Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-11-09/News and notes

AntWeb donates images to Commons


AntWeb, a project to catalog and illustrate all the species of ant in the world, has released its content under the Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 license. The project currently has images of 4400 species of ants and information about over 187,000 individual specimens. The AntWeb content was previously under a CC-By-NC license, as explained in a guest post by Waldir on Brianna Laugher's blog.

After prompting from Waldir and internal discussion, AntWeb decided to change their license to CC-by-SA. The AntWeb staff then uploaded over 30,000 of their images to Wikimedia Commons, using a bot. The images are high-quality, with metadata including image date and species information.

Waldir writes that there is still work for volunteers to do on the images: This is just the beginning, though! As usual in the wiki world, you can help! There are articles to be illustrated in the various Wikipedia language versions (Magnus’ FIST tool comes in handy for finding them!). There are WikiSpecies pages to be illustrated. There are categories in Commons to be created to allow the ant category tree to be navigated and have every ant image reachable through it. And more importantly, there are these great news to spread and let people who are interested in ants know that they can now count on what’s possibly the greatest online repository of free, high-quality ant images.

AntWeb is a project of the California Academy of Sciences, and is funded by private donations and grants from the National Science Foundation.

Bookshelf project and public outreach wiki started
The Foundation has officially kicked off its "Bookshelf Project", which aims to develop educational materials about the Wikimedia projects. According to the Foundation blog post, the project aims to

create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today.

A list of the planned materials to be developed includes a welcome brochure; several leaflets, including "Wikipedia for Teachers", "Wikipedia for Journalists", and "Wikipedia for Corporate Communications Professionals"; several videos; and lesson plans for secondary school and university teachers.

The project timeframe aims to have materials developed and rolled out by Fall/Winter 2010. Marlita Kahn is the newly hired project manager. There are several volunteer opportunities associated with the project as well.

The project is hosted on a new Outreach wiki, which also currently hosts the best practices documentation project, as well as beginning documentation of other outreach efforts, such as the Bundesarchiv cooperation.

Reliable source misidentifies newly promoted featured picture
The Library of Congress research staff have confirmed that Wikipedia editor Roger Davies spotted a significant error regarding a British World War I recruitment poster. The LoC bibliographic record had identified the subject as Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, but other reliable sources claimed it was actually Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts. Roberts had earned the Victoria Cross pictured in the poster, but Kitchener had not. Both men were British field marshals who died during the first two years of World War I. The Library of Congress has confirmed the correction and will be updating its online record within a few weeks. A restored version of the Roberts recruitment poster was promoted to featured picture on 27 October 2009. This is believed to be the first time that a reliable source has misidentified the subject of a Wikipedia featured picture. More details are available at Durova's blog.

"Four award" made official
Following a proposal by User:TonyTheTiger at the WikiProject Council, a new form of recognition for dedicated users has been created: the Four Award.

The award was originally created by User:TomasBat in February, but has remained in userspace until being made official this week. The award is given to users who successfully complete the entire article production process: starting a new article, having it featured in "Did you know?", bringing it to Good Article level, and finally achieving a stable Featured Article.

The award was approved for wider use with no opposition. However, there was consensus for the award not to appear on article talk pages; it will be awarded on user pages instead, much like a barnstar – but with criteria to be met. A table of all winners is maintained on the project page, along with the dates they achieved each stage.

Tips for preventing linkrot
Over the last week, several editors have rewritten Linkrot into a comprehensive "how-to guide" on ways to prevent the phenomenon known as link rot, where external links, often used as references and citations, gradually become irrelevant or broken. The essay describes strategies to prevent or mitigate link rot through the preemptive use of web archiving services or by judiciously using the  parameters in citation templates.

Briefly

 * Megan Hernandez has joined the Foundation as a development associate; she will be helping out with the annual fundraiser.
 * The Nokia Foundation awarded its 2009 award to Jimmy Wales on 4 November. The award had a theme of "open innovation."
 * User:Magnus Manske has made up a script to produce calendar pages with a different picture from commons for each day
 * Based on a conversation at WikiSym (see last issue), a group of researchers has set up a Zotero group for sharing citations to Wikipedia research. The group is available to everyone to join.
 * Along with the Twitter lists mentioned in the last issues, there is also an identi.ca Wikimedia group
 * A new maintainer/programmer is being sought to adopt the automated peer review suggestion script.
 * w00tstock participant Molly Lewis recently performed a breakup song about Wikipedia.

This week in history

 * 2006: Wikipedia now tied with Google for non-US traffic.
 * 2007: Discussion about reenabling new page creation for anonymous users continues
 * 2008: GFDL 1.3 released