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2015-08-05

Wikipedia better equipped to deal with systemic bias than traditional publishers

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By Gamaliel
Atmosphere and Environment XII (1970) by Louise Nevelson

The German publisher Taschen is one of the world's leading producers of art books. Among their most popular books are the Taschen Basic Art series, small (about 10 in. × 12 in.) affordable ($10 US) volumes, invaluable introductory volumes which are ubiquitous in libraries, museums, and bookstores.

In 2010, the artists Ditte Ejlerskov and EvaMarie Lindahl contacted Taschen to point out that out of 97 volumes published in the Basic Art series, only five included women: Tamara de Lempicka, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Jeanne-Claude (who shares a volume and a Wikipedia article with her collaborator and husband Christo). Taschen asked the pair about which artists they had omitted and should include in the series. That particular artists would be omitted through oversight or happenstance is reasonable, but that one of the world's leading publishers of art books is completely unaware of their major omissions is startling, as any art aficionado could easily produce a list of a half-dozen omissions instantly.

Ejlerskov and Lindahl produced a list of 100. This list was the basis for their exhibition last year at the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden called About: The Blank Pages. They assembled the 97 Basic Art books on two bookshelves, accompanied by covers they had created for each of the women on their list, covering books of blank pages.

The Basic Art series is not the canon. Canonicity or artistic excellence is certainly one criterion for inclusion, but artists are also clearly included on the basis of popularity, artistic influence, or representation of a particular historical moment, so one cannot argue that particular women were excluded from the list because their work is not as good as male artists included in the series. Even the most fervent adherents of Basic Art subjects Norman Rockwell or Keith Haring won't attempt to claim that they belong in the same rank as Michelangelo. One can quibble about many of the names on Ejlerskov and Lindahl's list (or ones omitted from the list, such as Remedios Varo, Tracey Emin, Kara Walker, or Sarah Goodridge), but one cannot seriously argue that artists like Mary Cassatt, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judy Chicago, and Cindy Sherman do not far outstrip some in the Basic Art series like Friedensreich Hundertwasser or Franz Stuck or the preposterous Fernando Botero in terms of artistic merit, influence, historical importance, and popularity.

The Swan (No. 16) (1915) by Hilma af Klint

Like the Basic Art series, Wikipedia serves an introductory audience, and in this particular area, Wikipedia succeeds where Taschen has failed. Of the 100 names on the list, which I've linked in my userspace, only two artists were omitted from the English Wikipedia when I wrote this editorial: The Canadian artist Helen Frances Gregor appears to be absent from Wikipedia entirely, and Russian painter Nadia Khodasevich Leger is mentioned a few times in passing as the wife of Fernand Léger, but not as an artist in her own right. We have many issues with systemic and gender bias on Wikipedia, but we also have the ability to address those biases in a way that a traditional publisher like Taschen cannot. We can question and argue about those omissions while Taschen cannot even recognize its own errors. We can form projects like Art + Feminism and WikiProject Women artists to systematically address these issues and improve our own coverage, while Taschen requires a public shaming before it can even begin to do so. It is another testament to the ability of Wikipedia to respond to omissions like these that even before this editorial was published, an enterprising editor created articles on the missing artists, articles I expect will be featured on Did You Know within a week.

Below is a gallery of self-portraits by twelve of the artists on Ejlerskov and Lindahl's list who are included in the English Wikipedia:




Gamaliel has been an administrator on the English Wikipedia since 2004 and is currently an editor-in-chief of the Signpost. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section.



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2015-08-05

Je ne suis pas Google

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By Mike Godwin

The French government’s privacy-regulation agency decided in June to order Google Inc. to remove (or "delist") from all Google websites worldwide – not just those in France or the European Union – links that mention EU citizens who have invoked their so-called “right to be forgotten.” In doing so, the CNIL (in French, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés) demonstrates that the primary liberté it seems to care about protecting is the French government's liberty to order informational takedowns.

Google has now responded, formally requesting today that the CNIL rescind its order, an appeal the French regulator could take up to two months to review. The move marks just the latest, most expansive phase in the ongoing debate – particularly in Europe, but also in Argentina and even the United States – over the degree to which concerns about privacy, including the appearance of citizens' names in potentially unflattering search engine results, trump rights to free expression.

That debate has been gathering increasing momentum ever since the EU's Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled last year that a complainant had the right under European privacy law to demand takedown of certain links from search-engine results. You can find a general discussion of that case here and the official English-language version of the court’s decision here.

Google leadership consistently has expressed reservations and criticisms of the right to be forgotten (RTBF). Notably, Google CEO Larry Page remarked shortly after the decision that the ruling would "be used by other governments that aren’t as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things."

While the court tried to express some guidelines for the RTBF —the opinion states that links should come down if they "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to those purposes and in the light of the time that has elapsed"— it failed to state any principles that limit when takedown demands are appropriate. As a result, Google has been compelled to strike its own balances in determining whether a takedown demand should be honored.

It should be noted that Google’s search engine is even more widely used in France than it is in the US. In the United States, the desktop market share for Google search is perhaps 68 percent. In France, by contrast, Google commands a market share of more than 90 percent. (You’d get somewhat different numbers if mobile search were included in the tally.) Google’s share of the French market is particularly impressive, given that Yahoo’s French-language search was offered for years before Google got its foot in the door.

While it may have won the market’s popularity contest decisively among francophones, the French government (like many in the EU) is reflexively anti-corporate and suspicious of commercial enterprises, especially those based in the United States. That anti-corporate sentiment has led to somewhat anomalous pro-censorship decisions by a government that, only a few months ago, made a point of showing free-speech solidarity with the journal Charlie Hebdo.

Even if, as some have argued, Google has the human and financial resources to make case-by-case determinations about whether to honor a takedown demand, not every company has Google’s deep pockets. New startups that hope to be the next Microsoft or Apple or Google can’t hire whole teams of lawyers to review a huge volume of RTBF demands. And those lawyers would be in addition to the legal teams they already need to respond to copyright-infringement takedown demands, not to mention all the other legal work, from trademark-infringement claims to defamation claims to reviewing government orders to remove online listings for companies that sell drugs illegally.

In fact, most technology companies don’t hire lawyers at all in their early phases. The most prudent strategy for such startups is just to remove links or other content in response to every demand. Over the long run, it’s not hard to see how this default impulse would constrain freedom of expression and the equally important freedom of inquiry on the Internet.

On the other hand, if you were seeking to cement Google’s pre-eminence as the dominant search engine for all time, you could hardly do better than to impose the RTBF, and other soon-to-be-discovered rights, in precisely the way France now seeks to do.

Despite CNIL's claim that it is acting in "accordance with the CJEU judgement," the judgment stopped short of the new territory into which French regulators are seeking to expand. They’re seeking, expressly, to demand content takedown from anyone on the Internet anywhere in the world. Even France's ancien régime in the age of Louis XIV did not assert its powers that expansively. Properly, France and the other EU nations should be skeptical of claiming worldwide powers—just as, in other contexts, those nations ask the same of the United States.

As it happens, I’ve been dealing with RTBF issues for about six years, ever since I was general counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. The foundation was sued by German ex-convicts (you can find me discussing the case here) who wanted to suppress archived news reports of their guilt in a highly publicized murder case. It turns out to be hard to get a job when a potential employer looks you up online and the first thing he or she finds is the Wikipedia article about your murder conviction.

I understood and, to some extent, sympathized with the ex-convicts’ concerns; I do believe one should have the opportunity to start over, at least to some degree. But I knew Wikipedia could never survive volume of takedown demands I foresaw would follow if we capitulated to this demand. Wikipedia, although hugely popular, is orders of magnitude less rich than Google Inc. is.

What I opted to do back in 2009 was to take the story of their demands to the press. The result? Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, the ex-convicts, arguably became more famous as a result of their demands than they would have been if they had focused more on their job hunts than on suing Internet newspapers and encyclopedias.

But that kind of happy outcome can’t be guaranteed all the time. Only a minority of complainants will turn out to be convicted murderers, although some larger number may turn out to have been convicted on other crimes. The public interest in remembering the facts about trials and convictions (and acquittals!) is, in my view, at least as strong as any "right to be forgotten." Which means that, just as we each should feel free to state "Je Suis Charlie," each of us should also be empowered to argue, with merit, "I am not Google."


Mike Godwin is general counsel for the R Street Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank. He was the general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007 to 2010. This article was originally published on the R Street blog and is reprinted with his permission. The views expressed in this editorial are his alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication.
Editor's note: The R Street Institute has received funding from Google.



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2015-08-05

VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief

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By Resident Mario and Gamaliel
  • Science and Wikipedia: Wikimedia UK published a blog post this week summarizing recent research on the place that Wikipedia has as an information directory in the scientific sphere. The post is worth reading in its entirety for anyone interested in information science, academic open access, and Wikipedia in medicine. The Wikipedia Science Conference is happening soon; see also previous Signpost coverage. R
  • VisualEditor: A discussion of interest occurred on the wikimedia-l mailing list this week, the topic of which was VisualEditor's much-improved usability for chapter-organized editing workshops. VisualEditor is now on slow roll-out on the English Wikipedia and elsewhere. R
For more Signpost coverage on VisualEditor see our VisualEditor series.
  • Endowment director: The Wikimedia Foundation published a call for candidates for an endowment director, fulfilling board and executive-level discussions about the creation of an endowment as a future financial security for the Foundation that have been ongoing for some time. Fundraising department concerns about future campaign returns, continued decline in community participation metrics, and a large-and-growing WMF cash pile form the backdrop. R
  • Netherlands conference: Wikimedia Netherlands has published a call for speakers for their annual conference. R
  • German chapter progress report: Wikimedia Germany is far and away the largest of the movement affiliate chapters, and so it publishes equally mammoth progress reports, as per the requirements of the annual plan grants funding process. These reports are now available for review. Such reports, published regularly, are indexed at Reports. R
  • Wikimedia Bangladesh: Wikimedia Bangladesh published a post to the Wikimedia Blog highlighting the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Bangla Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales was in attendance. R
  • Ada Initiative closing: The Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in open source technology and culture, announced it would be shutting down because of their inability to find a suitable new executive director. A number of their efforts focused on Wikimedia projects, most recently the Ally Skills Workshop at Wikimania 2015. Former Wikimedia Foundation director Sue Gardner and current WMF conference coordinator Ellie Young were members of their board of advisors. G
  • Arb case closed: The English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee case Kww and The Rambling Man closed on August 3. The Committee removed the administrator and edit filter manager rights from Kww and urged the community "to establish a policy or guideline for the use of edit filters". G
  • This Month: In Education has been published. R



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2015-08-05

Meet the boilerplate makers

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By Rcsprinter123

Can't work without 'em, if you're working on a wiki, but it seems that many Wikipedians can't work with 'em, either. Templates, of course – the backbone of every page providing layout, banners, infoboxes, and fancy links that change around when you refresh the page. Luckily, we have a team of editors super-versed in how to manipulate the markup to produce the final result that we want, providing a smooth and (hopefully) stylish appearance to the reader. WikiProject Templates, with a current membership of around 60, helps to do the following:

  1. Conducting efforts to better organise, document and display all templates in the template namespace, including: navigation templates, infobox templates, inline templates linking country articles, stub types, image copyright tags and user language templates (Babel).
  2. Solving specific templates issues, such as standardisation and locations.
  3. Improving the general documentation on how to create and use templates, in addition to improving the documentation pages of the individual templates.
  4. Clean-up of the unused, unneeded and/or redundant templates, using the templates for discussion (TfD) process and guidelines.
  5. Providing help and guidance in creating, updating, correcting and testing templates.
  6. Improving template accessibility

That's rather a big remit when all looked at together, so to give us more of an idea, we interviewed APerson, Paine Ellsworth and Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing).

What motivated you to join the project? Do you have a particular interest or proficiency in maintaining templates?

  • Paine Ellsworth: Back when I joined, I was fascinated by the fact that even a small edit to a template has the power to affect every page to which it's transcluded, and I wanted to help manage the template namespace. I guess I've gained a little proficiency over the years, mostly just learning from other template editors.
  • APerson: I always was very interested in templates, and especially liked some of the amazing things that could be accomplished via templates. For instance, according to some people, templates are (or were) Turing complete.
  • Pigsonthewing: I first became interested in template development in 2007, when I realised they could be made to emit microformats (machine-readable metadata), making their content understandable to computers, as well as people. The work I did on that is one of the things that led to Wikidata. Learning to code templates for that purpose gave me a wider interest in their use, and especially their accessibility, since web accessibility is another interest of mine. I'm also active in having redundant templates deleted or merged; we have far too many with only minor variations, and that's both confusing for editors (and readers, when the templates' presentation varies arbitrarily in similar articles) and a cause of unnecessary extra work for those of us who maintain them.

Does WikiProject Templates collaborate with any other projects?

  • Paine Ellsworth: There is a list of collaborations on the project page in the section "Related WikiProjects", and there are probably several more that are "unofficial" or "informal", such as WikiProject Redirects and WikiProject Disambiguation.
  • Pigsonthewing: Informally: all of them. There isn't a single project that doesn't make use of templates, and thus benefit from our work. And of course we're always happy to hear from projects. (or editors) who have a template issue and need our help.
A template allows you to reproduce infinite content.

How would you rate this project's success and participation?

  • Paine Ellsworth: Since templates are by their nature a delicate issue due to their potential to harm the overall Wikipedia project if misused, in my opinion my fellow project members, past and present, have done an admirable job of managing template namespace.
  • Pigsonthewing: In the famous phrase, "it is too early to judge". There is still a lot to do, to make, improve, and deploy templates, and to improve their accessibility. But we've come a long, long way in that regard, too.

What are WikiProject Templates's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

  • Paine Ellsworth: There is a list of open tasks on the project page, and I would encourage new editors to read the project page, its talk page and other template-related project and help pages to learn as much as possible about template management. And then dig right in!
  • Pigsonthewing: We need people – not just template editors, but also those who deploy them – to understand how accessibility issues affect templates; currently the hot issue is that many of them don't understand colour contrast requirements. We see people wanting to put, say, dark red text on dark green backgrounds, and a lot of people just can't read that. Some people can't read combinations that you or I might not find troublesome. All we need to do is to abide by the International Standard on web accessibility, but some resist that, often for weak reasons, or even no apparent reason at all.

Anything else you'd like to add?

  • Paine Ellsworth: Just that working with other template editors on the project has been more than a rewarding experience, and I wish them and all the workers at The Signpost only the very best!
  • Pigsonthewing: Populating templates with data from Wikidata is going to be a big game changer, and we're only just scratching the surface, there. And there's work to do to standardise templates (and the underlying Lua modules) across this Wikipedia, and to share them with other-language Wikipedias and sister projects, too. We need to combine the "TemplateData" required by the Visual Editor (VE) with ordinary template documentation, so we don't have to store (and update) everything twice. Finally, we need VE to work better with templates.


The WikiProject report will be taking a break for a couple of weeks while the regular author has a vacation. If you're interested in having a wikiproject that you work with featured in a future report, make sure to drop a note at the Signpost's WikiProject desk, and as always you may take a look in the archive to read previous reports.



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2015-08-05

Probe into Nehru edits launched; dangers of the right to be forgotten

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By Gamaliel

In brief

Jawaharlal Nehru in 1957
  • Nehru probe launched: NDTV reports that the Indian government has launched an investigation into the source of June 26 Wikipedia edits regarding Jawaharlal Nehru that caused outrage in that country (see previous Signpost coverage). (Aug. 5)
  • Clashing rights: In the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo writes about the spread of the right to be forgotten and its potential dangers in the wake of European court rulings demanding Google take down links. Manjoo quoted Jimmy Wales as saying “If we’re asking Google to comply in every version of Google worldwide, it becomes very hard to say where we want Google to draw the line. It’s a race to the bottom. Governments all around the world will immediately say, ‘Great, we’ll ask for things to be deleted worldwide.'" (Aug. 5)
  • Editorial comrades: The Daily Beast interviews Christopher Robinson and Gavin Kovite, authors of the new novel War of the Encyclopaedists, about protagonists who keep in touch by editing a Wikipedia article. (Aug. 2)
  • Grudge match: A few media outlets reported that the feud between rappers Drake and Meek Mill spilled over onto Wikipedia, with Drake partisans vandalizing articles. (July 31)
  • Pre-production: Bollywood Dhamaka reports that the Wikipedia article of actress Mandana Karimi, who debuts in the upcoming film Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3, has been deleted. A source told Bollywood Dhamaka that “Mandana is trying to procure the details of how the page got deleted. She is talking to some of her friends, who are proficient in information technology to help her sort out the mess. The actor's team will set up a new page." Karimi's article was deleted on July 14 following an AfD discussion on the grounds of notability and that she had not starred in any films that had been released. (July 31)
  • Wales slams Reddit: Wales spoke out to the Huffington Post about the embattled social media website Reddit. Wales suggested that Reddit should act more forcefully against hate speech, which is rampant on Reddit, though many on the site have suggested that clamping down on such content would be censorship. Wales said "Censorship involves a government using force or someone using a threat of intimidation or violence to suppress speech. That's a very different thing to saying that this is a private platform, where we are not welcoming hate speech." (July 31)



Do you want to contribute to "In the media" by writing a story or even just an "in brief" item? Edit next week's edition in the Newsroom or contact the editor.



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2015-08-05

Mrityorma amritam gamaya...

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By Serendipodous

If you were wondering, the title above is part of a mantra in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; it translates to, "From death lead us to immortality." Perhaps a touch melodramatic, I'll admit, but it seemed appropriate to me this week, given the milestones this list crossed. Death is no stranger to this list, but it has never cast such a pall as this week, when for the first time half the slots in the top 10 were devoted to it, including the top 3. The other milestone is, of course, India, who for the first time claimed five slots in the top 10.

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.

As prepared by Serendipodous, for the week of July 26 to August 1, 2015, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Good Article 3,589,713
The surge of views this former scientist and reluctant politician received upon his death this week at the age of 83 is merely a reflection of the regard in which he was held by his fellow Indians. A Muslim in a predominantly Hindu country, he rose to the very top of the political ladder, first as a developer of India's missile and nuclear programs, and then as President. Despite adhering to Islam, he considered himself an Indian and drew much inspiration from his country's Hindu heritage. As a result, his one term as President was one of the most popular in his country's history. A lifelong advocate of technology, he believed that India could become a developed country through embracing and expanding its knowledge base.
2 Yakub Memon Start-class 1,098,805 The Muslim terrorist, believed to have played a role in the 1993 Bombay bombings that killed 257 people, was hanged this week amid speculation that he was paying for the crime of his still-at-large brother Tiger Memon. Many commentators contrasted his death with the outpouring of grief which greeted that of his fellow Muslim and national hero A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and pondered what it augured for the future of India's society.
3 Roddy Piper C-class 1,086,945
Wikipedia viewers love their wrestlers, and so the death of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, world-renowned WWF and WCW heel, at the relatively young age of 61, was bound to stir emotions. In the ring, "Hot Rod" played up his Scottish roots, affecting the rage of a Glaswegian football hooligan and entering to the sound of bagpipes, for which he was named (his real last name, incidentally, was Toombs, which you would think would be a perfectly acceptable wrestling name). While never a wrestling fan, I will always remember him as the working class hero of John Carpenter's political alien invasion allegory They Live, in which he originated the now-legendary line, "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass- and I'm all out of bubblegum!" OK, so it makes no sense, but it's still cool.
4 Bajrangi Bhaijaan Start-class 948,650
Bollywood's Muslim-targeted counterprogramming to the raging box office tsunami of Baahubali: The Beginning, starring Hindu/Muslim superstar Salman Khan (pictured) and opening on Eid weekend, made Rs 2 billion ($31.2 million) in its first nine days, and earned support from legends like Shekhar Kapur. In its first 15 days, the film has grossed more than Rs 4 billion ($62.5 million) worldwide. But Khan's tweets in apparent support of Yakub Memon have led to posters for the film being defaced in some areas.
5 Bobbi Kristina Brown Start-Class 930,371
The eerie death of the daughter of the late Whitney Houston (found, like her mother, in a bathtub) has cast a pall of tragedy on a family already no stranger to it. Aged just 22, she had already become a focus of tabloid gossip and speculation.
6 List of highest-grossing Indian films List 725,049
With the barnstorming performances of Baahubali: The Beginning and Bajrangi Bhaijaan making national news in India, people are interested to know how they stack up against the recent crop of record breakers.

NOTE: includes views for its redirect page List of highest-grossing Bollywood films

7 Baahubali: The Beginning C-class 747,036
At $41 million, this sprawling, two-part historical epic is the most expensive film in Indian history (no, it isn't actually Bollywood, since it was made in South India, much to Bollywood's chagrin). Starring the Telugu actor Prabhas (pictured), the first part, subtitled "The Beginning", broke box office records upon its release on July 10, earning Rs 2.15 billion ($34 million) worldwide in just 5 days and in just three weeks has already crossed the Rs 4.85 billion ($76 million) mark, showing remarkable stamina for an Indian blockbuster, most of which drop off by 80 percent at that point.
8 Ant-Man (film) C-class 515,092
Other than Guardians of the Galaxy, this was always going to be Marvel Studios's biggest gamble, and signs did not augur well after writer-director Edgar Wright abandoned the project when denied total creative control. And yet, while it is hardly the box-office miracle that Guardians was, it has proved a moderate domestic hit, at $132 million to date, though it is on course to become the lowest-grossing film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
9 Deaths in 2015 List 482,484
The viewing figures for this article have been remarkably constant; fluctuating week to week between 450 and 550 thousand, apparently heedless of who actually died.
10 Ronda Rousey B-class 482,298
The undefeated UFC women's bantamweight champion beat Bethe Correia in 34 seconds during UFC 190 on August 1 in Correia's home town of Rio de Janeiro. Apparently Correia had been trash talking Rousey prior to the fight, which strikes me as a rather odd thing to do to someone who a) has never lost a fight and b) won her last fight in 14 seconds.



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2015-08-05

Maya, Michigan, Medici, Médée, and Moul n'ga

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By Xanthomelanoussprog, Hafspajen, and Gamaliel
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 19 July to 25 July.

Featured articles

Map of the Maya civilization.

Three Featured articles were promoted this week.

  • Fabula Nova Crystallis Final Fantasy (nominated by ProtoDrake) The New Tale of the Crystal (Fabula Nova Crystallis) is a series of games based on a mythology developed by Japanese video game writer Kazushige Nojima. The five games so far released within the Final Fantasy franchise have the theme of gods from an "unseen realm" destructively interfering in the human world; each god has an associated crystal, and in one story they are themselves "crystal-powered mechanical beings".
  • Hugh Beadle (nominated by Cliftonian) Sir Hugh Beadle was a lawyer, judge and politician, born in 1905 in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (today Harare, Zimbabwe). Beadle practised law in Bulawayo during the 1930s, and in 1939 became a Member of Parliament for the governing United Party, led by the Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins. Beadle served as Huggins' Parliamentary Private Secretary for six years before becoming a Cabinet minister in 1946. He retired in 1950 to become a judge of the Southern Rhodesian High Court.
  • Maya civilization (nominated by Simon Burchell) The Mesoamerican Maya civilization was developed by the Maya people over several thousand years. The earliest period, known as the Pre-Classic, lasted from about 2000 BC to 250 AD. The civilization was at its peak from circa 250 AD to 900 AD after which it gradually declined until the Maya's unfortunate encounter with conquistador Hernán Cortés and his compatriots in the early 16th century. The Maya had a sophisticated and highly developed writing system, and they produced stunning artwork, sculptures and pottery. They are also known for human sacrifice, astronauts, and a sophisticated calendar which predicted the apocalypse three years ago. Their chief export was maize (corn), which the Maya called naal and xiim, for the cob and grain respectively.

Featured lists

Sherlock Holmes: I think I know who did it. - The Man with the Twisted Lip

Seven Featured lists were promoted this week.


Featured pictures

Albert Bridge at night, with the tollhouses, London
Jade Raymond
St Etheldreda's Church Interior, London, UK - Diliff
Curcuma longa roots


Twenty-two Featured pictures were promoted this week.

Wave clouds above the lonely desert



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2015-08-05

Get help editing Wikipedia with the new “Co-op” mentorship program

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By I JethroBT
The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.


What if there were a gathering place on Wikipedia for newer editors to find a mentor? What if we could match these editors to mentors based on their needs and goals? And what if we could do more to help editors beyond pointing them to documentation? This was the motivation behind developing a recently piloted mentorship space called the Co-op on the English Wikipedia.

Funded by an Individual Engagement Grant, our team assessed the current state of help spaces on the English Wikipedia and created the Co-op, a mentorship space informed by our research. For instance, we noted that newer editors are often familiar with some guidelines and policies, but are unsure of how they are implemented in practice. Consequently, we ensured that editors using the Co-op could be matched with mentors to focus on conventions and best practices in editing that are not always easily found in documentation.

Another common theme was that newer editors seeking help were initially overwhelmed by the sheer number of help pages and felt lost. In building the Co-op, we created a system to design mentorships based on concrete topics or problems, rather than leaving them too broad or unfocused.

Using the Co-op is simple: editors are matched with mentors based on how they wish to contribute, which they specify within a profile. These matching criteria include writing, image help, and technical work (such as syntax), among other topic areas. Editors can provide more specific details about why they are seeking mentorship within their profile as well. A bot then searches and matches the editor to a mentor who has volunteered to teach in that area. The two editors are pinged using the notifications system and informed about the match, where mentorship can then begin. Editors can change their profiles at anytime based on their needs and goals. Mentors can award Co-op barnstars to editors who have achieved their goals during mentorship:

Screenshot of the landing page for the Co-op mentorship space on English Wikipedia.

Our final report details the outcomes of our background research in evaluating help spaces on the English Wikipedia in addition to the development and results of the Co-op pilot itself. The pilot was a one-month long experiment that brought in 49 participants to use the Co-op, and was supported by our team in addition to 25 mentors. Here are some key findings on the impact of mentorship through the Co-op:

  • Mentored editors were more productive than compared to editors who were not mentored. During the pilot, mentored editors made 7 times as many edits (35 vs. 4.5 in median edits). They also edited more articles during the pilot (10 vs. 3 on average).
  • 68% of mentored editors remained active in April 2015, the month after the end of pilot, whereas only 22% of non-mentored editors remained active.
  • Editors using the Co-op waited far less time for mentorship to begin (12 hours) compared to the only other mentorship space on en.wiki, Adopt-a-user (4 days).
  • Despite being geared toward newer editors, the Co-op was utilized by more experienced editors who reported having positive and constructive experiences through mentorship.

Based on our findings, the Co-op appears to facilitate positive and productive experiences for editors. As such, we have reopened the Co-op for general use. Our team feels that the broader editing community can begin to take charge of the Co-op to promote its maintenance and growth. There are certainly areas where our mentorship space can be improved, some of which can be found on our phabricator task board. In order for the Co-op to succeed, we also need mentors who are willing to engage with and help teach newer editors. Mentors need not be good at everything on Wikipedia, and can choose to teach only in the areas they are comfortable. If you are interested in becoming a mentor, we invite you to sign up today.

We feel that the Co-op's model of mentorship shows promise for providing a positive experience for newer editors. Whether you are looking for a mentor, or want to be a mentor, we invite you to check out and participate in the Co-op!

[[m:User:I_JethroBT|I JethroBT
Co-op Project Manager



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