Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-31/News and notes

Image filter sparks protests on the German Wikipedia
In June 2010, following controversy over the appearance of the vulva article as the German Wikipedia's article of the day, allegations by Larry Sanger of hosting inappropriate graphic depictions of children, and other controversial events, the board voted for an external survey, to be conducted by Robert Harris, of controversial images on Wikimedia. The study was completed by October of that year, but its recommendations were not immediately adopted. In the interim, in December, a poll failed to gain the consensus necessary to promote Commons:Sexual content to a policy, and the Wikimedia leadership focused on the topic as a central issue for 2011. In March 2011 a technical draft of a personal image filter that enables users to hide for themselves images they do not want to see was presented to the Board.

However, a poll this August showed just how polarizing the issue is for many users; on the German Wikipedia in particular, a separate vote showed that more than 4/5 of users were opposed to institution of the filter, including some 35% of core users. As Jan eissfeldt explained in an op-ed last month, the German community is particularly motivated against censorship issues; as another user put it on the mailing list, "it is against the basic rules of the project. It is intended to discriminate content. To judge about it and to represent you this judgment before you have even looked at it." On October 9, the results of the poll were followed by a "Letter to the community on Controversial Content" from WMF Board chair Ting Chen (User:Wing) and a clarification by WMF executive director Sue Gardner that although the Board's May resolution on controversial content still stood, "the specific thing that has been discussed over the past several months, and which the Germans voted against" was not being pursued any more, and that "the goal is a solution that's acceptable for everyone". Still, the letter triggered extensive discussion by German Wikipedians; and Sue Gardner promised to discuss the issue with them directly when coming to Germany in November for the German chapter's annual meeting.

Shortly thereafter, Wikipedian Sargoth proposed on October 19 that users should put white paper bags over their heads as a sign of protest when Gardner arrived. In the interim, users have taken to posting an image of a white paper bag on their userpages in protest. As of writing, have done so. The image filter issue has united the Germans, as one user wrote, "in a way that I haven't seen in several years." In addition, a filter-less German Wikipedia fork has been proposed, and as of writing the community poll on the issue stands at 31/40/24/1. In the meantime the referendum committee published the second and third appendices of results on Meta to make the votes per project and by age of account transparent. On October 28, Sue Gardner reiterated that she had taken the category-based solution off the table, and will not impose anything on the German community against their will.

In brief

 * Article-Feedback-Form-Option2-Wireframe-V5-10-20.png Feedback on article feedback: The Wikimedia Foundation hosted IRC office hours this week specifically for questions on the article feedback tool. The tool, which was introduced in September 2010 and fully rolled out in July 2011, is in its fifth iteration. In a message to the foundation-l mailing list, Deputy Director Erik Moeller clarified that "the idea is to experiment with some alternative approaches in parallel with the existing deployment, not to scrap the existing deployment and start over immediately". A log of the office hours can be found here.
 * Featured sounds tagged as inactive: The Featured sounds candidates process was tagged as inactive on October 25 by FSC director Guerillero. A change in process standards and an RfC both stagnated in the middle of the year. The two current nominations, a composition of the Maple Leaf Rag and a delist nomination for an older version of the same, have not had any comments for two months; as Wikipedian Major Bloodnok remarked, "Ultimately few Wikipedians are going to be interested in getting involved in a project which doesn't even know what it stands for." The project is in the process of closing its last two nominations.


 * Women and Wikimedia Survey 2011: In January, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia was suffering from a gender gap, stating that female contributors made up less than 13% of editors. The 2011 Editor Survey further expatiated on this gap, showing that only 9% of editors on Wikipedia are women, and the gap is even more pronounced among high-activity editors. The gap has drawn much discussion from editors, and the Wikimedia Foundation has made one of its goals through 2015 to increase participation, especially among women. This week Wikipedian SarahStierch published the results of her manual survey of women writers, the Women and Wikimedia Survey 2011. Stierch emailed 500+ female editors with a set of 22 questions, and garnered a total of 329 responses; the results of the survey can be seen here.
 * New Page Patrol survey: New page patrollers have been invited to participate in a survey intended to inform the Wikimedia Foundation in advance of the design of an overhauled quality control system for new articles. Participants are being actively solicited ahead of the closure of the survey on Monday 7 November at 23:59 (UTC).
 * Fundraising discussion 2012: The open talks about how to manage Wikimedia Foundation fundraising after the 2011/12 fundraiser have been kicked off by a statement from Jan-Bart on Meta. The next key date is November 15, after which the Board of Trustees will take the input that has been gathered in the discussion process and make a final set of guiding principles.
 * Identity guidelines published: The Wikimedia Foundation has published "Identity guidelines for Wikipedia." The file, which is an expanded version of the Wikimedia visual identity guidelines, deals with the treatment of Wikimedia's official marks on other sites and publications (the official marks are copyrighted by the Wikimedia Foundation).
 * Venezuelan chapter recognised: The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to provisionally recognise Wikimedia Venezuela as an official chapter, in accordance with a recommendation from the Chapter Committee. The arrangement is expected to be finalised with the signing of a Chapters Agreement in the coming year.
 * Call for Wikipedian in residence in South Africa: A call has been made for applications for a position as Wikipedian in residence in Cape Town, South Africa. The one year position is a monthly stipend of R8,500 and will be supported by the Africa Centre. The job description can be found here.
 * Wikimedia Participation Grants: The Wikimedia Foundation and the German chapter started a joint grant program for volunteers. The scope of the program consists of scholarships covering travel, accommodation and incidental expenses in relation with active participating in events. More details are available here.
 * Milestones: This week, the Kazakh Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles, the Ukranian Wikipedia reached 1,000,000 total pages, and the French wikisource reached 80,000 total entries. In fact, according to Wikimedia News, the Khazakh Wikipedia jumped from 90,000 to 100,000 articles in three days as a result of thousands of machine translations of articles on the Russian Wikipedia, imported by bot.