The Signpost will be interviewing Jimmy Wales this Wednesday at 15:00 UTC in the IRC channel #wikipedia-signpost. This interview will be moderated to ensure that everyone's questions get a shot at being answered; however, readers are welcome to join us and watch the interview unfold.
We're still accepting questions for Jimbo here, until late Tuesday night. Anonymous submissions will also be accepted at the Signpost's e-mail address (WikipediaSignpost@gmail.com). From these questions we will pick the best to submit to Jimbo.
As stated last week, Wikinews has expressed an interest in being involved in this interview, so in order to allow the usage of this interview on both projects, all questions submitted must be dual-licensed under both the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.
As always, thank you for continuing to read the Signpost.
— Ral315
An arbitration case against users involved in a pedophilia userbox wheel war was closed on Friday, less than five days after it was opened (see archived story.)
The case, which concerned the deletion of Template:User pedophile and subsequent creations under different names, was particularly notable in that prior to the opening of the case, Jimbo Wales desysopped five administrators, of whom only three (El C, BorgHunter, and Ashibaka) will get resysopped automatically, and two (Carnildo and Karmafist) must apply through RfA if they want the sysop flag again. Also notable is that the case is believed to be the fastest case ever closed with enacted remedies.
Remedies were enacted against eight users in the case, as follows:
El C, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was resysopped at the end of the case. His only action was to place a retaliation block against Carnildo, who had indefinitely blocked him. El C was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
BorgHunter, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, was resysopped two days after the close of the case. BorgHunter made personal attacks against David Gerard, but later apologized. BorgHunter was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
Carnildo, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, has been desysopped, with the ability to reapply for adminship starting on February 24th. Carnildo blocked three users indefinitely with disputed reasonings. Carnildo was also reprimanded for inappropriate use of the sysop powers.
Ashibaka, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, has been desysopped, but will regain his sysop powers on February 24th. He was involved in the wheel war, restoring the userbox(es) in question five times.
Karmafist, who was desysopped in the wake of the wheel war, has been desysopped, with the ability to reapply for adminship starting on February 24th. Karmafist undid a block made by Jimbo Wales.
Dschor was banned for two months, and placed on probation. Dschor had created a new pedophilia template which was seen as purposely inflammatory by the Arbitration Committee. In addition, Dschor was prohibited from creating or editing userboxes, either in template or text form.
SPUI was banned for ten days, and placed on probation. SPUI created a joke template meant to humorously allude to the userbox, but the Arbitration Committee found it purposely inflammatory.
Paroxysm was banned for three days. The Arbitration Committee felt that his original creation of the userbox was in good faith, but his recreation under an alternate title was not. In addition, Paroxysm was prohibited from creating or editing userboxes, either in template or text form.
The Wikimedia Foundation has begun the process of developing more of an organizational structure, with several meetings being held recently to spur this along. The new framework is already beginning to produce some results.
Part of this evolution in Wikimedia's development involves the creation of eleven committees that would deal with various aspects of the Foundation's work. These committees include Financial, Technical, Executive, Events, Communications, Special projects, Board expansion, Chapters, Audit, Insurance, and Trademarks. The committees were authorized in a series of resolutions passed by the Board of Trustees last month.
In order to discuss this with the Wikipedia community and those of other Wikimedia projects, open meetings were held on IRC each of the last two weekends (meeting logs). The purpose was to bring committee organizers together with community members and consider issues such as the selection process for committees. However, the meetings themselves produced no firm conclusions; another meeting was tentatively set for 4 March to allow time for the Board to meet again first.
In the course of discussion, some expressed concern about whether the committees would increase the control exercised by the Wikimedia Board of Trustees or instead help delegate responsibility to members of the community. Jimmy Wales explained that the Board of Trustees has a legal responsibility to direct the Wikimedia Foundation as an organization, but that "the point of this is to improve things toward distributed authority." After being unable to attend the follow-up meeting, he voiced some displeasure that his views and positions had, he felt, been misrepresented there.
The Executive committee was a focus of particular attention in the follow-up meeting, but there appeared to be some uncertainty as to what it would be and do. Among the options discussed were making it a subset of the Board of Trustees, of the other committees, or some combination of the two. This might also fit into a possible expansion of the Board's size, which Wales later confirmed is being discussed. Its responsibilities could involve providing guidance for the other committees or managing the affairs of the Foundation. Referring to the potential expansion, Wales commented, "a larger board should not be tasked with day-to-day management."
Another possibility mentioned was to make the Executive committee a group of representatives from the different Wikimedia projects and languages, perhaps with its members being elected by those communities. This would be similar to the idea of a Wikicouncil that was proposed last year, but never implemented. The nature of such a body would seem to resemble a legislature more than an executive, however.
Although some uncertainty remains about what is necessary to implement the board's resolutions and formally organize the committees, some of them have already begun working. Two that have been visibly active are the Chapters committee and the Communications committee, which have selected their initial membership. The Chapters committee, which will coordinate the organization of local Wikimedia chapters, has also begun drafting its mission statement and rules of procedure.
One of the first acts of the Communications committee was to organize how Wikipedia responds to queries from the general public, particularly dealing with one of the trouble spots, the helpdesk-l mailing list. This list had been criticized on occasion due to difficulty ensuring that someone would actually respond, duplicate responses, and even inconsistent or inappropriate responses being sent. To resolve these issues, as of Sunday helpdesk-l is now no longer a separate mailing list. Messages there have now been redirected to the info-en@wikimedia.org address, where they will be processed using the Wikimedia OTRS system. There the messages will be handled by the PR department, which can use the system to track responses and also has prepared answers for common situations.
Individuals interested in helping with the task should contact either sannse or Mindspillage, who are handling this area of the committee's work.
Also, in other news relating to the Foundation, elected Trustee Florence Devouard had a baby boy, Thomas, last Tuesday. She and her family are reportedly doing well.
Wikipedia has risen into top 25 most popular sites on the web, according to Alexa Internet [1]. At press time, the site's rank was 23rd, passing such sites as CNN.com and Go.com. It is also number one on Alexa's list of reference sites, finally surpassing the My Yahoo portal; it passed Mapquest in June of last year.
Proposed deletion is in a trial period this week, after discussion about the idea. The system allows uncontested deletions to be deleted after five days, bypassing AFD. If a deletion is contested by removing the "proposed deletion" template, it will usually be put to AFD then to determine community consensus. Many users worry that good articles will be deleted, but over fifty contributors promised to review the list of proposed deletion requests (generated automatically) to make sure that this does not happen.
A new competition for bringing articles to higher standard was launched at Wikipedia:Article assessment this week. Articles within a selected weekly topic (which are neither stubs nor featured articles) are rated on several criteria, and the article with the highest rating is selected as the winner. The first topic is Natural disasters.
A public opinion survey continues about the usefulness of user conduct requests for comments at Wikipedia:User RFC reform.
On 12 February, British newspaper The Independent published "Wikipedia under the microscope over accuracy", which invited experts to rate eight articles (Muslim, Russian Revolution of 1917, Kate Moss, Ann Widdecombe, Tony Blair, In vitro fertilisation, Philip Larkin, BBC Radio 1, and Punt). Overall, the online encyclopedia seemed to do fairly well; Wikipedia editors are now reviewing the criticisms at the external review page in order to improve the articles.
The Boston Globe published a front page article entitled "Bias, sabotage haunt Wikipedia's free world" on 12 February, the first half of a two-part story. This long story gives a wide overview of Wikipedia and its strengths and weaknesses. Most of the errors mentioned in the first article have been corrected, as of Signpost press time.
The second half, "Many contributors, common cause", was published on 13 February, compiled from interviews with the Boston local Wikipedia group. A sidebar, "The idealists, the optimists, and the world they share" explored the personalities and editing habits of a few more Wikipedia contributors. (Note access to the articles will require payment after 14 February and 15 February, respectively.)
A discussion at the Village Pump noted a few errors in the piece.
The story from two weeks ago about edits to political articles coming from computers assigned to United States congressmen (see archived story) continued to make high-profile news this week, as it did last week (see archived story). Notably, several mainstream media stories cited the investigation performed by reporters from Wikimedia's own news site, Wikinews (see "Wikinews investigates Wikipedia usage by U.S. Senate staff members").
Articles this week included:
A smaller newspaper, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, included an ironic quote in "Burns' office may have tampered with Wikipedia entry" on 9 February. James Pendleton, a spokesman for Senator Conrad Burns, said of Wikipedia: "They have exactly zero credibility. Because there is no fact-checking, anybody can go in and put in whatever they want."
The Lowell Sun, a Massachusetts newspaper which initiated the investigation into Wikipedia edits from Capitol Hill, published "Wikipedia founder: It's not about technology", a short interview with founder Jimbo Wales about how Wikipedia works.
Three weeks ago, Associated Press published a story about the "shutdown" of the German Wikipedia requested by the parents of a deceased hacker whose name was published against their will; AP later issued a correction clarifying the details. This week, they reported the German court's dismissal of the case, and the story was carried by several large news sources, including:
This month's Discover magazine states "Science entries in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, are nearly as error-free as those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, according to a team of expert reviewers." This figure comes from the comparative study performed by science journal Nature a few months ago (see archived story).
An opinion column in the Detroit Free Press ("RON DZWONKOWSKI: A War Beyond Images"), mentions Wikipedia's publication of the controversial Muhammad cartoons.
Gaming blog Joystiq quoted Microsoft Corporate Vice President J Allard as saying "We're going to take on the Wikipedia model", regarding player participation in world-building for computer and video games.
Wikipedia also made another appearance in a satirical article in The Onion, in "Mark-Paul Gosselaar Obviously Authored Own IMDb Trivia".
Eleven users were granted admin status last week: Cantthinkofagoodname (nom), Joke137 (nom), Ish_ishwar (nom), Superm401 (nom), Bbatsell (nom), Quarl (nom), Aaron Brenneman (nom), Guanaco (nom), Fred chessplayer (nom), Water Bottle (nom) and CanadianCaesar (nom). Two of the five users who were desysopped over the userbox controversy have been given back their admin privileges, one will receive them back on 24 February, and the other two may reapply in two weeks. (see related story)
Six articles were featured last week: Music of Minnesota, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Detailed breakdown of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II, History of Portugal (1777-1834), Scotland in the High Middle Ages and Canadian federal election, 1993.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Hurricane Dennis, Sino-German cooperation (1911-1941), Sydney Riot of 1879, Mount St. Helens, Apple Macintosh, Mass Rapid Transit (Singapore) and Gettysburg Address.
Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:
According to VampWillow on the wikitech LiveJournal community and the notes at the Server admin log, the server failure on Monday February 13 was caused by the physical hard disk failure on the "zwinger" server in Florida, one of Wikimedia's oldest machines. This caused problems throughout the server farm, and many servers had to be rebooted and relinked to the farm. This happened after 11pm GMT, and techs from U.S. West Coast and Australia (amongst others) were up throughout the middle of their nights to fix the problem.
Server-related events, problems, and changes included:
The Arbitration Committee closed six cases this week, including the high-profile case against participants in a pedophile userbox wheel war. (see related story)
A case against Beckjord was closed on Tuesday. As a result, Beckjord has been banned for one year. After this ban expires, Beckjord is subject to probation, personal attack parole, a one-account limit, and a ban from editing articles relating to the paranormal. Beckjord, whose full name is Jon-Erik Beckjord, was accused of using Wikipedia to promote his beliefs regarding Bigfoot and other paranormal phenomena, as well as using numerous sockpuppets as well as personal attacks and incivility.
A case against EffK was closed on Tuesday. As a result, EffK has been banned for one year. After this ban expires, EffK is to be indefinitely banned from all articles relating to the Roman Catholic Church, as well as any other articles he may disrupt, at the discretion of any administrator, for any period of time up to and including three months. EffK had posted "original research" regarding the Catholic Church, and had made personal attacks against other users.
A case against participants in a pedophilia userbox wheel war was closed on Friday. A full story can be found here.
A case against Reddi was closed on Saturday. As a result, Reddi has been placed on probation and revert parole, allowing him only one revert per article per week. Reddi was accused of edit-warring and disruptive editing on science-related articles.
A case against Freestylefrappe was closed on Sunday. As a result, Freestylefrappe has been desysopped, with the ability to reapply at any time. Freestylefrappe had been accused of improper blocking, abuse of administrative status, personal attacks, and failure to communicate with other users.
A case against Ruy Lopez was closed on Sunday. As a result, the case was closed, and merged into an appeal of a prior arbitration case against VeryVerily.
Cases were accepted this week involving Lapsed Pacifist (user page), bible verses, and editors on Shiloh Shepherd Dog. All are in the evidence phase.
Additional cases involving users IronDuke and Gnetwerker, Leyasu (user page), Instantnood (user page), Boothy443 (user page), and Dyslexic agnostic (user page) are in the Evidence phase.
Cases involving VeryVerily (user page), Tommstein (user page), Zeq (user page), Theodore7 (user page), KDRGibby (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, users RJII and Firebug, Sortan (user page), and Carl Hewitt (user page) are in the voting phase.
No motions to close are on the table at this time.
