Wikipedia in academic studies

There are always interesting new things to discover at Wikipedia.  Found this page last night. Definitely worth watchlisting, probably also worth bookmarking.

Requests for arbitration

Currently there are two requests for arbitration at English Wikipedia.  This post pertains to both of them, and also to that process generally. When contemplating opening a request for arbitration there are really three questions that need to be asked:

• Is this an urgent problem that cannot be resolved by anything else?
• Is this a non-urgent problem that cannot be resolved by anything else?
• Is it clear to uninvolved people that it cannot resolved by anything else?

The times to request arbitration are where the first condition has been met, or else when both of the other conditions have been met.  One big cause of strife and drama happens when the third condition hasn't been satisfied.

This is a good metric for determining when other formal dispute resolution is appropriate.  Non-arbitration dispute resolution serves two purposes:

• To resolve a dispute.
• To provide a fair (if slim) chance at resolving a dispute, while demonstrating to uninvolved people that the appropriate attempts have been made.

It's important to remember what constitutes dispute resolution.  Administrative noticeboards are not dispute resolution.  Other than arbitration, formal dispute resolution comes in six flavors.

• Wikiquette alerts
• Third opinion
• Requests for comment (content)
• Requests for comment (user)
• Mediation cabal
• Mediation committee

A while ago the dispute resolution navigation box used to list these clearly.  It no longer does, which may explain why requests for arbitration have been getting filed recently that cite nothing other than article talk discussions.  Those filings get rejected but waste everyone's time.  On other occasions, people try to list administrative board threads as if they were prior dispute resolution.  

It's a requirement when filing an arbitration to list prior steps at dispute resolution.  It's been my longstanding opinion that non-formal dispute resolution should be removed from that list on any request for arbitration.  The one exception is when the arbitration enforcement board has failed repeatedly, which indicates that a prior arbitration decision was unsuccessful.

If a situation is not urgent, usually two or three attempts at formal dispute resolution should be tried before filing a request for arbitration.  That's enough to demonstrate good faith efforts to resolve the problem.  

A key mistake that many editors make is to fail to open enough formal dispute resolution because they don't think it would work.  They might be right about that, but there's no way for the larger community to see that until it's tried.  

A lot of difficult RFAR discussions occur when the filer is technically right, but hasn't taken enough formal steps to demonstrate that to the community at large. Even if the case opens it could place all of its named parties at the center of a storm for one to three months afterward.  Usually it's better to open another formal dispute resolution process--even if it's mostly to clear the air and make the eventual arbitration more straightforward.  Optimism is worthwhile too with other dispute resolution; pleasant surprises have been known to happen.

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year

In case you haven't done it already, you can still help choose the Wikimedia Commons picture of the year. Round 1 remains open until February 26. Then the finalists get chosen for the second round.

Due to coding issues, it's possible to see how many votes each candidate is getting. So far the leader appears to be the spectacular fire breathing photo above by Luc Viatour, a volunteer from Belgium. Nearly 500 other featured images are also in the running.

With material like this to choose from, voting is a pleasure.

Congratulations to Xavexgoem

A while back I blogged about an ongoing restoration for the Ottoman surrender of Jerusalem in 1917. Good news: it's completed now and Xavexgoem has his first featured picture credit.

Here's the unanimous candidacy. It's great to see his work come to fruition. And it's a highly encyclopedic subject, well photographed, that counters systemic bias. Wikipedia could use more good material about the Middle Eastern Theater of World War I.

Xav's busy with another restoration now. Here's looking forward to praising his next success soon. Three cheers for a job well done.

Devious histograms

Jake Wartenberg is working on a wonderful chromolithograph of the Montana state capitol that's nearly done. He sent me a copy for review with a couple of challenges he was facing. And he was also generous enough to let me blog about it. So today we'll discuss more about histograms.

Changing the levels is just about the last step in restoration. It can be very useful to preview a levels adjustment in order to detect subtle problems that need to be addressed, but to do the actual fixes it's important to step back to a pre-levels version. It's a good practice to always save a version from immediately before the levels adjustment, and to keep that pre-levels version under a separate filename. Jake's got good habits and he's making more changes to his pre-levels version right now.

This is very good work and it's nearly complete. The bottom border needs cropping and an information tag that someone pasted into the lower margin needs to be clone stamped out. The data on that tag is useful--it ought to be transcribed for the image hosting page when the work gets uploaded--but it isn't part of the original work. Since histograms are dumb, that tag translates into bum data as far as the histogram is concerned. In turn, that has an effect on what the software wants to do with brightness and color adjustments throughout the image.

Another element to remember with older paper prints is that paper often acquires uneven brightness as it ages. Edges tend to dry out and darken more than the center of the paper. Notice how in this example it's the corners that are darkest of all, while some of the margin in the middle (top and bottom) is closer to white. So Jake's also going over his pre-levels image to create feathered adjustment layers that will even out the brightness and color balance.

While we were discussing this he asked me why that matters. How much difference does it make, really? Here's a demonstration from one of last year's restorations where the difference stands out.

Here's the unrestored version of a Robert Fulton submarine design from 1806.

And here's the final featured version. It took quite a bit of work to get to this point. The hardest part to fix was Fulton's description, because he had rubbed out the original description and written a second one in smaller lettering in its place. In order to get an even tone through that section I actually went in at 700% resolution, working with tool settings 2 and 3 pixels wide along the outside edges of each pen stroke. It took a lot of work, but the end result is a natural paper tone.

The original rubbed-out lettering is easier to see on a preview of the unrestored version.

But obviously, trying to work from this version isn't going to yield the best end results.

Histogram previews can be a wonderful way to glimpse the potential of an unrestored image. A histogram preview gives a hint of how far the restoration might go, and reveals challenges that might be difficult to detect otherwise. But whenever possible, do the other restoration work before a final histogram fix. The end result comes out better that way.