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14 January 2013

 

2013-01-14

Ship ahoy! New travel site finally afloat

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By Tony1
The logo of Wikivoyage, the WMF's newly launched travel content project.

After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched on 15 January—though without a traditional ship's christening—having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.

Unlikely history

The story of the new travel site is already complicated, having involved the migration of volunteer editors and content from two other sites. The first source is Wikitravel.com, which has about 25,000 destinations in English and coverage in 20 languages. It is owned by the company Internet Brands, which strongly objected to the proposal and took pre-emptive legal action against two of its volunteers in an attempt to stop the haemorrhaging of editors and admins (Signpost coverage). Wikitravel is still active, with some 500 edits a day, and appears to be continuing to sell advertising space. At least three active volunteer administrators remain, while 35 are listed at the English Wikivoyage—eight of them bureaucrats.

The second precursor to the foundation's travel site was the non-commercial German-led travel site that forked from Wikitravel in 2006, Wikivoyage, which has given its name to the WMF's site by vote and no longer exists as a separate entity. Until the WMF launch, this Wikivoyage had about 12,000 articles in German and was the largest travel-guide wiki in the German language. The new Wikivoyage also inherits the smaller Italian-language version, with 2,500 articles, as well as a Commons-like file-repository with about 29,000 files and a location database. The fork imported much of Wikitravel.com's English-language freely licensed content in the migration preparations.

The new sites

Wikivoyage's reincarnation now has nine language versions—English, German, Italian, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian. Wikimedians are welcome to visit and join in the task of improving these projects.

For all its similarities to other foundation wikis, the English Wikivoyage is fundamentally different from the English Wikipedia in several respects. Wikipedians will immediately notice the language tends to be less formal in articles, the structure of articles is very different, and there is no policy on verification or original sources (footnotes and ref-tags are not a feature of the text). The informal register in which de.voy articles are written is one topic that has sparked debates on the German Wikipedia, prompted by the release of a detailed memorandum on the state of Wikivoyage written by Ziko, a senior German Wikipedian and chair of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter (basics in English).

Compared with the Wikipedia readership, visitors to Wikivoyage are likely to be younger and to be seeking up-to-date, highly changeable information of a relatively narrow scope; if "on the road", they tend to want access to that information instantly and in an easy-to-read form; if planning their travel, their needs are likely to be akin to those of most visitors to Wikipedia.

Sex tourism
Amsterdam's red-light district ... a policy issue for Wikivoyage?

The Signpost has identified three issues of public interest, now that Wikivoyage is part of the Wikimedia family. The first is the sex tourism policy, which did not change significantly for many years. In the light of the BBC's recent shut-down of its Lonely Planet travel site after "posts that discussed topics related to paedophilia", the Signpost made inquiries about the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage policy. Shortly after, the policy was hurriedly strengthened against such possible behaviour. The policy had presented a neutral definition of "sex tourism" to include "sex with children"—an issue about which the rest of the policy had been silent. The recent change has added this explanation, in which the last statement is unverified, as far as the Signpost can determine: "Any information on that [sex with children] is against our policies and will be deleted on sight. Note that many Western countries have laws which allow prosecution of their citizens for this, even if the act takes place in another country. Also, the countries where it takes place are cracking down heavily on it."

The rest of the policy proceeds—as it did before the recent change—to express the site's attitude to sex tourism in terms of negative preference: "We prefer not to include sex tourism information on Wikivoyage", followed by a list of such negative preferences, including pricing information, locations, "quality information" on and tips for picking up prostitutes. But there appears to be a fuzzy line: "Descriptions of locations or areas where prostitutes may be found—so-called "red light districts"—may be useful to non-sex tourists." And "expressions like single males will be happy at this hotel should be avoided in favour of direct language".

Before the policy was changed, the Signpost asked several administrators and other editors for their views on the text, and presented a hypothetical situation in which visitors post questions or comments about the age of consent on the talk page of an article related to a particular country. Evan Prodromou is a bureaucrat on the English Wikivoyage and one of two founders of the original non-profit Wikitravel site in 2003. He told the Signpost, "We've never had problems with sex tourism specifically for children. We've had issues with differing expectations for readers on information about sex tourism for adult prostitutes in places where this is legal locally; thus the policy."

Mark Jaroski said: "Evan [Prodromou] came up with the original text of the sex tourism policy nearly 10 years ago. If you go over his notes on the talk page you can see that he was really uneasy about allowing this sort of material on the site at all, but at the same time recognizing that for some reason people do consider the red-light district in Amsterdam to be an legitimate tourist "attraction", for lack of a better term. In any case the point of the policy was to give potential contributors an unsubtle hint that they should crawl off to some other corner of the Internet and leave us alone.

"I think that the policy has always been played down to avoid making it higher-profile, [which might have inadvertently attracted] the attention of the very people we were trying to avoid having as contributors. That sort of thing does happen on the Internet after all. I suppose that if someone were to raise the point in the mainstream media that might well have the same effect of attracting those people, and that we might have to get rid of them again in somewhat stronger terms. I would like to think that that won't happen, but I figure we'll fight that battle when we have to, and not before."

Pashley told the Signpost: "That policy is tricky and has been extensively discussed on the talk page. There have been arguments for both a looser and a stricter policy. ... As I see it, the current version is sadly lacking and I have proposed a rewrite at Pashley/STP. That has not gained wide acceptance." Pashley says he knows of no instances on the site like the recent one on Lonely Planet.

Doc James, who played an important role in the creation of the new site, said, "I never knew that Wikivoyage had a policy on sex tourism before you mentioned it. We as a movement should take a stance against anything related to sex tourism and children as it is not only illegal but unethical. ... These policies need to clarified. There is some subtlety but there is also a very clear bright line: 'no discussion / content that promotes sex tourism with children'."

DerFussi, chairman of the German non-profit association that hosted Wikivoyage until November, told the Signpost: "Our sex policies are the same (en: and de:) in general. ... The community has an eye on all edits. I am not aware of any scenario like this. Discussion sites have never been used for discussions about having sex on a travel destination and the community and Wikivoyage would never accept this. The Wikivoyage sites are not a travel forum. I am going to check the rules on de: concerning using talk pages."

Jay Walsh, the foundation's senior director, communications, responded to our invitation to comment on the issue:


Plagiarism and copyright
Off the beaten track, featured on the main page of Wikivoyage ... Staraya Russa, a small historic town in Russia

The English Wikivoyage's copyright policy is that "fair use in Wikivoyage of works from other sources, with the exception of short quotes and excerpts of text, is not acceptable". We asked editors whether they are aware of any instances of plagiarism on the previous sites, or of its policing. Is there a need for a warning about copying slabs of text from copyrighted travel guides in the edit mode display?

Pashley said he's aware of many instances of plagiarism, "including quite a few I deleted myself and many more that other admins dealt with." Evan Prodromou pointed out that the "no fair use" policy dates back to the founding of Wikitravel (2003–04). The Creative Commons 1.0 license had some assertions about clear rights to the works, so I added the "be careful about fair use" stuff to the Wikitravel policies. It was mainly for Wikipedians. Wikipedia has gotten a lot [stricter] about "fair use", so this is less of an issue now. As for plagiarism from other guides: it's occasionally a problem, but it's usually easy to detect and correct."

Mark Jaroski said "our usual problem is that people copy their own promotional material into the wiki, and when questioned produce evidence of copyright ownership. Usually that language gets reverted, toned down, or rewritten in terms of our no-touting rule, rather than the copyright rule. In any case we've always tried for a more or less consistent tone, and that tone is not the same as the kind of promotional material that people tend to copy in. Meanwhile we've also made it clear that we don't want big chunks of material copied in from Wikipedia or anywhere else.

"Copying of user-submitted reviews from other travel sites is a lot harder to detect, but usually that kind of writing is too personal to match our style, so it gets noticed and reverted or reworked anyhow. We might need to do more to avoid that kind of thing in the future, but so far having enough eyes on RecentChanges has kept it manageable. Certainly we make it clear that copyright violations are not acceptable."

DerFussi told the Signpost that "plagiarism and copyright violations are not accepted and are deleted immediately under our deletion policy. People sometimes copy text from anywhere—mostly from—yes, Wikipedia. The WMF wikis don't have any technology to attribute articles properly (our old Wikivoyage wikis had this technology :) ). It seems even Wikipedians are not aware of this and copy text to us—and we delete it. Thanks for reminding us to put a warning to the edit page. The old wikis had these information, but they were not migrated by the WMF. We have to rewrite them."

Product placement

A travel wiki is inevitably exposed to the risk of touting and product placement. Is this hard to police? Editors we asked admitted there is a problem, but do not doubt the site's ability to deal with it. For Evan, "it's tricky, but the community has gotten pretty good at it." Mark said, "we have a no-touting policy, and that pretty much covers us for product placement. That said the whole point of a travel guide is to let people know about commercial services like hotels and restaurants, so they are going to be in there, but we don't keep promotional language around as above. We also don't allow travel aggregators and booking agencies under the "other guides" rule, so that keeps us mostly covered."

For Pashley, "it is a perennial problem, but fairly easily dealt with given those policies and a community with enough people who keep track of articles they are interested in and/or check the "recent changes" page fairly often. The same goes for most other major problems: spam, a user page offering a hot young girl to escort men around Shanghai, other ads, plagiarism, libelous reviews, ... As long as we have enough people who will spend some time on janitorial work, those can be dealt with."

DerFussi told the Signpost: "We cannot avoid product placement completely. But the community has a good sense for it by just checking the edits. There are ideas for future features like being able to edit the restaurant and hotel sections [only] when you have 100 edits. On the previous German Wikivoyage site there were not that many problems with product placement. We removed the ones we had. But I am sure we will face it." He said there are signs to watch out for—these include obvious user names like ACCOR France, and users or anons who just place recommendations for hotels and restaurants in multiple articles (often of the same company), place just a single edit and disappear, write excessively positive comments, or position their recommendation on the top of a list.

DerFussi made a broader point that since forking in 2006, the English-language Wikitravel and the German-language Wikivoyage "did not talk with each other, and now they are reunited". Therefore, our policies may differ slightly and it will take a short time to grow back together again. ... One of our main future objectives is to coordinate the policies and work on the wikis and help the small language versions. An application as a thematic organisation is one step we can take. Another is to become a more international."

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2013-01-14

Launch of annual picture competition, new grant scheme

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By Mono and Jan eissfeldt

Commons' annual contest opens

2011's Picture of the Year, of Lake Bondhus and the Bondhusbreen glacier in Norway.

On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits on any one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012.

This year will mark the seventh annual contest, which was originally started by Commons editor Alvesgaspar in late 2006. Since then, editor participation has expanded greatly and the contest has become an important part of the Commons calendar. The last contest was won by Heinrich Pniok, a German volunteer who submitted a photograph taken in Norway.

The 2012 Picture of the Year contest is organized by a small group of volunteers who are responsible for tasks like sorting images from the featured picture process, promoting the event, translating messages, and contacting the contest winners. In addition, a new script has been deployed to improve the voting experience. The tool allows voters to quickly and easily vote for the images of their choice, while checking the eligibility of voters.

Voting in the first round will run from from January 16 to January 30. Eligible editors can vote for as many of the 988 images featured in 2012 as they wish. The second round will start on February 7 to determine the winner among the finalists from the first round.

New WMF grant scheme kicks off

On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEGs). The program, after going through a consultation period since mid-December 2012, aims primarily to empower individual volunteer grantees or small groups, working on structural and time-intensive problems of the editing communities.

The scheme works on an eight-step process, from applicants learning about the program to assessing whether they are comfortable with the framework, to finally reporting results on Meta. The second step, the application process, is open from January 15 to February 15 in this first round, and at the same time Meta is setting up a volunteer reviewer committee. Its membership is supposed provide feedback on, evaluate and finally make recommendations on the proposals.

Siko Bouterse and other supporting staff will be checking whether submissions fulfil the formal requirements. Community discussions of applications will be open until February 24. The day after, the committee will start considering both the proposals and their related discussions in making its final recommendations until the grantee announcement, scheduled for March 15.

Successful applicants will secure a grant for one of the maximum seven IEG pilots. They will gain access to US$5–30K to fund their efforts for 6–12 months, and are expected to file mid-point reports on Meta by July. A second round is planned to start on August 1. Volunteers interested in participating in the work of the related committee are invited to join it.

Brief notes

  • Wikimedia Conference Japan 2013: Japanese Wikipedians are preparing this year's Wikimedia conference at the University of Tokyo on February 3. Information on the program, keynote speakers, and conference details is on both the conference website and on Facebook.
  • Steward elections: On January 15, Meta started its annual steward election proceedings. Candidature submissions for this vital global role are open until January 28, 23:59 (UTC). Community voting is set to begin on February 8, parallel to the reconfirmation process of volunteers already serving in that role.
  • Milestones: On January 13, Wikispecies—the WMF-supported project aiming at disseminating free knowledge of all known biological species—reached a milestone, with Tetramorium alpestre, its 350,000th entry. At the time of writing, the Italian Wikipedia project was less than two thousand articles short of its millionth entry.

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2013-01-14

Reach for the Stars: WikiProject Astronomy

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By Mabeenot
WikiProject news
Universal Edition
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
A barred spiral galaxy
The Flaming Star Nebula
A region of the Large Magellanic Cloud
Sunspots shown in ultraviolet light
The Pleiades cluster
The red planet
A celestial map from the 17th century
The Earth, as seen from the Moon

This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images. Since the 2010 reorganization of all space-related projects, WikiProject Astronomy has served as one of the primary outlets for space-enthusiasts, alongside WikiProject Spaceflight (interviewed in 2011) and WikiProject Solar System (interviewed in 2008 and 2011). This week's interview includes WikiProject Astronomy members StringTheory11, Keilana, Casliber, and Wer900.

What motivated you to join WikiProject Astronomy? Have you contributed to any of the project's Featured and Good Articles? Do you participate in any of WikiProject Astronomy's subprojects and task forces?

StringTheory11: Having joined somewhat recently (July 2012), I can clearly remember why I chose to join the project. Originally here on Wikipedia, I worked exclusively on chemical element articles for WikiProject Elements, but around this time, I came across the {{Stars of Cygnus}} template somehow, and noticed that many of the stars were redlinks. I forget the exact order of events after this, but eventually I wound up joining the project and am now working on creating articles for all stars brighter than magnitude 5. Having joined recently, I don't have any GAs or FAs here yet, but I have brought another natural science article, periodic table, to FA and am currently planning to work on Eta Carinae after I finish my current projects. I guess one could consider me to be most active in the astronomical objects project, but I plan to branch out into other areas eventually.
Keilana: I too joined recently, in April 2012. I joined because I was working on Andromeda (constellation) at the time and was planning to work on more constellation articles. I've contributed to a few constellation FAs (Andromeda, Aries (constellation), Auriga (constellation), and Corona Australis, which were really positive, collaborative experiences. I especially enjoyed helping Casliber, who took the lead on Corona Australis. Though I've been busy with women scientists lately, I hope to continue pushing all of the constellation articles to GA and ultimately, FA.
Casliber: I've been there off and on over the years- I read a couple of really cool books on Sirius, so I buffed that one up some time ago in early 2008. It remained my one astronomy FA until earlier this year. Betelgeuse in some ways ranks as my most rewarding and fascinating FA to have worked on, I initially worked it up and then Sadalsuud really ramped up the momentum. Titrating the prose between exact but dry and engaging but possibly too wordy was an interesting endeavour. I think astronomy articles can be very tricky to improve to balance the prose, and working on them collaboratively is to be recommended! A lot more sources are online than other stuff I work on (biology), but translating material to common English can be tricky indeed. Many members are only sporadically active so the WikiProject's activity can wax and wane markedly. Running prose by laypeople is extremely helpful and folks not familiar with astronomy are helpful in reviewing at FAC or GAN. I've gotten into constellations as they are relatively light on the hardcore astrophysics which I am not so good at....

The fields of astronomy and spaceflight has been covered by a variety of WikiProjects over the years, prompting the reorganization and merging of astronomy subprojects on several occasions. How is the current assortment of astronomy subprojects faring? What can be done to increase communication and collaboration between all the subprojects?

Wer900: The number of articles actively edited by WPAST increases and decreases in cycles based on how and when new astronomy-related news is released. Like any scientific field, progress comes in the form of a punctuated equilibrium, proceeding rapidly before settling to a lower base rate, with the cycle repeating itself eternally. Astronomical objects are discovered all the time, but rarely is a discovery of particular note announced that causes a surge in activity, which then dies down after all the required articles have been started and fleshed out to a much slower-paced improvement of articles incorporating new developments in the field. I think that it is the lack of recognition of these surges and declines in activity that keeps WikiProject Astronomy hanging by a thread, even though there are so many already extant articles that can be improved. What can be done to improve this is to consolidate all subprojects and to more actively market the existence of WikiProject Astronomy in order to build a committed team of editors that improves the necessary articles rather than merely working on those articles which are at the moment a "hot topic." This interview will help greatly to revitalize the project.
Keilana: Though I think the overarching project is doing okay, the subprojects aren't as active. The only one I've been involved in is the Constellations Taskforce, which has effectively been folded into the main project. I agree with Wer900, it may be helpful to the project as a whole to keep the guideline pages and resources compiled by the subprojects but, for example, redirect the talk pages to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Astronomy.
Casliber: My feelings align with Keilana's - I think redirecting the talks to the main project talk page is the way to go.

There are 226 astronomy-related articles on Wikipedia's list of vital articles. Have there been any concerted efforts to improve these articles? Why do some vital articles receive greater attention than others?

StringTheory11: In my time here, no, there have not been any efforts to improve the articles. That doesn't mean that improving the articles is impossible at all; it is very possible for one person or a small group to take a VA to FA level. As for the second part of the question, some topics are much easier to write about than others. For example, it would be much easier to make Neptune an FA (it is already) than it would be to bring something like universe to FA, as Neptune has concrete boundaries around which to write about, while universe is a little more abstract. Do we write about all multiverse theories? How much of the Big Bang do we include? Overall though, I would encourage anyone who is interested to improve the vital articles, as improving them gives the biggest benefit to the reader.
Keilana: I know that the planet articles are largely FAs, but if I remember correctly, that was done a couple of years ago. There are others, including star, but again, they weren't done during my time with the project. Since I've joined, people have been working on the constellation articles on the vital list, several of which are now FAs or GAs. I'd love to see more coordinated effort on other vital astronomy articles!
Casliber: Not sure, I have not seen any organised official collaborations on astronomy topics, but they might yield some Good Vital Articles.....

Has the project made any progress creating requested astronomy articles? What are the greatest difficulties editors face when creating or expanding new articles about astronomy-related topics?

StringTheory11: Progress on these articles is progressing, slowly but surely. Take a look at the list and you will notice a smattering of bluelinks mixed in with the redlinks here. Of course, if a subject does not have an article on Wikipedia yet, it is unlikely to receive much coverage, although this is less noticeable in the science fields. Overall though, I do think that we could be doing better in this area, as there are some requests from 2007 that have still not been answered. As for the other part of the question, I would say that the hardest part of creating these articles is finding sources. As I mentioned earlier, the subject will probably not have much coverage if it doesn't have an article yet, so finding reliable sources relating to the topic in question can be a very hard task.

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

StringTheory11: In my opinion, there are three ultimate goals: create all requested and redlinked articles, improve all mid-importance or higher articles to GA, and bring all top-importance articles to FA. Of course, these are long-term goals and will probably never be complete, but even creating one article or bringing one article from C-class to B-class really helps. Also, there is a constant need for grammar checkers, category fixers, and the like, as there are always small tyops typos to fix or missing categories and such. Really, short of adding plain inaccuracies or introducing vandalism, all additions to astronomy articles are helpful and we would appreciate any new editors who do something as small as adding a missing space.
Wer900: The short-term goals of this project should be an immediate restructuring and decision-making process formalization in order to improve the efficiency of the project. Out-of-date pages should be removed and newer ones should be added and updated, and the old and dormant task forces and subprojects need to be immediately swept away. In the medium term, more publicity of this project should be happening, and the project should be made more cohesive, aggregating the latest astronomy news and sharing articles and journals on a specialized wiki page in order to ease the ability of users to write new articles and improve existing ones even when there are few astronomical discoveries being immediately made. This would greatly improve our coverage of the field of astronomy, ensuring that we leave less undone that we can do. This should all focus on the ultimate long-term goal of expanding and improving articles with all possible information sources, hopefully bringing all of the major user-facing articles to FA and less-major ones to GA, as well as generally improving previously marginalized astronomical articles.
Keilana: A lot of astronomy articles have tons of unsourced statements and cruft (for lack of a better word) that's been added over the years. Any little bit helps, whether it's fixing the formatting, fixing typos, or adding sources. People with more time to spare could work on getting an astronomy article to GA. There are a lot of freely-available sources, and there's a pretty big pool of willing collaborators.
Casliber: Getting some more mainpage candidates (i.e. FAs) - Betelgeuse attracted a lot of visitors to the mainpage.

Anything else you'd like to add?

StringTheory11: If you know anything about astronomy, or even if you don't, please think about contributing to WPAST! We're a really friendly group, and we would love to have you on board :).
Keilana: I totally agree with StringTheory - it's a really fun project with a lot of work to do! :)


Next week, we'll get tongue-tied by a complicated project. Until then, feel free to conduct a discourse analysis in the archive.

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2013-01-14

Flag Manual of Style; accessibility and equality

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By J36miles

Proposals

Moderator user group
A new user group was proposed that would contain an abbreviated set of the administrator user-rights.

Requests for comment

Resysopping policy
A change to the policy of resysopping former administrators is under discussion. This discussion hopes to clear up cases of when to resysop admins and when they should go through the RFA process again.
Copying within Wikipedia guideline to policy
Copying within Wikipedia is currently a guideline. Should it be turned into a policy?
Flag Manual of Style
The way flags are used in sporting articles is under review. Should articles be updated to reflect the guideline, or should the guideline be updated?
Article title
Should a section be added to the article titles guideline to recognize how titles are styled currently to avoid arguments between the relationship of WP:MOS and WP:TITLE?
Today's article for improvement
After being successfully proposed, there are still unanswered questions regarding "Today's article for improvement". Questions still needing answers include how many are displayed per day, how the articles are chosen and what the edit notice on the article page will look like.
Accessibility and equality
A recommendation to modify the third pillar to include the word "read" was brought up. Also brought up was a request to add the statement that "Readers and editors are welcome, regardless of ethnicity, creed, gender, age, sexuality or disability. Wikipedia's content and tools will aim to meet industry-standard web accessibility guidelines."
Noreferrer
Should noreferrer be enabled for all external links on Wikipedia?
Changing file names
A clarification is under discussion regarding criterion 1 of the criteria for changing file names. The criterion currently reads "Uploader requested". The proposal would put some limitations on when this criterion would apply.
Previously sanctioned users and clean start
A discussion in under way to determine what are the circumstances when an user can do a clean start. Should all users have a chance at a clean start? When should the Arbitration Committee deny users from making a clean start?

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2013-01-14

Loss of an Internet genius

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By The ed17
Aaron Swartz ... programmer, activist, and Wikipedian of rare talent.


Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.

Aaron wore many Internet hats during his life. At the age of just 14 he played a key role in the initial RSS specification. While still a teenager, he served on the RDF core working group at the World Wide Web Consortium, defined the RDF XML content type and founded Infogami, which quickly merged with the social news and entertainment website, Reddit. Around the same time, he was part of the team that started Creative Commons.

In 2006 he ran into controversy for downloading and posting the bibliographic metadata of every book in the Library of Congress, which was in the public domain but available only for a fee. A more serious controversy occurred in 2008 when he downloaded about 20% of the entire PACER database, which allows public access to public domain US federal court documents, although ironically this required users to pay a fee. By taking advantage of a pilot program offering free access at certain public libraries, Aaron was able to download nearly two million documents before his access was revoked. He posted these documents openly on the Internet, prompting an FBI investigation, but no charges were ever filed. In 2010, he co-founded the Internet activist organization Demand Progress, which played a central role in the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), alongside Aaron's separate, personal contributions to the debate.

In July 2011, Aaron was charged with four felonies, three stemming from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. At issue was his use of an automated program to download 4.8 million scholarly articles from JSTOR by deploying the network infrastructure of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (Signpost coverage). Ironically, Aaron did not disseminate any of the files, and after he handed over to JSTOR the copies he had made, the digital library settled "any civil claims [it] may have had".

These felony charges could have sent Aaron to prison for 35 years and have fined him more than $1 million. Carmen Ortiz, the federal prosecutor overseeing the case, said "stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." In September, the government added nine charges, moving the total from four to thirteen felonies, which could have put Aaron behind bars for more than 50 years, with a fine of $4 million dollars.

On January 9, Ortiz’s office rejected an arrangement that would have kept Aaron out of prison. Two days later, he was found dead in his New York apartment.

Tributes

Obituaries were published in mainstream news outlets such as the Economist, NPR, Washington Post, The New York Times, Guardian, and BBC, and the websites of organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Open Knowledge Foundation, JSTOR and SPARC.

The most poignant tributes, however, came from those who knew Aaron. Three of the most prominent came from close friends, including Cory Doctorow, Quinn Norton, and danah boyd. boyd commented:


Others recalled Aaron's humorous antics, such as the time he was interviewed by The New York Times for a story. The day it was published, he parodied a personal ad on his blog, asking readers: "Attention attractive people: Are you looking for someone respectable enough that they've been personally vetted by The New York Times, but has enough of a bad-boy streak that the vetting was because they 'liberated' millions of dollars of government documents? If so, look no further than page A14 of today's The New York Times."

In a tribute, The New York Times published recollections from their reporter who had been covering Aaron's case, John Schwartz. Schwartz (not related to Aaron) enjoyed his "obvious brilliance" and "cutting wit". Affectionately, he said, "I liked him. He was about the age of my daughter; I told him that my own father is Aaron Schwartz, so I felt funny talking with him. I then joked that if she hadn't been in a committed relationship at the time of our interviews, I might have tried to set them up. He smiled awkwardly at my old-guy gaffe."

Many people focused on what they perceived to be unjust charges against Aaron. His family said that Aaron's death was a "product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." In a blog post written by Alex Stamos, the defense's expert witness said, "I know a criminal hack when I see [one], and Aaron's downloading of journal articles from an unlocked closet is not an offense worth 35 years in jail." Lawrence Lessig, a close friend of Aaron's, alleged prosecutorial misconduct, among other things, saying "Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the 'I'm right so I'm right to nuke you' ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame. One word, and endless tears."

Aaron and Wikimedia

Losing Aaron moved many Wikimedians on a deeply personal level. Aaron edited the English Wikipedia under the username Aaronsw, with more than 5,500 edits in ten years in a surprisingly wide range of topics, from biographies of living people to US legal cases and proposed legislation. He ran for the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees in 2006. This was just the time he had a significant effect on the way the community saw itself, in large part due to his blog post "Who Writes Wikipedia", that was translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, and French. The piece, which was part of a six-part series, was described last week by journalist Anne Sewell as a "landmark analysis of Wikipedia."

Part of "Who Writes Wikipedia" concerned a frequent talking point in Jimmy Wales' public addresses that Wikipedia operated on an "80–20 rule", where 80% of the writing, curating, and caretaking was being done by just 20% of the users. Aaron pointed out that by using edit counts Wales had discovered that the ratio was in fact worse than this—that more than 50% of all edits were made by 0.7% of users, and top 2% of users performed 73% of all edits. According to Wales, the remaining edits were done by minor contributors, the random people who came along to fix a typo or address a minor factual error.

Aaron questioned this premise, saying: "Wales presents these claims as comforting. Don't worry, he tells the world, Wikipedia isn't as shocking as you think. In fact, it's just like any other project: a small group of colleagues working together toward a common goal. But if you think about it, Wales's view of things is actually much more shocking: around a thousand people wrote the world's largest encyclopedia in four years for free? Could this really be true?"

Swartz in 2009.

Aaron went on to show that the direct opposite was true: that the 'core' group of Wikipedians—those who made the most edits to the site overall—actually added the least amount of content to the page. Aaron revealed that the problem lay in the methodology: the number of letters added, versus the quantity of edits.

Aaron's keenest insight into Wikipedia came near the end of his blog post:


Among several tributes from Wikimedians, Erik Moller, the Deputy Director of the WMF, wrote a Wikimedia Blog post, calling him an "extraordinary individual ... [and] beautiful person," and in an email to wikimedia-l said that Aaron was "an intense, passionate and focused intellectual who dedicated his life to changing the world for the better—and he did. It's a shocking loss and deeply sad that he left us so early, that he saw no other way."

Samuel Klein, a Wikipedian and WMF trustee, wrote a tribute on his blog. The Wikipedian, a blog run by William Beutler for non-Wikipedians, looked at Aaron's contributions to the Wikimedia movement, and other Wikipedians wrote their forms of remembrance on his Wikipedia user talk page.

As Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and an acquaintance of Aaron's, tweeted: "Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."


Aaron H. Swartz known as AaronSw on Wikipedia
Departed January 11, 2013
"I just can't believe someone so brilliant is gone so soon." /ƒETCHCOMMS/

This is an irreconcilable loss for humanity! We were fortunate to share his association, and as stewards, responsible to adopt his endeavors into our care, and conservancy. RIP (condolences)



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2013-01-14

Featured articles: Quality of reviews, quality of writing in 2012

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By Crisco 1492

Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.

Ian Rose
It was a privilege to serve as a delegate at FAC in 2012, and view articles I might not have otherwise (though we're from the same place, I never knew there were so many varieties of banksia, for example). Restricting myself to nominations with which I was directly involved as a delegate, the article that remains uppermost in my mind is Lynching of Jesse Washington. The subject matter is important and disturbing, but presented in a dispassionate yet compelling manner. As a candidate, it was well prepared through a good article nomination and peer review, in which experienced FA writers participated. That the FAC still generated some detailed commentary was hardly surprising, but the discussion remained cool and collegial, and issues were resolved in a timely manner. For me it was one of many articles and FAC nominations in 2012 that did Wikipedia proud.

Graham Colm
As a delegate I read a broad variety of articles that otherwise would pass me by. So different in subjects, I found it impossible to choose a favourite from the treasures on last year's list. But I do have a favourite FAC: it was a joy to follow the reviews of Betelgeuse. I was deeply impressed by the thoroughness and knowledge of the reviewers and the timely and intelligent responses from the nominators. Focused and ever mindful of our readers, the team went through the article with a fine tooth comb, refining every fact and nuance of meaning as they went along. Of course, I love the article – about a beautiful star with a beautiful name – it is a product of gifted content creators and expert reviews.

Brian Boulton
From the year's many excellent FA promotions, with some difficulty I made a short list of two: Mary, Queen of Scots, nominated by DrKiernan, and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, nominated by Maria. Mary, Queen of Scots is an engrossing account of a tragic life; the article has particular resonance for me since I live not far from Fotheringhay. The writing is crisp and authoritative, a credit to the encyclopedia. But my final choice of personal favourite, narrowly, goes to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a beautifully written description of a work by a writer who would perhaps never have come to my notice but for WP. It exemplifies for me the ability of Wikipedia to extend one's knowledge and sensitivities in unexpected and delightful ways.

Featured articles

Broad-billed Parrot
A wall from Caludon Castle, a Scheduled Ancient Monument in Coventry
SBB-CFF-FFS Re 460
Skylab

Three featured articles were promoted this week:

  • Broad-billed Parrot (nom), by FunkMonk. The Broad-billed Parrot (Lophopsittacus mauritianus) is a large extinct parrot once endemic to Mauritius, near Madagascar. It had a large head, distinct crest of feathers, and very large beak for cracking seeds. The birds exhibited extensive sexual dimorphism, with males at least 10 centimetres (3.9 in) longer. First mentioned in 1598, by 1680 the parrot was extinct; it was not formally described until the 19th century.
  • California State Route 56 (nom), by Rschen7754. State Route 56 (SR 56) is 9.210 miles (14.822 km) long and runs east–west, connecting Interstate 5 to Interstate 15. It is the only connecting freeway for several miles. Initially added to the state highway system in 1959, SR 56 was not completed until 2004 owing to funding issues and environmental concerns.
  • Brazza's Martin (nom), by Jimfbleak. Brazza's Martin (Phedina brazzae) is a bird in the swallow family native to central Africa. It averages 12 cm (4.25 in) in length and has grey-brown upperparts, heavily black-streaked white underparts, and a brownish tint to the breast plumage. The Martin burrows in river banks, where it lays a clutch of three white eggs. Its conservation status is currently classified "Least Concern".

Featured lists

Four featured lists were promoted this week:

Featured pictures

Twelve featured pictures were promoted this week:

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey


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2013-01-14

First arbitration case in almost six months

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By James

The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.

Open cases

Doncram (Week 1)

The case concerns Doncram's creation of masses of articles composed of unchecked content transferred from foreign databases and his perceived misrepresentation of legitimate criticism. The filer, SarekOfVulcan, notes that while he is a long-standing editor, he "has frequently run up against other editors relating to both the content and how he reacts when the content is challenged." When arbitrator Roger Davies asked the parties to "provide details of a [recent] arbitratable issue that the community has failed to resolve", SarekOfVulcan cited two instances:


In November 2011, SarekOfVulcan noted on the administrators' noticeboard for incidents that Doncram created the Chambers Building article without substantive content. Snottywong described the report as "an immediate kneejerk [sic] ANI complaint [which] was uncalled for." In her reply, Elen of the Roads states that she originally blocked him


Orlady's statement says that her long-standing complaints include Doncram exhibiting "an attitude of article ownership", escalating minor disagreements into larger arguments, believing that he is exempt from policies and guidelines, and demonstrating "a pattern of personalizing interactions with others, including engaging in blisteringly vitriolic personal attacks against [her]."

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2013-01-14

Intermittent outages planned, first Wikidata client deployment

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By Aude, Mono, and Jarry1250

Wikidata deployed to Hungarian Wikipedia

The Wikidata team in April 2012

The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository. Although they are now little more than edit window clutter, members of the Hungarian Wikipedia community have been hesitant with regard to remove existing links, given that Wikidata-ignorant interwiki bots remain in operation, potentially re-inserting the "missing" links in the wikitext. Changes coming from Wikidata can also be seen in recent changes and in the watchlist, though they are hidden by default, marking an end to interwiki-link changes cluttering watchlists (announcement on huwiki (in Hungarian) and blog post (in English) on the Wikimedia Germany blog). Deployments to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias are planned for 30 January, and assuming all goes well – and communities remain receptive – the Wikidata client should have found its way onto English Wikipedia by the end of February and then onto other language Wikipedias in the following month. The Wikidata team welcomes feedback, either via the Contact the development team page on Wikidata, on #wikimedia-wikidata on IRC, or on the mailing list. In addition to Hungarian Wikipedia, the client is also enabled on test2wiki where interested users who do not speak Hungarian can test it.

Development of phase 2, relating to infobox-style data entries is progressing well, the Wikidata team reports, though again code review is likely to be a slow and arduous process and no deployment dates have yet been set. In related news, the 3 millionth Wikidata item was created on January 13: "List of mayors of Westdorpe", a large village in the Netherlands.

Intermittent outages expected during primary data centre switchover

Servers at the Ashburn data centre

The Wikimedia operations team is busy preparing to switch over the master database servers and other key infrastructure to use the Ashburn, Virginia data centre as the primary data centre. The Ashburn data centre is already serving about 90% of traffic, but this is mainly the result of it hosting caching servers which serve pages for logged-out users, as well as images, JavaScript and CSS. When Wikimedians edit a wiki, the regeneration of the pages is still handled by master database servers in the Tampa data centre. The switchover is part of an ongoing project to enable redundancy for key infrastructure; in addition, the change in "primary" centre from Tampa to Ashburn revolved around the quality of the facilities at both locations.

CT Woo, the Foundation's Director of Operations, announced the change on the wikitech-l mailing list:


In the event of an outage, Wikimedians can get updates on IRC in the #wikimedia-tech channel, or via Wikimedia's Twitter accounts @wikimedia or @wikimediatech (detailed server logs).

As the operations and core platform team are setting up new servers and infrastructure, they are taking it as an opportunity to also switchover to new deployment tools (git-deploy) and a new internal workflow for the regular code updates to the Wikimedia projects.

Echo project holds office hours

Notifications on MediaWiki.org

The Echo team held IRC office hours on January 8 where they discussed development progress on a Facebook-style notification system for editors. As previously reported, Echo, currently deployed on MediaWiki.org, provides notifications when someone edits your talk page, creates a link to an article you created, nominates it for deletion, adds maintenance tags, or reverts your edit. There will be a notifications "badge" at the top of the page, next to your user name, which can replace the "yellow" bar that users see now when you have a new talk page message. The team described how they have a "'user mention' notification in the works" which could work similar to Twitter mentions and notify you when someone mentions you on another page. The team welcomes feedback on the types of notifications to provide, although they initially have in mind new users, who are more likely to miss important events than established users. Echo may also provide a public notifications API that could be used by bots and scripts, the team said, though they, together with the community, would need to figure out how to balance ease of use of the tool while minimizing abuse and spamming with the notifications API.

Echo is available for testing on test2wiki. The Echo team plans on initial experimental deployment to English Wikipedia sometime next month (presumably of an opt-in nature). Interested editors can also stay informed and discuss with the Editor Engagement team about Echo and other projects on their new editor engagement mailing list.

Disclaimer: User:Aude is an employee of Wikimedia Germany, working on the Wikidata project.

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 several weeks.

  • Experimental features pushed to mobile: Following the release of a new mobile Wikimedia experience in 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation has further extended their beta to include new features. This update is intended to "unleash the full creativity of our engineers and designers without disrupting the user experience for millions of readers". Specifically, logged-in mobile users can now upload pictures to the Wikimedia Commons directly from their browser, while Wikimedia editors will be interested in the new watchlist and section editing tools. These features, while functional, are described as experimental at this time.
  • Monthly engineering report published: The Wikimedia Foundation has released their December 2012 technical report, highlighting important developments including the deployment of VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, as well as progress on many of the Foundation's less-well-known projects.
  • Universal Language Selector deployment broadens: The Internationalisation team at the Wikimedia Foundation is deploying the Universal Language Selector on wikis with the Translate extension currently enabled (Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Outreach wiki, Incubator and the Wikimania wikis). The Universal Language Selector is replacing the similar Narayam and WebFonts extensions, which will be disabled on those wikis. The Selector, which enables easier switching between interface languages and input scripts, will be available only to logged-in users, as there are still caching issues for logged-out users; the plan is to release it to all users later in the year.
  • Staff promotion at Foundation: Patrick Reilly has been promoted to the role of Site Performance Engineer and Senior Technical Advisor at the Wikimedia Foundation. Reilly has previously worked on the MobileFrontend extension and as technical lead for the mobile development team.

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