Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Tag/opinion

Did World Patent Marketing pay to get Wikipedia to include flattering information on their board member, now the Acting United States Attorney General?

Op-ed Looking back, looking forward: A beginner's experience on Wikipedia

2018-12-01

The experiences of a new user on Wikipedia, told in their own words.

Op-ed The last leg of the Admin Ship's current cruise

2018-07-31

How admins would-bes run the gauntlet

Op-ed What do admins actually do?

2018-06-29

What do admins do?: Admins volunteer to be abused – or so it seems.

Op-ed Has the wind gone out of the AdminShip's sails?

2018-05-24

Kudpung has some thoughts on the reasons for becalmed forums and the reluctance of candidates to (wo)man the rigging.

Op-ed Wikipedia has cancer

2017-02-27

In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless and exponential multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing exponentially forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Exponential spending increases can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations. The Wikimedia Foundation's expenses have grown aggressively every year; Wikipedian Guy Macon offers his analysis.

Op-ed Commons Picture of the Year; Wikidata licensing

2016-06-15

Two for the price of one—do the popular Commons image contest and Wikidata licensing serve the community as well as they should?

Op-ed Knowledge Engine and the Wales–Heilman emails

2016-04-24

When is competing with Google not competing with Google?

Op-ed Hard work needed to address Wikimedia’s leadership challenges

2016-03-16

The road ahead for the WMF.

Op-ed A modest proposal for Wikimedia’s future

2016-03-09

A look at the future of our parent foundation.

Op-ed Backward the Foundation

2016-02-24

Parting words from a WMF employee,

Op-ed Shit I cannot believe we had to fucking write this month

2016-02-17

A new column that examines the articles that are helping to fight systemic bias

Op-ed So, what’s a knowledge engine anyway?

2016-02-03

Examining the issues at the heart of recent Board disputes.

Op-ed Lila Tretikov: the WMF needs your input in developing our strategy

2016-01-27

Participate in the new strategy initiative.

Op-ed Not a pretty picture: Thoughts on the "monkey selfie" debacle

2016-01-20

Is Wikimedia taking the right approach?

Op-ed Transparency

2016-01-13

James Heilman talks about why he was removed from the WMF board.

Community view Battle for the soul of the WMF

2016-01-13

Liam Wyatt shares his thoughts in "community view"

Op-ed Wikidata: Knowledge from different points of view

2015-12-09

A response from Wikidata.

Op-ed Whither Wikidata?

2015-12-02

Issues of quality and verifiability threaten the project.

Op-ed As one thousand of us requested, Superprotect has been removed

2015-11-11

Assessing the end of a controversial feature.

Op-ed You are invited to participate in the Community Wishlist Survey

2015-11-04

The WMF wants your ideas for technical improvements.

Op-ed It’s time to stop the bullying

2015-10-28

Gangs of bullies and trolls rove the internet and make life difficult for the rest of us.

Op-ed WikiConference USA 2015: built on good faith

2015-10-14

We believe that human interaction can only make Wikipedia stronger.

Op-ed Wikimania—can volunteers organize conferences?

2015-08-26

Should paid event staff supplement the work of volunteers?

Op-ed WP:THREATENING2MEN: The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus

2015-08-19

Nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia.

Op-ed Je ne suis pas Google

2015-08-05

The public interest in remembering the facts about trials and convictions is, in my view, at least as strong as any "right to be forgotten."

Op-ed My life as an autistic Wikipedian

2015-07-29

Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum.

Op-ed On paid editing and advocacy: when the Bright Line fails to shine, and what we can do about it

2015-07-15

"How long will this take?" This is one of the first questions new clients ask. They come to us because the Wikipedia entry about the company at which they work is wrong, incomplete, or even just outdated. The answer varies ...

Editorial So you want to get your message out. Where do you turn?

2015-07-08

It seems like a good time to discuss the various communications channels available to community members.

Op-ed Content Translation beta is coming to the English Wikipedia

2015-06-24

The Wikimedia Foundation's Language Engineering team plans to introduce Content Translation—a tool that makes it easier to translate Wikipedia articles into different languages—as a beta feature on the English Wikipedia.

Op-ed Making a difference in Wikipedia, one GA at a time

2015-06-17

We need to be ever-diligent in ensuring that articles remain of high quality.

Op-ed What made Wikipedia lose its reputation?

2015-05-13

There is a public misconception of Wikipedia: that any anonymous editor can edit Wikipedia at any time, and cannot be tracked or identified.

Op-ed We are drowning in promotional artspam

2015-04-08

Wikipedia has been gravitating towards a vehicle for business and product promotion for too long.

Op-ed How my father's railroad image collection now benefits the world: the value of digitization

2015-03-25

Once when I was young, growing up in the 1990s, my father pulled his collection of railroad slides out from the basement, set up his projector, and shared a glimpse into American railway history with our family.

Op-ed Does the Wikimedia fundraising survey address community concerns?

2015-03-18

The publication of the Wikimedia survey findings on fundraising questions came three months after significant concerns were voiced about the design and wording of the December 2014 fundraising banners and e-mails.

Op-ed Why the Core Contest matters

2015-03-11

I continue to be excited about the Core Contest because I see it as a way of encouraging the expansion of broad articles that are typically neglected by our article improvement incentives.

Editorial Conspiracy theories distract from real questions about grantmaking report

2015-03-04

Last week, my colleagues on the Signpost produced a news report covering a minor controversy about a report commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Written by the staff of The Lafayette Practice, a French research firm, it proclaimed the WMF as a leader in the practice of participatory grantmaking.

Op-ed Text from Wikipedia good enough for Oxford University Press to claim as own

2015-02-25

Doc James tells us that "The one good thing that has come out of all of this is that Wikipedia’s content passing a major textbook publisher review processes is some external validation of Wikipedia’s quality."

Editorial Recent retirements typify problem of admin attrition

2015-02-18

Go Phightins! shares his thoughts on admin attrition and the size of the administrative backlog.

Op-ed Is Wikipedia for sale?

2015-02-04

Hundreds of posted jobs offer money to edit Wikipedia. These jobs appear to be thriving, with tens of thousands of dollars changing hands each month.

Op-ed Let's make WikiProjects better

2015-01-21

Our contributor opines that WikiProjects are failing to live up to their potential. WikiProject X is a new project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grant that focuses on figuring out what makes some WikiProjects work and not others.

Op-ed Articles for creation needs you

2015-01-14

Ever since the Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident in 2005 triggered the restriction against un-registered editors creating new pages, WikiProject Articles for creation (AfC) has stood in the breach. The WikiProject's purpose is to review draft submissions from IPs (and frequently new registered editors) to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Op-ed My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation

2014-12-31

Chris Troutman has been a campus ambassador for six classes in the Los Angeles area over the past four consecutive semesters. He is currently a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at University of California, Riverside.

Op-ed It's GLAM up North!

2014-12-10

Highlights from the York Museums Trust's online collections.

Op-ed Who edits health-related content on Wikipedia and why?

2014-12-03

We found that around half of the editors are qualified medics or other healthcare professionals, providing reassurance about the reliability of content.

Op-ed Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution—a wiki-protest

2014-10-22

Our op-ed writer this week opines that the organization of Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution" resembles how Wikipedia is organized.

Op-ed Ships—sexist or sexy?

2014-10-15

Why does Wikipedia still use the gendered pronouns "she" and "her" for ships?

Op-ed Media Viewer software is not ready

2014-09-10

Last month, I wrote an open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, inviting others to join me in a simple but important request: roll back the recent actions—both technical and social—by which the Wikimedia Foundation has overruled legitimate decisions of several Wikimedia projects.

Op-ed Automated copy-and-paste detection under trial

2014-09-03

Doc James and some collaborators are working on quick detection of copyright violations

Op-ed A new metric for Wikimedia

2014-08-20

Denny Vrandečić argues that "We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors."

Op-ed Red links, blue links, and erythrophobia

2014-08-13

Erythrophobia is the fear of, or sensitivity to, the colour red. Recently, I have seen more and more erythrophobic Wikipedians; specifically, Wikipedians who are scared of red links. In Wikipedia's early days, red links were encouraged and well-loved, and when I started editing in 2006, this was still mostly the case. Jump forward to 2014, and many editors now have an aversion to red links.

Op-ed "Hospitality, jerks, and what I learned"—the amazing keynote at WikiConference USA

2014-06-04

I never feel quite adequate trying to paraphrase Sumana's words: she is so articulate. I highly encourage every person who reads this article to directly watch her keynote—it directly speaks to a lot of Wikimedia's most significant issues, made with great eloquence. We have a serious issue with retaining editors, and parts of her speech could serve as a pretty good partial blueprint towards how we could begin to fix that problem.

Op-ed Five things a Wikipedian in Residence can do

2014-04-23

Hey you—yeah you, the Wikipedian! Do you want to help a museum, a library, a university, or other organization explore ways to engage with Wikipedia? Great—you should offer your expertise as a Wikipedian in residence!

Op-ed Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia

2014-03-26

On 3 April, we will roll out some changes to the typography of Wikipedia's default Vector skin, to increase readability for users on all devices and platforms. After five months of testing, four major iterations, and through close collaboration with the global Wikimedia community, who provided more than 100 threads of feedback, we’ve arrived at a solution which improves the primary reading and editing experience for all users.

Comment A foolish request

2014-03-26

April Fools' Day is rapidly approaching. Every year, members of the community pull pranks and make (or attempt to make) humorous edits to pages across the project. Every year, the community follows April Fools' Day with a contentious debate about whether or not it is necessary to impose limits on April Fools' Day jokes for future years. It is a polarizing issue.

Op-ed Licensed for reuse? Citing open-access sources in Wikipedia articles

2014-01-15

It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started — largely to make it easier to share scholarly research — most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.

Op-ed WikiCup competition beginning a new year

2014-01-08

At the very start of the new year, 2014's WikiCup—an annual competition which has been held on Wikipedia in various forms since 2007—began.

Op-ed Commons medical diagnostic images under threat from unresolved ownership

2013-10-02

Medical images have transformed many aspects of modern medicine. Over the past two decades the increasing sophistication of MRI, CT-scanning, and X-ray techniques has made these technologies the cornerstone of diagnosing a range of conditions, replacing what used to be largely guesswork by doctors. They can be the difference between life and death for a patient, and their importance is underlined by the tens of billions of dollars spent on them annually just in North America. For Wikimedia Foundation projects, advanced images are now a powerful tool for describing and explaining, and educating our worldwide readership of medical articles.

Op-ed Q&A on Public Relations and Wikipedia

2013-09-25

Over the last year, there's been extensive debate about whether public relations professionals and other corporate representatives should participate on Wikipedia and, if so, to what extent and what kinds of rules should be followed.

Op-ed The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change

2013-07-31

One of the narratives I've heard a lot is that Wikipedia is unable to change, that it's too stagnant, too poorly resourced, too inherently resistant to change. I don't believe that at all.

Op-ed It's time to stop pretending the English-language Wikinews is a viable project

2013-07-10

This is Wikinews' fundamental problem: it can neither do a good job providing a summary of world news, nor does it have any special focus that it does well. It's a collection of random articles, with only the occasional, passing resemblance to important current events.

Op-ed Two responses to "The Tragedy of Wikipedia's Commons"

2013-06-19

Two responses to the 'Tragedy of Wikipedia's Commons': Following last week's op-ed by Gigs ("The Tragedy of Wikipedia's Commons"), the Signpost is carrying two contrary opinions from MichaelMaggs, a bureaucrat on Wikimedia Commons, and Mattbuck, a British Commons administrator.

Op-ed The tragedy of Wikipedia's commons

2013-06-12

I've long thought that we should get rid of the Wikimedia Commons as we know it. Commons has evolved into a project with interests that compete with the needs of the primary users of Commons and the reason it was created. It's also understaffed, which results in poor curation, large administrative backlogs, and poor policy development.

Op-ed How do we fix RfA inactivity?

2013-04-15

It has been well documented that less and less new Requests for adminship are being filed. Are there simply too many disagreeing views for us to reach a consensus?

Op-ed We must do more to turn readers into editors

2013-03-04

There seems to be rooted a belief that using Wikipedia means just reading the articles, and that editing is something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.

Op-ed An article is a construct – hoaxes and Wikipedia

2013-02-11

Wikipedia has a long, daresay storied history with hoaxes; our internal list documents 198 of the largest ones we have caught as of 4 January 2013. Why?

In the media Hoaxes draw media attention; Sue Gardner's op-ed; Women of Wikipedia

2013-01-28

Hoaxes draw media attention: On New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day.

Op-ed Meta, where innovative ideas die

2013-01-07

The project has long been an out-of-the-way corner for technocratic working groups, unaccountable mandarins, and in-house bureaucratic proceedings.

From the editor Wikipedia, our Colosseum

2012-12-31

In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.

Op-ed Finding truth in Sandy Hook

2012-12-17

Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits and more than half a million page views on the first full day.

Op-ed 2012 WikiCup comes to an end

2012-11-05

J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.

Op-ed AdminCom: A proposal for changing the way we select admins

2012-10-15

There is wide agreement among English Wikipedians that the administrator system is in some ways broken—but no consensus on how to fix it. Most suggestions have been relatively small in scope, and could at best produce small improvements. I would like to make a proposal to fundamentally restructure the administrator system, in a way that I believe would make it more effective and responsive. The proposal is to create an elected Administration Committee ("AdminCom") which would select, oversee, and deselect administrators.

Op-ed Fixing Wikipedia's help pages one key to editor retention

2012-09-10

Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated.

Op-ed Dispute resolution – where we're at, what we're doing well, and what needs fixing

2012-09-03

Since May 2012 I've been a Wikimedia Foundation community fellow with the task of researching and improving dispute resolution on English Wikipedia; I've analysed processes to determine their use and effectiveness, and present ideas that I hope will improve the future of dispute resolution.

Op-ed Wikimedians are rightfully wary

2012-08-20

The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes proposes new features that receive substantive criticism from Wikimedians, yet those criticisms may be dismissed on the basis that people are resistant to change—there's an unjustified view that the wikis have been overrun by vested contributors who hate all change. That view misses a lot of key details and insight because there are good reasons that Wikimedians are suspicious of features development, given past and present development of bad software, growing ties with the problematic Wikia, and a growing belief that it is acceptable to experiment on users.

Op-ed Small Wikipedias' burden

2012-08-13

In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some effect, that's all there is to it. Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.

Op-ed The Athena Project: being bold

2012-08-06

You should think of Athena as a kick in the head" – because that's exactly what it's supposed to be: a radical and bold re-examination of some of our sacred cows when it comes to the interface.

Op-ed The future of PR on Wikipedia

2012-07-23

There has never been a better time to improve the behavior of marketing professionals on Wikipedia. For the first time we're seeing self-imposed statements of ethics. Professional PR bodies around the globe have supported the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) guidance for ethical Wikipedia engagement. Although their tone is different, CREWE and the PRSA have brought more attention to the issues. Awareness among PR professionals is rising. So are the number of paid editing operations sprouting up and the opportunity for dialogue.

Op-ed Representing knowledge – metadata, data and linked data

2012-07-02

Op-ed A call for editorial input in developing new Creative Commons licensing

2012-06-25

Opinion essay Openness versus quality: why we're doing it wrong, and how to fix it

2011-12-26

Opinion essay Wikipedia in Academe – and vice versa

2011-12-12

Opinion essay The monster under the rug

2011-10-31

Opinion essay There is a deadline

2011-10-24