You may have noticed the new WikiProject News sidebar, which features news from WikiProjects around Wikipedia. In this issue, we're introducing sidebars for many of our common reports. The Signpost Sidebars help organize brief content into a neat view, leaving plenty of room for the great articles every week in the Signpost.
Included Reports
Starting in this week's News and notes section, a "Briefly" sidebar will showcase snippets of Wikipedia news. Originally pioneered as a section, the briefly sidebar will continue to showcase the same great content, contrasting nicely with the longer stories.
For approvals in the Technology beat, we added a sidebar to better organize the page and to provide an easier experience for readers. Look for this deployment in this week's Signpost.
Additionally, we have plans to roll out a sidebar for our Arbitration, In the news, and special story reports soon.
Finally, we are now featuring more graphics to better illustrate our articles. From graphs in News and notes, to spectacular shots from Wikipedia's Featured Picture collection in the WikiProject Report, we're sure that you'll enjoy the small tweaks we've made.
On Tuesday, 13 April 2010 over 50 leaders from the global museum sector were invited to meet with 11 Wikimedians for a day-long workshop in Denver, Colorado to discuss collaboration between the two communities. Building on the momentum of the GLAM-WIKI conference in Australia in August 2009, this workshop was thought important enough by Museums and the Web conference organizers Jennifer Trant and David Bearman to be given an entire day at the prestigious international conference and had the goal of "exploring and developing policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums." As Liam Wyatt, who helped initiate the event, said, "this is where we need to be, if we want to demonstrate we are serious about collaborating."
The day began with two keynote speeches. The first was by Wikimedia board member Samuel Klein, who outlined what Wikimedia and its sister projects are about and described Wikipedia as a city full of different communities that are "born of curiosity" and which want to "share beauty". The second was by the CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Maxwell Anderson, who outlined what museum culture is and what the stakes are for museums in opening up their content, in particular what about museum culture both "hinders and fosters candid information transfer". After the two opening speeches, the attendees introduced themselves and articulated an issue that they would like to see addressed at the workshop.
During the afternoon, four "breakout sessions" were formed around the issues raised in the morning. They addressed technology, content, return on investment, and model projects. Some of the main issues they explored were: importing metadata from museums, adding references to articles, differentiating between reliable and unreliable sources from Wikipedia's perspective, addressing conflict of interest issues, and developing partnerships. Ayers reported that "by and large people were enthusiastic about interacting with the site". Both groups learned about each others' assumptions and misconceptions as well. For example, Pellegrini noted that "It was clear that museums ... are reluctant to release free images for fear of losing revenue. Yet this is one of the first things that Wikipedians want from such a collaboration." Wyatt discovered that the prohibition against adding "external links" was being interpreted by museums as a prohibition against adding references in addition to promotional links. While the issue of multimedia collaboration was continually raised at the conference, Wyatt and others attempted to demonstrate that there were possibilities for content partnerships as well.
Four Wikimedians, Wyatt, Schindler, Wadewitz, and Multichill, remained for the rest of the conference, building on the connections established during the workshop and developing additional ones. On Thursday, Wyatt, Wadewitz, and Multichill ran an unconference session entitled "Everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were afraid to ask" and on Friday, Wyatt, Wadewitz, Bearman and Trant presented a summary of the proceedings on Tuesday to the entire conference and answered questions about Wikimedia.
The conference helped individual museums make connections with Wikimedians and see what kinds of projects are possible, such as creating learning resources on Wikibooks. Ayers pointed out that there are steps Wikipedia can take to make such projects easier to start, such as providing a notability guideline for artworks and setting up a "centralized and updated list of partnerships", which has already been started at WP:GLAM. Pellegrini and Anderson are working on "creating a mailing list for Wikipedia editors and museum staffers". On a broader level, the conference helped "legitimise [W]ikipedia and Wikimedia as a point of discussion in the global museum sector", as Wyatt said. "We will no longer be talked about as some anonymous thing, but as a legitimate thing that can be openly discussed at board meetings in museums.... Wikimedia has now stood up, waved, and introduced itself."
Wikimedia Norway had its annual general assembly on 19 April, and elected a new board.
Wikimedia announcements list formed
An announcements-only mailing list has been formed for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a mechanism for those who want to keep up with major Wikimedia and project news but don't want the traffic of Foundation-l in their inboxes.
The new list is called wikimediaannounce-l, and can be subscribed to here. To date there have been no postings beyond initial testing. The list in future will include press releases and major announcements from the Foundation, Wikimedia Chapters, and the community.
The types of posts to be accepted are detailed in the list guidelines on Meta, which were initially developed by Wikimedia Foundation Head of Communications Jay Walsh based on community ideas. This is the first announcements-only list for the Wikimedia community, although the general idea of an announcements list has been proposed several times in the past; the idea was brought up again last November during the discussions about moderating and improving Foundation-l, the open discussion list for the WMF (see previous story).
The announcements list is fully moderated; Walsh is the initial moderator. Replies sent to the list will go directly to Foundation-l, which is open participation. Everyone interested in Wikimedia news is encouraged to subscribe to the new list.
Wikipedia on transit
One of the Wikimedia screens on a Berlin subway
Advertisements featuring Wikipedia and Wikimedia began appearing on Berlin subways last week, in a project run by Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany). According to Catrin Schoneville, press contact for Wikimedia Deutschland, the ads were produced by TV production company Berliner Fenster GmbH, who were contacted by Wikimedia volunteer Juliana da Costa.
The ads feature short "did you know" clips and information about Wikimedia. The spots are showing on 3768 double screens in 1106 wagons, approximately 8 spots per hour, with an average of 1.5 million viewers per day. The advertisements are worth approximately 150,000 €/month. Wikimedia Deutschland hopes to expand the program to more cities' subways as well.
A Head of Office Administration job has been added to the list of current job openings at the Wikimedia Foundation; this job opening closes 1 May. In addition to the office administration position, which will manage "the administrative services support team" and functions related to the physical office, several core leadership and management positions are currently open at the Foundation. These including Chief Human Resources Officer (will manage issues related to HR), Chief Global Program Officer (will manage the Programs department, including outreach and communication), and Chief Development Officer (manages the fundraising plan), all of which are "open until filled." The Chief Human Resources and Chief Development officer positions are newly created positions.
Der Spiegel looks at how the sausage gets made on German Wikipedia
An article that appeared in last week's edition of German magazine Der Spiegel is available online in English: "Backstage with the Wikipedians: Inner Workings of Global Encyclopedia 'Better than a Soap Opera'". As an example, the article examined a controversy over a single word in the German Wikipedia's article about the Donauturm (a tower in Vienna, Austria), which began last fall and produced over 600,000 characters of discussion (assembled, tongue-in-cheek, into a 440-page bookavailable from Pediapress). Der Spiegel interviewed several Wikipedians and also quotes sociologist Christian Stegbauer.
Larry Sanger has published an article, "Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age", in EDUCAUSE Review; Sanger criticizes the idea that resources like Wikipedia are replacing the need for memorization in education.
A BBC news blog, in discussing the retirement of U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, notes that "Wikipedia briefly suggested today he was unique in other ways, but the entry, which had the bow tie-wearing nonagenarian down as the former bass player with Led Zeppelin was later removed...", a reference to John Paul Jones.
In late March, the Karachay-Balkar Wikipedia opened its doors. At the same time, after being closed and having its database locked some time ago, the Tokipona Wikipedia was completely removed.
Wikinews will be holding a writing contest from 1 May to 22 May. All are invited to compete; winners will receive barnstars.
Furthermore, the Audio Wikinews project has been revived. Help is needed in recording two to five minute newscast summaries of each day's top stories on Wikinews. Those who are interested may post a message on the project talk page.
Milestones
The following project milestones were reached in March and April:
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
This week, we're highlighting the efforts of WikiProject Gastropods. For readers unfamiliar with gastropods, Invertzoo introduces them as "snails and slugs of every kind. I know that may sound repugnant, but in reality they are extraordinary creatures; many of them are very beautiful and have quite fascinating lives." WikiProject Gastropods was created by JoJan in May 2004 and has grown to include 18,000 articles, including 6 good articles and 1 A-class article. The project maintains a portal, watchlist, to-do list and tools for starting new articles. Project members JoJan, Invertzoo, and Daniel Cavallari joined us for an interview.
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Gastropods?
JoJan: I started WikiProject Gastropods in May 2004 at the request of an admin, after I had made some changes to a gastropod article. Little did I know about gastropods, but in those early days of Wikipedia everybody was very enthusiastic. And so was I. Soon I realized the enormous scope of the task I had undertaken with about 60,000 to 80,000 known species in the class Gastropoda. I had to learn all the facts about these little creatures in the shortest possible time, and this at the age of 60 ! But the taxonomy was the hardest nut to crack. Most sources I consulted used different taxonomies, some of which were very old. This was a real shambles. Since I was at that time the only participant in this project, I sought cooperation from malacologists all over the world by making an appeal for cooperation in a scientific journal. The few responses I received turned out negative when they were told that their contribution would come under GFDL. Then finally I was able to find the most recent taxonomy and I started to write articles about gastropods and also related biographies of naturalists and malacologists. Gradually, a few years later, new participants started to join the project, a few of which became very active. Since then, and mainly thanks to their input, this project has been growing fast. This is a very international project, since the participants are distributed all over the world, some are native speakers, others (such as I) are not.
Invertzoo: I have been interested in mollusks since I was a toddler in Great Britain, when I fell in love with seashells and the shells of some of the more attractive land snails, specifically dune snails in North Devon, where my grandmother lived. I myself was fortunate enough to live in Kent, 5 miles from Charles Darwin's house, Downe House, which my family visited several times a year. I guess it was not surprising that I become a biologist, or at any rate a naturalist. Although all mollusks are very interesting, gastropods are by far the biggest class of mollusks and the most diverse.
As well as living in the sea, gastropods also live on land and in freshwater. They are almost everywhere actually! Their asymmetrical anatomy is fascinating. The shelled ones (the snails) also have amazing spirally-coiled shells, and the shell-less ones (the slugs) are equally interesting, in fact one group of sea slugs, some of the nudibranchs, in particular the chromodorids, have been claimed to be the most beautifully colored organisms on earth, even more so than butterflies.
On Wikipedia, many of us enjoy writing about what we love, and this is what I love. It seems to me that when you have loved a certain kind of creature for many decades, you end up knowing a great deal about them and enjoy writing about them.
Daniel Cavallari: I, as a biologist in training, was curious about how to edit articles in Wikipedia, and made a few attempts at a certain day last year. I was invited soon after to be part of the project by one of its members, who was very polite by the way. At times I had made small contributions to some gastropod articles, and even tried to create one article alone, mainly on a watch and learn basis. I’ve always loved the mollusks, they are my favorite subject in biology, the shells in particular. In fact, one could say that the mollusks led me to study biology! I ended up seeing the project as a delightful way to exercise my knowledge, and also discover new things and better understand the biology of many species unknown to me (mainly, terrestrial snails). In my humble opinion, being in an university and having access to academic journals and papers is a privilege, and to write free-access articles using this information is very satisfying to me.
The project is home to one A-class article (Chittenango ovate amber snail) and six good articles ranging from Byne's disease to love darts. Were you involved with any of these articles and which article are you most proud of being involved with? Overall, what have been some of the project's greatest achievements?
JoJan: I wasn't involved in these articles, They were in able hands and there was no need for me to intervene.
The article I'm most proud of is Radula, the anatomical structure by which mollusks feed. I wrote this in June 2004 (when I was still the only participant in this project) adding very technical stuff to a short article. This was necessary, as the radula is one of the main determining features of a gastropod. User: Debivort made, at my request, a magnificent drawing of the different types of radulae. I remember he had great difficulty understanding the technical differences between the different types but his detailed drawing explains this problem so much better than words.
As one of the greatest achievements of this project I could name a few basic articles such as Gastropoda and the ones named above, but the aim should be to make them featured articles. Only lack of time and manpower prevent us from doing so. But perhaps the greatest achievement, in my opinion, is the application of the latest taxonomy of the gastropods, partly based on cladistic research, in all our articles. By doing this, wikipedia is one of the few websites about gastropods with an up-to-date taxonomy.
Invertzoo: Yes, I was involved to some extent with all seven of those articles. The least I did on most of them was to fix up and smooth out the prose, because a lot of the writing was by non-native speakers of English, of which our project has several. Out of those seven, the article I had the most to do with, and the one I am most proud of, is love dart, which at the time it came out as a DYK had the second largest response ever. Three of us put it together completely from scratch in just 5 days, and I have to say, that was a real tour de force! If we could have put it out for Valentine's Day, I am certain the DYK numbers would have been totally through the roof!
I think the greatest achievement has been for our Project to have grown over the last 2 years or so from a scattered collection of almost random articles to a well-organized structure, with a standardized way of composing an article. We now have at least a stub for every family and every taxon above the level of family, and at least a stub for almost every genus that is mentioned in any article. That means a reader can navigate all the way up and down through the tree of lifetaxonomy structure without interruption. That's very important.
Daniel Cavallari: I've been involved with some of these articles. I made only some minor contributions to Kerry slug, but worked hard on Byne's disease (which I created, and wrote with a great deal of help by another project member) and Eustrombus gigas. As a matter of fact, I am mostly proud of the latter two articles, and seeing them listed as good articles feels wonderful, specially the one about the queen conch, which is a well known, economically important and possibly endangered species. Drawing the average reader's attention to such important subjects is one of my main objectives as a wikipedian.The queen conch, Eustrombus gigas As I have not been part of the project for too long, I believe I can't make long-term observations. I could only notice that the project has evolved considerably in recent times, and people are really getting excited about everything.
There are no unassessed articles within your project. How did you accomplish this and do you have any advice to other projects with large backlogs of unassessed articles?
Invertzoo: Well, really, it's true that getting a huge number of unassessed articles assessed is grunt work. Basically two of us just ploughed through it all alphabetically over the months. Actually we are still finishing up rating the importance of all of the articles, and other routine clean-up. This kind of work does take time, and most people do not want to do it. It does not seem glamorous! But if you do want "your" project to be in reasonable shape, someone just has to decide to go ahead and do the clean up. I think you have to motivate yourself out of pride, wanting your project to be really pulled-together, and then just bite the bullet and go ahead and work until it is all done, no matter how long it takes. I suppose you have to shift your emphasis, to think of the encyclopedia as a whole, and not just focus on the narrow range of tasks that you most enjoy doing.
Daniel Cavallari: It was no easy task, but a necessary one. Someone has to do the job, little by little if needed, but the outcome certainly ought to compensate all the effort.
The articles on snails, pearls, and gastropoda each receive over 2,000 views daily, however two of the three articles are only at C-class status. What are some of the biggest challenges to improving popular articles like these?
JoJan: At this time we are in the process of adding a lot of species and genera articles using a bot (already close to the 11,000 mark). Checking the facts takes a lot of work and leaves little if no time for doing other work. Only the cooperation of many new participants can contribute to the quality of existing articles.
Invertzoo: Well there are various factors. The article Pearl is primarily outside our scope because most pearl-producing creatures are bivalves, not gastropods, but we felt we should include it in our Project because there is as yet no "WikiProject Bivalves" or "WikiProject Mollusks" so for the time being, we can try to keep an eye on the biology part of the Pearl article. As for the other two popular articles snail and Gastropoda (which has a B assessment), they are both gigantic overview articles, and I think everyone who has worked on really big overview articles would agree that those are the hardest articles to pull together well, especially because gastropods are so very diverse that it is quite hard to generalize about them. Also it is simply a matter of people in the Project being so busy doing other things that they forget to try to work on those two big articles. We will go ahead and remind people, thanks for bringing that up!
Daniel Cavallari: Since I am not a native speaker, it is difficult for me to find reliable references in English when the subject is too broad or general. This happens mainly because the literature available to me about this kind of subject is usually written in my native language (Portuguese). I believe it is not convenient to use such references in this case, because it could bring verifiability problems in the future. Anyway, I think the subject deserves a little more attention from us, and I intend to redirect my focus in the future.
Writing articles on the taxonomy and anatomy of living creatures can become fairly technical. What can the average editor contribute to gastropod articles, even if they don't have specialized knowledge in the field?
JoJan: Indeed this stuff can be very technical. Reading a malacological journal sometimes equals to reading the technical report of an examination by a radiologist to your family doctor. Nevertheless anyone with some intellectual baggage can contribute. It only takes some research, a clear mind and the ability to digest the facts into a new article (or by adding to or improving an existing article), Others are ardent photographers and may be able to upload their photos of gastropods to the Commons and add them to existing articles (or write that article themselves).
Invertzoo: Judging by what I have seen over the last almost 3 years, I think the average editor seems to enjoy adding a short article about one species of snail or slug or a seashell, something they have perhaps come across in the news or in their everyday life. We very much welcome anything like that. People mustn't feel that they are obliged to delve into the taxonomy or the anatomy. If anyone wants to make a new stub article but needs help with the taxonomy or anything else they can ask at our Project talk page; we will be more than happy to help them!
And yes, there are close to 100,000 species of snails and slugs, and we need images for most of them. Even just shell images are good, but images of live animals (especially in their natural habitat) are even more valuable. With very few exceptions, no matter where you live you can find snails and slugs to photograph and we will be happy to have the images.
Daniel Cavallari: I believe that the average editor can contribute in several ways, i. e. drawing attention to a particular source of information, assisting with the writing and prose, with problems related to the manual of style, and many other things in fact. It does not take an expert to contribute positively to an article, in my opinion!
Anything else you'd like to add?
JoJan: The ever changing knowledge and information about gastropods is distributed among thousands and thousands papers in scientific journals (most of which are behind a paywall) and in a number of websites, most of which are pleasing to eye with photos but with little information (except a few). Our long term aim is to provide general and technical information about every family, genus and species in this project and keeping abreast of every new development in this field. This is an enormous project, almost a "mission impossible." It will take several decades to bring it to adulthood. Only the influx of many more participants can force the pace.
And as a final note, it is encouraging having received an email from one of the most eminent malacologists in the world, stating that he finds our work "very interesting."
Invertzoo: I feel very strongly that Project Gastropods is right now poised on the brink of emerging into people's awareness worldwide as a very useful resource, both for amateurs who are interested in finding out more about malacology, and also to some extent for professionals, at least in areas that are outside their particular area of expertise. If we can keep up our quality standards as we expand, and if we can flesh out our huge number of stubs to include more images and more text, I think we will go from strength to strength. I am very optimistic about the future.
Thank you to the contributors at WikiProject Gastropods for an interesting interview and some fascinating images. Regular readers of the Report should fix up their cars for next week's road trip! In the meantime, enjoy the 24-hour drive-through at the archives.
Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 10): The case was opened to deal with circumstances surrounding articles related to the eponymous movement, similar to the circumstances at issue in Scientology pages a year ago. The case is in the evidence/workshop phase.
Other
The Committee releasedban appeal statistics for the first quarter of 2010.
EarwigBot (Task 15) – The bot replaces the deprecated parameters |penalty= and |status= in transclusions of {{Infobox criminal}} with |conviction_penalty= and |conviction_status=, respectively.
FrescoBot (Task 5) – Put {{db-blanked}} on pages created and blanked by a single author
SmackBot (Task 25) – Delink dates per full-date unlinking bot, but in portal space only
SmackBot (Task 26) – Move non-redirects from the old VfD space to AfD where no conflict is found.
RjwilmsiBot (Task 3) – CiteCompletion: a script that completes fields within citations to common English-language news sites on the English Wikipedia. It works by taking the news article URL from the Wikipedia article page, looking up the news page and extracting the missing details of the news article based on per-site rules. User:Rjwilmsi/CiteCompletion.
On 9 April, lead software engineer Tim Starling switched the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation to a beta version of the upcoming MediaWiki 1.16 software.[1] Although some of the most important 1.16 changes had already been applied to the server park, this was the first major software update since July 2009, when MediaWiki 1.15 was released. The switch itself was relatively uneventful and Wikipedia was back in business after just a few hours. As expected after 10 months of development, a substantial amount of problems and oversights were discovered in the hours and days following the switch to the new software.
Several problems in wikis of languages such as Malay.
You can find details about the MediaWiki 1.16 changes in the release notes and some highlights follow:
The order of the "diff" and "history" links was switched on Contributions pages in order to be consistent with the Recent Changes views and the Watchlist. Bug 2971
Math images now have a transparent background. Bug 8
First letter capitalization can now be a per-namespace setting Bug 13750
Rewritten Special:Upload that is more extensible and has improved warning and error reporting.
You can no longer upload files of one file type on top of a file of another filetype.
Other changes
On 7 April, a security issue with the login process was discovered and fixed.[2][3] The fix caused many bots to temporarily be offline, but software updates for the major bot frameworks, such as AWB and Pywikipedia, were quickly released by the maintainers of the various bot frameworks.
Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) announced the availability of the PagedTiffHandler extension. This new extension will allow the creation of thumbnails for (paged) TIFF files and was developed by Hallo Welt under contract of Wikimedia Germany. When the code is fully reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation staff, it is hoped that this extension will be deployed on Wikimedia Commons. This will fulfill a longstanding request by the image restorationists for support of the TIFF format that their source material and restoration work normally use.[4]
Esperanto Wikipedia celebrates April with a Month of Wikipedia contest.
The Greek Wikipedia 50K commemorative logo
The Ukrainian Wikipedia 200K commemorative logo
The Catalan Wikibooks commemorative logo.
Chinese Wikipedia reached 300,000 articles celebrate logo
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The Three Sisters in Australia
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