During the course of the last week, an RfA on behalf of CharlotteWebb has spurred major discussions. Although the discussion closed as an unsuccessful request for adminship, the debate continues on the use of open proxies. Extended discussion on the policy has even gotten to the talk page of the RfA page, the talk page of the Meta version, and the mailing list. A request for arbitration has been filed as well because of possible misuse of checkuser privileges by revealing private information.

On 14 June 2007, Acalamari nominated CharlotteWebb for adminship. Several hours after the nomination, Jayjg asked this revealing question, which would be the center of controversy:

Can you explain why you edit using Tor proxies?

Before the question was asked, the tally was 32/4/3, and the only concerns raised were on civility. From this, it seems that the question has completely changed the state of the RfA from a likely successful request to a state of fury on both sides.

A couple of days later, CharlotteWebb posted a message on her talk page stating that her IP addresses had been blocked because they were suspected open proxies.

Another industrious checkuser has taken it upon himself to identify and block every IP address I have used in the last three months. I know this because I have read the block logs and noticed that several of the IPs blocked as part of this spree have (oh, shit!) nothing to do with the Tor network. For obvious reasons it would be foolish of me to say which is which, though I don't doubt everything about me will be revealed soon enough. It's so refreshing to know that my privacy is in such safe, competent hands! This looks and smells like an unannounced de facto ban from the English Wikipedia (one having nothing to do with my behavior). Because of the heightened level of surveillance I'm under, any further edits I make from this account will only have a denial-of-service effect on myself and any other legitimate users of the Tor network. So, all I can say is I hope to meet you all again in the future when I feel safer.

She also states that she has been editing under a new username:

I have already chosen to create a new username, after wasting a year of my life on this one. Of course I do realize that anyone with unrestricted use of checkuser will be able to find me if they fish long and hard enough for it. I'll just have to deal with it when the time comes.

After the standard seven days of discussion, Cecropia closed the RfA as "consensus not reached".

During the RfA and after the closure, discussion ensued and still ensues in various areas. The discussion is not on the contributions of the candidate, but rather the policy which the candidate may have broken by using an open proxy. For example, a concern was raised by Gurch that the opposition was concerned more with the breach of policy than the merits of the candidate (e.g. civility was the only concern raised prior to the question by Jayjg) and that the candidate has left the project because of the RfA. There were also a number of comments made on the issue at the mailing list as well. There is a current arbitration case on "whether Jayjg's actions were appropriate and within the limits of the privacy policy".

NB: Greg Williams is on vacation. This rerun is from January 2, 2007.

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

(← Prev)	Signpost archives	(Next →)

Noam Cohen of The New York Times noted errors in typography on the Wikipedia globe logo, and the difficulty in correcting these errors. The article includes quotes from Jimbo Wales, Paul Stansifer, the creator of the original logo, David Friedland (Nohat), who refined the image and introduced the errors noted, and Kizu Naoko (Aphaia).

In an announcement on Sunday, Jon Harald Søby announced that Wikimedia Norge was officially founded. Bylaws were approved, and will be submitted to the Chapters committee for approval.

• The Galician Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
• The Welsh Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles with Celtiberiaid.
• The Macedonian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Greek Wiktionary has reached 125,000 entries.
• The French Wikinews has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Czech Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
• The German Wikipedia has reached 600,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Volapük Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 23,000 pages.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Nepal Bhasa Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 62,000 articles.

Six users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Eleassar (nom), CloudNine (nom), Spartaz (nom), Ericorbit (nom), Leebo (nom) and Kubigula (nom).

One bot or bot task was approved to begin operating this week: PbBot (task request).

Eleven articles were promoted to featured status last week: Stereolab (nom), Geology of the Lassen volcanic area (nom), Wallis, Duchess of Windsor (nom), Uncle Tupelo (nom), SkyTrain (Vancouver) (nom), Ion Heliade Rădulescu (nom), Olm (nom), Fightin' Texas Aggie Band (nom), AHS Centaur (nom), Margate F.C. (nom) and IK Pegasi (nom).

Four articles were de-featured last week: Speaker of the British House of Commons (nom), Bulbasaur (nom), Parliament of Canada (nom) and Tony Blair (nom).

Five lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of New Jersey Devils players (nom), List of Cricket World Cup records (nom), 2007 Cricket World Cup statistics (nom), List of World Tag Team Champions (WWE) (nom) and List of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episodes (nom).

No portals were promoted to featured status last week.

Two topics were promoted to featured status last week: Devil May Cry game series (nom) and Christ Illusion (nom).

No sounds were promoted to featured status last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Hippocrates, Final Fantasy VI, Boston, Massachusetts, Antioxidant, Turkish language, B-52 aircraft crash at Fairchild Air Force Base and All Blacks.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: B-2 Spirit, Smithsonian Institution Building, Hypolimnas bolina, Luna Park, Melbourne, Hupa, NGC 602 and Zabriskie Point.

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

• 
  Landslide on Mars
• 
  Whipped slave
• 
  Maslenitsa
• 
  Acrididae
• 
  Alluvial fan
• 
  Great White Shark
• Einsatzgruppen
  Einsatzgruppen
• 
  Little Joe
• 
  Thespis (opera)
• 
  Sami people
• 
  South Dakota

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.26 (a37de05), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

• Some mixes of <pre> tags and section headers no longer cause section editing to duplicate part of the page. (r23101, bug 10309)
• Protecting a redirect now returns to the redirect itself, not to its target. (r23304, bug 10344)

• [1] now shows the username of the new user who made the change. (r23075, bug 10306)
• A new interface message MediaWiki:Revision-info-current now displays instead of MediaWiki:Revision-info when the current revision is shown in the history. (r23113, bug 9328)
• The 'watch' action now uses AJAX when possible. (r23233, bug 10326)
• Special:Contributions can now be filtered by month and year. (r23297, bug 516)

• Google Earth now has support for parsing the {{coord}} template in Wikipedia database dumps, in addition to the previously supported {{coor title dm}} and {{coor at dm}} (and their d and dms versions) and {{coor dm}} inside an infobox. [2]

• 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.

The Arbitration Committee opened one new case this week, and closed one case.

• TingMing: A case involving the actions of TingMing (talk · contribs). Ideogram (talk · contribs) alleged that he had engaged in "controversial edits", edit warring, incivility, and possibly sockpuppetry. As a result of the case, TingMing, who was already blocked while the case was ongoing, was banned for one year.

• Zacheus-jkb: A case involving the actions of -jkb- and Zacheus. Jkb alleges that Zacheus has published personal data on him, and has made legal threats. Zacheus denies the allegations, and Thatcher131 alleges on the talkpage that jkb has himself revealed personal information on Zacheus.

• Miskin: A case involving the actions of Miskin (talk · contribs), who was controversially blocked by Swatjester (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) for one month (later reduced to one week) for alleged revert warring.

• Abu badali: A case alleging that Abu badali (talk · contribs) has disruptively tagged non-free images for deletion, even when a valid fair-use justification exists, and has harassed editors who have complained about this behavior. Abu badali denies the allegations.

• NYScholar: A case involving the actions of a number of users, including NYScholar (talk · contribs) and Notmyrealname (talk · contribs), in relation to the Lewis Libby article.

• PalestineRemembered: A case involving the actions of PalestineRemembered (talk · contribs), referred from the Community sanction noticeboard. Kirill Lokshin has proposed a motion to dismiss, with the support of four arbitrators.

• Badlydrawnjeff: A highly controversial case involving the actions of Badlydrawnjeff, Doc glasgow, Tony Sidaway and JzG in relation inter alia to the article known as QZ, which underwent an AfD which was closed as delete by Drini, but overturned on DRV by Xoloz. The resulting AfD was then speedily closed by thebainer. Badlydrawnjeff then filed for a deletion review, which was speedily closed or removed by a number of administrators and others consecutively, including JzG, Doc Glasgow and Tony Sidaway, and the closures often reverted or new DRVs opened. There is dispute as to whether the actions of all parties were within process, and whether, as some believe, WP:BLP takes priority over DRV. A peripheral issue to the case is a 60-hour block of Badlydrawnjeff by Zsinj, apparently after discussions on the admin IRC channel, although some have stated that the consensus on the channel did not favour the block. The block was quickly undone by Gaillimh. Additionally, some allege that violetriga acted improperly in undeleting some articles deleted under BLP. Kirill Lokshin has proposed principles to the effect that the overriding principle with respect to BLPs should be "do no harm", and that suspected violations may be speedy deleted, but that these may be contested through the normal channels, although they must not be restored until consensus has formed to do so, and remedies cautioning or admonishing Violetriga and Night Gyr to avoid undeleting content deleted under BLP, all of which have the support of nine to ten arbitrators. Various remedies relating to Badlydrawnjeff have been proposed, but none has so far achieved a majority, except for one cautioning him "to adhere to the letter and the spirit of the Biographies of Living Persons policy", which stands at six to two.

• Piotrus: A case involving Piotrus (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) and other editors on Central and Eastern Europe-related articles. Multiple parties accuse others of edit warring, incivility, unethical behavior and biased editing. (An earlier arbitration case, Piotrus-Ghirla, was dismissed without prejudice, in part due to inactivity of Ghirlandajo (talk · contribs), who was listed as a party in the new case.) An amnesty for past behaviour in editing disputes on articles relating to Eastern Europe has the support of two arbitrators. Voting on other remedies is split.

• Paranormal: A case involving the actions of various users, especially as regards bias and attribution, on "articles on paranormal and pseudoscientific topics", such as parapsychology and Electronic voice phenomenon. Proposals placing paranormal-related articles on article probation, limiting editors on them to one revert per week, and cautioning Dradin and Kazuba have the support of two arbitrators; voting on other remedies is split.

• Hkelkar 2: A case involving the actions of Rama's Arrow (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA), Bakasuprman (talk · contribs), Dangerous-Boy (talk · contribs) and Sbhushan (talk · contribs), Rama's Arrow alleges that the others acted as meatpuppets of banned user Hkelkar, and blocked them for six months. They deny the allegations, and allege that Rama's Arrow acted improperly in blocking them, and in posting private e-mails to the incidents noticeboard. Various remedies have been proposed including an early proposal to impose no sanctions on any of the parties but calling on the parties to enter into mediation, based on a finding of fact noting a lack of reliable evidence in the case, but a proposal to prohibit administrator actions between the parties has the support of six arbitrators, and a recent proposal to desysop Rama's Arrow (who recently resigned adminship) stands at five-to-two. Voting on principles regarding the posting of private e-mails is split but it appears that a majority of arbitrators will support the principle that private e-mails may not be posted on-wiki without the consent of the sender.

• E104421-Tajik: A case involving the actions of E104421 and Tajik. The case had been suspended to allow a referral to Community enforceable mediation, but the mediation broke down after Tajik was alleged to have edited through sockpuppets while claiming to be away and unavailable for the mediation. If closed, Tajik would be banned for one year, and his community ban would be endorsed, and AzaToth would be reminded that Wikipedia operates by consensus.

• Transnistria: A case involving the actions of MariusM (talk · contribs) and William Mauco (talk · contribs) on Transnistria-related articles. MariusM alleges that Mauco (who has not made a statement because he is blocked) has engaged in sockpuppetry, edit warring and other misconduct. If closed, MarkStreet (talk · contribs), William Mauco (talk · contribs) and EvilAlex (talk · contribs) would be indefinitely banned from any editing related to Transnistria. However, Jdforrester has opposed the motion to close, calling for remedies against MariusM.

• Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram: A review of the Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram case. Ideogram and Sean William allege that Certified.Gangsta has engaged in tendentious editing since the main case.