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6 January 2016

 

2016-01-06

The WMF's age of discontent

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By Tony1, Go Phightins!, and Resident Mario

The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees voted last week to remove community-appointed trustee James Heilman (Doc James), an unprecedented action that has created controversy in the movement. The aftermath of the event has seen intense speculation on the institutional state of the Wikimedia Foundation—in particular the role of the community in the Foundation's vision for the future. These tensions have been heightened not just by continuing commentary on the circumstances of the removal, but by the unrelated announcement of the appointment of two new board trustees with strong Silicon Valley backgrounds.

Fallout from the Heilman removal

Ex-WMF board member James Heilman: "There appears to be a shift at Board-level away from a community perspective to a more corporate perspective."
A week after the announcement of Heilman’s removal the Board released an FAQ on the matter. The statement includes a claim that Heilman's fellow trustees "lacked sufficient confidence in his discretion, judgment, and ability to maintain confidential Board information about the Wikimedia Foundation governance activities"; notably, the first two claims ("discretion" and "judgment") are widely construed. The Signpost contacted Heilman for a reaction to the statement. He said: "This is simply an attempt to distract people from the underlying issues, and to discredit me." What he sees as a personal attack, he believes, is consistent with the way he has been treated during the more recent part of his tenure as a trustee, during which he said he was called "a troll" by two different people behind closed doors.

It is now clear that the move against Heilman had been planned for some time. Given the long lead-time, others have queried the cohesiveness of the Board's strategy surrounding the meeting called to dismiss him, which apparently failed to: (1) make a clear decision on whether the removal resolution would be "with" or "without cause", per the legal distinction in the relevant law of the state of Florida (the resolution text itself did not contain a legal cause, yet Jimmy Wales has since stated that the removal was indeed "for cause"); (2) prepare beforehand a public announcement for release immediately after the meeting, despite the likelihood that Heilman would announce his removal soon after his expulsion from the meeting; or (3) make a decision on filling the vacant seat, instead stating in an announcement soon after that "we will reach out to the 2015 election committee ... to discuss our options, and will keep you informed as we determine next steps."

New Board-appointed trustees have ties to Silicon Valley

New Board-appointed trustee Kelly Battles

In a move that, though not directly related to Heilman's departure, seems poorly timed, the Board has announced the appointment of two new trustees: Kelly Battles and Arnnon Geshuri. Kelly is a veteran technical manager whose credentials stem from financial leadership positions at firms such as IronPort and Hewlett Packard; Arnnon brings experience in human resources from experience at firms such as Tesla and E*TRADE. Trustee Dariusz Jemielniak has written that the selections came after "wide input from different stakeholders." In the announcing blog post, WMF executive director Lila Tretikov states that the appointments "bring a deep commitment to making knowledge more freely available for people around the world."

However, the Signpost is aware of an online expression of discontent from one WMF staffer with the Board's selection. In addition, Liam Wyatt (Wittylama), community-selected member of the WMF Funds Dissemination Committee, has questioned what these appointments bring to the overall diversity of the Board: "I've always believed that Wikimedia is an education charity that happens to exist in a technology field. ... But these appointments indicate the Board and WMF Executive believe Wikimedia is a technology charity that happens to exist in the education field."
New Board-appointed trustee Arnnon Geshuri

This brings the number of trustees with ties to Google up to five, which is half of the Board:

  • Jimmy Wales, who has served as a member of Google's "Advisory Council"
  • Denny Vrandečić, who is a Google employee
  • Guy Kawasaki, who has served as special advisor to the CEO of the Motorola business unit of Google
  • Kelly Battles of Bracket Computing, which partners with Google Cloud Platform
  • Arnnon Geshuri, who served as senior director of HR and Staffing at Google

WMF staff morale

Related articles
Knowledge Engine

It is becoming impossible to ignore the increasing anxiety among many Foundation staff over the last few months of 2015. This may not be entirely separate from the implications of the Heilman removal, since we understand that a specific complaint against Heilman by other trustees concerned his contact with disgruntled staff. Transparency appears to be a flashpoint in both the dismissal and low staff morale.

The Signpost contacted around ten staff members to seek their views on where the balance should be drawn between unfettered transparency and strategic secrecy for a leader of the free culture movement; what the causes are of the rapidly changing work environment at the organization; and what is necessary to improve project continuity and success. At this point we should say that not one source—whether those we reached out to or several others who initiated contact with us—would agree to be named, although some provided on-the-record information anonymously.

A key issue has been the WMF's annual evaluation of employee engagement, conducted and analyzed by a third-party consultant in late 2015. The results were made available on an internal office wiki, and it is now public knowledge that an internal discussion among staff has begun about making the survey public. As of publication, more than two dozen staff members have spoken in favor of releasing the survey as soon as possible "with no dissenting voices". The Signpost has been apprised of the results by one of their number. We understand that there was a healthy 93% response rate among some 240 staff. While numbers approached 90% for pride in working at the WMF and confidence in line managers, the responses to four propositions may raise eyebrows:

  • Senior leadership at Wikimedia have communicated a vision that motivates me: 7% agree
  • Senior leadership at Wikimedia keep people informed about what is happening: 7% agree
  • I have confidence in senior leadership at Wikimedia: 10% agree
  • Senior leadership effectively directs resources (funding, people and effort) towards the Foundation's goals: 10% agree

The Signpost has been informed that among the "C-levels" (members of the executive), only one has confidence in senior leadership.

It is unclear exactly what combination of factors underlie the discontent among staff, but we are aware that there has been internal controversy about recent moves to allocate significant resources to the Discovery unit in the second half of 2015. This unit is heavily involved in the development of what is called the knowledge engine. John Vandenberg, a member of the editing community and a volunteer developer, told the Signpost:

Vandenberg added that we seem to be witnessing a sharpening of the tension between two quite different approaches to achieving professionalism—a tension that may be unique to the Wikimedia movement. On the one hand, he said, the editorial community has developed a hugely successful process of open collaboration, based on incremental improvements. On the other hand, paid staff in any large organization achieve professional outcomes through hiding their incremental improvements in favor of a final product. There lies one basis for the clash between cultures of transparency and secrecy that we now see surrounding the Heilman dismissal.

In brief

Wikimania 2016 submissions open: Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario will take place from 21 to 28 June 2016. As this is somewhat earlier in the year than past conferences, the submission periods for proposals and scholarship applications have overlapped the winter holiday period, and the deadlines, placed much earlier in the calendar than in years past, are approaching fast. Please note the following key dates:

Proposals

  • Call for proposals opened: 11 December 2015
  • Deadline for submitting proposals: 17 January 2016
  • Notification of acceptance: 27 January 2016

Scholarships

  • Scholarship applications opened: 5 December 2015
  • Deadline for applying for scholarships: 9 January 2016 23:59 UTC

For further details, see Submissions and Scholarships on the Wikimania 2016 website. AK

Knight Foundation grant: a "Knowledge Engine": On 6 January, the Knight Foundation, a long-time benefactor for the Wikimedia cause, published a blog-post by WMF vice-president of product Wes Moran, titled "Exploring how people discover knowledge on Wikipedia and its sister projects". This was followed by a Knight Foundation press release announcing that

A Wikimedia blog post appeared as well, titled Wikimedia Foundation to explore new ways to search and discover reliable, relevant, free information with $250,000 from Knight Foundation, along with a press release, both featuring a link to a new, dedicated Knight FAQ page set up on MediaWiki. AK



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2016-01-06

Impenetrable science; Jimmy Wales back in the UAE

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By Gamaliel and Andreas Kolbe

Impenetrable science on Wikipedia

A frustrated reader of Wikipedia science articles.

John Timmer, senior science editor at Ars Technica, editorializes about the state of science articles on Wikipedia, writing "Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment": "Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you're likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible." According to Timmer, Wikipedia articles on many subjects are well-written and accessible to the lay reader. However, science articles are largely impenetrable to these readers. Of one typical example, he writes that "it descends into a mass of incomprehensible equations, sporadically interspersed with impenetrable jargon." Many of them appear to assume that the reader already has an advanced science background. "In other words, they're probably only useful for people who would never have to read them anyway."

Timmer posits that this is a negative influence on the state of science literacy, especially in the United States. He suggests that "one potential partial solution is to have more of the population feel that scientific knowledge is approachable, and scientific reasoning is intuitive", but inaccessible Wikipedia articles have the opposite effect: "They suggest that quantum mechanics is completely impenetrable. That evolutionary biology is just a bunch of jargon. That math involves little more than a bunch of random stipulations. More generally, they indicate that it's something that has to be left to the experts and is inaccessible to anyone without arcane knowledge." (Dec. 29) G

Jimmy Wales returns to United Arab Emirates

Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum holds several government posts and plays a key role in Dubai's finance and energy sectors

Jimmy Wales will deliver a keynote speech at Ericsson's Change Makers Forum in Dubai on January 10, as reported by Arabian Business and Emirates247. The event is held under the patronage of Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, a member of Dubai's ruling Al Maktoum family.

A year ago, Wales came under fire for accepting a $500,000 cash prize from Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and constitutional monarch of Dubai (see previous Signpost coverage). Critics pointed out the country's poor human rights record. According to Human Rights Watch,

(Dec. 29–30) AK

Is Wikipedia dying?

In The New Republic, Jeet Heer concludes that "Wikipedia is dying". Heer bases this on "a new academic paper" recently linked to on the blog of economist Tyler Cowan. The paper, "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline", appeared in the May 2013 issue of American Behavioral Scientist and its lead author was Aaron Halfaker, senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation. The paper was discussed in the September 2012 edition of the Signpost's Recent Research. Heer writes "The paper suggests the main reason is that, when it expanded rapidly between 2004 and 2007, Wikipedia responded by instituting restrictive policies that drove away eager new volunteers" and concluded by quoting the paper: "Over time, these changes resulted in a new Wikipedia, in which newcomers are rudely greeted by automated quality control systems and are overwhelmed by the complexity of the rule system." (Dec. 31) G

The first mention of Wikipedia on National Public Radio

Bruce Perens getting the word out

"First Mention" is a recurring segment on All Things Considered which looks at when the first time a now-ubiquitous word or phrase was used for the first time on National Public Radio. The latest segment discusses the first mention of Wikipedia, which occurred on January 17, 2003, two days after Wikipedia's third anniversary. Ira Flatow was interviewing open source advocate Bruce Perens, who told listeners about a website that was so new to them that he had to spell the name of it:

The English Wikipedia hit 100,000 articles four days later, on January 21, 2003. (Dec. 31) G


In brief

Phoebe Ayers speaking at the Erasmus Prize ceremony
  • MIT profile: MIT News discusses Phoebe Ayers (Phoebe) and her acceptance of the Erasmus Prize on behalf of Wikipedia in November (see previous Signpost coverage). Ayers is a librarian at MIT and a former member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. (Jan. 5) G
  • Banned user: Breitbart reports on the recent banning of User:The Devil's Advocate (see discussion on the ArbCom noticeboard). The title of the piece, "Wikipedia can now ban you for what you do on other websites", is somewhat misleading, given that there is ample precedent for ArbCom bans, even Wikimedia Foundation Office bans, for off-site activities. (Jan. 4) AK
  • Guerrilla Skepticism: On the January 3 episode of his podcast Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta interviewed Susan Gerbic, founder of Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia. G
  • Wikipedian dies of heart attack after alleged "cyber-lynching": An article in the German edition of the Huffington Post reported (Dec. 29) that User:Andreas Parker, who was active in both the English and German Wikipedias, had suffered a heart attack after upsetting exchanges on Wikipedia that the article's author described as "cyber-lynching". A follow-up article (Dec. 30) carried the sad news that Parker had died in hospital. The reports, which led to heated discussions in the German Wikipedia, were pulled from the Huffington Post website on December 30; readers following the links were first only presented with a page saying "The content of this article is being checked", and now see a blank page. AK



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



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2016-01-06

Catflap08 and Hijiri88 case been decided

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By GamerPro64

Catflap08 and Hijiri88

The priest Nisshin, a devotee of Nichiren Buddhism

On 29 December, the case on Catflap08 and Hijiri88 was decided. In their 12-part findings of facts, the Committee found that Catflap08 and Hijiri88 have been in conflict since June 2014, beginning with the Kenji Miyazawa and Kokuchūkai articles, and spilling over to other articles in the Japanese culture topic area, as well as various noticeboards. A two-way interaction ban was placed between the two on 17 April 2015, a ban both Catflap08 and Hijiri88 violated. It was found that Catflap09 forum shopped and edit warred while Hijiri88 edit warred and "engaged in personal attacks and incivility ... and has issued a threat of on-wiki retaliation." Other named parties were also found to have to been uncivil, with TH1980 being found to have edit warred and to have hounded Hijiri88. CurtisNaito was also found to have edit warred.

With these results, the Committee implemented remedies, including two major sanctions for Catflap08, who is now "indefinitely topic-banned from all pages relating to Nichiren Buddhism and its adherents, broadly construed" and "prohibited from making any more than one revert on any one page in any 24-hour period". Hijiri88 was topic-banned from all pages relating to Nichiren Buddhism and placed on a one-revert rule, as well as being "indefinitely topic-banned from all pages relating to Japanese culture". An interaction ban has been placed on TH1980 and Hijiri88.

The Devil's Advocate banned

On 1 January, in the first decision made with the participation of the newest members of the Arbitration Committee, The Devil's Advocate was indefinitely banned from the English Wikipedia. The Committee announced that "In remedy 8.5 of the GamerGate case, The Devil's Advocate was 'strongly warned that should future misconduct occur in any topic area, he may be banned from the English Wikipedia by motion of the Arbitration Committee.' Accordingly, for continuing harassment of other editors, The Devil's Advocate is banned indefinitely from the English Wikipedia. He may request reconsideration of the ban six months after this motion passes, and every six months thereafter." The reaction to this announcement has been polarizing, with the comments thread as of 19:39, 5 January 2016, being noticeably more active than other discussion sections on the talk page. A major issue cited in the announcement was the lack of transparency, as the nature of what was the cause for the ban was not specifically discussed. A similar issue was raised earlier on 30 December, when Soap was desysopped and banned for taking part in off-wiki harassment.

The GamerGate case was decided on 29 January last year, and is approaching its one-year anniversary. An overall controversial topic on Wikipedia, the case resulted in the topic-banning of 11 (later 12) editors, with one editor indefinitely banned from the site. The decision was covered by Breitbart.com's Allum Bokhari, with an article titled "Wikipedia Can Now Ban You For What You Do On Other Websites". One can argue that the title is misleading as off-site harassment has been seen as an ongoing issue for Wikipedia, with an example being Tarc, who was also one of the editors topic-banned from all pages relating to GamerGate, being indefinitely banned back in September, "for continued serious breaches of policy, including off-wiki harassment".



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2016-01-06

Featured menagerie

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By Armbrust
Bristol is one of the UK's most popular tourist destinations.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 27 December to 2 January.
Text may be adapted from the respective articles and lists; see their page histories for attribution.


1940 presidential campaign poster of Wendell Willkie
Beaver Run is the longest tributary of Bowman Creek

Five featured articles were promoted:

  • Wendell Willkie (nominated by Wehwalt) (1892–1944) was an American lawyer, corporate executive, and the 1940 Republican candidate for president. Willkie appealed to many convention delegates as the Republican field's only interventionist. His Democratic opponent, incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt, won the 1940 election with 55% of the popular vote.
  • Telopea truncata (nominated by Casliber) is a plant in the family Proteaceae. The plant, commonly known as the Tasmanian waratah, is endemic to Tasmania, where it is found on moist acidic soils at altitudes of 600 to 1200 m. It grows as a shrub to a height of 3 m, or occasionally as a small tree to 10 m high, with red flower heads appearing from November to February and bearing 10 to 35 individual flowers.
  • Murder of Dwayne Jones (nominated by Midnightblueowl) Dwayne Jones was a Jamaican 16 year old who was killed by a violent mob in Montego Bay in July 2013, after he attended a dance party dressed in women's clothing. The incident attracted national and international media attention and brought increased scrutiny to the status of LGBT rights in Jamaica.
  • Bristol (nominated by Rodw) is a city, unitary authority and county in South West England with an estimated population of 442,500 in 2015. Bristol is one of the eight largest regional English cities that make up the Core Cities Group, and is ranked as a gamma world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network, the fourth highest ranked English city. Bristol's modern economy is built on the creative media, electronics and aerospace industries.
  • Todd Manning (nominated by Flyer22 Reborn and Figureskatingfan) is a fictional character originated on the American daytime drama One Life to Live. Created by writer Michael Malone, the role was originated in 1992 by actor Roger Howarth. Todd was a college student and fellow fraternity brother to Kevin Buchanan, Zach Rosen, and Powell Lord, and became part of a storyline in which Marty Saybrooke is gang raped. The storyline was considered groundbreaking by television critics, and its main players. Howarth left the role in 2003; and it was recast with Trevor St. John, physically altered by plastic surgery. In 2011, Howarth returned; and it was disclosed that Todd had been taken hostage and that St. John's version of the character was really Todd's identical twin brother.

Four featured lists were promoted this week.

  • List of accolades received by Whiplash (2014 film) (nominated by Cowlibob) Whiplash is a 2014 American drama film directed by Damien Chazelle. The screenplay, also written by Chazelle, was partly based on his experiences in the Princeton High School Studio Band. The film stars Miles Teller as an ambitious jazz drummer selected to join a school studio band taught by a cruel music instructor played by J. K. Simmons. The film garnered awards and nominations in a variety of categories with particular praise for Chazelle's direction and screenplay, Simmons' supporting acting performance, and Tom Cross' editing. It received 52 awards from 117 nominations.
  • Amitabh Bachchan filmography (nominated by Yashthepunisher) Amitabh Bachchan is an Indian film actor, playback singer, producer and television personality. Bachchan made his debut as a narrator for Bhuvan Shome and acted in Saat Hindustani, both in 1969. He has appeared in numerous films since then, with his latest film, Wazir, being released on 8 January.
  • List of international goals scored by Robbie Keane (nominated by The Rambling Man) Robbie Keane, an Irish association footballer, is the Republic of Ireland national football team's top scorer, with 67 goals in 142 appearances. Keane made his international debut in a defeat against the Czech Republic in March 1998, and scored his first international goals on his fifth appearance, a UEFA Euro 2000 qualifying victory over Malta.
  • List of tributaries of Bowman Creek (nominated by Jakec) Bowman Creek is a 26-mile (42 km) long tributary of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. It has 26 named tributaries, of which 21 are direct tributaries and 5 are sub-tributaries.

One featured topic was promoted:

  • The Final Fantasy series (nominated by PresN) is a science fiction media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, and developed and owned by Square Enix. This featured topic contains the main video games of the series.

Ten featured pictures were promoted:



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2016-01-06

Teaching Wikipedia, Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?

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By Piotr Konieczny, Tilman Bayer, and Maximilian Klein

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Does advertising the gender gap help or hurt Wikipedia?

Reviewed by Tilman Bayer

A working paper[1] in economics provides several novel results shedding light on Wikipedia's much discussed gender gap, focusing on three aspects: The causes of the gender gap in contributors, its impact on Wikipedia's content, and how outreach measures that highlight the gender gap influence participation on Wikipedia.

It uses several sources of data, including the edit histories of all registered English Wikipedia users who have stated their gender in the user preferences, a survey and experiment with 1000 Amazon Mechanical Turk users (from the US only, who were paid $1.50 for a 20 minutes task), and a dataset of biographical articles with the subject's gender obtained from Wikidata (excluding "celebrities like actors, athletes, and pop stars", focusing on "professionals", e.g. politicians and scientists, and cultural figures like writers and composers), together with pageview data.

Regarding causes of the gender gap, the author provides an overview of existing research, for example dismissing the so-called second shift as an explanation ("There are no gender differences in the amount of free time", p.3) and pointing out that "women contribute no less than men to another example of online public good provision, writing user reviews for products and services".

From the survey, the author concludes that "almost half of the gender gap in Wikipedia writing is explained by gender differences in two characteristics: frequency of Wikipedia use and belief about one’s competence ... The gender difference in the belief about competence could be due to women being less competent or due to women underestimating their competence. The survey data does not allow to distinguish these." (While the paper is otherwise well-informed about pre-existing research, it would have benefited from connecting this result to the work of Shaw and Hargittai; see our review of their paper "Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia").

Moving on to the effect of the editor gender gap on Wikipedia's content, the paper finds "that women are about twice as likely as men to contribute to Wikipedia articles about women", based both on the edit histories dataset and the Mechanical Turk survey. Intriguingly, "the number of readers per editor is higher for articles about women, and the share of articles that no one reads is larger in the case of articles about men". In other words, readers prefer articles about women, editors prefer articles about men. The author indicates that the readership discrepancy mostly comes from the tail end of low-traffic biography articles:

"On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."

The third part consisted of an experiment designed to "test whether providing information about gender inequality in Wikipedia changes editing behavior". Mechanical Turk respondents were divided into two groups that were provided with different introductory information about Wikipedia:

"Wikipedia has been criticized by some academics and journalists for having only 9% to 13% female contributors and for having fewer and less extensive articles about women or topics important to women." (a quote from the article Gender Bias on Wikipedia)

vs.

"Wikipedia started in 2001. English-language Wikipedia has over 4.5 million articles."

They were then "asked to imagine a hypothetical situation in which they edit a person’s Wikipedia page. Respondents were asked to look at Wikipedia articles and find some relevant information from the web that is missing from a Wikipedia article. ... In the end, they were also asked how likely they are to edit Wikipedia in the future."

The first version, highlighting the criticism of Wikipedia's gender gap, is "associated with a 35 percent decrease in the likelihood of editing Wikipedia in the future", i.e. discouraged rather than encouraged respondents from contributing, which the author calls "somewhat unexpected". This negative effect is concentrated among men: "The information that the majority of Wikipedia editors are men, leads men to reduce their editing effort, but it does not change the behavior of women." As summarized by the author:

"The result provides an example where encouraging gender equality can partially backfire. Wikipedia has set a goal to increase the share of female editors. One way to achieve this is by discouraging male editors. However, this might not be desirable ... The implication for Wikipedia and other forms of media is that it is important to balance the efforts of attracting new contributors and keeping the current ones."

She also points out that "there are other examples in the literature where informational treatment has backfired".

The paper is highly innovative and adds several novel results (with direct relevance for Wikipedians' work to combat this kind of systemic bias), some of which are not mentioned in this summary. The author seems justified in calling it "the first comprehensive study of gender inequality in a new media environment such as Wikipedia". A weakness of the part of the paper that studies the effect of editors' gender on their contributions might be its partial reliance on the gender as stated in their accounts' user preferences. The author stresses that her methodology is robust against potential under-reporting by one gender (for example, female editors being less willing to publish their gender in this way because of concerns about harassment). However, she adds that the validity of the results rests on the assumption "that editors don’t systematically report wrong gender. Since the default option is not specifying one’s gender, I would not expect that they are massively reporting wrong gender." In contrast, a 2011 paper by other authors ("WP:CLUBHOUSE", see Signpost summary) that used the same methodology (and concluded that e.g. women vandalize Wikipedia more often than men) explicitly pointed to the possibility that their results might be affected by deliberately wrong reporting (although this might mostly concern vandals with few edits overall, i.e. less relevance to the questions studied here). The paper also falls victim to a survivor bias fallacy when interpreting an otherwise interesting result as "female editors [having] increased from 3.7 percent in 2002 to a peak of 11.5 percent in 2011. In 2013, 10.4 percent of the active editors were female." The option to state a gender in one's user preferences was only introduced in 2009, so it is possible that, for example, there was a much higher percentage of women editing Wikipedia in 2002 who however left before they had the opportunity to state their gender seven years later.


Teaching Wikipedia: The Pedagogy and Politics of an Open Access Writing Community

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This dissertation[2] looks at the opportunities for writing pedagogy offered by the Wikipedia:Education program. It provides an interesting, though not comprehensive, overview of the literature in the field, and then proceeds to describe and analyze a number of educational assignments that the author has carried out on Wikipedia through their 2011 course. The author concludes that the "teaching with Wikipedia" approach is generally beneficial to students in a number of ways, from improving their writing and research skills, to an increase in student's rhetorical skills, and understanding of topics relating to knowledge creation. The main limitations of the study, acknowledged by the author, is that it is based on a small sample of students (the course seems to have only about seventeen participants). Nonetheless, it is a useful addition to our still limited understanding of the practice and benefits of the use of Wikipedia in an educational setting.

"Wikipedia, sociology, and the promise and pitfalls of Big Data"

Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

This paper,[3] or perhaps an essay or an Onion piece (2,500 words, with little original research), entitled "Wikipedia, sociology, and the promise and pitfalls of Big Data", is a strange beast. Published in the journal Big Data & Society, it doesn't really address the topic of big data; instead presenting a sociologically-informed and critical discussion of a number of aspects of Wikipedia that, while interesting, seems out of place in an academic journal, and reads more like an academic blog entry. The authors display a reasonable familiarity with Wikipedia, though they make a few factual mistakes (such as suggesting that Wikipedia:WikiProject Sociology was formed with the assistance of the American Sociological Association in 2004; in fact ASA has not been aware of WP:SOCIO until late 2000s and its support for it has been limited to linking to the WikiProject from their Wikipedia Initiative Page).

Based on their literature review, the authors don't hesitate to make some strong claims about Wikipedia, primarily in the vein of Wikipedia becoming less friendly to new editors, though most of those claims are more or less supported by the sources cited. The authors' research question is how the discipline of sociology is framed on Wikipedia, with special attention to the concepts of notability of academics (WP:PROF) and the gender imbalance of the Wikipedia biographies of sociologists. Unfortunately, as this is not a proper research piece, the authors' findings are rather sparse, and primarily concern the fact that topics covered by the WikiProject Sociology and its related portal are poorly structured, that Wikipedia's biographies of sociologists are mostly about male subjects (the article omits, however, the question of gender bias in academia – aren't most sociologists male anyway...? ), and that WP:PROF guideline may not be enforced too strictly for sociological biographies. It was an enjoyable reading, but overall, as seen in the article's sections which are entitled Abstract, Declaration of conflicting interests, Funding and Notes, there is something important missing – the article proper. As the authors make a point of stressing (twice) the chaotic and unorganized nature of Wikipedia's coverage of sociological topics, I can't help but feel that the article, which also fails to drive home any particular and well organized point, could well fit that description too.

See also our earlier coverage of the authors' research project: "Gender imbalance in Wikipedia coverage of academics to be studied with 2-year NSF grant"

Briefly

Wikipedia and the Stock Market

Reviewed by Maximilian Klein

Wikipedia may affect the stock market in a "governing" way, says Crowd Governance: The Monitoring Role of Wikipedia in the Financial Market[4]. It looks at how the stock market and insider trading reacts to the creation of a Wikipedia article about a traded firm. Using a sample of 413 articles on S&P500 firms, it was found that stock prices significantly drop on the days their Wikipedia article is created. Furthermore prices drop further for companies that have more insider traders, or which are more institutionally owned. This goes to show, the authors say, that Wikipedia governs the stock market by "reducing information asymmetry". Firm information on Wikipedia would seem to benefit the public more than information in newspapers, that is bad news for Wall Street.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

  • "Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis"'[5] From the abstract: "This study aims to check if Wikipedia’s [quality] ratings really reflect its stated criteria. According to Wikipedia criteria, having abundant and stable content is the key to article’s quality promotion; we therefore examine the content change in terms of quantity change and content stability by showing the semantic convergence. We found out that the quantity of content change is significant in the promoted articles, which complies with Wikipedia’s stated criteria."
  • "Wikipedia's Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)action"[6] From the abstract: "In this article, I explore how Wikipedia functions as a rhetorical discourse community whose conventions exclude and silence feminist ways of knowing and writing. Drawing on textual analysis of Wikipedia's editorial policies, as well as interviews with female users, I argue that Wikipedia's insistence on separating embodied subjectivity from the production of knowledge limits the site's ability to facilitate any substantial, subversive feminist rhetorical action."
  • "Knowledge Quality of Collaborative Editing in Wikipedia: an Integrative Perspective of Social Capital and Team Conflict"[7] From the abstract: "Despite the abundant researches on Wikipedia, to the best of our knowledge, no one has considered the integration of social capital and conflict. Besides, extant literatures on knowledge quality just pay attention to task conflict, while relational conflict is rarely mentioned. Meanwhile, our study proposes the nonlinear relationship between task conflict and knowledge quality instead of linear relationships in prior studies. We also postulate the moderating effect of task complexity."
  • "Collective remembering of organizations: Co-construction of organizational pasts in Wikipedia"[8] From the abstract: "The authors analyze 1,459 edits of Wikipedia pages of ten organizations from various industries. Quantitative content analysis detects Wikipedia edits for their reputational relevance and reference to formal sources, such as corporate communication or newspapers. Furthermore, the authors investigate to which degree current corporate communication in form of 177 press releases has an influence on the remembering process in Wikipedia. ... The analysis of press releases shows that current frames provided by corporate communication finds only little resonance in the ongoing remembering processes in Wikipedia."

References

  1. ^ Marit Hinnosaar (2015): Gender Inequality in New Media: Evidence from Wikipedia. No 411, Carlo Alberto Notebooks from Collegio Carlo Alberto. PDF
  2. ^ Vetter, Matthew A. Teaching Wikipedia: The Pedagogy and Politics of an Open Access Writing Community. Thesis, 2015, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, English (Arts and Sciences). PDF
  3. ^ Julia Adams, Hannah Brückner: Wikipedia, sociology, and the promise and pitfalls of Big Data. doi:10.1177/2053951715614332, Dec 2015
  4. ^ Weifang, Wu; Xiaoquan, (Michael) Zhang; Rong, Zheng (2014). "Crowd Governance: The Monitoring Role of Wikipedia in the Financial Market" (PDF). Unpublished: 33. Retrieved 6 January 2016.
  5. ^ Huijing Deng, Bernadetta Tarigan, Mihai Grigore, Juliana Sutanto: Understanding the ‘Quality Motion’ of Wikipedia Articles Through Semantic Convergence Analysis. Proceedings of HCI in Business, Second International Conference, HCIB 2015, held as Part of HCI International 2015, Los Angeles, CA, USA, August 2-7, 2015, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-20895-4_7 Closed access icon
  6. ^ Leigh Gruwell: Wikipedia's Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)action. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S8755461515000547 Closed access icon
  7. ^ Zhan, Liuhan; Wang, Nan; Shen, Xiao-Liang; and Sun, Yongqiang, "Knowledge Quality of Collaborative Editing in Wikipedia: an Integrative Perspective of Social Capital and Team Conflict" (2015). PACIS 2015 Proceedings.Paper 171. http://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2015/171
  8. ^ Michael Andreas Etter , Finn Årup Nielsen, (2015) "Collective remembering of organizations: Co-construction of organizational pasts in Wikipedia", Corporate Communications: An International Journal, Vol. 20 Issue: 4, pp.431–447 doi:10.1108/CCIJ-09-2014-0059 Closed access icon



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2016-01-06

Try-ing to become informed – WikiProject Rugby League

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By Leeds United FC fan
Former France international Rémi Casty currently plays for the Catalans Dragons.
Johnathan Thurston's drop goal won the North Queensland Cowboys the 2015 NRL Grand Final.
The Leeds Rhinos, who play their home matches at the Headingley Carnegie Rugby Stadium, won the treble in 2015.

WikiProject Rugby league has a plethora of participants, many of which are active or semi-active. There are 5 Featured Articles, 11 Good Articles and 1 Featured List. We discussed the WikiProject with some of its most active members, RugbyXIII, Casliber and Mattlore.

Why did you join WikiProject Rugby League? Do you support a club team and/or representative team, and if so who?

  • RugbyXIII: I felt the project needed another fairly active member as a few of the rugby league pages needed more updating/tidying up and other RL topics needed articles creating. I follow Wigan Warriors home and away and also give my support to the England national rugby league team.
  • Casliber: I love reading history of sports articles and wikipedia (especially with early newspaper digitization and books etc.) offers a great opportunity to make some really good pages. I support Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs.
  • Mattlore: I'm a rugby league nut and a wikipedian, if there was only one project I'd be involved in on Wikipedia - it would be this one! I am from New Zealand and so support the New Zealand Warriors club side and the New Zealand representative team.

Have you significantly contributed to the WikiProject's articles, or even helped to promote articles to Did You Know, Good Article or Featured Article status?

The French Wikipedia also has an active Rugby league wikiproject. Have you ever made contact with members of the wikiproject? If not, do you plan to in the future?

  • RugbyXIII: To be honest, no. I do not speak or understand French and my knowledge of the game in France beyond the Catalan Dragons is limited.
  • Casliber: Sounds interesting but no
  • Mattlore: I wasn't aware there was a French wikiproject TBH.

Are there any areas of rugby league that are not well represented on the English Wikipedia? I noticed that the French Wikipedia has a page for the Elite One Championship whilst the English Wikipedia does not.

  • RugbyXIII: The amateur game in Britain and Europe definitely needs more coverage on the English Wikipedia.
  • Casliber: Aussie player coverage is patchy and real lack of audited content (GA/FA) compared with other areas of wikipedia.
  • Mattlore: I think coverage is fairly broad, in terms on quantity, but the quality of articles could be improved. And, like I imagine most sport projects, we suffer from 'recentisim' and could use more effort in historical articles - especially biographies.

What are the long-term aims of the WikiProject? How could a new editor help the WikiProject?

  • RugbyXIII: The standard of the Association Football articles on Wikipedia tend to be very high, so I think achieving similar levels should be a main goal. A new editors goal, like mine, should simply be the improvement of the rugby league Wikipedia articles and in the long run, GA's & FA's should be targets.
  • Casliber: what he said :)
  • Mattlore: One of the constant challenges to the project is the number of "fans" who come in and make biased edits or ones that don't meet Wikipedia guidelines, especially at the start of a season. The way to combat this is to have an active wikiproject that can be there to wikify edits and guide, and hopefully keep, these new contributors. The project is not as active as it has been in the past, so needs some help to rebuild.

Feel free to make a suggestion for a future WikiProject report at the WikiProject desk. Thanks for reading!

Editor's note: We welcome Leeds United FC fan as our new WikiProject report author. He is a member of the project he profiled this week, but in the future will profile projects in which he is not involved. In fact, feel free to suggest a project for profiling in the comments! Go Phightins!



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2016-01-06

Tech news in brief

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By Wikimedia tech ambassadors
The following content has been republished as-is from the Tech News weekly report.

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Tech News

  • Because of the holidays, the next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 11 January 2016.
  • The writers of the technical newsletter are asking for your opinion. Did you get the information you wanted this year? Did we miss important technical news in 2015? What kind of information was too late? Please tell us! You can write in your language. Thank you!

Recent changes

  • CompletionSuggester is a new suggestions algorithm for Search. It is available as a Beta feature since 17 December. (more information)
  • The Multimedia team is running an A/B test for the cross-wiki upload tool. They are testing four different interfaces. The test is running from 16-23 December. (more information)

Changes this week

  • There is no deployment of MediaWiki scheduled until 12 January 2016 (calendar).

Meetings

  • Should administrators and other users with advanced tools need stronger passwords? You can discuss about it in a Request for Comments.
  • No meeting with the VisualEditor team on 22 and 29 December, and 5 January.


Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.



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