Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-04-18
From the editor
As you read The Signpost this week, you may notice a few new features, which we hope will help make it an even more useful resource. One change is that we've added a newsroom page, which you can see linked next to the archive at the bottom of our slightly different layout. The newsroom will give us a place to organize each week's issue, and as part of the page there is a section for you to make suggestions about stories we should be covering. In the past, many people have been dropping me a note when they have a news tip to pass on; now we have a place specifically for this kind of information.
The newsroom is a tool for reporters, but another new feature is designed for our readers. To make navigation easier, we've added a template to each article with links to the other articles for this week's issue. This will make it simpler for you to read through an issue, by just clicking on to the next story after you finish reading.
During my vacation, I've asked Sj, the editor-in-chief of the Wikimedia Quarto, to fill in as guest editor. I appreciate everyone who has volunteered to help out, and I encourage more people to participate, as many hands make light work. I look forward to seeing what has happened on Wikipedia when I come back, and I'm sure The Signpost will be a big help in the catching up I'll need to do upon my return.
Wikipedia breaks the news of Andrea Dworkin's death
A major Wikipedia news scoop, in publishing that Andrea Dworkin had died before any other source knew about it, echoed around the internet last week as many bloggers picked up on the slow-breaking news of her death.
On a newsblog run by The Guardian, Simon Jeffery noted that Wikipedia had posted her date of death more than 24 hours before The Guardian's own obituary, the first to be printed in by a major news outlet. Jeffery opened his entry, "Wikipedia — first with the news", by quoting blogger Joe Gratz's comment, "Imagine an encyclopedia that had someone’s death noted in their biography before the first major news outlet had even published an obituary. That’s Wikipedia."
Events in recent weeks have shown Wikipedia's speed in updating biographical entries with news of the subject's death. In closely-watched situations like Pope John Paul II and Terry Schiavo, Wikipedia's entries were updated essentially simultaneously with media reports. After being one of the first sites to note recent deaths like those of Johnnie Cochran and Mitch Hedberg, Wikipedia clearly beat mainstream sources on this news.
How it came about
The process of confirming this event to the satisfaction of the editors working on the article took nearly an entire day itself. Dworkin's date of death was originally added by Stockma at 01:58 (UTC) on 10 April, a few hours after the event. The account's only contributions were to update Dworkin's biography and add her to the list of people who died on 9 April.
Because the news could not be confirmed in any media sources, Moink reverted the article at 11:59 (UTC) to remove the information. Discussion continued on the talk page, and Viajero restored it at 16:11 (UTC). Diderot remained concerned that the information was all third-hand and smacked of rumor, so he removed it again at 18:16 (UTC). Moink finally restored the death date at 22:41 (UTC), after receiving forwarded emails from another Wikipedian that contained enough detail for the report to appear credible.
Since The Guardian did not run its story until shortly before 18:00 (UTC) on 11 April, Wikipedia scooped the mainstream media on this story by anywhere from 19 to 40 hours, depending on how one accounts for the back-and-forth edits as the issue was being debated. The difficulty of convincing other Wikipedia editors of the veracity of breaking news is a challenge that has been encountered previously in similar situations, as with the unrest in Belize earlier this year, when someone provides information ahead of mainstream media sources.
Jeffery said the situation likewise caused some confusion at The Guardian, "unused as we were to researching a news story and finding Wikipedia the sole supporting published source, breaking the news in its own quiet and understated manner." He pointed to the talk page discussion in his post, and blogger Earl Mardle also commented on the open process used to verify the information. Mardle predicted, "For now Wikipedia people still defer to the corporate media for confirmation but as citizen journalism gains confidence and resources, that will fade."
Internal search function returns to service
For the first time in several months, it became possible again last week to search Wikipedia without using an external search engine.
Developer Brion Vibber reported on April 10 that a new search server had been set up[1]. The server uses a program originally written by Kate last December based on the Lucene text search engine.
Kate indicated that in covering the search load from the English Wikipedia, Lucene was doing "a bit more than MySQL can manage on even the fastest database servers." The new search function is capable of suggesting spelling corrections and close title matches, and also provides a score evaluating the relevance of individual results to the search.
On Tuesday, search was taken offline again after an apparent memory leak in the server. With some additional debugging, the developers were able to restore it, also adding a second server to divide the workload involved.
On Thursday, Vibber indicated that searching was now activated on several additional languages. He added that while the search index did not yet update automatically as pages changed, he hoped this feature would be available shortly.
The search function has been active at various times over the past few years, but mostly unavailable for many months. Even when operating, it was often unavailable during peak traffic hours. Alternative external search boxes, first one using Google search and later a similar one using Yahoo! search, were made available during periods when internal searching was down.
As indicated, Kate wrote the current program in December and it was briefly implemented, but was soon taken down due to concerns that Sun's Java virtual machine, in which it was implemented, was not free software. The program has since been rewritten to use GCJ.
Encarta makes subtle digs at Wikipedia
Encarta blog writers denigrate fully-editable philosophy
Last week, Microsoft's Encarta encyclopaedia announced that it was to allow users to make suggestions for article improvements (see archived story). It made the announcement with a nod to Wikipedia with the comment on the 'editing help' pages that Encarta is not like "open-content encyclopedias found elsewhere on the Web".
The news was not universally well-received, and many people were critical of the fact that Microsoft was only proposing to allow suggestions about existing articles, excluding ideas for new articles. On the Encarta blog Archived 2005-04-09 at the Wayback Machine, Encarta editor David Hirning elaborated on this point. "We don’t want our users to spend time crafting an article for Encarta that we ultimately decide doesn’t meet our standard for reference material", he said. "Encarta is not just a pell-mell conglomeration of information and random bits of trivia".
Making subtle digs at Wikipedia, he said "you won’t find articles on each of Ashlee Simpson's teeth in Encarta". Wikipedia's articles on the US pop singer have been causing controversy for some time, with Everyking creating a flurry of articles about the singer, her album, songs and tours, many of which have subsequently been listed on votes for deletion. Everyking is currently subject to an arbitration committee ruling preventing him from editing articles related to Simpson.
German Wikipedian posts challenging questions
Mathias Schindler from the German Wikipedia responded to Hirning's blog post with some pointed questions. "So, basically, your point is 'We don't offer anything special for wishes for new articles. Just do it the usual way and we may listen to you - or not.', right? There will be no way to provide a list of high-ranked wishes for new articles (which may or may not fall into your or your employer's definition of 'encyclopedia'), right? There will be no way to see if a wish for a new article on a certain subject has already been rejected, right?", he asked. At the time of writing there has been no response.
Schindler has been posting to his own blog on MSN space [2] Archived 2005-04-20 at the Wayback Machine. Among other things, he has been criticising the restrictive license applied by Encarta to contributions, which means that contributors from the public would not have the right to reproduce their contributions anywhere else, if they were incorporated into the encyclopaedia.
Microsoft invite Jimmy Wales to speak to them
Interestingly, Jimbo Wales reported to the Wikipedia mailing list that Microsoft had invited him to give a talk at Redmond, Washington [3]. Wales said that he would try to also give a talk at the University of Washington Information School, from which Encarta has employed graduate students to work as fact-checkers, to find out what their experience of the new system was. No date has yet been set for the talks.
News and notes: Features and new administrators
The number of new featured articles picked up again last week after a lull the previous week, with eleven articles being promoted. The success rate of nominations has remained relatively steady, although there was some discussion of how to deal with nominations that fall short of the featured article criteria.
Dealing with underqualified nominations
Nominations of articles involving current events continued to crop up even though these have generally met resistance. An article detailing the funeral of Pope John Paul II was deemed to be too unstable for featuring last week, coming after the rejection of Papal conclave, 2005 the week before. The objections also noted problems with the copyright status of the images used in the article.
Numerous other nominations were opposed because they didn't include a separate references section, a long-standing requirement for featured articles and a recurrent objection to candidates for featured article status. This led Bantman to initiate a discussion on the talk page questioning whether it would useful to have a fast-track procedure to remove candidates that failed the basic criteria. However, featured article director Raul654 was quick to point out that "the purpose of this page is not just to identify featured articles, but to encourage improvement of articles that are almost at featured article quality (but perhaps missing one criteria, such as references)."
One possible avenue suggested for screening nominations is the peer review process, which has helped produce an increase in featured articles (see archived story). Noticing that the option of moving articles from Featured article candidates to peer review has been edited out of the voting instructions, slambo asked if this might be restored. MacGyverMagic suggested that such votes could be used anyway, as an alternative vote to simple opposition when appropriate.
New featured content
Eleven articles managed to gain featured status last week: United Kingdom corporation tax, Stuttering, Ta-Yuan, Goa, Speaker of the British House of Commons, Moorgate, Order of St Patrick, Polish-Soviet War, Diego Velázquez, Samantha Smith and Sly & the Family Stone
In addition, five images gained featured picture status via Featured picture candidates:
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A static parachute jump from a C-130 "Hercules" -
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Plan of downtown Chicago
Requests for adminship
Five users were approved as administrators on requests for adminship, last week: Gdr, Jinian, Wwoods, Petaholmes (also known as nixie) and Biekko. Especially successful were Petaholmes and Gdr (both nominated by Darwinek), who gathered 31 and 21 support votes respectively without any objections.
Of the nominations filed last week, it seems Mindspillage is likely promoted when her voting period ends, having received 34 votes in the first four days of being nominated with only one opposing (a facetious vote by Gmaxwell).
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
Activity in arbitration cases continued at a slower pace last week, as the Arbitration Committee closed one case while its caseload did not change significantly, since no new complaints were submitted.
Irate was banned for three months in a decision issued on Sunday. The arbitrators found that Irate violated the policy of no personal attacks on various occasions, including a number after the case began and Irate made a promise to "act in a more restrained manner".
In considering the length of the ban, the arbitrators voted on different options of three, six, or twelve months. Some voted for more than one option, indicating which of the three was their preference. However, since these preferences did not coincide, this caused some confusion when the ruling was issued, but ultimately it was settled that the shorter three-month ban would apply.
In addition to the ban, the decision included a "suspended parole" for personal attacks after the ban ends. This would be a typical personal attack parole for twelve months, but the parole will not be immediately in force. Instead, it is suspended when he returns but can be "unsuspended" by the Arbitration Committee upon notice that Irate continues to make personal attacks (notice can apparently be made using the Committee's new requests for clarification procedure).
One of the parties, Matt Crypto, questioned why the parole was suspended and not imposed directly, saying this made it seem like "a very insubstantial measure". In opposing the suspended parole, arbitrator The Epopt said he expected that "a stiffer sentence will be required to get [Irate's] attention". However, the measure still passed by a vote of 7-1.
Some newish cases waiting to start
Nobody submitted any new cases to arbitration last week, although a few complaints remain outstanding on the requests for arbitration page, either because the arbitrators are still considering the request, or because the request has yet to be processed and either accepted or rejected.
Two new cases have enough votes to be accepted, although the arbitration case pages have yet to be officially opened. One involves Instantnood and a wide-ranging dispute on how to refer to China and Taiwan, while the other is a complaint about abusive behavior by STP. A request against B1link82 also has the required four votes to accept, but presumably will not be heard because the account has been banned indefinitely for vandalism.
The matter involving Instantnood marks the first arbitration case to have AMA advocates representing parties on both sides. Wgfinley and Wally are teaming up to represent Instantnood, while Snowspinner, who has now joined the AMA after previously starting the parallel Association of Member Investigations (see archived story), brought this request for arbitration on behalf of jguk and persuaded the arbitrators to merge a previous stalled request into the case.
Wikimedia Foundation granted tax exemption
The Wikimedia Foundation announced last week that it had officially been recognized as a tax-exempt charitable organization in the United States, almost two years after the Foundation was created, with the exemption being retroactive to its founding.
Foundation president Jimmy Wales reported last Saturday that he had received a letter from the IRS confirming that the Wikimedia Foundation would be considered a public charity under title 26 (Internal Revenue Code), section 501(c)(3) USC. This communication, confirming what had long been anticipated, came just over six months after submitting a final application for recognition of non-profit status.
The tax exemption will allow American taxpayers to deduct contributions to Wikimedia on their income tax returns if they itemize deductions. Since the decision is retroactive to the Wikimedia founding date of 20 June, 2003, all contributions made to the Foundation since then are considered tax-deductible.
Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer noted that unfortunately this came one day after 15 April, the deadline for people to send in their income tax returns. He indicated that the Foundation would be emailing individual donors with the information. If the donation is significant enough to justify the effort, an amendment can be filed to take advantage of the deduction for the 2003 or 2004 tax years, and obtain any return that would be due. An amendment is filed with form 1040X (pdf file).
In addition, this may make it easier for Wikimedia to find new sources of funding, since many grant-making organizations make qualification for 501(c)(3) status a requirement as part of their grant applications.
Project to record spoken Wikipedia articles is launched
A project to record Wikipedia articles being read out loud was launched last week, and already has managed to create over a dozen recordings.
Timwi announced the beginning of the WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia last Tuesday with the observation that "the best way of getting it going is to start recording things." The emphasis of the project is on recording featured articles, since these are reasonably complete and considered to be of good quality.
Sound recordings of Wikipedia articles are potentially useful for people who cannot read the text due to sight impairments or literacy problems. While screen readers are available using synthetic speech to deal with these issues, their accuracy and the ability to reproduce the text comprehensibly still pales in comparison to actual human speech.
The idea for the project came from the German Wikipedia, which started the original Gesprochene Wikipedia project early in 2004. The Dutch Wikipedia has now also initiated a similar project, while an effort to add spoken pronunciations to the Dutch Wiktionary has already been underway for some time.
Several enthusiastic participants produced a number of spoken articles within a few days, including five featured articles so far. One article, the ever-popular Exploding whale, produced a bit of competition for the honor of recording it, with blankfaze staking the first claim. And in one case, a sound recording was even produced for something other than an article, as Luigi30 created a recording of the three revert rule.
As with all sound recordings on Wikipedia, Ogg Vorbis is the preferred format being used by the project. For greater comprehension, Fuzheado suggested that readers not use normal conversational speech, but speak at a slower rate of about 150 words per minute.
Template dispute leads to design contest
In an effort to standardise the appearance of templates on article talk pages, a competition opened last week to come up with a basic visual design for them, ending a brief dispute over one of the affected templates.
The use of template messages has previously prompted concerns about them being misused and overused, with some past efforts trying to encourage placement of templates on talk pages where possible instead of directly on the article. Violet/Riga created a proposal at User talk:Violetriga/statusdevelopment to standardise the look of the current talk page templates throughout Wikipedia after realising they lacked consistent formatting. ALoan commented, "I think bringing some consistency to these templates is a fine idea".
Feeling that the combination of templates for some articles often made talk pages look messy, the proposal aimed to give them more of a table-like look. After some discussion and feedback, Violet/Riga went ahead and implemented this proposal, but an edit war developed focusing primarily on the {{featured}} template. This primarily involved Violet/Riga and JDG, who explained that he didn't like the layout used, claiming that the support for Violet/Riga's proposal was more for the concept of standardisation generally.
Turning it into a competition
At length it was suggested that a competition could be held to satisfy the opinions of both sides. Both editors agreed to this and the affected templates were restored to their previous state. Violet/Riga created a competition page at Wikipedia:Template standardisation, which quickly received a number of submissions, some based on the existing templates and others derived from Violet/Riga's new design.
So far, nine different users have submitted a total of 17 designs for consideration. The competition is scheduled to close Sunday 24 April 2005 at 23:59 (UTC). At that point a public vote will be held to determine the favourite design.
Press covers Wikipedia after being beaten to the punch
Extensive coverage in The Guardian
Wikipedia made the pages of UK broadsheet newspaper The Guardian twice on the same day last week, not long after that paper found itself being scooped by Wikipedia on a news story (see related story). On Thursday, the paper's weekly IT section included an interview with Jimmy Wales [4], and also listed the article on Pope John Paul II as one of the six best web resources on the late pontiff [5].
In the short interview, Jimmy Wales outlined the origins of the project as an offshoot of Nupedia (the newspaper, dubbed The Grauniad by satirical magazine Private Eye for its frequent typos, calls it Newpedia), and makes the common observation that the switch to a wiki-based model led to Wikipedia producing as much content in two weeks as Nupedia had in two years.
Wales also said that the wiki ethos was truer to the origins of the Internet, a point recently made by the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee (see archived story). He credited the success of Wikipedia in part with the time of its arrival, which came at the end of the dot-com boom at a time when people were becoming disillusioned with the internet. "People talked about free knowledge and the ability to share ideas but then it seemed to be all about pop-up ads and porn spam", he said. "We came on to the scene when people were getting disillusioned. Hopefully they thought it was an attempt to create something positive".
The continuing credibility conundrum
The much-discussed issue of Wikipedia's credibility and reliability (see archived stories here, here and here) was revisited this week by technology magazine IT Week [6]. The magazine looks at the two opposing views of Wikipedia, with supporters touting it as a vehicle for democratising encyclopaedias, while detractors claim it is an "unreliable amateur resource of unverified content".
The article says that the lack of a bibliography on articles may lead to a lack of trust in the content by users. While citing sources is now a basic requirement for featured articles, many other articles still lack source information. IT week also suggests that lack of biographical information on editors is a problem.
The article concludes that Wikipedia is something like a microcosm of the Internet, with content on a vast and diverse range of subjects. As such, it saves users from carrying out a mass of searches, but like the Internet, it is up to the user to judge the trustworthiness of the information. The article says that Wikipedia could become "a powerful resource for information professionals in the future".
Douglas Adams usurps Jimmy Wales (again)
Last week, The Guardian credited Douglas Adams with inspiring Wikipedia, and this week the BBC are at it [7]. In an article about a new mobile edition of h2g2, which is hosted on BBC servers, the BBC's Internet controller Tony Ageh says that Adams was "years ahead of his time", and the article notes that "In some respects the way that the H2G2 website was put together pre-figures the idea of the wikipedia". The mobile h2g2 contains 7,000 entries, covering Life, the Universe and Everything.
Citations this week
Among the citations this week are Liverpool FC supporter's magazine quoting from the Hillsborough disaster article on the 16th anniversary of the tragedy in which 96 people died [8]; the BBC looking at podcasting in an article about high-tech trends in US politics [9]; nbc4 and numerous other US outlets talking about the phenomenon of wardriving [10]; and Cincinnati news site wcpo.com (WCPO) listing the hazards posed by acetone in an article about a chemical spill in the city [11].