New arbitrators interviewed
15 January 2007
Seven arbitrators chosen
26 December 2006
Elections conclude, arbitrators to be chosen
18 December 2006
Arbitration Committee elections continue, extra seat available
11 December 2006
Arbitration Committee elections open
4 December 2006
Arbitration Committee elections: Candidate profiles
27 November 2006
ArbCom elections: Information on elections
13 November 2006
Arbitration election campaigns begin
6 November 2006
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New arbitrators interviewed |
Candidates began announcing themselves this past week for the upcoming elections to the Arbitration Committee. A number of aspiring arbitrators are already busily preparing their candidate statements and responding to community questions.
The elections are planned for December, with the current schedule calling for voting to start 4 December and run for two weeks. So far, no change has been announced for the method of holding the elections. The last election involved public voting to support or oppose candidates, with all those receiving over 50% support being eligible for appointment. Jimbo Wales then appointed the top eight vote-getters (the number of vacancies being filled last year) along with three additional members to expand the size of the committee.
Of the committee members whose seats are up for election, two have announced that they will not run. Theresa Knott explained that she no longer had the time for the job, while The Epopt said, "Actually, after three solid years of wading through the muck, I want to write encyclopedia articles for a while." By completing his term, The Epopt would become the first member of the Arbitration Committee to have served a full three-year term. (Committee members were initially appointed to staggered terms; Fred Bauder served for two years before being re-elected, and is the only other original member to have served continuously for three years.)
Two other arbitrators whose terms are expiring, Jayjg and Sam Korn, have not yet announced whether they plan to run for re-election. In addition, one position has been vacant since Mackensen resigned in February. If the election is simply to fill the existing body, there would be five seats available in this election, although it remains to be seen what Wales wants to do. Further expansion has been suggested on occasion, along with possibly dividing the committee into smaller groups to hear cases.
As of this writing, fifteen candidates have submitted statements. In addition, a few people have already withdrawn after earlier listing themselves as candidates. Editors must have 1000 edits in the English Wikipedia to be eligible for candidacy. The deadline for editors to declare their candidacy is 1 December.
Following up on a phenomenon noted in a number of sources, an enterprising blogger has run an analysis to see where Wikipedia articles appear in different search engines. Confirming what others had observed, he reported that two of three major search engines would show a Wikipedia article in the top 10 search results more than 75% of the time.
The study was conducted by Jure Čuhalev, a former Slovenian Wikipedian, as part of a university seminar dealing with internet search. Čuhalev used Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, the three largest search engines by market share, which collectively support 80% or more of all internet searches. He reported that Wikipedia appeared in the top 10, thus putting it on the first page of results, on 81% of searches using Google and 77% for Yahoo. MSN produced Wikipedia articles much less often by comparison, only 38% of the time in the first ten results. (Seth Finkelstein argued that the difference was because Yahoo had largely imitated the factors Google uses in weighting pages for search results, while MSN took a different approach.)
Čuhalev's methodology involved taking 1000 randomly selected Wikipedia articles and using the titles as search queries. A number of people pointed out that this was likely to affect the results, since the searches would be skewed in favor of terminology used on Wikipedia as opposed to other sites. Several suggested that the experiment could be run using data from actual search queries, such as that controversially released by AOL earlier this year. This would presumably give more realistic results and avoid overstating Wikipedia's presence in search results, although most agreed that in their own experience, Wikipedia does come up frequently in searches.
Čuhalev sought to more systematically research a question that has been asked previously, and followed in the steps of several other bloggers who had examined Wikipedia's position in search results. Earlier, Steve Rubel had studied where Wikipedia articles appeared in Google searches for the brands of leading advertisers. He found that on average, Wikipedia fell just outside the top 10, but for a sizable number of brands the Wikipedia article would be on the first page of search results.
Tim Bray, analyzing the difficulty of finding population figures for Canadian provinces, decided that the lack of standardization among more authoritative sources is a major reason people turn to Wikipedia as an "easy and quick" alternative. Bray concluded, "So Wikipedia is going to win. Do you see any other plausible outcome?" One possibility that might bridge the gap, and a reason why dealing with expertise and conflicts of interest among editors are such hot-button topics, would be for the experts to take a greater interest in ensuring Wikipedia's accuracy and quality. The Nature analysis that compared Wikipedia with the Encyclopædia Britannica last year (see archived story), for example, took exactly this approach in urging its readers to improve Wikipedia articles in their fields of study.
News coverage this week focused on Intellipedia, a series of classified and unclassified wikis run by the office of the United States Director of National Intelligence, for the purpose of sharing information among the United States Intelligence Community.
The wiki, which runs on MediaWiki software, was started earlier this year,[1] and as of October, had 28,000 pages and 3,600 users. Intellipedia's top secret version runs on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, a secure network controlled by the United States intelligence community. A wiki for secret but not "top secret" information exists on SIPRNet, and an unclassified wiki is located on NIPRNet.
The article on Intellipedia was created by technologist David Weinberger (User:Dweinberger), who stated that he first learned about Intellipedia in a non-classified meeting with CIA analysts. The wikis' existence was officially recognized at a press conference on Tuesday. According to intelligence officials, the wikis are being used to coordinate work on a "national intelligence estimate" on Nigeria, as well as annual terrorism reports by country.
The wiki is unrelated to a wiki proposal that bureaucrat and arbitrator Mark Pellegrini (User:Raul654) was involved in. According to Pellegrini, "I did a little private consulting for a military contractor who wanted to create a joint-forces wiki. They put in a proposal, but it was rejected (meaning my services were no longer required)." On Intellipedia, Pellegrini remarked, "I think Intellipedia is a great idea. Many of the intelligence agencies have historically had problems sharing information."[2]
Userboxes, edit wars, and user bans - these are normally the top debates in Wikipedia. Last week in the German Wikipedia, however, a single article caused all the controversy. Topic number one was Methodischer Kulturalismus (Methodical culturalism), an article about contemporary philosophical theory which won the fifth German Wikipedia writing contest. While members of German WikiProject Philosophy celebrated the jury decision and proposed it as a candidate for Exzellente Artikel (Featured articles), a storm of protests broke out. Many Wikipedians complained the article was obscure and incomprehensible, and the topic irrelevant. The debate became even more emotional when one of the jury members of the contest deserted his colleagues and joined the protesters. He even went so far as to propose the article for deletion, leading to an edit-war and the protection of the article - without the deletion notice. The featured article nomination was cancelled prematurely when the vote count reached 18 for, 30 against, and the article was moved into the review section. In sum: Wikipedia theater at its best - or worst?
Meanwhile, the sections for nominating "featured" and "good" article candidates were flooded with the other contestants from the writing contest, starting with the uncontroversial and widely admired second place finisher, the "Winter King" Friedrich V. (Frederick V), whose politics led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War. The article was especially applauded for its abundant citations of historical sources, which the author had thoroughly digitized and annotated in Wikisource alongside the article (example).
A more peaceful award ceremony took place on Wednesday in Munich, when the German Wikipedia won the OnlineStar, an award sponsored by a German publisher and selected by a vote among online users. The team who organized the Wikipedia booth at the Munich computer fair Systems went to the ceremony to receive the solid trophy alongside representatives from Google, Amazon and other companies which had won in different categories.
Wikipedia events took place all over Germany during the last months. On 17 September, Wikimedia Germany organized the first Wiki Research Symposium in Berlin after the Wizards of OS conference where former Wikipedia pioneer and Nupedia editor-in-chief Larry Sanger made headlines with his Citizendium announcement. Ten research teams had the opportunity to present and discuss their projects.
The Wikipedians from Dresden organized the Wikipedia Day Dresden from 2 October to 6 October. At the university, they held workshops and guided tours through the Wikipedia exhibition. In cooperation with the Dresden public transport company, the Wikipedians manned several Internet terminals - "Wikispots" - in the city center and explained Wikipedia to passers-by. The public transport company continued to offer free Wikipedia access at their terminals even after the event.
On 22 September, Frank Schulenburg, Finanzer and Markus Mueller organized a Wikipedia day at the Gymnasium Andreanum, an over 800-year-old high school in Hildesheim, and seventeen-year-old Manecke was the one-man team to represent Wikipedia at the "Hobby & Electronic" fair last week in Stuttgart.
Wikimedia Foundation Chair Florence Devouard announced this week that the Foundation would be making a US$5,000 donation to the Peer-Directed Projects Center, the non-profit organization that runs the freenode IRC network. In the announcement, Devouard noted the Foundation's appreciation for the network, which hosts nearly all Wikimedia project IRC channels. Devouard again noted the Foundation's condolences for the death of Peer-Directed Projects Center and freenode founder Rob Levin (lilo), who was killed in a car-bicycle accident in September.
Wikimedia Deutschland announced this week that they had officially received tax-exempt status, allowing the organization to issue donation receipts for the next 5 years. Also announced was the purchase of 15 new squid servers, at a price of €50,000. The servers will be deployed at the Amsterdam datacenter, more than doubling the European server capacity.
Voting to choose replacement logos on Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and Wikiversity has concluded. The following logos have been selected. Only the Wikiversity logo has been put into usage as of press time (and the Spanish language version retains the old logo), though discussion on the color of the logo was still continuing. The Wikibooks logo still awaits a change in color, as it was deemed too similar to the Wikimedia Foundation's logo, and discussion continues on the exact letters/glyphs to be used in the Wiktionary logo.
A project to develop a logo mosaic was started to commemorate the upcoming one millionth file upload on Wikimedia Commons. The mosaic, which will comprise 1200 individual images, will combine to form the logo of the Wikimedia Foundation. People from all projects are invited to help develop the mosaic by placing more images to replace duplicates.
Many computer magazines reported that hackers tried to trade on Wikipedia's reputation to distribute virus/worm programs. The attack is described as a standard phishing attack. An official looking email with a link to a fraudulent site is distributed to users. When the user clicks the link they are directed to the fraudulent site that looks like Wikipedia but is instead the distributor of the worm. See The Age, Information Week, Forbes.com blog, and Heise Online.
The Sydney Morning Herald covered the criticisms of Daniel Brandt concerning articles on Wikipedia that contain copyrighted material. However, the article notes that a "fair few" of the articles identified by Brandt had material which came from the public domain. See also articles by the St Paul Pioneer Press and the Inquirer.
Chicago-area media reported on the arrest of a local high school student who had tried to post on Wikipedia with a threat of Halloween violence at the school. A Wikipedia administrator warned the school and they increased security for the day, but police concluded that there was no real danger.
Jimmy Wales made his second appearance on National Public Radio in as many weeks. After being interviewed about his $100-million copyright fund idea 26 October on Talk of the Nation, Wales was a guest on the program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! last Saturday, 4 November. Wales was featured as part of the "Not My Job" segment, in which celebrities answer questions unrelated to their work. Playing on the fact that it is "not his job" to personally write all of Wikipedia, the trivia questions were based on actual information taken from Wikipedia articles. And perhaps fittingly, to demonstrate that it truly isn't his job, he got none of the three questions correct.
Coverage of the use of Wiki software, dubbed Intellipedia, by United States Intelligence Community was reported on by several news outlets (see related story). Articles were carried by The Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Pakistan Daily Times amongst others.
The New Yorker had an article, "Dirty Wikitricks", covering some of the negative campaigning going on in the U.S. elections, including back-and-forth on Wikipedia articles. The race for a seat representing New Jersey in the Senate between Bob Menendez and Tom Kean was particularly noted, with claims made that some edits were coming from Kean campaign offices (a spokeswoman denied involvement and said the edits could have been made by any volunteer passing through the office).
Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Osgoodelawyer (nom), GeeJo (nom), Youngamerican (nom), Saxifrage (nom), J Di (nom), Art LaPella (nom), and Daniel Olsen (nom).
Eighteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: 1994 San Marino Grand Prix (nom), Pierre Rossier (nom), W. S. Gilbert (nom), Boshin War (nom), Influenza (nom), Gilberto Silva (nom), Battle of the Tenaru (nom), Platypus (nom), "Weird Al" Yankovic (nom), Battle of Tulagi and Gavutu-Tanambogo (nom), Tourette syndrome (nom), West Bengal (nom), Meteorological history of Hurricane Katrina (nom), Hurricane Gustav (2002) (nom), Sound film (nom), History of the board game Monopoly (nom), Syed Ahmed Khan (nom), and Belgrade (nom). The eighteen promoted this week are just one short of the record nineteen articles promoted in one week in June. (see archived story) However, all 18 were promoted on the same day, setting a new record.
Eight articles were de-featured last week: Get Back, Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, Milgram experiment, Gramophone record, Kashrut, Air Force One, and Spacecraft propulsion.
No portals reached featured status last week.
Two lists were featured last week: List of top-division football clubs in CONMEBOL countries and List of Vice Presidents of the Philippines.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Defense of Sihang Warehouse, Night of the Living Dead, Kochi, Stuyvesant High School, Slate industry in Wales, Ketuanan Melayu, and V for Vendetta.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Canada Goose, World, Lugano, Apollo 8 photograph, Long-billed Curlew, Internal combustion engine, and Panthéon, Paris
Two pictures were featured last week:
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, and closed three cases.
