A group of Wikipedians held a meetup in London last week, with an important topic of discussion being the possibility of a UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The meetup was held on Saturday afternoon at a central London pub called "The Cock", with a total of 18 people attending. This was the third major Wikipedia meetup in London within the past year, all of which drew roughly twenty or so people, although this was the first London meetup without Jimbo Wales in attendance.
Following up on some recent discussions (see archived story), the group discussed plans to start a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation for the United Kingdom. Similar chapters have already been established in Germany and France, and the possibility has been mentioned for a few other countries as well. As David Gerard rather whimsically put it, "Let's go down the pub and start a charity!"
Some preliminary steps have already been taken, as the wikimedia.org.uk domain has been registered by James Forrester. VampWillow, who indicated that she has some previous experience with such matters, volunteered to help with the paperwork to get registered as a charity.
Among the things a local chapter could do is organize specific local projects and conduct its own fundraisers. It might also coordinate the placement of Wikimedia servers for the area it covers. With respect to tax deductibility of donations, Gerard was fairly confident that charitable status would provide this benefit at least for England and Wales, and "probably" also for Scotland and Northern Ireland (note: Gerard undoubtedly was not trying to provide legal or tax advice, and this reporter isn't either).
One concern that has been raised in connection with local chapters is that they might be misused for a nationalist agenda. Addressing this issue after the meetup, Jimbo Wales issued a reminder on Monday that it is important "to make sure that chapter organizers understand that they are not taking control of a particular language wikipedia." He reiterated that "All chapters are expected to support the *global* goals of the foundation."
The possibility of eventually starting a US chapter was renewed last Friday by Daniel Mayer, who said he had registered the wikimedia.us domain for that purpose. Although the main Wikimedia Foundation has its headquarters in the United States, a local chapter could still be set up there as well, since the international organization is not focused specifically on the US.
Notable events in software development included a new release of MediaWiki software last week, while work progresses on new features including one to help identify reliable versions of Wikipedia articles.
Last Monday, developer Brion Vibber announced the official release of MediaWiki 1.4.0 in a stable version. As is usual with MediaWiki development, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects had already been using this upgrade in a beta version a couple of months ahead of the official release.
Meanwhile, preparations continue for the next software version, to which Wikipedia will be upgraded in the near future. Vibber estimated that implementations of new features might still be considered for inclusion in MediaWiki 1.5 if ready within the next month. At some point soon, however, the development of version 1.5 will start focusing strictly on fixing bugs to prepare for beta and eventual release.
With respect to the upcoming schedule, Vibber has indicated that MediaWiki tends to have two or three major version releases per year. While there is no fixed deadline, six-month intervals could be a reasonable estimate. Considering that Wikipedia was moved to the MediaWiki 1.4 beta in December, a rough guess would put the transition to a beta of 1.5 around June, although many factors could still affect the timing of the upgrade.
One change that will definitely be included in MediaWiki 1.5 is a major revision of the database scheme, which will include giving the latest revision of a page its own unique identifying record. Among other things, this will make it possible to create links to the current version of an article (or diffs from that version) and still have these point to the same version after subsequent edits have been made.
In addition, Vibber issued a reminder that the databases for separate Wikimedia projects are independent of each other, a consideration that will affect plans for the server cluster. He said, "It's very likely that at some point we'll want to split out some of the larger wikis to separate master servers".
Also likely to be included MediaWiki 1.5 is the first implementation of a feature for use in rating or validating articles, written by Magnus Manske. Based on Manske's post to the Wikipedia mailing list on 18 March, the feature has been rewritten "to a point where all essential functions work", and now needs to be put through testing. People interested in generating a stable, reviewed version of Wikipedia greeted the announcement with enthusiasm. As mav commented, "Wikipedia 1.0 is starting to look less and less like vaporware."
In its preliminary stages, however, such a feature is likely to remain somewhat in the background. Besides the issue of whether and how it works in a purely technical sense, a rating system would benefit from testing in social terms, by seeing how Wikipedia contributors interact with it. As a result, the initial use of an article rating feature will probably be purely for gathering data, and evaluating whether the end product actually makes sense.
The volume of work for the Arbitration Committee increased again last week, with five new requests being accepted and only two matters closed. Following considerable discussion about the enforcement of content-related policies, the Committee accepted a potential test case dealing with this area.
A number of recent discussions, especially on the mailing lists, have focused on how to enforce policies such as no original research and cite sources in the context of the dispute resolution process. Several users complained that arbitration had been effective in dealing with poor behavior, but unable to deal with other policy violations that harmed the quality of articles. Proposed solutions floated during the debate included the creation of a separate committee to handle "content arbitration", or the expansion of the current Arbitration Committee's work to consider violations of content-related policy, but without actually dictating what content goes in or stays out of an article.
Slrubenstein, one of those who had expressed concerns about the imbalance, requested arbitration last Friday against RJII in a dispute over definitions of capitalism. Two arbitrators initially voted to reject the request, with Ambi saying, "We don't deal with content disputes." In response, mav argued, "We would not be ruling on content itself per se but instead enforcing our content policies." Ultimately seven arbitrators agreed to accept the request in order to take this approach to the issue.
Another of the newly accepted requests is also in large part a content dispute, although the evidence mixes in more allegations of misbehavior. That would be Cortonin's request against William M. Connolley, which stems from a debate over issues related to global warming. This request also saw the arbitrators divided between rejecting and accepting, but was narrowly accepted after Ambi changed her vote to support acceptance.
Matters involving the same people repeatedly coming into arbitration continued to fill up the process, as half of the currently open cases are at least the second request accepted dealing with that particular user. Two of last week's new cases deal with users who were banned last year and have returned after serving out the term of their ban.
John Gohde, previously known as Mr-Natural-Health and once banned for three months, brought a request against Snowspinner, who has been monitoring Gohde's activity for several weeks, for systematically reverting Gohde's addition of infoboxes to articles dealing with alternative medicine. The arbitrators rejected this request, but agreed to consider Snowspinner's "counterclaim" that Gohde had "returned to the behavior which got him in trouble twice before."
Rex071404 only received a partial ban from articles involving US politics, for a period of four months starting last November, and now has apparently returned using the IP address 216.153.214.94. In the brief period since returning, he has already been blocked twice for blanking pages and for violating the three-revert rule. JamesMLane, who spearheaded the case against him last time, made the new request and asked for a stronger remedy, saying, "It's obvious that we have here a definite and unrepentant problem user."
The other new request accepted last week involved GRider's activities on Votes for deletion, submitted by Kieran last Wednesday after two requests for comment were created for him within a week.
In the case brought against Anthony DiPierro, on the issue that prompted the request for arbitration — DiPierro's copying of content from a deleted article to his user space — the arbitrators decided that this did not constitute recreation of the actual article (this apparently would make the copy ineligible for speedy deletion). However, they went on to prohibit DiPierro from recreating a deleted article in any namespace for three months if a vote for undeletion failed after a proper deletion.
Finding that DiPierro had "engaged in an unhelpful amount of revert warring", along with occasional incivility, the ruling imposed a one-revert limit for a period of three months. Pointing to the fact that "almost all" of these disputes were conducted in the Wikipedia namespace, the arbitrators decided to ban DiPierro from that namespace for a year, with some limited exceptions. As the case was being closed, DiPierro said he would be "taking a break from Wikipedia", apparently for the three months covered by his revert parole.
Mirv criticized the arbitrators for not addressing the behavior of Snowspinner and David Gerard in "picking a fight with an illegitimate revert war over a page in someone else's userspace". In response, Snowspinner contended that he should not be sanctioned for a good faith interpretation of a vague policy in need of clarification, prompting DiPierro to say, "Good faith interpretations of vague policies is exactly what I've been smacked down for".
Meanwhile, the request against Dr Zen, apparently moot since he left the project once the case started, closed with an indefinite prohibition on "removing or otherwise altering the manner of appearance of any photographs on the article Clitoris." As arbitrator Nohat clarified, the ruling applied only to Dr Zen, and other editors are free to make any changes that have consensus support.
Last Monday, Erik Zachte announced the return of his statistical tables for Wikipedia. A new effort to produce regular snapshots of Wikipedia's current status was also started by Alterego.
For several months, Zachte had been unable to provide fresh statistics because of changes to the database. Last December, the developers began the process of reshuffling the already compressed database archives to conserve even more disk space. This prevented the generation of database dumps for a few weeks. As a result, the last update to the statistical tables was dated from 30 December 2004.
Even when the database dumps were available again, Zachte indicated that the scripts used to generate his statistics needed significant revision to deal with the new layout of the archives. Now that he has been able to do this, the updated statistics were generated based on a database dump from 9 March.
A number of people expressed their appreciation for Zachte's work in making the statistics available again. Eloquence commented, "I can't begin to count the number of times I've made use of your stats and pointed other people to them."
As part of the latest update, Zachte announced the availability of some new statistics. These include a count of the total number of records (i.e., pages, including redirects) along with the percentage of articles that have been categorised. Note that the latter does not include categories that are inserted via a template.
Also available are hierarchical category trees and an index of timelines used on Wikipedia. The timelines are created with the EasyTimeline feature, which was also developed by Zachte.
In the future, changes to the database design planned for version 1.5 of the MediaWiki software (see related story) will require additional adaptation for the statistics to be collected. Zachte has said to "expect a similar outage" when that time comes. Tentative indications are that the approach will change from relying on database dumps to using direct SQL access to generate statistics incrementally.
For those interested in tracking a variety of current information including some statistics, Alterego has created a new page called WikiPulse. Currently the statistics are drawn only from the English Wikipedia, although translations were invited to allow information from other Wikipedias to be added.
WikiPulse also has information on the status of the Wikimedia server network and even some data about IRC and mailing list activity. Zachte jokingly said he thought extra servers might soon be needed if Alterego's snapshot proved to be as popular as he expected (in fact the OpenFacts Wikipedia status page has already experienced difficulty with crashdotting during Wikipedia downtime).
Last Monday, metasearch engine SurfWax launched a search engine for locating Wikipedia articles, called WikiWax (www.wikiwax.com). When the user begins typing in the search box, the search engine dynamically lists articles matching the search term. Using a technology it calls LookAhead, WikiWax also 'rotates' the search term so that searching for 'Kreutz', for example, brings up links to entries on Kreutz Sungrazers, the Kreutzer Sonata, Harald Kreutzberg and Mario Kreutzberger. Clicking on one of the links listed takes the user directly to the relevant article.
The news was mentioned by Gary Price on the SearchEngineWatch site, as well as having a Wikinews article written about it. SearchEngineWatch also carried a guest column Tuesday by Mary Ellen Bates on the relationship with Answers.com, one of the major reusers of Wikipedia's content. Bates was quite positive and said, "There's a lot of intelligence built into the Wikipedia."
Also, the Taipei Times has recently incorporated a "Wikipedia feature" for its online articles. By clicking on a link marked "Wikipedia", you can view a new version of the article with links to the Wikipedia pages about certain subjects mentioned in the news article. The feature apparently still has some bugs, as a number of the links do not correspond to existing Wikipedia articles.
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050321-193410
An article in the online edition of Romanian newspaper Evenimentul Zilei discusses Wikipedia in an article on the perils of getting information from the internet. The article introduces Wikipedia's 'anyone can edit' philosophy, and then speculates on how an article might evolve as users with different beliefs and interests edit. The article looks at the case of Adrian Păunescu (who has a stub in the English Wikipedia but has a lengthy Romanian entry). Păunescu, a poet-turned-politician, is currently the leader of the Socialist Alliance Party, a successor party to the former Communist rulers.
The author, apparently unaware of Wikipedia's universal NPOV policy, discusses various hypothetical edits that might be made by people alternately sympathetic and hostile to Păunescu's poetry and politics, and then tries to shock the reader by announcing that 'This wikipedia page isn't a joke, it really exists'. The article claims that Păunescu's Wikipedia entry is remarkably positive about someone the author says most Romanians consider "a comic character". The writer also alleges that the article has been edited by Păunescu's son, although the history of the article reveals no evidence for this.
The point the article is trying to illustrate is that information from the internet is not always reliable. "The wiki system perfectly embodies the drama of searching for information through the Internet", says the paper. "Information is no better or worse than its last user/creator".
http://www.expres.ro/english/?news_id=182190 Archived 2005-12-21 at the Wayback Machine
Press citations of Wikipedia articles this week included Forbes Magazine quoting from our article on John DeLorean in their obituary of the carmaker and fraudster ([1]); British newspaper The Independent coming to us to fill them in on the fascinating history of patents ([2][permanent dead link]); and technology magazine ZDNet quoting our definition of ecosystem in an article about currently popular buzzwords in computing circles ([3]).
Also, in the world of Wikipedia games, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped proposed a new challenge involving the random page feature. As he described it, the objective of the game is to "create a random nonsense story", and he posted a short sample of his efforts. His rules were that you must use each of the random articles provided (in the same order as they come up) and weave them into the story.
The proposed addition of some new elements to the dispute resolution system last week prompted some often heated debate. By the end of the week, it seemed that a new association to act as a prosecuting body in arbitration cases might survive objections to its existence, but an attempt to create a new de-adminship process had been rejected.
Acting on a comment by arbitrator mav that, "It may in fact be a good idea to create an official prosecutor office to counter the AMA", an idea also endorsed by Raul654 and Ambi, Snowspinner started the District Attorney's Office last Tuesday. The organization offered to help deal with problem users and the "prohibitively difficult and stressful nature of bringing cases before the arbcom."
The original structure of the organization had Snowspinner as "dictator", with other participants being designated as partners. The page noted some of the arbitration cases its members were working on, including Grunt's request (since rejected) against Snowspinner himself. Snowspinner later explained that the title of dictator had been intended as humor, acknowledging that the joke did not go over very well.
As originally constituted, the organization quickly acquired a vehement critic in Mirv, who said it could "create an unaccountable clique of bullies". After an edit and page move war, Mirv created another organization called the "Sacred Office of the Inquisition", either as a fork or a parody criticizing Snowspinner's project.
One of Snowspinner's partners, Blankfaze, nominated this for deletion, which was overwhelmingly supported, although some people found it funny enough for BJAODN. Mirv responded by nominating the District Attorney's Office for deletion. Reflecting the split in the community over the issue, votes were roughly equally divided between those wanting to keep it as having a useful function, and those who supported deletion (the split in the voting continued even after multiple rewrites of the page).
Based on additional discussion, the DA's Office went through a few more names before settling on its current form, Association of Member Investigations. This gave it a name similar to the Association of Members' Advocates, of which it was intended as a counterpart. The renaming helped mollify some critics, although others questioned whether the two needed to exist as separate organizations.
Meanwhile, Mirv withdrew his "Sacred Office of the Inquisition" and moved it to his user space. Instead he set up the Association for Unbiased Prosecution to offer as a more serious alternative to the AMI, but this too was nominated for deletion. Eventually Snowspinner decided to modify his own title to "intern", along with some significant revisions to the AMI page. Based on this, Mirv announced, "I consider all my specific objections dealt with", and proposed to merge the AUP back into the AMI.
In another attempt to revise the dispute resolution system, Netoholic had suggested a new procedure for removing administrator status and offered a draft of the procedure on 14 March. The proposal would have required ten users to sign a petition in order to "nominate" a user for de-adminship, after which a vote would be held on the question. Eighty percent of voters would need to agree in order for adminship to be removed.
The idea was touted as a counterpart to the process at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. dab commented, "Adminship is granted by the community, it should also be revoked by the community." A few expressed support for the general principle while remaining uncertain about whether the proposal was ideal.
A number of concerns were also voiced, arguing that existing processes were adequate and that a de-adminship page would be a magnet for vendettas and harassment. Korath said he couldn't imagine the proposal actually generating any results, as an administrator with so little support would already be removed via arbitration.
In spite of a straw poll running roughly two-to-one against the proposal, Netoholic decided last Thursday to give part of it a trial run. He started a petition calling for a vote on the admin status of Snowspinner, but said it was outside the de-adminship policy proposal and explained that it was "only a petition at this stage." The petition received two additional signatures, then was nominated for deletion, a move that was widely supported. Other alternatives, such as moving it to Netoholic's user space or converting the petition into a Request for comment, were tried but Netoholic reverted them.
Finally, on Saturday the main Requests for de-adminship page was returned to its previous state as a redirect to Wikipedia:Requests for comment. The proposed petition procedure was moved instead to Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship/Old proposal.
