Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-01-03
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News and notes
Fundraiser goal met
The Wikimedia Foundation 2008 met its fundraising goal in the last days of 2008, reaching $6.1 million dollars on January 1, 2009. According to Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Foundation, this amount will cover all of the WMF's projected costs for 2008–2009.[1] Just over $4 million of this amount was raised during this fundraiser, which opened on November 5. The fundraiser was originally scheduled to end on January 15 (Wikipedia Day), however, the goal was reached earlier than anticipated. In part this success was due to a fundraising sitenotice banner that contained a link to "a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales", which helped raise over $280,000 in a single day.[2] The fundraising banners across the English-language projects and Commons have now been replaced by a thank-you banner, which will be up for "probably a week", according to Gardner.
MediaWiki interface to get a facelift
The Wikimedia Foundation announced on December 3 that it received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to make Wikipedia's editing interface more user-friendly. The Wikimedia Foundation has recognized that the mixing of ordinary sentences with wiki markup has probably turned off users who could be valuable contributors. According to Wikimedia Foundation's executive director Sue Gardner, "Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric." The grant will be used to identify and remedy what is turning these people off.
The project, which will be led by a five-person team of three software developers, a user interface designer, and a project manager, the newly hired Naoko Komura, is scheduled to begin in January 2009 and finish in April 2010. The goal is to hide some of the complexities of the MediaWiki software from users who do not need to see it. According to Erik Moeller on the Foundation-l mailing list, the main focus of the project will be "user testing designed to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and a series of improvements to the MediaWiki interface…to issues identified through user testing and…hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't use them. (Specifically, we'll focus on complex syntax like templates, references, tables, etc.)" There will be two phases to the project. Phase 1 will address some of the simpler barriers to editing, such as the visibility of the "edit" button. Phase 2, which will start in late summer 2009, will focus on simplifying the wiki code.
Some critics have suggested that the MediaWiki interface is intentionally difficult to use in order to lower participation and increase ease of management. A Wired.com post, "Wikipedia’s WYSIWYG Dilemma", quoted an estimate by Jason Calacanis (CEO of Mahalo.com) that a WYSIWYG interface would only cost around $50,000, but that the additional contributors it would attract would bring Wikipedia to a "grinding halt" (the stumbling block perceived is the difficulty of fact-checking in the expected drastically increased amount of contribution).
This earmarked donation is separate from the over $6 million raised through this year's fundraiser. For more information on the grant, see the Wikimedia Foundation press release, the Stanton Grant Q&A, and Erik Moeller's post on Foundation-l.
100,000 archival images donated
Starting on Thursday December 4, 2008, Wikimedia Commons witnessed a massive upload of new historical images. About 100,000 files are anticipated from a donation from the German Federal Archive. Included in the donation were pictures from the Weimar Republic, German colonial era, Third Reich, and Germany after reunification. Angelika Menne-Haritz, vice-president of the Federal Archives in Berlin, said "The public had a right to access the photos," and that "the deal with Wikipedia would facilitate public access to the material." This was the largest single donation of material to Wikimedia Commons since it was established in 2004.
These images are licensed Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Germany License (CC-BY-SA). Wikimedia Germany and the Federal Archive have signed a cooperation agreement that, among other things, asserts that the Federal Archive owns sufficient rights to be able to grant this kind of license. The images were scaled down to 800 pixels in size on the longer side.
The other part of the cooperation is a tool for linking people from a list compiled by the Federal Archive to the German Wikipedia Persondata and to the person authority file of the German National Library (something the German Wikipedia has been doing since 2005).
Biology journal requires summaries on Wikipedia
The journal RNA Biology has begun requiring authors to submit summaries of their work to Wikipedia before publication. For more, see the Wikinews story: RNA journal submits articles to Wikipedia.
French Wikipedia uses image pages to sell posters
On the French Wikipedia, all description pages for images hosted on Wikimedia Commons have been changed to include a link to purchase a poster print of that image from "WikiPosters", a service run by Messages SAS (a 90 employee printing company based in Toulouse). The company has donated €500 to the Wikimedia Foundation and €500 to Wikimedia France, and intends to donate €1.50 to Wikimedia France for each poster sold. However, the agreement between Messages SAS and the French Wikipedia community, while requiring the latter to insert those links, does not seem to place binding financial obligations on the company.
On each image page, a link appears (as in this example image) labeled "Obtenir un poster de cette image (nouveau !)" ("Obtain a poster of this image (new!)) at the top right of each image description page. After clicking on the link, the reader can choose between the ordering pages of different poster vendors (currently only wikiposters.fr).
Wikinews stories appear in Google News
Until recently Google News would not list articles from Wikinews, because of the editorial process requirements. Wikinews would sometimes republish original reporting on a blog that was listed on Google News, to attempt to draw some outside eyeballs. Now that is no longer necessary, and every Wikinews story is available in Google News search results.
Milestones
In December:
- The Danish Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles with Fuhse.
- The Polish Wikinews has reached 9000 articles.
- The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles with Guerra dels Ossos.
- The Ukrainian Wiktionary has reached 8,000 articles.
- The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles with Grand-Brassac.
- The West Frisian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles with Schotanusatlas.
- The Hakka Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
- The Komi Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Sardinian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 300,000 articles with article Arvidsjaurs kyrka.
- The Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles with John de Vere, 12. jarl av Oxford. Press release (in Norwegian).
- The Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, newly created in November, has reached 200 articles.
- The Wikipedia of Ripuarian languages has now 100 local images.
- The Croatian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
- The Komi Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
- The Czech Wikinews has reached 500 articles.
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The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Since last issue, ten new members of the Committee were appointed, and two resignations came into effect (those of Jpgordon and Deskana), bringing the total of seats on the Committee to eighteen, seventeen of which are occupied. See related story.
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases since last issue, and accepted four new ones, leaving a total of five open.
Evidence phase
- PHG: A case brought by PHG, in a follow up to a prior case against PHG, Franco-Mongol alliance. This case will review PHG's editing since the prior case, and may impose new sanctions, or repeal current sanctions, as necessary.
- Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/COFS.
- Fringe science: A case initially filed about the behavior of ScienceApologist, but which was opened to look at editing in the entire area of fringe science, and the behavior of editors who are involved in the area of dispute.
- G.-M. Cupertino: A case regarding the behavior of G.-M. Cupertino, accepted without significant prior dispute resolution as several arbitrators believed lower levels of dispute resolution would be fruitless.
Motion to close
- Ireland article names: A case to deal with the disputes about the naming of Ireland-related articles. As of press time, a remedy calling for the community to develop a mechanism to find consensus on naming of Ireland-related articles has eight unanimous support votes. A further remedy will create a three-member panel of uninvolved administrators to develop and oversee such a mechanism, if a suitable one is not created within fourteen days of the closure of the case. Until such a consensus is found, the articles in question are to remain at their current titles, and after a consensus is found, no further discussions about moving the pages may take place for two years.
Closed
- Piotrus 2: The latest in a series of cases involving alleged edit-warring and other misconduct by numerous editors on articles pertaining to Eastern Europe. The case, which was open for almost four months, passed remedies regarding seven specific editors, and banned Boodlesthecat and Greg park avenue for one year. The committee also, by remedy, stated that they would open a Request for Comment on the Arbitration Enforcement process, start a general community discussion about reforming the dispute resolution process, and publish guides for using the Workshop and Evidence pages. By motion, the entire Request for Arbitration was renamed from Piotrus 2 to Eastern European disputes.
- Cold fusion: A case involving conduct disputes around the article Cold fusion. In the final decision, Pcarbonn was topic-banned for one year from editing Cold fusion and related articles.
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