Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-03-07

Old Man Murray was a US computer gaming review website begun in the late 1990s by Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw. Harsh, irreverent, and satirical, many in the gaming industry look back on the website as an inspirational classic. Faliszek and Wolpaw went on to work in the industry for Valve Software and were central figures in the creation of Portal, one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed games of the last few years. So, naturally, people in the industry and gaming fans were surprised when the Wikipedia article on Old Man Murray was deleted on March 2. The deletion was overturned the next day at Deletion Review.

Deletion discussions can be one of the most contentious interactions Wikipedians have with those outside Wikipedia, especially when it involves a subculture or fandom with vocal adherents. Perhaps the most notorious of these incidents was the long running conflict regarding the deletion of articles on webcomics, as discussed in this 2007 Wikinews article. Non-Wikipedians often interpret a deletion discussion as an assault on their field of interest and are offended at Wikipedians who are ignorant of it making decisions about it, and some of them respond with uncivil comments or personal attacks. Wikipedians are dismayed when they are the subject of personal attacks during what should be a sober policy discussion, and see the vocal fans who are denouncing them as little better than those who vandalize articles. Needless to say, this isn't a fertile ground for productive discussion between the two groups.

This time was no exception. Gaming blogs and message boards filled with angry messages (a Slashdot article received over 400 comments) and many fans shared their ire by posting to the Wikipedia deletion discussion. Rob Beschizza, Managing Editor of the popular website Boing Boing, wrote about the deletion. About two dozen prominent figures in the gaming industry responded to a call by John Walker from the gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun to testify to the importance of Old Man Murray. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell wrote that "Old Man Murray were the Velvet Underground of post-print journalism" and Bryan Lee O'Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels which are steeped in gaming culture, wrote "As far as I'm concerned, Old Man Murray invented the internet, and also invented making jokes about video games, two things which are maybe the foundation of everything I hold dear." Walker told the Signpost that he was not surprised by this response. "OMM is something spoken about by people in our industry with hushed tones of reverence. I'd be fairly disappointed to learn a developer was not a fan of their writing."

Much of the ire was focused on the Wikipedian who nominated the article for deletion, User:SchuminWeb. Ben Schumin, who runs a website called The Schumin Web, was alleged by many complaining about the nomination both on and off Wikipedia, including Beschizza and Walker, to have a conflict of interest because of past interactions with Chet Faliszek. Most of the complaints centered around a brief decade old comment mocking The Schumin Web on the website Portal of Evil, founded by Faliszek and K. Thor Jensen. (The Wikipedia article on Portal of Evil was also nominated for deletion by Schumin and deleted on February 5.) For his part, Faliszek, who did not respond to the Signpost before press time, seemed to be baffled about the situation. On the website POE News, he wrote "What the? I actually helped Ben with his site and setting up his Cafe Press store... I don't remember ever been[sic] mean to him. I don't really care about wikipedia but this is bizarre."

Schumin told the Signpost "I do not currently, nor ever did, hold a grudge on either the Portal of Evil or Old Man Murray sites, or their creators for that matter." He said he nominated the articles for deletion "strictly on notability grounds" and only after examining the sources in the article and searching for more potential sources. "I was an 'exhibit' on the Portal of Evil site, and it seems that many people automatically equated being 'exhibited' with wanting revenge" and made those claims "rather than make arguments refuting the sourcing [...] It was an easy argument to make, and so people did, even though it really had nothing to do with the discussion." Schumin told the Signpost that he feels unfairly singled out in what he calls a "case of shooting the messenger." (Schumin said he's no stranger to this sort of thing and recounted how he was similarly targeted after he was denounced as an "anarchist" on the blog of conservative commentator Michelle Malkin for merely documenting an anti-war rally he did not participate in.) Beschizza, for one, is unsympathetic. He told the Signpost that someone who doesn't wish to be the target of such public anger "should probably not initiate public debates in the world's most popular publicly-edited information resource in an attempt to delete an article about a website that just happens to be a legendary and much-loved inspiration for legions of working journalists and bloggers."

Many of the Wikipedians participating in the deletion discussion were focused on sources instead of Schumin. At the time of its deletion, sources in the Old Man Murray article were largely limited to gaming message boards and the OMM website itself. The non-Wikipedians participating who were not focused on Schumin seemed to be confused by the insistence of Wikipedians on sourcing something that everyone in their field already knew or provided sources which merely mentioned the website in passing. On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, John Walker wrote of the difficulty of finding sources for defunct websites. "The issue starts when something was notable in an online form, but in the past. There aren't so many contemporary pieces being written about a website that ended in… oh, hang on, I can't check Wikipedia." However, the controversy surrounding the deletion seems to have spurred editors to find acceptable sources to establish the notability of Old Man Murray. As of this writing the article contains 46 sources, including one book of academic essays. Schumin notes that the deletion discussion he initiated also "led to the creation of articles on gaming-news sites that established that notability. So while the proper sourcing didn't exist before, now it does, and that seems fine to me, and actually a better result than a delete."

Everyone seems to be pleased with the resulting restored and properly sourced article, but still up for debate is what Wikipedia can do to avoid such contentious interactions and controversial deletion discussions. Both Beschizza and Walker expressed concerns to the Signpost about how Wikipedians interact with non-Wikipedians during those discussions. Beschizza said that "the underlying problem is that Wikipedia's editorial culture isn't very diverse. Those outside of it who notice AFD disputes, and who understand the importance of the articles threatened, don't seem to command much respect from established Wikipedians" whom he views as "quite insular." Walker said: "My suggestion for handling similar situations would be to move beyond this peculiar misunderstanding of the presence of new accounts taking part in a debate. It seems fairly obvious that when someone unrelated and uneducated about a subject is attempting to have its page removed, that those who are related and educated about the subject would turn up to defend it. A debate like that should offer an opportunity for acculturation, rather than further building up the walls to keep out the outsiders. It's an opportunity to say, 'You know much about this subject - could you edit the article with this information, correctly cited?' People screaming 'meatpuppet' at every new person does not give the impression of a professional body making the decisions."

Talking with WikiProject Feminism

WikiProject news

News in brief

• George Washington is the United States Collaboration of the Month.
• Members of WikiProject Horror are seeking help improving articles and discussing ways to revamp the project.
• WikiProject London Transport could use some help revitalizing the London Transport Portal.
• Join Milhist March Madness, a backlog reduction drive hosted by WikiProject Military History.
• The March Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive is underway. Join today!

This week, we talked with WikiProject Feminism. Originally created in February 2008 as a task force within WikiProject Gender Studies, WikiProject Feminism became its own project in June 2010. The project focuses on articles detailing women's rights, women's health, notable activists, and the history, literature, philosophy, and concepts related to feminism. The project is home to nine Featured articles and five Good and A-class articles. To aid contributors, the project maintains a directory of project members who can provide help with specific tasks, a HotArticlesBot list of articles with high activity in the past day, a variety of pages needing attention, and a list of missing articles for women featured by the National Women's History Project.

We interviewed Kaldari, Carolmooredc, and Danger. Kaldari is an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and admin on several Wikimedia sites including Wikipedia. He joined the Feminism Task Force in July 2008 because "most of the feminism articles on Wikipedia were in pretty bad shape at the time and I thought it was important that we provide more accurate and comprehensive information on the subject". After the task force outgrew WikiProject Gender Studies, he spun it off as a separate project. Carolmooredc first contributed to the Feminism Task Force in December 2008. Her interest in feminism began in the early 1970s, and her most recent efforts have been to seek "advice and support dealing with issues of sexism in Wikipedia". Danger is an admin and claims to be an "ethereal entity".

There have been recent discussions about a gender gap among Wikipedia's registered users (see major Signpost coverage and follow-up). Is WikiProject Feminism taking any steps to increase recruitment and contributions of women on Wikipedia? What else can be done by editors both inside and outside the project?

Carolmooredc: The fact Wikipedia has admitted a problem and announced its new goals, and gotten lots of mainstream publicity for them, by itself has had a positive effect on some male editors already and I definitely have found the incivility level dropping (knock on wood.) I see a lot of good suggestions, but the most important thing is for women to take on some of these excellent projects.

Kaldari: I think Carol is right that civility is a big issue, both for retaining women editors and retaining new editors in general. I think it's also important to give more support and encouragement to new editors instead of just flooding their talk pages with warning templates when they make mistakes. Towards that end, I'm currently working on a new WikiLove gadget in my spare time. Expect to see it available in the preferences some day soon.

Danger: I think the mailing list that Sue Gardner and Erik Möller set up and some of the projects on Meta-Wiki and related wikis are the real center of this sort of action. For better or worse though, WikiProject Feminism has become a sort of central location to discuss the issue on-wiki, which I think reflects a lack of other venues more than the focus of the project as a whole.

Some of the project's articles cover contentious issues or are frequent targets of vandalism. What tools does the project use to patrol and maintain the neutrality of the project's articles? How does the project cope with hostility from registered and anonymous users?

Carolmooredc: The vandalism tools are good. The tools for dealing with hostility over contentious issues are not sufficiently used. Even when multiple people complain to WP:Wikiquette alerts and even WP:ANI about medium grade incivility by the same editor in the same week, there may be little criticism and nothing done. Senior editors and admins can get away with even more hostility to newbies and other editors in areas of controversy. Bad behavior by male editors may be ignored while uppity females with far less obnoxious behavior are chastised. I have a thick skin and can take a lot of negativity, but a lot of women will flee after just a few attacks. We need more admins willing to give stern warnings to subtly and actively hostile editors, doing it at WP:Wikiquette, WP:ANI, other complaint pages and/or at the offending editor's talk page. More short blocks would definitely encourage people to be civil.

Danger: I'll echo Carol in saying that there's little we can do, as a project, besides revert and move on. I've been subject to some pretty grotesque user talk messages following reversion of disruptive editing on feminism pages; but there's really nothing one can do about it. That said, there's only so many times one can see grotesque rape threats on one's watchlist before fleeing to milder climes. (Although some of the vandalism on worm-related articles is surprisingly grotesque as well.) A lot of the high importance pages are protected and even those have to be revdeled on a regular basis. We also have a pretty big problem with neutrality, especially regarding due weight.

WikiProject Feminism is home to nine featured articles and five GA/A-class articles. Have you contributed toward any of these articles? Are you working toward bringing an article up to FA or GA status?

Carolmooredc: There definitely is one I’d love to, but I just keep getting sidetracked.

Kaldari: I collaborated on Emma Goldman and Mary Wollstonecraft (both featured articles), although the real credit goes to Scartol and Awadewit. I wrote Anne Dallas Dudley myself (GA class), as she was the most prominent feminist from my home town (Nashville). I'm currently collaborating with some other editors on Gloria Steinem to try to bring it up to GA class.

Does WikiProject Feminism collaborate with any other projects? Did the project play a role in the recent establishment of WikiProject Women's History?

Carolmooredc: I think some people watching Feminism Wikiproject supported its creation.

Kaldari: Occassionally we'll jump in on another project's article collaboration if the topic is relevant. For example, we're currently helping out with the U.S. Collaboration of the Month which happens to be the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Regarding WikiProject Women's History, it basically emerged on it own, but we've tried to help promote it to get more people involved.

Danger: In general, the articles within our scope seem to be pretty isolated from other projects, so we're not particularly active in inter-project collaboration. The exception is, of course, our parent project WikiProject Gender Studies, which we only split from relatively recently.

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

Kaldari: We're currently preparing for International Women's Day (March 8th). Expect to see a lot of women-focused content on the Main Page then. The best way for people to help is to improve the various Did You Know articles scheduled for that day.

Carolmooredc: Educational tools and an easier interface for new and experienced editors to find their way around and get help. Videos that deal with emotional aspects of editing Wikipedia for women would help. New contributors can best help by learning policy, learning dispute resolution, and being patient.

Danger: We need editors willing and able to dig through the dense thicket that is academic feminist writing in order to improve the various philosophy pages. You don't have to start out with Judith Butler or Mary Daly! Something originally printed on a dead tree would be great. A bibliography of websites where important texts are available would be a big help in doing research as well.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Carolmooredc: To me the biggest potential recruitment area for women in general is recently retired, educated, computer savvy women who have more time on their hands and lots to offer. We need outreach to all the various Seniors groups like AARP and American Seniors Association to get articles printed about editing Wikipedia and to advertise for editors in their publications. Their readers are very attentive to these publications. One big selling point: Wikipedia keeps the mind active and challenged for seniors. A certain number of those women will be feminists, and certainly mentioning the Feminist and Women's History projects to such a big, fertile pool would bring more feminists and women to the project.

Danger: Just that one does not have to identify oneself as a feminist—or even as a woman—to be a part of this project. We welcome editors of a wide variety of philosophical and political viewpoints. As long as you don't insert the "c" word into articles in our scope, we should get along alright.

Next week, we'll travel to a country that renounced its right to declare war. Until then, enjoy some sushi as you read previous Reports in the archive.

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2011-03-07

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87

This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 26 February – Friday 4 March

New administrators

The Signpost welcomes three editors as our newest admins.

• Boing! said Zebedee (nom), from the UK, is a freelance writer and online forum moderator, who has mainly done gnoming and anti-vandalism work. He is a member of the Guild of Copy Editors, the Wikification Drive, and the Wikipedia Typo Team.
• Kudpung (nom), from Malvern, UK, has been a significant contributor to five GAs, has founded Wikipedia:WikiProject Worcestershire, and played a part in establishing and implementing the WP:BLPPROD process. He currently coordinates Wikipedia:WikiProject School, and loiters at WP:EAR to offer assistance to newbies. He has credentials in business studies, linguistics, pedagogics, and media, and "wrote some awful plays and an even worse rock opera", he says.
• Neelix (nom), from Newfoundland on the east coast of Canada is a veteran editor who has made significant contributions to the backlog at Wikipedia:Requested moves, apart from creating more than 4,000 articles and uploading more than 800 images. He says he's a split infinitive, singular they, and serial comma kind of guy.

At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: Gfoley4 and Slon02 3, both due to finish Saturday 12 March.

Featured sounds

Four featured sounds were promoted.

Johannes Brahms, String Quintet No. 1 Op. 88, first movement Related article. Performed by Roxana Pavel Goldstein, Elizabeth Choi, Elias Goldstein, Sally Chisholm, and Jocelyn Butler. 2nd movement, 3rd movement Problems playing this file? See media help.	Star spangled banner (the US national anthem) Related article. Performed by the US Navy Band Problems playing this file? See media help.
Opening toccata from Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) Related article. Performed by the Bangkok Baroque Ensemble Problems playing this file? See media help.	Matthias Weslund's, Over the northern mountains, from the video game Battle for Wesnoth Related article Problems playing this file? See media help.

Featured lists

Four lists were promoted:

• List of battlecruisers of Japan (nom) (Nominated by Climie.ca and The ed17.)
• List of Metallica concert tours (nom) (Nominated by Nergaal.)
• List of New York Cosmos all-stars (nom) (Nominated by Cliftonian.)
• Grammy Award for Best Rap Album (nom) (Nominated by Another Believer.)

Featured articles

Seven articles were promoted to featured status:

• Luke P. Blackburn (nom), 19th-century governor of Kentucky, physician, philanthropist, reformer and accused bioterrorist. (Nominated by Acdixon)
• L. Ron Hubbard (nom) (1911–86), an American pulp fiction author turned religious leader who founded the Church of Scientology. (MartinPoulter)
• Herbie Hewett (nom) (1864–1921), an English amateur cricketer who played for Somerset, captaining the county from 1889 to 1893, as well as Oxford University and the Marylebone Cricket Club. (Harrias)
• 2010 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup Final (nom), played on 5 October 2010 at Qwest Field in Seattle. The match determined the winner of the 2010 Cup, a tournament open to amateur and professional soccer teams affiliated with the United States Soccer Federation. (Skotywa)
• Parkinson's disease (nom), the most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer's disease. (Garrondo)
• U2 3D (nom), an American-produced 2008 3D concert film featuring rock band U2 performing during the Vertigo Tour in 2006. (Dream out loud)
• Myotis alcathoe (nom), You'd think that after centuries of systematic research, we would at least know all the mammal species in Europe. Wrong; new species are discovered every few years. The bat species described in this article was first named in 2001, and only now are we gaining an understanding of its ecology and distribution. (Ucucha)

Featured pictures

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

• Haitian Presidential Palace destroyed by Earthquake (nom; related article), after last year's tragic event. The palace's collapsed cupola has become a symbol of the devastation caused by the quake. The Haitian government plans to demolish and reconstruct the palace; so far only the rotunda has been demolished. Reviewer Nergaal said "it is an impressive picture and I am amazed we have a free picture of it". (Created by Logan Abassi; picture at top)
• Grey-tailed Tattler (nom; related article), photographed in Tasmania. This close relative of a North American species shows the characteristic unpatterned, greyish wings and back, and a scaly breast pattern extending onto the belly in breeding plumage. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
• Black Rhinoceros skull (nom; related article), a historic specimen (with the whole skeleton) was collected in southern Africa for the Gallery of Paleontology and Compared Anatomy, National Museum of Natural History, Paris, by Pierre Antoine Delalande during his travels between 1818 and 1820. (Created by User Jebulon at Commons; picture below.)
• Map of the Painted Turtle distribution (nom; related article), a map showing the native range of the Painted Turtle, in North America. The map was praised by reviewers for its quality and encyclopedic value (Created by User:Fallschirmjäger.)
• The mushroom Cortinarius vanduzerensis (nom; related article), a North American mushroom species that clearly shows one of its main characteristics, the extremely slimy cap. (Created by John Kirkpatrick (natashadak) at Mushroom Observer.)
• Nazca Booby (nom; related article), a bird found on the Galapagos Islands and known for practising obligate siblicide; The Signpost was disappointed to learn that this is not an unusual sexual position. (Created by User:Benjamint444.)
• Common Imperial Blue Butterfly (nom; related article), a small-sized species found in eastern Australia. (Created by User:Benjamint444.)

Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.

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2011-03-07

New case opened after interim desysop last week; three pending cases

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By Ncmvocalist and Lord Roem

The Committee opened one new case during the week. Three cases are currently open.

Open cases

Rodhullandemu (Week 1)

This case, which was opened earlier today, will examine the circumstances surrounding the removal of Rodhullandemu (talk · contribs)'s administrative privileges. The Committee revoked the relevant motion that was passed last week (cf. Signpost coverage) and replaced it with another motion: Rodhullandemu's administrator privileges are suspended for the duration of the case. Rodhullandemu indicated that he will not be participating in the proceedings. 18 kilobytes of on-wiki evidence was presented during the day, of which more than 16 kilobytes was submitted by recused arbitrator, Elen of the Roads.

Monty Hall problem (Week 4)

During the week, another 4 kilobytes of content was submitted as on-wiki evidence, while drafter Elen of the Roads submitted additional proposed principles in the workshop.

Kehrli 2 (Week 4)

During the week, another 2 kilobytes of content was submitted in on-wiki evidence, while drafters David Fuchs and PhilKnight submitted several proposed principles in the workshop.

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2011-03-07

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

February Engineering Report published

(Due to a change in titling, this is in fact the second February update to be published. In future, all reports will cover the events in the month named in the title.) The Foundation's Engineering Report for February was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. It summarised the developments:

“

the racking [i.e. setup] party at our new data centre in Virginia the Data Summit that happened in early February in California the release of Editor Trends study data and tooling the painful, but ultimately successful, deployment of MediaWiki 1.17 to all Wikimedia wikis.

”

The update also noted that a job opening had been posted for a contractor in the Netherlands to support the Operations team in designing and maintaining the Wikimedia network(s), and perform on-site work in the data centre facilities in Haarlem and Amsterdam. The Foundation also noted its intention to hire a "Rich Text Editor Engineer", an indication that the Foundation is serious about its desire to provide its own WYSIWYG in-place functionality, a project for which research has begun (for context, see previous Signpost coverage). This might entail a move away from Wikimedia's traditional revise-and-save model to a more Google Wave-like approach, added developer Trevor Parscal. (On a related note, the report also discussed a new JavaScript parser for wikitext using parsing expression grammar.) In other news, Sumana Harihareswara was hired as a contractor to help out with Google Summer of Code 2011 and the Berlin Developer meeting.

In reference to the new Virginia data centre, the Foundation noted that all that was left was "finishing touches" to the hardware arrangement, as well as the initial setup of the software, "configuration of the first clusters of servers and services" and "network transport and transit services to be installed". In addition, contractor Russell Nelson has installed and deployed Swift on a test cluster of three machines. This forms part of the WMF's intent to improve the media storage architecture; the next steps are "fixing some bugs and doing some preliminary testing". The area of backups and general data redundancy has also seen significant developments: the operations team "have purchased a dedicated storage solution which will arrive in March... Once servers in the new data centre are online, and our private connection between Tampa and Ashburn is up, we will be able to replicate all data between the two data centres as well." Discussing the LiquidThreads project, the report also explained that "documentation on upcoming back-end and architecture changes [and] design specifications have been published".

The Foundation also announced the start of work done on two projects that have traditionally generated a great deal of debate: a system to allow users to censor their own visits to Wikimedia sites, and a mechanism for allowing expert reviews of articles. For the former, the report noted that initial UI design recommendations had been drawn up; on the latter, the report noted that a set of "draft requirements" had been drawn up for an "open review system for Wikipedia, as well as an API and user interface for quality indicators". The report, the Foundation's Engineering update to date, also noted work in a number of other areas not covered in this summary.

Brion Vibber rehired

The WMF's current Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Danese Cooper, has announced the rehiring of former CTO Brion Vibber to the post of Lead Architect. The post will be in the second layer of the current employee hierarchy, and Brion will start on March 31, 2011, she reported (Wikimedia Techblog).

Brion's name will be familiar to many Wikipedia regulars; indeed, in acronym form he gives it to this very report. The author of much of the original code in MediaWiki, and, as Wikimedia's first paid employee, having been among its most involved programmers for a number of years, Brion left the Foundation in 2009. He joined StatusNet, an open source startup focused on microblogging, while remaining active as a Wikimedia volunteer (see previous Signpost coverage). Danese explained Brion's new role:

“

Brion's first project will be on the team tasked with re-writing MediaWiki's parser, which should be both a challenging and rewarding effort, to which Brion tells me he's looking forward.

”

In a blog post, Vibber outlined this "next-generation parser work" briefly, saying that it will involve separating "weird template edge cases" from those that can be treated more easily.

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.

• An issue where the presence of a large SVG would break any page it was embedded in has now been fixed (bug #27508).
• Two dates have been proposed for the 2011 Berlin developer Meeting in mid- or late May, May 20–22 and May 13–15. A straw poll is being run to decide which should be used.
• Users on mobile devices will now be redirected much more quickly to prevent excessive loading times (bug #27690).
• Developer Mark Hershberger has signalled his intention to ensure that one of last year's GSoC projects, "Reasonably efficient interwiki template transclusion" (see previous Signpost coverage), comes into production (wikitech-l mailing list).
• Users of newer browsers will now be informed that their file exceeds the filesize limit (100MB on Wikimedia wikis) before the upload commences, rather than after it finishes (bug #26217).
  
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