Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-04-18
Commons milestone; newbie contributions assessed; German community to decide on €200,000 budget; brief news
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Commons reaches ten million files
The community-written press release on Commons noted that "the 5 millionth uploaded file was attained on September 9, 2009, so the project has doubled in size in only eighteen months." The Wikimedia Foundation's press release mentioned planned technical improvements that should increase the growth rate further: The new upload tool (Signpost coverage: "Upload Wizard release expected shortly") and better support for video.
Quality of newbie contributions decreases since 2004, but majority still constructive
As part of the ongoing discussions about improving participation and newbie friendliness in Wikimedia communities (also topic of last week's IRC Office hour with WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner), specifically the WikiGuides project, the Foundation's Community Department tried to answer the question "How much do new editors actually improve Wikipedia?", by analyzing a random sample of "155 new registered users on the English Wikipedia who made at least one edit in mid-April of this year" and assessing the quality of their first edit on a five-level scale from "vandalism" to "excellent". They found that
| “ | most new editors made contributions worth retaining in some way, even if they weren’t perfect. More than half of these first edits needed no reworking to be acceptable based on current Wikipedia policy. Another 19% made good faith edits but needed additional help to meet standards defined in policy or guideline. | ” |
A comparison with an analogous sample from 2004 indicated that the ratio of vandalism has multiplied since then, while the ratio of acceptable or better quality edits has declined. However, the blog posting focuses on a positive aspect of the result: "The key thing to note in comparing the two samples is that the percent of acceptable edits made by newbies did not dramatically decrease from 2004 to 2011."
German chapter offers €200,000 "community project budget"
The German Wikimedia chapter has set aside €200,000 for a "community project budget", which will fund "the realization of ideas from the Wikimedia communities for the Wikimedia projects", according to the announcement in the "Kurier" (the Signpost's sister publication on the German Wikipedia). The selection of projects to fund, with a minimum budget of €5000, will be based on the recommendation of a seven-member budget committee, consisting of the chapter's treasurer, three members elected by chapter (Verein) members, and three members elected by the community.
The idea is a reaction to a blog posting by longtime Wikipedian Southpark. In January, during the run-up to a non-regular general meeting of the chapter that had been prompted by a motion of distrust against the chapter's board (signed by more than 60 members, based on criticism of the board's unilateral decision process while restructuring the chapter – Signpost coverage -, but ultimately unsuccessful), he observed:
| “ | The Problem: Wikimedia Deutschland is sitting on a whole lot of donation money. No one really knows what to do with it, and the opinions about spending it efficiently are diverging, to put it mildly. Particularly few money is flowing directly back into the projects. Part of the reason is that no one knows where to spend it there in a sensible way. | ” |
To solve this part of the problem, Southpark started an open call for ideas in his user space, which received a lot of suggestions, some of which might now get a chance of being realized.
Some months ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's grants process, funding mission-related projects from US$500 upwards, was expanded from chapters "in a limited way, to volunteers and like-minded organizations."
In September, the German chapter had announced a "contest of ideas" dedicated to promoting free knowledge, aiming to include non-Wikimedia projects (Signpost coverage). Eight winning projects (each funded with a sum between €500 and €5000) were announced in December, among them the purchase of high-resolution aerial images for 500 German cities for use by the OpenStreetMap community, and a "motivational video for Creative Commons", encouraging artists, authors and others who create content to release it under a free license.
Briefly
- Wikimania 2012 will take place in Washington, D.C., as announced by the jury last week. After the 2006 Wikimania in Boston, this will be the second time that the annual Wikimedia conference takes place in the US. The second finalist was the bid for Stellenbosch, South Africa.
- Adminship required for higher access levels?: A request for comment started last week asked "Should adminship, obtained via WP:RFA, be a requirement for being granted checkuser or oversight rights by the arbitration committee ?" A related RfC proposed to remove the technical necessity for adminship when carrying out these roles (as well as bureaucratship), by adding the right to view deleted revisions to the checkuser, oversight and bureaucrat roles, and the right to move pages without redirects to the latter.
- Wikimedia Spain report: The Spanish Wikimedia chapter published a brief report for January–March 2011, including its approval by the WMF in February.
- Catalan report: The "Amical Viquipèdia" ("Friends of Wikipedia") association of Catalan Wikimedians has published its report for March 2011, mentioning among other things "great impact in the media" generated by press releases about the Catalan Wikipedia's tenth anniversary, and the presentation of a book titled "Wikipedia", 150 copies of which were distributed to schools by the department of linguistic policy of the government of the Balearic Islands (a part of Spain).
- British Wikimedia conference: Wikimedia UK hosted their first WikiConference in Bristol on Saturday, combining the annual general meeting of the chapter with talks on a number of aspects of Wikimedia including the GLAM collaborations like the rollout of QR codes pointing to Wikipedia in Derby Museum and Art Gallery, the role of wikis, Wikipedia and Wikiversity in education, and Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. Audio of the event was recorded and will be released in the next few weeks, and the slideshow presentations are available on the UK chapter wiki. It was announced that the chapter intends to run the event annually in a different city each time.
- Tools to extract data sets from Wikipedia: On the Wiki-research-l mailing list, Mohamad Mehdi posted a compilation of links to "online tools used to extract Wikipedia articles and ... pre-compiled Wikipedia articles data sets", inviting additions.
Wikipedia accurate on US politics, plagiarized in court, and compared to Glass Bead Game; brief news
Wikipedia articles about US politicians found to have "surprising accuracy", but heavy recentness bias
Adam Brown, a political scientist from Brigham Young University has concluded that Wikipedia has become a reliable source of political information. He published a peer-reviewed study, titled "Wikipedia as a Data Source for Political Scientists: Accuracy and Completeness of Coverage" in Political Science and Politics 44:339–43, in which he reviewed "thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and office holders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia’s coverage." He found "that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omission are extremely frequent", following "a predictable pattern: coverage is best on topics that are more recent or prominent."
In the paper's introduction Brown observes that "studies of Wikipedia’s accuracy have generally found worries about its credibility to be overblown." He notes that most of them, including the famous 2005 Nature study, have used what he calls "the 'small-n, every-detail' approach": "The reviewers select a small number of seminal topics within a field and then check the accuracy of every statement in those articles". He argues that
| “ | [This] approach is flawed in both its 'small-n' and its 'every-detail' aspects. First, when reviewers create their sample, they inevitably choose those articles that deal with the most important issues in their respective fields—but because of their importance, these articles are likely to be the most read, most edited, and therefore most accurate articles in Wikipedia. Second, the “every-detail” approach tends to focus on minor rather than major inaccuracies. Reviewers adopting this approach check every word in their sampled articles for errors, no matter how inconsequential. | ” |
In his own study, he tried to avoid these biases with "a 'large-n, specific-fact' approach. I identify a specific fact that every article in a category ought to contain and then check every article’s accuracy on that fact." Specifically, he examined all 230 Wikipedia biographical articles about major party US governorship candidates who ran for office between 1998 and 2008 and "checked a specific fact: whether Wikipedia accurately characterized the candidate’s previous political experience. I found no errors in these articles at all." Separately, he examined all yearly articles about United States gubernatorial elections back to 1976 to see whether the given results of the major political parties' candidates agreed with the official results, finding that "In only four (2.6%) gubernatorial elections was Wikipedia’s margin off by more than one percentage point."
While acknowledging that Wikipedia is not a quotable source for academic publications, the study concludes by cautiously suggesting that "for political scientists with limited time and research assistance, Wikipedia may be just accurate enough to permit its use in preliminary work."
The study was covered by The Salt Lake Tribune ("BYU scholar: Wikipedia’s political content is reliable"), UPI Science News and Trebuchet magazine.
Judge admonishes lawyer for plagiarizing Wikipedia
Recently, several US law blogs noted a February court decision where the judge admonished one party for plagiarizing from the Wikipedia article Strickland v. Washington: "The court notes here that defense counsel appears to have cobbled much of his statement of [a law relevant to the case] by cutting and pasting, without citation, from the Wikipedia web site. Compare Supplemental to Motion for New Trial (DN 199) at 18–19 with http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Strickland_v._Washington (last visited Feb. 9, 2011). The court reminds counsel that such cutting and pasting, without attribution, is plagiarism. The court also brings to counsel’s attention Rule 8.4 of the Kentucky Rules of Professional Conduct, which states that it is professional misconduct for an attorney to “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” ... Finally, the court reminds counsel that Wikipedia is not an acceptable source of legal authority in the United States District Courts." On the "Minnesota Lawyer" blog, an attorney (coincidentally named Michael Goodwin) commented that "Issues of plagiarism aside, this lawyer isn’t the first to use Wikipedia in a legal document. There probably are appropriate uses of Wikipedia in legal writing, and in fact, there is a Wikipedia article about courts that cite to Wikipedia. Most courts that do so use Wikipedia for illustrative purposes, such as this recent copyright case that cites to Wikipedia’s entry about fantasy football as a means of illuminating the context out of which the case arises. Using Wikipedia to establish anything of significance, however, can be troublesome ..."
Wikipedia compared to Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game
An academic paper titled "From Castalia to Wikipedia: openness and closure in knowledge communities" explores parallels and differences between Wikipedia and the fictional academic world depicted in the 1943 novel The Glass Bead Game (which earned its author Hermann Hesse a Nobel Prize in literature), regarding "knowledge, decision-making and social organization". (E-Learning and Digital Media, Volume 8 Number 1 2011, paywalled, abstract; by Peter Roberts and Michael A. Peters, professors of education at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/US, respectively.)
The authors assert that "of the novels that might be considered when addressing the idea of openness, particularly as this applies to knowledge communities, none is more helpful" than The Glass Bead Game. Hesse's book is set in the twenty-third century and centers around an intellectual system (whose "rules" are never laid out in detail) that evolved from a literal game involving actual glass beads into a kind of universal language encompassing and connecting all of the arts, sciences and religion and "emerged as the supreme form of cultural engagement. Castalia, a dedicated knowledge community, grew from the ruins of the twentieth century and became the home of the Game", as the paper says in its first part, a summary of the novel. It continues with a one page overview of Wikipedia, mentioning the Wikimedia Foundation and the Five Pillars.
The comparative analysis in the third part starts with differences: "Castalia is premised on the principle of intellectual and cultural elitism, with a privileged community of scholars and only the very best making it through to the most advanced schools; Wikipedia, on the other hand, is built on the notion of popular participation ... Far from being separated from the rest of the world, Wikipedia is the world. People who read and edit Wikipedia come from all corners of the earth", but that there still exist "definite patterns of participation, with a small group of dedicated contributors dominating the editing process" and moreover that there is "a clear hierarchy in Wikipedia, just as there is in Castalia, although in the case of the former this is more fluid and less formal." As the second common property, the authors identify the fact that "Neither Castalia nor Wikipedia focuses on the creation of new knowledge. Castalians assume that the ‘manuals, pedals and stops’ of the Glass Bead Game are now fixed, with nothing further to add to the vast stock of human knowledge on which exponents of the Game play", while Wikipedia has its Verifiability and No Original Research policies. "The ambitions that underpin Wikipedia as an enterprise bear a resemblance to the conceptual architecture of the Glass Bead Game. The Glass Bead is, the narrator informs us, capable of reproducing the entire intellectual content of the universe. The aim of Wikipedia [actually, the Wikimedia Foundation] is no less than ‘a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge’. The authors also find common traits in the attitudes towards individuality and collectivism: "In both Castalia and Wikipedia there is, as an ideal, a sense of participating in a process that transcends the thoughts, feelings and ideas of any individual – a commitment to working with knowledge in a certain way. Unlike the academic world, with its ‘star’ researchers, in both Castalia and Wikipedia the rewards are meant to be more intrinsic."
Returning to differences, it is noted that in the centuries-old Castalia, changes are occuring slowly, and it is "self-consciously conservative in its social organisation", while Wikipedia is characterized by rapid reactions to events, and promotes boldness. Both try to ensure quality by self-regulation, but in different ways – in Castalia "through a process of elite selection (with only the most able students making it to the top schools in the pedagogical province)", in Wikipedia by "a more populist form of collective monitoring and adjustment". Finally, the authors claim that Hesse's book, through its main character Josef Knecht, "problematises universalist constructs of truth", while Wikipedia "is explicitly wedded to an ideal of truth emerging through consensus. There is a faint echo, in the Wikipedia pages, of the Habermasian notion of dialogue through consensual communication between rational subjects".
Briefly
- Company sues IP editors for defamation: As reported by the Denver Post ("Upscale Façonnable sues over Web posts saying it has ties to Hezbollah"), fashion company Façonnable has filed a John Doe lawsuit against anonymous (IP) editors who inserted what it says are false claims alleging ties of the company with the Lebanese Hezbollah organization into the Wikipedia article about Façonnable. (The newspaper notes that the company is owned by the conglomerate M1 Group, which "was co-founded by Najib Mikati, a billionaire and politician who was recently made prime minister of Lebanon. Mikati had the support of Hezbollah, a significant political force in Lebanon, in his election. But in numerous interviews with Western media outlets, Mikati has described himself as a centrist who is not a part of or beholden to the organization.") The lawsuit was filed after the users' Internet provider, Skybeam Inc, had rejected the request to provide their names to Façonnable, stating that this would need "a summons delivered by a local law enforcement agency".
- Wikipedia found to be heavily consulted on cancer topics: Following the collaboration between Cancer Research UK and Wikimedia UK, the Experian Hitwise blog found that Wikipedia was consistently found towards the top of Google search results on cancer and specifically breast cancer.
- Wikipedia accused of having "wacky" information in political debate: In an opinion article criticizing Zimbabwean politician Nelson Chamisa, the Zimbabwe Telegraph mocked the claim that "Chamisa is considered to be one of the greatest orators of his generation", asserting it had come from Wikipedia which "has wacky information mingled with facts" (however, the Wikipedia article does not seem to have contained these words since at least 2010, although it does call Chamisa "an articulate orator in his own right" whose "charismatic speeches and eloquence" saw him rise to his current political position).
- Deleting one's account on Wikipedia: The website Smashing Magazine published an overview explaining "How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites". About Wikipedia, it was noted that it "is one of the few websites out there that doesn’t allow you to delete your account. That’s right, once you have a Wikipedia account, you have it forever." (However, the article did point out the possibility of having one's account renamed and the user page deleted). Smashing Magazine explained that "Wikipedia’s reasoning behind this is that all contributions have to be assigned to someone. They can’t have anonymous or orphaned contributions, or it would potentially ruin the crowdsourced and open nature of the site."
- Wikipedia lauded for obscure basketball game entry: an editorial in SB Nation expressed surprise at the existence of an article on Wikipedia for Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball, a 1991 "futuristic full-contact basketball video game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System" where all the players are robots except for the now-retired Detroit Pistons player Bill Laimbeer.
- "Malayalam loves Wikimedia": An article in The Hindu reported about successes of the "Malayalam loves Wikimedia" project which aimed to enrich the Malayalam Wikipedia with free photos and maps. The paper notes that the project "also found a mention in the international Wikimedia signpost" (see last week's "News and notes").
- Entire Wikipedia boiled down to "concept matrix": Lexalytics, a publisher of a technology that produces automated document summaries, has announced that the new release of its software "will be better able to understand concepts and relationships between concepts, thanks to a close reading of the entire content of Wikipedia", as reported in InformationWeek. Lexalytics' CEO Jeff Catlin says that the way Wikipedia is put together by human editors shows the way humans think about information, and how people think bits of information are related to each other. He points out the size of the computing task necessary to generate this "concept matrix" from Wikipedia content: "We basically did boil the ocean, so this required a lot of hardware behind the scenes and a lot of Amazon computing time," InformationWeek remarks that "because of the open source nature of the Web encyclopedia, Lexalytics was able to index it freely. A footnote to the press release cautions that no endorsement by the Wikimedia Foundation is implied."
An audience with the WikiProject Council
- WikiProject Wikify is making good progress with its April Wikification Drive. Join today and earn some barnstars for your efforts!
- WikiProject Berkshire is currently undergoing a revival. Interested editors are invited to participate.
- WikiProject Unreferenced BLPs could use your help referencing articles tagged since August 2009.
- Registration for the Guild of Copy Editors' May backlog elimination drive has started.
This week, we take our first in-depth look at the WikiProject Council. Started in August 2006 by Kirill Lokshin, the Council is a group of Wikipedians gathered to encourage and assist with the development of active and new WikiProjects, and to act as a central point for inter-WikiProject discussion and collaboration. The project does not maintain a formal list of members, but there are 128 editors with the project's userbox. The Signpost interviewed project members John Carter, WhatamIdoing and Kirill Lokshin.
John is an administrator, and has been on Wikipedia since January 2007. He describes himself as "a reviewer-type editor who helped establish a lot of the existing WikiProjects". WhatamIdoing has been a Wikipedian since March 2007, and joined the project because of her interest in clarifying the rights of WikiProjects, "Who decides the group's scope? Who decides which articles to tag? Who gets to write advice pages?" Kirill is an engineer who designs and builds ground systems for satellites and spacecrafts. He has been on Wikipedia since June 2005, and is also an administrator, as well as a current member of the Arbitration Committee. During 2005–07, he was particularly involved with WikiProject Military history (MILHIST), and was one of the main players in the consolidation of different projects in that topic area into a single entity, later serving as the lead coordinator of the amalgamated project for a number of years. Kirill said, "The idea of the WikiProject Council came about primarily because of a number of editors who approached myself and the other MILHIST coordinators for advice on setting up or reviving other WikiProjects; the number of such requests was sufficient to suggest that creating a central place to share ideas and recommendations would be beneficial. The initial concept of the Council was somewhat more formal than the current one. One of the models originally considered was that of an assembly composed of elected representatives from different projects; but the key objectives of documenting best practices and encouraging inter-project dialogue and collaboration were identified at the outset, and have continued to drive the direction of the Council in the time since."
Many Wikipedians have come across the WikiProject Council, but few know what it actually does. So, what are the most important functions of the project? According to Kirill, the project has three major functions. The first is the maintenance of the WikiProject Guide: "The initial drafts of the WikiProject Guide were written in mid-2006... Since then, the guide has seen extensive revision and updating. Some sections are, admittedly, rather dated at this point and a number of more recent approaches to WikiProject infrastructure and organization are not described, but the guide remains a useful resource overall." The second is maintenance of the WikiProject directory and the WikiProject proposal process. "A third function, which has always been an objective, but which has generally seen little activity, is serving as a central discussion point for matters concerning WikiProjects in general. While many of the editors most active in WikiProject maintenance do monitor the Council's discussion pages, many do not; and so there has traditionally been a tendency for discussions on WikiProject matters to be split among a number of venues (such as the Council, the various Village Pumps, and a variety of other pages), without participants at any particular venue necessarily following, or even being aware of the others," added Kirill.
We asked what their advice is for someone wanting to propose a new WikiProject or Task force, and the main reasons proposals fail. John's advice is to check whether an active or inactive project which deals with the subject of the proposal already exists: "Many projects, particularly those related to pop culture in some form, become inactive when the artist, TV show, movies, etc., become inactive. Also, I think it makes a great deal of sense to in most cases check to see if there is an existing project with which the new proposal can work some sort of subproject status. Regarding why projects fail, that can be for any number of reasons. Sometimes, the proposal seems to be promoting POV of some sort – if that is the case, the project will likely be eventually merged with something else so our existing POV guidelines are followed. Other times, it may simply be that the subject is not one which is so interesting to others that they feel they are likely to devote much time to it. And, of course, if there aren't many materials available on the subject, however much interest there might be, there might not be sources enough to develop content." For Kirill, "the first, and most important piece of advice, is to be quite sure that you're willing to put in the time and effort in making a project successful before creating one. While WikiProjects might have many members, their infrastructure and processes are typically maintained by a much smaller group, even in the largest projects; and newer or smaller projects are particularly reliant on a small group or even a single editor, to keep the project "running" during periods of lower activity. The behind-the-scenes work involved is typically neither particularly exciting nor particularly enjoyable; but it must be done if a project is to function as an entity in its own right, and many projects fail because no individual member is able or willing to take responsibility for doing it."
WhatamIdoing believes that most people forget that a WikiProject is a group of people – not a subject area, a project page or a talk page banner: "There's a sort of 'build it and they will come' mentality. If you just make a pretty enough project page, then surely a dozen editors will show up and collaborate with you. It actually works the other way around. If you've got a dozen editors working with you, then it's probably time to create a WikiProject page. If you're on your own, creating a project page is likely to be isolating, discouraging, and ineffective. Almost all "WikiProjects" with only a couple of members go {{Inactive}}, often within a few months. You need a critical mass of people to make a project successful. Proposals by inexperienced editors are highly likely to die—and the English Wikipedia usually loses those enthusiastic editors entirely in the process."
What are the biggest challenges for the project? John says that keeping track of all the projects that get created is a big challenge, "Considering several are made without consultation from anyone, that is a bigger problem than may be obvious. Another situation we face is trying to bring editors who are affiliated with individual projects to cooperate with other projects. Kirill says that while the Council has some level of visibility into the creation of projects that go through the proposal process, there is no requirement that projects be formally proposed before creation, and many new projects bypass the proposal process entirely. "With deletions, the situation is even more challenging; as a general rule, the Council has no visibility into deletion nominations beyond individual participants who might want to keep an eye on MFD. In addition, because many of the projects nominated for deletion are inactive, there is nobody with any real reason to inform anyone about the nomination," he added.
Does the Council collaborate with other WikiProjects? John is keen to see more of this, "We would like to help encourage interaction among editors from related projects to help develop content which may be only peripherally related to their topic, and the proposed 2011 religion-philosophy meeting is one way we are trying to help encourage such interaction. Results, sadly, aren't in yet on how effective they are. Kirill says, "There has always been a vision, albeit a rather vague one, of the Council serving as a central forum for discussions that involve multiple WikiProjects. To date, we've had only limited success in actually bringing this vision to life. In large part, this is because the Council is a lower-traffic discussion area than most of the projects who might otherwise be motivated to participate in such discussions; most projects will therefore prefer to hold discussions "in-house" to attract more participation. We are, however, continuing to explore ways in which we can promote increased dialogue and collaboration."
Finally, we wanted to know what the most pressing needs for the WikiProject Council are, and how a new contributor can help. John says that keeping track of all the extant groups is a priority, "Once that is done, it will help a lot to encourage and promote inter-project collaboration. In general, maybe one of the easiest ways to help it achieve some of its purposes is help promote the interaction of extant projects and task forces, and helping make the pages of such groups more useful to new editors interested in working on related content." Kirill sees the most pressing need as the area of directory maintenance, "...updating the WikiProject directory to reflect new projects, and changes in existing ones, is something that requires little experience, and can be readily done by new participants. The directory underlies much of what the Council does and might wish to do in the future. Without a clear picture of what WikiProjects exist, it's difficult to organize anything involving them, so this task is not an unimportant one. Beyond that, the Council discussed a number of ideas for improvement earlier this year. Many of them have yet to be implemented, and assistance with any of them would certainly be appreciated." WhatamIdoing says that anyone who feels responsible for any WikiProject would likely benefit from watching the Council's pages, "Seeing the "mistakes" that other groups make can help you avoid them in your own group. Make a particular effort to respond to messages that are posted. Tell your fellow members what you're doing and pass along any news that might interest them."
Next week, we visit the home of the Stanton Drew stone circles and the Glastonbury Festival. Until then, do take a stroll through our archives.
The best of the week
New administrator
The Signpost welcomes Bahamut0013 (nom) as our newest admin. Bob has been with the US Marine Corps since 2003 and with Wikipedia since 2006. He contributes mainly to articles that deal with the Marine Corps, military life and equipment, and video games, movies, anime, and TV shows. He is helping to construct the battleship portal with other members of Operation Majestic Titan. He has just been appointed to the Audit Subcommittee.
At the time of publication there is one live RfA: RHM22, due to finish Tuesday.
Featured articles
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Eighteen articles were promoted to featured status:
- Princess Maria Amélia of Brazil (nom), a princess of the Empire of Brazil. (Nominated by Astynax)
- Sherman Minton (nom), a United States Senator and Justice of the Supreme Court. (Charles Edward)
- Broad Ripple Park Carousel (nom), a 94-year-old carousel. (Ealdgyth)
- White Stork (nom), which, according to Northern European legend, brings babies to new parents. (Casliber)
- Cloud (video game) (nom), a puzzle video game in which the player assumes the role of a sleeping boy and manipulates clouds to solve puzzles. (PresN)
- Flowing Hair dollar (nom), the first dollar coin issued by the United States federal government. It was minted in 1794 and 1795. (RHM22)
- John A. Macdonald (nom), the first Prime Minister of Canada. (Wehwalt)
- Agaricus deserticola (nom), a species of fungus found in southwestern and western North America. (Sasata)
- True at First Light (nom), by Ernest Hemingway. It described his 1953–54 East African safari with his fourth wife Mary, and sparked a literary controversy for its alteration after Hemingway's death. (Truthkeeper88)
- CSI effect (nom), or how crime television shows have affected public opinion on forensic science. (Cryptic C62)
- Fiji Parrotfinch (nom), a small finch 10 cm (4 in) in length. (Jimfbleak)
- Egyptian temple (nom), a majestic structure in which the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt worshipped the gods. (A. Parrot)
- Cyclone Waka (nom), one of the most destructive tropical cyclones ever to impact the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga. (Cyclonebiskit)
- Mike Jackson (nom), a retired British Army general who at the end of the Kosovo War famously refused to enforce an order by US general Wesley Clark (requiring Captain James Blunt, the future pop star, to act against Russian forces), reputedly telling Clark "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you". (HJ Mitchell)
- Villa Park (nom), home to the Aston Villa Football Club since 1897. (Woody)
- Unknown (magazine) (nom); according to nominator Mike Christie, "it was one of the few pulp magazines aimed at a mature and intelligent readership, and the memoirs of long time science fiction fans and authors are full of laments for its passing in 1943, a victim of wartime paper shortages".
- Thomas Beecham (nom), an English conductor who founded the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. (Tim riley)
- Nixon in China (opera) (nom), by US composer John Adams, inspired by President Nixon's 1972 visit to China. (Brianboulton, Wehwalt)
Featured lists
One list was promoted:
- Grammy Award for Best New Age Album (nom) (Nominated by Another Believer.)
Featured topics
One topic was promoted:
- New York State Route 28 (nom), with two featured articles and two good articles. (nominators TwinsMetsFan and Mitchazenia)
Featured portal
- Portal:Arthropods (nom) was promoted, with 26 selected articles (all good articles, FAs, or FLs), 26 featured pictures, and 16 sets of 6 facts displayed on the Main Page as part of the did you know process.
Featured pictures
Five images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
- Shiva as the Lord of Dance (nom; related article), Chola dynasty statue depicting Shiva dancing as Nataraja. (Created by Los Angeles County Museum of Art; fibres and dirt removed, background denoised, converted to sRGB by User:Maedin.)
- George Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll (nom; related article), a Scottish peer, Liberal politician and a writer on science, religion, and the politics of the 19th century. (Created by the popular Victorian English painter George Frederic Watts.)
- Saturn's rings in visible light and radio and Zoom on Saturn's rings with labels (nom; related article), extraordinary photographs from 2005 taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission. (Created by NASA.)
- White-throated Rock-thrush (nom; related article); "That's one cool-looking bird", said reviewer Logan. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
Featured sounds
- Kyrie eleison (nom; related article), a chanted prayer in Christian liturgy, directed by Fr. Dariusz Smolarek.
- Soler's Sonate 84 (nom; related article), composed by Antonio Soler and performed by Megodenas.
- Dial-up modem (nom; related article), the noises typical of a dial-up modem negotiating a connection with an internet service provider.
- Ave Maria (Gregorian chant) (nom; related article), a traditional Roman Catholic prayer asking for the help of the Virgin Mary. Here, it is performed as a traditional Gregorian chant.
- "A la Nanita Nana" (nom; related article), a traditional Spanish Christmas carol, performed by the U.S. Army Band Chorus in Spanish and English. Edited by Adam Cuerden for balance and noise.
- Harry S. Truman's farewell address (nom; related article). According to nominator Adam Cuerden, the speech "sums up Truman's presidency in a very compelling way."
- Two Christmas carols (nom) performed by the U.S. Army Band Chorus:
- "Dormi, dormi, bel Bambin" (related article), an Italian Christmas carol.
- "Il est né, le divin Enfant" (related article), a French christmas carol.
- 2010 State of the Union Address (nom; related article), a video of United States President Barack Obama's first official State of the Union address.
- "Ross's Reel" (nom; related article), a jazz piece from the early 1920s, performed by Eddie Ross.
- "Houston, we have a problem" was delisted and replaced by a longer file that includes more context for the listener.
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Case comes to a close after 3 weeks – what does the decision tell us?
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases but closed one case. One case is currently open.
Open cases
Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AEsh) (Week 6)
During the week, several arbitrators submitted proposals, some of which will form part of the final decision. Other proposals are likely to be submitted in the coming week.
Closed case
Noleander (Week 3)
This case was opened after a number of divisive noticeboard discussions involving allegations of misrepresentation of sources, as well as tendentious and antisemitic editing. 19 editors submitted on-wiki evidence, and several users submitted proposals in the workshop. Drafter Newyorkbrad also submitted a full proposed decision in the workshop which attracted input from arbitrators, parties and others. A total of 14 arbitrators voted in the case before the case came to a close today.
- What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?
- Users are reminded that the terms which were recently adopted in the Race and intelligence case (see motion below) are applicable to other disputes similar to those arising in this case.
- Noleander (talk · contribs) is indefinitely topic-banned from making any edit relating to Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish history or culture, or individual Jewish persons identified as such, broadly but reasonably construed, anywhere on Wikipedia.
- Noleander may request that it be terminated or modified after at least one year has elapsed. The Committee will give significant weight to whether Noleander has established an ability to edit collaboratively and in accordance with Wikipedia policies and guidelines in other topic-areas of the project. Any perceptibly biased or prejudiced editing concerning any other group would weigh against lifting of the topic-ban and could result in further sanctions.
- An editor must not engage in a pattern of editing that focuses on a specific racial, religious, or ethnic group and can reasonably be perceived as as evincing bias in favor of or against the members of the group. Article content must be presented from a neutral point of view and the contents of source materials must be presented accurately and fairly. Contributors who engage in tendentious or disruptive editing, such as by engaging in sustained aggressive point-of-view editing or repeatedly misusing sources to favor a particular view, may be banned from the articles in question or from the site.
- Editors are expected to refrain from making unnecessary references to the actual or perceived racial, religious, or ethnic background of fellow editors. Such references should be made only if they clearly serve a legitimate purpose. In the context of a noticeboard discussion or dispute resolution, it will rarely serve a valid purpose to seek to classify the participants in the discussion on this basis.
Motion
- Race and intelligence case - a motion drafted by arbitrator Roger Davies was passed to replace one of the case remedies. Consequently, "standard" discretionary sanctions from the case were broadened to be applicable to: any edit relating to the intersection of race/ethnicity and human abilities and behaviour, broadly construed, anywhere on Wikipedia. All contributors to articles in the newly defined area of conflict were reminded of the contentious nature of this subject and were cautioned that to avoid disruption, they must adhere strictly to fundamental Wikipedia policies.
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Two MediaWiki releases, but neither of them 1.17
On Tuesday (12 April), MediaWiki version 1.16.3 was officially released to external sites (Wikimedia Techblog). It included a group of three security fixes that had already gone live to Wikimedia sites, which are running a pre-release version of 1.17:
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After the release, however, it soon became clear that the first of the three issues had not been entirely cleared up, prompting the second release of the week, MediaWiki 1.16.4, on Friday (15 April) (Wikimedia Techblog, wikitech-l mailing list). The updates also took advantage of recent localisation efforts in order to provide users with an interface translated into their own language.
In related news, no official date has yet been set for a release candidate of MediaWiki 1.17, the version WMF wikis are currently running. A beta version is expected "probably next week", however, according to developer Tim Starling, who is overseeing the release effort (also wikitech-l). The accompanying discussion also included calls to "branch" version 1.18 within the next fortnight. Branching would separate a snapshot of the software from the developmental bleeding edge version of the MediaWiki software (also known as "trunk"), allowing it to be stabilised, tested and released in the next few months.
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- A discussion on the foundation-l mailing list gave an insight into the processes for dealing with inappropriate uses of the Toolserver, a topic touched upon in last week's Technology Report.
- Developers can now get a copy of the live code via Git, even though the main repository is stored centrally in a competing format, Subversion (wikitech-l mailing list. See also Signpost coverage of recent discussions about whether MediaWiki should move to Git altogether).
- Wikis, particularly non-English ones, can now tweak the way their Javascript-based table sorting code works to accommodate custom sort orders for special characters (so that ä sorts under ae, for example; see bug #8732).
- Brian Wolff's work in last year's Google Summer of Code programme on image metadata was merged into the main development version of MediaWiki (revision #86169, see also original Signpost coverage).
- Bugmeister Mark Hershberger blogged about how to get a bug report dealt with, which he argued consisted not of bumping the "Priority" field of older bugs, but in finding either a body of users to support your position, or a developer to write the code for you.
- Operations Engineer Ryan Lane gave a talk about the server architecture of Wikimedia projects (1h video, slides), explaining how the WMF manages to operate with far fewer servers and members of staff than other "top 5" websites. One of the subjects covered was community involvement in the server operations (supporting the operating staff of currently six engineers), by giving volunteers the opportunity to help "without necessarily giving out root" access, and keeping operations as transparent as possible through the use of public IRC channels and wikis.