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2009-09-07

Commons hits 5 million files, vandalism study, and more

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By Sage Ross

Wikimedia Commons reaches 5 million files

The five millionth file on Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia Commons reached five million files on 2 September with the upload of File:Kjøbenhavnsposten 28 nov 1838 side 1.jpg. The file, uploaded by Danish Wikipedian Saddhiyama, is a scan of the front page of the first issue of the newspaper Kjøbenhavnsposten, from 28 November 1838. In response to the milestone, articles on the newspaper were created in the English and French Wikipedias; Saddhiyama had created an article in Danish the day before. The new image annotation function has also been used extensively on the image to provide translations of much of the Danish text in the image, which features an article about democracy.

The UK Wikimedia chapter has issued a press release about the Commons milestone.

Study estimates 0.4% of articles, 1.3% of views have vandalism

Robert Rohde (User:Dragons flight) has created a new analysis of vandalism on English Wikipedia by analyzing reversions in article histories from a mid-June database dump. Rohde's initial results, tabulated at Wikipedia:Vandalism statistics and described in more detail in a mailing list post, indicate that over the first half of 2009 about 0.2% of all mainspace page (including redirects) were in a vandalized state at any given time, or about 0.4% of all articles (assuming that redirects are rarely vandalized).

In a followup analysis Rohde used the article traffic statistics tool to weight vandalism according to page traffic, estimating that 1.3% of page views in recent months contained vandalized content.

Library of Congress updates record based on Wikimedian restoration work

The Library of Congress record for an 1891 photograph of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre has been updated based on a discovery User:Durova made while restoring the image: the pile of blankets in the foreground covers four dead bodies (see previous Signpost coverage). Durova also reports that the image is part of an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, with the details she uncovered included in the official program (see item 76).

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2009-09-07

Gender statistics, editors sued, and more

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By Sage Ross

Wikipedia's changing culture, and gender statistics

Following a post-Wikimania New York Times article by Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture", a number of news outlets have picked up the wide gender gap among Wikipedia editors. The gender statistics—across languages, 30% of readers and 13% of editors are female—were reported earlier this year in the preliminary results (see summary from the Wikimedia blog) of the UNU-MERIT survey; the survey results were presented (see slides) and widely discussed at Wikimania.

Following Cohen's article Howard Weaver blogged about Wikipedia and professionalism, arguing that new features to screen out "assholes" and the hiring of consultants are signs that Wikipedia is becoming more like traditional information sources. Eugene Eric Kim (User:Eekim), manager of the Strategic Planning program and one of the consultants to which Weaver refers, posted a response to Cohen's article to clarify his role and his hopes for the strategic planning process.

Coverage of the gender statistics by the Wall Street Journal Digits blog prompted more coverage and commentary from a number of other news outlets. Drawing on an essay about the gender gap in science by Philip Greenspun, Gawker suggested that rather than sexism at work, the Wikipedia gender gap is "an example of the easily conned male ego."

Although it is the best data available, the UNU-MERIT survey is far from perfect. The respondents were self-selected, and there were unexplained anomalies in response rate, including a dramatic over-representation of Russian Wikipedia users (whose responses were initially excluded from the gender statistics and other survey results and analysis).

American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine sues editors

Courthouse News Service reports that the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation and ten anonymous editors over edits made to the organization's Wikipedia article. The Wikimedia Foundation is widely thought to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act against liability for defamatory edits made by its users (see Signpost coverage of a previous lawsuit). However, Seth Finkelstein points out that the court summons names Wikimedia "solely as a nominal Defendent", which may indicate that Wikimedia is only named so that it can be made to provide identifying information about the individual editors who allegedly defamed the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

Study: "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences"

In the draft of his forthcoming article "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences", to be published in the Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, law professor Eric Goldman explores the difficulties Wikipedia is facing, or may face in the future, in sustaining a sufficient level of volunteer maintenance effort.

Goldman's abstract states:

This Essay explains why Wikipedia will not be able to maintain a credible website while simultaneously letting anyone freely edit it. To date, Wikipedia editors have successfully defended against malicious attacks from spammers and vandals, but as editors turn over, Wikipedia will need to recruit replacements. However, Wikipedia will have difficulty with this recruiting task due to its limited incentives for participation. Faced with a potential labor squeeze, Wikipedia will choose to restrict users’ ability to contribute to the site as a way of preserving site credibility. Wikipedia’s specific configuration choices make it an interesting test case to evaluate the tension between free editability and site credibility, and this Essay touches on how this tension affects user-generated content (UGC) generally.

In the article, Goldman argues that Wikipedia's "recognition systems may prompt existing editors to work harder, but they are weakly calibrated to recruit new editors." He offers a number of possible ways Wikipedia could draw in more contributors.

As Ars Technica notes, Goldman made headlines in late 2005 when he predicted that Wikipedia would fail within 5 years, and followed up with a similar prediction in 2006. As Wikipedia scholar Joseph Reagle (User:Reagle) notes on his blog, Goldman's definition of "failure" for Wikipedia does not match up with the stated goals and core values of the project, which have always placed quality and free access to knowledge above pure openness to editing.

Goldman explains in a blog post about his new work that his current conclusion is that "substantial restrictions to user editability are Wikipedia's only viable long-term solution to preserve site credibility."

Briefly

2009-09-07

Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations

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By Hiding

The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.

Do you have the right to edit policy?

Full disclosure: Your writer has participated in some of these discussions

Currently, across Wikipedia there are a number of discussions regarding the ability of editors to make bold edits to policy. At Wikipedia talk:Consensus User:M and User:Blueboar debated whether mistakes in policy should be corrected immediately or whether a discussion over the nature of the mistake was more appropriate first. User:Ohms law disagreed with what they depicted as an "extra hoop for people to go through in order to edit any project pages that happen to be policies", to which User:Xandar countered "that a change to POLICY and some major guidelines can often cause widespread troubles that the few people making the change don't consider or foresee." While Blueboar argued that '[t]he point of "discuss first" is that you can often avoid rigidity in the first place' M stated the opposite, that '"discuss first" does not avoid rigidity, it condones and offers support for it'. Over at Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines a similar debate is playing out, as a rewrite of the page has foundered over whether to remove guidance that editors can edit policy directly.

Historically, Wikipedia's rules to follow, as they were then known, were proposed at Rules to consider, with editors endorsing or rejecting them by adding their signature. Popular rules would be written up on separate pages, with anyone free to amend and suggest simply by editing the text. These rules were drafted in order to ensure the project could meet its stated goal of creating "a free encyclopedia--indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth. We also want Wikipedia to become a reliable resource." Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines noted that our policies are ever evolving and changing from its start on 1 November 2001 by User:Larry Sanger until an edit on 6 May 2006 by User:Wereareyou, one of only two edits this account has made, the other being to their talk page.

Why do we have naming conventions?

There is much debate over the purpose of our policy on Naming Conventions, largely initiated by attempts to revise the wording. User:M suggested that the main principle was that "Wikipedia articles are given the name that the greatest number of English-speaking readers would expect in a reliable source. Naming is for the benefit of readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists." User:Hesperian felt "[t]he name of an article should be optimised to be as acceptable as possible to as much of its audience as possible." User:GTBacchus offered a view on the fundamental objective, based on experience, that:

Where a particular WikiProject reaches a consensus on some particular naming convention, is is de facto the case that their naming convention supersedes the general principle of WP:COMMONNAME.

Debate now continues as to whether there is a logical loop in the relationship between the Naming Convention policy and separate Naming Convention guidelines. This loop is caused by text at Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines.

Defense is not the best form of defense

At Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion, editor and administrator User:GTBacchus opened a discussion about the best way to "save" an article listed for deletion, noting that "[s]ome editors claim that they would be better able to improve articles if they didn't have to defend them against deletion." User:Ikip suggested adding "a statement at the top of all AFDs: All articles which are deleted can be userfied by request by admin." User:Jclemens suggested "some sort of an 'AFD reset' button if someone has changed a certain percentage of an article".

The discussion also took in administrator behaviour, with User:A Nobody offering anecdotal evidence that "at least one admin ... does not look at the articles under discussion when he closes AfDs, but only the discussion." GTBacchus responded strongly, stating

Admins who close AfDs by nose-count need to be stopped. I will help you stop them, if you bring it to my attention. It's unacceptable; someone doing that should not have the mop.

Polling

A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.

Talk:Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China/FG poll is a poll on whether Reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China should be merged into Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China. The poll runs from 13:50, 3 September 2009 (UTC) and concludes 13:50, 14 September 2009 (UTC).

Deletion round-up

Your writer has trawled the deletion debates opened and closed in the last week and presents these debates for your edification. Either they generated larger than average response, centred on policy in an illuminating way, or otherwise just jumped out as of interest. Feel free to suggest interesting deletion debates for future editions here.

It's just not cricket!

A number of articles, amongst them Featured Articles have been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Sam Loxton with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948. In nominating, User:Hammersoft seemed most concerned with "the precedent being set here", noting that "the level of detail here is excruciating and absolutely astonishing" and would therefore seem to contradict Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not. In response, User:NuclearWarfare pointed out that

we aren't creating an article for every season for every player in every sport. These are 15 articles on the most important season for the most important players for one sport. Entire books have been published on this one team.

Debating the fact that some of the articles nominated are amongst Wikipedia's Featured Content, User:Nick-D noted that "their creator, User:YellowMonkey is trying to develop a featured topic on the 1948 'Invincibles' cricket team". WikiProject Cricket is also listing The Invincibles as its Featured Topic drive at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket, having done so since the 19 May 2008.[1] However, User:Calathan, who has argued for a merger of the articles, felt that "[b]eing a featured article doesn't necessarily mean that something is an appropriate article to keep in the encylopedia."

User:Juliancolton, expressing the view that the articles should be kept as they are, said "[t]hese are as I understand it the most notable players of the most notable team of the most notable year in cricket" with User:Bridgeplayer pointing out in an impassioned argument to keep that "[a]t the same time as one group of editors is effusing over these articles and awarding them coveted featured article status, another group of editors is 'policy wonking' i.e. trying to get the pages deleted on fine nuances of guidelines. Bizarre! What we have here is a unique set of pages; informative, accurate, well sourced, objective, and tolerably well written. If all the time spent on this discussion was spent on writing new material how much better would the project be?" Attempting to remain neutral, User:Resolute commented

On the one hand, this is a horrendous precedent, but on the other, enough sources exist that four of the articles are featured.

Articles

Categories

Files, templates, redirects and stubs

Deletion review and miscellaneous

Briefly

At Wikipedia:Village pump (all)#Making our editing interface more clear and helpful, a proposed change to the editing interface was put forward by User:Anxietycello. Anxietycello described their proposal as "simpler, clearer and prettier than the current situation". User:Noisalt like the proposal, adding that Anxietycello was "absolutely right about the hodgepodge of the current interface. It needs developing but it's a good start." Further revisions based on suggestions at the village pump were made to the draft before it was posted to the Wikipedia Usability initiative.

There is a debate at T(t)he Manual of Style over when to capitalise the definite article. User:Boson proposes we make it clear that it "is conventionally not capitalized, even when it is (or could be regarded as) part of a proper name: the United Kingdom, the Hebrides, the President of the United States." While there is consensus on some sort of standard, there is no consensus as to appropriate wording as yet, and there is some discussion over possible exceptions such as band names.

At Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion User:MZMcBride questioned how the right to vanish affected requests for user talk pages to be deleted. MZMcBride felt there "some sort of consistency. Currently it seems to depend entirely on who the admin going through the category is." User:Rd232 regarded the general consensus to be that "user talk pages shouldn't be speedied; where deletion is required, they should be referred to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion" and edited Wikipedia:Right to vanish accordingly.

After discussion, Wikipedia:Edit war was moved to Wikipedia:Edit warring. The page was initially created on 26 April 2003 as a redirect to what is now Wikipedia:Requests for comment, before User:Ed Poor wrote a brief description on 4 October 2003. On 29 October 2005 User:Radiant! proposed a merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule, a merge User:Kim Bruning rejected after finding no discussion. In the same edit Kim Bruning marked the page a policy, 6 November 2005. A merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule was finally achieved on 21 June 2009 after discussion.

At Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy a change to the wording of the Indefinite block section has been suggested by User:Atomic blunder. Consensus among administrators who rely on the section is that the change does not detail current practises.

Requests for comment

Twenty-four Requests for comment have been made in the week of 31 August – 6 September:



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2009-09-07

WikiProject Anime and manga

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By Kirill Lokshin

The Anime and manga WikiProject, founded in November 2004 by the now inactive Pyrop, covers the intertwined topics of anime, manga, visual novels, and the various individuals involved in creating them. Over the past five years, the project has grown to include almost 10,000 articles—including three featured articles, 60 featured lists, and 58 good articles—and nearly 800 members; it has also adopted the increasingly common "task force" model for managing smaller topics, and currently includes 11 work groups.

Today, we've asked four members of the project (Dinoguy1000, Jinnai, KrebMarkt, and TheFarix) to answer a few questions about their experiences there:

1. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?

Farix: It is hard to really put a finger on anything specific. The project has been quite dynamic since its inception in late 2004. During that time, anime and manga related articles were a jumble of plot summaries and loosely associated facts. Most of us who joined during those first couple of years had little idea what a proper encyclopedia article should look like and naively thought that better coverage meant documenting every single anime and manga that was ever published, aired, or released. Since then, the project has matured and now vigorously enforces the notability guidelines. Currently, several editors from project are working on the Gundam series of articles in which many individual character and mecha articles are being merged into lists with details trimmed to give just the essential details. In the past, Naruto, Bleach, and Dragon Ball have also received similar attention from project editors. This often does not sit well with many fans of the series who believe that more plot detail equates to better encyclopedic coverage. But so far, the project has been successful in holding the line.
Perhaps the project's most memorable contribution is Wikipe-tan. When I first started editing in 2006, the project was using a fan-drawn image of Midori from the manga series Midori Days as its mascot. However, due to the increasing restrictions on copyrigted material in non-article space, the image was no longer viable and the project had to find a new mascot. Several replacement images were suggested before Kasuga presented Wikipe-tan as a solution to our mascot problems. After the project decided to adopt her, the whole thing just snowballed from there. I am still not quite sure how she became so widely adopted by Wikipedia as a whole.
Dinoguy1000: I would have to agree with Farix here - perhaps our largest contribution to Wikipedia as a whole is Wikipe-tan, which as Farix said has been adopted by the entire community as a mascot, and the original image has spawned dozens of derivatives, both by Kasuga himself and by other users, as well as mascots for Commons (Commons-tan), WikiQuote (Wikiquote-tan), and other projects (Uncyclo-tan, anyone?). Other than that, the project is focused on cleaning up non-notable character and other articles, mostly by merging, as Farix and Jinnai point out, and we tend to be quite successful in this regard wherever we focus our attention.
KrebMarkt: We have a GA article on a series that has not been published in English, which is probably a first for fiction articles. In some way, it's a contribution to the fight against systemic bias, proving again that good articles can be written on subjects with limited English coverage.

2. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?

Farix: Perhaps the most unsuccessful initiative was the Anime and Manga Collaboration of the Week (AMCotW). Part of the problem was the the selection of article was largely a popularity contest. Editors voted on which articles they wanted to see improve instead of the articles they were willing to work on. It also suffered from the fact that no one had a clue as to what content was necessary to make the article encyclopedic. But it finally failed when no one was willing to maintain the nominations, much less work on the articles selected. In hindsight, the project should have waited until it had several Good Article promotions under its belt before starting a CotW. While the idea of resurrecting the AMCotW has been bandied about, lack of interest and lack of participation continues to be a problem.

3. Anime and manga topics in Wikipedia have sometimes been criticized as being too concerned with trivia and plot details, and there have occasionally been efforts to have significant numbers of these articles deleted. Do you believe such criticism is justified, and how has it affected the project? Have you developed any special methods for dealing with such issues?

Jinnai: I belive much of that critism is rightly justified as there have been a lot of articles with just plot info on people's favorite character and still are. However, I believe the GNG does not handle elements within a work (not the work itself) well for modern items as allowing too few vs. older classical/antiquity works which tend to have too many. This isn't a problem with only our project, but it does affect it and has seen some otherwise notable characters in world bestselling series merged even when work on providing real-world impact was done.
Farix: The criticism is sometimes justified. However, there has been a lot of progress over the years and there is not as much trivia or excessive amounts of plot details in the high-profile articles as there used to be. However, with almost 10,000 article tagged as being within our scope, it can be a difficult problem to deal with. We still have a huge backlog of articles whose notability we have not checked, which are still just a infobox, a lead sentence, and a plot summary. Most of this is the result of naive fans who think, like most editors in the project once thought, that better encyclopedic coverage means documenting every single plot detail.
KrebMarkt: The criticism is partly deserved because for fiction articles the most intuitive and easiest edit one can make is to add plot and trivia, leading if not kept in check to situations such as presented in the question. Editors have good reasons to be wary of fiction-related articles, and particularly anime & manga articles because of the "scary" potential of spin-out articles that could be created regardless policies, guidelines, and good sense. Fortunately our project is on the one hand reducing, at its own pace, the daunting number number that need to be trimmed of excessive plot & trivia, along the way merging articles that can't stand on their own and sending to Afd articles that fail to assert a modicum of notability. On the other hand, our project is trying to encourage creation of articles & spin-out articles for which the relevance & notability won't be contested. We don't need more items in our to do list.

4. Your project has partially adopted the task force model for subsidiary groups. Do you find this model to be effective? How might it be improved?

Jinnai: Task-forces are better for large groups of articles with a clear set of devoted fans. Rather than a seperate wikiproject I believe most of them are very focused on a small number of articles at a time, possibly with Gundam one being among the larger ones. For such focused groups task forces are often better. The only real thing I can think of is that in the future some of the task forces could adopt their own importance level system, especially when all of their own articles are rated low/mid by our project it doesn't help them determine what's most important to focus on.
Farix: WikiProject Anime and manga's work groups have not been that successful. Part of the problem has been the lack of participation and interest. But also the scopes of the work groups are simply too narrow. A work group that focuses on a single series is going to attract fans of that series. While this may not seem to be a problem, these fans historically have the same naive preconceptions about what encyclopedic coverage means that I have mentioned before. This naturally creates friction between the fan editors and the more experienced editors, and editors begin leaving out of frustration. But in most cases, when there is a problem with a set of articles, editors are much more likely to bring the issue to the entire project's attention instead of the work groups. On the other hand, task-oriented task forces tend to be more more successful, an example of one was the article assessment drive. But these task forces are generally short-lived.

5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Are they useful collaborators, or do you feel that they have little to offer you? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?

Jinnai: The only one I have had is with the video game wikiproject. The few others I've tried, like WP:Albums on occasion to help with article assements have been met with no response generally unless I ask them a generic question that doesn't apply to anime. For WP:Video games, mostly this has been more positive, but visual novel it still seems better to ask here than if I want a large body of response their main page (they do have a task force WP:WikiProject Video games/Visual novels which I am a member of, but the numbers are very low (although our output is high) so asking there helps, but does not get me the large response if I'm seeking a broader consensus as what to do).
Dinoguy1000: WP:ANIME is closely related to a number of other projects (Television, Comics, Films, Video games, and Novels would probably be the main ones, with Japan and Media franchises being additional parent projects), but in my experience, we really don't tend to reach out to these other projects much or have very close relationships with them. I'm not entirely sure why this is, perhaps we just happen to be self-sufficient and observant enough that we can easily reach consensus and keep tabs on the current practices of other projects. Other than that, individual editors more than the project as a whole tend to work with other projects - as Jinnai says, he tends to work closely with WP:VG; Collectonian, one of our main contributors, is also one of WP:FILMS' coordinators; and Nihonjoe is the founder and still an active member of WP:JAPAN - as a result, we tend to be kept up-to-speed on issues these projects are currently facing, and vice versa. A few of the related projects tend to do their own thing, largely ignoring the articles in our shared scope - WP:COMICS seems to focus almost exclusively on American and some European comics, and I suspect (never having observed very closely myself) that WP:NOVELS tends to focus on European and American novels.

6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles it shepherds, developing over the next year? The next five years?

Farix: I would like to see our two main articles, anime and manga, finally reach Good Article status within the next year and eventually become Featured Articles. I am also hoping to see more of our articles promoted to Featured Articles. Unfortunately, experience with the Featured review system has proven that it is a moving target whose standards are constantly shifting and entirely arbitrary. Some of the articles promoted to Featured in the past would not be promoted under current standards. This isn't a particularly desirable environment to develop articles in.
One task the project will need to do is a comprehensive review of all of the anime and manga articles for their notability. This will be a difficult task as most sources are only available in Japanese. Most of us in the project are still unfamiliar with which reliable Japanese sources can be checked for information relating to development and reception. And as far as the biographies that are within our scope go, we still have a lot of room for improvement.
Dinoguy1000: The nature of anime and manga means that generally, people are far more interested in editing articles about certain series or characters than about core topics. As a result, most of the articles on our core topics are largely ignored, and we still have several gaps in coverage in this regard (we didn't even have a central navigational template of any type for these topics until just a few months ago!). Therefore, I'd like to see more focus on these articles, and share Farix's hope that we can get the two main articles up to Good, or even Featured, status. On the other hand, when aiming for Good and Featured content, editors in our project tend to focus on lists (especially chapter and episode lists), which tend to be much easier than articles to get passed, and when articles are focused on, there only tends to be enough drive to get them to GA status, after which they are set aside to work on another article. This is generally fine - we have all sorts of articles that could be taken from Stub or Start-class to C or even B class with a bit of attention - but it would still be nice to see the occasional editor attempting to get an article to pass an FAC.
Jinnai: Another thing I'd like to see is some character lists and actual articles as featured in addition to anime and manga. Right now we have only two featured character lists and no character articles featured. Part of this is due to the continually changing requirements for featured articles. We don't have many good character lists (just List of Tokyo Mew Mew characters and List of Naruto characters) mostly due to the inability to have character lists be brought to either FLC or GAN since they both think the other should handle them. For character articles themselves it seems more to do with the changing targets Farix mentioned above.
Beyond that, as well as those listed by Farix, some of the major historical figures like Hayao Miyazaki being brought to GA-class or even FA-class would be nice as well.
Finally, what I'd really like to see is some copyediting resources. Anime and manga lacks any quality copyeditors. Beyond the basics of copyediting (spellchecking and fixing obvious grammatical problems), we don't have good skills in that department which I believe keeps the number of featured and GA content down. I know this has been an Achilles heel for us, however given that most of our group are fans, usually younger, we don't have the resources to correct this easily so perhaps trying to forge relations with other groups that do (such as WP:VG does with WP:MILHIST) might be our best way forward.
KrebMarkt: Like Farix and Dinoguy1000, I hope to get Anime and Manga to GA or, better, FA as we will have difficulties similar to those encountered to improve the Vital articles. I also wish that Scanlation and Fansub could be improved and balanced NPOV-wise to get them to B class. A last point is we had yet to see an anime soundtracks article reaching GA/FA or FL. From a non-initiated view, CDs related to a series franchise aren't a big issue but many of those CDs ended into the Japanese chart Oricon, sometimes in the top 10 (man, must start thinking hard on how to handle them accurately and properly).

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2009-09-07

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By Kirill Lokshin

The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving four cases open.

Requests for arbitration

Four new requests for arbitration were filed this week:

  • A request concerning the "no legal threats" policy, and its applicability to certain actions by Milomedes, was filed by Lambiam. The Committee has declined the request, deferring the question of Milomedes' ban appeal to the Ban Appeals Subcommittee.
  • A request concerning the drafting of biographies of living people in userspace was filed by Stevertigo. The Committee is declining the request as premature.
  • A request concerning the conduct of Pigsonthewing was filed by Erik9; the Committee has not yet determined whether to accept the request.
  • A request concerning allegations of disruptive editing on the "speed of light" article, filed by Jehochman, appears to be accepted for consideration.

A fifth request, concerning the naming of the "Catholic Church" article, was filed and subsequently withdrawn by Rockstone35.

Open cases

The Noloop case entered its third week of deliberations. The case involves mutual allegations of disruptive conduct by several parties, and is expected to address the conduct of all the editors involved. Evidence has been presented by several editors, and one of the parties, Noloop, has posted a statement that he does not intend to participate in the proceeding, but no drafting of proposals has taken place. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, is expected by 13 September.

The Lapsed Pacifist 2 case also entered its third week of deliberations. The filing editor, Steve Crossin, alleges that Lapsed Pacifist has engaged in advocacy, original research, and edit warring, as well as various other improprieties, over a wide range of articles. Lapsed Pacifist has so far refused to enter a statement or respond to the allegations, and a temporary injunction prohibits him from editing articles related to the Corrib gas project for the duration of the case. No arbitrators have commented on the evidence or workshop proposals at this time; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, was expected by 5 September, but has been delayed.

The 194x144x90x118 case entered its fourth week of deliberations and its second week of formal voting. The filing editor, Erik9, alleges that 194x144x90x118 has engaged in a variety of disruptive conduct, despite an RFC on the matter; 194x144x90x118 has refused to respond to the allegations, calling the proceedings a "sham".

The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Wizardman, condemns 194x144x90x118 for "soapboxing on talk pages, personal attacks, edit warring, and a lack of a desire to abide by policy" and ban him for one year. A series of additional findings have been proposed by arbitrator Carcharoth, who has also drafted a general reminder of policy for editors of the "DreamHost" article. With a majority of six arbitrators on the case, all substantive proposals in the decision appear to pass.

Finally, the Abd-William M. Connolley case entered its eight week of deliberations and its third week of formal voting. The case was filed by Abd, who alleged that William M. Connolley had improperly banned him from the cold fusion article; William M. Connolley denied these allegations, and stated that Abd's conduct had been inappropriate.

The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Stephen Bain, would place the cold fusion article under discretionary sanctions, remove William M. Connolley's administrator status, place Abd under mentorship, and issue several admonishments and reminders. Alternative proposals have been presented by arbitrator FloNight, who would only remove William M. Connolley's administrator status for three months, but also impose several restrictions on his use of administrative tools following their restoration; by arbitrator Coren, who would place William M. Connolley under administrative probation; by arbitrator Casliber, who would replace Abd's mentorship with a series of editing restrictions and ban him for a period of four weeks; and by arbitrator Risker, who has proposed banning Abd for three months. Voting on most remedy proposals remains deeply split.

Clarifications, amendments, and motions

A motion to terminate the six-month ban levied against Locke Cole as part of the Date delinking decision appears to have passed, but has not yet been formally enacted. The motion was proposed by arbitrator Risker, and provides for a reinstatement of the ban should Locke Cole be blocked for edit-warring.

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2009-09-07

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.5 (d64f667), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Bots approved

One new bot task (CheMoBot) was approved this week. CheModBot will monitor verifiable numerical data in infoboxes, in particular CAS registry numbers. There are also currently a large number of open requests, which anyone can comment on.

Bug fixes

  • Hidden categories are no longer displayed when viewing a printable version of a wiki page. (r55727, bug 20466)

New features

  • Special:Contributions has been changed so that it displays a note and excerpt from the block log if the user is currently blocked, and show a change block / unblock link. (r55903, r55909)
  • $wgShowDBErrorBacktrace has been added as a debugging option, to show database connection and query errors. (r55797)
  • A new Ajax spinner graphic (throbber) has been added to MediaWiki. (r55826)

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