Dear en.wiki-l,
As some of you may have seen in this week's Wikipedia Signpost[1] or on the
Wikimedia UK Blog[2] the British Museum is offering five prizes of £100
(≈$140USD/€120) at their shop/bookshop[3] for new Featured Articles on
topics related to the British Museum *in any Wikipedia language edition*.
Ideally, the topics will be articles about collection items. Your choice. A
good place to start looking is Category: Collection of the British Museum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Collection_of_the_British_Museum
The full information about this "Features Article Prize" is at the
documentation page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Featured_Article_prize That
is [[WP:GLAM/BM/Featured Article prize]]
This is the first time an organisation in the UK has put out a prize that
recognises the value of good quality articles on Wikipedia in their own
right. This is a recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality
but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum’s mission to engage
the public. You don’t have to sign-up and the competition runs as long as
there are prizes to hand out.
The museum has curators dedicated to answering phone and email questions
about their specialist areas and they recognise that editing Wikipedia
articles, especially about items in the BM’s collections, counts for those
purposes. Equally, the museum will not attempt exert any editorial control
over the articles and accepts the community’s own judgement on what
constitutes a Featured Article. If you require assistance in approaching the
British Museum curators, please contact me directly or place your request at
the "British Museum: One on One collaborations" page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/One_on_one_collaborations
Again, the full and place to ask questions is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM/Featured_Article_prize
Good luck!
Liam Wyatt [[Witty Lama]]
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Tools/Single#News…
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/06/featured-article-prizes-from-the-briti…
[3] http://www.britishmuseumshoponline.org/wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
Imagine an article with many revisions and pending changes enabled:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G...
A is an approved edit. B,C,D,E,F,G are all pending edits.
B is horrible vandalism that the subsequent edits did not fix.
You are a reviewer, you go to review page by clicking a pending review
link. On the review page you can accept— thus putting the horrible
vandalism on the site. Or you can "reject" which throws out the all
the good edits of C,D,E,F,G by reverting it to A.
To quote someone from IRC: "this seems like its going to make vandals
even more effective because all they have to do is make one edit in a
string of ten good ones, and then the entire set has to be thrown out"
But that isn't true at all. You're not confined to the review page,
you simply go to the edit history, click undo on B, and then approve
your own edit (it won't be auto-approved because G wasn't approved).
Tada.
This completely non-obvious to people, because the only options on the
review page are accept or reject, and it's already causing confusion.
This is a direct result of the late in the process addition of the
review button, — trying to fit the round-peg of a revision reviewing
system (which we can't have because of the fundamental incompatibility
with single linear editing history) in to presentation-flagging system
square hole that we actually have.
I don't know how to fix this. We could remove the reject button to
make it more clear that you use the normal editing functions (with
their full power) to reject. But I must admit that the easy rollback
button is handy there. Alternatively we could put a small chunk of
the edit history on the review page, showing the individual edits
which comprise the span-diff (bonus points for color-coding if someone
wants to make a real programming project out of it) along with the
undo links and such.
In the meantime I expect enwp will edit the message text to direct
people to the history page for more sophisticated editing activities.
(Thanks to Risker for pointing out how surprising the pending review
page was for this activity)
Just wanted to give everybody a quick update on Pending Changes.
Basically, it looks like we're in good shape for going live on the
English Wikipedia shortly.
We rolled the new code yesterday afternoon Pacific time. We've had a few
hiccups, but everything seems well in hand. The biggest issue wasn't
discovered until the wee hourss of the morning; the new code fought with
a configuration issue on the Hebrew Wikisource, apparently breaking the
wiki. (Sorry for that!) Domas Mituzas fixed the config and had
everything back up within a few hours of the initial report. Other than
that, there have been some small issues fixed promptly by Aaron, Chad,
Ariel, Tomasz, and Tim.
There has also been some lively feedback on some interface changes
designed to make unreviewed edits more obvious. Some projects would
rather that they not be quite so attention-getting, and so have used
local CSS changes to quiet them down a bit. That's not a showstopper,
but we'll definitely be taking a look at that issue soon.
The next step will be to enable Pending Changes on the English
Wikipedia. That will take place in an hour or two. We expect that to go
more smoothly. No new code will go out; we're just turning on the
extension used elsewhere, with a config that has been tested for the
last 10 weeks on a labs site. Once everything is working and stable,
we'll let everybody know.
After that, we expect to release updates weekly to the English
Wikipedia. We have some interface improvements already in the queue, but
will be listening carefully. to the community for feedback.
William
P.S. We'll be doing a retrospective afterward to see what lessons we can
learn from this, so if you have feedback, please send me an off-list
email and I'll make sure it gets incorporated.
Assuming all goes well, we're about a week away from releasing the
Pending Changes [1] feature on the English Wikipedia for the initial
trial. The software seems ready, the ops folks are ready for the
rollout, and the Pending Changes team is ready to handle the launch.
Does the community also believe it is ready? I think the answer's yes,
but I wanted to get a formal yes before we get too close to the launch date.
William
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Pending_changes
Hi all,
since there's already several million iPad (and soon, other tablet)
users out there, I thought I'd try one in the Apple store to see what
Wikipedia looks/feels like. Generally, I think it's very nice, with
one exception. In "portrait" mode, the sidebar takes up a lot of real
estate. Especially when you scroll down a long page, there's this
annoying white bar on the left that serves no real purpose. Also,
IMHO, it destroys that "book feeling" that would fit so well with the
iPad.
So I wrote a quick JS hack that /should/ hide the sidebar on the iPad.
Instead, it shows an icon in the top left corner that, when
"finger-clicked", will show the sidebar again, in case you really want
it.
Demo (on Commons, because of the "withJS" option there):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4iPad.js
Now, that should /only/ work on the iPad. Could someone please confirm
this and tell me if it's an improvement. On image pages it probably
doesn't matter a lot, but more text-laden pages like
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Welcome?withJS=MediaWiki:Adjust4i…http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia…
it should make a visible difference.
If it is as good as I suspect, we could use it by default on the
Wikipedias etc. There's lots of room for improvement; maybe the
sidebar could appear when switching to landscape mode (as in the mail
app). The usability experts may want to take a look :-)
Cheers,
Magnus
As requested, here's the weekly Pending Changes update.
We proceed boldly toward launch. The main update is that we have pushed
the English Wikipedia launch back one day to Tuesday, June 15. That will
let us avoid stepping on the WP Academy Israel event, and it means Jimmy
Wales will be available to talk to the press, which in turn will yield a
better public understanding of Pending Changes.
However, we will still be rolling the new FlaggedRevs code into
production on Monday, June 14th (circa 4 pm Pacific, or 23:00 GMT). We
hope that this, aside from some minor UI improvements, will pass
unnoticed on the project currently using FlaggedRevs. If there are bugs,
we look forward to hearing about them via the usual channels, including
#wikimedia-tech [1]. Minor bugs will be fixed in place; any major issues
will result in a quick rollback to the existing code.
More prosaically, we had a number of bits of work verified complete this
week, including a number of little bugs. Our thanks to the German
community for their diligent testing of a labs instance of the German
configuration.
If you'd like once last chance to see what's coming, try the latest code
updates on our labs site:
http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
To see the upcoming work, it's listed in our tracker, under Current and
Backlog:
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/46157
William
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Channels
We expect a publicity storm around pending changes. Jay doesn't
currently plan to do a press release as such, but we're definitely
getting ready with talking point sheets and Q+As and a blog post and
etc. For obvious reasons, this is best drafted in public.
Journalists are <s>simple creatures</s> busy generalists. If you want
them to get it right, you have to distill things into a *robust
soundbite*. I'm good with soundbites (if I say so myself), but
obviously accuracy is rather important.
This is what I have so far, off the top of my head:
"Some of our pages are locked from *anyone* editing them. With this,
we can open those up so people can edit the draft version, which then
goes live. Should be on the order of minutes, if it's over an hour
it's too slow. The trial's starting with locked pages about living
people. We'll see how it goes."
Now then. That's soundbitey enough it's hard to mess up. But is it
factually accurate? I must admit I haven't been keeping up with
precisely what this week's consensus is. Corrections please?
[Note: This post is strictly from me as a press volunteer helping WMF
and WMUK and likely victim of a melting phone, rather than any
official role.]
- d.
The number of admins on the English Wikipedia may possibly have
peaked, and the number of active admins is 20% down on its peak of a
couple of years ago.
Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and February 2010 had only 19 successful RFAs
between them, with December and January both equalling the previous
all time low of 6. March 2010 is not yet over, but with less than 7
days left and no-one running, it looks like 2 is a new record monthly
low for RFA, and 15 a new record low for a quarter.
Those who are becoming admins are mostly the tale end of the classes
of 2006/7, as we currently have only 34 admins who started editing in
2008, and only 4 from the class of 2009.
Are other projects experiencing a similar phenomena?
What are the likely results of a dwindling number of admins, and a
growing wikigeneration gap between admins and other editors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WereSpielChequers/RFA_by_month
Regards
WereSpielChequers