User : JPxG/SP 2006-2010

Sleuthing Wikipedia editors have found several cases of apparent plagiarism over the past two years by Tim Ryan, a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. It began with the discovery of an article last month containing language that closely matched a Wikipedia article, and more investigation found earlier articles that seemed to borrow from additional sources without attribution.

In response to these reports, the Star-Bulletin acknowledged the situation by adding corrections or editor's notes to some of the articles. Star-Bulletin Editor Frank Bridgewater took these actions after investigating the incident and also met with the newspaper's publisher, Dennis Francis, about the situation. However, Bridgewater said last week that he considered the issue of whether any action would be taken against Ryan "a confidential personnel matter."

This is not the first time a journalist has used text that originally came from Wikipedia without indicating his or her source. Another case involving the German news magazine Der Spiegel was reported in March (see archived story).

Story prompts investigation

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On Thursday, 22 December, the Star-Bulletin published Ryan's review of "Secrets of the Black Box: Aloha Flight 243", a History Channel documentary scheduled to air that evening. The program tells the story of Aloha Flight 243, involving a 1988 incident in which part of the airplane's fuselage tore off at normal flight altitude and caused a flight attendant to be ejected from the plane, along with injuries to 65 passengers and crew, before the plane made an emergency landing.

Wikipedia editor TenOfAllTrades soon pointed out that several paragraphs in Ryan's story were strikingly similar to the text of the Wikipedia article on Aloha Flight 243. This discovery was prompted, he said, because he had recently responded to a question on Wikipedia's science reference desk about airplane doors and ended up reading the article. When he came across Ryan's story via a link from Fark.com, he recognized that some of it matched the Wikipedia article he had just read.

To address the possibility that Ryan might have written both articles, a check of the Wikipedia article's history showed that two different users wrote portions of the paragraphs in question, along with one person who edited without logging in. These edits were made between January and May 2005. Ryan's article did change the spelling of flight attendant Jane Santo-Tomita's name to Sato-Tomita, as it also appears in other coverage from the newspaper. Presumably the Star-Bulletin, which must have reported on the incident contemporaneously, would get this item right.

On 24 December, after the matter was brought to the editor's attention, the Star-Bulletin ran a correction regarding Ryan's story. Based on the correction, Ryan apparently explained that he got the information from Reference.com rather than directly from Wikipedia. In any case, the newspaper acknowledged that the story "failed to attribute the information to either source."

Additional cases

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With assistance from users Dragons flight and Calton, several other instances of possible plagiarism by Ryan were also identified. As Dragons flight commented, "a writer is never caught for their first act of plagiarism". The next to be discovered was a 7 June 2005 review of the Toyota Highlander hybrid SUV, some of which was traced to an article in the Sacramento Bee by Mark Glover, from 15 April 2005. TenOfAllTrades thought this might have a different explanation, however, such as both reporters relying on the same press release. Meanwhile, a travel article about Australia had language matching several other sites; Calton suggested it may originally have come from a government factsheet.

A more intricate case involved a 17 December 2004 article interviewing cellist Matt Haimovitz in connection with his appearance at a Honolulu arts center. Nearly all of the quotes from Haimovitz matched up verbatim with an interview conducted by Steve Inskeep in 2003 on All Things Considered. This was discovered because the remaining "quotes", if they were not exactly the same as on All Things Considered, corresponded to the text on NPR's website accompanying the interview instead.

The editors tracking down these cases thought the Haimovitz story was the most serious. As summarized by Dragons flight, Ryan "appears to lift material from the NPR story and pass them off as quotes from a personal interview he conducted. That would seem particularly wrong, and hard to explain." Ultimately, an editor's note added to the story stated: "Information for this story was gathered through an interview with Matt Haimovitz, but many questions and answers are similar to those in a National Public Radio interview with Haimovitz." A note acknowledging the Sacramento Bee was also added to the Toyota Highlander review.

According to an NPR spokesperson, the text on the website is written by NPR Online staff, and naturally is based closely on the audio interview. It is not known whether Ryan has ever been affiliated with NPR, but he appears to have written for the Star-Bulletin since at least 1996, based on a search of the newspaper's online archives. A Variety profile says he also reported from Hawaii for Variety and several other publications in that time. The profile adds that Ryan works out of his home and, as a surfer, "only has to glance over his computer monitor to the ocean below".

SP 2006-2010

Arbitrator elections set to begin in a week

Contribute —

acejan2006

A chat with the elected Arbitrators
6 February 2006

Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size
23 January 2006

Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns
16 January 2006

ArbCom candidates (part two)
9 January 2006

ArbCom candidates
2 January 2006

Straw poll closes
19 December 2005

Jimbo starts new poll regarding election
5 December 2005

Last chance to run for ArbCom
28 November 2005

ArbCom voting process
14 November 2005

ArbCom duties and requirements
7 November 2005

A closer look: the calls for reform of the ArbCom
31 October 2005

A look back: the 2004 ArbCom elections
24 October 2005

Current ArbCom members
17 October 2005

Criticism of the ArbCom
10 October 2005

About the Arbitration process
3 October 2005

The history of the Arbitration Committee
26 September 2005

Introduction to a special series: A look at the upcoming Arbitration Committee elections
19 September 2005

This week, the community adapted guidelines to the Arbitration Committee elections after weeks of discussion. With tacit approval from Jimbo Wales, the elections will start in one week.

The election will run from 9 January until the end of 22 January, with the winners taking office on 1 February. During the two-week voting period, voters will use each candidate's subpage to either vote for or against the candidate. The subpages are currently used for statement and questions; once the voting begins, a requests for adminship-like vote will be added to each page. Anyone who created an account on or prior to 30 September, 2005 will be enfranchised. Also, in an effort to prevent antagonistic feelings created by the "disendorsements" used last year, voters are requested to keep all comments on the voting page as brief as possible.

After the closure of the election, anyone with more support votes than oppose votes will be eligible for the Arbitration Committee; Jimbo Wales will make the final appointments. However, Wales also noted that he had a "general intention to appoint candidates mostly in the order of the percentage of approval in the community." If there are more qualified candidates than open seats, then either the ArbCom will be expanded, or a pool of reserve Arbitrators will be created.

Wales also expressed his approval of the process tacitly by editing the elections page, indicating that he was aware of the community's decision and choices.

In addition, the elections page was also moved from Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections December 2005 to Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections January 2006 this week, indicating that the elections will be held in January instead of December 2005.

Finally, several more candidates joined the race this week: Ultraexactzz (statement), Ajwebb (statement), AntonioMartin (statement), and Kylehamilton (statement).

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

Contribute —

By Flcelloguy and Ral315

Jimbo Wales makes personal appeal for donations

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The Wikimedia Foundation fundraising drive, which began last week, continued this week. It will last until 6 January. As of January 05, 2006, nearly US$341,610.09 had been raised, although falling short of the wished for US$500,000 Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer had expressed. With donations fewer than expected, Jimbo Wales made a personal appeal for donations, urging people to "consider a generous donation to the Wikimedia Foundation... to take back the world."

Steward election continues

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The steward elections continue this week. The vote runs until January 10.

Userboxes spark controversy

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The role of userboxes, popular colored rectangles placed in user pages, ignited controversy this week. After Kelly Martin started deleting userboxes deemed controversial, offensive, or containing fair use images, a request for comments was filed against her. Several users defended her actions, while others sharply criticized her. Two other RfCs were also submitted relating to the deletion of userboxes. A request for arbitration was also filed later in the week.

The RfCs also generated discussion on the userboxes, with Wikipedians arguing both for and against their use. A policy page was created for drafting new policy regarding userboxes. In addition, issues pertaining to the use of fair-use images on the boxes and boxes that could be interpreted as offensive were being discussed.

Linking to dates questioned

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This week, the guideline at the Manual of Style regarding the linking of years and dates was brought into question, generating debate. The discussion started with the mass de-linking of years by Bobblewik using the AutoWikiBrowser; in addition, Bobblewik requested permission for a bot to do the work. Discussion was started about whether the guideline should be changed, with several editors arguing that the linking of dates was good, while others argued that the linking of dates was inappropriate. Bobblewik was blocked at first for the rapid de-linking of dates with the AutoWikiBrowser under suspicion of using a bot; however, it was later clarified that no bot had been used (the AutoWikiBrowser requires that the user manually verify each edit).

The proposed bot did not gain consensus, while attempts to change the Manual of Style resulted in heated debate. Also, Bluemoose, who created the AutoWikiBrowser, deleted his work after he apparently left Wikipedia.

Wikipedia "micronation" formed

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A micronation of Wikipedia was formed this week. Formed by Cctoide, CuBiXcRaYfIsH, and Talrias, Tirben was created on Friday.

Esperanza concludes election

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Esperanza concluded its elections this week. Celestianpower was chosen Administrator General, while FireFox, Karmafist, and Titoxd were elected part of the advisory council.

Briefly

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The Slovak Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
The French Wiktionary has reached 100,000 articles with the English word mourning.
The Bosnian Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 125,000 articles.
The Aragonese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. The 1,000th article is an:Ziudá de Panamá
The Chinese Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
The Portuguese Wiktionary (Wikcionário) has reached 10,000 entries. The 10,000th entry is Readiness.
The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles. The 1,000th article is ceb:Leon Kilat.
The Ido Wiktionary has reached 30,000 articles.
The Latin Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
The Albanian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles, after the Roboti bot generated thousands of stubs for years, decades, and centuries this week.
The Spanish Wikiquote has reached 1,000 articles.
The Spanish-language edition of Wikinews has reached 1,000 articles with Una comisión diplomática se reúne próximamente con las FARC
The Low Saxon Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The Thai Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
The Simple English Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
The Chinese Wiktionary has reached 5,000 articles.
The Indonesian Wikiquote has reached 500 articles.
The Dutch Wikibooks has reached 500 modules.

SP 2006-2010

ArbCom candidates

Contribute —

acejan2006

Because the Arbitration Committee elections currently has an abundance of candidates (41), the Wikipedia Signpost has compiled a short guide to all the candidates. Each candidate has links to the user page and talk page, along with the number of edits at press time, a link to Kate's Tool, the first edit date, the date when adminship was granted (if applicable), along with the link to the successful RfA and the vote tally, a quote from the candidate's statement, and any other pertinent information. We urge you not to consider only the statistics we provide here when voting; statistics can often be misleading and only offer one view of the candidate. In addition, comparisons of statistics between candidates on this page can be even more misleading – for example, earlier requests for adminships usually received fewer votes than they do today. In addition, several candidates (indicated with "Administrator since prior to 2003") were promoted before the start of the RfA page in July 2003; candidacies were announced on the mailing list back then.

Each of the candidate's quote is directly taken from the candidate's statement. No changes, including spelling or grammatical errors, have been made, except for formatting. In addition, some quotes may be from several parts of the candidate's statement; i.e. combinations of sentences from the statement. The "other" section gives information on the candidate that pertains to dispute resolution: mainly noting if the candidate is a current member of the Arbitration Committee or Mediation Committee or whether the candidate participated in last year's ArbCom elections.

In those elections, 34 candidates ran, and the vote was held using approval voting. The top seven candidates were chosen for the ArbCom.

Ajwebb

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User name: Ajwebb (talk)
Number of edits: 132 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 9, 2005
Statement: "I am a relatively new user to Wikipedia, but I enjoy the community and feel that I would be a strong addition to the Arbitration Committee. I would follow all procedures accurately, professionally, and do my best to resolve the situation and work closely with other members of the Arbitration Committee."

AntonioMartin

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User name: AntonioMartin (talk)
Number of edits: 17680 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 16, 2002
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: "I promise if I am honored with such position I will do my best to maintain discrepances according to wikipedia principles, and to keep expanding wikipedia into the website I think it will be, in other words, the website of the 00's. Furthermore, I will keep pursuing unity among writers."

Aranda56

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User name: Aranda56 (talk)
Number of edits: 6261 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 20, 2005
Statement: "I felt recenly that the arb-com takes too long to make a decistion. If I get elected to the arb-com I would try to make desistions that are best for Wikipedia and to look at each case very closely in my own view."

Blankfaze

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User name: Blankfaze (talk)
Number of edits: 9236 Kate's Tool
First edit date: April 3, 2004
Administrator since July 6, 2004 (28/2/1)
Statement: "Too many people see the Arbitration process as a sort of Inquisition or prosecutorial body; perhaps we need to be reminded of its original purpose: to arbitrate, to settle, disputes. If elected I would take a solutions-oriented approach to arbitration. There are times when punitive measures must be taken, but it should not be the go-to solution. I offer myself up as a qualified, experienced, intelligent candidate for the Committee."
Other: Candidate in December 2004 ArbCom elections; received 95 approval votes (18 percent), coming in 19th of 34

Charles Matthews

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User name: Charles Matthews (talk)
Number of edits: 52379 Kate's Tool
First edit date: February 25, 2002
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: "Wikipedia is working so well in general it is possible to talk about the ArbCom as a necessary evil, rather than use the language of crisis and panic about it. For me, it's mainly about the content. I'm concerned about systemic bias issues - the need for good peripheral vision, I'd say, in the whole approach."
Other: Ran in the December 2004 ArbCom elections; came in 14th (top 7 were selected) out of 34 candidates with 132 approval votes, or 25 percent of the total votes

DG

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User name: DG (talk)
Number of edits: 482 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 20, 2004
Statement: "I intend to bring a (sorely needed) sense of humour and perspective to the proceedings of the committee. Perhaps then disputes could be handled more fairly and efficiently. Excessive seriousness and organisation can be counter-productive to any work. With work so important and serious as that of this committee, airs of seriousness or importance could be lethal!"
Other: Also ran in the December 2004 ArbCom elections; came in 32nd of 34 candidates with 31 approval votes, or six percent of the votes

Dmcdevit

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User name: Dmcdevit (talk)
Number of edits: 8559 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 2, 2004
Administrator since July 24, 2005 (38/1/1)
Statement: "I think the ability of ArbCom to enforce binding remedies more creative and productive than a standard block is a major part of its success. Solutions like revert or personal attack parole, probation, per article, or topic banning, and other more customized remedies allow users to continue to operate in the community and contribute to the community, while targetting the source of the problem. I would continue to encourage such targetted solutions and view banning as a last resort."

Doktorbuk

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User name: Doktorbuk (talk)
Number of edits: 988 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 4, 2005
Statement: "I feel my short time here has already taught me how necessary it is to have time, effort and determination; but also a sense of fairness and understanding. I feel able to help to listen to all sides, to understand the frustration and weed out the vandals."

Edivorce

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User name: Edivorce (talk)
Number of edits: 25Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 10, 2005
Statement: "My approach to resolving content disputes would be 1)establish a clear record of the development the article 2)assist each party in the articulation of relief the requesting and basis for their request 3)apply wikipedia governing documents, guiding principals and established practices in making a determination. I have no axe to grind and can assure neutrality and impartiality."

Everyking

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User name: Everyking (talk)
Number of edits: 68945 Kate's Tool
First edit date: February 13, 2004
Administrator since May 10, 2004 (20/1/0)
Statement: "My views on the ArbCom are, in fact, mixed: on the one hand, I see it as a useful and positive means of final dispute resolution in the community, and probably the best form of that; in general I favor increased ArbCom involvement in resolving matters, an expanded scope for the committee and ideally an expanded size to go along with that. On the other hand, of course, I have frequently had very strong disagreements with the ArbCom over matters of individual rulings against users."
Other: Ran in December 2004 ArbCom elections; received 83 approval votes (16 percent), finishing 22nd of 34th

Filiocht

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User name: Filiocht (talk)
Number of edits: 9870 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 5, 2003
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: "I run on a simple platform. I would aim to follow the following basic principles: Equality of respect, Wikilove, assume good faith, Talking is better than blocking, [and] We're here to build an encyclopaedia, not a playground."

Fred Bauder

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User name: Fred_Bauder (talk · contribs)
Number of edits: 9650 Kate's Tool
First edit date: February 28, 2002 (as Fredbauder (talk · contribs)
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: " I have innovated with respect to Wikipedia:Probation and creation of a /Workshop page for discussion of cases before things are firmed up for actual voting. The workshop page, if used by arbitrators, parties and others, offers a broadbased public venue for discussion of the details of arbitration cases and evidence"
Other: Appointed by Jimbo Wales, Fred Bauder has been a member of the Arbitration Committee ever since its inception.

Ilyanep

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User name: Ilyanep (talk)
Number of edits: 4613 Kate's Tool
First edit date: May 7, 2003
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: "I promise that if I am elected, I will try to help find a way to expedite cases while still allowing time for the arbitrators to compile, read, and decide on evidence, which I find very important. I also promise to stay on for my entire term, as I see myself as a person who finishes what he started. The ArbCom has also been accused of bias in the past. I commit myself to strict neutrality in all cases, and am able to see when I can not possibly be neutral, in which case I will recuse. I don't see that happenning too often, however."
Other: Bureaucrat since June 20, 2004 (15/0/0)

Improv

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User name: Improv (talk)
Number of edits: 2313 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 28, 2004 (December 3, 2002 as User:Pgunn)
Administrator since February 19, 2005 (45/2/1)
Statement: "I don't have a platform, and promise only to be fair as I see it and to put in the effort needed in a timely fashion to prevent delay. All I can say on policy is that I think banning has a place, but I don't think it's possible to say anything useful as to how it should be handled in general. I will also suggest improvements that I think will be productive."
Other: Candidate in December 2004 ArbCom elections; received 74 approval votes (14 percent), coming in 23 of 34. Member of Mediation Committee since January 2005.

Ingoolemo

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User name: Ingoolemo (talk)
Number of edits: 9227 Kate's Tool
First edit date: May 27, 2004
Administrator since June 7, 2005 (18/0/0)
Statement: "For me, the most important of the five pillars is the one that states that we are an encyclopaedia. More than any other idea or policy, this is the one that will serve as my guiding principle if I am elected to the committee. To sort through all the possible ramifications of any ruling is a task that requires a thoughtful, reasonable, and humble ;) person such as myself."

Jdforrester

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User name: Jdforrester (talk)
Number of edits: 12571 Kate's Tool
First edit date: February 27, 2003
Administrator since prior to 2003
Statement: "I strongly believe that the Committee's real purpose is to prevent further damage to the project by taking measures as we see fit, not to mete out some form of 'justice' as punishment of those deemed to have done wrong. Where I have considered banning people, it is not because I think that they "deserve" it in some way, but more that I regretfully doubt that their continued presence is not damaging to the project. Of course, 'damage' is in the eye of the beholder, and so I hope that my decisions have reflected well the overall opinion of our Community."
Other: First appointed to the Arbitration Committee by Jimbo Wales at the beginning of the committee; failed re-election bid in December 2004 elections, coming in 11th of 34 with 155 approval votes (30 percent). Re-appointed by Wales to the committee in July 2005.

Jayjg

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User name: Jayjg (talk)
Number of edits: 31720 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 15, 2004
Administrator since September 13, 2004 (28/8/4)
Statement: "I believe the Arbitration Committee is an unfortunate, but necessary, last step in Wikipedia's dispute resolution process. In the past I've felt and raised concerns about the effectiveness of all of the formal dispute resolution mechanisms (including mediation, RfC, and RfAr). RfAr in particular has suffered from slowness (mostly related, I believe, to having far too many inactive members), and from decisions that tended to be too narrow to be effective (e.g. prescribing remedies on one specific article, when the issue is an editor's behaviour in general). I think it's important for Arbitrators to keep in mind that our primary and ultimate goal here is to create a great encyclopedia."
Other: Appointed to the Arbitration Committee by Jimbo Wales in July 2005.

Jpgordon

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User name: Jpgordon (talk)
Number of edits: 7850 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 4, 2004
Administrator since November 26, 2004 (21/2/0)
Statement: "I think I can be very helpful as an arbitrator. I pride myself on being good at understanding both sides of a dispute; I also pride myself on being able to recognize when a dispute exists primarily because one of the disputants wants a dispute."

Karmafist

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User name: Karmafist (talk)
Number of edits: 8327 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 9, 2004
Administrator since October 11, 2005 (53/2/0)
Statement: "My running is basically a protest against the arbitration process as it is, not against any particular member of the arbcom itself since I deeply respect all of them i've [sic] talked to individually. My goal will be a drastic reform of the entire arbitration system. Although my hope is that this won't be the case, I would consider this entire election to be invalid if Jimbo Wales interfered in any way, unless he truly does look down upon other Wikipedians, thus destroying the idea that Wikipedia is Egalitarian, which I am beginning to believe is not the case."

Kelly Martin

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User name: Kelly Martin (talk)
Number of edits: 7504 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 27, 2004
Administrator since June 15, 2005 (72/1/0)
Statement: "I don't have a platform, other than a promise to handle each case fairly, with every decision intended to further our fundamental goal: to write an encyclopedia."
Other: Appointed to the Arbitration Committee by Jimbo Wales in October 2005.

Kim Bruning

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User name: Kim Bruning (talk)
Number of edits: 5469 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 7, 2001
Administrator since August 4, 2004 (25/1/0)
Statement:"Most of my time this year was spent making sure that there was at least some dispute resolution available via the mediation cabal. This was conceived as a stopgap measure to provide mediation while the mediation committee was down (which it was for much of the year.)"

Kylehamilton

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User name: Kylehamilton (talk)
Number of edits: 128 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 3, 2004
Statement:"I am interested in the working on the arbitration committee because I have a good deal of experience in dealing with disputes and getting to a speedy resolution. I refined my ability by working with producers in the film industry and by working on set having to make quick decisions/resolutions on set."

Luigi30

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User name: Luigi30 (talk)
Number of edits: 1952 Kate's Tool
First edit date: March 8, 2004
Administrator since December 9, 2005 (42/16/2)
Statement: "I think that Arbcom has become too slow and bloated in the last year. Cases are piling up and waiting months for a final verdict. People are being driven away by the inefficiency. If I am voted to Arbcom, I'd try to speed things along. I hate trolls, and like long walks on the beach. I am against banning except in extreme circumstances or for repeat offenders. I think that a first offense should not be banned for, only for problem users or extreme trolls."

Maywither

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User name: Maywither (talk)
Number of edits: 43 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 18, 2005
Statement:"I am the most amazing and awesome Wikipedian ever. Place me on the committee and I will not make you sad."

Merovingian

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User name: Merovingian (talk)
Number of edits: 18047 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 9, 2003
Administrator since March 16, 2004 (18/0/0)
Statement:"I believe that I can help. During my time at Wikipedia, I have tried my very best to adhere to the projects tenets of honesty, good faith, and neutrality. All three are important features to be found in an arbitrator. If elected, I will maintain a high level of participation; the committee’s progress has been hindered by inactive members and resignations. I care about this project too much to give up. If elected, I will act with fairness to all involved parties, and conduct my work with the other arbitrators in the open. If elected, I will keep my personal views out of all cases, as I have tried to do when writing articles."
Other: Received 98 votes of approval (19%) in the December 2004 elections, coming in 18th of 34.

Mindspillage

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User name: Mindspillage (talk)
Number of edits: 7697 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 22, 2004
Administrator since April 18, 2005 (41/0/0)
Statement: "I believe strongly in keeping a civil and productive atmosphere on Wikipedia, and not being overly bound by precedent in search of a proper outcome. I also believe in using no firmer a touch than is necessary to remedy a problem. There are certain issues I am firm on, including civility and respect as well as the proper use of admin powers. I also am a strong supporter of ignoring all rules, which makes me all the more disturbed when that guideline is abused for ends it wasn't meant for.
Other: Appointed by Jimbo Wales to the Arbitration Committee in October 2005.

Morven

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User name: Morven (talk)
Number of edits: 10921 Kate's Tool
First edit date: February 17, 2003
Administrator since January 26, 2004 (14/0/0)
Statement: "My beliefs about Wikipedia are simple: we are here to create a free encyclopedia, and policy, procedure and process are simply tools to enable us to do that most easily. I believe in a light touch; we should have the minimum quantity of rules necessary to function, and the enforcement of them should bear in mind the intended outcome—creating that encyclopedia—rather than in their mechanical application."

Netoholic

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User name: Netoholic (talk)
Number of edits: 14950 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 28, 2004
Statement: "Unfortunately, the present "Arbitration" process has become increasingly legalistic and punitive - more like a criminal court. Re-establishing the proper focus is the compass by which I will measure my work as an Arbitrator."

PZFUN

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User name: PZFUN (talk)
Number of edits: 6349 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 15, 2004
Administrator since December 12, 2004 (9/1/1)
Statement: "I feel that more should be done to make sure that conflict is resolved before it arrives at the ArbCom. This would involve greater integration between the members of the Arbitration Committee and the various mediation groups on Wikipedia, as we can only work efficiently when we are working together. There are just too many editors, articles, and areas on Wikipedia in which arguments can develop. If elected, I intend to make sure that the Arbitration Committee becomes more culturally sensitive, is better able to interact with members whose first language is not English, is more active in promoting mediation before arbitration, and acts more promptly."

Ral315

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User name: Ral315 (talk)
Number of edits: 7126 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 30, 2004
Administrator since September 10, 2005 (25/0/0)
Statement: "The Arbitration Committee serves an important purpose on Wikipedia: Settling disputes between users, and more often, doling out punishments to unruly users. Such a position needs a strong, unbiased user. I feel that I can fulfill these requirements. I do not plan to decide cases based on my personal beliefs, nor on any other user's personal beliefs. Cases should be decided on the merits of the case alone."
Other: Member of Mediation Committee since October 2005.

Redwolf24

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User name: Redwolf24 (talk)
Number of edits: 11445 Kate's Tool
First edit date: April 20, 2005
Administrator since July 23, 2005 (49/7/4)
Statement: "I myself would like to lend a helping hand to the endevours of the arbcom. Some of my positions? I hate trolls, yet at the same time I believe in criminal rights. I strongly believe in such organizations as WP:AMA. I'd check the RfAr page often, voting on every case I could manage. I see a lot of cases only get the attention of maybe four members. Do we want four people deciding things that can potentially affect the whole project?"
Other: Member of Mediation Committee since September 2005; acting chair since then.

Ronline

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User name: Ronline (talk)
Number of edits: 3206 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 30, 2004
Administrator since December 2, 2005 (37/0/1)
Statement: "I'm candidating for the ArbCom because I believe in justice in Wikipedia and think I can bring about positive change as to the fairness of arbitration procedures. If I become an arbitrator, my most important consideration will be to look at both sides impartially and to guarantee that the rights of the accused are always upheld in the fairest way. I am a firm believed in dialogue, and I always aim to make sure that both sides understand very well what the dispute is about, since I believe that alienation and misunderstanding is the most significant and most dangerous root of conflict."

Rowlan

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User name: Rowlan (talk)
Number of edits: 267 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 9, 2005
Statement: "One key issue to me is that of silly censorship. Yes, you may have been here longer than me, but this is an open community of people working for the same goal. Let's keep it this way. So grab a pitch fork and a torch and let's hit the streets together and burn whatever monsters there are that might be hampering the cause and progress of Wikipedia!"

Sam Korn

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User name: Sam Korn (talk)
Number of edits: 7581 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 8, 2004
Administrator since April 24, 2005 (36/0/0)
Statement: "Points I believe would make me a good Arbitrator: 1)Complete and obsessive dedication to Wikipedia 2) A belief in reconciliation before confrontation and rehabilitation before sanctions 3) I am fair in always looking at both sides' faults 4) My strongest belief is that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and this should be reflected in the Committee's decisions 5) I have been around well over a year now, and understand every policy – I have also served as a mediator recently; although I haven't done much work, I have acted as a mediator, and have learnt a lot from looking at others' cases and also from on-going arbitration cases 6) This is the key one: I consider myself absolutely approachable and always helpful in my dealings with others."
Other: Member of Mediation Committee since October 2005

Sam Spade

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User name: Sam Spade (talk)
Number of edits: 31573 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 4, 2003
Statement: "I oppose the ArbCom deciding based on its own precedent, and favor rather an interpretation of wikipedia:policy most effective in producing and sustaining an encyclopedia and its editorial staff. I will be especially severe with administrators who violate policy, misuse their status, and disgrace their office. I will be particularly leniant with new users who clearly mean well, and I am particularly inclined to allow experienced users to act as mentors in such cases."
Other: Received 92 approval votes (18%) in the December 2004 elections, coming in 20th of 34

Silverback

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User name: Silverback (talk)
Number of edits: 5744 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 30, 2004
Statement: "Wikipedia does not need more rules, but it has become large enough, that it does need to be seen to enforce those that it has fairly, consistently and without prejudice. I am skilled at analyzing systems, arguments and evidence and at seeing both sides of issues. Too many people are taking disputes personally and not attempting to resolve issues in good faith and this culture is overburdening the arbcom. The arbcom can discourage this by making it clear that all allegations against any parties to a case will have allegations against them considered. This will discourage cases by those without clean hands. The arbcom also needs to clearly discuss the application of principles to the evidence in its decisions, instead of deciding cases on an ad hoc basis. Knowing how the evidence will be analyzed and the principles applied will establish new standards which should reduce frivolous cases."

SimonP

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User name: SimonP (talk)
Number of edits: 87718 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 10, 2001
Administrator since December 21, 2003 (5/0/0)
Statement: "I currently have the distinction of being number one on the List of Wikipedians by number of edits. Sheer number of edits is a pretty meaningless statistic, but it does show that I have a fair amount of time to dedicate to the project. I follow Arbcom fairly closely, but have only participated directly in only a couple of cases. I feel that in almost all cases the committee does its job admirably, though its speed is, as has often been noted, is sometimes far slower than ideal."

Snowspinner

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User name: Snowspinner (talk)
Number of edits: 8522 Kate's Tool
First edit date: April 18, 2004
Administrator since July 31, 2004 (62/9/3)
Statement: "What we need are arbitrators who are willing and able to put in the commitment to the harder cases - to the ones that involve the well-meaning editors with a legitimate disagreement that need to be disentangled, not smashed with a banstick. Different circumstances require different kinds of arbitrators. And I promise to be one of those different kinds of arbitrators. If elected, I promise to review evidence carefully, and to look at situations with the larger Wikipedia community in mind. Like it or not, arbcom decisions are cited as justifications in policy debates now, and the arbcom needs to be careful about what it says in light of that."

Tony Sidaway

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User name: Tony Sidaway (talk)
Number of edits: 23452 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 26, 2004
Administrator since March 11, 2005 (48/12/1)
Statement: "Abusive treatment of newcomers starves the community of new blood and unnecessarily expands the class of disaffected trolls and vandals. Edit warring and biting by administrators and other experienced editors should be taken seriously because it drives people away. I want to focus on this. The administrators should take the bulk of the load, but the Committee should act as a check on the administrators."

Trilemma

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User name: Trilemma (talk)
Number of edits: 617 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 3, 2005
Statement: "Arbitrators need to be dispassionate, dedicated and cogent, and I think my track record on wikipedia demonstrates these qualities. Upon election, I'd hope to help make the arbitration committee a more effecient operation, while maintaining precise and non biased decisions. I believe that severe action should always be a last resort relegated to the most egregious of circumstances and the wikipedia community should continue to foster a genial climate of respect and honesty. Most disputes can be resolved peacefully and civilly, and this is a testament to the strength of wikipedia."

Ultraexactzz

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User name: Ultraexactzz (talk)
Number of edits: 39 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 22, 2005
Statement: "I am eager to provide a fresh perspective to the committee. I haven't been around that long, I don't have any biases to fall back onto. Nor do I have a preconcieved notion as to how the site (or the committee) should function. This may make me a sort of "odd man out", where a pseudo-outsider is brought into the committee to provide just that fresh perspective. My experience is with the encyclopedia; I believe it is the duty of each committee member to evaluate the merits of each case in terms of impacts to the Wikipedia project as a whole. We're here to improve the encyclopedia, and any decision must reflect that ultimate goal."

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week.

Other cases

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Three new cases were accepted: one arguing for the appeal of VeryVerily (user page), one concerning multiple editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, and one involving multiple editors on Rajput. The three cases are now in the evidence phase, along with cases involving Robert I (user page), Firebug (user page), freestylefrappe (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), and EffK (user page).

The following cases are in the voting phase: cases involving Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, Copperchair (user page), and AndriyK (user page).

Finally, there are motions to close for two cases: one involving Xed (user page) and another involving voters on webcomics AFDs.

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Ten users were granted admin status this week: David Levy (nom), BorgQueen (nom), SamuelWantman (nom), Ricky81682 (nom), Mike Rosoft (nom), Ancheta Wis (nom), Natalinasmpf (nom), KnowledgeOfSelf (nom), Thorpe (nom) and InShaneee (nom).

Featured content

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Two portals reached featured status this week: Constructed languages and London.

Fourteen articles were featured last week: Apple Macintosh, Mass Rapid Transit (Singapore), Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia, Hurricane Dennis, Radhanite, Short-beaked Echidna, Saffron, Gas tungsten arc welding, Malwa, Economy of the Iroquois, Gettysburg Address, Guqin, Sheffield and Triumph of the Will.

Whereas three articles Paradox, Christianity and Christmas had their featured status removed.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Fauna of Australia, Sealand, Blues, Imagism, Iowa class battleship, Dinosaurs and Our Friends in the North.

Two lists reached featured list status last week: List of Formula One World Drivers' Champions and List of One-day International records.

Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:

2006-01-09

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 2	9 January 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

Fundraising drive concludes after reaching $380,000	Special Series: Arbitration Committee elections
ArbCom elections started	Google homage sparks work on Braille biography
Steward elections continue	News and notes: 900,000 articles, milestones
Wikipedia in the news\|	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

Fundraising drive concludes after reaching $380,0

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The Wikimedia Foundation's quarterly fundraiser concluded last week, having brought in more than $380,000 USD. This exceeded the amount raised in the previous quarter by more than $140,000, although it fell short of initial hopes for the fundraising drive, partly due to a change in which some donations were no longer included in the total.

The daily report for 5 January, the final day of the drive, indicated that a grand total of $382,619.60 came in through various methods (not a final figure). This compares with the $243,930 raised in the most recent fundraiser, from 19 August to 8 September last year (see archived story). In addition, the previous fundraiser counted approximately $35,000 donated to the German Wikipedia chapter, but similar donations in the current drive were not counted. Funds donated to local Wikimedia chapters can benefit from tax-deductibility in their own country, but are often subject to legal restrictions that prevent them being transferred directly to the Foundation, although they are still used to support the Foundation's mission.

Unlike previous fundraising drives, this one did not have a set goal, although Chief Financial Officer Daniel Mayer had expressed hopes that it might raise $500,000 or more. This amount would have been able to cover the Foundation's first-quarter expenses more easily, although predicting these remains challenging because of the continually growing traffic. Mayer was still positive about the result, noting that it "was the most successful fundraiser in the Wikimedia Foundation's history" and "it raised more money than all three previous fundraisers combined when Wikimedia Deutschland donations are excluded."

The pace of donations initially was similar to or slightly above the previous fundraiser, but slowed down as Christmas arrived. Besides the holiday distractions, there was some thought that the absence of a goal inhibited donations; however, using a goal created different issues last time, because there was some uncertainty as to whether the fundraiser ended when the goal was reached. For this latest effort, the fundraiser was simply set to last a full three weeks, with no provision to end early.

PayPal donations, which generate the bulk of the money raised, could be followed nearly in real-time thanks to a tracking system set up by Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber. This allowed the progress bar used for most of the fundraiser to be updated mostly automatically, instead of waiting for manual updates.

To help spur donations, and also in connection with the upcoming fifth anniversary of the start of Wikipedia, founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations on 1 January. This seemed to spark people's generosity, and a single-day record of $38,443.05 for PayPal donations was set on 2 January. Wales's message, which remains linked through the sitewide notice, has also sustained an above-normal level of donations continuing after the official end of the fundraising drive.

In order to meet the challenges of operating such a high-traffic website (recently peaking as high as the top 20 according to Alexa's daily traffic measure), the Wikimedia Foundation continues to explore grants and other possible means of adding financial support. Aesthetic changes to call more attention to the donations link on a permanent basis are also being considered. Mayer noted that over 12,000 people contributed (averaging around $25 each), the bulk of the money comes from small individual donations, and because the only fundraising costs are PayPal and bank fees more than 95% of donations go directly to the Foundation's charitable objectives.

SP 2006-2010

ArbCom candidates (part two)

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acejan2006

This week, 27 new candidates entered the election for Arbitration Committee. Similarly to the profiles of the other 41 candidates that we provided last week, we've provided a profile of the new candidates. We also want to remind you again of the warnings we provided last time: numbers, facts, and statistics, such as we provided here, only show one side of a candidate. While we hope the profiles help you get to know all of the record-breaking 68 candidates better, we hope that this won't be the sole data on which you base your vote.

Aytakin

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User name: Aytakin (talk)
Number of edits: 607 Kate's Tool
First edit date: March 24, 2005
Statement: "During my time in Wikipedia, I have never been in a argument or a revert war. I always try to discuss everything out instead of attacking. I have always been a great arbitrator and mediator in my whole life and have settled many conflicts."

Dbiv

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User name: Dbiv (talk)
Number of edits: 7520 Kate's Tool
First edit date: March 27, 2004
Adminship since January 20, 2005 (14/0/1)
Statement: "My principle campaign pledge for ArbCom is always to keep in mind the goal of writing a high-quality encyclopaedia. All ArbCom decisions must make it easier to do that, and I offer myself as someone who has good judgment as to whether a problem user with some good edits should be blocked for a time, or given help to stop causing problems. I believe that POV pushing users can be made a benefit, if they back up their opinions with research, and do not obstinately insist on their edits. However, offensive users can make life intolerable and action must be taken to stop them driving off useful contributors."

Dogbreathcanada

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User name: Dogbreathcanada (talk)
Number of edits: 144 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 30, 2005
Statement: "The other issue is arbitration on a schedule. Effective arbitration is not tardy arbitration. I'll try to help in moving the arbitration process at a less leisurely pace."

DoctorMike

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User name: DoctorMike (talk)
Number of edits: 37 Kate's Tool
First edit date: January 4, 2006
Statement: "I will be as fair and as unbiased as possible, and see no reason legitimate conflicts can't often be included in Wiki articles as a discussion, to the satisfaction of all concerned that they have been heard, which is probably the best way to solve many of these conflicts."

Emt147

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User name: Emt147 (talk)
Number of edits: 664 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 1, 2005
Statement: "The world is not black-and-white and I believe that some controversial and POV material does belong in an encyclopedia so long as the controversy or the point of view are clearly explained. I think Wikipedia arbitrators need to think like editors, not conflict mediators. A well-written explanation of controversial points of view will add depth to the article. I absolutely draw the line at all hate/racist material however, free speech be damned."

Golbez

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User name: Golbez (talk)
Number of edits: 19514 Kate's Tool
First edit date: March 14, 2004
Adminship since September 29, 2004 (16/0/0)
Statement: "I think the Arbitration process is one of great value to Wikipedia, but I think it could use a few changes. If the case is accepted, then clearly it has merit - thus, temporary injunctions should be more common. The process as a whole should be accelerated. I'd like to help with this, and improve my interaction with Wikipedia. I love this place, and think it has great potential, and I'd like to do anything I can to assist it in its goal of recording the sum of human knowledge. I would like to be on the Arbitration Committee to help with Wikipedia and help clean up after bad people, clear good people of poor accusations, and generally keep the cogs turning and well-greased."

Guapovia

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User name: Guapovia (talk)
Number of edits: 40 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 15, 2005
Statement: "I'd like to put my name up for several reasons - honor, laud, glory, and even ego. I think I'd do a good job at it. Yes, I'm a new user, but I've submitted several articles that haven't been deleted, and I think I know what I want to see in a Wikipedia article."

Jtkiefer

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User name: Jtkiefer (talk)
Number of edits: 8109 Kate's Tool
First edit date: May 29, 2005
Adminship since August 30, 2005 (43/3/4)
Statement: "The arbitration process needs to be streamlined... I believe that bans must be treated as a last resort when dealing with problem users. Either all other possible solutions must have been tried and have demonstrably failed, or there must be good evidence that all other solutions would have absolutely no chance of succeeding. I also feel that the Arbitration Committee should be flexible, and should focus more on the spirit of the existing rules rather than the enforcing the exact letter of them."

Kingturtle

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User name: Kingturtle (talk)
Number of edits: 22669 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 26, 2002
Adminship since prior to 2003
Statement: "In regards to how the committee should handle disputes, this is how I would lay it out: the arbiters should not know the usernames or identities of those involved in a dispute. Each side of the dispute would submit a report making their case; the report would refer to PERSON A and PERSON B, keeping the arbiters in the dark. There’s more to the process, but that’s the gist. In regards to the banning question, I wouldn’t rule out a ban as a last resort. It’s like expelling a kid from school. There’s a process - a long process, even for serious offenses. The number one task at hand is to create a wikipedia - an encyclopedia formed and shaped by the minds of thousands - but can it be done fairly and without hurt to contributors? This is a great social experiment. As a committee member, I will take great care in understanding the various points-of-view at hand, and I will try to find solutions that will bring dignity to all. I will also work to create procedures that are efficient and fair. I feel wikipedia is important and vital to mankind. I am devoted to it."
Other: Bureaucrat since February 28, 2004 (15/0/0)

Kitch

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User name: Kitch (talk)
Number of edits: 3776 Kate's Tool
First edit date: December 11, 2004
Statement: "I am running because I feel I can provide an impartial mind to the arbitration process. I have an extensive access to knowledge to assist me in determining facts, an ability to determine the difference between neutral and biased points of view, and uncanny problem-solving capabilities that were developed and exploited in Future Problem Solvers competitions in my youth."

LawAndOrder

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User name: LawAndOrder (talk)
Number of edits: 18 Kate's Tool
First edit date: January 6, 2006
Statement: "I recognize that there is a major epidemic here on wikipedia of sly behaviors that serve to obstruct neutrality, truth, and justice, on behalf of pushing POVs. I intend to fight such behaviors."

Luckyluke

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User name: Luckyluke (talk)
Number of edits: 371 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 5, 2004
Statement: "Since discovering Wikipedia in 2004, and in keeping with its' foundings, I believe that I have taken an active approach to improving the credibility and knowledge base of the database. As egotistical as it sounds, I feel that Wikipedia and future disputes will be well served by having me on the committee. I'm able to bring depth, experience, knowledge to resolving disputes and am able to approach problems to hopefully reach an un-biased, comprimisable decision."

Mackensen

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User name: Mackensen (talk)
Number of edits: 6660 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 24, 2003
Adminship since September 30, 2004 (17/2/0)
Statement: "My purpose in running for the Arbitration Committee is twofold: to serve the community and to push the notion of accountability and legitimacy with regards to the actions of administrators. Arbitration is a perhaps unfortunate yet clearly necessary final step in dispute resolution, because the community has vested such powers in the body. This entails a responsibility on the part of the Committee to act intelligently to uphold policy and to ensure that people can continue to make useful contributions to the encyclopedia. This also means holding administrators accountable if they shoot from the hip–this whole project will fall apart if people don't trust us."

Magicalsaumy

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User name: Magicalsaumy (talk)
Number of edits: 380 Kate's Tool
First edit date: October 16, 2005
Statement: "The arbitration committee needs to handle the disputes more effectively and impartially (including the fact that hoax claims must not be highly entertained). Hence I feel that the members of the arbitration committee need to have a sufficiently large knowledge base, so that they could distinguish points which conform to the neutral point of view from those that are naïvish and that have been added out of emotional ecstacy."

Mailer diablo

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User name: Mailer diablo (talk)
Number of edits: 12388 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 8, 2004
Adminship since March 31, 2005 (29/1/0)
Statement: "I have seen a lot of changes in Wikipedia for the last year, but my fundamental principles of assuming good faith, keeping civil even in the worst of situations, and to give newcomers reasonable chances does not change. Just as always my actions, past or future, are open for scrutiny by anyone. If possible, I'd want to see more in reformative action than just punishment."

Mikkalai

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User name: Mikkalai (talk)
Number of edits: 50517 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 13, 2003
Adminship since February 2004
Statement: " 1) I feel that further fate of the project depends on maintaining a reasonable working environment. 2) I am going to oppose the false idea that "all people are equal" (see into the history of Communism to understand what I mean). A better (but still not ideal) statement would be "... equal before the Law" (or "...before God" in some cultures). But in most societies the application of the Law does recognize that people are fundamentally unequal. 3)I will be standing for zero-point-one-tolerance (0.1-tolerance) for disruption of wikipedia's spirit of cooperation, such as ad hominem attacks, policy gaming, information censorship. "Zero-point-one" is a recognition that people are human, can make errors and have emotions. 4) I will stand for a structure in disputes, for efficiency. 5) Pledge: fairness, neutrality, mercy, participation."

Nandesuka

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User name: Nandesuka (talk)
Number of edits: 4510 Kate's Tool
First edit date: March 27, 2005
Adminship since September 15, 2005 (43/12/4)
Statement: "Arbcom has the potential to deal with problems that are beyond any one administrator. To realize that potential, Arbcom has to make two decisions: which requests to consider, and which requests not to consider. The act of deciding wisely which cases need to be heard is more important than the details of whatever decision is reached. The ability to provide stability and finality to the community is key. Arbcom must not get distracted by cases the community can handle. But Arbcom must not hide from difficult cases, simply because they are ugly. Deciding where the line falls is where the hard work is."

NSLE

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User name: NSLE (talk)
Number of edits: 3658 Kate's Tool
First edit date: September 20, 2005
Adminship since December 10, 2005 (71/1/2)
Statement: "The ArbCom needs a fresh approach to things, and I feel I can bring that to the ArbCom. I'm willing to recuse from any ArbCom dispute I may happen to be involved in. The main things for me, no matter what the context, ArbCom or not, are civility and no personal attacks. I don't subscribe to ignoring all rules. I believe this view helps us build a constructive encyclopedia."

Phroziac

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User name: Phroziac (talk)
Number of edits: 3295 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 2, 2005
Adminship since September 6, 2005 (56/2/2)
Statement: "I think that arbitration should be a relatively quick and straight forward process, but it should never be rushed. I generally do not agree with banning users who regularly contribute to writing an encyclopedia, in the first case they appear in. They should be sanctioned appropriately, depending on what they did, and given a chance to correct their behaviour. If they should show up in another arbcom case in a reasonable time, doing the same thing, stronger sanctions or maybe even a ban should be strongly considered. I especially support bans if the user does not appear to be interested in writing an encyclopedia. ArbCom should always put the encyclopedia first, before anything else. Always."

Quaque

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User name: Quaque (talk)
Number of edits: 1480 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 21, 2005
Statement: "I have seen a lot of cases go through, so my aim as an arbitrator is simple. To keep Wikipedia a decent encyclopedia and to deal with those who wish to corrupt it. The current system is too slow, and lots of damage has occurred and vandals don't take the system seriously. I have dealt with a large number of vandals and nonsense over the years and know a lot of the technical goings on at the wiki, so I feel confident on being able to take on the challenge of dealing with these disputes and restore credibility to the system."

RomaC

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User name: RomaC (talk)
Number of edits: 73 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 11, 2005
Statement: "As an arbitrator, well, I'd do what I could to try and keep it progressing. Philosophy? The five pillars work for me. Plus an open and inquiring mind. As for banning, I believe that's got to be the last resort, people will find a way to come back and screw with the project if they are simply kicked out. Better to go in with respect and reason first, help people realize that Wikipedia is their place too. And if that fails, then try again. Of course, sometimes that won't work and action will be necessary -- I'm hopeful but not utopian."

Skyscrap27

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User name: Skyscrap27 (talk)
Number of edits: 88 Kate's Tool
First edit date: January 5, 2006
Statement: "Why should I be on an Arbitration Committee? I live in a real world (just like all of us) where fights do happen. When you're arguing with somebody, you don't need anybody to tell you what to do, what to say. Both sides need someone to say they're right. That's compromise. If you're a noob (and a lot of arguing happens between new members), you won't listen to somebody old and experienced (just like parents), first you'll listen to other newbies. If the Arbitration Commitee has a new member, it will gain more influence towards other newbies. You're most likely to listen to a person your "age" than to a old member. Of course, I realize that it's a long shot, but that's what I think."

Svartalf

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User name: Svartalf (talk)
Number of edits: 206 Kate's Tool
First edit date: November 13, 2004
Statement: "If chosen, for as long as I serve, I will strive to uphold the ideals completeness and neutrality this wikigroup strives to embody, and to give all cases placed before me fair and optimal treatment, drawing both from existing jurisprudence and my own resources, as well as the considered opinions of my colleagues, particularly the more experienced ones, or those having shown themselves most worthy of my esteem."

SVera1NY

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User name: SVera1NY (talk)
Number of edits: 210 Kate's Tool
First edit date: June 13, 2005
Statement: "Although I have been a Wikipedian for only a few months, I have contributed alot, especially reverting vandalism and inviting newcomers. I think I would be a great addition to the Committee and would greatly appreciate a post. Thank you very much for your consideration."

Terenceong1992

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User name: Terenceong1992 (talk)
Number of edits: 2645 Kate's Tool
First edit date: January 28, 2005
Statement: "I would revamp the ArbCom from what it is like now. Arbitration is the final and worst way to solve a dispute. The ArbCom can be improved by having more arbitrators than now, as it will come to a concensus faster than what it is now. Some can take as long as three months, which I feel is a total waste of time. If I am elected as an arbitrator, I will help to come to a decision faster. The Arbitration Committee should cooporate to agree on the decisons. The committee needs a more cooporative effort than what it is now. Current members take quite some time to vote on the proposed decisions on that particular user and those involved."

Tznkai

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User name: Tznkai (talk)
Number of edits: 2715 Kate's Tool
First edit date: May 24, 2005
Adminship since January 6, 2006 (54/1/0)
Statement: "The goal of Arbitration is not punish those who have done wrong in some cosmic sense, but to protect the integrity and longevity of the project. Thus ArbCom must stand between the community and the Encylopedia, and intercept any disaster that may befall either. Keeping in mind those principles, Arbitration would be a processes which handles, primarily, disputes between editors. I think I provide a unique perspective. I provide the combination of beliefs I expressed above, and the relative newness to formal authority. I am NOT mired in past high profile disputes, and I very strongly believe that you need as many diffrent voices you can get, so long as they all work together."

Z.Spy

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User name: Z.Spy (talk)
Number of edits: 118 Kate's Tool
First edit date: August 6, 2005
Statement: "I am running for Arbitration comittee because I am a responsible contributor who reverts Vandalism, assists new editors, and Makes sure that Wikipedia is a clean, accurate Encyclopedia. I no longer state political opinons in Talk Pages."

SP 2006-2010

ArbCom elections started

Contribute —

acejan2006

The January 2006 Arbitration Committee elections began at 00:01 UTC on 9 January. The vote is taking place at Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Elections January 2006/Vote; anyone registered on or before September 30, 2005 with 150 total edits at that time is granted suffrage. A voter may either support, oppose, or abstain from voting for a candidate. A minimum of 50% support is required in order to be eligible for a position; Jimbo Wales will pick from the candidates with the most support to fill the committee. With 27 new candidates joining the race since last Monday (see related story), there are a total of 68 candidates.

The vote will run until January 22.

SP 2006-2010

Google homage sparks work on Braille biography

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One of Google's whimsical logos helped create a surge of attention on Wikipedia this past week, as the birthday of Louis Braille generated nearly 600 edits to that article in 24 hours.

Braille's birthday came on Wednesday, 4 January, and this year marked the 197th anniversary of his birth. As it has done on many other occasions, Google celebrated this event with a custom logo on its home page. The special logo (the word Google written in Braille) linked to the search result for louis braille birthdate, which yielded the Wikipedia article as the first hit (Wikipedia is also one of Google's top ten search results for "Louis Braille").

Before the influx of traffic, the article consisted of only five paragraphs, most of them rather short and only one of which actually dealt with the Braille system. Shortly after midnight in the Pacific Standard Time Zone, where Google's headquarters are located, the effect of the logo change manifested itself. Unfortunately, the first edit was vandalism, changing the year of Braille's birth so that it came after his death. This was reverted one minute later.

The Louis Braille article received a total of 585 edits on 4 January (according to Pacific Standard Time), after having 75 edits in its previous 3-1/2 years of existence. By way of comparison, the most actively edited featured articles of the day typically get a couple hundred edits while they are on the Main Page. Vandalism remained a problem, with those monitoring the page going back and forth on whether to protect it from editing. Ultimately, the new semi-protection feature was applied to the article for most of the day. The separate Braille article about the system, which was already more developed, also saw an increase in editing and vandalism.

SP 2006-2010

Steward elections continue

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This week, the steward elections continued. The vote will run until 10 January. Also, two candidates signed up this week, bringing the total number of candidates up to 16. Both Ascánder and Linuxbeak joined the race on Friday.

As of press time, ten of the sixteen candidates would be qualified to be stewards. The board makes the final decision, choosing up to 10 stewards from the list of potential candidates. The results, as of press time:

	Username	Total votes	For	Neutral	Against	Support percent
1	Jean-Christophe Chazalette	77	73	1	3	94,80%
2	Ausir	68	67	1	0	98,52%
3	Romihaitza	44	41	2	1	93,18%
4	Arno Lagrange	32	8	8	16	25%
5	Walter	80	79	1	0	98,75%
6	Traroth	24	8	8	8	33,33%
7	Klemen Kocjancic	13	1	4	8	7,69%
8	Paginazero	63	53	4	6	84,12%
9	Jredmond	19	5	3	11	26,31%
(10)	~~brian0918~~	24	12	6	6	withdrawn
11	Raul654	63	53	1	9	84,12%
12	Jon Harald Søby	56	54	2	0	96,42%
13	Suisui	74	73	1	0	98,64%
14	Rdsmith4	46	42	3	1	91,30%
15	Ascánder	39	38	1	0	97,43%
16	Linuxbeak	6	0	0	6	0%

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Ral315

English Wikipedia reaches 900,000 articles

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The English Wikipedia reached 900,000 articles on 4 January. A user monitoring new pages created during this time reports that Trackdown likely was the milestone article.

Briefly

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The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles with Eastern Front (World War II).
The Waray-Waray Wikipedia has reached 800 articles.
The Tok Pisin Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
The Alemannic Wikipedia has reached 1,500 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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By Catherine Munro, Michael Snow, Liam Wyatt, Ta bu shi da yu

New York Times article

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The New York Times published an article on 3 January by George Johnson entitled "The Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts", comparing Britannica and Wikipedia. It mentions the Nature study and discusses the fluctuations on the Dmitri Mendeleev page at length. The article was syndicated in The Australian Financial Review (the premier business daily in Australia) on 5 January entitled "Rule Britannica, but online rival eyes throne". In the article, the George Johnson noted that the birthdate for Hwang Woo-Suk was different between Wikipedia and Britannica, which was due to the fact that Wikipedia used the lunisolar Korean calendar which gave the date as 15 December, 1952 while the Britannica article used the Gregorian calendar, which uses the date 29 January, 1953. In response to the NYT article a footnote was added to the article. After being informed of this development through an email sent by Ta bu shi da yu, Mr Johnson responded that this was "interesting information indeed. It is fascinating the stories that unfold when one tries to chase down facts" and that his "admiration for the project continues to grow".

Newsweek article

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Newsweek featured Wikipedia in an article from its international edition, "The People's Encyclopedia". Unusually for an English-language story, but appropriately for an international audience, it prominently features Wikipedia editions other than English, starting with a profile of Italian editor Frieda Brioschi. The article also reviews some of the recent controversies on the English Wikipedia, although it misidentifies John Seigenthaler as a former aide to John F. Kennedy rather than Robert Kennedy (it also incorrectly credits Wikipedia with a total of 2.6 billion articles). It goes on to cite Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopædia Britannica, saying that Wikipedia is regularly discussed at editorial meetings.

Wikipedia and advertising

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The article "Wikipedia chief considers taking ads" in the The Times (based on a more complete interview at "Identity question for world's encyclopaedia") prompted a flurry of blog examination, but Jimmy Wales rejected the paper's conclusion, saying he had been badly misquoted. He discussed the matter on his Wikipedia talk page, and ClickZ published his clarifications on 3 January, in "No Ads in Wikipedia Says Wales".

The future

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Jon Udell writes about "Wikipedia, competition, and the future" in a 4 January article at InfoWorld, touching on Seigenthaler, Digital Universe, and more.

In The Inquirer, Wendy M. Grossman also writes about turning points and changes of perspective about Wikipedia, in "A tempest in a Wikipedia", published on 6 January.

More Nature follow-ups

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Online Wikipedia is not Britannica - but it's close - Christian Science Monitor
Nature gives thumbs up to Wikipedia - Information World Review

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Thirteen users were granted admin status this week: Nixdorf (nom), TimPope (nom), Nightstallion (nom), Tom harrison (nom), FrancisTyers (nom), Idont havaname (nom), Tznkai (nom), Babajobu (nom), Anonymous editor (nom), Jonathunder (nom), Wiki alf (nom), pgk (nom) and Sarge Baldy (nom).

Featured content

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One portal reached featured status this week: Trains.

No articles were featured last week. One article lost its featured status: Peer review.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Xanadu Houses, Delrina, Marilyn Manson, Voting system, De Lorean DMC-12, W. Mark Felt and Omnipotence paradox.

No lists reached featured list status last week.

Four pictures reached featured picture status last week:

Lorenz attractor

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Ral315

Plus signs now allowed in titles

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Thanks to a recent change, plus signs are now allowed in titles. The most prominent article that was affected by this bug was C++, which had previously been located at C plus plus.

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

3 January - "amane" rebooted at colocation center, fixed.
7 January - In response to a registration flood, a user throttle was added to the English Wikipedia. brion noted that CAPTCHAs or other confirmation devices may be used in the future.
Various SSL certificates added and replaced.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week.

Other cases

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No cases were accepted this week.

Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, freestylefrappe (user page), Firebug (user page), Robert I (user page), Sortan (user page) and EffK (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, Copperchair (user page), and AndriyK (user page) are in the Voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving Xed (user page) and voters on webcomics AFDs.

2006-01-16

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 3	16 January 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

A look back at Wikipedia's fifth year	Reporter who plagiarized Wikipedia gets dismissed
Victims of errors defend Wikipedia	Nine stewards elected
Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns	ArbCom elections started
Google homage sparks work on Braille biography	Wikipedia celebrates fifth anniversary
News and notes: Requests for CheckUser, milestones	Wikipedia in the news
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

A look back at Wikipedia's fifth year

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Wikipedia has progressed significantly in its fifth year. As Wikipedia enters its sixth year, The Wikipedia Signpost takes a look back at 2005 (and a bit of 2006).

The Signpost published its first issue on 10 January, 2005, five days before Wikipedia Day 2005 was celebrated, marking Wikipedia's fourth anniversary. Under founder and editor-in-chief Michael Snow, the Signpost has delivered news to the Wikipedia community every Monday since then. In August, though, after Michael Snow stepped down temporarily, Ral315 took over as editor-in-chief. We are proud to have continued the Signpost non-stop for over 52 weeks now, with over 400 articles written and published by our volunteers.

Besides in The Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia itself has seen the number of articles grow exponentially. On 18 March, the 500,000th article was created. Less than three months later, on 19 June, Wikipedia had reached the 600,000 article mark. In August, we reached 700,000 articles, and on the first day of November, 800,000 articles. Early in the new year, Wikipedia again reached a milestone with its 900,000th article. According to current projections, Wikipedia will have one million articles sometime in February or March. Besides the number of articles, the number of featured articles also rose, surpassing 500 in February. There are currently 850 featured articles.

The number of editors also rose dramatically. In October, the number of registered users surpassed half a million. Earlier in the year in July, the number of administrators reached 500; the current number is now greater than 750. In addition, four Wikipedians were granted bureaucrat status, bringing the total number over 20: Rdsmith4, Nichalp, Linuxbeak, and Francs2000.

The popularity of Wikipedia also increased greatly. According to the Alexa rankings, Wikipedia started 2005 at approximately rank 150. By September, Wikipedia had moved into the top 50 websites of the world, and in January 2006 reached an all-time high one-day rank of 19. Also in January, Alexa reported that Wikipedia's reach was nearly 30,000 per million, and the number of page views had jumped to nearly 2,000 per million page views.

Several technical aspects of Wikipedia were also modified. MediaWiki 1.4 was implemented in March, and 1.5 in June. Also in June, the Wikimedia servers were transported to a new location in Tampa, Florida, causing a planned shut-down of the site while the servers were moved. Earlier, though, the site had temporarily been shut down twice, once in late February and another time in early March. Both of them were unplanned; one lasted for 24 hours, and the other for approximately two hours. The temporary shut-downs were due to a power failure and faulty equipment, respectively.

Other technical features of Wikipedia were also implemented. After the first Wikipedia:Wikiportal was created in February, the Portal: namespace was created. (The first portal was Portal:Biology and the first in the Portal: namespace was Portal:Cricket). In September, the new users log was created so that it would be easier to block bot-generated usernames and inappropriate user names. Around the same time, Lupin released his popups tool, enhancing navigation of Wikipedia. Earlier in the year, CryptoDerk had released his CDVF, a vandal-fighting tool designed to make RC patrol more efficient. Later, following a debate on CheckUser, seven people (all current Arbitrators at the time) were granted CheckUser privileges. In December, semi-protection, the blocking of editing by new and unregistered users, was implemented on MediaWiki and activated after a poll showed almost unanimous support for it. In addition, new measures were taken toward article validation, although no such feature has been implemented yet.

In December, article creation was restricted to registered users only following the Seigenthaler controversy (see below). Access to Wikipedia sites was also blocked in China in October.

There were also changes in the way Wikipedia operates. In February, the templates that are transcluded onto the main page were protected, following severe vandalism. (Obscene images were placed on those templates.) Though the actual page had been protected since 2003, the transcluded templates had been left open for editing. Due to the severe nature of the vandalism, though, all of the templates have been protected ever since. Starting in July, the main page also started showing featured pictures on weekends, where Did You Know? used to be. (Did you know? still appears on weekdays.)

The Wikimedia Foundation also saw major milestones in the year. In April, the foundation was granted tax-exempt status in the United States. In July, Angela Beesley and Florence Nibart-Devouard were both re-elected to the board of the Wikimedia Foundation. The trademark of "Wikipedia" was granted to the foundation in January 2006, completing a process that had begun in September 2004. In October, the Foundation announced that Wikimania 2006 would be held in Boston, Massachusetts. However, the foundation also sparked controversy in October when they announced a partnership with Answers Corporation, parent company of Answers.com. Many users, interpreting the announcement as one to introduce advertising, protested; a WikiProject was even formed to demonstrate against the deal. Board members, such as Jimbo Wales, Angela, and Anthere, later clarified the deal, calming down the situation.

There were also multiple changes in the Arbitration Committee and the stewards. Nine new stewards were elected in January 2006, while one current steward failed to successfully keep his rights. The ArbCom also saw new members. Sannse, Ambi, Delirium, Maveric149, Grunt, and Nohat all resigned in 2005, and Kelly Martin resigned in January 2006. Jimbo Wales appointed five people to the committee this past year (Jdforrester, Fennec, Jayjg, Mindspillage, and Kelly Martin) and also changed the format of the annual elections for ArbCom. The elections were held in January 2006, using support and oppose votes for the first time ever. As of press time, the elections were still ongoing.

Wikipedia came under immense public scrutiny in November and December. The John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy was sparked after John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote an editorial in USA Today, criticizing the biography about himself in Wikipedia, which erroneously reported that he had been involved in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. The person who added the incorrect information, Brian Chase, was later uncovered by Wikipedia critic Daniel Brandt; Chase resigned from his job (from where he had posted the information) and apologized. In response, article creation was restricted to registered users in December in an effort to reduce vandalism and incorrect entries.

Finally, the scientific journal Nature published [1] the results of a comparative review between Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia concerning scientific articles. This was the first comparative review concerning Wikipedia using professionals and was done by scientific experts. After examining 42 articles in both the encyclopedias, Nature concluded that Britannica had 124 total factual errors in the articles (for an average of 2.92 errors per article), while Wikipedia had 162 total errors, for an average of 3.86 per article. Most of the errors in Wikipedia were corrected after the study.

Wikipedia has seen tremendous growth and development in its fifth year, which was primarily in 2005. We've grown into a top-20 website of the world and have become a valuable resource and free encyclopedia to millions. We look forward to a successful 2006 - and we'll be here reporting on it.

SP 2006-2010

Reporter who plagiarized Wikipedia gets dismissed

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Tim Ryan, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter whose plagiarism was recently discovered by Wikipedia editors, has been dismissed after additional instances of plagiarism were reported. This brought his tenure to an end last week after more than twenty years at the newspaper.

Ryan, an entertainment reporter who has worked for the Star-Bulletin since 1984, as well as writing for other publications during that time, was found to have copied material without attribution in multiple articles dating back as far as 2001, drawing from a variety of online sources. The plagiarism was originally reported in The Signpost two weeks ago and later picked up by a local news website, the Hawaii Reporter. Reporter editor Malia Zimmerman published a story on Tuesday, 10 January, pointing to two more articles by Ryan with passages that matched verbatim to content on other websites.

Zimmerman also noted what proved to be Ryan's last article for the Star-Bulletin, a 28 December column published after the plagiarism had been discovered but before news of the case spread. In the column, Ryan thanked a number of publicists and other sources and commented, "To write "Reel News," I usually can't name any sources because there could be serious repercussions to them." He added, "All who have helped me write this column -- and you do know who you are -- I thank you for your contributions and trust."

Officially, Star-Bulletin editor Frank Bridgewater initially indicated that any disciplinary action against Ryan was a confidential matter, but Zimmerman reported that according to her sources, he had been given a one-month suspension. She added that the Star-Bulletin had earlier been running an advertising campaign touting the paper as the source of "Truth" from among the state's news outlets, with Ryan featured prominently in one such ad.

After the Hawaii Reporter's discovery of additional problem articles, the Star-Bulletin announced Ryan's dismissal in its 13 January edition. In a statement, Bridgewater acknowledged that six Ryan articles contained unattributed content from other sources, including one case found during the paper's investigation that had not been publicly identified before. The statement also pointed out that Ryan's stories "did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications."

Craig Silverman, whose Regret The Error blog reports on corrections and retractions in the news media, commented on the Star-Bulletin's response: "This is the correct course of action, and it's good that the paper lists the plagiarized articles and placed corrections/Editor's Notes in them." Other industry coverage appeared in Editor & Publisher and on Jim Romenesko's site for journalism news, Romenesko. Rob Malda also posted an item about the incident on Slashdot, where among other discussion it prompted a form of humor that might be called recursive plagiarism. And Talk Stink, a blog focusing on Hawaii, ran a cartoon depicting a mock interview with Ryan.

Wikipedia editor Calton, one of those who participated in the original discovery of Ryan's plagiarism, commented that he felt bad for Ryan, "Twenty years at the paper down the tubes, for stuff he should have known better about."

SP 2006-2010

Victims of errors defend Wikipedia

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Despite encountering significant errors in their biographical articles on Wikipedia, two people have published lengthy defenses of the project. Both article subjects, Cory Doctorow and Bertrand Meyer, took an optimistic view of the experience and argued that Wikipedia's transparent processes make it more useful.

Wikipedia vs. The Register

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Doctorow, an author and Fellow with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote an essay Wednesday on the Boing Boing blog that contrasted Wikipedia with one of its most frequent critics. In his piece, Doctorow compared the process of getting information corrected in his Wikipedia biography with his experience in seeking a correction of an article by Andrew Orlowski in The Register.

With respect to his Wikipedia article, Doctorow related that an anonymous editor had misrepresented some of his views and cast aspersions on the success of his books. Doctorow fixed this as soon as he became aware of it, then progressively worked with other editors to produce a satisfactory article. He summarized, "That's what it was like when someone maligned me on Wikipedia: within five minutes of discovering it, I was able to correct it, and subsequently I had a public discussion with the guy, hammering out a consensus."

The Orlowski piece for which Doctorow wanted a correction involved people editing their own Wikipedia biographies, after the reports of Jimmy Wales editing his own article appeared in the press (see archived story). Orlowski failed to realize that the talk page had been refactored, so he took some quotes from it and called Doctorow "silly and foolish" for talking about himself in the third person. However, since Orlowski had gone on vacation, Doctorow was unable to get a correction until after he reached Orlowski's editor. Doctorow also complained that after the misquotations had been removed, no record was left that a correction had been necessary.

Doctorow argued that the test of both systems was not "how they perform when they work as they're intended to -- it's what happens when they fail". On this issue, he favored the Wikipedia process, in which he said you could trace how the truth was negotiated, over the hidden workings of The Register.

The reports of my death...

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A similar defense of Wikipedia came from Meyer, a computer scientist whose biography on the German Wikipedia was changed to indicate that he had died on 24 December. The change, actually made on 28 December, survived until someone else noticed it on 3 January. Meyer commented on the events in a treatise entitled "Defense and Illustration of Wikipedia", which he said he had initially prepared in response to another commentary published in Communications of the ACM. The authors of this commentary had cited several dangers associated with Wikipedia, which Meyer acknowledged, but he criticized their failure to cite concrete examples.

Meyer now had his own personal experience to relate as well, in an incident that was also reported by a number of German-language media sources. The offending revisions have been deleted from the page history, but a screenshot was preserved by Christian Kirsch of Heise. In Meyer's own translation, the article stated at the time, "According to the latest reports, Bertrand Meyer died on 24.12.2005 in Zurich. On 23.12.2005, exam results were published; links between that publication and his death couldn't be confirmed".

Like most people, Meyer thought the report of his death amounted to a student joke. In an observation on the media coverage, he gave as his impression that, after the Seigenthaler incident, it reflected a sort of pride in the German-language press having their own Wikipedia scandal to report. Responding to Lauren Weinstein, one of the authors of the Communications of the ACM article, Meyer conceded that an erroneously reported death was less disturbing than a false report of an arrest "for some truly reprehensible offense" would be. Meyer nevertheless concluded, "But if someone is going to slander me horribly on the Web, I'd rather that he chose an editable medium."

SP 2006-2010

Wikimedia Foundation reportedly facing privacy lawsuit

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By Ral315, Ta bu shi da yu

Editor's note: This article discusses a possible lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates this site. The Wikipedia Signpost takes no official position on this lawsuit.

Dutch and German press sources report that the family of Boris Floricic, a.k.a. Tron, is suing the Wikimedia Foundation over the reporting of the hacker's real name in Wikipedia.

The German Chaos Computer Club affiliate, who gained fame within the group for cracking phone chips and digital television boxes, was found dead in 1998 in a Berlin park. Floricic had been hanged by a belt, the cause of death. Police ruled the death a suicide, and the Berlin prosecutor's office stopped its investigation in 2001. ^[2] However, many of the club's members still suspect foul play may have been a factor. ^[3] ^[4]

The family's first announcement of the lawsuit was reportedly on 14 December, 2005. However, the notice was originally addressed to St. Petersburg, Russia, rather than the Foundation's address in St. Petersburg, Florida, causing some delay in the delivery of this information.

There is still a question as to whether a lawsuit has actually been filed. No proof has been submitted showing that such a lawsuit, or any legal action, has been taken. No public comment has been made by the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikimedia board members regarding the issue.

Addendum

The Wikimedia Foundation is facing a privacy lawsuit in Germany. The German courts have ordered that the German Wikipedia must remove all forms of the hacker's complete civil name, and have issued an injunction that ordered the German chapter to cease redirecting www.wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Deutschland complied but its lawyers announced that they will appeal the decision, saying that Tron's civil name was public knowledge for a long time. Further information can be found here.

References

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^ Sevriens, Dennis, The postmortale personality right: Controversy over Tron alias Boris F (in German). Accessed January 16, 2006.
^ Sullivan, Bob, High-stakes hacking, Euro-style. Accessed January 16, 2006.
^ Hudson, David, Out of Chaos Comes Order. Accessed January 16, 2006.

SP 2006-2010

Wikipedia registered as a trademark

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a trademark registration for the term "Wikipedia" to the Wikimedia Foundation last week, bringing to a conclusion an application process that has taken over a year.

According to the USPTO's trademark database, Wikipedia was officially registered as a trademark on Tuesday, 10 January. The description of the class of goods and services for which the registration was issued reads, "Providing information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet". The Wikipedia trademark also has an international registration through the Madrid Protocol.

The application, filed with the help of attorney and Wikipedia editor Alex756, was originally received by the USPTO in September 2004. Although this may seem like a lengthy delay, in reality the process for reviewing trademark applications is quite drawn out, and a time frame like this is fairly typical.

The Wikimedia Foundation has also applied for other trademarks including "Wikinews" as well as "MediaWiki" for the underlying software. These marks will be published in the USPTO's Official Gazette on 7 February.

One advantage of trademark registration is the ability to use the federal registration symbol '®' as opposed to use of '™' or no designation after the mark. This gives notice that a trademark or servicemark is protected under federal law. Wikipedia may now be written Wikipedia® when used as a trademark.

SP 2006-2010

Nine stewards elected

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The steward elections concluded this week, with nine of the sixteen candidates meeting the requirements, which included a minimum of eighty percent support and at least thirty support votes. All nine were later granted approval by the Board. The nine new stewards are Jean-Christophe Chazalette, Ausir, Romihaitza, Walter, Paginazero, Jon Harald Søby, Suisui, Rdsmith4, and Ascánder. One current steward, Arno Lagrange, was also demoted after he failed to garner the required amount of support.

In addition, Raul654 withdrew from the race prior to its closure after he faced opposition from users citing that he had little or no interlanguage experience. "While I don't agree with [the users who voted oppose], I can appreciate where they are coming from," he said. "So, I'm withdrawing my candidacy, with no hard feelings."

The full results of the elections:

	Username	Total votes	For	Neutral	Against	Support percent
1	Jean-Christophe Chazalette	81	77	1	3	96%
2	Ausir	72	71	1	0	100%
3	Romihaitza	45	42	2	1	98%
4	Arno Lagrange	36	10	9	17	37%
5	Walter	83	82	1	0	100%
6	Traroth	26	9	10	7	56%
7	Klemen Kocjancic	16	3	4	9	25%
8	Paginazero	65	54	5	6	90%
9	Jredmond	19	5	3	11	31%
(10)	~~brian0918~~	24	11	6	6	withdrawn
(11)	~~Raul654~~	72	54	3	15	withdrawn
12	Jon Harald Søby	58	56	2	0	100%
13	Suisui	78	77	1	0	100%
14	Rdsmith4	48	44	3	1	98%
15	Ascánder	49	47	2	0	100%
16	Linuxbeak	6	0	0	6	0%

SP 2006-2010

Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns

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acejan2006

This week, the Arbitration Committee elections continued, with voting running until Sunday, 22 January. As of press time, 13 of the 68 candidates had dropped out, leaving 55 candidates in contention. However, of those 55, only 22 have greater than 50 percent support. Aranda56, Blankfaze, Dogbreathcanada, Emt147, Jtkiefer, Kelly Martin, Mikkalai, NSLE, Redwolf24, Svartalf, Terrenceong1992, Tony Sidaway, and Z.Spy all withdrew; most of them had considerable amounts of opposition.

As of press time, there were six candidates with greater than 80 percent support (listed in percentage of support, from greatest to least): Mindspillage, Filiocht, Charles Matthews, SimonP, Morven, and Dmcdevit. Both Mindspillage and Filiocht had greater than 90 percent support. In addition, eight candidates had less than 80 percent support but greater than 70 percent support.

Real-time results of the vote (assuming server lag is negligible) are available at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/arbcom (see related story), and updates every hour (not dependent on server lag) are available at User:Mathbot/Results.

Also this week, Kelly Martin resigned from the Arbitration Committee after withdrawing from the elections, citing personal reasons. "I withdrew from the race because it was pointless to continue," she stated. "I resigned from ArbCom for solely personal reasons related to the amount of free time I have for the moment due to obligations at work." Martin was appointed to the Arbitration Committee by Jimbo Wales in October of 2005 along with Mindspillage and had been facing controversy over the past week relating to userboxes. However, after several users commented that they thought the controversy had caused Martin to resign, she dismissed those claims by saying, "Interpreting [my resignation] as attempts to 'restore tranquility' is misplaced."

SP 2006-2010

Wikipedia celebrates fifth anniversary

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On Sunday, 15 January, Wikipedia celebrated its fifth anniversary. Wikipedia was made public on 15 January, 2001, after spending five days of development and testing on Nupedia. The date has been known as Wikipedia Day ever since the one-year anniversary in 2002, although unlike other Wikipedia holidays, the holiday has never been officially proclaimed by Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales.

The English Wikipedia now has 920 thousand articles (not including redirects), over 340 million words, and 720 thousand registered users, along with nearly 800 administrators. Globally, Wikipedia now has over three million distinct articles in over 200 languages.

Wikipedia entered the top 20 of Alexa rankings this year, and also increased the number of servers by 129, bringing the total number of servers up to 171, located primarily in Tampa. Other server clusters are in Amsterdam, Paris, and Seoul.

The site celebrated with a notice on the main page, Community Portal, site notice (along with a continued appeal for donations), and the top of the recent changes page.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Flcelloguy, Ral315 and Wikizach

Requests for CheckUser created

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This week, former Arbitrator (see related story) and current CheckUser Kelly Martin created Wikipedia:Requests for CheckUser, a page where Wikipedians can request that a CheckUser be performed on other users. CheckUser privilege, which reveals which IPs a user is using and any other usernames being used by that user, is currently granted to only seven Wikipedians, all of them current or former Arbitrators. The page was created because of the large number of requests that were scattered in several different pages, including the Administrators' Noticeboard, the Administrators' Noticeboard of Incidents, and the user talk pages of the seven CheckUser members. However, because of the nature of the requests, restricted by the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy, requests "will not be performed unless the individual(s) in question are engaged in significant (e.g. pattern) vandalism or there is reason to believe that sockpuppets are being used to evade a block, ban, or 3RR, or to otherwise violate policy (such as to vote multiple times in a poll or to otherwise appear to represent a wider opinion in discussion than one actually does)."

In addition, this week Hall Monitor requested CheckUser priviledges for Curps. Though the request, which was initially placed on requests for adminship, received limited support at first, several users objected on the grounds that Wikimedia Foundation policy states that only the Board or Arbitration Committee can grant the rights. Curps never accepted the nomination, instead asking that his nomination instead be used to begin discussion. "I think CheckUser is a little too sensitive an issue to be decided by RfAdmin-style nomination and voting, so I don't really support this process," he commented. "I thank Hall Monitor for his initiative and confidence in me, and any discussion below may be useful for gathering opinions on the topic of Checkuser."

Wikimeetups in Seattle and St. Petersburg a success

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Wikimeetups in Seattle and St. Petersburg were held on 14 January. The Seattle meetup, held at the Suzzallo Library at the University of Washington, was the third Seattle meetup, after previous occasions in November 2004 and January 2005. The St. Petersburg meetup, the second in the area after a January 2005 meetup, was attended by Wikimedia Board members Jimbo Wales and Angela, as well as Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer.

New tools created

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Interiot released several new statistics tool this week. His Contributions Tree Tool allows users to peruse their edits by namespace and by number of edits; it also has the ability to let Wikipedians search for edits to a particular page. In addition, Interiot also created an edit counter, copied after the existing Kate's Tool. However, Interiot's tool also provides a graphical representation of the number of edits per namespace per month. Finally, Interiot also programmed a page to tally the results of the ArbCom elections. Providing live results (assuming negligible server lag), the tool also provides percentages, differences between support and oppose, and also flags votes from users who may not have suffrage.

Esperanza amendments proposed

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Since the Esperanza Advisory Council elections in December, many members of the Wikipedia Esperanza community have been talking about some changes to the voting system and how the group is organized. According to the present Charter, there must be a referendum to amend the rules, if a consensus cannot be reached within 21 days. The process of amending will be made much clearer after Saturday's Advisory Council meeting. Some of the changes discussed would ultimately alter the way that the Esperanza community elects its officials and leaders.

Rollback request policy considered

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A proposal to allow users to apply for the rollback privilege separate from all other administrator tools is in its final stages of discussion. The proposal would "be given out liberally to Wikipedians who request it", and it warns that misuse of the tool could result in the tool's removal.

Briefly

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The Polish Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles.
The Azeri (Azərbaycanca) Wikipedia has reached 2,500 articles.
The Uzbek (O'zbek) Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 1,500 articles.
The Sicilian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
The Greek Wikipedia has reached 7,500 articles.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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Wikipedia sleuthing

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Wikipedia readers uncover sex offender

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Young sex offender Joshua Gardner tried to pass himself off as the Duke of Cleveland in talking to students at Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota. However, edits he made to Wikipedia (as User:Earlofscooby) to bolster his claim left footprints that allowed student newspaper investigators and eventually the police to uncover his true identity. The story was reported in "Student Reporters Expose 'Royal' Sex Offender" by ABC News, and repeated in numerous other outlets.

A plagiarist dismissed

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Another misdeed brought to light by Wikipedia editors (see related story) has led to the dismissal of veteran news reporter Tim Ryan from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The story was reported in several media sources:

Chinese ban

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The article "Chinese ban on Wikipedia prevents research, users say" ran in The Globe and Mail on January 10. "The latest blocking of the website, the third shutdown of the site in China in the past two years, has now continued for more than 10 weeks without any explanation and without any indication whether the ban is temporary or permanent," writer Geoffrey York said. "Chinese students and intellectuals are expressing outrage at Beijing's decision to prohibit access to Wikipedia, the fast-growing on-line encyclopedia that has become a basic resource for many in China."

Israel News Agency

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In "www.israelnewsagency.com/wikipediagoogleisraelleyden5580110.html Wikipedia, Google, Israel And Free Speech", Joel Leyden, head of the "Israel News Agency", interpreted the nomination to delete the article he wrote on Israel News Agency as an anti-Israeli action and a suppression of free speech.

Summary articles

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"Wikipedia puts unique spin on Memphis and everything else." - Memphis Flyer, Tennessee
"You just can’t trust everything you read on Wikipedia.org" - Times Leader, Pennsylvania

Blog mentions

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"Can Wikipedia Survive Its Own Success?" - Knowledge@Wharton
"A Wiki Runs Through It" The Free Liberal blog
A passage in "Sleeping Cell" at alt.muslim uses the word "Wikipedia" as common parlance: "Again, these robotic conversations remind Muslims of no other Muslims, because no one, and I assume even terrorists, talks like a walking Wikipedia."

Citations in the news

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The number of citations this week has increased again after a lull in the wake of the Seigenthaler incident. Wikipedia was cited in the last week in the following publications:

Middle East North Africa Financial Network (Jordan), on Economy of Nepal [5]
Times Online (United Kingdom), on wiki [6]
North County Times (California, US), on Blue Cross [7]
Anderson Independent Mail (South Carolina, US), on Friday the 13th [8]
New Britain Herald (Connecticut, US), on light year [9]
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin, US), on blogswarm [10] (subscription required)
Charlotte Sun-Herald (Florida, US), on Student loan [11]
Examiner (New Jersey, US), on John O. Bennett [12]
Arizona Republic (Arizona, US), on frankincense [13]
Pittsburgh Post Gazette (Pennsylvania, US), on Bill Bradley [14]
American Thinker (Arizona, US), on Ptolemy VIII Physcon [15] ("This is according to Wikipedia, which is certainly not definitive, as we have come to learn. However, it is unlikley that the friends or enemies of Ptolemy VIII have been been altering articles there, so perhaps it approximates truth.")

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

Contribute —

By Ral315 and RoyBoy

Administrators

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Administration status was given to thirteen users this week: Punkmorten (nom), Wgfinley (nom), Banno (nom), Rogerd (nom), Mathwiz2020 (nom), Sceptre (nom), Admrboltz (nom), Aecis (nom), KillerChihuahua (nom), William M. Connolley (nom), Husnock (nom), Dsmdgold (nom), and JzG (nom).

Featured content

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Seven articles were promoted to featured status recently: Schabir Shaik Trial, Tooth development, Cynna Neele, Paul Kane, Dixie (song), History of saffron, and Nightwish.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: White's tree frog, University of Michigan, Holkham Hall, Game theory, War of the League of Cambrai, TGV, and Texas Ranger Division.

Two lists reached featured list status this week: List of English words containing Q not followed by U and List of Church of England dioceses.

Eight pictures reached featured picture status this week:

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Contribute —

By Ral315

Fundraising notice enabled only for anonymous users

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A recent change has prompted the splitting of Mediawiki:Sitenotice onto another message, Mediawiki:Anonnotice. The latter message is viewable only by anonymous users. The goal was to help prevent the edit wars that had occurred over a personal appeal for donations made by site founder Jimmy Wales. Many users felt that the donations link was obtrusive, and believed that the message would harm future fund drives. The compromise automatically hides the message from all logged-in users. The sitenotice will still be used for fundraising drives.

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

11 January — Installed srv71 through srv80, ten new servers hosted at the Florida datacenter.
11 January — PHP upgraded to version 5.1.1 on various servers.
12 January — Faulty code in SVG image rendering removed.
15 January — English Wikiquote upload problem fixed.
15 January — Semi-protection enabled on the Spanish Wikipedia and the Japanese Wikinews.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week.

Other cases

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No cases were accepted this week.

Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, freestylefrappe (user page), Firebug (user page), and EffK (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Robert I (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, and Copperchair (user page) are in the Voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving AndriyK (user page), Xed (user page), and voters on webcomics AFDs.

2006-01-23

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 4	23 January 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size	Issues surrounding adminship debated
News and notes: Arbitration Committee Clerk's Office, milestones	Wikipedia in the news
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size

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acejan2006

The Arbitration Committee elections concluded this week, with voting ending late Sunday. On Monday, Jimbo Wales announced that he had appointed 11 arbitrators to the committee, increasing the committee size to 15.

In a mailing list post, Wales explained that he appointed the top 8 vote-getters by percentage to the existing open positions, and created three new positions for the three arbitrators running for re-election, all of whom had received over two-thirds support from the community, but failed to reach the top 8.

Joining current arbitrators Raul654, Neutrality, The Epopt and Theresa Knott are the following users:

Filiocht
- Support percentage: 92.62%
- Rank: 1st
- Term ends: December 2008

Mindspillage
- Support percentage: 92.57%
- Rank: 2nd
- Term ends: December 2008
- Previous term: Served October 2005-January 2006

Charles Matthews
- Support percentage: 89.40%
- Rank: 3rd
- Term ends: December 2008

Morven
- Support percentage: 87.73%
- Rank: 4th
- Term ends: December 2008

James F.
- Support percentage: 75.42%
- Rank: 9th
- Term ends: December 2008
- Previous terms: Served 2004, July 2005-January 2006

SimonP
- Support percentage: 86.57%
- Rank: 5th
- Term ends: December 2007

Dmcdevit
- Support percentage: 81.94%
- Rank: 6th
- Term ends: December 2007

Fred Bauder
- Support percentage: 73.61%
- Rank: 12th
- Term ends: December 2007
- Previous terms: Served 2004-January 2006

Sam Korn
- Support percentage: 78.48%
- Rank: 7th
- Term ends: December 2006

Mackensen
- Support percentage: 76.87%
- Rank: 8th
- Term ends: December 2006

JayJG
- Support percentage: 69.75%
- Rank: 15th
- Term ends: December 2006
- Previous terms: Served July 2005-January 2006

During the week, only one candidate withdrew (RomaC), and voting proceeded smoothly throughout the week.

Of current arbitrators, only Raul654, Neutrality, Theresa Knott, and The Epopt did not face re-election or did not resign. Of the five arbitrators who ran for re-election (Fred Bauder, Jayjg, James F., Kelly Martin, and Mindspillage), only Kelly Martin was not reappointed to the Committee (Martin withdrew from consideration early in the vote and resigned from the committee shortly thereafter, citing personal reasons.)

Wales' decision to raise the number of seats was not a complete surprise; discussion had been raised on vote-related pages over whether an increased number of arbitrators would help to expedite cases. Of the remaining candidates who were not selected, they may still have a chance of being appointed to the committee in the case of resignation. Wales stated prior to the election that candidates that met the requirements but were "above the number of seats on the ArbCom [may] go into a pool of reserves."

At the end of the elections, 22 candidates finished with greater than 50 percent approval, while 32 finished with more opposition than support. 14 candidates also withdrew before the conclusion of the race. Of the 22 candidates, only two had greater than 90 percent support: Filiocht and current Arbitrator Mindspillage. Four (Charles Matthews, Morven, SimonP, and Dmcdevit) had greater than 80 percent approval (and less than 90 percent), and eight had greater than 70 percent approval (and less than 80 percent). Five of the candidates had 60 to 69 percent approval, and three had between 50 percent and 59 percent support.

Full tallies of the elections can be found at both User:Mathbot/Results and http://tools.wikimedia.de/~interiot/cgi-bin/arbcom. All eleven arbitrators have taken office as of Jimbo's post.

|Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size]]

SP 2006-2010

Issues surrounding adminship debated

Contribute —

By Wikizach, Michael Snow, and Flcelloguy

Matters related to the selection and conduct of Wikipedia administrators were the subject of considerable attention last week, as community opinion on these questions was solicited in multiple venues.

Radiant! launched an admin accountability poll on Tuesday in an attempt to see whether any particular changes should be made in order to deal with "a number of perennial complaints about adminship or the related procedures."

The poll asked for opinions on a number of different propositions. Radiant! said he had made an effort to include the most frequently expressed views about adminship issues, whether or not he agreed with them personally. A number of additional statements were still added for consideration after the poll started.

Just after the poll began, Linuxbeak also started a discussion intended to focus on possible reforms to the Requests for adminship (RfA) process. Linuxbeak said he hoped this could develop a rough draft of a modified system for handling adminship nominations. Considerable discussion followed, with people listing a number of complaints about the current RfA system. A few possible changes were mentioned, such as de-emphasizing voting in favor of discussion more like featured article candidates, but a concrete reform proposal has yet to emerge.

On Saturday, meanwhile, Radiant! started work on a possible Administrator Code of Conduct that might synthesize some of the ideas from the admin accountability poll. Initial reactions were positive, but indicated some uncertainty as to wording used. A proposal for an Arbitration Committee Code of Conduct discussed last month has gone nowhere, with the fundamental concept drawing mixed opinions, but the actual proposal was widely panned as the work of dissatisfied users who had come under Arbitration Committee sanctions.

In addition, a proposal was also started regarding Requests for comments (RfC). After a large percent of people commented that RfCs were ineffective and not taken seriously, the proposal was made in an effort to give administrators the ability to carry out and enforce small-scale remedies following RfCs. The proposal allows users to make motions to remedy certain undesirable behavior, such as by banning a user from a particular article, which will then be voted on. If the motion receives 2/3 support and has at least five administrators advocating it, other administrators will then have the ability to enforce that remedy.

Poll results

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The admin accountability poll is not designed to achieve any particular policy outcome, simply to gauge public sentiment. Note that most users made individual comments on most issues, thus the results are not as black and white as statistics would suggest. The responses on specific issues, as of press time, are listed below:

	Wheel warring is an inappropriate use of admin powers	95% Agree
	Requests for Comment (WP:RFC) is not taken seriously enough	93.8% Agree
	Admins placing blocks should be contactable via e-mail	92.5% Agree
	The ArbCom should be less hesitant about de-adminning admins who violate Wikipedia rules	86.8% Agree
	Admins should be held more accountable for their actions than they are now	83.3% Agree
#	Ignoring consensus is inappropriate for an admin	77.8% Agree
@	There should be suffrage rules for voting on RFA	73.8% Agree
	Someone should have the authority to temporarily de-admin problematic admins	63.6% Agree
	RFA should be more of a discussion and less a vote	62.5% Agree
%	The standards for becoming an admin should be higher than they are now	51.4% Agree
	A community-based process should be created to de-admin problematic users	43.6% Agree
	The rollback button should only be used in cases of clear vandalism, or reverting oneself	43.4% Agree
	Bureaucrats should remove (or strike out) votes that are in bad faith or nonsensical	38.5% Agree
	Rather than letting the ArbCom or the community deal with de-adminning, some other panel should deal with that	26.7% Agree
	Bureaucrats should not be on the Arbitration Committee	22.2% Agree
	All admins should be subject to periodic reconfirmation of their admin status	21.1% Agree
	More users should have CheckUser rights	10.9% Agree
&	There should be an additional layer between "user" and "admin"	8.2% Agree

Notes:
# Most dissenters think ignoring consensus is inappropriate in most cases, but cite a few clear exceptions.
@ There are widely varying suggestions for where suffrage should lie.
% The majority of votes are not agree or disagree, so this percentage can be somewhat misleading.
& Several users do suggest the Rollback Tool should be more widely available.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

Contribute —

By Ral315 and Catherine Munro

Arbitration Committee starts "Clerk's office"

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The Arbitration Committee introduced the idea for a clerk's office to help lighten the workload for arbitrators. The proposal calls for a small number of clerks, headed by a former arbitrator, to review evidence and write opinions. Clerks would have write-only access to the arbitration mailing list, to allow them to send comments to the arbitrators. The process is still in planning stages.

Main page

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Proposals for a new main page design are currently being voted on.

Living people category endorsed by Wales

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Jimbo has endorsed the creation of Category:Living people to aid in the improved cleanup of vandalism and libel which could be hurtful to living persons. He countermanded early attempts to list the category at Categories for deletion, and encouraged the development of processes (both human-powered and automated) to make the category most useful for its intended purpose. A suggestion to rename the category to Category:* (asterisk) to make it more flexible and less obtrusive to casual readers was made by Kappa; discussion on the possible renaming is ongoing at Categories for deletion.

Czech Wikipedia starts Arbitration

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The Czech Wikipedia has created its own Requests for Arbitration page, and taken its first case, against Vít Zvánovec. Six arbitrators were selected in an election ending on 16 January.

Briefly

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The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
The Lojban Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles after falling short of the mark earlier in the week.
The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles.
The Venetian Wikipedia has reached 50 articles.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 16,000 articles.
The French Wikipedia has reached 225,000 articles.
The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

Contribute —

Court orders shutdown of German Wikipedia

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Several news and blog reports touched on a legal case involving a German hacker named Tron. His parents did not want his real name revealed in Wikipedia and filed a legal suit to take down the site. German Wikipedians did temporarily remove a redirect from "wikipedia.de" to "de.wikipedia.org" (the site's true address), but the site was never taken down, and the redirect was restored within a day. The hacker's name remained on the site throughout the day, and although German newspapers obscured his identity, the name now appears in international news reports as well.

"German court orders shutdown of Wikipedia", The Register January 20
"German Wikipedia site goes offline after lawsuit", Ars Technica January 19
"Wikipedia.de Shut Down", Google Blogoscoped January
"Wikipedia Germany offline", p2pnet January 19
"Wikipedia returns after legal blackout", The Inquirer January 20
"German Wikipedia Back on Net", Techtree.com January 21

Vandalism spree

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A pair of deejays on one of the BBC's national radio stations took to editing their articles while on the air, leading listeners to edit Wikipedia as well. "Wikipedia editing hobby goes nationwide", by frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski, was published in The Register January 19.

Opinions and editorials

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Two cautious-to-negative columns were printed this week. "Be very wary of that wacky Wikipedia" was printed in the Toronto Star on January 17, and on January 20 the science site Physorg republished a University of California Berkeleyan article carrying a detailed critique from a professor trying to edit the Daniel Defoe article, in "Surfing is safer -- and smarter -- with flotation devices". On January 21 a site called Press Action reprinted an article named "Wikipedia's Accountability Problem" by Daniel Brandt, which originally appeared on his Wikipedia Watch website.

Two more positive evaluations came from The Japan Times ("Something wiki this way comes" and from Digital Lifestyle Magazine ("Wikipedia, despite expert’s opinion, extremely accurate.") on January 20.

An article in the Sacramento [California] Bee, on Jan 26, panned Wikipedia. http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/education/story/14116860p-14946117c.html

Congresional Staffers: 1000+ edits on wikipedia

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Full article here

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million...

More dicussion at User_talk:143.231.249.141 Including a complete list of articles edited.

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

Contribute —

By Ral315

Administrators

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Administration status was given to eight users this week: Fropuff (nom), Ambush Commander (nom), Yamla (nom), Interiot (nom), NoSeptember (nom), EurekaLott (nom), Haukurth (nom), and Wouterstomp (nom).

Featured content

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A near-record sixteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Karen Dotrice, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Michigan State University, Panama Canal, Céline Dion, Central processing unit, History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America), Marian Rejewski, Flag of Mexico, This Charming Man, Yagan, Vivien Leigh, €2 commemorative coins, Amateur Radio Direction Finding, Epaminondas, and OpenBSD.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Butter, Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia, Hero of Ukraine, Tooth development, Economy of the Iroquois, History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889), and Planetary habitability.

Featured articles that recently lost their status include Noam Chomsky, Jet engine, Ralph Yarborough, and Mark Latham.

Three lists reached featured list status this week: List of notable brain tumor patients, Flag flying days in Mexico, and List of countries.

Fifteen pictures reached featured picture status this week:

Two featured pictures lost their status: Image:William Cranch.jpg and Image:Yarra_river_near_city_medium.jpg.

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Contribute —

By Ral315

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

18 January — Caching software upgraded to resolve cache corruption issue.
19 January — Hawthorn server up and running.
20 January — Squid servers running slow, resolved.
21 January — Numerous down servers caused a short inability to access the site.
22 January — New database dump system tested, minor bugs fixed.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

Contribute —

By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week, marking the fourth straight week without a closed case.

Other cases

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No cases were accepted this week.

Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, freestylefrappe (user page), and EffK (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Firebug (user page), Robert I (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, and Copperchair (user page) are in the Voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving AndriyK (user page), Xed (user page), and voters on webcomics AFDs.

2006-01-30

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 5	30 January 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

U.S. congressional staffers' editing investigated	Clerk's office begins work to assist Arbitrators
Errors identified by Nature reportedly all fixed	Wikipedia in the news
News and notes: German Wikipedia going to print, milestones	Features and admins
The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

U.S. congressional staffers' editing investigated

Contribute —

A number of Wikipedia editors began scrutinizing edits made from IP addresses associated with the United States Congress last week after staffers for Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan admitted having replaced Meehan's article with one they had written themselves.

Staff rewrite articles

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The actions of Meehan's staff were first reported on Friday in his hometown newspaper, the Lowell Sun. As reported by the Sun, Meehan's staff decided to rewrite the article about their boss, which was done in a series of edits on 18 July 2005. In particular, news reports picked up on the fact that this removed references to Meehan's now-broken pledge when he first ran for office in 1992 to serve only four terms.

Meehan chief of staff Matt Vogel acknowledged the office's involvement, but defended it as having significantly expanded and improved the article. He said, "Let the outside world edit it. It seemed right to start with greater depth than a paragraph with incorrect data from the '80s." Implicitly, Vogel seemed to take the position that they didn't object to the term-limits pledge being discussed but felt no obligation to incorporate unflattering information in their own submission. Still, subsequent edits from the same IP address last month, on 27 December, severely trimmed the since-restored discussion of the pledge.

The resulting publicity apparently caused Meehan to regret this involvement, as he wrote a letter to the editor commenting, "It was a waste of energy and an error in judgment on the part of my staff to have allowed any time to be spent on updating my Wikipedia entry." A spokeswoman said that the office did not plan to change its rules about Internet use; general House policy reportedly allows "incidental" use by staffers.

The Associated Press also reported on Monday that the chief of staff for Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota admitted his staff had edited the article about Coleman. Chief of staff Erich Mische argued that the fact that anybody can edit Wikipedia serves to allow people to correct inaccurate information this way. However, some information about Coleman's voting record (that he voted with President Bush 98% of the time in 2003) was also removed. Mische conceded, "That probably should have stayed in there".

Checking for more cases

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The incident prompted an investigation on the administrators' noticeboard to look for possible additional instances of Wikipedia editing by congressional staff. Rick Block searched the most recent 500 edits for articles about current members of Congress and turned up contributions from 28 IP addresses believed to be assigned either to the Senate or the House of Representatives. An analysis by Aaron indicated that about half of these made legitimate contributions, while the other half edited in bad faith (meaning involvement in major edit wars, severely biased editing, or outright vandalism). Most had made very few contributions, and the IP address that edited the Meehan article had by far the most. Its contributions went back before the Meehan edits to the creation, on 2 June 2005, of an article about the McEntire Joint National Guard Station in South Carolina. Many but certainly not all of the edits were to articles on political subjects.

The edits were almost certainly not all by the same person, either, as another contribution from this IP address showed. Someone identifying herself as the Communications Director for South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson posted his official biography to the talk page for the article, asking that it be considered for use in updating the article. Jimbo Wales confirmed that he had corresponded with her and suggested this particular course of action, commenting that this staffer's conduct was entirely proper: "Her actions were 100% perfect in every respect, treating us appropriately." Some more discussion took place in the context of a request for comment about the situation.

Although the Meehan article is apparently the first case where legislative staffers have openly admitted editing an article in which they have a professional stake, it is not the first time such efforts have come to light. The German Wikipedia had a similar incident last May in which some edits about the candidates in a regional election were traced to IP addresses for the Bundestag.

Still, involvement by political professionals need not be detrimental, as SimonP pointed out: "We've long been aware of edits coming from the Canadian House of Commons. Overall their edits were not much worse than any random group of anons." And Adam Carr, a long-time user and one of Wikipedia's most prolific editors, works for Michael Danby of the Australian House of Representatives.

SP 2006-2010

Clerk's office begins work to assist Arbitrators

Contribute —

acejan2006

The Arbitration Committee's Clerk Office officially began work this week, following the appointment of a head clerk and several associate clerks. The clerks' duties are to assist Arbitrators and keep the Arbitration process running smoothly; tasks include opening cases and closing cases with enough votes, creating each case's subpage, summarizing evidence for each case, and assisting in writing decisions. Appointed clerks were Ryan Delaney, Tony Sidaway, Johnleemk, Phil Sandifer, and Tznkai; in addition, former Arbitrator Kelly Martin was appointed chair, a position which requires that the officeholder have been an Arbitrator.

The office was created after discussion by the newly-elected ArbCom and Jimbo Wales; all felt that the office was a good idea because of its potential to speed the process and take some of the workload off the Arbitrators.

"I support [the new positions]," commented Arbitrator Matthew Brown. "Wikipedia is getting bigger, and the number of ArbCom cases will inevitably increase. Help with the mechanical mechanisms of the ArbCom and in helping present evidence will improve the ArbCom's efficiency, which I think we all agree needs to be better." In addition, clerk Tony Sidaway also voiced his praise for the idea. "The Committee normally has many cases on its hands and is chronically short-staffed. It does not have the resources to undertake massive refactoring of ill-assorted evidence, and the quality of arbitration findings could suffer from this incapacity... Until now, purely mechanical tasks such as opening a case have been undertaken by arbitrators... Now the Committee has a dozen appointed clerks available to do it."

However, other users expressed hesitation at the idea. "I strongly disagree with the clerk's task of writing summaries of the evidence for the ArbCom from which they'll work," stated FeloniousMonk. "Summaries written by clerks is an all-too-tempting opportunity for the injection of personal view in a case to influence a particular outcome." Despite the fears, Arbitrators reassured people that the clerks would not influence their opinions. "I for one have no intention of solely following the clerks' opinions," said Arbitrator Sam Korn. "I only intend to use their summaries as a place to start research into a case."

The discussion also involved questions on whether or not the clerks should have access to the private Arbitration mailing list. Although the proposal had at first granted clerks full access to the list, after community discussion, it was changed to write-only access. Currently, though, none of the clerks except Kelly Martin, a former Arbitrator, have access to the list. (Former Arbitrators have traditionally retained access to the list.)

The clerks began work on the twenty plus cases the Arbitration Committee currently has; Template:ArbComOpenTasks was also modified to reflect the creation of the office.

SP 2006-2010

Errors identified by Nature reportedly all fixed

Contribute —

The errors identified in the Wikipedia articles selected for last month's review published in Nature have all been addressed. The final corrections needed were made last week, according to Violetriga, one of the participants in a project responding to the study.

The original report, published 14 December 2005 (see archived story), covered 42 articles on scientific topics, comparing the number of mistakes in both Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica. 42 days later on 25 January, the effort on Wikipedia's part to address these errors was declared complete. Only 38 articles actually required changes, however, since Nature reviewers identified no errors in four of them.

Although Nature published the results of the study on 14 December, a detailed report of what errors were found was not initially available. More than a week later, supplementary information (PDF file) explaining the review process in greater detail and indicating the errors identified was posted on the journal's blog.

By this time, work was already underway to address the criticisms, as the articles with problems were tagged with Template:NatureDispute and most began being edited fairly heavily. As a case in point, Cambrian explosion, one of the more flawed articles at 11 errors, had already been the subject of a significant rewrite by Dragons flight. Based on a table used to keep track of progress at correcting the articles, at least 15 mistakes were already fixed before Nature was able to release information about the nature of the errors.

In some cases, the issues were partly traceable to difficulties with the information available. For example Dmitri Mendeleev, the article in which the most errors were found (19), had problems with the number of siblings in Mendeleev's family. He was apparently the last of 13 surviving children, or the last of 17 total. Britannica stated 17 without qualification; Wikipedia said 14 at the time, and some other reference sources give this or some other number. The New York Times reported that a book written by reviewer Michael Gordin actually contained the same number that he identified in Wikipedia as being incorrect. His response: "I believe that is a typographical error in my book."

As the two articles with the most errors, Cambrian explosion and Dmitri Mendeleev were also the last to be checked off. And, as is always the case on Wikipedia, work on any of these articles cannot exactly be considered "finished". As to Mendeleev, to cite one instance, Gordin's review called for more information about "his role as an economic thinker, his work on the theory and practice of protectionist trade, his work on agriculture, etc." The fact that Mendeleev worked in these fields is now mentioned, but without much explanation other than a laudatory quote from a Russian historian of science, so more could certainly be added.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

Contribute —

Congressional editing

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An article in the Massachusetts Lowell Sun ("Rewriting history under the dome") on January 27, followed by an Associated Press report on January 28, described how Massachusetts congressman Marty Meehan's staff deleted unflattering information from his article. The report quickly spread throughout the mediasphere and blogosphere (including stories at community sites Slashdot and digg), and is now being touched on in mainstream radio and television in Massachusetts.

Wikipedians have since uncovered over a thousand other anonymous edits, many of them vandalism or childish libel, appearing to originate from House of Representatives staffers (see related story). Evan Lehmann, author of "Wikipedia target of House 'editors'" published by The Transcript, confirmed House ownership of the IP addresses in question, and spoke to some of the government officials involved.

related story 2006-02-06

Media corrections to German Wikipedia story

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The Associated Press printed a correction to the largely mistaken story it distributed last week on the "closure" of the German Wikipedia. ("Correction: Germany-Wikipedia story", Jan 27). Jimbo's explanation of the errors was reprinted in the HyperOrg blog: "The Media Gets Wikipedia Wrong Again".

Main page

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The Korea Times discussed the featuring of the StarCraft article on the main page, noting that Wikipedia had paid special attention to the video game's popularity in Korea ("Wikipedia Features StarCraft Story", Jan 26). Of articles that have been featured on the front page, the StarCraft article was one of the most heavily edited, with over 300 edits during its day in the sun.

Opinions

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"Wikipedia site quick - and flawed", London Free Press, Canada

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Ral315 and Michael Snow

German Wikipedia to go to print

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Zenodot, a sister firm to Directmedia Publishing, the company that previously produced the German Wikipedia on DVD, has announced that it intends to print the German Wikipedia in book form. This printing is planned to reach 100 volumes of roughly 800 pages each, with production beginning in 2007. Two volumes are supposed to be released each month and sold for €14.90 per volume to subscribers or €18.50 to the general public, so it will take about four years to print the complete encyclopedia.

If you can read German, take a look at the official announcement.

Briefly

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The Thai Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 90,000 articles.
The Polish Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
The Basque Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
The Slovenian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 registered users.
The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 125,000 articles.

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Five users were granted admin status this week: Chairboy (nom), RexNL (nom), Vegaswikian (nom), Peruvianllama (nom) and Ilmari Karonen (nom).

Featured content

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One portal reached featured status this week: War.

A record eighteen articles were featured last week: Kerala, Indo-Greek Kingdom, Shielded metal arc welding, Electrical engineering, Music of Athens, Georgia, Adriaen van der Donck, Médecins Sans Frontières, Krazy Kat, Sino-German cooperation (1911-1941), Military career of Hugo Chávez, Michigan State Capitol, History of New Jersey, HTTP cookie, Political integration of India, Flag of Australia, Cheers, Raney nickel and Bob McEwen.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Planetary habitability, Claudius, Kalimpong, StarCraft, €2 commemorative coins, Imperial Japanese Navy and Prostate cancer.

Featured articles that recently lost their status include Erich von Manstein and Simon and Garfunkel.

Four lists reached featured list status last week: List of U.S. states by date of statehood, List of South Park episodes, Counties of Lithuania and List of European Union member states by accession.

Two pictures reached featured picture status last week:

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

In the first week since the new Arbitration Committee took office, three cases were closed.

Webcomics

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A case involving voters on webcomic deletion requests was closed on Wednesday. As a result, all parties were "cautioned to remain civil", and Aaron Brenneman was also admonished to respect consensus. The dispute centered around these deletion requests, which often resulted in incivility and tension between parties in favor of keeping the articles and those wishing to delete them.

AndriyK

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A case brought against AndriyK was closed on Friday. As a result, AndriyK was banned for one month for deliberately creating irreversible page moves. He was also banned from unilaterally making page moves, or changing articles, regarding Ukrainian names. Ghirlandajo was warned regarding incivility and personal attacks. Finally, Andrew Alexander, MaryMaidan and AndriyK were warned regarding copyright violations. The dispute involved the usage of Ukrainian names and places, as opposed to other spellings.

Gibraltarian

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A case brought against Gibraltarian was closed on Monday. As a result, the Arbitration Committee did not take any action in support of, or against, an indefinite block placed against Gibraltarian in mid-December 2005. Gibraltarian was placed on personal attack parole, probation, and general probation. If he is unblocked, which the Arbitration Committee suggested should not be done in the absence of a promise to obey the remedies imposed in this case, then these remedies would apply. Gibraltarian was accused of editing with an aggressive point of view, making personal attacks against other users, and using numerous sockpuppets to continue editing after his block.

Other cases

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Cases were accepted this week involving users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Zeq (user page), Leyasu (user page), Instantnood (user page), Boothy443 (user page), Dyslexic agnostic (user page), Tommstein (user page), KDRGibby (user page), Ruy Lopez (user page), and Beckjord (user page).

Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page) and editors on WebEx and Min Zhu are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving editors on Rajput, Xed (user page), Freestylefrappe (user page), EffK (user page), Firebug (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, and Johnski (user page) are in the Voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving a series of editors on Winter Soldier, Robert I (user page), and Copperchair (user page)

2006-02-06

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 6	6 February 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales
Five users de-sysopped by Jimbo Wales	Blank passwords eliminated for security reasons
A chat with the elected Arbitrators	Controversial cartoon leads to fierce debate
Reactions by politicians continue	News and notes: Arbitrators granted CheckUser rights, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

From the editor

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By Ral315

The English Wikipedia is fast approaching one million articles. To commemorate this historic milestone, we at the Signpost thought it only fitting to interview the man who helped start it all: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

We will be accepting questions for Jimbo here. Anonymous submissions will also be accepted at the Signpost's e-mail address (WikipediaSignpost@gmail.com). From these questions we will pick the best to submit to Jimbo.

Wikinews has expressed an interest in being involved in this interview, so in order to allow the usage of this interview on both projects, all questions submitted must be dual-licensed under both the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

As always, thank you for continuing to read the Signpost.

— Ral315

SP 2006-2010

Five users de-sysopped by Jimbo Wales

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In an unprecedented move, five administrators were de-sysopped by Jimbo Wales following controversy over a userbox. Carnildo was the first to be temporarily de-sysopped, and the other four de-sysoppings came later. Following the incident, Wales asked the Arbitration Committee to review the case, and a request for arbitration was made and quickly accepted.

The userbox was created by User:Paroxysm and stated that the user "identifies as a pedophile". The box was deleted and restored several times; a duplicate userbox was also created and restored several times, before the original box was nominated for deletion (the nomination later being edited to refer to the duplicate userbox). However, Jimbo Wales intervened and deleted the first userbox, saying that it was inappropriate. Both boxes have all now been deleted and protected blank, and a similar template created by Dschor was also speedily deleted.

The de-sysopping of Carnildo stemmed from the debate: after some discussion on the administrators' noticeboard, Carnildo blocked three users indefinitely (El C, Giano, and Carbonite), for "hate speech and inciting attacks on other users". The reaction was immediately negative: most users agreed that none of the blocked users had done anything inappropriate, given that all of them had only participated in the civil discussion. Carnildo was later blocked (but then un-blocked), and El C, Giano, and Carbonite were unblocked.

Jimbo decided to step in at that point, de-sysopping Carnildo. Wales said that he had "desysopped Carnildo for tonight" and would "leave it to the ArbCom to engage in careful thinking and discussion about what should be done in the longer term." He also urged for calm and an end to the wheel-warring.

However, hours later Wales decided to de-sysop another four administrators, bringing the total number of administrators de-adminned to five. Ashibaka, BorgHunter, El C, and Karmafist were all de-adminned for their roles in engaging in the "absurd wheel war that went on tonight over this stupid thing", according to a post by Wales to the Wiki-en-L mailing list. In addition, Wales also commented on the administrators' noticeboard, stating that "after several hours of deliberations and discussions with a variety of people, including several ArbCom members, I have temporarily desysopped everyone who in any way was 'wheel warring' tonight over the stupid trolling template. The ArbCom will be considering the whole thing and handing out a more permanent ruling on the whole thing very soon." He also urged for calm again, saying that he was "desirous that we have peace until morning."

Ashibaka restored and unprotected the templates several times, and BorgHunter also restored the duplicate template; each time. The restored templates were deleted by other administrators (MarkSweep, Doc glasgow, Violetriga, David Gerard, Physchim62) before Jimbo Wales intervened. El C had blocked Carnildo for 24 hours after being unblocked from Carnildo's indefinite block. Karmafist, meanwhile, had unblocked Joeyramoney, the user who had originally placed the controversial userbox on his userpage; Joeyramoney had been blocked for one week by Jimbo himself.

Following the incident and the request by Wales for the Arbitration Committee to handle the case for the long-term, a request for arbitration was made and quickly accepted; after collecting evidence, the case has now moved into the voting phase.

SP 2006-2010

Blank passwords eliminated for security reasons

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A potentially dangerous security issue was addressed last week by forcing password changes for some insecure accounts. There were no reports that anyone had exploited this vulnerability.

Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber announced on Monday, 30 January, that blank passwords would no longer work for accounts on any Wikimedia Foundation wikis. He reported that he had located "a handful of sysop accounts" with blank passwords, and for security and accountability reasons decided to remove the ability to log in with a blank password.

For existing users hit by this change, Vibber explained, "Affected accounts can reset the password by the automated e-mail password gadget on the login form, unless of course they didn't put in an e-mail." He also added some code that would require affected users to change their passwords the next time they tried to log in.

Jtkiefer commented, "I'm surprised that blank passwords were ever allowed". The change did draw some complaint, however, especially due to it not being announced before implementation. However, as Shimgray pointed out, announcing in advance that a number of administrators had blank passwords would effectively invite people to look for and potentially hijack those accounts. Limiting the change to administrator accounts only was suggested, but according to Vibber there would still be nothing to prevent regular blank-password accounts from being made into administrators in the future.

This is not the first time that password security issues have come up on Wikipedia. Previously, controversy over the use of weak passwords to identify disruptive sockpuppet accounts led to an upgrade to salted passwords (see archived story).

SP 2006-2010

A chat with the elected Arbitrators

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acejan2006

This week The Wikipedia Signpost conducted interviews with each of the newly elected Arbitrators. Of the 11 elected, all responded except Filiocht, who is currently on a break, and Jdforrester. The answers provide the thoughts of each of the new and returning members.

This also concludes our special series on the election; all of the newly elected Arbitrators (with the exception of Filiocht) have begun work with over 20 currently accepted requests for arbitration.

1. How do you feel about getting the opportunity to serve on the ArbCom?

Charles Matthews (CM): Gratified with the degree of support I had. Settling into the ArbCom is another matter; any case accepted is a responsibility.

Dmcdevit (D): I'm honored to have been chosen, and excited to help out. And of course, a bit apprehensive after all the warnings and condolences I got, but we shall see...

Fred Bauder (FB): I take the role seriously. We are apparently destined to become a major human institution and our decisions should be made with a awareness that "The whole World is watching."

Jayjg (J): A bit overwhelmed; it's a lot of work, and getting even busier. But honoured as well.

Sam Korn (SK): I am delighted that the community felt sufficient trust in me. It is very gratifying and confirms my belief that I have done good things while I have been here. This is especially so since I believe I am the youngest Arbitrator (past and present). On the other hand, I am a little alarmed at the workload!

SimonP (SP): A mix of delighted and daunted.

Mackensen (MC): I'm honored that the community granted me that opportunity and I hope that I won't let them down. I said right after the election that I was in a state of shock and it still seems a little unreal.

Mindspillage (MS): Well, partly "oh, no, not again"... ;-) Hm. Both honored and overwhelmed that so many people expressed their support and worried about doing it, as it's a bit of a nerve-wracking job.

Morven (MO): It would be fair to say I was thoroughly shocked that I got so much support. I never expected that; hoped for it, of course. I'm still feels a little unreal.

2. What do you think of the election? Do you think they were conducted properly? What could have been improved, in your opinion?

CM: I was downbeat about it when the initial questions were posted. I disliked some of the lines of questioning, particularly the interrogations about personal beliefs, and that probably showed. There was a rush of last-minute candidacies, which did little good and less harm. Once the voting started it seemed quite orderly, and not such a bad system.

D: It wasn't perfect. There are the problems with voting in general, that a blatantly unhelpful or unfounded vote is worth the same as a well-reasoned one, that it encourages trolls to go play at others' expense. But I think it worked overall, and I wasn't that worried about it. There were a number of good candidates running, so most methods would have had a favorable result, even without me :).

FB: I was pleased with it. I was quite liberal in supporting candidates, which I felt free to do as I could vote as many times as I wanted. This included the chance to support users who had a statement I liked or thought might make a good arbitrator despite having no chance at being elected or selected.

J: It seemed conducted reasonably well. I think the purpose of the question page could have been better clarified; too many of the questions were simply thinly disguised attacks (or, in some cases, completely undisguised attacks). As well, the "winning" criteria might have been more explicit; was it simply percentage, or was it total Support votes, or Support-Oppose votes? Different measures gave radically different rankings.

SK: To my surprise (and gratification) they were conducted for the most part very well. I had my concerns about the procedure before it started, but the only significant problems came with trolling on the questions pages. I am grateful to the elections organisers for their effort. As to a possible improvement, it was annoying and disruptive to have over sixty candidates, the vast majority of whom had no chance of election. I hope a future election will exclude these somehow.

SP: I had great concerns about the election, as I don't think RFA works all that well. For the most part, however, it worked quite well and kudos are due its organizers.

MC: I expected the worst and was pleasantly surprised. I think enforcing the rule against diatribes on the voting pages helped matters. In the future, the suffrage rules ought to be decided further in advance.

MS: I was initially quite skeptical of the idea of open elections, and I'm still not thrilled with it (I refrained from voting, as a candidate), but it did turn out better than I thought it would, despite a few unfortunate incidents. Difficult to propose an alternate system; all have their tradeoffs.

MO: The elections went better than I feared. While it would have been nice if we'd all known how they were going to work a bit more ahead of time, there was surprisingly little chaos. While I had my worries about open, RFA-style voting, the advantage of it is that the results are clear for all to see - verifiable.

3. What would you say to those who supported you? Opposed you?

CM: Many thanks for the kind words which were said. Apart from a few grudges, I had some opposition on 'tone'. To those who held the way I express myself against me - look, I don't do bland, I do forthright.

D: Well, thanks to both for taking the time to consider me, and I hope I can live up to your expectations.

FB: I am thankful for the appreciation for my efforts expressed by supporters and will take seriously the criticisms expressed by those who opposed me.

J: I would simply thank those who supported me, and let both supporters and opposers know that I will faithfully carry out my mandate.

SK: To those who supported me, thank you, I'll do my best not to disappoint. To those who opposed, thank you as well. Your opinions were useful, and I also got some good laughs from the rationales (the one saying transparency was more important than justice was priceless).

SP: I obviously owe a great deal of thanks to the large number of Wikipedians who supported me. For those who opposed me, my goal is to prove them wrong by being an excellent arbitrator.

MC: In both cases, that I'm not taking it personally.

MS: To those who supported, thank you for your confidence in me; to all, I'll try not to let you down; please let me know if I screw up.

MO: That in both cases I hope I exceed expectations.

4. What do you think of the other Wikipedians who were appointed along with you?

CM: Filiocht is the one I know best - we worked together on The Cantos, a proof-of-concept project for 'Wikipedia can do the humanities'. It looks like solid, bright, committed Wikipedians all the way down, to me.

D: I had no disappointments, all were fine choices. In my week as an aarbitrator, I've been impressed and pleased by all the work I've seen them doing.

FB: With one exception I supported all of them for the role and I'm not sure that one won't make a fine arbitrator. Right now I am just observing their behavior and comments. Our new crew is rather untried. After a few hard, and perhaps contested cases I'll have a much more informed opinion. I may not candidly share all aspects of that opinion with the community. We need to maintain good relationships between us, not form permanent factions based on disputes on how to handle a particular matter.

J: They all look like good candidates for the Committee.

SK: The ones that I know are all exemplary Wikipedians and wonderful people. I hope to get to know those whom I haven't previously known very well.

SP: They are without exception an excellent group of people.

MC: They're good folks with the best interests of the encyclopedia at heart.

MS: All of them are people I have a good deal of respect for (and I'm not just saying that because you're going to print it publicly, either)!

MO: They are a great bunch of hard-working, committed Wikipedians that I respect very strongly. I doubt we'll all agree all the time, but that's not the point - we all have Wikipedia's best interests at heart and will try and do the best for the project.

5. What do you think of Jimbo's decision to re-appoint three Arbitrators (JamesF., Jayjg, and Fred Bauder)? Do you support this?

CM: Yeah. I've talked to James at meet-ups, Fred is the guy who keeps the ArbCom going forward when it would otherwise stall. Jayjg I know only from the wiki-en mailing list, but it already seems we agree on a few ArbCom technical things.

D: I think it's a very good idea to have a larger Arbitration Committee, and this was a good way of doing it. The experienced arbitrators are helping to move things along, and these are some of the most active.

FB: The appointed members have done good work. His appointment is based on that. I would say we need some continuity and experience.

J: Well, naturally I'm biased, but it seemed reasonable to me. The Arbitration Committee has, as far as I know, always had appointed members on it, and Jimbo stated that the conditions for eligibility this time were simply getting over 50% of the vote. All 3 of us are experienced Arbitrators who have proven ourselves, and we all had significant support no matter how you measure it: for example, if you measure by "Support-Oppose", then Fred came in 4th, I came in 7th, and James came in 9th. If you measure by Support votes alone, then Fred came in 3rd, and I came in 4th.

SK: I think it is very important to have a good number of experience Arbitrators on the Committee. The selection procedure is to be commended for allowing this to happen.

SP: I do think this is a good idea. Incumbent arbitrators have an inherent disadvantage when facing reelection as their job ensures that they regularly penalize other users, and these same users then come back and vote against them. Some avenue has to be created to overcome this handicap, and while direct appointment may not be the best solution it is an adequate one for the present.

MC: Their experience thus far has been invaluable. In that regard, I support Jimbo's decision whole-heartedly. Too much turnover on the committee would create chaos.

MS: Yes, I do; all of them have done good work in the past and I'm glad to see them continue. (Also, having more "old hands" around is really helpful when so much of the committee is new.)

MO: Arbcom needed more bodies, given the dropout rate in the past and the fact that some peoples' lives inevitably get busy. All three have proven themselves good Arbitrators, willing to work hard at the task, and they all got good approval ratings from the community. Speaking selfishly, I'm glad that it means we have eight experienced Arbitrators on the committee so us newbies don't have to come up to speed on ALL the old cases all at once. It also helps keep continuity, which is a good thing in my opinion.

6. After a week on the job, what are your initial thoughts?

CM: Help. (There is a backlog of cases, to which we opt in rather than out.) Like they say, the first task is to get control of your in-tray. There is an impossible amount of reading-into-the-job to do, so I've looked round for things where I can contribute.

D: Hm, the work doesn't seem to go away.

FB: It's interesting to see arbitrating personalities emerging.

J: Most of the new members seem to be enthusiatic and are contributing well; in particular, they have provided new thinking on a number of cases, which is welcome. The backlog seems to be slowly clearing.

SK: Bloody hell, there's a lot of work!

SP: I still don't really know what I'm doing. I've been WP:BOLD and jumped into a few cases already, but I think it will take some time before I am fully grounded in the procedures and conventions of the ArbCom.

MO: That there's a lot of procedure to get used to. I'm handling it by mostly jumping in and seeing what works.

7. What do you think are the strengths of the ArbCom? Weaknesses?

CM: Strengths: most people recognise that it is needed, and that its decisions deserve respect. Plus Jimbo's support for getting to the issues that really affect the project. Weaknesses: still finding its way, burns out people with huge numbers of diffs.

D: The main strength is that it's the final and enforceable step of dispute resolution. It can make up the best and creative remedies, or ban outright, whatever needs to be done can be. The weaknesses include the time it takes to get done, the fact that many of the remedies require active monitoring by admins (which sometimes doesn't happen), and the fact that we're human.

FB: Most of our disputes are over how to do things in the most common sense way. That goal, doing what serves Wikipedia's needs and purposes, is a strength. Meandering off into collateral issues, which I may do myself from time to time, is a temptation which weakens our efforts.

SK: The main strength is that it normally gives the right decision. The main weakness is its tendency to be drawn out with open-and-shut cases taking far longer than necessary.

SP: For the most part I feel the ArbCom has worked fairly well, especially considering the difficult task it is tasked to perform. Speed has always been a weakness, as is the mess that evidence pages usually become.

MO: The biggest historical weakness has been speed of decision-making, especially on cases of serious disruption.

8. # If you could change anything, what would you change? Why?

CM: Hah - a little early to say. When people are told '500 words', don't allow them 850. Get WP:RFAR reformatted somehow. Better navigation of the pages for any one case. These kinds of things are what you notice in the first 48 hours.

D: Hunger, poverty, war... Oh, about arbcom you mean? I'm still getting used to it really, but I promise to let you know in the future.

FB: I would change our procedures to require arbitrators "sign up" for those cases they intend to work on. And calculate votes from that total rather than from the whole committee. Although we do not know who at this point, a certain number of the arbitrators always turn out to be more or less not involved. This results in a lot of begging them to look at cases and vote. Much better if unless they signaled participation they were just not considered involved

J: I would have a process that automatically put arbitrators on the inactive list if they hadn't contributed in a reasonable period of time (say, a month), and would automatically remove them from the Committee if they were inactive for a similar period of time. This would help ensure that all members are active and contributing, and help keep cases moving through the pipeline.

SK: I would prefer to have more time to understand the process before I make any such judgments.

SP: Human nature, so we could dispense with the ArbCom and all write an encyclopedia in harmony.

MS: Hm. I'm happy to see the committee expanded a bit; there were plenty of qualified people running and I'm glad to see we'll get a wider range of opinions. I'd like to see the earlier stages of dispute resolution (particularly RfC) worked on some so we don't see as many cases; it's hard to give proper attention to over 20 at once.

MO: We need to explore better dispute resolution at the pre-arbcom stages. When things get so bad the arbcom get involved, peoples' positions are entrenched and bridges have been burned.

9. What are your thoughts on the clerk's office? Do you support it? Why or why not?

CM: Well, it looks like it could be a really good idea: someone does the paper-shuffling offstage, so that the Arbitrators can tug their metaphorical beards and concentrate on dispensing wisdom. Most people would favour something to get cases through the system quicker, even of the 'heart sinks' type. We'll have to see how the innovation works out. It's not quite in the wiki way, in a sense.

D: There have always been people who decided to help arbcom out with certain cases, I know I did before. This won't be much different except, we have people that we aare sure we can trust, and that now maybe I can boss them around to the neglected cases, instead of hoping someone will show up. Also, since they are sanctioned, they can do the mostly mechanical janitorial work, like opening, closing, archiving, and processing cases/motions when the votes are in.

FB: I have always supported anyone presenting evidence and making proposals on the workshop page. This is only a slight extension. I have opposed any internal proposal that the work of our clerks would not be out in the open for folks to see and comment on. Opening and closing cases is just paperwork.

J: I'm quite concerned about it. If it were simply an administrative role, which opened and closed cases, tidied up various pages, nagged the Arbitrators, etc., then I'd be all for it. However, I am not keen on the "summarize the case" aspect of the role which it seems to have taken on (indeed, almost to the exclusion of all other aspects); it seems very much like an arbitrator role at that point.

SK: I think this is an excellent idea. Evidence pages have a habit of becoming a horrid mess, which makes our job that much harder. For to allay the fears of any who have concerns about those without community approval shaping Committee decisions, I shall never base my opinions solely upon that of a clerk, but shall use such an opinion as a good place to start reading a case.

SP: It seems like a useful idea, and anything to speed up the process is important. However, a great deal of power could be accrued by these clerks. I think having multiple clerks with multiple viewpoints, who can collaboratively process cases, would be a good idea. Similar to how we have multiple users work on each article to ensure its neutrality.

MC: It's a good idea given the amount of paperwork we handle. Any deliberating body has a support staff; it makes sense that we have one.

MS: I think the idea is worth a shot -- the mechanical work of opening and closing cases, and of doing notifications, is tedious stuff. As for the rest, it may be helpful, it may not; it's worth a try to see what the benefits and drawbacks are. The case summaries I'm not sure of; some of the evidence is all but unreadable, but necessary to slog through anyhow; however, I've seen people working independently do things on Workshop pages that made my job in that much easier and if this happens, then great. I'd rather wait until it's actually been working for a while before offering much of an opinion.

MO: I support it. Wikipedia is getting bigger, and the number of arbcom cases will inevitably increase. Help with the mechanical mechanisms of the Arbcom and in helping present evidence will improve the arbcom's efficiency, which I think we all agree needs to be better.

10. Do you plan on finishing your term? If you had to make a choice right now, when your term expires, would you run for re-election? Why or why not?

CM: I want to serve out my three years. WP in 2009 is going to be much closer to maturity. How we get there matters, and an ArbCom seat is, at the least, very informative about the worst that gives. Three years of ruling on edit wars is probably enough for anyone, but let's see what the future holds.

D: I plan on finishing it, yes, because I think that's what I signed up for. As for another term, well, I haven't decided what I'm having for dinner tonight.

FB: I will probably finish. Might run again. I feel I am contributing to a significant project.

J: Yes I plan to finish my term, and I have no idea if I'd run again. It's a lot of work, and it makes you the target of a fair amount of abuse.

SK: Yes, I do intend to finish my term. I don't know exactly what my plans are for 2007 yet (I may be extensively unable to contribute to WP), so I have no idea whether or not I'd stand again.

SP: I very much plan on finishing my term. I've been with Wikipedia for four years and expect to be fully involved for many more. Then again, I'm sure that the last group of arbitrators all expected to finish their terms and a surprising number did not.

MC: Barring unforseen developments, yes. I'll run for re-election if I think I still have something to offer.

MS: I do plan on finishing. But three years is an eternity in Wikipedia time (I haven't even been editing that long), and I've seen plenty of others burn out from this. I have no intentions of running for re-election; one term will be more than enough! (Oh, great, of course, now that I've said this, watch me pull a Marty Meehan. I swear I won't have anyone go back and edit this for me.)

MO: Right now, I plan to finish my term. RIGHT NOW I would say I would run for re-election, but that's a long, long way off.

11. If there's one thing you could say to the Wikipedia community, what would you say, and why? Is there anything else you would like to mention?

CM: Keep up the copy edits: we'll soon have 1000000 articles, and they need TLC. A big shout to all the closet intellectuals out there. You are not alone.

D: Hi! Thanks for the encyclopedia and everything.

FB: Please consider negotiation and mediation. Gotcha is a dirty game. Don't play it.

J: Let's work together to build a great encyclopedia! Why? Because that is our ultimate purpose here.

SK: Get back to work!

MC: Please take care in writing your requests for arbitration. Explain yourself concisely and provide relevant diffs. The easier it is for us to determine what's going on and why the faster we can arbitrate your case.

MS: Other than "please don't do anything that makes me have to read a case against you"?

No, really. Do the right thing, and use your best judgment. Policies exist to help us do that, not to use as a bludgeon, a straitjacket, or a game. Be nice to people (nicer than you may want to be, even). Assume good faith (which doesn't mean letting bad behavior go unchecked). Use the talk pages. Don't be a dick. Remember that it's possible you're wrong, especially if lots of reasonable people are telling you to consider your actions. If you start feeling like editing is a battle, go do something else; the wiki really won't fall apart.

In other words, please don't do anything that makes me have to read a case against you. (Why? Purely selfish, of course: so I can get back to writing articles and quit reading cases. I suppose there's that whole community project bit too. ;-))

MO: Remember the goals of the project, and remember that most people are trying to do the right thing in good faith.

SP 2006-2010

Controversial cartoon leads to fierce debate

Contribute —

By Flcelloguy and Ral315

The image placement of twelve satirical cartoons depicting Muhammad sparked controversy this week, even as Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, the article in which the cartoons are shown, was linked from the main page.

The cartoons, which were published in a Danish newspaper in September 2005, have attracted international press coverage, and have drawn the ire of many Muslims, who feel the cartoon is insensitive to Muhammad. Similarly, some users believe that the inclusion of the image in Wikipedia's entry is offensive and unnecessary. Other users, however, contended that the article was about the cartoons, and that the collection of cartoons should therefore be displayed near the top of the article.

Three polls showed that most Wikipedians believed the image of the collection should be shown near the top of the article. More than 80% of the voters felt that the image belonged in the article, and over 70% believed that the image should be displayed at the top of the article, rather than further down in it. The third poll, over whether only one of the 12 cartoons should be shown, obtained similar results.

Jimbo Wales weighed in on the debate, saying that even though the "issue is not up to me to decide" and that he would only comment as a normal user, he would "argue for keeping the image in this article" and moving the image to the middle of the article. Nevertheless, the picture remains at the top of the article.

SP 2006-2010

Reactions by politicians continue

Contribute —

As news about editing by congressional staffers continued to circulate, the media sought out responses from politicians to see who was editing Wikipedia and what they thought about it. Some additional admissions surfaced, while reactions ranged from critical to glowing.

Beyond the initial revelations about staffers for Marty Meehan (D-Massachusetts) having edited Meehan's article, reports also came in about other cases. For example, one case involved the office of Senator Norm Coleman (R-Minnesota), whose chief of staff admitted having changes made to the article. He also questioned the Wikipedia system generally, asking, "What's to stop someone from writing in that Norm Coleman was 7-feet-10-inches, with green hair and one eye smack dab in the middle of his head?" Almost inevitably, one person took him up on the suggestion by adding just that (and was reverted within the minute).

In North Carolina, The News & Observer followed up with its own local politicians in a report published Friday. According to The News & Observer, the press secretary for Bob Etheridge (D-North Carolina) acknowledged correcting inaccuracies in his article. Similarly, the communications director for Tom Lantos (Democrat-California) admitted editing the article about her boss. She claimed that all her contributions were attributed to sources such as local newspapers, which can be seen reflected in the number of external links interspersed throughout the article's text.

However, one Congressman whose staff clearly had never troubled themselves about Wikipedia was Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), who found himself denying that he had ever been known as "the Flying Cheetah" in high school. That tidbit was added in October by someone who also altered the entry to say Burr represented the 4th Congressional District instead of the 5th, a mistake that was only corrected last week.

Stories about the congressional editing also frequently noted that one of the IP addresses involved, apparently the main proxy server for the United States House of Representatives, had been blocked from editing. It was blocked again on two occasions last week, but now only for shorter periods of time, since it has now been established that different people use it and beneficial edits do result.

With all this discussion in the United States, however, Wikipedia received the endorsement of a politician from a different country last week. President Leonel Fernández of the Dominican Republic included this praise in his speech at graduation ceremonies last Wednesday for students from English programs at several institutions. According to the newspaper Hoy (Today), Fernández called Wikipedia "the most revolutionary encyclopedia possible in terms of distributing knowledge" (English version). He noted Wikipedia's existence in a number of languages, but emphasized English due to its "hegemony" in the digital world.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

Contribute —

By Flcelloguy and Michael Snow

Two Arbitrators granted CheckUser rights

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Two newly-elected Arbitrators were granted CheckUser rights this week; in addition, the Arbitration Committee is also considering giving the rights to a non-member. Morven and Sam Korn join seven other current and former Arbitrators and developers with the access, which allows the user to check another user's IP address and match usernames used by that IP. The total number of people with CheckUser access is now nine.

Meanwhile, the Arbitration Committee is soliciting community opinion on giving CheckUser access to Curps, an administrator, contingent on him setting an e-mail address in his profile.

Wikimania open for submissions

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The second annual Wikimedia Conference, or Wikimania, announced its call for participation last Friday. Submissions for papers and other presentations are being accepted over the next few months. The deadline for proposed workshops and tutorials is 30 March; abstracts for panels, papers, posters, and presentations should be received by 15 April. Wikimania is scheduled to be held August 4-6 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Deletion process goes live

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A new deletion method began this week. Proposed deletion, as it was dubbed, involves letting editors flag an article for deletion. If no one objects and removes the tag within five days, administrators may then delete the article. Otherwise, if someone disputes the proposed deletion, the article may either be improved or be taken to articles for deletion. As of press time, the process had gone live, with over 100 articles already tagged. Community reaction was generally positive, although several people objected to both the proposal and the beginning of usage of the system.

New criterion for speedy deletion added

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A new criterion for speedy deletion was created this week. Originally added by Sannse, it stated that templates which were "divisive and inflammatory" could be speedily deleted. The criterion received implicit approval from Jimbo Wales; he reverted the removal of the criterion. The criterion is most likely intended for controversial userboxes (see related story), which are currently created in the template namespace.

Requests for adminship reform discussed

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A proposal to reform requests for adminship (RfA) was started this week. Created by bureaucrats Ilyanep and Linuxbeak, the proposal includes implementation of a discussion period, suffrage requirements and candidate requirements, and emphasis on providing diffs and discussion. Although the two bureaucrats initially suspended RfA to test the new proposal, it soon resumed after several users objected. Discussion on the issue continues.

Chair of Clerk's Office resigns

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Kelly Martin resigned from her position as chair of the Clerk's Office this week. The former Arbitrator said in her resignation that "It is obvious that the community, for its own inscrutiable reasons, is unwilling to accept the services I am willing and able to provide. I have no doubt that I have the trust of Jimbo and the Arbitration Committee itself. However, it's evident that the community has no intention of allowing me to provide any service of an administrative nature to Wikipedia without having to deal with endless sniping." The position vacated by Martin is now vacant, although only former Arbitrators may fill the position.

Featured content milestones, changes

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Raul654, current featured article director, announced that the number of people subscribed to the daily-article-l list, which sends out the featured article via email, had reached 9000 people. In addition, all the informational featured pages, such as featured articles, featured lists, featured pictures, and featured portals, were redesigned for a "sleek new look". Finally, all featured articles were tagged with {{featured article}} this week, which produces a small star in the upper right hand corner of the article that links to the list of featured articles. All featured lists were similarly tagged with {{featured list}}, which adds a star that links to the list of featured lists .

Briefly

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The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 pages.
The Tamil Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
The Russian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 25,000 pages.
The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles with Peszternye.
The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles.
The Greek Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 2,000 uploaded files.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The English Wikipedia has reached 950,000 articles.
The German Wikipedia has reached 350,000 articles.
The Japanese Wikipedia has been awarded the 11th AMD Award, Digital Contents of the Year '05, Best Writer prize by Association of Media In Digital.
The Breton Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
The Albanian Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

Contribute —

Congressional edits

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Last week's press roundup noted the beginnings of media coverage on editing of Wikipedia by Congressional staffers (see related story). The attention continued this week, with many mainstream media and numerous blogs focusing on Wikipedia's decision to block editing from Capitol Hill computers for a week.

On February 1, the Lowell Sun in Massachusetts published "Wikipedia bars Congress from editing entries" by Evan Lehmann, the original Sun reporter who broke the Marty Meehan whitewash story.

The Washington Post published a well-balanced story on their front page on February 3, entitled "On Capitol Hill, Playing WikiPolitics". The article revealed that the questionable edits coming from Meehan's office were the work of a summer intern. It was also one of the few to correctly note the scale of the issue (a few thousand bad edits -- most juvenile pranks rather than Orwellian rewriting of history -- out of the 4.7 million edits made to Wikipedia in December).

Articles

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"Reputations taking hits on Web site", The Argus
"Wikipedia and the Credibility of Online Information", Global Politician
"In defence of Wikipedia", NOW Toronto
"How accurate is Wikipedia's content?", Economic Times (India)

Citations in the news

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Despite a previously reported internal memo from New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia warning against use of Wikipedia, the article on mark to market accounting was endorsed as "a pretty good explanation" by the paper Saturday, in a story from Dan Mitchell. The story incorrectly referred to Wikipedia as wikipedia.com instead of wikipedia.org.

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy and Michael Snow

Administrators

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Five users were granted admin status this week: Ashibaka (nom), Lethe (nom), Steinsky (nom), MPF (nom) and Banes (nom). Ashibaka was desysopped less than a week later, along with four other admins, as a result of the dispute over a userbox template reported elsewhere.

Featured content

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Featured articles now have a special template that puts a star in the top right corner of the article. Talrias borrowed the idea from the Spanish Wikipedia. The addition was fairly popular, although there were some objections that this adds metadata to articles. Normal practice calls for such information to be added to talk pages instead. A similar template has been added to featured lists.

The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Australia.

Ten articles were featured last week: USS Wisconsin (BB-64), Lindsay Lohan, Edward Teller, Olivier Messiaen, Katyń massacre, New England Patriots, History of Miami, Florida, Trade and usage of saffron, Shoshone National Forest and Henry James.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Charles I of England, Dixie (song), Radhanites, Adriaen van der Donck, Restoration spectacular, Comet Hyakutake and Music of Nigeria.

Articles that were de-featured last week: Leet and Aztalan State Park.

One list reached featured list status last week: List of Formula One World Constructors' Champions, and one, Sri Lankan national cricket captains, became the second to be de-featured.

Seven pictures reached featured picture status last week:

Geneva drive

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Ral315

Last (two) weeks in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

26 January — ImageMagick 6.2.6 installed on all servers.
26 January — Spam blacklist disabled, following reports of bugs.
28 January — AFD, VFD, and other deletion pages added to Wikipedia's Robots.txt file.
29 January — Captcha images added to registration and some editing pages on smaller Wikimedia projects.
30 January — Blank passwords disabled (see related story)
1 February — Message trimmed from wikimediafr-l mailing list for privacy reasons.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

Contribute —

By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee closed eight cases this week, tying a record set last November.

Robert I

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A case against Robert I was closed on Tuesday. As a result, Robert I was banned pending the resolution of all legal disputes. When and if this ban is lifted, Robert I is subject to probation, a one-year ban from any articles relating to Gregory Lauder-Frost, and a requirement to use only one account. Robert I had been accused of POV editing on Gregory Lauder-Frost, and legal threats and other comments were made, purporting to be from Lauder-Frost, that were likely made by Robert I.

Copperchair

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A case against Copperchair was closed on Wednesday. As a result, Copperchair has been indefinitely banned from all articles relating to Star Wars and the War on Terrorism, and placed on indefinite probation. Copperchair was accused of carrying "fixed, non-negotiable views" about the above articles, and had edit-warred on them.

Johnski

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A case against Johnski was closed on Thursday. As a result, Dominion of Melchizedek and related articles have been semi-protected (with the ability to unprotect if administrators deem it acceptable to do so). Johnski and assorted IP sockpuppets had been accused of being linked with the micronation, and had edit-warred on the page.

Winter Soldier

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A case against editors on Winter Soldier Investigation was closed on Friday. As a result, TDC and an anonymous editor in the IP range 165.247.xxx.xxx have been banned from editing Winter Soldier Investigation for one year. Additionally, if either party wishes to appeal the ban, they can do so after three months. Both editors edit-warred on the article, resulting in numerous three-revert rule blocks and page protections.

Xed

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A case against Xed was closed on Saturday. As a result, Xed has been reminded to avoid personal attacks, and warned about citing "unreliable sources". Viriditas was also commended for his work in dealing with Xed. Xed, who was the defendant in a prior case, returned after a three month ban, and remains on personal attack parole.

Neuro-linguistic programming

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A case against editors on Neuro-linguistic programming was closed on Monday. As a result, a form of probation was enacted on the subject, whereby any administrator can ban any user from Neuro-linguistic programming and its related articles. The article will also be placed under mentorship, with mentors to be named later. Editors Comaze, HeadleyDown, JPLogan, Camridge, DaveRight, and AliceDeGrey have also been required to discuss any reversions on article talk pages, and have been reminded regarding NPOV and adequate sourcing.

Benjamin Gatti

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A case against Benjamin Gatti was closed on Monday. As a result, Benjamin Gatti has been placed on probation for one year and indefinitely on general probation. Benjamin Gatti was accused of editing with an aggressive anti-nuclear POV, disruption, failing to assume good faith, and Wikilawyering.

Deeceevoice

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A case against Deeceevoice was closed on Monday. As a result, Deeceevoice was placed on probation, and on personal attack parole, and has been prohibited from "using her user page to publish offensive rants." Deeceevoice was also counseled to assume good faith and reminded of the need to follow Wikipedia policies. Friday and Jim Apple were also cautioned to avoid suggesting that other users leave the project. Deeceevoice had been accused of incivility, making personal attacks, and editing with a strong point of view.

Other cases

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A case was accepted this week involving a wheel war on Template:User pedophile (see related story.) It is in the voting phase.

Another case was accepted this week involving Theodore7 (user page). It is in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Zeq (user page), Leyasu (user page), Instantnood (user page), Boothy443 (user page), Dyslexic agnostic (user page), Tommstein (user page), and VeryVerily (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving KDRGibby (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, Freestylefrappe (user page), users RJII and Firebug, Sortan (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), and Reddi (user page) are in the voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving Ruy Lopez (user page), Beckjord (user page), and EffK (user page).

2006-02-13

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 7	13 February 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

From the editor
From the editor: Interview with Jimbo Wales

Userbox warring
Userbox arbitration case closes

Wikimedia committees
Wikimedia Foundation committees organizing, starting work

News and notes
News and notes: Wikipedia hits top 25 sites, milestones

In the news
Wikipedia in the news

Features and admins
Features and admins

Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Arbitration report
The Report On Lengthy Litigation

2006-02-20

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 8	20 February 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

An interview with Jimbo Wales
Arbitrator Mackensen resigns	Access issues in mainland China revisited by media
Wikimedia chapter incorporated for the UK	News and notes: Proposed Main Page redesign, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

An interview with Jimbo Wales

Contribute —

By Ral315

Just five years ago, when Jimbo Wales founded Wikipedia, the project's goal of 100,000 articles [16] seemed ambitious. Yet today, the project, now one of the top 25 websites in the world according to Alexa, is nearing closer to 1,000,000 articles in English, and 3.5 million articles across all languages. This week, the Signpost interviewed Jimbo Wales, asking him questions that our readers have submitted.

Colored version

Wikipedia Signpost: Raul654 asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturfing?"

Jimbo Wales: The question is invalid. There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".

WS: Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"

JW: We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.

WS: An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"

JW: The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.

WS: ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"

JW: We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.

WS: GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"

JW: I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.

WS: Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude at best. The Featured article process seems too slow, and the article validation feature seems to have died a quiet death. Are you planning a big push on this front?"

JW: Isn't that the same question as the quality question? The article validation feature has not died a quiet death at all.

WS: Quadell asks: "Most important decisions on Wikimedia projects are handled with consensus. However, we sometimes have to deal with legal issues, especially related to copyright law. For instance, we as a community may need to decide whether to consider a certain use "fair", or how to deal with conflicting copyright claims. Dealing with this through consensus is problematic, since we can't do something illegal even if there is widespread misguided support for it. In general, how can we as a community deal with these issues?"

JW: I don't think there is any real problem with this. The community is strongly in support of following the law. I don't know of any particular cases of widespread misguided support for something illegal. In particular cases, there can of course be [dis]agreement, but I have never seen anyone in the community argue that we should not listen to the advice of our legal team.

WS: Raul654 asks: "Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years?"

JW: I don't know. My favorite answer to this is to say, the real question is: where will the world be after 10 more years of Wikipedia. :) Seriously, I think we'll eventually see a tapering off of new article creation in the large language wikipedias as more and more "verifiable" topics are covered. At this point, most changes will be expansions and updates and quality improvements to existing articles. But in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects. Our community will continue to become more diverse as more and more people worldwide come online.

WS: Kevin Myers asks: "The values reflected in certain Wikipedia policies (anti-censorship, neutral point-of-view) are problematic in cultures where freedom of expression is limited, as the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China and arguably the Muhammad cartoons controversy attest. As Wikipedia expands internationally, do you foresee Wikipedia becoming increasingly controversial in countries where "Western values" are seen as a potential threat?"

JW: I don't think that neutrality and objectivity are really controversial among most people of the world. It is true that the leadership in some places does not value these things, and may actually work against these things, but we can not deviate from our goals to accommodate them.

WS: On a similar topic, Vsion asks: "Are there currently any efforts being undertaken by the Foundation to address the People's Republic of China's blocking of Wikipedia or to alleviate its effect?"

JW: Beijing-area Wikipedians are working to have the block lifted. Our position is that the block is in error, even given China's normal policies. Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted.

WS: David.Monniaux asks: "The Foundation receives daily accusations of libel from semi-well-known people who have an entry on Wikipedia or are mentioned in some Wikipedia entry. What do you propose? Would a strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims suffice, in your opinion?"

JW: Yes. I think that our current systems do a good job of addressing these sorts of complaints, although it is very time-consuming for us here in the office. What really works wonders is a very strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims particularly relating to biographies of living persons. The new policy on biographies of living persons is a very strong step in the right direction.

WS: Tony Sidaway asks: "In the past six weeks the number of userboxes on English Wikipedia has risen from 3500 to 6000 and, despite your appeals for restraint, the number pertaining to political beliefs has risen from 45 to 150. Can the problem of unsuitable userboxes still be resolved by debate?"

JW: My only comment on the userbox situation is that the current situation is not acceptable.

WS: Larsinio asks: "How can Wikipedia effectively explain to the public its open-contribution model without simultaneously worrying the public about inaccurate information?"

JW: I think we do a reasonably good job of that. The best thing is to point to our overall quality while at the same time pointing out that we are currently a work in progress. Over time, this answer will change as we move toward '1.0'. At that time, we can point to '1.0' for those who are made nervous by the live editing.

WS: Rob Church asks: "Do you consider the encyclopedia to be 'finished'? Do you think it ever can be?"

JW: Nothing is ever finished. Human knowledge is always growing.

WS: Raul654 and Pavel Vozenilek both asked, "What kind of cool new features/announcements can we expect to see in the next year or two?"

JW: I think this question is too hard for me to answer. I almost never "announce" anything, and features are developed publicly by the community. I think other people have a better idea than I do what will happen in the next year or two. :) Ask Brion [Vibber].

WS: Celestianpower asks: "If you had not founded Wikipedia, and had just been referred to it by a friend, how active a contributor do you think you would be?"

JW: [I] dream fondly of such a scenario. I might actually get to edit articles then. Instead of spend the morning (this morning) documenting transactions and taking phone calls.

WS: OpenToppedBus asks: "The last fundraising drive was less successful than had been anticipated. Do you see a shortage of money holding back Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the short-to-medium-term, and are there any plans to bring in income from sources other than individual donations?"

JW: The last fundraising drive was more successful than had been anticipated, by a long shot. It was the most successful fund drive in our history. [Regarding a quoted goal of $500,000], Mav wrote something like that somewhere, in a scratchpad kind of way. That number was just a placeholder and had nothing to do with me or the official view of the foundation. He's apologized repeatedly for it.

WS: Thryduulf asks: "What is your single greatest wish for Wikipedia?"

JW: I would have to just point back to our original goal: a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. That's what I remain focused on daily.

Unabridged log
Channel log from #wikipedia-signpost: [10:20:08] * jwales has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:20:16] <jwales> er, hi [10:20:20] <jwales> first news: Jimbo can't tell time [10:20:32] <rory096> we've noticed ;) [10:20:36] <hahnchen> :) [10:20:43] <pillipalli> :) [10:20:58] <Alphax> jwales in IN [10:21:03] <Ral315> Hi, Jimbo. [10:21:17] * Ral315 sets mode: +v jwales [10:21:20] <Alphax> Greetings our lord and founder [10:21:22] * ElliottHird has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:21:24] * AlvaroM has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:21:27] <Alphax> what happend to the ferrari? [10:21:47] <rory096> apparently he gave it away [10:21:47] * Alphax considers adding that as an interview question [10:21:49] <jwales> what is the plan here? [10:21:56] * Amgine has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:22:15] <Ral315> jwales: Basically, I'm going to ask you some questions that we've compiled from our readers. [10:22:30] * Daniel_Bush has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:22:33] <Ral315> jwales: If there's time at the end, we might open it up for any other questions. [10:22:35] * Biekko has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:22:37] * Ral315 sets mode: +m [10:23:16] * johnleemk has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:23:45] <Ral315> Ready, Jimbo? :) [10:24:15] <jwales> yes [10:24:37] <Ral315> Raul654 asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturphing?" [10:24:52] * dungodung has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:24:57] * Submarine has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:25:21] * Commander_Keane has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:25:52] * galwaygirl has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:26:42] * qoreqyas has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:26:57] <jwales> The question is invalid. [10:27:26] <jwales> There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware. [10:27:50] <jwales> There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways. [10:28:05] <jwales> But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts". [10:28:45] * Tony_Sidaway has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:28:49] <Ral315> Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"A [10:28:52] * Ausir has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:28:56] * sanbec has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:29:17] * LordViD has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:29:42] * domas has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:30:45] * ErnestoGraf has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:30:53] * mclane has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:31:05] * Hraban has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:32:02] * LordViD has left #wikipedia-signpost [10:34:09] * fuzheado has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:34:49] * F-AR has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:35:51] <jwales> We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users. [10:36:04] <jwales> (sorry I'm slow, many things going on at the same time here :)) [10:36:23] <Ral315> jwales: Understandable [10:36:47] <Ral315> An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?" [10:38:16] * tsca has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:41:01] * FireFox has left #wikipedia-signpost [10:41:42] <jwales> The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite. [10:42:28] <jwales> I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial. [10:43:02] <Ral315> ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?" [10:44:20] <jwales> What surveys? [10:44:48] <Ral315> jwales: There were links associated with that [10:45:07] <Ral315> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100 , for one. [10:49:43] <jwales> We should be tightly focussed on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will [10:51:42] <jwales> require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality. [10:52:20] * Alfa_Scorpii has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:52:37] <Ral315> GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?" [10:54:44] * Marshau has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:54:54] * Stv has joined #wikipedia-signpost [10:57:19] * _sj_ has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:00:53] * Dave2 has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:05:49] * pillipalli has quit IRC (Client Quit) [11:05:55] * mclane has left #wikipedia-signpost [11:06:14] * jmcclane has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:06:37] <jwales> I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access. [11:07:31] <Ral315> Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude at best. The Featured article process seems too slow, and the article validation feature seems to have died a quiet death. Are you planning a big push on this front?" [11:09:23] * Ausir has quit IRC (Connection timed out) [11:09:52] * Alfa_Scorpii has left #wikipedia-signpost [11:12:59] * AlvaroM has quit IRC (Client Quit) [11:15:11] <jwales> Isn't that the same question as the quality question? [11:15:35] <jwales> the article validation feature has not died a quiet death at all [11:16:25] * Hraban has quit IRC (Client Quit) [11:16:56] <Ral315> Next question, then. [11:16:58] <Ral315> Quadell asks: "Most important decisions on Wikimedia projects are handled with consensus. However, we sometimes have to deal with legal issues, especially related to copyright law. For instance, we as a community may need to decide whether to consider a certain use "fair", or how to deal with conflicting copyright claims. Dealing with this through consensus is problematic, since we can't do something illegal even if there is widespread misguided support for it. In general, how can we as a community deal with these issues?" [11:17:40] * RXStrangelove has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:19:35] <jwales> it looks like the end of the question was cut off for me? [11:19:43] <jwales> "widespread misq" is the end of what I saw :) [11:19:56] <Ral315> widespread misguided support for it. In general, how can we as a community deal with these issues?" [11:20:21] <Ral315> (Sorry about that) [11:20:21] * Chairboy has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:21:30] <jwales> I don't think there is any real problem with this. The community is strongly in support of following the law. I don't know of any particular cases of widespread misguided support for something illegal. In particular cases, there can of course be agreement, but I have never seen anyone in the community argue that we should not listen to the advice of our legal team. [11:21:58] * fuzheado has quit IRC (Client Quit) [11:22:24] * Ryan_Delaney has quit IRC (Connection timed out) [11:22:49] <Ral315> Raul654 asks: "Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years?" [11:25:14] <jwales> I don't know. My favorite answer to this is to say, the real question is: where will the world be after 10 more years of Wikipedia. :) [11:25:58] <jwales> Seriously, I think we'll eventually see a tapering off of new article creation in the large language wikipedias as more and more "verifiable" topics are covered. At this point, most changes will be expansions and updates and quality improvements to existing articles. [11:26:29] <jwales> But in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects. Our community will continue to become more diverse as more and more people worldwide come online. [11:26:41] * dungodung has left #wikipedia-signpost [11:26:44] * dungodung\|away has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:27:13] <Ral315> Kevin Myers asks: "The values reflected in certain Wikipedia policies (anti-censorship, neutral point-of-view) are problematic in cultures where freedom of expression is limited, as the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China and arguably the Muhammad cartoons controversy attest. [11:27:15] <Ral315> As Wikipedia expands internationally, do you foresee Wikipedia becoming increasingly controversial in countries where "Western values" are seen as a potential threat?" [11:34:34] <jwales> brb [11:40:35] * F-AR has quit IRC (Client Quit) [11:43:01] <jwales> I don't think that neutrality and objectivity are really controversial among most people of the world. It is true that the leadership in some places does not value these things, and may actually work against these things, but we can not deviate from our goals to accomodate them. [11:44:04] <Ral315> On a similar topic, Vsion asks: "Are there currently any efforts being undertaken by the Foundation to address the People's Republic of China's blocking of Wikipedia or to alleviate its effect?" [11:48:44] * robchurch has joined #wikipedia-signpost [11:48:57] * sanbec has left #wikipedia-signpost [11:49:15] <jwales> Beijing-area Wikipedians are working to have the block lifted. Our position is that the block is in error, even given China's normal policies. Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted. [11:50:20] <Ral315> Submarine asks: "The Foundation receives daily accusations of libel from semi-well-known people who have an entry on Wikipedia or are mentioned in some Wikipedia entry. What do you propose? Would a strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims suffice, in your opinion?" [11:52:09] <jwales> Yes. I think that our current systems do a good job of addressing these sorts of complaints, although it is very time-consuming for us here in the office. What really works wonders is a very strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims particularly relating to biographies of living persons. The new policy on biographies of living persons is a very strong step in the right direction. [11:53:21] <Ral315> Tony_Sidaway asks: "In the past six weeks the number of userboxes on English Wikipedia has risen from 3500 to 6000 and, despite your appeals for restraint, the number pertaining to political beliefs has risen from 45 to 150. Can the problem of unsuitable userboxes still be resolved by debate?" [11:54:39] * ego has joined #wikipedia-signpost [12:05:04] * Alphax has quit IRC (Client Quit) [12:08:00] * jmcclane has left #wikipedia-signpost [12:11:30] <jwales> eh [12:11:32] <jwales> userboxes [12:11:33] <jwales> eh [12:12:13] <jwales> I'm looking at the political beliefs one now. [12:13:23] <jwales> My only comment on the userbox situation is that the current situation is not acceptable. [12:13:46] * domas has left #wikipedia-signpost [12:14:43] <Ral315> Larsinio asks: "How can Wikipedia effectively explain to the public its open-contribution model without simultaneously worrying the public about inaccurate information?" [12:16:07] <jwales> I think we do a reasonably good job of that. The best thing is to point to our overall quality while at the same time pointing out that we are currently a work in progress. Over time, this answer will change as we move toward '1.0'. At that time, we can point to '1.0' for those who are made nervous by the live editing. [12:17:09] <Ral315> Rob Church asks: "Do you consider the encyclopedia to be 'finished'? Do you think it ever can be?" [12:18:55] <jwales> Nothing is ever finished. Human knowledge is always growing. [12:19:53] <Ral315> Raul654 and Pavel Vozenilek both asked, "What kind of cool new features/announcements can we expect to see in the next year or two?" [12:24:30] <jwales> I think this question is too hard for me to answer. I almost never "announce" anything, and features are developed publicly by the community. I think other people have a better idea than I do what will happen in the next year or two. :) Ask Brion. [12:25:34] <Ral315> Celestianpower asks: "If you had not founded Wikipedia, and had just been referred to it by a friend, how active a contributor do you think you would be?" [12:26:23] * jwales dreams fondly of such a scenario. [12:27:00] <jwales> I might actually get to edit articles then. Instead of spend the morning (this morning) documenting transactions and taking phone calls. [12:31:19] <Ral315> OpenToppedBus asks: "The last fundraising drive was less successful than had been anticipated. Do you see a shortage of money holding back Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the short-to-medium-term, and are there any plans to bring in income from sources other than individual donations?" [12:31:29] * Interiot has joined #wikipedia-signpost [12:32:12] <jwales> The last fundraising drive was more successful than had been anticipated, by a long shot. It was the most successful fund drive in our history. [12:32:29] <jwales> Where did that come from? [12:33:01] <Ral315> jwales: There was some confusion over a statement that Daniel Mayer made that sounded like the Foundation's goal was $500,000. [12:34:02] <jwales> Mav wrote something like that somewhere, in a scratchpad kind of way. That number was just a placeholder and had nothing to do with me or the official view of the foundation. [12:34:09] <jwales> He's apologized repeatedly for it. [12:34:37] <Ral315> One more question: [12:34:40] <jwales> sure [12:34:41] <Ral315> Thryduulf asks: "What is your single greatest wish for Wikipedia?" [12:36:07] * _sj_ has left #wikipedia-signpost [12:36:14] * _sj\| has joined #wikipedia-signpost [12:41:41] * ego has quit IRC (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out)) [12:43:47] * ego has joined #wikipedia-signpost [12:48:03] * robchurch has quit IRC (Client Quit) [12:53:39] <jwales> ok [12:53:44] <jwales> sorry, phone call :) [12:53:57] <jwales> My single greatest wish for Wikipedia? [12:54:20] <jwales> I would have to just point back to our original goal: a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. [12:54:34] <jwales> That's what I remain focussed on daily. [12:55:09] <Ral315> Jimbo, thanks a lot for your time. [13:00:15] * ego has quit IRC (Client Quit) [13:00:23] * hahnchen has left #wikipedia-signpost [13:01:54] <jwales> and I apologize for this taking so long :) [13:01:58] <jwales> it's another insane day [13:02:07] <Ral315> jwales: No problem. [13:02:16] * Ral315 sets mode: -m

Unabridged log

Channel log from #wikipedia-signpost:

[10:20:08] * jwales has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[10:20:16] <jwales> er, hi

[10:20:20] <jwales> first news: Jimbo can't tell time

[10:20:32] <rory096> we've noticed ;)

[10:20:36] <hahnchen> :)

[10:20:43] <pillipalli> :)

[10:20:58] <Alphax> jwales in IN

[10:21:03] <Ral315> Hi, Jimbo.

[10:21:17] * Ral315 sets mode: +v jwales

[10:21:20] <Alphax> Greetings our lord and founder

[10:21:22] * ElliottHird has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[10:21:24] * AlvaroM has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[10:21:27] <Alphax> what happend to the ferrari?

[10:21:47] <rory096> apparently he gave it away

[10:21:47] * Alphax considers adding that as an interview question

[10:21:49] <jwales> what is the plan here?

[10:21:56] * Amgine has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[10:22:15] <Ral315> jwales: Basically, I'm going to ask you some questions that we've compiled from our readers.

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[10:22:33] <Ral315> jwales: If there's time at the end, we might open it up for any other questions.

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[10:22:37] * Ral315 sets mode: +m

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[10:23:45] <Ral315> Ready, Jimbo? :)

[10:24:15] <jwales> yes

[10:24:37] <Ral315> Raul654 asks: "Recently, there were revelations about organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. What is your take on this, as well as earlier reports of Corporate astroturphing?"

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[10:26:57] <jwales> The question is invalid.

[10:27:26] <jwales> There were no revelations of organized attempts by US Congressmen to whitewash their articles. Not any evidence of "corporate astroturfing" of which I am aware.

[10:27:50] <jwales> There was evidence that some congressional staffers edited Wikipedia in inappropriate ways.

[10:28:05] <jwales> But the internal evidence of the type and style of these edits do not suggest "organized attempts".

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[10:28:49] <Ral315> Nichalp asks: "Budget permitting, are there any plans to increase the number of Wikipedia servers, specifically into the less developed countries?"A

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[10:35:51] <jwales> We are always buying new servers. There are no specific plans to add servers in less developed countries, but we have looked into it as a possibility. We are particularly interested in doing so if it helps increase access and reduce costs for those users.

[10:36:04] <jwales> (sorry I'm slow, many things going on at the same time here :))

[10:36:23] <Ral315> jwales: Understandable

[10:36:47] <Ral315> An anonymous reader asks: "How much of a role do you feel the Wikipedia community (and the communities of its sister projects) should have in the running of the Wikimedia Foundation? Do you see an increasing separation of the organization from the projects? If so, do you regard that as beneficial or a potential problem?"

[10:38:16] * tsca has joined #wikipedia-signpost

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[10:41:42] <jwales> The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are increasing the community input and activity in the foundation through a new series of committees to delegate things to community members which have traditionally been handled by me or the Board. I do not see any increasing separation of the organization from the projects, quite the opposite.

[10:42:28] <jwales> I consider the increasing integration of the community and the foundation as overwhelmingly beneficial.

[10:43:02] <Ral315> ALoan asks: "English Wikipedia is approaching 1 million articles, but less than 1 in a thousand are Featured articles. The list of featured articles English Wikipedia should have has few featured articles, and recent surveys of articles chosen at random show that many articles are poorly written. How can we get from here to an encyclopedia of well-written articles? Or should we not worry too much about coverage and content?"

[10:44:20] <jwales> What surveys?

[10:44:48] <Ral315> jwales: There were links associated with that

[10:45:07] <Ral315> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carnildo/The_100 , for one.

[10:49:43] <jwales> We should be tightly focussed on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia. The path to that goal will

[10:51:42] <jwales> require us to be flexible and thoughtful. The first steps will come soon with the article review system, which will initially be used simply to gather data. After we have data, we can begin to work on how we will focus our attention to improve quality.

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[10:52:37] <Ral315> GeorgeStepanek asks: "You've said that 'Wikimedia's mission is to give the world's knowledge to every single person on the planet in their own language.' But very few of the wikipedias in the languages of third-world countries are seeing as much activity as the first-world language wikipedias. Do you have any ideas on how this could be turned around?"

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[11:06:37] <jwales> I am a believer in outreach. I would like for the Foundation to raise money specifically to pay one or more minority language co-ordinators. The goal would be to reach out in a more organized way to professors and graduate students and expat communities who have good Internet access, to seed projects for languages where the majority of speakers have poor internet access.

[11:07:31] <Ral315> Jacoplane asks: "How do you feel we will be able to reach Wikipedia 1.0? The tools currently available for vetting our articles are crude at best. The Featured article process seems too slow, and the article validation feature seems to have died a quiet death. Are you planning a big push on this front?"

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[11:15:11] <jwales> Isn't that the same question as the quality question?

[11:15:35] <jwales> the article validation feature has not died a quiet death at all

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[11:16:56] <Ral315> Next question, then.

[11:16:58] <Ral315> Quadell asks: "Most important decisions on Wikimedia projects are handled with consensus. However, we sometimes have to deal with legal issues, especially related to copyright law. For instance, we as a community may need to decide whether to consider a certain use "fair", or how to deal with conflicting copyright claims. Dealing with this through consensus is problematic, since we can't do something illegal even if there is widespread misguided support for it. In general, how can we as a community deal with these issues?"

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[11:19:35] <jwales> it looks like the end of the question was cut off for me?

[11:19:43] <jwales> "widespread misq" is the end of what I saw :)

[11:19:56] <Ral315> widespread misguided support for it. In general, how can we as a community deal with these issues?"

[11:20:21] <Ral315> (Sorry about that)

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[11:21:30] <jwales> I don't think there is any real problem with this. The community is strongly in support of following the law. I don't know of any particular cases of widespread misguided support for something illegal. In particular cases, there can of course be agreement, but I have never seen anyone in the community argue that we should not listen to the advice of our legal team.

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[11:22:49] <Ral315> Raul654 asks: "Where do you see Wikipedia in 10 years?"

[11:25:14] <jwales> I don't know. My favorite answer to this is to say, the real question is: where will the world be after 10 more years of Wikipedia. :)

[11:25:58] <jwales> Seriously, I think we'll eventually see a tapering off of new article creation in the large language wikipedias as more and more "verifiable" topics are covered. At this point, most changes will be expansions and updates and quality improvements to existing articles.

[11:26:29] <jwales> But in 10 years, it seems likely to me that many languages which are now quite small will have very large Wikipedia projects. Our community will continue to become more diverse as more and more people worldwide come online.

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[11:27:13] <Ral315> Kevin Myers asks: "The values reflected in certain Wikipedia policies (anti-censorship, neutral point-of-view) are problematic in cultures where freedom of expression is limited, as the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China and arguably the Muhammad cartoons controversy attest.

[11:27:15] <Ral315> As Wikipedia expands internationally, do you foresee Wikipedia becoming increasingly controversial in countries where "Western values" are seen as a potential threat?"

[11:34:34] <jwales> brb

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[11:43:01] <jwales> I don't think that neutrality and objectivity are really controversial among most people of the world. It is true that the leadership in some places does not value these things, and may actually work against these things, but we can not deviate from our goals to accomodate them.

[11:44:04] <Ral315> On a similar topic, Vsion asks: "Are there currently any efforts being undertaken by the Foundation to address the People's Republic of China's blocking of Wikipedia or to alleviate its effect?"

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[11:49:15] <jwales> Beijing-area Wikipedians are working to have the block lifted. Our position is that the block is in error, even given China's normal policies. Wikipedia is not propaganda, it is basic information. We expect that the block will be lifted.

[11:50:20] <Ral315> Submarine asks: "The Foundation receives daily accusations of libel from semi-well-known people who have an entry on Wikipedia or are mentioned in some Wikipedia entry. What do you propose? Would a strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims suffice, in your opinion?"

[11:52:09] <jwales> Yes. I think that our current systems do a good job of addressing these sorts of complaints, although it is very time-consuming for us here in the office. What really works wonders is a very strict application of the rule of citing controversial claims particularly relating to biographies of living persons. The new policy on biographies of living persons is a very strong step in the right direction.

[11:53:21] <Ral315> Tony_Sidaway asks: "In the past six weeks the number of userboxes on English Wikipedia has risen from 3500 to 6000 and, despite your appeals for restraint, the number pertaining to political beliefs has risen from 45 to 150. Can the problem of unsuitable userboxes still be resolved by debate?"

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[12:11:30] <jwales> eh

[12:11:32] <jwales> userboxes

[12:11:33] <jwales> eh

[12:12:13] <jwales> I'm looking at the political beliefs one now.

[12:13:23] <jwales> My only comment on the userbox situation is that the current situation is not acceptable.

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[12:14:43] <Ral315> Larsinio asks: "How can Wikipedia effectively explain to the public its open-contribution model without simultaneously worrying the public about inaccurate information?"

[12:16:07] <jwales> I think we do a reasonably good job of that. The best thing is to point to our overall quality while at the same time pointing out that we are currently a work in progress. Over time, this answer will change as we move toward '1.0'. At that time, we can point to '1.0' for those who are made nervous by the live editing.

[12:17:09] <Ral315> Rob Church asks: "Do you consider the encyclopedia to be 'finished'? Do you think it ever can be?"

[12:18:55] <jwales> Nothing is ever finished. Human knowledge is always growing.

[12:19:53] <Ral315> Raul654 and Pavel Vozenilek both asked, "What kind of cool new features/announcements can we expect to see in the next year or two?"

[12:24:30] <jwales> I think this question is too hard for me to answer. I almost never "announce" anything, and features are developed publicly by the community. I think other people have a better idea than I do what will happen in the next year or two. :) Ask Brion.

[12:25:34] <Ral315> Celestianpower asks: "If you had not founded Wikipedia, and had just been referred to it by a friend, how active a contributor do you think you would be?"

[12:26:23] * jwales dreams fondly of such a scenario.

[12:27:00] <jwales> I might actually get to edit articles then. Instead of spend the morning (this morning) documenting transactions and taking phone calls.

[12:31:19] <Ral315> OpenToppedBus asks: "The last fundraising drive was less successful than had been anticipated. Do you see a shortage of money holding back Wikipedia/Wikimedia in the short-to-medium-term, and are there any plans to bring in income from sources other than individual donations?"

[12:31:29] * Interiot has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[12:32:12] <jwales> The last fundraising drive was more successful than had been anticipated, by a long shot. It was the most successful fund drive in our history.

[12:32:29] <jwales> Where did that come from?

[12:33:01] <Ral315> jwales: There was some confusion over a statement that Daniel Mayer made that sounded like the Foundation's goal was $500,000.

[12:34:02] <jwales> Mav wrote something like that somewhere, in a scratchpad kind of way. That number was just a placeholder and had nothing to do with me or the official view of the foundation.

[12:34:09] <jwales> He's apologized repeatedly for it.

[12:34:37] <Ral315> One more question:

[12:34:40] <jwales> sure

[12:34:41] <Ral315> Thryduulf asks: "What is your single greatest wish for Wikipedia?"

[12:36:07] * _sj_ has left #wikipedia-signpost

[12:36:14] * _sj| has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[12:41:41] * ego has quit IRC (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out))

[12:43:47] * ego has joined #wikipedia-signpost

[12:48:03] * robchurch has quit IRC (Client Quit)

[12:53:39] <jwales> ok

[12:53:44] <jwales> sorry, phone call :)

[12:53:57] <jwales> My single greatest wish for Wikipedia?

[12:54:20] <jwales> I would have to just point back to our original goal: a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia for every single person on the planet.

[12:54:34] <jwales> That's what I remain focussed on daily.

[12:55:09] <Ral315> Jimbo, thanks a lot for your time.

[13:00:15] * ego has quit IRC (Client Quit)

[13:00:23] * hahnchen has left #wikipedia-signpost

[13:01:54] <jwales> and I apologize for this taking so long :)

[13:01:58] <jwales> it's another insane day

[13:02:07] <Ral315> jwales: No problem.

[13:02:16] * Ral315 sets mode: -m

SP 2006-2010

Arbitrator Mackensen resigns

Contribute —

By Ral315 and Michael Snow

Arbitrator Mackensen resigned from the Arbitration Committee on Sunday, citing personal reasons.

Mackensen blanked his user page on 19 February. Arbitrator Raul654 removed Mackensen from the Committee member list, the first public notification of his resignation. A day later, Mackensen clarified his actions, saying "...I resigned this post on February 19, 2006. My reasons for doing so are my own, and I am not willing at the moment to revisit what was for me a painful, if necessary, decision."

This followed his recent involvement in the ongoing dispute over userboxes, which continues to cause problems despite an Arbitration Committee ruling and repeated urgings from Jimbo Wales for cultural change to discourage the more objectionable uses. The latest episode involved a number of userboxes being deleted under the new speedy deletion criterion for templates, especially the explicitly political type which Wales had criticized. Mackensen had been one of several administrators involved in deleting these. A few of these were restored by Guanaco after being debated on Wikipedia:Deletion review, and that forum has now become a focus of attention, to the point that the discussion has been split off to a separate subpage.

It is unknown how soon the post vacated by Mackensen will be filled. Jimbo Wales had left open the possibility to appoint new Arbitrators from a pool of highly supported candidates from the last election; however, it's not clear whether Jimbo will choose to do so right away, or to appoint candidates after more leave the committee, as he did in July and October 2005.

Mackensen's resignation brings the Committee's active membership to twelve members, down from the fifteen members on the Committee after Jimbo appointed new Arbitrators in January. Filiocht is listed as inactive, and due to illness has not taken any Arbitration-related actions since his appointment. Additionally, Sam Korn is currently on vacation.

SP 2006-2010

Access issues in mainland China revisited by media

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Although no change in the situation has been reported, the blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China has become the subject of renewed attention. The subject's timeliness having increased in the context of other news stories, the predicament was the focus of an extensive story published by The Washington Post on Monday.

Following the recent news that Google is acquiescing in the government's censorship requirements, controls over internet content in mainland People's Republic of China have become a frequent topic in the media. Reports about Google's start of a google.cn search engine frequently mentioned Wikipedia as one of the sites that was blocked. Amid vocal criticism of this and similar decisions at other tech companies to cooperate with the PRC's efforts, members of the U.S. Congress have also expressed concern and called for hearings. A certain irony might be seen here, given that some have drawn a connection between the PRC's online censorship and the recent furor over Wikipedia edits by congressional staffers.

With this context, a new press report about Wikipedia access in mainland China has appeared, dealing with the block first imposed last October (see archived stories). This article, published 20 February, was credited to Philip P. Pan of the Washington Post Foreign Service. Andrew Lih, commenting on it in a blog post on the Center for Citizen Media website, highlighted the significance of this issue in Asia because "for most other languages, there is no general knowledge encyclopedia that is freely available". Accompanying the story, the Post published translations of two letters written last October by Wikipedia editors Shi Zhao and Cui Wei, appealing for the block to be lifted.

In the course of his story, Pan covered a number of important aspects in the development of the Chinese Wikipedia. This included efforts to keep the project from fragmenting over various cultural and political issues. For example, the implementation of a software conversion between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese characters was discussed.

One anecdote involved a user who raised concerns about "China-centrism" over whether, for example, the Second Sino-Japanese War article should be called that instead of the "War of Resistance against Japan", even though the latter is the name by which most Chinese would know this conflict. As Pan noted, the debate reflected a larger tension, one that frequently crops up in political naming disputes on any Wikipedia, between the practice of favoring common names and the neutral point of view policy.

Not surprisingly, the article on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, known on the Chinese Wikipedia as the "June 4 Incident", was also analyzed at length. The story covered the efforts to find a balance there between PRC perspectives of these events and those in the Western world, an ongoing process that included a major overhaul by longtime editor Sheng Jiong.

With little to report in the way of immediate news, the story concluded with a summary of the current situation: "The number of people using the Chinese Wikipedia site has dropped, but devoted users are finding ways to access it." It noted that most registered users on the Chinese Wikipedia are from the mainland. Activity continues despite the block, partly by use of proxy servers, but most would undoubtedly like to see the block lifted.

SP 2006-2010

Wikimedia chapter incorporated for the UK

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A local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation for the United Kingdom, to be known as Wikimedia UK, officially came into existence last week. This is now the sixth group to organise itself as a local chapter.

The chapter was incorporated under the legal name of Wiki Educational Resources Limited on Tuesday, 14 February. While incorporation means that it has legal status as a Company, it is seeking Charitable status and will shortly be applying to register as a charity. If this is successful tax deductions may be available for donations to the chapter. As an independent organisation from the Foundation, and subject to UK law, it will use its resources on specific projects as well as supporting the work of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The successful incorporation is the result of efforts that have been ongoing for nearly a year. A number of meetings were held in recent months, both in person and over IRC, to work on the elements necessary to the process. Several of those heavily involved comprise the chapter's initial Board of Directors, which consists of Alison Wheeler, Jon Garrett, James Forrester, Andrew Walker, and David Gerard. Responding to the news of incorporation, Foundation Trustee Angela Beesley said, "Congratulations to everyone who has been involved in setting this up!"

The chapter's objectives, as stated in the Memorandum of Association, are generally to promote "information and educational resources covering the world's knowledge and languages to all persons, everywhere". This parallels Jimmy Wales' stated goal of giving "every single person on the planet...free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

Additional information about the structure of the new chapter is contained in the Articles of Association. As pointed out by David Gerard, the chapter has no authority over content on Wikipedia or any other project of the Foundation, due in part to concern over UK libel laws.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Ral315 and Michael Snow

Main Page redesign

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The redesign project for the Main Page, after working on various ideas for several months, has completed an open editing session and nearly settled on a proposal. Among other things, the redesign incorporates both the featured picture of the day and the Did you know section. This would replace the current system of rotating them, a practice that began last July (see archived story). The organizers plan to submit the redesign for a community vote beginning 1 March.

One question that remains unsettled in the proposed redesign is whether to include a search box as part of the page (in addition to the search box that is part of the navigation sidebar on every page). A straw poll is being held this week about whether this is desirable, with preliminary results indicating that people are about evenly split on the issue.

Delaware meetup

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A Wikipedia meetup is scheduled for Newark, Delaware on Saturday, 25 February.

Briefly

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The Norwegian (bokmål) Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles. (Corrected from February 6)
The Finnish Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 100,000 registered users.
The Persian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles.
The Alemannic Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
The Czech Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
The Bulgarian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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Wikipedia may be the "next big thing"

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Mitch Kapor

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Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and chair of the Mozilla Foundation, discussed the Wikipedia model in detail in a keynote speech at the Open Source Business Conference on 14 February; Ross Mayfield summarized the talk at "Learning from Wikipedia", and blogger Dan Farber also had a report: "Mitch Kapor: Why Wikipedia is the next big thing" (ZDNet).

Quotes from Ross Mayfield's summary:

[Mainstream media] failed to notice that after the Seigenthaler affair, the Nature article showed a comparison in favor for the quality of scientific articles over the Brittanica. The quality was roughly equivalent for Wikipedia and fact, not statistically different. But in the Brittanica articles were poor. But after the article came out, the quality of those very articles improved [in Wikipedia].

I became convinced that Wikipedia was going to be the next big thing. And things like it. I have some history here. Next big things I have gotten right before:

1978 the Apple II
1982 Lotus 1-2-3
1992 UUNET, one of the first ISPs.
1995 Real Networks
2005 Mozilla/Firefox

[If] I was pointing someone now for what was going to be a big thing, it would be doing something where you harness the efforts of a community, one that is truly empowered. People here, basing their business on Linux; having a widespread community is what makes it goes. The community should own the underlying resource, the knowledge base created, because they will contribute if they know it is a commons, not owned by the business organization which commands attention of people who come in.

Paul Saffo

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Another look at Wikipedia's future was published in the San Francisco Chronicle on February 19, in "Institute for the future", an interview with "professional bystander" Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future:

Q: Can we continue to speed things up or is there a logical limit to information overload?

A: I don't think information overload is a function of the volume of information. It's a derivative of the volume of information plus the sense-making tools you have. [...] The rise of Wikipedia (an online encyclopedia) -- that's a sense-making tool. These are tools that help us make sense of information. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said, "There are two kinds of information in this world: that what you know and that what you know where to get."

Q: You talk about the benefits of using wikis and a divergence of thought. How do the two things come together? What are your thoughts on the reliability of Wikipedia in this culture of polarized thought?

A: I'm actually an optimist about what lies ahead. Are wikis reliable? It depends on the specific business. Is Wikipedia reliable? You bet. Wikipedia is a researcher's dream.

China block

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The Washington Post published a long story covering the ongoing block of Wikipedia in Mainland China (see related story) on 20 February, entitled "Reference Tool On Web Finds Fans, Censors" (registration required). The story was reprinted on MSNBC: "Chinese Wikipedia finds fans, censors".

Muhammad Cartoons

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According to a 16 February press release ("The Wikipedia Muhammad Cartoons Debate"), the Iraq Museum International is publishing a three-volume e-book containing over a thousand pages of conversation from various Wikipedia discussion pages, covering "the heated online discussions among the users of Wikipedia, the world's largest Internet encyclopedia, as they edited articles dealing with the notorious satirical drawings of Muhammad first published in Denmark." The e-book is released under the GFDL, as Wikipedia requires.

Downloads: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3

Comedy of misunderstandings in The Times

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"Comedy of errors hits the world of Wikipedia", published February 12 in The Times, noted several individual instances of vandalism in prominent Wikipedia articles. However, the article makes a false allegation: "One saboteur, codenamed Thruston, changes the same sentence in Blair’s entry on an almost daily basis to accuse him of setting out to “destroy” civil service neutrality." The reporter apparently misconstrued Thruston's single edit to the Tony Blair article, his reversion of an inappropriate edit, as vandalism itself. Even then, the edit Thruston cleaned up was a violation of style guidelines, not the destructive vandalism the article cites.

The piece also interprets everyday recent changes patrol as a state of "attack", saying "Hackers are abusing this openness to vandalise the site so frequently that its gatekeepers are relying on a volunteer army of nearly 1,000 supporters to police and correct the entries," and mistakenly says "Wikipedia is now planning a fixed version of its encyclopedia which cannot be changed." The story was reprinted or summarized in several other newspapers (including "Wikipedia - separating fact from fiction", The New Zealand Herald) and blogs (including "Wikipedia or Wackypedia?", p2pnet).

New York Times

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"Fakin' It: A Marketer Intends to Tease Consumers", in The New York Times, includes brief mention of a marketing hoax article on "Pherotones" that Wikipedia deleted.

Congress (still)

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"Wikipedia entry had fake data on Yarmuth", The Courier-Journal, Kentucky, highlights vandalism regarding candidate John Yarmuth which remained in his competitor Anne Northup's article for several days.
"Wikipedia gets input from Capitol Hill" Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (subscription required)
"Rewriting history - with the click of a mouse", The Philadelphia Inquirer opinion column

Cautious articles

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"Comment: You've been Wikipediad", PC Pro magazine
"If it comes from the Net, it's not necessarily true", Bismarck Tribune (Bismarck, North Dakota)
"Wikipedia (n): An unreliable source", Marquette Tribune (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)
"Wikipedia is wildly popular, but use it with a grain of salt, educators warn", The News-Sentinel (Ft. Wayne, Indiana)
"UNL Wikipedia posts not raising alarms for officials", Daily Nebraskan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln College Paper)

Citations

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Preval wins Haiti presidency by agreement on blank ballots, JURIST Legal News and Research, on René Préval
Why we don't use 'Torino' in Olympic coverage, London Free Press "'Anglicisation of place names', according to Wikipedia, 'was once universal ....'"

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Ten users were granted admin status last week: Essexmutant (nom), Chick Bowen (nom), Josiah Rowe (nom), Sjorford (nom), Elf-friend (nom), Xaosflux (nom), TexasAndroid (nom), SoothingR (nom), UkPaolo (nom) and Martyman (nom).

Featured content

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Ten articles were featured last week: Memory Alpha, Wayne Gretzky, Belarusian Republican Youth Union, Cape Horn, Sydney Newman, Phil Collins, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, Battle of Badr, Thrasybulus and Pink Floyd.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Douglas Adams, I Want to Hold Your Hand, Epaminondas, Shielded metal arc welding, Yagan, Political integration of India and James T. Aubrey, Jr..

Articles that were de-featured last week: Human, Not the Nine O'Clock News and Buddhism.

Two lists reached featured list status last week: List of municipalities of Lithuania and List of Category 5 Pacific hurricanes.

Five pictures reached featured picture status last week:

History of South Africa in the apartheid era

Special relativity

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Ral315

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

14 February-15 — Recovery from the crash of zwinger.
15 February — mailman back online, upgraded to 2.1.7.
17 February — srv55, srv57, srv61, and srv67 taken out of service due to bad RAM.
17 February — Wikidiff2, a C++ port of the "compare differences" algorithm, disabled due to adverse effects on apaches.
18 February — Wikidiff2 fixed, re-enabled.
20 February — German Wiktionary enables sysop patrolling.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee closed five cases this week.

Carl Hewitt

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A case against Carl Hewitt was closed on Friday. As a result, Carl Hewitt was banned from "autobiographical editing" involving himself or his students, both in editing articles and in adding links and categories. In addition, Hewitt was placed on probation. He had been accused of POV editing on Carl Hewitt, the article on himself.

Rajput

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A case against users on Rajput was closed on Friday. As a result, Shivraj Singh, DPSingh, Gurkhaboy, Ss india, Son of Kurus, Sisodia, 195.162.223.222, Suryabandhu, Kinsman of the Sun, Indologist, shonan, 220.227.238.195, and other related throwaway accounts and IPs have been banned from editing articles relating to Rajput. In addition, all editors on Rajput were reminded of basic Wikipedia policies regarding NPOV, verifiability, and citing sources. The editors above were accused of "sustained edit warring" for an extended period of time.

KDRGibby

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A case against KDRGibby was closed on Saturday. As a result, KDRGibby has been placed on indefinite personal attack parole, probation, and general probation. In addition, KDRGibby is prohibited from "keeping personal attacks ... in his userspace." KDRGibby had been accused of incivility, personal attacks, failure to assume good faith, point of view editing, and edit warring on articles relating to Wal-Mart and Communism.

RJII and Firebug

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A case involving RJII and Firebug was closed on Saturday. As a result, RJII has been placed on indefinite personal attack parole, probation, and general probation. In addition, RJII was cautioned about point of view editing. Firebug, meanwhile, was counseled not to expect perfection from other editors. RJII was accused of personal attacks, point of view forking, and violating prohibitions on using original research. Firebug had been accused of failure to assume good faith.

Theodore7

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A case against Theodore7 was closed on Monday. As a result, Theodore7 has been placed on a one year personal attack parole, and banned from editing articles relating to astrology and astronomy for six months. In addition, Theodore7 is required to make valid, civil edit summaries. Theodore7 had been accused of making improper reverts and personal attacks against other users.

Other cases

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Cases were accepted this week involving Tony Sidaway (user page), and Jason Gastrich (user page). Both are in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog, bible verses, Lapsed Pacifist (user page), users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, and Instantnood (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Leyasu (user page), Boothy443 (user page), Dyslexic agnostic (user page), VeryVerily (user page), Tommstein (user page), Zeq (user page), and editors on WebEx and Min Zhu are in the voting phase.

A motion to close is on the table in the case against Sortan (user page).

2006-02-27

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 0	27 February 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

Wikipedia preparing for millionth article this week	Interventions by Foundation have bumpy road
News and notes: One million users, milestones	Wikipedia in the news
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

Wikipedia preparing for millionth article this week

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Wikipedia is getting ready to see the creation of its one-millionth article in English this week, a milestone expected to be reached around Wednesday, 1 March. In terms of the number of articles, the English Wikipedia will have doubled in size in slightly less than a year, after reaching 500,000 articles last 17 March.

Among the preparations being worked on is a press release to be issued once the milestone is reached. The addition of a special banner to the Main Page celebrating the occasion has also been discussed.

Given the speed at which both new pages are created and others deleted, identifying the magic article is a challenge and was the subject of some disagreement at the previous milestone (see archived story). Sj said he hoped to get developers to provide a snapshot of the database that, combined with statistical analysis, could objectively identify the actual article in question. If not, an honorary millionth article may simply be designated as such.

While this milestone marks an impressive achievement in just over five years of Wikipedia's existence, size is not the only measure of accomplishment, and some have suggested it be de-emphasized as Wikipedia grows. As Jimmy Wales put it in last week's interview with The Signpost, "We should be tightly focused on the quality of our coverage and content. The goal of Wikipedia is to create and distribute a freely licensed high quality encyclopedia."

Among the tools anticipated to help with this are new features currently being worked on by the MediaWiki developers. These include a feature that allows readers to review and rate articles, and another that would allow a particular revision of an article to be marked as a "stable version". Both of these features could help efforts to publish print editions based on the English Wikipedia, similar to those already involving the German Wikipedia (see archived story).

Work is also being done toward a "single login" feature, so editors can have one account that works on all Wikimedia projects. It is hoped that this will encourage more people to help out across project boundaries and foster a greater sense of community. However, the transition will probably create some disruption as well, due to the technical difficulties of dealing with possible conflicts between existing accounts.

If expectations hold, the winner of the Million pool to correctly identify the date on which this article would be created should be András Mészáros. The next closest guess was 28 February by Kaizersoze, who might still win if it comes more quickly than expected. The pool was declared closed when the half-million article mark was reached.

SP 2006-2010

Interventions by Foundation have bumpy road

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A couple of incidents last week highlighted the difficulty of balancing outside complaints regarding articles with the views of Wikipedia editors. Partly at issue was the implementation of a relatively new policy that provides for the Wikimedia Foundation, which normally does not exercise editorial control at the level of individual articles, to intervene in such cases when deemed necessary.

These interventions, covering such things as protecting a page pending further investigation, or deleting possible copyright infringements, are designated as Office Actions. They may also involve reducing the content of articles drastically to stubs, a practice Jimbo Wales has said may occasionally be necessary to deal with complaints, especially involving biographies of living people. Wales created the policy earlier this month as something Danny Wool, his executive assistant, could cite when taking action on an urgent complaint.

Two recent cases underlined the tension between "caving in" to outsiders and "abdicating responsibility" for the content of the website. One of these, another occasion in which congressional attention has been directed at Wikipedia, was the biography of U.S. Senator Harry Reid (Democrat-Nevada). The second was Brian Peppers, about a disabled man whose photograph was promoted as a meme on the YTMND website.

In both cases, a personally interested party directed a communication to the Wikimedia Foundation complaining about the content of the page and/or its existence. Reid's article was protected by Wool on Thursday, 16 February, and remained that way for six days while the situation was sorted out. The delay, caused in part by the weekend and the fact that Monday was a government holiday in the U.S., prompted several people to express their displeasure on the talk page. The second case was not actually handled as an Office Action but done by Wales on his own initiative. Last Tuesday, he deleted the much-disputed Peppers article with instructions that it should not be recreated for a year, saying, "if anyone still cares by then, we can discuss it".

This eventually led to an extended discussion on the wikien-l mailing list about these actions. The debate over Peppers also extended to other issues, such as whether previous deletions or recreations of the article were valid, whether he was actually notable enough as an internet phenomenon to warrant coverage in Wikipedia, and whether this should override his interest in privacy even though he never sought any publicity. Meanwhile, the Reid situation posed the dilemma of what the subjects of articles can do, given that criticism may ensue whether they edit themselves or direct their concerns to the Foundation instead.

The practice of using Office Actions has been designated as official Wikipedia policy. Wales emphasized this last week with the addition of a note that reverting an action taken under the policy "may be grounds for blocking", although he avoided recommending that blocks actually be used in such cases.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Michael Snow, Catherine Munro, and Ral315

English Wikipedia reaches 1,000,000 users

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The English Wikipedia reached 1,000,000 users on Monday, just a few days before the anticipated 1,000,000th article. The millionth user is believed to be Romulus32, though it is not easily possible to find the exact user with complete certainty. Jimmy Wales however has noted that such a stat is really insignificant, due to inactive and sockpuppet accounts.

Wikimania seeking volunteers

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Wikimania organizers this week called for volunteers to join the Program Team for the 2006 conference, scheduled for 4 August–6 August at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Team members will help reviewing proposed presentations, inviting speakers, and coordinating other aspects of the conference program. A call for participation from potential presenters was also distributed recently; deadlines for initial submissions are 30 March and 15 April, depending on the nature of the presentation.

German chapter makes plans

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The German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation held its annual meeting last Saturday in Frankfurt at the site of the original Wikimania conference. As the organization is growing and having to deal with various pressing matters, such as litigation or partnerships to redistribute Wikipedia content, it was concluded that more professional support is necessary. Over the course of the year, the chapter will look to open a physical office and hire an experienced executive to run it. According to Kurt Jansson, one of the chapter's two chairpersons, "The needs of the organization have become so broad and complex that volunteer leadership alone is no longer enough to address them." The chapter reports that it now has about 250 members.

Integration of 1911 Britannica finished

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The list of 1911 Encyclopedia topics has been thoroughly examined and edited by a devoted team from WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, who have verified that Wikipedia now has an article or proper redirect for every single article which appeared in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, the content of which is now in the public domain. On the project page, Alba took pride in "declaring the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica to be, at first draft level, merged into Wikipedia."

A new project has begun at WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/1911 verification to ensure that all 1911 material has been properly updated to the 21st century.

New tools

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Henna has taken over the maintenance of the Vandal Fighter tool, a spin-off of CryptoDerk's VandalFighter.

Ask.com has revamped their search page, removing the Ask Jeeves interface and including Wikipedia results. A ZDNet report states "the new tools also include encyclopaedia search, for the US version of the site, that displays direct answers from Wikipedia and others at the top of the results page."

A new third-party search mechanism called Qwika is in development; it aims to provide searchable machine translation between different Wikipedia languages.

Most-edited user talk pages

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Upon a request by Raul654, Gmaxwell created a list of the top 100 most edited user talk pages (Note - a user's edits to his own talk page are not counted). Not surprisingly, the page most edited was Jimbo Wales' talk page. The other four talk pages in the top 5 were those of Tony Sidaway, Curps, Cool Cat and Mistress Selina Kyle.

Briefly

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The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 140,000 articles.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 6,000 registered users.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 50,000 total pages.
The Icelandic Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
The Georgian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Russian Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
The Ladino Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 2,500 articles.
The Waray-Waray Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
The Nynorsk Wikipedia has reached 14,000 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

Contribute —

Internal combustion engine

Allegations of anti-Islamic bias

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Media Monitors Network, a self-declared anti-media-propaganda site, published a long article by book author Abid U. Jan, entitled "Wikipedia: A tool for expediting the clash of religions" on 22 February. Jan states that:

While the concept behind Wikipedia is admirable, we cannot help but feel that the project has become a tool in the hands of diehard Islamophobes who have planned to add validity to the concept and divisive terminologies.

In reply to a letter from Wikipedian gren, Jan published another detailed article in the editorial section of the Al-Jazeerah Information Center (unrelated to the Al Jazeera TV channel), entitled "Wikipedia: Good Intentions, Horrible Consequences" on 27 February, in which Jan says:

Keeping the good intentions behind Wikipedia project and sincerity of its editors in mind, it is necessary to clarify some of the basic misconceptions so that one could see how these good intentions are being manipulated and could pave the way for horrible consequences.

Yahoo! adds more Wikipedia links

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According to a 23 February announcement on the Yahoo! Search blog ("Going deeper into the Wikipedia"), new functionality has been added to Yahoo searches which return Wikipedia articles in the results.

File:YahooQuickLinks.gif

Quick links to sections of the bootleg recording article

A new row of "Quick Links" near the bottom of Wikipedia results provide deep links to the section headers of article content, allowing "more answers in fewer clicks". The news was picked up by Search Engine Watch [17] and several other SEO magazines ([18], [19], [20]).

Promoters targeting Wikipedia?

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Public relations magazine PR Week published "Analysis: Wikipedia-friend or foe on the net?", (subscription required), in which the author, Adam Hill, asks how PROs (public relations professionals) can use the online encyclopedia to their advantage. Raul654 was interviewed for and quoted in the article. Interesting quotes in the article include:

Joel Cere, vice-president and head of netcoms EMEA at Hill & Knowlton -: "If an entry has been obviously modified to suit a particular agenda, it will only be a matter of time before it is swayed back to a more neutral ground or to the prevalent public opinion. My PR colleagues should have more faith in the "wisdom of crowds".
Idil Cakim, director of knowledge development at Burson-Marsteller -: "PR firms can advise their clients to update the information about their industries and companies on Wikipedia, without going into marketing-speak. Clients can also refer Wikipedia readers to websites that provide more in-depth information about the given topic."
Shimon Cohen, chairman of consultancy The PR Office -: "It is an example of the very best of the internet: fast, up to date and informative. Of course, it can also be at risk of the very worst of the internet: hackers, misinformation and distortion."
Cere (again) -: "PROs wishing to align Wikipedia's and their client's mention of an event shouldn't modify the original entry, unless factually incorrect, but provide additional information to offer a more balanced viewpoint."

Cory Doctorow

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Author and Electronic Frontier Foundation alumnus Cory Doctorow, aka User:Doctorow, who has previously defended Wikipedia in print (see archived story), was interviewed by the The Harvard Crimson college newspaper in "Doctorow Pushes for ‘Free Culture’". He mentions Wikipedia briefly:

THC: Could you speak a little bit about your attitude towards the online, open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia? Because I know there was some misinformation about your career on there for a while, regarding the relative success of your career, among other things.

CD: I never actually took that particularly amiss. I think that John Seigenthaler Sr. [Seigenthaler, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, wrote a furious editorial after a false biography of him emerged on Wikipedia] mystified a lot of Internet natives, who said “So you found something inaccurate on a wiki? Why didn’t you just change it?”

As I pointed out before in an editorial response, the difference between Wikipedia errors and errors in the mainstream press is their relative ease in correction. As Bruce Schneier said, the interesting thing about systems isn’t how they perform when they’re working, but how they perform when they fail. When newspapers fail, they perform very badly. When Wikipedia fails, it fails pretty well.

Features and admins

Contribute —

By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Four users were granted admin status last week: Kmf164 (nom), Alex Bakharev (nom), ESkog (nom) and Cohesion (nom).

Featured content

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The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Tropical cyclones.

Eleven articles were featured last week: Uma Thurman, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Invasion, Arthur Ernest Percival, 3D Monster Maze, Kargil War, Sun, Katie Holmes, Bangalore, 1996 U.S. campaign finance scandal and 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Sheffield, Raney nickel, History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America), Panama Canal, Flag of Mexico, Médecins Sans Frontières and History of Portugal (1777–1834).

Articles that were de-featured last week: Freemasonry, Euro, Jazz, Mandarin (linguistics) and Gene.

One list reached featured list status last week: Swedish football champions.

Eight pictures reached featured picture status last week:

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Ral315

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

21 February — srv38 restarted to stop segfaults
21 February — sq9 assigned an external ip, taking over Wikimedia image squid duty
22 February — All remaining Wiktionaries set $wgCapitalLinks to off, pages moved to lowercase lettering as necessary
23 February — Search indexes resynced
24 February — Old files removed from benet due to space restrictions
26 February — Mailing lists moved from zwinger to goeje
26 February — OTRS moved from ragweed to goeje
27 February — $wgThumbnailEpoch updated to allow missized images to rerender

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee closed three cases this week.

Sortan

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A case brought against Sortan was closed on Saturday. As a result, Sortan was warned regarding Wikistalking Jguk. Jguk, the complaining witness, was banned from editing any page or article to change era notation, an extension of a provision in his November 2005 case. Both Jguk and Sortan were heavily involved in edit warring over era notation. Sortan left Wikipedia on 22 December 2005, shortly after the case was opened. Jguk went on a wikibreak on 5 February 2006.

Tommstein

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A case brought against Tommstein was closed on Sunday. As a result, Tommstein's ban, imposed by administrator NicholasTurnbull, was endorsed by the Arbitration Committee. Additionally, Central was placed on probation and personal attack parole, and Duffer1 was warned regarding civility and edit warring. The dispute, which primarily involved articles relating to Jehovah's Witnesses, was marred by personal attacks and failure to assume good faith.

WebEx and Min Zhu

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A case regarding the articles WebEx and Min Zhu was closed on Monday. As a result, both Larvatus and Henryuzi were banned from editing any articles relating to WebEx or Min Zhu and his daughter, and placed on probation. Additionally, FeloniousMonk was admonished not to use administrative tools and warnings in content disputes that he is involved in, and FCYTravis was admonished not to use the "rollback" button in content disputes. Both Larvatus and Henryuzi were involved in strong point of view editing on the articles.

Other cases

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A case was accepted this week involving Agapetos angel (user page). It is in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving Tony Sidaway (user page), editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog, and Bible verses are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Lapsed Pacifist (user page), Jason Gastrich (user page), users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Instantnood (user page), Leyasu (user page), Boothy443 (user page), Dyslexic agnostic (user page), and Zeq (user page) are in the voting phase.

A motion to close is on the table in the case involving VeryVerily (user page).

2006-03-06

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 10	6 March 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

English Wikipedia hits one million articles	Politicians move from editing Wikipedia to citing it
E-mail confirmation enabled	News and notes: Wikipedian passes away, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

English Wikipedia hits one million articles

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The English Wikipedia reached the long-awaited milestone of one million encyclopedia articles on Wednesday, a little over five years after the launch of the community-written reference work in January, 2001. The encyclopedia passed this mark at precisely 23:09 (UTC) on 1 March, 2006. The millionth article was Jordanhill railway station, added by Wikipedian Ewan Macdonald (aka User:Nach0king) in the course of his ongoing work on Scottish railways.

The Wikimedia Foundation immediately issued a press release ("English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article"), and the news was reported on Slashdot within hours. (see more press coverage)

The winner of the Wikipedia:Million pool, a contest to guess the date on which the millionth article would be written, was Hungarian Wikipedian András Mészáros, who made his prediction on 28 November, 2004. With the reaching of the million milestone, the Wikipedia:Two-million pool is now closed.

Some near-contenders for the title of millionth article were:

999,996 Bobby Smith (baseball player)
999,997 Temporal coding
999,998 Steve Cox
999,999 One million articles
1,000,000 Jordanhill railway station
1,000,001 Squidoo
1,000,002 Tennessee Commissioner of Financial Institutions
1,000,003 Aaron Ledesma
1,000,004 Cellular architecture

Because of the problems in identifying the half-millionth article (see archived story), developers Tim Starling and Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason were prepared with precise monitoring tools this time.

Many competitive editors had articles queued up to submit as the big number approached. Clearly one of these was BorgHunter, who created eight different articles within the minute the milestone was reached. Not only Smith, but Cox, Ledesma, and several others were his, all baseball players with some connection to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (coincidentally, the professional team closest to Wikimedia headquarters). According to Raul654, "the article count jumped from 999,990 to 1,000,150 in one second. I've never seen anything like it."

Article grows, commemoration discussed

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With the attention of the entire community focused upon it, Jordanhill railway station quickly grew from a one-line stub to a full-fledged article, receiving over 200 edits in the first four hours. ([21] [22]) It now also features a map, as well as several pictures of the station taken the next day by Erath. The article then made an appearance on the Did you know section of the Main Page. It appeared on Peer review on 2 March and became a Featured article candidate on 7 March.

As the subject of the article happens to be a physical location, it allowed people to suggest placing some kind of marker at the site to commemorate the milestone. Some were not sure whether the suggestion was serious, and indeed it made for some humorous comments about the potential for vandalism of the marker. Others did take it seriously, however, and a number of people have signed up to express support for the idea. Whether it would actually happen is uncertain, as various steps would be needed to obtain approval from the appropriate authorities, and there would also be the question of raising funds to pay for a marker. The most recent incarnation is a bench, which would serve a practical purpose to the location.

Anthere has said she hopes that the Wikimedia Foundation would not provide any funds unless they were donated specifically for that purpose. A fundraiser is in the works.

But are they "real" articles?

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Deciding what qualifies as an article has long been a tricky issue to resolve. The software defines an "article" as any page that is in the article namespace, is not a redirect page, and contains at least one internal wiki link.

A recent informal survey by User:R. fiend, based on a sample of 500 random articles, estimates that roughly 80% of Wikipedia's articles are "real", informative articles: full articles (including public domain imports such as 1911 Britannica and Rambot articles), decent stubs, lists, and charts. Another 5% are disambiguation pages.

Roughly 10% are one- or two-sentence substubs, and the remaining 5% are articles that are dubious, deletable, or require substantial cleanup.

Another study was performed by User:Dantheox to study the change in the ratio of Wikipedia stubs to non-stubs over time. He filtered the database looking for {{stub}} template tags (which were introduced in late 2003), and found that roughly 35% of Wikipedia's articles are currently tagged as stubs. However, although stub articles have a great deal of room for expansion, many still provide good basic information on topics which may not be covered at all in comparable reference works.

Millionth user

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The English Wikipedia also reached one million registered users on 28 February, with the milestone account belonging to Romulus32. As of the time of printing, the user had not made an edit to the English Wikipedia.

More tidbits

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The next largest Wikipedia is the German version, which contains over 350,000 articles.
Wikipedia:Village pump (news)#The millionth article
Wikipedia:What is an article
Wikinews:English Wikipedia reaches one million articles

SP 2006-2010

Politicians move from editing Wikipedia to citing it

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Although the topic of politicians editing Wikipedia has been the subject of considerable attention lately, it turns out that they are also using it for other purposes. The editing, in particular by US congressional staff, was previously reported here and also the subject of a Wikinews investigation. But at least outside the US, where some edits have also been reported and investigated, it seems that some politicians quote material from Wikipedia as well.

Hansard reports have now recorded several instances of parliamentarians quoting Wikipedia in their debates and speeches. Two come from the Australian Parliament, including the most recent just this past week. On Wednesday, 1 March, in a speech by Senator Lyn Allison, leader of the Australian Democrats, remarking on the tenth anniversary of John Howard's election as Prime Minister, Allison turned to the Propaganda article for a list of techniques she charged the Howard government with using.

The previous citation of Wikipedia came from Danna Vale of Howard's own Liberal Party on 9 February 2005. Speaking at the opening of Parliament, she used portions of the Totalitarianism article in her comments about the war against terrorism. The cited passages are no longer recognizable in Wikipedia today, as the article underwent a significant rewrite in July by 172, who said it was an unfocused mess that had long had problems with original research and commentary.

Australian Wikipedian Mark Gallagher was not that impressed with the use these politicians managed to get out of it. As he put it, "Referenced twice in Parliament, and both times it's just to say 'Wikipedia says you're a tyrant!'? How sad. Remember when our politicians were eloquent?"

In contrast, a debate last year in the British House of Commons provides an example of a politician using Wikipedia as a factual reference, not just to bolster an argument. On 13 July 2005, MP Anne McIntosh of the Conservative Party quoted two paragraphs from Persecution of Christians while discussing that issue in regards to southeast Asia and China.

In a further example, the library of the Parliament of Canada cited Wikipedia's article on Same-sex marriage as a "related link" in the further reading list for Bill C-38 (An Act respecting certain aspects of legal capacity for marriage for civil purposes).

It remains to be seen whether these are simply isolated events or reflect a growing trend. In any case, it shows that politicians are taking a look at more of Wikipedia than merely the state of their own biographies.

Meanwhile, the fallout over congressional staff editing took an unusual twist last week. In Delaware, where Senator Joseph Biden's office was one whose editing was exposed by the Wikinews investigation, the Republican Party has apparently been trying to use this for political advantage. In particular, attention focused on the removal of information about a plagiarism controversy during Biden's 1988 presidential campaign. Now opinion columnist Ron Williams of the Delaware News-Journal has charged that the Republicans lifted material from another source, thus allegedly using more plagiarism to make noise about Biden's supposed plagiarism. And again like Biden's staff, engaged in some selective editing of the material they were using to remove unflattering information. At this point, good luck figuring out who's the pot and who's the kettle.

SP 2006-2010

E-mail confirmation enabled

Contribute —

By Ral315

Following the move of mail operations to a new server, Wikimedia e-mails were temporarily blacklisted by SpamCop following alleged e-mails received by spamtrap addresses. As a result, and due to the small possibility of Wikimedia e-mail services being used to send spam mail, brion enabled e-mail confirmation on all Wikimedia wikis.

How it works

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The setting disables e-mail communication by default, forcing all users to send a confirmation e-mail in order to re-enable it. This is done to ensure that e-mail addresses given are in fact that of actual users. A user must first visit Special:Confirmemail, and send a confirmation e-mail to their address. Then, they must open the e-mail and click the confirmation link inside the e-mail to confirm the address. After this is finished, e-mail communication is possible between users.

E-mail addresses are still not required, but if added, will not function unless a confirmation is sent. The confirmation must only be performed once per account, though users with multiple accounts on different wikis must confirm each separate account if desired.

SpamCop unblocked Wikimedia's mail server shortly after the announcement, though due to the possibility of being re-listed, the e-mail system will remain in effect permanently.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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By Ral315

Wikipedian Caroline Thompson passes away

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Caroline Thompson, a Wikipedian who primarily edited articles relating to quantum mechanics, died on 8 February, according to her family. [23] The cause of death was cancer. Thompson, who had written papers on the subject while a student at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, had edited sporadically in recent months, last editing on 10 January.

French Wikipedia reaches 250,000 articles

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Following the millionth English article on 1 March (see related story), the French Wikipedia reached a quarter-million articles on Saturday. The milestone article was John Anglin, an American who escaped from Alcatraz Island in 1962. This article was translated from the subject's article on the English Wikipedia. At press time, the article had received just four edits.

Wikipedia's Alexa rank rises to 20

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Alexa reports that Wikipedia's three month traffic ranking is 20th, an all-time high. Meanwhile, the daily traffic rank spiked upward to 12th on Sunday, a new high, surpassing the mark of 14th back in January. Wikipedia has recently surpassed CNN.com, Go.com, AOL.com, and the BBC in traffic, and seems likely to pass Blogger.com in the near future.

Fair use image policy reconsidered

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After administrator Ta bu shi da yu deleted a series of TIME cover images due to what he considered improper fair use claims, discussion has occurred over his actions, and whether they were appropriate. Ta bu shi da yu has proposed an amendment to the fair use policy, which would eliminate the need to notify an uploader that their image does not comply, and would reduce the length of time before deletion from 7 days to 24 hours. The proposed amendment is currently open for comments on its talk page.

CheckUser policy explained

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Arbitrator Raul654 recently clarified questions regarding CheckUser and the Arbitration Committee's policies regarding giving the tool to non-arbitrators. Raul654 explains that "some arbitrators are opposed to giving it to any non-arbitrators; others, like me, feel that there are a few special cases that giving checkuser access to a non-arbitrator would be a good idea." They do agree, however, that a system for requesting CheckUser similar to requests for adminship would not be desirable, due to the large volume of requests likely. Raul654 stressed that if the Committee were to grant access to non-arbitrators, it would only be granted to a few users.

Tip of the day to return in April

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Wikipedia's tip of the day project, which was placed on hiatus in 2004, will be started again on 20 April, 2006. New tips are being prepared, and relevant archived tips from its initial run will be re-used.

Briefly

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The English Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 articles. (see related story)
The Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 18,000 articles.
The Yiddish Wikipedia now has 4,000 total pages.
The French Wikipedia has reached 80,000 registered users.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 21,000 articles.
The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
The Danish Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
The Macedonian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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Millionth article, millionth user

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The million article milestone reached by Wikipedia on 1 March (see related story), with an article on Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, was reported in:

Even before the millionth article was created, The Guardian remarked on the millionth registered user, in "Wikipedia hits the million mark".

The Toronto Star also published an extensive article on Wikipedia, based on an interview conducted with Jimmy Wales and Nicholas Moreau before the milestone was reached: "A million entries later, the Wikigeeks are proud".

More Jimmy Wales interviews

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"Co-founder has learned to roll with the punches" National Post (Canada)
- Accompanying story: "Wikipedia.com near milestone" [sic] (subscription required)
"Wikipedia exec defends process" Rocky Mountain News (Colorado)

Interesting mentions

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On the 1 March, 2006, episode of The Colbert Report, columnist Arianna Huffington challenged Stephen Colbert on his claim that he had invented the word "truthiness." During the interview, Colbert declared, "I'm not a truthiness fanatic; I'm truthiness's father." Huffington corrected him, citing Wikipedia, that he had merely "popularized" the term. Of her source, Colbert responded: "Fuck them."

A new registry for establishing which print works are in the public domain will use MediaWiki software, and is supported by Jimbo Wales, according to "Database planned for public domain works" in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail:

"The public domain is our shared cultural heritage, and the best ground for the great new ideas of the future'" said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. "Without access to the public domain, we are cut off from our past, and therefore cut ourselves off from our future."

Chemistry World, the journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, published "Information free-for-all", following an interview with Martin Walker (Walkerma), assistant professor of organic chemistry at the State University of New York at Potsdam.

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia could become the main source of chemical information in 5–10 years, according to a professional chemist who contributes to the site.

Wikipedia in your pocket

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An open source project has made it possible to install the entire text of certain language editions of Wikipedia onto an iPod media player. A straightforward dual boot installation of iPodLinux allows the player to be used for both text and music, although not both at the same time. "Encyclopodia - the encyclopedia on your iPod", at Sourceforge, contains downloads and screenshots. The news was reported by:

"WikiPedia for iPods", Macworld
"Wikipedia on the iPod - Encyclopodia WikiPodia?", Search Engine Journal
The whole Wikipedia in your pocket (on ipod), Digg (over 3,000 "diggs")

There are similar technologies for Pocket PC and Palm devices ("Complete Wikipedia Encyclopedia on your handheld or notebook") and for cellular phones ("Wapipedia").

More attention from marketers

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WebProNews published "SEM NY: Communities, Wikipedia & Tagging", discussing a presentation given at a search engine marketing conference in New York. Regarding companies editing their own articles in Wikipedia:

Since the conversation about a company is going to take place online whether the company is participating or not, [National Instruments search and community manager Jeff] Watts thinks that a firm may as well be involved in the process. "Think about the things you know about and engage the community with unbiased information," he said.

Wikipedia benefits LabVIEW [an article started by Watts] by the traffic it delivers and the third-party objective viewpoint it possesses. That means information it contains about a firm may be unflattering but accurate, and companies need to resist the temptation to remove it.

Congress

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"Rep. Marshall is hit by GOP Wikipedia changes", The Hill (re Jim Marshall)
"Not exactly Watergate, but ...", Denver Post editorial

Overviews

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SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By Ral315

Administrators

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Administrator status was given to ten users this week: Raven4x4x (nom), Paolo Liberatore (nom), Bobet (nom), Rspeer (nom), DakotaKahn (nom), AYArktos (nom), Kingboyk (nom), R.Koot (nom), Ian13 (nom), and Bobo192 (nom).

Featured content

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Nine articles were promoted to featured status this week: Western Front (World War I), Donkey Kong (arcade game), Chew Valley Lake, New Radicals, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Second Malaysia Plan, Salsa music, Antarctica, and Thomas Pynchon.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Washington gubernatorial election, 2004, Edward Teller, Paul Kane, Zion National Park, Triumph of the Will, Central processing unit, and This Charming Man.

Two former featured articles lost their status this week: Auto rickshaw and 2004 Democratic National Convention.

Three lists reached featured list status this week: List of Canadian provinces and territories by population, Timeline of first orbital launches by nationality, and List of top-division football clubs in UEFA countries.

The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Tropical cyclones.

Three pictures reached featured picture status this week:

Drop (liquid)

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Contribute —

By Ral315

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

1 March — srv54 accidentally rebooted, causing five minutes of downtime
1 March — wgEmailAuthentication enabled (see related story)
2 March — goeje (e-mail server) set to sync files daily to another server
3 March — New language queues added on OTRS system
4 March — Upload errors on certain languages fixed
4 March — Trouble with math functions fixed
6 March — goeje temporarily down, restarted

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

Contribute —

By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee closed three cases this week.

VeryVerily

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An appeal of a December 2004 case was closed on Thursday. As a result, restrictions limiting users in the case to one revert per page per day, and policy for banning users temporarily for violating a provision no longer apply to VeryVerily. Other restrictions in the original case still apply, though VeryVerily has the option to appeal those after four months. In addition, Ruy Lopez was prohibited from using sockpuppets, and has been placed on probation. Ruy Lopez's sockpuppetry to avoid Arbitration Committee sanctions had been confirmed on at least one occasion.

Zeq

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A case brought against Zeq was closed on Sunday. As a result, Zeq has been banned from the articles 1948 Arab-Israeli War and Palestinian exodus indefinitely, and placed on probation. In addition, Zeq was cautioned to avoid removing well-sourced information, Zeq and Heptor were cautioned about using "propagandistic sources", and all others in the dispute were cautioned to use proper dispute resolution techniques. Zeq had been accused of removing sourced material, and all parties had been found to have engaged in edit warring.

Dyslexic agnostic

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A case brought by Benon against T-man, the Wise Scarecrow was closed on Monday. As a result, T-man was placed under the mentorship of administrators to be named later. If mentorship fails, T-man would be banned for six months. Both users were also placed on personal attack parole and probation for one year. Both Dyslexic agnostic and T-man had edit warred and made personal attacks against each other.

Other cases

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Cases were accepted this week involving Licorne (user page), -Ril- (user page), ZAROVE (user page), editors on Depleted uranium, and Lou franklin (user page). All are in the evidence phase.

An additional case involving Agapetos angel (user page) is in the evidence phase.

Cases involving editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog, Tony Sidaway (user page), editors on bible verse articles, Lapsed Pacifist (user page), Jason Gastrich (user page), users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Instantnood (user page), and Boothy443 (user page) are in the voting phase.

A motion to close is on the table in the case involving Leyasu (user page).

2006-03-13

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 11	13 March 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

Office actions policy receives renewed debate	News and notes: April Fool's Day, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

Office actions policy receives renewed debate

Contribute —

By Ral315

A recent invocation of the new office protection policy has attracted attention, with some questioning the process altogether.

An article on Jack Thompson, a Florida attorney who has garnered considerable criticism in gaming circles for his views on violence and obscenity in video games, was removed on Friday, and replaced with a one-sentence description of Thompson. In blanking the article, Danny, an assistant to Jimbo Wales, cited the new office protection policy, implemented by Jimbo Wales last month. The policy allows Danny to protect an article when the Foundation deems it necessary (usually relating to legal matters.)

The article had been criticized for its overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Thompson, and its lack of sources. In its last version before it was blanked, the article contained at least 21 uncited statements. Danny stressed that the move was temporary, and in response to complaints about the action, said "An article about Jack Thompson will be created. It will, I hope, be a very thorough article. It will also be properly and fully cited."

This is not the first time that the policy has been invoked; Harry Reid was protected for a time in February, and Brian Peppers was deleted through the office actions policy (see archived story). However, the high profile of the article within the tech community has led to a renewed debate about the issue.

Many editors on the article criticized Wikipedia for blanking the article. Silensor called the action "censorship by way of litigation threats." However, Mindspillage noted that the article would be unprotected, and rewritten, after a short period of time. Nortelrye said, "I've not seen them capitulate in the face of legal threats, and I don't expect that they will do so in this situation. ... If you really care about Wikipedia and its mission, you'll let them handle it according to their policies."

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

Contribute —

April Fool's Day policy proposed

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A proposal regarding what to do on April Fool's Day was started, with the goal of organizing and coordinating what the Main Page would look like. Last year, there was no coherent policy in place, and throughout the day several elements of the site were modified, including the changing of system messages and the introduction of hoax articles (see archived story). The proposed policy would have an unusual – but true – featured article on the main page, along with weird, but factual, news stories in In the News, along with strange and unusual anniversaries and Did you know items.

Wikipedians featured in news

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The Hockessin Community News began a special series on 2 March, featuring articles about Wikipedia and Wikipedians from the Delaware area. In the March 2 issue (pages eight and nine), an article on the Congressional astroturfing appeared, along with an article profiling Tim Westbrook (Stilltim). In the March 9 issue (pages eight and nine), Mark Pellegrini (Raul654), the featured article director as well as a bureaucrat and Arbitration Committee member, was featured. The articles were written by reporter Kevin Barrett, who attended a meetup in Newark, Delaware in late February. The articles are the first part of the series, which is expected to continue in next week's issue.

Wikiepic proposed

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This week, a proposed Wikiepic project was created, with the goal being to create a "freeform mythology or fantasy world". Nicknamed "the neverending wiki", the proposed project would allow contributors to write stories and eventually form an epic.

Main Page redesign poll continues

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A poll regarding changing the appearance of the Main Page continues this week, with the vote on the redesign ending on 18 March.

Briefly

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The Danish Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles. The 40,000th article is da:Teglgård Sø, a lake in Denmark.
The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 31,000 articles.
The Latvian Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
The Polish Wikipedia has reached 220,000 articles.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 54,000 total pages.
The Breton Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Luxembourgish Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
The Thai Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles. The 9,000th article is โปงลาง, a Thai musical instrument.
The Romanian Wikipedia passed 30,000 articles.
The Chuvash Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 15,000 registered users.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia now has a total page count of 28,000. Its article count is approximately 5,800.
The Slovak Wikiquote has reached 1,000 articles.
The German Wikiquote has reached 5,000 articles.
The Malay Wikipedia has reached 12345 articles with senarai negeri-negeri Malaysia.
The Thai Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles. The 8,000th article is DOM.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 120,000 articles. The 120,000th article is Ammerland.
The Hebrew Wikibooks has over 10,000 page edits.
The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles, the tenth wikipedia to pass this milestone. See also the relevant press release.
The Russian Wikiquote has reached 2,000 articles.
The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
The Albanian Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 30,000 registered users.
The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 1,000 registered users.
The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 3,000 registered users.
The English Wikibooks has more than 400,000 page edits.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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Articles

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"Anonymous Source Is Not the Same as Open Source", New York Times
"We are the Wiki world", cover article of Life section, The Press-Enterprise (Southern California)
"Is the printed encyclopedia dead?", Manila Bulletin (Philippines)
"Where flattery, insults live side by side", Buffalo News (New York State)
"Something 'wiki' this way comes in partisan politics", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Georgia; subscription required)

Mentions

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"What's next? Time peeks into the future", a summary of this week's Time Magazine cover story, says "...as Time tech expert Lev Grossman writes, we're living in an age of individual innovation spurred on by the Internet as well as what he calls "individual altruism" — a form of group project best represented by resources like Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is edited by the masses instead of an elite cadre of professional editors." The story was also prominently displayed on the front page of the CNN.com website (which features Time content).

Vague speculation on Google partnership

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"Google Reference, a Wikipedia partnership?", ZDNet

HowStuffWorks feature article

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"How Wikis Work", HowStuffWorks, featured on front page of Computer section

SP 2006-2010

Features and admins

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By RoyBoy

Administrators

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Ten users were granted admin status last week: (aeropagitica) (nom), Stifle (nom), Cyde (nom), Obli (nom), JDoorjam (nom), Deckiller (nom), Meegs (nom), Flowerparty (nom), Vary (nom) and Naconkantari (nom).

Featured content

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Sixteen articles were featured last week: Hurricane Floyd, Frog, Noah's Ark, Red vs Blue, Lothal, Bath School disaster, Manuel I Comnenus, Eric A. Havelock, George Washington Dixon, Starship Troopers, Joan of Arc, Chetwynd, British Columbia, X Window core protocol, Bulbasaur, The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Che Guevara.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Barbara McClintock, Battle of Badr, TARDIS, Kerala, Marian Rejewski, Scotland in the High Middle Ages and Amateur Radio Direction Finding.

Two featured articles were de-featured last week: The Foundation Series and Traditional counties of England.

Three lists reached featured list status last week: List of Presidents of Portugal, English football champions and List of Canadian provinces and territories by area.

The latest portals to reach featured status are Portal:Tropical cyclones and Portal:New Zealand.

Seven pictures reached featured picture status last week:

Han foreign relations 2 CE
Hay
British Museum Reading Room

Markham, Ontario

SP 2006-2010

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Ral315

Username changes now allowed for up to 20,000 edits

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Nichalp, a bureaucrat, announced earlier this week that a recent code change has allowed for renaming of users with up to 20,000 edits. A prior technical limit of 6,800 edits had existed. Nichalp stated that he had learned of the change from viewing the HTML source of the user renaming function. The first three users over this limit to be renamed were Dcoetzee (to Deco), Aranda56 (to Jaranda), and Snowspinner (to Phil Sandifer). All of these were done by bureaucrat Raul654. [24]

Last week in servers

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Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

7 March — Naconkantari made temporary sysop on the Korean Wikipedia due to The Communism vandal, or an impostor, vandalizing numerous pages.
8 March — khaldun routing issues fixed.
8 March — Wikimedia mailserver IP address changed to allow DNS changes.
8 March — thistle temporarily taken out of service due to lag issues.
10 March — Friedrich moved to fundraising-related service.
11 March — Fundraising site is back up.

SP 2006-2010

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week.

Leyasu

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A case brought against Leyasu was closed on Tuesday. As a result, Leyasu and Danteferno have been placed on revert parole, allowing a maximum of one revert per page per day for one year. Leyasu has also been placed on personal attack parole and probation, and Danteferno was warned against incivility and personal attacks. Both users had edit warred on Gothic metal, and Leyasu had failed to cite sources in the matter.

Other cases

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A case was accepted this week involving administrators involved in a userbox-related edit war. It is in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving Lou franklin (user page), editors on Depleted uranium, ZAROVE (user page), -Ril- (user page), and Agapetos angel (user page) are in the evidence phase.

Cases involving Licorne (user page), editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog, Tony Sidaway (user page), editors on bible verse articles, Lapsed Pacifist (user page), Jason Gastrich (user page), users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Instantnood (user page), and Boothy443 (user page) are in the voting phase.

No motions to close are currently on the table.

2006-03-20

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The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives


Volume 2, Issue 12	20 March 2006	About the Signpost

(← Prev)	2006 archives	(Next →)

Jack Thompson unprotected after office removal	News and notes: CheckUser rights, milestones
Wikipedia in the news	Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News	The Report On Lengthy Litigation


Home \| Archives \| Newsroom \| Tip Line	Shortcut : WP:POST/A

SP 2006-2010

Jack Thompson unprotected after office removal

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By Ral315

Four days after its protection under the office protection policy, the article on Jack Thompson, a Florida attorney and critic of video game violence, has been unprotected.

On 10 March, Danny, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, removed the article upon advice from the Foundation's attorney, replacing it with a protected one-sentence description of Thompson (see archived story). During the protection, the article was rewritten by many users, with better sourcing and a more neutral point of view. On 14 March, Danny and Michael Snow replaced the protected article with the new draft. Since its unprotection, the article has received over 250 additional edits, adding new citations and other information.

Since its introduction in February, the policy has been invoked several times; Harry Reid was protected for a time, and Brian Peppers was deleted through the office actions policy. Some critics of the policy feared that it would encourage litigation to remove unfavorable content from articles. However, most users agree that the policy is necessary to avoid legal troubles.

The Signpost interviewed Brad Patrick, legal counsel to the Foundation, about the policy on Monday:

Colored version

Wikipedia Signpost: What prompted the Foundation to examine Jack Thompson?

Brad Patrick: As the community is aware, the Foundation was in receipt of a letter addressed to the Board of the Foundation. As outside general counsel to the Foundation, I was made aware of the letter and responded to Mr. Thompson. Based on our communication, I felt a review of the article was warranted legally, and asked some administrators (with Danny's assistance) to perform that review. That was where the WP:OFFICE notice came up.

WS: What sort of problems were there with the article?

BP: I can't comment on the specifics, but generally, his allegations were that certain of the material in the article could, potentially, be considered libelous or defamatory.

WS: About how many office requests do you receive every week/month? Of these, how many are acted upon?

BP: That's a hard question to answer. There are probably one or more noteworthy requests a week, on average. Certainly a legitimate request from an attorney is the exception. Most of the stuff that comes in through e-mail is far from significant. Many readers express shock and astonishment that just anyone "could say [X] like that" and want one of our thousands of "paid" editors to explain how this got there. So, for the most part, the real situations are few and far between, and that's why WP:OFFICE should not be taken lightly.

BP: If Seigenthaler had happened and we had an WP:OFFICE policy, there is no doubt that would have been used in that circumstance while we figured out how to handle the issue. The important part is that Jimbo is not responsible for the content of the encyclopedia, obviously. Everyone just thinks he is. But we do have an obligation to respond to potentially libelous material that is on our servers, if we are made aware of it, investigate it, and we believe it has legal merit. When you get right down to it, we are in the business of being an encyclopedia, nothing more, nothing less. And we should respond to legitimate criticism legitimately. But the Foundation does not "cave in" because someone doesn't like something, as some have suggested.

WS: How much has the article improved since its protection?

BP: I'm not the best person to judge. Michael Snow did a phenomenal job rewriting the article from scratch, in a very short time, and sourcing every bit of it. The challenge to the critics was to source their proposed contributions with the same degree of verifiability, and that is what caused an uproar. So, from a legal protection perspective, I'm very satisfied that the article has improved. In a short amount of time. Verifiability is critical.

WS: Is there anything else you'd like to say in regards to the situation?

BP: Just one other thing. I think people in the community may lose sight of the fact that we are engaged in a very serious venture. It's cool, we love it, we have friends online, we edit what we like. It is freedom in the best sense. But there is a very real issue; it is the responsibility of the Foundation not to be put at risk based on the sloppy, poorly thought out choices of others. We have 1 million users and articles in English Wikipedia. That's a lot. We don't have millions of dollars. We are a small foundation, in the grand scheme of things. We want the Foundation and Wikipedia to be around 2, 5, 10 years from now. And to do that, we need to make sure we act responsibly to keep the mission moving forward. So, my advice to contributors is - keep doing the amazing work you are doing. And my advice to administrators is - if you see a WP:OFFICE warning, trust us. We are doing something at the highest level to make sure we aren't putting the Foundation at risk, and I promise, we are dealing with it - not promising to deal with it later. This isn't a "set & forget" policy.

BP: Also, this isn't my plaything. My job is to advise the Board and protect the Foundation if they are sued. So far, it hasn't happened.

SP 2006-2010

News and notes

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CheckUser rights granted to two

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Two Wikipedians were granted CheckUser rights this week. Ambi and Essjay were both granted the status after Arbitrator James Forrester requested the move, citing a discussion on the private Arbitration Committee mailing list. Ambi is a former Arbitrator who served from January 2005 to July 2005, while Essjay is the chairman of the Mediation Committee, making him the first non-arbitrator on the English Wikipedia to be granted checkuser access. There are now a total of 12 people on the English Wikipedia with CheckUser status.

Main page redesigned after poll closes

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Voting on a proposed redesign of the Main Page concluded this week, with the poll attracting significant participation. Nearly 700 Wikipedians supported the redesign, approximately 200 opposed it, and another 50 remained neutral. Following the closure of the poll, the main page was changed accordingly.

Chinese Wikimedia announces location of conference

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The Chinese Wikimedia community has chosen its location for the 2006 Chinese Wikimedia Conference; it will be held in Hong Kong in late August. The choice of the city was announced on March 14th, coming from a selection of six finalist cities. Taipei finished second in the voting, with Shanghai and Beijing tying for third. The judges noted Hong Kong's facilities as a key reason for their choice; the University of Hong Kong is expected to provide accommodation along with the conference facilities.

Newspaper series on Wikipedia continues

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The Hockessin Community News continued their series on Wikipedia and Wikipedians, reporting on the February meetup in Newark in the March 16 issue (page 6). There were eight Wikipedians attending the meetup: Stilltim, CComMack, Mrowlinson, Grenavitar, Rydia, Gmaxwell, Mindspillage, and Raul654. The article, written by staff reporter Kevin Barrett, who attended the meetup as well, briefly highlighted each person. The series on Wikipedia is expected to continue next week.

New projects proposed

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Two new Wikimedia projects were proposed this week: Wikikernel and One Encyclopedia Per Child. Wikikernel would be an independent wiki where new ideas could be proposed and developed, similar to the existing Meta-wiki, but with more emphasis and freedom in testing ideas and proposals. One Encyclopedia Per Child, meanwhile, would develop a set of basic articles, written in simple English, that could be distributed globally in conjunction with the proposed "One Laptop Per Child", involving the distribution of simple laptops to children around the world.

Briefly

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The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 19,000 articles.
The Slovene Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
The Spanish Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
The Italian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
The English Wikipedia has reached 1.1 million registered users.
The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
The WiKoelsch - Kölsch Wikipedia, a rapidly growing, recognized trial Wikipedia listed on the test-wp page, has reached 3,000 articles and 50 registered users.
The Korean Wikipedia has reached 22,000 articles.
The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 32,000 articles.
The Chinese Wikinews has been activated.
The Thai Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.

SP 2006-2010

In the news

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