Following a recent board meeting and the conclusion of its fundraising drive, the Wikimedia Foundation has made several significant announcements expanding the pool of people involved in the organization. Florence Nibart-Devouard, chair of the Foundation's governing Board of Trustees, announced the creation of an advisory board, consisting primarily of leaders and experts from the free culture movement. Wikimedia has also been adding new personnel to handle the growing demands on the organization, as the Board works to fill out the structure of the Foundation.
Devouard indicated that the new advisory group was chosen to include people who have already been in contact with Wikimedia or whose experience would be beneficial to the organization. Input from the community was solicited and considered, and the list of names (currently 18) is not closed—additional suggestions should be directed to Devouard. Among the members of the advisory board is Angela Beesley, former member of the Board of Trustees, who has agreed to serve as the chair for the advisory panel. The group also includes wiki inventor Ward Cunningham and Nomic creator Peter Suber.
The other members of the advisory board include Heather Ford, Melissa Hagemann, Danny Hillis, Mitch Kapor, Joris Komen, Rebecca MacKinnon, Wayne Mackintosh, Benjamin Mako Hill, Erin McKean, Trevor Nielson, Achal Prabhala, Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Raoul Weiler, and Ethan Zuckerman. Although most are primarily involved in other projects of their own, several have some experience editing Wikipedia. For an example, perhaps timely in view of the recent controversy over Microsoft's efforts, Shirky was once involved in a public debate over boosterism on the article for a minor Linux distribution (see archived story).
The Wikimedia Foundation has recently hired two new employees to its staff, Carolyn Doran as Chief Operations Officer and Sandra Ordonez as Communications Manager. Doran has already been working for Wikimedia for several months on a temporary basis on accounting matters, and is now joining the Foundation full-time. Her position will include responsibility for administration, personnel, and day-to-day financial matters. Ordonez has a background in public relations and will focus on dealing with the press and other communications issues. She started more recently but has already been quite busy in light of the Microsoft furor and reactions to the nofollow implementation.
With respect to other positions, the search continues for a permanent Executive Director. At its recent meeting in Rotterdam from 12 January to 14 January, the Board of Trustees approved the use of a search firm to help identify candidates. Brad Patrick, who had been covering the position on an interim basis, will now focus on his role as General Counsel.
Other resolutions passed during the Rotterdam meeting included the election of Jan-Bart de Vreede as Vice Chair, and the passage of a gift policy.
In what might be called a "soft endorsement", courts have increasingly been citing Wikipedia articles in their rulings, but usually with caution and primarily for non-essential "soft facts". The subject was the focus of a New York Times story on 29 January headlined "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively".
Reporter Noam Cohen framed the article partly as a friendly debate between two of America's leading legal intellects, Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein expressed doubt that it was appropriate to cite Wikipedia in judicial decisions, something Posner did earlier this month writing for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in U.S. v. Radomski. Illustrating the potential pitfalls, Sunstein (working as an unregistered editor) had previously corrected a factual misstatement in Posner's Wikipedia biography. Curiously, the IP address that made this change also edited Sunstein's own biography—updating the title of his then-still-unpublished book.
Posner's use of Wikipedia was a passing reference of no importance to the substance of the case, and Sunstein conceded that this kind of citation was "too innocuous for a basis of criticism." Law professor Stephen Gillers surmised that most judges citing Wikipedia are using it as background material, not for issues central to justifying their actual rulings. The function of the citations is to provide context and make judicial opinions more readable. Given that a number of people have poked fun at Wikipedia itself for cultivating a dry, bland style of writing, the reader may wonder just how bad legal prose really is if judges are resorting to Wikipedia references to add color.
Over 100 decisions have been issued using Wikipedia as a source in some fashion. A compilation of these uses can be found at Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a court source, but the list there is hardly complete. The earliest known court decisions citing Wikipedia date to 2004, after some lawyers began using it in their court filings the previous year.
To date, the most extensive use of Wikipedia has been in the case of Apple v. Does, where the California Court of Appeal's opinion included references to 11 different Wikipedia articles. The bulk of Wikipedia citations have come from courts in the United States. A handful of citations have been noted in the courts of England and Wales, along with isolated use in such forums as the European Court of Human Rights and a German patent tribunal.
A longstanding battle over the standards to be used in office software suites for document formats intersected last week with the debate over conflicts of interest among Wikipedia editors, producing quite a furor. The incident involved someone being hired by Microsoft to change the information in Wikipedia articles about those standards, primarily Ecma Office Open XML.
Office Open XML (or OOXML), a standard adopted by Ecma International last December, is one of two specifications trying to establish itself for electronic documents, the other being OpenDocument (or ODF). This has been in the context of an often bitter and public debate between Microsoft and open source advocates, which played a role in the controversial departure of a former CIO for the state of Massachusetts, Peter Quinn. On this occasion, Doug Mahugh, an Open XML Technical Evangelist for the company, became concerned about the Wikipedia articles in question and offered to pay someone to fix them. The offer was openly acknowledged by the person who received it, Rick Jelliffe, in a blog post titled, "An interesting offer: get paid to contribute to Wikipedia".
Jelliffe is an Australian programmer who founded an XML tools vendor called Topologi (note: the Wikipedia link for Topologi currently redirects to an apparently unrelated Linux distribution, Topologilinux). His biography on the O'Reilly website describes him as a standards activist, making him someone whose established credentials and relative independence would serve Microsoft's purposes. He and Mahugh both indicated that Microsoft did not seek any kind of editorial control over Jelliffe's efforts.
The revelation exploded into a media frenzy about the possibility of paid editing activity on Wikipedia. Perspectives on the incident ranged widely, some taking it as confirmation that Wikipedia policies are inadequate to deal with disputed issues, others seeing it as Microsoft living down to its reputation for heavyhanded and counterproductive public relations. David Gerard offered another explanation, commenting, "There's something about open-source and free-software related articles that attracts REALLY OBNOXIOUS partisans", so that articles involving those issues frequently are overwhelmed by advocacy.
Responses from the Wikipedia side in the press were generally negative about Microsoft's approach. Jimmy Wales said that he was "very disappointed" and reiterated his concerns about paid editing (see archived stories). David Gerard and Mathias Schindler also corresponded with Mahugh and Jelliffe, encouraging further dialogue to improve the articles.
Various press reports included several clarifications from Microsoft. The company indicated that it had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to get the Wikipedia articles fixed; that it perceived the problem as being partly driven by corporate competitors such as IBM; and it added that no payment had yet changed hands. On the first point, it was subsequently determined that Mahugh had made a single edit to the talk page in August 2006, then one more after hiring Jelliffe. Mahugh indicated his primary regret was "that I didn’t fight harder for cleaning up the Office Open XML entry before we turned to somebody outside Microsoft", although he expressed skepticism that such an approach would have worked.
Jelliffe, editing under his own name, has been more active as a Wikipedia editor. Since disclosing the Microsoft offer, he has primarily been active on talk pages related to the standards in question, although he has directly edited Open standard and Standardization. On account of the publicity surrounding the incident, the articles on the standards have been quite heavily edited recently to address some of the points raised. Prior to registering an account, Jelliffe also created the Wikipedia article about himself back in November 2005.
While he did not know at the time that Wikipedia policy discourages such efforts, Jelliffe has since become more familiar with such details and posted an analysis of how the conflict of interest policy applies to his situation. He focused on the question of whether it was appropriate for him to "edit material relating to Microsoft". Regarding his assignment, Jelliffe concluded "there is no conflict of interest created by me accepting an editing job from Microsoft to neutrally edit articles that are not about Microsoft, and not about their products, but about technical aspects of an Ecma standard that is before ISO." [emphasis in original]
This drew a response from Tim Bray, an executive with Sun Microsystems and thus on the opposite side of the document standards debate, but also a "personal friend" of Jelliffe. Bray expressed his opinion that Jelliffe was "deeply wrong" about this issue, although he felt Jelliffe would be an evenhanded editor. Bray argued that the draft was a Microsoft creation and would never have become a standard without the company's efforts.
The incident produced some spinoff effects in addition to the main points of debate. After reading the TechCrunch summary, Microsoft employee Dare Obasanjo decided to conduct an "experiment" by making one-sided edits to the TechCrunch article. TechCrunch owner Michael Arrington took umbrage at this, calling it vandalism and saying he lost a great deal of respect for Microsoft after defending them originally.
Outside the immediate orbit of affected parties, real vandalism was promoted by one of the usual suspects. The Colbert Report's Stephen Colbert mentioned the story on Monday (using "wikilobbying" for his recurring segment, "The Wørd"), and encouraged users to edit articles to state that "reality has become a commodity". Vandalism ensued, with pages relating to "reality", "commodity", Colbert, and others quickly protected. A similar incident occurred in late July and early August (see archived story).
WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.
Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Williams works as a visual journalist for the US-based The Tampa Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida. He also has worked as an illustrator and designer at newspapers in Dubuque, Iowa, and Dayton, Ohio.
Another administrative board was deleted this week after a miscellany for deletion request. Wikipedia:Requests for investigation was nominated for deletion on Wednesday, and following discussion, was marked historical on Monday. On 10 January, the personal attack intervention noticeboard received the same fate, following a similar discussion.
Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: BozMo (nom), Mysid (nom), Yannismarou (nom), CJLL Wright (nom), Ryulong (nom), Kuru (nom), and Wizardman (nom).
No articles were promoted to featured status last week.
Seven articles were de-featured last week: LSD, Central processing unit, History of Central Asia, English poetry, Regular polytope, WGA screenwriting credit system, and Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Three lists were promoted to featured status last week: Yukon general elections, Prince Edward Island general elections (post-Confederation), and United States Navy ratings.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Battle of Cannae, United States Bill of Rights, Hasekura Tsunenaga, History of saffron, Alain Prost, Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and Hurricane Juan.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Vitrification, Blue Jay, Amsterdam, Downtown Long Beach, California, Radcliffe Camera, Contre-jour, and Barred Owl.
Eight pictures were promoted to featured status last week:
Page protection can now be set with expiry dates. Preexisting protections, or protections made with the field left blank, will be indefinite. (Andrew Garrett, bug 4133, r19567; fixes by Brion Vibber in r19595, r19597)
A new special page, Special:Protectedpages, shows a list of all protected and semiprotected pages on the wiki. As with many special pages, its results are cached, and they have not been generated for Wikimedia wikis as of the time of this writing. (Andrew Garrett, r19561)
Page patrolling is now logged for wikis with this feature enabled. An example can be seen in action here. (Rob Church, bug 8621, r19341)
It is now possible to search for deleted pages beginning with a particular string of characters on Special:Undelete. (Brion Vibber, r19365)
It is now possible for wikis to require a certain number of edits, as well as a certain registration time period, for users to become autoconfirmed. Thus, for instance, accounts that have existed for several weeks but have made fewer than five edits might be prevented from moving pages or so on. If a particular wiki would like this enabled for them, it can file a bug report after community agreement. (Andrew Garrett, bug 8391, r19376)
A new JavaScript variable, wgUserGroups, contains an array of the user's groups, which can be used (for instance) for displaying certain added elements only to sysops. (Carl Fürstenberg, bug 8712, r19524 and r19611)
MediaWiki:Uploadtext can now access the name of the image to be saved, as $1. This allows links to Commons, for instance, to prefill the name field, via links such as [http://commons.wikimedia.org/{{#if:$1|w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&wpDestFile=$1|wiki/Special:Upload}} Upload to the Wikimedia Commons instead!]. (Rob Church, bug 8671, r19527)
Cascading protection no longer applies to user CSS or JS subpages. This fixes an issue that prevented at least one bot from operating. (Andrew Garrett, r19549)
A few interface changes were made:
Some bugs were fixed:
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 three cases this week, and closed no cases.
