Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-11-05/SPV

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Volume 3, Issue 45	5 November 2007	About the Signpost

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Wikimedia avoids liability in French lawsuit	WikiWorld comic: "Fall Out Boy"
News and notes: Grant money, fundraiser, milestones	WikiProject Report: Lists of basic topics
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation


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SPV

Wikimedia avoids liability in French lawsuit

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By Michael Snow

In a decision announced last week and proclaimed a "landmark", the Wikimedia Foundation prevailed in a lawsuit brought by three people over alleged defamation on the French Wikipedia.

The plaintiffs were attempting to have the Wikimedia Foundation declared responsible for an article in the French Wikipedia that identified them as gay activists. The statements, which also referred to one of them having difficulty adopting children because of his activism, were introduced by an unregistered editor and subsequently removed. The plaintiffs sought to hold Wikimedia liable for € 69,000 in damages based on a claim of defamation and invasion of privacy.

Taking the position that the Wikimedia Foundation had been notified of the problem, one of the plaintiffs claimed to have contacted the foundation to complain. Efforts to locate a message from the plaintiffs failed to yield fruit, and Wikimedia's position was that the disputed content was removed promptly once it was notified. While not reaching the issue of whether the statements were legally defamatory, the judge noted that any damage was mitigated by the removal of the material from Wikipedia. He concluded that Wikimedia "acted promptly to cease giving access to the content once it became aware of its character."

The decision came Monday, 29 October, from Judge Emmanuel Binoche of the tribunal de grande instance (the court of initial jurisdiction) in Paris. The ruling was based on a French law known as the LCEN (Law for the Security of the Digital Economy). Somewhat like Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in the U.S., the LCEN distinguishes Internet hosts from content publishers, and provides some protection from liability for hosts who are unaware of illegal content. By classifying Wikimedia as a host, it would relieve the foundation from the burden of actively screening for defamatory material.

Some news reports pointed to the case as the first European litigation involving the Wikimedia Foundation. However, it should be mentioned that the local chapter for Germany, Wikimedia Deutschland, prevailed in a lawsuit last year over whether the name of a deceased individual could be published in Wikipedia. In the United States, Wikimedia seems to have avoided direct involvement in litigation so far, although Wikipedia edits have been the subject of lawsuits involving other parties, such as one involving a Nebraska school, and a professional golfer complaining about defamation. The Wikimedia Foundation was included as a party in a wide-ranging lawsuit filed in Canada by a Green Party activist earlier this year, with such companies as Yahoo and Google as co-defendants, over postings about the plaintiff on Wikipedia and elsewhere; Wikimedia is seeking to have the matter dismissed.

SPV

WikiWorld comic: "Fall Out Boy"

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By Greg Williams

This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Fall Out Boy". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

SPV

News and notes

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By Ral315

Foundation receives $20,000 illustration grant

The Foundation announced the acceptance of a $20,000 grant, earmarked for the process of creating copyleft illustrations for use within Wikipedia and elsewhere. The grant was given by entrepreneur Philip Greenspun. The project, coordinated by Brianna Laugher (Pfctdayelise) and Cary Bass (Bastique), will involve a list of needed illustrations, to be compiled on the Meta-Wiki, followed by a period in which users can sign up for an illustration, and upon completion and acceptance, earn the amount offered for that illustration (most will be around US$40 per illustration, with some variation). The grant marks the first foray into paid content creation for the Foundation.

Fundraiser continues

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. In the first fifteen days of the fundraiser, about 15,700 people had donated, and the Foundation had raised about US$442,000.

After an update to the sitenotice displayed on all Wikimedia websites, the fundraising totals on November 4-6 were roughly doubled from prior levels. In response to a thread critiquing the banner's design, Board member Erik Möller said,

I think no matter what we put at the top of the page, we'll probably get 20 comments telling us that it's horrible, unprofessional, too professional, too preachy, not preachy enough, too irritating, not irritating enough, too colorful, too gray, too banner-like, not sufficiently banner-like, too familiar, too unfamiliar, [etc.] I'll stop now. Since we put up the new banner, the number of donations per day has more than doubled. Whether this is due to its newness or the new design -- it's clear that we have to make modifications like this to meet our fundraising goals. We need $4.6 million for the FY 2007-2008, and so far we've raised $368,000. We expect that we'll need another fundraiser in 2008 and we also have some major donors interested in contributing for this fundraiser; this one will run into late December. During that time we'll experiment further with the notice, the landing page, etc. Helpful comments are appreciated at Wikipedia:Fundraising redesign.

Later in the thread, in response to a comment by Dragons flight asking whether the US$4.6 million budget was overestimated, Möller said,

There are two paths the Foundation could take in its organizational development: 1) Focus, 100%, on hosting Wikipedia and generating enough funding to do so -- rely almost exclusively on ad hoc volunteerism for everything beyond hosting. 2) Build WMF into a mission-driven non-profit that is not merely hosting a website, but distributing knowledge to people world-wide, and reaching out to the global community for participation and content creation. These paths are extremely different. For example, in scenario 1), it would not be necessary to relocate the Foundation from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco, as we've decided to do -- we would surely be able to support basic server hosting without it. On the other hand, becoming a successful and global charity requires access to a different talent pool, the ability to execute program directives, etc. As Jimmy's video should make clear, the Foundation (through its majority-elected Board of Trustees) has chosen path 2) -- we're not merely a webhost; we want to be a new kind of charity: a charity of free knowledge. And this necessitates that we prepare & plan our growth accordingly.

Job openings

Various updates were made this week to job openings listed for the Wikimedia Foundation. Job listings for the position of Personal Assistant to the Executive Director and Office Manager closed last week. Meanwhile, job openings for the position of Accountant, Head of Development, Head of Communications, and Head of Business Development were scheduled to close on Monday, though the openings still remained on the Wikimedia Foundation's website as of press time.

The office of Chief Financial and Operating Officer is scheduled to close on November 12, while the volunteer position of Treasurer of the Board of Trustees will close on December 1. In an update on Friday, Foundation advisor Sue Gardner noted that the positions of software developers, public outreach and partnerships development will open soon.

List of users by articles created released

A list of all users who have created at least 50 namespace non-redirect pages was compiled this week. The results show bots at the top two positions, with Blofeld of SPECTRE as the top human, with 11,752 articles created (most of which, according to Blofeld of SPECTRE, were geographical stubs). 180 IP addresses or IP ranges had written at least 50 articles, accounting for over 21,000 articles.

Nominations for ArbCom election open

Nominations for the December 2007 Arbitration Committee Elections opened this week. As of press time, 21 users had nominated themselves: Cbrown1023, David Fuchs, Deskana, Dreamafter, Durova, Endlessdan, Giano, Hemlock Martinis, Messedrocker, Misza13, Monsieurdl, Moreschi, Newyorkbrad, Physchim62, Pilotguy, Raul654, Ryan Postlethwaite, Shell Kinney, Swatjester, White Cat, and Wizardman.

Of the five current arbitrators, only Raul654 has indicated that he will stand for re-election. Fred Bauder, Mackensen, and Neutrality have all stated that they will not run in the 2007 elections; SimonP has not yet indicated whether he plans to stand for re-election. These five seats will expire in 2007; it has not yet been noted whether any other seats will be added or replaced.

Briefly

Wikipedia is now the 8th most visited site on the Web, according to Alexa.
The Wikimedia Commons has reached 1,000 Featured Pictures.
The Romanian Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
The Quechua Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 75,000 articles.
The Norfolk Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
The Aymar Wikipedia has reached 200 articles.
The Galician Wikisource has reached 100 articles.

SPV

WikiProject Report: Lists of basic topics

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By Arknascar44

WikiProject Lists of basic topics is a WikiProject dedicated to improving Wikipedia's collection of basic topic lists, or lists of topics in a subject area. Started by The Transhumanist (talk · contribs) on 22 October 2007, it is very new. As a result, the project has only four members, but grew to that size within six days.

Lists the project aims to create

The project has found some gaps in basic list topics, and has compiled the list below of lists that should be created.

Lists that need to be finished

Project members have also located several lists that are incomplete, and need expansion, and have listed them.

List of basic geography topics

List of basic geography topics is currently nominated to become a featured list. It is a slightly controversial nomination, as the list is a basic topic list, it serves as a sort of "table of contents" with other articles in it, and thus has no sources.

How to help

Since the Basic topic lists project is relatively new, it is in need of help. If you are interested, you can join it by adding your name to its members list.

SPV

Features and admins

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By The Placebo Effect

One topic was promoted to featured status last week: Mary Wollstonecraft (nom).

No portals or sounds were featured last week.

Two articles were de-featured last week: Separation of powers under the United States Constitution (nom), and Canadian House of Commons (nom)

No pictures, lists, portals, topics, or sounds were de-featured last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Plug-in hybrid, Halloween II, Karnataka, Arrest and assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm, Four Times of the Day, 1880 Republican National Convention, and GameFAQs.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Murerplan, Human Skeleton, Landslide on Mars, Korean War, Bird Beaks, Beautiful Demoiselle, and Little Joe 1.

Fourteen pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.

SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By ais523

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), 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.

Fixed bugs

When renaming a user, uses of their username in page history will now update more quickly. Executing the table queries all at once also avoids the problem of edits not being updated if they are deleted while renaming takes place. (r27035)
A bug in the sortable table code affecting numbers with at least two thousands separator commas was fixed. (r27138)
It's now impossible to enter a deletion, protection, user rights change, user rename, bot flag change, or promotion to sysop edit summary that's too long to fit in the database. Previously, such long summaries could be entered but the extra parameters would be ignored. Also, the default summary for deletion has been reworked to better fit into the edit summary field. (r27170)

New features

After logging in via the API, the parameters (lguserid, lgusername and lgtoken) that it returns can now be passed as parameters in the URL rather than in cookies (obviously, I can't give an example). (r27151)
It's now possible to make an API query for the currently logged-in user's preferences. (r27153)

Other technology news

A feature was added to the software that makes it possible to set up patrolled edits on the new page log only. (Previously, it was only possible to set up patrolled edits on Recent Changes, which includes new pages and the new page log.) The full patrol feature is used on many other wikis (including some Wikimedia wikis) to help load-balance Recent Changes, and marks edits with a ! mark to users with the correct permissions (these permissions are usually set to administrators only or to all 'autoconfirmed' users, that is, users who can edit semiprotected pages) if no such user has yet indicated that they've reviewed them; it does not affect what is shown to users generally, but only helps to make sure that each edit is reviewed exactly once. The new-page-only patrol feature does not seem to be enabled anywhere yet, but it would perform a similar feature, of making sure that each new page is reviewed exactly once by a user in the relevant group. This is relevant due to the possibility that anonymous page creation may soon be re-enabled (see archived story); no developer has yet said that they will or won't enable it, and whether it is enabled and what the details will be will likely depend on whether there's a request from the community with the required level of consensus. (r27025, bug 1405)
Several changes were made to the fundraiser code; one of the suggestions from Wikipedia:Fundraising redesign was coded and set as the fundraising banner, and various bugfixes to the code were also implemented.

Ongoing news

Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.

SPV

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By David Mestel

The Arbitration Committee accepted one new case this week, and closed one case.

Closed case

The Troubles: A case involving a large number of editors on articles related to The Troubles. As a result of the case, any editors joining in the edit-warring on the articles in question are liable to be placed on probation, and the indefinite ban of Vintagekits was lifted.

New case

Sadi Carnot: A case involving alleged POV-pushing by Sadi Carnot, and alleged wheel-warring by Physchim62.

Evidence phase

Stefanomencarelli: A case involving alleged copyright violations by Stefanomencarelli, for which he was banned from the Italian Wikipedia. Problems are also caused by Stefanomencarelli's lack of fluency in English. Stefanomencarelli denies the allegations.

Voting phase

Ferrylodge: A case involving a community ban of Ferrylodge on the now-defunct Community sanction noticeboard, but which User:B has, in accordance with Wikipedia:Community ban, stated that he is willing to overturn. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies disapproving the ban, but restricting Ferrylodge's editing and instructing him not to interact with Bishonen or KillerChihuahua.

Martinphi-ScienceApologist: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility on pseudoscience-related articles. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies restricting the editing of Martinphi and ScienceApologist, and limiting ScienceApologist to one account.

Ebionites: A case involving alleged POV-pushing on the Ebionites article. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy restricting MichaelCPrice's editing to one revert per page per week, for one year.

Alkivar: A case involving alleged misuse of administrative tools by Alkivar, including protection of a page in a dispute in which he was allegedly involved, an indefinite block of Equazcion, and a banner on his userpage stating that "comments left by anonymous editors may be removed without warning". Remedies desysopping Alkivar and forbidding him from reapplying through RfA, and banning Burntsauce as a meatpuppet of JB196.

Commodore Sloat-Biophys: A case wherein Biophys alleges that Commodore Sloat has been incivil and has edit-warred, while Sloat denies the allegations and alleges that Biophys has not been co-operative in the dispute. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy, supported by Fred Bauder, instructing the parties to refrain from interacting with or commenting about each other in any way.

Wikimedia avoids liability in French lawsuit

WikiWorld comic: "Fall Out Boy"

News and notes

Foundation receives $20,000 illustration grant

Fundraiser continues

Job openings

List of users by articles created released

Nominations for ArbCom election open

Briefly

WikiProject Report: Lists of basic topics

Lists the project aims to create

Lists that need to be finished

List of basic geography topics

How to help

Features and admins

Administrators

Bots

Featured content

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Fixed bugs

New features

Other technology news

Ongoing news

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

Closed case

New case

Evidence phase

Voting phase