Wikipedia

User:JPxG/The Illuminated Signpost

< User:JPxG
Ancient history from 2009 -- found this image in a 2009 revision of the now-redirected Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Newsroom

If I am going to be in charge of the damn thing, I ought to read the damn thing first. There are only 7,960 articles so this should not take too long. Here we go, I guess. jp×g 01:06, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

False: there are 6,557 articles. I can simply transclude this list into User:JPxG/test zone and read them (althogh the page will get too big so I have to do it in batches). jp×g 01:13, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
False: of those 6,557 there are 404 single-page editions (for all of them from 2010-01-04 on), 26 special pages and templates, 663 archive pages, and one readback page. This leaves a mere 5,464 articles. jp×g 01:16, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Here we go: the Signpost gauntlet

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Let's get in the mood, shall we?

Misc other stuff

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  • 1: April 2018 – July 2018
  • 28: July 2022 – September 2022 (?)
  • Signpost talk archives
  • Signpost talk archives, de-clusterfucked

2005 part 1

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  • The first post. It's called the SIGNPOST because you SIGN your POSTS, get it? "even a small community newspaper is a huge task", indeed.
  • Back when redirecting wikipedia.org to a landing page was big news. Has it even changed since then? I guess there was some obscure discussion about this on a mailing list, and then everyone had to deal with it. The more things change, the more they stay the same...
  • Maybe I should change my skin from Vector to Monobook to go through these, huh?
  • [[1]]: "The fallout from Larry Sanger's New Year's Eve Kuro5hin article criticizing Wikipedia for its 'anti-elitism' trickled into the media last week, which took up the ongoing debate over Wikipedia credibility": a sentence that only could have been written in 2005, not in the least because of Larry now holding diametrically opposed views.
  • A guy just said "a productioizzle" in the song I'm listening to. It really is 2005, isn't it. Maybe I should try and find a CRT to read these on.
  • No spoilers please -- I want to see if Wikipedia manages to unseat the vast unassailable titan of Encarta...

Okay, this is getting tedious, I think I will adopt a different format for these.

  • 2005-01-17/Arbitration report: "at one point the Arbitration Committee had to instruct the parties to organize and summarize the information they wanted to present in a manageable form" -- seeing a lot of beginnings here in the old days!
  • 2005-01-17/Celebrities: Lol, I guess there wasn't a rule against it, huh? And with Jimbo pronouncing the final decision as well. Party like it's 2005...
  • 2005-01-17/Features: Interesting to see how detailed the discussions were -- I guess because there were only a couple articles being promoted in a week, and there wasn't a very formulaic process for the promotions, so why not go into detail?
  • 2005-01-17/Fvw: "Thought he was already an admin" was a cliche in 2005? "Record numbers" meant 81 supports and 13 opposes then... and the Mediation Committee was understaffed(!)
  • 2005-01-17/In_the_media: Plans to develop a "finished" Wikipedia 1.0, huh?
  • 2005-01-17/SPV: Oh, I guess this is what the single-page editions were called back in the day, huh? I thought it was weird that there were none of those prior to 2010 when I searched for them -- this might make it a lot easier to do my reading. Or, wait -- I guess there were SPVs for January 2005, but not for the rest of 2005, and they started in earnest in 2006? Strange if true.

Okay, here we go for the rest of 2005, I guess:

  • 2005-01-31/Arbitration_report: Interesting to note that there is this amount of depth being given to individual cases -- the CheeseDreams case is being reported on for multiple instance of this column -- but on the other hand, I guess there weren't a lot of cases, so it wasn't like there was anything else to talk about. That and a weekly publishing schedule means there was probably nothing else to talk about. Some guy was under intense scrutiny but promised to limit his use of rollback and join the... harmonious editing club?
  • I opened so many tabs (every article from 2005 through May) that my browser slowed down substantially when I went to edit this page. I guess maybe I should cut back on the userscripts, huh?
  • 2005-01-31/Block_wars: In response to the ban, Wik indicated that he was leaving Wikipedia permanently. Many users left goodbye messages on his talk page, ranging from sad to hostile and gloating. This, along with vandalism to Wik's user page and subpages, apparently prompted the appearance of a vandalbot, which retaliated with vandalism against some of Wik's tormentors. -- lmfao
  • 2005-01-31/Heavy_metal_umlaut: I guess we had to takesies what we could getsies in terms of media coverage back then.
  • 2005-01-31/New_features: More microscopic FPs. Pixels cost money!
  • 2005-01-31/Policy_proposals: The birth of WP:DICK! Now this is history.
  • 2005-01-31/Tangshan_earthquake: Collaboration of the week running strong.
  • 2005-01-31/Tim_Starling: Tim Starling quit the project and got banned by Jimbo to help him focus on his PhD program?! How did I never hear about this.
  • 2005-01-31/Webcred_conference: Man, remember the blogosphere? And WikiNews?
  • 2005-02-07/500_featured_articles: What a freakin' milestone. I guess we also have a concrete number: 11 FAs in a week was unusually successful at that point.
  • 2005-02-07/Advocacy_groups: You know you've made it when suddenly people start editing the encyclopedia to push a POV! Oh shit, now we have to make policies for this!
  • 2005-02-07/Arbitration_report: Gzornenplatz is Wik! Who would have thought. Vfp15 was banned for a month for disrupting the Charles Darwin article, based on failing to work with other editors and seek consensus about the inclusion of a trivia item (Darwin's shared birthdate with Abraham Lincoln). Arbitrator David Gerard commented, "Most ArbCom cases revolve around someone doing something stupid, but this one is a particularly stupid case." -- lmao
  • 2005-02-07/Encarta: Oh no!!! How can the scrappy band of misfits at Wikipedia ever hope to compete with such an encyclopedic titan!? Also, what the hell is Clusty? The article acts like I am supposed to know what Clusty is.
  • 2005-02-07/Main_page_protection: Wait a minute, anyone could just go edit the main page in 2005? the most dramatic vandalism happened on Thursday, when the template listing Wikipedia's sister projects was vandalized with the infamous goatse.cx image. The vandal used HTML to spread the image across the entire main page. The Recentchanges header was also vandalized in similar fashion -- LMAO
  • 2005-02-07/Proxies: Is this the first adminbot proposal? Kind of sounds like it.
  • 2005-02-07/Three-revert_rule: I take it this was before the "obvious vandalism" carveout.
  • 2005-02-14/Arbitration_report: CheeseDreams again? The case was further complicated by the use of a large number of sockpuppet accounts, and the difficulty of blocking CheeseDreams due to her use of a dialup with changing IP addresses -- lmao
  • 2005-02-14/Article_hoax: It's really amusing to me how this is both a novel concept and a prank played by experienced users which was seen by all as uproariously funny. It was a different time.
  • 2005-02-14/Budget_and_contract: Freaking BOMIS was still involved at this point? Wowie zowie! And I suppose this is the genesis of Wikia. the Wikimedia Foundation approved a $130,000 budget last week for the first quarter of 2005. The budget allocated at least $75,000 to servers and other hardware -- what a ratio! What a blast from the past.
  • 2005-02-14/Google_hosting: Jimbo just popped in to meet with Brin and Page, like it was no big thing? I guess it was 2005, huh. I remember everyone was still using Yahoo and I was a huge badass for knowing what Google was.
  • 2005-02-14/Misinformation_on_Wikipedia: Perish the thought!
  • 2005-02-14/Music_recordings: A noble effort, but hard to imagine this happening today without some big kerfluffle over OR.
  • 2005-02-14/Wikipedia_portal_redesign: problems cropped up with rendering the page properly in older versions of Konqueror -- lmao
  • 2005-02-14/Wikiportals: The first domino falls in the chain of events that will lead to the assassination of the Archduke and the outbreak of the portal wars... Despite the jump in portal creations, their exact goal and their difference from WikiProjects remains unclear -- in 2022 the difference between portals and WikiProjects is obvious, one of them is a ghost town and the other is a ghost town. Wait a minute...
  • 2005-02-21/Arbitration_report: although an argument was raised that they were two separate people using the same computer -- remember when people would say this online and everyone would take it seriously?
  • 2005-02-21/Feature_storm: It took this long for someone to upload Migrant Mother to Wikipedia?
  • 2005-02-21/Fundraising_drive: Nail-biter! I wonder if the fledgling Wikimedia Foundation will ever be able to raise enough money to keep the lights on at Wikipedia...
  • 2005-02-21/Gdansk_or_Danzig: Still going through firsts -- I guess at this point the prevailing practice was something like Talk:Gdansk/Vote.
  • 2005-02-21/Googlepedia_column: He speculated that Google might be "trying to corner the all the world's information" -- perish the thought!
  • 2005-02-21/Harvard_coverage: In case you ever wondered how down bad we were for material for an in the media column, here's one about mentions in a college newspaper, which we're lauding for remembering that the domain ends in .org.
  • 2005-02-21/NPR: Britannica starting to be BTFO?
  • 2005-02-21/Wired_feature: Man, remember when Wired was good?
  • 2005-02-28/Arbitration_report: An edit on his talk page also threatened to sue the "Nazis" who own Wikipedia -- I guess some things never change.
  • 2005-02-28/Criticism_and_reaction: More bloggers. I guess this is a combination of the relative lack of prominence for Wikipedia in 2005 and the blogosphere having genuinely been a major part of cultural discourse in 2005.
  • 2005-02-28/Power_outage: Imagine not being able to edit for a whole day from a single power outage... or to go on LiveJournal. Heck, imagine LiveJournal. It was a different time!
  • 2005-02-28/Vertical_search: Some reports saw this as the New York Times' strategy to get into the blogging world, characterizing About.com as analogous to a network of 500 bloggers -- lmao
  • 2005-03-07/Arbitration_report: CheeseDreams again!? I guess the weekly schedule means that this whole series of arbitration reports is only a few months -- but still. And I wonder if we'll ever hear from this JarlaxleArtemis character again.
  • 2005-03-07/Block_war_and_desysoping: "Unblocking yourself is verboten", huh?
  • 2005-03-07/FOSDEM: It's very important that Wikipedia doesn't become the next Usenet -- imagine mentioning Usenet and having people remember what was going on there.
  • 2005-03-07/Fundraiser_ended: Wow, they got some cash!
  • 2005-03-07/Gdansk_or_Danzig: 100 users as a high turnout in the most contentious article naming dispute in Wikipedia's history. It was a different time...
  • 2005-03-07/NY_Times_archive: Imagine a blogger getting an interview with the director of product management at the NYT and then writing about it on their own website, not associated with any kind of social media, and then everybody hearing about this and doing their own journalism about it. IWADT...
  • 2005-03-07/Peer_review_and_FAC: I guess peer review was a much larger component of the FA process back then.
  • 2005-03-07/Wikipedia_citations: And they still called it "the Wikipedia" -- it was a different time -- but Larry hated it -- the more things change the more they stay the same...
  • 2005-03-07/Yahoo_anniversary: Remember Yahoo?
  • 2005-03-14/Arbitration_report: the touchy issue of whether private emails could be considered as evidence in arbitration -- TMTCTMTSTS...
  • 2005-03-14/Dispute_resolution_changes: Wales indicated that the threshold set of 100 support votes had been "overly ambitious" considering that 500 edits were required in order to be eligible to vote -- IWADT, although I suppose nowadays this is inching back towards being a reasonable objection.
  • 2005-03-14/Guanaco_adminship: a misguided debacle masquerading as a referendum - TMTCTMTSTS...
  • 2005-03-14/In_the_news: Hearing a lot from Clay Shirky... wonder if we'll ever hear about him again? Him and "Snoop Doggy Dogg" -- lmao
  • 2005-03-14/Page_moves: Remember Willy on Wheels being relevant?
  • 2005-03-14/Power_outage_redux: I guess this time it only took out the whole site for a couple of hours.
  • 2005-03-14/Recycling_Troll: It's a testament to the optimism of the 00s that someone with a name like this was given a fair shake at all, and even more of a testament that they continued to be given one despite acting the part. IWADT...
  • 2005-03-21/Arbitration_report: Following his offer to serve as a sort of self-appointed prosecutor of arbitration cases (see archived story), Snowspinner last week kept up his pace of bringing new requests -- now that's something you don't see happening anymore.
  • 2005-03-21/Best_or_worst: Tim Berners-Lee says we're the most advanced development in the area of collaborative editing, and Jimbo is interviewed by Nature -- does that mean we made it?
  • 2005-03-21/CC-Wiki_license: It's strange to look back and see that Creative Commons was right there with Wikipedia in the realm of goofy idealistic things that were made up one day and had no guarantee of success!
  • 2005-03-21/Conference_and_expo: Clay Shirky again! How's it been?
  • 2005-03-21/Database_disk_space: A real duality of man situation -- the "we're all gonna make it" milestone of 500,000 articles happening at literally the same time as the "not gonna make it" milestone of the servers shitting the bed and making Wikipedia read-only for 15 hours straight.
  • 2005-03-21/Half-million_articles: Alterego indicated that an article needed to contain a comma and a link in order to be recognized by the article counting feature -- I'm inclined to simply "lmao" but I have debugged Oracle bugs where it was crapping out because of even dumber stuff than this. So I will instead lmao with compassion.
  • 2005-03-21/Quarto: This sounds pretty impressive, but the link to the Quarto is currently a 404, so I guess it must not have amounted to much. Oh, I see -- it is here. Looks fairly moribund, though... will the Signpost be able to survive past 2006? We can only find out by reading on!
  • 2005-03-21/Top_admin_leaves: I wonder if we'll ever hear from Ta bu shi da yu again.
  • 2005-03-28/Arbitration_report: requested arbitration last Friday [...] in a dispute over definitions of capitalism -- TMTCTMTSTS...
  • 2005-03-28/London_meetup: More beginnings -- here they talk about potentially forming a UK chapter of the WMF. I wonder if anything will ever come of that?
  • 2005-03-28/MediaWiki_progress: A new database schema, that will hopefully fail in less spectacularly embarrassing ways!
  • 2005-03-28/Prosecution_and_de-adminship: It may in fact be a good idea to create an official prosecutor office to counter the AMA -- I guess this is another one of those things that just never really panned out. Imagine what the place would look like if we still had an Association of Member Investigations and an Association of Members' Advocates! And another proposal for RfDA...
  • 2005-03-28/Return_of_stats: Imagine keeping detailed statistics about stuff that happens on Wikipedia -- utter nerd stuff.
  • 2005-03-28/Wikiwax_index: In 2005, every time a news site quoted Wikipedia it rose to notability. Ah, those were the days -- Wired magazine, Britannica, the blogosphere, everyone listening to Cory Doctorow, Slashdot, kuro5hin, and Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3 downloaded from LimeWire and plugged into one of those IRC now-playing scripts that blasted it out to everyone else in the channel with obnoxious text formatting...
  • 2005-04-04/April_Fool's_Day: People arguing about pranks on Wikipedia -- ah, some things never change.
  • 2005-04-04/Arbitration_policy_revote: Tim Starling and a few others opposed the concept of having community votes to amend the arbitration policy at all. As Starling put it, "Just edit the policy page." Of all the crap from 2005 that wouldn't fly now, I think this may be by far the least aerodynamic.
  • 2005-04-04/Arbitration_report: Perhaps the first instance I can find of clamor over AfD making its way to arbitration. A sign of things to come...
  • 2005-04-04/In_the_news: Deaditors gonna deadit.
  • 2005-04-04/Plagiarism_and_comedy: Ah, to live in a time when things "swept through the blogosphere". What a strange incident -- rather tenuously related to Wikipedia, but indeed, we had to takesies what we could getsies.
  • 2005-04-04/Proxy_list: Imagine Wikipedia if you could edit logged-in on a proxy -- ruined forever by a bot engaging in page move vandalism on the Albanian Wikipedia in 2005! This is what they took from us......
  • 2005-04-04/Syntax_standardization: Yeah, we're still working on that.
  • 2005-04-11/Arbitration_report: Another deletion drama at ArbCom -- although, of course, back then it was VfD.
  • 2005-04-11/DVD_releases: Have we ever followed up on this? And, by the way -- remember h2g2?
  • 2005-04-11/Dot-org_boom: Another one of those catchphrases that never really caught on.
  • 2005-04-11/Encarta_editing: I think this is what it looks like when we start making it...
  • 2005-04-11/From_the_editor: If several people would each commit to writing just one article a week for The Signpost, we could easily cover as much news as I manage to do on my own. Please contact me if you are interested in helping -- TMTCTMTSTS.....
  • 2005-04-11/Privacy_policy: The historian is forced to wonder if the adoption of a privacy policy in 2005 (by which point Wikipedia already had some hundred thousand articles) was spurred by the rapid growth of the project, the rapid growth of the necessary organizational and financial structures to support such development, or perhaps an Internet-wide trend of adopting such policies around that time. Well, the historian isn't forced to wonder, he can go find out -- the guy writing this is forced to wonder.
  • 2005-04-11/Speed_feature: Remember good-natured rivalry?
  • 2005-04-11/Yahoo_support: Yahoo provided free hosting for Wikimedia projects? Now there's some stuff that never comes up in conversation!
  • 2005-04-18/Andrea_Dworkin_death: A major Wikipedia news scoop, in publishing that Andrea Dworkin had died before any other source knew about it, echoed around the internet last week as many bloggers picked up on the slow-breaking news of her death. Nota bene: by the tone of the Signpost article, this is supposed to be a good thing (presumably WP:BLP had not been invented yet). Mardle predicted, "For now Wikipedia people still defer to the corporate media for confirmation but as citizen journalism gains confidence and resources, that will fade." Damn, that sure did the exact opposite of happen.
  • 2005-04-18/Arbitration_report: More about the Association of Member Investigations. Nobody ever talks about this stuff anymore -- I guess it just stopped mattering so hard it popped out of existence.
  • 2005-04-18/Encarta_elaborates: "Encarta is not just a pell-mell conglomeration of information and random bits of trivia" -- lmao
  • 2005-04-18/Features_and_admins: Seems like a strange grouping (featured articles, featured pictures and RfAs?) but I suppose it may have made sense at the time.
  • 2005-04-18/From_the_editor: Ah -- the birth of the Signpost newsroom and the suggestions page. And a guest editor, from the Wikimedia Quarto!
  • 2005-04-18/In_the_news: While citing sources is now a basic requirement for featured articles -- wait a minute, is now? What the hell?! Also, remember h2g2?
  • 2005-04-18/Lucene_search: Remember how every web search in 2005 kind of sucked? You had to spell everything right and even then it wouldn't really work the way it does now.
  • 2005-04-18/Spoken_Wikipedia: It seems that exploding whale was a bit of an epic meme back in the day, wasn't it? Except in early 2005 I don't think people had started saying "epic" yet -- it would have been "for great justice", if memory serves.
  • 2005-04-18/Tax_exempt_status: I didn't know they did it retroactively.
  • 2005-04-18/Template_standardisation: Fairly impressive that an editing dispute was able to culminate in a design contest -- I guess this is just the kind of thing we don't have the space for anymore.
  • 2005-04-25/Arbitration_report: No link to the actual arbitration proceedings so I can't see if the phrase "anti-Wikipedian behavior" was actually used or if this is a tongue-in-cheek embellishment. Again with the "representation of Snowspinner" thing: I wonder what event precipitated the apparent total disappearance of this representational model from the project.
  • 2005-04-25/Features_and_admins: Back in these days, leaderboards seem to have been kept quite openly -- much to think about.
  • 2005-04-25/From_the_editor: Guest editor for this one is Samuel Klein (User:Sj).
  • 2005-04-25/In_the_news: Rupert Murdoch as wiki advocate? IWADT... although interesting to see that someone even in 2005 is saying "making the Internet exciting again, like the early days". Of course now we think that 2005 was the early days, but the good old days never feel like the good old days, do they?
  • 2005-04-25/Papal_scoop: Wikipedia experiencing server difficulties due to a hot news item -- IWADT
  • 2005-04-25/The_Sanger_memoirs: Again with the "early days" -- I guess there was always a time to look back on. Perhaps in this mailing list the first "official" debate of Sanger's status as a cofounder? Good link to meta:WQ/Retro -- this one on the topic of reminiscence. Much good stuff in that link.
  • 2005-04-25/Writing_contest: Very funny to see a writing contest where articles like Diamond were sub-2000-character stubs -- a lot of good places to blast your creative energy in those days.
  • 2005-05-02/Arbitration_report: Is there ever going to be one of these without Snowspinner in it?
  • 2005-05-02/Commons_donation: Ah, back when Creative Commons was the new kid on the block. Also, I didn't know that de.wiki had actually released a DVD.
  • 2005-05-02/Features_and_admins: A FA "self-nomination" is mentioned in passing, presumably because this was unusual at the time? Also: At press time, Wikipedia:Requests for adminship is unusually busy, with twelve ongoing nominations, including those of many well-known and long-standing users.
  • 2005-05-02/From_the_editor: Sj again -- looks like more collaboration is happening by this point, with several people writing different articles in each issue.
  • 2005-05-02/In_the_news: Interesting to see that Reuters was just repeating stuff from Wikipedia (albeit with attribution), even this early into its existence.
  • 2005-05-02/Wikimedia_elections: Moreover a separate #wikimedia-conclave channel was created on freenode.net to focus discussions about election preparations -- wow! It seems that at this point there are two user representatives on the board, although it's not clear what the overall size of the board is. Jimbo is appointing trustees directly, as well (as of 2022 the bylaws say that there are "at least nine (9) and, at most, sixteen (16)")
  • 2005-05-02/Wikipedia_in_print: It seems many people thought of Wikipedia as a project which eventually culminated in printed volumes -- I suppose that's what an encyclopedia was prior to the 21st century, so it makes sense that this would be a credible threshold of having "made it", although it seems a bit insignificant in retrospect.
  • 2005-05-09/Brockhaus_plagiarism_suspected: "mistakes had probably been made" indeed. OTRS and the legal mailing list both exist at this point for copyright takedowns.
  • 2005-05-09/Features_and_admins: What kind of a username is "Wikipedia is Communism"? Anyway, this is what a 2005 RfA looked like: 2400 edits was a solid selling point, and 44 supports a landslide. One can see here the beginnings of the current state of affairs -- the "support" section is a straightforward bulletpoint list, while the "oppose" section is heavy with multiple trees of indented debate.
  • 2005-05-09/From_the_editor: Still an Sj production: the title of the column is "Wikipedia is communism!" as a joke. One imagines that the current WP:DENY treatment had not yet been developed.
  • 2005-05-09/In_the_news: Rush Limbaugh decided that some articles should be created, but they got deleted (with their AfD arguments all making copious reference to Google hits!)
  • 2005-05-09/Meetings_and_events: Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society recently made Wales their latest non-resident Fellow, one of a score of academics and luminaries across the country who are affiliated with the Center. I suppose this may be the background on them having an article.
  • 2005-05-16/Board_meeting: Am I reading this right? Four candidates?
  • 2005-05-16/Features_and_admins: First mention of FAR that I see anywhere.
  • 2005-05-16/From_the_editor: The return of the snows of yesteryear.
  • 2005-05-16/Image_uploading: Drag-and-drop uploading for Commons? What the fuck!!! I am still doing it with the file select window in 2022! Anyway, this is also the birth of the Flickr scraper, it seems.
  • 2005-05-16/In_the_news: Encarta, About.com, and Answers.com officially BTFO (at least according to Hitwise). Note that nobody cares about any of these four companies anymore: the only reference site ahead of Wikipedia is Dictionary.com, which I guess still "exists" in some sense. a former Britannica editor, who accuses the project of cherishing an "irrelevant principle - openness" -- lmao.
  • 2005-05-16/MediaWiki_1.5: Is it possible that we wouldn't have had a move log if not for Willy on Wheels and Wikipedia is Communism?
  • 2005-05-16/Other_news_sources: Third edition of the Quarto is almost ready to release -- in six to ten languages, wow!
  • 2005-05-16/Skanwiki_proposal: Because Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are all mutually comprehensible, articles written in one language can easily be understood by speakers of another. The Skanwiki initiative has led to the sharing of featured articles between the neighbouring Wikipedias, among other developments -- interesting.
  • 2005-05-23/Arbitration_report: Again with 172? I suppose it hasn't been that long -- I am used to Signpost issues coming monthly, so it feels like I have been reading through two years but it's only been from January to May.
  • 2005-05-23/Dating_system: Oh, the classic BC/BCE thing. Back in those days, people cared a lot about religion online, huh? My own memories are unclear but it feels to me like 2005 was well in the swell of, and little bit before the zenith of, strident online atheism being the most important issue to many posters. Remember when creationists were all over the place?
  • 2005-05-23/From_the_editor: While the focus here is still on the English Wikipedia, I hope this can stimulate efforts to get similar news sources going elsewhere...
  • 2005-05-23/German_scandal: Maybe one of the first instances of a big politician controversy involving Wikipedia that I can find record of -- this one in North Rhine-Westphalia.
  • 2005-05-23/In_the_news: Interesting insight: "the professor said that Wikipedia's scientific articles showed the "discussion-bolstered character of science", while traditional science reporting tended to show science as a "uniform system generating truth"".
  • 2005-05-23/Librarians_project: Observing that people will undoubtedly continue using Wikipedia, sometimes naively unaware of issues about its accuracy, he concluded that librarians have a "professional responsibility to make Wikipedia a reliable information source." We made it?
  • 2005-05-23/Noncommercial_images: Did the restriction of non-free media only happen in mid-2005? I guess so. Also, an example of consensus from Commons being taken into account for Wikipedia proceedings.
  • 2005-05-23/Proceedings_of_Wikitech-l: An interesting feature which shows up for the first time, a recap of the mailing list (by Ben Brockert, who apparently is a rocket scientist). Meta-templates a major item of contention -- some even saying they shouldn't be used at all. And they are still using CVS for source control -- IWADT. Looks like they are also proposing the pipe trick?
  • 2005-05-23/Radio_show: Before it was called a "podcast".
  • 2005-05-23/Traffic_growth: 7,626,000 unique visitors in April 2005. And that was 4.65% of everyone in the US who was using the Internet at that time. And in the top 100 according to Alexa -- wowzies!
  • 2005-05-23/Wikijunior_needs_you!: A Wikimedia project stagnating, something which I suppose is a new phenomenon at this point. But there is still quite a bit of optimism: "we need some dedicated editors to spend some time over on Wikibooks, helping get Wikijunior on its feet". I think that even Wikispecies is still going strong by this point, so this optimism seems quite justified.
  • 2005-05-30/Arbitration_report: No Snowspinner or 172 this week -- as well as what looks like the first rumblings of WP:CIR in a proposed statement of principles. Still no links to case pages, so hard to follow along, but a quite detailed summary nonetheless.
  • 2005-05-30/Features_and_admins: The first appearance of featured lists is here. Furthermore, citation guidelines for FAs are discussed -- some people even arguing that inline citations make articles too difficult to read. Wow!!! Also, five RfAs succeed in two weeks, which is normal, because IWADT.
  • 2005-05-30/Foundation_official_positions: This seems to mark the beginning of the WMF as an organization with permanent, full-time employees (apart from officers like CFOs and etc) unless I am missing something, which I probably am.
  • 2005-05-30/Free_software_trophy: Imagine being given a prize by a PHP foundation...
  • 2005-05-30/In_the_news: Remember when Time Magazine was more prestigious than Wikipedia?
  • 2005-05-30/Laotian_Rock_Rat: Would this count as OR in 2022, or not? The article was written after the publication of the journal, so likely not -- quite interesting that something like this may still be possible. Also interesting to see that New Scientist and the Natural History Museum simply pointed to Wikipedia: not very often do we get credit for breaking anything.
  • 2005-05-30/Substubs_and_templates: A stele! A stele! I love steles! And I found one! Check it out!!! As an interesting historical note, after the category was cleaned out and the template was ceremoniously deleted, it was briefly recreated... by User:AaronSw. Yes, that AaronSw. Furthermore, the deletion log for the template points to Wikipedia:Historical_archive/Template:Substub. Historical_archive? Huh?? How many have there been before me?
  • 2005-05-30/Vandal_fighter: Very fascinating here: it looks like this may be the first automated anti-vandal tool (CDVF, by CryptoDerk).
  • 2005-05-30/Wikimedia_Board_election: Here I believe we are seeing the last embers of the distinction between volunteer members and contributing members, which is at this point I believe entirely historical.

Part 2

edit

For this, I think I will try a new approach and transclude these to a single-page view in the test zone; the approach of opening each page individually takes an extremely long amount of time. I had figured that, since it was only for 2005, I wouldn't need to worry about it, but even the first half of 2005 has taken a solid several hours to go through.

Anyway: it is June 2005. George W. Bush has just started his second term, everyone is malding about Terri Schiavo, New Orleans is still above water, the Pope is lying in state, people are camping out for the release of the new Star Wars movie (the sixth and the last one that is planned), Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stefani is on the radio, some nerd has uploaded a video called "Meet me at the zoo" to some random website called "You Tube", Greece just won Eurovision, and the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is buckling in for another year of exponential growth.

  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-06-06: A now-typical case of WP:PRECOCIOUS as evidence for a sock block; discussions about broadening the remit of ArbCom to content disputes via a "Content Committee" (or reviving the already-moribund Mediation Committee); whether some content is "inherently unfeaturable"; Ta bu shi da yu returns; downtime for the entire site scheduled for June 7 2005 (this keeps happening! but IWADT). Wordpress founder endorses use of wikis for collaboration among bloggers. Wikipedia named "one of 2005's best products" by the more-prestigious PC World; Slashdot talks about list of pwned accounts; password salts finally implemented. Jimbo meets cute with German encyc honcho, Wikipedians prank by guerilla-writing an entry on themselves in fancy German encyc. They get mad.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-06-13: Steve Apple includes Wikipedia as widget in new computer dashboard gizmo. "Do you really think someone would do that -- go on Wikipedia and write an article about a product to spam?" AD/CE meatbotter hauled before Arbs, Delirium realizes there's no actual procedure for Arbs to resign, WP reps meat with European Space Agency for open content access, potential changes to GFDL mulled, new procedure for reviewing FAs proposed, 10 new admins in one week(!).
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-06-13 The LA Times this week announced that its online editorials will shortly be editable by readers via wiki software. Bloggers anticipate that newspapers will start allowing normal people to edit their articles. Britannica predicts it will be triumphant. Medical editors fear a coronavirus pandemic where respiratory illness sweeps the globe. What a bunch of nutcases! A bunch of proposed changes to wikitext markup that apparently were never implemented. More downtime.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-06-20 100 Wikipedias with 100 articles. Everyking petitions for tban removal, agrees to mentorship deal, Internodeuser case closed, new license policy starts to affect FPs, 4 new admins. RSS feed for the Signpost introduced (now through qwikly.com). More reporting on the user-generated revolution (it isn't called "Web 2.0" yet), WikiNews going strong, many citations of Wikipedia in the news (now including government sites in the UK). Notable also is an instance in which some bloggers argue about an edit war and it gets outside Wikipedia. Board of Trustees election looming, new software being written for it, LA Times culls wikitorial effort (after being Slashdotted no less).
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-06-27 Attempt to make software that animates the history of an article -- hell, that still seems like a good idea -- Antarctic climate modeling professional sanctioned by ArbCom over climate change argument, single-page blocks proposed, RickK leaves, trustee election starts. WMF CFO thinks dimly of donators earmarking funds: he said that feedback from donors should be collected, but it "should not tie the hands of the board". New FP rules, eight successful RfAs. Wikipedia integration into KDE desktop? An API planned -- hey, remember Mandriva? New database schema unveiled, and moves now logged. Remember when iPods couldn't play .oggs? Spoken articles being recorded now. Wikipedia featured as the answer to a trivia question on the BBC, WSJ points out an inaccuracy in war figures, AD/CE case and wikistalking case closed at ArbCom, and JarlaxleArtemis case opened.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-07-04 At this point Wikipedia itself is being used to beta-test MediaWiki upgrades, and watchlists briefly break as a result. Cricket WikiProject creates a bunch of featured content -- not the first mention of a WikiProject in Signpost archives, but I believe the first of a content-based one. So far, 2005 has seen 1 new FA per day (accounting for removals). Big hoo-ha about people... playing chess using Wikipedia? I'm not sure which is goofier: doing it, or getting mad about it. I guess it was a different time. The Department of Fun under fire. BJAODN tolerated. Tim Starling offers to set up a separate dicking-around wiki on WMF servers for funtime. Professors surveyed by newspaper say Wikipedia is mostly accurate, although bio prof says an article is trash, and polisci prof says Alexis de Tocqueville is strangely short at 1,000 words (n.b. in 2022 it is about 5,000). Drama over LA Times wikitorial debacle continues. Mailing list hubbub on wikiEN-l "to deal with an atmosphere that some felt was dragging the English Wikipedia's mailing list down to the level of Usenet". New Quarto out, first LA meetup scheduled. Several Arbs resign (?) and no new cases processed. London's been bombed. Linux Journal gives us an award. FP listing page becomes long enough for 56k no-go; galleries in articles discussed. More coverage on Wikipedia's lightning coverage, this time for the London bombings: In the next 24 hours after Morwen created the Wikipedia article, over 800 editors contributed 2,857 edits, which as best as can be determined is a Wikipedia record. No downtime from the traffic this time. A photo from Flickr with a CC license used to illustrate the article nearly in real time. It is amazing how quickly a page detailing every aspect of the attack forms together on Wikipedia - they have more information than any of the major news providers. Bloggers are still the kings of posting, so this was said by a blogger, of course -- IWADT -- NYT references Wikipedia article.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-07-11 More discussion in the blogosphere. ZDnet ponders whether Wikipedia could be used for PR. Potential main page redesign, to add PotD (perhaps as a replacement to DYK, which wasn't very good at the time). Blocked users now able to edit own talk pages "as a temporary workaround while Starling works on a feature for per-article blocking" (and to cut down on posts to wikiEN-l). Crats to be able to change names; doppelganger policy in the works. CSD reform proposed (including new criteria). NSCHOOL under debate. Rather short issue.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-07-18 Snowspinner back in the arb report, this time because of having "proposed a system he called Wikimediation". MedCom alive and kicking. PotD on weekends and DYK on weekdays? Wowzies. Three new admins. "Folksonomy" and GNAA up for VfD. The GNAA, however, has been restrained in its editing of Wikipedia, generally staying within the guidelines of Wikipedia policy. Various GNAA members have made many useful edits, although some have also been accused of being disruptive -- lmao. New redirect created at Wikipedia:Kick the ass of anyone who renominates GNAA for deletion before 2007. de.wp introduces article bounty scheme. Heavy metal umlaut and inherently funny word still considered the best articles (by Jimbo) in an interview for the Star-Telegram... people are still calling it "the Wikipedia" too. WikiNews did a bang-up job with the London bombings, according to many. Page rank drops slightly due to Google machinations. Double-redirects to be tackled by new project. Angela and Florence (the two community reps on the Board) re-elected.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-07-25: Jimbo appoints more arbs (while arb elections occurred at this point, there was a big understaffing issue after previous resignations, so this was an emergency action). Britannica forms an advisory board (Wikipedia has articles on all the board members, while Britannica does not). About.com still a major competitor. Troll edit to article of SCOTUS nominee (John Roberts) sparks blogosphere speculation -- hey, remember Wonkette? LinuxFund names WMF as beneficiary of some of its funds ($6k over the course of a year), putting us in such illustrious company as Debian andd freenode. Officially we have made it: Hitwise puts us at top market share for reference websites. Dictionary.com BTFO. Of our traffic, 66% comes from "search engines" (that's what people used to call Googles); 50% from Big Goog, but 43% from Yahoo and 3% from MSN. Seven new admins, five FAs, 3 FLs, and 6 FPs. One of the admins is some fellow named "Essjay", I wonder if we'll hear about him again. CSD are expanded (largely to reduce overloading VfD with obvious "delete" noms). Serious academic treatment of Wikipedia as an economically modelable system by a guest blogger (law professor Cass Sunstein) at Laurence Lessig's blog. Wikipedia compared to Mumbai in "the avatar versus the journalist".
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-01: Irate and Plautus satire freed from 2004 bans and brought again to ArbCom after continuing in their contention. Another arb request from Snowspinner: this one about Everyking. Non-Wikipedia sources are talking about FA process now: grad students publish a paper about "information quality discussions". Five new admins, 11 FAs, 2 FLs, 5 FPs. Short issue: Unfortunately, the budget for The Signpost does not cover flying its reporters around the world, since said budget is zero (TMTSCTMTSTS). Coverage for "List of films ordered by uses of the word "fuck"" -- Pakistan newspaper writes about how Wikipedia affects news coverage. Some bloggers write about VfD as well; NYT covers AfD for dog poop girl. After the recent GNAA fiasco (see archived story), the deletion policy has been updated to mention that "repeated attempts to have an article deleted may even be considered disruptive."
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-08: Everyking and Snowspinner still at it. VfD is deleted briefly, causing some consternation. Mailing list arguments include this from David Gerard: MOTION: That while VFD nominally performs a useful function in clearing crap out of Wikipedia, its current operation and subcommunity is so pathological and damaging to the Wikipedia community that it should be removed entirely. Remove it completely. Then talk and think how to come up with something that works without becoming an engine for rancor. It's eventually deleted by Ed Poor. Discussion follows at Wikipedia:Deletion reform. GNAA nominated for FA -- "intense debate", indeed. Slate writes an article about an internet hoax perpetrated by... goons. Remember goons? Wikipedians VfD'd the article about the hoax, and then the article about the Slate writer. Snowspinner chimes in on this as well. Some offhand Jimbo comments at Wikimania are turned into big potatoes (rumors of permanent page lockings, etc). Article rating feature is put on hold. Bryan Derksen achieves fame for Wikipedia exploits. Jimbo fills in for Laurence Lessig on his blog. Finally: Michael Snow kills the Signpost, at least for now: The work needed to produce it remains a daunting task for me in particular, and my schedule for the next month would make it difficult to satisfy the standards I have for this project. And even if I had more time, I don't think I could maintain my present level of effort indefinitely. In addition, we would in any case shortly be losing Spangineer, who has regularly been covering featured articles but needs to prepare to resume his studies. The hiatus is expected to be temporary, insofar as people step up to continue it. Damn!!! Will the Signpost die?!
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-15 Perhaps worthy of note that four of the six arbitrators are facepoasters (Fred Bauder, Daniel Mayer, David Gerard, James Forrester; the only two pseudonymous members now are Fennec and JayJG, both of whom are emergency appointments). Arbitration case is closed over foreign relations of the United States. I haven't caught any reference to precedents yet: it seems likely to me that we just didn't have any yet. Twelve new admins this week -- jeez o'pete. The Asheville Citizen-Times is starting a wiki-themed newspaper (although it doesn't seem that they are actually using a wiki -- they're just publishing things that readers send in). Some new ideas for featured content as well. Slate is causing more controversy about VfD. Also, this is the first Ral315 issue.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-22: Deletion reform proposals are still being fleshed out -- "experimental deletion" process started. Another really big VfD drama: Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for Decency, which I guess was about porno. Also this Jimbo action from February. Wow, I guess Slate was "slate.msn.com" at that point. The more you know! Also, more stuff about Wikipedia astroturfing, a few boring arb cases. There is also this interesting thing: On August 16, G4 aired an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales. They created a user page for the show, where viewers could edit as they pleased. Vandalism ensued, and just a day after the episode aired, and over 1200 edits after the page was created, the page was protected. As of press time, the page is still protected to deal with vandalism. Tony Sidaway protected the page immediately after it was created, but Jimbo unprotected it and instructed administrators to leave it open, because he had already talked with G4, and authorized the move.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-29: Arbitration against an IP -- you don't see much of that anymore. Media citations seem to be getting numerous enough that there's just a list of them now. In this issue we also see the Portal namespace created (evidently started by Portal:Cricket). Also, the first great debate on changing VfD, to either PfD (pages) or AfD (articles). The refdesk is split into four, and the collaboration of the week is reduced to one. Willy on Wheels is back, it looks like, who somehow managed to dick up the portal at wikipedia.org (!). Very short issue. Imagine that -- a new EiC putting out short issues. Perish the thought.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-09-05: Arb request for Ed Poor, list of media citations, WMF breaks past its goal (which is now $200,000). Hurricane Katrina is happening now. Statistics are out as well, and Wikipedia "moves closer to" being a top-50 website.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-09-12 Curps writes a bot to pwn Willy on Wheels-style vandals, a user creation log is established (how the hell did we not have that before?) and navigational popups start existing. Ed Poor is at ArbCom (now I see that it's for his out-of-process deletion of VfD) -- two new crats and nine new admins. GNAA FA nom faces trouble; image uploads given license selection dropdown; blog mentions show up again after having been absent for some issues. Edit war among admins about whether the sitenotice should link to the Red Cross Katrina fundraiser (!?) and Jimbo settled it by demanding they stay out. Wikipedia now in the top 50 per Alexa.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-09-19 Simply because I am anal-retentive, I will note here that the Signpost calls itself the Signpost and not The Signpost in this issue. Here we see the introduction of an ambitious new series (by Flcelloguy) to cover the ArbCom elections, with a long timeline of important dates provided. This series seems like it will be quite important (and contain some useful historical information). Note that the template is messed up in this article (it mentions the January 2006 elections and not the 2005 ones that the article is talking about). Probably, someone just used the same template page for the new ones. Tsk tsk. Anyway, Ed Poor resigns as bureaucrat (but retains adminship), and arb case against him closes -- JarlaxleArtemis page closes after CU reveals he's been making bogus accounts to fuck with LinuxBeak, image CSD for unknown copyright/source is added... and Esperanza is born. 12 sysops, 5 FAs, 2 FLs, 6 FPs. Reference.com adds Wikipedia search access.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-09-26: History of ArbCom. This is some good reading (Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-09-26/ArbCom_election specifically). JarlaxleArtemis banned. Esquire asks Wikipedia users to write and edit an article for them. 6 sysops, and debate on RfA reform involving the use of editcounts. Ral315 announces a main page redesign for the Signpost is underway. Newspapers inaccurately report on a piece of vandalism (wonder if they'll ever do that again?) and Jimbo does an hour-long Q&A on C-SPAN. Wikinews goes with CC-BY 2.5, Wikiversity about to finish debating on moving to its own wikiversity.org domain. WMF hires its second full-time employee (I guess all those people from before weren't full-time) and Mac OS X 10.4 gets a Wikipedia dashboard widget.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-03: Wikimania (the second one ever) is being planned, and a city is being decided on. Another in-depth exploration of the arbitration process (at least as it existed in 2005). Speaking of ArbCom, Daniel Mayer (aka Maveric149) just resigned from it. Some cases are opened and closed. A glitch prevents new admins from being promoted for a few days (in 2005 this was a substantial disruption). MedCom undergoes reforms after "falling behind on their caseload": two new mediators and new temporary committee chair appointed, backlog cleared, new cases actively assigned. The mediation cabal had been taking up slack in the meantime, and some cases are shunted back to MedCom. More new CSDs added: one for blatant copyvio (how the hell did we not have that yet) and one for unused fair use images.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-10: In the ArbCom series, we now get to one about criticism of the Committee. Juicy stuff! Mostly people think that it takes an insanely long time and the proceedings are too complicated (TMTCTMTSTS). People also say that it's a cabal (TMTCTMTSTS). And still more people think they should take a direct role in content disputes (need I repeat myself?). More arb cases are opened and closed. A journalist, on his blog, says that a couple of our articles suck. There is less talk of blogs in the Signpost at this point, but still telling that even a journalist who writes for a news outlet is also putting stuff on his blog (and it's getting reactions). Two new arbs are appointed by Jimbo (mindspillage and karynn); candidate statement pages are made for thirteen candidates. FA production drops for the first time in a while (although 13 new admins are appointed in a week anyway). Jimbo joins the Socialtext board of directors, Sergey Brin mentions Wikipedia in a lecture, an obituary appers in the Signpost for the first time, and Esperanza sees its first controversy (but initiates elections for an Advisory Committee nonetheless). Additionally, an article rescue contest is started (modeled after Danny's contest, which seems like the first such activity on Wikipedia).
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-17: Interviews with arbs. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first interview that's featured in the Signpost. Six more arb candidates join the election. More arb cases with unfamiliar names. IP editor (warring over airline legislation) is traced to airline company's headquarters. A mind-boggling 20 new administrators are appointed in one week; 11 new FAs, Wikipedia makes a Time cover story, Ward Cunningham drops some wiki takes, Nielsen reveals we're number one baby. In September 2004, Wikipedia had 3.3 million unique visitors, which grew to 12.8 million for September 2005, a difference of 9.5 million in the US. Overall, the number of unique visitors for the educational reference category increased by only 8.5 million in the same period.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-24: Partnership with Answers.com extended; some express concern about potential ads on WP. Retrospective piece by Flcelloguy on ArbCom is good reading: this one covers the 2004 election. Jimbo overhauls ArbCom election process; arbitration report goes in depth on four newly closed cases and mentions others that are opened and moving through phases. The arb report seems to be in basically its modern form now. Some hubbub over a proposal to let people request Checkuser like they do for adminship: given what RfAs looked like back then, the panic is understandable. China blocks Wikipedia ("again"?) and Esperanza closes its first Advisory Committee election. 12 new admins, 9 FAs, 4 FLs, and 12 FPs. More newspaper citations. Procedure for redirecting very old wikipedia.org links to en.wp debated (i.e. http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl which at the time redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl ). Find-a-Grave project starts (of course, we think much more dimly of such sources now, but IWADT) and the Register talks smack. Wikimania 2006 to be in Boston. ArbCom series continues with a review of the recent calls for reform. More arb cases: Everyking back again.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-10-31: Wikipedia still blocked in China: an "apparent fork attempt" is made to circumvent the filter. WMF devs look for workarounds. 12 more sysops! The Guardian has experts review some articles; some pass and some fail. Project Galatea launches, image storage fixes planned for devs, and Wikipedia finally gets an article in Encarta (written with outrageous cope/seethe/mald vibes). Halloween is Tim Starling Day. Another piece on ArbCom from Flcelloguy: duties and requirements. Sannse resigns from ArbCom... more cases... 10 sysops and 10 FAs. There are now 800 FAs.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-11-07: There is a newsroom reorganization for the Signpost, and a gmail tipline now exists. Some coverage of press coverage (and some news citations). Merriam-Webster starts an "Open Dictionary". Meanwhile, Wikipedia breaks Alexa's top 40, has 800k GET, scoops legacy media on the death of a New Zealand politician (OR?!), and Wikiversity approves the move to the wikiversity.org domain.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-11-14: More in the ArbCom series (this one on voting methods); some detailed reports on cases as well (Pigsonthewing, Lightbringer, and people editing on the Bogdanoff affair, among other stuff). Based on the Guardian article evaluating WP articles, some other sites follow suit, as well as people on Wikipedia itself. Five Arbs are given CU rights, 13 new sysops, and 8 new FAs. Wiktionary to 100K GET; search feature improved; JarlaxleArtemis and MARMOT unbanned and given mentors "in an unusual move". Daniel Brandt comes on the scene. Something tells me this guy will be around for a while. Tax contracting group brags about COI editing in the news. On the Signpost front, this is the beginning of the central page for all articles to be transcluded. Also new is the storybox (for transcluding on user pages or user talk pages) and attempts to get a RSS feed back up.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-11-21: Little update on ArbCom elections, and little update on the cases in progress. Wikipedia is still using the GFDL, but Creative Commons is drafting a license that is more compatible with it. A new weekly Signpost series is added: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News (B.R.I.O.N.) -- 6 sysops, 10 FAs, 3 FLs, 4 FPs. We made page C4 of the New York Times, baby. Vandalism makes front page news, Wikimania dates narrowed down, username changes re-enabled (which had been disabled since September 26), new statistics system set up.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-11-28: Call for ArbCom candidates about to be over. Community input given on Jimbo's election procedure changes (note -- he is now referred to as Jimbo in the Signpost -- previous to this he was always Jimmy). Many complain about him not telling everyone what the deal is with the elections. Lightbringer is banned from freemasonry; neurolinguistic programming brought to Arbs; another WMF fundraiser scheduled for December; 12 sysops, 8 FAs, 3 FPs. Print article in Esquire, coverage in a Russian newspaper, more citations, and proposed committee for experts to screen requests for new language Wikipedias (languages or dialects?) -- "article validation" expected to go live soon as well. Special:Cite is created as well.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-12-05: Jimbo creates a straw poll about the ArbCom elections to clear up misunderstandings and quell concerns. Yet more people join the race (there are now 32); big-shot podcaster revealed to have been editing the article on podcasting (which was a bit more of a niche concern back then, I believe -- every online radio show hadn't yet been folded into the umbrella). Lots of copyvio found on de.wp, 20 (!!) sysops. "One article was featured this week" -- one new FA? Much less than before. A list of TFAs is given as well, which is new in the Signpost. Siegenthaler shitstorm unfolds in this issue: a survey of news coverage is mostly about it, and Jimbo takes actions to restrict editing. The first WikiWand-type thing: "Gollum" -- is introduced (which strips out menus and tabs on the interface). WMF fundraiser postponed, Russians elect their own ArbCom... IPs no longer allowed to create mainspace articles, per edict of Jimbo implemented by Brion and reacted to by editors. Another Siegenthaler piece: this one a summary of what happened, a blow-by-blow of the edit history and subsequent actions on Wikipedia.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-12-12: Alexa rank goes from 37 to 27. Some stories last week, like one in The Times of London, drew heavily on the rewritten Seigenthaler article in providing biographical information about him -- lmao. We also see that Daniel Brandt was the one who revealed the initial hoaxer as Brian Chase. No new candidates for ArbCom race (and no withdrawals). Jimbo's straw poll getting lots of votes. Pigsonthewing banned... for one day. Another case against Ed Poor brought to Arbs. 15 sysops. RSS feed has been added as of this issue at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~ral315/signpost.rss now (which is hosted on the old Toolserver).
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-12-19: Yet more ArbCom candidates. Jimbo closes the straw poll, a majority favor "a hybrid approach that requires a Requests for Adminship-like vote by the community". Some more bickering (which deserves to be read in greater detail than this brief summary). More Arb cases; a whopping 17 sysops. 14 FAs, 1 FL, 5 FPs. More reporting on how Wikipedia is based, more (dubious) claims of rampant vandalism picked up by press; new press kit at Wikipedia:Press Kit. Nature publishes a story "Internet encyclopaedias go head to head"; this is, I believe, one of the famous WP-Britannica studies that are so endlessly cited by future generations. Britannica "wins" according to this one, but not by much. New WMF fundraiser begins. Semi-protection proposed and approved; steward elections planned. This is the first I have seen of "stewards" in the Signpost.
  • Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-12-26: Yet another person joins the ArbCom race. Six cases closed; Chip Berlet admonished for edits on his own article. Notable in that he is a BBS guy from the 80s (and involved in the development of posting). LaRouche drama; cases "against voters on webcomics AFDs"; 16 sysops; first Featured Portal (Cricket); news articles about Jimbo editing his own page; more Seigenthaler stuff. Larry Sanger announces "Digital Universe", a Wikipedia "with expert review", gets 10m in angel funding (another Citizendium?). Semi-protection enabled on enwp; more steward elections; deleted edit summaries made invisible to non-admins; AutoWikiBrowser created; CatScan created.

Thoughts on 2005

edit

In 2005, the Signpost was a new institution, as was the Wikipedia it documented. Initially, it was solely the work of Michael Snow; as it gained steam, it gained contributors, and as it gained contributors, it gained perspective. While Wikipedia was already a large community getting regular press coverage at the beginning of 2005 (or at least enough to fill out an "In the media" section every week), it remained a curiosity in the eyes of most. It was an also-ran to traditional encyclopedias like Britannica and online expert-written encyclopedias backed by large companies like Encarta; the days of Nupedia were over, but the long-term viability of the wiki model still remained unproven. This can be seen in early Signpost coverage -- Wikipedia's credibility was not a question in the eyes of most, it was a "no". While its existence was increasingly well-known, it was still worth noting each time a traditional publication mentioned it (or, better yet, cited it for a definition). The last part is notable as well: while newspapers and magazines constantly debated the question of Wikipedia's reliability, they often felt no compunction about using it to cite definitions and history in their articles (as well as trivia and factoids). Perhaps this was even more validating than a positive article about Wikipedia -- proof of its superiority, or at least proof of its greater breadth and accessibility, the few times a week it happened. At this point, one can imagine that all results in a news search for "Wikipedia" in any given week would fit into a small Signpost column; indeed, even trivial mentions in passing are recorded. In 2022, it goes without saying that this is absolutely not the case; typically, only major media coverage is even mentioned in Signpost issues.

Reporting on the proceedings of disciplinary procedures, primarily (and most visibly) the Arbitration Committee, became an integral part of Signpost reporting. The Committee, started as an ad-hoc tribunal of last resort, was at this time becoming steadily more integrated into the dispute resolution process. ArbCom cases in early 2005 are sparse, and their conclusions are mostly arbitrary; even within the space of one year, it is easy to see its current structure developing (with ubiquitous reference to previous findings of fact, principles and precedents).

The structure of arbitration proceedings (and indeed, of Wikipedia goings-on as a whole) in early 2005 can be seen as somewhat reminiscent to societies of antiquity, like the Greek polis: they were carried out primarily by (and to) small groups of people with recognizable names who showed up again and again. Personal relationships seem to have been quite relevant at this stage in Wikipedia's development; indeed, arbitrators were still being personally appointed by Jimbo. By the end of the year, a process of gradual accumulation enabled more regularity: precedents were established when arguments led to consensus on a variety of subjects that could be referenced afterwards as a source of common understanding.

However, the process of development was not linear -- Wikipedia's history is not a Whig history. A number of evolutionary dead ends are present during this time. One example of this is the strange occurrence of advocate groups, and counter-advocate groups, who brought (and defended) arbitration cases involving their own members. While the modern Arbitration Committee acts in a capacity largely equivalent to civil courts, its jurisprudence in 2005 was markedly different and resembled criminal proceedings in many ways. Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Regarding_The_Bogdanov_Affair is a typical ArbCom case of the period: note that people are listed as "defendants"! Also of note is that every single person listed (except the people who later changed their usernames) is now blocked -- most of them for totally unrelated reasons.

In the days of 2005, long-term patterns had yet to emerge, whether for better or for worse. Editors like JarlaxleArtemis, for example, are extended the good faith of clemency many times in a way that now seems alien. If a user in 2022 were to create dozens of sockpuppet accounts threatening an administrator, it seems patently absurd that this administrator would welcome them back to the project under mentorship: yet this was a regular occurrence in 2005. It was impossible, of course, for someone to have been a Wikipedia troll for more than four years at that point.

While Wikipedia's rise to prominence certainly did not start in 2005, and it didn't end there either, a number of pivotal events happened in that year. This is the year that its Alexa rank went from [whatever it was before] to [27 I think], as well as the year during which ratings of reference websites placed it above competitors like Britannica, Encarta, About.com, Answers.com and even Dictionary.com.

As for the Signpost itself -- a rising tide lifted all boats. There was not only an increase in editors, but an increase in highly involved editors (with up to seventeen sysops being promoted in a single week); this provided a massive boost for readership, but also for material to cover, as a "well-attended vote" went from the high thirties to the high hundreds and it became increasingly impractical for one person to keep track of even major discussions. It is fortunate, then, that as the amount of readers increased, so did the amount of potential writers and editors. A large portion of the Signpost's content in 2005 is routine descriptions of everyday events -- like requests for adminship, featured articles, summaries of media coverage and updates on WMF fundraisers -- that one can imagine automated by script. However, there are many pieces of original reporting on the proceedings of noticeboards, policy debates, and dispute resolution. Moreover, towards the end of 2005, we begin to see detailed investigations, like Flcelloguy's series on the Arbitration Committee; documentation of events that, were it not recorded here, would be nearly impossible to know about the existence of, let alone understand and interpret.

It is in 2005, then, that we see not only the origin of the Signpost, but the beginnings of an expansion from a simple newsletter into something that could be called a genuine news publication.

2006

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Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH476CxJxfg&list=PL8_eOvxF3aIY2Bwj6qILU4GcYEbYyo--i -- we live in a society where this playlist will probably be deleted at some future point. So know, dear reader, that I searched "2006 top hits" and clicked the first thing I found.
  • 2006-01-02: We start out 2006 with a case of plagiarism by a reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, broken by Wikipedia editors. Apparently he was cribbing from us. Flattering, but bad. Information is gathered on possibly the coolest-named subpage of all time: User:TenOfAllTrades/Aloha Dupe. The userbox wars seem to have started right about now: they are introduced as "popular colored rectangles placed in user pages". Oh, how we'll come to learn more about those later! Also, date delinking. Esperanza elections.Ten more admins and fourteen articles. There are a lot of candidates in the arb election. Many familiar, but many not. The election is becoming more formalized; statistics for candidates provided. There are an unbelievable number of candidates, and many of them will have, like, a hundred edits. Familiar names: Snowspinner, Jpgordon, Karmafist, Everyking...
  • 2006-01-09: WMF fundraising drive reaches $380,000 and everyone agrees that this is enough (although the CFO says he'd hoped for around $500k). Another... twenty-seven ArbCom candidates? There are now 68. Lots of candidate statements to the effect of "I have 600 edits and have never gotten in an edit war". The elections have now begun, which I believe means that no new candidates have entered. Jimbo is set to "pick from the candidates with the most support", which I assume is a formality, since it seems unlikely that anyone would put up with him picking random unpopular candidates! Steward candidates are going on at the same time. But there are only 16 candidates in that race. While the election hasn't concluded, there are still live statistics being kept. A Google Doodle spurs an editfest to improve an article... en.wp reaches 900k articles... the New York Times, Newsweek, and The Times write on Wikipedia. Thirteen admins, one featured portal, no new FAs, and one article lost FA status (peer review, ironically enough). Apparently, + wasn't a legal character in titles until now, meaning we really had an article titled C plus plus -- wow. The arb report is pretty sparsely written, although a number of cases were taken. Webcomics AfDs are an object of great contention, since webcomics are a gigantic part of online culture. The music video in my other browser window has a guy conspicuously showcasing that he owns a BlackBerry. God, 2006 rules.
  • 2006-01-16: Begins with a long and detailed retrospective of 2005, which is uncannily similar to the one I wrote above (albeit without the benefit of hindsight). The reporter from the earlier story who had plagiarized Wikipedia has now been dismissed -- the story having originally been broken by the Signpost, as far as I can tell. Cory Doctorow defends Wikipedia despite it making errors in his BLP (that acronym means something now). The WMF faces a privacy lawsuit over Wikipedia's inclusion of a hacker's real name -- in Germany, they've gotten an injunction to remove his name from de.wiki. "Wikipedia" is registered as a trademark, Wikimeetups are held in Seattle and St. Petersburg, and nine stewards are elected on Meta. In other election news, ArbCom's is still going, and 13 of 68 candidates have dropped out. Since real-time voting statistics are available, it's possible to make some comment on the process; only 22 of the remaining 55 candidates have more than 50% support. Kelly Martin resigns due to not having enough time for arb duties. Requests for Checkuser is created. Esperanza proposes new processes for amending Esperanza processes. Rollback unbundling is proposed. A sex offender trying to pass himself off as a nobleman is uncovered by Wikipedia sleuths. Wikipedia is banned in China; for news coverage, the "number of citations this week has increased again after a lull in the wake of the Seigenthaler incident". Thirteen RfAs pass, seven new FAs, and anon sitenotices split off from normal sitenotices. No arb cases are closed, but some are in progress.
  • 2006-01-23: Arb election ends, and Jimbo appoints eleven arbitrators (total committee size now being 15, as he raised the number of seats). They are mostly people I've never heard of, like Filiocht, Morven and James F. Some of them I've heard of, like Mindspillage and Sam Korn. A couple other people's userpage links are purple, so I must have heard of them at some point. The idea of RFA reform is brought up once again. A big poll is held, in which everyone agrees that wheel warring is bad (which I guess was an item of discussion at some point). A proposal is raised for Wikipedia:Administrator_Code_of_Conduct. ArbCom gets clerks, and BLPs are given their own category. A German court case... takes down the German Wikipedia? 16 FAs, 8 admins, and 15 FPs. Most arb cases around these days are about specific users, except for Webcomics...
  • 2006-01-30: IP addresses from Congress were scrutinized, and it turns out that some guy's staffers had expanded his article. Arb clerks (now called the Clerk Office) began work this week. All errors from the Nature article have been fixed. Eighteen FAs this week (a record!) and 5 admins. Webcomics case was closed, with all parties cautioned to remain civil.
  • 2006-02-06: Coming up on a million articles, and the Signpost is about to be interviewing Jimbo. Here's the most 2006 sentence ever written: "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." Gee willikers! Speaking of Jimbo, he de-sysopped five admins in an argument about a goddamn userbox. To be fair, the userbox said "this user identifies as a pedophile". Carnildo, El C, Giano, Carbonite, Ashibaka, BorgHunter, Karmafist, MarkSweep, Doc glasgow, Violetriga, David Gerard and Physchim62. What a mess. Arb case opened for that disaster. But they also closed eight cases, a record -- looks like the clerks are doing their job. Although chair of the clerk's office Kelly Martin resigns, saying "It is obvious that the community, for its own inscrutiable reasons, is unwilling to accept the services I am willing and able to provide". Speaking of disasters, thoughj: you used to be able to have a blank password on Wikipedia? ADMINS used to have blank passwords? Well, this week, they changed that. Interview with the new arbitrators. Muhammad cartoons on the main page. More politicians comment on Wikipedia... arbs are given CheckUser, which it seems is originally is just for them and devs ("Morven and Sam Korn join seven other current and former Arbitrators and developers with the access"). WP:PROD is introduced (really? I thought it was newer than 2006). Also a "divisive and inflammatory" template CSD, in the wake of Jimbo wild-assing a speedy on the pedo userbox. More news about the Congress edits. Five new admins this week (including Ashibaka, one of the participants in the wheel war, which was just a few days after his sysopping). Sanctions (which aren't called that, they are called "article probation" are put on Neuro-lingusitic programming. And Deeceevoice is put on "personal attack parole". They really love naming shit after jail, huh?
  • 2006-02-13: Jimbo to be interviewed on IRC on Wednesdaya, in #wikipedia-signpost on Freenode. Ah, 2006. And questions are to be submitted to WikipediaSignpost@gmail.com. Wheel war over userbox case closed: El C, BorgHunter, Ashibaka resysopped. Carnildo and Karmafist desysopped but allowed to reapply. Paraoxysm and Dschor given timed bans. Also, the WMF is in the process of being born, with "the creation of eleven committees that would deal with various aspects of the Foundation's work": Financial, Technical, Executive, Events, Communications, Special projects, Board expansion, Chapters, Audit, Insurance, and Trademarks. Open meetings on IRC between Wikimedians. "some expressed concern about whether the committees would increase the control exercised by the Wikimedia Board of Trustees"... Chapters and Communications have selected initial members. Communications has set up a system for help desk mailing list to be redirected to OTRS. Sannse and Mindspillage are handling this. Wikipedia now in top 25. Straw poll at Wikipedia:User RFC reform. Arb case about Bigfood guy is closed (one-year ban). Here's a 2006 sentence for you: "According to VampWillow on the wikitech LiveJournal community and the notes at the Server admin log, the server failure on Monday February 13 was caused by the physical hard disk failure on the 'zwinger' server in Florida, one of Wikimedia's oldest machines". Eleven new admins. Also, lol at this: Wikipedia publicity could force Biden to lower his political aim, Delaware News-Journal.
  • 2006-02-20: Actual interview with Jimbo is in this one. He says basically the things you would expect; "The community has always been and will always be absolutely crucial to the running of the Wikimedia Foundation". Regarding the Muhammad cartoons thing, he says: "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." He says the current situation with userboxes (3500 six weeks ago, 6000 now) is "not acceptable". And he says that the most recent fundraising drive was "more successful than had been anticipated, by a long shot". An arb (Mackensen) resigns for personal reasons after being involved with the userbox brouhaha. China still has Wikipedia blocked, which makes the news cycle again. WMUK is officially incorporated. Main Page redesigned. Wikipedia mentioned by chair of the Mozilla foundation as the next big thing. Alongside... Firefox. God, we need to go back! And this: "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." Hello, based department? Ten new admins, including Xaosflux, who I think was involved with the 2023 approval process for the bot which I used to index these articles! Carl Hewitt banned from editing Carl Hewitt. Tony Sidaway case opened.
  • 2006-02-27: Office actions in the spotlight, which are completely new and have caused a few clusterfucks this week, including Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Brian Peppers (meme-YTMND). Jesus, check out this delete log. en.wp reaches 1,000,000 users, at the same time that it's preparing to reach 1,000,000 articles. Britannica 1911 (public domain) has been integrated into Wikipedia -- imagine us having so little fleshed-out content that this would be an improvement! The ranking of top five most-edited user talk pages is Jimbo Wales, Tony Sidaway, Curps, Cool Cat and Mistress Selina Kyle. Wikipedia articles featured on Ask and Yahoo.
  • 2006-03-06: One million articles. A lot of news coverage about that. Politicians move from editing Wikipedia to citing it. Wikipedia on the iPod, and email confirmation added -- I guess before this you could just put whatever crap in as your email address and it would display that when you used Special:EmailUser! Obituary for Caroline Thompson. Fair use drama begins to flare up (Ta bu shi da yu proposes to reduce deletion period from 7 days to 24 hours)... ten new admins, and three arb cases about users closed.
  • 2006-03-13: People are mad about office actions, including one where Jack Thompson got reduced to a one-sentence stub after a nastygram from the famously prolific litigant. Here's something: "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". Ten admins, sixteen FAs. Another userbox arb case. The ability to change usernames was previously restricted to users with less than 6,800 edits, but now is possible up to 20k: the first three users so renamed are Dcoetzee (to Deco), Aranda56 (to Jaranda), and Snowspinner (to Phil Sandifer).
  • 2006-03-20: Jack Thompson's article unprotected, and rewritten from a one-sentence stub to a fully cited article by Michael Snow. Brad Patrick (WMF counsel) interviewed about office actions: "[how many office requests are gotten per week is] 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." Essjay (now head of the Mediation Committee) is given CU. Chinese Wikipedia plans conference in Hong Kong for August. Jimbo is a keynote speaker at SXSW along with Craig Newmark. The WSU Signpost (no affiliation) reports on student journalist plagiarism from Wikipedia. Five admins, no FAs, and another Karmafist case opened.
  • 2006-03-27: Britannica makes a pissed-off rejoinder to the Nature comparison of Wikipedia articles and Britannica articles... and Nature makes a riposte to the rejoinder. Community Portal being redesigned; they don't make 'em like they used to. Two more CUs. ACN is created. The English Wikinews and Czech Wikipedia closed their first arb cases as well. Karmafist's case is closed, and Karmafist is restricted from posting huge numbers of welcome messages, and "linking to 'wikipolitical' pages" while doing so. That Sidaway case is still open.
  • 2006-04-03: An RfA was closed thirty minutes early due to a timezone boner, leaving it just under the discretionary threshold: the resulting dustup ends with two crats resigned. UninvitedCompany proposes unbundling of perms... another RfA is closed, with the crat (Cecropia) forgetting to promote the user afterwards. The subsequent shellacking prompts them to resign as well. Many people are incensed by April Fools' Day jokes. "Cyde was blocked three times during the course of the day. The first two blocks were in response to his addition of randomly-generated userboxes to other users' user pages without their permission. Later in the day, he was blocked for changing the text of MediaWiki:Watchlist from "My watchlist" to "Stalked pages"". And [[2]]. The French Wikiquote was... deleted. Was that a joke? They got rid of the database dumps too. Also, the French Wikipedia held its third ArbCom election. A proposal is made to close the September 11th wiki, and Pakistan blocked access to all Wikipedias for a few hours due to the ongoing Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. Wikia (then a project of Jimbo and Angela Beesley) has now raised 4M in VC funding. 8 new admins, 1 new crat (Essjay), and the damn Sidaway case finally closed. And a motion was made in the Lightbringer case (not to be confused with Lightbreather).
  • 2006-04-10: Most Wikimedia projects go down for six hours due to a datacenter power outage. A thousand people are in the IRC channel asking wtf is up. Sj begins the Wikimania 2006 series (the second Wikimania of all time, in Cambridge, at Harvard Law School). A charity picks 2000 Wikipedia articles to put on a CD for kids in 125 countries around the world. A very bizarre item, which I'll reproduce here:

Schwartz Communications has been volunteering its services to Wikimedia since last fall, according to the communications committee. Schwartz is a professional public relations firm that has over 175 clients and is currently the largest firm of its kind in the New England region. The company has created an account, User:Schwartz PR, which is shared by four of its employees: Emily Fisher, Jason Morris, Rob Skinner and Kate Hunter. The account is reportedly one of the first multiple-user, shared accounts allowed on the English Wikipedia.

Huh? Anyway, Britannica is still taking out ads to disagree with the Nature article which said they had shittier articles than Wikipedia. Wikipedia traffic has increased 275% between Feb 2005 and Feb 2006. Seventeen(!) new admins, with Can't sleep, clown will eat me setting a new record of 246 support votes. They aren't !votes yet, mind you. Of about a dozen and change arb cases, most are about specific users, with only two about editors on pages.
  • 2006-04-17: Publication of a new series was delayed by computer problems. Wouldn't know anything about that! Following up on the Nature study, the BBC gives its own version of a comparison between Wikipedia and Britannica (and Encarta, and InfoPlease). Another hoax article makes headlines; this one about stolen valor guy Alan Mcilwraith, which achieved notability after the hoax was revealed (albeit with a very different tone). Jimbo introduces a link on Wikipedia:Tools to a "1-Click Answers" tool done in partnership with Answers.com, part of a plot to raise bux for Wikipedia from advertising on the latter site. But they don't comply with GFDL (which everything was at the time). User:AmiDaniel/VandalProof is released, based on User:CryptoDerk/CDVF, "exclusively for use with Windows based PCs with Internet Explorer" -- lol. An interesting historical note is that, even though Wikipedia in its early days was populated by a much higher proportion of rabid free-software enjoyers, it seems that very few of them actually developed tools for Linux or Firefox -- it just wasn't the year of the Linux desktop yet. This reminds of a book I have about writing Linux device drivers from the early 2000s... which skips over USB support entirely because it hadn't been properly implemented yet! Sometimes the good old days weren't so great. Anyway, some media coverage for WikiTruth, which was then nommed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Wikitruth.info. TripAdvisor adds a wiki to their site (a competitor to Wikitravel?) and WMF legal counsel User:BradPatrick is sysopped by WMF employee Danny Wool. Five other admins, six FAs... ParserFunctions enabled, and big-ass wheel war arb case is closed. Imagine this: "The Arbitration Committee also banned Guanaco from requesting adminship, in light of his previous desysopping in a prior case". Wikimania series fills in some history: the first recorded "wikimeet" was some time around December 2022, at User:Kurt Jansson's presentation at the 19th Chaos Communications Congress...
  • 2006-04-24: There are currently three full-time WMF employees (Jimbo Wales, Danny Wool and Tim Starling). User:Eloquence, admin and developer, is blocked and desysopped after a "flap" over an office action where Christopher Ruddy and NewsMax.com (the website he founded) are protected and stubbed. This was reverted as vandalism.... but it wasn't clarified as an office action in the initial edit! Mailing list drama. But then: "Within a few hours, Möller's block had been removed, reinstated, shortened, then finally removed definitively by Jimbo Wales, and by the next day all of his editing and administrative privileges had been restored". Some guy named Jay Robert Nash who's cited in a bunch of articles threatens to sue Wikipedia over some kind of unspecified copyright infringement, and it's discovered that he writes a bunch of nonsense in some of his books. Which figured into another deal where a WaPo reporter and a Catholic radio host tried to figure out the provenance of a factoid about priests roaming the streets "looking for heretics to burn" after the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (it was nonsense, and it was from Wikipedia, which came from a Nash book, and it was nonsense). Nash himself "repeatedly said that his books are seeded with misinformation, including incorrect facts and nonexistent people, so as to catch those who 'steal' from his work" -- fascinating. Someone proposes Wikipedia:Paid editor job board. It's MfD'd. Wikipedia reaches Alexa rank 17, Wikitruth pisses people off, Economist reports on the Britannica/Nature Wikipedia beef, accusations of liberal bias, Wikitravel bought by some brand, five admins, twelve FAs, crats allowed to set bot flags (instead of stewards), some arb cases close.
  • 2006-05-01: Campaign manager for Georgian gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox resigns after scandal over editing opponent Mark Taylor's article. IP addresses strike again. Wikimania is seeking presenters. Jimbo is to be named in the 2006 TIME 100, and given an EFF Pioneer Award. Wikipedia reaches 4 million articles (wow, that was fast). Amazon adds a "wiki section" to its product pages, wonder how long that will last? Seven admins, six FAs, some new special pages (Special:Randomredirect and Special:Unusedtemplates), and some more user arb cases (plus cases for the King James Version, depleted uranium, and biological psychiatry).
  • 2006-05-08: Raul654, Mindspillage, and Sj represent Wikimedia at the ACM CFP-2006 conference. comScore Networks claims Wikipedia is the number-seven website worldwide, and Alexa gives #13. A review of Wikimania 2005. The Miami Herals reports on internal wikidrama, re: our article on Cuba. Jimbo is presented the EFF award. One new crat, eight new admins, seven FAs, and the edit count ceiling for Special:RenameUser increased to 200,000 -- in retrospect these ceilings seem tiny (I'm at 80,000 edits myself) but this was a time before everyone had AWB and Cat-a-lot, nobody had been a Wikipedian longer than five years, and RfA voters were demanding the lofty accomplishment of... a thousand edits. Most of them made at 640x480 or, if you were fancy, 1024x768, on Internet Explorer... yecch. Depleted uranium clase closed, and some more user arb cases in process. The one-year ban seems like a fairly common outcome in these cases, which nowadays is quite rare indeed.
  • 2006-05-15: Baidu bursts on the scene, with a shitload of content scraped from Wikipedia, giving it 120,000 articles straight out of the gate (twice as many as in the Chinese Wikipedia, which was then banned in China). Well, if they obey the terms of the license... Bucketsofg writes The RfA Candidate's Song. Eleven FAs and five admins. Jimbo attends a fancy TIME gala. Switzerland forms a Wikimedia chapter, Brion Vibber gives a tech talk at Google, Wikipedia is now Alexa #16, behind a score of luminaries like MySpace and the reigning juggernaut, the unstoppable Yahoo, a name that will forever ring out in history as the greatest search engine and Web company... A Scientology arb case is closed. Wikipedia reaches 1,000 GAs, which are at this point "intended to be a stepping stone for articles to featured status". Password reset requests made throttlable (was there just NO anticipation of people using the software to mess with each other?). We get {{BASEPAGENAME}}, {{BASEPAGENAMEE}}, {{NUMBEROFPAGES}}, and {{CURRENTVERSION}}. Lawsuit from the German hacker (the same that had earlier caused the German Wikipedia to be entirely deleted) is defeated by Wikimedia Deutschland, court rules that it's not a violation of anything to publish the guy's real name. But wait -- the German Wikipedia wasn't shut down? "This led to widespread erroneous reports in the media that the German Wikipedia had been shut down. In reality, it remained available throughout and the injunction itself was soon suspended." But the Signpost said they had gotten rid of the database dumps and the website! What to believe? Anyway, more overview of Wikimania 2005: sounds like it was a pretty fun time. They even danced.
  • 2006-05-22: Baidu Baike is chugging along, described by most news outlets as the "self-censored Chinese Wikipedia". The mayor of Lima, Ohio makes plans for citizens to improve the city's article. Professor expresses confusion about edit wars on his own BLP. Sitepoint talks about MediaWiki (then considered very high tech for already running PHP 5!) and Wikipedian Mark Fisher (aka Vaoverland) profiled in local news article. Wikimedia chapter updates from Poland, Germany, Italy, and Serbia and Montenegro. Statistical reports for WMF projects are put up for every project except Wikipedia (database dumps being irregular and sometimes broken). Eleven FAs and seven admins. A typical "close" count is given as 59/9/3. Arb cases proceed as normal. Two cases closed, a new case opened on 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities. Planning for Wikimania 2006 is almost done, and its agenda is basically determined now. And an article from Michael Snow, of a format we haven't seen in a while: the detailed discssion report. This one is about some deletion discussions for metadata icons, like {{Featured article}} and {{Spoken Wikipedia}} topicons: a similar GA topicon was deleted in April. FA director Raul654 nominated the other two as cluttering up the pages, and improperly putting metadata on the main article, which some disagreed with, but many favored the deletion.
  • 2006-05-29: Jimbo's proposal to change semiprotection becomes a big debate, on-wiki and on the mailing list. Some bloggers say that this is Wikipedia's death knell. Others say that is dumb and makes no sense. User:Phil Sandifer is... investigated by University of Florida police, for some kind of random LiveJournal bullshit, causing a dumb attack BLP to be created and deleted. Whodunit? Presumably, disgruntled blocked users: Daniel Brandt "first suggested contacting UF officials on Wikipedia Review earlier this month". Previously, an administrator named Katefan0 left the project after Brandt started sending nastygrams to her employer about wikidrama. Many admins move to revdel dox from their userpages. The WMF passes a resolution to hire a full-time employee to manage OTRS stuff (viz. answering phone calls and emails). Here's a wild post:

Mistress Selina Kyle and Blu Aardvark, previously banned by the community for general disruption, were briefly unblocked by Linuxbeak, who had offered both a second chance under mentorship. Linuxbeak has previously mentored several banned users, such as MARMOT and JarlaxleArtemis, with varying degrees of success. The move to unblock the users was met with both criticism and praise, though as of press time, both remain blocked, with the restoration of the users' blocks by SlimVirgin and FeloniousMonk, respectively. FeloniousMonk cited the re-block of Blu Aardvark as temporary "until more information is provided and a consensus is reached".

Statistics for en.wp are updated, to some extent, although database dumps are still quite difficult to do. Video game guides prohibited from Wikibooks by Jimbo, WP 0.5 starts accepting nominations, and three proposals for new projects are made: WikiBrain, WikiPoll and WikiActivism. Jimbo interviewed again, for an Australian technology magazine. Eight new admins. Six FAs, and eleven FA delists, which I don't think I have seen in any issues prior to this one. Arb cases chug along as normal. One case, to restrict a person to one account, has been... open for like a million years in the voting phase. RSS and atom feeds for the most recent few page history items are introduced. Also, Wikimania is about to pop off.
  • 2006-06-05: Oversight usergroup is created, as a "temporary hack". The WMF passes one resolution, to buy some new hardware, and another (supported by Jimbo, TimShell, Anthere, Michael E. Davis, and opposed by Angela) to hire an in-house legal counsel and interim executive director. Jimbo gets an honorary Doctor of Laws degree and is profiled in an Indianapolis newspaper (that takes some issue with Wikipedia's poor coverage of local businesses). WikiTruth guy interviewed in Australian newspaper, and "more press releases, news articles, and blogs are reporting their subject having 'an article of its own in Wikipedia' as a newsworthy fact in and of itself". Many people around the web talking about an essay called "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Wikipedia defiitions used by a California Court of Appeals in an opinion. 4 new admins and 19 new FAs. Some search tools are introduced (like a "Googlepedia" Firefox extension and some weird Windows thing called "Pico" that gives a "latent search engine" in the... address bar or something). Also, Wikimapia exists now. Some more arb cases, including one including Blu Aardvark from last week's issue. And this, about that unending StrangerInParadise case: "It appears that the motion has been enacted, with the StrangerInParadise account blocked pending the user's decision on which account to use, but it has not been removed from the arbitration page". Sheesh, what happened to the clerk's office? Wikimania analogues in other countries are profiled as well: Germany, Hong Kong, and Netherlands.
  • 2006-06-12: A thousand featured articles on en.wp (the thousandth being Iranian peoples). Two more WMF resolutions: to define the scope of the "special projects committee", and to authorize the creation of a fundraising committee headed by Daniel Mayer (Maveric149), then-current CFO. Incubator and Wikicitizens are proposed at Meta. Debate over whether updated World Cup scores should be on the Main Page. Obituary for Nataraja, admin on fr.wp, commons and en.wp. Discover shows a chart, made by IBM's Watson Research Center, of the evolution of Evolution up to October 2005, and gives a positive view of Wikipedia's editorial processes. An admin is desysopped by ArbCom after investigation finds he'd been socking, and not permitted to file an RfA without committee approval. Also, the Signpost RSS feed is back up, on a new server -- and the Signpost has a new domain name, http://wikipediasignpost.com (note that this is before HTTPS became cool). Thanks, Ral315! Seven admins and eight FAs (but one FA delist). Two arb cases closed and some motions enacted. An overview of Wikimania speakers (Lawrence Lessig, Jim Giles, Karen Christensen, Paul Kobasa, Paul Ginsparg, and some Wikipedians (Jimbo, Anthere, Angela and BradP).
  • 2006-06-19: Big-ass New York Times story about Wikipedia "revising it's 'anyone can edit' policy", pursuant to semiprotection changes (although semiprotection has existed since December '05); Jimbo describes the piece as schlock. He also discourages people from citing Wikipedia in other encyclopedias. Brad Patrick is hired as the WMF's full-time legal counsel and interim executive director. User:Adam Carr, staffer for Australian Labor MP Michael Danby, is in hot water in the mainstream press for editing stuff about politics, although his identity and occupation were known on Wikipedia, where he was open about them and had seen no major conflict: "Carr's response to the story was to dismiss it as 'a plain and simple smear-job'". Undeletion of images is now possible, closing a ticket open since May 2005. Eight new admins, seven FAs, and one FA delist. No arb cases closed, and four opened. Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikispecies, and Incubator logos under discussion on Meta. We also get {{NUMBEROFADMINS}}, __NOGALLERY__, and Special:Uncategorizedimages. Wikimania travel scholarships are available, and early registration is open.
  • 2006-06-26: Journal of American History writes a paper about Wikipedia, New York Times issues correction on the big piece from last week, The Independent asks "New Media: Who are the real winners now we've all gone Wiki-crazy?" and the WMF seeks a CEO. There are now Wikipedias with 1,000 articles in 100 languages. Debate over fair use: quicker deletion is proposed for non-compliant images, since they can now be undeleted. Seven admins, nine FAs, one delist. Two arb cases closed, three cases opened, seven in voting phase and three with motions to close. DjVu files can now be uploaded, and blocked users can now view source (or preview diffs) in edit view. Wikimania speakers and workshops are explored, including online community researcher Jenny Preece, technologist Clay Shirky, and IBM researcher Fernanda Viégas.

q3

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  • 2006-07-03: Angela Beesley resigns as WMF trustee, with her seat to be filled in the 2006 elections. This news is reported in the... Wikizine, which I somehow never heard of until now. How'd that happen? Anyway, she says, "it's been a great two years and I've enjoyed the role". Wiktionary has a million entries in all languages. WMF privacy policy changes to account for CheckUsers, and a medical dictionary wiki is proposed. San Jose mayor Ron Gonzales in the news as someone adds dirt to his Wikipedia page. Scott McNealy at canada.com says Wikipedia has "nothing left to prove". An unblock mailing list is created, unblock-en-l, to filter unblock requests out of the high-traffic wikiEN-l with "requests sometimes degenerat[ed] into an exchange featuring rants on one side and mostly sarcasm and mockery on the other". Five admins, twelve FAs. A proposal is made to require email address confirmation for accounts attempting to upload images and media. Five arb cases closed, four in evidence phase, six in voting phase, one motion to close, two closed; Linuxbeak's attempt to mentor Blu Aardvark ultimately unsuccessful. Wikimania's schedule is being drafted. And Wikipedia is cited for the first time in a reported judgment of the High Court of Justice (Kay v. the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin) 27 June 2006), regarding Critical Mass, although there were two previous citations in lower courts in England and Wales: BBT Thermotechnology UK Ltd v Brainfire Group [2006] DRS 3931 (12 January 2006) and Media Marketing & Promotions v. Office of Communications [2006] CAT 12 (15 May 2006).
  • 2006-07-10: Proposal to identify and show stable versions of articles is discussed, with "in-progress" versions being hosted on subpages. Tim Starling deployes some new options for IP blocks. Swaths of random uncited crap on Ken Lay's article after his death makes the news many times, as well as Reuters messing up their own coverage on it. So does the breakup of Rocketboom being documented in real-time on their article. Wikia launches a site for political campaigns, as a "central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent".. Three admins, ten FAs. Four arb cases opened, three in evidence phase, nine in voting phase, and one closed. More talk about Wikimania panels.
  • 2006-07-17: Larry Sanger is starting his own encyclopedia project, called Digital Universe, in addition to his "Text Outline Project". Debate over whether BLP subjects should be allowed to request deletion of their own articles (prompted by a self-requested AfD for Angela Beesley). Access to archival materials from the United States Library of Congress and Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed with WMF representatives. Six admins, eleven FAs, four delists. One arb case opened, six in evidence (including one about Israeli apartheid), nine in voting, one motion to close. Single-user login is "nearly ready". Wikimania tutorials and workshops are covered.
  • 2006-07-24: WP:BLP upgraded from guideline to policy. Michael Snow talks about the focus of the Signpost, which mostly covers the English-speaking community, but is this week featuring a report from the German Wikipedia. Wikipedia covered by the New Yorker. New project, Digital Universe, calls itself the "anti-Wikipedia". Report from the German Wikipedia talks about their status, community news, featured articles, and press coverage (like this). Reports of Wikipedia being blocked in Saudi Arabia (rumored to have happened previously as well). WMF prepares to fill Angela's seat, naming Essjay, Datrio, and Aphaia as their election commission. Lawsuit filed by a Catholic high school in Nebraska seeks damages from anonymous IP editors on their Wikipedia article. Eight admins, fifteen features, five delists. Two arb cases opened, four in evidence phase, ten in voting phase, one motion to close, and two closed. Wikimania contests, parties, and local attractions covered.
  • 2006-07-31: The Onion article lays sick burns on Wikipedia. Some professors talk about us on mailing lists -- geographers lament that sociologists are "royally kicking our butts", a decisive factor in getting them to sign up and edit. WMF board candidate rules released. Coverage of "online battle" about municipal elections in Vaughan, Ontario. Six admins, no features, four delists. Three arb cases open, three in evidence, thirteen in voting, and one closed. By the way, you know what else is closed? Registration for Wikimania. Polish Wikipedia plans to release itself on DVD; Wikipedia is the 8th most popular website in Poland.
  • 2006-08-07: Wikimania covered in the press, including the Detroit Free Press. The United States House of Representatives IP is tempblocked. Jimbo announces intent to form a "formal advisory board" to control article quality(?). The Atlantic writes an article about the history of Wikipedia's first year. Stephen Colbert gets our asses on TV, kicking off the infamous "tripled elephants" vandalism craze: "Latchkey kid was quickly protected within 15 seconds of the statement being said on air". The Washington Post says some dumb stuff about this "crashing [the] servers". The Beaver County Times notes that some living baseball players are falsely claimed, by us, to be dead. Some controversy about instructions for celebs to upload fair use publicity photos. More people enter race for WMF trustee elections. There are now 1000 FAs, and 200 delisted FAs (the Signpost mentions criteria becoming "more stringent" but many of these 2006 FA reviews basically look like DYKs from 2023). Four admins. One failed RfA with over a hundred supports (Ambuj.Saxena), the third RfA in history to have over a hundred supports and not pass. Fifteen FAs and three delists. No arb cases opened, three in evidence, eleven in voting, five motioned to close, and none closed. At Wikimania, we learn that the One Laptop per Child project is going to load some Wikipedia articles onto their computers, and "Webaroo" is going to put Wikipedia articles into their "Web content packs". Also, "The Wikimedia Foundation will also now have an advisory board to help upgrade partnerships, public relations, financing, etc". Wikimania is officially over, with an index of all proceedings now available on the Wikimania site. And single-user login is about to roll out; Vibber also mentions the possibility of OpenID (which Wikitravel already uses). Wikiversity approved by the board, and Jimbo announces it's about to start a "three-language beta test". "Since January 2006, there has been established a column about the French Wikipedia, called Wikifeuilleton in a weekly satirical newspaper called Le Tigre [3] [...] relates passionate debates which have occurred during 2006 in the Wikipedia, like the discussion about a dictator category or an incredible story of a sysop having about ten sock puppets". French zoological history portal interviews herpetologist.
  • 2006-08-14: Trademark Examiners permitted to cite Wikipedia and e-Wiki (a Chinese Wikipedia-based encyclopedia) is shut down due to political pressure. Some company named MyWikiBiz.com, run by a Gregory Kohs, starts offering to write Wikipedia articles for pay ($49 for a "basic stub", $79 for a "standard article" and $99 for the full package with a one-year checkup and submission to other sites). Reactions are mixed, Kohs is blocked, Jimbo talks to him on the phone and agrees to a setup where he's unblocked bt has to post the articles on his website first (and have other editors add them to Wikipedia). A BLP about Kohs is created and then deleted. Seven new WMF trustee candidates enter election. Wikimania 2006 deemed a rollicking success. Preparations for Wikimania 2007 are beginning, and translation-combo Babel userboxes are introduced. AOL IPs can now be blocked more efficiently using X-Forwarded-For headers, and new JavaScript variables added for userscript writers. Six admins, of whom another (Joturner 2) achieved >100 supports but failed to reach consensus to promote. Eleven FAs and two delists. Fifteen FAs and six delists. Four arb cases opened, two in evidence, twelve in voting, two motioned to closed, and three closed. Chinese Wikipedia beginning to release a spoken version, though stymied by mutual unintelligibility of Chinese dialects, and is...blocked from being accessed by proxy servers in Florida?
  • 2006-08-21: Time magazine names Wikipedia as one of the "25 Sites We Can't Live Without", Finnish newspaper writes profile of Wikipedia editor, Congress edits in the news again, this incident involving Gil Gutknecht (or his staffers) editing his article. Wikimedia projects go down for a bit. Two people join as candidates for the WMF board seat. Cities bid for hosting Wikimania '07, and a village pump proposal to redesign the sidebar gains traction. Usurpation is proposed. Six admins, eleven FAs, two delists. Three arb cases opened, four in evidence, eleven in voting, two motioned to close, and three closed. Swedish Wikipedia is one of the largest editions, despite only having 9 million speakers; their admins are elected for limited terms.
  • 2006-08-28: Signpost puts out a call for writers. Daniel Mayer (mav) resigns as WMF CEO, having "noted that he took the position with the understanding that when the job became too big for a volunteer to handle, he would be replaced". Interview with WMF board candidates, including Aaron Swartz. Wikiversity has launched, and debates over logos are proceeding. Pending changes enabled on German Wikipedia. Blogger Christopher Blizzard reports that an article on ABC News online ripped off Parasitic twin. Pluto isn't a planet anymore, and people are arging about it. All Wikipedias put together now have five million articles (of which the English Wikipedia is about 1.5 million of). Eight admins, sixteen FAs, and five delists. Two arb cases opened, two in evidence, thirteen in voting, two motioned to close, and two closed. Spanish Wikipedia elects CheckUsers, prohibits fair use images, and bickers about userboxes. Hong Kong and Utrecht plan meetups.
  • 2006-09-05: Voting for WMF board starts, with two candidates disqualified for refusing to provide paperwork to the WMF office, one withdrawing, and several entering in the final few hours. Board passes resolution to add two more election officials, Jdforrester and Jon Harald Søby. Candidate Aaron Swartz (User:AaronSw) writes a story about "who writes Wikipedia". Everyking is desysopped by ArbCom after an spicy post on Wikipedia Review in which he offered to post the content of a deleted article for all to peruse. Sparks fly at Wikipedia:Publicgirluk photo debate, concerning a user who likes to post nude photos of herself, which culminated in her being indef-blocked by Nandesuka at Jimbo's behest, unblocked, and reblocked by Dragons flight. Statistics show that about 48% of all Wikimedia edits are on the English Wikipedia; Alexa says that Wikipedia now has 50 million unique visitors in a single day (including all languages for the count). Eight admins, one emergency desysop; Wikipedia now has over 1,000 admins (the 1,000th being Xyrael). The second-highest count for Wikipedia admins is German (225) and French (109). Sixteen FAs and ten delists. One arb case opened, two in evidence (including a case featuring an Encyclopedia Dramatica article), ten in voting, three motioned to close, and four closed. Uploading of images from public URLs is now allowed at Special:Upload. Italian Wikipedia renovates their Main Page and Village Pump, holds an official meeting in Valentano.
  • 2006-09-11: Carnildo, desysopped in userbox war from February, regains adminship in contentious RfA; "many users noted that the "75% guideline" was first introduced by Cecropia, and that prior to this guideline, bureaucrats did not rely on percentages". Board elections underway. WMF hires a "networking coordinator". Third iteration of Wikipedia:Danny's contest starts (for $100 in educational materials from Amazon!) Three admins, sixteen FAs, and three delists. Two arb cases opened, none in evidence, eleven in voting, one motioned to close, and four closed, with two motions in prior cases. Various technical fixes. Hungarian Wikipedia holds its fourth meeting and introduces separate deletion process for substubs.
  • 2006-09-18: Larry Sanger plans to launch Citizendium, his own encyclopedia, with blackjack and real names. Jimbo interviewed in the Wall Street Journal and Nightline, the latter along with some other Wikipedians. Tim Starling in the hospital -- get well soon. The September 11th wiki is locked, and some squatted Wikipedia domains are requested by the WMF. Seven admins, nine FAs, four delists. Two arb cases opened, one in evidence, eight in voting, one motioned to close, and four closed. Various technical fixes. Simple English Wikipedia, which doesn't allow image uploads or non-Babel userboxes and has only 8 active adminstrators, reaches 11,000 articles.
  • 2006-09-25: WMF board elections conclude: Erik Möller (User:Eloquence) to fill Angela's empty board seat. Tony Sidaway resigns as arbitration clerk, at behest of arbitrator Charles Matthews, after controversial three-hour block on Giano. Wikimania 2007 to be held in Taipei. Citizendium gets some coverage in a couple papers. en.wp breaks 1,400,000 articles, and de.wp (the second largest) is at 470,000. Three admins, five FAs and three delists. Two arb cases opened, two in evidence, eight in voting, one motioned to close, and one closed. The Danish Wikipedia is working together with Danmarks Radio (DR), the national Danish Broadcasting Corporation, to expand articles about the Denmark national football team and the SAS Ligaen.

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  • 2006-10-02: Two speedy deletion criteria added, G10 (attack pages) and G11 (corporate spam). WMF counsel Brad Patrick says: "Some of you might think regular policy and VfD is the way to go. I am here to tell you it is not enough. We are losing the battle for encyclopedic content in favor of people intent on hijacking Wikipedia for their own memes. This scourge is a serious waste of time and energy. We must put a stop to this now". CIO magazine covers the German Wikipedia's implementation of Flagged Revisions. Jimbo meets with Indian editors in Bangalore. WP 1.0 assesses its 100,000th article. Four admins, eighteen FAs and eight delists. One arb case opened, four in evidence, eight in voting, and one closed.
  • 2006-10-09: Big brohaha over MyWikiBiz, and the origins of WP:COI, which is now a guideline. Interview with Eloquence (Erik Möller), following his election to the WMF board: "We do have the core problem of operating with a very small Board, and I remain committed to expanding it very soon, with a majority of the Board members being community-elected". AfD covered in the New York Times. Accounts can no longer have @ in their names. Six admins, thirteen FAs and six delists. For "the first time in over five months", no arb cases opened, four in evidence, eight in voting, one motioned to close, and none closed. The Portugese Wikipedia, the 8th largest (with 190,000 articles), adopts a policy to allow fair use images, redesigns their article promotion system, gets a new Main Page layout and almost splits into Brazilian and Portugese versions.
  • 2006-10-16: Readers in mainland China can read (most of) Wikipedia now, for the first time since its block a year ago (reported on by many, including the NYT). Jimbo floats the idea, from a donor, of purchasing the rights to significant works and releasing them under open licenses (with an eye-watering budget of $100 million). Floyd Landis employs "the Wikipedia defense" in his doping case. Citizendium gets coverage in San Diego's Union-Tribune, The Financial Times and The Paramus Post. Wacky online poll site ranks weirdest Wikipedia articles. Four admins, and an unsuccessful RfA for a bot (TawkerbotTorA). Twelve FAs and five delists. Three arb cases opened, two in evidence, eight in voting, one motioned to close, and two closed.
  • 2006-10-23: The Globe and Mail covers the Chinese government's partial removal of their Wikipedia block. Some newspapers compare Citizendium to Wikipedia. Ten new currencies are now accepted for donations through PayPal. Twelve admins, four FAs and four delists (inclding the 250th delisted FA). Three arb cases opened, three in evidence (including one on "non-notability", four in voting, two motioned to close, and five closed. The Finnish Wikipedia debates notability, permission removal for inactive admins, and the correct spelling of "pizza" (or "pitsa"?).
  • 2006-10-30: Blog network owner attempts to estimate valuation of Wikipedia, and comes up with $42 million per year if it switched to a for-profit model (of which $35 million would be profit), with an overall valuation of $500M to $600M. Other disagree; Netscape.com showrunner says $5 billion ($7.56 billion in 2023). WMF board reorganization: Jimbo steps down as chairman, replaced by Florence Nibart-Devouard. Tim Shell chosen as Vice-Chair, Erik Möller as Executive Secretary, and Michael E. Davis as Treasurer. John Hubbard, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, makes a training workshop video titled "Why Wiki?". Daniel Brandt claims multiple instances of plagiarism by Wikipedians, causing firestorm (including egg on the face of a well-established editor and admin). Logo mosaic project for Commons begins, to commemorate the upcoming millionth upload. Five admins, ten FAs and seven delists. One arb case opened, five in evidence, five in voting, and two closed. The Japanese Wikipedia is reported on in Asahi Shimbun and NHK, and has meetups in Tokyo and Osaka.
  • 2006-11-06: US spies make internal Wikipedia knockoff for their own use. Blogger studies Wikipedia appearance in search results; it's in the top 10 on most searches with Google and Yahoo (although less highly ranked on MSN). Sydney Morning Herald covers some Daniel Brandt drama, Jimbo goes on NPR. WMF makes $5,000 donation to Freenode. WMDE gets tax-exempt status. Voting on new logos for Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity is closed. Seven admins, eighteen FAs and eight delists. Arb candidates have begin submitting themselves for the 2006 election, planned to run two weeks, with little controversy and no change from the last year's elections. Two incumbents have declined to run for re-election (with The Epopt set to be the first arbitrator to serve a full three-year term). There are fifteen candidates currently (required to have at least 1,000 edits). One arb case opened, three in evidence, four in voting, one motioned to close, and three closed. The German Wikipedia has a controversy over their article on methodical culturalism (Methodischer Kulturalismus), with philosophers rejoicing about it winning a writing contest and others complaining that it was unreadably dense. Wikipedians in Berlin and Dresden meet up.
  • 2006-11-13: Following the unblock of other-language Wikipedias in mainland China, the Chinese Wikipedia is also made freely accessible, after which it experiences a spike in growth. Jimbo interviewed in The Telegraph and The Guardian. AfDs in the news: Ars Technica on the NPA Theory of personality; and Gawker.com on the "Internet It Girl". Board passes four resolutions: to create a new events committee, a domain names workgroup, a committee to search for a permanent executive director, and a resolution to summarize the WMF's retreat in Frankfurt, Germany. Tim Shell is goint to resign at the end of the year. Wikizine publishes its 50th issue. Wikipedia Weekly is started by Tawker and Fuzheado. Eleven admins, thirteen FAs and five delists. There are now 26 arb candidates; some propose a secret ballot, which Jimbo says he has no objection to "in principle" but "the standard wiki voting system is much more in line with our traditions and appears to produce better results" (i.e. when private voting was tried in the past, it led to a shitshow). One arb case opened, one in evidence, six in voting, and two closed. The AntiSpoof extension (written by Neil Harris in Python and translated to PHP by Brion Vibber) has been enabled on all Wikimedia sites, making it impossible to register usernames too similar to existing ones. Many symbols are added for math tags; the edit box becomes wider; retroactive autoblocking made possible. Both Wikipedia and Google have 79.8% of their visitors coming from outside the US, according to comScore.
  • 2006-11-27: Voting begins for steward elections; there are 15 candidates (and 13 confirmed by the WMF). The Digital Art Registry apologizes for using Wikipedia's name in a fundraiser to buy and maintain an "on-line catalog of global Public Art and architecture". British Columbia paper The Tyee, profiles User:Tawker (Andrew). Wikipedia briefly blocked in Tunisia. en.wp reaches 1,500,000 articles. Statistics for en.wp are made available online again. Two admins, thirty-four FAs (a new record) and nine delists. Arb candidates were interviewed for a Signpost election guide. Two arb cases opened, four in evidence, four in voting, and one closed. Autoblock whitelist created.
  • 2006-12-04: This is the hundredth Signpost issue. Wikipedia wins an award in Russia and gets blocked in Iran. Commons reaches a million uploads. WMF board decides to appoint three more members. Seigenthaler incident is revisited. Some newspapers write about political differences between Wikipedia articles in Chinese and English. Steward elections underway, and Wikipedia reaches #12 in Alexa's rankings. A new service to summarize Wikimedia mailing lists is started (the LSS). Seven admins, fifteen FAs and eight delists. The month of November had 65 FAs, a new record. Mention is made of the "new" sortable wikitable syntax... lol! Arb nominations are now closed, with 37 candidates in the running. Interesting HTML note: "Other than major things like a front-runner resigning or a vote turning around suddenly, please don't update these results; there are many different areas on-wiki where full, frequently updated results can be found". Also: "Among the most controversial candidates in the elections were former arbitrator and administrator Kelly Martin, who entered the race earlier this week, and Phil Sandifer, who held 14% and 18% of the vote, respectively". One arb case opened, three in evidence, three in voting, two motioned to close, and three closed. {{#rel2abs}} now exists.
  • 2006-12-11: The first WikiWorld comic is released. The first audited financial statements are released by the Wikimedia Foundation, covering everything back to its formation in 2003: "the Foundation raised nearly $1.3 million through contributions in 2006, an increase from the $300,000 raised in 2005 and the $70,000 raised in 2004". Three new members on the WMF board: Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), Oscar van Dillen (Oscar), and Jan-Bart de Vreede (Jan-Bart). CBS interviews Jimbo and Larry. Wikia to provide free hosting services. Google Earth to provide information from Wikipedia. WMF begins planning fundraiser. WMF passes a resolution to approve an agreement between Wikimedia chapters and the WMF, covering "the use of the Wikimedia name, utilization of the Foundation logo, and conduct and activity by each local organization". Four admins, ten FAs and one delist. One arb candidate (Radiant!) withdrew from the race, but re-entered with Jimbo's endorsement of candidates re-entering (and the possibility of expanding the committee if more candidates passed the threshold than there were empty seats). At this point, three candidates have >90% support, and 17 have >50% and are eligible to be selected. The most active candidate pages are Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Kelly Martin, UninvitedCompany, Geogre, and Blnguyen. One arb case opened, three in evidence, two in voting, and five closed. WikiChix, an "organization intended to help women feel more comfortable in Wikipedia and wiki communities", causes drama by banning men from their offsite wiki and mailing list (which was moved to Wikia's mailing list servers). Also, "an article on the internet trolling association Gay Nigger Association of America was deleted on 28 November, after the 18th attempt for its deletion", although discussion continues on the article's talk page. Section redirects now work, and Special:Recentchanges shows the number of characters added/deleted in a revision. And "sortable tables no longer use the Unicode arrow characters ↓ ↑ ↕ for sort direction buttons, but rather use icons taken from Semantic MediaWiki.
  • 2006-12-18: WMF fundraisier has begun. Steward elections conclude, and "You" is selected Time's Person of the Year (with heavy reference to Web 2.0 sites, including Wikipedia). Time profile written on editor and arb Simon Pulsifer (SimonP). Seven admins, eight FAs and six delists. Arb elections have concluded, and Jimbo is set to appoint new arbs. Mindspillage has resigned from the committee to fill one of the three new WMF trustee seats, leaving at least 6 seats open. Two arb cases opened, three in evidence, two in voting, and one closed. Some new features require database schema changes; edit counts now available directly from the database. Comment from 2006: <!-- details? I don't know how this works . . . --> Another WikiWorld.
  • 2006-12-26: A story looking into the connection between Wikipedia and academia. A story in Yahoo!'s business section reported that Nielsen BuzzMetrics releases a "Top 10 Cited Wikipedia Entries in 2006". San Francisco Bay Guardian reports on the formation of WikiChix. Stewards appointed (Lar, Mzlla, and Taxman); WMF fundraiser has already raised $341,000. Three admins, fourteen FAs and no delists. New arbs appointed by Jimbo (the top ones by percentage): "Flcelloguy, Kirill Lokshin, Paul August, UninvitedCompany, and Jpgordon received three-year terms, while FloNight and Blnguyen received terms of up to two years." Six arb cases opened, three in evidence, three in voting, and one closed. Autopatrolled edits are enabled, and a couple extensions that allow lists of significant contributors to be generated for articles, and for pages (and their history) to be duplicated. The recentchanges byte change counter also accounts for template expansion now. Another WikiWorld.

The Annotated Signpost, 2007

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The Annotated Signpost, 2008

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The Annotated Signpost, 2009

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Note

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2010-2022 at here.

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