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5 March 2014

 

2014-03-05

Brinksmen on the brink

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By Serendipodous

There's nothing like a good old bit of Cold War nostalgia, combined with a suitably scary international incident, to focus our attention on the real world, and the rapidly unfolding, or toppling, situation in Ukraine clearly has tingled our collective nape, as people searched out the players and places involved in what could be the most destabilising event since the Yugoslav Wars. The Winter Olympics continued to haunt the list as well, no doubt buoyed by those same events. That said, nothing could stem our outpouring of affection for the beloved comedian Harold Ramis, whose death managed to top the week in the face of those international concerns.

For the full top 25 list, plus an explanation as to any exclusions, see WP:TOP25.

For the week of 23 February to 1 March, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most viewed pages, were:

Rank Article Class Views Image Notes
1 Harold Ramis C-class 1,158,070
Nothing guarantees Wikipedia attention like a sudden and unexpected death, and Ramis's death at only 69 appeared to come out of the blue. People rocked in sudden recognition of the director who gave us such beloved comedies as Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation and Groundhog Day, though most probably mourned him as the guy who played huggable nerd Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters.
2 Ukraine B-Class 700,513
Things are moving fast in the country, from protest to revolution to armed hostility. It has now reached the point where anything I say will probably be obsolete by the time this is published. But it's fair to say things are getting pretty hairy; the last time Vladimir Putin asserted his manhood to his near neighbours, the conflict lasted a week. Here's hoping a similar outcome prevails now.
3 True Detective (TV series) C-class 633,432 This HBO police procedural stars Woody Harrelson and actor-of-the-moment Matthew McConaughey
4 Crimea C-class 606,887
The evil of a strategic position is to be the plaything of great powers, and, 160 years after inspiring the war that gave us the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sevastopol,* the balaclava, and Florence Nightingale, the hapless peninsula has become so again.

*The first one, anyway

5 Internet C-class 506,413
I'm giving this the benefit of the doubt for now; there's no reason for people not to be interested in the thing off of which they are currently reading. However I suspect that it might follow IPv6 to the Exclusions list before too long.
6 Facebook B-class 482,478
A perennially popular article
7 Deaths in 2014 List 460,121
The list of deaths in the current year is always quite a popular article.
8 Joaquín Guzmán Loera B-class 441,481 Some consider this head of the Sinaloa Cartel to be the most powerful drug lord of all time; even surpassing the infamous Pablo Escobar, so much so that Chicago police named him public enemy number one—the last person so named was Al Capone, and he lived in that city. His arrest on 22 February may be a harbinger of better things. Or not—the last time he was in prison, he just bribed the guards and walked out.
9 House of Cards (U.S. TV series) B-class 441,280 The second season of this political thriller series was released in its entirety on Netflix on 13 February
10 2014 Winter Olympics B-class 404,604
The 2014 Winter Olympics ended last week, but the impending Paralympics kept it in the public mind. Thanks to Russia's vicious anti-gay laws, roundly condemned political imprisonments, and questionable behaviour with his neighbours, the event has become, whether Russia wanted it to or not, a lightning rod for modern civil rights protest.


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2014-03-05

Four paragraph lead, indefinitely blocked IPs, editor reviews broken?

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By Tucoxn
The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day for March 1, 2014 shows Ponta de São Lourenço on Madeira island, the largest island in the Portuguese Madeira archipelago.

This is mostly a list of non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 5 March 2014 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices (last two in bold). If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.

Style and naming

Policies and guidelines

WikiProjects and collaborations

Technical issues and templates

Proposals

English Wikipedia notable requests for permissions

(This section includes active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections.)

  • None at time of this writing

Other



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2014-03-05

Wikipedia Library finding success in matching contributors with sources

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By The ed17
The Wikipedia Library uses this image of the Stacie Library at York University to illustrate its centralized template.

This week, the Signpost caught up with the Wikipedia Library (TWL), which aims to connect reference resources with Wikipedia editors who can use them to improve articles. Funded through the Wikimedia Foundation's Individual Engagement Grants program,[A] TWL has several initiatives coming up (including "visiting scholars" and an Arabic Wikipedia microgrants program). It declares on its Wikipedia page that it has five "big goals" to accomplish:

  • Connect editors with their local library and freely accessible resources
  • Partner to provide free access to paywalled publications, databases, universities, and libraries
  • Build relationships among our community of editors, libraries, and librarians
  • Facilitate research for Wikipedians, helping editors to find and use sources
  • Promote broader open access in publishing and research

The program relates to GLAM-Wiki—galleries, libraries, archives, and museums—by focusing on the libraries, which Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi), the overall coordinator of TWL, sees as the outlier in the original GLAM model (libraries are not cultural institutions with extensive collections): "It's totally complimentary and the lines are not well-defined. Where we get editors access to a university library's collections, they can improve articles, possibly in the area of that library's expertise". He continued:

TWL's recent priorities were influenced in large part due to a December 2013 survey that was sent out to 1500 TWL recipients. Out of the 200 responses, Ocaasi told the Signpost that out of thirteen proposed areas for growth, an "overwhelming" amount asked for access to additional research—particularly the voluminous publications held behind JSTOR's paywalls. While TWL has a program in place with JSTOR, it only opened up 100 free accounts. This left around 200 still waiting on the list, with the potential for far more—TWL's Questia partnership had over 400 applicants, while HighBeam gave out about 1000 accounts. This has resulted in, as of publishing time, 7052 links to Questia and even more to HighBeam. Ocaasi remarked that "it's clear our pilot program has only whetted the appetites of editors for more", and "we are working very hard to expand that offering."

TWL is also in talks with the New York Times, EBSCO, Proquest, the Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and Science, among others, to open up their archives to Wikipedians. They narrowly missed out with LexisNexis, even having a meeting with eight department executives, but they were unable to sort out a host of legal issues. This isn't unusual, as Ocaasi noted: "It's part of the process that we have hits and misses, both in arranging partners, and finding resources the community really wants and needs."

Future

Beyond free accounts, what does the future look like for the Wikipedia Library? A new "visiting scholars" program affiliated with TWL offers a promising alternative: it is a pilot that will see Wikipedia editors paired with university libraries to gain access to their collections and reference resources. Ocaasi told the Signpost that such scholars would be unpaid but official staffers of the university, with remote access to the library's offerings.

TWL has already contacted 150 libraries, with 40 responses and 5–10 seriously interested in participating. The first visiting scholars position will be with George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.

Additionally, TWL—which is, fundamentally, still an English-language pilot—is planning to expand into other languages. Its Meta timeline lists three upcoming launch dates for Wikipedia Libraries in other languages, including Arabic on 15 March. The largest amount of TWL-related criticism came from non-English-language Wikimedians, who asked why the program was concentrating only on English-language sources. Unfortunately, despite some cross-wiki participation, the program at the time "definitely lived on the English Wikipedia", said Ocaasi.

[The Arabic TWL] is a source access approach TWL hasn't tried before, in book purchases. It's also a true collaboration between a WMF-identified project and a community led program in TWL. WMF has a lot of knowledge about non-English community and helped translate and frame the consultation with Arabic Wikipedia. Now TWL gets to use its established 'account coordinator' model to expand programs into other communities.

—Jake Orlowitz ( Ocaasi)

To remedy this deficiency, TWL will be creating "satellites" on three other Wikipedias (Arabic, Spanish, German) that will be operated by the local communities. By partnering with the Wikimedia Foundation's Siko Bouterse, the organization's head of Individual Engagement Grants and Travel and Participation Support, TWL is supporting a pilot project that will award microgrants to Arabic-language Wikipedians who need funds to access sources for their article writing. Interestingly, despite a wide variety of grantmaking processes, microgrants are not something the Foundation has tried before. These grants, for a maximum of US$200 each and a total of $7000, will directly fund book purchases with minimal bureaucracy after-the-fact: editors will only have to write one sentence, including links to the article(s) improved, within three months.

TWL is founded by a WMF Individual Engagement Grant. While the original TWL grant, awarded in March 2013, was "experimental" (according to Ocaasi), the concept's success led to the grant's renewal in January for six more months for three times as much as the original US$7500. The extra funds allow for three paid contractors, including full-time coordinator Ocaasi, part-time coordinator Patrick Earley (The Interior), and technical consultant Nischay Nahata.

Notes

  1. ^ The IEG program was introduced in January 2013 to empower individual or small teams of volunteers to tackle long-term on-wiki problems; it covers tasks largely outside the scope of other WMF programs like entity-focused FDC or GAC procedures. The Foundation reaches its final funding decisions based on community input and a volunteer committee's recommendations.

In briefs

  • STiki: The English Wikipedia's vandalism reversion tool STiki has reached a milestone of 500,000 reverts. According to the tool's creator West.andrew.g, STiki "is an intelligent routing tool that directs human users to potential vandalism for definitive classification."
  • Individual Engagement Grants: The Wikimedia Foundation has reminded the community that applications for this round's IEGs will close on 31 March. Siko Bouterse, the program's head, wrote that IEGs "support individuals and small teams to organize projects for 6 months. You can get funding to turn your idea for improving Wikimedia projects into action, with a grant for online community organizing, outreach and partnerships, tool-building, or research. Funding is available for a few hundred dollars up to $30,000." In addition, three clinics will be hosted in the month of March via Google Plus.
  • Two new quarterly reviews: The Foundation has published the results of two new quarterly reviews with its projects, Wikipedia Zero and its Growth team. Quarterly reviews are aimed to ensure accountability and allow senior Foundation staff to offer specific guidance to their proliferous and diverse initiatives. Wikipedia Zero is partnering with mobile providers in developing countries to give free mobile access to Wikipedia articles, and the Growth team, formerly known as "Editor Engagement Experiments", focuses on methods to add contributors to the various Wikimedia projects.
  • Wiki Education Foundation: The Education Foundation's first monthly report, covering the month of February, has been published.
  • Bot editing examined: MIT Technology Review took a look into Wikipedia's bot editors in February.

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2014-03-05

Full speed ahead for the WikiCup

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By Pine
This depiction of SMS Kaiserin Augusta was restored by WikiCup competitor Adam Cuerden. The 2014 WikiCup competition is underway.
This Signpost "Featured content" report covers material promoted from 23 February 2014 through 1 March 2014. Subject descriptions are quoted from the articles; see their histories for attribution.

Wikicup 2014

This year's WikiCup competition has completed the first round. Here is a summary from the WikiCup 2014 February newsletter by WikiCup judges J Milburn, The ed17 and Miyagawa.

"And so ends the most competitive first round we have ever seen, with 38 points required to qualify for round 2. Last year, 19 points secured a place; before that, 11 (2012) or 8 (2011) were enough. This is both a blessing and a curse. While it shows the vigourous good health of the competition, it also means that we have already lost many worthy competitors. Our top three scorers were:

  1. Smithsonian Institution Godot13 (submissions), a WikiCup newcomer whose high-quality scans of rare banknotes represent an unusual, interesting and valuable contribution to Wikipedia. Most of Godot's points this round have come from a large set of pictures used in Treasury Note (1890–91).
  2. Oh, better far to live and die / Under the brave black flag I fly... Adam Cuerden (submissions), a WikiCup veteran and a finalist last year, Adam is also a featured picture specialist, focusing on the restoration of historical images. This month's promotions have included a carefully restored set of artist William Russell Flint's work.
  3. United States WikiRedactor (submissions), another WikiCup newcomer. WikiRedactor has claimed points for good article reviews and good articles relating to pop music, many of which were awarded bonus points. Articles include Sky Ferreira, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus and "Wrecking Ball" (Miley Cyrus song).

"Other competitors of note include:

Six articles were promoted to featured status last week.

Wells Cathedral
First edition cover of Drama dari Krakatau
Japanese aircraft carrier Sōryū fitting out at Kure Naval Arsenal in 1937
  • Wells Cathedral nominated by Rodw and Amandajm. Wells Cathedral is a Church of England place of worship in Wells, Somerset dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle, and is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. As with other cathedrals, it is the central church of a diocese and contains the bishop's throne (cathedra). The present building dates from 1175 to 1490, an earlier church having been built on the site in 705... Wells has been variously described as "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and as "the most poetic" of English cathedrals.
  • Typhoon Maemi nominated by Hahc21 and Hurricanehink. Typhoon Maemi (international designation: 0314, JTWC designation: 15W, PAGASA name: Pogi) was the most powerful typhoon to strike South Korea since record-keeping began in the country in 1904. Maemi formed on September 4, 2003 from a disturbance in a monsoon trough in the western Pacific Ocean. It slowly intensified into Tropical Storm Maemi while moving northwestward, becoming a typhoon on September 8. That day, favorable conditions facilitated more rapid strengthening; the storm developed a well-defined eye and reached peak maximum sustained winds of 195 km/h (120 mph).
  • Japanese aircraft carrier Sōryū nominated by Sturmvogel 66. Soryu (蒼龍 Sōryū, meaning "Blue (or Green) Dragon") was an aircraft carrier built for the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) during the mid-1930s. A sister ship, Hiryū, was intended to follow Sōryū, but Hiryū's design was heavily modified and she is often considered to be a separate class. Sōryū's aircraft were employed in operations during the Second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s and supported the Japanese invasion of French Indochina in mid-1940.
  • Drama dari Krakatau nominated by Crisco 1492. Drama dari Krakatau (Drama of Krakatoa) is a 1929 vernacular Malay novel written by Kwee Tek Hoay. Inspired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton's 1834 novel The Last Days of Pompeii and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, the sixteen-chapter book centres around two families in 1920s Batam that are unknowingly tied together by siblings who were separated in 1883. The brother becomes a political figure, while the sister marries a Baduy priest-king. Ultimately these families are reunited by the wedding of their children, after which the priest sacrifices himself to calm a stirring Krakatoa.
  • Tucana nominated by Casliber. Tucana is a constellation of stars in the southern sky, named after the toucan, a South American bird. It is one of twelve constellations conceived in the late sixteenth century by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman. Tucana first appeared on a 35-cm (14 in) diameter celestial globe published in 1598 in Amsterdam by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius and was depicted in Johann Bayer's star atlas Uranometria of 1603. French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille gave its stars Bayer designations in 1756. The constellations Tucana, Grus, Phoenix and Pavo are collectively known as the "Southern Birds".
  • No. 34 Squadron RAAF nominated by Ian Rose. No. 34 Squadron is a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) VIP transport squadron. It operates Boeing 737 Business Jets and Bombardier Challenger 604s from Defence Establishment Fairbairn in Canberra. The squadron was formed in February 1942 for standard transport duties during World War II, initially flying de Havilland DH.84 Dragons in Northern Australia. In 1943 it re-equipped with Douglas C-47 Dakotas, which it operated in New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies... During the 1960s it operated Dakotas, Convair Metropolitans, Vickers Viscounts, Dassault Falcon-Mysteres, Hawker Siddeley HS 748s, and BAC 1-11s, the last three types continuing in service until the late 1980s. The squadron's fleet consisted solely of Dassault Falcon 900s from 1989 until 2002, when it began operating the 737 and Challenger.


A Boeing 737 aircraft of No. 34 Squadron RAAF

Three lists were promoted to featured status last week.

Performing artist Natalia Kills
  • List of songs recorded by Natalia Kills nominated by Prism. English singer-songwriter Natalia Kills has recorded songs for two studio albums and one extended play (EP), some of which were collaborations with other artists. She began her career as a recording artist by releasing the single "Don't Play Nice" on UK-based record label All Around the World Productions in 2005, under the name Verbalicious.
  • Dan Savage bibliography nominated by Cirt and The Rambling Man. The American author Dan Savage (born 1964) has written six books, op-ed pieces in The New York Times, and an advice column on sexual issues in The Stranger (an alternative newspaper from Seattle, Washington). A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Savage began contributing a column, Savage Love, to The Stranger from its inception in 1991. By 1998 his column had a readership of four million. He was Associate Editor at the newspaper from 1991 to 2001, when he became its editor-in-chief, later becoming its editorial director in 2007.
  • List of works by Sax Rohmer nominated by SchroCat. Sax Rohmer (pseudonym of Arthur Henry Ward; 1883–1959) was a British writer of songs sketches, plays and stories. Born in Birmingham to Irish immigrant parents, the family moved to London in about 1886, where Rohmer was schooled. His formal education finished in 1901, following the death of his alcoholic mother. After attempting careers in the civil service, as well as the banking, journalism and gas industries, Rohmer began writing comic songs, monologues and sketches for music hall performers, including Little Tich and George Robey.

Ten pictures were promoted to features status on last week.

Mars rovers
Gastric mucosa


Senegalese wrestling


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2014-03-05

Article Rescue Squadron

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By Buffbills7701

This week, we jumped into one of the most important WikiProjects of them all, the Article Rescue Squadron. The WikiProject has an uncountable number of articles that have been saved from AfD. This week, we spoke with Dream Focus and Green Cardamom to learn more about what they do and how they do it.

What motivated you to join the squadron? Are there any articles that you have recently "saved"?
Dream Focus: I was there when everything changed, when massive numbers of Wikipedia articles were being mass deleted on a whim, and decided to try to help save some by following WP:BEFORE and looking for evidence of notability instead of just mindlessly spamming the word "delete" everywhere, as many often did back then. For the first years of Wikipedia you didn't need any references in the article, and then suddenly someone slipped in that requirement and then later on started enforcing it, more often than not refusing to do even a quick Google News Archive search to see if reliable sources even existed.
Green Cardamom: I've been active in AfD for about 2 years and over time noticed how much skill, time and resources are required when researching the notability of articles, not just Google but commercial databases and foreign language sources, plus an understanding of the nuanced notability rules. It is a constant learning experience, challenging and often humbling, but ultimately saving an article from deletion is highly rewarding.
Do you add articles to be saved on the content rescue list?
Dream Focus: Sometimes. Mostly I just see what others have found.
Green Cardamom: Occasionally.
What makes this project so different than TAFI [Today's Article For Improvement]?
Dream Focus: It was created long before them. We save articles that are about to be deleted.
Green Cardamom: ARS is a first responder for the patient. Field medics, so it will live to see another day. With AfD there is a short window to save an article.
Do you follow the checklist when you "save" articles?
Dream Focus: You do what needs to be done.
How do you find articles that are worthy of "saving"?
Dream Focus: Whatever anyone stumbles upon that they believe has potential, they mention on the list, and others help find reliable sources if they exist.
Green Cardamom: Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting is probably the best place for finding AfD cases (another little known and unheralded project). See the Compact view, "Arts", "Topical" and "People" sections for example.
What are the squadron's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Dream Focus: Look over things up for deletion, and just pick something to check for sources for.
Green Cardamom: There are more articles being deleted than fairly should be.
Is there anything else you'd link to add?
Dream Focus: If people just followed WP:BEFORE, then a lot of articles wouldn't go through the needless AFD process.
Green Cardamom: Deletion serves a purpose and is needed but the process of determining that fairly is like freedom something not to take lightly. We can't forget there are real people on the other side of a deleted article (creators and subjects), with every unfair deletion - improper due diligence and misapplication of the rules - it erodes the project materially and the spirit of an egalitarian place.

Next week, we'll read about bugs from a Russian WikiProject. Also, if you have any suggestions for good WikiProjects, give us a piece of your mind at the WikiProject desk. Until then, check out the archive!

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