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Volume 2, Issue 51 18 December 2006 About the Signpost

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Elections conclude, arbitrators to be chosen Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser opens
WikiWorld comic: "Dr. Seuss" News and notes: Steward elections conclude, milestones
Features and admins Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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From the editor

The Arbitration Committee elections have finished; however, Jimbo has not yet announced his picks for the position. When he announces his selection, we will update our article; until then, you can place the article on your watchlist. Users who receive the Signpost via e-mail, or on their talk page, via the spamlist will not be notified.

Also, something to note: because Christmas and New Year's Day fall on Mondays this year, the Signpost will be publishing its next two issues on Tuesday (26 December and 2 January).

Thanks for reading the Signpost, and have a happy holiday season.

Ral315


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Elections conclude, arbitrators to be chosen

Related articles
SPV

New arbitrators interviewed
15 January 2007

Seven arbitrators chosen
26 December 2006

Elections conclude, arbitrators to be chosen
18 December 2006

Arbitration Committee elections continue, extra seat available
11 December 2006

Arbitration Committee elections open
4 December 2006

Arbitration Committee elections: Candidate profiles
27 November 2006

ArbCom elections: Information on elections
13 November 2006

Arbitration election campaigns begin
6 November 2006


More articles


Editor's note: Jimbo Wales's selections for the Arbitration Committee will be published in the December 26th issue.

The December 2006 Arbitration Committee elections concluded this week. 31 candidates ran for one of at least six positions on the Committee. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections for the Committee this week.

At the beginning of the elections, 37 candidates had submitted their names; however, six candidates — crazytales56297, Doc glasgow, freakofnurture, JzG, MONGO, and Voice of All, had withdrawn from the race. Radiant! also resigned, but later re-entered the race.

It is believed that at least six seats will be available in the race, with the resignation of Mindspillage, who was nominated to one of three new seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (see archived story). The other five seats will come from the five positions in Tranche Gamma, where no sitting arbitrator chose to stand in the elections. These five seats would serve a three-year term ending in December 2009, while the person chosen to replace Mindspillage in Tranche Beta would next stand for election in December 2008.

At the end of the elections, just three candidates held over 90% support: Flcelloguy, Kirill Lokshin, and Paul August. Two other candidates (UninvitedCompany and Jpgordon) held at least 85% support, and FloNight and Blnguyen ran close behind, with 84%. Can't sleep, clown will eat me received the most support votes (303), but with 100 oppose votes, his 75% support ranked 8th. In all, 17 of the 32 candidates held at least 50% support, making them eligible to be chosen by Jimbo Wales at the close of the elections.

Final election statistics are available at User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections and User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006; the former utilizes the new sortable wikitable syntax, allowing users to sort the results by the number of support and oppose votes, the support-oppose margin, and the support percentage.


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Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser opens

The Wikimedia Foundation's three-week fundraiser began on Saturday, its first public fund drive in nearly a year. The Foundation hopes to exceed its record total from the previous fundraiser, held last year around the same time (a goal of US$1,500,000 was discussed in connection with possible matching donations, but the Board of Trustees decided not to set a formal goal). As of press time, over $83,000 had been raised.

The drive is the first to include matching gifts from participating corporations; the matching gift program has not yet begun, but reports indicate that it may begin on Wednesday. The Foundation is still soliciting corporations to participate in the program for this fundraising drive, and potentially, future drives; if you know a corporation who would be interested in participating in such a program, please contact Danny.

The drive also is the first to incorporate the new contribution system, Wikimedia Fundraising C.O.R.E. (Central Online Reporting Engine). The site provides real-time donation data, with optional comments from donors. It also allows for the easy statistical breakdown of data. During the first three days of the drive, for example, 58.4% of the money donated in the drive was made in American dollars, while 23.8% was made in Euros, and 7.2% was made in British pounds.


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WikiWorld comic: "Dr. Seuss"

WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.

Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Williams works as a visual journalist for the US-based The Tampa Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida. He also has worked as an illustrator and designer at newspapers in Dubuque, Iowa, and Dayton, Ohio.



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News and notes

Steward elections conclude

The steward elections concluded on Friday, 15 December; confirmation of current stewards also ended at the same time. At the end of the voting, all of the candidates had at least 30 support votes, and 13 of the 15 candidates had at least an 80 percent support ratio. In order to qualify, candidates must have met both criteria. The Board of Trustees will appoint stewards from the 13 qualifying candidates. Although the exact number of candidates that will be chosen is unclear, it is thought that approximately 10 to 20 new stewards will be added, and the Board appointed every qualified candidate in January's steward elections. It is also unclear how present stewards will be re-confirmed, as several of the stewards had garnered some concerns and opposition to re-confirmation.

You chosen as Person of the Year

Time magazine released its annual Person of the Year award this week, and you were featured as the chosen person. Citing the perceived Web 2.0, the magazine elaborated on how the year was marked with the "story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before", and how the power of the individual - you - was greater than ever before. "It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace," the magazine added. YouTube and MySpace are both popular sites driven by community-based contributions; the former is a video sharing site, and the latter is a social network service.

The magazine also featured Wikipedia editor Simon Pulsifer (known as SimonP) in one of its 15 stories about individuals who have made an impact on the "new digital democracy." Pulsifer, who is currently an Arbitrator, once had the most edits of any account, excluding bots, on the English Wikipedia.

Briefly


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Features and admins

Administrators

Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: J.smith (nom), Davidruben (nom), Ceyockey (nom), Kchase02 (nom), Tonywalton (nom), Royalguard11 (nom), and Cbrown1023 (nom).

Eight articles were promoted to featured status last week: Brabham, Kitsune, Rus' Khaganate, 1995 Pacific hurricane season, Kinetoscope, Hero of Belarus, Bodyline, and Caspian expeditions of the Rus.

Six articles were de-featured last week: Bath, World War I, Lawrence v. Texas, Kitsch, Autism, and James II of England.

One portal reached featured status last week: Portal:Science.

Four lists were featured last week: List of Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, List of Nova Scotia general elections, List of Manitoba general elections, and List of British Columbia general elections.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Green and Golden Bell Frog, Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles and Fundamental Duties of India, History of the board game Monopoly, Mormon handcart pioneers, Enzyme inhibitor, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and Sound film.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Bird flight, Bang Pa In, Cameoflage, Denver, Colorado, Petrified wood, Vibrissa, and DNA clamp.

Four pictures were featured last week:


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Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Note that a number of features were added recently that required database schema changes. They may not go live for a few days or even longer, until the databases can be updated, and neither will any other changes made since r18226.

Edit counts are now finally available directly from the database. There is not yet a software interface to display them, but they should soon be usable for many heuristics where they were previously not efficient enough to use (such as for when a user becomes "autoconfirmed" and is able to move pages). They will also likely be viewable somehow through the wiki interface. (Brion Vibber, r18325)

Users whose passwords were reset can now only log in using their temporary e-mailed passwords. The password entered by the resetting sysop will not be valid. Also, their e-mail addresses will no longer revert to being unconfirmed. (Brion Vibber, bug 6394 and bug 2259, r18307, r18319, r18320)

Users who have newly registered on a wiki with e-mail confirmation enabled (such as the English Wikipedia), if they have provided an e-mail address, will be notified of the confirmation e-mail once it has been sent. Users attempting to confirm their e-mail addresses will also now be warned if a confirmation e-mail was sent for their account recently. (Brion Vibber, r18320)

<nowiki> now works inside poems on wikis with that extension installed, such as Wikisource. (Steve Sanbeg, bug 7503, r18340) It also now works in the site notice. (Rob Church, bug 8153, r18390)

On wikis with the ConfirmEdit extension enabled, anonymous users can no longer avoid CAPTCHAs for inserting URLs by inserting an HTML comment (<!-- -->) or other simple obfuscation. Also, a bug that in some cases stopped the extension from working entirely was fixed. (Brion Vibber, bug 4823 and bug 8268, r18349)

Special:Booksources will now have a URL that can be copied and pasted for links. (Previously it used HTTP POST, and now uses GET.) (Rob Church, bug 8164, r18372)

A new extension, UserImages, dynamically creates a gallery of all images uploaded by a user. It is not enabled on any Wikimedia Foundation wiki. (Rob Church, r18376)

A few interface changes were made:

Incorrect behavior for user pages in a corner case where users might have names ending in .js or .css (thus tricking the software into treating their user page as a CSS/JS subpage) was fixed. (Mark Haidar/Fyren, bug 8241, r18300)

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.


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The Report On Lengthy Litigation

The Arbitration Committee opened two cases this week, and closed one case, leaving only seven still in arbitration.

Closed case

New cases

Evidence phase

Voting phase





       

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