The Mediation Committee added two new members last week and, in an effort to address complaints that the mediation process has stalled, nominated a new chair to coördinate the process. Meanwhile, the nominations of several other candidates for the Mediation Committee remain to be acted on.
The activity of the Mediation Committee has decreased significantly in the past few weeks. Although requests continue to come in regularly, the mediators have not responded to most of them for the past month, and several users requesting mediation have wondered at the lack of response. The only visible activity since the beginning of the year has been Danny agreeing to mediate between Auto movil and Jewbacca.
Part of the problem has been a severe reduction in the staffing of the Mediation Committee. As recently as the beginning of December, there were 13 active mediators, but since then four have been elected to the Arbitration Committee, and Llywrch resigned from his position. Others dropped out of activity, leaving it uncertain to what extent any of the mediators was still monitoring the process.
In anticipation of losing members to the Arbitration Committee, some effort was made to advertise the need for new mediators. In all, seven candidates had come forward, a total equal to the number of mediators designated as "active" (although several of these have not actually been active editors for weeks or even months).
However, while a few people commented on the new candidates, no action was taken and this aspect of the Mediation Committee seemed to be in limbo along with the rest of its functions. Most of the candidates had been waiting for a decision anywhere from one to two months.
Last Friday, the most recent candidate to come forward, former arbitrator Jwrosenzweig wrote to the wikien-l mailing list, expressing his concerns about the delay. He described the situation as "an apparent standstill", commenting that the mediation process also urgently needed fixing because the Arbitration Committee expects people to use mediation and other dispute resolution procedures before requesting arbitration.
Acting in response to these concerns, Anthere, who is a member of the Mediation Committee but currently inactive due to her work on the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, decided on Saturday to install the two candidates she thought were clearly supported, Jwrosenzweig and Improv. Regarding the others, she said, "It is not so obvious to me whether the other candidates should be added or not added."
The position of Mediation Committee chair, which has been rotated among several current and former members, was declared vacant as its previous occupant, Bcorr, has been away from Wikipedia for several weeks. The chair coördinates and facilitates the work of the Mediation Committee, and lack of activity in this regard seems to have contributed to confusion in the mediation process, as well as failure to act on the candidacies of potential new mediators.
Anthere nominated the newly appointed Jwrosenzweig for this position and opened the nomination for comments, as well as other candidates if there are any. Having Jwrosenzweig as chair had already been suggested by former mediator Ambi in response to his initiative to reactivate the mediation process. Others on the mailing list also endorsed this idea.
According to Anthere's suggestion, Jwrosenzweig should become the chair if there is no opposition within the next few days.
Last week, major search engines and makers of blogging software announced a new effort to fight link spam, fueling debate over whether to incorporate it into the MediaWiki software and implement it on Wikipedia. A feature to do this was quickly developed, and discussion turned to the possibility of selective implementation.
The three largest search portals, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, announced Tuesday that they would support systematic use of a "nofollow" tag as a way to deter link spam. In conjunction with this, a number of major blog software makers indicated they would participate in the effort.
Link spam, sometimes also called "comment spam" because it is frequently placed in the comments section of blogs, has become a common but widely disliked technique in search engine optimization. The spammer places links to a website on many other sites that are open to editing, notably blogs that allow public comments as well as publicly editable wikis. Since search engines rely heavily on links between sites in ranking websites, the effect is to artificially raise the rank of the spammer's website in search engine results.
The "nofollow" tag serves as an instruction for the search engine's spider as it browses the links on a webpage. Google indicated that effective immediately, hyperlinks with this tag "won't get any credit when we rank Web sites in our search results." Yahoo stated that it would support this technique within weeks, and MSN plans to recognize the tag when it switches over to its Microsoft-developed search technology later this year.
According to a Google statement (on a blog, naturally enough), joining in the initiative are a number of notable providers of blog software and related services. These include Six Apart, WordPress, Blosxom, and blojsom, as well as the in-house blogging services of the search engines such as MSN Spaces and Google's Blogger. Also participating are photo-sharing services Flickr and Buzznet. Six Apart also announced its plans for implementing the tag on its individual blog services, including Movable Type and the recently acquired LiveJournal.
On Wednesday, following the public announcement of this initiative, Shizhao asked on the wikitech mailing list whether the MediaWiki developers were planning to join the major search engines in fighting link spam. (In its statement, Google indicated the idea could apply to any software that allows outside people to add links on a site.)
Tim Starling argued that the new feature needed to be enabled by default on MediaWiki installations, because the initiative "will only work well if everyone participates, otherwise spammers will just continue to spam every wiki because they couldn't be bothered checking which ones are using this feature." Brion Vibber agreed that this would be the case if the MediaWiki development team decides to support the campaign.
However, concerns were raised about whether implementing the tag on Wikipedia was desirable. Decumanus commented, "My experience is that spam gets cleaned up very quickly. Conversely, I find pleasure in adding legitimate external links, knowing it will help raise the page rank of those sites." Jimbo Wales expressed the opinion that the feature should be on by default in the MediaWiki software, but that Wikipedia itself should turn this feature off.
As Wikipedia has grown in popularity, it has become a more valuable target for spammers, but watchful editors have helped keep the problem under control. Individual spam links can be removed, and more concerted spamming efforts fought off with additional technical help.
The developers have already implemented several features to discourage spam. Known spammers have been placed on a spam blacklist that prevents edits linking to their websites from being saved.
Restrictions on bot editing also serve partially to deter bulk spamming efforts. According to the spam policy, bots that add external link spam can be treated as vandalism.
These measures have generally succeeded in keeping external link spam from staying on Wikipedia for any significant length of time. However, Tim Starling pointed out that some Wikipedia mirrors probably would not use the "nofollow" tag, meaning that spammers might still see some benefit from adding links to Wikipedia.
Also, spam has been a serious problem on other Wikipedias, particularly those in languages that have little activity and are difficult to monitor. The developers emphasized that the nofollow tag was especially suited for wikis that are largely unattended and more vulnerable to link spam.
As a result of their discussion, the developers enabled this use of the nofollow tag in the MediaWiki software and implemented the change. However, more objections had been raised in a discussion on the village pump, and ideas for selective implementation of the change had not yet been designed.
This led to further discussion and a poll on the Meta site about the issue. The poll started with only two options, either keeping the nofollow tag or getting rid of it. However, a third option, "Keep nofollow on unattended wikis, think about alternatives for active projects", was soon added and quickly became the preferred option of most participants.
The Taiwan News reported last Wednesday that the government of the Republic of China has set up a Taiwanese encyclopedia, citing Wikipedia as a model. The plans offer an interesting mix, combining ideals of openness with the prospect of government supervision.
In the article, "Taiwan Encyclopedia opens site to users", reporter Hungfu Hsueh relates the official opening last Tuesday of the Taiwan Encyclopedia website and outlines the government's plans for the project. An important element of the encyclopedia will be that users are allowed to edit directly; it even offers the possibility of payment for writing articles of a certain length.
A senior adviser to the project, Chiang Shao-ting, highlighted the similarities with Wikipedia: "Like the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia which is highly popular among users, the Taiwan Encyclopedia will also be a open platform that allows user to contribute to its content." (Editors considering a salary drive on Wikipedia might be advised to reconsider, however, as funds for the foreseeable future will probably go toward the technical demands of the site, see related story.)
The article describes the project as the brainchild of Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian, who outlined the idea in his e-journal last May. Though it is not known how much influence Wikipedia had in its development, the project shows that open content sites are growing in popularity.
Following this initial proposal, the Council of Cultural Affairs, a cabinet-level agency, held a number of meetings to plan the development of the encyclopedia, leading up to the announcement and unveiling of the encyclopedia's website.
For its purpose, the Taiwan Encyclopedia is mostly dedicated to Taiwanese history, culture, and geography, which are divided into 22 different subject areas. It has plans to publish a print edition of its contents in 2008, as well as to develop an English version and an edition geared for teenage students.
While the article highlights the encyclopedia's openness, there is apparently at least one significant restriction: "Only Taiwan citizens will be able to contribute to the encyclopedia, as an ID number is required to log in and edit or add content." In spite of this, the project has a goal of 40,000 articles, or "key words", so it appears that its ambitions are to significantly exceed the current content of the Chinese Wikipedia, which has been active for a little over two years.
How much control the government will exercise over the content is uncertain, but Chiang mentioned that all content would be reviewed by scholars in the relevant field. The article outlines plans for expert committees in each subject to be organized eventually to review new content.
One might see in the various features promised by the Taiwan Encyclopedia an effort to address criticisms that have been leveled at Wikipedia, as the project tries to appeal to various interest groups and bring them on board. Regarding the student edition, the chairman of the Council of Cultural Affairs is quoted saying that students need research material that is available on the internet, perhaps implying that what exists there now is not reliable. The proposal to have experts make the final determination on content matches up roughly to the objections of Larry Sanger and others, who argue that Wikipedia fails to defer sufficiently to expert knowledge.
However, while the motivations can be interpreted from a Wikipedia perspective, there is undoubtedly another significant factor at work. Though unstated in the article, the policy and content decisions made for the Taiwan Encyclopedia presumably reflect some consideration of the delicate balance between Taiwan and mainland China. Since the government is directly behind the project, these issues would have even more importance.
In any case, the development of this project may be interesting, not only for its similarities and differences to Wikipedia, but also because it is a novel way of interaction between a government and its citizens.
Mahatma Gandhi became a featured article last Saturday, though the process was not entirely smooth sailing (fortunately, at least nobody had to go on a fast in order to get the article featured).
In responding to objections and concerns, ashwatha, who made the nomination, put a considerable amount of effort into dealing with these. As a result, the article underwent significant expansion while its nomination was being considered.
The article also went through several images of Gandhi as editors worked to track down a photograph whose legitimacy for Wikipedia use was unassailable. The initial image had no source information; when it was traced to the French Wikipedia, it was discovered that the source information listed there was for an entirely different image, over which the newer image had been uploaded. A third image was found on the internet that might be suitable, but finally the article ended up with yet a different image, this one borrowed from the Dutch Wikipedia and identified as being in the public domain.
Other new featured articles from the past week include Common Unix Printing System, Aquarium, the cities of San Jose, California and Johannesburg, MTR, Link (Legend of Zelda), and H II region.
Only one picture was given featured status last week:
After a long delay (see archived story), the winners in the second edition of Danny's contest were announced on Sunday. Danny apologized to the contestants for the delay, explaining that his duties in administering the Arbitration Committee election, which coincided with the official cutoff for contest submissions, had put the judging process on hold.
Now that the judges have reconvened, the winners announced were Battle of Alesia, Turquoise, and Page table. Turquoise is already a featured article, and Battle of Alesia is currently a featured article candidate.
Honorable mentions went to Paper plane, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, and Andamanese languages. Grutness also received a special mention for submitting four separate articles related to New Zealand.
Four users were newly minted as administrators last week, Vague Rant, Dbiv, Gabbe, and Jni.
All of the successful candidates were overwhelmingly supported. Vague Rant (nominated by Frazzydee) received 53 support votes and Jni (nominated by fvw) received 25, while each had token opposition from one voter. For both of these users, the one opposing voter was apparently voted that way because of a conflict with one of the support voters, and several users protested against it.
The self-nominations of Dbiv and Gabbe were both unanimously granted adminship, with Dbiv receiving 14 support votes and 1 neutral vote, and Gab receiving 17 support votes.
Nominations for Piotrus and Alteripse are now pending. Piotrus, who has been heavily involved in topics related to the History of Poland was nominated by Páll. Alteripse has been heavily active in medical topics and was nominated by TacoDeposit. They will end Monday, and both look likely to pass. Another nomination, a self-nomination by Curps is also pending. It will end Monday, and also looks likely to pass.
The only unsuccessful nomination was a self-nomination by ABCD whose nomination ends Monday. He received 4 support votes, 8 oppose votes and 3 neutral votes. Many of the oppose and neutral voters felt that he was not involved enough in the community and does not make edit summaries.
Late last week, several more nominations were filed. Omegatron nominated himself on Friday, and has 3 support votes and 0 oppose votes. Dinopup also nominated himself on Friday and his nomination does not look likely to pass, as he has 1 support vote, 1 neutral vote and 5 oppose votes. The main reason behind the opposition is inexperience.
The greatest controversy of the week was over the nomination of Mike Garcia, who is the same person as former banned user Michael. Mike Garcia was unbanned several months ago and placed under the supervision of Danny, and is generally believed to be making good edits, but there was much opposition to his adminship. After some debate, Jimbo Wales intervened to cancel the nomination and end the discussion.
The Arbitration Committee closed four cases last week and accepted no new requests, thus severely slashing its caseload. It also continued to act on cases more quickly than in the past, taking one case from start to finish in eight days.
The Everyking case went quite quickly, as a final decision was reached early on Monday, 24 January, after the case had been accepted on Sunday, 16 January. Since the dispute was already the subject of a lengthy request for comment, as well as two previous arbitration requests that were withdrawn, the expedited handling may be due to the fact that much of the evidence was already organized and the arbitrators already had some familiarity with the case.
After considering several different ways of restricting Everyking from articles related to Ashlee Simpson, where his editing was the focus of the dispute, the arbitrators finally settled on prohibiting him from all reverts except for cases of obvious vandalism. Otherwise, for the next year Everyking is subject to 24-hour blocks for any reverts to these articles.
The arbitrators considered requiring Everyking to reapply for adminship, a possibility that had been suggested by Everyking's critics, but decided not to take this step. Notably, several people pointed out that Everyking had not in fact misused his administrator capabilities, as even his opponents had to concede.
At one point during the case, while Everyking was blocked for violation of the three-revert rule, some controversy ensued when he continued to use the admin rollback function to remove vandalism while he was blocked. However, it was explained that blocks specifically only prevent users from reaching the edit window, and the feature is intentionally limited so as not to restrict other capabilities.
In a case closed last Tuesday, IZAK received a ban and was placed on personal attack parole thereafter. This resolved the last of several cases related (at least partially) to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The case against IZAK was originally brought because he was campaigning against User:Sam Spade's adminship nomination by posting identical messages to a large number of talk pages. Also raised was his general practice of widespread "spamming" on talk pages regarding various issues dealing with Israeli-Palestinian topics.
However, while the arbitrators noted IZAK's crossposting of messages to multiple users in their findings of fact, they imposed no remedies to address it. As arbitrator Ambi had urged in declaring her recusal, they appear to have considered the lack of a clear spam policy with respect to talk page messages.
Instead, the ruling gave IZAK a ten-day ban for making personal attacks, followed by a two-month parole period in which he can be given short bans if he repeats these offenses. A ban from Israeli-Palestinian subjects was considered as a remedy, but rejected.
In a case brought by OneGuy against -lothario-, the arbitrators introduced a new form of sanctions to impose, called "POV parole".
Previously, arbitration cases have resulted in a number of users being placed on a probationary status, where if they violate the terms of probation they may be blocked for short periods of time (usually 24 hours). So far these have dealt with reverting or personal attacks, allowing blocks if the user exceeds a certain number of reverts or makes personal attacks on other editors.
According to the ruling, the POV parole covers situations in which -lothario- "re-inserts any edits which are judged by a majority of those commenting on the relevant talk page in a 24-hour poll to be a violation of the NPOV policy". As the lone dissenter on this remedy, Fred Bauder called it "An abomination, an invitation to bans based on bias and misunderstanding of the NPOV policy". In response, mav pointed out that the parole applied only to reinsertion of material after a determination on the talk page that the material did not conform to NPOV.
Since none of the available evidence indicates that -lothario- has edited Wikipedia, at least while using an account, since the underlying incident took place in November, it appears that an opportunity may not arise in this case to determine how a POV parole would be applied in practice.
Besides the POV parole, the decision gave -lothario- a three-day ban "for repeatedly vandalizing OneGuy's userpage with personal attacks." The arbitrators also admonished OneGuy "not to respond in kind even to severely provocative personal attacks", but did not impose any penalties on him.
The case of ArmchairVexillologistDon, accused of harrassing AndyL was closed without any action because ArmchairVexillologistDon indicated on his talk page that he was "resigning from Wikipedia" on 3 January. (If he should return, the arbitrators indicated that the case could be reopened.)
The only requests for arbitration last week came from Ollieplatt, an alleged sockpuppet of Libertas, and were unanimously rejected. Since Ollieplatt is already involved in the arbitration case regarding Libertas, Fred Bauder commented, "I think your plate is full right now, please resolve your own case first."
In the actual case involving Libertas, Ollieplatt, and a number of other accounts identified as sockpuppets, the Arbitration Committee also issued a temporary injunction last Saturday. The different accounts were all prohibited from editing any pages other than those related to the case (as well as their own user pages and user talk pages). Ollieplatt, the most active of these accounts recently, was later blocked for violation of the injunction, after already receiving several earlier blocks for violation of the three-revert rule.
Wired Magazine announced last week that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales had been nominated for one of its annual Rave Awards, scheduled to be awarded on 22 February.
The Rave Awards, now in their sixth year, honor "The People Changing Your Mind." Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson called the nominees "an eclectic mix of people who are changing the world by doing something truly new". The awards celebration will be held 22 February at The Fillmore in San Francisco.
The top Rave Award is for Renegade of the Year; the nominees this year are Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, Burt Rutan (designer of SpaceShipOne and a repeat nominee from last year), Mozilla Firefox architects Blake Ross and Ben Goodger, Howard Stern, and the Google team of Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. Past winners include Steve Jobs, Stephen Wolfram, and Dave Winer.
Wales' nomination came in the Tech Innovator category, which seems to have been renamed from a category known in previous years as Software. Last year's winner was BitTorrent author Bram Cohen.
Each category had five nominees; other categories include art, architecture, music, film, books, television, business, medicine, science, industrial design, and game design. Newly added this year was a Blogger category. Winners will be featured in the magazine's March issue.
A quick look at the other nominees in the Tech Innovator category:
There is no truth to the rumor that Jimbo personally deleted Wikipedia articles about his competitors to lessen their chances.
Following several weeks of poor performance, the Wikipedia website gradually returned to reasonably normal performance last week. After various efforts to diagnose problems and test solutions, MediaWiki developers managed to implement several changes that significantly improved the situation.
Early in the week and continuing over from last week, complaints continued to come in that Wikipedia was practically unusable, whether for editing or browsing. Particularly for peak periods of activity in North America, virtually any page load would take up to a minute, or more often it would simply time out altogether.
At one point, the OpenFacts project, which hosts an off-site page for Wikipedia status reports, was also not responding. The error messages being generated there resembled those on Wikipedia when a database query has failed. Since the status page on OpenFacts is linked on many of the error messages provided by Wikipedia's servers, it seems somewhat plausible to suggest that OpenFacts may have been experiencing a Slashdot effect of incoming traffic from frustrated Wikipedians (crashdotting, anyone?).
On Wednesday, developer Jamesday reported that an increase in the capacity of Wikimedia's memcached system, along with some other improvements to it, was helping to improve page load times for logged-in users. In addition, he said this would reduce problems with servers that stopped responding when visited by web crawlers.
As the situation began to improve, Tim Starling took the time Thursday to publicly thank the other developers on the wikitech mailing list for their work. In recognition of the amount of work put in, Starling said, "I've lost count of how many problems we've identified and fixed just over the last few weeks." He commented that in spite of the complaints, most users are appreciative of the work being done, but, "They don't know what our achievements have been and they don't know the challenges we face."
In other changes, new load balancing software set up by developer Kate Turner helped distribute the work more effectively between the servers.
After Wednesday, editors continued to report sporadic problems, but the reports came in far less frequently than before. The remaining complaints seemed to focus on being able to save edits. In an update on Saturday, Jamesday indicated that the developer team had done additional work to increase the speed of saves, which should address those problems.
Since Wikipedia traffic continues to grow, and any signs of this growth leveling off have generally been due to performance limitations, the potential for future problems remains unless the server system can continue to accommodate the growth. Comments from developers and Wikimedia Foundation officials continued to emphasize that more servers will be needed. Since the Foundation still relies heavily on donations, the upcoming February fundraiser is an important element in keeping up with the demand for Wikipedia content.
A poll on expansion of the speedy deletion process ended with criteria expanded slightly, and the new criteria went into effect last Monday with the approval of Jimbo Wales.
The massive poll on Wikipedia:Proposal to expand WP:CSD ended last week with three of the eleven proposals passing. Over 200 Wikipedia editors participated in the poll.
Proposal I, which will allow administrators to speedily delete any article with no content other than a category, template, external link, see also section, or book reference, passed with 84% of the vote. Proposal VI, which allows admins to speedily delete mistakenly created articles (if the original editor requests it and nobody else has edited the article), passed with 88% of the vote.
The most widely supported proposal, Proposal X, allows speedy deletion of articles which consists only of someone attempting to correspond with the subject of the article. It passed with 95% of the vote.
Two proposals received majority support, but not the 70% required for passage. Proposal II came closest with 60% of the vote, which would have allowed speedy deletion of extremely short articles that give no information other than what is obvious from the title.
Proposal XI, dealing with vanity articles, received 58% support. This proposal, somewhat reminiscent of previous proposals like Managed Deletion, would have set up a special process whereby the article would first be listed in Category:Articles which may be unencyclopedic, then considered eligible for speedy deletion after three days if nobody objected or improved the article during that period.
Proposed criteria that were considered more subjective and open to interpretation were generally rejected. However, speedy deletion of obvious vanity articles or dictionary definitions did have significant minority support (44% and 33% on Proposals III and IV, respectively). Proposal V, dealing with copyright violations, received only 37% support, as many voters suggested that copyright problems should be left to the existing process for handling such issues.
Ben Brockert submitted the three proposals that passed to Jimbo Wales for his approval, to which he responded affirmatively, "These should be considered policy now."
However, the changes in the criteria do not seem to have significantly impacted the way speedy deletions and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion operate. Many administrators have speedily deleted articles under the new criteria for a long time, relying on the already existing criteria of patent nonsense, vandalism or spam.
Interestingly, the least widely supported proposal was Proposal IX, which stated that any of the proposals not passed could never be used as criteria for speedy deletion. It received only 2% of the vote and was widely deemed unnecessary and undesirable.
Like related proposals that preceded it, part of the reason articulated for this change in deletion policy was to lighten the load of Votes for deletion. However, the outcome of the poll suggests that it will not have much effect, since of the proposed new criteria, vanity articles and dictionary definitions get listed on VfD more frequently than the other cases, and those proposals failed to pass. Meanwhile, many of the articles under criteria that did pass have been speedily deleted in the past using other criteria, rather than being put on VfD.
A major Brazilian newsweekly published an overview of Wikipedia last week that shed doubt on Wikipedia's reliability. The reporter tested this by vandalizing Wikipedia and noting that the vandalism went uncorrected for two days.
As reported by JoaoRicardo and Redux, the Brazilian magazine Veja published an article about Wikipedia on its website Sunday, and also in its print edition dated 26 January. The article noted that the freedom to edit pages gives rise to Wikipedia's success, but also characterized this as a flaw because it makes content vulnerable to malicious or ill-informed editors.
In the article, the reporter claimed to have inserted (and later removed) factually incorrect information in the Wikipedia article about Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as "Lula". This type of misinformation is commonly known as sneaky vandalism. A few individuals have previously published their results from attempts to test Wikipedia using a similar approach, notably University of Buffalo professor Alex Halavais.
Publication of the article prompted a flurry of additional edits to Lula's Wikipedia biography, both in English and Portuguese. However, although the Veja article was written in Portuguese, the vandalism was done to the article located on the English Wikipedia.
In checking out the reporter's account, corresponding edits were identified on the article about Lula. The first edit, made from an IP address on 17 January, changed his biography from stating that he was born "in a small village in the impoverished Brazilian state of Pernambuco", to read instead, "in a big city in the industrial Brazilian state of Pernambuco".
The town in which Lula was born, known today as Caetés, is certainly not a big city. And while Pernambuco is not devoid of industry, its primary economic base is agriculture and it is not particularly industrial by Brazilian standards. Lula's own biography describes him as having been born to a family of small farmers.
As indicated in the Veja article, the erroneous information was removed two days later, by someone using the same IP address as for the original edit. Nobody has tried to repeat this vandalism, but editors in both languages have been reverting a user who adds a section to the article, "Against The Students", which criticizes Lula as "a stupid fool" for his education policy.
