WMF general counsel Geoff Brigham, whose analysis of the impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act was the focus of much discussion
On October 26, 2011, Representative Lamar S. Smith introduced the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) in the United States House of Representatives. The bill would give the U.S. Department of Justice the power to more closely pursue online copyright infringement, allowing them to bar Internet-based services such as PayPal from working with websites accused of infringement, blocking search engine results for these sites, and requiring Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to the sites completely; it may even make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony. The proposed bill has met with protests from a significant number of major websites, while drawing support from the Hollywood production houses whose works are being infringed. The Washington Postdepicted the bill as a battle between the old media and new.
Discussions on the proposed bill raged across Wikipedia this week. Jimbo Wales's talk page was flooded by editors arguing over the bill after he seemingly proposed a server lockdown, similar to the Italian lockdown in October over a similar bill that was circulating in their parliament. A straw poll at the Village pump in support of the idea failed to gain traction and was quickly closed.
So far, the Wikipedia community has only achieved consensus to do something, with suggestions ranging from standing by, to shutting down Wikipedia for a day, to replacing the Main Page with an anti-SOPA demonstration notice. In a post on the foundation-l mailing list, Kat Walsh (mindspillage) crystallized the Wikimedian position on the issue, saying:
“
Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world's knowledge. We're putting it in context, and showing people how to make sense of it. But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
”
General Counsel Geoff Brigham has posted a legal overview of the law on the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, as well as a rough schedule of the Congressional process of considering the bill.
In an IRC office meeting on December 15, Brigham and Sue Gardner discussed the Wikimedia Foundation's stance on the issue (summarized here), stating: "The official position of the Wikimedia Foundation is that we are opposed to SOPA ... [but] we believe that the community should make up its own mind about whether to take any kind of on-wiki action." Gardner said the Wikimedia Foundation will follow community consensus in any actions against the proposed bill while doing its best to provide legal interpretation and guidance. Meanwhile, community action has shifted over to the new SOPA initiative page, a workshop to explore the various actions that the community could take in opposition to the bill, and the Wikimedia Foundation has routed all of its updates on the bill there.
Wikimedia Foundation publishes the 2010–11 annual report
Community activity in India: Although only 7% of the Indian population has Internet access, this translates into 81 million people—the fourth largest Internet population in the world. Only around 2,000 Indian editors have contributed to date, a small number relative to its population, but the Wikimedia Foundation has been making waves in the region.
Wikipedia Education Program: the United States Education Program (USEP), part of the Wikimedia Foundation's global Wikipedia Education Program, is an ambitious program whose pilot program obtained the participation of professors from 27 universities. The USEP's 17 month pilot project, the "Public Policy Initiative", was led by "Campus Ambassadors" and resulted in 800 students contributing the equivalent of 5,800 pages of text, increasing the quality of the articles they contributed to by an average of 64 percent, as measured by a new quality metric developed for the project. As the Annual Report details, "Research from the pilot program found that students are much more motivated by a Wikipedia assignment than they were by a traditional term paper because it was a useful assignment."
Technology marches forward: With more than 3.8 million English-language Wikipedia articles, 10 million Commons files, and a billion edits, maintaining and improving the Wikimedia software is a laborious task. Changes this year include the Resource Loader system that speeds up page loading, a new UploadWizard to make media contributions more fluid, the Article Feedback Tool to "engage readers in quality assessment", a new volunteer-development coordinator and a bugmeister to better handle code improvement backlogs, six students participating on behalf of Wikimedia in the Google Summer of Code, and an upgraded data center in Virginia.
Wikipedia's mobile growth: "The mobile web is growing faster than the desktop Internet around the world, and most new users from the Global South will come online via cell phones." The Wikimedia Foundation is working to enhance its mobile coverage, and is "striving to develop partnerships with network providers in key regions of the Global South to provide [its] customers with no or low-cost access to Wikipedia on a range of devices."
10th anniversary marked: Wikipedia's tenth anniversary this year, "a decade that changed the world," saw more than 450 celebratory events in 120 countries.
Arab Spring and Wikimedia: The Middle East has been a "priority area" for the Foundation since 2010, and this year marked the Arab Spring, the series of mass protests on the North African continent that touched off several revolutions. With image donations from Al Jazeera and thousands of edits by Wikipedians with first-hand experience of the events, "the repository of articles and photos about the Arab Spring already stands as a living example of how people around the world increasingly see Wikipedia as a vital channel for telling the most important stories of our time."
Other case stories include QRpedia, the recognition of Wikipedians as officially accredited photographers, and a breakdown of financials from the audit earlier this year. The report is available in six language versions—Arabic, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish—which reportedly "took some serious coordination to time translation, design, production and wiki publishing." Printed copies will be available in the Foundation headquarters within the week.
Indian language Wikipedia statistics published
Attendees at this year's first annual WikiConference India, which precipitated a boost in attention given to Indian language projects
Shiju Alex, a Wikimedia Foundation consultant for Indic Initiatives, has released statistics on contributions from Indic language Wikipedia projects this week. The report is subdivided into three sections:
Community: The Malayalam and Tamil languages have the healthiest Wikipedian communities, while the communities of Marathi and Bengali, "large languages with massive potential," have increased a sizable amount. Overall, however, Shiju felt that "the total number of new editors coming to new Indic Wikipedias is low", and that the focus needs to be "on bringing new editors to wiki and the retaining [of] existing users."
Article quality: The Tamil and Sanskrit Wikipedias show the greatest growth; the Sanskrit language version's growth is particularly impressive as it has a very small speaker base. In addition, the Malayalam has the highest edits per article average, a good indicator of quality. With over 100,000 articles, the Hindi Wikipedia continues to lead the Indic languages in size, but both article growth and edits per article have dropped; Shiju speculates this was caused by a low active editor population and an emphasis on quantity over quality in reaching the 100,000 milestone. The Pali, Bishnupirya Manipuri, Newari, Bhojpuri and Sindhi Wikipedias have all been largely inactive.
Readership: With the largest speaker base, Hindi continues to reach the greatest number of readers at 8.7 million times a month; Marathi, also large, has been accessed 5.9 million times. WikiConference India coverage in Marathi Wikipedia has helped increase the language version's readership. Shiju points out that despite a total of 43 million readers and 12 million new readers in October alone, editor population growth has been disappointing.
Brief notes
Article Feedback version 5 rolled out: Version 5 of the Article Feedback tool was rolled out this week (for full coverage, see this week's "Technology report"). The update replaces the existing "Rate this page" mechanism with one of four randomly selected comments-based systems, of which one will eventually be selected for ongoing use. The Article Feedback team also held an office hours session on the tool on the 16 December (logs), shortly before the launch.
Milestones: The Malagasy Wiktionary has reached 900,000 total pages, the Limburgian Wiktionary has reached 80,000 entries, and the French Wiktionary has reached 10,000,000 page edits this week. In local news, the combined figure for quality articles (FA, FL, and GA) has passed .5% of the encyclopaedia, at a combined total of 19,210 articles (about 1 in 200).
New administrators: No new administrators were promoted this week.
Jimmy Wales, whose call for Wikipedians to consider action on the Stop Online Piracy Act threat set off a stream of media commentary
The spread to Wikipedia of the online furore over the potential impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a piece of legislation being considered by the United States Congress, has been well-marked in the media. Although the campaigning against the bill by prominent Internet organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, PayPal and Tumblr had been afoot for some time and the matter had been debated on a small-scale by Wikimedians (see "News and notes"), it was Jimmy Wales' instigation of a poll to assess whether the English Wikipedia editing community had the stomach for protest that drew the interest of the online press (the precipitating discussion can be found here). Among the outlets to cover the story were CNET, The Atlantic, The Hill, and Paste magazine.
The Daily Telegraphhighlighted Wales' urging of the community not to underestimate their power to terrify Congress members by inciting a "popular uprising" in protest of the Act. VentureBeattracked early support for a putative strike at 87% of respondents. The intrepid and attentive The Registerproffered an incisive taxonomy of respondent sentiment beyond simple support and opposition: "Confused, Uncertain, LOL, and Fuck knows", and The Daily Mailcharacterised the informal poll as a threat by Wales on his "private Wikipedia blog" (user talkpage) to "turn off" the site.
MSNBC's Technolog asked whether a Wikipedia blackout could "save the Internet". TheStreet.comworried about the possible impact on students working on their final papers of the academic term, while SF Weekly's The Snitch remarked "it seems like pulling the plug on Wikipedia might not do much more than piss off people who just want to find out who played bass on the Rolling Stones' last album or which Simpsons episode featured Krusty's racist standup routine". ZDnet's iGeneration proposed nonetheless that it might be worth the disruption but ended its article on a note portended with doom:
If the SOPA bill does come in to play, Wikipedia may end up on more than a voluntary, short-term blackout.
At last, an interface that anyone can edit with
When Wikipedia was created, everything was hard on the Internet. We were no harder than anything else. But today most forms of interaction online are easier than editing a wiki article and that creates a barrier to entry that doesn’t do anybody any good
This week saw the launch of a trial for Wikipedia's first long-heralded "what you see is what you get" editing interface, the Visual editor (see "Technology report" for in-depth coverage). The new interface is intended to make the site's technically demanding wiki syntax less intimidating to potential contributors, and movedThe Economist to state that "it would be no overstatement to call it the most significant change in Wikipedia’s short history". The newspaper's tech blog Babbage, which had early access to the project's sandbox, drew a contrast with a site at the other end of the accessibility spectrum, Facebook:
If HTML is a vast open field on which you can wander in any direction unfettered by restrictions, then Facebook is a city tram line, structured and restrictive of where those using it can go. Wikis fall somewhere in the middle, allowing a great deal of freedom within certain limits. Think of it as a network of pathways and cycle lanes where your route is based on the specific needs of your journey. The wiki syntax assumed people were familiar with the lay of the land. Visual editor is akin to handing out maps at the entrance.
The column cast the development in the context of a series of recent Wikimedia Foundation initiatives aimed at making the site a more welcoming environment, such as the wikilove extension. "It is hard to say whether that will be enough", it concluded,"[b]ut if things go well, Wikipedia’s famously grumpy senior editors should have their hands full once again."
The development was noted in characteristically concise terms by the Wikipedia-fans at The Register ("Wikipedia simplifies article editing for world+dog"), who disparaged the sandbox as "decidedly beta and somewhat buggy" and worried that "the thought of making it brain-dead simple to change a Wikipedia entry gives us pause". PC World was more optimistic, entreating readers to help test the interface and "usher in a new, user-friendlier editor for the benefit of all". Ubergizmo allowed that "the introduction of these new tools will probably help introduce a new generation of editors", but wondered whether they would "lead to more useless pages and errors". The development was also covered by The Verge and CIOL.com.
In brief
Australian MP Craig Thomson, who made liberal use of Wikipedia's generous licencing terms in an official economic report
Australian MP caught plagiarising Wikipedia for parliamentary report It has been widely reported in the Australian media that federal MP Craig Thomson plagiarised Wikipedia in a report about his taxpayer-funded study trip. The Age reported: "Much of Mr Thomson's discussion of economic conditions in Ireland and Spain has been taken from Wikipedia articles including texts labelled outdated and needing clean-up to meet Wikipedia's quality standards." The Age, ABC, Nine News (more sources)
Cartographic resistance: Following protests last month by Indian nationalists irate at Wikipedian cartographers' treatment of national boundaries (see Signpost coverage), Mylaw.net took a look at the encyclopaedia's handling of disputed maps of the country, and found that like many online resources, it hosts maps that are "manifestly illegal" under the relevant Indian legislation. Drawing a comparison with Google's refusal to censor its search results in the face of Chinese pressure, the report's author Rahul Sharma concluded that the effort to prosecute Wikimedians on these grounds "is borne out of an obsolete map policy rooted in nationalist paranoia" and that acceding to it would have "an adverse effect on our precious right to information and the freedom of expression".
Wales about town: Business Weeklyreported that that Jimmy Wales had permanently relocated to the United Kingdom, and was "keen to get involved in the startup scene" in London. Wales was speaking at an event connected to the city's Tech Entrepreneurship Week.
The week in death hoaxes: This week saw two fatalities-by-Wikipedia: that of actor Scott Baio (on December 14th of a "diaper-related illness"), as reported by MSNBC's "The Scoop", and that of celebrated DJ and rodent millinery enthusiast Joel Zimmerman AKA Deadmau5, which was picked up upon by Canoe.ca. Zimmerman expressed disappointment with the lack of imagination behind his cyber homicide, objecting to followers on Facebook that he "thought we had all agreed on acid spitting koala's skydiving and volcano".
Gingrich staffer treads lightly on COI: Politicodrew attention to yet another instance of a political staffer attempting to influence Wikipedia's coverage of his/her employer, in this case Joe DeSantis, communication director for Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. DeSantis' nuanced, collaborative approach evinced a more subtle understanding of Wikipedia's dynamics regarding contributions with conflicts of interest than is typically observed (see recent Signpost coverage). He refrained from intervening directly in the article to cast his employer, the candidate, in a more favourable light, and instead engaged editors on the talkpage with his suggestions. "Occasionally I will post notes to the Talk page to suggest changes and raise issues," DeSantis told Politico. "We have found working with the Wikipedia community pays off by reaching a consensus on language and that results in less ‘edit wars’ than if we were to just change language ourselves."
Coverage of discussions on the Stop Online Piracy Act can be found at this week's "News and notes" section.
Fallout from the Harvard/Science Po poll
A number of discussions emerged from the Harvard/Science Po poll advertised on a Wikipedia-wide top banner on December 8. As detailed in last week's "News and notes", anger was expressed over several issues: that an advertisement was run on Wikipedia for an organization other than the Wikimedia Foundation, that the discussion that led to the posting of the banner took place on Meta, not on the English Wikipedia, and that the study linked responses to the survey takers' usernames, edit counts, and user privileges. The discussions on Meta included criticism of the way that payments for completing the study were set up. Threads were also started at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents and Central Notices. Discussions on the poll also took place on the Administrators' noticeboard in March, when the authors sought permission to leave messages on the user talk pages of several thousand editors. The idea was tabled after significant opposition. Plans for proceeding with the poll, and what form it would take, are still uncertain.
Template:Foreign character put up for discussion
Centralized
Discussions
Discussion on what sort of action to take regarding SOPA
Proposal to add a requirement at WP:CFD that category creators be notified
RfC to rename the tab title from "discussion" to "talk"
RfC about creating binding solutions to intractable content disputes through RfCs
RfC about enabling multilingual search results for registered Wikipedians
Discussions detailed in the main body of the discussion report, or in previous reports, are not listed here.
A Templates for discussion (TfD) debate was opened on {{Foreign character}} on December 6, arguing that the template is unneeded because non-English characters can be searched for, and that the template is dangerous because it offers non-neutral and potentially misleading advice. The debate generated a large amount of discussion for a TfD, with more than two dozen editors commenting, three-quarters advocating for the deletion of the template. Two additional and very similar templates, {{Foreignchars}} and {{Foreignchars2}}, were also placed for deletion in the same nomination. {{Foreign character}} is used on just over 1,650 pages, and the other two combined are used on just over 100 pages.
In brief
With the conclusion of the 2011 Arbitration Committee elections, the election coordinators are now soliciting feedback about various aspects of the process.
A discussion has been started on the talk page of the Thanksgiving article, asking the community to decide between four potential lead sections. The Request for Comment emerged from a week-long argument on what extent religious aspects of the holiday should be covered in the lead section. The discussion has slowed to a near halt in recent days, with three of the four options attracting close to the same levels of support.
A Request for Comment was initiated on whether or not a particular image from the article Fisting, depicting action performed on a man, anally, should be removed. The discussion became heated after the nominator, Camilo Sanchez, made a series of objectionable comments towards editors advocating the position opposite to his. The discussion has seen no activity since November 12, with two-thirds of participants commenting before then in favor of removing the image.
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
This week, we interviewed the outspoken members of WikiProject Economics. The project was created when WikiProject Business and Economics split in February 2007, also resulting in the creation of the sister project WikiProject Business. WikiProject Economics is home to 12 pieces of featured material, 2 A-class articles, and 47 Good Articles. Our interviewees this week were Kiefer.Wolfowitz, Fifelfoo, and Protonk.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Economics? Do you have any academic degrees or work experience in economics?
Fifelfoo: The amazing economic history article, Economy of England in the Middle Ages made me interested in WikiProject Economics. Academically, I come from a labour history and Marxist political economy background so I felt I could contribute in some areas where I have a little expertise.
Protonk: I started editing articles on crises: Tulipmania, Panic of 1907, LTCM related articles. Those articles are great because they combine interesting historical tidbits with economic theory. We can talk about the Panic of 1907 as a fixed event in the past but we can also point to more current research on the causes and impact of certain events in the banking sector and government. Tulipmania was especially intriguing because our current folk understanding of what happened may not actually comport with the historical record. Unlike Kiefer Wolfowitz I don't have a great deal of mathematical aptitude so I had to focus on historical events, figures and history of economic thought. I have a BA (and progressing through an MA) in Economics but for many of the articles I don't think my experience or degrees are necessary for contributing meaningfully to the articles.
The terminology and concepts behind economics can be overwhelming to a layperson. How do you approach writing or rewriting articles that are sufficiently detailed but can be understood by readers who do not have prior knowledge of the subject? What role does the project play in helping non-experts write articles about economics?
Kiefer.Wolfowitz: The premise of this question seems wrong-headed. Economic principles are needed to understand the newspaper as well as other disciplines. How does one make sense of the Great Depression or the contemporary financial crisis without an understanding of effective demand and other concepts from macroeconomics? Economic models that describe how much insurance we purchase also describe how much time an alligator devotes to protecting its eggs (versus foraging for food).
To understand supply and demand curves requires only junior-high school mathematics. What is needed is the will to learn and the discipline to read and to think.
The intellectually impoverished can find amusement elsewhere on Wikipedia.
Fifelfoo: Much of political economy is accessible to the lay person. Adam Smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx, Veblen and the Austrian school of economics all wrote in prose, with comprehensible anecdotes. In addition, economic history reads much like normal history! Our economic history articles could do with love and improvement, and users need similar apparatus to writing history articles: a willingness to read books and synthesise what the scholars say.
Protonk: I'll disagree with my esteemed colleagues here on this subject. While writing Mathematical economics, I effectively hit a wall by the 1930s. Substantively summarizing the progress of mathematical econ. in the 20th century is basically impossible without a good working understanding of topology and set theory. Obviously what constitutes a "working understanding" may vary for different people and mathematical economics is a rather rarefied subject, but it is difficult to do justice to the subject without a good understanding of the underlying math. It is nearly impossible to make the math tractable for a layperson without an exceptional understanding--though this is true for any technical discipline. These issues crop up in areas where econometrics and statistics intersect. Making an article on the normal distribution useful, true and comprehensive for a practitioner will almost assuredly make it incomprehensible to a layperson unless a simple explanation is relegated to one section or subsection.
Charts and diagrams are often used to illustrate articles about economic concepts. How easily can someone contribute graphics like these? How can new contributors find articles that need charts or diagrams? Are there any photographic images that would be appropriate in economics articles?
Fifelfoo: One problem with contributing diagrams and charts is to avoid original research. In areas of macro-economics and micro-economics charts and diagrams would be very helpful. Negotiating what the "facts" are to be illustrated on the talk page, or with the project helps. In addition, users who can edit LaTeX math codes on Wikipedia could supply a great deal of help, both to "mainstream" economics, and to political economy areas like Marxism where circuits of capital and reproduction schema need illustration.
Protonk: Problems with original research exist with any subject area when talking about illustrations. What we really need is a reliable, open source sketching system for simple economics diagrams which can output both images (preferably SVGs) and source code. the source code matters because updating or editing graphs is difficult without basically recreating them. The graphics capability of R fits the bill for this but an economist unfamiliar with R would hit a steep learning curve well before being able to produce meaningful graphs and charts. There are a number of proprietary products out there (e.g. Excel and Gapminder) but those may be unavailable to all contributors or simple static image export under a free license may be impossible.
Further complicating this is the history of limited data disclosure in economics publications. Some of the big journals are slowly turning around on this front but merely recreating a graph or chart from a paper (rather than scanning the image and uploading it as a fair use file, which will often not meet our non-free content criteria) is a challenge without access to the original data.
Protonk: I have pretty much zero interest in Wikipedia books with the exception of using the books interface as a handy PDF exporting tool.
What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Kiefer.Wolfowitz: Contributors should have passed M.A. sequences in mathematics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics, so that they know what they are talking about.
Economics as a discipline also suffers from faddishness, being dominated by 4 U.S. departments in two cities; macroeconomics is dominated by MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Economics departments run their Ph.D. programs like trade schools/Ph.D. factories, teaching techniques like dynamic programming or cointegration, which then are applied in dull theses. An educated person who follows any science is shocked to see how changes in economics follow faddish technique rather than experimental/econometric triumph (in competition against competing theories or methods) or mathematicalprogress: Some pseudo-scientificfads are visible in the history of macroeconomic thought, which neglects progress in mathematical economics and assessment by econometrics.
Recently, economists have been embarrassed by "econometric methods" that estimated exposure-effects (for having participated in a labor-market training) as positive, when randomized experiments found negative or zero average treatment effects. As a result, funding agencies are encouraging or mandating designed experiments to evaluate treatment effects---forcing economists to do more than raid databases with Stata and inflict more of their idiotic "econometric models" on the public.
Lately, economics textbooks have been shamelessly replacing their previous editions' claims about the efficacy of so-called "econometric methods" for observational data with new sections on the importance of experiments---this is like economics textbooks previously having replaced sections about the virtues of economic planning---again without confession or shame!
Fifelfoo: Contributors need to understand WEIGHT and NPOV policy. Economics as an academic discipline has a very firm idea of what is current scholarly practice, including current scholarly minority view points: the Keynesian/neo-liberal positions. However, editors with experience in areas of political economy, such as Austrian economics and Marxist economics are welcome to contribute. Editors with backgrounds in political economic traditions need to avoid claiming that their analytical perspectives are factual, avoid adding too much weight, and most importantly: find elements of their own tradition that aren't written very well and reliably source them from scholarly works. Everyone is welcome, but, Wikipedia needs to represent the economic mainstream with central weight and focus — if the scholarship changes, the scholarship changes, but, we're not scholars, we're encyclopaedists.
Personally, I'd prefer seeing more economic historians contributing! We need articles on economic modelling and theory; but, we also need articles on how past economies actually worked. Editors who are intimidated by advanced micro-economics or macro-economic theory could certainly help write on the economic history of transatlantic trade; or, the economic history of Indian Ocean trade; or, the economic history of primary production in Australia. Noel Butlin's monographs are waiting to supply us with excellent articles. The biographies of economists are also in need of love.
Protonk: NPOV is a big issue. Many large economics articles have what are essentially forks dedicated to explaining or promoting the Austrian school point of view on a subject. This is especially problematic on articles relating to central banking, inflation and big macro issues like demand or government spending. Why the Austrian school is so over-represented on Wikipedia is a question for another day, but suffice it to say the model Wikipedian is right in the wheelhouse for Austrian demographics: male, young and technologically inclined. Consequently disputes on Wikipedia over areas of interest to the Austrian school grow well out of proportion to their significance within the discipline.
I don't know what solves this problem. Credentialism won't work. Even if we could reliably enforce standards for contributors it would run counter to the mission of Wikipedia and foreclose opportunities for talented and interested amateurs to improve articles. We also don't have the strength or consensus to apply a strict content rule (similar to the way fringe theories are treated in science or medicine). We could vote on a rule and ban contributors who run afoul of it but that would just invite complaints of censorship and create a negative environment for everyone. The only real potential solution is to signal members within the discipline that Wikipedia is a worthy, malleable resource as Prof. Erik Olin Wright has to the American Sociological Association.
On the subject of econometrics vs. experiments there was a symposium in the Spring 2010 JEP discussing this very issue. Movements away from econometric dominance in general are good but I agree somewhat with Christopher Sims that economics will never be an experimental science. This has always been broadly claimed at the outset of every intro/intermediate course with trivial examples (e.g. we can't experiment with large scale fiscal policy) but it is true even in more meaningful fashions.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Kiefer.Wolfowitz: With all of its problems, economics still has the highest mean I.Q. of any social study, and it and (non-clinical) psychology have the best intellectual standards in the social studies---sad but true.
One problem is that educated economists are less likely to contribute pro bono than they would if they were e.g. medical doctors or biologists. In particular, the study of microeconomics reduces students' propensity to cooperate, according to experiments by Cornell's Robert Frank. (Robert Frank, Thomas Gilovich & Dennis Regan: Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation? in: Journal of Economic Perspectives. Volume 7, Number 2. Spring 1993. pp. 159–71.) The gloomy science's WikiProject has a gloomy future!
Fifelfoo: Our economics articles could really do with an influx of high quality articles written from the mainstream weighting and perspective. If you have a degree in economics, why not fine tune an article using scholarly sources?
Protonk: Economics suffers from a dearth of practitioners who have general interest knowledge on many subjects in the discipline and maintain a professional interest in keeping the average reader informed on basic research. Contrast this with medicine (as exemplified by the great WikiProject Medicine) where practicing physicians benefit from their patients reaching only quality content from google searches for drugs, symptoms or disease name. Every preconception disabused online is a question they will not have to answer in a clinic. By contrast most practicing economists have no direct contact with the public (save professors). They may be interested in spreading knowledge about research or techniques but the intended audience will be very different and in many cases they have already found outlets outside of Wikipedia to host their contributions. There are a number of contributing factors to the low level of professional contributions to economics articles but lack of an external interest in an informed public is most persistent.
Next week, we'll decorate the tree of life. Until then, categorize every living thing in the archive.
This edition covers content promoted between 11 and 17 December 2011.
A 360-degree panorama of the crater of Mount St. Helens, photographed by Farwestern, who gives us background information and suggestions on the art and technique of the panorama
This week, The Signpost interviews Farwestern, who has contributed numerous panoramas to the project (many of them featured pictures). He gives some background information on his new featured picture (above), and shares his favourite panoramas and his tips for those who wish to make better panoramas.
The new featured picture: This new featured picture was the best shot from three climbs of the mountain. I tried earlier in August 2009 and made the summit but the conditions were very smoggy due to a wildfire in north eastern Oregon. In this October attempt, conditions were just perfect (and that doesn't happen very often in Washington State): right after a snowstorm and with a temperature of 24 °F (−4 °C). A subsequent attempt yielded footage that didn't have the "wow" factor that this one did. So, you see, the physical energy, time, and effort expended was truly only something that a dedicated artist might expend a few times in a lifetime.
The mountain has a special place in my family's story. My father was once a mountain climber and journalist for the Tacoma News Tribune. He climbed the mountain both before and after the explosion. In 1980 he rode with President Carter and select members of the press, via helicopter, to survey the site to educate the president about the disaster. My father considers his coverage of the event to be the highlight of his career, and my brother and I grew up exploring the wilderness around the mountain and grew to love and respect it.
Favourite panoramas: It's hard for me to choose a single favorite. I aspire to communicate the essence of a place as holistically as possible, and that inspired me towards capturing everything; in the form of many 360-degree panoramas, which are like virtual worlds and capture a special time and place in a way that really wasn't possible before recent technology. However, if I had to choose only four images it would be the new featured picture, this one of Mount Ellinor, and two on my own site: Hurricane Ridge covered in snow and El Capitan at night. I'm working on a project to create an interactive experience that captures many of the highlights of the western United States. A lot of these images aren't yet published on Wikipedia, but they will be soon.
Creating panoramas: My suggestions for those interested in capturing panoramas are threefold:
I spend huge amounts of time studying topographical maps of various outdoor areas. When I have a good understanding of the geography then I can usually predict places that will yield good results. You can usually tell where sunsets will look best by looking at where the sun will be relative to the environment. Then you can plan adventures around ideal setups. There is always that random-inspiration factor that sometimes happens but I find I am more "lucky" when I plan or do research about the place before going.
Worry less about the camera and more about composition. Panoramas are a different art because the idea is to capture as much as possible in a creative, beautiful way. Anyone can find a single, beautiful angle in almost any place, but imagine how hard it must be to take an ordinary place and make everything there interesting or beautiful. The classic tricks apply, like framing, rule-of-thirds, lines, contrast, but some new ones also, like how to get the sun in the shot without flare (by stitching two photos together: one with the sun blocked, and one without, so the top-half can be inserted over the non-flaired bottom).
Go places that other people aren't going. This is probably the biggest thing I try to do. A lot of the art is in getting to, and returning safely from distant, remote places. Images that offer something new are interesting. You can change a perspective by showing a common thing at night, or from a strange projection.
Featured articles
The enclosure and keep at Warkworth Castle, a new featured articleHurricane Gert, the subject of a new featured article, approaching MexicoSaint Joseph's Oratory in Montreal, the subject of a new featured picture by Paolo CostaA Yellow-throated Honeyeater stealing hair from a Tasmanian Pademelon, a new featured picture by JJ HarrisonA BNSF GE Dash-9 C44-9W between Kennewick and Wishram, Washington, a new featured picture by Kabelleger
Eight featured articles were promoted this week:
Oswald Watt (nom) by Ian Rose. Watt, born on 11 February 1878 in Bournemouth, England, moved to Sydney as an infant. After receiving his education in Britain, Watt returned to Australia and in 1911 became the first Australian to qualify for a Royal Aero Club flying certificate. During the First World War he first fought in the French Foreign Legion, later transferring to the Australian Flying Corps in 1916. After receiving numerous awards for his service during the war, Watt left the military to pursue business interests. He drowned at Bilgola Beach, New South Wales, on 21 May 1921.
Piano music of Gabriel Fauré (nom) by Tim riley. The new featured article, dealing with all piano compositions by Gabriel Fauré, was created by Tim as "Fauré's piano works are not so very numerous, and [I] think a single article covering them all is probably better than a series of short articles on the various pieces". The article covers 13 nocturnes, 13 barcarolles, six impromptus and four valses-caprices, which are rich in classical restraint and understatement.
M-185 (Michigan highway) (nom) by Imzadi1979 and Mitchazenia. M-185 circles the tourist destination of Mackinac Island in Michigan, stretching for 8.004 miles (12.881 km). The highway is unattached to any others and is said to be the only one in the United States from which cars and other motor vehicles are banned. For a period it was also the only highway in the US never to experience an automobile accident. All that ended in 2005, when the island's firetruck nicked the island's ambulance on the highway while responding to a call.
Warkworth Castle (nom) by Nev1. Warkworth Castle in the English county of Northumberland is a ruined castle founded in the 12th century. King Henry II gave the castle to Roger fitz Richard and it descended through his heirs until 1345, when it was taken over by the Percy family, one of the most powerful dynasties in northern England. Parts of the stone castle date from the 14th and 15th centuries when various owners added and remodelled parts, but it has been in ruins since the English Civil War. Today it is cared for by English Heritage and open to the public (pictured on right).
RAF Uxbridge (nom) by Harrison49. RAF Uxbridge was a Royal Air Force base located on a 44.6-hectare (110-acre) plot of land in Uxbridge on the westernmost border of Greater London. Open to the public until 1939, after the start of World War II the base was secured and its flight squad, No. 11 Group RAF, was put in charge of the aerial defense of London during the Battle of Britain. The base closed in 2010, with many of its units relocated to RAF Northolt.
Hurricane Gert (1993) (nom) by Hylian Auree and 12george1. Gert, a Category 2 tropical cyclone, originated from a tropical wave in the south-western Caribbean. It struck Central America and Mexico in September 1993, causing 96 deaths as it hopped between sea and land, eventually dissipating over the Pacific ocean. The damage was estimated at US$170 million (pictured on right).
68th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment (nom) by Coemgenus. The 68th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment consisted mainly of German immigrants and was organized three months after the start of the American Civil War. Under several commanders, including one fired for drunkenness and a German prince, the regiment fought in both the eastern and western theatres, seeing heavy losses at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. It was disbanded in November 1865.
1689 Boston revolt (nom) expanded by Magicpiano and nominated by DCI2026. A popular uprising on April 18, 1689, the Boston revolt involved provincial militia and citizens revolting against Sir Edmund Andros, then governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros and his followers, defended by only 25 soldiers and a frigate, were quickly swept from power in a bloodless struggle; they were then replaced by members of governments that existed before the dominion.
Featured lists
Two featured lists were promoted this week:
Kansas City Cowboys (AA) all-time roster (nom) by Neonblak. The American Association baseball team the Kansas City Cowboys had only 44 players in their two-season lifespan, from 1888 to 1889. One of these players, "Slidin' Billy" Hamilton, went on to enter the National Baseball Hall of Fame. After two losing seasons, the Cowboys joined the Western Association as the Kansas City Blues in 1890.
K-Ci & JoJo discography (nom) by Michael Jester. Brothers Cedric "K-Ci" Hailey and Joel "JoJo" Hailey, better known by their stage names K-Ci and Jojo, have released five studio albums, four compilation albums, fifteen singles, and fifteen music videos since their debut in 1995 with the single "If You Think You're Lonely Now". Of these, the best-performing were their earlier albums; their most recent album, Love, failed to chart.
Featured pictures
Eight featured pictures were promoted this week:
Poster for Island of Lost Men (nom, related article), restored by Centpacrr and nominated by Crisco 1492. This original poster for the 1939 film Island of Lost Men, direct by Kurt Neumann and starring Anna Mae Wong, J. Carrol Naish, and Anthony Quinn, advertises "Thrills! Mystery! Adventure!". Although the film received mixed critical reception, the featured picture nomination was passed unanimously.
Musk duck (nom, related article), by JJ Harrison. Hailing from southern Australia and Tasmania, the Musk Duck – subject of our new featured picture – lives most of its life in water and is known to have difficulty taking off and landing. The only living member of its genus, the Musk Duck is not considered endangered despite a dwindling population. This specimen was photographed in Sandford, Tasmania.
Yellow-throated Honeyeater stealing hair (nom, related article), by JJ Harrison. Another picture from JJ Harrison's trip to Malaleuca (see previous coverage), this new featured picture depicts a Yellow-throated Honeyeater stealing hair from a Tasmanian Pademelon for lining its nest. The behaviour, previously mentioned in Did You Know? in February 2009, extends to collecting hair from dogs, horses, and humans. In the words of reviewer Chick Bowen, "a photograph illustrating behavior that's documented and significant (as opposed to something silly as [sometimes seen at featured picture candidates]) seems ideal for an FP" (right).
Tasmanian Scrubwren (nom, related article), by JJ Harrison. Another featured picture from Maleuca, this image depicts a Tasmanian Scrubwren perched on a branch. The Tasmanian Scrubwren is endemic to Tasmania and King Island. Its familial relations are unclear, with some suggesting that it is in fact a subspecies of the White-browed Scrubwren.
Crepuscular rays at Sunset near Waterberg Plateau (nom, related article) by Alchemist-hp. Raising opposition at featured picture candidates due to the existence of two featured pictures (and a former featured picture) of the phenomenon, the nomination passed 9 to 4. It depicts crepuscular rays, rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from a single point in the sky. The rays often appear near dawn and dusk, when columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions are more apparent (below).
Oratoire Saint-Joseph du Mont-Royal (nom, related article) by Paolo Costa. The new featured picture (right) depicts Saint Joseph's Oratory, the largest church in Canada. The building, constructed beginning in 1904, has a prominent dome that is the third largest of its kind.
BNSF GE Dash-9 C44-9W Kennewick - Wishram WA (nom, related article) created by Kabelleger and nominated by Tomer T. After consternation on behalf of reviewers about coloration of the subject, several BNSF GE Dash 9-44CW locomotives pulling cars, it was established that the shade of orange was accurate. The nomination passed unanimously, with the original picture (right) strongly preferred over an edited alternative.
Crepuscular rays near Waterberg Plateau in Namibia, Southern Africa, a new featured picture by Alchemist-hp.
Dwindling participation: voter and candidate numbers since 2008.
ArbCom elections come to a close, with eight successful candidates elected
At 20:20 UTC Sunday, almost eight days after the close of voting, the stewards Bencmq, Trijnstel, and Vituzzu announced the results of the ninth annual election for the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee. Of the 17 candidates, 10 achieved a support percentage-ranking of more than the required 50%, and thus all eight vacancies were filled—seven for two-year terms, and one for a single year to fill the vacancy created by a late resignation.
What made this election notable was the continuation of the downward trend in voter numbers, to just 729, down from 854 in 2010 and from nearly a thousand in 2009 and 2008. The number of candidates too has fallen steadily, from 28 in 2008 to just 17 this year. Opinions varied on why the voter participation rate is so low, from the overall sagging in editor retention to the decision not to run a site banner advertising the election.
The pie graphs to the right show the aggregate proportions of the support, oppose, and no vote/neutral votes by all voters. They indicate the marked effect of SecurePoll in increasing "voting intensity". Before the use of SecurePoll, which made expressing an opinion on each candidate mandatory, more than three-quarters of voters' potential to support or oppose went unused.[1] In 2009, the first year of software-assisted voting, this fell to less than 45%, then 38% last year, settling on 35% this year. Because of this increase in voting intensity, the actual number of supports this year was 4,312 (an average of almost 6 supports per voter), whereas in 2008 that number was only 3550 (3.6 supports per voter). We do, in fact, have much more voter engagement than we used to, in this respect.
In 2011, Courcelles was the most popular candidate: 59% of voters clicked Support for him, while the seven other successful candidates achieved 55, 51, 51, 48, 42, 47, and 43% support respectively. Again, voters appeared to favour editors who have already had experience on the Committee: five of the eight new arbitrators have already served in that capacity.
The eight successful candidates are:
Courcelles, who takes up a seat for the first time. He has been an admin on en.WP for 18 months, a member of the Audit Subcommittee for almost seven, and was confirmed as a permanent Checkuser and Oversighter a few months ago. He is also an admin on Commons and Meta, and a member of the Volunteer Response Team. He has contributed to the promotion of 23 featured lists, 2 featured articles, and a featured topic.
Risker, who has been an arbitrator since 2008. During this time she has contributed to the development of a community-based checkuser and oversighter corps, as well as the development and functioning of the Audit Subcommittee. Her work has ensured that checkusers, oversighters and auditors are expected to be available and active, and has put the management of the checkuser mailing list and data on a better footing.
Kirill Lokshin has served on the Committee for nearly five years, concentrating on the drafting of case decisions, of which he has written more than 60. He was coordinating arbitrator from February to July 2009, and deputy coordinating arbitrator since February 2010.
Roger Davies has been active at both the Military History WikiProject and Featured Article Candidates. He has been an arbitrator for three years, has heard about 50 cases, and has drafted or co-drafted decisions for ten. He served for a year on the Ban Appeals Subcommittee and had a four-month stint on the Audit Subcommittee. He helped draft the committee's checkuser and oversight procedural policy. He was instrumental in drafting the new arbitration policy that was ratified by the community this year. He has been the coordinating arbitrator since July 2009.
Hersfold served as an arbitrator from January to May last year, when he was forced to resign because of real-life commitments. He is an admin, a checkuser, a bureaucrat, and ArbCom clerk, and has been active at the Bot Approvals Group. He is highly experienced in sockpuppetry investigations, unblock requests, account creations, and bot management.
SilkTork will be new to ArbCom. He is an all-round Wikipedian, with experience ranging from Good Article nominations and reviews to administrative tasks such as maintenance and backlogs.
AGK has experience on the Mediation Committee and has been its chair since April 2010. He is a checkuser, has oversight access, has been a member of the Audit Subcommittee, and has worked in Arbitration Enforcement and as an ArbCom clerk.
Jclemens served a one-year term with the Committee this year. He has experience as a checkuser, in oversight and high-profile OTRS queues, and with other, non-public tools such as the arbitration wiki and various mailing lists. He has just posted his first case decision as a primary drafter.
Footnote
^These abstentions are counted as "Neutral" for purposes of these graphs, while the default option of "Neutral" in 2009 and 2010 was renamed after objections to "No vote" in 2011.
Cases and motions
A case was requested this week concerning Muhammad Images, after long-festering discord over which depictions if any of the prophet Muhammad are appropriate to showcase appeared to be beyond the community's ability to resolve. Fourteen parties were named and at the time of writing no arbitrators have voted to reject the case, while 7 have indicated their wish to see it opened, and a binding RfC has been mooted as a potential solution to the underlying dispute.
The Signpost is seeking a regular writer for the Arbitration Report. If you have an interest in the Arbitration Committee and its proceedings and would like to see the report continue, consider applying either by emailing wikipediasignpostgmail.com or by leaving a message in the newsroom.
The visual editor allows for the easy addition of wikilinksDevelopers say they are committed to allowing editors to 'switch to manual' if they want
“
There is plenty of evidence that wiki-markup is a substantial barrier that prevents many people from contributing to Wikipedia and our other projects. Formal user tests, direct feedback from new editors, and anecdotal evidence collected over the past several years have made the need for a visual editor clear ... It’s the biggest and most important change to our user experience we’ve ever undertaken.
”
— The Visual Editor Team, Wikimedia Foundation
Tuesday saw an announcement at the Wikimedia tech blog of the deployment to a sandbox of what many see as having the potential to be a major breakthrough in making it easier to edit Wikipedia. The Visual editor project, which will provide an integrated "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) interface for wikitext, may well be in its early stages, but its demonstration version (released this week) has already attracted a great deal of attention (see "In the news" for media reaction).
At the moment, the visual editor team have focused on support for basic formatting such as bold, italics, section headings and lists, though they are continually adding to the list of supported wikitext structures. Having found native browser support lacking, they have also been forced to reimplement many features that people take for granted, including arrow-key scrolling, cut/paste, and undo/redo. A number of bugs with the editor have already been found in this round of early stage testing; many have since been fixed.
The WMF team responsible for the editor were keen to stress that the editor, which is set to launch to its first wiki in June, will allow for the seamless switch between visual and old-style direct editing modes. Nonetheless, it seems likely that hand-constructed pages will be subject to a one-off normalisation program, after which all manual edits will be silently normalised. Whole wikitext-template structures could also be phased out as part of the transition process.
The most significant limitation with the demonstration is undoubtedly that the interface only allows users to edit a small number of predefined articles, thus avoiding the problem of understanding potentially difficult wikitext. It has been this concern over backwards compatibility that has long been seen as the challenge for developers of WYSIWYG editors, of which a number of competing designs are already available. The difference this time, developers say, is that the introduction of the radically improved new parser will make all the difference when it comes to the provision of a truly comprehensive editor.
[See "In the news" for reactions from outside of the Wikimedia universe.]
WMF takes flak over deployment times
While the visual editor project may have received little criticism so far, it seems that a number of other projects have not been so treated.
On Wednesday, Siebrand Mazeland – the project manager attached to the WMF localisation team – reported in his summary of the preceding WebFonts deployment (covered in brief last week) that he had received complaints over the speed of the deployment. Srikanth L, a self-admitted "critic" of the deployment, explained that one issue was whether "sufficient testing to a large user base" had really been carried out before the rollout. Mazeland responded by stressing that the Localisation team had for some time been trying to build up dedicated "language support" teams to consult with, although to little avail.
The comments came only hours after Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling relayed that he "had been hearing a lot of resentment from community members about the features team deploying extensions" without taking the time to "properly consult the community". On Monday, the recent change to image rotation had also led one upset commentator to deplore a state of affairs where staff developers seemed to make design decisions unsupported by reason (see also previous Signpost coverage). (Starling later pointed out that the recent image rotation adjustment had been a volunteer-led project that WMF developers had only been involved with in a review capacity.)
Starling's comments were made in a wider discussion about the deployment process faced by volunteers and staff developers. He recommended that to restore parity, staff developers focus on gaining wider community input, which would also yield "a huge amount of design input".
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.
One of the four possible interfaces users may experience when visiting one of the 11,000 articles version 5 of the ArticleFeedback extension is now live onArticleFeedback version 5 goes live: As trialed last week, on 19 December the fifth version of the ArticleFeedback extension went live to a little over 11,000 articles. A number of bugs (one of which forced the extension to be temporarily disabled) were quickly identified and fixed; the extension will now undergo a series of technical tests before being rolled out further. The performance of the various interfaces will also be compared during this phase, with the winning interface going onto phase 2 of the testing.
Git migration takes step forward: The migration from SVN to Git, scheduled in September this year, has taken a step forward with the creation of a test repository holding core MediaWiki code (wikitech-l mailing list). Changesets pushed to the test Git repository can be viewed on gerrit.wikimedia.org. IRC meetings to discuss the Git migration are in the process of being held this week, with a preference for many, smaller repositories emerging in the first such meeting (full IRC log).
Android app nears release candidate: Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber noted on his blog the imminent release of a release candidate of the official Wikimedia app for Android phones. However, in a second post later in the week, he also confirmed worries that much of the code powering the app would need substantial revision for compatibility with the latest version of the Android operating system (4.0, codenamed "Ice Cream Sandwich").
A code review Christmas ahead?: Official figures show that, as many Wikimedia developers enter holiday periods in their part of the globe, code review figures for MediaWiki 1.19 are considerably behind target. As of 19 December, over 500 revisions are left to review, 200 (or approximately 10 days) off the figure of 300 penciled in as a target (full statistics).
No more planetary problems on https: With the resolution of bug #32028, visitors attempting to view certain Wikimedia blog "planets" will no longer be redirected away from the main site when trying (manually or automatically) to switch to the secure, https version of the site.
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