Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-24/SPV
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| Volume 4, Issue 13 | 24 March 2008 | About the Signpost |
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Single User Login enabled for administrators
This week, Single User Login was enabled for all administrators, allowing users, after migration through the system, to log onto any public Wikimedia wiki with the same username and password.
Unification occurs via Special:MergeAccount, a new special page. There, users will be asked to provide their password; this password and their e-mail address will be compared to those on other wikis; those that match will automatically be transferred. For those that do not match, users can submit more passwords (in the event that the additional account(s) are valid, but have different passwords).
In the case of impostor accounts, users are currently unable to automatically usurp those accounts, for security reasons. Users can request that bureaucrats (or stewards, for small wikis) usurp them manually, allowing the administrator to reclaim them. However, after unifying an account, impostors cannot be registered under the same name.
The feature is only available to users who are administrators on at least one Wikimedia wiki, and to access the feature, must visit Special:MergeAccount on any wiki that they are an administrator on. It will be enabled for all users at a later date, but in order to work out any bugs in the system, and roll the system out slowly, developers decided to limit the number of users who have initial access to it.
Single User Login is also not available for any private or "fish-bowl" wikis, including WikimediaFoundation.org, and internal, board, staff, ArbCom, and other wikis where account creation is not open to the public.
There are many outstanding bugs with the new system; first and foremost, local control on user accounts is broken in some ways with global accounts. According to developer Tim Starling, "The new user log, IP blocks on account creation, and AntiSpoof conflict checking are broken." Also, users must log in manually to each wiki; Starling hopes to allow users to log in once for all wikis, and fix user account controls, in the future.
Other bugs may not be fixed right away; preferences and e-mail addresses do not change from one account to the rest, and global accounts currently cannot be renamed. Starling "won't make any guarantees" to fix those bugs, although other developers may work on these.
Article validation tested
Meanwhile, an open beta of article validation is in progress, at the English and German versions of labs.wikimedia.org. Registered users can grant themselves one of two statuses: "Editor", which allows a user to flag a revision as being checked for vandalism and obvious nonsense, and "Reviewer", which allows a user to flag a revision as a "good" or "featured" article. When implemented, these statuses will likely be granted manually by administrators, but for the purposes of the test, any user can make themselves a "reviewer".
After doing so, users can mark specific revisions as "unapproved", "basic check", "good", or "featured" (the latter two designations available only to "reviewers"). The test will be open for 2–4 weeks. Its developer, Aaron Schulz, will implement changes based on comments about the test.
The extension will not be enabled by default, according to developers; individual communities will have to come to agreement as to whether the feature is desired before it is enabled.
Best of WikiWorld: "Clabbers"
- This WikiWorld rerun is from February 5, 2007.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Clabbers" and "Anagram". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
News and notes
Wikimedia receives 3-year, $3,000,000 grant
On Monday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation voted to award the Wikimedia Foundation a grant of US$1,000,000 yearly for the next three years, for a $3 million total grant. The grant is designed to help meet Wikimedia's institutional needs; Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner said that the money would go toward "financial and operational sustainability, increasing quality, increasing and broadening participation, and distributing our material beyond the wiki environment. As you know, we’ve recently expanded the staff from 10 to 15, and we still have a few more positions to fill: this funding will offset those increased costs."
Deputy Executive Director Erik Moeller is said to be the catalyst for receiving the grant; Moeller was in contact with the Sloan Foundation through Wikimedia's involvement on the institutional council of the Encyclopedia of Life; the Sloan Foundation is also one of the funders of the Encyclopedia of Life. Through this contact, Moeller met formally with the Sloan Foundation, and they asked for a formal grant request, which was approved.
The announcement was first made on Tuesday by Gardner; a press release has also been issued. The grant is by far the largest ever given to the Wikimedia Foundation; prior to this donation, the largest donation was a $500,000 donation by an anonymous donor.
Briefly
- As of press time, the final decision on the host city for Wikimania 2009 had not yet been made.
- The Welsh Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles with Polydore Vergil.
- The Sardinian Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
- The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 90,000 articles.
- The Walloon Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
- The Tamil Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
- The French Wikiquote has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Zamboanga Chavacano Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
In the news
Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace
Music fans prefer Wikipedia to MySpace - Social networking sites like MySpace would be likely candidates for being the most popular sites to turn to for information about bands, but results from Yahoo show that Wikipedia is preferred by a ratio of more than two-to-one. This is in spite of the fact that the "tens of thousands" of Wikipedia band entries pale in comparison with the millions of MySpace entries. Wikipedia's advantage lies in the fact that it's "so clear, so concise, and it's standardized", and is not promotional.
Other mentions
Other recent mentions in the online press include:
- Wikipedia Questions Paths to More Money – More coverage this week about whether Wikipedia could and should get more revenue, and its relationship with venture capitalists.
- Al Gore, Internet experts to explore First Amendment – Jimmy Wales joins Al Gore and others to discuss relationship between the First Amendment and the Internet.
- How to Be a Model Wikipedia Contributor – This is a guide on how to begin to edit Wikipedia written by someone who was stung on her first encounter with editing on Wikipedia.
- They're trying to put the blame on beer – The top ten signs that someone bought their Wikipedia entry (humour).
- Newsmax's Kessler Scrubs Reference To His Obama Factual Blunder From His Wiki Page – Journalist Ronald Kessler is guilty of editing his own Wikipedia article, supposedly in a bid to remove left-wing bias.
Dispatches: Articlehistory and banners tame talk page clutter
Template clutter has been a concern for the community for a long time. Article talk pages have historically been overburdened by templates from the various processes on the path to featured status. The plethora can include:
- DYK dates;
- peer reviews;
- good article listings, delistings and reviews;
- featured article candidacies (FAC) that failed or were promoted;
- mainpage appearance date; and
- featured article reviews (FAR)
To these can be added WikiProject and other templates. If you're still not convinced of the need to clean up talk-page clutter, take a look at the images below. Making matters worse, template links are broken when articles are moved to reflect name changes, fracturing or losing pieces of an article's progression through the content review processes.
New ArticleHistory and WikiProject banner templates
The situation has changed markedly over the past year. In December 2006, there were several discussions among participants at featured article candidates about talk-page template clutter. Following these discussions, implementation of a new {{ArticleHistory}} (AH) template designed by Dr pda began. Simultaneously, there was discussion that the number of steps to close featured article candidates and featured article reviews was time-intensive, and Gimmetrow gained approval for a bot to partially automate these closures and to convert existing talk-page templates to the AH template. GimmeBot began closing FACs and FARs and converting talk-page templates on featured articles and former featured articles in February 2007. By March, two new templates to consolidate WikiProject talk page templates were in place—{{WikiProjectBannerShell}}, designed by Kirill Lokshin Lokshin, and {{WikiProjectBanners}}, designed by Raul654.
GimmeBot
GimmeBot processes the closure of FAC and FAR pages; in 2008, it also began processing the closure of featured list candidates, featured list removal candidates, and featured portal candidates (but not yet featured portal reviews), by adding these events to AH. It also updates the good article page and its counts, typically after a FA promotion, and is gradually converting the {{GA}} templates to AH.
Editors often ask why a bot closed a featured process. In fact, the bot doesn't make the decision to close; rather, it merely performs a lot of basic clerical work, updating talk pages after a human decision to archive or promote a candidate. It is critical that nominators not remove nomination templates from article talk pages before the bot runs; if they do, this stalls the bot and creates extra work.
GimmeBot's magic extends to converting the following templates to ArticleHistory:
- {{facfailed}}
- {{FACfailed}}
- {{GA}}
- {{delistedGA}}
- {{failedGA}}
- {{oldpeerreview}}
- {{dyktalk}}
- {{oldafd}}
You too can use the ArticleHistory template
- peer review version on 1 May, 2006,
- good article version on 31 August, 2006
- featured version on 2 November, 2006.
Another sample AH template—combining three peer reviews, two FACs, a FAR, a good article nomination, and a mainpage date—is at Talk:Autism.
However, the syntax is complex, and learning to use AH correctly can take time.
- AH reflects only closed processes; it does not handle nomination processes. For example, do not add unclosed FAC or GAN processes to AH, as doing so will cause an error.
- Editors frequently updating AH templates will find the task easier if they employ Dr pda's articlehistory script, which locates AH events in the article history and returns dates and oldids.
- Editors unfamiliar with building AH can leave regular templates (like {{GA}}, {{DelistedGA}}, etc.) on the talk page and wait for GimmeBot to convert them to articlehistory.
After adding or modifying AH, please check the bottom of the talk page for a red error category; if the red category is there, your AH edits need repair.
Using the WikiProject banner shells
Two are available.
{{WikiProjectBanners}} (sample at Tourette syndrome) is a fixed-size banner that hides all of the project information within a collapsible block. It can be used on any normal banner without modification.
{{WikiProjectBannerShell}} (sample at Battle of Ceresole) is larger than its counterpart, since it displays the project name and assessment ratings—and, rarely, additional information—for each project. The shell can be used only on banners that support its particular layout (typically triggered by passing the "|nested=yes" parameter to each banner). Virtually all commonly used project banners have been modified to support this option (there are still a few that do not format properly when placed in the shell).
The choice of which shell to use is occasionally debated by editors on a talk page.
WikiProject Report: Video games
This week we interviewed a few members from the Video games WikiProject. With a large number of members, the project and its participants have made the project into a high-achieving group with seventy-nine featured articles, nine featured lists, sixteen A-class articles, one hundred and sixty seven good articles, and seven featured topics - placing it among the very small group of WikiProjects which have very high numbers of good or featured content.
- Questions
- What does the Project cover?
- Someoneanother: Individual video games as well as series articles; from the original video, computer and arcade games right through to the modern systems and emerging platforms such as mobile phones. All game genres and types; including online, multiplayer, casual and the indie scene. Characters, either within game or series articles, or as separate character articles and lists. Video game culture and terminology. Magazines, podcasts, websites, court cases and events. Developers, leading figures in gaming, publishers and musicians involved in the game industry. The project's remit is wide and continues to widen as videogames and related topics expand in influence and popularity.
- Have any of the daughter–projects taken any ideas from it?
- Krator: Though many of the daughter projects work in a similar fashion as the Video games project, I think this is caused by the nature of the subject, rather than any ideas that were taken. There is not much interaction between the parent and daughter projects in general, this may be something to work on.
- Was there any particular reason behind the creation of the project's own barnstar? A user perhaps?
- Pagrashtak: Jacoplane made our barnstar—see User talk:Jacoplane/archive4#Current Events Barnstar for a conversation regarding its creation.
- How could the project improve? Greater input needed etc.
- Guyinblack25: A project is only as good as the editors that comprise it. Improving the writing skills of members and getting everybody on the same page will strengthen the project as a whole. Trying to get all the video game related articles to comply with Wikipedia's various policies, like Wikipedia:Notability and WP:NOT, is a sizable task that not everyone in the project knows how to do. Writing well-written, neutral prose is another area that not all members have experience in. Efforts to better connect projects members and consolidate resources have been in discussion and should be implemented in the near future.
- Masem: Video games are a tricky beast from an encyclopedic viewpoint in that there are three ways to approach most topics: discussion of the game, development, reception, and sales, discussion of the game's gameplay and how certain tasks in the game are done, and discussion of the game as a work of fiction, describing the plot and characters. Moreso than other topics, all three need a careful balance which is now being realized in our Featured Articles and Topics, but it is a slow learning curve. Video games, being a completely contemporary topic, also tend to lack the academic and paper sources that other topics enjoy, and we are working to try to ensure that the best sources are used to back up key articles.
- The project is very high achieving, how could this distinguish it from other projects?
- Krator: The main cause of our high number of featured and good articles lies with the project's editors, of whom many are quite attached to the specific topics they write about, for example, a particular game series. Fandom is usually admonished on Wikipedia, but in this case, it motivates people to write good articles. A second thing, more project-related, is that the project's experienced members share their experience through peer reviews and assessments (which are more like peer reviews here). Furthermore, on featured article candidate pages (we keep track of those), project members often comment on each other's articles. I think that, as an editor, you're more likely to take criticism well when it's coming from someone you've seen around the project.
The downside of this approach is that many of our high importance articles, like the video game genres and "video game" itself, are neglected, because these subjects do not have any dedicated editors. Compare the trend of the project as a whole to neglect high importance, vital articles.
- Krator: The main cause of our high number of featured and good articles lies with the project's editors, of whom many are quite attached to the specific topics they write about, for example, a particular game series. Fandom is usually admonished on Wikipedia, but in this case, it motivates people to write good articles. A second thing, more project-related, is that the project's experienced members share their experience through peer reviews and assessments (which are more like peer reviews here). Furthermore, on featured article candidate pages (we keep track of those), project members often comment on each other's articles. I think that, as an editor, you're more likely to take criticism well when it's coming from someone you've seen around the project.
- How does anyone uninvolved in the project start off? Is there a newsletter or a welcoming template etc.?
- Gazimoff: As a newcomer to Wikipedia, I discovered the project through my interest in video game related articles and was quickly welcomed after posting on the project's talk page. I started off by offering to help out with ongoing work, such as processing articles that required cleanup or referencing. Since then I've started to get heavily stuck in to improving the quality of existing articles, as well as creating a couple of new ones. The project members have been really helpful in providing assessment and peer review of the work I've done, as well as helping me learn the ropes through mentoring.
- Krator: A welcoming template was made only recently, and we're now writing the first newsletter. Before that, and perhaps still, a large amount of new editors started out with the project through direct interaction with the project's members. For example, an editor involved in a dispute may be pointed to our project talk page to seek broader consensus. Another common way of getting involved is the assessment department: when assessing articles, we usually leave some suggestions for improvement, and new editors often come back to seek reassessment. Finally, as with all WikiProjects, the largest source of 'new blood' is curiosity: "what's that funny banner doing on my article's talk page?"
- Dihydrogen Monoxide: I first saw a banner for the project on the talk page of an article I was interested in, and it looked like fun. I found the project really welcoming, and its members quite helpful, so I just dove in and tried to do my bit to improve video game articles. It's been a while since then, but I feel that many members of the project agree that one of its strength is the sense of community within it.
Features and admins
Administrators
Five users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Hersfold (nom), Hurricanehink (nom), DeadEyeArrow (nom), Doug (nom), and Aleta (nom).
Bots
Seven bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: STBotI (task request), SoxBot IV (task request), John Bot (task request), ClueBot II (task request), Bikabot (task request), Erwin85Bot (task request), and FlagBot (task request).
Featured pages
Fourteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Rokeby Venus (nom), Effects of Hurricane Ivan in the Lesser Antilles and South America (nom), Damageplan (nom), 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack (nom), Song Thrush (nom), Super Smash Bros. Melee (nom), Tomb of Antipope John XXIII (nom), HMAS Melbourne (R21) (nom), Elderly Instruments (nom), Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards (nom), Opeth (nom), Æthelred of Mercia (nom), D. B. Cooper (nom), and This Charming Man (nom).
Fifteen lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of retired Pacific typhoon names (JMA) (nom), Silverchair discography (nom), Timeline of Jane Austen (nom), Slayer discography (nom), BBC Young Musician of the Year (nom), Virginia Tech bowl games (nom), List of Halo media (nom), List of Scottish football champions (nom), List of tallest buildings in Albuquerque (nom), List of tallest buildings and structures in Salford (nom), List of Press Gang episodes (nom), The Prodigy discography (nom), European Golden Shoe (nom), Manchester City F.C. seasons (nom), and The Simpsons (season 7) (nom).
No topic was promoted to featured status last week.
Two portals were promoted to featured status last week: Portal:English football (nom) and Portal:Journalism (nom).
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, Nutrition Assistance for Puerto Rico, Paleolithic-style diet, Surfer Rosa, Reese Witherspoon and Freedom Monument.
Former featured pages
Six articles were delisted recently: Saturn V (nom), Game theory (nom), Marginated Tortoise (nom), Korean name (nom), New England Patriots (nom) and Robert Lawson (architect) (nom).
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Hereford, Fissure vent, Magpie-goose, USS Franklin, Catrina, Tagus River and First Battle of Grozny.
One featured picture was demoted: Image:Prokaryote cell diagram.svg.
No sounds were featured last week.
Three pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
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
- The total numbers of articles and subcategories in a category are now displayed correctly. (r32085, bug 1212)
- When an invalid title is given to an API query, the rest of the query now continues as normal. (r32109, bug 13390)
- A generator=backlinks API query now honours the gblredirect parameter. (r32125, bug 13419)
- Ogg-contained audio and video now play back correctly in Safari. (bug 11249)
- The audio/video playback no longer confuses the media player Totem with QuickTime. (r32130, bug 13401)
- Some invalid XHTML on the protection page was fixed. (r32147, bug 13428)
- Special:Search now deals with unusual characters like newlines in the search string correctly. (r32148, bug 9403)
- The punctuation on the enhanced watchlist has been corrected. (r32194, bug 13440)
- API queries for category members in the main namespace now return the correct results. (r32279, bug 13465)
- Special:Search with no search query now gives the option to select which namespaces to search in. (bug 8444)
New features
- There is a new special page Special:FileDuplicateSearch that allows you to search for all images which are completely identical to a given image (that is, same format, pixel-identical, same metadata, etc.). (r32180, bug 1459)
Other changes
- The eiredirect option to the embeddedin API query has been removed, because it didn't actually make any difference to the query's results. (r32125, bug 13418)
- A category table is currently being added to the Wikimedia databases; when it is complete, it will allow various category-related bugs to be fixed (mostly relating to counting the number of items in a category correctly). (bug 13326)
- The SHA1 hash of uploaded images is now stored; this makes checks for duplicate images easier (and has made some of this week's image-related changes possible). (bug 5763)
- The search feature on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia wikis has been synchronised with the search feature used by most small MediaWiki wikis. As a result, several bugs have been fixed and features have been added to the search form (for instance, a search within the image namespace will now display the images as well as the text on the image pages).
Other technology news
- A test of flagged revisions (the 'stable versions' system) is currently taking place at http://en.labs.wikimedia.org (see related story).
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.
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee opened two new cases this week.
New cases
- September 11 conspiracy theories: A case involving the actions of some editors on articles related to the September 11, 2001 attacks, particularly in relation to 9/11 conspiracy theories.
- Prem Rawat: A case involving the actions of editors on Prem Rawat and related articles.
Evidence phase
- Betacommand 2: A case involving the actions of Betacommand and others in relation to BetacommandBot, a controversial bot which tags some non fair use compliant images. Betacommand's actions had previously been discussed on a subpage of WP:AN.
Motion to close
- Highways 2: A case involving editing by NE2 on articles relating to WikiProject U.S. Roads, allegedly against consensus of other editors involved with that wikiproject. If closed as-is, only a remedy counselling editors to consider contributing outside of disputed articles would pass.