Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-06-13
Main server cluster relocated, more machines coming online
The Wikimedia Foundation continued the expansion of its server configuration last week, adding several machines and preparing to accommodate even more. In order to upgrade the facility for its main server cluster, however, the project's websites had to be taken offline for half a day.
In a planned service outage (see archived story), the cluster of servers located in Tampa, Florida was moved to a new facility last week. The purpose of the move was for relocating to a larger rackspace, which will help in handling future growth. The Wikimedia projects were unavailable for approximately 11 hours total to accomplish the move.
Downtime message problems
The most visible glitch associated with the move was in the downtime message displayed during the server relocation. While a message explaining the reasons for the interruption was prepared and translated into a handful of languages, providing this message to visitors was only sporadically successful.
It was intended that the downtime message be hosted on the new servers in Amsterdam, but a miscommunication in switching over the DNS server initially prevented this. Even when the problem was solved, the servers in Paris were apparently still redirecting traffic to the disconnected Florida servers. This meant that users accessing Wikipedia via the Paris servers received a more generic message, suggesting that the problem was a server crash rather than a planned outage. In the aftermath, there was some discussion about developing translations of the regular downtime messages as well.
Returning to normal
After the downtime, the recently added Amsterdam server cluster, hosted by Kennisnet, was put into live service. This brings the total number of operating servers to 81 (in addition to the eleven servers in Amsterdam, three are in Paris and two more servers there are awaiting upgrades before being put to use). Also, two new database servers ordered in May were delivered to the Florida data center on Wednesday.
Some performance problems continued to be reported throughout the week, although it was not clear that they were a result of the server relocation. Certain actions, especially page deletions, reportedly would fail repeatedly and attempts would only generate error messages. With some tweaks, developer Brion Vibber was largely able to fix this problem. However, operations such as loading watchlists remained persistently slow.
Process for removing featured articles debated
Debate over featured article removal policy started out slow but in recent days has intensified, with some users suggesting that the old rules made it too easy for featured articles to be nominated, while others argue that a waiting period between stating concerns and nominating the article is instruction creep.
There were 10 new admins, 3 new featured articles, 1 new featured list, and 2 new featured pictures.
Featured article removal rules
A tighter procedure for delisting featured articles was suggested by Nichalp and initially received little attention. Several users agreed that the old rules were faulty, as they allowed any article to be nominated for removal, without regard for those involved in the article's original featured candidacy. According to the new guidelines, the nominator must post a critique of the article on the article's talk page, and then must wait seven days before nominating it on featured article removal candidates so that any problems can be addressed.
After this discussion, the new rules were added to the process, and several nominations for removal that did not comply with the instructions were themselves removed. However, as more people encountered the change in guidelines, other users expressed renewed concern over the waiting period, suggesting that it is instruction creep and makes the process "too much hassle", as Bishonen put it. A quick poll showed support for eliminating the new requirements, although the level of attention so far has not been significantly higher than the attention paid to implementing them in the first place.
New admins
10 requests for adminship were approved last week: JYolkowski (nom), Mulad (nom), Fawcett5 (nom), Linuxbeak (nom), Zzyzx11 (nom), Ingoolemo (nom), Pjacobi (nom), Radiant! (nom), Eugene van der Pijll (nom), and Zocky (nom).
Featured content
Just three articles were featured last week, but a queue of 25 articles is waiting for approval at Featured article candidates. Sydney Riot of 1879 was the subject of the debate over whether or not two letters ought to be included in the article, even though they are also on Wikisource. In the end, consensus was to keep them, and the article was promoted. In summary, the new featured articles in the last week were Sydney Riot of 1879, Sandy Koufax, and Xiangqi. Articles demoted on featured article removal candidates were Copyright and Computer security.
One more featured list candidate was promoted this week, List of cultural references in The Cantos, after receiving praise from a number of wikipedians. The list complements The Cantos, which is already a featured article.
2 featured picture candidates were promoted, and San Francisco Bay Area Skyline and San Francisco Bay Area Skyline 2 both survived the featured picture removal process.
Wikipedia inspires fight against disease, newspaper "wikitorials"
'Wikitorials' to appear at the LA Times
The LA Times this week announced that its online editorials will shortly be editable by readers via wiki software [1]. The so-called 'wikitorials' will be introduced as part of a larger shake-up of editorial policy at the paper, with the aim of generating greater reader involvement in the paper.
Wikitorials, inspired by Wikipedia, will initially involve selected editorials, and the newspaper's staff suspect the results may be unpredictable. Editorial page editor Andrés Martinez said "We don't know how this is going to turn out. It's all about finding new ways to allow readers to interact with us in the age of the Web". One former bureau chief of the paper described the idea as "absolutely crazy" [2].
The details of how wikitorials will work have yet to be described in detail, and commentators speculated that the paper would have trouble preventing edit wars without a predetermined point of view for an editorial to work towards expressing [3].
'Breathtaking' Wikipedia
An article in Business Week this week looked at the power of the mob on the Internet, as a study showed that over 15% of Americans have contributed material to the Internet [4]. Blogs, wikis and the open source movement are all challenging the traditional dominance of proprietary software and content, and the article described Wikipedia as "the most breathtaking example" of this phenomenon.
The article quoted figures of 5 million visitors a month to the project, and noted that the current total of about 1.5 million articles in 200 languages far exceeds Encyclopædia Britannica's total of 120,000. Business Week described the quality of Wikipedia's volunteer-produced content as "surprisingly high". Wikimedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying "Our work shows how quickly a traditional proprietary product can be overtaken by an open alternative", but a Britannica spokesman claimed that the sheer volume of Wikipedia articles may be too much information for most readers, and said nothing about quality.
Wikipedia to save the world
The threat of a pandemic has been much in the news recently, with the scare of the SARS virus in 2003 being followed by ongoing concerns that avian influenza, which has devastated chicken stocks in Southeast Asia, might mutate into a form easily transmitted between humans.
Having noted the wide readership of Wikipedia's article on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Dr Lucas Gonzalez from the Canary Islands decided to use the Wikipedia article on the 'bird flu' as a platform to educate the public and possibly aid in the prevention of a pandemic. Editing as User:Lugon, Dr Gonzalez has been working on the article since 1 June, and his efforts were reported earlier this week by blogger Stephen O'Grady [5]. O'Grady said it was "great to see" easy-to-use wikis allowing experts in disciplines other than technology to contribute to international collaborative projects.
Wiki pros and cons
Search engine news outlet searchviews.com this week reported on the best and worst of Wikipedia, and concluded that the best and worst feature are the very same thing — namely, the fact that it's a free-content encyclopaedia that anyone can edit [6]. A blog on the site provided a link to the unfortunate (from a PR point of view) lamest edit wars ever page, and offered its own favourites from the edit war archives. Making the grade included one edit war in which the participants were blocked for 30 seconds as a suitably lame punishment for a lame edit war, and the edit wars over which edit wars should even be on the edit wars page.
Citations
Global Politician magazine this week demonstrated that citing your sources enhances Wikipedia's credibility, as an article on the ethnic heritage of Palestinians quoted from Wikipedia's article, and listed in turn the academic journals which had been cited there [7]; the Kansas City Star used the article on goatees to demonstrate that they were a fashion faux pas these days [8]; Bella online examined the history of the barcode [9]; and Peruvian emergency service news website desastres.org wondered why the US is reluctant to use the Russian Ilyushin Il-76 'waterbomber' plane to fight forest fires.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed two inactive cases last week, although one may yet be reopened, and appeared set to issue a temporary injunction in a third. Meanwhile, a possible resignation raised the question of how to replace an arbitrator during the course of a term.
As reported last week (see archived story), two cases were closed because the dispute was no longer active. The matters involved Wareware, who had stopped editing, and the dispute around Instantnood's attempts to impose naming conventions dealing with China.
However, arbitrator Ambi had opposed closing the case involving Instantnood, and it was not clear whether this might lead to a reversal. According to stated practice, each vote opposing closure negates one support vote, and four net votes to close are required. Since only four arbitrators total voted to close the case, this would leave three net votes, thus the case may possibly be reopened.
Injunction leads to departure
The arbitrators were voting on a potential injunction against Jguk that would prohibit him from modifying dates that use common era notation, and the injunction appeared to have enough support to pass. The dispute is an extension of a continuing battle over whether to adopt a policy in favor of a particular dating system on Wikipedia (see archived story). Often involved in matters of convention and style, Jguk had also been a party to the Instantnood case.
Jguk maintained that he was simply maintaining the status quo and reverting edits that unilaterally changed the format from BC/AD to BCE/CE. He also objected to the fact that the proposed injunction applied only to him rather than other parties to the dispute. Rather than submit to the injunction, Jguk announced his departure from Wikipedia on Saturday.
Several new requests for arbitration were submitted, of which two so far had enough votes for a case to be opened. One involved a long-running dispute over the Iglesia ni Cristo and related articles, while the second was a case brought by arbitrator Neutrality against OldRight, based on a catalog of disputes over political articles. The remaining requests, including Everyking's attempt to lift his ban on editing articles related to Ashlee Simpson, all stood one vote short of acceptance.
Possibility of arbitrator resignation
Arbitrator Delirium, who has been on leave from participating in the arbitration process, has recently indicated that he "will likely resign once we figure out how that works". The move is not terribly surprising; prior to the Arbitration Committee election last December, he had indicated that he would be inclined to resign except that he lacked the confidence that enough suitable replacements would run as candidates.
Delirium's term expires at the end of this year, at which point his position would be up for election. Similar interim arbitrators were chosen in a special election last August; the possibility of having interim appointments made by Jimbo Wales, or the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, has also been mentioned.
Since the original group of arbitrators was appointed by Wales, all new arbitrators have been elected. However, some concerns have also been raised about putting candidates through two elections in close succession, and possible overlap with the upcoming Board of Trustees election may also be a consideration. As no procedure has been set in stone, any of these options remains theoretically possible.
Apple-Intel fallout both good and bad for Wikipedia
Publicity following last week's announcement of an alliance between Apple Computer and Intel had both positive and negative implications for Wikipedia. While Steve Jobs gave Wikipedia a glowing endorsement in his keynote address, media coverage in the aftermath resulted in an incident described as using Wikipedia for a "reputation hack".
Wikipedia a Jobs favorite
The positive publicity came during Jobs' keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last Monday. He brought up Wikipedia as one of several examples of "widgets" in the new Apple Dashboard feature. Jobs introduced Wikipedia by saying, "It has now become one of the most robust and certainly accurate encyclopedias in the world because you've got experts from all over the world contributing to it."
As a demonstration of the Wikipedia widget, Jobs looked up the Tiger article (since Tiger is also the code name for the latest version of the Apple Macintosh operating system). Stan Shebs, an Apple employee attending the conference, said, "I was very relieved to see that the tiger article wasn't in a vandalized state".
A key element of Jobs' speech, the announcement that Apple would be switching to Intel microprocessors, had already been widely rumored and continued to receive a great deal of media attention for several days. This in turn led to a Tuesday column by Steven Vaughan-Nichols on eWeek, opining that the strategy might undermine hopes that Linux could gain ground in the desktop OS market.
Promotion tactics using Wikipedia
On Wednesday, Slashdot posted a story that pointed to Vaughan-Nichols' piece and then proceeded to play up Symphony OS, a new Linux operating system project still in alpha development (although the eWeek column had actually advocated consolidating efforts around one of the major Linux desktop environments, not developing even more new ones). The submitter, "esavard", pointed to the Wikipedia article on Symphony OS as a place to start for information. This article had been started on 19 May by EliasAlucard.
One Slashdot poster called the story "An advertisment [sic], disguised as an Apple article, disguised as a Linux topic." Meanwhile, not surprisingly for a fledgling project, the attention quickly overloaded its website, a fact that was promptly noted with reference to the Slashdot effect on the Wikipedia article. Then on Thursday, blogger Clay Shirky joined in, echoing the earlier comment in a post entitled "Wikipedia, Authority, and Astroturf". He criticized the Slashdot editors for letting the story through, saying that they fell for "an interesting kind of spam, or maybe we could call it a reputation hack." According to Shirky, the incident taught a lesson that, "Since the threshold for exclusion from the Wikipedia is so low, there is almost no value in thinking 'Hey, it’s got a Wikipedia article — must be serious.'"
Reaction to Shirky
Shirky's comments were also picked up by reporter/bloggers from BusinessWeek and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer [10] [11]. However, Symphony OS project head Ryan Quinn said both the Slashdot and Wikipedia postings were unsolicited and admitted, "It did make it look like someone was trying to bring attention to the project by riding the coattails of the apple/intel announcement." In the meantime the Symphony OS article was nominated for deletion, but most of those commenting nevertheless favored keeping it.
Although Shirky speculated that the similar-looking esavard and EliasAlucard were "pretty closely related", EliasAlucard strenuously denied this. The denial seemed to be borne out by Quinn, who had received a separate email from esavard apologizing for the way the incident backfired. Shirky later apologized for making this insinuation. Quinn also reiterated that these efforts were not by anyone representing Symphony OS, for the simple reason that "we did not want the traffic."
In reality, the events do not exactly meet the common definitions for problems like astroturfing (formal public relations that simulates grassroots popularity) or spam (unsolicited bulk communications) alluded to by Shirky. The incident seems better described as a poorly executed grassroots project without enough forethought, apparently because it was not actually coordinated. In a way, a closer analogue might be last month's abortive effort to promote Creative Commons using the grassroots marketing company BzzAgent.
Wikimedia representatives to meet with European Space Agency
In an effort to facilitate the use of content under free licenses, representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation have arranged two meetings in the near future that will hopefully help improve matters. One meeting is directed toward obtaining more content compatible with Wikipedia's license, while the other is focused on improving the license itself.
Last Saturday, it was announced that a meeting has been arranged with the European Space Agency (ESA), to be held in two weeks, in an effort to open access to more content for Wikimedia projects. According to notafish, the French chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation will be meeting with the Division of Communication of the ESA on 27 June in Paris. This division is responsible for handling the rights to reuse ESA images and multimedia.
In the United States, where works produced by the federal government are in the public domain by law, a great deal of material generated by government agencies has been used to help build Wikipedia's content. For example, content from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the ESA's American counterpart, provides the bulk of illustrations for articles related to space exploration. A number of US government photographs are also among Wikipedia's featured pictures.
This meeting is the result of an exchange of communications between the ESA and Arnomane, who has been trying to negotiate the release of ESA images under a free license since last year. While the meeting is an important step toward gaining access to important resources, dramatic immediate results should not be expected. The goal of this initial contact is simply to "present the Wikimedia projects and lay out the basis of a possible future collaboration."
Meanwhile, Wikimedia Trustee Angela Beesley reports that Jimmy Wales will be meeting with Eben Moglen, who helped draft the GNU licenses as counsel for the Free Software Foundation, on 15 June. The purpose of the meeting to discuss possible changes to the GNU Free Documentation License, and provides an opportunity for the Foundation, as one of the license's biggest users, to have input on its future development. Wales has previously indicated, however, that it will be difficult to satisfy hopes for full compatibility with Creative Commons licenses; making compliance with the current license less burdensome for Wikipedia and downstream users is a more realistic goal at this point.
Initial draft of revised wiki syntax floated
A proposal was formulated last week to revise the markup used by the MediaWiki software, which could possibly also be promoted as a global standard for wiki projects. Considerable discussion followed and the project received a mostly positive reception.
Last Friday, developer Lee Daniel Crocker announced on the wikitech mailing list that he had completed a draft version of a new wiki syntax and solicited feedback about the project. The effort was spurred by a March suggestion from Jimmy Wales to develop a general syntax standard, potentially not just for Wikimedia Foundation projects but wikis in general (see archived story).
Some questions were raised and alternatives suggested to some aspects of the new syntax, but the feedback was generally positive and showed enough support to warrant continued work on the project. Wikimedia Chief Research Officer Erik Möller said, "this is an excellent proposal with a lot of potential."
Details of the proposal
One of Crocker's emphases was to eliminate instances of markup based on single characters, using two or more characters to prevent any possibility that legitimately necessary uses might trigger wiki markup. Thus the first available level of section headings would be based on ==two== equal signs rather than =one=, and external as well as internal links would be based on [[double brackets]] rather than [single brackets].
Another proposed new feature is the addition of line breaks without requiring either an empty line or the use of HTML. Some kind of syntax for this purpose has long been desired, particularly from users wishing to render poetry or song lyrics. Crocker's draft suggests using two backslashes ( \\ ) at the end of the line in order to force a line break.
Perhaps the most significant changes involve styling (such as text formatting) and syntax that results in content from another file, such as an image or template, being incorporated into the page. The draft syntax uses {{curly brackets}} for styling instead of templates, and also employs distinct shortcuts for each type of formatting (such as asterisks for **bold text** and slashes for //italics//), rather than various combinations of straight apostrophes. Meanwhile, inclusion of images and templates would be handled with <<angle brackets>>, which would in turn allow regular brackets to link to images instead of requiring a single colon as a prefix. These elements were the most debated aspects of the proposal.
Changes are not likely in the immediate future, and work remains to be done in terms of discussing the proposal with developers of wiki software other than MediaWiki. Crocker indicated that he plans to continue to develop this into a formal proposal, after which it would still be necessary to write the actual code for the new syntax, along with code to convert the old syntax to the new.