The growth of Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation has led to several members of the community being given responsibilities and formal recognition, in order to help the Board of Trustees better manage the affairs of the organization.
Last Thursday, Wikimedia Foundation President Jimmy Wales announced the appointment of seven people to official positions in the Foundation. They include:
Wales said the appointments are "a reflection of the work these people are already doing in these areas". The first four are all MediaWiki developers, for example, and Wool has been spearheading the Foundation's initial efforts in applying for grants.
Most of the positions are newly created, except for that of Developer Liaison, which was previously filled by Tim Starling (see archived story). Wales also confirmed that Daniel Mayer would continue in his role as Chief Financial Officer. All of the positions remain volunteer (although Vibber is employed by the Foundation for other duties).
Also under consideration was the possibility of making appointments to handle outside partnerships (Möller had previously been a "Content Partnership Coordinator"), translation efforts, and the role of Quarto editor (which sj has been handling). However, no official positions were created in those areas for the time being.
Christopher Mahan suggested that coordinators were also needed for mediation, mentoring, and government relations. Sj, who had been advocating the formation of "special interest groups" instead of or in addition to having official titles, agreed that government relations needed to be considered. Although the Foundation's ability to pursue political activity is limited (due to its nonprofit status and commitment to the neutral point of view policy), sj pointed out that most governments are involved in education and maintain libraries and archives. Reaching out to these institutions, which have goals similar to Wikimedia projects, would be of considerable interest to the Foundation.
While the notion of special interest groups was not formalized, Wales did express his support for the idea and encouraged people to develop them. As an example of this at work, Chief Research Officer Möller quickly began organizing a research team to study project needs and bridge the gap between developers, the community, and outside researchers.
Recent news from the world of zoology has once again brought to the fore Wikipedia's ability to stay ahead of mainstream sources when dealing with current events. Following on from breaking the news of Andrea Dworkin's death (see archived story), an article on the newly-discovered Laotian rock rat appeared a matter of days after the publication of a journal article announcing the new species, and well in advance of the news reaching other outlets.
In spite of the fact that Wikipedia was one of the first places to have this information, it could still be said that it took years for the information to appear. The rock rat was actually discovered nearly ten years ago, but the intervening time was necessary for the discoverers to test and confirm that this was in fact a new species. The foot-long rodent was first noticed by researchers in 1996, when a team visiting Laos found the rat being sold as bushmeat at a market.
Researchers Robert Timmins and Mark Robinson sent specimens of the rat to the Natural History Museum in London for analysis, and examination of the creature's DNA revealed it to be an entirely new species, more closely related to rodents found in Africa and South America than others found in Southeast Asia.
The rock rat (known in Lao as the kha-nyou) is not only a new species, but has become the first known member of both a new genus and a new family as well. Such a discovery is very rare, the last being over thirty years ago when a new family of bats was discovered in Thailand.
Many of the most significant and remarkable discoveries in many fields of science tend to be reported in the journals Science and Nature. Science journalists monitor these publications for breaking news stories. However, in this case the discoverers of the Laotian Rock Rat published their findings in the much more specialized journal Systematics and Biodiversity, in an article published on 18 April 2005. Mainstream news sources didn't pick up on the discovery until it was publicised by the Wildlife Conservation Society in a press release on 11 May.
Weeks before that, though, Aranae had picked up on the announcement and had created an article on the mysterious creature. The article, created on 23 April, was mentioned on the Main Page in the Did you know section two days later. It also served as an opportunity for Wikinews to scoop other media sources about the discovery, as Aranae published a separate article there on 23 April (New rodent discovery leads to new mammal family). Aranae later said "I'm interested in rodent evolution/systematics/taxonomy and recognized that this is just about as big of a story as that subject matter can ever produce. It bothered me that no one seemed to care so I did what I could to propagate the story as much as possible."
Following the WCS press release announcing the Laotian rock rat on 11 May, several magazines and websites picking up on the news pointed their readers towards Wikipedia's article, including the New Scientist [1] and the website of the Natural History Museum [2].
In the push to cite sources, participants in the featured article process continue to debate best practices for providing references in articles. Meanwhile, a new type of featured content—featured lists—has been created in the past two weeks, with criteria modeled on the existing featured article requirements. There are also 14 new featured articles, 10 new featured pictures, and 5 new administrators.
First came featured articles, then featured pictures, and now, featured lists. In the past, list articles have been nominated as Wikipedia:featured article candidates, but rejected because they did not contain sufficient prose explanation. Filiocht proposed that lists should form a new category of featured content, alongside articles and pictures. Filiocht's idea quickly generated discussion about whether or not lists were featurable, and if they were, what the featured list guidelines should be. Others suggested that collections of content such as categories might also be featurable, but this idea faced more opposition.
Filiocht based the new featured list requirements on the criteria for featured articles, and the list requirements were amended and improved by ALoan and Dmcdevit, mandating that all featured lists be examples of the Wikipedia's best work by being useful, comprehensive, factually accurate, stable, and well-organized. Images are recommended, but are not required. To be promoted, consensus must be reached that a candidate list meets these standards, with at least four votes of support within 14 days. Discussion continues over the acceptable number of red links in a list; as some point out, a list of red links is not helpful for the reader, but conversely, red links encourage editors to add to Wikipedia's coverage. To date, no lists have been featured, but eight are currently candidates.
Discussion related to featured articles has lately focused on referencing and citations. A number of users have expressed a desire to see more stringent inline citation requirements for featured articles, but others are not pleased with the current methods, pointing out that they are not useful for the user or make the article too difficult to read.
Also being discussed is the increasing use of subarticles and how references on such articles should be included. Some suggested that the references from the main article be used, but others pointed out that that would require a rereading of the references to verify that their contents did indeed confirm the specific section of the main article. Another suggestion was formally referencing the main article in the subarticle, but this suggestion faced strong objection from several wikipedians.
Among the 14 total articles promoted were two by prolific featured content authors Maveric149 and Filiocht (History of the Grand Canyon area and Imagism, respectively). Imagism was lauded for its eloquence and excellent research, causing at least one user to wonder if Filiocht is a famous author outside of Wikipedia. Myxobolus cerebralis, Tamil people, Military history of Puerto Rico and Whale song also received abundant support, while others, like Habsburg Spain and Papal Tiara, were subject to more extensive discussion before promotion.
From earliest to most recent, the newly featured articles are: Welding, History of the Grand Canyon area, Imagism, Blue Whale, Dawson's Creek, Papal Tiara, WGA screenwriting credit system, Whale song, Military history of Puerto Rico, Hero of Belarus, Habsburg Spain, Grunge music, Tamil people, and Myxobolus cerebralis.
Featured article removal candidates Goa and Java programming language were both kept. The POV problems in Goa were largely judged to be insufficient cause to remove its featured status, and Java programming language improved greatly during the voting process. Currently, Computer security, Copyright, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nuclear weapon face having their featured status removed.
10 pictures were featured, and Gold Coast (from The Spit) survived the featured picture removal process.
Following votes on Request for adminship, five users were made admins in the past two weeks—Clarkk, Arcadian, Wiglaf, Evil Monkey, and Oven Fresh. Clarkk and Evil Monkey were promoted unanimously, while the others faced some opposition, either by users with specific adminship criteria or by users with concerns about insufficient experience.
This column will focus on changes in Wikipedia's guidelines, policies and style guides. It is intended as a semi-regular feature, so people can learn of developments in this area without having to track every discussion.
Recent changes include the deprecation of substubs and the finalization of a standard model for article templates. Meanwhile, debate continues over the issue of nesting templates inside other templates, or "meta-templates".
It has been a long-standing tradition to mark short or incomplete articles as stubs to let them get attention and expansion. In July 2004, based on a reference in the instructions about stubs, Mike Storm took it upon himself to promote substubs, a category of extremely short stubs particularly in need of attention. However, this idea was controversial, with some people considering it a distinction without a difference, and others believing that substubs were effectively speedy deletion candidates.
In November, a less controversial stub-sorting WikiProject was created by AllyUnion and others, in order to categorize stubs into such things as actor stubs, Japan stubs and even extraterrestrial geology stubs. The project picked up new members rapidly, and currently has eighty participants, making it one of the largest WikiProjects.
Through several months of hard work, the number of uncategorized stubs slowly but steadily diminished. Presently there are about a thousand left, which may seem like a lot, but is only a fraction of the amount earlier. Therefore, it was recently decided that there was no further need for a separate category of substubs. The template and category were put up for deletion, and afterwards a solemn memorial was set up by the joyful project members.
So, whenever a short or incomplete article needs to be tagged as such, the template {{stub}} will do the job, along with its many children and grandchildren in the template tree.
WikiProject Stub Sorting is setting up a separate page for the deletion of stub-related templates and categories, at WP:SFD. The intent is to prevent having to hold the same discussion twice, on both Categories and Templates for Deletion. Also, people have a tendency to refer such a matter back to the WikiProject, unaware that the nominator and most of the voters are in fact members of that project.
WikiProject Stub Sorting has well-defined guidelines for when and how to use stub templates (and categories) so people who want to create or remove a stub template are advised to discuss the matter with them.
Early in April, some users discussed the idea of streamlining the look of article templates, such as those for Featured Articles and the Collaboration of the Week. Violet/Riga put together a proposal, and asked everyone to design the perfect template style.
Wikipedians put their creativity to work, and more than twenty different template schemes were drawn up, in a wide variety of color and styles. By the end of April, the matter of choosing one amidst the many possibilities was put up for a vote.
With more than twice as many votes as any other candidate, the CoffeeRoll style designed by ClockworkSoul was the designated winner.
The list of standardized templates and their layout can be found at WP:TS. All active WikiProjects might want to consider adapting to this standard, which makes use of the class="Talk-Notice" stylesheet class and looks like this:
|
This article is a current featured article candidate. A featured article should exemplify Wikipedia's very best work, and is therefore expected to meet several criteria. |
Since their introduction, templates have quickly become a popular feature for consistency, layout, or simply bringing a matter to people's attention (e.g. Template:Cleanup). However, because they make a page or article more complex, templates cause an increased consumption of server resources. It is often commented upon that Wikipedia is not limited by disk space, which is indeed true. However, Wikipedia is, at least to some extent, limited by our database's programming, and the computing power of our servers.
A meta-template is simply a template included in another template. For instance, a number of templates that look like colored boxes could plausibly include a basic template to determine the box size and color. It seems obvious that any demands made on the server by regular templates, are multiplied for meta-templates. In an essay on Avoid using meta-templates, leading MediaWiki developer Jamesday explains in detail how meta-templates affect server performance.
Thus, whenever a meta-template is in use, people should consider whether this is in fact necessary. A very simple workaround is using the syntax {{subst:templatename}}, which basically copies and pastes the meta-template into the main template, thus combining the two into one.
The Arbitration Committee remained busy handling a number of new requests for arbitration last week, with three new cases started and more about to be opened. Faced with this influx to deal with, the arbitrators did not close any existing cases, but did continue deliberating and are considering an innovative remedy to deal with one dispute.
With the volume of incoming requests, one of the new cases was merged with the current arbitration caseload. William M. Connolley, already a party to an arbitration case also involving Cortonin, made another request for arbitration against JonGwynne, who had previously been placed under editing restrictions by the Arbitration Committee in a separate case. The arbitrators voted to accept the case and merge it with the existing matter of Connolley and Cortonin. With JonGwynne added to the case, the designation of the case was changed to simply "Climate change dispute".
In this case, the arbitrators are also considering a new justification for placing restrictions on an editor. The proposed statement of principles includes a point with the heading "Competence", which reads: "In order to adequately edit a Wikipedia article a user must be able to understand and adequately interpret references which relate to the subject. A user who persistently and aggressively edits articles in areas which they are unable to understand may be banned from those areas."
The proposed findings indicate that Cortonin has proven unable to understand that the allusion to greenhouses in the term greenhouse effect is metaphorical, so that analogizing to greenhouses is not always an accurate explanation of global warming phenomena. As a result, it appears that Cortonin may be prohibited from editing articles in this field. These aspects of the ruling are still being considered, however, and do not yet have enough votes to become part of the committee's decision.
The arbitrators accepted a request for arbitration by Slrubenstein involving Jguk, based on a dispute arising out of the BC/AD vs. BCE/CE debate (see archived story). Also accepted was a case against Internodeuser for his treatment of other contributors while editing the Port Arthur Massacre.
Another new case was brought by AlexR and several other editors against Njyoder, complaining of "persistent incivility and aggressiveness". The request was quickly accepted and on Sunday, the arbitrators issued a preliminary injunction against Njyoder allowing him to be blocked for 24 hours if he makes personal attacks.
In addition to the cases that have formally begun, two requests have enough arbitrators voting to accept and will likely be started soon. One case ready to be opened is against a group of alleged sockpuppets involved in various heated disputes on articles related to Islam. SlimVirgin has called the person behind these accounts "the new Alberuni". It also appears the arbitrators have narrowly decided to hear a case against Skyring, with four voting to accept and three to reject. The matter involves a long-running dispute over Government of Australia.
One additional request, brought by Netoholic against Cantus, remains in limbo even after all of the active arbitrators except Neutrality have commented, with three voting to accept and three voting to reject the case.
Time Magazine this week became the latest prestigious publication to take a look at the wiki phenomenon, and Wikipedia in particular [3]. Jimmy Wales spoke to the magazine, and said that some people were still completely thrown by the concept of an encyclopaedia that anyone can contribute to. He still gets e-mails from people helpfully pointing out the enormous security lapse that has allowed an edit button to appear at the top of every page.
The article described Wikipedia's current total of over 1.5 million articles as "stunning", and said that the success of Wikipedia had encouraged many companies to use Wiki software for project management and collaboration between firms. Socialtext, a company which installs wikis for businesses in Silicon Valley, claim that working the wiki way increases productivity by 25%, and that "wikis foster trust".
The article also looked at the flaws of Wikipedia, and reported Larry Sanger's widely known criticisms of the project on the basis of its lack of deference to expertise. However, the strength of the neutral point of view policy was demonstrated when the article quoted from Wikipedia's article on itself to note the project's "perceived lack of reliability, comprehensiveness and authority".
Two new projects have been reported this week which, while not using wiki software, are inspired by the Wikipedia ideals of producing open source reference works. ZDNet reported on the recently-launched Rosetta Project [4], which aims to be an open source archive of all human languages. The project has over 2,000 volunteer contributors already, and says that it aims to become an "open source 'Linux of Linguistics'".
At the same time, technology news outlet worldchanging.com reported on the upcoming launch of iFabricate.com, a service in which users will collaborate on various projects related to mechanical engineering [5]. According to iFabricate.com, "Consumer electronics hacks, engineering prototyping, recipes, fine wood-working, and hobby projects are all equally ideal ifabricate projects", and it describes itself as a "Wikipedia for atoms".
Main article: Wikipedia:Wikipedia in the media
Wikipedia continues to be referenced as a source for information on everything from the latest cultural phenomena to ancient Persian mathematicians. This week, the New Jersey Sunbeam reports on the history of Daylight Saving Time [6]; searchengineguide.com warns its readers about the dangers of click fraud with help from Wikipedia [7]; mathematics news site mathforge.net reports on the origins of algorithms, and says Wikipedia's article contains "much more reasonable" information than a recent news piece from MSNBC [8]; and the Daily Times of Pakistan reports on the awful phenomenon of the Crazy Frog, formerly a ring tone and now storming to number one in the UK music charts [9].
The timetable of the election for two members of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees has been pushed back again, but everything finally seems to be in place for the process to start 7 June.
Angela and Anthere were elected in June 2004 for a one-year term as community representatives on the Board. At the time, Angela was designated as Volunteer User Representative and Anthere as Contributing Member Representative, but this distinction will not be maintained. There will still be two representatives, who will be elected for two-year terms this time around.
The date originally set for candidates to start declaring was 21 May, which was then pushed back to last Saturday, 28 May. This came and went with no indication of the election opening, and the published information still indicated that candidates were not to declare themselves yet. Some confusion also resulted on Tuesday after Aphaia posted a joke election announcement to the Foundation mailing list, indicating that the election officials were going to fire Jimmy Wales.
Because the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws specifically provide for two election inspectors, it was decided to officially designate Danny and Datrio to these positions. Aphaia and BjarteSorensen will still serve as Assistant Election Officials, with Tim Starling as Election Technical Officer.
In related news, the Board is thinking about modifying the bylaws, since they refer to concepts (such as distinctions between paid and unpaid members) that do not exist in practice. Angela has created a new draft of the bylaws for consideration.
CryptoDerk has this week released the latest version of some open source software he has written to help combat vandalism on Wikimedia Foundation projects. The software, titled simply CryptoDerk's Vandal Fighter or CDVF for short, works on Wikipedia and its sister projects, and runs off a live feed via IRC of the recent changes on the project. CryptoDerk first released the software on 9 May, and has been rapidly adding new features and functionality, releasing version 2.1 on 26 May.
CDVF runs under Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS, and is essentially a GUI for a recent changes feed which allows users to customise what changes they see in a variety of ways. Most usefully, usernames and IP addresses can be added to blacklists and whitelists; changes made by users on the blacklist are flagged with an icon, while those on the whitelist do not show up.
Users can import their watchlist into the program, allowing the program to highlight changes made to articles on it. The program can also be set to automatically blacklist users whose edits have been reverted by users in the whitelist. Another feature handy for detecting suspicious edits is a display of the number of bytes added or removed at each edit, quickly revealing any page blanking or section removal.
The software is yet another enhancement for those for whom the simple recent changes page is not enough. Hard core Wikipediholics have for some time been able to take advantage of live feeds of recent changes [10], which update in real time, and have more recently been able to monitor changes via IRC. An IRC channel tracking recent changes was recently installed on one of the Wikimedia servers.
CDVF takes recent change watching one step further, and many users have already declared themselves hooked. CryptoDerk expects to keep up the rapid release of new versions, and has many new feature developments in the pipeline. More information about CVDF, including where to download it from, can be found on CryptoDerk's CDVF page.
The MediaWiki software won a special PHP prize in the second Trophées du Libre, a competition for free software, last Thursday. The award was presented at a ceremony in Soissons, France.
Receiving the award on behalf of the MediaWiki developers was Ryo. In announcing the victory on the wikitech mailing list, Ryo commented, "Many people often forget that, backing Wikimedia Foundation's projects, lies MediaWiki, an amazing piece of software. Today developers' efforts were recognized."
As part of the award, the MediaWiki team received several prizes. These include an actual trophy (fittingly enough), an HP dual-boot laptop, the possibility of some hosting from awards sponsor Nexen Services, and four subscriptions to DirectionPHP.
Plans for what to do with these prizes are still being discussed, and it is not certain that all of them will be put to use. The hosting, for example, is a limited arrangement and it is unclear whether it will be of much help to the Wikimedia Foundation. Brion Vibber suggested that the laptop might come in handy at the upcoming Wikimania conference, after which it will likely go to developer Tim Starling.
Note: Last week, it was incorrectly reported that MediaWiki was submitted to the awards jury by Vibber. It was actually Ryo who entered MediaWiki into the competition.
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