Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-02-14
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
MediaWiki 1.17 deployment failed, postponed
The planned update of MediaWiki as the underlying software which forms the basis of WMF wikis to version 1.17 failed last week (Wikimedia Techblog). The original deployment was expected to begin 07:00 UTC on February 8 (see previous Signpost coverage), but preparations took longer than anticipated and actual deployment began at around 13:00 UTC.
Several issues became apparent almost immediately. The parser cache miss rate almost doubled with the new deployment, at which point the Apache servers, which are responsible for delivering content to users, became overloaded and started behaving unpredictably. The increased load culminated with multiple issues across the project from increased lag to even outage for some users. At this point, the deployment was rolled back to the previous 1.16 release. The tech team investigated and prepared for another attempt after resolving some technical issues. A second attempt was made at 16:27 UTC, but this ran into similar performance issues and had to be called off 90 minutes later. Further attempts were put on hold.
Danese Cooper, Wikimedia's Chief Technical Officer, blogged about the failed deployment and explained what the Foundation had attempted to deploy:
| “ | The 1.17 release process has been longer than we would have liked, which has meant more code to review, and more likelihood for accumulating a critical mass of problems that would cause us to abort a deployment.... [it] was an omnibus collection of fixes, including a large number of patches which had been waiting for review for a long time. The Foundation’s big contribution to the release was the ResourceLoader, a piece of MediaWiki infrastructure that allows for on-demand loading of JavaScript. Many other incremental improvements were made in how MediaWiki parses and caches pages and page fragments. | ” |
After further investigation and several fixes to the release, Rob Lanphier, a developer with the WMF, added that "some of the unsolved issues are complicated enough that the only timely and reasonable way to investigate them is to deploy and react". As a result of this, he said, a new plan had been drawn up in which 1.17 will be deployed on "just a few wikis at a time". The tech team believes the problem was located in the configuration of the $wgCacheEpoch variable, which caused a more aggressive culling of the cache than the servers could handle (Wikimedia Techblog).
The team decided on a two-stage deployment for their next attempt (reviving some old code for project-wise upgrading). The first phase took place 6:00–12:00 UTC on Friday, February 11. This was limited to the Simple English Wikipedia and Wiktionary; the Usability and Strategy Wikis; Meta; the Hebrew Wikisource; the English Wikiquote, Wikinews and Wikibooks; the Beta Wikiversity; and the Esperanto and Dutch Wikipedias.
At the time of writing, the deployment had been completed on all but the last two projects. The Hebrew Wikisource, included after a request from a community member, gave a chance to observe the deployment on a right-to-left language wiki. The team also reported some localization issues which triggered ParserFunction bugs on both nl.wikipedia.org and eo.wikipedia.org. The traffic from nl.wikipedia.org was enough at the time to cause a noticeable spike in CPU usage on the web servers, including some time-out errors; thus, deployment onto nl.wikipedia.org had to be delayed. After these issues are resolved , the second wave of deployment is expected to start on Wednesday, February 16 (see the current list of WMF wikis that are already running 1.17).
An IRC office hour Q&A was held on matters related to the ResourceLoader, which is expected to cause compatibility issues with some existing Javascript code. Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw, the main developers of the ResourceLoader, were available on IRC on February 14 at 18:00 (UTC) to answer queries related to the new feature.
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.
- RefTools default: Through a poll at the Village Pump, it was decided by near unanimous consensus to make the refTools gadget a default feature on the English Wikipedia. Implementation discussion is proceeding at MediaWiki talk:Common.js, and the switch is currently on hold until MediaWiki 1.17 is deployed (see also last September's Signpost dispatch on RefTools/RefToolbar and other references-related tools).
- New wikitext parser? After the last attempt at creating a wikitext parser generated excitement and lengthy discussion on the wikitext-l mailing list, a new attempt, by AboutUs.org developer Karl Matthias, has been brought to light under the name of "Kiwi". Discussion is ongoing in the post's comments and on wikitext-l.
- Distributed wikis: One of the applications of a defined parser grammar would be the ability to have alternative, non-MediaWiki interfaces to interact with the content. The full video was released of "Distributed wikis", a talk at linux.conf.au by Brianna Laugher (User:pfctdayelise; abstract) that touched on the subject. She proposes the use of the write function of the API and custom interfaces to create WikiProject-sized "forks" as the key to the long-term survival of the project, arguing that community decentralization would create smaller, more manageable and more welcoming groups of editors. Laugher compares these to the editing groups that existed at the beginning of Wikipedia, and those that can still be found in various specialized wikis (most notably wikias). Similar ideas have been floating around for a while; see meta:Versioning and distributed data.
The talk also examined the possible application of the concept of distributed revision control to wikis, to allow easy forking and merging (a concept explored in various earlier proposals), and compared Flagged revisions to release versions in software development. - Call for skins: A call for skins was made on the wikitech-l mailing list.
- Public status-monitoring page: The WMF announced that a public status monitoring page has been set up at http://status.wikimedia.org to allow staff, community members and the general public to keep an eye on the servers' uptime and status (Wikimedia blog). The service, powered by Watchmouse, has been in the works for a while, having been mentioned in the last three WMF Engineering Updates. Its relationship with previous monitoring tools Nagios and Ganglia is still unclear.
- Bug fixes: Several long-standing bugs have been fixed:
- The successful close of bug #17160 (opened January 2009) allows for the display of namespace aliases in userpages to be gender-specific (revision #82029). As The Signpost reported last week ("Widespread discussions about the low participation of women in Wikipedia"), the blanket use of masculine namespace forms—such as Benutzer (male user) rather than Benutzerin (female user) on the German Wikipedia—had come up in the recent discussions about Wikipedia's "gender gap", where it was criticized as "hardcoded discrimination" and Sue Gardner had called it "awful".
- Bug #16013 (opened October 2008) was resolved in revision 81573, allowing the direct linking to sections (tabs) of the preferences page.
- Bug #8680 (opened January 2007) was closed successfully, after the introduction of $wgFooterIcons allowed easy customisation of MediaWiki sites' footers.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Opinion
Foundation report; gender statistics; DMCA takedowns; brief news
Foundation's report for January: Anniversary impact, Brazil and India travels
The Wikimedia Foundation's monthly report for January has been published, much of it related to the celebrations of Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15. The Communications Department observed that although journalists and other commentators have often been very critical of Wikipedia since its inception, "as the 10th anniversary approached, the international media seized the opportunity to reassess: this resulted in hundreds of stories around the world that were overwhelmingly positive" (an observation that had similarly been made by Sue Gardner and some Wikipedia critics, see Signpost coverage). The report called the shipment of "more than 80 Wikipedia 10 celebration kits" (with T-shirts, buttons and stickers) from the WMF to event organizers worldwide "an important pilot for the Wikimedia movement: new data about customs, logistics, and postal services for a wide range of nations has been gathered, and new processes for soliciting orders from chapters or other groups for timely delivery have been developed." Preparations to set up a Wikimedia merchandising webstore are underway.
The Human Resources Department reported a downside of the celebrations: "A large percentage of the staff in San Francisco was out for at least a week with the 'WikiPlague', a variant of the RSV virus that we seem to have caught at the 10th Anniversary Party." The department also reports that it has "started tracking metrics for new hires and the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole, and will start compiling anonymized data regarding diversity and other internal characteristics so that we stay mission-aligned."
Staff members of the Global Development department spent time in India and Brazil in January, and progress with the "Catalyst Projects" for both countries was reported.
Among the visitors to the Foundation's office in January, the report records representatives of IT firm Trivad, Inc, three consultants from communications firm OMP (a former employer of Chief Community Officer Zack Exley) attending a "Wikipedia brainstorming", the CEO of Paymentwall (a company offering ecommerce solutions) and the CEO of Charity Navigator.
Wikipedia's gender gap examined further
After the widespread discussions about the small proportion of women among Wikipedia editors had brought increased scrutiny of the study where the widely quoted "13%" estimate had originated (see last week's Signpost coverage), attention turned to evaluating the gender statement that users on Wikimedia projects can provide in the "preferences" for their account. While this information is optional and the majority of accounts do not state it, it can produce some interesting numbers.
On the Wikitech-l mailing list, DaB. provided statistics about some large Wikipedias and Commons from the toolserver database, which were used by Wikipedia researchers Joseph Reagle and Paolo Massa to produce tables.
Dispenser collated API and Toolserver data to do some further analysis, relating the statement of gender to the user's registration date (within the last month), edit count, and whether or not the user gave an email address.
| Edit count up to | Users | Percentages | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | Female | Unknown | Male | Female | Unknown | F/M | |
| 0 | 5531 | 1191 | 95588 | 5% | 1% | 93% | 0.22 |
| 1 | 1199 | 246 | 28024 | 4% | 1% | 95% | 0.21 |
| 3 | 1153 | 216 | 23302 | 5% | 1% | 94% | 0.19 |
| 7 | 1105 | 164 | 17695 | 6% | 1% | 93% | 0.15 |
| 15 | 1210 | 155 | 13684 | 8% | 1% | 91% | 0.13 |
| 31 | 1385 | 158 | 11764 | 10% | 1% | 88% | 0.11 |
| 63 | 1453 | 135 | 10433 | 12% | 1% | 87% | 0.09 |
| 127 | 1377 | 121 | 8642 | 14% | 1% | 85% | 0.09 |
| 255 | 1305 | 103 | 7059 | 15% | 1% | 83% | 0.08 |
| 511 | 1139 | 82 | 5363 | 17% | 1% | 81% | 0.07 |
| 1,023 | 1032 | 60 | 4243 | 19% | 1% | 80% | 0.06 |
| 2,047 | 847 | 41 | 3233 | 21% | 1% | 78% | 0.05 |
| 4,095 | 781 | 42 | 2409 | 24% | 1% | 75% | 0.05 |
| 8,191 | 725 | 38 | 1752 | 29% | 2% | 70% | 0.05 |
| 16,383 | 572 | 37 | 1255 | 31% | 2% | 67% | 0.06 |
| 32,767 | 413 | 26 | 788 | 34% | 2% | 64% | 0.06 |
| 65,535 | 227 | 14 | 343 | 39% | 2% | 59% | 0.06 |
| ∞ | 104 | 5 | 214 | 32% | 2% | 66% | 0.05 |
DMCA takedowns of fair use and US-Gov-PD images
The Foundation complied with two more DMCA takedown requests last week, continuing the recently established custom of making copies of them available on its website (cf. previous Signpost coverage).
The first request came from the US Department of Health and Human Services, concerning photos on Commons that apparently had been mistakenly designated as public domain by publishing them on the government's own websites: "Although the images had been posted to the public NCI/NIH Websites in the past, that posting was done in error. ... The photographs are protected by a license agreement and none of the parties involved ... has ever intended for the image to be in the public domain." Last month, the photographer had contacted the NCI, who took down its own copies of the images and notified the Wikimedia Foundation.
Another DMCA takedown request last week resulted in the deletion of a photo that had been illustrating the article about 1960s style icon Talitha Getty. According to the image description page as still available in Google's cache, the image had been uploaded on 15 November 2010, copied from another website with a resolution of 344 × 457 pixels, with a standard non-free content rationale as it is frequently used for portraits of deceased persons, which includes a fair-use claim.
Briefly
- Spanish chapter: The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the founding of Wikimedia España. In a post on the Foundation's official blog ("Welcome Wikimedia’s 30th Global Chapter, Wikimedia España"), Jorge Sierra (User:Lucien leGrey), the chapter's president, said that its formation had begun in September 2007.
- "Movement roles" work meeting: The notes for a recent meeting of the Foundation's "Movement Roles" workgroup in Frankfurt have been published.
- Expert survey: The Wikimedia Foundation's Research Committee has launched a survey "to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities." It grew out of a discussion started on Wikiversity in November. (Notes about the survey's design)
- Community fellowships: The Foundation's Community Department has posted a job opening for the "Head of Community Fellowship Program", a new position to "coordinate the recruitment and support of Wikimedia Foundation community department fellows". Introduced last September (Signpost coverage), the program temporarily employs community members to "lead intensive, time-limited projects focused on key areas of risk and opportunity". It was recently suggested "to give the community more of a voice in both proposing and selecting individuals and projects" as the program is being scaled up, and fellowships outside the Community Department are being created (Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia fellowships discussed and clarified"). In other news, according to the Foundation's January report (see above) the fellowship of Maryana Pinchuk (m:User:Buickmackane) "has been extended for an additional 12 months, so that she can coordinate the writing of histories of several more Wikipedias." Together with Victoria Doronina (User:Mstislavl), she had started an eight-week research fellowship around the end of September to develop methods for writing such project histories (Signpost coverage), and had published an (English-language) "attempt of a social history" of the Russian Wikipedia (see last week's "News and notes").
- GLAM fellowship plans: Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) has outlined the priorities of his recently begun 12-month Wikimedia fellowship, whose goal it is to "help create systems and processes to make outreach partnerships [with cultural institutions] more efficient and effective." They include a system of "Wikimedia GLAM ambassadors" (similar to the Foundation's "Campus ambassadors"), improving how-to documents and case studies, technical metrics and tools, and better communication about GLAM partnerships. His posting was published shortly before embarking on a trip to India, where he is currently meeting with various Wikimedians and representatives of cultural institutions, as already reported (about Mumbai) by the Hindustan Times ("Wiki to tie up with city galleries, museums").
- October Board minutes: The minutes for the October 2010 meeting of the WMF Board of Trustees have been published. Among other topics, they shed some more light on the Board's three-hour discussion about the recommendations of the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content, which had been expected to result in a resolution at that meeting (Board member Phoebe Ayers had already described some of the discussion in November, see Signpost coverage: "Controversial content and Wikimedia leadership"). According to the minutes, "an exercise to capture the level of agreement around the appropriateness of each recommendation" showed that "half of them were uncontroversial, while others required further discussion" (it was not stated which recommendations belonged to which half). A working group on the issue was "to make an initial report to the Board by November 6, 2010".
- Global Development IRC hours: The logs for two IRC office hours by the Foundation's Global Development department have been published, featuring the department's head Barry Newstead and its two new employees, "Head of Global South Relationships" Asaf Bartov, and "Chapter Relations Manager" Moushira Elamrawy. Asked about the plans to set up a Wikimedia office in India, Newstead said, "We will make an announcement on India early next week." About the topic of subnational chapters, he said that "WMF has no issues with subnational chapters in general", but that fundraising might be "trickier at a subnational level". Asaf Bartov expressed "pain" at the "Global South" moniker that has been used to describe geographic areas with respect to the WMF's development, calling it an "infelicitous term. Please consider it temporary; we're hoping to involve the community in picking a better term." He said that he would "mostly be dealing with non-chapters."
- Wikimedia Hungary report: The Hungarian Wikimedia chapter published their (English-language) report for January 2011 last week. It records the chapter's fundraising results (HUF 5,7 million or about US$28,600), describes celebrations of Wikipedia's tenth anniversary, including a conference that featured a keynote by the Foundation's Head of Public Outreach Frank Schulenburg (available on Youtube), noted that the Hungarian Wikipedia had to deal with "a copyright violation case where one user has uploaded 5000+ articles from copyrighted encyclopedias over 5 years" but that the resulting media coverage had been mostly positive, and mentions the chapter's plans to set up its own toolserver this month.
- Wikimedia Netherlands report: The Dutch Wikimedia chapter published their report for January 2011 this Monday.
- UK university recruitment tour: Six members of the Contribution Team held a Recruitment Drive at London's Imperial College last week, which was declared a "roaring success" by Wikimedia UK. It involved handing out leaflets, speaking to people around campus, discussing a possible Wikipedia collaboration with the Imperial College librarian, and "hanging out at the Student Union with our laptops, ready to answer questions, invite people to edit and persuade people that Wikipedia can be fun!" The team will be hosting similar events at the Universities of Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester between the 1st and 4th of March (believed to be the first such week-long "tour"). For more information or to sign up as a volunteer or attendee, see the events page.
- MIT OpenCourseWare videos: Board member Samuel Klein (User:Sj) reports that he has been working with MIT OpenCourseWare to make some of its teaching videos available on Wikipedia (example), releasing them under the CC-BY-SA license instead of the initiative's more restrictive default CC-BY-NC. He describes some usability concerns about video on Commons that were put forth by OCW.
- Egyptian Wikimedians and the revolution: After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 led to the resignation of president Hosni Mubarak last week, Wikipedian Mohamed Ibrahim (User:Mido, known to many Wikimedians as lead coordinator of the Wikimania 2008 conference in Alexandria) responded to messages of concern and support on the Foundation-l mailing list: "Wikimedians I'm aware of [are] safe and were part of this great revolution, and we all thank you for your support." Mido proudly noted the Wikimedia connections of activist Wael Ghonim, "who was widely credited as one of the main people who moved the protests in 25th Jan, he was also leading the Health speaks initiative from Google - enriching Arabic Wikipedia medical content- and was discussing over with the Wikimedians in Egypt the Wikipedia 10th anniversary event in Cairo sponsored by Google in part just few weeks before the revolution. I don't know yet the status of that but no matter what I promise that we will work even harder on spreading free knowledge to help building our country." Ghonim had publicly expressed his support for Wikipedia when donating during the recent fundraising campaign, calling it "a noble project to educate humanity". In a web-only outtake of his interview on 60 Minutes, Ghonim stated that "Our revolution is like Wikipedia... Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened."
- Trustee looks back: WMF Board member Phoebe Ayers (User:phoebe) has posted a summary of her activities in "the past three months" on her personal blog, many of them Wikimedia-related.
- African language Wikipedias: Ian Gilfillan (User:Greenman) has posted an "African language Wikipedia update" on his personal blog, noting that the efforts to found a South African Wikimedia chapter are nearing completion, and that a bid to host Wikimania 2012 in Stellenbosch is underway. He compared the development of the article count of several African language Wikipedias since 2007, and remarked: "Of all the official South Africa language Wikipedias, all but Afrikaans, and of course English, are extremely low traffic, where a single edit is a noteworthy event! ... There’s been a flurry of activity in the rest of Africa though. A number of languages have shot past 1000 articles, and two are even growing faster than the relatively stable Afrikaans."
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/In focus
Proposed decisions in Shakespeare and Longevity; two new cases; motions passed, and more
The Committee opened two new cases during the week. Four cases are currently open; two of which have posted proposed decisions.
Open cases
Monty Hall problem (Week 1)
Opened on 12 February 2011, this case involves allegations of problematic behavior relating to the Monty Hall problem article. During the week, one editor submitted under 2 kilobytes of content as on-wiki evidence. A deadline for evidence submissions has not yet been set.
Kehrli 2 (Week 1)
Opened on 11 February 2011, this case involves allegations of disruptive editing to the Kendrick (unit) and Kendrick mass articles. The case is following on from the 2006 case concerning Kehrli (talk · contribs). During the week, two editors submitted over 10 kilobytes of content as on-wiki evidence. A deadline for evidence submissions has not yet been set.
Shakespeare authorship question (Week 4)
On 10 February 2011, drafters Newyorkbrad and SirFozzie posted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals which are being voted on include "standard discretionary sanctions"(see Signpost coverage: 20 September 2010) and rulings concerning two editors. Yesterday, arbitrators Cool Hand Luke and Elen of the Roads added a new principle to the proposed decision; the principle builds on the proposals made in the workshop. A motion to close was then adopted on 14 February, ending the case.
Longevity (Week 12)
On 7 February 2011, drafter Kirill Lokshin posted a proposed decision in the workshop; the proposals, consisting of 14 kilobytes, attracted comments from arbitrators, parties, and others. During the week, more than 50 kilobytes of content was added to the workshop, of which more than 15 kilobytes was contributed by a single party. On 12 February 2011, the drafter submitted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include "standard discretionary sanctions", an evidence subpage remedy, rulings concerning two editors, a specific ruling that affiliation with the Gerontology Research Group does not in itself constitute a conflict of interest when editing longevity articles, as well as a proposal that urges WikiProject World's Oldest People to seek experienced editors as mentors to the WikiProject.
Motions
As reported last week, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed two motions to amend this case. The motions were passed this week with two recusals:
- Lightmouse (talk · contribs) is permitted to use a separate bot account for any bot task(s) approved by the bot approvals group.
- Ohconfucius (talk · contribs) is permitted to use a separate bot account for any bot task(s) approved by the bot approvals group.
Other matters
The Committee conditionally suspended the indefinite ban of Lyncs (talk · contribs) (formerly Justanother (talk · contribs) or Justallofthem (talk · contribs)). The conditions are such that Lyncs is subject to a single account limitation, an interaction ban, and a Scientology topic ban. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Humour