In a return of the congressional editing incident, the office of Minnesota Republican Gil Gutknecht was identified as having edited his article last week. When the news broke, Gutknecht's spokesman responded by criticizing Wikipedia's trustworthiness.
The latest episode was reported by the Star Tribune after the edits were called to the paper's attention by Wikipedia editor Daniel Bush. Bush was also heavily involved in the earlier Wikinews investigation of edits from Senate offices.
Gutknecht, a member of the House who represents the 1st District in southern Minnesota, had until July only a very brief article. It contained a picture and two short paragraphs of text followed by a list of his election opponents, a couple of external links, and two standard templates at the bottom. A third paragraph mentioning his comment about US troop withdrawal from Iraq was added 21 July.
What seemed to be most important to Gutknecht's office was that the article mentioned his promise, when first elected in 1994, to serve no more than 12 years. Nevertheless, Gutknecht is running for re-election this year. Edits from his office consistently removed references to this promise and replaced it with other biographical information. A similar broken term limits pledge was also at issue in the case of Massachusetts Democrat Marty Meehan, the first Congressman to have his office implicated in editing his own article.
The initial edits from Gutknecht's office seem to have been under the account User:Gutknecht01 (contribs) on 24 July. One edit summary read, "Edited on the authority of Congressman Gil Gutknecht's Office". The new content paraphrased Gutknecht's official biography on the House website.
After this was reverted, Gutknecht's office returned on 14 August, this time simply copying and pasting his website biography to replace the article text. Rather than using an account, the edits came from the IP address that serves the House, 143.231.249.141, helping to confirm the connection. This was reverted as a "copyvio", then restored with the edit summary, "This is the official biography of Congressman Gutkencht [sic]". John Broughton then reverted this with the comment, "You're posting from an IP address of the U.S. House of Representatives, and both your additions and deletions are highly POV. Please go away." Finally, the IP address was blocked for two weeks by Kungfuadam, but this was later reversed by Mindspillage with the observation that it was an "excessive block for an IP shared by hundreds of people".
Reached for comment by the Star Tribune, Gutknecht's office did not deny making the edits. However, spokesman John Yarian decided to criticize Wikipedia instead: "This is the same source that called former Assistant Attorney General John Seigenthaler a murderer in his official Wikipedia entry ... I would encourage people to find a more trustworthy place to do their research." (Note: Seigenthaler is actually a journalist by profession and not a lawyer. He was an administrative assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, which is not the same as an Assistant Attorney General.) Meanwhile, the article has been significantly expanded with additional information, while still retaining the reference to Gutknecht's term limits promise.
The elections for the Board of Trustees continued this week with the call for candidates. The registration period for candidates to declare their candidacies ends this week on 28 August, 2006, and voting will start on 1 September, 2006.
Only two new Wikimedians joined the race this week: Oscar van Dillen and Charles Matthews. In addition, one of the previous candidates, Jon Cates, withdrew from the race for "unforseen circumstances which will limit my ability to fill this role", bringing the total number of candidates to 15. Although there is one week left in candidate registration, the number of candidates is not expected to rise significantly.
The elections officials - Aphaia, Datrio, and Essjay - also clarified several issues that had been unclear since the start of the elections. First, the current elections will only elect one Board member, who will fulfill the rest of Angela Beesley's term until 2007. There had been widespread speculation that the elections were going to elect more than one seat or that the Board would be expanded; the announcement by the elections officials implied that although such a change could still occur, the expansion of the Board, if any, would come after the elections. In addition, the statement also quelled rumors that more than one person would be elected. Board member Tim Shell has already announced his intention to resign later this year, and it is unclear what process will be used to choose his successor.
Another statement by the elections official asked all the candidates to be aware of emails sent to their meta email accounts; these emails would be for "candidacy confirmation". No details were available on what that meant, although most candidates, as of press time, had already been initially confirmed by one of the elections officials.
Finally, there was also a bit of humor in the elections this week as notacandidate was briefly added to the list of candidates. The user's platform, first created by notafish, immediately drew attention and attracted several "endorsements", including one by Mindspillage, signing as "Notmindspillage", who commented that she would "enthusiastically cast notavote for notacandidate, whose notleadership and notdirection will serve the Foundation notwell."
As of August 21, the Swedish language Wikipedia has approximately 179,700 articles. Of these, 92 articles (about 1 in 1900) are considered Utmärkta artiklar, the Swedish Wikipedia equivalent of featured articles. In addition, 82 articles are considered to be Läsvärda artiklar, the equivalent to Good articles.
The last three "featured" articles are Herrens motståndsarmé (Lord's Resistance Army), Propaganda and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Swedish Wikipedia has 20,279 registered users, including 59 administrators (0.29 %). The relatively large number of administrators can be compared with English Wikipedia (0.05 %), German (0.08 %), Polish (0.15 %), Chinese (0.07 %) or Italian (0.06 %). Another difference with other major Wikipedias is that the articles are much shorter (link); less than half of the average article in English Wikipedia.
Considering that the Swedish language only has around 9 million native speakers it may be surprising that the Swedish Wikipedia is still one of the largest Wikipedias by the number of articles. It was long the fifth largest Wikipedia, but is now the eighth, having been overtaken by the Dutch earlier this year. It is still larger than the Portuguese or Spanish Wikipedias, although the lead over the Portuguese Wikipedia has decreased rapidly during 2006.
As far as community building goes, a large number of informal meetings have taken place in cafes in and around Stockholm, Linköping and Lund, where Wikipedia users have met to discuss Wikipedia matters. Calls for a more formal structure to arrange meetings and to collect donations have been unsuccessful.
Wikipedia is regularly mentioned in the Swedish media. In March, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet wrote (link) that the Swedish Wikipedia claimed that Prince Gustav Adolf, deceased 1947, was sympathetic to Nazi Germany. The matter also included a photo of the prince donating money to a German charity and one Wikipedia contributor claiming that this showed the prince having strong sympathy for the Nazis. This sparked a controversy about the truth of the matter and how this should be presented.
In March the daily Svenska Dagbladet compared (www.svd.se) the Swedish Wikipedia with the subscription-only Nationalencyklopedin and the wikistyle Susning.nu. Although the Nationalencyklopedin was considered the overall best, the Swedish Wikipedia was praised for quick updates and its coverage of popular culture. The journalist also created two articles about fictional authors; these were nominated for deletion within hours. The journalist also changed correct information to incorrect (diff); this was not detected until the newspaper article was published weeks later. This can serve as a reminder of how easy it can be to add false information: administrators can easily revert simple vandalism and spamming but preventing more advanced vandalism is more difficult.
Since March 2006, administrator status on the Swedish Wikipedia is only temporaral. Administrators are reelected once a year. As far as it is known, only Metawiki uses anything similar. The reasons behind this is that the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an arbitration committee and that attempts to create one have stalled. Also of concern was a growing number of administrators that either were not very active or had left the project.
Although it may be too early to evaluate the reform yet, the most obvious effect it has had is giving administrators the opportunity to voluntarily step down. Nine administrators have either stepped down or did not reply to nominations for reelection. Hopefully, the reform will stress the importance of administrators following policy. On the other hand, it would be unfortunate if administrators were afraid of doing anything that would upset people.
The Swedish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images except for logos or coats of arms. A discussion to go even further and not allow fair use images at all was started in July. Although the request did not receive majority support, it showed that a considerable minority are in favour of removing all fair use images.
There is a weekly competition, Veckans tävling, where contributors can focus on a task that needs to be attended to, such as categorizing articles, expanding stub articles, spell checking and so on. One user is judge and awards points and at the end of the week one user is then awarded first prize: eternal glory and a medal to put on his or her user page. The competition has become quite popular and it is a fun way of doing some necessary chores.
Several new cities had bids entered for Wikimania 2007. Alexandria, Taipei, and Orlando joined the list of running cities. No official bids have been submitted, though unofficial bids are being discussed for the above cities, along with Hong Kong, Singapore, Geneva, Istanbul, Chicago, Las Vegas, and bids for the United Kingdom and Australia.
Official bids are due no later than September 10th. A jury panel composed of the Wikimedia Foundation executive board, the organization team for Wikimania 2006, and Andrew Lih will convene to compose a shortlist of cities on September 15th, after which finalists will answer jury questions and finalize their bid. The final vote is scheduled for September 24th. More information can be found on Meta's Wikimania page.
A proposal to redesign Wikipedia's sidebar has attracted the attention of users and programmers. The change would place an additional box between the search box and the toolbox, containing Wikipedia help pages, and would rearrange other links. Details are being discussed, after which Rob Church has offered to write the MediaWiki code necessary to make the changes work. User input is requested on the proposed changes.
An amendment to the current changing username process was proposed this week. The current policy states that accounts "can only be renamed to [another] account that does not exist [already]", meaning that people could not switch account names into one that had already been registered, even if the account had few or no edits. However, despite this policy, the demand for such user-name change has been high, and bureaucrats have been known to occasionally allow such requests. The proposed policy would make this official provided an attempt to contact the account is unsuccessful and the account has few or little edits with no recent activity.
Time magazine named Wikipedia as one of the "25 Sites We Can't Live Without". The accompanying description reads, "A real Web wonder: this massive, collaborative online encyclopedia is written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers; some 1.3 million articles in English, and millions more in 228 other languages". Meanwhile, The Observer included Wikipedia in its list of "Websites that changed the world" (a group of 15, to coincide with the web's 15th anniversary — they incorrectly called us wikipedia.com, however).
The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest subscription newspaper in Finland and the Nordic countries, published a feature on Wikipedia editor Timo Jyrinki. The article focuses on the Finnish Wikipedia, but is available to read in English. Among the items noted is an incident involving the article on Finnish MP Jari Vilén (English article). When a paragraph dealing with reported plagiarism in Vilén's master's thesis was removed last year, the edits were traced to an IP address assigned to the Finnish Parliament.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropped an interesting tidbit into a report on a program conducted by Microsoft to boost the presence of women in the tech industry. Microsoft brings a group of young women to its campus for a weeklong camp. Describing the students using technology to work on complex equations, the article said, "rather than using the built-in Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia for research, another girl quietly used the Wikipedia site instead to finish the project."
More sources are reporting news stories about Wikipedia's quality, such as one that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a follow-up to Wikimania 2006. According to the article, Jimbo Wales said that with Wikipedia having come so far, contributors should now turn "away from growth and toward quality." The story went on to provide more background about Wikipedia, such as earlier praise from Nature magazine, proposed improvements including a stability experiment underway in the German version of Wikipedia, as well as the quality concerns raised by pranks.
Six users were granted admin status last week: Renata3 (nom), Aguerriero (nom), Andrew Levine (nom), Alphachimp (nom), Wangi (nom), and Consumed Crustacean (nom)
Alphachimp joined the ranks of WP:100 with 138 support votes, the 44th RfA to do so.
Eleven articles were featured last week: Warsaw Uprising (1794) (nom), Battle of Moscow (nom), Toledo War (nom), Banksia brownii (nom), Hilary Putnam (nom), Darjeeling (nom), Ahmedabad (nom), G. Ledyard Stebbins (nom), Scooby-Doo (nom), Procellariidae (nom), and Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (nom).
Two articles were de-featured last week: Economy of the Republic of Ireland and Lastovo.
The latest portal to reach featured status is Portal:Indigenous peoples of North America.
Five lists reached featured list status last week: List of Canadian federal parliaments, List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Avon, BAFTA Award for Best Film, List of current world boxing champions, and List of people with epilepsy.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: O-Bahn Busway, Cane Toad, Hurricane Mitch, Sikhism, Illmatic, Roman Vishniac, and Sesame Street.
These were the pictures of the day last week: Prothonotary Warbler, India, Mont St. Michel Spire, World War II Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, Ozyptila praticola, white-lipped snail, and Leaf Green Tree Frog.
One picture reached featured picture status last week:
All Wikimedia projects were briefly locked down after most users were unable to access the site. The reason, according to developer Brion Vibber, was the readvertising of Wikimedia's IP space by Cogent. [1]
As a result of the IP snafu, which occurred on Friday at about 17:30 UTC, few users (mostly AOL users) were able to access the site, while most others were blocked. Developers made the decision to put all databases into read-only mode until the route was restored around 19:55 UTC; write access was enabled shortly afterward. A new IP space was given to Wikimedia, and the old space is or will soon be unavailable. River Tarnell said that developers were looking into obtaining a permanent IP space [2].
Three tables have been added to the MediaWiki database structure since MediaWiki 1.6. These links are meant to contain more information either untracked, or in other locations in previous releases.
Domas Mituzas published an operations report for November 2005 to August 2006, covering major hardware and software changes. Image hosting systems are one of the next purchases planned, after high-performance caching and application hardware and Foundry routing hardware were purchased earlier this year.
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The Arbitration Committee opened three new cases this week, and closed three cases.
