Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-03-21
Wikipedia reaches milestone with half-million English articles
Wikipedia added its 500,000th article in English last Thursday, with Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union being designated as the milestone article.
In the half-million pool to guess when Wikipedia would cross this threshold, the winner was Llywrch. Nobody managed to pick the correct date, however; Llywrch was the closest, coming within one day by guessing 18 March. The pool was held last June, and another pool for the millionth article was set to close once the half-million mark was reached.
Sj started a press release to send to media outlets publicizing this event. Some even got in on the news without any prodding. In anticipation of the milestone, The Inquirer published an article Thursday entitled "Wikipedia nears half million article mark Archived 2005-03-17 at the Wayback Machine", coming barely a few hours before it was actually reached (The Inquirer also happened to be the first media organization to break the news of Wikipedia's one-millionth article overall last September).
Tracking down the milestone article
A number of people were busy watching events as Wikipedia's article count approached this milestone, but it was still difficult to pin down the actual 500,000th article. In the end, technical limitations and some miscommunication made it impossible to be completely certain of its identity.
Among those following progress, Alterego was taking periodic snapshots of the article count, from which he determined that Wikipedia had exactly 500,000 articles at 20:54:46 (UTC). Looking at the new article log for 20:54 gave eight possible options: Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, created by Mikkalai; a group of five articles about Nintendo games written by 63.249.99.51; Keshmirian, a disambiguation page created by 69.227.0.149; and P. J. Abbott, an article started by Hedley.
Alterego concluded that he was unable to break the "tie" between these articles, but Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union was ultimately chosen as the milestone article and mentioned as such in the press release. One way to reach this conclusion would be to treat the eight articles as if they were equally spaced out over the course of a minute, in which case it comes closest to the precise time calculated by Alterego. However, Alterego later pointed out that his snapshots indicated that the articles were added much more closely together.
Attempting to independently reconstruct the logic of the selection, Alterego ruled out the most recent of the Nintendo articles, Milon's Secret Castle, after concluding that it would not have been included as part of the article count. Based on information from Cyrius, Alterego indicated that an article needed to contain a comma and a link in order to be recognized by the article counting feature. Since the original version of Milon's Secret Castle lacked commas, it would be disqualified, making the next-most-recent article, Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, the most likely candidate.
After checking with the developers, Cyrius said that Alterego had misunderstood the criteria, and clarified that the requirement of a comma or a link was a choice based on a software setting, and in this case the setting was to count based on links. Accordingly, the original version of Milon's Secret Castle did qualify as an article for purposes of the counter.
In any case, Cyrius indicated that according to developer JeLuF, the article counter is wrong anyway. Alterego also determined that there were some inconsistencies in his snapshots, and further speculated that the timestamps on new pages may have been held up due to the load of people trying to get the milestone article. Although realistically a number of candidates might be considered tied for the honor, commenting on the designation of Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, Alterego said, "I like the sound of that so we can move on."
Rapid progress on the article
Moving on certainly could describe the transformation of Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union, which grew considerably after being designated as the 500,000th article. As started by Mikkalai, the article had a couple of paragraphs and a few placeholder sections, along with two links to Wikisource documents. Mikkalai commented, "I didn't expect to get myself in the limelight", and warned not to expect a fully-developed article anytime soon.
However, the article attracted a number of editors and by Sunday had already received nearly 100 edits. As a result, one of the sections in particular, dealing with "Exile settlements", had been significantly expanded. The article also had at least one reference to support the content. Meanwhile, an active discussion had already begun on the talk page over what the sources said about particular ethnic groups.
Second issue of Wikimedia Quarto released in five languages, more to come
The second issue of the Wikimedia Quarto Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, covering the last quarter of 2004, was released last Saturday, 19 March.
The Wikimedia Quarto was begun in September 2004 as the official newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Quarto's goal is to distribute regular updates about the Foundation's activities as widely as possible, and to provide a forum for Jimmy Wales, the Board, and the projects to report on important events.
The first goal of the Quarto is to publish quarterly in 10 languages, and to include original content related to Wikimedia from project members, essayists, and great thinkers in related fields. The intended audience includes contributors to Wikimedia projects and people interested in Wikimedia Foundation activities.
For this issue, Quarto editor-in-chief Samuel Klein tracked down Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and chairman of Creative Commons, for an exclusive interview. In a whirlwind session, Lessig talked about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight.
The publication of the current issue was somewhat delayed, partly because of the winter holidays, but also due to a dramatic increase in length over the previous issue - more than half again as much text. Ruth Ifcher, Alno, Arnomane, KMT, Li-sung, and the rest of a growing proofreading team helped to clean up the double-length issue. Thanks to Aphaia, the new translation coordinator, and over 50 translators, the Quarto is being released in five languages: Czech, English Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, Spanish, French, and Italian, with Polish, Portuguese, Japanese and German to be finished over the coming week.
To discuss how the newsletter is published, or the contents of the next newsletter, see the current Quarto talk page. All editors are invited to help build the forthcoming issue, which is expected to be significantly shorter. The Quarto team hopes to focus on improving the different steps of publishing an article, and emphasizing the proofreading stage.
Contacts :
- m:user:sj (Samuel Klein)
- m:user:Aphaia (translation coordination)
Please post your feedback to m:Talk:WQ.
Wikipedia represented at tech conference and major computer expo
Continuing his efforts to promote Wikipedia at professional and academic conferences, Jimmy Wales made an appearance last Wednesday at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (eTech for short), hosted by O'Reilly Media. The CeBIT expo in Germany that concluded last week, one of the world's largest events in the technology industry, also included a Wikipedia booth.
Jimmy Wales at eTech
Wales gave a presentation about Wikipedia at eTech and also participated as a speaker on a panel about tagging methods such as Wikipedia's category system. The panel, moderated by Clay Shirky, also included Stewart Butterfield - President of Ludicorp, the company that developed Flickr - and Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us.
The panel discussion focused on the collaborative categorization process sometimes known as folksonomy, and had as its title, "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess". One particular focus was the different approaches and uses of tags on each site. Schachter described this in terms of whether people were tagging their own contributions or those of others, and whether the tags were meant to benefit themselves or others.
Among the interesting tidbits to come out of the eTech conference were that about 350,000 Wikipedia articles have category tags (David Weinberger's blog post gave the erroneous impression that Wikipedia has 350,000 different categories). Blogger Sean Bonner reported that on a show of hands, about a quarter of the audience had contributed to Wikipedia, compared with around 90% having used Flickr and roughly half using del.icio.us.
Wikipedia at CeBIT
Wikipedia volunteers recently staffed a booth at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany. The fair stretched for a week, of which Wikipedia had a booth for three days, from 10 March to 12 March, as part of a section dedicated to open source projects. Also having a booth in the same hall was Wikipedia's German competition in the encyclopedia field, Brockhaus.
Elian told a story of one of the booth's first visitors being Jon "maddog" Hall. Hall found that the English Wikipedia article about him misspelled his name as "John", so he corrected the mistake himself (RickK cleaned up afterward by moving the page to its new location). Other highlights included a presentation by Elian and an interview of Elian and Mathias Schindler by North German Radio (NDR).
This article is based in part on reports from Cory Doctorow, Ross Mayfield, and Elisabeth Bauer.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
Following his offer to serve as a sort of self-appointed prosecutor of arbitration cases (see archived story), Snowspinner last week kept up his pace of bringing new requests. With the Arbitration Committee having spent a couple of months clearing out its caseload, his work seemed to be building it back up again somewhat.
Picking up on an earlier arbitration case whose aftereffects continue to produce tension, Snowspinner submitted a new request last Saturday against Everyking. The request focused on the fact that Everyking had been blocked repeatedly for continuing to make reverts dealing with Ashlee Simpson, in violation of the previous ruling.
The request was accepted, although Everyking complained that the previous steps in resolving disputes had not been tried. Snowspinner contended that Everyking's "hostility and aggressiveness" about the subject meant that "there is no reasoning with him." Anthony DiPierro, the subject of an earlier request for arbitration brought by Snowspinner, echoed Everyking's concern and asked for Snowspinner to be barred from making additional requests, saying "he instead seems to intentionally get involved in conflict and arbitration."
In response, Snowspinner then volunteered to submit his own conduct in pursuing arbitration for review, through the "inspired lunacy" of requesting arbitration against himself. The arbitrators declined to consider this matter, with mav commenting that some kind of official prosecuting position might actually be worthwhile.
Disposing of two easy cases
More of the focus seemed to be on processing new arbitration requests (several other requests were rejected), as the arbitrators only closed two fairly simple cases last week, and most of the more complex matters remained under consideration.
Based on complaints by several users, the Arbitration Committee accepted a case a couple of weeks ago against JarlaxleArtemis, a relatively new contributor. Among the issues involved were some personal attacks, as well as uploading and incorrectly tagging a variety of images, some of them likely to have problems with copyright. The case was closed last Friday with a fairly brief ruling.
Concluding that these actions were out of ignorance, the arbitrators required that before making any further edits, JarlaxleArtemis review the relevant policies (No personal attacks, Image copyright tags, and the Copyright FAQ), then post a statement that he had read and understood them. He promptly prepared a brief statement to that effect, and has continued to edit Wikipedia without serious incident. In connection with this, JarlaxleArtemis is on a type of parole for the next three months to cover any future violations of these policies.
The arbitrators also closed another case due to lack of evidence. In the Noah Peters case, Apollomelos had asked for the Arbitration Committee to review the situation involving a user with various sockpuppets who was already informally banned for vandalism. The accounts were blocked again indefinitely around the time of the arbitration request, so apparently nobody felt the need to pursue the matter further to get an official ruling.
Other new cases opened
Due to the presentation of a substantial amount of evidence in the 172 case dealing with the user making the initial request, Netoholic, in response to a suggestion from arbitrator Neutrality the Committee decided to split the matter into a separate case. Neutrality is recused from both cases, but along with Snowspinner was involved in presenting most of the evidence about Netoholic.
Also, the arbitrators accepted a case involving Iasson and his alleged use of so-called "public accounts". These are accounts for which the password is made publicly available, somewhat similar to the action of CheeseDreams during her last arbitration case.
Wikipedia described as best or worst of the Web, depending on the source
Inventor of the Web says Wikipedia is what he had in mind
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World-Wide Web in 1989 while working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, was trying to make it easier for fellow scientists to share information and collaborate over the Internet. Speaking at a conference on the future of the Web, he said that so far it had been "a big disappointment" in this respect. However, the increasingly common use of Wiki software to create collaboratively-edited web sites could fulfil some of the early ideals. "Wikis in general are great examples of how people want to be creative and not just suck in information", Dr Berners-Lee said, and described Wikipedia as the most advanced development in this area.
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/17/web.future.reut/[permanent dead link]
Former Britannica editor still not convinced
Robert McHenry, former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, wrote an article several months ago entitled 'The Faith-Based Encyclopedia', the fuss over which still continues. McHenry does not believe that the anyone-can-edit philosophy of Wikipedia can produce a reliable encyclopaedia, and writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, continues to describe what he sees as the project's failings.
McHenry draws an analogy to Howard Dean's ill-fated US Presidential campaign, describing it as a situation in which the media looked at the campaign's success in attracting a large, unusually youthful group of activists who made extensive use of the Internet, and overrated the impact of Dean's campaign because of its unconventional nature. The campaigners themselves believed they were leading the way with a new brand of politics. Wikipedia, argues McHenry, is surrounded by similar hyperbole, with "...a small and self-selected group convincing itself...that it is in some ineffable way superior". McHenry describes those who speak in favour of Wikipedia as 'apologists', and claims they are ignoring "the hard lessons the rest of us have learned about how things actually work".
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0503200191mar20,1,26199.story
Jimmy Wales interviewed in Nature
Prestigious science journal Nature this week interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The interview discussed the origins of Wikipedia, with Wales talking about how the tightly-controlled, strictly peer reviewed system adopted by Nupedia worked very slowly, and did not attract large numbers of volunteers, whereas opening everything up completely attracted large numbers of people to the project. Wales was inspired in part to create Wikipedia by the collaborative growth of software projects such as Apache and Linux.
Discussing why so many people become so involved in the project, Wales advanced two possible reasons: firstly, that many people, particularly scientists, simply have a desire to share what they know, that being the nature of science, and are motivated by the global reach and enormous audience of Wikipedia. The second reason, said Wales, is that "it's really geeky fun".
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050314/full/050314-17.html
From the archives...
In the week the 500,000 article milestone was passed, we can look back on an article written by Larry Sanger for Kuro5hin back in 2001 when Wikipedia was still in its infancy. The article, entitled 'Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias', makes a number of bold predictions for what was then still regarded as an offshoot of the now-defunct Nupedia project. At 6 months old, Wikipedia contained 6,000 articles.
"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month", Sanger speculated. "In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles. It's far from inconceivable that the rate of article-production will actually increase over the coming years--in fact, this seems rather likely". With hindsight, one might think the exponential growth of the project could have been anticipated, but who would really have imagined four years ago that the rate of article creation would eventually reach 1000 articles per day, and show no signs of slowing down?
Citations this week
Among the press citations of Wikipedia articles this week were The Jurist, a legal journal, which referenced the article on the CEO of Viacom, Sumner Redstone; the Journal Times quoted from New York Minute; and US media magazine Industry Week looked to Wikipedia to fill it in on the history of infomercials.
Overloaded database server forces Wikipedia to shut off editing temporarily
The rush to Wikipedia's 500,000th article (see related story) was interrupted Wednesday when a disk ran out of space and forced the developers to put the site in read-only mode for about 15 hours. The incident highlighted the need for more people to be involved in Wikipedia development and server administration (see archived story).
The problem developed when the master database server ran out of space, not for the database itself, but for the binlog file used to store updates that need to be sent to the additional slave database servers. As developer Kate Turner explained, when the disk allocated to the binlog runs out of space, MySQL bypasses the binlog and writes updates directly to the database itself. This makes it impossible to resynchronize the slave databases with the master without halting the process.
Under normal circumstances, the potential problem can be avoided through regular maintenance of the binlog. Old binlogs that have already been processed by the slave databases can be deleted, freeing up more space for new updates. However, this requires that someone be actively monitoring the situation at the time when the binlog is filling up.
Unfortunately, the binlog managed to fill up on Wednesday and escaped the notice of the developers until it was too late. As a result, Wikipedia briefly went down around 16:00 (UTC) and was brought back in a locked state. Turner apologised on behalf of the developers for the lack of monitoring. In response to a few complaints, Silsor issued a reminder that "our developers are all volunteers who have lives of their own and often get sucked into annoying Wikimedia issues."
Unlike previous instances of downtime caused by power outages (see archived stories), Wikipedia remained available to readers, so that the only people seriously affected were those trying to edit. Readers also might not have seen some of the latest changes while the site was in read-only mode. Editing was restored at around 07:00 (UTC) on Thursday.
The problem had already come up once this year and is a known issue with MySQL. The MediaWiki developers have previously been in contact with MySQL developers about this bug, although it isn't known whether any progress has been made in that regard. In the meantime, however, Turner reported that she was writing additional code for servmon (a tool used to monitor the status of the servers) that will monitor disk space and hopefully prevent similar incidents in the future.
Creative Commons unveils new license for wikis
Last Thursday, Creative Commons introduced a beta version of its new license designed specifically for wikis, in conjunction with Lawrence Lessig's introduction of a wiki to help draft an updated version of one of his books.
As Lessig explained it, with the new license, which has been given the designation of CC-Wiki, "rather than requiring attribution back to the copyright holder, [the license would] require attribution back to either the copyright holder or a designated entity." The designated entity would presumably be whatever organization controlled the wiki. Lessig characterized it as a newly branded version of the attribution/share-alike (CC-by-sa) license, rather than being an entirely new license.
Lessig is also using a wiki to work on updates to his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally published in 2000. The wiki for the book, which is powered by JotSpot, will use the new CC-Wiki license, although the published version will not use a Creative Commons license - Lessig told BusinessWeek that he wasn't able to get his publisher, Basic Books, to agree to one of the Creative Commons licenses.
The new license could have implications for Wikipedia, since for quite some time there have been periodic complaints that the GNU Free Documentation License is difficult to comply with and incompatible with the popular Creative Commons licenses. In an attempt to reduce the burden of license compliance on those who reuse Wikipedia content, Wikipedia:Copyrights encourages mirror sites to focus on providing a link back to the Wikipedia article. Ram-Man also spent some time organizing an effort to encourage people to release their contributions under multiple licenses, usually the GFDL and one of the Creative Commons licenses.
However, Lessig's project received a cool reception from some Wikipedians. Angela called the decision to use proprietary software from JotSpot to host Lessig's wiki a bizarre choice. Others, including Jamesday, also criticized the CC-Wiki license itself, particularly over the effect of group attribution on the rights of individual authors.
Ta bu shi da yu leaves the building
One of the most popular admins on Wikipedia, Ta bu shi da yu, decided last week to leave the project. He left on his user page a picture of Elvis together with the caption, "Ta bu shi da yu has left the building."
The departure was first noticed by Mark Dingemanse, who saw on Recentchanges that Ta bu shi da yu had blanked his user page (Elvis was added later). Ta bu shi da yu explained that he wasn't leaving due to any dissatisfaction or frustrations with Wikipedia, but simply because he wanted to focus on other aspects of his life. Among other things Ta bu shi da yu, one of Wikipedia's Christian editors, said he needed to "spend more time with God and the Bible."
Ta bu shi da yu asked Angela as a steward to remove his admin status in connection with his departure. He then left a parting message for Jimbo Wales thanking him for helping to create "the most amazing software project I've ever worked on."
As news of his departure spread, Ta bu shi da yu received an outpouring of appreciative comments on his talk page for his participation in the project. Still hanging around somewhat, he took the time to reply personally to each of these comments. He also joined in the widespread support of SlimVirgin's adminship nomination (which passed 77-1, one of the highest support/oppose ratios ever), saying, "Impossible for me to leave without some loose ends to tie up."
Replying to expressions of dismay on the Administrators' noticeboard at the news of his leaving, Ta bu shi da yu stated, "I have a great deal of confidence that you'll be fair and reasonable to everyone, and countermand a decision (with politeness, of course) when you see someone make a bad judgement call." dab also made a tongue-in-cheek request there for approval to move the WWTBSDYD graphic (below) from his user space into template space.
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'What would Ta bu shi da yu do?' The author of this comment has requested that you ask, WWTBSDYD? Please edit this article in any way to improve it. |
Perhaps best known as creator of Exploding whale, one of Wikipedia's quirkiest featured articles, Ta bu shi da yu's contributions also included starting the Administrators' noticeboard.