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Volume 5, Issue 26 29 June 2009 About the Signpost
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SPV

Jackson's death, new data center, more

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By Phoebe

The King of Pop vs. Wikipedia

Michael Jackson's hospitalization and death on Thursday, June 25 was immediately picked up by news sources and widely broadcast through online social networks, which in turn caused a vast number of people to turn to the Wikipedia article on Jackson. According to the Wikimedia Techblog, the number of people checking the Jackson article caused a load spike that briefly took Wikipedia offline. Developer and member of the Board of Trustees Domas Mituzas described what happened.

This story was in turn picked up by CNN, which also discussed the effects of Jackson's death on other major websites: Twitter and Google News also reported problems. Noam Cohen of The New York Times also reported on the traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of Jackson's death, with nearly a million visitors to the article in the space of an hour, which Jay Walsh of the Foundation said may be the "most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history." According to Henrik's statistics server, the Jackson article received 5.9 million views on June 26, more than the main page this day, with 12.5 million views total this month so far. William Beutler in a blog post compared this spike to the 2.5 million visitors that the article on Sarah Palin received in the wake of McCain's announcement of her as his running mate in the 2008 United States presidential election, and speculated that the traffic to the article on Jackson may be unprecedented.

Apache web server load spike for Wikimedia sites following news of Michael Jackson's death

Data center donation

The Wikimedia Foundation announced that it has signed a contract with EvoSwitch, a carbon-neutral data center based in Amsterdam. The data center will become Wikimedia's European hub. According to the announcement, EvoSwitch is offering over €300,000 of in-kind support in bandwidth and hosting. There will be around 50 servers installed at the EvoSwitch site.

Donation button feedback

The Wikimedia Usability project is soliciting feedback on a possible "donation button" to go in the left-hand sidebar. Mockups are available for comment on Meta. The Usability Project also continues to seek feedback on their prototype sites.

"Bookshelf" volunteer sought

The public outreach group at the Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a volunteer to help with the "bookshelf" project to develop short educational materials (such as fliers) about Wikipedia. The volunteer will lay out documents in Scribus, a free desktop publishing program. More information is available on Meta.

Algae articles created, deleted

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Anybot's_algae_articles resulted in the deletion of 4077 articles, which is possibly the largest number of deletions ever from a bulk AfD. According to the AFD, "Anybot created 4092 algae articles by scraping information out of the AlgaeBase database, and formatting it into articles. In doing so, it introduced numerous serious errors into more-or-less every article." An attempt was made to correct the errors by bot, but it was unsuccessful.

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SPV

Google News Support, Wired editor plagiarizes Wikipedia, Rohde's kidnapping, Michael Jackson

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By Tilman Bayer, Tarheel95, Aude and Phoebe

Google News now includes Wikipedia as a source

As reported in earlier Signpost issues (June 15, June 8), Google News has been experimenting with links to Wikipedia articles about current events in its news results for various topics, such as the H1N1 Flu outbreak and the Iranian election protests. At first these links were only visible to a small percentage of readers.

Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker has now confirmed that this addition has been made permanent on the English language editions of Google News, because the tests had indicated that "users were finding the Wikipedia pages to be helpful complements to so many stories they saw," adding that Wikipedia frequently offered "the broader overview on the topic."[1] Half a year ago, Google News had already started to list Wikinews articles (see Signpost story).

Stricker did not explain how Google News chooses the Wikipedia articles to include, except by stating that these links are selected automatically: "An algorithm determines when Wikipedia topic pages are relevant to Google News clusters". [2]

Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Jay Walsh (who, like other Wikipedians, had learned of this change from a third-party report) commented that "Google is recognizing that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information," although "it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day." Among the observers who had noted the strength of the English Wikipedia in summarizing current events is Sue Gardner. In an interview with the Signpost shortly after becoming the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director in 2007, the former director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's web site described her positive impression of Wikipedia's coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre and the collaboration on that article as her initial motive for becoming more involved with Wikimedia.

Wired editor plagiarizes Wikipedia, apologizes

As reported in a NY Times blog post by Noam Cohen, Wired editor Chris Anderson has issued a "mea culpa" apology for copying passages from Wikipedia, without attribution, in his upcoming book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. A post by Waldo Jaquith on the Virginia Quarterly Review blog noted what had been copied—large parts of several Wikipedia articles appeared to have been reprinted in the text of the book with minimal changes and no citation or credit. The story was picked up by the LA Times blog and others. Both Anderson and his publisher Hyperion responded to Jaquith's post, and Anderson wrote a post on his own blog detailing the mistake and his proposed corrections.

Rohde's kidnapping—and edit wars

According to an article published in The New York Times on June 28 by Richard Pérez-Peña, "the New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban" for seven months, in an effort to prevent Rohde's value as a captive from rising and make it less likely that he would be killed. With difficulty, the Times also managed to keep this information from appearing in Wikipedia, with the help of Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia administrators and Times employees. The article details the editing process that occurred, including the work of Times employee Michael Moss, who worked to keep news of Rohde's kidnapping off Wikipedia, despite the best efforts of a few anonymous contributors. Moss stated in the article that "I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he'd done, what his value to them might be." Rohde was captured on November 10, 2008, and made his escape on June 27, 2009, as reported by ABC and elsewhere.

The story of Wikipedia's omission has caused great debate in the media and among bloggers; the Christian Science Monitor blog asks "Was Wikipedia correct to censor news of David Rohde’s capture?" Debate has also continued on sites such as Slashdot.

Jackson's death rocks Wikipedia

A wide variety of sources reported on the edit wars and traffic surrounding the Wikipedia entry on Michael Jackson after his death on June 25, including the The Telegraph (which noted the edit war over whether Jackson was actually dead) and the San Francisco Chronicle blog, which also noted the effects of Jackson's death on other sites. Also see related News and Notes story.

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SPV

Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations

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By Drilnoth

The following is a brief overview of discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Policy

New! Request for comment: How should "Wikipedia is not plot" be worded? Should it be a policy, guideline, or essay?

New! Discussion: Should the notability guideline for pornographic actors be rolled back?

Style

New! Request for comment: How should the Macedonia naming conflict be resolved?

  • Request for comment: Full-date unlinking bot: Should a bot be allowed to unlink dates under this proposal? Specifically, unlinking only full dates with day, month, and year information, and not editing the same page twice to do so in case the edit is reverted? So far the community seems supportive of this proposal.
  • Request for comment: Should the relatively new template, {{italic title}}, be used to italicize names? If so, what articles should it be used for?

Technical

New! Request for comment: Should Google be allowed to include Wikipedia user pages in their search results?

Open bot requests for approval

This is a list of current bot requests for approval, with brief descriptions of the proposed tasks. See this week's technology report for information on recently-approved bots.

New! BOTijo 2 (again): Confirmation of community's support requested on bot's creation of large numbers of redirects from other capitalizations.

New! Chris G Bot 7: To fix external links to the IUCN Red List.

  • Coreva-Bot 2: To add maintenance tags to articles.
  • CSDCheckBot: To notify users who tagged an article for speedy deletion if that article was not deleted or deleted under a different criteria from what they selected.

New! EarwigBot I 3: To tag articles that are members of WikiProject United States presidential elections with the project's banner.

New! EarwigBot III: To update statistics related to articles for creation.

  • Erwin85Bot 8: To notify major article contributors when an article is nominated for deletion.

New! JCbot 2: To deliver newsletters for Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of knowledge

New! Numbo3-bot 3: To update Template:Linked on Google News.

  • OgreBot: To update sports scores on a regular basis.
  • SPCUClerkbot 3: To modify all existing checkuser/sockpuppet related templates to one single template: {{sockpuppet}} with correctly named parameters.
  • UnitBot: To fix articles that describe unit conversion to "a ridiculous degree of precision"

Other

New! Discussion: For the Wikimedia Foundation's 2009 fundraising effort, should a button saying something like "Donate now" or "Support Wikipedia" be added to the sidebar?

Open requests for adminship

The following requests for adminship are currently open (numbers indicate support/oppose/neutral voting, and are updated every half hour):

New! Ceranthor 2: Final, (54/27/6), closed at 12:11, 1 July 2009 (UTC) by PeterSymonds

New! decltype: Final: 73/5/3, ended 12:19, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

New! LouriePieterse: Final: (16/29/3); closed by User:Kingturtle as unsuccessful at 20:04, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

New! Mlaffs: Final (73/3/1) Closed 21:14, 1 July 2009 (UTC) by Avi

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Approved this week

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By seresin

Administrators

Five editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Patar knight (nom), Cool3 (nom), Wtmitchell (nom), Plastikspork (nom) and Jarry1250 (nom).

Bots

This section is now included in the Technology Report, and contains an expanded description of the bots that have been approved. This week's article.

Ten articles were promoted to featured status this week: Hippocampus (nom), Military history of Australia during World War II (nom), 2008 Monaco Grand Prix (nom), Cheadle Hulme (nom), House (TV series) (nom), Gregorian mission (nom), Wind (nom), Symphonic poems (Liszt) (nom), Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (nom) and H.M.S. Pinafore (nom).

Nineteen lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of CZW World Heavyweight Champions (nom), List of places of worship in Brighton and Hove (nom), Orange Prize for Fiction (nom), BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award (nom), List of Gold Glove Award winners at second base (nom), List of 2008 Summer Olympics medal winners (nom), List of Jewish Medal of Honor recipients (nom), List of current members of the Maryland Senate (nom), List of Gold Glove Award winners at first base (nom), List of Grade I listed buildings in Mendip (nom), List of Olympic medalists in badminton (nom), List of Ambassadors of Russia to Austria (nom), List of tombs of antipopes (nom), List of Chicago Blackhawks head coaches (nom), List of Luton Town F.C. managers (nom), List of Luton Town F.C. seasons (nom), 2007 IIHF World Championship rosters (nom), List of CZW World Tag Team Champions (nom) and List of Gold Glove Award winners at third base (nom).

Two topics were promoted to featured status this week: State highways in Marquette County, Michigan (nom) and World Series of Poker Europe (nom).

No portals were promoted to featured status this week.

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Major depressive disorder, Ancient Egypt, White dwarf, Ten Commandments in Roman Catholicism, Hippopotamus, Stonewall riots and Joking Apart.

Eight articles were delisted this week. Able Archer 83 (nom), Open cluster (nom), Gremlins (nom), Samuel Beckett (nom), National Anthem of Russia (nom), USA PATRIOT Act, Title III, Subtitle A (nom), Section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II (nom) and Kung Fu Hustle (nom).

No lists were delisted this week.

One topic was delisted this week: Gwen Stefani albums (nom).

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Waldseemüller map, Embden Goose, V-2 rocket, "Au Clair de la Lune", Forest scorpion and Rhea.

No featured sounds were promoted this week.

Four featured pictures were demoted this week: Two butterflies (nom), Chinese mantis (nom), Huntsman spider (nom) and Dry Tortugas Lighthouse (nom).

Three pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.



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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250 and Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Bots approved

3 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These were:

  • DrilBot 3: To update image files in accordance with the image license migration.
  • MondalorBot: To cleanup interwikis and rename categories.
  • Erik9bot 9: To tag and categorise articles with its own special unreferenced category if it can't find any evidence of references.

This week's discussion report contains information on current bot requests and related discussions.

Bug fixes

  • Improvements have been made on handling Chinese multi-character search terms. (r52338, bug 8445) [3]

New features

  • A new system for localisation caching of core and extension messages has been introduced, which involves fetching individual messages. The $wgCacheDirectory variable has been added, replacing $wgFileCacheDirectory, $wgLocalMessageCache and other local caches, and $wgLocalisationCacheConf replaces $wgEnableSerializedMessages and $wgCheckSerialized. (r52503)
  • The Special:Version page has been updated to show the Math rendering engine version number (r52525), version of the SVG image thumbnailing engine used (r52516), and version of the diff/diff3 engine. (r52486, bug 14611)
  • Site copyright and TOS statements can now override the default, with messages available. New messages include wikimedia-copyright (page footer), wikimedia-copyrightwarning (edit page, above summary/save button), wikimedia-editpage-tos-summary (edit page, below summary/save button). Defaults for English Wikipedia come from meta:Licensing update/Implementation.

Other news

  • The Wikimedia Foundation blog and the Wikimedia Technical Blog were out of service for the past few days. These were located on a separate server, which had the WordPress installations compromised. The Open Conference Systems site for Wikimania 2009 was also down. The server has been hardened to better protect it in the future. [4]
  • GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) has been updated on Wikimedia sites to the latest version — 1.0.8.4. GeSHi is used to provide syntax highlighting for source code samples. (bug 10967)

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The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By seresin

The Arbitration Committee this week provisionally suspended the community ban of Thekohser. The Audit Subcommittee released an overview of the Oversight-l mailing list.

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases and closed one this week, leaving three open.

Evidence phase

  • ADHD: A case examining the dispute on the ADHD article and the conduct of the editors involved therein.

Motion to close

Closed

  • Seeyou: A case examining the conduct of user Seeyou; the Committee banned him for one year.

Withdrawn

  • Matthew Hoffman: This case, which took place in December 2007 and January 2008, has been officially withdrawn by the Arbcom, because "a series of significant irregularities occurred" which "resulted in a fundamentally flawed process". The full statement may be found here.

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