Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-03-07
Wikimedia fundraiser exceeds target, ends early
The Wikimedia Foundation's fundraiser Archived 2005-04-05 at the Wayback Machine for the first quarter of 2005 surpassed its goals and ended early last Tuesday, with nearly US$100,000 having been raised.
Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer announced the official end of the campaign on Tuesday (midnight Monday based on PayPal's eastern U.S. time zone) when it became clear that the US$75,000 target had been reached. Mayer said the fundraiser, which had originally been planned to run through 10 March, was "a phenomenal success". The site-wide notice used to call attention to the drive was converted into a "Thank you" message to donors for a few more days, then removed.
In his final updated report on Thursday, Mayer indicated that the Foundation had brought in a total of $94,648.70, with more than half of this being funds in other currencies converted into U.S. dollars. A few people still indicated that they weren't able to donate in the currency they had available, since PayPal only supports six currencies. Donations could also be made in Moneybookers, which supports 27 different currencies, but the fundraiser information page only said that Moneybookers' fees were often lower, without mentioning the availability of other currencies.
Planning for the next round
For the next fundraiser, Mayer said that direct processing of credit card payments would almost certainly be provided, without needing to use PayPal or Moneybookers, although those options would still be available.
Another issue raised as a result of the fundraiser was the possibility of starting additional local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation in the United Kingdom and Canada. The donations generated by this fundraiser included €15,254.66 raised by the German chapter of the Foundation, helped by the fact that the chapter has its own bank account in order to support bank transfers (a more common form of transaction there), along with the eligibility of donations for tax deductions. Meanwhile, at last report the Foundation is still awaiting confirmation from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service that it qualifies for tax exemption, which will allow U.S. taxpayers who itemize to deduct donations as a charitable contribution.
In related news, Yann announced on Monday that the French chapter of the Foundation had been officially registered as a nonprofit organization.
Jimmy Wales asks for more developers at FOSDEM
As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels, Jimmy Wales appealed to the development community for support on the technical side of running Wikipedia, and coverage of his remarks was published in several places last week.
Wales' appearance at the conference came 26 February, but reports of his remarks took a few days to trickle into English-language media. On ZDNet's UK site last Tuesday, Ingrid Marson's article on the speech, "Wikipedia needs help to keep growing", focused on the need for people to help handle Wikipedia's continuing growth in traffic. While the necessary hardware is easy to provide, Wales said, the worry is that a lack of developers to manage the increasingly complex server structure will restrict the development of the project.
Of particular concern is making sure the encyclopaedia will be resistant to the ever-growing problems presented by spambots. "It's very important that Wikipedia doesn't become the next Usenet", said Wales. The article noted that people interested in helping with development tasks should sign up for the wikitech mailing list or join the MediaWiki IRC channel.
Spymac reprinted an abbreviated version of the article, "Wikipedia needs public's help", on its website Thursday. Several bloggers who attended the conference also commented on Wales' address, with generally favorable impressions.
Interview signals future directions
In a pre-conference interview, Wales commented further on some of the issues developers are dealing with, along with answering general questions about the project. As part of these issues, he talked about efforts to produce reviewed or stable versions of Wikipedia content, including print and optical disc formats.
Wales promised that an article rating system would be implemented soon, although this would be for information-gathering purposes only prior to developing a more formal review process. An article rating feature designed by developer Magnus Manske is currently being tested and may be incorporated into a future MediaWiki software upgrade.
Student use of Wikipedia citations debated
The interaction between Wikipedia and academia was revisited in a blog entry last Monday, entitled "Who's afraid of Wikipedia?" by Clay Shirky, a New York University professor who frequently writes about the Internet. Shirky discussed the ever more common situation of students citing Wikipedia articles.
In contrast with other academics, who often oppose the use of Wikipedia citations, Shirky said that "the Wikipedia is a fine resource on a large number of subjects, and can and should be cited in those cases". He compared the situation to students citing Encyclopædia Britannica, and said that in both cases, citing a primary source might sometimes be better, but saw no general problem with Wikipedia citations.
Contrasting views on Wikipedia citations
The post prompted several responses, and among those who weighed in was Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. Sanger continued his recent trend of commenting negatively on the current state of Wikipedia. "I always recommend that my students not use Wikipedia as a source for philosophy papers", he said. He went on to criticize Shirky for having a "misguided faith" in the way Wikipedia works, and predicted that a different way of creating an open-source encyclopedia would soon arise to "blow Wikipedia out of the water", and that academics would be happy to see citations from this new source.
Pursuing a similar story angle, a reporter for the Wayne State University student newspaper, The South End, [1] interviewed several professors for their comments on the issue of citing Wikipedia. Their responses varied depending on the situation and context of the citation. "For an undergraduate class it's just fine", but "for my graduate class I don't expect them to use it", said one. Others noted concerns with the lack of a formal peer review system on Wikipedia.
Citations continue in press coverage
Academics may worry about using Wikipedia as a source, but major news outlets continue to reference Wikipedia articles. Mentions this week include ABS-CBN citing our article on the Sony Walkman, WebProNews.com making use of the entry on phishing, Dutch newspaper Expatica.com citing Total Football in an article on the death of Rinus Michels, and the New York Sun discussing stakeholder in an article about corporate takeovers.
Meanwhile, in other press coverage, the feature about Wikipedia in the March issue of Wired Magazine, "The Book Stops Here", which has already been on some newsstands for a couple weeks (see archived story), was finally published online last week.
New York Times moving closer to competing on Wikipedia turf
Efforts by The New York Times to compete directly with the type of content Wikipedia provides may increase in the near future as the paper continues to overhaul its web presence.
Earlier hints of this can be seen in the Times' purchase of About.com (see archived story), which like Wikipedia uses human editors to provide content on various subjects. It appears that the Times also plans to use its own archives to create similar topical sites that could compete with Wikipedia.
Blogger David Weinberger reported on Wednesday that the newspaper would be revamping its website at www.nytimes.com in April. Based on an interview with Robert Larson, the website's director of product management and development, he said the changes would include a significant effort to provide more access to content drawn from the paper's archives.
The format Weinberger described would not be direct access to the newspaper's archives, for which the website will continue to charge a fee. However, the archived material would also be used to organize a number of topic pages, and as current news stories get moved to the archive, the link for the story would direct readers to an appropriate topic page instead. In concept, the topic page would be like a gateway or portal leading to the archives and helping the Times to generate more revenue from them.
In his analysis, Weinberger commented that it would be natural to compare these topic pages to Wikipedia articles dealing with the same topic. He expressed confidence that in most cases, "we're going to find the Wikipedia page more useful, more current, more neutral, and more linked into the Web." If not, Weinberger added, "we'll edit the Wikipedia page until it's better. And then we'll link it to the NYTimes.com topic page."
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee last week closed the case of one of the most problematic users it has dealt with, imposing a lengthy ban. In a separate case, it backed off from its experiment with POV paroles as a remedy.
Litigating can be vexing
In their second case dealing with CheeseDreams, which involved a variety of disruptive activity, the arbitrators imposed several different bans last Thursday. The grounds for banning included her disregard of the previous ruling, misuse of the dispute resolution process, and abuse of sockpuppet accounts. The total bans add up to 18 months and will run consecutively, but the Arbitration Committee has adopted a practice that the maximum length of a ban at any given time is limited to one year.
In addition to CheeseDreams' disclosure of her password (see archived story), the matter was further complicated by the involvement of one of her antagonists, Rienzo (who received his own three-month ban in January), and the use of numerous sockpuppets. The use of sockpuppets and impersonation accounts was such that the arbitrators could not determine for each specific instance which of the two was responsible. Instead, they banned both users for six months, and instructed that attempts by either one to implicate the other would restart the running of the six-month period for both users.
Due to CheeseDreams' attempts to start a number of requests for comment as well as a few requests for arbitration, which the arbitrators concluded were "unreasonable" and did not meet the guidelines for those processes, the decision ruled that CheeseDreams was considered a "vexatious litigant", and restricted her use of the dispute resolution process. CheeseDreams was required to submit any such requests to one of two arbitrators for clearance, The Epopt or sannse, and failure to do this could lead to a ban of up to one week.
Cooling down global warming
On Sunday, the arbitrators issued their ruling in the case against JonGwynne, brought by William M. Connolley based on allegations of POV editing and personal attacks. The decision found that JonGwynne had engaged in a mixture of incivility and personal attacks, so they placed him on a standard personal attack parole, which allows bans up to a week in length for any personal attacks.
The arbitrators also considered imposing a "POV parole", such as was previously applied to -lothario- (see archived story). However, arbitrator Fred Bauder reiterated his objection to a procedure that "gives the majority of those editing an article the ability to block another user on the basis of addition or removal of content." Instead, the decision settled on placing JonGwynne under a restriction of one revert per 24 hours for all articles related to global warming, the subject that was the focus of the dispute.
New cases accepted
The Arbitration Committee opened three new cases last week. A request from several editors on Tuesday led to the initiation of a case involving JarlaxleArtemis, after complaints about a variety of bizarre behavior. Disputes over Turkic issues and the Caucasus prompted another request. Also, the recent block war (see related story) was one of the issues raised in a new request brought by Netoholic against 172.
Correction: A previous story included Jakew as part of a group of anti-circumcision activists warned by the Arbitration Committee about their editing habits in the Robert the Bruce case. As Tony Sidaway points out, Jakew actually tended to side with Robert the Bruce against the anti-circumcision activists.
Peer review boosts featured article output to new record
Recent efforts to improve the process at Wikipedia:Peer review yielded noticeable results last week, as they helped contribute to a record output of new featured articles.
Over the week covering from 27 February through 5 March, 17 articles were promoted to featured article status. Featured Articles Director Raul654 reports that this is a record for the most new featured articles in one week. Peer review helped with nearly half of these - Tamil language, Steve Dalkowski, Bank of China (Hong Kong), Aramaic language, Penda of Mercia, Kylie Minogue, Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern Railway, and The Cantos.
Articles that have gone through peer review have been increasingly well-represented over the last few weeks among featured article candidates. They also tend to be more likely to be successful nominations. The Steve Dalkowski article was actually nominated unsuccessfully once, went through peer review, then came back and passed on its second try.
How peer review changed
The peer review system received a significant overhaul in January to make it more like the featured article candidates page and allow the two processes to work more closely together. Peer review is intended as a way of preparing articles that are not quite polished yet to eventually reach featured article status.
The changes to peer review included both cosmetic and substantive measures. Visually, the peer review page was organized more like the FAC page, including the use of individual subpages for each article being listed. This allowed users requesting peer review to monitor the listing they were interested in. Also, to make things more useful and manageable for those contributing, this was now expected as part of the request - failure to respond to suggestions would lead to the article being removed from the peer review process. Meanwhile, the featured article nomination process has long allowed obviously unqualified nominations to be sent to peer review, but until recently such a move usually brought little feedback.
Other featured articles and pictures
The rest of the new featured articles, which managed without going through peer review first, included James K. Polk, Buddhist art, Bicycle, Comet Hale-Bopp, The Temptations, and Pioneer Zephyr. Also, Páll worked on several nominations related to South Africa, as Flag of South Africa was promoted along with History of Cape Colony from 1806 to 1870. His nomination of the South Africa article itself failed on its first try, but a second nomination was still pending.
New featured pictures from last week:
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The vote on Talk:Gdansk/Vote to resolve the Gdansk/Danzig naming dispute has closed as scheduled on Friday, March 4th 0:00. (See also the previous article) This vote aimed to resolve the multi-year, multi-article dispute about the naming of Gdansk/Danzig, arguably the largest and longest-running article content dispute on Wikipedia.
Since notice of the vote was posted on many of the talk pages for affected articles, and also announced in several other places, the vote received a significant turnout with about 100 users adding their votes. A lively discussion was also active on Talk:Gdansk/Vote and Talk:Gdansk/Vote/discussion, although many of the arguments were already known to participants in previous discussions on Talk:Gdansk.
Naming of Gdansk/Danzig
In the first section of the vote, the naming of Gdansk and Danzig was decided. Dividing the history of the city into six periods, most periods received a very clear result, although there were some discussions about the exact starting and ending years for the respective periods. A large number of voters preferred the city to be named Gdansk before 1308, and after 1945. Between 1308 and 1466, and between 1793 and 1945 a large majority voted for Danzig. Only the period from 1466 to 1793 was almost evenly split between Danzig and Gdansk, as the city was under Polish overlordship during this period but remained culturally German. Ultimately a slim majority preferred Danzig, in line with the practice common in English-language history books.
For a quick summary, the outcome is that the city is to be named Danzig between 1308 and 1945, and Gdansk before 1308 and after 1945. The vote left open the possibility that these guidelines may change in the future if the community consensus changes.
Cross-naming
In addition to settling which name to use according to different time periods, three cross-naming proposals received large support. These dealt with the initial reference in an article, so that the first mention of Gdansk should also refer to (Danzig), and the first mention of Danzig should also refer to (Gdansk) to provide more information to the user about the city that is still known under both names. The same principle would apply to other locations that share a history between Poland and Germany, for example with Szczecin (Stettin) or Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland).
Another guideline that received general support recognized different treatment in biographical articles based on the nationality of the subject. Thus for biographies of clearly Polish persons, the Polish name is to be used, and for biographies of clearly German persons, the German name is to be used, always with the first instance referring to the other name Gdansk (Danzig) and Danzig (Gdansk).
Some voters expressed an explicit preference for Polish-only names if the location reference is limited to after 1945, citing for example the List of cities in Poland, List of airports in Poland, etc. This, however, did not receive majority support, with a smaller number of voters explicitly opposing this limitation. In any case, the cross-naming does not need to be followed at all cost if there is agreement with respect to individual articles, but the vote could still guide decisions in case of a dispute.
Enforcement
The last part of the vote dealt with how the results could be enforced, and the possible protections for users trying to enforce them. Many voters on both sides opposed labeling edits that did not comply with this naming convention as vandalism. However, a majority of participants did support the enforcement proposal.
Underlying this was the question of whether changes that violated the naming guideline, as determined by the poll, could be reverted without subjecting the person reverting to the three-revert rule. In complex edits that involved more than just the naming issue, however, reverting other content would still be seen as a regular revert.
Conclusion
The vote successfully showed that community opinion strongly favors one of the options over the other in most cases. This may help solve a large number of edit wars related to Polish-German topics on Wikipedia, although many disputes are not limited only to the location names. As with all decisions on Wikipedia, the consensus view may change in the future, but until then this vote can hopefully serve as a useful guide to editors dealing with these disputed names.
Block war leads to group being de-sysoped temporarily
A block war last week briefly led to the de-sysoping of several Wikipedia administrators. All had their admin privileges restored, but one of them decided afterward to leave Wikipedia.
Revert complaint stokes furor
The incident started as a reported three-revert rule violation, due to a dispute between 172 and Silverback over History of Russia, an article 172 had recently succeeded in getting made a featured article. The two got into an edit war on Monday over the subject of emigration and each made three reverts (Reverts: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]), but because 172 had made a different revert the previous day, Silverback reported this on the admin noticeboard as a violation.
In response to the complaint, Jayjg pointed out that the first revert was different from the others, since the question of whether the rule applies to any reverts or only identical reverts has been debated previously (see archived story). However, Geni went ahead and blocked 172 at 20:44 (UTC) on Monday.
About two hours later at 22:42 (UTC), 172 unblocked himself, contending that the block was mistaken and he had not violated the rule. He was immediately re-blocked by Snowspinner with the comment, "Unblocking yourself is verboten." Again 172 unblocked himself, and the two went back and forth for several blocks and unblocks, ending with 172 unblocking himself at 23:20 (UTC).
At 01:39 (UTC) on Tuesday, Geni stepped back in to block 172 again, saying on the noticeboard, "There was no mistake." When 172 returned to unblock himself later that day, another round followed when Chris 73 blocked him yet again. Throughout the dispute over the block, 172 insisted that he had not violated any rule and said, "I'm a bit disappointed that so many admins fell for Silverback's trick of reporting an earlier revert of an incorrect anon edit as a part of the emigration edit war."
Ed Poor's intervention
The cycle of blocks and unblocks finally ended when bureaucrat Ed Poor took the extreme measure of de-sysoping all of the admins who had been involved in the block war - Geni, 172, Snowspinner, and Chris 73. This prompted further concerns, both due to the unilateral action taken without warning, and because bureaucrats are only supposed to have the ability to confer admin status, not remove it.
It was determined that Poor, who although not a developer himself had been one of those responsible for promoting new admins before bureaucrats existed, still had a developer flag in the system for this purpose. While he had since been made a bureaucrat, the developer flag had never been removed, which made it possible for him to de-sysop as well as make new sysops. Once this was determined, the flag was removed, and Poor restored the admin status of all those affected.
Once this was all sorted out, Snowspinner, who had brought a request for arbitration over the issue, withdrew the request. Meanwhile, 172 announced his departure from Wikipedia by posting a farewell message on his user page.
The ability to remove admin status is actually supposed to be restricted to stewards, who have this capability on all Wikimedia projects but are only supposed to use it on projects where they are not personally active, based on community consensus. In the aftermath of this incident, Anthere suggested that new stewards be added, saying that there was a need and several people had expressed interest. A discussion ensued on the Foundation mailing list, but the process had not been finalized.
Yahoo! features Wikipedia in its anniversary celebration
As part of Yahoo!'s celebration of its tenth anniversary last week, it featured Wikipedia in a look back at the history of the internet over the past ten years.
In what Yahoo called a "Netrospective", the company presented 100 snapshots of various events involving the internet since 1995. These naturally emphasized Yahoo's own corporate history, but also took the time to explore many internet phenomena, including both the purely ephemeral as well as more durable institutions.
Wikipedia was placed at number 75 on the list, although the order was not intended as a type of ranking, but rather followed a roughly chronological pattern. This fell right in between a commemoration of the MP3 format and a note about the failures of Webvan and Kozmo.com during the dot-com crash.
The item on Wikipedia featured an image of the newly designed portal at www.wikipedia.org (see archived story). The accompanying text read: "Merging collaboration and reference, Wikipedia launches a web encyclopedia in '01--letting anyone write and edit entries. Despite concerns about accuracy, the online world embraces the free-content model, adding over a million entries by '05." It also linked to an article in Wired News from January, Daniel Terdiman's "Wikipedia Faces Growing Pains".