A month after the rest of Wikipedia was unblocked in mainland China, the Chinese-language version, which had remained partially blocked, now appears to be generally reachable. During this period the Chinese Wikipedia has also experienced significant growth in articles and the number of new users joining the project.
Andrew Lih, who has been tracking the availability of Wikipedia in the aftermath of October's partial unblock (see archived story), reported Friday that over the previous 24 hours, the Chinese Wikipedia was widely accessible in the People's Republic of China again. This included several ISPs that were already allowing access to other Wikipedia languages, such as English, but had been continuing to block the Chinese-language version. (Around the same time as the unblock, Shizhao reported on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list that the https connection to Wikimedia servers, previously used as one potential circumvention method, had been blocked in China.)
In a follow-up, Lih noted that the number of new users registering on the Chinese Wikipedia had gone up significantly after the partial unblock on 10 October, with an even bigger spike coming after the full unblock. At the latest rate of increase, Chinese was adding contributors faster than any Wikipedia language but English. Lih called the increase "exciting" but also pointed out that it would test the community's ability to absorb this volume of newcomers.
This spike in interest may have been helped by, and also contributed to, another factor as well. The growth since the partial unblocking helped the Chinese Wikipedia surge past 100,000 articles this past weekend. This makes Chinese the twelfth language for which Wikipedia has passed that milestone.
A sustained increase in participation from the PRC would help the Chinese Wikipedia compensate for the factors that have hindered its growth up till now. Lih indicated that while the block was in place, the mix of contributors to the Chinese Wikipedia was roughly 1/4 from Hong Kong, 1/4 from Taiwan, and the rest from a mixture of locations with Chinese-speaking populations (Singapore, Malaysia, the United States, Canada, and those from the PRC who could circumvent the block). And even in the unblocked areas, country data from Alexa suggests that Wikipedia's popularity has been affected by the block. Wikipedia is currently #45 in web traffic for Hong Kong and #94 in Taiwan, compared to being in the top twenty or even ten for most other countries.
Lih added the tidbit that New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was in Beijing over the weekend "extolling the virtues of Wikipedia" in an appearance at the Bookworm Cafe to promote his latest book, The World Is Flat. Influential support like this may have played a role in the unblocking, as Fortune recently reported that a well-connected ally wrote to PRC officials about a week before the initial unblock, helping to convince them of Wikipedia's neutrality.
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 |
This week, the Signpost takes a look at the process for, and other information on this year's ArbCom elections.
This year's elections to the Arbitration Committee will be held from 4 December through 17 December. At press time, 26 users had presented themselves as candidates; the deadline for submitting oneself is 1 December. Candidates for the Arbitration Committee must have made at least 1,000 edits by 1 October.
It is anticipated that the election will be conducted in a similar manner to that of last year's elections (which itself was based on the requests for adminship process). All votes are public, and users can either support or oppose a user.[1] Prior elections had used approval voting, but Jimbo Wales had expressed interest in using an open method. In response to questions over which method would be used this year, Jimbo replied:
After the public has voted, Jimbo will select users with at least 50% support. In practice, Jimbo has generally appointed by percentage of support, with minor exceptions. Last year, with eight open seats, Jimbo appointed the top eight users by percentage, while also adding three new seats. To these new seats, he appointed three incumbent arbitrators (James Forrester, Fred Bauder, and Jayjg), all of whom had received at least two-thirds support in the elections. According to Jimbo, the choices were made "in the interests of expanding the committee and maintaining continuity".[3]
As in last year's election, voters must have registered before 1 October, and made at least 150 edits by 4 December, in order to be eligible to vote. Some users suggested a higher limit, while others suggested a lower limit; discussion on changing the limit was eventually dropped.
In other election-related news, arbitrator Sam Korn announced that he would not be running for re-election this year,[4] leaving at least four seats with no running incumbent. The Epopt and Theresa Knott had previously announced their intention not to run, and one seat up for re-election is vacant. Jayjg has not publicly announced whether he intends to run again.
A new report last week from traffic analysis firm comScore showed that among the busiest sites on the Web, Wikipedia is one of the leaders in drawing its traffic from outside the United States. The report had Wikipedia tied with Google for the highest percentage of unique visitors from outside the US.
Both Wikipedia and Google have 79.8% of their visitors coming from outside the US, according to comScore. Previous evidence has shown that in a number of countries, Wikipedia's popularity is even greater than in the US. For example, Alexa indicates that Wikipedia is the 9th-most-popular site in the US, but 4th in Germany. However, this is one of the first systematic external analyses to confirm the relative strength of Wikipedia popularity on a global basis.
The comScore report, which covers the month of September, studied the top 25 websites in terms of unique US visitors (comScore is based in the US, but has lately been expanding its services to offer reports covering the global internet). Despite the US-oriented sample, 14 of the 25 had more unique visitors outside the US than in, and 12 of 25 had more than half their page views from outside the US.
In terms of the share of page views, Wikipedia came in behind Google, but ahead of all the other sites listed. Wikipedia's percentage of page views from outside the US was at 82.4% (Google had 89.1%). Microsoft, a close third when it comes to unique visitors (79.0% outside the US), was still in third place but further back with respect to page views, at only 75.4%.
Wikipedia was also exceptional in having a higher percentage of non-US page views than the percentage of unique visitors from outside the US. Aside from Google, the only other sites with the same pattern were Lycos (which has non-US ownership) and the Monster network of job sites. Overall, comScore ranks Wikipedia 11th in the number of unique visitors from the US, but 6th worldwide.
The Board of Trustees, coming off a reorganization and retreat earlier this month, passed four resolutions on Wednesday, 8 November. The first resolution authorizes the creation of a new events committee, to be developed by Board member Tim Shell. Another resolution, meanwhile, authorizes the creation of a group "to assess and later manage Wikimedia Foundation domain names." This resolution comes after increased reports of cybersquatting on potential Wikimedia domain names, and the use of such legitimate-sounding domain names to spread viruses (see archived story). The third resolution authorizes the creation of a committee, led by Brad Patrick, Oscar van Dillen, and Jan-Bart De Vreede, to formulate a process in the search for a permanent executive director; Patrick currently serves as the Foundation's legal counsel and interim executive director. The final resolution summarizes the Board's retreat in Frankfurt, Germany. Among the topics discussed were the resignation of Board member Tim Shell, effective at the end of the year, Wikimedia's expansion, and another face-to-face meeting for the entire Board.
Wikizine, a newsletter in blog format about Wikimedia Foundation projects, published its 50th issue this week, having now been active for a full year. In contrast with The Wikipedia Signpost, which focuses on the English Wikipedia, the Wikizine aims to cover news relevant to the larger Wikimedia community, not any specific project.
Meanwhile, another source of Wikipedia news is the recently launched podcast Wikipedia Weekly, a project launched by Tawker and Fuzheado. It has completed four weekly episodes so far, with more in production, and also released a special midweek podcast about the German article-writing contest (see archived story), along with an interview with Larry Sanger of Citizendium.
Several articles discussed the influence of Wikipedia. In What does Wikipedia say about you, Law.com advises readers to monitor Wikipedia's article about their firm and prominent members because of the influence Wikipedia has. The Dallas Morning News reported on Google's ranking criteria and the results that make Wikipedia articles and shopping sites appear first in results list. In an editorial released by opinioneditorials.com, Rex Curry reports on the references Wikipedia makes to Curry's own research in an apparent attempt to use Wikipedia to bolster his credibility. In an email from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, Wales asked Wikipedians to carefully verify the referenced articles.
The New Haven Register reports in Academia split on free-for-all Wikipedia that students should be "skeptical about the content, but people should be skeptical about all the content they read..." A prank that changed the president of Kazakhstan to Borat was highlighted in a short article by Digital Spy.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, was the topic of articles in two major UK newspapers. The Telegraph carried a very long article, titled Wiki's World discussing the unlikely success story, the varying quality level of different articles, the issues involved in the biographies of living persons, and other topics. The Guardian reported on an interview of Wales (including an audio file of excerpts of the interview) where Wales answered questions about Wikipedia's success, his initial vision of the project and the dynamics of the Wikipedian community. Wales was also given the "Visionary Achievement" award by the Tampa Bay Technology Forum. In a more lighthearted vein, Wales played the 'Not My Job' game on the November 4, 2006 NPR quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Wales was asked three obscure questions originating from Wikipedia articles and got none of them correct.
Deleted Wikipedia articles also have generated minor media coverage. Ars Technica covered the deletion of NPA Theory of personality; and Gawker.com covered the deletion of the "Internet It Girl" article and how some rejected Wikipedia articles live on.
The following topics in prior "In the news" coverage continued to generate media reports:
Eleven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Future Perfect at Sunrise (nom), Lostintherush (nom), EVula (nom), AnonEMouse (nom), Rockpocket (nom), Shyam Bihari (nom), Husond (nom), Trialsanderrors (nom), Cholmes75 (nom), Femto (nom), and Dalbury (nom).
Thirteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Dundee (nom), Alain Prost (nom), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (nom), Extratropical cyclone (nom), Great Fire of London (nom), Stegosaurus (nom), Bette Davis (nom), West Wycombe Park (nom), Lead(II) nitrate (nom), Fin Whale (nom), Girl Scouts of the USA (nom), Basiliscus (nom), and Hurricane Fabian (nom).
Five articles were de-featured last week: Emacs, F-35 Lightning II, Sid McMath, House of Lords, and Speech synthesis.
No portals reached featured status last week.
Two lists were featured last week: List of Telecaster players and List of countries by Human Development Index.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Eric A. Havelock, Virtuti Militari, Concerto delle donne, Karen Dotrice, Supreme Court of the United States, Leonhard Euler, and Spyware.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Wide-body aircraft, Weedy sea dragon, Mallard, Giza pyramid complex, American Bison skulls, Comet Hale-Bopp, and Dingle Peninsula.
Eleven pictures were featured last week:
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Since the last edition of the technology report, there have been a number of noteworthy changes to software and server configuration. Most significantly, the AntiSpoof extension (written by Neil Harris in Python and translated to PHP by Brion Vibber) has been enabled on all Wikimedia sites. It is now impossible to register usernames that are too similar to ones already registered on the wiki. Due to concerns that the restrictions were too harsh, they were relaxed less than a day before press time, and discussion is ongoing on the mailing list as to what changes exactly should be made to the code to strike the right balance between false positives and false negatives.
Nick Jenkins, Simetrical, Evan Prodromou, Andrew Garrett, and Jason Richey have become developers and now have general-purpose access to Subversion.
Additionally, various new features were added, including:
.svg){kind=link}
@ character is now forbidden in usernames, with Brion Vibber having blacklisted it in r16658. The original concern raised in bug 6849 was that a common cause of unneeded blocks was users signing up with e-mail addresses as their names, against the English Wikipedia's policy. Brion did not comment on that concern, but rather said that the symbol "interferes with multi-database tools and was meant to be banned years ago". The ban takes effect on every wiki running the MediaWiki software package, including all Wikimedia Foundation wikis.Users who already had names with the @ symbol in them will be permitted to log in for the time being, but at some point in the indefinite future it's possible that they'll be renamed. The similar-looking ＠ symbol (Unicode character FF20, "full-width commercial at") is not banned.
<math> tags, all committed by Jens Frank but many of the patches written by Carl Fürstenberg. The added functions are too numerous to list here, but were added in response to bugs 4528, 7749, and 7774, which contain complete lists in the form of patches. Fürstenberg and Frank also fixed a bug in the display of uppercase Greek letters in mathematical formulas, and another bug relating to the syntax of underbraces and arrays.#wpSummary { width: 360px } to Special:Mypage/monobook.css (or another skin as appropriate), although that might not be precisely the previous width.<ref> and <references> tags have been made less technical and more descriptive by Simetrical in r16960 (bug 6554).<ref> tags, the one containing the contents of the reference no longer needs to be first (bug 5885). This may help alleviate complaints that lengthy references clutter articles' wikitext and make it difficult to read. Patch is thanks to Phil Boswell, committed by Andrew Garrett in r17382.The only significant software improvement made this week was retroactive autoblocking (bug 5149), added in r17486 by Andrew Garrett. When a user is blocked, the last IP address that they edited from will be immediately blocked. Previously, it was possible for a blocked user to log out without editing anything and then edit anonymously; this would only be stopped by an autoblock if the user attempted to edit a page before logging out. As an added bonus, CheckUser is now much faster, due to the indices that this modification required.
The Wikimedia Commons now allows users to specify that they should receive e-mail notification for changes to their talk page there, like Meta. (bug 7870, enabled by Brion Vibber)
A number of minor tweaks were made to the interface this week:
Some changes were made to non-English messages. Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are.
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, and closed two cases.
