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Volume 5, Issue 38 | 21 September 2009 | About the Signpost |
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( ← Prev) | 2009 archives | ( Next →) |
|
| |
Home | Archives | Newsroom | Tip Line | Shortcut : WP:POST/A |
|
The Signpost is calling for letters to the editor, position pieces, and short essays addressing important issues facing English Wikipedia and the broader Wikimedia community. Many Signpost readers have expressed interest in seeing opinion/editorial content; this will be an experiment in that direction, and it may become a regular feature if successful and well-received.
Opinions are welcome, but submissions should be fact-based and well researched, and should not be unnecessarily inflammatory in tone. Sets of contributions that address a single issue from different perspectives are especially encouraged. Submissions can be listed at the
opinion desk.
Reader comments
The cite.php extension, which drives the footnote system of references, has been updated by Dragons flight so that references can be defined within the references list instead of the body of the article. Under this system, the <ref> is named in the body of the article, and the corresponding named reference in the references section contains the full reference. Help:Footnotes#List-defined_references explains these "list-defined references".
The articles Arthur Rudolph and Anne Dallas Dudley have been converted to the new system as examples.
A long-standing complaint has been that inline references disrupt the wikitext and make it difficult to read. This change may help alleviate that problem. Extensive discussion about the change took place in July of this year, along with a straw poll about the change. This new method of referencing is strictly optional.
Foundation staff have reported that the Wikimedia Foundation office in San Francisco will be moving to a new location on New Montgomery Street in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco. The current office is not large enough for the size of the staff, many of whom have been hired since the Foundation moved to San Francisco; according to Daniel Phelps, "we've been over capacity for several months now." The new office, which will be located at 149 New Montgomery Street, will be large enough for the entire staff (including the usability team, which is now in a separate office) and will also have room for community meeting space. There is still some time on the lease at the current office; plans are to sublease this space by the end of November.
There were a few staff changes at the Wikimedia Foundation announced this week, and there are several new and continued job openings at the Foundation.
Anya Shyrokova, Development Associate for the Foundation, was promoted to a newly created role of "Stewardship Associate," who will work with donors that give from $500 to $10,000 to the Foundation. This leaves open her role of Development Associate; the job is open until 30 September.
There are also two jobs associated with the Ford grant for Multimedia Usability (see previous story) that are currently open. One is a project manager position; the other is a software developer for the project. Both jobs are temporary, lasting until July 2010. The project manager job is open until 30 September, while the software developer job is open until 2 October.
Erik Möller gave an update on Foundation-l on the status of the CTO job (see previous story); a firm has been engaged to help look for a suitable candidate and the job should be posted early this week.
Finally, Sue Gardner announced that Jennifer Riggs, the Chief Program Officer for the Foundation, has left the WMF; her last day was 18 September. Gardner wrote that "... Jennifer and I have agreed that despite [her] contributions, she ultimately will not be a good fit for the Chief Program Officer role." Gardner wrote that it would likely "take at least three months, and possibly more" to replace Riggs.
The formal Call for Participation in Strategic Planning processes and projects launched today with a project-wide sitenotice. Several ways to participate are listed, including serving on task forces. According to the call for participation in task forces,
Task forces will be the backbone for the strategic planning process. They will be given a specific topic and questions to answer related to emerging strategic priorities. Task forces will be responsible for engaging in in-depth research, analysis, and dialogue in order to produce recommendations for the community and the Wikimedia Foundation on their topic. Over the next few months (from October to mid-December), task force members will be asked to commit a substantial amount of time to this work. Each task force will have a core group of 5–10 members who will be asked to volunteer up to 10 hours per week or 100 hrs in total preparing, researching, and consolidating the group's work.
Applications will be taken at http://volunteer.wikimedia.org/, where those interested can indicate their skills and areas of interest.
There is also a need for experts on many subjects; people who are interested in being called upon for specialized expertise (rather than being on a task force) should also submit their name through that form.
The next strategic planning office hours will be held on 04:00–05:00 UTC, Wednesday 23 September, in the #wikimedia-strategy IRC channel; questions about the task force process can be asked here.
In " What the MSM Gets Wrong About Wikipedia -- and Why" on The Huffington Post, Jimmy Wales attempts to clarify what the introduction of flagged protection and patrolled revisions and its likely successor policies will mean for English Wikipedia. Mainstream media sources reported widely but inaccurately that flagged revisions would mean a significant increase in restrictions on editing ( see previous Signpost coverage). Wales explains instead that "English Wikipedia will soon launch a new feature that will allow you to edit, as an inexperienced user, articles that have previously been locked more-or-less continuously for years."
"What? Really?", writes Wales. "The solution to the problem of bad speech is actually more speech? Openness and collaboration actually work?" On Twitter, Wales said he hoped the piece would be read widely.
An audio feature, " Jimmy Wales on the (Encyclopedic) Value of Sharing", was posted this week on the Good magazine website.
Advice from Wales is also featured in the 19 September issue of New Scientist as part of the "Blueprint for a better world" series:
The most important thing we can do as individuals is to think. Instead of responding with your gut reaction, get the facts, get a complete picture of the problem and the possible solutions. As an exercise, take one of your strongly held opinions and challenge it. Spend a week, or better a month, researching it. You may find that you were mistaken. And if it turns out that you were right, then so much the better.
Time magazine will feature its first story on Wikipedia in over two years in the upcoming 28 September issue. " Where Wikipedia Ends" focuses on the trends discussed at Wikimania and elsewhere of a declining level of active editors on English Wikipedia ( see earlier Signpost coverage). The story includes commentary from Wikipedia researcher Ed Chi, whose analysis of recent database dumps was the basis for Wikimania discussions:
There are some bloggers out there who say, 'Oh, yeah, Wikipedia will be gone in five years.' I think that's sensational. But our data does suggest its existence in 10 or 15 years may be in question.
(Chi likely refers to Eric Goldman, who has been a frequent Wikipedia doomsayer: see earlier Signpost coverage.)
The Time story also mistakenly reports that Wikipedia "recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people." The current flagged revisions plan has not yet been instituted and will not, at least during the planned trial, extend to all biographies of living people. As Jimmy Wales explained recently (see above) it is hoped that the English Wikipedia flagged revisions implementation (along with ongoing efforts to improve site usability) will make the project more open and easier to contribute to.
While the size of the editing community on English Wikipedia currently appears to be declining slightly or holding steady, many small language Wikipedias' communities are still growing. Erik Zachte blogged about participation level statistics, arguing for the importance of contributor level as a metric for the success of individual Wikipedias—especially as the combination of bot-made articles and relative completeness make the traditional metric of article count less useful.
Yet, their ways of manhandling authors of new entries suggests that creating entries there is something to avoid although I did read a newspaper story about a high school dropout who created 400+ entries posing as a classics professor. Overall, my experience of Wikipedia was like that dealing with a gang of marauding young men roaming around the countryside looking for victims—yup, no country for old men.
The Wikipedia article the writer attempted to write appears to be Six Sigma Pricing ( AfD). The magazine is sent to all INFORMS members, who generally work in Operations Research and related areas); the article has also been mentioned in blog comments here.
Blogger and some-time Wikipedian Gene McKenna expressed similar frustration in his post " Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who’s Tired of Getting Beat Up", which sparked a lively set of discussions on the WikiEN-l mailing list.
The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.
At Wikipedia talk:Notability#Do news reports confer notablity? John Kenney sought clarification over the meaning of guidance that "routine news coverage of such things as announcements, sports, and tabloid journalism are not sufficient basis for a topic to have its own standalone article". Jinnai offered the opinion that it related to "stuff like late-night sports highlights on the all the professional games that were played that day, annoucements for stuff like space shuttle launching, and tabloids specifically go out to sensationalize trivial events" [ sic]. However, S Marshall countered that "A reliable source is a reliable source, and if there are several of them, the article passes the GNG." Gavin.collins argued that "Notability is about which topics should be included in Wikipedia as standalone topics, and sometimes news articles on their own don't provide sufficient coverage to provide information to provide context to the reader." The debate turned to whether coverage of individual sports matches would allow for the creation of an article on that match. Gavin.collins argued that while "loads of coverage can be found for one match ... I still think rountine news reports (no matter how long) are more or less a primary source" [ sic]. Masem said "(w)hen an event occurs, even if it has much coverage that day, it is difficult to ascertain if that event is truly notable to gain an article". S Marshall countered that "what makes something significant (i.e. notable) is the fact that it's been noted in reliable sources. Why should any other judgment of "significance", apart from the reliability of the sources, matter?"
A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.
Fourteen Requests for comment have been made in the week of 14–20 September:
The Dungeons & Dragons WikiProject was founded in October 2006 by the now-inactive Piuro as an offshoot of the Role-playing games WikiProject. In the three years since then, the project has seen considerable success, writing six featured articles and twenty good articles, and has grown to include more than 1,700 articles in total.
Today, we've asked three members of the project ( BOZ, Drilnoth, and Peregrine Fisher) to answer a few questions about their experiences there:
1. What can you tell us about the origins of the project?
2. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
3. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
4. Your project works in an area which has often been criticized for being too concerned with trivia and plot details. Do you believe such criticism is justified, and how has it affected the project? Have you developed any special methods for dealing with such issues?
5. What experiences have you had with the featured article process? It's a widely held belief that fictional topics are very difficult to bring to featured article status; do you believe this is true, and, if so, how does it affect your project?
6. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Are they useful collaborators, or do you feel that they have little to offer you? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
7. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles it shepherds, developing over the next year? The next five years?
Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: MuZemike ( nom) and Willking1979 ( nom).
Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: Loihi Seamount ( nom), Starvin' Marvin (South Park) ( nom), MissingNo. ( nom), Stanley Green ( nom) and Werner Mölders ( nom).
Ten lists were promoted to featured status this week: Desperate Housewives (season 1) ( nom), Seinfeld (season 2) ( nom), Listed buildings in Widnes ( nom), List of New York Mets managers ( nom), David Bowie discography ( nom), List of Tokyo Mew Mew episodes ( nom), Major League Baseball All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award ( nom), List of bridges to the Island of Montreal ( nom), List of international cricket centuries by Ricky Ponting ( nom) and List of defunct National Basketball Association teams ( nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: Rawlings Gold Glove Award ( nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Quark, Stanford Memorial Church, Harbhajan Singh, Samuel Johnson's early life, Economy of the Han Dynasty, General aviation in the United Kingdom and " North by North Quahog".
No articles were delisted this week.
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Eritrean Railway, Hobart, Mazda6, eye of Hurricane Isabel, Pirate, Old World screw-worm fly and Bethlehem Iron Works.
One featured sound was promoted this week:
| Livery Stable Blues | ( nom) |
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Thirteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
The Arbitration Committee opened two cases this week, and closed none, leaving five cases open.
An arbitration request regarding administrator Law's unblock of ChildofMidnight, who was blocked by Sandstein pursuant to the Obama articles decision, was filed by Sandstein himself. The Committee, having expressed general agreement with the substance of Sandstein's complaint, appears to be preparing to deal with the request by summary motion.
A request concerning the conduct of Dr90s, filed by Thibbs, is being declined as premature.
In an unprecedented move, the Arbitration Committee opened the Eastern European mailing list case by sua sponte motion. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing list archives which are alleged to show an extensive history of conspiracy among numerous editors of Eastern European topics; no official confirmation of the archives' provenance has been made, and several of the accused editors have claimed that the archives have been maliciously altered by the party or parties who publicized them.
As part of the ongoing investigation, the Committee has temporarily removed Piotrus' administrator status, and is considering placing restrictions on various other editors for the duration of the case. A draft decision is to be written by arbitrator Coren, but no date for it has been announced.
The Asmahan case was also opened this week. The filing editor, Supreme Deliciousness, alleges that Arab Cowboy has engaged in a variety of disruptive behavior on the " Asmahan" article; Arab Cowboy denies the allegations, and claims that Supreme Deliciousness is pursuing a disruptive agenda of his own. No drafting of proposals has yet taken place; a draft decision is expected from arbitrator FayssalF, but no date for it has been announced.
The Speed of light case entered its second week of deliberations. The case was filed by Jehochman, who cited concerns about "tendentious editing and disruption" by a large number of editors on the " speed of light" article. Unusually, arbitrator Cool Hand Luke, who is slated to draft the decision in the case, has directly asked the parties "what resolution [they] would like to see from this process, and what (if any) concessions would [they] be willing to give to achieve that end?"; the parties have provided a set of varied responses to this. A draft decision in the case is expected by 30 September.
The Noloop case entered its fifth week of deliberations. The case involves mutual allegations of disruptive conduct by several parties, and is expected to address the conduct of all the editors involved. Evidence has been presented by several editors, and one of the parties, Noloop, has posted a statement that he does not intend to participate in the proceeding, but no drafting of proposals has yet taken place. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, was expected by 13 September, but has been delayed.
The Lapsed Pacifist 2 case also entered its fifth week of deliberations. The filing editor, Steve Crossin, alleges that Lapsed Pacifist has engaged in advocacy, original research, and edit warring, as well as various other improprieties, over a wide range of articles. A temporary injunction prohibits Lapsed Pacifist from editing articles related to the Corrib gas project for the duration of the case. Several arbitrators have commented on the evidence or workshop proposals; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, was expected by 11 September, but has been delayed.
Two separate requests to amend certain clauses concerning Scuro in the ADHD decision were filed by Hordaland and Literaturegeek. Most of the Committee has not yet responded to the requests.
The Committee adopted a motion removing Pastor Theo's administrator status and indefinitely blocking him after an investigation determined that he was the same individual who had been community-banned under the name " Ecoleetage".
The Ban Appeal Subcommittee announced that it was granting an appeal by Life, reminding him to "adhere to the guidelines of harmonious editing". The subcommittee also granted an appeal by RMHED, unbanning him with several conditions.
Hersfold,
Hmwith, and
KnightLago were
promoted to
full clerks to the Arbitration Committee.
Reader comments
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.11 (7df99f2), 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.
This week saw a major code update, including changes for how MediaWiki handles file uploads and new Upload API capabilities that work with the Firefogg extension for Mozilla Firefox. As part of the updates, the cite features have been updated to allow list-defined references.
The software changes resulted in a number of bugs, and caused the pywikipedia Python library used by bots to break. [1] As a result, bots stopped working for a few days.
According to Kozuch [2], major bugs resulting from the updates have been:
Compatibility problems were discovered in the Usability Initiative's new edit toolbar, when it was used with Internet Explorer. Due to the bug, developers disabled the new edit toolbar for a few days while the bug was resolved.
A full list is available at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=code-update-regression
Two bots were approved this week: HerculeBot 2, for the transfer of interwiki links from redirects to redirect targets, and Yobot 8 to assist with a previously approved task. There are a number of outstanding requests for bots, which anyone is free to comment on.
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Volume 5, Issue 38 | 21 September 2009 | About the Signpost |
| ||
( ← Prev) | 2009 archives | ( Next →) |
|
| |
Home | Archives | Newsroom | Tip Line | Shortcut : WP:POST/A |
|
The Signpost is calling for letters to the editor, position pieces, and short essays addressing important issues facing English Wikipedia and the broader Wikimedia community. Many Signpost readers have expressed interest in seeing opinion/editorial content; this will be an experiment in that direction, and it may become a regular feature if successful and well-received.
Opinions are welcome, but submissions should be fact-based and well researched, and should not be unnecessarily inflammatory in tone. Sets of contributions that address a single issue from different perspectives are especially encouraged. Submissions can be listed at the
opinion desk.
Reader comments
The cite.php extension, which drives the footnote system of references, has been updated by Dragons flight so that references can be defined within the references list instead of the body of the article. Under this system, the <ref> is named in the body of the article, and the corresponding named reference in the references section contains the full reference. Help:Footnotes#List-defined_references explains these "list-defined references".
The articles Arthur Rudolph and Anne Dallas Dudley have been converted to the new system as examples.
A long-standing complaint has been that inline references disrupt the wikitext and make it difficult to read. This change may help alleviate that problem. Extensive discussion about the change took place in July of this year, along with a straw poll about the change. This new method of referencing is strictly optional.
Foundation staff have reported that the Wikimedia Foundation office in San Francisco will be moving to a new location on New Montgomery Street in the South of Market neighborhood in San Francisco. The current office is not large enough for the size of the staff, many of whom have been hired since the Foundation moved to San Francisco; according to Daniel Phelps, "we've been over capacity for several months now." The new office, which will be located at 149 New Montgomery Street, will be large enough for the entire staff (including the usability team, which is now in a separate office) and will also have room for community meeting space. There is still some time on the lease at the current office; plans are to sublease this space by the end of November.
There were a few staff changes at the Wikimedia Foundation announced this week, and there are several new and continued job openings at the Foundation.
Anya Shyrokova, Development Associate for the Foundation, was promoted to a newly created role of "Stewardship Associate," who will work with donors that give from $500 to $10,000 to the Foundation. This leaves open her role of Development Associate; the job is open until 30 September.
There are also two jobs associated with the Ford grant for Multimedia Usability (see previous story) that are currently open. One is a project manager position; the other is a software developer for the project. Both jobs are temporary, lasting until July 2010. The project manager job is open until 30 September, while the software developer job is open until 2 October.
Erik Möller gave an update on Foundation-l on the status of the CTO job (see previous story); a firm has been engaged to help look for a suitable candidate and the job should be posted early this week.
Finally, Sue Gardner announced that Jennifer Riggs, the Chief Program Officer for the Foundation, has left the WMF; her last day was 18 September. Gardner wrote that "... Jennifer and I have agreed that despite [her] contributions, she ultimately will not be a good fit for the Chief Program Officer role." Gardner wrote that it would likely "take at least three months, and possibly more" to replace Riggs.
The formal Call for Participation in Strategic Planning processes and projects launched today with a project-wide sitenotice. Several ways to participate are listed, including serving on task forces. According to the call for participation in task forces,
Task forces will be the backbone for the strategic planning process. They will be given a specific topic and questions to answer related to emerging strategic priorities. Task forces will be responsible for engaging in in-depth research, analysis, and dialogue in order to produce recommendations for the community and the Wikimedia Foundation on their topic. Over the next few months (from October to mid-December), task force members will be asked to commit a substantial amount of time to this work. Each task force will have a core group of 5–10 members who will be asked to volunteer up to 10 hours per week or 100 hrs in total preparing, researching, and consolidating the group's work.
Applications will be taken at http://volunteer.wikimedia.org/, where those interested can indicate their skills and areas of interest.
There is also a need for experts on many subjects; people who are interested in being called upon for specialized expertise (rather than being on a task force) should also submit their name through that form.
The next strategic planning office hours will be held on 04:00–05:00 UTC, Wednesday 23 September, in the #wikimedia-strategy IRC channel; questions about the task force process can be asked here.
In " What the MSM Gets Wrong About Wikipedia -- and Why" on The Huffington Post, Jimmy Wales attempts to clarify what the introduction of flagged protection and patrolled revisions and its likely successor policies will mean for English Wikipedia. Mainstream media sources reported widely but inaccurately that flagged revisions would mean a significant increase in restrictions on editing ( see previous Signpost coverage). Wales explains instead that "English Wikipedia will soon launch a new feature that will allow you to edit, as an inexperienced user, articles that have previously been locked more-or-less continuously for years."
"What? Really?", writes Wales. "The solution to the problem of bad speech is actually more speech? Openness and collaboration actually work?" On Twitter, Wales said he hoped the piece would be read widely.
An audio feature, " Jimmy Wales on the (Encyclopedic) Value of Sharing", was posted this week on the Good magazine website.
Advice from Wales is also featured in the 19 September issue of New Scientist as part of the "Blueprint for a better world" series:
The most important thing we can do as individuals is to think. Instead of responding with your gut reaction, get the facts, get a complete picture of the problem and the possible solutions. As an exercise, take one of your strongly held opinions and challenge it. Spend a week, or better a month, researching it. You may find that you were mistaken. And if it turns out that you were right, then so much the better.
Time magazine will feature its first story on Wikipedia in over two years in the upcoming 28 September issue. " Where Wikipedia Ends" focuses on the trends discussed at Wikimania and elsewhere of a declining level of active editors on English Wikipedia ( see earlier Signpost coverage). The story includes commentary from Wikipedia researcher Ed Chi, whose analysis of recent database dumps was the basis for Wikimania discussions:
There are some bloggers out there who say, 'Oh, yeah, Wikipedia will be gone in five years.' I think that's sensational. But our data does suggest its existence in 10 or 15 years may be in question.
(Chi likely refers to Eric Goldman, who has been a frequent Wikipedia doomsayer: see earlier Signpost coverage.)
The Time story also mistakenly reports that Wikipedia "recently instituted a major change, imposing a layer of editorial control on entries about living people." The current flagged revisions plan has not yet been instituted and will not, at least during the planned trial, extend to all biographies of living people. As Jimmy Wales explained recently (see above) it is hoped that the English Wikipedia flagged revisions implementation (along with ongoing efforts to improve site usability) will make the project more open and easier to contribute to.
While the size of the editing community on English Wikipedia currently appears to be declining slightly or holding steady, many small language Wikipedias' communities are still growing. Erik Zachte blogged about participation level statistics, arguing for the importance of contributor level as a metric for the success of individual Wikipedias—especially as the combination of bot-made articles and relative completeness make the traditional metric of article count less useful.
Yet, their ways of manhandling authors of new entries suggests that creating entries there is something to avoid although I did read a newspaper story about a high school dropout who created 400+ entries posing as a classics professor. Overall, my experience of Wikipedia was like that dealing with a gang of marauding young men roaming around the countryside looking for victims—yup, no country for old men.
The Wikipedia article the writer attempted to write appears to be Six Sigma Pricing ( AfD). The magazine is sent to all INFORMS members, who generally work in Operations Research and related areas); the article has also been mentioned in blog comments here.
Blogger and some-time Wikipedian Gene McKenna expressed similar frustration in his post " Bullypedia, A Wikipedian Who’s Tired of Getting Beat Up", which sparked a lively set of discussions on the WikiEN-l mailing list.
The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.
At Wikipedia talk:Notability#Do news reports confer notablity? John Kenney sought clarification over the meaning of guidance that "routine news coverage of such things as announcements, sports, and tabloid journalism are not sufficient basis for a topic to have its own standalone article". Jinnai offered the opinion that it related to "stuff like late-night sports highlights on the all the professional games that were played that day, annoucements for stuff like space shuttle launching, and tabloids specifically go out to sensationalize trivial events" [ sic]. However, S Marshall countered that "A reliable source is a reliable source, and if there are several of them, the article passes the GNG." Gavin.collins argued that "Notability is about which topics should be included in Wikipedia as standalone topics, and sometimes news articles on their own don't provide sufficient coverage to provide information to provide context to the reader." The debate turned to whether coverage of individual sports matches would allow for the creation of an article on that match. Gavin.collins argued that while "loads of coverage can be found for one match ... I still think rountine news reports (no matter how long) are more or less a primary source" [ sic]. Masem said "(w)hen an event occurs, even if it has much coverage that day, it is difficult to ascertain if that event is truly notable to gain an article". S Marshall countered that "what makes something significant (i.e. notable) is the fact that it's been noted in reliable sources. Why should any other judgment of "significance", apart from the reliability of the sources, matter?"
A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.
Fourteen Requests for comment have been made in the week of 14–20 September:
The Dungeons & Dragons WikiProject was founded in October 2006 by the now-inactive Piuro as an offshoot of the Role-playing games WikiProject. In the three years since then, the project has seen considerable success, writing six featured articles and twenty good articles, and has grown to include more than 1,700 articles in total.
Today, we've asked three members of the project ( BOZ, Drilnoth, and Peregrine Fisher) to answer a few questions about their experiences there:
1. What can you tell us about the origins of the project?
2. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
3. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
4. Your project works in an area which has often been criticized for being too concerned with trivia and plot details. Do you believe such criticism is justified, and how has it affected the project? Have you developed any special methods for dealing with such issues?
5. What experiences have you had with the featured article process? It's a widely held belief that fictional topics are very difficult to bring to featured article status; do you believe this is true, and, if so, how does it affect your project?
6. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Are they useful collaborators, or do you feel that they have little to offer you? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
7. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles it shepherds, developing over the next year? The next five years?
Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: MuZemike ( nom) and Willking1979 ( nom).
Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: Loihi Seamount ( nom), Starvin' Marvin (South Park) ( nom), MissingNo. ( nom), Stanley Green ( nom) and Werner Mölders ( nom).
Ten lists were promoted to featured status this week: Desperate Housewives (season 1) ( nom), Seinfeld (season 2) ( nom), Listed buildings in Widnes ( nom), List of New York Mets managers ( nom), David Bowie discography ( nom), List of Tokyo Mew Mew episodes ( nom), Major League Baseball All-Star Game Most Valuable Player Award ( nom), List of bridges to the Island of Montreal ( nom), List of international cricket centuries by Ricky Ponting ( nom) and List of defunct National Basketball Association teams ( nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status this week: Rawlings Gold Glove Award ( nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Quark, Stanford Memorial Church, Harbhajan Singh, Samuel Johnson's early life, Economy of the Han Dynasty, General aviation in the United Kingdom and " North by North Quahog".
No articles were delisted this week.
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Eritrean Railway, Hobart, Mazda6, eye of Hurricane Isabel, Pirate, Old World screw-worm fly and Bethlehem Iron Works.
One featured sound was promoted this week:
| Livery Stable Blues | ( nom) |
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Thirteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
The Arbitration Committee opened two cases this week, and closed none, leaving five cases open.
An arbitration request regarding administrator Law's unblock of ChildofMidnight, who was blocked by Sandstein pursuant to the Obama articles decision, was filed by Sandstein himself. The Committee, having expressed general agreement with the substance of Sandstein's complaint, appears to be preparing to deal with the request by summary motion.
A request concerning the conduct of Dr90s, filed by Thibbs, is being declined as premature.
In an unprecedented move, the Arbitration Committee opened the Eastern European mailing list case by sua sponte motion. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing list archives which are alleged to show an extensive history of conspiracy among numerous editors of Eastern European topics; no official confirmation of the archives' provenance has been made, and several of the accused editors have claimed that the archives have been maliciously altered by the party or parties who publicized them.
As part of the ongoing investigation, the Committee has temporarily removed Piotrus' administrator status, and is considering placing restrictions on various other editors for the duration of the case. A draft decision is to be written by arbitrator Coren, but no date for it has been announced.
The Asmahan case was also opened this week. The filing editor, Supreme Deliciousness, alleges that Arab Cowboy has engaged in a variety of disruptive behavior on the " Asmahan" article; Arab Cowboy denies the allegations, and claims that Supreme Deliciousness is pursuing a disruptive agenda of his own. No drafting of proposals has yet taken place; a draft decision is expected from arbitrator FayssalF, but no date for it has been announced.
The Speed of light case entered its second week of deliberations. The case was filed by Jehochman, who cited concerns about "tendentious editing and disruption" by a large number of editors on the " speed of light" article. Unusually, arbitrator Cool Hand Luke, who is slated to draft the decision in the case, has directly asked the parties "what resolution [they] would like to see from this process, and what (if any) concessions would [they] be willing to give to achieve that end?"; the parties have provided a set of varied responses to this. A draft decision in the case is expected by 30 September.
The Noloop case entered its fifth week of deliberations. The case involves mutual allegations of disruptive conduct by several parties, and is expected to address the conduct of all the editors involved. Evidence has been presented by several editors, and one of the parties, Noloop, has posted a statement that he does not intend to participate in the proceeding, but no drafting of proposals has yet taken place. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, was expected by 13 September, but has been delayed.
The Lapsed Pacifist 2 case also entered its fifth week of deliberations. The filing editor, Steve Crossin, alleges that Lapsed Pacifist has engaged in advocacy, original research, and edit warring, as well as various other improprieties, over a wide range of articles. A temporary injunction prohibits Lapsed Pacifist from editing articles related to the Corrib gas project for the duration of the case. Several arbitrators have commented on the evidence or workshop proposals; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, was expected by 11 September, but has been delayed.
Two separate requests to amend certain clauses concerning Scuro in the ADHD decision were filed by Hordaland and Literaturegeek. Most of the Committee has not yet responded to the requests.
The Committee adopted a motion removing Pastor Theo's administrator status and indefinitely blocking him after an investigation determined that he was the same individual who had been community-banned under the name " Ecoleetage".
The Ban Appeal Subcommittee announced that it was granting an appeal by Life, reminding him to "adhere to the guidelines of harmonious editing". The subcommittee also granted an appeal by RMHED, unbanning him with several conditions.
Hersfold,
Hmwith, and
KnightLago were
promoted to
full clerks to the Arbitration Committee.
Reader comments
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.11 (7df99f2), 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.
This week saw a major code update, including changes for how MediaWiki handles file uploads and new Upload API capabilities that work with the Firefogg extension for Mozilla Firefox. As part of the updates, the cite features have been updated to allow list-defined references.
The software changes resulted in a number of bugs, and caused the pywikipedia Python library used by bots to break. [1] As a result, bots stopped working for a few days.
According to Kozuch [2], major bugs resulting from the updates have been:
Compatibility problems were discovered in the Usability Initiative's new edit toolbar, when it was used with Internet Explorer. Due to the bug, developers disabled the new edit toolbar for a few days while the bug was resolved.
A full list is available at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=code-update-regression
Two bots were approved this week: HerculeBot 2, for the transfer of interwiki links from redirects to redirect targets, and Yobot 8 to assist with a previously approved task. There are a number of outstanding requests for bots, which anyone is free to comment on.