Planet Wikimedia

Giving thanks

2009-11-24T10:30:22+00:00

Most of the active Wikimedians are aware that the English language Wikipedia is largest in terms of total articles and the German Wikipedia is second, but it it comes as a surprise that the second largest featured program is not German but Turkish.

The English language Wikipedia currently has 2,111 featured pictures. German has 747 featured pictures. Yet the Turkish Wikipedia has 976 featured pictures. That sets the Turkish language site in second place if one counts by Wikipedia editions. To set this in perspective, the Turkish Wikipedia is nineteenth in overall size with 138,000 articles. The German Wikipedia is on the verge of crossing the one million article milestone.

This means roughly 1% of the articles in the Turkish Wikipedia have featured pictures. One featured picture can illustrate multiple articles.

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:

They're delighted.
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.

Wikireaders

2009-11-23T15:44:32+00:00

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?

2009-11-22T16:18:41+00:00

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 [...]

Letter perfect

2009-11-22T12:20:41+00:00

Thumbnail previews and reduced size views don't always reveal how much work a restoration is going to require. This World War I era poster is in very good condition. At the web-optimized reduction for this blog post it hardly seems to need any restoration at all. A closer look at the full size file, though, shows that this won't be a walk in the park.

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.

Here's the most heavily damaged word at full resolution. I actually perform the restoration at twice that resolution, but this is enough to convey what the work will be. The basic idea is to trace the outline of each letter and substitute undamaged paper texture in place of the ink smears. Two factors will make the difference between a mediocre repair and a good one:

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.

The narrowest parts between letters have to be done at a tool diameter of five or six pixels. Unfortunately this is a situation where Photoshop has a big advantage over the current version of GIMP. The Photoshop clone stamp tool has a sliding option that allows the user to select any percentage hardness.

Hardness affects how much a cloned area blends with surrounding data. One hundred percent hardness looks like the cloned area was cut with scissors and pasted in. Zero percent hardness is really soft and smudgy. Smudgy is what we're trying to get away from, so we do want some hardness here. But we don't want the text to seem like a ransom note or an old punk rock poster. So what's needed is something in between. A static setting is going to lose its subtlety as this work progresses from wide spaces to narrow gaps between letters. I do most clone stamping at thirty-five percent hardness. Getting down to half a dozen pixels, though, it helps to be able to drop that to twenty percent.

This is where GIMP users get caught between a rock and a hard place. Hardness in GIMP is a simple on/off toggle. If there's a plugin to make that more nuanced I'd love to know about it because the GIMP editors who work with me have real trouble with this sort of challenge. They can get an acceptable result with the default program if they work hard enough, but it takes them several times as long as it takes me in Photoshop. GIMP is open source, so if you happen to be a motivated programmer who likes to see this work spread free culture you could do something to help solve this problem.

I fixed the smudges on this row of text in about two hours. If discussions with good GIMP editors are accurate, multiply that by a factor of three to five for them to get a result of comparable quality.

The full version of the completed restoration can be viewed here. Below is a glimpse of it.

Warm welcomes

2009-11-21T19:28:54+00:00

More good news: another editor has gotten into image restoration and doing really good work. The image above is a historic isothermal chart from 1823. Jujutacular ran it as his first restoration about a week ago. His first effort was impressive and it was a treat to see that he had gotten it from the New York Public Library website. The pool of resources for source material is broadening.

The version Jujutacular ran as his first nomination is better than my early work.

That represents quite a lot of cleanup. His effort really shows on the upper margin and far left. I was on the fence about the nomination--didn't want to rain on his parade yet thought the restoration could go even farther. Took a chance and offered to collaborate. It turns out he's a really good sport, eager to learn, and a joy to work with.

He had a version saved without the histogram adjustment. Smart fellow! We traded off on additional dirt and smudge removal; both of us applied masks to correct the uneven brightness. I added a perspective crop, patched in a margin at the lower right edge, and did the final tweaks with curves and color balance. Sometimes it's magical when the final work feels like a time machine. This was one of those occasions.

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:

First Wikimedians’ Conference in Japan

2009-11-21T04:50:38+00:00

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

What is a stain?

2009-11-20T15:59:35+00:00

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.

The proportions on this are reduced substantially from the original file, which was 13MB on this cropped area. Yet it can be informative to see the work before the stain removal is complete. No cloning has been done at all in this stain correction.

Unlisted Skype Emoticons

2009-11-20T15:28:01+00:00

Here are some emoticon commands that do not appear in the Skype emoticon directory. Enjoy

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

~IShadowed

[guest] AntWeb goes CC-BY-SA

2009-11-20T02:50:20+00:00

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!

Huffington Post readers select WMF ED as media game changer of the year

2009-11-19T22:57:37+00:00

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

Low-Hanging GLAM fruit

2009-11-19T07:01:21+00:00

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.

Daniel Brandt's Hive Mind

2009-11-19T02:01:09+00:00

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

Wikipedia: 1/10 of Webby’s most influential projects of the decade

2009-11-19T01:42:04+00:00

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

In unrelated news, deletion is still broken

2009-11-18T20:50:32+00:00

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:

Sticking articles in AfD is like seeing a book being fed in a wood chipper. Very slowly. There's no point in trying to save the book from being destroyed once the process has already started because the damage has already been done. The rednecks with shotguns think it's hilarious to do this sort of stuff, and you don't want to annoy people with shotguns. With enough determination and hard work, those books can, theoretically, be rearranged back into coherent wholes if you salvage all pieces of paper. Ultimately, in this situation we can at least comfort ourselves that not everybody engages in this sort of hideous destructive behaviour. Far from it.

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...

update

2009-11-18T18:36:46+00:00

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. ;-)

President of Suriname visits WMF partnered museum exhibit

2009-11-18T10:20:10+00:00

Good news from The Netherlands. President Ronald Venetiaan of Suriname has visited the Tropenmuseum exhibit about the cultural history of Suriname. First Lady Lisbeth Venetiaan saw the exhibit last Saturday and was so impressed that she returned with her husband the next day. The Suriname exhibit was developed in partnership with WMF Netherlands and the Open Progress Foundation.

UX + Usability Study Take Two!

2009-11-18T01:40:34+00:00

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

wikiwix.mobi, a search engine in your pocket.

2009-11-17T16:05:54+00:00

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;
…

Volume 5, Issue 46 – 16 November 2009

2009-11-17T16:01:22+00:00

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

digiKam / KDE imaging coding sprint 2009

2009-11-17T07:07:00+00:00

I just came back from the digiKam / KDE imaging coding sprint in Essen, Germany. My main goal was to start working on an export plugin to Wikimedia Commons from digiKam, which can be a wonderful tool for Wikimedia photographers.

I met a lot of great people there, and it was really nice to benefit from their experience. I learnt a lot during these three days, and being in the same room as other developers made it a lot easier to work together.

By analyzing how the existing Facebook KIPI plugin was made, I was able to create the basis of the communication layer between the plugin and a MediaWiki site, even though I had not done any C++/Qt development before. Admittedly, I had some existing knowledge of Lisp, Java and C, but it was old and limited; I was quite happy to advance so quickly. While my current work focuses on a specific wiki (Wikimedia Commons), it could be later extended to a more general MediaWiki library for Qt.

Special kudos and Vielen Dank to Marcel Wiesweg, who organized the whole event. Everything went great, we had a pretty good Internet connection and we even ate well! (one thing you wouldn’t necessarily expect during a coding event). The trip back was also fun.

Wikipedia Review and Julian

2009-11-17T03:58:20+00:00

Well today I can say I'm officially pissed off at Wikipedia Review. This post was the start of it all, Daniel Brandt rushed to the rescue and decided that it would be a great idea to put one of the best non-adult admins on hivemind. This sort of bullshit is what I hate about some people on Wikipedia, yeah let's all talk about how Julian, as an admin, has to administrate over porn, and not say

Wherein the Toolserver becomes more reliable

2009-11-17T01:12:29+00:00

Some months ago, the Wikimedia Foundation approved a $40,000 grant to Wikimedia Deutschland, for the purpose of improving Toolserver reliability. We’ve now implemented the first part of this plan: redundant NFS and LDAP.

When we first proposed the grant, the plan (which you can read more about at the above link) was to purchase 3 database servers, which we would use to provide a redundant backup for the 3 current servers. However, before we made the purchase, we realised that for the same amount of money, we could purchase 2 database servers, 2 smaller servers and a disk array. The Foundation approved this change, and that’s what we ended up buying.

The purpose of the two small servers and array was to provide redundant service for NFS and LDAP. These services are critical to the platform operation; if either is offline, the entire platform is down. Previously, both were hosted on a single server (hyacinth), which meant the entire Toolserver depended on this server being up. As well as hurting reliability, this made it very difficult to do any maintenance on that server.

Now, however, the NFS and LDAP data is stored on the disk array, which is connected to two servers (turnera and damiana) running Solaris Cluster software. If one server breaks, or we need to do maintenance on it, the services are automatically moved to the other server, with no interruption in service. The array itself has two redundant, independent controllers, making failure quite unlikely.

The previous NFS/LDAP server, which is now idle, has exactly the same specification as a database server. We will be using this as the third redundant database (along with the two we purchased with the grant) to provide redundant access to the MySQL databases. More news on that later.

Difficult repairs

2009-11-15T17:59:15+00:00

The image above is an interim save on one of my current projects: an early nineteenth century Japanese woodblock print of the ram from the Chinese zodiac. The artist is Gogaku Yajima, who doesn't have a Wikipedia biography yet. It's an attractive print, but as you can see from the lower right corner this isn't in pristine condition. Have already spent about seven or eight hours to bring the restoration this far. What follows is a close-up of the upper border before starting work on the hardest part of this project. Notice the odd mark that branches downward from the upper edge.

At a glance it looks like really sloppy click-and-drag clone stamping, but close up the problem isn't consistent with post-digital alteration. My best guess is that the rice paper print developed a tear and that the mark represents an attempt at physical repair. Someone might have added a reinforcement to the reverse side of the paper and used an adhesive. Then, since the repair could have occurred generations ago, over time the adhesive had a chemical reaction with the paper which resulted in that branching stain. It would be interesting to contact the library staff and see whether this guess is accurate. But for today the challenge is how to make it disappear.

For starters, here's a closer look. The border is a repeating pattern of cherry blossoms. This takes careful study because reconstruction of the design involves inferring the shapes of three flowers and a bud.

Repairs to complex areas such as this are much more difficult than repairs to solid colors. A photograph print that gets torn at a cloudless sky could be fixed in a minute. Damage to near-random features such as a sandy beach or a grassy field are also fairly simple. This is a different matter.

When I look at this type of image I estimate the difficulty in terms of five elements:

How many color borders or line demarcations does the damage cross?
Does enough information remain to infer the shapes of the missing areas?
Is the damaged pattern repetitive or unique?
Is there enough similar data elsewhere in the image to patch a repair?
How much importance will the viewer attach to the damaged region?

This bit of damage interacts with the woodcut design in complex ways. If I want the repair to look seamless, and I do, it's going to take a few hours to get this right. Here are a few close-ups from screen shots as the work progressed. You'll see how, progressively, I fixed areas and inferred colors and shapes.

In the far right frame I actually altered one petal, which is something I don't like to do. That particular area had sustained so much damage that I had difficulty understanding what the shape was intended to be. If I'm a stickler I might go back and recreate that petal again, because after a day I had better ideas. These are the kinds of decisions that make me bite my lip. If the feature were a face instead of a flower I wouldn't have attempted to alter it.

After a bit more cleanup around the edges, here's how that area looks now.

COFFEE FOREVER and other recent Wiki happenings

2009-11-15T07:20:14+00:00

SO APPARENTLY THE WIKIMEDIA FOUNDATION THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GREAT IDEA TO PAY A PR FIRM $250,000 FOR 11 MONTHS TO, AMONG OTHER THINGS, CREATE AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN OF BIG ASS BANNERS THAT ARE IN ALL CAPS AND SAY RIDICULOUS THINGS LIKE "WIKIPEDIA FOREVER". Yeah great move Wikimedia... At least now they've toned them down a bit to where they have a "Donate Now" button and aren't in all CAPS. I

Wikiportret is in SVN

2009-11-14T23:50:00+00:00

Wikiportet.nl is a website where people who do not have a picture on their Wikipedia article find an easy way of getting their portrait uploaded to Commons.

Husky developed it for the Dutch chapter and, he entered the code to SVN at the Paris meeting. Today Siebrand had a stab at it. In his tweet, he indicated that he is trying to understand the code and, standardise it.

While a first effort at Internationalisation has been done by Husky, more work will be needed in order to get the software ready for localisation.

The aim is to have quality portraits of the people who have their Wikipedia article. Achieving this will make our articles more attractive.
Thanks,
GerardM

Four big languages

2009-11-14T23:43:45+00:00

In the top 20 of biggest Wikipedias ordered by traffic we find four languages that I find of interest: Russian, Chinese, Arabic and Indonesian. They are ordered as the number 6, 11, 16 and 17 in this list. All four represent large populations and consequently they all will go up in the rankings because all four are lively projects.

There is a relation between the number of articles and traffic. At the end of September, they had respectively 442 k (+2%), 266 k (+1%), 104 k (+3%) and 113k (+3%) in articles.

The Russia and Indonesia have their chapters. Arabic is not local to one country and there is only a chapter in Egypt. Chinese is also spoken in multiple countries and it does not have a chapter in the People's republic but has one in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

When you consider that the annual growth in traffic is respectively 87%, 20%, 27% and 52%, you will recognise that they still growing. Compare them to the English Wikipedia its growth in absolute numbers is huge but expressed as a percentage it is not. I expect that these projects will benefit most from any measures that will make Wikipedia a friendly place. They need to grow to realise their potential and a healthy community is part of that.

Wikia has experience with several social extensions to MediaWiki. Does what they learned apply to our projects? Does it help in turning around communities that have gone sour? How do you introduce social functionality in our big projects ?

I expect all these four languages among the top ten Wikipedias in five years time. At the same time I expect the Wikipedias that currently make up the top 10 to continue their evolution and grow.
Thanks,
GerardM

Geograph

2009-11-14T14:41:28+00:00

Geograph.org.uk has a cool million images about the British countryside. Some of them are dull, some of them are not so dull but what do you expect the panorama is not everywhere like this..

All these images are available under a free license and it makes sense for us to have them. These pictures have added value because all of them come with geo tagging. With the integration of the maps of OpenStreetMap, it will be great to integrate our services in there as well and show the beauty of Britain.

We can and we may take all these pictures. The reasons in favour to take them all are really strong; we do not want to make a selection..But even when we can and may take those pictures, it makes sense to reach out to the people at Geograph because together we are likely to do an even greater job.
Thanks,
GerardM

A huge thank you for our staff

2009-11-14T12:30:00+00:00

Yesterday we started our November board meeting in the new location in San Francisco. Michael had posted the agenda of the meeting on foundation-l. After the meeting he would surely post a summary of the meeting and Kat would post the meeting minutes a little later.

For me the meeting in San Francisco is also a very welcome opportunity to meet the staff.

One thing about our staff is that they are so often criticized, in most cases unjustified, and often very personal and in a hurting manner. And they are so few thanked, although there are so many reasons to say thank you to them.

For example thank you that you are keeping the project sites running, thank you that you are improving our software, thank you that you are fending off every threat against us, thank you that you are keeping the public informed about us, thank you that you are coordinating our volunteers works like OTRS and translation, thank you that you are organizing Wikipedia Academy to invite and encourage more people join our movement, thank you that you get all the money so that we can do all these wonderful things.

Thank you that you are even working off works and if necessary even at the weekend or during vacation.

If we consider our movement as an organism, for me our staff is the heart, the very heart that keeps the organism nourished so that it can grow, move and change the world.

It is a tiny heart, only 30 people, for a HUGE organism, with hundreds of thousands of editors and even more users. It is a very strong heart, because even despite of this disproportion it is keeping our movement going, and even improving itself during all this time.

Everyone know how important our heart is. But in the most time we don't think about it. Mostly we only think about it if we feel it begins to fail to meet our demand. So be thankful that we have this strong heart. And keep in mind it is OUR heart, it is a very vital part of US.

Gestern war der erste Tag unseres November Boardmeetings, diesmal in der neuen Lokation in San Francisco. Michael hat das Agenda des Meetings auf foundation-l gepostet. Nach dem Meeting wird er wie gewohnt eine kurze Zusammenfassung dort veröffentlichen. Wenig später wird dann Kat das Meetingprotokol veröffentlichen.

Für mich ist ein Meeting in San Francisco immer auch eine sehr willkommene Gelegenheit um die Mitarbeiter zu treffen.

Unsere Mitarbeiter werden sehr oft kritisiert, in den meisten Fällen ungerechtfertigt, oft sogar sehr persönlich angefeindet. Und sie werden so selten bedankt, obwohl es sehr viele Gründe gibt, sich bei ihnen zu bedanken.

Zum Beispiel Danke dass Ihr die Projektseiten am Laufenden haltet, danke dass Ihr unsere Software verbessert, danke dass Ihr jede Bedrohung gegen uns abwehrt, danke dass Ihr die Öffentlichkeit über uns informiert, danke dass Ihr Arbeit der Freiwilligen wie zum Beispiel bei der OTRS und der Übersetzung koordiniert, danke dass Ihr Veranstaltungen wie Wikipedia Academy organisiert, um mehr Leute einzuladen, und anzuschließen, danke dass Ihr das Geld sammelt, damit wir all diesen wunderbaren Sachen tun können.

Danke dass Ihr selbst nach der Arbeit, wenn notwendig selbst an Wochenenden und in Urlaub arbeitet.

Wenn ich mir unsere Bewegung als ein Organismus vorstelle, dann ist für mich unsere Mitarbeiter das Herz, DAS Herz, das das Organismus mit allem versorgt, was er braucht, um zu wachsen, zu bewegen und die Welt zu ändern.

Es ist ein winziges Herz, bestehend nur als 30 Leute, für ein RIESIGES Organismus, mit hunderttausenden Autoren und noch mehr Benutzer. Es ist ein sehr starkes Herz, weil ungeachtet diese Disproportion es unsere Bewegung nach Vorne hält und sich selbst immer weiter verbessert.

Jeder weißt wie wichtig das Herz für uns ist. Aber in den meisten Zeiten denken wir nicht darüber. Meistens wird unser Herz uns erst bewusst, wenn es unsere Anforderungen nicht gerecht werden. Um so wichtig ist es, um dankbar zu sein, dass wir ein so starkes Herz haben. Und denkt immer daran, es ist UNSER Herz, es ist ein lebenswichtiges Teil von UNS.

昨天是基金会理事会11月会议的第一天，这次在旧金山的新办公室里。迈克尔在foundation-l上发表了会议的议程。会后他会一如往常发表一个短暂的总结。凯特会在短时间后发表会议的正式纪录。

在旧金山开会也总是一个和基金会工作人员碰头的好机会。

我们的工作人员经常被批评，在大多数情况下不公正地被批评，往往非常人身攻击地被批评。而他们却很少听到别人对他们说：谢谢你们。尽管我们有许多理由谢谢他们：

比如谢谢你们保证项目网页的运行，谢谢你们不断改善我们的软件，谢谢你们排除一切外来的威胁，谢谢你们向公众介绍我们的工作，谢谢你们协调志愿者在OTRS和翻译方面的工作，谢谢你们组织Wikipedia Academy之类的活动来鼓舞更多的人参加我们的运动，谢谢你们募捐所有需要的钱来使得我们可以做所有这些美妙的工作。

谢谢你们即使在下班后，必要的时候甚至在周末和假期中工作。

假如把维基运动看做一个生物体的话那么我们的工作人员是这个生物体的心脏，那颗保障我们的运动能够发展、行动、改变世界的心脏。

它是一颗微小的心脏，只有30个人，但是却为一个巨大的生物体服务：上十万的作者和更多的用户。因此它是一颗非常强壮的心脏，因为尽管它相比整个生物体这么小它依然保证我们的运动发展，与此同时还不断地完善它自己。

我们每个人都知道心脏有多么重要。但是在大多数情况下我们不会想到自己的心脏。在多数情况下我们感觉到我们的心脏因为它无法满足我们的要求。因此我们必须感谢这颗强壮的心脏，必须随时想到它是我们的心脏，是我们不可缺少的一部分。

WIKTIONARY FOREVER

2009-11-14T02:22:13+00:00

At the time when Firefox had "only" 6% market penetration, the marketing people of companies were asked the question: "Can you afford to ignore 6% of your target audience ? If not, tell your techies to conform to standards ! "

Wiktionary is in traffic bigger then the Dutch Wikipedia. It does not have the banners for the fund raiser. It should if only to achieve our goal and not see these banners for another year.

Seriously though, the fund raiser is not about Wikipedia, it is about achieving our goal to bring the sum of all knowledge to the people of this world and Wiktionary helps us achieve that.
Thanks,
GerardM

COMMONS FOREVER

2009-11-14T02:10:56+00:00

At the time when Firefox had "only" 6% market penetration, the marketing people of companies were asked the question: "Can you afford to ignore 6% of your target audience ? If not, tell your techies to conform to standards ! "

Commons is in traffic bigger then the Portuguese Wikipedia. It does not have the banners for the fund raiser. It should if only to achieve our goal and not see these banners for another year.

Seriously though, the fund raiser is not about Wikipedia, it is about achieving our goal to bring the sum of all knowledge to the people of this world and Commons helps us achieve that.
Thanks,
GerardM