Planning for April Fool's Day turned out to be a touchy subject on Wikipedia, dividing the community over the issue of whether to feature a hoax article. Hoaxes did make an appearance on the Main Page in the end, but dissatisfaction over this turn of events prompted preparations for a better-organized approach next year.

Back on 12 March, Featured Articles Director Raul654 announced that he would open up the selection of the featured article on the Main Page for April 1 for suggestions. He suggested combing through the list of unusual articles for possibilities.

Unfortunately, some of the best options had already appeared on the Main Page as featured articles, like exploding whale. An attempt was made to get Boston molasses disaster promoted to featured article, but this proved unsuccessful.

However, a fake article on European toilet paper holders had already been put in place on the featured article template for April 1 by Jguk. This collaborative joke had already been put through featured article candidates (facetiously) and suggested as ideal for the Main Page on April Fool's Day, but Raul rejected this idea back in February (see archived story). When its presence on the template was pointed out, he reset the April 1 template to its original empty state.

On 26 March, Raul threw the issue open for a poll to run through 30 March, a decision he later came to regret. A few suggestions were made, although the most popular suggestion initially was "No special article", meaning that the choice should be left to Raul's judgment as usual. However, Worldtraveller suggested the European toilet paper holder article the next day as "an example of the very best of Wittypedia." As before, Raul vetoed this suggestion, and a debate ensued over whether the featured article for April 1 should be a hoax or not.

Several people argued that other respected information sources like the BBC had perpetrated April Fool's hoaxes in the past. However, others supported Raul's position and Everyking commented, "we are in the business of providing information, not playing silly games, especially not when those silly games would directly contradict the goal of providing information." mav said he would remove the hoax if it appeared on the Main Page.

The European toilet paper holder article remained the most popular option, with a majority of all participants in the poll supporting this choice. Partly in a reaction against the proposed hoax, "No special article" also received considerable support. Most of the other choices were largely ignored.

Raul and mav appealed for Jimbo Wales to express an opinion on the question. Wales finally did so on Wednesday but felt torn between the two sides and said, "I think it's really fun, but we're also a very serious project." He suggested setting up a parallel Main Page for April Fool's jokes, but those pushing the planned joke were unenthusiastic about this idea.

After the poll ended, Raul declared that the featured article for the day would be Nintendo Entertainment System, calling it "a very good article, and I think it's a 'fun' article". Questioning whether there was anything "fun" about it, Geogre responded, "It's an entirely predictable article that shows the rather boring user base that floods the encyclopedia with breathless articles on hobbies."

The first major hoax to appear on the Main Page was a different item, the 2005 Britannica takeover of Wikimedia. Originally a relatively short news story created by Grunt and added to the "In the news" template, it drew a frenzy of edits and expanded into a lengthy article, complete with photoshopped images and a list of new corporate officers.

After this had been up for a little while, the featured article template was replaced with the European toilet paper holder article after all, using a suggestion from BanyanTree that it be labelled as "Today's featured Nihilartikel". When objections were raised about including the hoax news story with other serious items, it was removed from the "In the news" template and placed in a separate banner below the Main Page's introductory text. The hoaxes on the Main Page lasted about half the day, and were removed by Raul at 18:39 (UTC).

A variety of other pranks and nonsense were tried, both on the Main Page and elsewhere. Hedley collected a gallery of screenshots from the different jokes from the day, and a list of some of the fake adminship nominations, votes for deletion, and the like is at Wikipedia:Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense/April Fools' Day 2005.

An after-the-fact nomination, which JRM said he'd like to get up to featured article status and used next year, was Extreme ironing. This subject was actually the basis of an April 1 newspaper article in the Gonzaga University Bulletin, using the Wikipedia article as a source. Meanwhile, the "news" of the merger with Britannica was featured on Slashdot and mentioned on several other websites as well.

Some who had been uncomfortable with the hoax remained unhappy after seeing how the day played out, complaining that the pranks got out of control. Eloquence proposed setting guidelines for next year, with an emphasis on coordinating one main joke and limiting pranks to those areas that would not affect the encyclopedia. Several people endorsed this idea, although Tony Sidaway argued that it would be impossible to enforce.

A second vote, held in an effort to implement some amendments to the arbitration policy, ended last week with none of the proposed amendments meeting the criteria for passage.

At stake in this referendum were a number of different changes to the provisions of the arbitration policy, each being voted on separately. Many of the changes were proposed in order to bring the formal policy in line with the actual practices of the Arbitration Committee.

The vote started on 14 March after a controversy over the implementation of the previous vote, and ran through last Monday, 28 March. Each different amendment needed to have 80% support, with at least 100 total votes, in order to pass. While some of the changes had enough support in terms of percentage, none managed to reach the 100-vote threshold.

Three proposed changes would have passed if percentage alone had been the standard. The first of these would have added a reference to other forms of dispute resolution besides mediation, while the other two were intended to confirm the current format in which arbitration is handled in terms of using subpages and the organization of arbitration rulings.

The arbitration policy has received no significant updates since the creation of the arbitration process at the beginning of 2004. A proposed amendment was voted on last November, consisting of several of the items that were later voted on individually. The amendment easily exceeded the 70% support required at the time for passage, but did not meet a target stated at the outset of having at least 100 total votes in order to qualify as adopted.

After no action was taken initially, Jimbo Wales stepped in on 11 March to declare the amendment ratified based on the strength of support it received. This prompted complaints from several people about changing the rules after the voting had already taken place, which in turn led to starting a second vote.

When closing the original vote, Wales said he thought the threshold of 100 total votes for adoption was "overly ambitious", and apparently it proved to be too ambitious for the revote as well. This is in spite of the fact that the revote didn't specify a 500-edit voter eligibility requirement, as the first vote had. However, the two-week time period and the extent to which the vote was advertised still failed to bring in enough voters to satisfy the 100-vote threshold on any proposal.

Given the ongoing difficulty in having a successful vote to amend the policy, and in the traditional spirit of collaborative editing, Tim Starling and a few others opposed the concept of having community votes to amend the arbitration policy at all. As Starling put it, "Just edit the policy page."

Wikipedia began blocking open proxies again last week based on a list provided by SORBS. This initially caused some concern when established users were also blocked, but a later fix for this problem seemed to settle the issue.

In a continuing effort to deter spam on Wikimedia Foundation projects, the developers deployed the SORBS blocklist last Tuesday. SORBS (an acronym for Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System) maintains a database of IP addresses responsible for various kinds of spam and other abuse.

Open proxies have long been a problem for Wikipedia and have been routinely blocked for the past year. According to developer Tim Starling, "Almost all of our bot-driven vandalism and spam comes from open proxies." However, finding the best technical solution to deal with the situation has been an ongoing struggle (see archived story).

Complaints about the new proxy-blocking system came quickly from several users, including Waerth. Waerth, a user based in Thailand whose Internet service provider is configured as an open proxy, has for several months been complaining about being blocked on multiple projects as a result of various efforts to deal with proxies. He reports that he has little choice but to use this provider, and he has no influence to convince the operators to fix their service.

David Gerard asked if the developers could change blocks so that they only affect users who aren't logged in. Starling implemented this temporarily, despite his misgivings over the ease with which spammers and vandals could create accounts. This was soon followed by Dori reporting a bot engaging in page move vandalism on the Albanian Wikipedia.

On Thursday, Starling indicated that he had written some additional code to deal with Waerth's situation. He explained that some ISPs force their users through proxies, but the proxy reports a valid header that indicates the actual IP address of the end-user behind the proxy. Under these circumstances, the user's real IP address could be used for the purposes of the block-checking code. With Waerth's ISP falling into this category, the problem was apparently solved.

In cases involving two editors coming before the Arbitration Committee for a second time, the Committee moderated its ruling in one situation while increasing restrictions in the other matter. Meanwhile, the arbitrators confirmed the existing practice of blocking so-called public accounts in the Iasson case.

The arbitrators closed out several cases on Monday, including the second case each dealing with RK and Everyking. RK successfully appealed the terms of his original case to lift a subject-matter ban, while Everyking received a similar ban after previous restrictions were deemed insufficient.

The request for arbitration against Everyking was submitted by Snowspinner after continued debates on Ashlee Simpson-related articles led to Everyking being blocked and unblocked several times. The complaint focused on alleged violations of a previous ruling, which prohibited Everyking from reverting these articles. Snowspinner and others claimed that Everyking was using "partial reverts" to restore disputed text piecemeal in hopes of avoiding the prohibition on reverts from the original case. Everyking argued that the edits people were calling reverts were not in fact reverts, but attempts at compromise, and that the evidence was being misinterpreted.

The arbitrators determined that Everyking had in fact continued to revert articles related to Ashlee Simpson, in spite of the prior ruling, and decided instead to prohibit him from editing those articles entirely. The restriction was defined as applying to "Any article which contains a link to Ashlee Simpson or mentioning Ashlee Simpson...with respect to that portion of [the] article which is concerned with Ashlee Simpson." Noted in the ruling was the fact that Everyking had conducted himself well on issues not related to Ashlee Simpson.

RK's case involved reconsideration of the previous ruling after RK had completed a four-month ban. Observing that RK had "demonstrated some improvement in editing habits", though not enough to be called a "model editor", the arbitrators decided to lift RK's ban on editing articles related to Judaism. Instead, they replaced it with a limitation of one revert per 24 hours on those articles, along with a general personal attack parole. As with the original ban, these restrictions were to last for a one-year period.

The Iasson case traces back to December, when Iasson arrived and began making "unilateral changes to deletion policy" against consensus. He followed this up by making peculiar votes and comments regarding articles nominated for deletion and trying to conduct polls about them. As Taxman described Iasson's modus operandi, "The votes are generally nonsensical, and clearly not designed to be helpful".

A request for comment about this ongoing behavior in January brought considerable agreement that Iasson was being disruptive. Around this period, a new account by the name of Faethon appeared in the discussion. Several people familiar with the situation identified Faethon as having the same style as Iasson.

As Faethon, he created a number of accounts for which the password was effectively disclosed, because it was usually the same as the name of the account. Following standard practice for public accounts (where the password has been compromised), most of these accounts were either blocked or had their passwords changed. It was also reported that some additional accounts had been listed by bugmenot.com, which posts account passwords for a number of sites that require registration, but these were removed upon request.

Finding that his conduct on Votes for deletion and with respect to deletion policy was disruptive, the arbitrators banned Iasson for a year. The arbitrators noted that Iasson had made only seven edits to articles, instead making nearly all of his edits on deletion issues. The decision also provided that any public accounts could be blocked routinely upon discovery.

Also set to close was a case involving several edit wars between a number of contributors, including quite a few sockpuppets. The abusive sockpuppets were simply banned, and most of the ruling focused on two other parties, Tabib and Rovoam. Based on the revert wars and interspersed personal attacks, they applied a one-revert parole and a personal attack parole to Rovoam for a year. Tabib escaped without any sanctions, as arbitrator David Gerard said, "Tabib was being sorely provoked".

Two new requests were accepted last week. The first involved a dispute between Tkorrovi and Paul Beardsell over the Artificial consciousness article, including allegations of personal attacks. On Sunday, Violetriga made a complaint against Irate for abusiveness and vandalism of user pages, which the arbitrators also agreed to consider.

In coordination with wiki software maker Socialtext, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed last week the development of a standard for wiki syntax.

Following up on a discussion with Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield at the Emerging Technologies Conference last month, Wikimedia President Jimmy Wales suggested on Wednesday that the Foundation should lead an effort to develop a core set of wiki syntax standards. Wales indicated that Mayfield was eager to help the project. Socialtext is a company focused on enterprise-level wiki software built around a Kwiki framework, working with clients like Nokia and Ziff Davis Media.

In his post to the wikitech mailing list, Wales said, "I propose that we set up a group of people either in a mailing list or a wiki or both, and invite representatives from all the major wiki software projects and companies to participate in a syntax standard." Several developers jumped in with ideas, and the general concept seemed to be readily accepted. As Wales put it, "it seems that wiki syntax is a natural for some standardization."

Brian Ingerson, a Socialtext employee and creator of Kwiki, joined the discussion as well. He said, "The key is to have a standard semantic model" which would allow wiki documents to be processed through that model correctly. Several people suggested that XML could provide the basis for developing a standard format.

It is not known whether Socialtext's biggest competitor, JotSpot, has been approached about participating, or whether the two companies would be able to cooperate on developing a syntax standard.

Some attempts have been made to promote syntax standardization previously, but the idea hadn't yet gained much traction. This might change with the explicit support of Wikimedia as the largest wiki project group, with MediaWiki being a popular software platform on other wiki projects as well. A comparison of several existing wiki engines, covering both syntax format and other features, can be found at DokuWiki.

Evan Prodromou of Wikitravel suggested the possibility of having a WYSIWYG editor within the browser, which would allow contributors to avoid the problems of differing wiki syntax. However, Ingerson said that a standard model for syntax was necessary "before you can seriously think about moving to a WYSIWYG option."

In the week in which both Terri Schiavo and Pope John Paul II died, many news outlets took advantage of Wikipedia's ability to keep the content contemporary with the latest information. For example, many articles during the Pope's last days referenced the Wikipedia article on the late pontiff, while a flurry of edits also took place (Thryduulf reported that over nearly six hours around the time of his death, edits were coming faster than one per minute).

Besides citing Wikipedia as a source, some of the coverage specifically noted how quickly Wikipedia articles are updated. A report which appeared in several Canadian news outlets noted that Wikipedia was updated with news of Schiavo's death "within moments - even as leaders walked to microphones" ([1]). CNET technology news also reported that Wikipedia's "lengthy account of Schiavo's life and last days" was updated immediately on the news of her death ([2]).

Whether to include a nihilartikel on the main page for April Fool's Day caused a certain amount of friction among Wikipedians (see related story). In the end, outside websites picked up on both the nihilartikel and the nihilnews that made it onto the front page.

In their round-up of the day's internet tomfoolery, business news website bizreport.com declared Wikipedia's antics the most confusing ([3]). "Is the featured story on the history of toilets and lavatory paper a sophisticated exploration of a most important topic?", they wondered, "Or is it just toilet humor?". P2Pnet ([4]) and broadbandreports ([5]), meanwhile, both reported the disastrous news of the takeover by the ligatured encyclopædia. The latter outlet reported it as a straight news story, cheekily fobbing off their readers with a second-hand hoax.

That's the verdict of an article on Wikipedia in ITweek.com ([6]). Columnist Tim Anderson asked the question "Critics said collaborative web publishing would be chaos, but were they wrong?", and resoundingly concluded that they were. Anderson was impressed at how easy it is for the large body of editors to keep on top of vandalism and spamming, contrary to what one might initially expect. "Despite what seem fundamental flaws, Wikipedia has become a huge and valuable resource", he said.

The success of Wikipedia has focussed attention on Wiki software, and many businesses are now investigating using wikis for collaborative working. Anderson remarks on Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for a collaborative internet, and says "Wikipedia and the wiki concept have brought that vision to life".

Many people remain astonished by the suggestion that letting anyone edit an encyclopaedia could produce a useful resource, but two articles this week extol the virtues of mass participation. Fast Company Magazine reported a speech given by David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute for Internet & Society, in which he said that the Internet provided ample evidence of the general goodness of people ([7]). "Wikipedia works because human nature is so f'ing good!", he enthused.

Meanwhile, the Nashua Telegraph discussed the success of flickr, which allows anyone to categorise anyone else's photographs, and said that Wikipedia demonstrates the pros and cons of collaborative editing ([8]). Columnist Dave Brooks (who happens to be User:DavidWBrooks) noted the recent creation of the 500,000th English language article, and said that Wikipedia contains "a surprising amount of valuable, fascinating information". On the other hand, he added a harsh conclusion that "many of the entries are wrong and even more are stupid".

Also looking at the negative aspects, an article in The Age noted that the oft-vandalised article on George W. Bush varied in reliability from minute to minute ([9]), with the author finding the article describing Bush as plotting the downfall of America when he looked at it.

Article citations in other news outlets this week included the Search Engine Journal quoting from our article about phishing following Microsoft's legal action against phishers ([10]); the Arizona Republic relating to its readers some of the 12 uses of asterisks our article lists ([11]); and the Washington Post quoting facts from articles on Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in a quiz question relating to the centenary of the Special Theory of Relativity ([12]).

Wikipedia had a minor role in an incident that swept through the blogosphere last week, as the story of a college student hiring a blogger to write a paper for her prompted a debate over ethics and plagiarism.

The story starts March 27, when Nate Kushner wrote about receiving an offer from a total stranger via instant messaging to write a paper about Hinduism. He posted his story on the website A Week of Kindness, a recently started blog for Kushner's comedy troupe.

According to Kushner, a Lewis University student named Laura offered $75 for him to write a five-page paper for her. Kushner did so, but also blogged about it, including mentioning Laura's full name and adding that he had sent a link to the blog post to the university's president.

Kushner wrote what he called a "pretty awful paper", complete with nonsense names and other comedic touches. He said that he "made up some citations to make it look real, but mostly told lies that were close enough to what I knew about the truth, plus I cited Wikipedia ferchrissakes..."

The Wikipedia citation in question was to the article Georges Dumézil, referring to this scholar's theories about the development of the caste system from early tribes. Kushner cited the Dumézil article for the proposition, "It is thought by some that even today, the members of the lowest castes are descendants of those conquered tribes." While it's not known how the particular professor would have viewed Wikipedia citations, considered against the other silliness in the paper this aspect would hardly be worth criticizing.

In the following days a number of other blogs linked to the story, which provoked an intense discussion on Kushner's blog, and he posted several follow-ups over the course of the week. Opinions were divided over whether Kushner had acted properly in exposing plagiarism or if the resulting public humiliation was excessive.

Boing Boing reported that it might be an April Fool's Day hoax, although if so it was several days early. In addition, most of the information Kushner provided seemed to check out, although citing student privacy laws the university has reportedly refused to confirm that Laura is a student there.