The Signpost has been an integral part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2005. Nearly a thousand editors on the English Wikipedia alone have subscribed to it, in addition to the many on other foundation sites who have subscribed to global delivery. Others subscribe via email, including outside individuals interested in the movement. The Signpost's rise has been aided by a series of extremely respected and capable people; those who have been around for years will easily recall names like Michael Snow (January – August 2005), Ral315 (August 2005 – December 2008), and Ragesoss (February 2009 – June 2010). Editors who joined more recently will recognize HaeB (June 2010 – July 2011) and the Signpost's interim editors-in-chief since: Jarry1250, SMasters and Skomorokh.
After the recent departure of Skomorokh and SMasters, I offered to complete the largely formal process of pushing buttons to publish each edition. While the issues have gone out with few problems, Signpost journalists felt that appointing a new editor-in-chief would serve as a point of contact and final arbiter over journalistic decisions that confront us each week, like what topics to cover and matters of weighting. My name was floated as a possibility, and many of the regular journalists supported the idea. So I accepted.
Being the eighth editor-in-chief of the Signpost is an intriguing challenge, as the newspaper is written in a unique genre from the rest of the project: we have deadlines, are not limited to an encyclopedic style, and disseminate Wikimedia-related news—and I am sure nearly all of you have heard " Wikipedia is not a newspaper", our little irony. I also feel that I have to live up to the esteemed former editors who have done so much for the Signpost, while simultaneously blazing my own trail, bringing the Signpost to new heights, new places, and new readers.
One of my goals in changing the Signpost is reviving its dormant opinion desk. My definition of an op-ed has traditionally been expansive, thanks to my time as an editor of the Military History Project's Bugle. In my view, op-eds can be anything from "how-to" articles (e.g. the oft-cited " Let's get serious about plagiarism", or the Bugle's " John Goodall's The English Castle and delving into castle editing"), in-depth observations into a Wikipedia process, calls for participation in an important new initiative, or position pieces on a divisive newsworthy development. I am keenly aware that no matter what topic is being discussed on-wiki, you will find strong support and determined opposition among our diverse contributors. While we cannot publish every submission that comes our way, as we are looking for high reader interest and engagement, your imagination is the outer limit.
Send us your preliminary thoughts for an op-ed at the opinion desk, on my talk page, or to my email—whichever you are most comfortable with.
The Wikimedia foundation has just announced new community fellowships aimed at tackling two very different challenges faced by the movement. Both fall within the 2011–12 priorities of increasing participation and editor retention across the projects.
"Small", though, only refers to the size of the site: ironically, by some counts Bengali ranks sixth among the world's languages in terms of the number of native speakers, with nearly 300 million. We asked Tanvir why more Bengali-speakers aren't editing the site. He said, "Most Bengali-speakers get the English Wikipedia when they Google. A lot of them don't know about the Bengali Wikipedia, and still fewer that they can actually contribute to the site."
"Part of the problem is that Bengali is written in a non-roman script, and to edit you need software that supports this script. Many people don't have it, even though there are now increasingly satisfactory open-source tools, such as Avro Keyboard to which we have a link on our main page."
But there have been tensions, some of them even recent; for example, Tanvir told us that over the past few years, the Indian government has been blocking the transmission of Bangladeshi television into West Bengal, reportedly citing fears of "anti-Indian" propaganda and coded messages to separatists (the Signpost cannot reliably confirm the details or whether the blocking persists).
Despite these hiccups, Tanvir says, there are obviously strong links between the groups. We asked him whether the Bengali Wikipedia has the potential to bring the two groups together in terms of free information and intellectual pursuit. He says that both Wikimedia India and Wikimedia Bangladesh have been active in supporting the Bengali Wikipedia (Tanvir played a key role in establishing the Bangladesh chapter, which has already begun outreach in the country). He points out that although India has some 400 languages, Bengali is its second most spoken native language, after Hindi. Bengali matters to both countries, and articles on the Wikipedia concern the whole language region.
Furthermore, Tanvir says, West Bengalis are welcome to collaborate with the Bangladesh chapter—anything, he says, that will develop the editing community. "There are possibilities for joint ventures with Wikimedia India on workshops, and we would be glad to help, although so far this has not occurred." On the Bengali Wikipedia, there are "very few" editors from West Bengal, although "one of the four active administrators is from West Bengal".
The project will comprise a number of overlapping phases. Initially, information and feedback will be collected regarding editing patterns and the basic needs of the community, including technical and social issues that might have a bearing on editor engagement. These findings will be analysed and pilot projects designed on welcoming and training new editors, and on the creation of an outreach program. The pilot programs will then be run, and outcomes reviewed, measured, and reported, leading to implementation in the longer term.
Tanvir says the project will open opportunities for transferring to other small wikis what we learn about attracting and retaining editors on one. "Communities may live in very different sociocultural circumstances, but there are likely to be common factors in all small wikis that enable us to formulate more robust strategies."
Another dimension of the editor retention narrative is dispute resolution, highlighted by last week's release of data suggesting that a surprising proportion of Wikipedians find the social milieu problematic, with 23% of respondents rating their fellow editors "arrogant", 13% "unfriendly", 7% "rude", 5% "dumb", and fewer than half "collaborative", among their top two descriptors (question 17). Steven Zhang, according to Bouterse, has "a passion for resolving on-wiki disputes and helping others to do the same". In June last year he was instrumental in setting up the dispute resolution noticeboard (DRN) on the English Wikipedia, and his fellowship will use this as the starting point for developing new tools and strategies to improve mediation.
We asked Steven how he would score the noticeboard out of 10; he says 6–7 might be a fair assessment at the moment. Previously "there were many entry points for dispute resolution, as though they'd grown without any planning at all. Unless you were a seasoned editor, you wouldn't know which one to go to. My whole purpose was to draw the system into a 'single capsule' for low-end disputes, and if a particular dispute needs to go somewhere else, to direct it there subsequently."
What skills are necessary to work in dispute resolution, then? How do you get one religious or political group talking productively to their opposite number? "First, mediators need to know policy, because often disputants will quote policy, and you need to know your way around it yourself. But just as important, you have to look at a complex situation and clearly extract what the differences of approach are, separating the content issues from personal agendas. In the end, if they can't look at the situation objectively there may be nothing you can do, and it probably needs to go to another forum."
How much psychological insight is necessary? "You sometimes need to work out what the mind-sets of the parties are, and you can only do that by going into their edit histories. A lot of patience is required to succeed. Being aware of a number of typical scenarios might help both mediators and disputing parties to see their way through to resolution. For example, there's the ping-pong match, where participants don't listen to each other, the boomerang, where just bouncing back policy explanation does the trick, and the my source is better than yours dispute that can be solved by carefully working out how to present the different points of view in the article text. Then there's the compromise, where the final result is an amalgamation of opinions from parties, and the tough nut, disputes that would benefit from more formal mediation. You need to know when page protection may break the back of the dispute, and how to manage verbose editors, where tighter structure and intervention might work. Occasionally, a dispute has many issues and can be divided into components for better results.
Could admins play a greater role generally? "The problem for admins is that when a dispute is based on deep emotions—like some of the religious disputes I've mediated—they're reluctant to get involved. I think the admin and mediator hats are quite different. Being an enforcer and a mediator at the same time is a very hard thing to do. But having said that, experienced admins who have a detailed knowledge of policy and how to apply it can do a lot of good in resolving disputes."
"While on the issue of admins," says Steven, "I'll take this opportunity to say that I see a lot of RfAs where applicants are given a hard time for having less content creation experience than people think they should have; but my view is that dispute-resolution experience is a reasonable and valuable alternative to a lot of content editing."
As part of his fellowship, Steven will analyse the results of a survey of approximately 1,100 Wikipedians to determine the relationship between demographics and experiences of dispute resolution, and will collate opinions on how the process can be improved and who might be interested in participating as mediators. As part of the Wikimedia Fellow panel at Wikimania, he will outline the history of dispute resolution on the English Wikipedia, the results of his survey, and how they might feed into new strategies. In a related workshop at the unconference, he'll present developed case studies (anonymised) to compare how the audience believes the case should be resolved and how the case actually played out. He'll go on to create an online version so these test cases can be used by editors across foundation projects to improve their dispute resolution processes.
This week, we located a ragtag band of rebels fighting for survival in Wikipedia's remote Outer Rim. Started in February 2006, WikiProject Star Wars has endeavored "to produce a succinct, comprehensive, general, and authoritative reference on Star Wars materials" while discouraging the inclusion of extreme detail (fancruft) and in-universe writing. The project got off to an energetic start with over 100 members managing to fill six archives worth of talk page discussions in the project's first year of existence. That enthusiasm dwindled each of the following years until the project's last roll call revealed that only six active members remained in January 2011. With the 35th anniversary of the first Star Wars film approaching on May 25, we decided to help the struggling project search for a new hope. We interviewed "Darth" Sjones23, Harry Blue5, and EEMIV.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Star Wars? Do you follow any other science fiction franchises?
How does the project determine notability for the characters, locales, and technologies in the Star Wars canon? Does the project frequently deal with cleaning out in-universe language or fancruft?
What relationship does WikiProject Star Wars have with the Star Wars wiki
Wookieepedia? How does Wikipedia's coverage of Star Wars differ from that of Wookieepedia?
WikiProject Star Wars is home to 6 Featured Articles and 16 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these? What are some challenges to improving Star Wars articles to FA or GA status?
How does WikiProject Star Wars compare to the projects of other major franchises like
WikiProject Star Trek or
WikiProject Doctor Who? Do the projects share members or resources? Has there ever been a collaboration between these projects?
With the 35th Anniversary of the first Star Wars film on May 25, are there any plans to celebrate on Wikipedia? What articles could use some help in preparation for this milestone?
Next week's project is a little more down to earth. Until then, dig into some other solid interviews in the
archive.
Reader comments
After a hiatus of several months, the Signpost is again bringing its readers a series of interviews with editors who create featured content in under-represented areas. This week we interviewed Lemurbaby, who has written four featured articles and a featured list since she began editing in July 2007. Lemurbaby shared with us what it is like to create high-quality articles on African topics. One was promoted this week.
What motivated you to write about Africa?
What are the challenges in writing about these topics?
Why such a broad spread of topics? For example, why not write about animals and plant species?
Do you need to rely on French/Malagasy sources?
How do you think Wikipedia can improve its coverage of Madagascar in particular, and Africa as a whole? What kinds of outreach are necessary?
Seven featured articles were promoted this week:
Two featured articles were delisted:
Three featured lists were promoted this week:
Six featured pictures were promoted this week:
For the first time in nearly two years, the Arbitration Committee has no cases pending before it.
The closure of Rich Farmbrough last week marked the closure of the last open case before the Arbitration Committee. This has happened on only two occasions in the recent history of the committee—besides the instance in 2010, there was at least one period in early 2009 when there were no open cases.
However, full cases are not the entirety of the committee's workload. A total of six requests for amendments and two requests for clarification are still actively being discussed by arbitrators; and ban appeals, among other issues, are handled on their off-wiki mailing list.
One request for arbitration—a request for a full case—was filed a day after the last open case was closed. However, that request was unanimously rejected by arbitrators due to the lack of prior attempts at dispute resolution.
A request to amend the just-completed Rich Farmbrough case was filed 19 May by editor Nobody Ent, seeking a modification of the restriction on the use of automation in Rich's edits. "The restriction as currently written is overly broad and vague," Nobody Ent wrote, "even a template is a type of automation and is therefore included in the scope of the remedy as currently written." Arbitrator Jclemens stated the request is a strawman. "We can deal with specific requests for clarification that pose real problems."
Arbitrator AGK concurred with Jclemens' position, to the dismay of commenting editor Hammersoft: "The restriction isn't so clear as Jclemens seems to think it is ... there's apparently still uncertainty as to whether Twinkle or Huggle qualify as 'automation'".
Jclemens answered that criticism in his opening remarks by arguing that "in the context of the case, automation is clearly intended to be that allowing an editor to modify multiple articles or other pages in rapid succession."
Reader comments
“ | Good work. We are approaching finally to an indestructible corpus of knowledge. | ” |
The content of Wikimedia wikis has recently moved significantly closer towards indestructibility, it was announced this week by WMF developer and data dumps specialist Ariel Glenn.
Specifically, data from all Wikimedia wikis is now being successfully replicated to three non-WMF sites around the globe: C3L in Brazil, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and the servers of Your.org in the United States. Each site holds ("mirrors") at least five monthly snapshots ("dumps") of the publicly available wikitext-based content of all of the many hundreds of Wikimedia wikis. Your.org also hosts a copy of all previous dumps and will hold a single snapshot of all publicly viewable media. Moreover, Glenn reports, "getting the bugs out of the mirroring setup [has made it] easier to add new locations" as well as providing the latest snapshots to already established mirrors. As reported then, the first dump mirror came online in October last year, but this is the first time so many have been available concurrently.
Increasing the number of mirrors—made possible by the free licensing of Wikimedia wikis—helps to ensure that content is sufficiently accessible and geographically diverse to survive natural and artificial disasters; while multiple websites do host live copies of the English and other major Wikipedias, dump mirroring is particularly useful for protecting the content of smaller wikis, which do not enjoy such protection; the same used to be the case of the English Wikipedia, whose 2001 articles were long thought to be lost until old backups were uncovered in December 2010. Theoretically, dump mirrors could also offer better download speeds at times of peak usage, but that is unlikely to be a primary use case for Wikimedia wikis.
Of course, not everyone is so concerned at the possibility that Wikimedia's content might be destroyed in the immediate future, dump mirrors or no dump mirrors. As WMF Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling commented in a 2011 discussion of forking Wikipedia, "the chance of [WMF financial collapse] appears to be vanishingly small, and shrinking as the Foundation gets larger. If there was some financial problem, then we would have plenty of warning and plenty of time to plan an exit strategy. The technical risks (meteorite strike etc.) are also receding as we grow larger". That discussion focussed rather less on the technical aspects of making Wikimedia content indestructible, and more on allowing separate communities to emerge if Wikimedia communities broke up.
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.
The Signpost has been an integral part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2005. Nearly a thousand editors on the English Wikipedia alone have subscribed to it, in addition to the many on other foundation sites who have subscribed to global delivery. Others subscribe via email, including outside individuals interested in the movement. The Signpost's rise has been aided by a series of extremely respected and capable people; those who have been around for years will easily recall names like Michael Snow (January – August 2005), Ral315 (August 2005 – December 2008), and Ragesoss (February 2009 – June 2010). Editors who joined more recently will recognize HaeB (June 2010 – July 2011) and the Signpost's interim editors-in-chief since: Jarry1250, SMasters and Skomorokh.
After the recent departure of Skomorokh and SMasters, I offered to complete the largely formal process of pushing buttons to publish each edition. While the issues have gone out with few problems, Signpost journalists felt that appointing a new editor-in-chief would serve as a point of contact and final arbiter over journalistic decisions that confront us each week, like what topics to cover and matters of weighting. My name was floated as a possibility, and many of the regular journalists supported the idea. So I accepted.
Being the eighth editor-in-chief of the Signpost is an intriguing challenge, as the newspaper is written in a unique genre from the rest of the project: we have deadlines, are not limited to an encyclopedic style, and disseminate Wikimedia-related news—and I am sure nearly all of you have heard " Wikipedia is not a newspaper", our little irony. I also feel that I have to live up to the esteemed former editors who have done so much for the Signpost, while simultaneously blazing my own trail, bringing the Signpost to new heights, new places, and new readers.
One of my goals in changing the Signpost is reviving its dormant opinion desk. My definition of an op-ed has traditionally been expansive, thanks to my time as an editor of the Military History Project's Bugle. In my view, op-eds can be anything from "how-to" articles (e.g. the oft-cited " Let's get serious about plagiarism", or the Bugle's " John Goodall's The English Castle and delving into castle editing"), in-depth observations into a Wikipedia process, calls for participation in an important new initiative, or position pieces on a divisive newsworthy development. I am keenly aware that no matter what topic is being discussed on-wiki, you will find strong support and determined opposition among our diverse contributors. While we cannot publish every submission that comes our way, as we are looking for high reader interest and engagement, your imagination is the outer limit.
Send us your preliminary thoughts for an op-ed at the opinion desk, on my talk page, or to my email—whichever you are most comfortable with.
The Wikimedia foundation has just announced new community fellowships aimed at tackling two very different challenges faced by the movement. Both fall within the 2011–12 priorities of increasing participation and editor retention across the projects.
"Small", though, only refers to the size of the site: ironically, by some counts Bengali ranks sixth among the world's languages in terms of the number of native speakers, with nearly 300 million. We asked Tanvir why more Bengali-speakers aren't editing the site. He said, "Most Bengali-speakers get the English Wikipedia when they Google. A lot of them don't know about the Bengali Wikipedia, and still fewer that they can actually contribute to the site."
"Part of the problem is that Bengali is written in a non-roman script, and to edit you need software that supports this script. Many people don't have it, even though there are now increasingly satisfactory open-source tools, such as Avro Keyboard to which we have a link on our main page."
But there have been tensions, some of them even recent; for example, Tanvir told us that over the past few years, the Indian government has been blocking the transmission of Bangladeshi television into West Bengal, reportedly citing fears of "anti-Indian" propaganda and coded messages to separatists (the Signpost cannot reliably confirm the details or whether the blocking persists).
Despite these hiccups, Tanvir says, there are obviously strong links between the groups. We asked him whether the Bengali Wikipedia has the potential to bring the two groups together in terms of free information and intellectual pursuit. He says that both Wikimedia India and Wikimedia Bangladesh have been active in supporting the Bengali Wikipedia (Tanvir played a key role in establishing the Bangladesh chapter, which has already begun outreach in the country). He points out that although India has some 400 languages, Bengali is its second most spoken native language, after Hindi. Bengali matters to both countries, and articles on the Wikipedia concern the whole language region.
Furthermore, Tanvir says, West Bengalis are welcome to collaborate with the Bangladesh chapter—anything, he says, that will develop the editing community. "There are possibilities for joint ventures with Wikimedia India on workshops, and we would be glad to help, although so far this has not occurred." On the Bengali Wikipedia, there are "very few" editors from West Bengal, although "one of the four active administrators is from West Bengal".
The project will comprise a number of overlapping phases. Initially, information and feedback will be collected regarding editing patterns and the basic needs of the community, including technical and social issues that might have a bearing on editor engagement. These findings will be analysed and pilot projects designed on welcoming and training new editors, and on the creation of an outreach program. The pilot programs will then be run, and outcomes reviewed, measured, and reported, leading to implementation in the longer term.
Tanvir says the project will open opportunities for transferring to other small wikis what we learn about attracting and retaining editors on one. "Communities may live in very different sociocultural circumstances, but there are likely to be common factors in all small wikis that enable us to formulate more robust strategies."
Another dimension of the editor retention narrative is dispute resolution, highlighted by last week's release of data suggesting that a surprising proportion of Wikipedians find the social milieu problematic, with 23% of respondents rating their fellow editors "arrogant", 13% "unfriendly", 7% "rude", 5% "dumb", and fewer than half "collaborative", among their top two descriptors (question 17). Steven Zhang, according to Bouterse, has "a passion for resolving on-wiki disputes and helping others to do the same". In June last year he was instrumental in setting up the dispute resolution noticeboard (DRN) on the English Wikipedia, and his fellowship will use this as the starting point for developing new tools and strategies to improve mediation.
We asked Steven how he would score the noticeboard out of 10; he says 6–7 might be a fair assessment at the moment. Previously "there were many entry points for dispute resolution, as though they'd grown without any planning at all. Unless you were a seasoned editor, you wouldn't know which one to go to. My whole purpose was to draw the system into a 'single capsule' for low-end disputes, and if a particular dispute needs to go somewhere else, to direct it there subsequently."
What skills are necessary to work in dispute resolution, then? How do you get one religious or political group talking productively to their opposite number? "First, mediators need to know policy, because often disputants will quote policy, and you need to know your way around it yourself. But just as important, you have to look at a complex situation and clearly extract what the differences of approach are, separating the content issues from personal agendas. In the end, if they can't look at the situation objectively there may be nothing you can do, and it probably needs to go to another forum."
How much psychological insight is necessary? "You sometimes need to work out what the mind-sets of the parties are, and you can only do that by going into their edit histories. A lot of patience is required to succeed. Being aware of a number of typical scenarios might help both mediators and disputing parties to see their way through to resolution. For example, there's the ping-pong match, where participants don't listen to each other, the boomerang, where just bouncing back policy explanation does the trick, and the my source is better than yours dispute that can be solved by carefully working out how to present the different points of view in the article text. Then there's the compromise, where the final result is an amalgamation of opinions from parties, and the tough nut, disputes that would benefit from more formal mediation. You need to know when page protection may break the back of the dispute, and how to manage verbose editors, where tighter structure and intervention might work. Occasionally, a dispute has many issues and can be divided into components for better results.
Could admins play a greater role generally? "The problem for admins is that when a dispute is based on deep emotions—like some of the religious disputes I've mediated—they're reluctant to get involved. I think the admin and mediator hats are quite different. Being an enforcer and a mediator at the same time is a very hard thing to do. But having said that, experienced admins who have a detailed knowledge of policy and how to apply it can do a lot of good in resolving disputes."
"While on the issue of admins," says Steven, "I'll take this opportunity to say that I see a lot of RfAs where applicants are given a hard time for having less content creation experience than people think they should have; but my view is that dispute-resolution experience is a reasonable and valuable alternative to a lot of content editing."
As part of his fellowship, Steven will analyse the results of a survey of approximately 1,100 Wikipedians to determine the relationship between demographics and experiences of dispute resolution, and will collate opinions on how the process can be improved and who might be interested in participating as mediators. As part of the Wikimedia Fellow panel at Wikimania, he will outline the history of dispute resolution on the English Wikipedia, the results of his survey, and how they might feed into new strategies. In a related workshop at the unconference, he'll present developed case studies (anonymised) to compare how the audience believes the case should be resolved and how the case actually played out. He'll go on to create an online version so these test cases can be used by editors across foundation projects to improve their dispute resolution processes.
This week, we located a ragtag band of rebels fighting for survival in Wikipedia's remote Outer Rim. Started in February 2006, WikiProject Star Wars has endeavored "to produce a succinct, comprehensive, general, and authoritative reference on Star Wars materials" while discouraging the inclusion of extreme detail (fancruft) and in-universe writing. The project got off to an energetic start with over 100 members managing to fill six archives worth of talk page discussions in the project's first year of existence. That enthusiasm dwindled each of the following years until the project's last roll call revealed that only six active members remained in January 2011. With the 35th anniversary of the first Star Wars film approaching on May 25, we decided to help the struggling project search for a new hope. We interviewed "Darth" Sjones23, Harry Blue5, and EEMIV.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Star Wars? Do you follow any other science fiction franchises?
How does the project determine notability for the characters, locales, and technologies in the Star Wars canon? Does the project frequently deal with cleaning out in-universe language or fancruft?
What relationship does WikiProject Star Wars have with the Star Wars wiki
Wookieepedia? How does Wikipedia's coverage of Star Wars differ from that of Wookieepedia?
WikiProject Star Wars is home to 6 Featured Articles and 16 Good Articles. Have you contributed to any of these? What are some challenges to improving Star Wars articles to FA or GA status?
How does WikiProject Star Wars compare to the projects of other major franchises like
WikiProject Star Trek or
WikiProject Doctor Who? Do the projects share members or resources? Has there ever been a collaboration between these projects?
With the 35th Anniversary of the first Star Wars film on May 25, are there any plans to celebrate on Wikipedia? What articles could use some help in preparation for this milestone?
Next week's project is a little more down to earth. Until then, dig into some other solid interviews in the
archive.
Reader comments
After a hiatus of several months, the Signpost is again bringing its readers a series of interviews with editors who create featured content in under-represented areas. This week we interviewed Lemurbaby, who has written four featured articles and a featured list since she began editing in July 2007. Lemurbaby shared with us what it is like to create high-quality articles on African topics. One was promoted this week.
What motivated you to write about Africa?
What are the challenges in writing about these topics?
Why such a broad spread of topics? For example, why not write about animals and plant species?
Do you need to rely on French/Malagasy sources?
How do you think Wikipedia can improve its coverage of Madagascar in particular, and Africa as a whole? What kinds of outreach are necessary?
Seven featured articles were promoted this week:
Two featured articles were delisted:
Three featured lists were promoted this week:
Six featured pictures were promoted this week:
For the first time in nearly two years, the Arbitration Committee has no cases pending before it.
The closure of Rich Farmbrough last week marked the closure of the last open case before the Arbitration Committee. This has happened on only two occasions in the recent history of the committee—besides the instance in 2010, there was at least one period in early 2009 when there were no open cases.
However, full cases are not the entirety of the committee's workload. A total of six requests for amendments and two requests for clarification are still actively being discussed by arbitrators; and ban appeals, among other issues, are handled on their off-wiki mailing list.
One request for arbitration—a request for a full case—was filed a day after the last open case was closed. However, that request was unanimously rejected by arbitrators due to the lack of prior attempts at dispute resolution.
A request to amend the just-completed Rich Farmbrough case was filed 19 May by editor Nobody Ent, seeking a modification of the restriction on the use of automation in Rich's edits. "The restriction as currently written is overly broad and vague," Nobody Ent wrote, "even a template is a type of automation and is therefore included in the scope of the remedy as currently written." Arbitrator Jclemens stated the request is a strawman. "We can deal with specific requests for clarification that pose real problems."
Arbitrator AGK concurred with Jclemens' position, to the dismay of commenting editor Hammersoft: "The restriction isn't so clear as Jclemens seems to think it is ... there's apparently still uncertainty as to whether Twinkle or Huggle qualify as 'automation'".
Jclemens answered that criticism in his opening remarks by arguing that "in the context of the case, automation is clearly intended to be that allowing an editor to modify multiple articles or other pages in rapid succession."
Reader comments
“ | Good work. We are approaching finally to an indestructible corpus of knowledge. | ” |
The content of Wikimedia wikis has recently moved significantly closer towards indestructibility, it was announced this week by WMF developer and data dumps specialist Ariel Glenn.
Specifically, data from all Wikimedia wikis is now being successfully replicated to three non-WMF sites around the globe: C3L in Brazil, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and the servers of Your.org in the United States. Each site holds ("mirrors") at least five monthly snapshots ("dumps") of the publicly available wikitext-based content of all of the many hundreds of Wikimedia wikis. Your.org also hosts a copy of all previous dumps and will hold a single snapshot of all publicly viewable media. Moreover, Glenn reports, "getting the bugs out of the mirroring setup [has made it] easier to add new locations" as well as providing the latest snapshots to already established mirrors. As reported then, the first dump mirror came online in October last year, but this is the first time so many have been available concurrently.
Increasing the number of mirrors—made possible by the free licensing of Wikimedia wikis—helps to ensure that content is sufficiently accessible and geographically diverse to survive natural and artificial disasters; while multiple websites do host live copies of the English and other major Wikipedias, dump mirroring is particularly useful for protecting the content of smaller wikis, which do not enjoy such protection; the same used to be the case of the English Wikipedia, whose 2001 articles were long thought to be lost until old backups were uncovered in December 2010. Theoretically, dump mirrors could also offer better download speeds at times of peak usage, but that is unlikely to be a primary use case for Wikimedia wikis.
Of course, not everyone is so concerned at the possibility that Wikimedia's content might be destroyed in the immediate future, dump mirrors or no dump mirrors. As WMF Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling commented in a 2011 discussion of forking Wikipedia, "the chance of [WMF financial collapse] appears to be vanishingly small, and shrinking as the Foundation gets larger. If there was some financial problem, then we would have plenty of warning and plenty of time to plan an exit strategy. The technical risks (meteorite strike etc.) are also receding as we grow larger". That discussion focussed rather less on the technical aspects of making Wikimedia content indestructible, and more on allowing separate communities to emerge if Wikimedia communities broke up.
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.