Actually, I'm only temporarily the editor this week as Ral315 has been called away on a business trip. This may cause a slight delay, a few hours for posting on the wiki or possibly a few days for readers who wait for one of our delivery methods.
Meanwhile, we introduce something new and a little different this week. As the Signpost evolves, we get a chance to try out some of the elements you may find in other newspapers that supplement the basic news reporting. We've been running a weekly comic for a while, and now we have the opportunity to present a book review, covering a recent book that deals in part with Wikipedia and has provoked a lot of debate. While venturing into content that reflects personal views is rare for us, I hope you'll find Thespian has tried to present a balanced review.
As always, we appreciate your feedback about these features on Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost, and would also be happy to consider ideas from people who want to develop new reporting or features. We realize that not every experiment here will be to everyone's tastes, but we hope everyone can still find something useful in the Signpost every week.
Möller, Walsh retain seats; Brioschi elected
16 July 2007
Board election series: Elections closed, results pending
9 July 2007
Board elections open
2 July 2007
Board election series: An interview with the candidates
25 June 2007
Board election series: Election information
18 June 2007
Board candidacies open, elections planned
11 June 2007
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Möller, Walsh retain seats; Brioschi elected |
Here is the original version of this historical template, from 2007:
 | |
| 2007 Board of Trustees elections A Wikipedia Signpost series | |
|---|---|
| June 11 | Candidacies open |
| June 18 | Election information |
| June 25 | Candidate interviews |
| July 2 | Elections open |
| July 9 | Elections closed |
| July 16 | Election results |
This week, the Signpost covers the results of this year's Board elections.
In an announcement late Thursday evening, the Wikimedia Board Election Steering Committee announced the results of the 2007 Board Elections: Incumbents Erik Möller (Eloquence) and Kathleen Walsh (Mindspillage) were re-elected for a two-year term, with Frieda Brioschi (Frieda) narrowly edging out incumbent Oscar van Dillen (Oscar) for the third and final seat.
Möller finished in first, with 1,671 votes (40.1% of the vote), and Walsh finished in second with 1,427 votes (34.2%). The race for the third and final position was unusually close, with third (Brioschi) and fourth (van Dillen) separated by just 20 votes, or less than one-half of one percent of the 4,170 valid ballots cast in the election. In three prior board elections, the closest vote was a difference of just eleven votes in 2004, when Florence Devouard defeated Möller, 269-258 for one of the two seats; however, that vote was a difference of just over one percent.
Behind Brioschi and Van Dillen, who held 1,254 and 1,234 votes, respectively, was Michael Snow, who took fifth with 1,229 votes, just five votes behind Van Dillen. Danny Wool finished in sixth with 1,217 votes.
The Board of Trustees officially approved the results, and all users have officially taken their positions, which will last until July 14, 2009.
This year's elections set a record, by far, for the number of valid ballots cast. The 2004 elections received 1,088 votes; in 2005, the elections received 1,484 votes, and in 2006, 2,347 ballots were cast; this year's 4,170 valid ballots represent a 78% increase over the elections held in 2006. This year's elections also show much more turnout from the English Wikipedia than in previous years; in 2005 and 2006, English Wikipedia voters accounted for 48.92% and 45.27% of the vote, respectively. In this year's elections, English Wikipedia voters accounted for 58.67% of all votes (statistics were not kept for 2004's elections).
The final results of the election were as follows:
| # | Name | Username | Votes | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Erik Möller | Eloquence | 1,671 | 40.1% |
| 2 | Kathleen Walsh | Mindspillage | 1,427 | 34.2% |
| 3 | Frieda Brioschi | Frieda | 1,254 | 30.1% |
| 4 | Oscar van Dillen | Oscar | 1,234 | 29.6% |
| 5 | Michael Snow | Michael Snow | 1,229 | 29.5% |
| 6 | Danny Wool | Danny | 1,217 | 29.2% |
| 7 | Yann Forget | Yann | 1,153 | 27.6% |
| 8 | Kim Bruning | Kim Bruning | 1,124 | 27.0% |
| 9 | Steve Dunlop | UninvitedCompany | 1,047 | 25.1% |
| 10 | River Tarnell | Kate | 889 | 21.3% |
| 11 | Stephen Kennedy | Kingboyk | 864 | 20.7% |
| 12 | Pawel Dembowski | Ausir | 693 | 16.6% |
| 13 | Michael "Chad" Horohoe | ^demon | 672 | 16.1% |
| 14 | Artur Jan Fijalkowski | WarX | 571 | 13.7% |
| 15 | Jason Safoutin | DragonFire1024 | 495 | 11.9% |
The next elections to the Board of Trustees will be in June or July 2008. Florence Devouard's seat is currently the only seat up for re-election, though current board expansion plans call for two new seats to be added, with elections for these seats in June 2008. If these plans are enacted as anticipated, it is unclear whether the seats will be filled temporarily, as was the case when Walsh and van Dillen took expansion seats in December 2006, or whether they will first be filled by the 2008 elections.
July 30: Interviews with the elected trustees.
A United Kingdom official has denied an attempt to register F1 as a trademark for Formula One racing in the UK, relying in part on Wikipedia to make the decision that F1 describes a form of motor racing rather than being seen as a trademark.
The decision (PDF) was made last month by David Landau of the UK Intellectual Property Office, acting on an application by Formula One Licensing BV, the commercial rights arm of the Formula One Group of companies. The application was opposed by a French company, Racing-Live, which operates a multilingual network of motor racing websites. Concurrently, the Formula One Group is opposing a Racing-Live trademark application for its F1-Live website. The Formula One Group has previously litigated before the World Intellectual Property Organization over similar issues involving f1.com, eventually buying that domain after its attempt to deny the previous owner's rights was rejected.
Evidence presented in the case included material from the Wikipedia articles on Formula One (which is a featured article), Formula One engines, the contents of Category:Racing formulas, and excerpts from articles about some of the other formulas. Also cited were other sources using F1 as an abbreviation for Formula One, referring to that as one of several auto racing types, and news reports about attempts to start a rival F1 series. The Formula One Group currently has an effective monopoly over these races, but Landau concluded this did not support considering F1 a trademark.
Commenting on the evidence, Landau noted the intrinsic "self-editing" of Wikipedia and its ability to produce "potentially libelous statements." However, he commented that "inherently, I cannot see that what is in Wikipedia is any less likely to be true than what is published in a book or on the websites of news organizations." As the parties did not express any concerns about this evidence, he concluded that it could be taken "at face value."
While Wikipedia has appeared in a number of court decisions over the past several years (see archived story), these have more often been passing references or use for background information. Citing Wikipedia as evidence to help decide a matter in controversy is much rarer. However, in a trademark case like this one, where the question is in part about the popular usage of a term, use of Wikipedia may be understandable.
Last week, the Signpost reported that seven administrators were nominated to be bureaucrats. This week, the Signpost will report the results of the nominations.
Deskana (talk · contribs · rights · renames) Closed at 21:12, 10 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 117/12/3
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Deskana 2
Deskana had an unsuccessful nomination that closed on 30 January 2007. User:Raul654 closed this nomination as successful and promoted him.
Andrevan (talk · contribs · rights · renames) Closed at 03:00, 11 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 78/12/2
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Andrevan3
Andrevan has had 2 unsuccessful nominations. The first which closed on 16 November 2004 can be found at Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Andrevan. The second which closed on 3 September 2005 can be found at Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Andrevan2. User:Raul654 closed this nomination as successful and promoted him.
Majorly (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) Closed at 13:41, 4 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 35/12/2
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Majorly 2
Majorly had an unsuccessful nomination that closed on 5 April 2007. The nomination was withdrawn by Majorly. He withdrew with the statement, "This does not have a chance of passing. I agree and admit to being confrontational, but I thought that I could be trusted to view others opinions. Some of the comments have been fair; some not, some just really hurtful, the kind I'd like to see banned from RfAs. There's several people I knew would oppose me, but not this much, and it's quite funny how they say I should assume good faith morer, when they are not themselves. I'm probably one of the top five users active on RfAs; I've commented in hundreds, been pleased to nominate 10+ new admins, and even though I carefully explained why I question people, it seems certain users do not want me as a Bureaucrat. There's 5 other nominations up at this time - mine has the honour of being the only one to fail, so I'm going to close it early, since it hasn't the slightest chance when people oppose others as willingly as they do. It's ironic, the guy who tries to eliminate horrible, unhelpful opposes gets a load of them thrown back in his face. Ah well...".
Husond (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) Closed at 18:39, 10 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 80/22/3
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Husond
User:Raul654 closed this nomination as unsuccessful. There were various concerns including ones involving his ability to determine consensus in an RFA.
A Man In Black (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) Closed at 10:31, 11 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 29/38/5
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/A Man In Black
User:Andrevan closed this nomination as unsuccessful. A Man In Black's block log resulted in multiple opposes to his nomination.
RyanGerbil10 (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) Closed at 02:13, 12 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 33/14/5
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/RyanGerbil10 2
User:Cecropia closed this nomination as unsuccessful. RyanGerbil10's ability to determine consensus in a Request for Adminship was a major concern in the nomination.
Ral315 (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) Closed at 01:31, 13 July 2007 (UTC) Final tally: 124/27/6
Wikipedia:Requests for bureaucratship/Ral315
User:Raul654 closed this nomination as unsuccessful. The fact that Ral315 would continue as editor of the Signpost was a major concern in the nomination.
Perceived trends in the deletion of articles led to a new Wikipedia organization after a number of Wikipedian bloggers voiced concerns. Following recent arguments that substantial numbers of articles were being inappropriately deleted, the blog discussion prompted the creation last Friday of an Article Rescue Squadron, dedicated to saving articles on "perfectly notable topics" from deletion.
Ben Yates, who runs a Wikipedia blog, launched the group on the premise that many of the articles nominated for deletion are in jeopardy primarily because they are targeted as being "ill-formed", often by inexperienced Wikipedia contributors, even though the topics they cover would be appropriate subject matter for Wikipedia. A primary concern was that "making sure that articles about notable topics don't get deleted because of writing style, or because they're stubby." His idea drew on examples highlighted by Andrew Lih in a provocative blog post on Tuesday titled "Unwanted: New articles in Wikipedia".
Lih pointed to an entry he himself recently started, about PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, which was tagged within an hour for speedy deletion. The tag used was the {{db-empty}} template, even though the article consisted of a complete sentence identifying the subject, a properly formatted external link to Getler's PBS biography, and a stub template. A quick expansion explaining his background as an experienced journalist and the first ombudsman appointed at a major American television network kept the article from being deleted.
Near the same time several other Wikipedian bloggers posted about deletion issues, including Geoff Burling [1], Urpo Lankinen [2], and Kelly Martin. Martin criticized the deletion of an article on web startup Pownce, a project of entrepreneur Kevin Rose that recently received a round of publicity. Mentioning the fear that Wikipedia is being used to boost the profile of other projects, Martin commented, "Basically, any web property less prominent than Wikipedia itself may not have an article on Wikipedia under the current mindset." Pownce had been through speedy deletion along with both Deletion review and Articles for deletion before Lih stepped in to restore the article.
The Article Rescue Squadron has begun signing up members, including both Yates and Lih along with current arbitrator Matthew Brown and former arbitrator Rebecca. Examples of inappropriate deletions were being collected along with strategies for dealing with the problem. The launch also prompted an extended discussion on the English Wikipedia mailing list. Yates tried to emphasize that the effort is about improving articles that might be threatened with deletion, not mobilizing to control deletion debates, but some thought the concept still fundamentally questioned the judgment of those nominating articles for deletion.
Cultural issues with the overall deletion process, and concerns about the perceived detriment to Wikipedia, have long been fodder for debate. A previous cycle in 2005 was particularly intense, something manifested most dramatically when Ed Poor deleted the page then known as "Votes for deletion" (see archived story). After several previous alternatives stalled, early 2006 saw the introduction of Proposed deletion, a more lightweight process that relieved some of the pressure from the volume of nominations at Articles for deletion.
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, 2007
Andrew Keen
One of the hardest parts of reading The Cult of the Amateur is the temptation to agree with the author, Andrew Keen. It's tempting, when involved in an edit war, to pick up the book, read it, and say, "My god, he's right! People who don't have a clue are RUINING the Internet!", before stepping back and realizing, he's also talking about you.
Keen opens his anti-Web 2.0 polemic (and he admits in the afterword that is exactly what he was aiming for) by stating that Web 2.0 technology and attitudes are "blurring the lines between traditional audience and author, creator and consumer, expert and amateur".
Obviously, I approach this subject differently than Keen, and have for a while. One section of my personal website gets about 200 hits a month because someone else cited it on Wikipedia; that same content, which I researched and assembled about 12 years ago, was covered at the time by the Wall Street Journal in an article about how the Web could provide information that wasn't available in regular resources. The information that I created was never put online by the company in question; eventually, they just started referring people to my page (how the WSJ found the information).
Keen's short book focuses almost entirely on blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and of course Wikipedia. Like many people who are arguing against the current state of the Internet, he disregards the main "amateur" things that preceded them, such as BBSes, regular web pages, and shareware, in order to make his points. Indeed, the World Wide Web started out collaboratively, initially developed as a system at CERN to keep track of internal information.[3] If you had the most recent information, you updated it. Andrew Keen was an entrepreneur whose reputation came in the late-90s dot-com bubble, and when reading the book the reader perceives that he'd like to go back to the time when only the highly-technical people (and the people who could afford to hire them) could post to the web. He wants to install gates on a system that, when you return to the very basic DARPA-plans for an Internet, was designed to be amorphous and decentralized.
Keen points out that in the past, "our collective intellectual history has been driven by the careful aggregation of truth - through professionally edited books and reference materials, newspapers, and radio and television". Much in the same way that he doesn't seem to see through to the original intent of both Internet and World Wide Web, Keen has an idealized, end-of the-20th-century view of that aggregation. Until a few centuries ago, most information was aggregated by religious bodies, which was followed by a period of free-wheeling publication (much of the writing of the Founding Fathers of the United States would be considered self-published today; indeed, the first American newspapers were quite comparable to political zines, published mostly to advance personal ideas). This was followed by a century-and-a-half of corporate-controlled presses, and researchers are still working to find out truths about events that were sanitized or covered up in the early parts of this century. Despite the sheer flood of information, it is not a bad thing that researchers in 100 years will be able to find out just what a person who "just wants to talk" had to say.
The modern press, with highly professional editors, attempts at neutrality, fair-handed coverage and more, is a very recent development, not the megalith of information that Keen envisions it as being, and tells his readers it was. One of Keen's main arguments is that "few of us have any training, knowledge, or hands-on experience to generate any kind of real perspective". The feeling that I, as a web developer, occasional journalist, and active user in the technology lumped into "Web 2.0", come away with is that Keen does not possess the knowledge and experience to give the readers of his book the very perspective and authority he wishes information online to have.
In many science fiction apocalyptic futures, people are shown not caring at all about their environment, becoming passive consumers of... well, one can't even call it information (think of things like Max Headroom and Idiocracy). Unlike Keen, I don't think that it's a bad thing when I see a woman wearing a shirt that cheekily announces, "I'm Blogging This"; it means that she's paying attention to what's going on, even if that attention turns out to become a narrow slice of what happened. Certainly, there are hundreds of sites out there that discuss the inane, and sites where people who barely seem able to put a coherent sentence together want to discuss George W. Bush's foreign policies. But being involved enough to want to post a video blog, whether it decries Livejournal's Strikethrough or the tragedies in Darfur means that you're engaged, reacting, and speaking out. Keen may not realize it, but his work reads far more like a disillusioned Usenet post than a book.
NB: This comic is from April 2. Its subject, Charles Lane, died this week; as a result, the comic has been updated and has been re-run.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Charles Lane (actor)". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Smith magazine interviewed the Wikipedian with the largest number of edits, Rich Farmbrough (who as of press time, has over 165,000 edits to his account). Despite his large number of edits, Farmbrough says that he is not obsessed with Wikipedia, instead saying that his involvement, which largely involves minor edits, is instead a manifestation of his desire for continuous improvement. In fact, he mentions editcountitis, and states that he believes others have made more valuable contributions to Wikipedia. Farmbrough also weighs in on the issue of the value of using Wikipedia as a resource, and comments that it depends on what you are looking for and what other resources you have available. Farmbrough, who also runs the bot SmackBot, says that he is interested in keeping Wikipedia from "stultification", following a childhood interest in building a repository of all knowledge.
The Plain Dealer reported that there were substantial errors with the article about Steve LaTourette, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives. For example, the article claimed that he disrupted a visit by Prince Charles to the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, a claim which was removed by an anonymous user. It appears that the inaccuracies were the result of vandalism, and in an interesting move, LaTourette's office would not correct the entries lest it appear as political interference.
Jorge Brouwer is suing Microsoft for damage caused by the Xbox 360, claiming that the game consoles scratch discs, a problem that the company denies is "widespread". His lawyer said that he found reports of scratching found by a Dutch television program as reported on Wikipedia: this appears to be this section.
Three users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Jaranda (nom who was reconfirmed to administrator status after being an administrator since July, 2006.), Butseriouslyfolks (nom), and Oldwindybear (nom).
Two users were granted bureaucrat status via the Requests for Bureaucratship process this week: Deskana (nom) and Andrevan (nom) (see related story).
Two bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: NrhpBot (task request) and DeadBot (task request).
Ten articles were promoted to featured status last week: Brownsea Island Scout camp (nom), European Parliament (nom), Kingdom Hearts (nom), Deinonychus (nom), Michael Brown Okinawa assault incident (nom), Geology of the Lassen volcanic area (nom), Backmasking (nom), Hey Ya! (nom), Bengali Language Movement (nom), and Elizabeth Needham (nom).
Nine articles were de-featured last week: Geography of India (nom), RMS Titanic (nom), Cyberpunk (nom), CPU cache (nom), Margaret Thatcher (nom), San Jose, California (nom), Isaac Asimov (nom), Niagara Falls (nom), and Alchemy (nom).
Seven lists were promoted to featured status last week: Gwen Stefani discography (nom), List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Greater Manchester (nom), List of municipalities in British Columbia (nom), List of islands of Scotland (nom), List of WWE Women's Champions (nom), and List of sister cities in Maryland (nom).
No portals were promoted to featured status last week.
No topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Building of the World Trade Center, Daylight saving time, Mourning Dove, The Wire, Climate of India, Johannes Kepler, and Holden VE Commodore.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Japanese Instrument of Surrender, Pomegranate, Eye, Manzanar War Relocation Center, Virginia Opossum, Holdridge life zone, and Arachnida.
Nine pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.
[[../#section]] now works correctly. (r24046, bug 9151)A MediaWiki software bug occurred on 10 July, 2007 for slightly over half an hour, causing edits and reverts to numerous unrelated pages across Wikipedia to affect Wikipedia:Wikipedians, rather than the page that the user making the edit was trying to revert to. It started with this edit by Tiago Heitor, which was to an unrelated article. Thinking it was vandalism, KnowledgeOfSelf reverted the edit, but then reverted it back. Shortly after, another completely unrelated revert occurred, to a version that was from another totally unrelated page. After many continuous edits and reverts, KnowledgeOfSelf decided to report the problem to the Admins' noticeboard. The problem persisted while three separate threads were posted to the noticeboard. After some 50 or so strange edits, W.marsh protected the page while it was still in chaos. Although the page was protected, administrators were still accidentally posting edits to the page. The error was fixed when Brion VIBBER notified the village pump that he had accidentally broken it, and that the problem was resolved. Still, users complained that talkpage reversions were taking them into Wikipedia:Wikipedians.
On a technical level, the bug was caused by a typo in r23973, which was fixed immediately afterwards in r23974; Wikipedia:Wikipedians was the page causing trouble because it contained the revision with revision number 1. (This is not Wikipedia's first edit, because other software has been used before MediaWiki in the history of Wikipedia; that page has earlier revisions with higher numbers, and the number given is likely due to the transition to new 'phase II' software during January 2002.)
{{DISPLAYTITLE:correct page name}} allows for changes in how the page's title is displayed, as long as the displayed title is a valid link to that page (therefore, the magic word is mostly useful for lowercasing the first letter of a page's name). (r23393, bug 7255)
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases last week. No new cases were accepted, although several new requests for arbitration are currently being considered.
In these cases, the Arbitration Committee announced its final decision last week:
These cases are in the evidence stage of consideration, during which editors may submit evidence and workshop proposals for consideration by the arbitrators:
The "under review" category refers to situations where the arbitrators are examining a party's compliance with a prior ArbCom decision, without opening a full new case to address the matter.
In these cases, a proposed decision has been drafted and is being voted on by the arbitrators:
An arbitrator has proposed closing the committee's consideration and finalizing the decision in this case:
