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 covers the beginning of the Arbitration Committee elections, and profiles candidates in this year's elections.
The December 2006 Arbitration Committee elections opened this week. 36 candidates are running for one of at least five positions on the Committee. The elections will run for the next two weeks, ending on Sunday, 17 December. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections for the Committee on Monday or Tuesday, and the newly elected Arbitrators will take their positions on 1 January, 2007.
At the beginning of the elections, 37 candidates had submitted their names. As of press time, one candidate, Doc glasgow, has withdrawn from the race.
Current arbitrator Jayjg decided not to run for another term, saying, "I appreciate the support, everyone, but ... the thought of being trolled again during the voting (and afterwards) the way I was last year is just a bit too much to tolerate." With all four members whose seats are up for reelection choosing not to run again, and an empty seat, at least five seats will be filled in this year's election.
Just over a day into the elections, five candidates held over 90% support: Paul August, Kirill Lokshin, Flcelloguy, UninvitedCompany, and Jpgordon. In all, 18 of the 36 candidates held at least 50% support, making them eligible to be chosen by Jimbo Wales at the close of the elections. Paul August was unanimously supported at press time, while Kirill Lokshin and Flcelloguy had received just one oppose vote each.
The Signpost election guide is still available, and has been updated from last week with new candidates, as well as other candidates who were not able to submit responses to our questions in time for last week's issue. The election guide is intended to be a brief overview of each candidate's beliefs and experiences. More detailed information about each candidate may be gleaned from their user pages, as well as their responses to questions from other users.
Due to size, the guide has been split up alphabetically, though a page transcluding all sections is available below:
Among the most controversial candidates in the elections were former arbitrator and administrator Kelly Martin, who entered the race earlier this week, and Phil Sandifer, who held 14% and 18% of the vote, respectively.
Updated statistics on the election are available at User:Gurch/Reports/ArbComElections and User:Mathbot/ArbCom Election December 2006; the former utilizes the new sortable wikitable syntax, allowing users to sort the results by the number of support and oppose votes, the support-oppose margin, and the support percentage.
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
The past week marks one year since the Seigenthaler incident, one of the defining events in the history of Wikipedia. The project's credibility, and what measures to pursue in ensuring it, are still subjects of debate today.
To review the incident: A year ago on 29 November, retired journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. wrote an editorial complaining about falsehoods in his Wikipedia biography. These had actually been written in May and removed in October after he contacted Jimmy Wales, but the article in USA Today nevertheless gained considerable media attention. The story remained in the news for a couple of weeks and is still regularly cited as a canonical illustration of the potential for misinformation on Wikipedia.
One step taken in the aftermath, on 5 December, was removing the ability of unregistered editors to create new encyclopedia articles, such as had been done in Seigenthaler's case. This was characterized as an experiment but has remained in place since that time, although it is unclear how successful this was. The issue was recently raised again on the English Wikipedia mailing list, and Wales stated his opinion that the experiment "did not achieve the intended effect." He suggested that the restriction should be changed when the planned feature to flag "stable" or "non-vandalized" versions of articles is available.
This feature is supposed to be tested initially on the German Wikipedia, and was discussed at Wikimania, but is not yet ready for implementation. What to call flagged revisions remains a matter of debate, but the ability to flag an article version is expected to be widely distributed. One possibility is after a small number of edits or a brief waiting period such as the time needed to edit semi-protected articles.
With the issue of Wikipedia accuracy in the news, another perspective soon came from a Nature article reporting that Wikipedia approached the accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica for scientific articles. Wikipedia editors fixed its errors over the next few weeks, while Britannica would eventually respond with a detailed criticism of the study, dismissing the comparison and objecting to many of the points Nature had made.
Examining Wikipedia's accuracy remains a popular topic. The November issue of the peer-reviewed online journal First Monday featured a study reporting differences in the perceived credibility of articles. The study was conducted by Thomas Chesney, lecturer at the Nottingham University Business School, assigning academic researchers to review various Wikipedia articles.
The operating principle of the study involved dividing articles between expert and non-expert reviewers, meaning that some researchers were assigned articles on topics within their field of study, others received random articles. Using 55 responses (the Nature study had 42), an admittedly small sample, it found no major difference between experts and non-experts in their perceptions of the overall site and its authors. But one statistically significant difference, which Chesney called an "oddity", was that experts were actually more likely than non-experts to rate the specific article they were assigned as being credible.
The study also concluded that 13% of Wikipedia articles had mistakes, a somewhat more forgiving result than the Nature reviewers (roughly four errors per article for Wikipedia, about three per article in Britannica). Part of the difference may be that the study excluded articles flagged as disputed in some fashion, along with stub articles. It's also not clear whether the process for selecting articles might have affected the sample group given to experts as opposed to non-experts.
The Wikimedia Commons reached the major milestone of 1,000,000 files uploaded this past week, a little more than two years after the project officially launched. The achievement was the subject of a press release and celebrated with a mosaic of images representing the Wikimedia Foundation logo. And in other Wikimedia Foundation news, the organization plans to start its next fundraiser this coming week.
The one-millionth file, uploaded on Thursday, 30 November, was a photograph taken at the Singapore Zoo by Terence Ong. A picture of the zoo's pygmy hippopotamus exhibit, it was among a group of photographs Ong uploaded around the same time. Over the past year, Ong has added over 4,000 files to Wikimedia Commons.
Wikimedia Commons was started in September 2004 as a repository specifically for free content media, with no fair use arguments being applied. Some of its content existed previously on Wikipedia or other projects and has migrated to Commons, and the project has also received significant outside donations of content. And many of the files are entirely new since the launch of Commons, with the project receiving on average over 2,000 new files per week.
In honor of the milestone, Brianna Laugher had suggested creating a photographic mosaic to resemble the logo of the Wikimedia Foundation. With the help of Larry Pieniazek, a project was set up to facilitate arranging the images to form this mosaic. The photographs (along with a handful of animations) are laid out in a 30x40 grid for a total of 1200 images used. You can also watch an animation of how the mosaic was developed.
The next Wikimedia fundraiser was one of the items mentioned by Florence Devouard, reporting on a meeting of the Board of Trustees last week. She indicated that the fundraiser is planned to start on Friday, 8 December, with more information to come shortly. Some preparations are still being made, so the date is not yet absolutely firm and could be delayed by a few days. The last official Wikimedia fundraising drive was held nearly a year ago.
Previous discussions had contemplated having fundraisers as often as quarterly. That has not proved necessary for the past year, while still operating on a skeleton staff, but at the same time supporting the Wikimedia projects has stretched the Foundation's technical resources of late. The upcoming fundraiser will involve prominent use of the sitenotice message, as in past efforts.
The board meeting in question was held at the Wikimedia Foundation offices in St. Petersburg, Florida, from November 29-30. Other topics discussed included expansion of the Board of Trustees, possibly up to 11 members, which will include replacing Tim Shell, along with creating a separate advisory board. An audit of the Foundation's books for its first three years of existence was completed, with a report due "very soon", and an agreement also reached on a revision of the bylaws.
Most notably, three new board members have been chosen for appointment; these members are being contacted to confirm their interest in a position. The board also decided that positions made by appointment will expire after one year or less, meaning that the terms of the new members, as well as current board members Jimbo Wales and Michael Davis will be up for re-appointment in 2007. Board Chairperson Florence Devouard's term was extended to 2008 to provide stability, with the board planning elections for up to three new board members in 2007.
The board also discussed the position of Executive Director; currently, the position is held by Foundation legal counsel Brad Patrick on an interim basis. The board is currently considering ways to handle a search process. A full report of the meeting's notes, provided by Devouard, can be found on the Foundation-l mailing list.
The Wikimedia Commons celebrating the addition of its one-millionth file was not the only significant accomplishment among Wikimedia projects last week. Wikipedia also achieved some recognition in Russia with a national prize for internet content.
Meanwhile, Iran has joined the list of countries that have apparently blocked Wikipedia at some point, a group that also includes Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Pakistan. The situation in mainland China is the best-known instance and has generally had the greatest long-term impact. Like most of the others, the Iranian block appears to have been a more temporary disruption, as a later report indicated that it had been lifted.
The Russian Wikipedia received a national award last week from the Russian Federation for internet sites in the category "science and education". The award, known as the Runet Prize, was presented in a Moscow ceremony on 29 November. A group of Wikipedia editors attended to receive the prize on behalf of the site.
In recognition of this achievement, the Russian Wikipedia currently sports a modified Wikipedia logo that includes a drawing of the Runet trophy. A banner was also posted about the news on its Main Page. Contributor Alexander Sigachov said he hoped the publicity would attract new participants to the project.
The Runet Prize is an award that has been given out since 2004 with the support of UNESCO. The name of the award is a reference to the .ru domain for Russia, so the Russian internet collectively is often called Runet. A monetary prize is sometimes included, but not in this instance; Sigachov indicated that they were not sure what they would have done with it anyway. A local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation has not yet been organized in Russia.
The Guardian reported on 4 December that Iran blocked access to a number of popular websites, Wikipedia among them. The action was reportedly part of a stepped-up government campaign against foreign media deemed corrupt or immoral. Also listed as blocked were such sites as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Amazon.com, YouTube, and the New York Times website.
By the time the story was published, it seems that the block may already have been lifted, according to a report from Roozbeh Pournader, a Wikipedia editor based in Tehran. He indicated that access was cut off on 1 December and restored on 3 December. As with the blocks in China, no official explanation has been provided. Pournader notes that the Kurdish Wikipedia is still blocked in Iran, but this has been the case for a long time.
Next to the People's Republic of China, Iran is regularly mentioned as one of the countries that most actively filters the internet to prevent its citizens from accessing particular sites. This seems to be the first report of Wikipedia being blocked there, and previous indications would suggest that the project enjoys some popularity there. The official language of Iran, Persian, has an active Wikipedia with over 16,000 articles, comparable in size to Greek.
In fact, Alexa indicates that Wikipedia is more popular in Iran, where it was blocked, than in Russia, where it just won an award. (On the other hand, the Russian Wikipedia, which is approaching 120,000 articles, is significantly larger than the Persian Wikipedia.) Alexa ranks Wikipedia #16 among websites with the most traffic from users in Iran, while it ranks #27 in traffic from Russian users. While the usefulness of Alexa data has been questioned because of its methodology, publicly available information focused on these specific countries is scarce as compared to Western Europe and the US, so Alexa seems the best way to compare.
Of the sites The Guardian said were being blocked, Wikipedia is the most popular in Iran according to Alexa. IMDb is eleven spots behind Wikipedia at #27, followed by Amazon.com at #33 and YouTube at #39. The New York Times does not appear in the top 100. It is not clear whether any of these sites are still blocked, or if access to them was restored along with Wikipedia.
In recounting attempts to deal with the situation, Pournader focused on contacts with ISPs and personal connections, some of whom felt the block was some type of mistake. He discouraged protests and other public gatherings designed to put pressure on the government. Similarly, Andrew Lih was recently critical of the "moral righteousness" from some external critics, arguing that establishing the mutual benefits of openness would be more productive.
Voting in the steward elections continued this week. Voting, along with the chance to confirm the current stewards, will last until 15 December. As of press time, there remained 15 candidates in the election, unchanged from last week, with every candidate confirmed by the Foundation already.
Wikipedia became the 12th most visited site this week, according to Alexa. During the week, the French Wikiversity and the Tamil Wikinews were also created, and the French Wikiquote was reopened, with Board of Trustees approval. The French Wikiquote was temporarily closed in April of this year (see archived story) following potential legal issues.
List Summary Service, or LSS, began in late September; its goal is to summarize threads on Wikimedia mailing lists in multiple languages. It initially only summarized the Foundation-l mailing list, but has now expanded to four languages and includes the Wikipedia-l list and the Wikien-l list, used for the English Wikipedia.
In a story first published in the International Herald Tribune (later reprinted in The New York Times and also covered in a blog by CBS News), Howard W. French exposes the varied coverage by different language versions of Wikipedia. "Chinese-language Wikipedia presents different view of history" compares the coverage of Mao Zedong, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and notes that the Chinese version "sometimes reads as if it were approved by the censors themselves." The article speculates on how collaboration has resulted in a different worldview in Chinese than in English, and reviews the consensus process. The article also mentions that many of the articles in Baidu Baike (a collaborative encyclopedia hosted by major Chinese search engine Baidu), "appear to be copied directly from Wikipedia." The article received wide coverage with commentary from South Africa's Mail&Guardian and SlashDot.
Several Chinese Wikipedia contributors objected rather strongly to the premise of the article. They argued that the neutral point of view policy is taken seriously, and denied that "self-censorship" is taking place. One point made was that while French cited a debate over whether to emphasize death tolls in the Chinese Wikipedia article on Mao, some of the positive aspects of Mao's rule are equally omitted in that version.
The news of Wikipedia being blocked by Iran (see related story) was also covered by: the Persian Journal, The Sydney Morning Herald, and in an article published by National Council of Resistance of Iran's Foreign Affairs Committee.
Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia history were profiled in two articles this week. The Chicago Sun-Times article focused on Wales's history as a trader on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It also includes a short bio information on Wales.
Newsday profiled two internet pioneers: Jimmy Wales and Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist). The article provides a history of Wikipedia and quotes Larry Sanger as saying, "Jimmy was a very, very hands-off manager, so he's taken credit for a lot of my work." The article also points out that what critics identify as one of Wikipedia's weakness, the use of amateurs, is also its strength because it provides the ability for Wikipedia to be updated quickly.
In an Editorial on the "anniversary" of Seigenthaler's report on finding misinformation about himself (see related story), the Yakima Herald-Republic advocates government oversight of potentially libelous statements made on the Internet. "The most frightening aspect is not that this happened to John Seigenthaler. It's that without congressional repair of a flawed federal act, this could happen to any of us." Ironically, The Dominion carried an article this week where Alexander M.C. Halavais purposely inserted various false information into Wikipedia articles. Halavais reported that he was surprised when "less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted."
Independent weekly paper, The Philadelphia City Paper covered the November 2nd Meetup in Philadelphia. The article highlights the different backgrounds of the Wikipedians including: two Drexel undergrads, a biochemical engineer, someone with medical expertise, railfans, and a Ph.D. candidate. User:Evrik is quoted as saying, "People have been writing history since they painted images on walls — Wikipedia is an opportunity for people to write their history as they see it."
First Monday released a study it conducted on Wikipedia Quality. In the study, 53 of 258 surveyed research staff responded to a request to "assess [the] credibility [of an article], the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole." The survey found that "experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts." This surprising result was reported by arstechnica, TechSpot, and SlashDot.
Dr. Peter J. Nicholson, speaking at the University of Waterloo, identified Wikipedia as the 'single best example' of [an] authoritative paradigm shift." In a speech addressing the changing nature of information and authority, and claims Wikipedia's success is due to it being "in synch with Web culture."
In addition to the above articles on Wikipedia's quality, Renew America interviews Dr. Judith A. Reisman who criticises her Wikipedia biography. WBRZ-TV reports that ETS (formerly the Educational Testing Service) has been testing the ability of students to "correctly judge the objectivity of a Web site." ETS evaluated "the responses of 6,300 college and high school students" and found "just 52 percent of test takers could" do so. Wikipedia is identified as one site students need to question.
The Washington Post covers the AfD process including quotes from several Wikipedians who give examples of discussions on specific AfD discussions. The Post also noted that the discussions are generally courteous. In response to the Post's somewhat "snickering" tone, a blog from Network World discusses "Our love/hate relationship with Wikipedia."
Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Daveydweeb (nom), Gogo Dodo (nom), Sandstein (nom), HighInBC (nom), Renesis13 (nom), Nae'blis (nom), and Viridae (nom).
Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: History of Solidarity, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, Ian Thorpe, 2005 United States Grand Prix, Jocelin, Thylacine, Weymouth, Cyclol, Joseph W. Tkach, Scottish Parliament, Indian Standard Time, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Bacteria, Minnesota, and Tropical Storm Bonnie (2004).
The month of November set a record for most featured articles promoted, with 65. Previously, the record was held by July 2006 (53 articles), and before that, September 2004 (48 articles).
Eight articles were de-featured last week: Mark Antony, Mixed-breed dog, Celtic Tiger, Pashtun people, Bodyline, Supply and demand, Propaganda, and Super Mario 64.
No portals reached featured status last week.
Three lists were featured last week: List of major opera composers, List of Saskatchewan general elections, and 2003 NFL Draft.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Stegosaurus, Great Fire of London, Jaws (film), History of erotic depictions, Extratropical cyclone, Battle of Austerlitz, and Demosthenes. History of erotic depictions fell short of a FA record with 421 edits while on the Main Page; the record is The Lord of the Rings, with 453 edits while on the Main Page in October.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Infrared photograph, Zuni, Rogue River, Orion Nebula, Child Labor, Northern Gannets, and Zipper.
Ten pictures were featured last week:
More work on a Single User Login was done this week. Brion Vibber made some modifications to the Central Auth code and tested the cross-wiki username merging for how long it would take. See the mailing list post for more details.
A new ParserFunction, {{#rel2abs}}, was added this past week. Given a relative page name such as /Subpage, it will return a fully qualified page name such as Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-12-04/Subpage. This can be used as input for other functions, such as {{#ifexist}} or {{localurl}}. (Carl Fürstenberg and Tim Starling, bug 8021, r17979)
Automatically-linked ISBNs can now contain spaces. (Ilmari Karonen, bug 8110, r18074)
A few interface changes were made:
Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:
Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.
The Arbitration Committee opened two case this week, and closed three cases.
