Eglise Saint-Maimboeuf. Photo by Thomas Bresson, CC-BY-SA

Wikimedia Commons has over 12.5 million freely usable multimedia images, from photos and video, to illustration and sound files. Of these, roughly four thousand files have been selected by the community to be Featured Pictures, some of the highest quality images in the database, representing just 0.03 percent of the total. From the Featured Pictures, the Commons community elects a Picture of the Day, which appears on the home page.

Today’s image is of the interior of the Église Saint-Maimboeuf in Montbéliard, a town in eastern France. The photo was taken by Thomas Bresson (user:Computer_Hotline). Bresson considers himself an amateur photographer and has been a regular contributor to Wikimedia Commons since 2005. He shoots on a Nikon Coolpix P500 and a Nikon D300.

Bresson took the image above during Wiki Loves Monuments 2011, a month-long photo contest in September 2011 where over 5,000 photographers from 18 European countries uploaded more than 167,000 images of important historical sites and monuments. Like all photos on Commons, they were donated under a freely usable license so they can be used and re-used by everyone. 80 percent of the photographers who participated in Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 had never before uploaded to Commons.

The photo of the Église Saint Maimboeuf is a high dynamic range (HDR) image that Bresson shot on his D300 with a wide angle lens. He said he was particularly interested in capturing the symmetry of the church’s interior. Bresson believes it is important to record and share local history, which he happily donates to the Wikimedia projects through his beautiful photography. In addition to the physical structures around him, he loves to shoot insects, several of which have also been Featured Photos and Photos of the Day.

“I consider that the images of natural elements — insects, plants, landscapes, astronomical events, ancient ruins — must be shown to all,” he said. “So I put them under a license close to the public domain.”

The recognition he has received from the Commons community for his photos has inspired him to contribute more to Commons and French Wikipedia. He is also looking forward to participating in Wiki Loves Monuments 2012, which will be held this September in countries all over the world.

Stay tuned for more of Bresson’s Featured Photos in the future and please consider contributing your own work to the growing collection of free Commons images.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications
Reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern

A wasp on a hive, another Featured Photo by Thomas Bresson, CC-BY-SA

The second phase of Wikidata will aim to augment the infoboxes which are currently widely used on Wikipedia to display structured data

Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement, and the Wikimedia Foundation are proud to announce Wikidata, a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge and the first new Wikimedia projectsince 2006.

Wikidata will support the more than 280 language editions of Wikipedia with one common source of structured data that can be used in all articles of the free encyclopedia. Wikidata is expected to lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions. At the same time, Wikidata will decrease the maintenance effort for the 90,000 volunteers editing Wikipedia.

“Wikidata is ground-breaking. It is the largest technical project ever undertaken by one of the 40 international Wikimedia chapters,” said Pavel Richter, CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland. ”Wikimedia Deutschland is thrilled and dedicated to significantly improving the data management of the world’s largest encyclopedia with this project.”

In addition to the Wikimedia projects, the data is expected to be beneficial for numerous external applications, especially for annotating and connecting data in the sciences, in government, and for applications using data in very different ways. The data will be published under a free Creative Commons license.

The initial development of Wikidata is being funded with a donation of 1.3 million Euros, half of which comes from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [ai]². The Institute supports long-range research activities that have the potential to accelerate progress in artificial intelligence. It was established in 2010 by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, whose contributions to philanthropy and the advancement of science and technology span more than 25 years.

“Wikidata is a simple and smart idea, and an ingenious next step in the evolution of Wikipedia,” said Dr. Mark Greaves, Vice President of the Allen Institute for Artifical Intelligence. “It will transform the way that encyclopedia data is published, made available, and used by a global audience. Wikidata will build on semantic technology that we have long supported, will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, and will create an extraordinary new data resource for the world.”

One quarter of Wikidata’s initial funding has been donated by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through its Science Program. ”It is important for science,” said Chris Mentzel, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation science program officer. “Wikidata will both provide an important data service on top of Wikipedia, and also be an easy-to-use, downloadable software tool for researchers, to help them manage and gain value from the increasing volume and complexity of scientific data.”

Google, Inc. has provided another quarter of Wikidata’s funding. ”Google’s mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful,” said Chris DiBona, Director, Open Source at Google. ”We’re therefore pleased to participate in the Wikidata project which we hope will make significant amounts of structured data available to all.”

Wikidata will be developed in three phases. The first phase is expected to be finished by August 2012. It will centralize links between the different language versions of Wikipedia. In the second phase, editors will be able to add and use data in Wikidata. The results of the second phase are scheduled to be released in December 2012. The third and final phase will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. This will close the initial development process for Wikidata.

The team of eight developers is being led by Dr. Denny Vrandečić. Formerly of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, he works with Wikimedia Deutschland and is, together with Dr. Markus Krötzsch, of the University of Oxford, co-founder of the Semantic MediaWiki project, which has pursued the goals of Wikidata for the last few years. The proposal for Wikidata was developed with financial support by the EU project RENDER, which also involves Wikimedia Deutschland as a use-case partner.

Wikimedia Deutschland will perform the initial development, and plans to hand over operation and maintenance of the project to the Wikimedia Foundation by March 2013.

Matthew Roth
Global Communications Manager 

As Women’s History Month wraps up, we should all remember an especially significant figure in tech: Ada Lovelace. In 1843, Lovelace became the world’s first computer programmer by writing an algorithm intended to be understood by a machine, which became what is arguably the world’s first open source code.

An illustration of Ada Lovelace. Public domain

While women are involved in tech and occasionally head prominent companies, 170 years after Lovelace’s achievements, we are still discussing the ways women are under-represented in the industry. Despite the attention that Lovelace’s legacy brought to the role of women in technology in 2009, when the first Ada Lovelace Day was declared, she would probably not be happy with the status quo of women in tech today.

Inspired by Lovelace and concerned by the scarcity of women in open source and open culture, Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora co-founded The Ada Initiative (TAI) in 2011. Gardiner and Aurora, both advocates and developers with a long history in open source, started the organization not only to honor Lovelace’s memory, but also to elevate the role of women in open source and open culture and to address issues that women in the open source community face.

Aurora said she realized the need for a formal organization after a mutual friend of hers and Gardiner’s was sexually assaulted, for the third time in a year, at an open source conference. After writing about her experiences on her blog, Aurora’s friend was the product of blame and derision, rather than sympathy. Aurora felt the only solution to combat this type of behavior was to substantially increase the involvement of women in tech and open source, one of TAI’s primary objectives.

“I have also been assaulted at open source conferences, as well as many of my friends,” said Aurora. “It hit me then: this problem isn’t going away, it’s just getting worse. I decided to try forming a non-profit to pay people to work full-time on the problem, since volunteer work clearly wasn’t enough to fight the tide.”

Aurora quit her job as a Linux file systems developer and threw herself headlong into TAI, and Gardiner was her first pick as co-founder. The two had been friends for more than 10 years. Gardiner, who had already been a strong advocate for women in open source, was the perfect partner.

Gardiner had previously founded AussieChix, the first and largest open source organization for women in Australia, which she later helped expand to all of Oceania as Oceania Women of Open Technology. Gardiner and Aurora recruited prominent members of the open source and open culture community to serve on TAI’s advisory board, including Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation; Karen Sandler, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation; and John Ferlito, President of Linux Australia.

Since its founding a little more than a year ago, TAI has developed and led initiatives and programs that have solidified the organization’s role as a leader of the movement for women in open source and open culture. One of these initiatives is the “Ada’s Allies” workshops, where participants learn how to be good allies for women in open source.

“Many of us want to speak up when we see something sexist or offensive happening, but we don’t know what to say,” says Aurora. The workshop helps Allies learn how to respond to scenarios through role-playing and discussion.

TAI has also been a leader in working with open source tech and culture conferences to adopt policies to ensure a healthy and safe environment for all attendees, such as the Wikimedia Foundation’s “Friendly space policy.”

“What we’ve found over and over again is that people who behave in embarrassing and harassing ways believe that their behavior is acceptable,” says Aurora. “Ninety-percent of the battle is simply telling them how you expect them to behave in clear, specific terms.”

With Gardiner’s recent selection by the Wikimania 2012 Program Committee as the keynote speaker at Wikimania 2012 this July, she will certainly bring more attention to the issue. Coupled with the upcoming WikiWomenCamp 2012 and AdaCamp DC, 2012 will be the year to both honor the historical role of women in the tech and computer industries, and to promote their greater involvement in the future.

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, Ada Initiative Advisory Board Member

Aniruddha Kumar is a very active editor on Hindi Wikipedia, making over 8,000 edits in three years. The 27 year-old Wikipedian hails from Paṭnā, Bihar, in East India and is an Assistant Professor at Delhi University, where he studies Hindi Literature. He can speak Hindi, Urdu, English and Sanskrit.

Aniruddha Kumar. Photo by Victor Grigas, CC-BY-SA

Kumar has helped with the development of Hindi Wikipedia, where he devotes much of his time to articles on Hindi literature, music and history. He works as an administrator and is the number seven editor by total contributions.

Impressive as this is, you might be surprised to learn that Kumar is blind.

To contribute to Wikipedia, Kumar uses the open-source software NVDA (Non-visual Desktop Access), developed by NV Access, a non-profit organization based in Australia and “dedicated to the ideal that access to technology should not incur an extra cost for blind and visually impaired users.” He also uses the JAWS screen reader program developed by Freedom Scientific.

Both Jaws and NVDA provide feedback through synthetic speech and Braille. For references and citations, Kumar often uses recorded Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) books.

While he notes some limitations due to blindness, he says the unique and open collaboration on Wikipedia makes that less of an issue than with other sites.

“Wikipedia can be edited and read by anyone, unlike various things which are inaccessible for persons with disabilities,” he said. “We still have image-related problems but we don’t worry about that. We contribute as best we can. If I can’t add images to an article, then another person will.”

Kumar said he sees himself like one of millions of editors. “I’ve seen some more devoted and capable editors. I just do my job and what I like.”

He spends 2-3 hours editing Wikipedia articles on his days off, one hour during work days. If a subject particularly enthralls him, he says he will spend an entire day editing. He appreciates the absence of advertisements on Wikipedia, which saves him a great deal of time he would otherwise spend listening to extraneous jabber. On other websites, he said, he has to continually press the “down arrow on all these things that waste a lot of my time.”

For Kumar, access to free knowledge is necessary for people to live with dignity. “Having access to the combined knowledge of the world strengthens pluralism. It brings hope to growing a better and lovely world, where each works for the benefit of all.”

He said he values the collective nature of Wikipedia, where there is “something for all of us, including me. There is no barrier of nationality, ethnicity, religion, caste or gender. You don’t have to pay for a subscription, or read ads — it’s only about the right to information.”

He participated in the 2011 Wikipedia Fundraiser because he believed donating to Wikipedia was a way to protect the right to access knowledge and promote education.

Wikipedia, he said, is “one of the most beautiful things in the world.”

Story and reporting by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern
Additional reporting by Victor Grigas, Storyteller

Photo: Lane Hartwell, CC-BY-SA

After the recent SOPA/PIPA blackout, many media outlets characterized the debate as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood for clout in Washington DC. Lost in this myopic narrative is the truth: the millions of regular Internet users who called and wrote their congressional representatives were giving a collective voice to their individual demands that Congress not enact legislation, written by industry, that would harm the free and open web. They spoke up to support those innovative websites and online communities that are possible only through a free exchange of ideas and information.

Congress, the media, and many others do not always understand or appreciate the meaning and power of the free-knowledge movement, nor the community that nurtures and supports it. For this reason, we offer a summary on free knowledge. Much will be familiar to Wikimedia project contributors and our peers in the free-knowledge community, but we hope to say something useful for our other readers — and legislators — who have not previously explored the issue or who have found themselves surprised by the backlash when they have ignored it.

As you can guess, we are quite protective of the Internet, which is a great facilitator of the free-knowledge movement, and we are suspicious when others seek to ram through legislation in their private interests without proper reflection on the values that are vital to our mission.

What you need to know about free knowledge

The mission of the free-knowledge community is to create and share informational resources and cultural works in full compliance with copyright laws. When offering works to the world, however, their creators guarantee five freedoms: the freedom to use, the freedom to study, the freedom to copy, the freedom to redistribute, and the freedom to improve those works.[1] Authors, artists, photographers, researchers, and others who have joined the worldwide free-knowledge community are committed to these freedoms, and in turn they produce media that hundreds of millions of people can use. The result: freely-licensed and valuable materials for education, business, technology, science and culture around the world.

The creators in the free-knowledge community are in fact copyright holders, just like the creators in the media industry, but unlike most industries, creators in the free-knowledge community volunteer to promote progress and innovation by releasing their content under a free license that provides their creations to the world for no cost.

The free-knowledge community is worldwide, diverse and growing. There are nearly 200 million free-knowledge works now available, and the amount of new, freely-licensed content is growing rapidly.[2]  Many organizations[3] now have large repositories of freely-licensed content, including C-Span,[4] YouTube,[5] Vimeo,[6] and Flickr.[7] Wikipedia has more than 21 million articles in 283 languages.[8] The Wikipedia community is built on the work of hundreds of thousands of contributors from around the world. Wikimedia Commons hosts over 12 million files, including more than 10 million images and photographs, more than 100 thousand sound files, and more than 20 thousand scans of freely-licensed and public domain documents.[9]
Read the rest of this entry »

Wikimedia District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC), the organizer of Wikimania 2012, has announced that Mary Gardiner will keynote the opening session of Wikimania 2012 in Washington, DC on July 12.  Gardiner is the co-founder of The Ada Initiative(TAI) and an important advocate for women in open source and open culture.

This announcement builds on WikiWomen’s History Month, a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation, TAI, and OCLC. It shows a commitment by the Wikimedia community to make women’s participation in tech and wikis a central goal moving forward.

“Wikimania’s choice of Mary Gardiner says that the Wikipedia community is moving on from asking ‘Is the underrepresentation of women a problem?’ to asking ‘What can we do to increase the representation of women?’,” said Valerie Aurora, a co-founder of TAI and an open source developer.

Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner. Photo: Mary Gardiner, CC-BY-SA

Aurora noted that it has taken a while for one of the world’s largest open source communities to view the issue in that light. “Many people have worked hard for several years to get the community to pay serious attention to the gender gap. Now it’s starting to look like they have succeeded, and we can start having a conversation on what to do to close the gender gap.”

Wikimania 2012 presents a great opportunity to do just that. Gardiner is the first female keynote speaker at a Wikimania. Many of the over 400 submissions we received were made by female contributors, with several focusing specifically on the role of women in the Wikimedia movement. In addition, AdaCamp DC, an unconference event, will coincide with the Wikimania 2012 Hackathon/Pre-Conference Developer Days on July 10-11.

Both Gardiner and Aurora are excited for the opportunity to connect with the global community. ”We will have quite a few experts on Wikipedia and related projects at this year’s AdaCamp,” says Aurora, “and I am looking forward to seeing what they think up.”

To top it all off, Washington DC is home to one of the most active communities of women in tech anywhere in the world, with groups such as Women in Technology and DC Web Women present in the area. All of this makes Wikimania 2012 a perfect opportunity to raise awareness of the important role of women in tech, open source and wikis.

Thank you,

Nicholas Michael Bashour, President of Wikimedia District of Columbia and General Manager for Wikimania 2012
Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow, Wikimedia Foundation and member of the Ada Initiative Advisory Board

Predicting admin elections by editor status and similarity; flagged revision debates in multiple languages; Wikipedia literature reviewed

With contributions by: Tbayer, DarTar, Jodi.a.schneider, Njullien and Piotrus

How editors evaluate each other: effects of status and similarity

A team of social computing researchers based at Stanford and Cornell University studied how users evaluate each other in social media.^[1] Their paper, presented at the 5th ACM Web Search and Data Mining Conference (WSDM ’12), focuses on three main case studies: Wikipedia, StackOverflow and Epinions. User-to-user evaluations, the authors note, are jointly influenced by the properties of the evaluator and the target; as a result, differences in properties between the target and the evaluator should be expected to affect the evaluation. The study looks specifically at how differences in topic expertise and status affect peer evaluations. The Wikipedia case focuses on requests for adminship (RfAs), the most prominent example of peer evaluation in Wikipedia and a topic that has attracted considerable attention in the literature (Signpost research coverage: September 2011, October 2011, January 2012). Similarity is measured based on article co-authorship, and status as a function of an editor’s number of contributions. Previous research by the same authors showed that the probability an evaluator will evaluate a target user positively drops dramatically when the status of the two users is very similar, and there is general evidence that homophily and similarity in editing activity have a strong influence on peer evaluation in RfAs. The study identifies two effects that jointly account for this singular finding:

• “Elite” or high-status users are more likely to participate in evaluations about other users who are active in their areas of interest or expertise.
• Low-status users tend to be judged differently than those with moderate or high status

In a direct application of these results, dubbed ballot-blind prediction, the authors show how the outcome of an RfA can be accurately predicted by a model that simply considers the first few participants in a discussion and their attributes, without looking at their actual evaluations of the target.

Sociological analysis of debates about flagged revisions in the English, German and French Wikipedias

At the center of debates on “Coercion or empowerment”: Icons signifying accepted (left) and not yet accepted (right) revisions under a flagged revisions scheme

In an article to appear in Ethics and Information Technology, Paul B. de Laat analysed debates occurring in the English, German and French Wikipedias about the evolution of the rules governing new edits.^[2] As noted by the analysis of the English Wikipedia’s rules, by Butler et al., 2008,^[3] these rules are numerous and have increased in number and complexity; they range from the more formal and explicit (intellectual property rights) to the more informal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The proportion of quality newcomers over time. (2006-2011)

As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bots and automated tools, which started in 2006.

For those of us studying editor trends, the following question has continued to puzzle us: did the change in communications to new users lead to the decline, or can the rise in warnings be explained by a decrease in quality contributions from new users? Perhaps, as some Wikipedians have argued, the new users of today are being reverted and warned more aggressively than those who entered the project in 2001-2006 because their edits are qualitatively worse (e.g., more self-promotional or spammy, less serious and encyclopedic) than those of previous generations of editors.

While the complexity involved in determining what constitutes a “good” contributor to Wikipedia may never allow us to definitively answer this question, our research argues against the theory that today’s newbies just plain suck.

The proportion of rejection for quality newcomers over time.

To test the hypothesis that new contributors who entered the project in recent years have been more harmful and less interested in positively contributing to the encyclopedia, we randomly sampled the first edits of newcomers to the English Wikipedia from the earliest days of the project to the present. With the help of some experienced Wikipedians, we hand-categorized the edits of 2,100 new users according to a four point quality scale – blatant vandal (obscene language, obvious vandalism), bad faith (jokes and nonsense), good faith poor-quality edit (bad formatting, unreferenced, but trying to add value), and golden (good faith good edits that should not be reverted).

What we found was encouraging: the quality of new editors has not substantially changed since 2006. Moreover, both in the early days of Wikipedia and now, the majority of new editors are not out to obviously harm the encyclopedia (~80 percent), and many of them are leaving valuable contributions to the project in their first editing session (~40 percent). However, the rate of rejection of all good-faith new editors’ first contributions has been rising steadily, and, accordingly, retention rates have fallen. What this means is that while just as many productive contributors enter the project today as in 2006, they are entering an environment that is increasingly challenging, critical, and/or hostile to their work. These latter findings have also been confirmed through previous research.

Survival rate of newcomers over time.

This study has many important implications for community and Wikimedia Foundation efforts to engage and retain new editors. To begin, it reasserts the centrality of one fundamental policy on the project, “Assume good faith.” This research strongly supports efforts in the community and at the Foundation to do a better job of integrating new editors into Wikipedia and its sister projects, not simply for the sake of gaining new editors, but for the quality of these new editors’ contributions overall.

At the Foundation level, this includes major software changes like the creation of a visual editor to lower the technical barrier to entry, as well as more experimental pilot projects like template A/B testing, an attempt to make the template messages received by new users more personalized and clear, and the Teahouse, which gives new users a friendly, low-pressure space to seek help from experienced Wikipedians. With better software and an inviting and supportive atmosphere, the encyclopedia can continue to grow both in quality of material and quantity of dedicated contributors.

• Find out more about this study at Research:Newcomer quality
• This work is part of a journal article in submission to a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist on Wiki Research
• A special thanks to R. Stuart Geiger from UC Berkeley, as well as Maryana Pinchuk, Steven Walling, and Oliver Keyes from the Wikimedia Foundation, for their assistance with this study.

Aaron Halfaker,
Wikimedia Foundation Research Analyst and University of Minnesota PhD candidate

Netha Hussain

User:Netha Hussain‘s inspiring story is a wonderful way of celebrating Women’s History Month. Netha is a woman editor of the Malayalam language Wikipedia from the state of Kerala in India.

Netha is both a medical student and a Wikipedian. She mostly edits articles related to medicine/biology, literature and women’s biographies. She used to maintain a portal for biology on the Malayalam Wikipedia and is presently working to create and improve its most important health articles.

Netha recalls how she landed up on Wikipedia searching for a kind of chutney made in Malayali cuisine, ‘Chammandi‘, and after realizing there was no article on it, started it herself. Initially reluctant to edit in Malayalam, it is actually through Wikipedia that she brushed up her language skills well enough to write a Featured Article in Malayalam within a year! On the English Wikpedia, she started by editing the article about her college.

As it is so often the case, until Netha landed up at a WikiAcademy in Kozhikode, not many knew she was a female editor! She has taken up the challenge to bridge this gender gap and now runs mailing list discussions for women Wikimedians in Malayalam to share their experiences and build offline relationships. “Most of my friends online are Wikipedians”, she quips.

About welcoming women editors on Wikipedia, especially its Indic language versions, she says, “The community is very receptive to women editors. I was not privileged or discriminated just because I was a woman. I was encouraged to work on women’s biographies which were mostly stubs. With my help, many good quality articles on famous women were created on Malayalam Wikipedia.”

As in Netha’s case, in most Indic language Wikipedias it is easier to make substantial contributions than in other projects. Netha believes that the role of women is not different from the role from men in their contribution to free knowledge movements.

Netha believes her medical dreams and her Wikipedia editing reflect aligned missions “to empower people with knowledge and fulfill our duties towards the society.” (To reach out to her, the best place is her talk page.)

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program, Wikimedia Foundation

A growing number of visitors access the mobile site of Wikipedia and it is an area the engineering team is keen to improve. To do this, we are offering a more functional and polished experience adapted for mobile users, who operate in a much more confined world compared to those on the desktop.

This week we pushed several new and updated design changes to our beta. We hope these changes will provide a more professional look and a better experience for you. These include changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience. The mechanism for toggling between desktop and mobile has also moved from the footer to the top navigation menu to the left of search to allow users to switch more effortlessly.

In addition to this we have also pushed an experimental feature which makes it easier to refer to references on articles without having to plunge to the bottom of the page. Now clicking on a reference will load an overlay which readers can consult without losing their place in the article.

We are keen to gather feedback to stabilise these additions and make these changes available by default to a much larger audience. In particular and as always, we are interested in any device-specific issues being brought to our attention as well as feedback on the new design. Let us know how you find the experience – good and bad and also the quirks that you discover.

We are also experimenting with animations when revealing references and would appreciate thoughts from the community on which is felt to work best. By default, references are revealed by a fade in/out effect but we would appreciate thoughts on whether a slide animation or no animation would be preferable.

Opt in to our beta and try them out today. We look forward to your feedback which can be provided either here or by your involvement in the design process.

– Jon Robson, Software Developer Mobile