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Volume 3, Issue 38 17 September 2007 About the Signpost
(← Prev) 2007 archives (Next →)
From the editor: Reader survey
Wikimedia treasurer expected to depart soon WikiWorld comic: "Sarah Vowell"
News and notes: Template standardization, editing patterns, milestones Wikipedia in the news
Features and admins Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
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SPV

From the editor

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By Ral315

In order to gauge reader concerns and opinions, we've added our first-ever reader survey. The survey is, of course, optional; however, it should take only a few minutes and will really help us understand what you, the readers, desire. I do urge you, if you have time, to please respond to this survey. Some statistical results will be published next week, for those interested.

Thanks for reading the Signpost.

— Ral315


SPV

Wikimedia treasurer expected to depart soon

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By Michael Snow

As plans for the next Wikimedia fundraiser are underway, the foundation's treasurer and one of its original board members is looking to leave the organization. While day-to-day matters are being handled by staff, the foundation will be looking for someone with skills in the financial arena to fill the position.

In a 12 September message addressing the issue of when the board might be expanded again, board chair Florence Devouard mentioned the need for a new treasurer. Michael Davis, the current treasurer, was appointed to the board of trustees when the Wikimedia Foundation was initially created. He has been involved in various business ventures with Jimmy Wales, including as CEO of Chicago Options Associates, where Wales was research director, and is now the COO of Wikia. Davis's appointment to the Wikimedia board currently runs through December of this year, so presumably a replacement could be appointed to take over in 2008. The foundation is looking for "someone with a strong financial foundation who can think strategically, and provide advice and recommendations to the rest of the Board and Chief Executive."

Devouard explained the anticipated transition as being due to the fact that Davis no longer has sufficient time to devote to board responsibilities. He has served for over four years and already indicated a readiness to move on a year ago. Part of the issue is the demands of the growing Wikia operation—although a resident of Florida, Davis has been working part-time out of Wikia's office in San Mateo, California.

The importance of having Davis to oversee financial matters is highlighted by the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation has not had a Chief Financial Officer since Daniel Mayer, who had filled the role on a volunteer basis, resigned over a year ago. Since then, the organization has kept its ongoing books with the help of local accountants, and a former colleague of special advisor Sue Gardner is now covering the CFO role as a part-time consultant. Wikimedia has also retained the same audit firm that completed the foundation's 2006 audit.

Meanwhile, planning for another fundraiser is ongoing, as Gardner announced earlier. It may cover as much as two months, with an initial window given of 23 September to 22 November. This would make the fundraising period longer, but possibly also make the intervals less frequent than previously anticipated (an earlier fundraiser had been tentatively considered for around May or June). Wikimedia has not held an organized fund drive since the most recent one concluded in January, despite reports circulated afterward on some blogs, based on a passing observation by Devouard, that the foundation might soon run out of cash (see archived story).

The form of fundraising efforts will presumably rely heavily on a sitewide notice on Wikimedia websites. One additional element being pursued is the creation of banners and buttons people can place on websites or blogs, including versions that allow you to show support for individual Wikimedia projects. Sabine Cretella, who has been involved in organizing this, blogged about the challenge of getting the community to respond, leading to a discussion on the foundation mailing list about the amount of help being provided to put the fundraiser together.


SPV

WikiWorld comic: "Sarah Vowell"

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By Greg Williams

This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Sarah Vowell". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.


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SPV

News and notes

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By Ral315

Template standardization

This week, nearly all article message boxes were standardized with a consistent theme, and colors are based on the severity of each message. Multiple messages can also be stacked on top of one another, reducing the amount of screen space used when multiple notices are used. An example can be found below:

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.
This article or section lacks formatting.
Please wikify it as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style.
This article documents a current event.
Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.

Discussion on the changes continues at the standardization talk page.

Editing pattern prototype released

Recently, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) released a research prototype called WikiDashboard that can visualize users' editing patterns on Wikipedia articles. The tool shows visualizations embedded in live Wikipedia pages to provide social transparency about who edits how many revisions on each Wikipedia page. For example, this link shows editing patterns on the Main Page, and this link shows Raul654's personal editing patterns. Release notes for the prototype can be found here.

Wikimania bidding ends Sunday

Wikimania 2008 bids must be completed by Sunday at 0:01 UTC; later Sunday, at 15:00 UTC, a public meeting with bidders will be held. The final jury decision will be made around October 6.

Briefly


SPV

In the news

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By Enochlau

WikiDashboard: visualisation of edits on Wikipedia

Truth in Metadata - WikiDashboard: WikiDashboard is a new tool from PARC that allows you to visualise edits to a particular Wikipedia page. On a particular screen, you can see the amount of activity on a given Wikipedia article over time, the contributions from a particular editor over time, and some other basic statistics. Information can also be gleaned about a particular user's editing habits. Termed "Social Transparency", this human-readable information can be used by Wikipedia readers to evaluate the quality of the edits that have gone into an article.

US election candidates' articles heavily scrutinised

On Wikipedia, Debating 2008 Hopefuls' Every Facet: The Washington Post notes that there is much editing interest in the Wikipedia biographies of 2008 US presidential candidates. It notes that the content on Wikipedia is highly influential, because it tends to show up high on web searches. Campaign aides, however, say that the matters that the editors war over are inconsequential. In the debates that ensue, editors have been accused of bias by being associated with one political party or another, and in some cases, administrators have been called in to protect articles from editing.

Other mentions

Other mentions in the online media about Wikipedia in the past week include:


SPV

Features and admins

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By Ian Manka, Singularity and The Placebo Effect

Administrators

Eight users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Flyguy649 (nom), Caribbean H.Q. (nom), Jayvdb (nom), monotonehell (nom), The Random Editor (nom), Jogers (nom), markles (nom) and Pedro (nom).

Bots

Eleven bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: ClueBot II (task request), ClueBot (task request), Kl4m-AWB (task request), ClueBot III (task request), Jogersbot (task request), StigBot (task request), ProteinBoxBot (task request), BetacommandBot (task request), AlptaBot (task request), PsychAWB (task request) and Kotbot (task request).

Featured content

Nineteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Ban Ki-moon (nom), Parapsychology (nom), Red-tailed Black Cockatoo (nom), Yes Minister (nom), Exosome complex (nom), Scotland national football team (nom), Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (nom), Battle of Ramillies (nom), Titan (moon) (nom), Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (nom), Egbert of Wessex (nom), Monte Ne (nom), Banksia telmatiaea (nom), California Condor (nom), Battle for Henderson Field (nom), History of Stoke City F.C. (nom), Manzanar (nom), Casino Royale (2006 film) (nom) and Wilco (nom)

Two articles were de-featured last week: Galileo Galilei (nom) and Swastika (nom).

Nine lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Crowded House awards (nom), The Make-Up discography (nom), Aston Villa F.C. seasons (nom), Signatories of the Act of Independence of Lithuania (nom), List of mammals of Canada (nom), Neutral Milk Hotel discography (nom), The Simpsons (season 2) (nom), List of Governors of Arkansas (nom) and King Clancy Memorial Trophy (nom).

No lists were de-featured last week.

No portals were promoted to featured status last week.

One topic was promoted to featured status last week: Chrono (supplemental) (nom).

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Fightin' Texas Aggie Band, Thou, Amanita phalloides, Dungeons & Dragons, Georg Cantor, France national rugby union team, and Soviet invasion of Poland (1939).

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Soyuz TMA-7, Saint Peter's Square, Mantodea, Ensay, Victoria, Australia, Milky Way, Green Turtle, and United States Constitution.

Ten pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.


SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By ais523

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.8 (f08e6b3), 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

  • Width calculation of a <gallery> tag when the widths= option is given has been improved. (r25822, bug 11321)
  • A bug involving Special:BrokenRedirects that showed redirects pointing to a target that they in fact did not point to has been fixed. (r25843, bug 7890)
  • When the source language on a <source> tag is not given entirely in lowercase, this now no longer causes incorrect uppercase characters to appear in the class name of the generated content. (r25873, bug 11351)

New features

  • An API query for the members of a category can now be sorted in reverse alphabetical or reverse chronological order (previously only forward alphabetical and chronological sort orders were supported). (r25726, bug 11275)
  • The API now allows an image's metadata to be queried. (r25812, bug 11308)
  • The 'Return to' link that appears in some error messages (for instance, when a non-admin tries to edit a protected page) now no longer incorrectly links to Main Page. (r25863, bug 11342)

Configuration changes

Other technology news

  • There is currently a bug with image thumbnailing that's affecting large numbers of images, causing them to not display in pages. The bug was caused at least partly by a server running out of disk space; system administrators are currently trying to fix the problem. As a workaround in the meantime, if you come across an image that isn't working, purging the server cache of the image's image description page often solves the problem for that image. (For more information, see this mailing list post.)

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.


SPV

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By David Mestel

The Arbitration Committee accepted two new cases this week, and closed no cases.

New cases

  • 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.

Evidence phase

  • 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.
  • SevenOfDiamonds: A case involving alleged abusive sockpuppetry and other misconduct by SevenOfDiamonds. SevenOfDiamonds vigorously denies the allegations, and alleges that MONGO has harassed him.
  • Digwuren: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility by Digwuren and alleged sockpuppets.

Voting phase

  • 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 three arbitrators.
  • 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. Voting on most proposals is split.
  • 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.
  • COFS: A case initiated by Durova based on a discussion at the community sanctions noticeboard. The case involves allegations of tendentious editing by various editors, sockpuppetry, conflicts of interest, and other user conduct issues on Scientology related articles. The proposed decision, which has the support of six to nine arbitrators, would ban COFS for 30 days for POV editing and require him to change his username and disclose any duties he may have to the Church of Scientology before resuming editing. A proposal banning Anynobody from harassing Justanother has the support of six to eight arbitrators, and one placing Scientology articles on article probation has six.

Motion to close

  • Catalonia: A case brought by Physchim62 involving alleged edit warring, possible sockpuppetry, and other misconduct by various editors on Catalonia, Valencian Community, and related articles. If closed, Maurice27 would be banned for thirty days, and the parties encouraged to continue with the normal consensus-building procedure.


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