This Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation's fall fundraiser opened. The fundraiser is set to last two months; no goal for the fundraiser was set publicly. Further, instead of assessing the success of the fundraiser through amount of money, it is decided that the success be assessed by the number of people who donated.
So far, the fundraiser has raised an estimated
US$26,600 in just over 14 hours. As of press time, 910 individual donations have been received so far; the largest single donations so far were two separate, anonymous $500 donations made on Tuesday.
The fundraising notice, linked from all pages on the English Wikipedia, caused some controversy at the beginning of the fundraiser, because it contained a scrolling marquee element that some users found distracting. The marquee was removed and replaced with a single quote that changes upon page reload; trustee Erik Moeller
commented, "Surely I agree with you that running a marquee wasn't a particularly
good idea. :-) I think in a few weeks/months we'll all laugh about it. ... Getting attention is always going to be a balancing act between success & irritation."
In related news, a
preliminary budget distribution has been released. This distribution for
FY2007-2008 estimates spending for the year at $4,611,000, in the following areas:
Office of the Executive Director (director, assistant, relocation and consulting fees): $509,000
Program Services: $185,000
Legal: $182,000
Board of Trustees: $201,000
Wikimania Conference: $150,000
Communications: $113,000
The fiscal year runs from 1 July, 2007 through 30 June, 2008. Advisor
Sue Gardnercommented on various aspects of the budget. On the topic of commission work, which is not reflected directly in the budget, Gardner said, "We are setting aside a small amount of money to commission work that can't be done by the staff, for either capacity or expertise reasons. For example, we've occasionally been hiring project managers, developers, legal firms, and analysts/advisors/consultants of various kinds."
On the topic of "Program Services", meanwhile, Gardner explained:
In the non-profit world, "program services" generally refers to initiatives designed to deliver core-mission services. So for the Foundation, for example, it would include partnering with NGOs to get Wikipedia materials into schools in the developing world, or staging Wikipedia Academies to strengthen the smaller-language projects. In this budget, the "program services" allocation will fund, for example, positions dedicated to partnerships development, volunteer coordination and public outreach. Typically in non-profits, the higher the percentage of the overall budget dedicated to program services, the better. That's because most charities want to reduce administrative overhead and reserve as much of their resources as possible for mission-related service delivery. In our case however, we would likely consider that the "Technology" portion of the budget part of core services delivery as well, since that money pays for bandwidth, servers, and so on. So, the fact that only 4% of our budget goes to program services doesn't really suggest that WMF underallocates towards core service delivery.
An analysis of
Category:Living people indicates that biographies occupy an increasing proportion of the total article count as Wikipedia grows. With the coverage expanding to explore how far the much-debated concept of
notability reaches, for some lesser figures there also comes the sense that having a Wikipedia article is a mark of achievement.
The latter phenomenon has now been treated in a
Reuters article headlined,
"Wikipedia page the latest status symbol". As it describes, for entertainment and media personalities who are not particularly famous but have some sort of following, the presence of a Wikipedia article validates the significance of their achievements. In contrast with the problem of self-promoters trying to boost visibility by creating articles directly, the story focused on people who generally respect the
conflict of interest guidelines. It also highlighted the disconcerting effect on the subject when an article's deletion is mooted (although critics who object to Wikipedia's impact might wish the opposite for themselves).
Writing such biographies seems to be a powerful incentive for Wikipedia contributors, as suggested by data compiled by
Greg Maxwell and
reported on the English Wikipedia mailing list Tuesday, 16 October. His report indicated that about 11% of the articles in the encyclopedia are about living people (and therefore governed by the
special policies related to such subjects). Or to be more precise, as Maxwell
put it, "11% of non-redirect articles pages are tagged with Category:Living people."
Not only is the proportion that high, it has apparently been growing steadily for several years. As the chart above shows, articles whose subjects are presently alive remained fairly steady around 4% for about two years. A sharp drop in late 2002 is associated with the use of
Derek Ramsey's
Rambot to create articles for US localities in bulk based on census data. (The initial spike, Maxwell guessed, is not reliable data and may be based on the conversion script used to transition to
MediaWiki.) Since then, these articles have multiplied markedly faster than the rest of the Wikipedia corpus, leading Maxwell to
wonder why Rambot might have set off such a reaction.
Despite arguments that editing activity on Wikipedia has slowed down overall, the downward slope at the end of the graph is not necessarily significant. When an article is started, it commonly does not have categories, which are more likely to be added by subsequent editors as time passes. Data pulled in this fashion from newer articles is thus less likely to be stable or complete.
Lawsuit filed to determine which state official edited Wikipedia
Two Associated Press journalists
sued officials of the U.S. state of Arkansas, in response to the denial of a
Freedom of Information Act request to determine which state computers had been used in various Wikipedia edits. According to the article, one edit removed controversial information about former Governor and current Presidential candidate
Mike Huckabee, while another reverted vandalism in current governor
Mike Beebe's article.
New image tool to supplant current tools
The
Free Image Search Tool (FIST) is the successor to both
WatchFlickr and
MissingImages. The new tool will look for free images for articles (manual list, categories) or to replace non-free/placeholder images. It currently uses
Flickr (what WatchFlickr did)
For a given article, it follows language links to find images (what MissingImages did)
Direct Wikimedia Commons search
The GIMP-SAVVY archive (PD images from USGov)
EveryStockPhoto.com (Creative Commons BY and BY-SA images)
More image sources will be added in time. There is also a
JavaScript tool that adds FIST links to the toolbox for articles (find images for this article), images (replace this image with a free one), and categories (find images for the articles in this category).
WatchFlickr and MissingImages have been turned off and redirected to FIST.
Private Eye gets regular Wikipedia column
Private Eye magazine has spun off its one-time article "Wikipedia Whispers" into a
regular column. The column generally covers violations of
the autobiography guidelines by politicians (this week it mentions
Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley claiming falsely that the Guardian had libeled him on Wikipedia), corporations and journalists, although other Wikipedia-related news is also covered sometimes (such as inaccuracies in obituaries of
Ronnie Hazlehurst sourced from a vandalised Wikipedia article).
Small analysis shows new users unlikely to have edited
A very small statistical analysis performed by checkuser
Raul654 showed that very few new users had previously edited an article from the same IP address. In response to a
question on Slashdot, Raul654
sampled ten recent users from the
new user log. Of these ten, only one had edited prior to registering. No data was released on whether the users made any edits after registering. The study draws from a small sample, making its margin of error relatively high.
Briefly
Discussion is ongoing at
Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2007 regarding the upcoming Arbitration Committee Elections. Current plans are for the elections to start on Monday, December 3, with candidates being accepted starting on November 1.
A collaboration called "
Gnome Week" is ongoing through Sunday; this collaboration aims to clear various backlogs, and clean up articles in need of help.
The WikiProject has made a very good deal of progress in copy-editing, as evidenced by the time line on its main page, completing hundreds of articles, but as over 2,000 still remain, they will require a good deal of help to completely clear out the backlog.
If an editor consistently impresses with excellent copy-editing, the project has its own
barnstar that you can award that user. Its syntax is {{subst:The Copyeditor's Barnstar|message ~~~~}}.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.14 (fb46c87), 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.
Fixed bugs
Undeletion of pages now fails more gracefully during a database lock. (
r26768,
bug 11343)
When an anonymous or non-autoconfirmed user views a move action in a log, they no longer get the (revert) link that allows the move to be quickly undone (it previously appeared, but was nonfunctional). (
r26804,
bug 11690)
New features
An
API 'allpages' query now allows sorting in reverse alphabetical order, and allows more than one page protection condition to be given at once. (
r26725,
bug 11634)
Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See
mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to
bugzilla or use
Betawiki.
Bharatveer: A case involving alleged edit-warring, incivility and personal attacks by
Bharatveer on
India-related articles. As a result of the case, Bharatveer's editing was restricted for one year.
Digwuren: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility by
Digwuren and alleged sockpuppets. As a result of the case, Digwuren and
Petri Krohn were banned for one year, and a general restriction imposed on editors working on Eastern European topics.
Giovanni33-John Smith's: A case regarding actions taken with respect to a block of
Giovanni33 in a dispute between him and
John Smith's. As a result of the case, both parties' editing was restricted for one year.
New cases
Alkivar: A case involving alleged misuse of administrative tools by
Alkivar, including protection of a page in a dispute in which he was allegedly involved, an indefinite block of
Equazcion, and a banner on his userpage stating that "comments left by anonymous editors may be removed without warning".
Martinphi-ScienceApologist: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility on pseudoscience-related articles.
Ebionites: A case involving alleged POV-pushing on the
Ebionites article.
Voting phase
Commodore Sloat-Biophys: A case wherein
Biophys alleges that
Commodore Sloat has been incivil and has edit-warred, while Sloat denies the allegations and alleges that Biophys has not been co-operative in the dispute. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy instructing the parties to refrain from interacting with or commenting about each other in any way.
Motion to close
The Troubles: A case involving a large number of editors on articles related to
The Troubles. Some editors attempted to withdraw from the case when its scope was widened at the request of an arbitrator to cover the entire area rather than only the behaviour of
Vintagekits, but in accordance with
arbitration policy, these attempts, along with other changes to statements after the case opened, were reverted by the
clerk. If closed, any editors joining in the edit-warring on the articles in question would be liable to be placed on probation, and the indefinite ban of
Vintagekits would be lifted.
THF-DavidShankBone: A case involving alleged POV editing by
THF relating to
Michael Moore, and alleged harassment by
DavidShankBone. Voting on remedies is split, but a motion dismissing the case because one of the parties has left Wikipedia stands at 4-1.
Allegations of apartheid: This case concerns the conduct of various editors in connection with a group of articles whose titles include the words "Allegations of apartheid". It has been alleged that these articles were created in violation of
Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, after several deletion debates concerning
Allegations of Israeli apartheid resulted in that article being kept. Issues have also been raised concerning comments made in deletion discussions and reviews. Several users who have created and edited the "Allegations of apartheid" articles have strongly denied any inappropriate conduct. Voting on most proposals is split, but an amnesty for past actions currently has a majority, and a motion to dismiss the case has the support of five arbitrators.
This Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation's fall fundraiser opened. The fundraiser is set to last two months; no goal for the fundraiser was set publicly. Further, instead of assessing the success of the fundraiser through amount of money, it is decided that the success be assessed by the number of people who donated.
So far, the fundraiser has raised an estimated
US$26,600 in just over 14 hours. As of press time, 910 individual donations have been received so far; the largest single donations so far were two separate, anonymous $500 donations made on Tuesday.
The fundraising notice, linked from all pages on the English Wikipedia, caused some controversy at the beginning of the fundraiser, because it contained a scrolling marquee element that some users found distracting. The marquee was removed and replaced with a single quote that changes upon page reload; trustee Erik Moeller
commented, "Surely I agree with you that running a marquee wasn't a particularly
good idea. :-) I think in a few weeks/months we'll all laugh about it. ... Getting attention is always going to be a balancing act between success & irritation."
In related news, a
preliminary budget distribution has been released. This distribution for
FY2007-2008 estimates spending for the year at $4,611,000, in the following areas:
Office of the Executive Director (director, assistant, relocation and consulting fees): $509,000
Program Services: $185,000
Legal: $182,000
Board of Trustees: $201,000
Wikimania Conference: $150,000
Communications: $113,000
The fiscal year runs from 1 July, 2007 through 30 June, 2008. Advisor
Sue Gardnercommented on various aspects of the budget. On the topic of commission work, which is not reflected directly in the budget, Gardner said, "We are setting aside a small amount of money to commission work that can't be done by the staff, for either capacity or expertise reasons. For example, we've occasionally been hiring project managers, developers, legal firms, and analysts/advisors/consultants of various kinds."
On the topic of "Program Services", meanwhile, Gardner explained:
In the non-profit world, "program services" generally refers to initiatives designed to deliver core-mission services. So for the Foundation, for example, it would include partnering with NGOs to get Wikipedia materials into schools in the developing world, or staging Wikipedia Academies to strengthen the smaller-language projects. In this budget, the "program services" allocation will fund, for example, positions dedicated to partnerships development, volunteer coordination and public outreach. Typically in non-profits, the higher the percentage of the overall budget dedicated to program services, the better. That's because most charities want to reduce administrative overhead and reserve as much of their resources as possible for mission-related service delivery. In our case however, we would likely consider that the "Technology" portion of the budget part of core services delivery as well, since that money pays for bandwidth, servers, and so on. So, the fact that only 4% of our budget goes to program services doesn't really suggest that WMF underallocates towards core service delivery.
An analysis of
Category:Living people indicates that biographies occupy an increasing proportion of the total article count as Wikipedia grows. With the coverage expanding to explore how far the much-debated concept of
notability reaches, for some lesser figures there also comes the sense that having a Wikipedia article is a mark of achievement.
The latter phenomenon has now been treated in a
Reuters article headlined,
"Wikipedia page the latest status symbol". As it describes, for entertainment and media personalities who are not particularly famous but have some sort of following, the presence of a Wikipedia article validates the significance of their achievements. In contrast with the problem of self-promoters trying to boost visibility by creating articles directly, the story focused on people who generally respect the
conflict of interest guidelines. It also highlighted the disconcerting effect on the subject when an article's deletion is mooted (although critics who object to Wikipedia's impact might wish the opposite for themselves).
Writing such biographies seems to be a powerful incentive for Wikipedia contributors, as suggested by data compiled by
Greg Maxwell and
reported on the English Wikipedia mailing list Tuesday, 16 October. His report indicated that about 11% of the articles in the encyclopedia are about living people (and therefore governed by the
special policies related to such subjects). Or to be more precise, as Maxwell
put it, "11% of non-redirect articles pages are tagged with Category:Living people."
Not only is the proportion that high, it has apparently been growing steadily for several years. As the chart above shows, articles whose subjects are presently alive remained fairly steady around 4% for about two years. A sharp drop in late 2002 is associated with the use of
Derek Ramsey's
Rambot to create articles for US localities in bulk based on census data. (The initial spike, Maxwell guessed, is not reliable data and may be based on the conversion script used to transition to
MediaWiki.) Since then, these articles have multiplied markedly faster than the rest of the Wikipedia corpus, leading Maxwell to
wonder why Rambot might have set off such a reaction.
Despite arguments that editing activity on Wikipedia has slowed down overall, the downward slope at the end of the graph is not necessarily significant. When an article is started, it commonly does not have categories, which are more likely to be added by subsequent editors as time passes. Data pulled in this fashion from newer articles is thus less likely to be stable or complete.
Lawsuit filed to determine which state official edited Wikipedia
Two Associated Press journalists
sued officials of the U.S. state of Arkansas, in response to the denial of a
Freedom of Information Act request to determine which state computers had been used in various Wikipedia edits. According to the article, one edit removed controversial information about former Governor and current Presidential candidate
Mike Huckabee, while another reverted vandalism in current governor
Mike Beebe's article.
New image tool to supplant current tools
The
Free Image Search Tool (FIST) is the successor to both
WatchFlickr and
MissingImages. The new tool will look for free images for articles (manual list, categories) or to replace non-free/placeholder images. It currently uses
Flickr (what WatchFlickr did)
For a given article, it follows language links to find images (what MissingImages did)
Direct Wikimedia Commons search
The GIMP-SAVVY archive (PD images from USGov)
EveryStockPhoto.com (Creative Commons BY and BY-SA images)
More image sources will be added in time. There is also a
JavaScript tool that adds FIST links to the toolbox for articles (find images for this article), images (replace this image with a free one), and categories (find images for the articles in this category).
WatchFlickr and MissingImages have been turned off and redirected to FIST.
Private Eye gets regular Wikipedia column
Private Eye magazine has spun off its one-time article "Wikipedia Whispers" into a
regular column. The column generally covers violations of
the autobiography guidelines by politicians (this week it mentions
Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley claiming falsely that the Guardian had libeled him on Wikipedia), corporations and journalists, although other Wikipedia-related news is also covered sometimes (such as inaccuracies in obituaries of
Ronnie Hazlehurst sourced from a vandalised Wikipedia article).
Small analysis shows new users unlikely to have edited
A very small statistical analysis performed by checkuser
Raul654 showed that very few new users had previously edited an article from the same IP address. In response to a
question on Slashdot, Raul654
sampled ten recent users from the
new user log. Of these ten, only one had edited prior to registering. No data was released on whether the users made any edits after registering. The study draws from a small sample, making its margin of error relatively high.
Briefly
Discussion is ongoing at
Wikipedia talk:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2007 regarding the upcoming Arbitration Committee Elections. Current plans are for the elections to start on Monday, December 3, with candidates being accepted starting on November 1.
A collaboration called "
Gnome Week" is ongoing through Sunday; this collaboration aims to clear various backlogs, and clean up articles in need of help.
The WikiProject has made a very good deal of progress in copy-editing, as evidenced by the time line on its main page, completing hundreds of articles, but as over 2,000 still remain, they will require a good deal of help to completely clear out the backlog.
If an editor consistently impresses with excellent copy-editing, the project has its own
barnstar that you can award that user. Its syntax is {{subst:The Copyeditor's Barnstar|message ~~~~}}.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.14 (fb46c87), 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.
Fixed bugs
Undeletion of pages now fails more gracefully during a database lock. (
r26768,
bug 11343)
When an anonymous or non-autoconfirmed user views a move action in a log, they no longer get the (revert) link that allows the move to be quickly undone (it previously appeared, but was nonfunctional). (
r26804,
bug 11690)
New features
An
API 'allpages' query now allows sorting in reverse alphabetical order, and allows more than one page protection condition to be given at once. (
r26725,
bug 11634)
Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See
mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to
bugzilla or use
Betawiki.
Bharatveer: A case involving alleged edit-warring, incivility and personal attacks by
Bharatveer on
India-related articles. As a result of the case, Bharatveer's editing was restricted for one year.
Digwuren: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility by
Digwuren and alleged sockpuppets. As a result of the case, Digwuren and
Petri Krohn were banned for one year, and a general restriction imposed on editors working on Eastern European topics.
Giovanni33-John Smith's: A case regarding actions taken with respect to a block of
Giovanni33 in a dispute between him and
John Smith's. As a result of the case, both parties' editing was restricted for one year.
New cases
Alkivar: A case involving alleged misuse of administrative tools by
Alkivar, including protection of a page in a dispute in which he was allegedly involved, an indefinite block of
Equazcion, and a banner on his userpage stating that "comments left by anonymous editors may be removed without warning".
Martinphi-ScienceApologist: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility on pseudoscience-related articles.
Ebionites: A case involving alleged POV-pushing on the
Ebionites article.
Voting phase
Commodore Sloat-Biophys: A case wherein
Biophys alleges that
Commodore Sloat has been incivil and has edit-warred, while Sloat denies the allegations and alleges that Biophys has not been co-operative in the dispute. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy instructing the parties to refrain from interacting with or commenting about each other in any way.
Motion to close
The Troubles: A case involving a large number of editors on articles related to
The Troubles. Some editors attempted to withdraw from the case when its scope was widened at the request of an arbitrator to cover the entire area rather than only the behaviour of
Vintagekits, but in accordance with
arbitration policy, these attempts, along with other changes to statements after the case opened, were reverted by the
clerk. If closed, any editors joining in the edit-warring on the articles in question would be liable to be placed on probation, and the indefinite ban of
Vintagekits would be lifted.
THF-DavidShankBone: A case involving alleged POV editing by
THF relating to
Michael Moore, and alleged harassment by
DavidShankBone. Voting on remedies is split, but a motion dismissing the case because one of the parties has left Wikipedia stands at 4-1.
Allegations of apartheid: This case concerns the conduct of various editors in connection with a group of articles whose titles include the words "Allegations of apartheid". It has been alleged that these articles were created in violation of
Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, after several deletion debates concerning
Allegations of Israeli apartheid resulted in that article being kept. Issues have also been raised concerning comments made in deletion discussions and reviews. Several users who have created and edited the "Allegations of apartheid" articles have strongly denied any inappropriate conduct. Voting on most proposals is split, but an amnesty for past actions currently has a majority, and a motion to dismiss the case has the support of five arbitrators.