Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-01-03
2010 was Wikipedia's tenth year, and the seventh year for the Wikimedia Foundation. In the tradition of previous Signpost annual summaries, we are presenting a review of the past year.
Growth and statistics
2010 has been a period of significant growth for the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. On 16 April, the Wikimedia projects as a whole achieved the one-billionth edit, as measured by the edit counter (although which edit exactly was the billionth remains unclear).
Several of the Foundation's largest projects have achieved major milestones this year. The first was in January, with the upload of the six-millionth file on Commons. The image, "Sailing on Ullswater", was part of a mass upload from Geograph, a website containing at the time 1.5 million and now nearly two million licensed images of the British Isles. In a continuation of its explosive growth, Commons surpassed seven million files (albeit quietly), and ended the year with a bang by surpassing eight million files on December 30.
Some of the bigger Wikipedias crossed important thresholds. In September, the French-language Wikipedia celebrated its one-millionth article, becoming only the third Wikipedia to surpass that number after the English Wikipedia on 1 March 2006 and the German Wikipedia in December 2009. The next two largest Wikipedias are the Polish Wikipedia, currently at 761,000 articles, and the Italian Wikipedia, currently at 759,000 articles. Between those two sites there has been a friendly rivalry: they have swapped places several times, and at one point the Polish community even offered their congratulations to the Italians for surpassing their mark. Meanwhile the English language Wikipedia passed 3.5 million articles in December.
On 20:26, 17 August 2010 (UTC), SandyGeorgia simultaneously promoted six articles to Featured article status, representing our 3,000th featured article. The number of good articles surpassed 10,000 in October 2010. This is a growth of 2,000 good articles in just under nine months, as the number passed 8,000 good articles in January. Currently, about one in 331 articles is a good article, and about one in 1,130 is a featured article.
Strategic planning and India
This year also saw an increasing degree of organization and improvements by the Foundation itself. At a board meeting in April, the Wikimedia Foundation laid out a preliminary five-year plan, developed by the Strategy Project to allow the Foundation to better lead its projects through 2010–15. The initiative had originally materialized in July 2009, setting up a wiki to invite community involvement, and by August 2010 had attracted "close to 900 proposals, 14 task forces, a repository for statistics gathered for the process, and a specialized community to discuss and influence the direction of all Wikimedia projects." By the end of the year, the final version of the 2010–2015 plan appears not to have been fully approved yet by the Board, but in its October meeting it already adopted the plan's summary targets.
These include a focus on the "Global South", which began to materialize with the Foundation's activities in India during the second half of the year, where it plans to open its first ever office outside the US. These plans and various visits by senior Foundation staff (including Barry Newstead, Erik Möller and Danese Cooper) generated prolonged attention by Indian media. In an interview with Mediaweek, Jimbo Wales praised the success of Indian-language Wikipedias; some 20 of these Wikipedias saw "a lot of success" in their recent endeavors, and Wales described them as a model of successful foreign-language growth.
Fundraiser
Describing the planned developmental growth, Foundation chief Sue Gardner has indicated she plans to hire as many as 200 new full-time employees by 2015, with annual spending "reaching $40 million." Indeed, the 2010 end-of-the-year fundraiser was the biggest in Wikimedia history, with a fundraising goal of $16 million. This compares with a goal of $50,000 in 2004, 1/320th of the current figure. The 2010 fundraiser, which started on 15 November and is in its closing stages, involved heavy technical and logistical planning and achieved its $16 million goal by the end of 2010. It emphasized community involvement and data-based decisions, as exemplified by an (unsuccessful) "Beat Jimmy" challenge for Wikimedians to create banners that would perform better than the personal appeals by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales that had been most successful in previous years. Also departing from earlier fundraisers, it relied heavily on graphical banners, which may have contributed to adverse reactions and many parodies based on Wales' "creepy" persona. By December, the Fundraiser had moved to editor appeals featuring prominent Wikimedians.
Staff and Board changes
The Wikimedia Foundation went through several major staff changes this year. After the hiring of Danese Cooper as Chief Technology Officer at the beginning of the year (see below), in June the hiring of two other chief officers was announced: Barry Newstead became Chief Global Development Officer, while various parts of the staff were regrouped to form the new "Community Department" under the incoming new Chief Community Officer Zack Exley, soon followed by the announcement of the departure of fundraising team members Rand Montoya and Anya Shyrokova, and of Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass. On the other hand, various new staff members joined the Department, which also put out an experimental hiring call to community members, which resulted in almost 2000 submissions by September, the hiring of several Wikimedians as "Community associates" mainly for the fundraiser, and the start of the "Community Fellowship program", enabling volunteers to work full-time for a limited period "on solving and researching community problems".
In September, the hiring of Cyn Skyberg as the Foundation's first ever Chief Talent and Culture Officer (formerly described as Chief Human Resources Officer) was announced, thus filling the last open C-level position.
October marked the departure of the Foundation's legal counsel, Mike Godwin. Godwin had handled day-to-day legal issues in the Foundation since 2007, most recently an allegation by the FBI regarding the use of their seal. His feisty response earned him commendations from The New York Times and others, and silence from the FBI. The reason for his departure was not explained, but was noted as "personal." Sue Gardner, Kat Walsh, and other Wikimedians extended their thanks for his service, and the search is currently on for a replacement.
In July, several changes to the Board of Trustees were announced, primarily as a result of the chapter selection of Board members. The process was internal, with the chapters deliberating on nine candidates for the two seats, of whom several withdrew before the process was completed. The largest change was the departure of Michael Snow, Chair of the Board (and founder of The Signpost); noting his contributions, new Chair Ting Chen said he "has been a loyal and devoted leader in the Wikimedia movement."
Meetups and events
This year has seen multiple gatherings of Wikipedians from around the world. The largest was Wikimania 2010, the annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, held at the Baltic Philharmonic in Gdańsk, Poland, in July, the second time the conference has been hosted in the European Union. Four hundred people reportedly attended the event, and sessions were streamed live from all conference rooms (however, the recordings have not yet become available as originally announced). The event was preceded by the WikiSym research conference in the same city, and saw the premiere of Truth in Numbers, a documentary about Wikipedia that has long been awaited; the film provoked much debate and received reviews and further screenings in October and November.
Other major meetups included the NYC Wiki-Conference, held at New York University, including keynotes by author Clay Shirky and Sue Gardner. In March, the fifth annual Wikimedia Polska Conference was hosted in Warsaw, Poland; in June, more than 150 Wikimedians gathered for the "Skillshare" event in Germany. There were many smaller meet-ups this year: the first Mumbai meetup was in September; Wikipedians met in London for a backstage tour of the British Museum; and the 50th Hong Kong meetup was in July.
Collaborating with academia
In May, the Foundation announced its Public Policy Initiative, a 17-month pilot project for which preparations began at the end of 2009 and which is funded by an $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation. In its first stages, it involved students of the subject of public policy at several US universities improving Wikipedia content as part of their coursework, aided by "Wikipedia ambassadors", a concept that is set to grow beyond the Foundation-led pilot project to a community-run program extending to other subject areas and countries. The Initiative also experiments with new ways of assessing article quality, including use of the new article feedback tool. It generated prolonged coverage by media, including major newspapers (example) and student newspapers (examples).
Throughout the year, academics working for the Encyclopedia of Life were vetting Wikipedia articles on biological species, which was hailed as a "proof-of-concept for expert reviews", an idea that goes back to the very foundation of Wikipedia almost 10 years ago as a feeder project for Nupedia.
Another pioneering project concluded after three years: The "Nawaro" project, funded by the German government, achieved its goal of improving coverage of the subject area of renewable resources on the German Wikipedia, but mostly by getting existing Wikipedians interested in the subject and editing articles directly – the second goal of recruiting external experts as sustained contributors was largely missed.
Collaborating with the cultural sector
2010 saw a proliferation of contacts and collaborations between Wikimedia and the cultural sector, customarily denoted by "GLAMs" (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). In April the two communities met at a workshop at the Museums and the Web Conference in Colorado, in October at the Museum Computer Network Conference in Austin, Texas (Signpost coverage), and in November/December at "GLAM-WIKI" conferences in London and in Paris. Such contacts resulted in several major image donations this year: several thousand from the Brooklyn Museum, 30,000 from mineral collector Rob Lavinsky, more than 1000 from the National Archives of the Netherlands and the Spaarnestad Photographic Foundation, and 50,000 from the State Library of Queensland. The French National Library donated 1400 public domain books to Wikisource. However, the German Federal Archives decided not to extend their seminal collaboration with Wikimedia Commons.
The British Museum pioneered a new form of collaboration by hosting User:Witty lama as "Wikimedian in Residence" in May/June (combined with a "backstage pass" tour for Wikimedians), followed by the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Wikimedians also started to cooperate with the staff of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
Controversial images
The long-standing debates on the upload and use of potentially offensive images – especially those of a sexual nature – escalated in several events. In March, the German Wikipedia's main page showed an explicit image illustrating the day's featured article on the vulva, despite protests by Jimmy Wales. In April, Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002) announced he had reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI and to his political representatives, alleging it might be hosting "child pornography" (a wording he later modified) in two categories on Commons. None of the images in question (mainly historical drawings) appear to have been removed from Commons after his allegations, which were rejected by Wikimedia's legal counsel Mike Godwin, and no reactions from the FBI are known. However, Sanger's accusations were given prominence by an article on FoxNews.com, which also added allegations against the Foundation's Deputy Director, Erik Möller, and was strongly refuted by Möller and the Foundation – its Communications department spent "much of late April" on the issue. In early May, Jimmy Wales advocated removing "all images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests" from Commons, but many of the deletions he and other admins carried out met with strong opposition, leading to a reduction of the extended editing privileges attached to Wales' "Founder" user status; this change in his privileges was widely reported (often in exaggerated form) by the media. Wales justified his deletions afterwards by stating that "we were about to be smeared in all media as hosting hardcore pornography and doing nothing about it", and the writer of the Fox News article, Jana Winter, claimed the deletions were done "in response to reporting by FoxNews.com" and its inquiries to Wikimedia donors. During May, Fox published four of Winter's articles on the subject, and followed up in June with an article on pedophiles and Wikipedia that led Wales to suggest that Winter "should be fired from her job. The story is idiotic nonsense from top to bottom." Also in June (after a resolution by the Board), the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner contracted an external consultant, Robert Harris, to conduct a study on the issue of potentially objectionable material on Wikimedia projects. Its recommendations were finished in time for the October board meeting, but not immediately adopted, with the Board forming a workgroup instead. Both Gardner and Ting Chen, the current Chair of the Foundation, have identified the issue as an important example regarding leadership and change at Wikimedia. In December, a poll on Commons failed to gain consensus to promote Commons:Sexual content to a policy.
Technical changes
Development work for a project like MediaWiki (which forms the basis for running the Wikimedia sites) is inevitably divided between big, obvious projects and those developments end-users never get to see (for example, bug-fixing and work on stable releases of the software for other sites to use). Undoubtedly the biggest development of the year was the roll-out (over several months) of the Vector skin as the default on all the many hundreds of Wikimedia wikis, concluding the initial phase of the WMF's Usability Initiative, begun in 2009 and funded by a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly, not all established editors preferred the new theme (and there was criticism of the way it was "imposed" on projects), in general it was well received. It is still a work in progress. It remains to be seen whether this first overhaul of the look of the site in most of Wikipedia's 10-year history can contribute to halting the long-term decline in the number of active Wikipedians.
Another high-profile case for the Wikimedia Tech team in 2010 was implementing the English Wikipedia's plans for a system of flagged protection and patrolled revisions, or, as it became known, "Pending changes". The development of this modified form of the system developed for other language Wikipedias was finished ahead of the prescribed two-month trial started in June. The interpretation of its results involved considerable debate. As an outcome, an update for the software was released in November, and discussion over its use is ongoing. Among the disappointments of the year, for some at least, is that the LiquidThreads extension, designed to make talk pages more user-friendly, has not yet been completed to a point where it can be released to Wikimedia sites on a large scale. According to the Foundation's November 2010 update, part of the problem was staff unavailability, which is set to be resolved in the new year with more hirings.
As one of the main outcomes of the Multimedia Usability project (a one-year project funded by a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation), Wikimedia Commons launched a prototype new upload wizard (and with it, the infrastructure for allowing uploads to be held in a non-public state while associated issues are fixed). A new Resource Loader to speed up page load times is slated for imminent release at time of writing. An increase in the default thumbnail image size (from 180px to 220px) was rolled out, first at Commons in April, then at the English Wikipedia, and over the next few months at all of the other WMF projects.
Among other Chief-level hirings at the WMF, Danese Cooper was named as the new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at the beginning of the year, becoming – in rough terms – one half of the replacement for Brion Vibber, who was both CTO and Senior Software Architect. In December, she was joined by the new Director of Technical Operations, CT Woo. Other hirings included Zak Greant, a technology writer, to help with documentation issues. A full list of outstanding WMF projects, as of December 2010, is also available. The exact role the Foundation should play in driving development of the open-source MediaWiki software, which serves a number of big sites other than Wikimedia wikis, was one of the key issues of contention during 2010, with many observing a rift developing between staff and volunteer developers. By allocating more resources to code review, the Foundation made progress with the backlog of unreviewed revisions, but the new position of "Bugmeister", intended to resolve the much-lamented problem of difficult bug reports and feature requests sometimes languishing for years, appears not to have been filled yet, even though the hire had been intended to be made during October. On a more positive note, 2010 may also be remembered as the year Wikimedians discussed how to best help rival Citizendium with its apparently excessive hosting costs, and as the year the very earliest revisions of the English Wikipedia were finally recovered.
In the news
The enormous amount of public attention for WikiLeaks had a considerable effect on Wikimedia and Wikipedia this year. Since the whistleblowing site's founding four years ago, modeled after Wikipedia at the time, there have been some interactions between the two sites, including confusion in the media, but starting this summer Jimmy Wales and Sue Gardner reported that they needed to explain more often that they were not involved with WikiLeaks. With the release of US diplomatic cables from the end of November, negative effects became tangible (including the departure of the German chapter's treasurer, citing problems for his real-life job), and even the French president confused Wikipedia and WikiLeaks.
As in earlier years, the media covered various hoaxes and errors in Wikipedia articles, such as an article on the French Wikipedia about a supposed traveller, scholar and shipowner born in 1767 in La Rochelle, an article which fooled a prominent politician; also, tourists in La Rochelle were offered guided tours named after the nonexistent local hero.
Wikipedia's policy on spoilers found notable public critics in August, when The Independent kicked up a storm about the Wikipedia article on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap. Christie's grandson said it was "unfortunate" that the article revealed the identity of the play's murderer, which the audience is asked not to reveal to anyone else.
In October, reports emerged of a 42-year-old Kenyan man, Gabriel Nderitu, who had built in his front yard a full-size aircraft he designed himself based, as he said, on Wikipedia as his principal source of information.
Requests for adminship
This year, Requests for Adminship saw a total of only 75 promotions to adminship, compared with 117 promotions in 2009 and 201 promotions in 2008. The number of nominations has dropped drastically; in 2009, a total of 351 Wikipedians requested adminship, while this year, only 227 Wikipedians did so. December 2010 has been the first month since Requests for Adminship began in which there was only one promotion. In a statistical analysis in August, WereSpielChequers also saw a "wikigeneration gulf emerging": "Over 90% of our admins first edited more than three and a half years ago." In recent months, many users have raised concerns at the talk page about the decline of the RfA system and the tightening of RfA standards.
Not all see it in such terms, however. "Areas generally considered urgent (CSD, AfD, Unblock requests, AIV) ... have not been experiencing significant backlogs recently, even though it is a very busy time of year for many, so I think we can all relax secure in the knowledge that ... the project is not going to collapse from lack of administration", wrote Beeblebrox. Iridescent added that "the number of active editors has fallen 10% over the last 12 months. It's entirely to be expected that the number of active admins would also fall by 10%."
Other reviews of 2010
- This week's "WikiProject report" summarizes the Signpost's coverage of WikiProjects over the last year.
- On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) described what he considers as "The Top 10 Wikipedia Stories of 2010"
- The WikiProject "Guild of Copy Editors" has published its 2010 Annual Report
- See this week's "Features and admins" for a look back at the year's featured sounds.
Past years in review
- 2005 in review
- 2006 in review, Part I, Part II
- 2007 in review, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV
- 2009 in review
Reader comments
Wikimedia fundraiser concluding, reaches $16 million goal
On January 1st, the Wikimedia Foundation announced in a press release and a blog posting that the annual fundraiser had exceeded its goal of $16 million - contributed by more than half a million donors, an average donation of $22, during 50 days, making it both the shortest and the most successful fundraiser to date. (As the Foundation's Moka Pantages explained to ReadWriteWeb, a discrepancy to the real-time donation statistics - which shows a cumulative total of $13,457,989.11 at the end of day 50 - is caused by the fact that the latter only count online donations, excluding donations made by checks and to individual chapters.) According to earlier announcements, the fundraiser was set to run about two months until around Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15th, but some banners displayed in the last days of the year proclaimed $16 million as "our 2010 goal", according to a TechCrunch article titled "Wikipedia Still $1M Short Of Fundraising Goal For 2010 (And Why I Donated)".
While the now familiar banners showing Jimmy Wales' appeal for donations were still displayed in parts of the world on January 3 (chapters, rather than the Foundation itself, choose the banners in some areas, per geotargeting), Philippe Beaudette, the head of the WMF's fundraising team, announced in the blog posting that
| “ | we are transitioning into the contribution phase of the campaign. We will be running banners for the next few days to thank everyone who came together in the spirit of creating and 'effectively disseminating the sum of human knowledge available for all.' We will also begin to celebrate Wikipedia’s tenth birthday, with banner ads encouraging readers to join us in a local celebration.
We want to invite every one of the readers of Wikipedia and its sister sites to make their first edit, or upload their first photograph, and join our community of volunteer contributors ... |
” |
According to Beaudette's November 4 announcement, these invitations to edit will also be featured on some of the remaining banner ads, reflecting the integrated view of donors, readers, and Wikipedians as part of the same community that is embraced by the Foundation's Community department.
On the Foundation-l mailing list, Wikimedia's Deputy Director Erik Möller addressed some criticism about the intrusiveness of the fundraising messages (such as the use of animated banners during the last days):
| “ | ... the size and graphical visibility of the banners this year have certainly pushed my own pain points as to what I consider an acceptable balance. At the same time, I've had countless conversations in past years with people who didn't even notice that we were fundraising.
Prior to this year, we didn't really have a good sense exactly what the ceiling of the fundraiser would be, because we'd never pushed it as hard [as] we could before we reached our goal. |
” |
Möller defended the fundraising team's judgment in keeping the balance between achieving effectiveness and avoiding intrusiveness, citing its decision to disable the banners completely for registered users at some point of the campaign, and the fact that "in spite of the proven effectiveness of the Jimmy appeal, the team switched away from it for extended periods of time". One of the alternative banners had generated controversy last month for describing Sue Gardner as "Wikipedia Executive Director". Chief Community Officer Zack Exley first defended the inaccurate job title by the "need to connect with millions and millions of readers", most of whom have never heard about Wikimedia, but later accepted the criticism ("I learned my lesson! Thanks for teaching it"); the banner was changed.
See also this week's "In the news" for further media coverage of the fundraiser's closure.
Board extends term of Board-appointed Trustees from one to two years, re-appoints them
In a resolution last month, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees amended its bylaws to extend the terms of Board-appointed Trustees - board members that are chosen by the board itself, currently four of the ten Trustees - from one to two years. This had been part of the recommendations of the Board's "Governance Committee" (aided by the philantropy firm Omidyar Network) that were already accepted in principle at the Board's October meeting (Signpost coverage). In a subsequent vote, the Board reappointed Stu West and Jan-Bart de Vreede until December 31, 2011, and Bishakha Datta and Matt Halprin until December 31, 2012. Halprin had joined the Board in 2009 while being a partner at Omidyar (see Signpost coverage: "Omidyar Network gives $2M grant, new board member to the Wikimedia Foundation"), but is no longer involved with the firm according to his LinkedIn profile. The Board also reappointed Jimmy Wales to his position as "Community Founder Trustee" until December 31, 2011.
News in brief
- GLAM-WIKI conference recordings: On Friday December 31, Wikimedia UK released the audio recordings of the GLAM-WIKI UK conference in November. They are available in Category:GLAM Wiki UK 2010 on Wikimedia Commons.
- "Editathon" at British Library: On January 14/15, coinciding with Wikipedia's tenth anniversary, the British Wikimedia chapter is holding an "Editathon" at the British Library in London, where up to 20 Wikipedians will "be able to access the resources of the British Library, guided by the expertise of its curators, with the joint aim of improving the content on Wikipedia that is relevant to the British Library's collections."
- Main pages: Erik Zachte, the Foundation's Data Analyst, has announced a page on stats.wikimedia.org collecting screenshots of the main pages of more than 770 Wikimedia projects (sorted by the number of page views of the entire project in each category).
- VolCo leaves: Cary Bass (User:Bastique) has stopped working as the Foundation's Volunteer Coordinator, as announced in August shortly after the formation of the new Community Department (Signpost coverage). As it had been indicated in the announcement, the role is not continuing to exist in the same form, with other staff members taking over as contact points for volunteers (e.g. Philippe Beaudette and Megan Hernandez in the case of the Identification noticeboard).
- Wikimedia Italia report: The Italian Wikimedia chapter has published the English-language version of its latest "Wikimedia News" bulletin, covering the second half of the year.
Reader comments
Multiple news sources relay Wikipedia's fundraising success
After it was announced that the 2010–11 fundraiser had concluded with more than $16 million raised (see this week's "News and notes"), up from $7.5 million in 2009, the news was promptly spread on New Year's day by mainstream news sources, including CNET News and The Atlantic, where Nicholas Jackson blogged "I had grown so used to seeing his face over the past couple of months during the site's annual drive that I was shocked he had disappeared". ReadWriteWeb observed: "A look at the real-time statistics shows that while the average donation remained around the same as years past, the number of people donating was far greater." An ArsTechnica article was titled "For a good cause: Half a million people fund Wikipedia" and a blog posting on MSNBC "Jimmy Wales' creepy stare rockets $16 million in Wikipedia donations". An Examiner.com article (URL blacklisted) summed up the fundraiser's success: "The sheer number of donations seems to show that people are starting to 'get it,' that Wikipedia is an endless sources [sic] of (mostly correct) information."
Briefly
- Canadian Wikipedia use: An article on Internet usage in Canada by The Canadian Press stated that "the average Canadian web surfer reads 16 Wikipedia pages a month, which is the most in the world — one more than German users, two more than Polish users and four more than Americans" (numbers which agree with the Wikimedia Foundation's "Wikipedia page views per country" overview, although the Foundation page lists other countries with a higher monthly page view average, most of which are small nations that may be statistical outliers, but also Finland with 17 monthly views per Internet user). The article remarked that "Canadian users generate about 217,000 edits a month, which ranks eighth among the most productive countries."
Doc Searls with his camera (2005) - Wikipedia "canonical and durable": In a posting on his blog at Harvard University's Berkman Center, US technology writer Doc Searls talked about his geography-related photographs that he had been uploading to Flickr under a CC-BY license, noting that nearly 200 of them had been copied to Wikimedia Commons ("Big thanks to the Wikipedians who have put them there"). On the occasion, Searls recommended fellow Berkman fellow Joseph Reagle's recent book about Wikipedia, Good Faith Collaboration (Signpost review), and explained why he was linking to Wikipedia frequently: "One reason is that Wikipedia is the closest we have come, so far, to a source that is both canonical and durable, even if each entry changes constantly, and some are subject to extreme disagreement. Wikipedia is, like the protocols of the Net, a set of agreements. Another reason is that Wikipedia is guided by the ideal of a neutral point of view (NPOV)."
- Good Faith Collaboration review: The Californian alternative weekly newspaper North Coast Journal also reviewed Reagle's book last week, concluding that it is "short on drama and personality, and so it’s probably destined to be a source document if a publisher is ever convinced that Wikipedia is sexy enough to merit a more narrative-driven treatment. Since that seems unlikely, this may remain the best opportunity for learning about this remarkable project."
Reader comments
- The January 2011 Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive is underway. Help cut down the backlog and earn barnstars along the way.
- Check out the new Syracuse, New York Portal.
- Editors are keen to revive WikiProject Music Theory and WikiProject Louisiana Tech. If interested, add yourself to the project's membership list and head to the project's talk page to get started.
- Article alerts are back! AAlertBot has received final approval and is now delivering article alerts to subscribed projects and task forces.
Starting a new year isn't complete without looking back at the accomplishments of the previous year. For WikiProject Report, 2010 was highly productive and was the section's first year without breaks in coverage. When the Report was revived at the beginning of 2010, the backlog of interview requests stretched all the way back to 2007. Today, the oldest request is from April 2010. Eight contributors reported on 49 WikiProjects and Task Forces ranging from Algae to Zoos. Four of our writers even had the opportunity to experience sitting on the opposite side of an interview.
Pretzels built a permanent home for the Report, the WikiProject Desk, which features lists where Wikipedians can suggest their favorite WikiProject for an interview, the latest schedule of future articles, and workspaces to conduct interviews and build articles. We introduced the WikiProject News Sidebar in March and it proved useful for spreading the word about many new projects, backlog elimination drives, monthly collaborations, and helpful bots. The archives, originally maintained in user space by Cryptic C62, are now an official part of the Signpost.
Before looking back at the projects covered in 2010, we'd like to make a note about our first roundup of previous WikiProject Reports. The archives were incomplete when we wrote the first Where Are They Now?, neglecting the work of Kirill Lokshin from September to early November 2009. He introduced us to WikiProject Anime and Manga, WikiProject Dungeons and Dragons, and WikiProject National Register of Historic Places in addition to revisiting WikiProject Video Games, WikiProject Military History, and WikiProject Tropical Cyclones. His tenure also featured a special report on project banner meta-templates.
Common themes
The natural world dominated WikiProject coverage in 2010. Large umbrella projects like WikiProject Animals and WikiProject Mammals sat alongside smaller projects dedicated to Algae and Gastropods. The highly popular WikiProject Birds has continued to soar since their coverage in May, adding 14 new featured articles to the 63 they possessed when we interviewed them. WikiProject Zoo gave us a look at the zoos, aquariums, and aviaries that shelter and exhibit many creatures while WikiProject Dinosaurs and WikiProject Cryptozoology uncovered the mysteries of extinct and legendary creatures. The environment received coverage as well as natural phenomena like volcanoes and severe weather.
The second most talked-about projects were those related to sports. WikiProject College Football has seen 30 new Did you know? articles since we interviewed the project in November. WikiProject Baseball has added 36 new featured lists to the 117 they had when the project was up to the plate in April. WikiProject Ice Hockey made its second Report appearance in November and has added six new good articles since then. Basketball was represented by WikiProject NBA and auto racing arrived in the form of WikiProject NASCAR. As for international sporting events, Ks0stm introduced us to WikiProject Olympics just in time for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver.
Transportation also played a major role in last year's coverage. A variety of projects answered our call, traveling by air like WikiProject Aviation, sea like WikiProject Ships, rail like WikiProject Trains, or open road like WikiProject Motorcycling and WikiProject U.S. Roads. The places we traveled ranged from the shores of Singapore to the green mountains of Ireland to the skyscrapers of Chicago and the varied landscapes of California.
Literacy was also a common theme. RegentsPark wrote the first chapter of our 2010 series with WikiProject Novels while Mono penned articles on WikiProject Children's Literature and the Percy Jackson Task Force. The unique WikiProject Essays showed us that even the personal views of Wikipedians need a project to keep things organized. The Comedy and Horror genres each warranted their own articles. WikiProject Universities and WikiProject Smithsonian Institution provided the educational background and cultural literacy needed to make 2010 a well-read year.
The computer company Apple Inc. made an appearance, making Mac and iPhone fanboys salivate. The computer language Java also received a nod, confusing some readers who clicked the article hoping to read about their favorite coffee or an island in the Pacific.
Some projects that focused more on improving Wikipedia as a whole included WikiProject Copyright Cleanup, WikiProject Images and Media, the Graphics Lab, and the Uncategorized Task Force.
Backlogs
The year 2010 may be known as the year of Backlog Elimination Drives. Projects took the opportunity to highlight their ongoing drives in the Signpost, with the Guild of Copy Editors making their second appearance and eliciting a note from Jimbo Wales in support of drives like theirs. The Guild held drives in May, July, September, and November. WikiProject Wikify, which was not interviewed this year but made extensive use of the new WikiProject News Sidebar, held drives in October and December. Both projects borrowed templates from the Good Article Nomination Backlog Elimination Drive held in April. At the end of the year, the Wikipedia Contribution Team sponsored a Great Backlog Drive to clean up a variety of projects' backlogs during the annual Wikimedia fundraiser.
Potpourri
A variety of other projects graced the pages of WikiProject Report in 2010. Trekkers/Trekkies got a treat when WikiProject Star Trek beamed down to the surface and Bonoites were similarly pleased when WikiProject U2 rocked the Signpost this past summer. Pious Wikipedians celebrated the glory of WikiProject Saints while a variety of holy and unholy days made an appearance when WikiProject Holidays spread some cheer and controversy about what the word "holiday" means.
WikiProject Military History holds the record for being featured four times in the WikiProject Report, once each year since the section first appeared in the Signpost in 2007. This time, the Report focused on Operation Majestic Titan, a large subproject intended to improve coverage of battleships on Wikipedia.
The Report experimented with different formatting this year, easily seen when comparing how the interview with WikiProject Architecture was constructed and the collection of collectors in the article on WikiProject Numismatics.
We end with WikiProject Bacon because it epitomizes the joy that random WikiProjects can bring. A group of editors sharing a love for salty strips of pork turned their tongue-in-cheek Bacon Cabal into a fully functional WikiProject that continues to be an active project today. If they can do it, anything is possible with a little motivation.
Next week, we'll navigate Her Majesty's Waterways. Until then, you can dip into our vast archives, suggest a project for a future interview, write a brief news blurb for the sidebar, or even become a regular contributor for the WikiProject Report by leaving a note on the WikiProject Desk's talk page. Let's make 2011 our best year yet!
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The Signpost asked reviewer Sven Manguard to do a round-up of the featured sound process in 2010. His report, and his choices of the highlights of the year, appear below in this week's "Features and admins".
New administrator
The Signpost welcomes Grondemar (nom) as our newest admin. Grondemar joined Wikipedia just over a year ago and has some 7,000 edits, many of them on the US state of Connecticut, especially the Connecticut Huskies (the athletic teams of the University of Connecticut).
Featured articles
- Gianni Schicchi (nom), the last opera finished by Italian bel-canto composer Puccini (nominated by Wehwalt and Brianboulton; picture above).
- Alexander of Lincoln (nom), a member of a very powerful Norman ecclesiastical family, who dominated the administration of King Henry I of England and was an important patron of both monastics and authors (Ealdgyth).
- Banksia attenuata (nom), commonly a tree reaching 10 m high, but often a shrub in dryer areas 0.4–2.0 m high. It has long narrow serrated leaves and bright yellow inflorescences, or flower-spikes, held above the foliage, which age to grey and swell with the development of the woody follicles. The species is found across much of the southwest of Western Australia (Casliber; picture at the right).
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (nom), widely considered the Star Trek film most accessible to non-fans. Nominator David Fuchs says, "learn how Leonard Nimoy's voice became the droning of a powerful alien probe, how assistant producers make great punk rockers, and how Star Trek was *this close* to having Eddie Murphy in a starring role."
- Taare Zameen Par (nom), a 2007 Bollywood drama film directed by Aamir Khan, one of the first such films to use "claymation" (Ophois).
- Goldcrest (nom), a very small passerine bird in the kinglet family, with colourful golden crest feathers that give rise to its name (Jimfbleak)
Featured lists
Eight lists were promoted:
- List of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves recipients (1942) (nom) (nominated by MisterBee1966)
- List of National Basketball Association season steals leaders (nom) (Chrishmt0423)
- List of National Basketball Association player-coaches (nom) (Martin tamb)
- Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album (nom) (Another Believer and Jaespinoza)
- Chris Brown discography (nom) (Candyo32)
- Eazy-E discography (nom) (CrowzRSA)
- List of churches preserved by the Churches Conservation Trust in the English Midlands (nom) (Peter I. Vardy)
- Sakharov Prize (nom) (The Rambling Man)
Featured pictures
- Hard-drive head crash (nom and related article), just what ruined your day: a hard-disk failure occurs when a read–write head of a hard-disk drive comes in contact with its rotating platter, resulting in permanent and usually fatal damage to the magnetic media on the platter surface (created by Alchemist-hp).
- Hafnium (nom and related article), another metallic element. There were a few comments about the photographer's red shirt; creator Alchemist-hp reflected on the difficulty of photographing an image of "1001 mirrors".
- Gian Lorenzo Bernini (nom and related article), a self-portrait by the 17th-century Italian artist, painted ca. 1623.
- Red-headed Finch (nom and related article), the vibrant red head of the male of this bird common in southern Africa (created by Hans Hillewaert, denoised by Papa Lima Whiskey; picture below).
- Condylactis gigantea (nom and related article), a tropical species of sea anemone that is found in coral reefs, shallow ocean waters, in shore areas in the West Indies and the Western Atlantic Sea (created by Nick Hobgood; picture at the right).
- Lead (nom and related article), the metallic element (created by Alchemist-hp).
- Hooded Plover (nom and related article), shot on Bruny Island, Tasmania (created by Noodle snacks).
- Sooty Oystercatcher (nom and related article). Creator Noodle snacks says it's "a fairly difficult bird to expose for (being black, with a beak that can easily clip)".
- Welcome Swallow (nom and related article), shot at Risdon Brook Park, Tasmania (created by Noodle snacks).
- Thulium (nom and related article), another valuable addition to our stock of images of the elements (created by Alchemist-hp).
- Lutetium (nom and related article), praised by the reviewers (created by Alchemist-hp).
- St Moritz (nom and related article), a view of the ski resort St Moritz and its lake, as seen from Muottas da Schlarigna, Grisons, Switzerland (created by Murdockcrc).
Featured sound choice of the year
We asked featured sounds reviewer Sven Manguard to comment on the year in featured sounds, and to choose what he feels were the 2010 stand-outs. Featured sounds is a project that recognizes high quality free-use sounds that contribute to the readers' understanding or appreciation of the articles that they are in. (Featured Sounds: Listing · Criteria · Candidates)
"As the year comes to a close, I’d like to reflect on one of the less trafficked areas of featured content, featured sounds. Created by Pharos in late 2005, the featured sounds project has, by the end of 2010, promoted 156 featured sounds in 194 parts. Featured sounds has promoted a diversity of material, everything from 18th-century baroque music penned by JS Bach to a Bulgarian folk-metal song first released in 2001. In addition to musical content, featured sounds includes such historical treasures as the two 1945 speeches by US President Harry S. Truman announcing the surrenders of Germany and Japan, and a collection of phonograph cylinders from 1888 representing the earliest surviving intentional recordings of music in the world. Featured sounds also counts among its numbers a collection of field recordings of animals, and two videos.
Featured sounds has never been a highly trafficked project; however this year saw only 17 sounds promoted, a third of the previous year's promotions, and just under half of those promoted in 2008. For many candidates, fewer than five editors voiced their opinions, and often nominations were promoted with only three voters and one closer participating. Low traffic also led to instances where the process took many months. Of the 23 nominations closed this year, 11 took more than two months, with a record of just over a year for a candidate that was promoted just two weeks ago.
Despite the low number of promotions, 2010 was a year of impressive firsts. June marked the promotion of a recorded drama production of Oscar Wilde's 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan (Acts: I · II · III · IV); this was the first promotion of a recorded drama. In August, the Hungry Lucy album Pulse of the Earth (Tracks: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10) was released under the CC-by-SA-3.0 license and was promoted. Thanks to the work of the nominator, this is the first full-length studio album among our featured sounds, in an area in which it is notoriously difficult to persuade owners to release files under free licenses. In both cases, the promoted materials marked the only known examples of the medium on Wikipedia. Few professional productions are released into the public domain, especially sound files. However, while few professional musicians have released their music into the public domain, a number of Wikipedians have done so themselves. Several promotions were recorded or performed by Wikipedians, including Jujutacular, ZooFari, and La Pianista.
So what is to become of featured sounds? Its value to Wikipedia is unchallenged, and the body of promoted material is considerable. I believe featured sounds deserves to be on the watchlist of any editor interested in producing, selecting, or judging sound recording. Featured sounds has significant potential for growth in the coming year, and I hope that 2011 will see an increase in the number of participants and submissions, and in particular more high-quality performances and recordings produced or performed by Wikipedians.
I leave you with a selection of my choices for the year:
- Field recordings: Three were promoted—two of bird songs and one of a cat purring. Of the three, I chose ZooFari's recording of a Northern Mockingbird calling. The file Mimus Polyglottos impressed in both clarity and duration. I'm no ornithologist, but I still managed to pick out at least a dozen distinct calls from the recording.
- Historical music recordings: Four were promoted that were in part notable for the age of the recordings themselves. It's a Long Way to Tipperary was composed in 1912, and this recording was made three years later. For a recording that is nearly a century old, the quality of this file is excellent. While I find the 1921 recording of Ride of the Valkyries that was promoted just two days before Tipperary to me much more to my taste, no other historical performance promoted this year came close to the quality of sound and encyclopedic value of Tipperary.
- Contemporary music recordings: Three recordings that were produced recently were promoted in 2010. While recordings can be featured regardless of their age, the featured sound criteria for new recordings demand considerably higher quality. Of these three, one made my pick of the year, and is profiled below. The other two, a piece for the guitar by the Spanish composer Fernando Sor—Twelve Minuets - Op 11, No 2—performed by Wikipedian Jujutacular, and a piano composition by the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff—Prelude in B Minor, Op. 32, No. 10—performed by Wikipedian La Pianista deserve to be recognized. Both performers demonstrate skill in their chosen arts and both recordings are both high in quality and provide high encyclopedic value. I have neither the musical knowledge and skill nor the heart to choose between them.
- Choice of the year: While there were several excellent promotions this year, at the end of the day I just had to go with the Hungry Lucy album Pulse of the Earth, nominated by User:J Milburn (files on the linked page and above). Maybe it's just me, but the concept that a known and notable living artist has released an entire studio album under a free license is impressive. While I do not expect it to be so, I think it would be a wonderful thing if more artists released their work under free licenses. Of course, it goes without saying that as a professional studio album, the sound quality is top-notch."
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.
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The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases this week, leaving two cases open.
Open cases
Longevity (Week 6)
Ten editors have so far submitted evidence since the case was opened on 22 November. On 27 December, Ryoung122 (talk · contribs) started to submit a holding statement with preliminary evidence.
Motion
West Bank - Judea and Samaria
Following the request on 14 December 2010 by Jayjg (talk · contribs) to have his editing restrictions from this case lifted, Arbitrator Risker formally proposed a motion to terminate the topic ban. As of publication, the motion has already received the required number of supports from arbitrators, but has not yet been closed.
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WYSIWYG? WYSIWTF!
One of MediaWiki's (and by implication Wikimedia's) longest standing issues - how wikitext can be made more friendly to new and inexperienced users, resurfaced this week. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) solution would allow for editors to use a word processor-like interface to view articles during editing as they would appear after saving, before converting them into the relevant wikitext (see previous Signpost coverage from last August). David Gerard, writing on both the Foundation-l and Wikitech-l mailing lists, suggests that this could raise participation by a significant amount, but the problems were vast:
| “ | Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously easy... Wikia wrote a good WYSIWYG [editor] that works really nicely on new wikis...[but] we can't start from a clear field - we have an existing body of wikitext. So, specification of the problem:
|
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Responses to David Gerard's post raised even more possible issues, among them the lack of a defined syntax for wikitext and Wikimedians' reliance on (often idiosyncratic) templates. George William Herbert added "'We can't do away with wikitext' [has] always been the intermediate conclusion (in between 'My god, we need to do something about this problem' and 'This is hopeless, we give up again')".
In celebrating the new year, Magnus Manske - one of the original MediaWiki developers - also demonstrated his first attempt at an in-browser solution of the issues, entitled "WYSIWTF" (wikitech-l mailing list).
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.
- A new feature has been written to allow users of up-to-date browsers to access thumbnails of their image uploads prior to transfer (wikitech-l mailing list). The feature would allow users to check they are uploading the right file, and whether or not they are about to overwrite a file that is identical but inferior, or completely different.
- A new page documenting with which versions of other pieces of software and with which browsers the MediaWiki software is compatible was started (wikitech-l mailing list).
- Austin McChord, CEO of a firm specialising in data backup and storage, offered to host a copy of the WMF's backups (colloquially known as "dumps") (wikitech-l mailing list).
- Wikimedia Engineering Program Manager Tomasz Finc blogged about a new version of the Open Web Analytics software, the development of which the WMF had been guiding so as to be able to use it on Wikimedia sites, initially for the fundraiser.
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