In keeping with the Signpost's main objectives, to provide Wikipedia important community news, and to do so in a clean, uncluttered interface, we at the Signpost have been collaborating on a new look for the main page that presents pertinent information better.
The story pages (i.e. the one you're viewing now) will remain the same, as will our coverage of important issues that affect the Wikipedia community. What we've done is we've taken Wikinews' layout and altered it a bit, to fit the needs of the page. We invite our readers to weigh in on the issue — a preview of the design can be found here.
Thank you for letting us be one of your primary sources on Wikipedia and Wikimedia news, and we promise to continue this tradition in the months to come.
— Ral315 and the Signpost staff
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On September 18, Jimmy Wales announced that Danny Wool would be working as an Executive Assistant at the Wikimedia Foundation. He becomes the second full-time employee hired by the Wikimedia Foundation, joining Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber. Ever since Wikipedia started in January of 2001, disputes have been inevitable. As the enyclopedia — and the number of active users — expanded exponentially, the number of disputes and disagreements rose as well. It was up to Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to settle the disputes and to dole out punishments. Other stories this week
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Volume 1, Issue 38 Event Calendar Currently, we do not have any information on upcoming Wikipedia events. In the future, this calendar will be used for such a purpose. About the Signpost Newsroom Archives Shortcut : WP:SIGN |
On 18 September, Jimmy Wales announced that Danny Wool would be working as an Executive Assistant at the Wikimedia Foundation. He becomes the second full-time employee hired by the Wikimedia Foundation, joining Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber.
Wool is relocating to Wikimedia headquarters in Florida in order to take the job. The description of the position is broad and flexible, as Wales said it "will primarily entail removing work from me so that I can better focus on the parts of my job that I am best at." Before accepting this position, Wool worked for a museum in New York, and his experience in the nonprofit sector gives him a useful background for the work of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wool was previously named Grants Coordinator in May (see archived story), working as a volunteer in this capacity. He will continue to deal with grant proposals, and it is anticipated that this, not the Executive Assistant position, will ultimately be his focus. Wales indicated that the plan is for a replacement Executive Assistant to be hired within a year or so, allowing Wool to resume focusing on grants.
In other recent developments related to the volunteer official positions, the new position of Chapter Coordinator was announced in August, after discussions at Wikimania indicated that someone was needed in this role. Delphine Ménard was appointed to the position on 18 August, and will serve as a liaison between the Board of Trustees and the local chapters, of which four have been created so far (Germany, France, Italy, and Poland).
Also, Chief Research Officer Erik Möller resigned his position 17 August, "due to personal differences and a fundamental disagreement about the nature and scope of the role." He indicated that he would be cutting back his involvement in Wikimedia projects, but would continue doing development work to help implement the Wikidata concept. So far, the position of Chief Research Officer has not been filled.
A chat with the elected Arbitrators
6 February 2006
Jimbo Wales appoints 11 arbitrators, increases committee size
23 January 2006
Arbitration Committee elections continue; ArbCom member resigns
16 January 2006
ArbCom candidates (part two)
9 January 2006
ArbCom candidates
2 January 2006
Straw poll closes
19 December 2005
Jimbo starts new poll regarding election
5 December 2005
Last chance to run for ArbCom
28 November 2005
ArbCom voting process
14 November 2005
ArbCom duties and requirements
7 November 2005
A closer look: the calls for reform of the ArbCom
31 October 2005
A look back: the 2004 ArbCom elections
24 October 2005
Current ArbCom members
17 October 2005
Criticism of the ArbCom
10 October 2005
About the Arbitration process
3 October 2005
The history of the Arbitration Committee
26 September 2005
Introduction to a special series: A look at the upcoming Arbitration Committee elections
19 September 2005
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A chat with the elected Arbitrators |
This week, the Wikipedia Signpost examines the history of the Arbitration Committee.
Ever since Wikipedia started in January of 2001, disputes have been inevitable. As the encyclopedia — and the number of active users — expanded exponentially, the number of disputes and disagreements rose as well. It was up to Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, to settle the disputes and to dole out punishments. In fact, only Jimbo had the authority to block users for anything other than simple vandalism. However, this posed a major problem as the disputes became more lengthy and complex; Jimbo no longer had the time to judge all the disputes. Some disputes would take months to settle, proving the inefficiency of having just Jimbo resolving disputes. Thus, the need for a "judicial branch" of Wikipedia arose.
In January of 2004, a dispute resolution process was proposed, and was ratified by the community in the next month. The dispute resolution process included several steps, such as requests for comments, mediation, and then finally, the Arbitration Committee. The ArbCom, as the Committee is often known, was the last step in the dispute resolution process, and had the responsibility of hearing disputes and cases, and then deciding on the proper punishments and decisions. The power vested in the Arbitration Committee was supreme; only Jimbo could override the ArbCom's decisions.
"The Arbitration Committee [...] can impose a solution that I'll consider to be binding," Jimbo said. "With of course the exception that I reserve the right of executive clemency and indeed even to dissolve the whole thing if it turns out to be a disaster. But I regard that as unlikely, and I plan to do it about as often as the Queen of England dissolves Parliament against their wishes, that is, basically never, but it is one last safety valve for our values."
However, the Arbitration Committee proved successful, and Jimbo did not disband the ArbCom in the coming months. In fact, Jimbo appointed the first twelve arbitrators — Fred Bauder, Maveric149, Jdforrester, The Cunctator, The Epopt, Delirium, Nohat, Camembert, MyRedDice, Gutza, UninvitedCompany, and Eloquence. All of the twelve, with the exception of Eloquence, accepted the offer from Jimbo. UninvitedCompany later resigned, and an election was held in July of 2004, with Raul654 and Jwrosenzweig winning the two open seats out of 10 candidates.
However, according to Jimbo, the arbitrators were not to serve for life; on the contrary, each one would serve for three years. The twelve seats would be staggered so that four arbitrators would be up for re-election every year. Thus, the annual elections for the ArbCom were begun.
During this time period, the ArbCom began hearing cases. Originally, the committee would only hear cases approved by Jimbo; this added to the relative inefficiency of the committee. In fact, one of the earliest cases heard by the Arbitration Committee, that of Plautus satire, a disruptive user, took six weeks to be approved, even after intense pressure on the ArbCom. Because the ArbCom was new, and because there were no precedents or guidelines to follow, the earliest cases had lengthy delays in approving and hearing cases. Despite this, most of the earliest cases were clear-cut disputes often involving a sophisticated vandal or POV-pusher.
As time progressed, however, the arbitration committee became an integral part of the dispute resolution process, and by December 2004, had become essential to Wikipedia. In the December 2004 elections, in fact, 34 people ran for the seven open seats. The ArbCom had been plagued by resignations, with five arbitrators either resigning or choosing not to run for re-election. Thus, seven seats were open for election. The results of the election, which used approval voting were extremely close, with only one vote separating a successful candidacy and an unsuccessful one.
In July 2005, three more arbitrators resigned. While the December 2004 resignations did not greatly influence the ArbCom operations because of the upcoming December 2004 elections, the resignations in July of 2005 slowed down the hearings, as there were fewer arbitrators available to decide cases. Combined with several inactive or away arbitrators, the ArbCom was down to six arbitrators, a number inadequate to hear proceedings. Thus, Jimbo appointed three temporary arbitrators: Jdforrester, who had been unsuccessful in his re-election bid in 2004, Fennec, and Jayjg, and the ArbCom continued normal operations after the temporary appointments.
A record eight seats will open in the upcoming January 2006 ArbCom elections — the four terms up for re-election, plus the three temporary appointments, as well as a position vacated by Nohat, who has indicated he will resign.
With two-thirds of the committee's seats up for grabs, the second annual ArbCom elections are a crucial moment for the ArbCom, and will surely shape Wikipedia in the upcoming years.
Next week — About the Arbitration Committee
This week, an Esquire editor invited Wikipedia users to edit an article that will appear in the magazine. Wikipedia users reacted strongly, with over 500 edits to WP:ITAAW before the article was frozen.
Editor A.J. Jacobs wrote the original article, which was riddled with deliberate errors. These errors were quickly corrected by users, who rewrote many sections from scratch. Jacobs said of the massive edits made by Wikipedians,
Jacobs is no stranger to encyclopedias; he read all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, writing about it in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.
One minor source of controversy was the caveat that all edits to the page were officially released into the public domain, in order to avoid problems when using the article. However, this did not pose a legal problem for Wikipedia, since public domain content fits with GFDL.
The article will presumably run in the November 2005 issue.
More commonly lately, Wikipedia is being used in many different applications, both online and in the real world.
PlaceOpedia is a project to link Wikipedia's geographical articles to Google Earth maps, allowing visitors to http://www.placeopedia.com/ to add their own connections. The ever-growing database of connections between latitude/longitude coordinates and Wikipedia URLs is available under a Creative Commons license. (A related project, currently in demonstration mode, is http://www.yourhistoryhere.com/, a collection of local information, history, and trivia attached to Google Earth locations.)
Sean Billig has written a free Wikipedia Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X v10.4 operating system. In his announcement of the release of Tiger [1], Apple CEO Steve Jobs used the Wikipedia widget to demonstrate the many uses of Dashboard.
There are several projects to allow mobile access to Wikipedia, including Wapedia, which offers separate versions for phones and PDAs, and JOCA, which allows free access via GPRS.
Matt Biddulph of the BBC found a way to use Wikipedia and a Yahoo API to build a network of directed links, showing how British government figures are related to each other. [2]
Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales appeared on cable network C-SPAN's program Q&A on 25 September, speaking for an hour in a taped interview. The show discussed many of the strengths and weaknesses of Wikipedia, as well as debunking many of the problems with Wikipedia. A full transcript of the program can be found here.
Changing username has been temporarily disabled, says bureaucrat Nichalp. The reasoning, according to developer Brion Vibber, is that "it very inefficiently tries to alter the archive table". There is currently no timetable for when the feature will be reenabled.
Wikinews has chosen the Creative Commons CC-BY 2.5 license as their official license for all content uploaded as of 25 September. This allows Wikinews content to be included in Wikipedia, though not vice-versa.
The Wikiversity project, which currently resides on Wikibooks, started a vote on 15 September to move to wikiversity.org, which currently hosts a near-dormant German Wikiversity project. The vote will last until 1 November. Currently, the vote is about 77% in favor of the project (a two-thirds majority and board approval is required to start a project beta period)
Several sources carried incorrect or misleading information on Wikipedia following the death of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The Inquirer [3], The Sydney Morning Herald [4], and The Age [5] all reported that vandals had inserted information referring to Wiesenthal as a homosexual. While all of the articles above did say that the changes were quickly reverted, they say that the articles could be viewed in page history, while failing to mention that doing so would require a conscious effort by a user to view previous versions. The versions have since been deleted to try and avoid controversy.
Wikipedia was cited in the last week in the following publications:
Six users became administrators this week. Meanwhile, four articles and eleven pictures gained featured status, and three articles also lost their featured status.
Six users were granted administrator status - Oleg Alexandrov (nom), Brookie (nom), IceKarma (nom), Doc glasgow (nom), Ixfd64 (nom) and R. fiend (nom). There also was debate on the possible reform of the requesting process, mostly involving the use of edit counts.
Four articles were promoted to featured article status: Flag of Belarus, Katamari Damacy, Read my lips: no new taxes and Spoo. Three articles, Io (moon), Chinatown and Bioinformatics, had their featured status removed.
There were no featured lists promoted this week.
These are the eleven pictures promoted to featured status:
Also this week: Editor's note — Wikimedia hire — ArbCom election — Esquire article — Wikipedia apps — News and notes — Press coverage — Features and admins — T.R.O.L.L.
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases this week; one against JarlaxleArtemis and one against ArmchairVexillologistDon. In addition, a whopping seven new cases were accepted.
A case against JarlaxleArtemis has closed with no extra sanctions after the Wikipedia community effectively banned JarlaxleArtemis. Last week, a checkuser operation performed by David Gerard reported that JarlaxleArtemis was the creator of numerous sockpuppets with offensive usernames, most of which attacked Linuxbeak and other administrators.
A case against ArmchairVexillologistDon has been closed after the original user who brought the case withdrew from the case. User:Homey's complaint, which was filed in December 2004, was originally closed after ArmchairVexillologistDon left Wikipedia, but was continued when he returned to the project recently. Homey officially withdrew the case, however, on September 3, and the case was subsequently closed three weeks later.
The Arbitration Committee this week accepted cases against 12.144.5.2 (user page, a.k.a. Louis Epstein), Rktect (user page), DreamGuy (user page), Ultramarine (user page), Keetowah (user page), Maoririder (user page), and Onefortyone (user page)
Cases against -Ril- (user page), Stevertigo (user page), Rainbowwarrior1977 (user page), and an IP dubbed DotSix are also in the evidence phase.
