Writing articles for a change...and oh what a change

Strange as it may seem, I've also been known to write for Wikipedia.  This last day has been more interesting than usual in that regard.  You're going to love how this post ends.

Found the topic from a short mention at an administrative noticeboard.

It appears that this article on a California company may be part of that company's pre-IPO publicity blitz. The company's website, linked from the article, shows a countdown clock for tomorrow at 9:00 am local time. Given that just a few contributors wrote most of the article over the past few days, is this cause for concern? User:LeadSongDog come howl 21:37, 23 February 2010 (UTC) 

The good thing about blogging is it gives the chance to be more candid.  So not to mince words, this looked like astroturfing.  Here's how it appeared shortly before my first edit.  Red flags for promotional writing include awards in the lead and a single sentence of criticism backloaded at the tail end of the article.  The section entitled "Competition" used one source that basically stated the major players had recently pulled out of the field.  If you check the references the quotes turn out to be cherry picked.

Actual press coverage is mixed: plenty of positives, also skepticism over feasibility and hype.  The company was profiled by 60 Minutes a few days ago and has been doing a media blitz since then.  It's a tech firm that wants to sell green energy and is very cagey about its company secrets.  They held a press conference this morning with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Colin Powell, and Michael Bloomberg.  Is this pre-IPO hype?

Astroturfing jobs at Wikipedia these days are getting contracted at one or two levels of separation from the client company.  So the geolocation of this major contributor is less significant than its singlemindedness.  Read the edits for yourself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&limit=500&target=58.179.137.71

Following are a few highlights from the IP's attempts to reinsert promotional content into company history such as a tangential NASA connection that the CEO had prior to founding the startup:
*(the idea came from somewhere....look at the Microsoft Page....)
*(one fine day in 2001, Mr Sridhar became an expert in fuel cells!)
*(the fucking Google page says where the name Google came from!!!!! ok, bitch?)

The last of those comments looks to have been intended toward me; the IP user appears not to have noticed that by this time the IP was actually edit warring with a male administrator.  This IP editor doesn't seem to understand much about the underlying engineering or science.  At one point I stopped to explain that hydrolysis consumes energy rather than produces it; shortly afterward the IP shuffled sentences so it looked like a venture capitalist was using a cost per kilowatt hour argument to rebut a criticism about fuel cell manufacturing costs.

The firm has $400 million in venture capital and a burn rate of $85 million a year.  Everyone loves green energy--or would if it were cost effective--but this looks like a very high stakes gamble.  Bloom Energy's business plan is based upon a bet that a notoriously unstable technology can be mass produced by a startup firm headed by a Ph.D. who never got any closer to NASA than managing a university department that built prototypes.  Instead of Schwarzenegger and Powell, I wish that company had introduced its VP of production at the press conference today.

It turns out that Sprint Nextel owns 15 patents on similar fuel cell technology and has been using their own models in the field for five years.  The Department of Energy gave Sprint a $7 million grant last year to expand their program.  Quite a few other firms are active in the area.  It isn't clear what Bloom Energy has that they don't--other than a star studded board and a hype generator.  It could be the start of a new era or it could be the next Pets.com.

Among the interesting tidbits I found was a piece from Wired that had located a 2009 patent award to Bloom Energy for a device that seems very similar to its Bloom Energy Server.  Perhaps the vaunted "secret ingredient".  Did you know...

... that Bloom Energy was awarded a patent in 2009 for a power device that utilizes yttria-stabilized zirconia?

That lovely bit of information is on Wikipedia's main page right now.

Time to go back onsite and politely congratulate that IP coauthor.  Entries at Wikipedia's "Did you know?" feature remain live about six hours.  Wikipedia's main page typically receives 1 million page views during that time.

Preserving culture

The other day Jose Antonio Vargas wrote a piece for the Huffington Post about online coverage of the Haitian earthquake.  He had very kind things to say about Wikipedia's article on the earthquake--hundreds of people from around the world were prompt about compiling relevant information from newspapers and other sources.

Internet communication brings the world a whole lot closer.  It can bring out the best in us, yet the comfort of distance also produces a few howlers.  When Jose asked for research assistance with that story I stumbled across these highlights from a two hour sequence in the article edit history.  These edit summaries all seem well intended even if not all of them are equally clueful:

18:40, 13 January 2010 Scribeofargos (talk | contribs) (41,751 bytes) (→Casualties: UN has confirmed Annabi is missing and updated the latest confirmed casualty numbers released from UN) (undo)
19:07, 13 January 2010 Schuster gph (talk | contribs) m (47,425 bytes) (Put Costa Rica on the list of solidarity. Waiting for reference as it is happening now.) (undo)
19:24, 13 January 2010 Krenakarore (talk | contribs) m (47,896 bytes) (International aid - Brazil) (undo)
19:39, 13 January 2010 Br10ta10 (talk | contribs) m (48,908 bytes) (Added the fact that the main Port-au-Prince jail collapsed (and prisoners escaped) ~~~~) (undo)
19:51, 13 January 2010 RobNS (talk | contribs) (49,108 bytes) (Added image of National Palace before it was destoyed) (undo)
20:47, 13 January 2010 Moncrief (talk | contribs) (52,306 bytes) (→International aid: why oh why would someone do this. This is an encyclopedia. SPELL OUT "AND") (undo)

So, during this time while fresh water and mass burial are urgent concerns is it inappropriate to discuss photography?  Here's hoping, with respect, that it's sufficiently clueful.  One of the things that gets lost in a disaster is culture.  What happens to the museums and libraries?  The photograph above is a Port-au-Prince street scene from 1901.  Since I can't get to Haiti to clear rubble from the streets I'll repair a piece of Haitian heritage.

Here's a section near the lower left corner.  Someone wrote a description on the image.  It also has a large fingerprint and several small dirt specks.

A good habit to develop when doing restoration work is to repair small damage first.  The edits so far were all done with the Photoshop healing brush at default settings and 4 pixels diameter.  Now that this has a good region at right to sample from, I increased the healing brush to 21 pixels to address the thumbprint.

With the preparation work done properly, the fingerprint disappeared in under a minute.  The trap to avoid is the urge to rush things.  Nothing looks more artificial than repetitive fiber marks from faulty cloning.  The practice I follow to review a section at 200% resolution.  If the result looks natural enough that I can't see where the edits were made, then it's ready.

This image is not going to be finished in an hour, though.  Similar to the Guadalcanal photograph, it has scratches through important sections.  Whenever a scratch crosses a boundary that boundary area needs special attention to repair.  So a large scratch across a busy street scene requires much more effort to fix than a scratch across a clear sky.  Here's a view of the work on another part of the photograph.  Not exactly before and after, but before and interim.  The portion at right shows the work in progress.  Click in closer to see the details.

Susan Sarandon doesn't know what Wikipedia is

Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic Monthly has picked up on David Shankbone's recent blog post about an encounter with Susan Sarandon, where Sarandon said she didn't know what Wikipedia is.

Well good for her!  It's refreshing to find a celebrity who is not fussed about her Wikipedia biography and not vain about the portrait that runs at the lead.  David took the shot at right last year at the Tribeca Film Festival. 

She's one of the best actors in the business, she's been making films since 1970, and she looks fantastic in more ways than one.

Kudos, Susan.  Keep it real.

Great figures of history: Admin or troll?

Skype voice chat can be wonderful.

"If there had been a Wikipedia in Thomas Paine's day, would he have been an administrator or a troll?"

That's a typical why-is-the-sky-blue question the people at WikiVoices kick around. During the more routine parts of image restoration this keeps my brain cells from sliding down my ear and swimming to Mexico.

After a discussion we all agreed that Paine would be a troll.

Which opens up other possibilities. What about other figures from history? You decide; please state your reasons.

1. Socrates
Admin traits: Major philosopher. Got other people to discuss highfalutin' stuff. Distracted them from doing anything useful.
Troll traits: Didn't actually write anything. After conviction, lectured the people who had judged him about how he should be rewarded instead of punished. Distracted people from doing anything useful.

2. Julius Caesar
Admin traits: Reformed society and government, declared "dictator in perpetuity".
Troll traits: Invaded Gaul, started a civil war in Rome, chased his enemies for four years rather than accept no for an answer.

3. Dante Alighieri
Admin traits: Good writer.
Troll traits: Put everyone who disagreed with him in hell, including popes.

4. Harriet Tubman
Admin traits: Leadership, good organizational skills.
Troll traits: Illiterate. Kept sneaking back no matter what people who didn't like her tried to do.

5. Linus Pauling
Admin traits: Two Nobel prizes.
Troll traits: Pushed a fringe theory about vitamins.

Please state your age

There's a disturbing trend lately at Wikipedia's requests for adminship and requests for bureaucratship. Although no age requirement exists for either position, an increasing number of people are opposing due to age. The most heated opposes are directed not against the youngest candidates, but against an individual who refuses to answer an optional question. Observe the reaction:

"I do not wish to state my age (for security reasons)" (see candidate's response to Sandstein's oppose, #10 at the time of this writing). Seriously? What "security concerns" could there possibly be here? "Congratulations, by knowing the age of this pseudonym, we can narrow it down to one of roughly 400,000,000 people on the planet! Soon the world will be ours!". To put it bluntly: this, er, "position" shows definite kookiness. Whether this is kookiness due to being kooky like most kids, or the more entrenched nuttiness of age doesn't matter: It is incompatible with a position of responsibility. That is, of course, Assuming Good Faith® and taking the candidate's statement at face value. Were I to read into the statement, I might conclude that the candidate is using trumped-up "security concerns" as a cover for the fact that, for some reason - perhaps due to youth - he is actually ashamed of his age. I would then still oppose, partially due to maturity concerns, partially to the unmigitated audacity displayed by the candidate honestly expecting anybody here to swallow such a far-fetched yarn. But, again, I strive to Assume Good Faith wherever possible - hence, I will assume kookiness, rather than juvenile embarrassment. Badger Drink (talk) 14:19, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Scathing. I do not know the candidate in that RfA, but imagine--hypothetically speaking--another candidate who refuses to give his age due to security concerns. We'll call him User:Nematode. Nematode is actually a thirty-four year old stepfather of two children, but he does not like to disclose personal details because his wife's prior husband is violent. The ex has been jailed repeatedly, but never for a long time. Last year Nematode moved his family to a different city for their protection. The ex's most recent conviction was for stalking.

Nematode has been an active Wikipedian for a year. He accepted a nomination for administratorship in the belief that no personal disclosure would be required. He is aware of websites that publish the names, photographs, and home addresses of Wikipedia administrators. He does not want to do anything that could assist such an exposure regarding himself because if that occurred he would have to move his family again. Due to market changes he owes slightly more in mortgage than his home is worth. Very early in his Wikipedian career he made a few edits to his undergraduate university and to his favorite sports team. That isn't enough to identify him, but he doesn't want to pass out more pieces to that puzzle.

Now he is expected to disclose those circumstances or else be labeled a child or a kook, with the strong suggestion that he is also a liar. This is the appreciation he receives for a year of volunteer contribution to an educational charity. Of course Nematode is not going to explain his answer more fully than "security concerns." He has every reason not to.
----
The oddest thing about this dilemma is how easy it is to get away with lies at RfA and RfB, if a person is inclined to do so. It was not too long ago that an editor, a woman in her twenties, became a bureaucrat at a Wikimedia Foundation website. This popular individual subsequently returned to Wikipedia, where she had previously been banned as a sockpuppeteer--a decision which was widely believed to have been wrong and driven by internal politics. Then it turned out she wasn't in her twenties and wasn't a she. He wasn't a teenager either; he was in his fifties and was running three separate administrator accounts on that other project. Previously he had been running an administrator sock on Wikipedia.

A dedicated liar tells his audience what he knows they want to hear.

I'd like to ask Badger Drink and the people who think his way to step back and reconsider. Is that really a tone to be using? Is it constructive or effective?

The three week rule

When several different people make queries and the same advice needs to be given, it's probably better (or at least less work) to blog the darn thing. So here's one of my little methods for defusing content disputes. Call it the three week rule.

This is one of the reasons why the cases I take to formal dispute resolution almost never relate to my own content disputes.

First, a little harmonious spirit.

Now here's the trick: if you've tried the bold/revert/discuss model and it isn't going anywhere useful, then consider this: walk away for a while. Give it about three weeks. Hang out somewhere else. Chill. Wikipedia has millions of other articles.

Sometimes the person you were locking horns with ain't so bad. In three weeks, if that person has a broader set of references and perspectives to bring to the page then that's plenty of time for them to shine. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Second option: your hunch is correct and that dude's a POV pusher. Let them own the article for three weeks. If that's what they really are then they'll slant the article even further so it's obvious to everyone. Once things reach that stage the problem is easier to correct.

Third option: the individual is a troll (or at least feeds off conflict). So stop acting like an immovable object, and watch the irresistible force wander elsewhere. There's a beauty to the Zen approach.

So give it three weeks. Let the article be wrong. When you return, post politely to the talk page. If nobody objects then go ahead and edit. If somebody does object then don't quarrel; open a content request for comment promptly. If you're really right then uninvolved editors will step forward and agree.

It's surprising how often this turns out well.

----
After

Biographies of living persons: An ingenius compromise?

So what do we do about the people who don't want their biographies written up on Wikipedia? The dead trees standard (see last month's post) has some support but not consensus. Well here, for the first time in two years, is a really new solution:

Suppose we noindexed biographies of living persons, upon the subject's request.

First the basics, then the details. Suggestions welcomed.

Basics: A subject who doesn't want his or her biography to show up on Google could email OTRS with a request to have their biography noindexed. The biography itself would remain on Wikipedia, but the search engines wouldn't crawl it anymore.

Details: The ability to noindex in mainspace would be tightly controlled. Policy would restrict its use to BLP articles only, and the developers would toggle the ability only for select users. P possibly this ability would be restricted to functionaries. A log would be generated of all noindexed biographies, which would be reasonably accessible (viewable by all administrators)? The specifics on access would need to be nailed down, but something along the lines of that scope.

Generally speaking, most biography subjects' chief complaint has to do with the high ranking given to Wikipedia articles by search engines--combined with the difficulty in preventing malicious vandalism. Most of the objections to deleting biographies upon request have to do with the desire for encyclopedic completeness. So this looks like a viable compromise. At the very least, it's worth discussing.

Many thanks to the folks at WikiVoices for the brainstorm that led to this idea.

Proof positive that not enough women edit Wikipedia

Read 'em and weep:

• French braid
• Shaving

The top ten reasons it's time for a wikibreak

10. You nominate articles for FA the day you create them.

9. You care about the difference between an em dash and an en dash.

8. You've made more edits to WP:AN than to your favorite article.

7. You've made more posts to Jimbo's user talk page than to your own.

6. Your block log no longer displays on a single screen.

5. Three or more entries at WP:LAME are edit wars you've been in.

4. You still don't believe they all were lame.

3. You dream in wikimarkup.

2. Wikipedia Review dedicates a subforum to you.

1. The Arbitration Committee mailing list takes you off moderation.

Evelyn, please please be reasonable

The line everyone remembers from Chinatown, one of the best films of the 1970s and one of the best written films of the twentieth century, is the final sentence: "Forget it, Jake.  It's Chinatown."  But there's another line a minute earlier where the villain speaks in a soft voice on an open street to the heroine, "Evelyn, please please be reasonable".  Anyone who doesn't understand the context would have no reason to object, but to anyone who does understand it the words are unspeakably wrong.

Robert Towne, who wrote the script, explains some of the background in an interview:

The title had come from a Hungarian vice cop. He had said that he worked vice and he worked in Chinatown. And I asked him what he did, and he said “As little as possible.” And I said “Well what kind of law enforcement is that?” And he said “Hey man, when you’re down there with the tongs and the different dialects, you can’t tell who’s doing what to who and you can’t tell whether you’re being asked to help prevent a crime or you’re inadvertently lending the color of the law to help commit a crime. So we’ve decided that the best thing to do when you’re in Chinatown is as little as possible.”

Who's honest and who's sending up smoke?  Chinatown plays upon the conventions of film noir in which the leading lady is almost always the nemesis, so through most of this plot Evelyn (played by Faye Dunaway) is a murder suspect.  By the end the protagonist (played by Jack Nicholson) learns who the actual murderer is, and also learns that she has been acting from honorable motives, but before he understands that much he has led the villain to the victims and is powerless to intervene as the police seal the victims' doom.

Noah Cross (played by John Huston) is one of the great movie villains because his manners remain so courtly that one has to think about it to realize what he's doing and hate him properly.  The character Noah Cross is never willing to be reasonable.  The writer Robert Towne had the insight to distinguish politeness from reasonableness.  When Noah Cross exclaims "Evelyn, please please be reasonable", he is pushing past the daughter he had raped about sixteen years before to get at the daughter/granddaughter he wants to rape, and he is framing his older daughter for murder while very skillfully giving an appearance to onlookers that he is simply an affectionate old family man.  No one who knows the truth is in a position to contradict him.  His civility inspires hope that hell exists, to quietly wish him there.

You knew this was going to segue to Wikipedia, right?

Obviously Chinatown is fiction, with all the caveats that entails.  One of the reasons it's such an acclaimed film is because it nails the human dynamics so well.  Unreasonable people--the ones who get away with their unreasonableness--also manipulate situations so they appear reasonable to passersby.  What an unreasonable person chooses to be unreasonable about varies widely; most actual examples are far more mundane than Noah Cross.  Yet there are only so many ways to succeed at unreasonableness; one of the most effective is to have excellent social skills.  A reasonable and knowledgeable person who stands in the way can get cornered into a situation where the only responses they can think of are either to remain passive or to else take action and appear absurd.

Wikipedians are prone to the mistake of presuming everybody in an ugly situation is equally wrong, and Wikipedians are also prone to confusing civility with reasonableness.  Some individuals simply aren't reasonable.  We give them chances to be reasonable, we try different approaches to achieve reasonableness, and in most instances that works because most people really are reasonable.  But occasionally someone who is not reasonable comes along with smoothness and affability.  When that happens there's a very good chance that individual is busy undermining the people who stand in their way and also blowing as much smoke as possible.  

This evening I was composing an email about Wikipedia dispute resolution, and really could have applied the same ideas to two dozen situtions, when that line came to mind:  "Evelyn, please please be reasonable".  Wikipedians repeat a mantra to "avoid drama"--that's our site culture's preferred response to really messy situations--and it carries echoes of the Hungarian police officer's explanation to Robert Towne.  In Towne's story the way to get a promotion in the Los Angeles Police Department was to do as little as possible; intervention could lose a man his job.  That was fiction, of course.  How much better are we doing?

April Fool's

Some people claim that April Fool's Day is the only holiday Wikipedia deserves. Last year's April Fool's shenanigans got out of hand and several administrators lost their bits for being silly, so let's take a cue from people who organize the main page and have the fun sensibly.

The basic theme to WP main page on April Fool's Day is to present material that's actually legitimate but that seems like it ought to be an April Fool's prank. Ima Hogg was last year's article for the day: a completely serious biography of a philanthropist who had an unusual name. So in a very small imitation of that spirit I've started Mafia Island National Park. Fortunately no one speedy deleted it before it got two genuine external links to the government of Tanzania and the World Wildlife Fund. It's surprising how many redlinks like that there are, if an editor only takes a moment to look for them.

Up above at the top of this post is a caricature of Idi Amin, who was all too real, as drawn by Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Edmund S. Valtman, who generously donated a portion of his work to the public domain.

Mostly today has been serious stuff correcting systemic bias on African topics (also restored a photochrom of Tunis, Tunisia), but this also seemed like a good time to restore an old circus poster. As a reminder to fellow Wikipedians: please keep the clowning constructive and good fun.

The passive voice swamp

Gary King is one of Wikipedia's most prolific featured article writers; bless him. He asked for a review of his latest effort because no matter how good one is, it does help to get extra sets of eyes on the work. Little mistakes creep up on the best of us. After the fiftieth time reading a paragraph a small error starts to seem invisible. So here's hoping our wonderful volunteer Gary will be a good sport about this post: there's a phenomenon that needs a name.

Here's a sample from the article, which really is very good and close to featured quality already:

Metroid II was released by Nintendo in North America on January 20, 1992,[1] in Japan on January 21, 1992, and in Europe on May 21, 1992.[11] The game was not as well received as its Nintendo Entertainment System counterpart,[3] but it was still given generally favorable reviews, receiving an aggregated score of 80% from Game Rankings.[1] Nintendo included the game in its Player's Choice marketing label.[11] Metroid II is often considered the weakest game in the franchise.[3] Praise focused on the game's story and settings, while criticism targeted its graphics and audio. In their Top 200 Games list, Nintendo Power ranked the game as the 102nd best game on a Nintendo console.[12] Metroid II was also included in Videogames.com's list of the best Game Boy games.[13]

Write one sentence in passive voice and it's easy to write another. Occasionally people just slip into the passive mood, hardly noticing the change. So I told him "Gary, you've wandered into the passive voice swamp," so of course he changed the paragraph and got out of that swamp before any allegories bit him. Yet there ought to be a term for the phenomenon. And now (with forbearance from one of Wikipedia's very best contributors) the blogosphere has one.

Drain the passive voice swamp!

This message is public service from the Wiki Witch of the West.

Reviewing history

"Rewriting history" is a phrase that raises eyebrows. It could mean correcting errors in previous scholarship, but more often it prompts worries about aggressive forms of wishful thinking that obscure the record of the past. What's the equivalent with visual records, reviewing history? Somehow that sounds much milder. Perhaps too mild, because the obligation to act responsibily is equally weighty.
So here's the Wright Flyer on its first flight, December 17, 1903. Very important photograph; it ought to be featured. But this edit that was promoted four years ago never was to my taste. Look at that sky: it's a visual essay on why reliance on auto settings for histogram adjustments is not always a good idea.

Most of Wikipedia's featured pictures do not get much individual traffic except for their day on the main page. This one does. Last month it received 4327 individual page views, with many more views in thumbnail version at article space. The Wright brothers article received over 100,000 page views in February. It's also at Aviation (33,914 views), Aviation history, (11,044 views), Transport (49,656 views), Aerospace engineering (36,618 views), and several other English language articles. The image is also featured at Wikimedia Commons and the Japanese language edition of Wikipedia, and it appears at a total of 338 pages on 68 Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The current version is not a very careful restoration. Note the cracking still visible above the left wing. Glass negatives are delicate things. Our current featured picture was edited primarily by cropping away the worst damage. The photograph is equally important either way, but we can do better. The Library of Congress has a much higher resolution version available. I've been working on that during the last day.

So this interim version is what I have now. It isn't finished; there's a bit more to correct before the histogram is ready to go. The toughest decision, though, has been the crop. Obviously this shot was set up for documentary purposes rather than esthetic reasons, but I've decided to take on the difficult task of including more foreground. The light patch of sand has greater continuity with a crop low enough that it approaches the left and right corners, and it seems to add to the sense of awe to raise the horizon a little higher.

This crop brings other challengs. I've managed to get rid of the blue staining at far right, and to remove a brown circular stain near Orville Wright at the edge. The left edge has been harder and there's more work remaining to be done, but I wanted to include as much of the wooden track as possible. Still deciding whether to crop out a few more pixels from the top border; that part of the sky is badly damaged.

But for some reason it's the lower left corner that prompts the most second guesses. The negative chipped and broke and that little bit is unrecoverable. So I've cheated and patched in order to achieve this crop. It's virtually certain there was nothing else there but a few square feet of sand.

A few square feet of sand at Kitty Hawk: a justifiable surmise, but a surmise for entirely esthetic reasons. Does that enter the pejorative sense of 'rewriting history'? 'Reviewing history': thousands of people see it every day, but who would notice? In four years nobody commented on the awful histogram of the current featured version.

Maybe this redirect expresses Wikipedia's priorities.

Durova's law of online community management

Copied from the mailing list. Probably should have been written out in a public setting quite some time ago.

In Internet communities generally, 5% of the participants will violate the rules no matter what they are. 5% will abide by the rules no matter poorly enforced they are. The other 90% would prefer to abide by the rules if the rules are generally enforced, but will also ignore rules if the rules become meaningless. The key to managing a community is to sway that 90%.

Discoveries and tough decisions

Sometimes the most important things are tucked away in archival corners. This is the aftermath at Wounded Knee. The bibliographic notes say "U.S. soldiers amid scattered debris of camp", but I wondered at the size of those piles. Why had the tipi sides been taken down, but blankets left on the snow? Regardless of what was there, this is an important historic scene and a high resolution file. So I downloaded and started work on it.

Most of the images in this post come from the current partial restoration. Here's one from the original file that demonstrates the usual challenge of cleaning out creases and dirt: a small sample of the sky. This is in pretty good shape for photography over 100 years old; everything collects a few problems over time. Sky is usually a good thing to start on; deciphering sky is relatively easy. Worked down from there, saw a tin cup or two in the snow. Then something else.

A shoe. Two shoes. They looked like they were still being worn. The way to find out is to scroll to the right and slightly downward.

A hand. Then a face. There were at least three bodies in the foreground, all partially covered with blankets. Probably four. More piles farther off, the right size and shape.

It's the sort of scene that makes one stop and think. Is it respectful to work on this? Someone someday will probably take this the wrong way, but this is history. It happened. It's important to document these things. So after hard thought I decided to continue the restoration.

It's quite a responsibility. And it makes the choices harder.

Knowing a fair amount about image restoration doesn't make a person an expert in forensics. Very near the bodies there's an unusual spot pattern that seems to follow the contours of the snow. Is that photographic degradation or is it blood? I'm going to make my best guesses with this image, but frankly they're guesses. If some of it comes out wrong there ought to be an effective way of correcting the mistakes. This is one of the days when I wish the Wikimedia Foundation had more restorationists--someone to turn to with greater expertise. So here's one argument for a separate restoration wiki. Someday we may get a forensics expert on board, and when that day comes it'll be very useful to have an archive of interim saves.

Cream of the crop

Rotation and cropping are the first, simplest and most important decisions in many restorations. Unrestored images could be interpreted more than one way, and cropping is a powerful method of selecting one interpretation at the expense of others.

Take the caricature of Charles Darwin: is the illustration itself the only thing that matters? Or is the date and publication in Vanity Fair important enough to retain? And if context is important, how much context do we keep? A crop that includes the border text needs balance. And that can be tough to attain from material this old: With many originals from the nineteenth century or earlier, either the paper has dried and warped with age or the borders were never drawn perfectly to begin with. Twenty-first century tastes are accustomed to digitally perfect parallels and can object to variances as small as a few hundredths of a degree.

Here's one where that problem is easy to spot. The borders on this political cartoon of Lincoln and Johnson are off by tenths of a degree, not hundredths. So the bottom border tilts upward from left to right while the vertical borders are reasonably vertical already. One gets an urge to rotate the thing, but every rotation comes out wrong because the border itself isn't rectangular.

There are three potential potential solutions here:

• Crop the border out of the picture and lose the caption.
  
• Manipulate individual lines of border to create an actual rectangle.
  
• Leave the caption in and the border lines unchanged.

Any of those choices are arguably correct, depending on how one regards the image.  The easiest one to refute is the first option.  This caption may be obscure after a century and a half, but to me it looks like an explanation of the original artist's choice to juxtapose the president in coat and tails against a reference to his humble origins.  Of all the people who became United States presidents, Lincoln started out life lower on the socioeconomic ladder than any other.  Hence the references to manual labor, which seem to result in a compliment to Lincoln's hard work and perseverence bringing the country back together at the end of the Civil War.  The artist's caption helps explain that; I decided to leave it in.

So if we keep those darn borders, do we fix them?  Do we rotate individual lines and make them correct?  It can be argued that is not artistic intent, that it's distracting, and it ought to be fixed.  It can also be argued that slight variances from mechanical perfection are characteristic of the period, therefore historical, and ought to be kept.  When they performed a digital restoration on the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz they erased the wires that had lifted the flying monkeys.  I'm a Wiki Witch; I prefer vintage monkeys in their original technical imperfection even if it takes me out of the story just a little bit.

So I selected a compromise rotation and cropped a little extra space outside the border lines to minimize attention to that flaw.  The closer an uneven border comes to the edge of the digital image, the more apparent any deviation is.

Ragesoss complained about the final choice here and, to be candid, it wasn't my first crop either.  Originally I had kept the side borders and I'd left leeway outside them because they were a few hundredths of a degree off from true.  But the area outside the border on the original has uneven tone, especially the blown whites at lower left.  And although the file was big enough to work with it wasn't ideal.  I could have filled in the problem tolerably but the technical limitations of the file didn't make it worth the effort.  Overall, for an image that most viewers will see in thumbnail, a good rule is to crop in as close as feasible.  These kinds of decisions are often tradeoffs, and arguable either way.  

Shakespeare's "Howard the Duck"

If you haven't read Titus Andronicus (and Wikipedia's excellent restorationist Shoemaker's Holiday hadn't), there's not much need to regret that particular gap in an education. Even the best of them can turn out one real dud. The only analogy that came to mind was a stretch. If Shakespeare is the Steven Spielberg of the stage, then Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's Howard the Duck.  Shortly after getting that explanation Shoemaker read the plot summary.  It wasn't the cannibalism that bothered Shoe quite so much as...eh, well...find out for yourself if you dare.

Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom has claimed that the play cannot be taken seriously and that the best imaginable production would be one directed by Mel Brooks.

Shoemaker, though, was interested in a detail. And that detail is worth attention as an example of digital image management.

The article has a larger version of the illustration above. Obviously the illustration reflects a high technical standard of workmanship and it looks like the book was a good reproduction. A little staining at the bottom border is a minor concern. This ought to be good material for restoration, but it isn't. The hosting page data is the giveaway: (2,080 × 2,789 pixels, file size: 1.34 MB, MIME type: image/jpeg). That's large enough dimensions for featured picture consideration even after rotation and cropping, but at only 1.34 megabytes the data is much too compressed. I've cropped and blown it up a bit to illustrate the problem.

There's just not much to be done with this. The file is too artifacted. Shoemaker checked out the source archive in hopes their original would be better and it wasn't. Which is a shame because this could have been so much better. Lesson for the day: use a lossless format and don't compress files if they're intended for a serious purpose. I wish Wikimedia Foundation software accepted .tif format. Library of Congress does. But the University of Pennsylvania doesn't. And because of JPEG compression and artifacting, their hosting of Titus Andronicus is a dead end.

Cleaning dirt

One of the greatest fears of serious restoration work is that somebody will come along and suppose it was all done by hitting three buttons in Photoshop. Actually it was two days into this one getting the background to a natural tone when the thought occurred 'I'm cleaning dirt.' Why care that much?

The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II were the first African-American pilots in United States military history. This particular image caught my attention because of its composition and the expression in the subject's eyes. I had been searching for portraits of Booker T. Washington, then Marcus Garvey, then Doris Miller. Archival searches yield a lot of heartaches: the photographs that looked promising weren't available in high resolution and the high resolution images had serious technical flaws. Then this turned up. And it was a pleasant surprise to discover it was taken by Toni Frissell, the official photographer of the Women's Army Corps. It isn't often one finds a technically superior image on a significant subject that counters two kinds of systemic bias. Overall, only about 1 in 1000 archival images has the technical parameters to consider for featured candidacy with restoration.

Yet there were serious problems ahead. When the full 25MB TIFF file downloaded it became clear that this would be no easy cleanup. Thousands of tiny white flecks populated the image. This was unusual for a photo less than seven decades old and the problem was probably a shortage of fixative in the original emulsion.

Fortunately the face suffered relatively light damage compared to other areas, but this close-up gives some idea of what resulted. This is culture. This is history. Yes, the restoration took two days: hours on the grain in the cheap plywood wall at left and hours more getting photographic degradation out of the dirt. On an image like this I don't consider the work done until I view the thing at 300% resolution and can't see the flaws, but the labor was worth it. It's worth preserving his face; it's worth preserving his eyes.

It would be interesting to locate enough information about Edward M. Thomas, the man in this photograph, to justify a Wikipedia biography entry. He came from Chicago, Illinois, reached the rank of Captain, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. This is the text of the citation:

For extraordinary achievement in aerial flight P-51 type aircraft in the Mediterranean theatre of operation. Lt. Thomas’ outstanding courage, aggressiveness and leadership enabled the formation to inflict damage upon a heavily defended airdrome in Athens, Greece. On October 6, 1944, Lt. Thomas flew as a flight leader in a formation of 14 aircraft assigned to strafe the heavily defended Totoi Airdrome and the surrounding terrain. Upon approach of the formation towards the airfield, Lt. Thomas’ aircraft was hit by flak. Disregarding all thought of personal safety, Lt. Thomas courageously pressed his attack to a deck level and destroyed two enemy aircraft and damaged another. Due to his exact judgement, skill and aggressiveness, a total of 11 enemy aircraft was destroyed or damaged without loss to any aircraft of his section. Flying over treacherous, mountainous terrain, under adverse weather condition and against severe enemy opposition, Lt. Thomas flew 81 hazardous combat missions for a total of 205 combat hours. His outstanding courage, judgement, unquestionable devotion to duty and professional skill have reflected great credit upon himself and the Armed Forces of the United States of America.

Captain Edward M. Thomas did not survive the war.

Regarding this week's stuff

"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." - Abraham Lincoln

Been a bit busy with onsite stuff the last week or so. Once in a while a handful of edits take a whole lot of work. Just a few asides to go along with that.

A certain episode of The Simpsons played a role in some evidence. Well, that goes both ways. So here's a suggestion.

In another episode called "Missionary: Impossible" Homer becomes a missionary on a South Seas island. At the end of the episode he tells the natives they can follow any religion they like. "Except the Unitarians. If that's the one true faith I'll eat my hat."

Well ya know, watch that show long enough and sooner or later, whoever you are, they take aim at you. I was sitting in a room with a bunch of other UUs when that came on, and for two seconds we all exchanged glances, gasped somebody remembered us. And then we laughed our ears off.

So if you don't like what I did this week (or if you do like it) go ahead and take revenge (reward) by building up that article. Heck, run the insult on the main page.

It's a joke.

And it's a cartoon.

Peace on earth, goodwill toward Marge.

Bad taste v. hypocrisy

In the eternal struggle between bad taste and hypocrisy, usually bad taste is less offensive. In case you haven't seen the new Associated Press article, British readers have been blocked from accessing an article because it contains an image of a nude child. The article itself is about a 1976 album released by the German band The Scorpions. In a cheap tasteless gimmick the band and its record label called the album Virgin Killer. In case for whatever reason the image isn't available to you, here's a direct link. You can also view the image at Amazon.com on a couple of pages, or at The Scorpions official website, or any number of other places.

Yet rather than target any of the other sites that host this 32-year-old commercial image, the Internet Watch Foundation has decided to focus on Wikipedia. The lady depicted has reached middle age. The image would remain in well-deserved derision and obscurity if it weren't for this attention. And the consenus of Wikipedia volunteers aren't happy about the hassle.

In the words of one site administrator, Jonathan Hochman:

There are two stories: a) censorship, and b) technologically hamfisted measures.

If the censors used XFF, at least there would not be so much collateral damage.

I am also very nonplussed that this censorship was approved by a private charity that answers to nobody.

XFF stands for X Forward-for. It's a protocol that proxies use to identify the source of an Internet transaction. This helps Web 2.0 sites have the ability to identify users by IP address and block those who are disruptive.

As things stand now, if any user in the UK gets blocked, the autoblock will prevent a huge swath of the UK from editing. This is an enourmous [sic], unnecessary problem.

So in response to one image readily available elsewhere, Wikipedia's ability to respond to inappropriate conduct of any sort from UK users has been severely hampered. And actual UK pedophiles (if any are active) have an easier time hiding in the crowd. In other words, the worst of all possible worlds.

Want to do something about it? Well claims are floating around that the album cover has been banned. It hasn't been; a lot of music stores carry it. And Wikimedia Foundation UK press contact David Gerard is speaking to the press tomorrow. Editors who don't mind letting their face and identity be known can help demonstrate that the image is indeed widely available, by photographing themselves with it.