Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-10-10
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/In the media
1.18 deployment and HTTPS switchover completed, but developer help now needed with new projects
1.18 deployed to remaining wikis
With the dust settled from the first two phases of the deployment of MediaWiki version 1.18, on October 4 the full rollout programme began. Since small but technically interesting wikis had been the focus of the first two phases, only 2% of traffic had been routed through MediaWiki 1.18; now, all visitors and editors will be able to take advantage of its new features, which include support for gender-specific user pages and better directionality support for RTL languages. According to a post on the Wikimedia blog, progress with the final phase was slightly slower than anticipated but still good, with the French, Polish and English Wikipedias, along with Wikimedia Commons, having their version of MediaWiki updated within the first four hour window. Other wikis were then transferred during secondary windows on October 5 and 6.
The deployment did not go perfectly, however, and a number of bugs have since been discovered with 1.18; as of time of writing, approximately 40 open ones are currently being tracked under the auspices of bugmeister Mark Hershberger, although few are serious. The list of bugs reported but not yet fixed includes problems with the watchlist API (bug #31526), the localisation update system (bug #31559) and the display of <math>...</math> (bug #31442). Responding to the relatively high volume of bugs found despite a recent emphasis on improving Wikimedia and MediaWiki's pre-release test infrastructure, Hershberger appealed for help in writing unit and/or parser tests for key bug fixes to ensure that regressions are spotted more quickly in the future. If this is the case when 1.19 nears deployment (currently scheduled for late this year), the whole process would be likely to pass off "a *lot* smoother", wrote Hershberger (wikitech-l mailing list).
Improved https support comes to Wikimedia wikis
Also announced this week was the https switchover. Writing for the Wikimedia Foundation blog, operations engineer Ryan Lane said that the secure.wikimedia.org domain had been officially deprecated. Lane advised security-conscious visitors to simply change http to https in their URL instead to take advantage of new functionality which has taken months of planning to achieve (including the introduction of protocol-relative URLs). In addition to a noticeable speed improvement over its secure.wikimedia.org forerunner, Lane was clear on the benefits of the switchover to full https functionality:
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The deployment of new https functionality was commended by many commentators; one wrote that "the lack of proper HTTPS" support had in his eyes been a long-standing issue with the site. At time of writing, support for secure browsing on the mobile site has not yet been enabled (bug #31333) – there are no plans to enable mobile support until the mobile and non-mobile sites are fully merged – but the core support for non-mobile devices outlined by Lane in his blogpost at least appears to be working correctly. HTTPS Everywhere, a popular browser add-on designed to make it easier to use the secure version of a website where it exists, is in the process of being updated to take advantage of the new format (wikitech-l mailing list).
In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
This week, Tomasz Finc, the WMF's Director of Mobile and Special Projects, issued a call for potential app developers for the Google Android operating system, whilst developer Jack Phoenix appealed for help with the Video extension.
- Quick fix turnaround for serious bug: A bug in the JavaScript component of Wikimedia wikis that caused the browser windows of Internet Explorer 8 users to crash has now been fixed. The bug (#31424) was fixed only a day after it was filed, tracked down to a fault in the jQuery library version that MediaWiki 1.18 came packaged with (wikitech-l mailing list). The version of jQuery packaged with MediaWiki has since been upgraded to a version that does not cause the problem and Wikimedia wikis have been updated to reflect the change. In unrelated news, WMF Internalisation team member Gerard Meijssen blogged about bug #31310 as a paradigm for good volunteer involvement in making sure bugs are fixed quickly (it has since been re-opened pending further investigation).
- Discussion over conversion to Git continues: The finer details of a plan floated late last month to convert the MediaWiki repository to Git began this week on the wikitech-l mailing list. Discussion so far has focussed on the most widely acknowledged point of contention, whether MediaWiki should remain as one repository or spin-off extensions and/or localisation files into their own repositories.
- Wikimedia Blog mobile friendly: A special mobile edition of the combined Wikimedia blog was released this week, according to an announcement on the blog itself. Previously, mobile devices had been forced to display the full fixed-width layout that had been designed solely with larger screens in mind.
- $3.6 million grant announced: As reported in more detail in this week's "News and Notes", the Stanton Foundation have announced that they have awarded Wikimedia a $3.6 million grant to support technical projects aimed at making its wikis more newcomer friendly, including work on enabling editing from the new mobile site and the long-awaited visual editor project.
- Bot tasks open: Bot requests for approval are currently open on the English Wikipedia for helping automated Mediation Cabal pages and mass updating instances of a biological infobox. In addition, a BRFA focussed on article creation by Rich Farmbrough is also open.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Opinion
Largest ever donation to WMF, final findings of editor survey released, 'Terms of use' heavily revised
Stanton Foundation give $3.6 million grant
The Wikimedia Foundation announced this week that they have received a $3.6 million grant from the Stanton Foundation. According to the press release from the Foundation, the funding will go to support development of the long-awaited visual editor and other technical improvements including the addition of editing facilities to the new Wikimedia mobile site. The grant can also be put towards any project that "make[s] Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors".
| “ | The Stanton Foundation is a long-time funder of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I am thrilled they're increasing their investment in us. The Stanton Foundation was one of the first institutions to recognize that Wikipedia is a serious educational endeavour that's having a significant impact on people around the world. I will always be grateful to them for taking a risk in first funding us, many years ago." | ” |
| — Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation | ||
The $1.2 million grant in 2010 from the Stanton Foundation helped fund the Public Policy Initiative and a 2008 grant of $890,000 helped fund usability improvements. This week's $3.6 million donation is the largest ever to have been received by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Brief notes
- WMF Chair speaks out on controversial content: Chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees Ting Chen issued a letter to the community on foundation-l in response to the image filter referendum. Thanking participants for their input, he acknowledged "significant division inside the Wikimedia community about the potential value and impact of an image hiding feature", noting a "significant minority" in opposition to the measure. Nevertheless, the statement expressed dissatisfaction with the status quo, arguing that "when material on the projects causes grave offence, those offended don't benefit from our work" and "exercising editorial judgment to mitigate that offence is not censorship". He declined to withdraw or alter the Board's previous resolution on the topic, instead charging Foundation staff with continuing community consultation and coming to a solution.
- Final findings of editor survey released: The WMF's Head of Global Development Research Mani Pande has announced the release of the fifth and final report on the findings of the 2011 Editor Survey. Raw data from the survey findings is also available for download. Issues addressed include editing activities, demographics, women editors, the editing community, the location and languages of editors, technology and networking, and the institutions of the Wikimedia Foundation itself.
- WMF to launch Arabic initiative: In the last month, WMF has been working on plans to support the growth of the Arabic Wikipedia, and will be holding a working session with the Qatar Foundation's computing research institute (QCRI) in Doha on 20 and 21 October. In a blog post, it announced that it will also conduct an IRC hour on Thursday, October 13 2011 at 20:00 UTC in #wikipedia-ar, to listen to community suggestions and respond to any inquiries around the initiative.
- Wikipedia’s global reach visualized: The author of the winning entry of WikiViz 2011, Jen Lowe, presented her work, titled “A Thousand Fibers Connect Us – Wikipedia’s Global Reach” at the annual WikiSym conference last week. Launched in July, WikiViz 2011 is a data challenge calling for submissions to visualize the impact of Wikipedia beyond the scope of its own community, using open data.
- Milestones: Wikipedia passes Blogger to rank sixth globally on Alexa. The Portuguese Wikipedia reached 700,000 articles, while its Sorani counterpart celebrated its 10,000th page. In other news, the Russian Wiktionary marked its 300,000th entry, a great degree more than the comparatively small Spanish version (60,000 entries) and the Welsh language version (10,000) which reached its important milestone with a definition page for carreg filltir (literally "milestone").
- Terms of use in revision: The Wikimedia-wide Terms of use document has undergone heavy editing by WMF General Counsel Geoff Brigham. Robust discussion between the drafter and interested community members continues on the talkpage. In addition to discussion over specific terms used in the document, editors have also commented on the timing of the terms of use change, which comes just weeks after two other controversial initiatives (a new chapters agreement and the image filter referendum) ran into problems.
- Steve Jobs' death leads to enormous page views: the article on Steve Jobs in English Wikipedia had 7.4 million page views on October 6, the day after the Apple founder's death. As a point of comparison, the article about Michael Jackson got 5.9 million views two days after he died.
- New administrators: No new editors were granted administrator privileges this week, although at the time of writing, Redrose64's request remained open with favourable margins.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/In focus
Senkaku Islands closes; administrators authorized to place articles on discretionary sanctions
The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week, Senkaku Islands. Another case, Abortion, is still pending before the Committee.
Senkaku Islands
Senkaku Islands has closed, a month and a half after it was originally filed by Qwyrxian. Two parties were topic banned, Tenmei indefinitely and Bobthefish2 for a year, and the former was also banned from Wikipedia for a year; Arbitrators cited the editor's past Arbitration sanctions in another topic area in the decision. Unusually, the Committee also considered an indefinite ban for the editor; but while five Arbitrators supported it, they did so only as an less-favored alternative to the 1 year ban. STSC was given a warning.
Standard discretionary sanctions were also authorized for the Senkaku Islands topic area, marking the sixth time in the past twelve months that the Committee has authorized discretionary sanctions. In contrast, from October 10, 2009 to October 10, 2010, the Committee only placed a topic on discretionary sanctions three times. The case also marked the first time the Arbitration Committee has devolved the authority to place discretionary sanctions; any "uninvolved administrator may, after a warning given a month prior, place any set of pages relating to a territorial dispute of islands in East Asia, broadly interpreted, under standard discretionary sanctions for six months if the editing community is unable to reach consensus on the proper names to be used to refer to the disputed islands."[nb 1]
- ^ Although not specifically stated in the final decision, it appears that at least two Arbitrators' intentions were to exclude the island of Taiwan from this remedy.
Deliberation on checkuser and oversight candidates
Public commenting on the candidates for checkuser and oversight functionaries (see previous Signpost coverage) has concluded, and the Committee is expected to release its decision on who it is appointing by October 15. This deadline has been pushed back several times in previous stages of the appointment process; the decision date was originally to be October 5. The list of candidates that ArbCom is considering is:
- CheckUser: 28bytes • AGK • Courcelles • Elockid • HelloAnnyong • Keegan • Kww • Mentifisto • WilliamH
- Oversight: Courcelles • Fluffernutter • WilliamH
Clarifications and amendments
The Committee also received two requests for clarification, one on WikiProject Conservatism (which was filed as a case request)[1] and the other on the propriety of administrators overturning unblocks by the Arbitration Committee. It closed two other clarification requests, one on the naming of Ireland articles and the other on Eastern Europe. The Committee also continued to consider a request for amendment by William M. Connolley, who had filed a request lifting removal of sanctions imposed on him in Climate change. As of publication, an unusually high number of 24 other editors had commented on the request, most of whom had been previously involved with William M. Connolley or the topic area in some form. The Committee received an additional amendment request from mediator Steven Zhang, who requested that two editors recently topic banned at Arbitration Enforcement be allowed to continue editing a mediation discussion page. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-10/Humour