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WikiProject news

News in brief

• The August Wikify Drive is already halfway through the month. Don't procrastinate any longer. Earn those barnstars!
• There's something creepy, cooky, mysterious, and spooky at WikiProject Horror. They could use your help improving articles about horror television shows, movies, novels, and comics.
• The Guild of Copy Editors is already preparing for their September drive. Reserve a spot for yourself today.

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week we returned to the always energetic WikiProject Oregon. When we first interviewed them in June 2009, the project was proud of their successful collaboration system, a WordPress blog, and their tendency to blur Wikipedia with real life. While some of these efforts have slowed a bit recently and several project members have found themselves living far from their Oregon roots, the project has nonetheless continued to foster discussion and churn out Good Articles. The project is currently home to 22 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, and 88 Good and A-class articles. We interviewed Peteforsyth (Pete), tedder, Aboutmovies, and Jsayre64. Pete even offered to write an introduction for this article, so I'll turn it over to the experts:

Pete: Thank you for the opportunity! Before jumping into the specific questions, I want to say that since the first Signpost article on WikiProject Oregon, many things have changed, but the core has remained the same! The Project has had an evolving cast of characters, but (in my view) there has been a great balance between early members moving on (but generally still checking in from time to time) and fresh, enthusiastic contributors every bit as dedicated to the improvement of encyclopedic content about Oregon. In the two years since your last interview, three of us have left the state (all, oddly enough, to California -- more on that later); but we all continue to stay engaged to some degree. There have been a couple of times when I feared that the momentum of the project would diminish substantially, but in recent months, I have been very encouraged by the level of activity and enthusiasm I've seen. I'd love to hear from some other project members on this point: have we achieved "escape velocity"? What will it take to ensure that the project continues to consistently improve Oregon-related content in the years and decades to come?

Last December, WikiProject Oregon created its 10,000th article, Spruce Production Division, which was displayed on the Main Page as a DYK at the end of December and became a Good Article in February. Share with us the story behind this article. Was its incubation different from most articles created on Wikipedia?

Jsayre64: Well, you could say it all started with this post on our project's talk page, pointing out that there were nearly 10,000 Oregon-related articles on Wikipedia at that time. We !voted for what article to write together as the project's 10,000th, and we elected Spruce Production Division. We started the article soon after that, and it looked much like this while it was in the project namespace. But I doubt the article would have reached GA status by February if it weren't for a unique group of Oregon editors who were dedicated to making our 10,000th article a good one. It was a collaboration, of course, and it was successful.

One unique feature about WikiProject Oregon is the amount of collaboration that occurs in the real world. Project members meet for "Wiki Wednesdays" each week and three RecentChangesCamp unconferences have been hosted in Portland. What do you do at these meetups? Is there something unique about Oregon that fosters these kinds of offline collaborations? Would this work in other states?

tedder: Since Ward Cunningham and the Portland ethos runs strong, Wiki Wednesdays (held at the AboutUs.org offices) are about many different wikis, not just Wikipedia. They've involved Wikipedians (especially during OSCON) but generally the Portland Wiki has been at the top of the plurality. In fact, the civic wiki formed out of the WikiWednesdays as a complement to Wikipedia.

I think the Wikipedia presence has been weak for several reasons- going to an event involves an excursion outside of an introvert's comfort zone, simple contributions can be done just as easily from home. This is different from team activities like deciding on the proper free license, how to handle various issues, which software to use. The most recent WikiWednesday I attended was about a year ago, and it involved drinking, talking, and content contributions. Unfortunately the latter tends towards being an individual activity, much like parallel play.

There are many things about Oregon that support these types of collaborations. Portland's tech community is notoriously open-everything and well-connected.

The biggest reason WikiWednesdays haven't been well-represented is mostly the reverse Californication of WikiProject Oregon. Three individuals embarked for Oregon's Mexico over the past ~18 months. This is certainly a minority of the active project members, but all three were from the Portland metro and that removed some of the face-to-face energy.

When we first interviewed WikiProject Oregon, we were amazed by the project's double collaboration of the week system. Is the collaboration still as strong today as it was then? Are there any limitations to the collaboration of the week/fortnight/month concept?

Jsayre64: I wasn't yet on Wikipedia back then, but I've heard that the project's COTW system has not been as strong in the past year or so as it had been earlier. However, we nominated ourselves for a Triple Crown and received one, found here. Also see Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Triple Crown. This motivated some of us who were not originally included in the award to work on GA and FA content so we could be a part of the project award. User:Another Believer helped get the articles Keller Fountain Park, Director Park, and Hands Across Hawthorne (in record time, by the way) all to GA status. Perhaps Bitar Mansion will be next. He has earned his part in the award; User:EncMstr as well. As for me, I joined the party with a three-way collaboration to get Willamette River to GA status (the article is now under peer review for an FA nomination), and hopefully my nomination of Klamath River will be reviewed and the article will receive the green icon sometime soon. So in summary—although again, I know nothing about 2009 and earlier around here—I would say that the selected collaborations that appear in Template:WikiProject Oregon collab don't receive as much attention as before, but the collaborative spirit has been just as strong with other articles.

Aboutmovies: COTW has had a slight renaissance in the last few months, but just like the project in general, there has been a drop-off in the last 18 months or so. COTW has dropped off mainly because I graduated and had to start working, thus far less Wiki-time to keep it updated. The overall drop of has to do with similar drops in editor activity by many long-time WPORE members as the real world has reared it's ugly head and spread our members out across the country and/or reduced editing time. Simply put, we need more new blood, which from my understanding is a Wikipedia-wide problem.

tedder: COTW has definitely dropped off. It's gone from an organized event to an even more grassroots effort. There are good and bad things about this, but I think the biggest advantage is that proposed collaborations happen immediately and are self-sorting. Something like Hands Across Hawthorne would lose momentum if they were confined to the weekly model.

The Oregon Portal is a Featured Portal. How much effort goes into building and maintaining a Featured Portal? What role does the portal serve as a component of WikiProject Oregon?

Pete: An observation: the Portal draws in the neighborhood of 1,000 page views per month. This stands in contrast to the highest-rated content the project has worked on, which draw thousands or tens of thousands of views per month. I feel the Featured Portal drive was more valuable as a tool for building our sense of shared purpose and scope, than for serving Wikipedia's readers. There is, of course, great potential for this to change: imagine the kinds of uses schools, museums, foundations, or other institutions could find for the portal. But in order for that to happen, I believe that Wikipedians' ideas of how to construct a portal -- which has not exactly been a hotbed of innovation -- would need to shift substantially, and/or there would need to be strong and sustained efforts to communicate with those kinds of institutions in the state.

The community-building aspect, though, is not to be taken lightly. I learned a great deal from the editors leading the charge on the portal, and felt more motivated than ever to create good content.

Aboutmovies: There was a lot of collaboration in the creation and drive to featured status. However, the last few years I think it is pretty much just me adding new content to it. Luckily we still have active editors to get articles to GA/FA status so that I have new articles to work into the portal.

Does WikiProject Oregon collaborate with any other projects? Have you considered annexing the wayward WikiProject California?

Pete: Thanks a lot for blowing our cover. Three of our operatives have been deeply embedded in the California Wikiverse during the last two years, covertly studying their infrastructure, the weaknesses in their social order, etc. etc. We have borrowed heavily from their technology and even attempted praying (to no avail) to their sun gods. But thanks to your public inquiry, the entire operation has now been compromised.

Okay, in all seriousness, I may have some useful observations to share. As a current resident of San Francisco, and as former Public Outreach Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation, I've had the chance to get to know Wikipedia communities in Oregon, California, and around the world. I have a couple of theories: (1) Size matters. Wikimedia Chapters, by and large, have been successful in countries similar in size to Oregon: for instance, many European countries. If it's possible for Wikipedians to get together in person, whether in organized groups or just casual meetups, it facilitates community-building. And (2) An existing sense of community. This is difficult to measure, but I think very important. Portland, my former hometown, is the biggest city in the state; but it's not very big compared to California's Bay Area, where I live now (which is one of several large population centers in the state). While living in Portland, I felt strongly that "my people" were not merely Portlanders, or people who shared my various hobbies and interests, but Oregonians more generally. I have the sense that is common in Oregon. Not ubiquitous, but common. Finding other Wikipedians interested in focusing on the state was exciting, but also felt natural. In San Francisco, I don't get that sense. Things move faster here, and there are more people. People seem to gravitate toward smaller communities: they identify, for instance, with Silicon Valley culture, or Burning Man, or the various non-profits in the area, more than they identify as Californians. I suspect these (and surely other) factors tend to make it more difficult to organize Wikipedians in a huge state like California than in Oregon.

That said, I've also had the pleasure of being involved with a number of local efforts here -- and we've even begun to try to coordinate a bit between the states. Both cities had vibrant celebrations of Wikipedia's 10th anniversary, and were able to share the experience via the magic of YouTube and other social networks. More recently, we both had a go at putting on local versions of the Great American Wiknic, which had a big draw here in SF, and didn't quite get off the ground in Portland. I am hopeful that those of us in Greater Cascadia will work together more closely in the years to come!

tedder: Pete is correct. We are Oregonians (and Portlanders) in our hearts, and it's hard to move away from that. I tend to migrate every four years but Portland is the only place I have attachment to. My Portland-centric article creation has certainly dropped off, but my time has also dropped off, so I tend to do more wikigardening than creation.

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Pete: Above all, just come say hi -- and tell us a little about your interests -- on the WikiProject Oregon talk page. Unlike other projects, we haven't gone too far in the direction of setting up sub-projects or task forces. I think the biggest advantage of our approach is that everybody talks in the same place; although we might have varied interests, we try to support each other's content-building efforts, and teach each other wiki tricks along the way. I'm sure others will have specific suggestions -- but the important thing is, just come make your interest known!

Jsayre64: I think that what's extremely important to the project's future are new editors. If you take a look at the talk page, you'll find that most of the editors involved in the discussions have been on Wikipedia for at least two years, and many for more than three years. And I agree with Pete; enthusiastic new members should come introduce themselves as well as their Oregon-related interests on the talk page. I guarantee the project's members will be welcoming, and more likely than not, they will be interested in working within the project with the new members.

tedder: We have diverse interests. New members add to this diversity. Some enthusiasm for a subject that happens to have an Oregon component is always nice. If nothing else, the project talk page is a vibrant hub of activity. This has led to various "adoptions" of pages- a few of us adopted Hazen, Nevada when we stumbled across fantastic pictures, for instance, and research into tiny mostly-abandoned Oregon towns led me to the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company and a handful of towns in Utah and Idaho.

Aboutmovies: Cash, and lots of it, so we can buy Idaho and annex and put to rest once and for all the Idaho's Portugal issue. Though some sort of ability to legally provide access to all of the paid archives of the Oregonian, Register-Guard, and Statesman Journal newspapers would be beneficial.

Anything else you'd like to add?

tedder: I've been able to contribute some technical skills towards Wikipedia based on the needs of WikiProject Oregon. For example, this list (which enables this watchlist) was manually generated until I wrote some perl to handle it. Having that list updated daily allows us to monitor new article additions and also to celebrate our 10,000th article with a collaboration ( Spruce Production Division, as JSayre64 mentioned above). This service is used by other projects- see Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports/Admin, for instance. It also prompted me to rewrite the hugely popular AlexNewPageBot when it went missing, but that will be covered in a future WikiProject Oregon blog post.

Next week's article will be very animated. Until then, draw your own conclusions in the archive.

Reader comments

2011-08-15

The best of the week

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By Tony1, Dabomb87, and Jorgenev

This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 7 – Saturday 13 August

Featured pictures

Six images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":

• Swimming Green Turtle ( nom; related article), whose range extends throughout tropical and subtropical seas around the globe, with two distinct populations in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Their common name derives from the usually green fat beneath their upper shell (created by User:Mbz1; picture at right).
• Phantasmal poison frog ( nom; related article), a species of poison dart frog whose natural habitat is the Andean slopes in central Ecuador. They have a radiant colour, powerful poison, and yet range in length from only 1–4 centimetres. They can live up to 10 years in captivity (created by Holger Krisp at Commons).
• Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever ( nom; related article), was bred to "toll", or lure, ducks into shooting range by causing a disturbance near the shore. After the duck is shot, the dog brings it to the hunter (created by Kallerna at Commons; picture at top).
• Papuan Frogmouth ( nom; related article), whose natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests, is found in Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Torres Strait. (created by User:JJ Harrison).
• Rainbow Bee-eater ( nom; related article), perching on a drinking fountain at Centenary Lakes, Cairns, on the north-east coast of Australia (created by User:JJ Harrison).
• Château de Maintenon ( nom; related article), in the Eure-et-Loir region of France, was the private residence of Madame de Maintenon, the second spouse of Louis XIV. Construction began in the 12th and ended in the 18th century. The east and west wings frame a cour d'honneur. The castle has been classified as a historic monument since 1944 (created by User:Eric Pouhier; picture at bottom).

Featured lists

Five lists were promoted:

• Simon & Garfunkel discography ( nom). (Nominated by GreatOrangePumpkin; picture at right.)
• Nadia Ali discography ( nom) ( Hassan514.)
• Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (M) ( nom) ( Killervogel5.)
• List of accolades received by True Grit (2010 film) ( nom) ( Crystal Clear x3.)
• 2010 Asian Para Games medal table ( nom) ( Bill william compton)

Featured topics

One topic was promoted:

• Hugo Awards ( nom), given every year by the World Science Fiction Society, for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The 15 categories of the Hugo Awards each have a featured list. (nominator PresN; picture at right).

Featured articles

No articles were promoted to featured status last week.

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2011-08-15

Abortion case opened, two more still in progress

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By Jorgenev

Abortion now under arbitration

Request

The request for arbitration submitted nearly two weeks ago for user conduct issues related to Abortion-related articles has now been accepted. Nineteen users are involved parties.

The request was submitted by Steven Zhang after formal mediation failed to produce results. He stated there were some remaining content issues involved in the dispute (the titles of abortion-related articles are a focal point of the issue), but stressed that user conduct is the impediment to progress. MastCell agreed, writing that "the underlying problem isn't what to call these articles ... There's clearly no One True Naming Convention for the pro-choice/pro-life articles. The real problem is the unreasoning intransigence with which the naming dispute has been litigated."

Arbitrator response was tepid at first, with a smattering of comments, opposes, and recusals; but in the end the case was accepted, with five arbitrator supports, one oppose, and three recusals.

Beginnings of case

Sven Manguard was the first to make it to the evidence page, presenting a plea that the "canvassing" attempts in the earlier steps in the dispute resolution process—where most users reacted poorly to being brought in—be avoided this time.

As of time of writing, seven editors have submitted evidence, related to issues as diverse as page moves, user conduct, and image selection.

Manipulation of BLPs: Week 2

Will Beback joked that the lack of submissions to the case "may set a record"; as it stands, four users have submitted evidence in the last week:

• Cla68 accused Prioryman of disruptive behavior and intends to present evidence against Will Beback and Jehochman as well.
• Jehochman questioned why he had been named by Cla68, writing that "there has been no prior dispute resolution between us whatsoever. I am busy and do not have time to address any evidence or participate in this case".
• Anthonyhcole has not laid out any specific accusations yet—he plans to—but has saved his place with the unusual declaration that "we (angels) are opposed to racism, sexual bigotry, anti-scientific nonsense, cults, and evidence-free 'therapies'. Guardian angels have descended upon these areas to protect articles from the taint of the evil ones."
• Collect points in their evidence to a number of articles that have content issues and urges ArbCom to "require scrupulousness in editing of biographies and articles which in any way touch upon specific living people".

The case workshop was much more active, with concerns about scope. This was followed by an unsuccessful attempt to have the case closed. Arbitrator David Fuchs acknowledged "the frustration of parties who aren't exactly sure how this is being cleaved or what's being dealt with; this case has suffered from ... everyone yelling about everything else and being a badly-framed request with lots of people wanting lots of things", but said he didn't "think it's pointless to develop a sort of 'best principles' result without sanctions—given that this is a novel approach anyhow". Newyorkbrad is the drafting arbitrator. Mirroring Fuchs' comments, he agreed that "it may be that this case winds up with a reaffirmation of general principles, and guidelines for dispute resolution when there are allegations those principles have been violated, rather than with findings and sanctions against particular editors. ... But we will see what other evidence comes in, and then as drafter I anticipate being able to do something useful with the case, even though I was not the biggest proponent of splitting the request into two cases precisely as was done."

Cirt and Jayen466 case continues

On 9 August, the deadline for submitting evidence to this case was extended to 15 August. In doing so, drafter Roger Davies suggested that the deadline may have to be pushed back further to allow "time to respond to new evidence submitted". As of time of writing, nine editors have submitted on-wiki evidence.

Reader comments

2011-08-15

Forks, upload slowness and mobile redirection

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By Jarry1250, Jorgenev

Making Wikimedia more forkable

The question of how easy it is to " fork" Wikimedia wikis, or, indeed, to merely mirror their content on another site, was posed this week on the wikitech-l mailing list by Wikimedian David Gerard. The concept is also related to that of backups, since a Wikipedia fork could provide a useful restore point if Wikimedia server areas were affected by simultaneous technical failure, such as that caused by a potent hacking attempt.

During the discussion, Lead Software Architect Brion Vibber suggested that the Wikimedia software setup could be easily recreated, as could page content. Instead, he said, the major challenge would lie in "being able to move data around between different sites (merging changes, distributing new articles)", potentially allowing users of other sites to feedback improvements to articles whilst also receiving updates from Wikimedia users. So far, at least one site ( http://wikipedia.wp.pl/) has been successful in maintaining a live copy of Wikimedia wikis, lagging behind the parent wiki it tries to mirror by only minutes. No site has yet implemented an automated procedure for pushing edits made by its users upstream to its parent wiki, however. Other contributors suggested that few external sites would have the facility to host their own copy of images, and keeping in line with Wikimedia's strict policy on attribution.

In unrelated news, there were also discussions about making pageview statistics more accessible to operators of tools and apps ( also wikitech-l). In particular, the current reliance on the external site http://stats.grok.se to collate data was noted. As MZMcBride wrote, "currently, if you want data on, for example, every article on the English Wikipedia, you'd have to make 3.7 million individual HTTP requests to [the site]".

Uploading was slower than it used to be, but that's fixed, says bugmeister

Although hampered by a lack of data points, anecdotal evidence collected over the past fortnight pointed to a slowdown in the speed of uploading files to Wikimedia wikis. The problem therefore made mass API uploading very difficult, and, as a result, a bug was opened. "An upload that should take minutes is taking hours", wrote one commenter. Another pinpointed Wikimedia servers as the bottleneck: during a test, uploads to the Internet Archive had been over ten times quicker. As it became clear that the problem was affecting a large number of users and data collected seemed to show a dramatic decrease in upload speeds earlier this year, significant resources were devoted to the issue. WMF technicians Chad Horohoe, Roan Kattouw, Sam Reed, Rob Lanphier and Asher Feldman have all worked on the problem.

Once the upload chain was determined as "User → Europe caching server → US caching server → Application server ( Apache) → Network File System → Wikimedia server MS7", members of the operations team worked to profile where the bottleneck was occurring. Unfortunately, an error introduced by the profiling meant that uploads were in fact blocked for several minutes. Then, on 12/13 August, the problem was pinpointed and fixed: a module for helping optimise network connections, Generic Receive Offload (GRO), had in fact been slowing them down. According to WMF bugmeister Mark Hershberger, smaller data packets were being collated into much larger ones. The new packets were then too large to be handled effectively by other parts of the network infrastructure. Although there are still some reports of slowness, test performance has increased by a factor of at least three. In the future, more data on upload speed is likely to be collected to provide a benchmark against which efficiency can be tested.

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

How you can help

Spread News of Job Vacancies

This week, the Foundation's Rob Lanphier reiterated that the Foundation is having problems hiring a new Data Analysis engineer and a software developer. Know someone who might be interested? Link them to the details.

• There was a brief incident on Wednesday where users were being inappropriately identified as mobile users and redirected to the mobile version of Wikipedia following a software deployment ( discussion). The deployment was aimed at improving levels of redirection ahead of the launch of an improved mobile browsing experience (set to be trialled later this month). Estimates for the amount of time the redirection was in place stand at around 6 minutes. In unrelated news, WMF Data Analyst Erik Zachte this week upgraded his figure for the percentage of Wikimedia page views originating on mobile devices to fifteen per cent.
• On the English Wikipedia this week, bots were approved for a number of tasks including mass TfD tagging and tagging valid files as being eligible for transfer to Wikimedia Commons. BRFAs that are still open cover a number of other tasks, including the import of expert comment from an external site.
• Mark Hershberger has suggested that efforts to get 1.18 released on time had significant "momentum" but needed to sustain that to achieve success. The bugmeister explained that while approximately 160 revisions had been reviewed in the last week, another 210 were still left to review ( wikitech-l mailing list). The figures include certain core extensions, and are consequently higher than previously published figures which did not.
• A MediaWiki hackathon has been announced for 14–16 October. Held in the American city of New Orleans, it will include discussion of Wikimedia Labs (a project that will integrate and extend the functionality available to tool developers) and a bugsmash ( wikitech-l mailing list).
• As is now becoming a regular event, developers reviewed the list of bugs currently marked as "blocking" the 1.18 release, or otherwise proving particularly problematic for users. Those attending noted their thoughts down in an Etherpad collaborative report.
• A question raised at Wikimania – why the Chinese Wikipedia was getting so much more traffic than it used to – turned out to have a technical answer. The robots.txt file for the Chinese Wikipedia was written in both traditional and simplified Chinese, causing problems for bots from search engines and the like, a Chinese Wikimedian explained.
  
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