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Volume 3, Issue 5 29 January 2007 About the Signpost
(← Prev) 2007 archives (Next →)
Foundation names advisory board, new hires Court decisions citing Wikipedia proliferate
Microsoft approach to improving articles opens can of worms WikiWorld comic: "Hyperthymesia"
News and notes: Investigation board deprecated, milestones Features and admins
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News The Report on Lengthy Litigation
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SPV

Foundation names advisory board, new hires

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By Michael Snow

Following a recent board meeting and the conclusion of its fundraising drive, the Wikimedia Foundation has made several significant announcements expanding the pool of people involved in the organization. Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Foundation's governing Board of Trustees, announced the creation of an advisory board, consisting primarily of leaders and experts from the free culture movement. Wikimedia has also been adding new personnel to handle the growing demands on the organization, as the Board works to fill out the structure of the Foundation.

Devouard indicated that the new advisory group was chosen to include people who have already been in contact with Wikimedia or whose experience would be beneficial to the organization. Input from the community was solicited and considered, and the list of names (currently 18) is not closed—additional suggestions should be directed to Devouard. Among the members of the advisory board is Angela Beesley, former member of the Board of Trustees, who has agreed to serve as the chair for the advisory panel. The group also includes wiki inventor Ward Cunningham and Nomic creator Peter Suber.

The other members of the advisory board include Heather Ford, Melissa Hagemann, Danny Hillis, Mitch Kapor, Joris Komen, Rebecca MacKinnon, Wayne Mackintosh, Benjamin Mako Hill, Erin McKean, Trevor Nielson, Achal Prabhala, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Raoul Weiler, and Ethan Zuckerman. Although most are primarily involved in other projects of their own, several have some experience editing Wikipedia. For an example, perhaps timely in view of the recent controversy over Microsoft's efforts, Shirky was once involved in a public debate over boosterism on the article for a minor Linux distribution (see archived story).

The Wikimedia Foundation has recently hired two new employees to its staff, Carolyn Doran as Chief Operations Officer and Sandra Ordonez as Communications Manager. Doran has already been working for Wikimedia for several months on a temporary basis on accounting matters, and is now joining the Foundation full-time. Her position will include responsibility for administration, personnel, and day-to-day financial matters. Ordonez has a background in public relations and will focus on dealing with the press and other communications issues. She started more recently but has already been quite busy in light of the Microsoft furor and reactions to the nofollow implementation.

With respect to other positions, the search continues for a permanent Executive Director. At its recent meeting in Rotterdam from 12 January to 14 January, the Board of Trustees approved the use of a search firm to help identify candidates. Brad Patrick, who had been covering the position on an interim basis, will now focus on his role as General Counsel.

Other resolutions passed during the Rotterdam meeting included the election of Jan-Bart de Vreede as Vice Chair, and the passage of a gift policy.


SPV

Court decisions citing Wikipedia proliferate

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By Michael Snow

In what might be called a "soft endorsement", courts have increasingly been citing Wikipedia articles in their rulings, but usually with caution and primarily for non-essential "soft facts". The subject was the focus of a New York Times story on 29 January headlined "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively".

Reporter Noam Cohen framed the article partly as a friendly debate between two of America's leading legal intellects, Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein expressed doubt that it was appropriate to cite Wikipedia in judicial decisions, something Posner did earlier this month writing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Radomski. Illustrating the potential pitfalls, Sunstein (working as an unregistered editor) had previously corrected a factual misstatement in Posner's Wikipedia biography. Curiously, the IP address that made this change also edited Sunstein's own biography—updating the title of his then-still-unpublished book.

Posner's use of Wikipedia was a passing reference of no importance to the substance of the case, and Sunstein conceded that this kind of citation was "too innocuous for a basis of criticism." Law professor Stephen Gillers surmised that most judges citing Wikipedia are using it as background material, not for issues central to justifying their actual rulings. The function of the citations is to provide context and make judicial opinions more readable. Given that a number of people have poked fun at Wikipedia itself for cultivating a dry, bland style of writing, the reader may wonder just how bad legal prose really is if judges are resorting to Wikipedia references to add color.

Over 100 decisions have been issued using Wikipedia as a source in some fashion. A compilation of these uses can be found at Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a court source, but the list there is hardly complete. The earliest known court decisions citing Wikipedia date to 2004, after some lawyers began using it in their court filings the previous year.

To date, the most extensive use of Wikipedia has been in the case of Apple v. Does, where the California Court of Appeal's opinion included references to 11 different Wikipedia articles. The bulk of Wikipedia citations have come from courts in the United States. A handful of citations have been noted in the courts of England and Wales, along with isolated use in such forums as the European Court of Human Rights and a German patent tribunal.


SPV

Microsoft approach to improving articles opens can of worms

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By Michael Snow

A longstanding battle over the standards to be used in office software suites for document formats intersected last week with the debate over conflicts of interest among Wikipedia editors, producing quite a furor. The incident involved someone being hired by Microsoft to change the information in Wikipedia articles about those standards, primarily Ecma Office Open XML.

Offer and disclosure

Office Open XML (or OOXML), a standard adopted by Ecma International last December, is one of two specifications trying to establish itself for electronic documents, the other being OpenDocument (or ODF). This has been in the context of an often bitter and public debate between Microsoft and open source advocates, which played a role in the controversial departure of a former CIO for the state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn. On this occasion, Doug Mahugh, an Open XML Technical Evangelist for the company, became concerned about the Wikipedia articles in question and offered to pay someone to fix them. The offer was openly acknowledged by the person who received it, Rick Jelliffe, in a blog post titled, "An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia".

Jelliffe is an Australian programmer who founded an XML tools vendor called Topologi (note: the Wikipedia link for Topologi currently redirects to an apparently unrelated Linux distribution, Topologilinux). His biography on the O'Reilly website describes him as a standards activist, making him someone whose established credentials and relative independence would serve Microsoft's purposes. He and Mahugh both indicated that Microsoft did not seek any kind of editorial control over Jelliffe's efforts.

Public reaction

The revelation exploded into a media frenzy about the possibility of paid editing activity on Wikipedia. Perspectives on the incident ranged widely, some taking it as confirmation that Wikipedia policies are inadequate to deal with disputed issues, others seeing it as Microsoft living down to its reputation for heavyhanded and counterproductive public relations. David Gerard offered another explanation, commenting, "There's something about open-source and free-software related articles that attracts REALLY OBNOXIOUS partisans", so that articles involving those issues frequently are overwhelmed by advocacy.

Responses from the Wikipedia side in the press were generally negative about Microsoft's approach. Jimmy Wales said that he was "very disappointed" and reiterated his concerns about paid editing (see archived stories). David Gerard and Mathias Schindler also corresponded with Mahugh and Jelliffe, encouraging further dialogue to improve the articles.

Various press reports included several clarifications from Microsoft. The company indicated that it had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the Wikipedia articles fixed; that it perceived the problem as being partly driven by corporate competitors such as IBM; and it added that no payment had yet changed hands. On the first point, it was subsequently determined that Mahugh had made a single edit to the talk page in August 2006, then one more after hiring Jelliffe. Mahugh indicated his primary regret was "that I didn’t fight harder for cleaning up the Office Open XML entry before we turned to somebody outside Microsoft", although he expressed skepticism that such an approach would have worked.

Is there a conflict?

Jelliffe, editing under his own name, has been more active as a Wikipedia editor. Since disclosing the Microsoft offer, he has primarily been active on talk pages related to the standards in question, although he has directly edited Open standard and Standardization. On account of the publicity surrounding the incident, the articles on the standards have been quite heavily edited recently to address some of the points raised. Prior to registering an account, Jelliffe also created the Wikipedia article about himself back in November 2005.

While he did not know at the time that Wikipedia policy discourages such efforts, Jelliffe has since become more familiar with such details and posted an analysis of how the conflict of interest policy applies to his situation. He focused on the question of whether it was appropriate for him to "edit material relating to Microsoft". Regarding his assignment, Jelliffe concluded "there is no conflict of interest created by me accepting an editing job from Microsoft to neutrally edit articles that are not about Microsoft, and not about their products, but about technical aspects of an Ecma standard that is before ISO." [emphasis in original]

This drew a response from Tim Bray, an executive with Sun Microsystems and thus on the opposite side of the document standards debate, but also a "personal friend" of Jelliffe. Bray expressed his opinion that Jelliffe was "deeply wrong" about this issue, although he felt Jelliffe would be an evenhanded editor. Bray argued that the draft was a Microsoft creation and would never have become a standard without the company's efforts.

Resulting sideshows

The incident produced some spinoff effects in addition to the main points of debate. After reading the TechCrunch summary, Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo decided to conduct an "experiment" by making one-sided edits to the TechCrunch article. TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington took umbrage at this, calling it vandalism and saying he lost a great deal of respect for Microsoft after defending them originally.

Outside the immediate orbit of affected parties, real vandalism was promoted by one of the usual suspects. The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert mentioned the story on Monday (using "wikilobbying" for his recurring segment, "The Wørd"), and encouraged users to edit articles to state that "reality has become a commodity". Vandalism ensued, with pages relating to "reality", "commodity", Colbert, and others quickly protected. A similar incident occurred in late July and early August (see archived story).


SPV

WikiWorld comic: "Hyperthymesia"

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By Greg Williams

WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.

Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Williams works as a visual journalist for the US-based The Tampa Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida. He also has worked as an illustrator and designer at newspapers in Dubuque, Iowa, and Dayton, Ohio.


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SPV

News and notes

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By Ral315

Investigation board deprecated

Another administrative board was deleted this week after a miscellany for deletion request. Wikipedia:Requests for investigation was nominated for deletion on Wednesday, and following discussion, was marked historical on Monday. On 10 January, the personal attack intervention noticeboard received the same fate, following a similar discussion.

Briefly


SPV

Features and admins

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By Daniel.Bryant

Administrators

Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: BozMo (nom), Mysid (nom), Yannismarou (nom), CJLL Wright (nom), Ryulong (nom), Kuru (nom), and Wizardman (nom).

Featured content

No articles were promoted to featured status last week.

Seven articles were de-featured last week: LSD, Central processing unit, History of Central Asia, English poetry, Regular polytope, WGA screenwriting credit system, and Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Three lists were promoted to featured status last week: Yukon general elections, Prince Edward Island general elections (post-Confederation), and United States Navy ratings.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Battle of Cannae, United States Bill of Rights, Hasekura Tsunenaga, History of saffron, Alain Prost, Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and Hurricane Juan.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Vitrification, Blue Jay, Amsterdam, Downtown Long Beach, California, Radcliffe Camera, Contre-jour, and Barred Owl.

Eight pictures were promoted to featured status last week:

  • Green tent spider
    Green tent spider
  • Montserrat Mountains, Catalonia
    Montserrat Mountains, Catalonia
  • 5"/54 caliber Mark 45 gun firing
    5"/54 caliber Mark 45 gun firing
  • Young grasshopper
    Young grasshopper
  • Australian infantry wearing Small Box Respirators
    Australian infantry wearing Small Box Respirators
  • Thermal motion of gas molecules
    Thermal motion of gas molecules
  • Toledo Skyline
    Toledo Skyline


SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Simetrical

Page protection can now be set with expiry dates. Preexisting protections, or protections made with the field left blank, will be indefinite. (Andrew Garrett, bug 4133, r19567; fixes by Brion Vibber in r19595, r19597)

A new special page, Special:Protectedpages, shows a list of all protected and semiprotected pages on the wiki. As with many special pages, its results are cached, and they have not been generated for Wikimedia wikis as of the time of this writing. (Andrew Garrett, r19561)

Page patrolling is now logged for wikis with this feature enabled. An example can be seen in action here. (Rob Church, bug 8621, r19341)

It is now possible to search for deleted pages beginning with a particular string of characters on Special:Undelete. (Brion Vibber, r19365)

It is now possible for wikis to require a certain number of edits, as well as a certain registration time period, for users to become autoconfirmed. Thus, for instance, accounts that have existed for several weeks but have made fewer than five edits might be prevented from moving pages or so on. If a particular wiki would like this enabled for them, it can file a bug report after community agreement. (Andrew Garrett, bug 8391, r19376)

A new JavaScript variable, wgUserGroups, contains an array of the user's groups, which can be used (for instance) for displaying certain added elements only to sysops. (Carl Fürstenberg, bug 8712, r19524 and r19611)

MediaWiki:Uploadtext can now access the name of the image to be saved, as $1. This allows links to Commons, for instance, to prefill the name field, via links such as [http://commons.wikimedia.org/{{#if:$1|w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=$1|wiki/Special:Upload}} Upload to the Wikimedia Commons instead!]. (Rob Church, bug 8671, r19527)

Cascading protection no longer applies to user CSS or JS subpages. This fixes an issue that prevented at least one bot from operating. (Andrew Garrett, r19549)

A few interface changes were made:

Some bugs were fixed:

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.


SPV

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By David Mestel and Ral315

The Arbitration Committee opened three cases this week, and closed no cases.

New cases

  • Nathanrdotcom: "Under private deliberation", with no workshop or evidence page, a case involving Nathanrdotcom. In August, Nathanrdotcom was indefinitely blocked by former administrator Sceptre, with the summary "particularly spiteful email attacking Sergeant Snopake and I, twisting my words, just being a total dick". Due to the sensitive nature of the issue, the block was discussed privately, and at that time was endorsed. In January, Tawker unblocked him, citing the fact that it was a private e-mail, and arguing for the benefit of the doubt. The issue was discussed on the administrators' noticeboard, before being referred to ArbCom for a decision.
  • WLU-Mystar: WLU alleges that Mystar has harrassed him, alleging incivility, wikistalking and sockpuppetry, inter alia. Mystar has yet to respond to the allegations, but has stated that he will do so "by Friday at the latest".
  • Barrett v. Rosenthal: A case brought by Peter M. Dodge involving the actions of Ilena and Fyslee. According to Dodge, Ilena was initially reported to AN/I for "posting links to sites that some considered to be attack sites". Various users attempted to assist Ilena, but "This was sabotaged...when Fyslee posted a link to a site that attacked Ilena in a personal manner". The title of the case refers to Barrett v. Rosenthal, a decision of the Supreme Court of California, which ruled that internet users and providers were not liable for the republication of defamatory statements, which some editors believe provides protection for Wikipedia. According to Durova, Ilena is the Rosenthal in that case, and she (Ilena) alleges that Fyslee has a close relationship with Barrett.

Evidence phase

  • Piotrus-Ghirla: A case involving the actions of Piotrus and Ghirla on various Russia- and Poland-related articles. Piotrus alleges that Ghirla has added unsourced POV material to these articles, and generally been incivil, while Ghirla claims that Piotrus has engaged in various forms of harassment, and calls for his desysopping. However, the parties have now entered into informal mediation, with proposals including mutual civility parole (and in which Ghirla has dropped his call for desysopping), and as a result of this and the fact that Ghirla has been inactive since the 27th of December, a motion has been proposed dismissing the case without prejudice, which has the support of four arbitrators.
  • Starwood: A case involving links to Starwood Festival-related articles from various pages. Paul Pigman, who brought the case, alleges that Rosencomet "persistently and systematically" added these links, perhaps to an extent that violates WP:SPAM, and that Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999 have harassed users attempting to remove the links. Mattisse confirms that she has been harassed by Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999, but that she has no issue of harassment with Rosencomet himself. Hanuman Das has asked that his name be removed from the request, as "I decline to participate", citing that he has not edited the links since he agreed not to on the 5th of December. Although Arbitration is not a consensual process, he also seems to have exercised the right to vanish. 999 and Ekajati deny the allegations, and allege that Mattisse has used multiple sockpuppets to request the links and then call for their removal. In addition, various users allege that Rosencomet has a WP:COI, as the executive director of the for-profit ACE LLC, which promotes the festival.
  • Robert Prechter: A case regarding the behaviour of Rgfolsom and Smallbones on the Socionomics and Robert Prechter pages. Rgfolsom alleges that Smallbones has violated WP:NPOV, WP:CIVIL and WP:DR (by abusing the mediation process), and that he has added "smears, demonstrable falsehoods, and a calculated overemphasis on quotes of critics". In response, Smallbones alleges that Rgfolsom has violated WP:V and WP:NPOV by removing claims critical of Prechter, and adding claims complimentary to him, and WP:COI because he is one of Prechter's employees.

Voting phase

  • Husnock: A case involving the actions of Husnock and Morwen, involving a comment made by Husnock, "I would be careful telling a deployed member of the military they shouldn't edit on Wikipedia for whatever reason.", following disputes on various Star Trek-related AfDs, which Morwen considered to be "intimidating", and Husnock alleges that she stated that she was "in fear of her life", and that he has been investigated by real-world bodies regarding it. Fred Bauder has proposed motions describing Husnock's comments as "regrettable", and others desysopping him as well as cautioning him on various matters, and encouraging Morwen to "be more sensitive to the feelings of others". Most of these proposals have the support of three arbitrators, but FloNight has opposed the remedy relating to Morwen.
  • Sathya Sai Baba 2: Thatcher131 alleges that Andries has repeatedly added a link to an unreliable source to the Robert Priddy article, in violation of a remedy in a prior case on the subject, and that SSS108 has edit warred and exhibited signs of article ownership on the page. Both users deny the allegations. remedies have been proposed banning Andries, Wikisunn, SSS108 and Freelanceresearch from editing the article, and requiring Ekantik to edit under one username only. These proposals have the support of two to three arbitrators.
  • Midnight Syndicate: A case brought by Durova involving an edit war on the Midnight Syndicate article. Dionyseus and Skinny McGee allege that GuardianZ has engaged in sockpuppetry and general disruption on the article. He denies the allegations and argues that Dionyseus and Skinny McGee have engaged in similar behaviour. A temporary injunction has been granted placing Dionyseus, Skinny McGee, and GuardianZ on revert parole. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies, which have the support of six arbitrators, banning GuardianZ and Skinny McGee from the article indefinitely, and Dionyseus for a period of three months, and forbidding any employees of Midnight Syndicate, Nox Arcana or Monolith Graphics from editing the article. Interestingly, unlike other cases, no general "enforcement by block" motion has yet been proposed to enforce the bans, although a motion to allow SPAs and others to be blocked indefinitely has the support of six arbitrators.
  • Yoshiaki Omura: Various users, principally Crum375, allege that Richardmalter and alleged sockpuppets have added biased, unsourced material to Bi-Digital O-Ring Test, an alternative medicine technique created by Yoshiaki Omura which was criticised by a New Zealand disciplinary tribunal as lacking scientific basis. However, Richardmalter denies that his pro-Omura edits were either biased or unsourced and claims that the mediation process has supported his position. Fred Bauder has proposed motions to the effect that "Richardmalter...[has] edited Yoshiaki Omura in an aggressive biased manner", and banning him from the article indefinitely. These motions have attracted the support of five arbitrators.

Motion to close

  • Derek Smart: A case involving a dispute over the inclusion of critical material in the Derek Smart article. Various editors on both sides of the dispute claim that the other has violated policy in promoting their case, and some suggest that various accounts (Supreme Cmdr and WarHawkSP inter alia) are in fact used by Smart himself, citing as evidence perceived similarities in their writing styles. These editors deny the allegations. Remedies have been proposed prohibiting single-purpose accounts (of which Mael-Num, WarHawk, WarHawkSP, and Supreme_Cmdr are named as examples) from reverting the article, and banning Supreme Cmdr for two weeks, as well as an alternative remedy banning him for one year, and another banning him only from the Smart article. These remedies have the support of three to eight arbitrators. A motion to close has been proposed by UninvitedCompany, but opposed by Fred Bauder.


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