Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-06-29

News and notes
Jackson's death, new data center, more

In the news
Wired editor plagiarizes Wikipedia, Google News Support

Discussion report
Discussion Reports And Miscellaneous Articulations

Features and admins
Approved this week

Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Arbitration report
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

 

2009-06-29

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By Jarry1250 and Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.14 (47ccde2), 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.

Bots approved

3 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These were:

• DrilBot 3: To update image files in accordance with the image license migration.
• MondalorBot: To cleanup interwikis and rename categories.
• Erik9bot 9: To tag and categorise articles with its own special unreferenced category if it can't find any evidence of references.

This week's discussion report contains information on current bot requests and related discussions.

Bug fixes

• Improvements have been made on handling Chinese multi-character search terms. (r52338, bug 8445) [1]

New features

• A new system for localisation caching of core and extension messages has been introduced, which involves fetching individual messages. The $wgCacheDirectory variable has been added, replacing $wgFileCacheDirectory, $wgLocalMessageCache and other local caches, and $wgLocalisationCacheConf replaces $wgEnableSerializedMessages and $wgCheckSerialized. (r52503)
• The Special:Version page has been updated to show the Math rendering engine version number (r52525), version of the SVG image thumbnailing engine used (r52516), and version of the diff/diff3 engine. (r52486, bug 14611)
• Site copyright and TOS statements can now override the default, with messages available. New messages include wikimedia-copyright (page footer), wikimedia-copyrightwarning (edit page, above summary/save button), wikimedia-editpage-tos-summary (edit page, below summary/save button). Defaults for English Wikipedia come from meta:Licensing update/Implementation.

Other news

• The Wikimedia Foundation blog and the Wikimedia Technical Blog were out of service for the past few days. These were located on a separate server, which had the WordPress installations compromised. The Open Conference Systems site for Wikimania 2009 was also down. The server has been hardened to better protect it in the future. [2]
• GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) has been updated on Wikimedia sites to the latest version — 1.0.8.4. GeSHi is used to provide syntax highlighting for source code samples. (bug 10967)

2009-06-29

Jackson's death, new data center, more

By Phoebe

The King of Pop vs. Wikipedia

Michael Jackson's hospitalization and death on Thursday, June 25 was immediately picked up by news sources and widely broadcast through online social networks, which in turn caused a vast number of people to turn to the Wikipedia article on Jackson. According to the Wikimedia Techblog, the number of people checking the Jackson article caused a load spike that briefly took Wikipedia offline. Developer and member of the Board of Trustees Domas Mituzas described what happened.

This story was in turn picked up by CNN, which also discussed the effects of Jackson's death on other major websites: Twitter and Google News also reported problems. Noam Cohen of The New York Times also reported on the traffic to Wikipedia in the wake of Jackson's death, with nearly a million visitors to the article in the space of an hour, which Jay Walsh of the Foundation said may be the "most in a one-hour period of any article in Wikipedia history." According to Henrik's statistics server, the Jackson article received 5.9 million views on June 26, more than the main page this day, with 12.5 million views total this month so far. William Beutler in a blog post compared this spike to the 2.5 million visitors that the article on Sarah Palin received in the wake of McCain's announcement of her as his running mate in the 2008 United States presidential election, and speculated that the traffic to the article on Jackson may be unprecedented.

Apache web server load spike for Wikimedia sites following news of Michael Jackson's death

Data center donation

The Wikimedia Foundation announced that it has signed a contract with EvoSwitch, a carbon-neutral data center based in Amsterdam. The data center will become Wikimedia's European hub. According to the announcement, EvoSwitch is offering over €300,000 of in-kind support in bandwidth and hosting. There will be around 50 servers installed at the EvoSwitch site.

Donation button feedback

The Wikimedia Usability project is soliciting feedback on a possible "donation button" to go in the left-hand sidebar. Mockups are available for comment on Meta. The Usability Project also continues to seek feedback on their prototype sites.

"Bookshelf" volunteer sought

The public outreach group at the Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a volunteer to help with the "bookshelf" project to develop short educational materials (such as fliers) about Wikipedia. The volunteer will lay out documents in Scribus, a free desktop publishing program. More information is available on Meta.

Algae articles created, deleted

Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Anybot's_algae_articles resulted in the deletion of 4077 articles, which is possibly the largest number of deletions ever from a bulk AfD. According to the AFD, "Anybot created 4092 algae articles by scraping information out of the AlgaeBase database, and formatting it into articles. In doing so, it introduced numerous serious errors into more-or-less every article." An attempt was made to correct the errors by bot, but it was unsuccessful. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-29/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-29/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-06-29/In focus

2009-06-29

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

By seresin

The Arbitration Committee this week provisionally suspended the community ban of Thekohser. The Audit Subcommittee released an overview of the Oversight-l mailing list.

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases and closed one this week, leaving three open.

Evidence phase

• ADHD: A case examining the dispute on the ADHD article and the conduct of the editors involved therein.

Motion to close

• A Man In Black: A case brought to examine the conduct of administrator A Man In Black.
• Mattisse: A case, brought when a recent Request for Comment failed to abate concerns regarding her behavior, examining the conduct of User:Mattisse.

Closed

• Seeyou: A case examining the conduct of user Seeyou; the Committee banned him for one year.

Withdrawn

• Matthew Hoffman: This case, which took place in December 2007 and January 2008, has been officially withdrawn by the Arbcom, because "a series of significant irregularities occurred" which "resulted in a fundamentally flawed process". The full statement may be found here.

If articles have been updated, you may need to .

The Signpost needs your help putting together the next issue.

Home

About

Archives

Newsroom

Subscribe

Suggestions