Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-08-21
Politician's staff criticizes Wikipedia after being caught editing it
In a return of the congressional editing incident, the office of Minnesota Republican Gil Gutknecht was identified as having edited his article last week. When the news broke, Gutknecht's spokesman responded by criticizing Wikipedia's trustworthiness.
The latest episode was reported by the Star Tribune after the edits were called to the paper's attention by Wikipedia editor Daniel Bush. Bush was also heavily involved in the earlier Wikinews investigation of edits from Senate offices.
Gutknecht, a member of the House who represents the 1st District in southern Minnesota, had until July only a very brief article. It contained a picture and two short paragraphs of text followed by a list of his election opponents, a couple of external links, and two standard templates at the bottom. A third paragraph mentioning his comment about US troop withdrawal from Iraq was added 21 July.
What seemed to be most important to Gutknecht's office was that the article mentioned his promise, when first elected in 1994, to serve no more than 12 years. Nevertheless, Gutknecht is running for re-election this year. Edits from his office consistently removed references to this promise and replaced it with other biographical information. A similar broken term limits pledge was also at issue in the case of Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan, the first Congressman to have his office implicated in editing his own article.
The initial edits from Gutknecht's office seem to have been under the account User:Gutknecht01 (contribs) on 24 July. One edit summary read, "Edited on the authority of Congressman Gil Gutknecht's Office". The new content paraphrased Gutknecht's official biography on the House website.
After this was reverted, Gutknecht's office returned on 14 August, this time simply copying and pasting his website biography to replace the article text. Rather than using an account, the edits came from the IP address that serves the House, 143.231.249.141, helping to confirm the connection. This was reverted as a "copyvio", then restored with the edit summary, "This is the official biography of Congressman Gutkencht [sic]". John Broughton then reverted this with the comment, "You're posting from an IP address of the U.S. House of Representatives, and both your additions and deletions are highly POV. Please go away." Finally, the IP address was blocked for two weeks by Kungfuadam, but this was later reversed by Mindspillage with the observation that it was an "excessive block for an IP shared by hundreds of people".
Reached for comment by the Star Tribune, Gutknecht's office did not deny making the edits. However, spokesman John Yarian decided to criticize Wikipedia instead: "This is the same source that called former Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler a murderer in his official Wikipedia entry ... I would encourage people to find a more trustworthy place to do their research." (Note: Seigenthaler is actually a journalist by profession and not a lawyer. He was an administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, which is not the same as an Assistant Attorney General.) Meanwhile, the article has been significantly expanded with additional information, while still retaining the reference to Gutknecht's term limits promise.
Board of Trustees elections continue with call for candidates
The elections for the Board of Trustees continued this week with the call for candidates. The registration period for candidates to declare their candidacies ends this week on 28 August, 2006, and voting will start on 1 September, 2006.
Only two new Wikimedians joined the race this week: Oscar van Dillen and Charles Matthews. In addition, one of the previous candidates, Jon Cates, withdrew from the race for "unforseen circumstances which will limit my ability to fill this role", bringing the total number of candidates to 15. Although there is one week left in candidate registration, the number of candidates is not expected to rise significantly.
The elections officials - Aphaia, Datrio, and Essjay - also clarified several issues that had been unclear since the start of the elections. First, the current elections will only elect one Board member, who will fulfill the rest of Angela Beesley's term until 2007. There had been widespread speculation that the elections were going to elect more than one seat or that the Board would be expanded; the announcement by the elections officials implied that although such a change could still occur, the expansion of the Board, if any, would come after the elections. In addition, the statement also quelled rumors that more than one person would be elected. Board member Tim Shell has already announced his intention to resign later this year, and it is unclear what process will be used to choose his successor.
Another statement by the elections official asked all the candidates to be aware of emails sent to their meta email accounts; these emails would be for "candidacy confirmation". No details were available on what that meant, although most candidates, as of press time, had already been initially confirmed by one of the elections officials.
Finally, there was also a bit of humor in the elections this week as notacandidate was briefly added to the list of candidates. The user's platform, first created by notafish, immediately drew attention and attracted several "endorsements", including one by Mindspillage, signing as "Notmindspillage", who commented that she would "enthusiastically cast notavote for notacandidate, whose notleadership and notdirection will serve the Foundation notwell."
Report from the Swedish Wikipedia
Status and community news
As of August 21, the Swedish language Wikipedia has approximately 179,700 articles. Of these, 92 articles (about 1 in 1900) are considered Utmärkta artiklar, the Swedish Wikipedia equivalent of featured articles. In addition, 82 articles are considered to be Läsvärda artiklar, the equivalent to Good articles.
The last three "featured" articles are Herrens motståndsarmé (Lord's Resistance Army), Propaganda and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Swedish Wikipedia has 20,279 registered users, including 59 administrators (0.29 %). The relatively large number of administrators can be compared with English Wikipedia (0.05 %), German (0.08 %), Polish (0.15 %), Chinese (0.07 %) or Italian (0.06 %). Another difference with other major Wikipedias is that the articles are much shorter (link); less than half of the average article in English Wikipedia.
Considering that the Swedish language only has around 9 million native speakers it may be surprising that the Swedish Wikipedia is still one of the largest Wikipedias by the number of articles. It was long the fifth largest Wikipedia, but is now the eighth, having been overtaken by the Dutch earlier this year. It is still larger than the Portuguese or Spanish Wikipedias, although the lead over the Portuguese Wikipedia has decreased rapidly during 2006.
As far as community building goes, a large number of informal meetings have taken place in cafes in and around Stockholm, Linköping and Lund, where Wikipedia users have met to discuss Wikipedia matters. Calls for a more formal structure to arrange meetings and to collect donations have been unsuccessful.
Media coverage
Wikipedia is regularly mentioned in the Swedish media. In March, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet wrote (link) that the Swedish Wikipedia claimed that Prince Gustav Adolf, deceased 1947, was sympathetic to Nazi Germany. The matter also included a photo of the prince donating money to a German charity and one Wikipedia contributor claiming that this showed the prince having strong sympathy for the Nazis. This sparked a controversy about the truth of the matter and how this should be presented.
In March the daily Svenska Dagbladet compared (www.svd.se) the Swedish Wikipedia with the subscription-only Nationalencyklopedin and the wikistyle Susning.nu. Although the Nationalencyklopedin was considered the overall best, the Swedish Wikipedia was praised for quick updates and its coverage of popular culture. The journalist also created two articles about fictional authors; these were nominated for deletion within hours. The journalist also changed correct information to incorrect (diff); this was not detected until the newspaper article was published weeks later. This can serve as a reminder of how easy it can be to add false information: administrators can easily revert simple vandalism and spamming but preventing more advanced vandalism is more difficult.
Temporaral administratorships
Since March 2006, administrator status on the Swedish Wikipedia is only temporaral. Administrators are reelected once a year. As far as it is known, only Metawiki uses anything similar. The reasons behind this is that the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an arbitration committee and that attempts to create one have stalled. Also of concern was a growing number of administrators that either were not very active or had left the project.
Although it may be too early to evaluate the reform yet, the most obvious effect it has had is giving administrators the opportunity to voluntarily step down. Nine administrators have either stepped down or did not reply to nominations for reelection. Hopefully, the reform will stress the importance of administrators following policy. On the other hand, it would be unfortunate if administrators were afraid of doing anything that would upset people.
Other items of interest
The Swedish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images except for logos or coats of arms. A discussion to go even further and not allow fair use images at all was started in July. Although the request did not receive majority support, it showed that a considerable minority are in favour of removing all fair use images.
There is a weekly competition, Veckans tävling, where contributors can focus on a task that needs to be attended to, such as categorizing articles, expanding stub articles, spell checking and so on. One user is judge and awards points and at the end of the week one user is then awarded first prize: eternal glory and a medal to put on his or her user page. The competition has become quite popular and it is a fun way of doing some necessary chores.
News and notes
New cities join in run for Wikimania 2007
Several new cities had bids entered for Wikimania 2007. Alexandria, Taipei, and Orlando joined the list of running cities. No official bids have been submitted, though unofficial bids are being discussed for the above cities, along with Hong Kong, Singapore, Geneva, Istanbul, Chicago, Las Vegas, and bids for the United Kingdom and Australia.
Official bids are due no later than September 10th. A jury panel composed of the Wikimedia Foundation executive board, the organization team for Wikimania 2006, and Andrew Lih will convene to compose a shortlist of cities on September 15th, after which finalists will answer jury questions and finalize their bid. The final vote is scheduled for September 24th. More information can be found on Meta's Wikimania page.
New sidebar proposal
A proposal to redesign Wikipedia's sidebar has attracted the attention of users and programmers. The change would place an additional box between the search box and the toolbox, containing Wikipedia help pages, and would rearrange other links. Details are being discussed, after which Rob Church has offered to write the MediaWiki code necessary to make the changes work. User input is requested on the proposed changes.
Amendment to changing usernames proposed
An amendment to the current changing username process was proposed this week. The current policy states that accounts "can only be renamed to [another] account that does not exist [already]", meaning that people could not switch account names into one that had already been registered, even if the account had few or no edits. However, despite this policy, the demand for such user-name change has been high, and bureaucrats have been known to occasionally allow such requests. The proposed policy would make this official provided an attempt to contact the account is unsuccessful and the account has few or little edits with no recent activity.
Briefly
- The French Wiktionary has reached 200,000 articles.
- The Latin Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
- The Malay Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
- The Finnish Wikipedia has reached 75,000 articles.
- The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 4,000 files.
- The German Wikipedia has reached 450,000 articles.
- The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles
- The Albanian Wikibooks has reached 100 Wikibook modules.
- The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 220,000 articles.
- The Uzbek Wikipedia reaches 4,000 articles.
- The Russian Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
- The Korean Wikipedia has reached 26,000 articles.
- The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 20,000 registered users.
- The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
In the news
List appearances
Time magazine named Wikipedia as one of the "25 Sites We Can't Live Without". The accompanying description reads, "A real Web wonder: this massive, collaborative online encyclopedia is written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers; some 1.3 million articles in English, and millions more in 228 other languages". Meanwhile, The Observer included Wikipedia in its list of "Websites that changed the world" (a group of 15, to coincide with the web's 15th anniversary — they incorrectly called us wikipedia.com, however).
Coverage from Finland
The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest subscription newspaper in Finland and the Nordic countries, published a feature on Wikipedia editor Timo Jyrinki. The article focuses on the Finnish Wikipedia, but is available to read in English. Among the items noted is an incident involving the article on Finnish MP Jari Vilén (English article). When a paragraph dealing with reported plagiarism in Vilén's master's thesis was removed last year, the edits were traced to an IP address assigned to the Finnish Parliament.
Even at Microsoft...
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropped an interesting tidbit into a report on a program conducted by Microsoft to boost the presence of women in the tech industry. Microsoft brings a group of young women to its campus for a weeklong camp. Describing the students using technology to work on complex equations, the article said, "rather than using the built-in Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia for research, another girl quietly used the Wikipedia site instead to finish the project."
More quality news
More sources are reporting news stories about Wikipedia's quality, such as one that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a follow-up to Wikimania 2006. According to the article, Jimbo Wales said that with Wikipedia having come so far, contributors should now turn "away from growth and toward quality." The story went on to provide more background about Wikipedia, such as earlier praise from Nature magazine, proposed improvements including a stability experiment underway in the German version of Wikipedia, as well as the quality concerns raised by pranks.
Features and admins
Administrators
Six users were granted admin status last week: Renata3 (nom), Aguerriero (nom), Andrew Levine (nom), Alphachimp (nom), Wangi (nom), and Consumed Crustacean (nom)
Alphachimp joined the ranks of WP:100 with 138 support votes, the 44th RfA to do so.
Featured Content
Eleven articles were featured last week: Warsaw Uprising (1794) (nom), Battle of Moscow (nom), Toledo War (nom), Banksia brownii (nom), Hilary Putnam (nom), Darjeeling (nom), Ahmedabad (nom), G. Ledyard Stebbins (nom), Scooby-Doo (nom), Procellariidae (nom), and Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (nom).
Two articles were de-featured last week: Economy of the Republic of Ireland and Lastovo.
The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Indigenous peoples of North America.
Five lists reached featured list status last week: List of Canadian federal parliaments, List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Avon, BAFTA Award for Best Film, List of current world boxing champions, and List of people with epilepsy.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: O-Bahn Busway, Cane Toad, Hurricane Mitch, Sikhism, Illmatic, Roman Vishniac, and Sesame Street.
These were the pictures of the day last week: Prothonotary Warbler, India, Mont St. Michel Spire, World War II Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, Ozyptila praticola, white-lipped snail, and Leaf Green Tree Frog.
One picture reached featured picture status last week:
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Outage
All Wikimedia projects were briefly locked down after most users were unable to access the site. The reason, according to developer Brion Vibber, was the readvertising of Wikimedia's IP space by Cogent. [1]
As a result of the IP snafu, which occurred on Friday at about 17:30 UTC, few users (mostly AOL users) were able to access the site, while most others were blocked. Developers made the decision to put all databases into read-only mode until the route was restored around 19:55 UTC; write access was enabled shortly afterward. A new IP space was given to Wikimedia, and the old space is or will soon be unavailable. River Tarnell said that developers were looking into obtaining a permanent IP space [2].
Database changes
Three tables have been added to the MediaWiki database structure since MediaWiki 1.6. These links are meant to contain more information either untracked, or in other locations in previous releases.
- A new "langlinks" table tracks interlanguage links
- A new "filearchive" table stores information on deleted files
- A new "querycache_info" table stores information on query page updates
Operations report released
Domas Mituzas published an operations report for November 2005 to August 2006, covering major hardware and software changes. Image hosting systems are one of the next purchases planned, after high-performance caching and application hardware and Foundry routing hardware were purchased earlier this year.
New changes in Software
- Bug 7037: Regression in login tab order fixed
- Bug 7031: Requesting a password by e-mail when an e-mail address is not set results in an error message, rather than a false "success" message
- Bug 7010: Don't send email notifications for watched talk pages when user has selected to receive only updates for their own talk page - Note: Email notifications are not activated on the English Wikipedia.
- New magic word
{{CURRENTHOUR}}added - revision 16116: Added [[:Image:Foo.png]] style links to the pagelinks table; i.e. such links now show up in Whatlinkshere.
- Avoid duplicate revision imports with Special:Import
- Bug 7054: Validate email address before sending email confirmation message
- Bug 7061: Format title on "from (page)" links on Special:Allpages
- Bug 7044: Introduce "padleft" and "padright" colon functions
- Pass page title as parameters to "linkshere" and "nolinkshere" and update default message text
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee opened three new cases this week, and closed three cases.
Closed cases
- Irishpunktom: Closed on Monday, a case involving Irishpunktom, Karl Meier, and Dbiv. As a result of the case, Dbiv was desysopped, and Irishpunktom and Dbiv were banned from editing Peter Tatchell for one year, Irishpunktom and Karl Meier were placed on probation for one year, and Irishpunktom was placed on one revert per article per week parole. The dispute involved edit warring on Peter Tatchell. With the case near-closing last month, Dbiv made an IP edit to his case, rewording a resolution. [3].
- Alienus: Closed on Sunday, a case involving Alienus. As a result, Alienus was banned from editing for one year. Prior to the case, Alienus had been blocked 15 times, and had assumed bad faith, and been warned many times about personal attacks, edit warring, and incivility.
- Pudgenet: Closed on Wednesday, a case brought against Pudgenet, involving a dispute between Pudgenet and -Barry-. As a result, Barry was banned indefinitely from editing Perl and its talk page, Pudgenet was placed on personal attack parole and probation, and all parties were warned about their actions. The dispute involved pages relating to Perl, as well as Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles.
New cases
- Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Ed Poor 2: A case involving Ed Poor. JoshuaZ and Consumed Crustacean have accused Poor of POV pushing and disruption; Poor has not introduced evidence in the case. Ed Poor was party to two prior cases; the first was closed after Poor resigned his status as a bureaucrat, and the second resulted in his desysopping.
- Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pat8722: A case involving the actions of Pat8722. BorgHunter has accused Pat8722 of edit-warring; Pat8722 has not yet introduced evidence in the case.
- Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/St Christopher: A case involving St Christopher Iba Mar Diop College of Medicine, a school whose accreditation status is in dispute.
Evidence phase
- Kehrli: A case involving the actions of Nick Y and Kherli on Mass-to-charge ratio and related articles. Both protagonists accuse each other of POV pushing, adding unsourced information, and adding dispute tags without reason.
- Israel-Lebanon: A case involving the actions of AdamKesher, Tasc and others on 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. AdamKesher accuses Tasc of removing relevant external links which satisfy WP:EL, and he denies the allegation. In response, Denis Diderot accuses Kesher of "using Wikipedia as a tool to promote his POV".
- Deir Yassin massacre: A case involving the actions of KimvdLinde and Guy Montag on Deir Yassin massacre. KimvdLinde alleges that Montag has violated his probation by rewriting the article, unilaterally moving it to "Battle of Deir Yassin", violating copyright and votestacking. In return, Montag refuses "to participate in any of these proceedings", and alleges that KimvdLinde has abused her admin tools by exercising them in a dispute in which she is involved.
- Warren Kinsella: A case involving the actions of Arthur Ellis, Pete Peters and others on the Warren Kinsella article. Both users accuse the other of disruptive edits on the page, and Peters and others acccuse Ellis of sockpuppetry using anon accounts, while Ellis alleges that administrators dealt inequitably with him and Peters.
Voting phase
- Zer0faults: A case involving the actions of Zer0faults and Nescio on Template:War on Terrorism, War on Terror and related arguments. Nescio alleges that Zer0faults has engaged in violation of WP:POINT, disruptive editing, and "uncivil remarks". In return, Zer0fault alleges that Nescio has failed to assume good faith, violated WP:POINT and WP:RS, and failed to provide explanations for his reverts. A single remedy that would place Zer0faults on probation was suggested by Fred Bauder, but has not yet been voted on by other arbitrators.
- Intangible: A case involving the actions of Intangible. Cberlet alleges that Intangible has used an "aggressive and confrontational" editing style to push his POV (partly through the wholesale deletion of the term "far right" from numerous pages), making sweeping edits and reverts with little or no discussion, and being "contentious and confrontational" in talk page discussions. Intangible vigorously denies the allegations. A single remedy, supported by Bauder and Sam Korn would place Intangible on probation.
- CoolKatt number 99999: A case involving the actions of CoolKatt number 99999 on WWOR-TV and related articles, as well as the actions of Crossmr, Kramden4700 and others. A temporary injunction has been enacted, which bans CoolKatt from editing pages other than his own user pages and the arbitration pages for the duration of the case. Remedies banning CoolKatt from U.S. television articles for one year, placing him on probation, and ordering the deletion of all user subpages that violate userpage policies have the support of Bauder and Korn.
- Ericsaindon2: A case involving the actions of Ericsaindon2, Coolcaesar and Will Beback. Coolcaesar claims that Ericsaindon2 has tried to insert original research, has disrupted Wikipedia, used sockpuppets, uploaded images violating copyright law, and failed to assume good faith. In response, Ericsaindon2 claims that Coolcaesar has contributed equally to the dispute, and that Will Beback has misused admin powers, in particular with incorrect and biased application of the 3RR. Remedies have been proposed limiting Ericsaindon to one account, placing him on probation, and banning him for one year have the support of three arbitrators.
- Heqong: A case (formerly referred to as Chiang Kai-shek) involving the actions of Heqong (formerly Chiang Kai-shek) on China and Taiwan-related articles. Proposed remedies placing Heqong on personal attack parole and probation, and banning him for one month for personal attacks have the support of three arbitrators.
- His excellency: A case involving the actions of His excellency. The case involves the actions of His excellency on Islam-related talk pages. Remedies banning His excellency for at least four months, placing him on personal attack parole, and placing His excellency and Timothy Usher on probation have attracted the support of two arbitrators, as has one permitting the use of "traditional Muslim usages" such as "Salam, brother" on talk pages, so long as they do not create a hostile atmosphere for non-Muslims. Consensus has not yet been reached on other proposed remedies.
- Sathya Sai Baba: A case involving Andries and SSS108's actions on the article Sathya Sai Baba. Both have accused each other of "POV pushing", and violating Wikipedia's policy on original research. Proposed remedies that unsourced or poorly sourced information be removed from these articles, and a complete amnesty for Andries and SSS108 for any unreliable information they may have added in the past have the support of three arbitrators.
- Eternal Equinox: A case involving Eternal Equinox. Several users complained that Eternal Equinox has been trying to claim ownership of articles with edit wars and abuse directed at those who try to edit them. Eternal Equinox claimed to have left Wikipedia, but the other parties argued that this was not credible because of a number of similar statements made previously. Eternal Equinox has since returned, editing anonymously from several related IP addresses while acknowledging his or her identity. Remedies proposed placing Eternal Equinox on probation and personal attack parole for one year, and cautioning Jim62sch "to avoid teasing or taunting sensitive users" has the support of six arbitrators.
- Israeli apartheid: A case involving the actions of editors and administrators on Allegations of Israeli apartheid (formerly at Israeli apartheid). The article was the site of a move war during a poll to determine the article's naming. Remedies encouraging negotiation and mediation, admonishing administrators involved in the dispute, directing discussion of issues to Wikipedia:Central discussions/Apartheid, and granting an amnesty to all users except Zeq have the support of six arbitrators.
- Añoranza: A case involving Añoranza. Users asserted that Añoranza had been incivil, and had filed a retaliatory request for comment and request for checkuser. The dispute involves the usage of terms such as "Operation Iraqi Liberation" for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Remedies banning Añoranza for a week for the disruptive way in which he went about bringing the terms to light and encouraging the parties to enter into good-faith negotiations into the matter have the support of five arbitrators; other remedies are split.
- 8bitJake: A case involving 8bitJake. badlydrawnjeff, the initiator of the arbitration request, has asserted that 8bitJake's editing on political articles was biased, and that 8bitJake was incivil to other editors on the articles. Remedies supported by six arbitrators would place 8bitJake and related editors on probation and ban them from articles relating to the politics of the State of Washington.
Motion to close
- Hunger: A case involving a dispute about articles related to The Hunger Project. One of the parties, Jcoonrod, identifies himself as John Coonrod, an executive with that organization. The dispute has been in mediation about how and whether to include unflattering material about the organization in the article. If closed, "non-controversial" information from the official website of the Hunger Project can be included unless it is contested in good-faith, in which case a reliable source must be found, and negative material can be removed unless it is adequately sourced.
- Dionyseus: A case involving Dionyseus and Danny Pi, and their actions on Veselin Topalov, an article on a Bulgarian chess player accused of cheating. Remedies brought by Fred Bauder and supported mostly by three other arbitrators, would ban Danielpi for a week for "discourtesy and personal attacks", and recommend that Dionyseus "consider carefully the suggestions of others regarding punctuation and other matters he is not familiar with".