Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-06-05
New revision-hiding feature added
A new revision-hiding user class, "oversight", was created recently. Users with the function can permanently delete page revisions containing personal information, copyright violations, or libelous content.
The permission was created after a number of problems involving the current deletion process. The biggest problem was the insertion of inappropriate content including the phone numbers of administrators and potentially libelous information into revisions and edit summaries. To make matters worse, pages with high numbers of edits, such as the administrators' noticeboard, were often the target of these attacks. Due to the number of edits, removing such revisions was often impossible without the intervention of a developer.
The revision-hiding function works more efficiently than the current deletion function. Rather than forcing the user to delete an entire page and restoring the other revisions, a user with "oversight" privileges can delete revisions individually, allowing for the move to occur with little disruption. The English Wikipedia is the only wiki with oversight privileges assigned so far.
For legal reasons, revisions deleted through oversight are not visible to anyone, including oversight members. The only way to retrieve such revisions is by manual restoration by a developer. There are currently 17 users with oversight privileges. These users include the 14 Arbitration Committee members, Jimbo Wales, developer Brion Vibber, and bureaucrat/checkuser Essjay, who was given the permission by the Arbitration Committee.
By deleting revisions using oversight, rather than having a developer do the work manually, all actions are automatically logged; previously, such actions were not logged. The log can be found at Special:Log/oversight; at press time, 93 revisions had been deleted since the tool was first used on 28 May.
Vibber, who created the setup, has stated that the current setup is more of a temporary hack, until the deletion code is rewritten.
Paper profiles Wales, criticizes Wikipedia business coverage
A major US city newspaper ran an article last week highlighting Jimmy Wales' connection to the area, but in turning to examine Wikipedia's coverage of local businesses gave the project low marks.
Jeff Swiatek of the Indianapolis Star published the profile of Wales, "Time at IU shaped Wiki founder", on Friday. The story focused on Wales' studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he did graduate work before leaving to work in options trading. Wales talked about how the school's emphasis on game theory influenced his ideas about Wikipedia.
The profile that accompanied the article, "Companies face a Wiki world", took a different local angle by focusing on the quality of Wikipedia articles about Indiana businesses. Swiatek concluded that "Wikipedia tends to have spotty coverage of business." The story noted cases of vandalism and pointed out some sizable companies that did not yet have articles. Five existing articles were evaluated and rated in a sidebar: Conseco, Cummins, Eli Lilly and Company, Marsh Supermarkets, and WellPoint. Four out of the five were rated as "Poor", and Eli Lilly was deemed only "Fair".
The companies themselves had mixed reactions to the articles. A Conseco spokesman indicated that he found the article out-of-date and added some fresh information. The latest edit does indeed trace back to a Conseco IP address, although his addition still needed to be integrated into the article. In contrast, Eli Lilly said it had no interest in monitoring its article. Meanwhile Upland Brewing Company, the state's largest microbrewery, was quite favorably impressed at seeing the article about it.
All of the companies mentioned, and more besides, can be found in Category:Companies based in Indiana. Potentially related WikiProjects include WikiProject Indiana and WikiProject Business and Economics (the latter seems focused more on theoretical concepts, however). Conseco, Cummins, and Eli Lilly have been tagged as part of WikiProject Indiana, although there's no sign that project members have actually worked on any of these articles.
Other international meetups
Wikimania recap
28 August 2006
Wikimania recap
14 August 2006
Wikimania recap
7 August 2006
Wikimania last-minute information
31 July 2006
Events: Contests, parties, and the local area
24 July 2006
Wikimania updates
17 July 2006
Wikimania updates
10 July 2006
Meetups And Newsworthy International Assemblages
3 July 2006
More featured speakers at Wikimania
26 June 2006
Hacking Days
19 June 2006
Featured Speakers at Wikimania
12 June 2006
Other international meetups
5 June 2006
About Wikimania
29 May 2006
About Wikimania
22 May 2006
About Wikimania
15 May 2006
About Wikimania
8 May 2006
About Wikimania
1 May 2006
About Wikimania
24 April 2006
Three years of meetups : 2003-2006
17 April 2006
Introduction to a series: Looking forward to Wikimania 2006
10 April 2006
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Wikimania recap |
This week, the Signpost takes a look at some other international meetups happening this year.
The second MANIA column on 17 April, 2006 profiled the history of Wikimedia Meetups and Wikimania. This column takes a look at three large international Wikimedia meetups planned in 2006 other than Wikimania: Wikipedia Academy, Chinese Wikimedia Conference 2006, and Wikimedia Conference Netherlands.
Wikipedia Academy
The "Wikipedia Academy" will be held 16 June and 17 June, 2006, in Göttingen, Germany. It is conceived of as a way to teach academics, students, teachers and others more about Wikipedia and how they can participate. The event was first discussed in September 2005, and is being run by members of Wikimedia Deutschland. The program for the event, which includes lectures, workshops, and panels, is now available. For more information email info<<at>>wikipedia-academy.de.
Chinese Wikimedia Conference 2006
There will be a conference for Chinese-speaking Wikimedians on 26 August and 27 August, 2006 in Hong Kong. It was announced on 14 March on Wikinews, and was discussed on the Foundation-L mailing list in mid-March. Discussions about having a conference were begun in Taipei in late 2005; Hong Kong was chosen as the city for the event after a vote and discussion. The conference is being organized by an organizing group, chaired by KaurJmeb; and a local Hong Kong organizing group, chaired by users chpapa and lorenzarius.
The purpose of this international gathering is to provide a way for Chinese-speaking Wikimedians to talk in person about the issues faced by the Chinese Wikimedia projects. The conference will enable contributors to meet in person and communicate more effectively, as well as benefiting those who are unable to travel abroad to Wikimania. It is also hoped that by having the meetup just three weeks after Wikimania, individuals who are able to attend both conferences will be able to report back on Wikimania to the Chinese community. Finally, the conference aims to promote Wikimedia projects in Hong Kong. It is hoped that the conference will provide a chance for editors from Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other areas to meet. While there have been local meetups for the Chinese community, this will be the first regional meetup, and is the first time the Chinese community has collaborated on producing such an event.
The two-day program will consist of six presentations and eight workshops and discussions. Presentations are targeted towards the general public, while workshops and discussions are aimed towards Wikimedia contributors. Topics will include Wikipedia, Wikimania, copyright and free knowledge, and government, education and the media. The planning committee is also still looking for presenters. Sponsors of the event include Red Hat and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), which is providing the venue and audiovisual equipment. There will be a low entrance fee of around HK$50 (roughly US$6.40). For more information, contact lorenzarius.
Wikimedia Conference Netherlands
On 2 September, 2006, the Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland (VWN), the Dutch Wikimedia Association, is planning a regional conference to be held in the Netherlands, the "Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland" (or WCN for short). It is hoped that this meetup will be a chance for Dutch-speaking members of the Wikimedia projects to share ideas and brainstorm in their native language, as well as meet and get to know each other. Others are also welcome, however, and there may be presentations in other languages, although the majority of the content will be in Dutch. The organizers are also still looking for presenters. They hope to cover the spectrum of Wikimedia projects with the presentations, as well as have a number of workshops or Birds of a Feather discussions.
The main sponsor of this event is Kennisnet, a Dutch organization that provides an Internet portal for education information in the Netherlands.
This meetup was first discussed in a meeting on 31 October, 2005, following the first Wikimania conference, and was originally nicknamed "Wikimania Reloaded". Since that time, the idea has developed, with a planning committee formed in February 2006. The location of the conference is not yet set, but will be centrally located in the Netherlands. For more information, please leave a note on the WCN pages or email wcn<<at>>wikimedia.org.
In addition to these larger meetups, other local and regional meetups are constantly occurring around the world. Check the Meetups page for details of meetups in your area. Some events from all over the world are posted on Meta; links to localized Wikipedia meetup pages can be found there, and as interlanguage links from the English Wikipedia page.
Next week: an update on featured speakers at Wikimania 2006.
New external tools
Search Wikipedia and Google on the same screen
A new "Googlepedia" extension for Mozilla Firefox integrates Wikipedia content into Google searches, and redirects internal Wikipedia links to Google search requests. It displays a Wikipedia article and Google search results side-by-side, similar to the Amazon.com A9.com search engine. The add-on can be customized to certain languages; the Wikipedia in that language will be used.
"Latent search engine" toolbar links web content to Wikipedia
A press release from search software company blinkx says "Pico reveals latent talent"
- After a simple download (for Windows users only), a series of 12 coloured buttons form the Pico toolbar. If relevant content is available, the box will appear coloured – such as red for news, green for a Wikipedia entry. Each button is for a different form of content, such as blogs, video, websites, images and the Myspace online community.
Some readers may have been confused about the relationship because the press release referred to Wikipedia "partnering with Blinkx." In reality, blinkx has no official connection to the Wikimedia Foundation, and Jimmy Wales commented, "I have never heard of them."
Publicly editable Google Maps
"WikiMapia" allows the public to add and edit notations on a Google Map, in an "anyone can edit" style. Despite some misleading news blurbs, Wikimapia does not have any connection to Wikipedia (although users can include links to any website within their map notation).
Similar mapping projects include:
- Placeopedia.com - Encourages users to place links between mapped locations and Wikipedia articles
- Alder-digital.de - Google Earth coordinates for English Wikipedia articles
- Pintomap.com - Google Map showing articles from English Wikipedia
- Geonames.org - Google Map showing Wikipedia articles from many languages, and short blurbs about every location
News and notes
Two resolutions passed
Two Wikimedia Foundation resolutions were passed on Friday, June 2. One resolution, passed with three support votes with Michael E. Davis, Angela Beesley, and Florence Nibart-Devouard (Anthere) casting support, authorizes money to purchase new hardware, update equipment and pay for the required services. The second resolution, passed with four support votes (Nibart-Devouard, Jimbo Wales, Davis, and Tim Shell) and one oppose vote (Beesley), authorizes the hiring of an in-house legal counsel and interim executive director.
Wikimarkup changes debated
A proposal to introduce Wikimark2, a wiki-markup code designed to supersede the current coding syntax in MediaWiki, was made this week. Wikimark2 would change several of the current methods of linking to other languages, images, and external links. There are no plans, however, to introduce or change the current markup syntax.
Wikiscope proposed
A proposal was made this week to create Wikiscope, a project that would integrate all of Wikimedia's projects. Each article in the project would link to the relevant pages in each project, and a search function would simultaneously look through all of the projects.
Briefly
- The Estonian Wikipedia has reached 270,000 edits.
- The Korean Wikipedia has reached 60,000 total pages.
- The Macedonian Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
- The Ukrainian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
- The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 32,000 articles.
- The Chinese Wiktionary has reached 90,000 entries.
- The Bosnian Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
- The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
- The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 26,000 articles.
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
- The Kongo Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
- The Uzbek Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.
In the news
Collective thinking and Wikipedia
Computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author Jaron Lanier (creator of the term "virtual reality") wrote an extensive essay for The Edge intellectual magazine, titled "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism".
In the essay, Lanier discusses the perils of trusting the idea of "the new online collectivism" (as embodied by Wikipedia) too much, or too soon. The prologue reads:
- The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.
It includes some ideas on how to turn collective thinking to our advantage, rather than trusting it blindly, and concludes:
- The illusion that what we already have is close to good enough, or that it is alive and will fix itself, is the most dangerous illusion of all. By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots. The best guiding principle is to always cherish individuals first.
The article gained wider exposure through The Huffington Post (Ariana Huffington's blog), which was then picked up by Yahoo News. The post there ("The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism") led to some lively discussion in the comment section, and in various other blogs, including entries from Larry Sanger ("On some alleged hazards of “online collectivism”") and Howard Rheingold ("Collective Action is not Collectivism").
Wikipedia used in court
A California Court of Appeals has used definitions drawn from Wikipedia in an opinion for the case "Apple v. Doe" (PDF document).
- As with many of the concepts in this opinion, the most authoritative and current sources of information may themselves be found on the web. Thus FireWire is described by a well-known cooperative encyclopedia as a type of serial bus interface used to connect external devices to a computer. (Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (as of May 23, 2006).)
This aspect of the case was commented upon by Andrew Orlowski in The Register ("New Age judge blasts Apple"), and several others (MacDailyNews, Ars Technica, etc.)
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales receives Doctor of Laws degree
Knox College, an Illinois liberal arts college, presented Wales with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at their 2006 commencement ceremony, held on 3 June. At the ceremony, former diplomat and human trafficking opponent Shirley E. Barnes and comedian Stephen Colbert also received honorary degrees.
Copying from Wikipedia can cost a lot
On 30 May, The Oklahoma Daily (student newspaper for the University of Oklahoma) reported in the article "Plagiarism charges laid against students" that sixteen students in a history of science class had been charged with plagiarism. According to professor Katherine Tredwell, many of the students had copied entire essays from Wikipedia for their final exams.
Wikitruth editor discusses Wikipedia's failures
Australian broadsheet The Age republished an article by Andrew Orlowski originally published in the U.K.'s The Guardian. Orlowski talked with "Skip", a Wikipedia administrator and member of critic's forum Wikitruth in "Knowledge down the Googler".
- While plenty of people nurse resentments against Wikipedia, having failed to win a consensus for their views, Skip's colleagues at Wikitruth have a different motivation. Branding themselves the true keepers of the flame, they argue that Wikipedia's wounds are self-inflicted and unnecessary.
Minor reporting trends
Several recently launched projects have been compared to Wikipedia, using increasingly common language:
- "Minti is designed to be a Wikipedia of sorts for parenting advice." ZDNet
- Regarding YouTube: "Basically, it's like the Wikipedia of video, which hasn't really been done on the Internet before." PhysOrg
- Wiki-Law's mission "is to become the Wikipedia of the legal world." Law Sites
- Splunk "aims to be the equivalent of an online encyclopaedia, like Wikipedia, but for technology administrators." Silicon.com
Wall Street Journal columnist Jeremy Wagstaff lists more at in his LOOSE wire blog, in The New Cliche: "It's the Wikipedia of...".
Also, more press releases, news articles, and blogs are reporting their subject having "an article of its own in Wikipedia" as a newsworthy fact in and of itself ([1], [2]). Similarly, mention of relevant vandalism of a given article is starting to appear in occasional news articles as well ([3]).
Overview articles
Malaysian newspaper The Malay Mail included "The enlightened encyclopaedia", a positive article which touches on the multiple languages in the Wikipedia site, other Wikimedia projects, and the "anti-elitism" problem.
The Seattle Times published a thoughtful examination of Wikipedia in "Wikipedia can be useful tool". Its only error was the notion that "New articles [...] are first posted for preliminary review before publishing in the encyclopedia where anyone can edit them."
Features and admins
Administrators
Four users were granted admin status last week: AmiDaniel (nom), KimvdLinde (nom), Natalya (nom) and Wwwwolf (nom).
Featured content
A record nineteen articles were featured last week: Psittacosaurus (nom) Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (nom), Detroit, Michigan (nom), Georg Forster (nom), Indian Institutes of Technology (nom), Battle of Smolensk (1943) (nom), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (nom), Hurricane Claudette (2003) (nom), Chew Valley (nom), Absinthe (nom), Pashtun people (nom), F-4 Phantom II (nom), Enceladus (moon) (nom), Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (nom), Hurricane Nora (1997) (nom), Operation Auca (nom), Gremlins (nom), Definition of planet (nom) and Deconstructivism (nom).
Two articles that were de-featured last week: Quantum mechanics and Gender role.
No portals reached featured portal status last week.
No lists reached featured list status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Pakistan, Hopkins School, Nostradamus, 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, Transhumanism, Bob McEwen and Elias Ashmole.
These were the pictures of the day last week: Loch Lomond, Carbon nanotubes, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, Apartheid, Monument Valley, Shipka Pass and Tower Bridge.
Two pictures reached featured picture status last week:
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Parser fixes
Brion Vibber has made various fixes to the parser in an attempt to remove the need for HTML Tidy, a software program that fixes HTML errors, but has various glitches. Many of the fixes involve problems with the parsing of extensions such as <ref>.
Last week in MediaWiki software
New functionality
- Smart edit summaries for redirect pages (i.e. "Redirecting to PAGENAME"). (Rob Church)
- Allow customisation of robot policies per-namespace. (Tim Starling)
- Add "edit based on this version" links to diff. views. (Jens Frank)
- Add job queue count to action=raw output on Special:Statistics. (Tim Starling)
{{#language:}}magic word added. For example,{{#language:es}}produces español. (Rob Church)
Bug fixes
- Ensure that page links viewed after undeleting a page always appear as blue links. (Rob Church)
- Improve handling of large data sets when adding template links updates to the job queue. (Brion Vibber)
Last week in servers
- Portal namespace conflicts fixed on Chinese Wikipedia
- bart added to installation group, allowing it to receive software updates with other servers.
- New motherboard installed on srv3, new drive and OS installed on srv119
- "Wikipedia Incubator" created as alternative to initially keeping new languages on Meta.
- 19 new Wikisources added.
- New drive and OS installed on srv51.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases this week.
SqueakBox and Zapatancas
A case against SqueakBox and Zapatancas was closed on Sunday. As a result, both were banned for a month, banned from articles relating to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and placed on personal attack parole for one year. SqueakBox and Zapatancas had edit-warred with each other over the article, and both had made personal attacks against each other and vandalized each other's userpage.
Marcosantezana
A case against Marcosantezana was closed on Monday. As a result, Marcosantezana was banned one year from articles related to natural selection and placed on indefinite probation. A mentorship has also been suggested, awaiting the selection of mentor(s). Marcosantezana had caused "disruption" at these articles, edit-warring and "persist[ing] in adding excessively detailed information into the article."
Cases
Cases were accepted this week involving a request to unblock Blu Aardvark (user page), a request to unblock Saladin1970 (user page), editors on Francis Schuckardt, and a naming dispute on U.S. highway articles. All are in the evidence phase, and no other articles are in the evidence phase.
Cases involving editors on the article 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities, Deathrocker (user page), Infinity0 (user page), PoolGuy (user page), editors on Biological psychiatry, and Sam Spade (user page) are in the voting phase.
A motion to close is on the table in the cases involving Locke Cole (user page) and users DarrenRay and 2006BC.
A motion to restrict StrangerInParadise to one user account is still pending, with seven support votes with no opposition. It appears that the motion has been enacted, with the StrangerInParadise account blocked pending the user's decision on which account to use, but it has not been removed from the arbitration page.