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Volume 4, Issue 32 09 August 2008 About the Signpost
(← Prev) 2008 archives (Next →)
Anthrax suspect reportedly edit-warred on Wikipedia WikiWorld: "Fall Out Boy"
Dispatches: Style guide and policy changes, July WikiProject Report: WikiProject New York State routes
Features and admins Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
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SPV

Anthrax suspect reportedly edit-warred on Wikipedia

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By Ral315

In recently unsealed affidavits, the United States Federal Government claimed, among other things, that Bruce Edwards Ivins, a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks who apparently committed suicide in July 2008, had edit-warred on Wikipedia under the username Jimmyflathead. The site of the edit-warring was Kappa Kappa Gamma, a women's fraternity that investigators claim Ivins had an obsession with.

The first affidavit page dealing with Wikipedia.
The second affidavit page dealing with Wikipedia.

The text of the affidavit refers to Ivins' apparent usage of Wikipedia, and his edit-warring on Kappa Kappa Gamma pages: (NB: Where applicable, redacted text is marked "[REDACTED]", and errors have not been corrected.)

Investigations have revealed instances when [an e-mail account reportedly belonging to Ivins] was used in association with Wikipedia to further his obsession with KKG. Wikipedia is an on-line collection of information created by the contributions of Wikipedia users. Anyone may contribute to an entry, or article, once they set up a Wikipedia account and user name. The articles on Wikipedia are similar to an encyclopedia entry, however, the information contributed is not verified and may not be factual. Each Wikipedia article has a discussion page for contributors to post comments or questions about the contents of the article. Wikipedia users may also communicate directly with each other through Wikipedia using their Wikipedia user name. Wikipedia contains articles on the different national fraternities and sororities, including an article on KKG.

One frequent contributor to the KKG entry is identified by the username "jimmyflathead", believed by investigators to be Dr. Ivins. In e-mails to [REDACTED] Dr. Ivins, using his true name and the e-mail address jimmyflathead@yahoo.com, referenced information in the KKG article posted by "jimmyflathead" as his contributions. ...

As cataloged in the history pages of the KKG entry, Dr. Ivins has attempted to post derogatory information about the organization and its members as well as confidential information known only to KKG's members. Dr. Ivins, as jimmyflathead, frequently "signed" his postings on the discussion page as "jf". Dr. Ivins and other users have previously engaged in an "edit war" on the KKG article. An edit war is where a Wikipedia contributor posts information that is later changed or deleted by another contributor, and the contributors go back and forth deleting or changing each others contributions. [REDACTED] observed Dr. Ivins's postings and discussions with other users through the Wikipedia discussion forum in the KKG article and described his actions as follows:

Every time someone removed information, he added it back, and added more negative information along with it. That was his usual threat - delete this again and I will add more negative information to this site or reveal more secrets. The sheer volume of information is that [jimmyflathead] has is more than most members remember.

Over the course of the edit war, Dr. Ivins provided his personal e-mail address to other contributors to e-mail him directly before they removed his contributions from the site. According to [REDACTED] Dr. Ivins "seemed to encourage people to e-mail him directly" and described such action as counter to the "culture" of Wikipedia, where contributors usually communicate with each other through the individual article talk pages or e-mail using their Wikipedia user name. By so doing, Dr. Ivins was also keeping other contributors out of the discussions about the KKG article."

Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel Mike Godwin confirmed to the Signpost that the Foundation had been subject to a subpoena regarding the case last year: "[W]e complied with a subpoena regarding Jimmyflathead back in September of last year. We did not, as I recall, have an e-mail address or any other way to notify Jimmyflathead about the subpoena." Jimmyflathead's e-mail address is currently enabled, though it's not clear whether that was the case at the time of the subpoena.

Jimmyflathead edited sporadically from December 2005 through September 2007, making just over 100 edits, nearly all of which involved Kappa Kappa Gamma. Among those edits, Jimmyflathead mentions the names of Dr. Nancy Haigwood and Dr. Gail Wertz more than once, claiming that the two were members of KKG, and describing them as "alumae who have distinguished themselves". Haigwood taught pathobiology at the University of Washington, and is currently the director of the Oregon National Primate Research Center. She was also the target of Ivins' apparent obsession, stemming from his post-doctoral work at the University of North Carolina while Haigwood was studying microbiology there.[1]

She reported a suspicion that Ivins may have been involved to the FBI in 2002.[2] Haigwood remained in contact with Ivins over the next few years in order to help investigators. Wertz, meanwhile, teaches microbiology at the University of Virginia, but no link has been established publicly between Ivins and Wertz.

In response to the release of these documents, Jimbo Wales performed a checkuser on the Jimmyflathead account. When asked about the action, Wales said,

"In this case, this was about a potential press situation where I might find my phone ringing off the hook with journalists asking for information, and I felt a need to be prepared. As it turns out, his Wikipedia edits aren't that interesting, I didn't find any socks. I just thought, hmm, what if a checkuser showed that this guy was editing articles about Anthrax or whatever... no way do we need the disruption of claims like that surfacing without me being prepared. Fortunately, I found nothing." [3]

Evidence of any possible sockpuppet accounts would, of course, be unlikely to surface due to the long period of time since Jimmyflathead's last edit, a fact that Wales also noted.

References

  1. ^ Kravitz, Derek. Anthrax Evidence Getting Mixed Reaction, Washington Post, 7 August, 2008.
  2. ^ Nuckols, Ben. Microbiologist says she was stalked by Ivins, Associated Press, 8 August, 2008.
  3. ^ Wales, Jimbo. User talk:Jimbo Wales, 7 August, 2008.


SPV

WikiWorld: "Fall Out Boy"

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By Greg Williams
This comic originally appeared on November 5, 2007.

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

Dispatches: Style guide and policy changes, July

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By Tony1

Manual of Style (main page)

Article titles. The parenthetical phrase was added.

The initial letter of a title is capitalized (except in very rare cases, such as eBay).

This text:

Avoid restating or directly referring to the topic or to wording on a higher level in the hierarchy (Early life, not His early life).

was changed to:

Section names should not explicitly refer to the subject of the article, or to higher-level headings, unless doing so is shorter or clearer. For example, Early life is preferable to His early life when His means the subject of the article; headings can be assumed to be about the subject unless otherwise indicated.

This was added:

Section names should not normally contain links.

Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

The following text was added to Date autoformatting:

Careful consideration of the disadvantages and advantages of the [date] autoformatting mechanism should be made before applying it: the mechanism does not work for the vast majority of readers, such as unregistered users and registered users who have not made a setting, and can affect readability and appearance if there are already numerous high-value links in the text.
In the main text of an article, autoformatting should be used on either all or none of the month-day and month-day-year dates.

A number of not-very-substantive changes were made to Numbers as figures or words.

This text was added to "Conventions" (under "Unit symbols"):

  • Avoid the unicode characters ² and ³. They are harder to read on small display, and are not aligned with supercript characters (see x1x²x³x4 vs. x1x2x3x4). Superscript 2 and 3, created with <sup></sup>, can produce irregular line spacing, but that is usually a less serious problem.
  • The symbol for liter is either the lowercase l or uppercase L. However, since l can be easily confused for I (uppercase i ) or the numeral 1 (one), the uppercase L should be given preference when unprefixed (e.g., writing A 200 ml bottle and A 500 mL glass of beer are both acceptable, but write A 10 L tank instead of A 10 l tank).
  • Do not use the unicode "script ell" character ℓ and its variants (㎕, ㎖, ㎗ and ㎘).
  • Articles should use the lowercase l or uppercase L consistently (e.g., do not write This soft drink is available in both 250 ml and 2 L bottles, but rather This soft drink is available in both 250 mL and 2 L bottles).

In Disambiguation, this text:

Use long ton or short ton rather than just ton (the metric unit—the tonne—is also known as the metric ton).

was changed to:

Use long ton or short ton rather than just ton; these units have no symbol or abbreviation and are always spelled out. The metric unit equal to 1000 kilograms is the tonne and is officially known as the metric ton in the US. Whichever name for the metric unit is used, the symbol is "t".

The underlined wording was added to Criterion 3b:

[Articles in a topic that are not featured] due to either their limited subject matter or inherent instability must have passed an individual quality audit that included a completed peer review, with all important problems fixed.

Non-free content

WP:NFCC#8. The final clause was reinstated (after the comma), having been removed, reinstated, and removed over the past three months:

Significance. 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.

Audio and video clips are now explicitly included in the definition of "non-free content", which is "all copyrighted images,... and other media files that lack a free content license".

Lead section

In Bold title, "need not be" was strengthened to "is not":

If the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, and the title is simply descriptive—like Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers, Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, or List of schools in Marlborough, New Zealand—the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text; if it does happen to appear, it need not be is not in boldface."

MoS (capital letters)

This was added to Mixed or non-capitalization:

Some individuals, such as k.d. lang, do not want their personal names capitalized. In such cases, Wikipedia articles may use lower-case variants of personal names if they have regular and established use in reliable third-party sources. If multiple styles have regular and established use in reliable sources, use the orthography preferred by the individual.

MoS (text formatting)

In Main uses, the third sentence (after the ellipsis) was added:

Italics are generally used for titles of longer works. Enclose titles of shorter works in double quotation marks,... Items of middling length should be italicized or placed within double quotation marks as appropriate for the context.

In Boldface, the opening paragraph was rationalised to this:

Boldface is used to highlight an article title in the opening paragraph. It is typically used with proper names and common terms for the article topic, including any synonyms and acronym. Do this only for the first occurrence of the term; for instance, avoid using boldface both in the lead section and the caption of the lead image.


SPV

WikiProject Report: WikiProject New York State routes

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By Shoemaker's Holiday

Welcome to another issue of the WikiProject Report, highlighting the ways Wikipedians coordinate their efforts to make Wikipedia better. In this issue, we're interviewing prolific contributor Mitchazenia about WikiProject New York State routes.

New York State routes is a very successful small WikiProject. In under a year and a half, the vast majority of New York State routes have gained articles, and inroads have begun to be made on getting them to featured quality. Indeed, it has recently reached its "breakthrough" point, with the project's first five featured articles all have been achieved in the last two months, as well as a featured list and a featured topic. One of the many fine editors in that project, Mitchazenia has kindly agreed to take time out of his content work to be interviewed for this issue of The Signpost.

Before we begin, tell us a bit about yourself.

Mitchazenia: I am a user who started in November 2005, with the username of HurricaneCraze32, which implied that I was active with hurricanes. After some time with the project, around 2007, I moved off the hurricane scene and into U.S. Roads, mainly New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I started working hard with the roads, I sort of moved on, raising GAs and a few As over time. Anyway, the project now dominates all US Roads projects in FAs, As, and GAs.

Tell us about WikiProject New York Roads.

Mitchazenia: WikiProject New York State Routes was created in February 2006. It was originally to just include Interstates, State Routes, and U.S. Routes. The project, over a couple months began to gain more editors, and articles, with at least 2 articles being created a day. The project, as of today, mainly serves the same three, with two new additions, State reference routes, and county routes, the latter of which defies the project's name. There used to be a sister project, New York County Routes, which covered the county routes, but that was disbanded in July 2007 for the lack of need, as most articles were gone.

What happened to the County Routes?

Mitchazenia: They were deleted because most of them did not reach the notability standard, and were forever stubs.

About what percent of roads are now covered, and how many are FAs and GAs?

Mitchazenia: 5 Featured Articles, 3 A-class, 55 Good Articles, 1 Featured List, and 1 Featured Topic. That will probably change by the time it comes out.

How many roads are covered by the project?

Mitchazenia: I believe as of August 4, there were so far 680 roads that were covered by the project.

What achievements within the project are you most proud of?

Mitchazenia: New York State Route 174's Featured Article debacle, with which I spent months arguing getting the article up to Featured Article status. Another would be New York State Route 343 , which is currently a candidate for FA. This one has also taken a long time, and I really enjoy working on it.

Finally, what would you say to someone considering joining this project?

Mitchazenia: The project needs your help, there's only 136 stubs left, and we need more members to speedy clean them up. The articles then can move on to be the best on Wikipedia. We just need the help, but, its mainly up to you.


SPV

Features and admins

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By Ral315

Administrators

Two users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Gazimoff (nom), and Peripitus (nom).

Bots

Six bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week:

DinoBot2 (task request)

Diligent Terrier Bot (task request)

OKBot (task request)

DumZiBoT (task request)

TaBOT-zerem (task request)

SVGBot (task request).

Sixteen articles were promoted to featured status this week:

Twenty-two lists were promoted to featured status last week:

Four topics were promoted to featured status this week:

Two portals were promoted to featured status this week: Portal:California (nom) and Portal:Mars (nom).

The following featured articles were displayed this week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Joseph Francis Shea, Nuthatch, The Wiggles, Roy Welensky, BioShock, Anna May Wong, and Holden.

Two articles were delisted this week: Paragraph 175 (nom) and Jerusalem (nom).

One lists was delisted this week: List of X-Men episodes (nom).

No topics were delisted this week.

The following featured pictures (and film) were displayed this week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Malcolm X, Patchwork quilt, Yellow coneflowers, a film of tanks in World War I, JetBlue Airways Flight 292, and Bufflehead.

One sound was featured this week: Eisenhower farewell address (nom).

No featured pictures were demoted this week.

Six pictures were promoted to featured status this 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.2 (8fd6c9c), 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

  • Rollback was broken for a while last week due to incorrect code (not enough data was being sent by the server to validate that the rollback was permitted); this has now been fixed. (r38326, bug 14997)
  • The checkbox to not automatically fix redirects when moving a page now works (previously it incorrectly did nothing). (r38342, bug 14987)
  • An update to the code broke the Simple and Modern skins recently; the skins are now working again (bug 14954http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14954, several revisions involved in the fix)
  • Links in edit summaries to sections in diffs are now shown in the correct colour if the user viewing them has a stub threshold set. (r38505, bug 15023)

New features

  • "Show preview" now previews redirects as redirects, rather than previewing their wikitext. (r38409, bug 2333)
  • Logs, contributions and page histories all now allow paging by date and time as well as by pages. (r38404, bug 14377)
  • Special:Search now lists the search term used in the HTML <title> of the page in question. (r38440, bug 11035)

Other technology news

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 did not open or close any cases this week, leaving three currently open.

An apology

I must apologise to readers for taking my eye somewhat off the ball, and failing to notice until TML kindly brought it to my attention the desysopping of Can't sleep, clown will eat me, in a summary motion, on 18 July, pending his contacting the committee. This was on the basis of his failure to communicate regarding a large number of administrative actions he had taken.

Evidence phase

  • SlimVirgin-Lar: A case brought by Thatcher, asking the committee to review the use of checkuser by Lar, in the light of comments by SlimVirgin (here, inter alia), alleging that he misused the tool. Evidence is to be submitted privately to the committee by e-mail.

Voting phase

  • Geogre-William M. Connolley: A case involving wheel warring between Geogre and William M. Connolley. William M. Connolley inappropriately extended a block on Giano II, while Geogre inappropriately reversed the block, and reversed page protection on Giano's talk page. The case is currently in the voting phase; proposed remedies include:
    • Four different versions of a remedy modifying or removing remedy 2.2 in IRC. All versions are supported by four to five arbitrators, and opposed by three to four arbitrators.
    • Currently passing is a remedy prohibiting Geogre and Connolley from taking any administrative action with respect to Giano II. There is also injunction in effect prohibiting blocks or unblocks of Giano without the consent of a committee member.

Motion to close

  • C68-FM-SV: A case involving disputes between Cla68, FeloniousMonk, SlimVirgin, JzG, and others. The case, which has seen little-to-no public input from arbitrators, is currently subject to a motion to dismiss, with the support of one arbitrator, and the opposition of one.


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