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2011-01-31

Executive Director travels; DMCA takedowns; fellowship clarifications; brief news

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By Tilman Bayer

Executive Director's travel report: enlightenment in Dubai and meditation in India

Sue Gardner has published an "Executive director trip report: Stockholm, London, Dubai, Delhi", describing her activities and personal impressions while travelling to these cities on Wikimedia-related business from November 20 to December 6, and also including a subsequent three-week vacation with a 10-day silent meditation retreat organized by the Indian Dhamma Institute ("the McDonald’s of Buddhist meditation retreats"), her first extended holiday since being hired by the Foundation in 2007. "I chose to vacation to India because it’s a strategic priority for the Wikimedia Foundation, and I wanted to get a little more exposure to the country and its people."

Sue Gardner giving her keynote at the London GLAM-WIKI conference

In Stockholm, Gardner gave the keynote at the Swedish chapter's "Wikipedia Academy" and in London at the GLAM-WIKI conference (Signpost coverage). In Dubai she was a speaker at the local TEDx event, and as in the other cities, met with local Wikipedians, which meant their first-ever meetup (Signpost coverage). Gardner remarked that she found it "always interesting to get a sense of how Wikipedia is being received/understood in different parts of the world", e.g. "Wikipedia has always seemed to me best-loved and most-accepted in Germany", comparing media attitudes toward Wikipedia in particular (with UK journalists being the least friendly). She related an observation from her talk in the United Arab Emirates (a region which had been considered for a possible expansion of the Wikimedia Foundation, after India):

Videos from the TEDx event are currently being uploaded, with Gardner's talk not yet available at the time of writing.

DMCA take-down notices

The Wikimedia Foundation acted on two separate DMCA take-down notifications this month, in both cases removing images from Commons where apparently an image creator or purported rights holder had withdrawn or amended a previous permission for usage. (DMCA takedown notices are legal procedures under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, whereby a copyright owner notifies an online service provider such as the WMF of an alleged infringement on its servers, and the provider can retain immunity from copyright violations committed by its users if they remove the allegedly infringing material promptly. Last year, the Foundation's former legal counsel Mike Godwin stated that "I typically get only one or two true take-down notices a year. I always thought I would get more, but our community is very good at removing infringing material before a copyright owner complains to us.")

The first take-down notice concerned a multitude of coat of arms images on Wikimedia Commons (example image description page in Google's cache) uploaded by a user who later had tried to impose an additional reuse restriction on them (discussions about the case include [1] before and [2], [3] after he took legal action), and is now blocked.

The second DMCA notice was issued against the Wikimedia Foundation by classical music label Deutsche Grammophon, concerning an official portrait photo of the singer Placido Domingo. It appears to have been the same photo as one used by DG on the tenor's Facebook page, where it celebrated his 70th birthday on the day the undated take-down notice was enacted (January 21st). According to the image description page as still available in Google's cache, the photo had been uploaded "with permission from the company that owns and holds the rights for the photo", as documented in an OTRS ticket dated September 2008. However, in November 2009 the uploader already requested the removal of the image, saying it had been "received with written consent from Mr. Domingo's PR, who are also incharge of his website (www.placidodomingo.com). I have just received e-mail from his PR asking me to remove "File:DomingoJ1.jpg" from Wiki. It is a request from Sheila Rock. Could you please remove it as soon as possible? (I think partly because it is not entirely belong to Sheila Rock, the photo was taken for Deutshe Grammophon)".

A third DMCA take-down notice was also made available on the Foundation wiki this month, dating back to November and concerning the specification for the PCI bus, an article that was already subject to an office action.


Wikimedia fellowships discussed and clarified

Achal Prabhala, new Wikimedia Foundation Fellow
As reported earlier ("New Wikimedia fellow to research sourcing problems in local languages"), Achal Prabhala recently became a "Wikimedia Foundation fellow" for a project to conduct field research in South Africa and India on how Wikipedias in local languages might deal with the lack of printed sources in many such languages. Since then, the brief announcement by Chief Community Officer Zack Exley was complemented by additional information about Prabhala's project and his previous Wikimedia-related work, in a discussion thread on Foundation-l which included postings by several senior Wikimedia people, and clarifications about Wikimedia fellowships in general.

WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller explained that (unlike previous fellowships announced by the Community Department) the project is being funded by a Wikimedia grant (of $21,500, approved on December 17) and will result in the creation of a video documentary:

Exley and former Wikimedia chair Anthere (Florence Devouard) stressed that the Foundation's Advisory Board indeed has a purely advisory role and holds no powers within the organization, i.e. that there is no conflict of interest if an Advisory Board member is receiving a grant or being hired by Wikimedia (Prabhala had been an Advisory Board member since its inception and among the original members "has probably been the most active in the past years", according to Devouard). Likewise, to alleviate such concerns, Indian Board of Trustees member Bishaka Datta described the process that led to her appointment as a Trustee in March 2010, which involved interviews with five senior Wikimedians but not with Prabhala, who however mentored her and did "some serious handholding in the first three months" after her appointment. The Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead also expressed his appreciation for Prabhala's help in launching Wikimedia in India, and other issues: "I, personally, have found him to be an excellent advisor and not someone who expects anything in return."

On January 27, The Hindu published a portrait of Prabhala ("One among the clan of Wikipedians"), where he described how he was introduced to Wikipedia by Angela Beesley and Erik Möller ("they looked like college students") in 2005 while working as an activist against restrictive copyright and for affordable school textbooks in South Africa, recalled "making nervous, anonymous edits to the entries of obscure sci-fi writers who I thought deserved more attention" and attending the first Wikimania in Germany. He said that after moving back to Bangalore, Wikipedians became one of the reasons for him to like the city (which has an active Wikipedian meetup and is the seat of the recently incorporated Wikimedia chapter): "... hundreds of encounters with Wikipedians later, I'm kind of excited about being home. I've been witness to some extraordinary, selfless, tireless and downright funny instances of community work, and I've seen people turn Wikipedia into something local and lovable."

About the fellowship program in general, Möller said that while it was being scaled up, "it would be good to have more open conversations about the criteria and process through which fellowships (but also Wikimedia Foundation grants) are awarded. ... I do think it's important to give the community more of a voice in both proposing and selecting individuals and projects, perhaps through some form of review committee which makes a preliminary recommendation, and which strongly interfaces with WMF to align the program with our strategic priorities." Newstead agreed that there was "room for improvement in our processes at WMF": "we have used the title of Fellowship for different types of activities e.g., hiring someone on a contract for general staff-like purposes, providing a grant to someone for a specific activity. We should figure out how to distinguish between these (and other roles) more clearly."

On the Foundation's wiki, a page about fellows was subsequently created. Human Resources Manager Daniel Phelps clarified that the "Community" in "Community fellow" was "a misnomer, Achal isn't specifically a Community fellow and as the fellowship program expands this will likely contain fellows from multiple departments" and said that unlike the other five fellows, Steven Walling "is on payroll and is set to work in the office during the duration of his fellowship as a staff member. We have to process each Fellowship currently based on several criteria as to how we engage with them. Much of this is based on HR [Human Resources] law." At the time of its introduction in September (Signpost coverage), the program - where community members were to "lead intensive, time-limited projects focused on key areas of risk and opportunity" with some of them possibly joining the permanent WMF staff later - had been called the "Community Fellowship program"; it followed the Community Department's earlier "Community hiring" call (Signpost coverage).

Newstead also announced that he was "planning on introducing a community input mechanism into the grant process for 2011/12."

Briefly

Indiana State House
  • State legislature recognizes public art project: This week, work done by Wikipedian RichardMcCoy from the WikiProject Public art and his fall 2010 course at IUPUI to document the artwork in and around the Indiana Statehouse will be honored by the Indiana Senate and House of Representatives, who have issued a Concurrent Resolution (sponsored by Senator Jim Merritt and Representative Tom Saunders) to recognize the "valuable work being done by Richard McCoy and the students enrolled in the IUPUI Museum Studies Collections Care and Management course." See also McCoy's description of the project on Witty lama's blog, and coverage in the upcoming Signpost issue.
  • Sue Gardner's Office hours: The log of Sue Gardner's IRC Office hour on January 27 has been posted. Topics included the ongoing search for the Foundation's new legal counsel (following the sudden departure of Mike Godwin); Gardner said that it was in its final stages and an announcement was likely within 2-3 weeks. The process also involved a re-thinking of the job description. The search for the National Program Director in India (who will head the Foundation's new office in the country) is expected to conclude soon, too. A member of the Indian chapter asked about overlaps between the tasks of the office and those activities usually done by a Chapter (including fundraising). Sue Gardner replied that "what we're going to aim for in India is to have the two entities complement each other, rather than just overlapping. So, the Indian office will focus on the kinds of things that paid staff are better suited for, and the chapter will focus on the kinds of things that volunteers are better suited to". Replying to concerns that the Indian presence would expose the Foundation to strict local laws and prosecution, Gardner said that "obviously this is a big deal for the Wikimedia Foundation: it'll be the first time we've opened an office outside the United States, where we are comfortable and familiar with the legal context. We don't have that comfort and familiarity anywhere else, including India. So the goal is for us to have a plan that will 1) mitigate risk in advance, by structuring our work there to avoid unnecessary exposure, and ii) have a plan in place to defend our interests, should we need to."
  • New ombudsman commission: The members of the new Ombudsman commission have been announced. They are
    • Herbythyme, of Commons
    • Sir48, of the Danish Wikipedia
    • FloNight, of the English Wikipedia, Commons and English Wikiquote
    • Mwpnl, of the Dutch Wikipedia
    • Thogo, of the German Wikipedia
      The Ombudsman commission was set up in 2006 by the Wikimedia Foundation and is tasked with investigating complaints about violations of the privacy policy (in particular concerning the use of CheckUser tools) on any Wikimedia project in an official manner. The one-year term of the current ombudspeople (cf. last year's Signpost coverage) is ending in February.
  • Indian language milestone: On January 22, the Malayalam Wikipedia crossed the one million edit milestone, the first Indian language Wikipedia to do so.[4]
  • Egypt protests and Wikipedia: During the 2011 Egyptian protests, the country has been cut off almost completely from the Internet, visible from the perspective of Wikimedia sites as a sharp drop in traffic from Egypt on approximately January 27, 11 PM UTC, per diagrams provided by the Foundation's Data Analyst Erik Zachte. Arab TV news station Al Jazeera, which is an important source of information on the events, has been releasing media under Creative Commons licenses for a long time, but usually with non-commercial and non-derivative restrictions that make them unusable for Wikipedia. On the suggestion of Aude, Al Jazeera agreed to relicense video footage showing clashes between police and protesters at Cairo's 6th October Bridge under the freer CC-BY-SA license. A "quick and dirty transcode" of the video has been uploaded to Commons.
  • Founding of the Czech Wikipedia: Following his series of blog posts on the founding of the Esperanto Wikipedia, Chuck Smith has published a (translated) interview with Miroslav Malovec, the "founder" of the Czech Wikipedia, who in 2002 translated the wiki's user interface from the Esperanto version into Czech.
  • Wikimedia IRC meeting: Board member Phoebe Ayers has called to resume regular Wikimedia IRC meetings, with the next one on February 5, 2011 at 17:00 UTC in the Freenode channel #wikimedia.
  • Public Policy Initiative: On the Foundation's blog, LiAnna Davis from the Public Policy Initiative has concluded her series of profiles of some of the participating university students and their Wikipedia experience with a summary of some common themes that "echoed across the students in all of the 14 classes we worked with last term", describing a few changes that the Initiative has made, based on them, for the upcoming spring term.
  • German Wikipedians reject author payments scheme: As reported earlier ("German Wikipedia debates payment schemes"), since 2008 there have been debates on the German Wikipedia to join the "METIS" system by German collecting society VG Wort, which pays royalties to authors of web pages. The money – an estimated €15 million in 2008 – comes from fees imposed on the sale of CD and DVD burners in Germany. The rationale for including web pages is that, according to consumer surveys, around half of the copyrighted texts that are copied using these devices have been downloaded from the Internet. To be eligible, the web page has to be registered with METIS and usually needs to carry a web bug from their server (the payments are based on page impressions). METIS had indicated that the system might include the German Wikipedia, too; its free license notwithstanding. A new poll on the issue was started on January 25 by Achim Raschka (the "quality officer" of Wikimedia Germany, an unpaid position focusing on ways to improve content quality). It is to run one month, but as of January 31, a very clear majority (130:12) against the use of METIS was already apparent. Many "no" voters gave reasons such as these voiced by Kurt Jansson (former chair of the German chapter): "The potential destructive impact on the project is immense. Overall, the incentives provided by METIS are counterproductive and can have devastating consequences within just a few years; fueling edit-wars and discouraging dedicated non-authors", or by the chapter's current chair Sebmol: "contradicts meaning and purpose of free content". At the moment, however, METIS also allows users to claim authorship of Wikipedia articles without the endorsement of the site owner (and the installation of a web bug). Achim Raschka reports that under this separate payment plan, he had already received 300 Euro for "his" Wikipedia articles.

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2011-01-31

Facebook hack; gender gap; What is the Wikipedia "community"?; brief news

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By Wackywace, Lumos3 and Tilman Bayer

Wikipedia page used in Facebook hack

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
The Guardian last week observed that a hacker who gained access to a page for fans of Mark Zuckerberg on the social networking site Facebook and left comments about how the website should become a "social business" included a shortened link to the Wikipedia article on social business (clicked over 50,000 times as of January 31, according to bit.ly/fs6rT3+).

Before the incident, an anonymous contributor had edited that article to add a link to the website of a company offering "total web consulting", based in Pickerington, Ohio. However, two minutes after posting the link in the article, the same IP removed the link. The website appears to have since been taken offline, and an HTTP 404 ("not found" error) message is displayed.

Then, a link to an old ID of the article was posted on the Facebook fan page through Mark Zuckerberg's personal account, with comments about the way the social networking site is run. "If facebook needs money, instead of going to the banks, why doesn't Facebook let its user [sic] invest in Facebook in a social way?" Why, he questions, does Zuckerberg not "transform Facebook into a 'social business'" in the way Nobel Prize winner "Muhammad Yunus described it?"

A whois check on the IP address used to make the edits shows the edits were made from a United States Department of Defense computer in Williamsburg. Although this could indicate the edits—and, indeed, the identity of the Facebook page hacker— could have been the actions of a member of the U.S. military, The Guardian points out the edits could be made using a proxy server from outside the military base.

Wikipedia's gender gap

An article on the January 31 front page of the The New York Times ("Define gender gap? Look up Wikipedia’s contributor list") concerned the gender gap in Wikipedia's editor base and how it is affecting article quality. Written by Noam Cohen, it gives examples of how subjects dear to girls and women tend to be short while those dear to boys and men are voluminous. It points out that the entry on friendship bracelets, likely to be of interest to teenage girls, is limited to only four paragraphs, whereas the article on baseball cards, a topic more likely to be followed by boys, is voluminous and includes a detailed chronological history of the subject. The entry on TV series Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of each episode while the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode. The New York Times quotes Sue Gardner as saying how she has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015 from its present 13%, but "that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas", being wary of triggering the "strong feelings" of many people for whom gender is "a huge hot-button issue". Wikimedia Board member Kat Walsh (User:Mindspillage), who was also quoted by the NYT, reacted to the article by publishing a draft essay on "Women on Wikipedia" disagreeing with the statement "that Wikipedia has a culture that is unfriendly to women ... I think the disproportionate lack of women in the community isn't about gender so much as it is about a culture that rewards certain traits and discourages others. And we're not getting people who don't have those other traits, male or female; more of the people who do fit the current culture are male. But the focus should be on becoming more open and diverse in general--becoming more inclusive to everyone, which will naturally bring in more women."

What is the Wikipedia "community"?

A paper titled "Imagining the Wikipedia community: What do Wikipedia authors mean when they write about their 'community'?" was published last month in "New Media & Society" (doi:10.1177/1461444810378364, paywalled) by Christian Pentzold, a doctoral student at Chemnitz University of Technology. Led by the question "What particular meaning do the Wikipedia editors attach to the term 'community'?", the paper examines postings on Wikipedia-l, the oldest Wikipedia mailing list, from its founding on January 22, 2001 until the end of 2007 (the author notes that the list has "lost traffic" to other lists). Of the 30,500 postings during that time, 3105 contained the word "community", used in 5563 passages. A part of them was coded using grounded theory procedures, using a set of standardized questions such as "Q7. In which activities can people partake?" (in the "community" referred to in that particular passage) or "Q10. What are prohibitions?". The author arrived at four "categories representing particular phenomena", labeled "ethos-community" (defined by a shared ethos, i.e. a set of norms and standards such as NPOV), "language community" (e.g. the Finnish Wikipedia community), "technical community" (limited to "a core group of technical rights access holders", e.g. developers) and "expert community" (a group "contributing their special knowledge to the encyclopedia"). Further axial coding led to elevate the "ethos-community" category to a "core category" and reformulate it as "ethos-action community", i.e. its members are not only defined by sharing the ethos, but also by adhering to it "apparent and assessable in their performances". The second part of the analysis elaborated on the connections between various subcategories to "narratively" lay out "an empirical theory of the 'Wikipedia community'".

Briefly

  • Medical Wikipedians issue "Call to Action" to their peers: In the Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22 members of WikiProject Medicine have published a viewpoint article titled "Wikipedia: A Key Tool for Global Public Health Promotion". After an introduction to Wikipedia's model, a section on its prominence as a source of health information, and a survey of empirical studies on Wikipedia's medical content, the authors issue a "Call to Action", inviting the medical community to join in editing Wikipedia, with the goal of providing people with free access to reliable, understandable, and up-to-date health information.
  • Robot reader of Wikipedia articles: Several news outlets noted the launch of Qwiki, a multimedia website which features a robotic reader of text drawn from Wikipedia's article on a chosen subject. The website adds still and moving pictures drawn from various web sources that attempt to synchronise with the text as it is read, to construct an audio-visual presentation of the subject. The site uses a text summariser to condense an article-reading to around one minute, with most text coming from the introduction. This story was reported at PC Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, WebProNews, Mashable, among other sources. The announcement of Qwiki a few months ago and a first demo had also attracted media attention (Signpost mention).
  • Jimmy Wales on voting and the Tea Party: The New Statesman published the transcript of a long interview with Jimmy Wales. Topics included controversial images such as in the 2008 Virgin Killer affair, NPOV (Wales recalled a recent conversation with Tony Blair about the topic, who is currently working on inter-faith dialogue), voting (Wales said that he was currently not voting because "In Florida in order to vote you have to register with your real, actual address, and for security reasons, for the safety of my family -- because there are many, many lunatics -- I can't register to vote with my real address"), the US Tea Party movement ("I'm intrigued and interested"), Sarah Palin's influence on it ("hijacked by lunatics") and other political topics, and Wikipedia as "an example of the 'Big Society' in action" (a policy concept used by the UK Conservative Party).
  • Sue Gardner on India, Middle East and iPad: Dubai-based newspaper Gulf News asked "Five questions to Sue Gardner", about the Foundation's plans for India and the Middle East, and about her news reading habits (Gardner remarked that she was not fond of Apple's iPad since it was "designed for consuming corporate-made media" only, as opposed to normal computers that allow producing and sharing own material, too).
  • Wikipedia advice for local governments: UKGovcamp, an informal event "for government types with an interest in how the public sector uses technology" held in the UK on January 22, featured a session on "the use of Flickr, Wikipedia and Open Streetmap for local authorities", summarized in a blog post. Participants learned about reuse of Wikipedia content, and were advised that "authorities should be keeping an eye on content in Wikipedia relating to them and making sure that they accurately represent their organisation" and "ensure links back to main website from Wikipedia are healthy and relevant".
  • Swiss award for Jimmy Wales: As announced a few weeks ago (Signpost coverage), Jimmy Wales received the Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize from the eponymous Swiss think tank on January 26. Cf. article and interview in English on swissinfo.ch, list of coverage on Swiss media (in German), with national TV SF1 featuring the award in its news programme SF Tagesschau and a report that included footage from the Foundation's office in San Francisco and a few soundbites by Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh (from 3:30). A video of Wales' speech and a Q&A afterwards is available (in English). Asked about a typical week in his life, Wales said that he was "on the road probably 250 days a year", although he was trying to reduce this time, while focusing more on travelling in India, and hoped that the prize money awarded to him (100,000 Swiss francs; around $106,000) would allow him to spend more time in the country.
  • Brockhaus revival?: In 2008/09, the editorial staff of Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (roughly Germany's equivalent of Encyclopaedia Britannica) was sacked and the rights were sold to Bertelsmann, a move that was widely interpreted as the end of the printed Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, caused by the competition of Internet-based reference works such as Wikipedia. However, according to a new interview in German book publishing trade magazine Buchreport (English summary by Ziko), the new owner is planning a further edition, possibly including a version for tablet PCs and print-on-demand products.

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2011-01-31

Building a pantheon of scientists from Wikipedia and Google Books

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By Headbomb

On 14 January 2011, Science, one of the world's most prominent scientific journals, published a "Science Hall of Fame" (SHoF),[1] which they described as "a pantheon of the most famous scientists of the past 2 centuries". Unlike in traditional assessment of "fame" and "influence", which usually relies on polls and the opinion of experts in the field, Science has opted for an objective approach based on how many times people's names are found in the digitized copies of books available on Google Books, and whether Wikipedia considered these people scientists.

The Signpost takes a look at what they did and reports some of the trends in the data.

Origins and overview

The origin of the SHoF was made possible by a paper written by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden and published on 17 December 2010.[2] Michel and Aiden aggregated data from Google Books, which at the time contained 15 million digitized books—roughly 12% of all books ever published. Filtering for quality revealed that about a third of the original data was suitable for analysis; this is available online at ngrams.googlelabs.com. Based on Michel and Aiden's work, John Bohannon from Science and Adrian Veres from Harvard University teamed up to create a pantheon of the most influential scientists as measured by the number of times their names appear in Google Books. However, millions of names can be found in books, and thus a way was needed to decide who is a scientist and who is not. This is where Wikipedia comes in, with its 900,000 biographical entries (the authors report 750,000),[3][4] which can then be searched using for science-related categories, science-related keywords, and years of birth and death.[5]

They have created a new unit, the darwin (D), defined as "the average annual frequency that 'Charles Darwin' appears in English-language books from the year he turned 30 years old (1839) until 2000". Scientists named more often than Darwin himself would have a fame greater than 1 darwin. However, as few people were as influential as Darwin, the millidarwin (mD; a thousandth of a Darwin) is used instead. As it turns out, only three people beat Darwin in terms of fame as measured by this metric: John Dewey (1752.7 mD), Bertrand Russell (1500.1 mD), and Sigmund Freud (1292.9 mD). Other famous figures, such as Albert Einstein (878.2 mD), Marie Curie (188.6 mD), and Louis Pasteur, (237.5 mD) rank lower.[6] This is not a measure of the impact of their scientific work, but rather of how often they are mentioned in all types of books. For example, a scientist could have a moderate scientific impact but be famous for political involvement or even for negative scientific impact, such as involvement in scientific fraud or high-profile pseudoscience.

The authors warn that the current version of the Science Hall of Fame is a rough draft subject to further refinements; not all fields are covered equally and some scientists were excluded for technical reasons. Further details are on the Science Hall of Fame website, especially their FAQ section. As an aside, the authors called this an experiment in "culturomics" (the analysis of large sets of data to find cultural trends), which has been dubbed by the American Dialect Society as the "least likely to succeed" word of 2010.[7] It will be interesting to see if the word catches on, or if the culturomics link will remain red or turn blue.

Fame, article quality, and other trends on Wikipedia

Based on this measure of fame as established by Bohannon and Veres, a comparison of Wikipedia with the SHoF (WP:SHOF) was created by Snottywong, based on a suggestion from this article's writer. The comparison lists scientists, along with their fame in mD and years of birth and death as reported by Science, as well as years of birth and death as reported by Wikipedia and assessment ratings (taken from the {{WikiProject Biography}} banner). Since the SHoF remains a rough draft at the moment, a highly-rigourous analysis of its findings would be pointless at this stage; however, some things are worth noting.

Numbers

First, some numbers. As of writing ...

  • ... the SHoF contains 5,631 entries
  • ... of these, 1,783 are living, 3,848 are dead
  • ... the breakdown of these articles is 14 FA-class, 13 GA-class, 238 B-class, 246 C-class, 2011 Start-class, 2479 Stub-class; 630 articles are unassessed
  • ... Wikipedia is missing only two articles: Herbert Mayer, which was deleted on CSD A7/BLP grounds on 9 January 2011, and Jacob Jaffe, deleted 9 December 2010 for lack of notability through AfD
  • ... the Science compilation missed 42 deaths (34 of which occurred in 2010 and 2011—possibly after the data was compiled)
  • ... Wikipedia articles are missing nine births, but no deaths
  • ... there are 18 discrepancies between births and deaths, other than missing dates; the first date is from Science, the second from Wikipedia

The high degree of "completion" or of "accuracy" should not be considered a sign that Wikipedia is "complete" or "accurate", because the authors used Wikipedia to determine whether people were scientists or not and possibly used dates from Wikipedia articles. People who lack a Wikipedia entry would presumably be excluded on "technical grounds". It is also possible that the discrepancies merely reflect changes in Wikipedia due to vandalism, mistakes, and corrections which occurred since the data was acquired.

Fame and quality

How, then, are article quality and fame related? Number crunching by The Signpost revealed the following.

Class FA GA B C Start Stub ???
Average Fame
(mD) 		107.8 113.45 60.4 17.9 11.73 5.92 5.9
Fame (mD) →
Class ↓		 0–0.1 0.1–1 1–10 10–100 100–1000 1000–10000
FA 0 0 50 21.4 28.6 0
GA 7.7 7.7 46.2 15.4 23.1 0
B 2.5 8.4 38.7 38.7 10.5 1.3
C 4.1 16.3 53.7 21.1 4.9 0
Start 2.8 18.6 58.5 17.9 2.3 0
Stub 4.6 25.3 57.8 11.8 0.4 0
??? 4.4 22.7 60.5 11.8 0.6 0

We can see that as the quality of articles increases, so does the mean fame of the scientists within the assessment class. Another way to look at this is through the distribution of fame within assessment classes: as the quality increases, the distribution of fame shifts towards higher fame – that is, higher-quality articles tend to be about more famous people. While fame correlates to some extent with quality, it is still in no way a guarantee that a famous person will have a high-quality article on Wikipedia (or vice-versa). There is not much else to say about these rather unsurprising results, except perhaps to mention that the distribution of unassessed articles most closely matches that of stubs.

Gender and quality

We can also take a look at some trends. For gender, the rankings of the top 10 men and top 10 women look like this.

Men
Rank Name Fame Ranking Main fields
1 John Dewey 1752.7 B Philosophy, psychology
2 Bertrand Russell 1500.1 B Philosophy, mathematics
3 Sigmund Freud 1292.9 B Psychology
4 Charles Darwin 1000.0 FA Biology
5 Albert Einstein 878.2 GA Physics
6 Havelock Ellis 672.4 Start Psychology
7 Noam Chomsky 506.6 B Philosophy
8 G. Stanley Hall 480.5 Start Psychology
9 Lewis Carroll 479.3 C Literature, religion
10 Erich Fromm 466.0 B Psychology, philosophy
Women
Rank Name Fame Ranking Main fields
1 Anna Freud 537.1 Start Psychology
2 Julia Kristeva 444.0 Start Philosophy, feminism
3 Ruth Benedict 314.7 Start Anthropology
4 Melanie Klein 285.1 Start Psychology
5 Luce Irigaray 242.9 Stub Sociology, feminism
6 Carol Gilligan 235.3 Start Psychology, feminism
7 Juliet Mitchell 210.2 Stub Psychology, feminism
8 Nancy Chodorow 209.0 Stub Sociology, feminism
9 Marie Curie 188.6 B Physics
10 Karen Horney 158.7 Start Psychiatry

Unsurprisingly, the top 10 men have higher fame than the top 10 women. At first glance, it seems there is an enormous disparity between the relative quality of articles on men (1 FA, 1 GA, 5 B, 1 C, 2 Start, 0 Stub) compared to those on women (0 FA, 0 GA, 1 B, 0 C, 6 Start, 3 Stub). However that conclusion is not strongly supported at the moment. Since quality & fame are somewhat correlated, it would be natural for the top 10 women (who are on average, less famous) to have articles of somewhat lower quality, although the discrepancy here seems to be too big to be entirely explainable only by lower fame. Instead, what seems to be the top indicator of quality is a combination of fame plus field. Many of the men in the top 10 ranking come from hard sciences and philosophy, while most of the women come from humanities (especially feminism and psychology/psychiatry). Indeed, the two lower-ranked articles (Start-class) for men concern psychologists (Havelock Ellis and G. Stanley Hall), and the only one above Start-class for women is for a physicist (Marie Curie).

Based on this, a more sensible conclusion would be that famous people from the humanities are under-represented on Wikipedia, compared to other fields. However, even that conclusion should not be embraced blindly. After all, it relies on a very small sampling (10 men, 10 women). Someone interested in doing a rigourous analysis of the data would have to weight ratings scores according to fame and year of birth, classify people according to the fields for which they are famous, and make sure the ratings are up to date. For example, the articles on Anna Freud and Melanie Klein could arguably be rated as a C-class instead of their current Start-class, and Karen Horney is rated B-class by WikiProject Psychology but the WikiProject Biography rating has not yet been updated, and is still a Start-class. And lastly, there is possibly a bias in the Google Books selection. Books from certain fields could be digitized more often than books from other fields, or the writing conventions of the field could make full names more prevalent than in other fields, boosting the "measured fame" compared to their "actual fame".

Closing remarks

The above analysis just gives a hint of the type of questions that can be asked and answered by analysis of the SHoF data. It will be very interesting to see if concerted efforts to improve coverage in fields which are lacking will take place, or see if the gender gap truly exists, or if it is the result of a coverage bias amongst fields. It will be equally interesting to see if culturomics will take off as a field and what direction it will take.

Got comments or ideas of your own? Share them here!

References

  1. ^ J. Bohannon (2011). "The Science Hall of Fame". Science. 331 (6014): 143. doi:10.1126/science.331.6014.143-c.
  2. ^ J.-B. Michel; et al. (2010). "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books". Science. 331 (6014): 176. doi:10.1126/science.1199644. PMID 21163965.
  3. ^ WP 1.0 bot (23 January 2011). "Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Biography articles by quality statistics". Retrieved 2011-01-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ J. Bohannon, A. Veres. "FAQ: How are the members of the Hall of Fame chosen?". The Science Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2011-01-27.
  5. ^ J. Bohannon, A. Veres. "FAQ: How are the members of the Hall of Fame chosen?". The Science Hall of Fame. Retrieved 2011-01-27.
  6. ^ Snottywong, Headbomb (25 January 2011). "Science Hall of Fame". WikiProject Biography. Retrieved 2011-01-27.
  7. ^ ""App" 2010 Word of the Year, as voted by American Dialect Society" (PDF) (Press release). American Dialect Society. 7 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-27.


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2011-01-31

WikiWarriors

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By Mabeenot
WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
The project's logo features a cat and bear to represent the Warriors and Seekers series.
The fictional forest of the Warriors novels was inspired by New Forest (above) and other locales in England and Scotland.

This week, we took a look at WikiProject Warriors which focuses on the Warriors series of fantasy novels and other media that follow clans of feral cats living in a forest. The project also covers the related Seekers series about the adventures of four bear cubs. Both series were written by several authors under the pseudonym Erin Hunter. The small project is home to 13 active editors working on 57 articles and lists, including three Good Articles promoted in the fall of 2010. The project maintains a to-do list and patrols a watchlist. We interviewed project members Brambleclawx, Derild4921, and PrincessofLlyr.


What motivated you to join WikiProject Warriors? Which book is your favorite?

Brambleclawx: I joined WikiProject Warriors in October/November of 2009. I'd read the series, and the Wikipedia articles for quite some time. One thing that I noticed was the poor writing in the articles; at the time, many of the very active members of the past had disappeared, and it was mostly anonymous IP users doing the editing. When I first joined, there wasn't anyone to answer my queries. Eventually, I stumbled across Airplaneman and PrincessofLlyr, who basically helped revive the project. I currently watch the pages for vandalism and unnecessary information like excessive plot summaries, and am adding references to some articles, in addition to trying to get them to GA. In terms of a favourite book, I'd say my favourite is Bluestar's Prophecy, which was long, had a nice cover painting (under the shiny silver jacket), and had a really nice story.
Derild4921: I joined around February or March of 2009 when I just began actively editing. At that time, Warriors was one of the only articles I commonly visited and was surprised by the good coverage (all thanks to Bcx of course!). Soon, I began making small changes to the pages and joined the project. My activity in the project was sporadic, but i gained experience in novel articles by expanding other pages. I'd say my favorite book is Sunrise (Warriors) which was the conclusion of quite a good series with many mysteries.
PrincessofLlyr: Later than the above two, I didn't actually join until January of 2010. I had been involved in some of the pages before, just never joined. Motivation: I had read the series and was brought into the project by Brambleclawx's attempts to revive it (which ultimately worked!). I have since stopped reading the series, so I don't really have a favorite book. My main participation is just cleaning up vandalism and copyediting for grammar and form.

Have you contributed to any of the project's three Good Articles? Are you currently working on bringing an article up to GA or FA status?

Brambleclawx: I put in lots of work to get Warriors (novel series) to GA, which had been my main goal ever since I registered on Wikipedia, and found out about this "article ranking thing". I can't take all the credit for it though And I also helped out a little bit with Into the Wild (Warriors), but that was mostly just fixing grammar. I'm currently working on getting Moonrise (Warriors) to Good article, and hopefully FA after that, though it may be a little difficult.
Derild4921: I've worked on two of the threes GA's, Into the Wild and Seekers (novel series), though helped out the main Warriors article in the GAN. I currently am working on several articles, but within the Warriors scope.
PrincessofLlyr: I haven't actually involved myself in any of the GA reviews. However, I did copyedit Warriors (novel series) several times in preparation for GAR.

Has the project had any difficulty establishing notability for its articles? How does establishing notability for the Warriors articles compare to establishing notability for other literature projects?

Brambleclawx: The project has faced lots of notability problems in the past. Most of the book articles have been nominated for deletion around twice.
Derild4921: As Brambleclawx states above, the book articles have twice been nominated for deletion and luckily kept both times. We both have been added reliable sources to the articles in order to establish notability.
PrincessofLlyr: Notability is definitely difficult. As Derild mentions somewhere below, the fact that the series is so long running makes it much more difficult. The reviews tend to be much less in depth.

Do you have any tips for editors working on improving articles about books or stories in general?

Derild4921: A main thing many new editors do is write an extremly detailed plot summary. This adds unnecessary fluff and weight to one section. Only the important plot elements that are absolutely necessary should be added.
Brambleclawx: I'd say, to find some good reviews, before trying to write the article. Otherwise, it looks pretty empty, being only a plot summary.

Does WikiProject Warriors collaborate with any other projects?

PrincessofLlyr: Obviously, we fall under the scope of WikiProject Novels, but we are mostly free-standing. Many of us work in other novels related projects.

What are the greatest challenges facing WikiProject Warriors? How can a new editor help today?

Brambleclawx: I personally think that one of the greatest challenges for the project is the finding of reliable third-party sources. Although the series is rather popular, there aren't really that many reviews out there, especially for the later books in the series. Another point that's been brought up is the use of Wands and Worlds Author Chats as a source; although Wands and Worlds is a forum, I personally believe that the author chats can be counted as reliable sources, since they are essentially interviews (albeit with random chatting interspered between the questions and answers).
Derild4921: I totally agree with Brambleclawx on this one. Since I joined the project, finding reliable sources have also been a problem. In certain articles, I have resorted to using Barnes and Nobles reviews which can be considered unreliable since they may only publish the parts that praise the novel. However, much of the time I find that Barnes and Nobles posts whole reviews while Amazon only publishes snippets which I never use. Even with this, the more recent books have little to no sources due to the fact that the series has gone on so long.
PrincessofLlyr: I can only echo what they said about reliable sources. Particularly with reviews, because so many of them are subscription only. And also with the later books, they just aren't being reviewed that much.

Anything else you'd like to add?

PrincessofLlyr: We can always use fresh eyes. There are some things we just don't pick up, being so familiar with the books and our own writing. Of course, if anyone has great suggestions about where we can find sources, that would also be greatly appreciated.


Next week we'll launch monkeys into space. Until then, float over to our zero-G archive.

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2011-01-31

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
New featured picture: Utopia, Limited poster, advertising the 1894 D'Oyly Carte production in New York of the comic opera written by Gilbert and Sullivan the previous year. The image was from an original version consisting of 32 squares, which were stitched together by User:Adam Cuerden.


This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 22 – Friday 28 January (UTC)


New administrators

This week saw no new admins. Looie496 resigned as admin after a recall request against him succeeded, with five administrators "in good standing" supporting recall. Closing admin Kingpin13 wrote "Looie496 may at any time start another Request for Adminship, and a promotion there would override this recall. It should be noted that some of the administrators supporting recall said they might support an RfA." The request for recall made was in response to a controversial unblock performed by Looie496, while the block was under discussion at the administrators' noticeboard. This recall makes Looie496 one of the shortest-serving admins ever, since his RfA was in October (see the "F and A" blurb, The Signpost's story about a notable admin recall last July, and Wikipedia:Administrators open to recall/Past requests).

At the time of publication there are four live RfAs, all to close soon: Acdixon, Ponyo, Gonzonoir, and Smartse.


Featured articles

A painted turtle is swimming, apparently in an aquarium, and we see it front on at large scale, with its left webbed foot raised.
From the new featured article Painted turtle: in an almost comic shot, a swimming individual displays its yellow face-stripes and nasal groove while raising a webbed foot. Picture: US Bureau of Land Management
Seven articles were promoted to featured status:
  • Teresa Cristina of the Two Sicilies (nom) (1822–89), an Italian princess who married the second Brazilian Emperor, Dom Pedro II. (Nominated by Lecen and Astynax).
  • 1955 MacArthur Airport United Airlines crash (nom), the story of a Douglas DC-6 aviation accident that involved several technical "features" that seemed to conspire against the flight crew. (Wackywace).
  • C. D. Howe (nom), who virtually ran the Canadian economy for more than a decade after the Second World War, and is remembered for founding Air Canada and the CBC. (Bzuk and Wehwalt.)
  • Painted turtle (nom), the most widespread, numerous turtle of North America, with supercooled blood that resists winter freezes; it has been the subject of controversies in taxonomy and commercial harvesting. (NYMFan69-86 and TCO.) picture at right
  • William Warelwast (nom) (died 1137), a medieval Norman cleric, Bishop of Exeter, England, and a royal clerk for King William II. (Ealdgyth and Malleus Fatuorum.)
  • C. R. M. F. Cruttwell (nom), a respected historian with a fine war record, who was dean of an Oxford college at 33. What could go wrong for him? asked nominator Brianboulton. "Well, in 1922 he had the misfortune to meet, and fall out with, the young Evelyn Waugh, a resourceful and unforgiving enemy. For the next 17 years the name "Cruttwell" was introduced repeatedly into Waugh's novels and stories, always as a nasty or ridiculous character."
  • Carousel (musical) (nom), which according to co-nominator Wehwalt "may be the most beautiful musical ever written". (Co-nominator JeanColumbia.)

Featured lists

Four lists were promoted:

Featured topics

Engraving
Crispijn van de Passe's contemporary engraving of eight of the 13 conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, the new featured topic. The Dutch artist probably never actually saw or met any of the conspirators, but it has become a popular representation nonetheless. Missing are Digby, Keyes, Rookwood, Grant, and Tresham. (From the UK National Portrait Gallery)

Gunpowder Plot (nom) was promoted to featured status, with seven featured articles and seven good articles. The Plot was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England and VI of Scotland in 1605 by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. It is a highly significant, complex, and multilayered part of English history. (Nominated by Parrot of Doom.)


Featured pictures

Who'd have thought math could be this much fun? The generalised Lyapunov fractal for some sequence that went way above The Signpost's head.
Eight images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
New featured picture: the curious redeye gaper. Nominator J Milburn said, "Note that the "cuts" are entirely natural – they are the lateral lines of the fish."


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2011-01-31

Evidence in Shakespeare case moves to a close; Longevity case awaits proposed decision; AUSC RfC

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By Ncmvocalist

Two cases are currently open. The Committee opened or closed no cases during the week.

Open cases

Shakespeare authorship question (Week 2)

This week, further on-wiki evidence in excess of 4,000 words (~38kb) was submitted, while several proposals were also made in the workshop. Evidence submissions came to a close yesterday.

Longevity (Week 10)

During the week, one party made several proposals in the workshop. Drafter Kirill Lokshin has not yet submitted a proposed decision on-wiki for arbitrators to vote on.

Other

Today, a request for comment on the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) was opened by the Committee. AUSC is a subcommittee of the Arbitration Committee which should review and act upon concerns received by the community about CheckUser and Oversight activities. The Community has been invited to comment on AUSC, and the effectiveness of AUSC to date (if any).

Comments have also been invited about ongoing Community representation in AUSC. Currently, AUSC consists of three arbitrators and three community representatives elected by the Community. The Committee is considering a suggestion to abandon the election method in favour of the system that was used to appoint CheckUsers and Oversighters last year (see Signpost coverage from 16 August 2010, 23 August 2010 and 6 September 2010). A suggestion to appoint standby representatives is also being considered.

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2011-01-31

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

Update on Wikimedia "offline" project

As mentioned in the latest WMF Engineering Update (see previous Signpost coverage), Foundation developers have been working on a project to improve the availability of "offline" versions of Wikimedia content. These versions would enable readers to access the collective information of Wikipedia and its sister projects even in areas with non-existent or poor internet coverage, including India, which was recently visited by some of the Tech team. This week developer Tomas Fincz posted an update on progress with the project (Wikimedia Techblog, adapted slightly):

In brief

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


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