Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-06-27
Wikipedia upgraded to MediaWiki 1.5
Wikipedia has been upgraded to a new version of the MediaWiki software after the release of a beta for MediaWiki 1.5 last week, which necessitated nearly a day of editing downtime.
On Sunday, Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber announced the release of MediaWiki 1.5beta1, which should have essentially the full range of features that will be in the 1.5 series. As is usual for MediaWiki software development, the sites of the Wikimedia Foundation serve as the base for beta testing.
The upgrade cycle began with some of the Foundation's miscellaneous wikis and then moved on to the major projects, beginning with Wikinews. The Wikimedia Commons site experienced some bugs as a result, but these were quickly repaired.
The process on the English Wikipedia began early on Monday, 27 June (at 05:38 UTC), at which point editing was disabled during the upgrade. This lasted for 21 hours and 20 minutes, with service resuming at 02:58 UTC on Tuesday, 28 June. However, some issues still had to be sorted out and reliable editing took another half hour to restore.
Vibber said that by completing the upgrade in less than 24 hours, the process had taken less time than he feared might be necessary. Since the English Wikipedia has the largest database, the others should not take as long unless problems arise. He indicated that "the remaining wikis will get upgraded bit by bit over the coming days."
New features
The biggest change involved in the upgrade is a revised schema for the database, which is the reason that an extended read-only period was necessary. This change should significantly speed up rename and delete operations on pages with long edit histories. It will also create a fixed ID for the most recent revision of a page, which will allow permanent links to current as well as old revisions of an article.
Another major new feature affects page moves, which will now be recorded in the log pages and appear separately in revision histories. These changes are expected to help in dealing with page-move vandalism, and a 'rollback' function for page moves will be available to administrators. Other changes include the availability of a 'diff' for edit previews, and the ability to specify a file name for uploads distinct from the original filename on the user's hard drive.
Blocking users by article pondered after block triggers admin's departure
A copyright dispute last week led to a block that prompted the departure of one of Wikipedia's best-known administrators, RickK. In the aftermath of these events, a proposal for more flexible methods of blocking users appeared to be gaining momentum.
RickK was known as one of the Wikipedia users most active in fighting vandalism, but was also sometimes criticized for the way in which he went about it. In a dispute that escalated into a brief flurry of reverts and blocks last Monday, RickK himself was hit with a 24-hour block and decided to leave Wikipedia entirely as a result.
The dam breaks
The disagreement arose over an alleged copyright violation on the GAP Project, at the time a stub article about a Turkish dam. This article previously had been much longer, but was deleted as a copyright infringement and the editor responsible, Coolcat, was seeking to have it undeleted. Coolcat claimed to have the right to license the content under the GFDL on the grounds that he was its author. This claim was doubted by some, however, since Coolcat had no evidence to support it and he had provided contradictory information when charged with violating copyrights on a separate article.
An edit war ensued on Monday in which SPUI restored the disputed content to GAP Project, and for doing this was blocked by RickK for 24 hours. Silsor then unblocked SPUI, after which RickK promptly restored the block. The edit war continued, however, and RickK was subsequently blocked by Silsor for violating the three-revert rule on the same article.
RickK then announced that he would be leaving Wikipedia for good, and once the block expired he left a departure message on his user page and deleted his talk page. He had previously left in February after learning of some public comments made about him by Jimmy Wales, but later returned after being persuaded that the comments were meant in a positive light.
Reactions and renewed proposal
The incident prompted renewed expression of concerns about the three-revert rule. Some questioned whether the rule covered this situation, since RickK was reverting a copyright infringement, but the dispute over the copyright itself made it uncertain whether such an exception should apply. Fuzheado made the argument that the rule was being applied too readily in general, and that page protection was a better solution. However, others argued that the rule needed to be enforced to have any value and that making an exception in this case would create a double standard for administrators. Silsor said that RickK "received the same consequence he would have given anybody else in the same situation."
In response to these points, Ed Poor suggested reviving the idea of blocks that would only prevent a user from editing a specific article. Poor said this would get the message across while avoiding the shock of being blocked from making any edits whatsoever. A similar concept had been suggested over a year ago by Wales, but not pursued at the time.
Developer Tim Starling indicated that the proposal might be sensible, saying, "I'm accustomed to all blocking-related features being controversial, but this one seems to be unusually well-supported." Per-article blocking was endorsed by a number of users, although Jayjg suggested that it might simply divert some people into continuing the same dispute while editing a different article.
Contest held to produce history-animation tool
As external tools for using Wikipedia continue to crop up, a contest to design a tool for animating Wikipedia history, complete with prize money, closed last week with several entries competing for the reward.
On 14 June, blogger Andy Baio, inspired by the discussion over the disputed Podcasting article (see archived story), announced that he would offer $50 for the best implementation of a tool to animate the history of a Wikipedia article. Several others, including Wikipedia critic Jason Scott, added to the pot, bringing the total reward to $250.
Studying the history of articles has already received significant interest in the past from various sources outside of Wikipedia. A 2004 MIT study on how Wikipedia authors interact focused particularly on how a given article developed over time, including visual representations of its "history flow". And earlier this year, Jon Udell created a movie showing the evolution of the Heavy metal umlaut article (see archived story).
A total of four entries were submitted for Baio's contest within the week. The entries included Dan Phiffer's Wikipedia Animate; WikiDiff from Corey; AniWiki, created by John Resig; and Colin Hill's BetterHistory.
The winner, announced on Monday by Baio, was Dan Phiffer for his Wikipedia Animate program, which Udell had already used to create a new "screencast" of Heavy metal umlaut. Resig was awarded second place for AniWiki. Baio indicated that the prize would be divided up with Phiffer receiving $200 as well as a Flickr Pro account, a $20 Threadless gift certificate, and a starter package from Socialtext; Resig would receive $50 and a Flickr Pro account.
Innovative tools abound
This adds to the proliferation of software tools created as accessories for Wikipedia readers and editors. Some previous efforts include CryptoDerk's popular Vandal Fighter, used by many of the people patrolling recent changes, and the Wikiwax index of articles.
Another similar project, the Humanbot script written by r3m0t to correct spelling mistakes, recently finished its latest round and is considering what to undertake next. Because automatic correction of spelling has always been controversial, Humanbot was actually a distributed system hosted by JoeyDay, where the script fed changes to live users for review before they could be processed. Like most of the history-animation tools, Humanbot uses the Greasemonkey extension for Mozilla Firefox, which allows the addition of JavaScript to web pages.
The point was raised about these scripts that some might have a detrimental effect on the Wikipedia servers, although this can be avoided with appropriate design. One of the reasons Baio gave for Phiffer winning his contest was that the Wikipedia Animate tool does not load history automatically, but waits for the user to request it.
Wikipedia integration into KDE desktop announced
In a move to bring Wikipedia to an ever-larger audience, Jimmy Wales last week announced a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and KDE, one of the leading free software desktop environments.
As part of his keynote address last Thursday at the LinuxTag conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, Wales revealed that Wikipedia would be integrated into the KDE desktop. Incorporation of content from other Wikimedia projects, such as Wiktionary, is also being contemplated.
KDE is already using Wikipedia to provide artist, album, and track information for the Amarok music player. The primary new application planned as part of this effort is an offline reader for Wikipedia (called "Knowledge"), so that content is available even without an internet connection. Wales pointed out that this would be helpful in his goal of bringing Wikipedia content to areas where internet access is generally unavailable. A number of other possible applications have been suggested, such as integrating astronomical information from Wikipedia into KStars, a planetarium program that is part of KDE.
The announcement received a fair amount of coverage from online German sources and apparently has generated considerable enthusiasm. Wales said, "It seems that a lot of people are excited about the concept of KDE integration".
In order to facilitate access to Wikipedia for this project, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to provide a web service API that can be queried by the applications involved. KDE could then access the service if a network connection is available, or launch the Knowledge reader if not. The API would also be available for other projects, thus promoting possible integration of Wikipedia elsewhere as well. To gauge how this would affect the Wikimedia servers, Wales launched a discussion on the wikitech mailing list on how the traffic from these applications would be managed.
The collaboration with KDE represents part of a growing incorporation of Wikipedia into software products from outside organizations. Plans have also been discussed to include Wikipedia as part of the next Linux distribution from Mandriva. And even without explicit partnerships with the Wikimedia Foundation, various projects have decided to build in ways to use Wikipedia, including recently the new dashboard widgets from Apple (see archived story).
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed its oldest case last week while also formally opening several cases the arbitrators had previously voted to accept. Other activity remained slow, as no new cases were accepted, although the possibility of reopening the case involving Instantnood was being considered.
On Sunday, the arbitrators issued a ruling in their longest-running case, the climate change dispute involving William M. Connolley, Cortonin, and JonGwynne. Both Cortonin and JonGwynne were prohibited from editing articles related to climate change for six months, although they may ask for this restriction to be lifted after three months. In addition, since JonGwynne displayed "continued incivility and edit warring" after being the subject of a previous arbitration case, he was banned from Wikipedia entirely for a period of three months.
Although all of the parties had showed a tendency to engage in revert wars, the decision drew a distinction between the two original parties to the case, Connolley and Cortonin. As part of their ruling, the arbitrators found that Cortonin was unable to grasp the metaphorical nature of concepts like the greenhouse effect, and that this interfered with his ability to appropriately edit the articles involved.
Meanwhile, the arbitrators acknowledged that Connolley, a climate modeller for the British Antarctic Survey, "is widely viewed in Wikipedia as being highly knowledgeable in the field". However, Connolley was left subject to the provisions of an earlier temporary injunction, which prohibited reverting the disputed articles more than once in 24 hours. This restriction was to apply for six months, but Connolley may apply to have it lifted after one month.
The request to reopen the Instantnood case came from SchmuckyTheCat, arguing that the earlier closure had been improper and alleging that Instantnood had resumed making edits to enforce disputed naming conventions related to China and Taiwan. Instantnood's advocate, Wally, objected that Instantnood was being subjected to personal attacks and should not be penalized for the Arbitration Committee's procedural error. At last report, however, three arbitrators had voted to accept the case with no votes to reject.
Earmarking of donations considered, trustees election starts
The administration of the Wikimedia Foundation was a topic of some discussion recently with a proposal for earmarking donations, while the election for two seats on the Board of Trustees starts this week after two candidates jumped into the race at the last minute.
Grants Coordinator Danny Wool proposed that instead of having all donations go into the general fund, donors should be allowed to earmark their donations for a specific purpose. He suggested that in order to account for overhead costs of running the Foundation, ten percent of earmarked donations would still be deducted to cover such costs.
This system of handling donations would allow small donors, who make up the bulk of the Wikimedia Foundation's financial support, to pool resources in a manner similar to large grant-making organizations. Sj suggested that the earmarking scheme should be kept simple, using broad categories like "hardware", "software", and "language development".
Reactions to earmarking proposal
Trustee Angela Beesley asked whether the proposal would not create a huge imbalance in favor of the English Wikipedia, as it receives the most visits of any project. Many people, she suggested, might "decide to put all their donations towards that project rather than the Foundation's wider goals". However, Wool indicated that he had more focused targets in mind for earmarking, not simply promoting development of particular Wikipedia languages.
The response from Wikimedia CFO Daniel Mayer was skeptical. He said that feedback from donors should be collected, but it "should not tie the hands of the board". Mayer pointed out that fundraising drives are held after a budget is drafted and the budget is mentioned as part of the fundraising, giving potential donors an idea of how the money would be used.
One major question was how the process of tracking such donations would work. It might be possible if the Foundation began using direct processing of credit card payments, as an appropriate form could be designed. However, while this method of accepting donations was reportedly imminent several months ago (see archived story), it still has not been implemented. According to Mayer, the current donation setup emphasizing PayPal allows only two options on their form data, which limits its usefulness for this purpose.
For the time being, the proposal remains up in the air. Beesley suggested having a meeting of the grants committee to further refine and develop the idea before putting it into effect.
Six candidates in election
In other news related to the Foundation, two additional candidates joined the race for the Board of Trustees, in addition to the four who had already declared (see archived story). The new candidates are Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, better known to many as Cimon avaro, and Samuel Klein, generally known on Wikipedia as sj.
This leaves a total of six candidates running for the two positions representing the community on the Board of Trustees. Voting was to begin Tuesday, 28 June, although at last report this might be delayed slightly due to the ongoing software upgrade (see related story) and because the voting interface was still being translated into additional languages. The election is scheduled to run through Monday, 11 July. The winners, to be chosen by approval voting (thus allowing voters to cast ballots for as many of the candidates as they wish), will serve for two-year terms.
Wikipedia is answer to TV quiz show question
Instead of being a place where you can go to get answers to trivia questions, Wikipedia itself became the answer to a trivia question last week when it was featured on a BBC quiz show. And at the same time, the media were also casting doubt on whether Wikipedia could indeed be used to answer such questions.
The question to which Wikipedia was the answer featured on an episode of "University Challenge: The Professionals" on BBC Two on Monday evening, 20 June. "University Challenge" is a show using a quizbowl format, hosted by Jeremy Paxman. This episode featured teams representing "The Today Programme" and "Masters of Wine".
As one of the starter questions on the show, a question was asked that called for Wikipedia as the correct answer. The form of the question was, "Which internet resource was founded in 2002 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger?" As neither team knew the answer to the question, Paxman then commented, "I recommend it if you do not use it."
In the absence of a transcript or recording of the show, the exact wording of the question is uncertain, and several Wikipedia editors reported it in different variations. Steinsky pointed out that if the show's researchers had used Wikipedia to get their information, they would at least have gotten the year of its creation right.
Setting the record straight
Moving from entertainment to regular news, press coverage of the demise of the Los Angeles Times wikitorial experiment continued to bring out comments about Wikipedia. Following up on the theme adopted earlier by Stacy Schiff (see archived story), Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam in reviewing the events took the opportunity to call Wikipedia "notoriously unreliable".
As one possible datapoint on this argument, the Wall Street Journal pointed out Thursday that Wikipedia carried an inaccurate figure for US military casualties during the Korean War. The number of deaths in that conflict, long reported as 54,000, had been revised downward to 36,000 several years ago after it was discovered to include all US military deaths from those years, regardless of whether they were related to the war. Wikipedia, however, still had the earlier figure — which was promptly changed within minutes of the article becoming available online.
Featured picture process tweaked, changes to adminship debated
New nomination rules for featured pictures took effect this week, encouraging users to comment on fixable image problems before voting. Controversy over requests for adminship also sparked discussion of possible modifications to that process, but had not produced any changes yet. There were 8 new admins, 8 new featured articles, 3 new featured lists, and 1 new featured picture this week.
New featured picture rules
Only one featured picture candidate was promoted this week, while numerous other nominations failed. A change spearheaded by brian0918 took effect, resulting in new nomination instructions. Now, all nominations will pass through a two day period in which users will suggest image improvements, like cropping, contrast, or coloring. During that time users will not vote, instead waiting until the two day period has expired. Then, the nomination will remain on the candidates page for an additional 12 days to round out the required 14-day candidacy period.
Adminship process under discussion
Eight requests for adminship were approved this week: Grm wnr (nom), Schissel (nom), Guettarda (nom), Grue (nom), TheoClarke (nom), TenOfAllTrades (nom), JoJan (nom), Sn0wflake (nom). However, some more controversial requests provoked an extended discussion of how the process was being managed. Among the issues being considered were the propriety of extending the process in close cases, and whether the bureaucrats were handling adminship promotion appropriately.
The debate prompted administrator Seth Ilys to "re-nominate" himself for adminship, resurrecting an idea previously floated by Danny that admin status could be reviewed periodically. When the purpose of this move was questioned, Ilys clarified that he was in fact willing to step down if the community did not support him continuing as an administrator. The concept has some resemblance to how adminship is handled on the Meta-wiki, where admins are reviewed on an annual basis.
Featured content
The featured article candidates page continued to produce new featured articles this week, with eight successful nominations. They were Restoration literature (the first in a series on English literature), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Commodore 64, Convention on Psychotropic Substances, Panavision, Australia, The Ashes, Architecture of Btrieve (complementing the already featured article Btrieve), and Democratic Labour Party (Trinidad and Tobago).
List of Ohio county name etymologies, Timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites, and Australian national cricket captains were the three featured list candidates that were promoted this week. Australian national cricket captains kicked off a wave of cricket related nominations, many of which appear to be on their way to featured status in the weeks to come.
Spoken Wikipedia project moves into podcasting
Wikipedia has branched out into the field of podcasting with the addition of a feed for new recordings of articles being spoken out loud, while work also continues in other projects to provide similar content.
The Spoken Wikipedia WikiProject has a new RSS feed , which allows anybody whose music player supports Ogg Vorbis to podcast Wikipedia articles read aloud. The project's RSS feed was created by Steinsky and first announced on 17 June.
Ironically, the term "podcasting" is an allusion to Apple's popular iPod player, but the iPod cannot be used to play these particular recordings because it does not support the Ogg Vorbis format.
The Spoken Wikipedia project has only been in existence since April (see archived story) and has recorded 80 articles so far. Of these, 32 are featured articles, as making recordings of featured articles has been a particular emphasis of the project. Willmcw and Luigi30 have been among the most prolific participants in producing recordings.
Efforts to expand into the realm of sound are also underway at Wikinews, which has organized an Audio Wikinews series of radio-style newscasts. Wikimedia Trustee Angela Beesley commented, "I'm pleased to see people are working on moving the projects beyond a simple text-based approach." Streaming audio is also being produced, although some issues remain to be settled in deciding what software and servers to use for live broadcasts.