First, it is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will announce his selections for new arbitrators this week, to replace Dmcdevit, who retired this week. To add this article to your watchlist, click here; it will be updated when the announcements are publicly released.
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Arbitrator Dmcdevit resigned this week, after just over a year of service. In announcing his resignation on his user page, Dmcdevit thanked the community, and indicated his desire to return to editing outside the sphere of arbitration:
In an IRC interview, Raul654 said that Jimbo's appointments had been posted to the Arbitration Committee's mailing list, and "barring unforeseen complications, an announcement should be coming [Tuesday] on new arbitrators."
The new Arbitrators were announced on Friday. Mackensen, who had briefly served on the Committee following his election to a one-year term in the January 2006 elections but resigned the following month, will take Dmcdevit's seat, which expires in December of this year. Essjay, meanwhile, who has been a bureaucrat since March 2006, will also serve until the end of this year.
Fierce controversy and some administrative confusion followed the writing of an essay called "Wikipedia is failing" this week. The essay, written by Worldtraveller, argues that Wikipedia is failing in some ways to become a "reputable, reliable reference work". Many Wikipedians took issue with the claims, but attempts to change the essay produced a subsidiary debate over the extent to which users can control the contents of essays they have written in project space.
The essay argues that the failure to produce featured or good quality content in a substantial number of the 'vital articles' identified as needing them, meant that Wikipedia was failing in its mission to become a "reputable, reliable reference work". It argues further that the substantial number of former featured articles is an indication of failure to maintain standards.
It goes on to observe that six years of work has produced only 3,000 articles of good or featured quality, which leaves 99.8% of articles not having been assessed as of good quality. In many cases, contends the essay, "they are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage". In debate, Worldtraveller observed that he had asked contributors to the Featured article candidates page if they thought every article had the potential to be featured, and had been given the clear answer "yes".
The essay was first created by Worldtraveller on 10 February, and in order to promote discussion he then advertised it on several noticeboards including the Village pump. Discussion started almost immediately there and on the essay's talk page, although the essay itself attracted no substantial edits.
On 14 February, the well known technology news website Slashdot linked to the essay, prompting a large number of vandalism edits from non-logged in users. The swift semi-protection of the essay attracted more publicity, and established users who disagreed with the general point it made began to edit it to conform with their analysis. These edits prompting Worldtraveller to protest and revert their edits. A rebuttal essay was started at "Wikipedia is not failing" by Jeff Carr.
Heathhunnicutt, whose edits to the original essay had been reverted by Worldtraveller, filed a request for mediation over their editing dispute; after it was rejected by Worldtraveller, he then filed a request for arbitration. This request did not receive the support of any arbitrators and was delisted. After Worldtraveller continued to revert edits to the essay, he and Willow were blocked by Kirill Lokshin for a violation of the three revert rule on 15 February. These blocks produced much debate over whether a user had the right to defend the general thesis of an essay they had written which was in Wikipedia project space, and whether the ownership of articles policy applied to essays.
While Worldtraveller was blocked, Cyde Weys moved a rewritten version of the essay to Worldtraveller's userspace on 16 February. As this removed it from the scope of the three revert rule, Worldtraveller was unblocked. Willow was unblocked at the same time; she wrote her own essay called "Evaluating Wikipedia as an encyclopedia". Later that day, JzG deleted the cross-namespace redirect. When a soft redirect was created instead, this was also deleted by JzG and turned into a protected deleted page by Nearly Headless Nick. After further discussion, JzG restored the essay to its original position on 17 February. On 19 February, Ta bu shi da yu nominated both the essay and rebuttal on Miscellany for deletion, but both debates were closed as a "snowball keep" by Radiant! after a few hours.
One early comment pointed to the Wikipedia general disclaimer which proclaims that "Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here". Those who disagreed with the approach of the essay pointed to the fact that many published encyclopaedias include poor quality and biased articles, which if they were on Wikipedia would be classed as stub articles, and that the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not include references but relied on its general reputation.
Others pointed out that many articles which are neither featured nor classed as good are still substantial and referenced, and some felt that the featured article candidate process was too restrictive and sometimes rejected articles for trivial and arbitrary reasons. One user identified a major failing of Wikipedia being that advocacy groups can use it to promote their cause in such a way as to make it prominent in Internet searches. Responding to a suggestion in the essay, some users tried the "10 random article test", clicking on Special:Random ten times and assessing each article's quality. This test produced mixed results.
The response Wikipedia is not failing essay argues that with 1.6 million articles, even if some of them are stubs, Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia ever known. It points to the fact that the number of articles on Wikipedia has shown sustained exponential growth. This essay considers that as a general encyclopaedia, Wikipedia coverage of diverse areas is generally good, and where it is not, there are active groups working to fill the gaps. The use of Wikipedia as a source in journalism and even in court judgments is mentioned as proof that, while Wikipedia does not claim reliability, some of its articles are in fact relied upon.
Information released by two different firms last week sheds some additional light on the nature of Wikipedia's continuing traffic growth. Internet traffic monitor Hitwise indicated that for the United States, roughly half of external traffic to Wikipedia comes from Google, with another 20% from other search engines. Meanwhile, competing analysis firm comScore reported that among US users, Wikipedia was one of the Internet's ten most popular websites in January.
Prompted by Danny Sullivan, Hitwise research director LeeAnn Prescott put together a summary of Wikipedia traffic coming from search engines. For the week ending 10 February, 2007, Hitwise showed 49.57% of Wikipedia traffic coming from Google. While Wikipedia's total traffic has increased significantly in the past year, Google's share has risen 19% in that period.
The overall proportion coming from all search engines, about 70%, has not changed as much; Prescott's accompanying chart indicates that traffic from Google grew largely at the expense of traffic from Yahoo. This is interesting when considering that in the competition for search market share generally, recent reports suggest that Google has cut into more of Microsoft's share than Yahoo's. Prescott also reported that among sites to which Google searches send the most traffic, Wikipedia was third behind Google Image Search and MySpace, at 1.87% of Google downstream traffic.
The issue of Wikipedia and search engine results has been the subject of some previous analysis, and the interdependent relationship gained significance in light of the media attention given to the financial health of the Wikimedia Foundation. Steve Rubel called for Google to revisit the possibility of defraying a significant portion of Wikimedia expenses, an idea that prompted its own media frenzy when it was discussed two years ago.
In the monthly report from comScore, Wikipedia sites ranked #9 on the list of most visited web properties in the United States for January, up from #13 in December. It should be noted that comScore ranks groups of sites in common ownership, not individual websites. The total number of unique visitors reported was 42,880,000. Measured against current population estimates, this would mean that of all the people in the US, about 14% visited Wikimedia sites in January. According to comScore's figures, the number of visitors is 24.4% of total internet users in the country.
While the number of Wikimedia visitors did increase 11% from the previous month, the higher ranking was also partly due to fluctuations in the other sites on the list. Web properties passed by Wikimedia since December included those of Wal-Mart, digital properties of Viacom and The New York Times, and the company formerly known as Apple Computer. Wal-Mart's website dropped significantly down the list as the surge of holiday shopping traffic ended.
As indicated, all of these figures are from the United States, as analysis of global internet traffic is less developed. Previous reports indicate that Wikimedia draws an even larger share from outside the US, however. On a global basis, comScore ranks Wikimedia sites as the world's 6th-most-visited web properties.
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.
Wikipedia was down for about 25 minutes on Saturday, 17 February. One of the servers that handles text load balancing failed and service was restored after this function was moved to a different server.
Work has been done to merge Verifiability and No Original Research into a single policy, Wikipedia:Attribution. Discussion is underway on Wikipedia talk:Attribution; the proposed move/merger has sparked significant discussion.
The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year competition has reached the second and final round. For the second round, which lasts through Wednesday, 28 February, the 321 pictures on the shortlist have been narrowed to the top 11 (due to a tie). Users with at least 100 edits on any local project or Commons can vote on their favorite of the 11 photos. The finalists can be seen below:
After the creation of the meta-template {{ArticleHistory}}, which was designed to reduce the number of talk-page notices relating to the featured and good article processes, (see archived story), its proponents created another template, {{WikiProjectBanners}}, meant to combine all WikiProject-related templates into one. The template's creation and usage has been supported by many users involved in the featured article process, including Raul654, Dr pda, Gimmetrow, Kirill Lokshin, and SandyGeorgia. An example of the template's usage can be found at Talk:Jogaila.
The template, which was created on 5 February, was nominated for deletion on 19 February. Ned Scott said in nominating the template for deletion, "We all agree some talk pages have gotten out of hand with their template banners, but not all ideas are good for how to clean up the situation. This template basically just shoves all the WikiProject templates of a given talk page into a drawer, rendering the banners useless. If you're going to do that then you might as well just not use the banners in the first place. The hide-and-forget method is a sloppy way of dealing with this situation."
In the template's defense, SandyGeorgia noted that "While there are a few exemplary WikiProjects that keep up with the articles they have tagged, these projects seem to be in the extreme minority. Not only do most Projects not contribute to writing or maintaining the articles they tag; months of experience at WP:FAR shows that most of the Projects make no effort whatsoever to preserve featured status on articles that have fallen into neglect in spite of repeated notifications to the Projects when articles come up for review. ... If an editor needs to locate the Projects, they are in the banner, and full functionality to the Projects is retained. I often am restricted to a slow dialup (when I travel); another reason to consider the need to clean up extreme talk page clutter." In response to a comment about how the template hides WikiProject assessments, Raul654 replied, "It hides them by default because there is no good reason they should be displayed by default. The majority of talk page visitors do not need or want that information. They do need and want a clutter-free talk page. The ones who need them know damn-well where to find them." Discussion on the TFD is currently heavily against the template's deletion; on the template's talk page, a change to another version of the template that shows the names of all WikiProjects seems to be preferred.
A recent piece of legislation introduced in the United States Senate would force libraries and schools to block access to "social networking sites". Because the term "social networking" was not defined in the text of the bill, blogs surmised that the bill might force public institutions to ban Wikipedia. In response to the posts, Wikimedia Foundation general counsel Brad Patrick said, "I'm still chuckling over this, only it's *real*. This is REAL LIFE and a REAL US SENATOR (one with a startling ignorance about things technological) offering this bill. We aren't however, commercial, and as long as we stay that way, it will be awfully hard to put us in this category. Shame on the reporters for jumping to the obviously incorrect (but salaciously inflammatory) headline."
Wikipedia is being cited more and more often by patent authors. A Google patent search shows that 111 patents cite Wikipedia, including patents filed by Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Samsung, the University of Illinois, the United States Secretary of the Navy, Lucent, Boeing, Epson, NVIDIA, the United States Secretary of State, Texas Instruments, Lenovo, Nintendo, Airbus, DaimlerChrysler, Carnegie Mellon University, Sony, Sun Microsystems, and the University of California.
The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet has begun to occasionally add contextual links to Wikipedia within their articles. The links go to articles on persons and concepts mentioned in the article; for example, an article about nominees for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize linked to the articles on Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier. Another article on Hugo Chávez links to Augusto Pinochet, Canal Metropolitano Televisión, axis of good and axis of evil.
Eleven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Cuchullain (nom), Hu12 (nom), Riana dzasta (nom), VegaDark (nom), Persian Poet Gal (nom), Heimstern (nom), ShadowHalo (nom), Zzuuzz (nom), Delldot (nom), Llama man (nom), and Heligoland (nom).
Eleven articles were promoted to featured status last week: Delhi (nom), Roman-Spartan War (nom), Jenna Jameson (nom), Military brat (U.S. subculture) (nom), Thomas Playford IV (nom), Law (nom), Bill Russell (nom), John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (nom), Solar System (nom), Maserati MC12 (nom), and 2000 Sri Lanka Cyclone (nom).
Six articles were de-featured last week: Flag of South Africa, Baseball, Marilyn Manson (band), Oakland Cemetery, British East India Company, and Igor Stravinsky.
Three lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Florida hurricanes (pre-1900), United States Navy enlisted rate insignia, and List of X-Men episodes.
One sound was promoted to featured status last week: .
One topic was promoted to featured status last week: Michigan State University.
Five portals were promoted to featured status this month: Portal:Physics, Portal:Military of Australia, Portal:Ukraine, Portal:Hinduism, and Portal:Utah. Portal:Hinduism became the 50th featured portal; Portal:Utah, the most recently promoted portal, was featured portal #51.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: DNA, California Gold Rush, Charles Atangana, Flag of Lithuania, Polar coordinate system, Sly & the Family Stone, and The Four Stages of Cruelty.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Curculionidae, Lantana, Göttingen, Acarina, Zabriskie Point, Erg Chebbi, and Achilles.
Five pictures were promoted to featured status last week:
Special:Protectedpages should now update in real time, rather than being cached. (Andrew Garrett, r19941)
On Special:Log, the log types in the drop-down menu will now be sorted alphabetically. (Ashar Voultoiz, r19980)
Euros and pounds should now be treated as currency by sortable tables. (Brion Vibber, r19989)
Irrelevant options on Special:Blockip will now be hidden depending on whether the blocking user has entered a username, IP address, or IP range. (Brion Vibber, r19997)
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 cases this week, and closed no cases.
