After a wheel war involving multiple administrators over the existence of the article on Daniel Brandt, a Wikipedia critic and activist, three sysops had their administrative powers temporarily stripped on Friday. Jimbo Wales then referred the case directly to the Arbitration Committee.
The incident occurred on Friday, 23 February, beginning at 12:53 UTC, when Yanksox deleted the article, with the summary "privacy concerns, more trouble than it is actually worth. Are you people even human?". At 13:54, Cool Cat placed the article on deletion review. Beginning at 15:47, and continuing over the next two hours, the page was deleted five more times, and undeleted six times. While some of these moves were for various housekeeping moves (including worries over possible libelous revisions, and a minor GFDL violation), it was not immediately clear during the war which moves were done for good reason and which were not. At 22:48 UTC, nearly 5 hours after the last action, Jimbo Wales desysopped Yanksox, Geni, and Freakofnurture (the three administrators that had made more than one deletion or restoration), and made this statement on the incidents administrators' noticeboard:
I am referring this case directly to the ArbCom to look at possible remedies for all parties involved up to and including desysopping, blocking, etc. I have absolutely no opinion on the actual content question (Should we have an article about him? I don't care) but [its deletion log] is a disgrace.
Different people played different roles. I do not have time to sort it all out today, so I am referring most of it to the ArbCom. I have instantly desysopped Yanksox, though, because he's basically begging for it. I have temporarily desysopped Geni and Freakofnurture pending the ArbCom thinking it through.
Here's the action count:
Yanksox - out of process deletion coupled with an insult, 2 deletions
Geni - 3 restores
Freakofnurture - 2 restores
Bumm13 - 1 restore
Deskana - 1 delete
Doc Glasgow - 1 restore
Mailer Diablo - 1 restore
CesarB - 1 delete
I know how these things go. Some of the people involved were trying to calm things down. Others were merely trying to cause more disruption and fighting by engaging in inflammatory actions designed to outrage the other side. It is hard to sort it all out. This is why wheel warring is so bad.
The arbitration case mirrors that of a February 2006 wheel war case on a pedophilia userbox; in both cases, Wales temporarily desysopped key participants in the dispute. In that case, five administrators were desysopped; of those, one was resysopped immediately upon the case's closure, two were resysopped after a 3-14 day wait, and two (Carnildo and Karmafist) were not automatically resysopped (Carnildo was re-adminned in a contentious adminship request nearly seven months later, while Karmafist was banned by the community following other incidents).
The case is, as of press time, in the evidence phase. The workshop page has over 60 proposed principles, findings of fact and remedies. Among these are the desysopping of Yanksox, with the option to ban him from seeking adminship for one year, the desysopping of Bumm13 and Freakofnurture for three days, the desysopping of Geni for thirty days, with or without automatic resysopping, and the banning of Gaillimh for 10 days. In an intriguing development, Fred Bauder expressed a belief that Yanksox might be a sockpuppet of Brandt himself; however, a request for checkuser confirmed that the two were unrelated.
The case continues this week.
One year after Jimbo Wales deleted the article on Brian Peppers, with the instructions that the article not be created for at least a year, a deletion review ruled that the article should stay deleted. The debate sparked a thread on the administrators' noticeboard, and two requests for comment.
The article described a disabled man whose photograph was promoted as a meme on various websites. The article was deleted in June 2005 after an AFD; subsequent recreations were deleted as repostings of deleted material. After Tony Sidaway unprotected the article, it was recreated, and on 6 February, 2006, was deleted by UninvitedCompany, with the summary "Non-public figure; deletion requested by family". After a few weeks of wheel-warring over the page, Wales deleted the page on 21 February, 2006, and prohibited the article's recreation for one year, saying "if anyone still cares by then, we can discuss it" (see archived story).
Exactly one year to the day after Wales' deletion, Dave (since indefinitely blocked as a disruptive sockpuppet) brought the article to deletion review. The request garnered significant community input in the ten-and-a-half hours that it was open; the response was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the article deleted. JzG said:
"In the year or so since deletion, not one additional reliable source has been produced, and the sole reliable source is not primarily about Peppers but about the internet rumour that his mugshot was a fake (so fails the primary notability criterion by a long way); sole data is in relation to an offence about which we know next to nothing plus snickering at his appearance (so WP:BLP also says no thanks). No press coverage (local or otherwise) has been cited, no substantive details of the offence or the victim, no biographical data, no indication of what might have caused the supposed congenital deformity, no data on whether the wheelchair in the pictures is the result of a permanent disability ... the sum total of verifiable knowledge about Peppers is that he was convicted of a technical offence ... and some people with no scruples turned him into an unwilling participant in a freakshow."
Also arguing in favor of the article's deletion, Doc glasgow said,
"We can play our little in-house include/exclude games. And whether a church/school/company/garage band gets an article or not is of no existential significance. But this is different. This has ethical issues. With the powerful medium we have, come humanitarian responsibilities. There is a real world and real people out there and our actions have consequences. Carrying an article on a living person who simply an unfortunate non-entity, and having endless discussions that are permanently recorded all over the world-wide web, because it amuses us, or because we've some particular favoured wiki-philosophy is wrong. It is sick. It is morally unjustifiable. If we can't have a basic level of human decency, then what are we?"
Among those who disagreed was Everyking, who argued to allow the article's recreation:
"This isn't how I wanted the process to go; I'd hoped there would be discussion on the article talk first (still protected at this point, although it has at least been recreated with a link to this discussion) to decide on the best course of action, or, less optimistically, at least see what the "battle lines" look like after the passage of a year. Forced to plunge directly into a vote, I reluctantly vote recreate based on my long-standing view that Peppers is marginally notable, and a reasonable (but short) article can be crafted on the basis of our limited sources to satisfy the curiosity of those who want real, neutrally-presented information and not YTMND and such things."
The discussion was closed later that day by Samuel Blanning, who said "I'm snowball closing this early as there is clear, overwhelming consensus, and the length of this page after only half a day is already excessive to the point of ridiculousness. Further hand-wringing for its own sake only a) wastes our time and b) makes us look like idiots for devoting reams and reams of debate to a YTMND joke. Enough. Hopefully "Brian Peppers Day" 2008 will be celebrated by absolutely no-one, because we'll have completely forgotten about it 364 days before."
This closure was debated on the administrators' noticeboard; its closure was endorsed to varying degrees by all administrators commenting. Friday noted, "All useful arguments related to this issue are already well-known. It was pretty apparent to me that nothing good would have come from keeping this open longer." Starblind said, "I don't think there would have been any harm in letting it run one full day, but on the other hand I don't dispute the close either. Consensus was extremely clear, and among established editors it was truly overwhelming. 'Brian Peppers Day' has come and gone without any great cataclysm, and we all survived. Time to get back to building an encyclopedia." User badlydrawnjeff was one of the lone dissenters there, arguing "I wasn't seeing a lot of heavy trolling, honestly, and there, again, were not a lot of BLP issues - certainly not so many that couldn't be dealt with via editing. I guess it depends on whether you think a consensus can be based on incorrect reasoning - Wikipedia:Consensus certainly doesn't."
While the thread on the administrators' noticeboard continued, badlydrawnjeff initiated a request for comment on the closure. In his statement, badlydrawnjeff said:
"After 11 hours, Blanning shut down an ongoing deletion review without checking the arguments or weighing the evidence, instead inserting his own opinions into the matter. A proper close would have ended the discussion, and perhaps with an outcome that made sense and wasn't based on personal opinions rather than what's good for the project and what's reflected in our policies and guidelines. This did none of the above. This will likely be unpopular. I expect people who agree with his close to support him. I don't care."
At press time, an overwhelming percentage of users supported Blanning's closure. At press time, 40 users had endorsed Redvers' outside view: "This was never going to be anything other than an obvious "keep deleted". The "discussion" that was being held was generating heat but no light. Samuel Blanning therefore correctly used his judgment to end a broken process. Wikipedia processes exist to facilitate the creation of an encyclopedia. They are not a means unto themselves." A response by Newyorkbrad addressed whether an RFC was the right move: "I do not believe this is an appropriate use of the Requests for Comment process. Administrator conduct RfC's should be utilized in situations where the admin in question has engaged in a pattern of allegedly problematic or controversial behavior that the filing party believes needs to be changed. This procedure is not suitable for reviewing a single disputed decision, such as a DRV closing, and much less when the closing has received general approval in other forums and is being discussed exhaustively there." Comparatively, badlydrawnjeff's statement was certified by two other users, and endorsed by an additional two users.
On the RFC's talk page, Jimbo Wales emphasized the fact that his deletion was done in his capacity as an editor and administrator, not as "god-king": "My own role in this drama has been oft misunderstood. I understood my action as being enforcement of something the community had already decided (repeatedly) against endless trolling." On the discussions, Wales said "A healthy self-examination of what is working and not working in wikipedia is always a healthy thing, if undertaken in a friendly spirit and with the assumption of good faith. So I am glad to see that a vigorous discussion has developed around this case. This is one of the cases I can point to with some pride and say 'Wikipedia is still working'."
In a related matter, Doc glasgow submitted himself to self-RFC after he blocked Jmaynard for adding material that Doc glasgow had previously removed for violating the biographies of living persons policy. Participants on this RFC seemed to indicate that Doc glasgow was clearly acting in good faith, and his actions were correct, if not a bit broad or premature. Bryan peppers is the cousin of Bryan scamardella
Editor's note: The Wikipedia Signpost is an independent, community newspaper, and is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Any comments published on this page are the opinions of their author alone, and do not reflect the opinion of the Wikimedia Foundation.
In an event seemingly reminiscent of the Seigenthaler controversy that unfurled in the latter part of 2005, professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller is suing Miami-based education consulting firm Josef Silny & Associates, Inc. for posting defamatory statements on his Wikipedia biography. The statements, purporting that Zoeller was an alcohol and drug addict and a domestic abuser, were originally posted on 2006-08-28 by User:Damien Lynch and reposted twice, most recently by IP address 208.204.187.19 (an IP that appears to be related to Lynch) on 2006-12-20.[1]
Zoeller filed his case anonymously (under the name "John Doe") on 2007-02-13 in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The court filings state that he intended to mask his identity to "prevent or minimize unnecessary further injury to the Plaintiff's reputation." Zoeller and his lawyer Scott D. Sheftall are seeking damages in excess of $15,000 on counts of defamation, invasion of privacy (false light), and intentional infliction of emotional distress.[2] When confronted with these claims, a surprised Josef Silny expressed doubt that any of his 45 employees were responsible for the statements. He reported that he would have his computer consultant check into the situation.[3]
Sheftall could not sue Wikipedia because safe harbor provisions of federal law say that the provider of an interactive computer service cannot be held liable for the statements of its users. He plans to subpoena Wikipedia, though, in order to ascertain certain details of those who published the comments. Miami lawyer Thomas Julin doubts that the consulting firm can be held responsible. If the employer did not know about the statements made and it was unrelated to business, he says, then the employer could not be held liable.[3]
The edits in question were removed via selective deletion in December, after a request from Zoeller or a representative.
In a random polling of administrators about the implications of this situation, general consensus was that there were flaws in Wikipedia policy or it was not enforced as much as it should be. Pengo commented that "measures will need to be taken to keep biographies of living persons free of unsourced nonsense." The user also stressed that "these measures [cannot] affect the people editing the rest of Wikipedia." Marine 69-71 urged compulsory registration, suggesting that in problems like the Zoeller controversy, "part of the blame should go to our lenient 'Everyone can edit' policy."
Conversely, Bucketsofg stated that "we can't do much more than we've done so far: create policies like WP:BLP that demand higher standards of evidence." Pengo admitted that "far greater crimes [are] committed on Wikipedia [than living persons biographies vandalism]," suggesting that our efforts should be spent elsewhere: "I'm not so big on litigation-happy American society, which seeks payouts over restorative justice. I hardly think a lawsuit will improve the lives of any of the parties involved any more than a handshake and a "sorry" would....This case, by itself, surely will not have a huge affect on Wikipedia, but it does appear to be part of a growing trend of people getting upset about what's written about them on Wikipedia.... What's more important than settling this case is to put in place measures to stop further cases popping up...."
Several users noted the need for reliable sources. Aude said, "[We] need to be firm about enforcing the biographies of living persons policy and do everything we can. We need to be very firm about reliable sources.... Because there are so many articles and IMHO not enough active Wikipedians for the given workload, a lot of stuff gets added to these articles that goes unnoticed for too long. Dino suggested, "Maybe [create] a *public* "one strike and you're banned for a day, two for a month ..." type of policy. [Wikipedia] has become a victim of its own popularity, and must change with the times."
On Saturday, 24 February 2007, the Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia passed the 100,000 article milestone. Of these, 100 (approximately one in 1,000) are considered utmerkede artikler (the Bokmål equivalent of featured articles), and 278 (approximately one in 357) are considered anbefalte artikler (the Bokmål equivalent of good articles).[1] There are also six utmerkede lister (featured lists). There is no equivalent to the featured images. The 100,000th article was Ordulf av Sachsen (Ordulf, Duke of Saxony).
The latest additions to the list of utmerkede artikler are Niels Henrik Abel (Niels Henrik Abel) and Matematikkens historie (History of mathematics).[2] The latest additions to the list of anbefalte artikler are Giuseppe Garibaldi (Giuseppe Garibaldi) and Moderne krigføring (Modern warfare).[3]
The Bokmål Wikipedia currently has 64 administrators and around 38,000 registered users; that is, 590 users per administrator (compare to English, which has 3,229 users per administrator).[4] There are five bureaucrats, and no checkusers or oversighters. There is no Arbitration Committee, and no current plans of forming one.
The Norwegian Wikipedia (more about transition from Norwegian to Norwegian (Bokmål) below) was the first Scandinavian language Wikipedia to be opened, on 26 November 2001. It had some activity in the spring of 2002, but then there was no regular activity until the summer of 2003, when a group of students revived it. At this point, the Norwegian Wikipedia allowed for articles to be written in both written Norwegian standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk. The conventions of the time was that an article should keep the standard it had been written in, and not converted from one standard to another. This led to much debate, and on 31 July 2004, the Nynorsk Wikipedia (http://nn.wikipedia.org/) was created. The Norwegian Wikipedia would still allow for articles to be written in both standards, however, until a decision was finally made in the spring of 2005, when it was decided that the Wikipedia would be in Bokmål only. The Bokmål Wikipedia continues to be hosted on http://no.wikipedia.org/, even though the ISO 639-2 code for Bokmål is nb.[5]
Since March 2005, the Bokmål Wikipedia has featured featured articles from other Scandinavian language Wikipedias on its main page, as part of the "Skanwiki" cooperation with the Nynorsk and Danish Wikipedias (see related story). The Swedish Wikipedia, the largest Scandinavian-language Wikipedia, is not part of "Skanwiki", but Swedish featured articles are still featured on the other languages' main pages. Since May of 2006, the Bokmål Wikipedia has only showed one of the other languages' articles daily, to reduce the size of the main page: a Nynorsk article is featured on Monday, Thursday and Sunday; a Danish article on Tuesday and Friday; and a Swedish article on Wednesday and Saturday. Articles from other North Germanic Wikipedias, such as the Icelandic and Faroese Wikipedias, are featured on occasional Sundays.
The image policy on the Bokmål Wikipedia has become more strict recently, and now only allows for images from Commons. Local uploads are still possible, but are strongly discouraged, as there should be no need for uploading locally.[6]
The media in Norway has been using both the English and the Bokmål Wikipedia quite a bit; the Nynorsk one is more rarely referred to in media. All three of Norway's largest newspapers use Wikipedia as a source for infoboxes and other background information, and all have featured stories about Wikipedia. Local papers and business papers also often use Wikipedia as a background source for their articles, and many have featured stories about Wikipedia as well.
Since November 2006, the Bokmål Wikipedia has had a coöperation with the online magazine Vox Publica, called "Wikipedia-stafetten" ("the Wikipedia relay race"). The project is about scholars and scientists contributing articles to Wikipedia, then challenge other scholars to do the same. The project has only been a moderate success, with four people having contributed. The articles written are Offentlighet (Public sphere), Offentlig rom (Public space), Aud Richter (Aud Richter) and Drammensbiblioteket (Drammen library).[7]
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.
On Friday, Jimbo Wales appointed two arbitrators to the Arbitration Committee. Mackensen, a former arbitrator who resigned in the wake of minor controversy (see archived story), will replace Dmcdevit, who retired last week (see archived story). Essjay, a checkuser, bureaucrat and former chair of the mediation committee, will claim an expansion seat on the Committee. Both positions will expire in December 2007.
Due to malicious robot account creation, CAPTCHA images are now required to register a Wikipedia account. To help users who cannot read the images, a new process, request an account, has been created. Administrators are needed to watch the page and create accounts for these users. For more information, contact Ral315.
Alexa ranks for Wikipedia rose again this week. The daily traffic rose to 8th for the first time on Monday, 19 February, but dropped back to 9th on Wednesday. Wikimedia sites traffic ranks (updated Friday, 23 February) include:
| Site | 3-month rank | 1-week averages |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 12 | 10 |
| Meta/Commons/Wikispecies | 351 | 311 |
| Wiktionary | 2,255 | 2,338 |
| Wikibooks | 3,286 | 3,357 |
| Wikiquote | 3,596 | 3,626 |
| Wikimedia Foundation | 5,820 | 14,596 |
| Wikisource | 7,007 | 6,995 |
| Wikinews | 11,672 | 16,109 |
| Wikiversity | 21,899 | 23,452 |
Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikiquote showed small declines in rank; Wikinews and Wikiversity showed larger declines in rank. The sharp decline in rank for the Wikimedia Foundation website can be attributed to the end of the fundraiser; indeed, the site's rank had risen to about 1500 during the peak of the fundraiser, then declined sharply.
Wikipedia has again been mentioned on a prime-time U.S. sitcom. On 18 February, the American animated television series American Dad! episode entitled Black Mystery Month centered around the main character, Stan Smith and his son, Steve, discovering a plot involving peanut butter and the Civil War (a parody of The Da Vinci Code and other movies). Near the end of the episode, Stan says, "If only there was a place where you could make outrageous claims, without any proof, and millions of people would accept it as fact...", and the show cuts to Steve adding a Wikipedia article on The Truth about Peanut Butter. The article on Peanut butter was semi-protected shortly after the show aired to combat vandalism.
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:
Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Crum375 (nom), ProveIt (nom), Marskell (nom), Irishguy (nom), TimVickers (nom), James086 (nom) and Anetode (nom).
Twenty-seven articles were promoted to featured status last week: Pashtun people (nom), RNA interference (nom), Hurricane Isabel (nom), West Indian cricket team in England in 1988 (nom), Anton Chekhov (nom), Act of Independence of Lithuania (nom), The Turk (nom), David I of Scotland (nom), Houston, Texas (nom), El Hatillo Municipality, Miranda (nom), Peter Jennings (nom), Cannibal Holocaust (nom), Cricket World Cup (nom), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (nom), GameFAQs (nom), Nathu La (nom), Meteorological history of Hurricane Wilma (nom), Intelligent design (nom), Ellis Paul (nom), Mourning Dove (nom), Nagorno-Karabakh War (nom), Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (nom), Banksia epica (nom), Jupiter (nom), Red Barn Murder (nom), Mini Moke (nom) and George I of Greece (nom).
Three articles were de-featured last week: Carl Sagan, Battle of the Somme and Fanny Blankers-Koen.
One list was promoted to featured status last week: List of important operas.
One sound was promoted to featured status last week: .
No topics were promoted to featured status last week.
No portals were promoted to featured status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Mary Wollstonecraft, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Shadow of the Colossus, Ahmedabad, Oriel College, Enta Da Stage and Sviatoslav I of Kiev.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: F-15D Eagle, Battle of the Somme, Radomes, House Sparrow, Hopi Chipmunk, Ferrofluid and Lemon.
Four pictures were promoted to featured status last week:
Some changes to HTTP headers sent by MediaWiki should improve performance for users a long distance from the main server clusters of the Wikimedia Foundation (Tampa for almost all projects, Seoul for some East Asian-language projects). However, Tim Starling observed that "it's not as great a difference as we had hoped, barely user-visible. Research will continue." (Tim Starling and Brion Vibber, various revisions)
Superfluous links such as "next 200" and related links should no longer be shown on certain pages such as Special:Ipblocklist or Special:Listusers when there are no results. (Sui Min and Raimond Spekking, T10919, r20019, r20034)
Quickbar settings, which are used by some skins, can now be localized into different languages using MediaWiki:qbsettings-none, MediaWiki:qbsettings-fixedleft, MediaWiki:qbsettings-fixedright, MediaWiki:qbsettings-floatingleft, and MediaWiki:qbsettings-floatingright. (Niklas Laxström, T11032, r20033)
When there are no pages in a category, the "Pages in this category" heading will no longer be shown. (Raimond Spekking, T10132, r20039)
It is now possible for wikis to be configured to limit the rate at which e-mails can be sent. This was enabled for Wikimedia Foundation wikis, with up to 100 e-mails per hour per user account (or IP address, for anonymous users) permitted. By default, sysops and bureaucrats are exempt from this limit, as from all limits, but this is configurable. (Tim Starling; r20049, r20051, and r20052)
Images on image pages now have checkered backgrounds, so that any transparent parts will show up as checkers rather than white, light blue, or whatever other color is used by the wiki. (Leon Weber, r20065)
A workaround was instituted for Internet Explorer for Mac's poor handling of empty CSS/JS files. This could cause extremely slow loading of pages under some conditions. While this problem is fixed, IE/Mac has not been maintained since 2003, and users should consider switching to other browsers such as Camino or Safari. (Brion Vibber, T11044, r20018)
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 one case.
