Wikimedia Foundation investing further in User Experience (UX). However, I see little added value in having an UX department separate from the main development cycle. There are at least two reasons to keep them as one.

UX should be a systematic approach

A more systematic approach is necessary in order to improve the usability of Wikimedia projects perennially; good, usable design needs to happen before the actual implementation of any feature, in the early stages of the product (or component) development. Otherwise, we will always be running after the train, and never catch it. A separate entity made sense when these UX programs had a specific scope and time frame, but it was because they were tied to specific grants. In a more permanent setup, I see no reason to separate UX programs from the “regular” development processes; targeted actions can be carried out by specific projects inside the development team, rather than by a separate team altogether.

Everything is UX

More generally, all the activities of our Technology department are about User experience; everything we do is UX. Software development aims to fix bugs, develop new features, improve others, and remove hindrances. The sole goal of all of these activities is to improve the user experience by making the software better and closer to users’ needs. Even Operations are about UX: the goal of the Operations team is to make sure the information can be accessed reliably and reasonably fast by an audience as large as possible; in short, the point of Operations is to ensure we actually provide a user experience.

As a consequence, I recommend to make UX a systematic part of the product or component development cycle, not a separate parallel entity.

UNESCO document on measuring linguistic diversity

2010-03-04T13:51:00+00:00

The UNESCO publication "Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives" is an update to a previous UNESCO study on this subject that was issued for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005. It is based on research done from 1996 to 2008.

I browsed this document and I do not like it. It does include some parts that I could use but it seems to me to be a regurgitation of things that others have done. The percentage of languages used on the Internet is based on Google statistics. The problem is that Google only recognises a limited number of languages.

I would expect this report to include information on the things that prevent languages from getting a presence on the Internet; words like Unicode, CLDR even locale are not found. Information on a percentage of documents that accurately flag its language, another relevant statistic are missing.

I do applaud UNESCO for having an interest in linguistic diversity, I am not convinced that the methodology used for this document helps languages find their way to the Internet.
Thanks,
GerardM

Streets of Sydney 1832

2010-03-04T10:41:00+00:00

One of the more interesting GLAM things I learned about is this map of Sydney from 1832. It is part of the dictionary of Sydney and it is a contemporary map based on an old map.

There are many maps in many museums and, this is one of the best ways of giving objects in a museum a location that is based in time.

Thanks.
GerardM

Pictures of the Day - March 04

2010-03-04T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Cilician Armenia-en.svg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Sémhur

de.wikipedia.org:

Karoo P1030687.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Amrum

en.wikipedia.org:

Thamarai-Namam2.png from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Vaikunda Raja

Google’s Gift to Wikipedia Probably Not Evil

2010-03-04T05:29:27+00:00

This is a few days old now, but if you haven’t already heard, Google gave Wikipedia $2 million dollars to help with its never-sated appetite for bandwidth and “increasing … multimedia needs.” Here are two of the Internet’s most important websites getting together, and I’d have thought it would’ve been worth more than a small roundup on Techmeme.

Reported the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 18:

Google Inc., the Internet’s most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web’s most-read sites.

Good.

Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia, said Wednesday that Google has donated $2 million to further develop the popular encyclopedia and other projects.

Awesome. Right.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, broke the news on Twitter on Tuesday, followed by a formal announcement from the nonprofit organization.

Twitter, well played.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a statement, called Wikipedia “one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet…this vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

You bet. Of course. But why now?

To some this raises the question of what Wikipedia might do for Google; after all, a sizable donation could be said to create the possibility of a Conflict of Interest. Previous donations, such as that from a conspicuous Silicon Valley VC and partner of Elevation Partners (not Bono), have raised eyebrows. And everyone knows about Jimmy Wales’ occasional willingness to cut special someones (and Google is) a break — at least until the community gets involved.

But this question is probably backward. Wikipedia already helps Google, and by helping Wikipedia, Google helps itself.

Google depends on Wikipedia to provide topical, authoritative results at the top of its search results pages (SERPs, in SEO-speak) on more subjects than any other website. One occasionally-discussed, conspiracy-tinged theory has Google purposefully privileging Wikipedia precisely because it “cleans up” their search results. That’s possible.

But that isn’t needed to explain Wikipedia’s prominence on Google. It guarantees, for a range of topics functionally as vast as Google searches are regularly performed, an end result that is usually informative, free (as in beer, but liberty too) and not-for-profit, “not evil” and reliably neutral in a Switzerland kind of way. From what we know about Google’s recommendations for webmasters, no website is so organized as well around the Google algorithm as Wikipedia, whether we’re talking about software, community or purpose. It’s basically Google’s perfect website.

Yeah, I would give Wikipedia $2 million, too. And even though it’s positively swimming in cash, I’d probably give it some more.

HTML5 video efforts & SF meet up

2010-03-04T04:57:54+00:00

wikimedia meet up

Its been a while since the last post as I have been pretty busy with wikimedia / kaltura development efforts. I wanted to pass along a few links to highlight what I have been up-to.

First I want to let people know about the html5 video meet-up march 10th at the wikimedia offices.
TheDj has done a good post outlining recent html5 player work.
I have been hard at work packaging the html5 video library for reuse in projects outside of wikimedia. This means the html5 video player ( and other components ) can easily be used in other web sites. More on this in the near future.
Also I have been working on some efforts to make it easier to contribute videos to wikimedia. More on this in the near future as well

Amazing geographic feature OTD

2010-03-04T03:13:46+00:00

I can’t get over this amazing geographic feature of Quebec. The central km-high peak is now way up on my list of mountains to climb.

Wikimedia & MediaWiki bugs, issues and requests

2010-03-04T01:26:46+00:00

Disclaimer: The content of this article reflects only my personal opinion and is not an official plan or communication of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Bugs & Bugzilla

Right now, the bug tracker we use is based on Bugzilla and located at bugzilla.wikimedia.org. Many major free projects use a generic “bugs” or “issues” prefix or suffix in their URL: bugs.kde.org, bugs.gentoo.org, issues.apache.org, www.debian.org/Bugs. Some projects use the “bugzilla” prefix like we currently do, like bugzilla.gnome.org. The latter is an example of a choice based on the implementation model: the name reflects the technical implementation of the bug tracker, not its actual purpose. A better name would be closer to the user model and describe the actual goal of the platform: to report and manage bugs and issues related to a specific project. If we do change our tracker, the current name will have to change too, because it is specific to a given tool.

Recommendation: Use a generic descriptive prefix rather than one based on the tool we use.

Wikimedia & MediaWiki

Another current issue is the confusion caused by the similar names used for the organization (Wikimedia) and the software (MediaWiki). A good example of this confusion is the number of MediaWiki users who join the #wikimedia IRC channel instead of #mediawiki to ask for software support. The confusion is even worsened by the fact that we have a unique bug tracker located at bugzilla.wikimedia.org, dealing with issues related to both Wikimedia websites and the MediaWiki software.

There are obviously strong ties between Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki: all Wikimedia projects use the MediaWiki software, and the MediaWiki software is primarily developed with Wikimedia projects in mind. However, there is also a growing community of MediaWiki users who are not Wikimedia users and we should provide them with tools relevant to them. This might be for instance a support forum dedicated to MediaWiki users.

Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki are separate products and they should be acknowledged as such: as a consequence, the separation between bugs in the MediaWiki software, and Wikimedia-specific operations & configuration requests should be made more explicit. Obviously, we would prefer to have a unique back-end to support both sites, particularly to be able to move bugs and requests from one platform to another, but this is easily configurable. Possible names could be dev.mediawiki.org and tech.wikimedia.org; both are currently unused. They are pretty wide prefixes, because we may host a real project management platform there, rather than just bug trackers.

Recommendation: Offer two different public-facing platforms for MediaWiki- and Wikimedia-related issue tracking.

Save BBC 6 Music

2010-03-03T21:44:36+00:00

(aka ‘Axe a TV station instead’)

This whole impending closure of BBC 6 Music has got me thinking. Obviously, I’m very very unhappy about the prospect of it closing - 6 Music offers something that nobody else does. 6 Music’s DJs are a diverse, intelligent bunch, playing a wide range of great music - and I’m constantly scurrying off to t’internet to find out more about the band that’s currently playing.

And, of course, there are the peerless, magnificent, multi-talented, yet self-effacing but always hyper-endearing, song-warring geniuses, the eye-wateringly, stomach-crampingly funny, Adam and Joe.

I can’t understand that, under the rationale to focus on “higher quality” programming, Mark Thompson is proposing to axe 6 Music. Mark, you’ve got high quality right there - on 6 Music - and it seems pretty good value for money too.

So, I’ve done my small bit, joined facebook groups, signed petitions, posted on twitter, etc. And today, I’ve taken part in the consultation process, which I appreciate that the BBC trust have put together to garner the public’s views. This is what got me thinking.

I think that a radio station is a more distinctive entity than a TV station, and if I had to make a cut anywhere on the BBC, it would be to one of their TV stations. (BBC3 I’d say, but, in the sake of neutrality, I’ll keep an open mind.) What I’m saying is that I will channel hop on TV, but I won’t do that to the same extent on radio. I’ll leave the radio on the same channel, and tune my attention in or out depending on what’s playing, or what they’re saying. We consume radio in a different way to television. And more importantly to my point, I believe that we go to particular radio stations at particular times because they fit our current mood, as well as our values (in much the same way as we go to a particular newspaper). I will turn on Radio 4 or 6 Music because that’s the mood I’m in at the time - but I would never say, “Ooh, I’m in a BBC2 (TV) mood now…”.

For what it’s worth, and for the potential interest of anyone out there, these are my thoughts - and I said more or less the same thing in the consultation…

I think, if anything, that TV programming could be cut and consolidated among fewer channels (even though it would pain me to see BBC4 cut, for example). A radio station is more important to have as an *entity* than is a TV station, in my opinion and experience. In other words, I don’t mind tuning into a TV station to watch a specific programme, but I like to be able to turn on a radio station and know that it will be giving me ‘the kind of programming that I know it does, and that I’m currently in the mood for’. Radio 4 and Radio 6 (and occasionally Radio 3) are my go-to stations, covering most of my moods!

#savebbc6music!

#whattheboggins?!

Fighting usability beta bugs

2010-03-03T19:08:28+00:00

Another quick update from the Wikimedia Usability team — the Foundation team working on user interface and editing system improvements for Wikipedia and the Foundation’s projects.

If you are one of the usability beta users, you might have noticed that dialogues for links and tables, and dynamic collapsible table of contents have been disabled. We regret that we had to take away these features temporarily. The babaco enhancements release which was deployed in February caused text formatting problems. So we decided to temporarily disable these features until we have solid solutions. The plan is to restore at least the dialogue feature mid-March.

The beta opt-in rate in February suffered from challenges as well. It is possible that the decline is related to the formatting issues with the release mentioned above, but we could not pinpoint the correlation. February ended with a total of 571,579 users having tried the beta. Although the monthly retention rate for all projects for the month declined by one percent to 80.4%, the cumulative retention rate since the beginning of the beta in August 2009 across all projects held steady at 79.8% as of February 28. Close to a half million users continue using the beta, so we wish to restore all beta features as soon as possible. The updated beta status by Howie is found here.

Lastly, we have a pretty big release coming up this month. The release nick name is Citron, and it is scheduled in the week of March 15. The main feature of this release is to collapse templates, aka scary double curly brackets in the editor, and provide a form-based interface, so that users do not need to navigate through the templates. Mock-ups, Parul, Hannes, Nimish and Adam worked on, can be found here. Template-collapsing and form-based editing interface will be staged on prototypes soon and we will send out invite for you to play with it. These features are planned to be enabled under user preferences for the gradual rollout.

Naoko Komura
User Experience Programs

Gotta watch that oxygen

2010-03-03T18:14:00+00:00

Celebrities and downtown denizens salute 25 years of Michael Musto

2010-03-03T15:14:14+00:00

Last night was a star-studded salute to one of the main reasons people pick up the Village Voice: Michael Musto, who has written for the newspaper for 25 years. Pick up his new book, Fork on the Left, Knife in the Back, and you’ll be as enchanted by his acerbic wit as is the rest of New York City.

Below are photos from the celebration, all taken by David Shankbone and licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution.

Joan Rivers hosted the party.

Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of the Real Housewives of New York

Irina Movmyga and artist Andres Serrano

Miss Dirty Martini, Michael Urie and Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector serenading Michael Musto

Ronnie Spector of The Ronettes

Joan Rivers enjoying Murray Hill’s performance.

Michelangelo Signorile and Linda Simpson.

Michael Urie of Ugly Betty.

Robert Verdi (center) and artist Robert Richards (right)

Burlesque sensation (and Karl Lagerfeld muse) Miss Dirty Martini.

Lisa Levy and David Shankbone (both of whom fought this People’s Court case for a dog rescue)

Epiphany, Brooke Crescenti and friend.

Party-goers

Robin Byrd

Musto and Judy Garland (Tommy Femia)

More party-goers

Possibly related posts

Growth of Biographies on Wikipedia

2010-03-03T11:34:33+00:00

We all know that Wikipedia is growing. Just over 2 years ago, on February 14, 2007 there were 1,638,583 articles on Wikipedia. Today there are 3,204,518 - 95%. But where is Wikipedia growing? Is article growth constant across categories or are some growing more quickly than others? I took a look, and though there are some admitted methodological flaws in my approach, the results are interesting. It seems that biographies are growing much more rapidly than other sorts of articles. In my opinion, this is hardly a good thing.

Biographies

I measured growth in biographies on the basis of how many articles are tagged as in the scope of WikiProject Biography (the flaw here, of course, is that we may be capturing an increase in taggings not an increase in articles). Biographies have grown much, much faster than Wikipedia as a whole. On February 14, 2009 there were 208,490 tagged biographies on Wikipedia. Today there are 793,693, an increase of 280% (vs. 95% for Wikipedia as a whole. So, in 2007, biographies made up 12.7% of Wikipedia, but today they make up 24.8%. This is a shocking increase.

Biographies of Living People

There is no WikiProject for living people, but such articles are all included in Category:Living people (this is, in fact, probably a much more solid method than measuring on the basis of WikiProject taggings). In February 2007, there were 162,304 biographies in this category (see here). Today, there are 435,492 articles, an increase of 168%. This is substantially more than Wikipedia as a whole, but substantially less than biographies as a whole. Nonetheless, living people make up now make up 13.6% of Wikipedia (more than all biographies did in 2007) vs. 9.9% in 2007.

If we assume that Wikipedia will grow at the same rate from 2009 to 2011 as it did from 2007 to 2009, then by 2011 Wikipedia would be looking at quite a situation. If these trends continue, Wikipedia would include 6,266,690 articles in 2011 of which 3,021,481 (48.2%) would be biographies and 1,168,506 would be biographies of living people (18.6%). Wikipedia, in other words, would be on its way to becoming a biographical dictionary.

Carrying forward a theme here, we should also note the disproportionate role of athletes in all of this. The number of articles tagged for WikiProject Football (soccer), which includes primarily articles on players (but also some on teams, etc.) has shot up from 7,711 in 2007 to 108,557 today (a 1307% increase). In this context, it is important to note that in early 2007, the notability criteria for biographies underwent substantial changes (diff) leading, among other changes, to the emergence of the modern version of WP:ATHLETE, which must be seen as the most foolish of all Wikipedia policies.

It is quite troubling, when one considers that Wikipedia has significant problems maintaining the biographies already in place, that biographical articles are growing so much more quickly than the encyclopedia as a whole. If I were to dictate Wikipedia policy (and I most certainly do not), I would suggest an elimination of all the "Additional criteria" for notability, and a mild tightening in enforcement of the general criteria. Such changes are the only reasonably way for Wikipedia to proceed.

As a more scholarship-oriented aside, the fact that one can plausibly tie the immense growth in athlete biographies to the revision of the notability guidelines is interesting and suggestive. It seems to show that policy is indeed prescriptive rather than descriptive and that the "letter of the law" has a substantial effect on Wikipedia practice.

More mobile news (continued)

2010-03-03T09:11:00+00:00

mobile MediaWiki uses caching, an update takes some two hours to become available
a change to a mobile main page takes these same two hours for it to become visible
by changing the MediaWiki:Common.js you can adjust your wiki's settings so that all mobile users are automatically redirected to the mobile interface.
configurations for main pages were also entered
mobile Wikipedia is now localised for Hausa
the Hausa Wikipedia main page is however so poor, that we cannot make a mobile main page using the parts
the mobile main page for the Malayalam wikipedia is now life !!

Thanks and a special thank you for everyone that make the use of mobile MediaWiki spike :)

GerardM

Chilean quakes and turmoil

2010-03-03T07:06:55+00:00

My brother is in Santiago at the moment, where he teaches architecture. The city has been shaken by the recent disastrous earthquake, but survived.

My brother just finished a survey of how to preserve important structures in Valparaiso, a city more damaged by the disaster. Of course the sorts of preservation that keep urban development from destroying important landmarks rarely covers protection from acts of God… which made me think about how we are preserving our major cultural artefacts in digital form, and through subtle synthesis of the elements that make them so inspiring and memorable.

I can think of few cases in which the exact original of a physical object is needed for most inspiration and transmission of culture and heritage… in an era of 3d printing, cheap fabrication materials, lifelike capture of image and acoustics, and lifelike digital rendering, what does this mean for curation of physical objects and spaces?

Pictures of the Day - March 03

2010-03-03T06:03:01+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

ISS March 2009.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by 84user

de.wikipedia.org:

Stilfser Joch 7886.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Varus111

en.wikipedia.org:

Georges Bizet - Rosabel Morrison - Carmen poster.png from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Adam Cuerden

Change is the only constant

2010-03-03T05:51:03+00:00

Thoughts about change are on my mind today as we shut down our office in Lahore, Pakistan.

We’ve worked with our Lahore colleagues for three years. They are terrific people who have done some really good work for AboutUs, and we’ve enjoyed a great relationship with them.

As a small, venture-backed company, we’re constantly evaluating options and tradeoffs. Sometimes we’re faced with a tough choice about where to focus our resources. The decision to shut down our Lahore office is one of those tough choices. We’re moving fast on new product development, and all our time, attention and resources need to be focused on these efforts here in Portland.

We’re grateful for the work and friendship we’ve shared with our Lahore colleagues. We hope their experience with AboutUs will serve them well in the next chapter of their working lives.

The "Delta" nightmare

2010-03-03T02:25:35+00:00

My weekends usually go hibernating copious hours, catching up on lkml, cooking good food, watching a good movie or anything that doesn't make me drive for long hours or take a long flight (well, I used to drive to NYC over the weekends but that was out of sheer necessity). Since my fiancée moved to DC, I persuaded her to do all the traveling while I do the "not very difficult job" of doing nothing. That(persuasion), as everyone knows, is not very easy! So, finally, I decided to give her a break and got myself a round trip shuttle to DC for the (last) weekend.

Now, everyone has their airline horror stories and I tend to take them very seriously. Delta Airlines, fortunately is rarely a part of these stories and I was happy that I was flying with them. And so, with a smile on my face, I took a cab to the Logan airport. Everything was as expected: I had my usual dose of a 3 hour departure delay from Boston. And just like the buses at South Station, I actually saw that the Delta flights were on ground so that they could be filled up with passengers! This may be outright common or may be there was a genuine reason flights were getting delayed but at that moment, nothing seemed like it could be the reason. Finally, my flight took off (and landed in DC) and I was having a good time until Sunday happened. That was the day I took the DC metro to Vienna (suburbs) and had a really terrible motion sickness. My flight back to Boston was on Monday morning and I was optimistic that I would feel better by that time but my body didn't really care for my optimism. It was Monday morning at 8 am, and I had nausea, dizziness and everything unpleasant. That's when the Delta horror story started.

Seeing that I was not in a very good shape to fly, my fiancée called up the Delta customer service asking what it would take to reschedule my flight to Tuesday. She was told that we had to pay a $150 rescheduling fee which was probably fine but at that time it looked like too much for a "little less than" $200 fare. We gave up; still optimistic that I would magically feel better. An hour passed and things were still the same. So, we decided to make the final call and reschedule to Tuesday. Honestly, we still had our doubts that we wouldn't have to pay the difference in fare (which was $650 on Monday for a Tuesday flight!) and so to make sure we know what we are getting into, my fiancée explicitly asked : "Are there any other fees involved that we should know about ?" The answer she received was " No ma'am, you only have to pay a $150 fee rescheduling fee". My fiancée thought that we could probably save a bit more considering the fact that I am actually ill and so wished to talk to the supervisor to ask for a reduction in the rescheduling fee. After explaining the whole story to the supervisor again, what we heard from her completely bowled us over. The supervisor said "We do have to pay the rescheduling fee and *also* have to pay the difference in fair!" And when we confronted her saying that we spoke to two customer reps minutes before her who told us that there was no other fees involved, she didn't really care; in fact, she didn't even offer an apology. All she could offer us were statements like : "The system wouldn't allow such a transaction" or " the customer rep didn't mention anything like that".

At this point, my fiancée was furious and I realized it's probably best to end the call as it was going nowhere! We disconnected the call, and I tried my best to feel better(somehow) and finally took the flight. I actually wanted to feel worse so that I could throw up inside the aircraft but later realized that would be too evil of me and discomfort to fellow passengers. Again, as usual, the flight from DC was late by an hour because of some lame reason, the flight itself was very uncomfortable : my nausea was bad to the extent of being painful and I somehow passed one hour and 12 minutes and finally reached Boston.

So, what exactly am I whining about ?
We spoke to two customer service reps who had no idea that we had to pay the difference in fare along with the rescheduling fee. Does that mean they were irresponsible ? No, that means that Delta doesn't give a damn about customer service (and so is the case with any other airline). Once the ticket is sold, their liability becomes zero. And the way the supervisor handled the misinformation provided by the reps just shows how serious they are about the whole thing.

And Delta, this is what I have to say to you : I will probably fly with you again; because I would have no other option or I would get a really good deal but you really need to pick a role model for yourself and learn what customer service is all about. Here's one for a start.

Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 9 – 1 March 2010

2010-03-02T23:22:37+00:00

Reference desk: Wikipedia Reference Desk quality analyzed
News and notes: Usability, 15M articles, Vandalism research award, and more
In the news: Idealizing the Star Spangled Banner, Curious Announcement, and more
WikiProject report: WikiProject Severe Weather
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

The power of enthusiasm

2010-03-02T23:08:00+00:00

A friend of mine invited me to the theatre for a tv registration of NotaBene, with text by the Dutch author Willem Wilmink set to music. At the last moment my friend was not able to come so I ended up going with a lady friend of his.

This evening waiting in the row for our tickets, I told enthusiastically of my latest scheme of conquering the world .. Meina was amused and so was the gentleman standing right behind me. We ended up sitting next to each other. When I mentioned the 37,000 pictures of the Tropenmuseum, he interrupted me and told me that it was more then likely that family pictures of his would be among them.

We had a real interesting conversation, we exchanged e-mail addresses and he promised me to send me a picture produced from one of his glass negatives. I asked him to send me the picture he likes best. His grandfather worked for the customs office and consequently he had to move house every two years. This resulted in pictures from all over Indonesia.

This is a family picture I received from Colin.. He pointed out the giant clam shell in the foreground.

What are the chances for something like this to happen? It does however show that many people have material that is worthy of becoming part of a collection like the one of the Tropenmuseum.

Thanks,
GerardM

Wales and Objectivism

2010-03-02T22:10:50+00:00

I just finished an excellent biography of Ayn Rand and her philosophy in the context of American political culture. While reading, I couldn't help think of Wales' expressed interest in Objectivism and the next to the last page actually comments on this issue:

One of the many ironies of Rand's career is her latter-day popularity among entrepreneurs who are pioneering new forms of community. Among her high-profile fans as Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales, once an active participant in the listserv controversies of the Objectivist Center. A nonprofit that depends on charitable donations, Wikipedia may ultimately put its rival encyclopedias out of business. At the root of Wikipedia are warring sensibilities that seemed to both embody and defy Rand's beliefs. The website's emphasis on individual empowerment, the value of knowledge, and its own risky organizational model reflects Rand's sensibility. But its trust in the wisdom of crowds, celebration of the social nature of knowledge, and faith that many working together will produce something of enduring value contradict Rand's adage "all creation is individual." (Burns 2009, p. 284)

The Karachay-Balkar community is waiting for any traffic

2010-03-02T21:15:00+00:00

The process for a krc.wikipedia.org is finished. The krc community is waiting for its conclusion; the creation of its Wikipedia. What do you do when you are waiting? You prepare in any which way.

Consequently we can already show the draft of its mobile page..

Thanks,
GerardM