Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-21/News and notes

News and notes

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By Jean-Frédéric and HaeB

The Palace of Versailles: six-month residence for a Wikimedian

The Palace of Versailles and its gardens

As part of a partnership with Wikimédia France, the Palace of Versailles announced last week that they will host a "Wikimedian in Residence" for six months, to act as "the interface between the scientific staff of the Palace and the editor communities".

The Palace, a royal château near Paris, was the residence of the Kings of France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until October 1789 with the beginning of the French Revolution. The Palace and its park are viewed as an architectural masterpiece and a historical symbol strongly associated with the Monarchy. As such, it is listed by the UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. As an institution, the Palace makes use of new technologies and mediums, with the creation of mobile applications, the organisation of a photo contest on social photo-sharing site Flickr, and recently its involvement with the Google Art Project.

How the collaboration started

Following the partnership established by Wikimédia France with the City of Toulouse, Adrienne Alix, chairwoman of the French chapter, was contacted by Laurent Gaveau, Deputy Director of Information and Communication of the Palace of Versailles. Gaveau was interested in building something with the Wikimedia projects. He came to the Rencontres Wikimédia in December 2010 and met Benoît Evellin (User:Trizek), with whom he discussed the idea of bringing together Versailles and Wikimedia. Inspired by Liam Wyatt's past residence at the British Museum last year (see Signpost coverage), the project quickly settled on a Wikimedian in Residence.

Contents and possible outcomes

Royal arms of France on the central golden gate of Versailles

According to Laurent Gaveau, the instution realized that Wikipedia, the second most widely used source of information about the Palace (after the official website), could not be ignored. He stated that they found the articles numerous and of a good quality. "Thus, this is not about correcting them strictly speaking, but going into the subject in greater depth. And especially, providing these Versailles enthusiasts who edit Wikipedia with first-hand material". He mentions, as possible activities, taking photos to illustrate article, consulting archives or discussing with curators. Jean-Jacques Aillagon, former Minister of Culture and Communication and actual President of the Château de Versailles, mentioned that several curators already contribute to Wikipedia on their own accord.

Benoît Evellin, who recently celebrated his 1000th day as a Wikipedian, is an administrator on the French-language Wikipedia and a member of the chapter. Active in helping newcomers learn about Wikipedia (as part of the Service de Parrainage Actif, equivalent of the Adopt-a-user program), he is also one of the leaders of a WikiProject dedicated to cultural heritage buildings. Incidentally, the Versailles domain contains many of such protected monuments. He will be undertaking this residence as part of his studies, since the residence "is [his] final training period for [his] master degree in cultural mediation". As such, "the Palace of Versailles gives me the legal compensation for a training period". The situation is thus similar to second Wikipedian in Residence Lori Phillips (HstryQT) at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis (see Signpost coverage), who spent a paid student internship there, while Wyatt had staid at the British Museum as an unpaid volunteer.

Press coverage and community reactions

The chapter describes the partnership as the end of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns – Allegory of Peace at the entrance to the palace

The official announcement was made on Tuesday, February 15, with a press release which was picked up in many media outlets (including Le Monde). Since then, Wikipedia and the partnership have been featured on the front page of the Palace of Versailles website. See also the English-language announcement on the Foundation's blog.

Early feedback from the French-speaking community was very positive. A mere few hours after the announcement on the Village Pump was kicked off a WikiProject dedicated to the Palace, and a Portal quickly followed. The editor who created both pages stated that "if it is announced everywhere (and it is!) that a partnership between Wikipedia and the Palace of Versailles is going to happen, then we have to prove now our capacity to set up a discussion space for coordinating such a project". Benoît Evellin also outreaches to Wikimedia Commons, and the English-language Wikipedia.

Artinfo.com reported that "the fact that experts at the institution will edit the articles generated by the project may raise some eyebrows, and French art site Artclair has already been wondering if contributors will still have the ability to modify the articles that are officially sanctioned by the château." Responding to community concerns about original research, worrying that the Wikimedian in residence or Versailles experts might be tempted to add true but unverifiable facts, Evellin stated that "I do not plan to go evangelizing people around by shouting "Edit, edit!". I am here to teach people how to edit Wikipedia well, the same way I strive to teach newbies while patrolling. Among other things, I am working to explain that every piece of information must have one verifiable source. The Five Pillars were presented, and they will be again".

Asked about the first week, Benoît Evellin tells the Signpost it were busy days:

"Interview, press reporting, presentation of the partnership on WPfr, WPen and Commons. I have not visited the palace yet!"

Gender gap conversation connects with sexual images controversy

Collage currently illustrating meta:Women on Wikipedia Month

The "gender gap" discussion about the low participation of women in Wikipedia continued last week, and extended to overlap with another much-debated topic where the Wikimedia Foundation has been pondering changes: Controversial content (sexual images).

On February 17, the Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner posted "a quick note recapping the basics about Wikipedia's gender gap and Wikimedia's response to it." She recalled the widespread media coverage that had been triggered by a January 31 New York Times front page article on the issue (cf. Signpost coverage), and revealed that the Foundation had actively sought it out, based on the insight that the gender gap problem "is complicated by the fact that solutions don’t lie entirely within the Wikipedia editorial community, because important voices are missing there. We knew we would need to bring in voices from outside, and support them in making themselves heard." In 2009, after the presentation of the UNU-MERIT study (whose estimate that only around 13% of Wikipedians are female also formed the basis of the recent debates) Noam Cohen, the author of the recent NYT article, had already written about the same topic (Signpost coverage: "Wikipedia's changing culture, and gender statistics"). Indicating an explanation for how the same topic made it to the paper's front page, Sue Gardner recounted how last month she and Moka Pantages (the Foundation's Global Communications Manager) had "used the occasion of Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary to have off-the-record lunch with New York Times staff", talking with them about Wikipedia's gender gap. Summarizing the state two and a half weeks later, she said: "We've leveraged Wikipedia's visibility to develop public awareness of the gender gap, resulting in a flurry of decentralized activity in expected and unexpected forums, brainstorming potential solutions".

For example, a list participant announced that she had started the website Women4Wikipedia.net, aiming "to organise Womens Wikipedia Hackfests between now and International Womens Day (8 March)" and is also hosting weekly chat session on the topic. A Facebook group has been started as well. Since its inception on February 1, the "Gendergap" mailing list had reached over 600 postings at the time of writing. The gender gap page on Meta collects material on the topic.

Two days later, Gardner listed "Nine Reasons Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)" on her personal blog, based on an extensive reading of online conversations generated by the NYT article. It mostly quoted comments made outside Wikimedia sites, with an exception being reason 7 - "Some women find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting" - for which she listed some answers to a question posed on the Gendergap list by George Herbert and herself to women editors: Whether they had "come across explicit material on the Wikimedia projects that you find offensive, degrading or discouraging". That thread had been triggered by a current debate on the English Wikipedia about an essay by Herostratus which (in its current version) argues that "Wikipedia should not include images from hardcore pornography" (and has for example been cited with regard to the article bukkake). After conflicts with users who disagreed with that view, it was userfied, a decision that was overturned by Jimmy Wales. Gendergap list members chimed in, such as Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle, who - somehow reminiscent of Gardner's "bring in voices from outside" - asked: "Is this the sort of thing that would benefit from public pillory? For example, a posting on Geek Feminism blog or elsewhere?"

Last November, Gardner herself had already touched that topic in a blog post (cf. Signpost coverage: "Controversial content and Wikimedia leadership") where she noted that "we’re the only major site that doesn’t treat controversial material –e.g., sexually-explicit imagery, violent imagery, culturally offensive imagery– differently from everything else", and that the Board of Trustees had aimed "to probe into whether that was helping or hurting our effectiveness at fulfilling our mission" in its October 2010 meeting. On that occasion, the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content, commissioned by the Foundation after widespread debates over the deletion of sexual images, was presented. But the Board did not adopt its recommendations immediately, as it had been envisaged: About half of them proved controversial (see last week's News and notes). Instead, it formed a workgroup. On Sunday, an update on the group's progress since November was posted by one of its members, Trustee Phoebe Ayers (Phoebe). She reported that she had asked the Wikimedia Tech Department about possible specifications to implement the study's recommendations for features that would enable users to block content they find offensive, for themselves only. However, no actual development of such features would start without a request from the Board. Two of the original group members, Jan-Bart de Vreede and Kat Walsh, had stepped down and were replaced by Matt Halprin, Jimmy Wales and Bishakha Datta. Phoebe also said that "that the board does not yet have a formal position on this whole issue".

Foundation appoints "consultant for National Programs" in India, following search for National Program Director

The Wikimedia Foundation has appointed a "consultant for National Programs, India", whose role it will be "to design and implement specific pilot programs that encourage many more Indians to become contributors to our projects in Indic languages as well as English." The new position is being filled with Hisham Mundol, who was previously a consultant for the Public Health Foundation of India, where he worked on "large-scale national programs on HIV/AIDS prevention". As Hisham Mundol said in his first IRC office hours, he speaks Hindi, Malayalam and English, and is currently based in Delhi.

The announcement by the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead explained that Mundol is "a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement [who] will be spending the coming weeks (not months!) in learning mode". In a FAQ on the new position, it was explained that among the 179 applications, there had only been seven from active Wikimedians, which did not have the required experiences.

The Foundation had not been advertising a job opening for a consultant for National Programs. Instead, the job opening that had been put up last August was for a "National Program Director, India", who would have been "the Wikimedia Foundation's chief representative in India". Newstead did not mention the previous job title or explain the modifications, except noting in the FAQ that the new position was as consultant rather than a staffer partly because "we want to keep our options open in regards to the potential structure of future Wikimedia Foundation operations in India". It is likely that concerns about such a Director's exposure to legal liability for Wikimedia content may have played a role. Asked in the IRC office hour about "the strategy we have for dealing with legal issues in India", Newstead emphasized that the Indian chapter and "Hisham, who is an independent contractor, have NO control over Wikimedia content as organizations." Discussing such concerns further, he advised the Indian chapter to get a good legal counsel, and align with organizations like the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) who might be inclined to support Wikipedia.

Briefly

• Upload of Nordic Museum image donation resumes: In November 2010, Wikimedia Sverige and the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet) announced a long-term partnership which included a multimedia donation of 1000 images. Several hundreds were uploaded right away by the Museum. Per common practice, the upload was stalled and a discussion ensued about the batch upload, focusing on the extensive metadata provided by the Museum. Prolineserver who undertook this work is now done and provided a test-upload of 50 images, which is open for feedback and improvements.
• Google Art Project upload: Dcoetzee, who started two weeks ago to extract high-resolution reproductions of artworks from the Google Art Project (see Signpost coverage), announced on Commons Village Pump he was done with the upload. He added that files which are not yet in the public domain were identified and ignored. It represents more than 850 files, which he calls for help in categorising and diffusing on projects. In distantly related news, the German Wikimedia chapter's monthly report for January mentions that Harriet Bridgeman, whose surname is well known from the losing party in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (the US court case that Dcoetzee's uploads and the use of countless other artwork reproductions on Wikimedia projects rely on), has been visiting Wikimedia GLAM events. She is in contact with Wikimedia Deutschland's Mathias Schindler about possible collaborations - "despite differing views about some questions of copyright" - where the chapter is aiming for the release of digital reproductions of public domain works.

Visualization of the revision history of sv:Michael Jackson by the "mwhistory" tool

• Swedish chapter reports: Wikimedia Sverige has published brief monthly reports for November and December 2010. Among the topics mentioned is a blog post (in Swedish) presenting "mwhistory", a tool to visualize article histories on the Swedish Wikipedia, representing each revision by a vertical line and distinguishing the amount of text contributed by each author with different colors (similar to the "history flow" software developed around 2002-03 by IBM researchers).
• Rich-text editing and newbies as top priorities: The draft of a "Product Whitepaper for the Wikimedia Foundation on the Strategy wiki was completed by priority recommendations last week, sorting possible "product-focused" development efforts by the WMF into four categories of differing priority ("Great Movement Projects", "Strategic Opportunities", "Frontier Projects" and "Red Links"). For the top category, it nominated the development of a rich-text editing interface, and improvement of "the -1 to 100 edit experience" (which might include "welcoming strategies, user account creation as a key vector mentoring programs, changes to policies, procedures and implementations"). In related news, the Outreach team's "Account Creation Improvement Project" announced that it is starting to test different versions of the "landing page" that greets newbies after the create their account.
• WMF mid-year financial report: A PDF file containing the Wikimedia Foundation's mid-year financial report for July to December 2010 has been uploaded.