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Explicit sexual content draws fire
A story from conservative news website WorldNetDaily has sparked media scrutiny of Wikipedia's sexually explicit content—and reportedly attracted FBI attention as well. Most of the images and media remain available, including the most controversial image, the cover of the album Virgin Killer.
WorldNetDaily published "Is Wikipedia wicked porn? - Online encyclopedia proudly posts graphic sexual images kids can see", by Chelsea Schilling, on May 6. Schilling's piece gives a brief account of the range of sex coverage on Wikipedia and some of the associated images and media, such as the photographs illustrating the articles "fluffing", "striptease" and "masturbation".
The WorldNetDaily article also quotes Matt Barber, a lawyer and "Policy Director for Cultural Issues" of the anti-pornography group Concerned Women for America, expressing outrage that Wikipedia allows children "to bypass [school and home] filtering devices and view hard-core, vile pornography." Barber was reportedly preparing to contact the United States Department of Justice and the office of the United States Attorneys, "to determine whether Wikipedia may be engaging in the dissemination of illegal obscenity."
The reaction among Wikipedians has largely been to resist any effort to self-censor Wikipedia. However, three audio files alluded to in the article—recordings described by their uploader as "a Woman experiencing an orgasm"—were deleted due to lack of proper permissions from all recorded parties. Editors are also discussing whether fluffing should be a disambiguation page.
Virgin Killer album cover
The image mentioned by Schilling that has generated the most media—and Wikipedian—attention is the original cover of Virgin Killer, a 1976 album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. The cover, which features a naked, provocatively-posed pre-pubescent girl with bare breasts and obscured genitals, generated controversy in the United States and elsewhere; the album was subsequently released with a different cover. Schilling's article, and many Internet sites, claim the original cover was banned in the United States, although the contributors to Wikipedia's newly-expanded article on the topic have not been able to confirm such a ban.
Schilling [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=63722 reported] on May 7 that "the FBI is now reviewing a Wikipedia photo of a nude adolescent that could violate federal child-pornography laws." Representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation and the English Wikipedia community reiterated to Schilling the relevant content policies and community practices: Wikipedia is not censored, and barring a legal imperative the decision to display or remove the offensive image rests with Wikipedia's users.
The media coverage prompted a deletion discussion for the offending image, Image:Virgin Killer.jpg (which had undergone a previous deletion discussion in November 2007). The large majority of participants in the discussion favored keeping the image, which most judged to be neither pornographic nor illegal under U.S. laws. In spite of this near-consensus, the result of the debate was deletion; the administrator closing the discussion argued that use of the image did not satisfy Wikipedia's non-free content criteria—in particular the requirement that "Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding." The deleted image was quickly restored by another administrator, while a deletion review formalized the consensus to overturn the deletion.
The Gazette of Colorado Springs ran an opinion column on May 10 arguing that, regardless of whether the FBI decides it to be illegal, the Virgin Killer image should be removed. "For Wikipedia administrators," the column says, "the mere fact that FBI investigators have launched an investigation should tell them it's beneath their standards."
See also
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
The German Wikipedia introduced sighted revisions this week. With the feature, any page with a "sighted revision" shows the sighted revision by default to non-logged-in users; logged-in users, by default, view the most recent revision, whether it has been sighted or not.
Sighted revisions has been in the works for a while, and is available via the MediaWiki extension known as FlaggedRevs. This feature is intended by many as an alternative to traditional semi-protection, particularly on high-profile pages like George W. Bush, to allow good-faith edits while avoiding the very visible vandalism that comes with open editing.
The German Wikipedia is acting as the testing ground for this feature, as that community has been very vocal in their support of such a feature. It is expected that their experiences will affect how the English Wikipedia uses the feature. Testing there is expected to last for several weeks at the least before it is enabled here.
How it works
As proposed, the process would be handled via a user right known as "Surveyor". This right would be granted liberally; on the German Wikipedia; current requirements are two months of editing and 200 article edits (the same requirements that they have for voting in their requests for adminship process). The current English proposal would require an account 30 days old, at least 15 days since the user's first edit, 150 edits, 30 article edits, 10 different articles edited, and a confirmed e-mail account. The right can be revoked as necessary by administrators.
Members of the surveyor user group have the ability to mark pages as sighted, have access to a list of unreviewed pages, and can use the rollback feature.
Some parts of the process are largely automatic. New articles created by members of the surveyor group, and edits made to a sighted version by a surveyor, are automatically marked as sighted. The process can also be handled manually; articles can be marked as "sighted" either while editing (through a checkbox similar to the minor edit checkbox) or without making an edit to the article.
At press time, 16.62 percent of German articles have been flagged, with the extension active for about eight days.
Quality revisions
The FlaggedRevs extension is highly configurable, and can be used to identify articles in more sophisticated ways than simply "sighted" or not. A second proposal on English Wikipedia would create a level known as a quality revision for some pages. On the most developed or most visited pages, a quality revision would show that the version "conforms to all our content policies". These quality revisions would hold precedence over sighted revisions, and would display to logged-out readers (logged-in readers would have the option of viewing the quality version, or the current version).
Only users in the reviewer user group would be able to grant this status. It is unclear who would be part of this group; bureaucrats would be granted the ability to give this status, and it appears, by the current proposal, that it would be given to a small subset of the community, particularly those heavily involved in quality assurance processes such as featured article candidates and good article nominations. Pages could also, through this process, be flagged as good or featured by users in the reviewer group.
At least on the English Wikipedia, the entire process is proposed, with details still to be hammered out on many important issues. However, with the German community embracing flagged revisions, it is likely that the feature will be enabled on the English Wikipedia within the next few months.
Foundation receives copyright claim from church
- Wikinews contributors are listed here.
The Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church or LDS Church. The infringement claim is in reference to a URL used as a source in a Wikinews article about Mormon Church documents leaked to the website Wikileaks, titled "Copy of handbook for leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints obtained by Wikinews". The URL was originally cited as a link in the sources subsection of the article. While such claims have been received regarding other projects, including Wikipedia, this is the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation has received a copyright infringement claim regarding an article published by Wikinews.
The Wikinews article, originally published on April 19, described material in the Church Handbook of Instructions. The work is a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. Wikinews obtained the Church Handbook of Instructions from Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because "...the book is strictly confidential among the Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka LDS in short form) bishops and stake presidents and it reveal [sic] the procedure of handling confidential matters related to tithing payment, excommunication, baptism and doctrine teaching (indoctrination)."
The material was released on the Wikileaks website on April 16, and according to the site was first made available on the document sharing website Scribd. A message at Scribd now states: "This content was removed at the request of copyright agent B. S. Broadbent of the Intellectual Property Division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."
On May 5, the Wikimedia Foundation received a copyright infringement claim from Intellectual Reserve, Inc., the legal entity that owns the intellectual property of the Mormon Church. The infringement claim is addressed to Jimmy Wales, the designated agent of the Wikimedia Foundation, and requests that access to the link to Wikileaks be removed. The link was removed from the article on May 5 by a Wikinews administrator, and the article remains available without the link. The infringement claim was sent by Berne S. Broadbent, president of Intellectual Reserve, Inc. and director of the Intellectual Property Division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. According to Mike Godwin, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the Mormon Church has not filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice with the foundation.
The link is no longer available on the current revision of the article, but as of press time, was available in the history of the article. The information is still available on Wikileaks; in a statement to Wikinews, a Wikileaks representative commented on the material hosted at the site: "WikiLeaks will not remove the handbooks, which are of substantial interest to current and former mormons [sic]. WikiLeaks will remain a place were [sic] people from around the world can safely reveal the truth."
News coverage
The story has been covered by a few media sources, particularly from media sources based in Salt Lake City, Utah (where the Church is headquartered) and technology sites. In a Salt Lake Tribune article, Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh said he didn't know of any letter from the Church, noting that Wikinews had nevertheless removed the information.
The story was also covered by the Deseret News [1], and on tech sites Slashdot [2] and Ars Technica [3]; other sites also covered the story, but focused primarily on Wikileaks' role in the publication and dissemination of the material.
Board to update privacy policy, adopts data retention policy
This week, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees announced a forthcoming update to its privacy policy, as well as the adoption of a new data retention policy.
On Thursday, May 8, board Chairperson Florence Devouard made separate announcements for each. The first announcement was the adoption of a data retention policy; according to Devouard, the resolution reads:
[T]he Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, consistent with its long-standing commitment to minimizing the data retention of users and editors, adopts the policy of retaining the least of amount personally identifiable information consistent with maintenance of its services, with its privacy policy, or as required by state or federal legal provisions under United States of America law.
According to board member Domas Mituzas, who also serves as a developer, prior practice with regard to data retention was "kind of undefined. This resolution gives us clear guidelines, what we want to comply with, and a place to point at anyone who wants more (or less) than what we do." [4] No draft of the policy has yet been published.
The second announcement, and arguably the more important, was the decision to amend the privacy policy: when possible, the Foundation will notify community members when their personal data, such as IP addresses, has been sought by legal processes. The resolution:
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees will amend its privacy policy to notify, when possible, those members of the community whose personally identifiable data has been sought through, or produced as a result of, civil or criminal legal process, except when such notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States of America.
According to Devouard, the resolution was suggested in March by Nsk92, after the late-2007 "Video Professor incident", where Video Professor, Inc. sought and received the IP addresses of Wikipedia editors, following a subpoena.
Devouard said that the privacy policy would be reviewed in full by general counsel Mike Godwin, in anticipation of a full draft for a summer meeting. However, because of the nature of the concern, Devouard felt that an expedited addition, allowing the Foundation to contact users whose information had been sought, was worth seeking.
Board member Michael Snow noted that the change does not promise that such contact will occur, citing a recent case where such contact could not legally be made:
The resolution covers both the case where information has only "been sought", as well as where it has been "produced" already. It also acknowledges that in some cases the notice itself may be forbidden (compare the recent news story about the Internet Archive, which successfully resisted an FBI attempt to extract information, but was forbidden to disclose it while the matter was being litigated). Otherwise, clearly we would prefer to notify affected parties prior to producing information, but given the varied circumstances that might lead to such a request, we cannot promise this in every situation.
While the resolutions were published on the mailing list, they have not yet been published on the Foundation's resolutions page.
Four other resolutions announced
Four other resolutions were approved at the April San Francisco meeting, and announced this week on the resolutions page. Three of these (the approval of December's and March's meeting minutes, and the already-announced appointment of Stuart West as a trustee) have not been published in full.
The fourth is the formal amendment of the Foundation's bylaws, to allow for the restructuring of the Board (see archived story), and to lessen legal liability to chapters due to Foundation or volunteer actions, and vice-versa. The changes have not been applied to the official bylaws as of press time.
Update on Citizendium
In the nine months since the Signpost's previous "Report on Citizendium", the fledgling Citizendium encyclopedia has grown slowly but steadily and has been experimenting with new ways of developing, organizing and presenting content. Citizendium now has over 6500 "live articles" (up from ~2400 last July), including 787 "Developed articles" and 65 "Approved articles" (up from 31). The daily level of editing activity and the number of active contributors have risen moderately.
In addition to content and community growth, developments in the last nine months include: the selection of a free-content license (Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0); reorganization of article content into "clusters", with separate subpages for bibliographies, external links and other material; a new design for the website; and the launch of "Eduzendium", a program in which educators assign Citizendium projects to their students.
Site activity
New articles have been created at a rate of about 12 per day in recent months, close to the 11 per day average last July. The average daily editing rate has been rising fitfully, from about 450 edits per day last July to over 700 edits per day recently. New author arrivals have also been trending up, with almost 100 accounts making their first edits in March (although less than half that many in April, the lowest month on record). About 120 accounts were active (defined as making more than 20 edits) in April—the most active month on record.
During Citizendium's early months much of the article content was derived from Wikipedia, a trend that continued to some degree even after unmodified Wikipedia articles were purged from the database in January 2007. Focus has increasingly shifted to developing new articles from scratch, and to enlarging the article count with short "stubs", often no more than a few sentences long. Consequently, median article length has declined from 562 words in July 2007 to 339 words in April 2008, according to the Citizendium statistics page. Since September, article creation has been boosted by monthly "Write-a-Thons", in which authors are encouraged to work simultaneously during a particular day on new and existing articles: "It's like an online party! Heck no, it is an online party!"
According to Alexa Internet, citizendium.org's average traffic rankings have not changed significantly since August (although they vary considerably from day to day). The site's average traffic rank is #98,681, and it reaches about 1 in 700 internet users each day. Conservapedia ("The Trustworthy Encyclopedia")—another wiki encyclopedia that started around the same time as Citizendium—is currently ranked #53,242 and reaches about 1 in 450 internet users.
Approved articles
The number of Citizendium Approved articles has over doubled from 31 to 65 in the past nine months. While a number of the early Approved articles were derived from Wikipedia content, recent approvals represent mostly original Citizendium content.
Citizendium articles in general, and Approved articles in particular, are expected to follow broad standards similar in spirit to Wikipedia's content policies. According to the Approval Standards, "[t]he standards of a good Citizendium article are complex", but are summarized in ten bullet points: Encyclopedic; Accurate; Neutral; Coherent; Comprehensive; Well-written; University-level; Not original research; Family-friendly; and Legal and responsible. In contrast to Wikipedia's highly codified standards for Featured Articles, an article is eligible for approval on Citizendium simply when it "is so well developed that it gives the Citizendium reader a good introduction and overview to its topic. An editor in the article's workgroup will be needed to nominate the article for approval." Well-developed articles must then be vetted by one or more Editors—users with relevant subject-area expertise who have final authority over content within their fields.
Approved articles vary widely in depth. Some of the longer articles, such as Michael Faraday at about 5500 words, are comparable in size to a typical Wikipedia Featured Article. Most are considerably shorter, between 1000 and 3000 words; at the low end, Azole is a mere 165 words.
Citizendium takes what users there consider "a more sensible approach to citing sources" than Wikipedia. A few Approved articles, such as Compressibility factor (gases), come close to the citation density of a typical Wikipedia Featured Article. For most Approved articles, however, the "sensible approach" results in much sparser citations—often no inline citations at all—with a separate page containing the article's bibliography (or in some cases, not even that).
Subpages
From July 2007 to the present, Citizendium has been developing and gradually implementing a system of "subpages" to organize article-related content. Where Wikipedia has a single article, Citizendium plans to have a "cluster", with everything but the article itself on separate pages. The standard subpages are: Def for a brief definition of the topic; Talk for discussion of the article, as on Wikipedia; Related articles; Bibliography; and External Links. Approved articles also have a Draft subpage for continued article development, since Approved articles are protected from direct editing. Some topics, such as the prototype cluster Biology, have other subpages: Gallery for topical image collections and Signed Articles for "one or more possibly 'biased' articles written exclusively by real experts".
The subpages system is meant to be flexible. Other optional subpages, some of which are as yet unused, include tutorials, student- and advanced-level versions of the article, news and debate guides, timelines and catalogs, and addenda for extended discussions in overlong articles. Most of the Developed articles—and even some Approved articles—make only limited use of the standard subpages.
License decision
In December 2007, Citizendium officially adopted the Creative Commons-Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (or later) license for original content. Until then, Wikipedia-derived content was available under the GFDL, but other content had indeterminate licensing, with the promise of a free license choice to come. Citizendium's unsettled licensing situation had been a source of criticism early on, especially from the Wikimedia community. The Citizendium community was divided on the license issue, with some contributors favoring a non-commercial license, some favoring a CC-by-sa license to prevent re-use by Wikipedia but allow commercial use (and to avoid the logistical problems associated with the GFDL, a license designed for software manuals), and some favoring the GFDL to ensure compatibility with Wikipedia.
Editor-in-Chief Larry Sanger ultimately decided on CC-by-sa after the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation (maintainers of the GFDL) announced a plan for a revised GFDL to allow the migration of Wikimedia content to CC-by-sa. Sanger explained the decision in a lengthy essay laying out the principal arguments for each aspect of the license choice.
Eduzendium
In January 2008, following preliminary work over much of the previous year, Citizendium launched Eduzendium—a program for educators to use Citizendium as a venue for student coursework, e.g., the creation of encyclopedia articles. From the Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 academic terms, eight courses are listed as participating in Eduzendium. However, only three appear to have contributed content.
49 students in John Dennehy's General Microbiology course at CUNY chose individual microorganisms on which to write articles. Students were assigned to use scientific literature to address each organism's: Classification; Description and significance; Genome; Cell structure and metabolism; Ecology; Pathology; Application to Biotechnology; and Current Research related to the organism.
For Daniel Folkinshteyn's finance course at Temple University, students (singly or in pairs) created 18 articles on basic finance-related topics. The articles produced for this course vary widely in length and quality, but most cite no sources.
26 students in Matt Sponheimer's Human Evolution course at the University of Colorado produced articles on a range of topics in physical anthropology and human evolution. The articles, some of which are still being developed, range from the impressively detailed Neanderthal to the barely-begun Piltdown hoax.
Board candidacies open through May 22
Ting Chen wins 2008 Board Election
26 June 2008
Board elections completed; results forthcoming
23 June 2008
Board elections continue
9 June 2008
Board elections open
2 June 2008
Board elections: Candidate questions
26 May 2008
Board elections: Voting information, new candidates
19 May 2008
Board candidacies open through May 22
12 May 2008
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Ting Chen wins 2008 Board Election |
This week, the Signpost covers the opening of candidacies for the 2008 Board elections.
Candidate entries for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees election opened on Sunday. One (1) one-year seat will be filled in the election. As of press time, three users had presented themselves as candidates.
Candidates are being accepted through 23:59 UTC on 22 May. This year, voting will run for three weeks, from 1 June through 21 June (last year's election ran for just ten days). While the rules of the election are largely completed, some minor changes may still be introduced. Under discussion currently is a proposal to send an official e-mail to all eligible voters regarding the election, and the voting system to be used; both of these proposals are contingent upon their technical feasibility.
These rules, and any other election-related tasks, are being handled by the Board Election committee, a seven-person panel consisting of the following users:
Incumbent board member and current Board Chairperson Florence Devouard has not yet stated whether she plans to run in this election. Devouard has been a member of the Board since the first elections in 2004. Before the restructuring of the Board of Trustees in April, the seats of Michael Snow and Domas Mituzas, both of whom were appointed in February, would have come up for confirmation in this election. Instead, they will remain in their seats until Wikimedia chapters choose their own selections for the seats.
This week, Harel (Harel Cain), Sarcasticidealist (Steve Smith), and Skenmy (Paul Williams) entered the race. These three users are the only users standing for election as of press time; last year, 15 candidates ran for three open seats.
Multilingual editors are encouraged to consider translating various election notices, candidate presentations, and other pages into as many languages as possible.
Next week: The Signpost will examine the election rules and regulations.
Two wiki events held in San Francisco Bay Area
Maker Faire
Credit: ShakataGaNai.
On May 4 and 5, volunteers and staff from the Wikimedia Foundation ran a booth about the Wikimedia projects at Maker Faire, a two-day event in San Mateo, California focused on do-it-yourself technology. Over 65,000 people attended the event, which was sponsored by O'Reilly Media and Make Magazine.
The Wikimedia booth featured two large projection screens, one displaying an IRC feed of recent changes from the top-10 language Wikipedias, and the other displaying random articles from a selection of projects. Computers were available for demonstrating the projects and showing visitors how to edit. Volunteers gave away Wikimedia-related materials, including buttons, stickers, and small "reader's guide" versions of the new book Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. Thousands of people visited the booth over the course of the two-day weekend. Several booth volunteers commented that although the majority of visitors said they already were familiar with and used Wikipedia heavily, few visitors said they were active editors.
Recent Changes Camp
Credit: Jay Walsh.
On May 9, 10 and 11, volunteers from the wiki community hosted the fourth Recent Changes Camp, in Palo Alto at the Socialtext offices. Recent Changes Camp (or RCC) is a free unconference about wikis, in the style of Barcamp. The theme of the weekend was "Assume Good Faith", and the sponsors were AboutUs.org, Atlassian, Socialtext, Solseed, Wikia, and wikiHow.
The first RCC was held in Portland, Oregon in 2006; subsequent conferences have been held in Portland and Montreal. Members of any wiki community or company are welcome at RCC, along with others who may be unfamiliar with wikis but would like to learn more. The conference has usually focussed on issues related to wiki culture and community, as well as wiki software technical development.
Around 60 people were in attendance over the course of the weekend, including several Wikimedians. Some Wikimedia Commons contributors took extensive photos, now collected in a Category at the site. Attendees were from as far away as Boston, Montreal and Chicago; a group of attendees also drove together from Portland on a "wiki bus". The conference used open space methodology to develop the agenda; participants proposed discussion topics of interest and placed them on a "schedule wall", thereby creating the conference schedule. Topics of discussion at the camp included "wiki & fandom", "Community Building", "wiki data" (on structured wikis) and "What Will/Should Wikipedia Look/Feel Like in 20 years?" A session entitled "Who edits Wikipedia?" focussed on research done by Ed Chi at PARC. Along with a research team, Chi has developed a tool called WikiDashboard which can be used for analyzing editor contributions, and has also analyzed Wikipedia data dumps to determine the proportion of Wikipedia edits made by administrators, among other questions.
The next Recent Changes Camp will be held in Portland, Oregon in 2009. Find out more at the Recent Changes Camp website (there should be a wiki for '09 up and running soon).
New feature enables users to bypass IP blocks
Users may now be given permission to bypass a block on the IP address from which they edit Wikipedia. Even if the IP address is "hard-blocked" so that registered users cannot edit, the IP block exemption policy enables these users to edit.
NonvocalScream announced the new feature on the Administrators' noticeboard on May 8. It was implemented as a result of feature request 9862.
FT2 explained on the noticeboard: "There are two main situations it'll be most useful - constructive users who edit via a vandalism range or shared IP we would like to hard-block, and users who would like to edit anonymously via Tor or another hard-blocked open proxy."
Several users have been given IP block exemptions because they edit from the same IP range as a hard-blocked vandal. However, the process for allowing trusted users to edit via open proxies, which are often blocked due to the "open proxies" policy, has not been finalized or implemented. Allowing users to edit from open proxies would require careful investigation to prevent abuse of the anonymity, as it would mean that a checkuser on the user would not produce useful results.
Some bots have also been given an IP block exemption. FT2 explained: "This might be useful for 'bots that meet some suitable standard of approval and acceptance'... it will mean such a bot can't be blocked as a result of a toolserver block, or fallout via autoblock from another bot being blocked."
One way in which this feature has been used over the past few days is in blocking dynamic IP ranges where particularly persistent vandalism has occurred; increasingly, these ranges are being blocked, with checkusers providing good-faith accounts within that range with IP block exemptions. Previously, many of these ranges were not hard-blocked, allowing so-called "sleeper" accounts to continue to vandalize via these ranges.
Users and bots with the IP block exemption are listed here.
"Accountcreator" permission also added
Another, much more low-key permission was added this week. The "accountcreator" group allows non-administrators to create more than six accounts per day. It's used for non-administrators who help out on Wikipedia:Request an account, a page for users who cannot, for some reason, create a username through the usual process. There, the ability to create more accounts can be helpful in granting requested accounts. The permission has been granted, so far, to about twenty non-administrator accounts involved in the process.
WikiWorld: "Tony Clifton"
- This comic originally appeared on February 19, 2007.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Tony Clifton". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
News and notes
Poll to change "autoconfirmed" level
A poll is currently active, aiming to judge whether the level for "autoconfirmed" status should be changed. The status, which is currently given automatically four days after the registration of an account, allows a user to move pages, edit semi-protected pages, upload files, mark pages as "patrolled", and add external links without running into a CAPTCHA question or image. Currently, consensus is leaning toward a change to seven days after the registration of an account, with at least 20 edits, but the poll is still open.
What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia was the response to a question on the American game show Jeopardy!. The clue, in the category "How Sophomoric!", was "In February 2008, someone edited Hillary Clinton's entry on this website, replacing her picture with one of a walrus". It was answered correctly. The game in which the question appeared, part of the show's 2008 College Championship, aired on May 7.
Briefly
- A Washington D.C. meetup is scheduled for Saturday, May 17, at 5 p.m. EDT (21:00 UTC). It will be held at Uno's, at Union Station.
- The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
- The Latin Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
- The Ukrainian Wiktionary has reached 4,000 articles.
In the news
Wikipedia: a game in need of fixing
The failure of Wikipedia – Wikipedia is said to be a game where the people with the most time, but not necessarily the most knowledgeable, manipulate Wikipedia's "gameable system". Against the backdrop of allegations of groups seeking to intentionally bias Wikipedia articles, this letter to the editor calls for the "experiment" to be fixed.
Student works proudly displayed
Wikipedia now a teaching tool – Academics have often viewed Wikipedia with disdain, but some academics have turned Wikipedia into a teaching tool, by asking their students to write articles for Wikipedia. One particular project, called "Murder, Madness and Mayhem", run by a Latin American literature professor, was particularly successful, and resulted in three featured articles created by nine students. The professor promised his students an A+ mark if the articles became featured.
Other mentions
Other recent mentions in the online press include:
- Traffic Report: Nielsen Says Wikipedia U.S. Growth Slowing – The U.S. audience for Wikipedia seems to be "maturing" based on figures that show that the growth rate is slowing down.
- French publisher plans Wikipedia rival – French publisher Larousse has launched an online encyclopedia, where you can find its own content on the left-hand side of the page and user-generated articles on the right-hand side of the page. The publisher will also consider using contributed content in special print publications.
Dispatches: Changes at Featured lists
A Featured list (FL) exemplifies Wikipedia's very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation. The process of determining which lists to feature is similar to the procedure for identifying featured articles: high-quality lists are nominated at Featured list candidates (FLC) and reviewed for compliance with the criteria before they can be promoted. Featured lists do not have a spot on the Main page, but there have been several proposals for a "Today's featured list".
Initiated in June 2005 by Filiocht, the process has since seen more than 700 promotions. List of North American birds was the first successful promotion on June 1, 2005, while List of gaps in Interstate Highways was the first to fail. The majority of the promotions during the first year were handled by ALoan and Jguk.
As of May 9, 2008, just under a third (231) of FLs are related to sports or recreation; 81 are media-related; 64 relate to politics and government; 62 are about geography and places; and 61 are music-related. At present there are no featured lists relating to language and linguistics, philosophy or psychology (see the bar graph below). This profile is significantly different from that of featured articles. While there is less participation than in the featured article candidates process, the number of FLC promotions per month is slowly increasing: in March and April, a total of 113 lists were promoted.
The featured list removal process has traditionally seen a lower level of participation: from 2005 to 2007, only 11 FLs were delisted. However, participation has recently increased, and 23 FLs have already been delisted this year.
FL directors
The FL process has never had a designated manager. Instead, promotions and archivings have been handled by users from among the community of regular reviewers. Recent debate on the process has led to the creation of two FL directors. They play a similar role in the FL process as the featured article director Raul654 and his delegate SandyGeorgia in the FA process. The directors will be responsible for the overall management of the process and, inter alia, will determine consensus, interpret reviewers' declarations, and on that basis promote and archive nominations.
The recommendation to create the directorate received almost unanimous support. The nomination process began almost immediately. Initially, there were 11 candidates; as voting proceeded, five declined and two withdrew, leaving Dweller, Matthewedwards, Scorpion0422 and The Rambling Man as candidates. All four have extensive experience of the FLC process, and between them have successfully nominated 60 FLs. Two vote leaders—The Rambling Man and Scorpion0422—emerged early on. When the election was closed on May 8 by Raul654, Scorpion0422 had 29 support votes, The Rambling Man 27 supports and one oppose, Dweller 15 supports; and Matthewedwards six supports and one oppose vote. The Rambling Man and Scorpion0422 will serve as co-directors, and in the next week will make arrangements for two designated users to manage the featured list removal process.
FL criteria and instructions
Along with the creation of director roles, the FL criteria have come under scrutiny. Lack of reviewers and lack of clarity in the criteria were felt to be issues that needed to be addressed. Tony1 initiated the discussion and offered a draft for discussion. Comments on this have prompted several revisions, and work towards consensus continues. All editors with an interest in the FL process are invited to participate.
The instructions for the FL process have undergone interim changes to accommodate the creation of the directorate, drawing partly on the wording of the FAC instructions. The current rules require nominations to remain on the FLC page for ten days; to be promoted, they must have consensus for promotion with a minimum of three supports in addition to that of the nominator. These rules are safeguards against premature promotion or archival without an adequate review. Further changes to the instructions are likely to be debated over the coming weeks and months; a discussion has already begun on whether the fixed rules on minimum levels of support or the length of time a nomination remains open should be altered or left to director discretion.
A current issue: longer lists and comprehensiveness
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The general list guidelines and FL criteria require that the lead section of a stand-alone list clearly define the entry criteria. While desirable, it is not always possible to select a suitable title that accurately summarises the scope of a list.
Authors of football (soccer) player lists have traditionally placed a threshold on their entry criteria, to keep the list to a manageable size and to focus the entries on those more likely to have a worthwhile Wikipedia article. Many football clubs have been around since the late 1800s, so a complete list of players would probably be enormous. In contrast, lists of ice-hockey players have traditionally been complete; this has generally not been a problem, because nominated clubs have not been particularly old. However, a recent nomination of the Chicago Blackhawks (founded in 1926) ran into problems when it attempted to adopt a football-list approach to restricting the entry criteria. The nomination failed three times (1, 2, 3), and several reviewers opposed promotion because of a lack of "completeness". The nominator (Teemu08) then nominated one of the football lists (Arsenal F.C.) for removal, to establish if we should "delist all sports-related lists that do not include all of the players that ever played for the club".
A long debate ensued with comments from more than 20 editors, but ultimately the attempt to demote the list at FLRC failed for lack of consensus. All of these lists meet the current FL criterion for "comprehensiveness", since they summarise the defined scope in their leads. However, many football lists are incomplete in relation to their title, and some editors felt that this rendered the title misleading. The advantages and disadvantages of complete or restricted lists were discussed, and two of the suggestions were to split a list into several sections (similar to the List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people lists, several of which are FLs), and to rename a list to reflect the defined scope.
Features and admins
Administrators
One user was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Kakofonous (nom).
Bots
Eleven bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: SamatBot (task request), Giggabot (task request), SteveCrossinBot (task request), SteveCrossinBot (task request), SoxBot (task request), BetacommandBot (task request), ClueBot II (task request), WODUPbot (task request), SoxBot V (task request), BLPWatchBot (task request), and Addbot (task request).
Featured pages
Twelve articles were promoted to featured status last week: Parallel computing (nom), Halo 3 Original Soundtrack (nom), Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (nom), Sertraline (nom), Getting It: The psychology of est (nom), Johnson Creek (Willamette River) (nom), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (nom), Akhtar Hameed Khan (nom), Cattle Egret (nom), Chickasaw Turnpike (nom), Hugh Trumble (nom), Touch Me I'm Sick (nom), Ngo Dinh Can (nom), Aeneas Mackintosh (nom), Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood (nom), J. R. Richard (nom), Cygnus X-1 (nom), and 2006 Atlantic hurricane season (nom).
Ten lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of acquisitions by Cisco Systems (nom), List of acquisitions by Yahoo! (nom), El-P discography (nom), List of tallest buildings in Jersey City (nom), List of Oxford United F.C. managers (nom), List of acquisitions by eBay (nom), List of Atlantic Coast Conference football champions (nom), List of Christmas number one singles (UK) (nom), Sydney International Piano Competition (nom), and List of Governors of Pennsylvania (nom).
One topic was promoted to featured status last week: Rock Steady (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: El Señor Presidente, Battle of Blenheim, West Indian cricket team in England in 1988, Israel, Glynn Lunney, Flag of Germany, and History of Minnesota.
Former featured pages
Six articles were delisted last week: Scooby-Doo (nom), Cheese (nom), Ku Klux Klan (nom), Tom Brinkman (nom), TGV (nom), ASCII (nom).
One list was delisted last week: List of billionaires (2007) (nom).
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Acapulco, Saltbox, Autotomy, John F. Kennedy Library, Northern Mockingbird, VR warehouses and Mandibles.
No sounds were featured last week.
No featured pictures were demoted last week.
Four pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
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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 RSS feed for Special:Newpages no longer incorrectly prompts for an edit summary. (r34230, bug 13952)
- Several bugfixes to the API were made this week:
- Admins and bots can again query large numbers of titles in one API query (rather than being limited to 50). (r34296, bug 13965)
- The API allpages query now honours the apfrom parameter when sorting in decending order. (r34361, bug 13993)
- The query-continue for alllinks queries now works correctly when there are a large number of links to the same page. (r34392, bug 14018)
- Image redirects now work correctly when viewing the redirected image page itself. (r34568, bug 13943)
New features
- There is now an option to watchlist a user's User and User Talk pages when blocking them. (r34307, bug 13950)
- API recentchanges queries now allow an rcshow=patrolled option to filter out patrolled (or non-patrolled) changes; note that on the English Wikipedia, the only patrolled changes will be page creations and log entries (log entries are always considered patrolled by the software). (r34394, bug 14013)
- The list of templates used on an article (shown at the bottom of the edit page) is now sorted, even when previewing a page. (r34485, bug 12644)
- API queries for the interwiki map now distinguish between interlanguage links (which appear in the 'in other languages' box unless quoted with a colon, like :de:) and interwiki links (which appear as ordinary links, like w:). (r34499, bug 14028)
- The API queries list=allusers and list=users now each support displaying all information that was available from the other (thus adding usprop=registration and auprop=blockinfo). (r34500, bug 14022)
- Special:Whatlinkshere now supports listing image inclusion links; although these were available on the image page anyway, that list is limited to 500 entries whereas the Special:Whatlinkshere list can be paged through any number of entries. (bug 3759; r34320 and r34507)
Configuration changes
- Two new user groups were added this week. Each can be granted and revoked by administrators; note that all administrators gain the benefit of these groups regardless of whether they have them or not (much the same way as with rollback).
- The ipblock-exempt group allows users to edit via a blocked IP; in order to block a user with ipblock-exempt, it is necessary to block their username. (see related story) (bug 9862)
- The accountcreator group allows users to create more than 6 accounts per day (this limit is an anti-sockpuppetry measure, but used to cause problems at Wikipedia:Request an account, as checks for conflicting accounts need to be done by non-administrators). (bug 13498)
Other technology news
- Wikipedia was down for a while at about 17:40 on 5 May; this was due to some code related to global groups (e.g. granting +rollbacker to all a user's Single User Login accounts) accidentally being deployed before the servers had been prepared for it.
Breaking changes
- The deprecated usage of titles= rather than bltitle= in a list=backlinks API query has been removed. (r34518, bug 14021)
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 closed one case this week, leaving five currently open.
Closed case
- Prem Rawat: A case involving the actions of editors on Prem Rawat and related articles. Remedies passed placing Prem Rawat and related articles on article probation, and reminding editors on the topic who may have, or may be perceived as having a conflict of interest, to comply with NPOV and conflict of interest policies.
New cases
- Giovanni33: A case involving the accusation of sockpuppetry by Giovanni33. Giovanni33 and Rafaelsfingers, who has been labeled as a sockpuppet of Giovanni33 by some, have denied the charges.
- Footnoted quotes: A case involving the use of quotes in footnotes; some users allege that Richard Arthur Norton has been using these quotes excessively, and against consensus. Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ), however, has argued for the quotes, and noted that he's "flexible" regarding specific uses of the quotes.
- CAMERA lobbying: A case involving alleged lobbying by pro-Israel group Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) on Middle East-related articles. Gni was banned indefinitely by the community in the wake of these allegations; Gni denied allegations that he was Gilead Ini, a senior member of CAMERA. Zeq was community-banned for one year, and Dajudem was banned from Arab-Israeli topics for one year.
Voting phase
- Homeopathy: A dispute involving a number of editors over the Homeopathy article. Remedies with the support of four arbitrators include banning DanaUllman for one year, the creation of a "Sourcing Adjudication Board" regarding the inappropriate use of citations, and emphasizing the Committee's ability to issue subsequent sanctions in the case, based on reports of "inappropriate conduct" as judged by the Sourcing Adjudication Board. Two versions of another sanction each have the support of just one arbitrator, allowing administrators to impose sanctions on editors in the dispute.
- Tango: A case involving a controversial block of MONGO by Tango under this finding. Currently, three remedies have been proposed:
- Suspending Tango's use of the blocking tool: Supported 5-2.
- Suspending Tango's adminship for one month: Supported 7-1. This is the only version that currently passes (a majority is seven arbitrators for this case)
- Indefinitely revoking Tango's adminship: Supported 5-2.