Planet Wikimedia

Expressing special thanks today to Gerard Meijssen and the Open Progress Foundation for outstanding work opening global access to digitized material from great cultural institutions in The Netherlands.  This week 35,000 images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and due to the cooperative relations he has developed Wikimedian volunteers can obtain high resolution versions of selected highlights upon request, for restoration purposes.

Several months ago I expressed gratitude for these efforts by restoring an 1890s photochrom print of the Amsterdam Centraal railway station.  Today it's Wikipedia's picture of the day being highlighted on the site's main page.

Congratulations, Gerard.  This is for you.  Couldn't have happened to a nicer person.

If you follow the news, you may have noticed a whole series of stories in the last couple of days about how Wikipedia is losing editors. This started with a long article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal (summary in last week’s Signpost), which featured an analysis of research done by my friend and colleague Felipe Ortega, research which was published in his dissertation about Wikipedia contributors this Spring. (Editorial comment from my dissertating-roommate: he had the Wall Street Journal calling him about his dissertation?!)

The article also had quotes from various Wikipedia luminaries, including the two community-representative board members, and Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution. (I suspect the reporters also interviewed a number of people they didn’t end up quoting; they interviewed me this summer, for instance). In a nutshell, the story is about whether there is a net loss of steady contributors to Wikipedia in recent months (Felipe’s data shows a net loss of contributors, though he’s focusing on leave dates, which is an inconsistent indicator; Andrew writes about why). The answer (though this is not highlighted by the WSJ) is that at the very least there seems to be a flatlining of new contributors, proportional to the overall growth of the site, and this has been true for a while. Though there’s dozens of theories, we don’t know why. Our in-house stats are summarized here. (The other conclusion to draw, though the WSJ doesn’t highlight this either, is that Wikipedia research is hard: making assumptions, e.g. about who’s a contributor, must be done with care and with a deep understanding of the system, and no one quite knows how to do it “properly.” Trust me on this; I’ve been following Wikipedia research for a long time).

The article got a lot of buzz, as front-page analytical stories tend to do, and the story (such as it may be) got picked up by a wide variety of other big news outlets.

Though I’m interested naturally in the substance of the story, I’m also interested on a meta-level in the development of the story itself. In one respect, my roommate is right — what’s so special that a major paper wants to write about a fairly technical academic dissertation? Of course, “Wikipedia in decline” makes for a nice headline; but it’s more than that — people are genuinely interested, inside our community and out, whether this project can work over the long-term. At this point, it’s hard to imagine an internet without us; our readership, which is a substantial chunk of the web’s traffic, cares if we stay up or not.

People who evangelize Wikipedia, myself included, like to talk about the extraordinary social system and contributor base the projects have. What matters in the long-term, I feel, is the lesson of how a huge and disparate group of people can come together online to build something; the content that everyone else uses is in some sense a byproduct, though it is the projects’ reason for being. This is also why people care if Wikipedia works: this is in some ways all a grand social experiment.

So will it work? This is a question we’ve been asking and worrying about internally for a long time — though perhaps not as much as one might expect. There’s an old saw that “Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory, only in practice” (see my friend Sage’s post on this subject for a nice analysis) and we’ve more or less run with that so far, crossed our fingers and watched it grow. And it does work in practice — but will it continue to? We’re in the midst of our annual fundraiser right now, as you might have seen from the banner ads, and the budgetary goals are more ambitious than they’ve ever been before; the WMF is reaching out into supporting more areas (outreach about Wikipedia, chapter development) than ever before. Will it work? What does success look like, for us? The foundation is in the midst of a soul-searching year-long strategy development project, but I don’t know that we’re much closer to the answer to those two questions.

So I’ve found the deep and immediate and interested response to this story compelling — everything from the dozens of comments on our own Signpost article to the 113 comments on the original WSJ article, to the story getting picked up everywhere from the BBC to Slashdot. People care, and there’s a lot of anxiety about the future of the participatory web. How can we turn this interest to our advantage? Wikipedia needs engaged people to help find solutions for why more people aren’t participating, and we need more contributors, too (or do we? Not everyone agrees, and in my grumpier moments, I feel like only people who are interested enough to try editing without any prompting ever make it through the Wikipedia gauntlet). But why do such a small percentage of readers ever try editing at all? To my friends, relatives, neighbors, colleagues, who all talk about Wikipedia every time they see me: why don’t you edit? These are the questions I’d like answers to.

I swear I’m alive! I just kind of disappeared for a bit.

School got really busy, and then I ran off to Paris for the Multimedia Usability Project Meeting. It was massively productive, and I got to meet a lot of really cool people I’ve known for a long time online but never met in person. Also, major thanks to Delphine for putting the whole thing together and doing a generally fantastic job. A lot of really good work was accomplished while we were there. We spec’d out a new upload form, we discussed staging areas for new uploads while licensing stuff gets sorted out, the GLAM folks talked about their interests. We had a very good group dynamic of developers and non-developers, and I think it worked out very well in the end. We talked about getting similar small-ish focus groups together in the future; we seem to get a lot done. I’m not sure how these public links work, but here’s my pictures from Paris (if you’re my friend already, they should be viewable from my profile).

Flew back to Richmond, massively jet lagged. Then I got sick. Like, really sick. As in, I ended up in the hospital for several days kind of sick. In the end, they determined I had viral encephalitis caused by the herpes virus (read the scary article). They don’t know how I got it, but the best we can guess is that my immune system was shot from being low on sleep, stressed out, etc. And since the herpes virus is in a huge percentage of the population anyway–myself included–it took advantage of my poor brain. But I’m fine now, and just trying to catch up on life.

Maybe over winter break I can finally do something with MediaWiki again. Maybe we’ll actually get 1.16 soon too ;-)

Wiktionary Lookup is a tool that allows you to double click on a word, and have a little popup with its definition from Wiktionary. (Its enabled on this blog, and several wikis). So far it is translated into:

• English
• Spanish
• Italian
• French
• Japanese
• Dutch
• And several other languages pending

The script itself has improved quite a bit. Words can now be selected by highlighting and pressing ctrl+shift+L in addition to double clicking. It should be able to determine what language the word you are clicking on is in (in some cases anyways), to make sure it gets the right definition. There is now also several configuration options:

• showWord - determine if it should display the word that was looked up (its set to bold on this blog)
• count - number of definitions to return
• height - max height of the popup box
• width - max width
• key - the key combo to look up a word when highlighting
• reverseShift - change the role of the shift key from preventing the popup from appearing when double-clicking, to requiring the shift key be pressed when double clicking

In the future, there will be even more options (such as say the word if audio pronounciation is available), more languages, and more awesomeness ;) See [[n:WN:WiktLookup]] for more details and how to use the script on your own webpage/wiki.

I have a bunch of ideas for more “Wikipedia in Theory” posts, but I’ve been too busy to write any of them lately.  So maybe if I jot down some of the ideas, I’ll get around to them before I forget about them.

• “Wikipedia in Theory (postmodernism edition)” – how does the idea of metanarrative, and the postmodern condition of “incredulity toward metanarratives”, apply to Wikipedia, where readers are free to construct their own narratives as they weave from one article to the next (creating their own larger stories from the small ones in each article)?
• “Wikipedia in Theory (economic governance edition)” – the recent economics Nobel was for work on economic governance of the commons.  How does Wikipedia look in the light the work of Nobel laureates Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson?
• “Wikipedia in Theory (philosophy of technology edition)” – this could actually be several posts, but the key thing to explore is how the technology of Wikipedia shapes its social environment and vice-versa.  A related point that Erik Moeller drew my attention to a few years ago is how the wiki is an environment that allows even fairly novice users to extend and modify the technology, broadly interpreted as not just the base MediaWiki code but also the templates, interface, and even policy and process.
• “Wikipedia in Theory (media studies edition)” – if there’s some truth to the idea that “the medium is the message”, then what messages is Wikipedia’s medium sending?
• “Wikipedia in Theory (cyborg theory edition)” – Donna Haraway’s powerful-but-challenging Cyborg Manifesto (1991) lays out many themes that resonate strongly with Wikipedia and the cultural effects of the net more broadly: the importance of affinity over identity; the blurring of lines between social organisms and social machines; science fiction-inspired utopianism; the “informatics of domination”, and more.

Other suggestions are welcome.  What theoretical perspectives do you find interesting or provocative or useful when applied to Wikipedia?

Related posts:

1. Wikipedia in theory (Marxist edition)
2. Britannica Blog asks "Web 2.0: Threat or Menace?"
3. Wikipedia in theory

I identified the #tropenmuseum picture I blogged about on Commons. For this picture there is already a translation on Commons in Indonesion... When a fellow Wikimedian does this for us on Eid al-Adha, I am truly amazed, happy and grateful.

Penarikan batu “Darodaro” untuk almarhum Saoenigeho dari Bawamatalua, Nias. Batu yang berasal dari dasar sungai ini ditarik menempuh jarak 3 km yang dimungkinkan dengan penggunaan konstruksi alat penarik khusus. Batu besar (megalit), kadang dihias dengan bagus, adalah bagian dari budaya di pulau Nias. Di Nias dijumpai patung batu besar, kursi batu untuk kepala suku, serta meja batu tempat pengadilan. Ada juga batu besar yang dibutuhkan untuk memperingati kematian orang penting. Sewaktu batu untuk tujuan peringatan tersebut dipasang, biasanya diadakan pula suatu pesta ritual yang bertujuan melapangkan jalan orang meninggal tersebut untuk bergabung dengan nenek moyangnya di kehidupan setelah kematiannya. Pada foto terlihat bahwa batu ditarik ke atas. Konon dibutuhkan 525 orang selama tiga hari untuk mendirikan batu ini di desa Bawemataluo. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

Thank you Ivan..
GerardM

I tweeted the following, in a discussion with someone else:

@jeamland mr landeryou has some history on wikipedia. (i did the sockpuppet investigation.)

Mr Landeryou saw fit to send me a threat for this:

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dgerard@gmail.com

Mr Gerard,

I am told you made reference to me in your musings on Twitter. I don't know
you, would rather not have to become familiar with who you are and what on
Earth possessed you to comment so freely about me or to edit Wikipedia to
say absurd things about me.

Your entitled to your opinion of me but I think it might be best for you to
discuss claims you make about me with me first. If you don't, I'll promise
to return the favour after an investigation into exactly what ails you. And
that really would be a waste of time for me and a very unpleasant outcome
for you, so I urge you to Twit more carefully in future.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Landeryou

I look forward to an exchange involving pie charts.

p.s.: if you don’t want your months-long-running Wikipedia shenanigans remembered, it helps not to have done them. Oops, too late.

Uploading tool: New tool for photo scavenger hunts
Election report: Arbitration Committee Election: Nominations closing November 24
Fundraiser: “Wikipedia Forever” fundraiser continues
News and notes: Government stubs, Suriname exhibit, milestones and more
In the news: The Decline of Wikipedia, and more
Discussion report: Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

What’s happening to Wikipedia’s volunteer community? Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages”. The article is a comprehensive description of the challenges and opportunities facing the Wikipedia community. Among other things, it describes recent research findings regarding the number of Wikipedia editors. A quote from the article: “In the first three months of 2009, the English-language Wikipedia suffered a net loss of more than 49,000 editors, compared to a net loss of 4,900 during the same period a year earlier, according to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega.”

Other news stories have further focused on this particular number, some going so far to predict Wikipedia’s imminent demise, others highlighting its strengths and resilience. It’s understandable that media will look for a compelling narrative. Our job is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of what’s going on. This blog post is therefore an attempt to dig deeper into the numbers and into what’s happening with Wikipedia’s volunteer community, and to describe our big picture strategy.

In a nutshell, here’s what we know:

• The number of people reading Wikipedia continues to grow.  In October, we had 344 million unique visitors from around the world, according to comScore Media Metrix, up 6% from September.  Wikipedia is the fifth most popular web property in the world.
• The number of articles in Wikipedia keeps growing.  There are about 14.4 million articles in Wikipedia, with thousands of new ones added every day.
• The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then.  Every month, some people stop writing, and every month, they are replaced by new people.

The numbers quoted in the Wall Street Journal are the result of analysis by Spanish researcher Dr. Felipe Ortega. Dr. Ortega has conducted valuable research on a wide range of aspects of the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.  It is, however, important to understand the meaning of the cited numbers.  Dr. Ortega’s findings are described in his doctoral thesis “Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis.”

Even more importantly, the findings reported by the Wall Street Journal are not a measure of the number of people participating in a given month. Rather, they come from the part of Dr. Ortega’s research that attempts to measure when individual Wikipedia volunteers start editing, and when they stop. Because it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

Dr. Ortega supplements this research with data about the actual participation (number of changes, number of editors) in the different language editions of our projects. His findings regarding actual participation are generally consistent with our own, as well as those of other researchers such as Xerox PARC’s Augmented Social Cognition research group.

What do those numbers show?  Studying the number of actual participants in a given month shows that Wikipedia participation as a whole has declined slightly from its peak 2.5 years ago, and has remained stable since then. (See WikiStats data for all Wikipedia languages combined.) On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000. (See WikiStats data for the English Wikipedia.) Many other Wikipedia language editions saw a rise in the number of editors in the same time period. As a result the overall number of editors on all projects combined has been stable at a high level over recent years. We’re continuing to work with Dr. Ortega to specifically better understand the long-term trend in editor retention, and whether this trend may result in a decrease of the number of editors in the future.

Let’s move on to the bigger picture.

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to ensure that every single human being can share in the sum of all knowledge. Both the health and growth of our volunteer community are key to succeeding in that endeavor. This is why the Wikimedia Foundation works with researchers from around the world to understand what is happening in its projects, supports comprehensive analytics work, and is pursuing long term initiatives to recruit new editors and support the development of its communities:

• Our usability initiative is making it easier to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects by improving the underlying open source technology. Removing barriers is key to recruiting new editors.
• Our outreach initiative is developing a comprehensive set of training and outreach materials that will help us to recruit new volunteer editors.
• Our strategic planning initiative is a unique community-driven process to identify how we can maximize our impact. One of its task forces is specifically studying community health.

Wikimedia chapter organizations around the world are supporting our technology work, our outreach initiatives, and strategic partnerships; their activities are documented in the archive of chapter reports.

The Wikimedia volunteer community is also engaged in important discussions and experiments. A community-initiated project in the English Wikipedia, for example, tried to assess the typical experience of new Wikipedia editors when trying to contribute useful content. This newbie treatment study is directly informing community discussions about community processes. Similar experiments and large strategic discussions are happening in other languages.

These discussions and projects are important. Wikimedia is a unique global volunteer movement to share what we know, to make and keep it available. We need your help and your participation in these initiatives – please follow the above links and get involved.

We want more people to join us, to edit Wikipedia to make it richer and better and more comprehensive. We don’t know what the “perfect” number of Wikipedia volunteers is, but we do know that we want to significantly increase it from where it is today.

In addition to direct volunteer participation, Wikimedia depends on public support. If you share our goal of bringing free knowledge to every person on the planet, please make a donation today.

Erik Moeller, Deputy Director
Erik Zachte, Data Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

Today we had a meeting at the Tropenmuseum where Multichil and me were given some 35,000 images to be uploaded to Commons. These images are from Indonesia and, there are more images to come. Richard, has been really busy cleaning up this collection in order to make sure that these images conform to the high standards of the Tropenmuseum.

This collection comes with annotations in Dutch and I am really happy that the Indonesian chapter is willing to organise translation into Indonesian. In this way this part of the Indonesian cultural heritage becomes truly available to the Indonesian people. It would be good if we are able to find people willing to translate all this in English as well; this makes it truly opens up as part of our global cultural heritage.


A good example is this picture of people from the village of Bawemataloeo on the island of Nias. While it is a great picture, it can only be understood with its annotations.

Het verslepen van de steen 'Darodaro' voor de gestorven Saoenigeho van Bawamataloea, Nias. De steen wordt uit de rivierbedding gehaald en over een afstand van ca. 3 km versleept waarvoor een speciale sleepconstructie wordt gemaakt.

Grote stenen (megalieten), al dan niet fraai bewerkt, waren een onderdeel van de cultuur van het eiland Nias. Er waren grote stenen beelden, stenen zetels voor de hoofden en stenen tafels waaraan recht werd gesproken. Er waren ook grote stenen nodig voor de nagedachtenis van belangrijke overledenen. Bij het oprichten van een dergelijke steen moest een ritueel feest gegeven worden. Dit alles om een edelman in staat te stellen zich bij zijn vergoddelijkte voorouders in het hiernamaals te voegen. Op de foto wordt zo'n steen naar boven gesleept. De overlevering wil dat het 525 mensen drie dagen gekost heeft om deze steen op zijn plaats in het dorpje Bawemataloeo te krijgen. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

The dragging of the stone “Darodaro” for the deceased Saoenigeho of Bawamataloea, Nias. The stone came out of the river bed and was dragged over a distance of 3 km made possible by a special dragging construction.

Big stones (megaliths), some nicely decorated, were a part of the culture of the island of Nias. There were big stone statues, stone seats for the chieftains and stone tables were justice was done. There were also big stones needed to commemorate of important deceased people. When such a stone was errected, a ritual feast was to be given. All this to enable a nobleman to join his godly ancestors in the afterlife. On the photo such a stone is hauled upwards. The story has it that it took 525 people three days to erect this stone in the vilage of Bawemataloeo. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

The upload of material from Suriname proved to be a great preparation; as the data is provided to us in the same format, Multichil was able to start with the upload the same evening.. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!


~IShadowed

This means roughly 1% of the articles in the Turkish Wikipedia have featured pictures.  One featured picture can illustrate multiple articles.  That comes out as a far higher ratio than at any other Wikipedia of substantial size.

What's really interesting is how one medium sized Wikipedia developed a featured picture program that's 25% larger than the German program.  A core of perhaps half a dozen Turkish editors have been scouting other language projects' featured picture programs, translating the captions into Turkish, and adding the images to articles on their Wikipedia.  Featured picture content at the other projects is different enough from one site to another that the Turkish editors could amass three or four thousand featured pictures if they just keep doing what they're already doing.

Of course I hope they also knock on the doors of museums in their home country. Also very curious about whether this generates synergies with text edits and improvements at their Wikipedia.

Two things happen universally when people from other parts of the world see restored featured pictures about their own culture:

1. They're delighted.
2. They want to share information.

Now and then I do restorations about Turkish history and culture, in gratitude and to give their project an extra boost.  The most recent of these is the 1917 Ottoman heliograph crew at Huj pictured above.  Its featured candidacy is underway at the Turkish Wikipedia.  Last week the Turkish Wikipedia passed Wikimedia Commons as the project where I have the second most featured content credits.  Darned if I understand the discussion other than the succession of green light icons.

The Turkish editors have created a model that can be emulated.  And I'm very interested in trying a pilot project with another Wikipedia to see whether a caption translation and featured picture drive would provide a shot in the arm in terms of editor participation and article growth.

One place where I'm proposing a pilot program is the Irish language Wikipedia.  They already have a small featured picture program (two dozen images, a quarter of which I restored) and I know one of their administrators (hi there Alison) and have done a few restorations specific to her country and culture.  A few days ago President Kennedy came up in conversation and I asked whether she knew en:wiki has a featured picture of his brother.

There's Robert F. Kennedy at a CORE rally in 1963: the Attorney General of the United States speaking from the steps of the Justice Department in favor of racial equality.

Very cool.

Right now the Irish Wikipedia is the ninety-second largest Wikipedia with 9,274 total articles.  If their editor community is willing I'd like to help them emulate the Turkish featured picture program.

Although I can't speak a word of either language, if a picture is worth a thousand words we can hold a conversation.

My friend Sean from OpenMoko recently gave me one of OM's new WikiReaders. It's essentially a touchscreen-based device dedicated to displaying Wikipedia articles offline.

And while I'll never forgive the thing for not having an Edit button, I've got to admit the device is pretty cool. Not only does it make it possible to bring WP to a bunch of places that are otherwise impossible or impractical, the thing is built entirely with free software. One of my colleagues at the Center for Future Civic Media suggested we should put one in every bar to help settle drunken arguments. Think of the lives we might save!

I hope the device becomes successful but I'm worried about what success will mean for the already indefensibly large gap between the number of readers and editors on Wikipedia. After all, the ability to change and contribute is the thing that makes Wikipedia interesting, empowering, and successful; cutting this functionality out kind of misses much of the point.

I think it is important to start implementing a simple method to allow users of these types of devices to contribute back. Over the last few years, Sj and I have talked repeatedly about a simple method for contributing back from offline devices that would even be possible from devices like the Om Wikireader where editing the articles is probably impractical. Perhaps the device could be extended so that people could write short comments about articles from their reader --- there's an on screen keyboard after all --- which could be saved to a log on the SD card. When the data on the card is updated, messages from this log could be uploaded somewhere --- perhaps the talk pages of the articles in question or some dedicated page or ticketing queue. Editors could help merge these changes back into the articles.

Defend an openess that does not exist? A wiki is a web site everybody (or anyone) can edit, they say. But how „wiki“ is Wikipedia nowadays? Ed Chi has taught us that 20 % of a newbie’s edits are reverted, in comparison to 2 % of the edits of an experienced Wikipedian. It became difficult to [...]

It's a mostly good image with several tricky problems including a crease that runs vertically through the Statue of Liberty's hand and torch.  Today let's look at the ink smears.  It isn't unusual to encounter smeared lettering on historic posters.  Often the source of the problem is water damage.  In this instance it only affects the line that was printed in black ink.  Most of the caption is gray and doesn't have this problem, but the entire line of black lettering has ink smudges.

In case you're wondering, this poster translates to say, "Food will win the war - You came here seeking freedom, now you must help to preserve it - Wheat is needed for the allies - waste nothing."  It was printed in 1917.

• Paper texture in historic images is not created equal.  Slight differences will occur in brightness, color balance, and roughness.  So the source area has to be chosen with an eye for those subtle distinctions or else the result will look patchy.
• The letters have to look like they exist naturally within the cloned area.  This means the cloning has to mimic the aliasing that occurs in undamaged regions.

My first passes worked mostly with large areas and a tool setting of 12 to 15 pixels in diameter.  The source area for this cloning comes from an area that looks a bit rougher and more textured than most of the poster.  Our goal here is not to create something that's digitally perfect, but that fits seamlessly with the surrounding image.  The aim is to mimic good printing for 1917.

There's nothing quite like the moment of enjoying an editor's reaction for the first time when he realizes, "I did this."  So cheers to Jujutacular.  Looking forward to seeing his next project.

----
Per request, adding links to the full versions:

• Unrestored
• First restoration
• Second restoration
  

The first ever Wikimedians’ conference is taking place in Tokyo this weekend. A group of Wikimedians, who were inspired by Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, gathered in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan in the late summer of 2008. Those who traveled to Alexandria shared their excitement and inspiration gathered from Wikimania, and others listened. The excitement in the room turned into collective will power, determined to form a Wikimedians’ conference in Japan within a year from the meeting.

Wikimedia Conference Japan (WCJ) is happening this Sunday, November 22nd, at the University Tokyo’s Hongo Campus. The Center for Knowledge Structuring of the University Tokyo offered the space for this conference. Japanese National Institute of Informatics also supports this conference and invited Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, to give the keynote speech. WCJ will cover a number of topics including academic research, wiki workshops, introduction of Wikimedia projects, language support and education.

The goal was to draw 150 participants, however due to overwhelming interest, 180 have already registered with more expected on the day of the conference. As a volunteer organizer, I am sending my cheers to WCJ organizers from San Francisco. I hope this conference will create synergy among Japanese Wikimedians and who knows, Wikimania 2011 could take place in Tokyo.

Naoko Komura

The Tropenmuseum has provided a very special challenge.  This post is probably the first glimpse of it to become visible to the public.  Roughly speaking, it's something like the Bayeux Tapestry of Indonesia.  The museum had it professionally photographed in twenty-nine parts.  Then they discovered that none of the digital segments quite matched together: the lighting was slightly uneven from left to right and the thin tapestry fabric had shifted so that the fibers and images no longer matched neatly.  These problems affected every one of the twenty-nine segments; the museum staff thought the image couldn't be stitched.  We've had very enthusiastic responses from the museum staff now that I've pieced it into a single file.  It's a huge job: 992.4 MB.  Now it gets interesting.

There's a lot more to be said about the digital restoration on an image that's nearly a gigabyte than one blog post can encapsulate.  One part that's easy to recognize is the large brown stain that runs vertically along this segment.  Today's post takes a different approach to repair than the last post because this time the original design remains visible within the damaged area.

In terms of digital image data, this stain consists of three elements:

• Brightness
• Color
• Contrast
  

If one thinks of a stain as too dark and deficient in blue and lacking contrast, then the way to eliminate the stain is to brighten, add blue, and restore contrast.  The concept is simple.  It's mainly a matter of creating enough masks to make the corrections in small increments.  Stains tend to be uneven so different portions require individual adjustments.  Here's an interim save as it looks on my monitor right now.

• (mooning)
  
• (finger)
• (rofl)
• (headbang)
• (smoking)
• (poolparty)
• (drunk)
• (toivo)
• (myspace)
• (heidy)
• (rock)
• (bandit)
• (flag:us)
  
• (fubar)
  

~IShadowed

Waldir has previously guest-blogged here and I am happy to welcome him back for his second post. Congrats on helping make this cool project happen! —Brianna

Image by AntWeb, licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0

written by Waldir Pimenta

Did you know that the most venomous insect in the world is an ant? That’s right. One sting from the Maricopa Harvester Ant is equivalent to twelve honey bee stings — the required amount to kill a 4.5 pound rat.

I found that over a year ago, through University of Florida’s Book of Insect Records. I immediately headed to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about it, but to my surprise there was no such article! I thus started one from scratch, using some information I found in several ant-related websites. Eventually people started adding information to the article, up to the point that it contained a fairly good collection of information about this fascinating species. But still one thing was missing — something that single-handedly could make the article ten times more useful: an image.

So, when searching for images to illustrate it, I found the fantastic images from AntWeb, a project from The California Academy of Sciences, which aims to illustrate the enormous diversity of the ants of the world. I was especially happy to find that they were using a Creative Commons license — but soon after I was disappointed to find that the specific one they used (CC-BY-NC) was not appropriate for Wikipedia (or, more generally, free cultural works, and thus discouraged by Creative Commons itself).

So I sent them an email suggesting them to change the license. When they replied, I found out that they actuallly had been internally discussing license issues for quite a while. I kept in touch, and made sure to let them know the advantages of having their work showcased in such high-traffic websites as Wikipedia, Commons or WikiSpecies.

I like to think that my two cents helped in their decision, some time later, to not only change their license to CC-BY-SA, but also upload all their images to Commons themselves! This was part of their overall mission: “universal access to ant information”. Before, the AntWeb project focused only on digitization of content and development of the web portal; but now they also decided to “export” AntWeb content to improve access. Putting the images and associated metadata in Commons was an example their outreach initiatives.

This was very welcome by the community, and there was a lot of input on how best to perform the mass upload in order to make the images easy to find and be used to illustrate articles and other relevant pages. The process took several days, but finally, over 30,000 images were uploaded, full with EXIF tags, taxonomic data, and geographic information when available.

This is just the beginning, though! As usual in the wiki world, you can help! There are articles to be illustrated in the various Wikipedia language versions (Magnus’ FIST tool comes in handy for finding them!). There are WikiSpecies pages to be illustrated. There are categories in Commons to be created to allow the ant category tree to be navigated and have every ant image reachable through it. And more importantly, there are these great news to spread and let people who are interested in ants know that they can now count on what’s possibly the greatest online repository of free, high-quality ant images.

Many thanks to Brian Fisher, AntWeb Project Leader, who coordinated the license change process, Dave Thau, AntWeb Software Enginer, who wrote the upload script and performed the upload, and to all the AntWeb staff for their outstanding work!

Over the last few weeks Huffington Post readers have been asked to select a variety of ‘game changers of the year’ in categories ranging from entertainment, philanthropy, eco, and media.  We were very pleased to see our own Executive Director Sue Gardner nominated as one of the Post’s ‘game changers’ of the year – and as of today we’ve learned that Sue came out on top – she is the chosen game changer of the year in media!  Way to go, Sue!

How Sue is changing the game, according to the Huffington Post:

Taking the people’s online encyclopedia to the next level. Drawing on the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission of bringing free knowledge to everybody, executive director Gardner is overseeing a strategic plan to broaden access to Wikipedia’s vast storehouse of information. Her battle plan: making Wikipedia easier to use and available to more people worldwide. Expansion takes money, but it helps to be one of the Web’s five most-trafficked sites. In the depths of the recession, the foundation raised $3 million in ten days, completely covering its 2009 operating budget.

We couldn’t agree more! Thanks to the poll voters and Huffington Post readers for putting our Foundation’s leader at the top of the game. And voters, take your love for Wikipedia and make a donation to Wikipedia and the Foundation during our annual campaign!

Jay Walsh, Communications

I’ve been meeting with a lot of GLAM institutions recently who are keen to collaborate with Wikimedia projects but, unsurprisingly, wanted to “go on a few dates before getting married”. So, this post is directed to those institutions who are looking at finding a small, manageable project that they can undertake with the Wikimedia community - a project that has a low level of risk and difficulty but with a relatively high level of measurable impact. A good ROI for some low-hanging fruit, if you will. This is by no means the only thing a GLAM could collaborate on with the Wikimedia community, so don’t be limited by it, but it is nevertheless a viable option.

Dearest GLAM,
What I suggest is that you upload one image, of one object, to Wikimedia Commons.
Just the one.
But, a quite specific one.

1) Selection
I suggest that you find within your collection an item that is notable in and of itself. Ideally this object already has a Wikipedia article written about it already or it should be an object of individual significance enough to warrant such an article (see our policy on Notability). If you don’t have any such items in your collection perhaps there is something, though not uniquely notable, that is a perfect example of its type and warrants being the headline image for the article about genre/style/craft.

To avoid conflicts between the Wikimedia community and the institution about whether the faithful reproduction of a 2D object creates new copyright in favour of the organisation making the reproduction (see the backgrount to the NPG controversy for more information about this subject), I recommend specifically choosing a 3D item - an ancient sculpture or archeological artifact for example - that is in itself definitively out of copyright. Thereby, your photograph of this object is incontrovertibly the institution’s own copyright and no other copyright claims exist.

2) Username
Go to Wikimedia Commons (the multimedia repository associated with Wikipedia) and create a user account. Technically, Wikimedia policy says you’re not supposed to have “role accounts” (usernames associated with an organisation rather than an individual). Speaking for myself, I can understand this on Wikipedia (where a role-account may be promotional and unaccountable) but on Commons having a role account seems to me to be a good thing as it provides good attribution to the institution. So, whilst the anti-role-account rule is in place I suggest the institution create a username something like “user:JohnCitizen_NationalMuseumofAtlantis” (this gives both attribution and personalisation).

3) Tech specs
Take your “canonical photograph” of this item and compare it to the existing free-use images available of it online (e.g. in the Wikipedia article, on Flickr, Google Image search etc.) and also compare it to Wikipedia’s “Featured Picture Criteria“. Ideally the image being donated to Wikimedia Commons should be of higher quality than any other freely-available image of the object and the image should be clearly above the minimum standards for being listed as a Featured Picture. Among other things, this means that it should be at least 1000pixels along the longest side. But, as with all of Wikipedia’s quality standards, this tends to increase over time so it is good to go significantly above these criteria if possible (especially if the subject of the photograph has fine/intricate details). Also the level of “wow factor” to the Wikimedia community is almost directly proportional to the resolution of the image. For example, some of our most highly prized images are simply huge. (Also, please don’t upload images with watermarks or equivalent).

4) Upload and notify
Although it’s a bit unwieldy (and we’re working on improving it), use the “upload file” form and upload the image putting in as much attribution, metadata, captioning as you want. Many of the specific elements of uploading are a bit tricky to work out (e.g. placing it in categories or giving it a geo-code) but the essential should be straightforward. The most important bit is that the image is “your own work” (i.e. it’s copyright to the institution) and that you agree to release this copyright under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. (Other acceptable copyright licenses are available but this is the Wikimedia community’s preference.) Yes, this license does mean that third-parties can make commercial use of your image without asking your specific permission. But! If they make a derivative work (such as incorporating the image into a montage for a documentary film) then that derivative work has to be “shared alike” and made equally freely-available. This, not surprisingly, is something that commercial re-users rarely want to do and therefore they would need to get your specific permission for their usage requirements. Feel free to charge them $$$$$ if they are unwilling to release their work into the commons like you have.

Because your image has never been made available before under a free-license, it is probable that Wikimedians checking the copyright status of new uploads might be suspicious that the image has been uploaded without the copyright holder’s consent. Write an email, from your work email address (for verification purposes), to the “permissions system” attesting to the fact that the upload is legitimate and that you really did intend to release it under that license. If you don’t do this, someone might list the image for deletion from Wikimedia Commons in an attempt to make sure that the copyright of your institution isn’t being infringed. The burden of proof on copyright checking lies with the uploader, not the deleter.

5) Tell a Wikimedian
Tell several. Tweet it. Dent it. Blog it. Notify someone on the discussion page associated with the Wikipedia article about the item itself. Leave a message with your local Wikimedia Chapter or the relevant WikiProject. These people will then rally around the image and make sure that it is appropriately categorised, and that it is used in relevant Wikipedia articles, probably in several languages. For example, the Deutsches Bundesarchiv ’s image of Konrad Adenauer is now used as the headline image in upwards of 15 language editions of Wikipedia. It is now THE image of Adenaur across the internet (see the “global file usage“).

6) Go for Gold
Leave it a week and then check to see how many times the image is being used in Wikipedia, especially the Wikipedia edition in your institution’s “home” language. Assuming you’ve uploaded an image of high enough quality then the image may very well qualify as a Featured Picture. Nudge a Wikimedian or two to ask them to nominate it as a Featured Picture Candidate for you. What will follow will be about a week’s worth of public critiquing of the image’s technical quality, encyclopedic value, replicability… The image may get worked on a bit in Photoshop by a Wikimedian or someone might come along and crop it more tightly. But, if all goes well, then the image will be given the gold star that is Featured Image status. Congratulations.

The image is now worthy to be displayed on Wikipedia’s main page for a day. There is a queue for this and every FP is eligible for this honour once. Generally FPs go on the mainpage on a first-in first-out basis, but hopefully given that you’re a special guest on Wikipedia, someone will bump-up your image to appear on the mainpage sooner rather than later - but there’s no promises Unfortunately, we don’t currently clicktrack people going to the GLAM’s website from the image’s attribution statement (for privacy reasons) but if you are aware of the image’s imminent appearance on the mainpage then perhaps you could get your own tech department to monitor inbound traffic to your website over that 24 period to see if there is any difference. You can also check how often the article appears is viewed by clicking on the “history” tab at the top of the article, then click “page view statistics”. You should see a noticeable spike once the stats are compiled a day or two later.

7) Repeat!

Best of luck.

Well apparently Daniel Brandt thought me important enough to add to his "hive mind". Let's take a look at what he's released: My birthdate, yep I already released that Where I live, odd I think I already released that My full name, oooh this is a fun one, it was my old wikipedia username So all in all Daniel, you haven't really released anything. At least about me. Well he also decided that

We’re excited to learn today that the Webby Awards have chosen Wikipedia as one of the ten most influential “Internet moments of the decade.” The timing is excellent as we’re now well-underway with our 6th annual fundraising drive.  It’s a great time to think about the extraordinary efforts of thousands of volunteers to make Wikipedia and its sister projects, and to make a donation to help ensure Wikipedia forever.

Alongside the other major hallmarks of a decade of the web, including protests in Iran, the 2008 presidential election, the expansion of craigslist, and the debut of the iPhone, Wikipedia is profiled – highlighting early beginnings in 2001 with 20,000 articles and 18 languages to its status today as a top-five web property used by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

Thanks to the Webby’s for such esteemed recognition, and congrats to the other big projects and story-makers of the year. Here’s to another big decade of influencing the web and promoting free knowledge!

Jay Walsh, Head of communications

Okay, some time ago, they blew up the Wikipedia article on Exaile. (One of the major Linux music players obviously needs no article.) Now, they've blown up the article on MyPaint.

The latter is an annoying case. No, admittedly there's no sources. Nominator says "we shouldn't have a consensus for deeming most FOSS as notable" - well, duh, maybe we should craft actual software notability criteria then, it seems to be AWOL at the moment, and it's a tad bit annoying that the software notability has to be judged solely through the common notability criteria (i.e. availability of outside coverage). But Exaile's case showed that even reviews in high-profile web sites shouldn't be trusted. The fact that Blender guys endorse MyPaint is obviously not important at all. What the hell can we trust these days, then? Do we need the third-party books nowadays?

We need the MyPaint article. Where's MyPaint's press coverage? Should I blame them for not publicising the project better?

And at the same time, we get more and more and more bullshit articles that no one even looks at. If the deletionists are winning, why the hell does the site have over 3 million articles? Why?

And an actual quote from the deletion discussion: "Thank god we don't have a bunch of "WP:IAR" hand wavers this time around and can delete this cleanly." Yeah, especially when everyone who values their sanity stays the hell away from AfD. I've been writing a webcomic about assassins lately, and haven't done that much research into the topic yet, but even I know that best way to murder someone in the night is to make sure no weird helpful people buzz around and stay concerned about wellbeing of others. With attitudes like this, it's easy to see why I don't follow AfD any more.

And let's not forget the whole recent deletion and deletion reviews discussions around Human disguise. Hundreds of kilobytes. Thousands of words. A few million bullets. No answers.

Here's an analogy that I posted on my user page today:


In summary: with each case like this, my faith in the workability of AfD decreases. We need some new process to replace it.

Articles get murdered in the night.

So yeah, I've probably snapped. I just can't defend our deletion processes any more. I'm not having a complete mental breakdown here.

I'm not blaming anyone here. I try not to call anyone names - the above comment about shotgun-wielding ignoramus psychopats is an obvious exaggeration and anyone who doesn't get that is an obvious n00b who has no idea about our consensus on humour.

I'm against these prevalent negative attitudes.

Simply put, I'm against the notion that producing hundreds of kilobytes of deletion and deletion review discussions is somehow helping the community to build an encyclopedia. We're pretending we're seeking consensus and acting toward the good of the website. We failed to realise that the site is growing too fast for AfD to handle.

I still somehow have faith in tomorrow. Somehow.

I just wonder why no one's fixing things.
I mean, I can't. I've got to go draw more stuff using the awesome graphics application that doesn't exist because some nascent philosopher figured out its existence is original research. Damn. Can't really argue with that.
Do I sound jaded again? Sorry...

In past few months I had lots of changes going on – left the Sun/MySQL job, my term on Wikimedia Board of Trustees ended, I joined Facebook and now I got appointed to Wikimedia Advisory Board. This also probably means that I will have slightly less hands-on work on Wikipedia technology (I’ll be mostly in “relaxed maintenance mode“), though I don’t know yet how much less – time will show :)

P.S. I also quit World of Warcraft. ;-)

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative partnered with Bolt Peters and Davis Research to evaluate the changes we’ve implemented so far and inform our work moving forward.  If you don’t know what changes we are talking about, check out our Beta (including a new skin, new toolbar, improved search, and more) by following these instructions.

Overall, the study confirmed that we are on the right track with our beta features – showing us room for improvements, maybe a bug or two along the way, and work yet to be done!  You can view the full report (and soon the full videos) on our project wiki, but we thought we’d share with you some highlights:

Success

“It was easy, and I wouldn’t have thought it would be that easy.”

“Before there were a lot of tools, and I liked that they were all spread out in front of you, but this actually makes a lot of sense. I had to muddle my way through the older system, but this one seemed fine.”

“Websites don’t have common sense, but programmers do.”

The majority of our 8 interview subjects found and used our features and tools without instruction and with success.  Special victories go to our more spacious and grouped tabbed navigation, improved search and new searchbox location, and built-in toolbar.  In using these features, users were not only less intimidated, but also showed a greater ease of use and increased performance.  All of the 8 users successfully found the “edit” tab with a minimum of hunting; no one resorted to Google to get to the Wikipedia article they were seeking; two of our users even expressed pleasure and delight in the process!  Perhaps small victories, but a major change from our first study if you remember!

Needs Improvement

“Uh-oh, I think I may have made the wrong kind of link before. I’ll go to the preview window to see if this is a link. It would have been nice to just edit it in the preview.”

“This is different, it’s got these hot-links [the table of contents]. That’s nice.”

“Links are so easy to screw up. I’m not sure if we’ve correctly typed the link markup. Ah, there are these buttons…”

Some of our tools are definitely still rough around the edges – their flaws and failures were seen in technicolor when observing people using them.  Our link dialog caused the most confusion.  6 of our 8 users initially made some errors in using it, and some received a false positive assurance when they had not actually accomplished the link behavior they were attempting.  Oops!  Our features need to err on the side of a user’s expectation rather than giving users access to the technical structure or wiki syntax, which they did not in this case.  For example, to create a new link in our prototype, users were asked to specify whether they wanted to create an “external link” (to a website) or “internal” link (to a different article) – a differentiation that exists in wiki code, but not in the eyes of a novice user.  Additionally, our toolbar buttons need to behave consistently and be grouped accordingly.  Having dialogs for links and tables, and not having one for a reference was not acceptable and led to some quite confused and persistent button pushing by our subjects.

Speaking of buttons, our “Bold” and “Italics” toolbar buttons use the roman character “a” – the result of our struggled effort to be accessible to an international community while attempting to take advantage of software standards.  In our effort to generalize, we became too general – even those users who correctly guessed the purpose of these buttons had to hover over or use them to confirm their assumptions.  We’re going all in – look out for our efforts to make our toolbar icons language specific soon!

As if we didn’t already know it – adding media or “embedding a file” was the least understood toolbar action of our study.  Most users avoided it, but when they did the sample text that it inserted provided no additional insight.

Moving Forward

“I’m completely intimidated by that [template].”

“I’m not sure what that is. I’m going to save it and then see, because this preview is too confusing.”

Our study illustrated how large an effect a small change can have and brought to our attention tweaks and enhancements that need to be made to our current features.  It also showed us that we are just a slice of what is a very, very large pie.  We had many deja vu moments seeing users flounder around previewing and saving, many times adopting strange techniques and multiple windows to add a simple sentence.  The terms “code,” “computer lingo,” “html” often came up and highlighted the separation users feel from their content while editing.  The expectation for editing a wiki to be similar to editing a blog or word processing document was still prevalent.  And though our Table of Contents and built-in cheat sheet put out some small fires, when navigating an lengthy article or searching for help, we again heard “there sure is a lot of stuff to read” and “this is where I’d give up.”

As we’ve mentioned before, we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants surface.  But I think I can speak for our team when I say we all felt a certain amount of satisfaction in the results of those problems we did address and it has only made us more eager to attack new problems and iterate on solutions we’ve proposed.  As always, we look forward to your comments, insights, and feedback!  We also appreciate your contributions during our fundraiser – it’s in part community support like this that makes the Foundation’s work possible.

Parul Vora + the Wikimedia Usability Initiative

• French
• German
• Spanish

I use Wikipedia quite a lot. Well, I mean… really a lot! Most of the time I can survive without Wikipedia. But I may sometimes feel as well quite disarmed without it. I need it a lot for my work, I use it also just for my own pleasure… Then I find it of course very convenient to be able to browse Wikipedia on my mobile phone. Anywhere, anytime…

Well, people like me may be interested by the fact that our company, Linterweb, has just released a mobile version of its semantic Wikipedia search engine, Wikiwix.

It is quite simply called wikiwix.mobi.

Like Wikiwix, it gives only results out of Wikipedia.

This mobile version is available at the address http://wikiwix.mobi/. Just give it a try!

So, we hope you will enjoy wikiwix.mobi, and of course enjoy Wikipedia,

Take care, Matthieu.


Linterweb is a web company that, for now several years, has been developing various Wikipedia oriented programs, including:

• Wikiwix, a semantic web search engine that gives only results out of the databases of the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects; My Wikiwix, your own search engine for your own website; wikiwix.mobi, a mobile version of Wikiwix;
  
• Okawix, the offline Wikipedia browser free of copyrights and free of charge that allows you to read offline the articles of the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, as well as archives of your own website;
  
• a DVD of around 2000 articles from the English speaking Wikipedia; a USB flash drive that contains the version 0.7 of the English speaking Wikipedia;
• …

Fundraiser: “Wikipedia Forever” fundraiser begins
Bulgarian award: Bulgarian Wikipedia gets a prestigious award
Election report: Arbitration Committee Election: Several candidates standing
News and notes: Kiswahili contest, new advisory board members, Foundation-l and more
In the news: German lawsuit, Jimbo interview and more
Sister projects: Wiktionary interview
Discussion report: Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News