Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2007-10-01
WikiWorld comic: "Buttered cat paradox"
NB: Greg Williams is on vacation. This rerun is from April 23, 2007.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Buttered cat paradox". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
News and notes
Commons top uploaders calculated
The top uploaders at Wikimedia Commons, by number of bytes uploaded, were calculated recently. The top uploader is GerWsUpload, a bot account to upload book scans for the German Wikisource; the scans totaled about 45.7 gigabytes. Second is Infrogmation, who uploaded about 17.6 gigabytes worth of media.
Wikimania bidding: Toronto withdraws, 2008 decision Saturday, 2009 in December
Wikimania 2008 bids are being reviewed by members of the Wikimania 2008 Jury, with the final decision scheduled for October 6. Zanimum removed Toronto's bid on Monday, noting that he'd focus on a Toronto bid for 2009. The three remaining bids are Alexandria, Atlanta, and Cape Town.
Foundation Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass announced Friday that Wikimania 2009 bids would be accepted in October, with the expectation of a selection of 2009's host city by December 15, 2007. The decision was "based on our experiences of the process this time around". As such, individuals interested in hosting Wikimania 2009 should begin preparing bids; a timeline will be announced soon.
Briefly
- Two new wikis were created this week: The Bengali Wikisource and the Upper Sorbian Wiktionary.
- The Dutch Wikiquote has reached 500 pages.
- The Czech Wikisource has reached 3,500 pages.
- The Danish Wikipedia has reached 70,000 pages.
- The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 80,000 pages.
In the news
Jimbo sparks deletion debate
Wikipedia wars erupt - Jimmy Wales created a one-sentence article about a popular gathering spot in South Africa, Mzoli's, which was originally speedily deleted and then taken to AfD. Some accused others of affording a God-like status to the Wikipedia co-founder, while Wales accused his detractors of bad faith. This incident has refocused attention on the debate between quality and quantity, and because the site has just reached the two-million article mark, the article notes that making an original contribution is harder. The debate between inclusionists and deletionists is framed as one between newer members of the project, and older members who understand that some of the deletions they have made are wrong.
Wikipedia's changing culture
Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence - At Wikipedia's egalitarian foundations, where anyone can edit, lies a contradiction with its status as one of the top ten trafficked websites. Recent events with WikiScanner have shown Wikipedia's weaknesses, but edits by less established editors are likely to be edited out. There is an increasing bureaucratisation of Wikipedia, as exemplified by the use of codes for policy pages, which leaves Wikipedia open to attack in that the right priorities are not being attended to. As a check and balance for administrators, the article proposes a repository of deleted articles. The article suggests that greater accountability, and some competition, may result in better quality.
Other mentions in the news
Other mentions in the online media recently include:
- The 8 Most Needlessly Detailed Wikipedia Entries: This is an amusing account of eight long Wikipedia articles, and Anna Kournikova.
- The Art of Wikigroaning: Wikigroaning is the sport of finding a "useful" article and then comparing it with a similar-sounding, but "useless" article.
- Wikipedia Discredits Reports It's Abandoning Open Editing: Proposals to increase the quality of Wikipedia garner some discussion.
Features and admins
Administrators
Eight users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Fabrictramp (nom), Ronnotel (nom), SQL (nom), Bearian (nom), Danaman5 (nom), Metropolitan90 (nom), JForget (nom), Kicking222 (nom), and Recurring dreams (nom).
Bots
Two bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: Ficbot (task request), and BOTijo (task request).
Featured content
Sixteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Victoria Cross (Canada) (nom), Lung cancer (nom), Biman Bangladesh Airlines (nom), Frederick Russell Burnham (nom), Truthiness (nom), Isle of Portland (nom), Peterborough (nom), Audioslave (nom), Uranus (nom), Religious debates over the Harry Potter series (nom), Eadbald of Kent (nom), Omaha Beach (nom), Issy Smith (nom), Dartmouth College (nom), Israel (nom), and Rachel Carson (nom).
Four articles were de-featured last week: Battle of Normandy (nom), United States Congress (nom), First Battle of the Stronghold (nom), and Article One of the United States Constitution (nom).
Ten lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Georgia Institute of Technology athletes (nom), List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people/T-V (nom), List of Calgary Flames players (nom), List of Orkney islands (nom), The Breeders discography (nom), Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy (nom), List of Baltimore Ravens first-round draft picks (nom), John Frusciante discography (nom), Art Ross Trophy (nom), and IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship (nom).
No lists were de-featured last week.
No portals were promoted to featured status last week.
Two topics were featured last week: Song Dynasty (nom), and Confederate government of Kentucky (nom).
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre, Hannah Primrose, Countess of Rosebery, Pilot (Smallville), Henry, Bishop of Uppsala, Trade and usage of saffron, Ernest Emerson, and House with Chimaeras.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Philippine-American War, Wilson's Snipe, Barbary Macaque, Hyperion (moon), Lassen Volcanic National Park, British Columbia Parliament Building, and Slavery in the United States.
Eight pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
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World Trade Center complex, 12 days after its destruction -
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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Fixed bugs
- A bug which caused the name of the rename log to sometimes fail to load on Special:Log was fixed. (r26105, bug 11446)
- The API now returns a more useful error message when it couldn't carry out an action due to high database load. (r26140, bug 11404)
- When a <math> tag encounters an error, it now returns the correct error message rather than always returning the default error message. (r26184, bug 11474)
- The Cortado player sometimes used by the OggHandler media handler to play audio/video (depending on what software is available on the viewer's computer) has been patched to no longer sometimes cut off the end of the sound. (r26224, bug 11232; note that you may have to bypass your cache to gain the benefit of this fix)
- There were some problems with watchlists on 25 September; this was due to the server that handles watchlists having problems. (The database server that handles watchlist requests was down for a while; it's back up now. --brion 17:25, 25 September 2007)
- The Search feature now only finds exact word matches, rather than matching a substring of a word, unless a * is used to specify 'any characters go here' (so to find articles containing words ending in the letters 'ing', it's now necessary to search for *ing rather than just ing). (r26271, bug 278)
New features
- Every page now contains an RSS feed link for Special:Recentchanges. (r26058, bug 5412)
- A new API feature with similar functionality to Special:ExpandTemplates has been added; the rvexpandtemplates=true parameter has been added to a query for a page's content, which recursively expands all templates on the page in the output. (r26125, bug 11405)
- The RSS watchlist feed now allows an allrev=true option that works the same way as the 'Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes' preference. (r26139, bug 11218)
- It's now possible to prevent images being uploaded with certain non-descriptive filenames by blacklisting prefixes for image filenames via MediaWiki:Filename-prefix-blacklist. (r25637, bug 10735)
- The section= parameter was added to action=raw, so it's now possible to request the raw content of a section as well as the raw content of a page. (r26142, bug 11353)
Other technology news
- Two new Wikimedia wikis were created this week (note that these and other links to the new wikis might not work yet, due to the interwiki map taking time to update):
Ongoing news
- Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee accepted one new case this week, and closed one case.
Closed case
- Jmfangio-Chrisjnelson: A case involving alleged edit-warring, hostility, and incivility between Jmfangio and Chrisjnelson. Jmfangio has been indefinitely blocked after checkuser confirmed that this account is the reincarnation of a community-banned editor. As a result of the case, Chrisjnelson's editing was restricted for six months.
New case
- Giovanni33-John Smith's: A case regarding actions taken with respect to a block of Giovanni33 in a dispute between him and John Smith's.
Evidence phase
Voting phase
- Liancourt Rocks: A case involving alleged WP:NPOV violations on the Liancourt Rocks article. A remedy banning Wikimachine for one year has the support of one arbitrator.
- Bharatveer: A case involving alleged edit-warring, incivility and personal attacks by Bharatveer on India-related articles. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy restricting Bharatveer's editing for one year.
- SevenOfDiamonds: A case involving alleged abusive sockpuppetry and other misconduct by SevenOfDiamonds. SevenOfDiamonds vigorously denies the allegations, and alleges that MONGO has harassed him. Voting on remedies is split.
- Dalmatia: A case involving a dispute between Italian and Croatian editors on articles relating to the Dalmatia region. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies, supported by Fred Bauder, restricting the editing of Giovanni Giove and DIREKTOR.
- DreamGuy 2: A case involving alleged persistent incivility by DreamGuy. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a remedy restricting DreamGuy's editing, which has the support of Fred Bauder.
- The Troubles: A case involving a large number of editors on articles related to The Troubles. Some editors attempted to withdraw from the case when its scope was widened at the request of an arbitrator to cover the entire area rather than only the behaviour of Vintagekits, but in accordance with arbitration policy, these attempts, along with other changes to statements after the case opened, were reverted by the clerk. Remedies placing a group of editors on probation have the support of two arbitrators.
- Attack sites: A case involving disputes over whether the attack sites section of WP:NPA should prohibit links from articles in the mainspace to websites which include pages attacking Wikipedia editors. Voting on most remedies is split, but remedies encouraging the community to develop a policy through consensus have a majority.
- THF-DavidShankBone: A case involving alleged POV editing by THF relating to Michael Moore, and alleged harassment by DavidShankBone. A motion banning THF from politically charged topics has the support of two arbitrators, but is opposed by Fred Bauder.
- Artaxerex: A case involving alleged POV-pushing, incivility and sockpuppetry by Artaxerex. Artaxerex denies the allegations, and alleges that Shervink and others are focusing on getting him blocked, and that certain editors push an Iranian nationalist POV. Remedies banning Artaxerex and reminding parties of the need to adhere closely to WP:NPOV have the support of four arbitrators.
- Allegations of apartheid: This case concerns the conduct of various editors in connection with a group of articles whose titles include the words "Allegations of apartheid". It has been alleged that these articles were created in violation of Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point, after several deletion debates concerning Allegations of Israeli apartheid resulted in that article being kept. Issues have also been raised concerning comments made in deletion discussions and reviews. Several users who have created and edited the "Allegations of apartheid" articles have strongly denied any inappropriate conduct. Voting on most proposals is split, but an amnesty for past actions currently has a majority.