Despite previous plans to reenable the creation of Wikipedia articles by editors without accounts, the change has yet to take place and faces significant community opposition. The idea of conducting an experimental evaluation of the effects, as in the original announcement of a 30-day trial beginning 9 November, now seems to be in limbo.
With a general consensus on the move unclear in either direction, the anticipated start date saw instead a request for comment to "assess whether this is a viable idea and the conditions under which it would occur." Although initially launched by Ryan Postlethwaite with a statement supporting the experiment, it quickly attracted a sizable group of editors against it.
At press time, two comments opposing the experiment each had more contributors endorsing them than Postlethwaite's original statement (not surprisingly, there was significant overlap between the two groups opposing). A number of editors argued that from observation of new pages, they could already predict the undesirable results the trial would produce. As Tim Vickers put it, "Sticking your finger into an electric shredder is not a sensible experiment".
In another comment Cryptic, describing himself as someone who "used to do a great deal of new page triage" but no longer finds it beneficial, came up with some arguments as to why allowing the change could actually improve the effectiveness of patrolling. He pointed out that with disposable accounts, vandals rarely encounter more than a 24-hour autoblock on their IP address, while tracking the individuals responsible to use escalating block durations is impractical without excessive use of the Checkuser function.
One development may leave open the possibility for the experiment to take place. Both authors of the primary statements opposing the experiment, Vickers and W.marsh, also signed on to another comment by John Broughton indicating that he might support it but considered the parameters poorly defined. Broughton (incidentally, also the author of a forthcoming book that is a guide on contributing to Wikipedia, part of the O'Reilly Missing Manuals series) argued that the evaluation criteria and measures for success were lacking. He said the experiment needed those to be conclusive, otherwise the only guaranteed result would be "a fight about what to do at the end of the 30 days".
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Exploding whale". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. In the first three weeks of the fundraiser, about 21,000 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation had raised about $625,000.
The large bump realized from changing the sitenotice displayed at the top of all Wikimedia projects was short-lived; however, over the last few days, donations were still up 1-7% on comparable days of the week. The Monday total of $23,748.94 was also 25% higher than the lowest donation total of this fundraiser, on November 1, when $18,957.87 was donated.
Interestingly, this drive has resulted in a surprising number of small donations. The number of donations below $0.30, often made by users critical of Wikipedia policies who wish to have their comments displayed on the donation website, is about four times that of last year's drive. To combat this, the contributions page, by default, shows only those contributions equivalent to $5 or more, though comments can still be viewed by filtering contributions to view all donations, regardless of value.
Honolulu International Airport's WikiWiki bus system will be replaced by an air-conditioned moving sidewalk. The bus system, dubbed WikiWiki for "wiki", a Hawaiian language word for "fast", became the namesake of Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb. The word "wiki" soon became synonymous for most types of collaborative editing software, and has since become known within much of the general public as a synonym for "Wikipedia".
Steward elections are set to commence on November 26. New stewards will be up for election, and current stewards will be up for re-confirmation. Stewards must be at least 18 years old, and of legal age in their jurisdiction, at the time the elections end (December 16), and must be willing to identify themselves to the Wikimedia Foundation. They must also have an account on Meta-Wiki, and knowledge of multiple languages, though not required, is usually regarded as helpful. Prospective candidates can apply until the elections begin.
Candidates must receive at least 30 support votes, and at least 80% support, to be among those eligible to become a steward. The final decision rests with the Wikimedia Foundation. Voters, meanwhile, must have at least 3 months experience on their home project, and have a link to that home project on their Meta-Wiki account.
For the re-confirmation discussions, votes are not used. Instead, users can submit complaints about various issues; inactivity, for example, can result in an automatic loss of steward powers. Current and newly elected stewards review the complaints listed, and a majority of stewards requesting removal of a user's status will result in the loss of that status.
Nominations for the December 2007 Arbitration Committee Elections remained open this week. This week, Adam Cuerden, JoshuaZ, NHRHS2010, Phil Sandifer, Stifle, and Thebainer nominated themselves for the position, bringing the total number of candidates up to 27.
Of the five current arbitrators, only Raul654 will stand for re-election. Fred Bauder, Mackensen, Neutrality and SimonP have all indicated they will not run for another term. These five seats will expire in 2007; it has not yet been noted whether any other seats will be added or replaced.
Why the idea of paid entries annoys Wikipedia - There has been controversy in the past with people being paid to create entries on Wikipedia for corporate entities; a notable incident involved Microsoft paying a blogger to edit technical articles. This article ponders the question, "Why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia?" For example, MyWikiBiz, a service that offered to write Wikipedia articles for businesses, was stopped in its tracks by Jimbo Wales and the changing conflict of interest policy. Despite its apparent similarities with Wikipedia's own reward board, Wales' opinion is that it is "antithetical", and even though people are probably doing similar editing surreptitiously, it is not behaviour that should be encouraged or sanctioned. However, he admits that "It's all tricky, you know".
Wikipedia's Wales Goes To Africa To Encourage Participation - Jimbo Wales attended workshops in South Africa to promote the local-language editions of Wikipedia. While the Afrikaans edition has around 7000 articles, other languages only have about 100 articles. Wales gave a keynote at a Wikipedia Academy, which is co-hosted by iCommons; workshops show attendees how to edit Wikipedia. Wales commented that having Wikipedias in more African languages would "enable speakers of those languages to more actively participate in the global exchange of knowledge. Additionally, it may, in a small way, help to preserve those languages."
Other recent mentions of Wikipedia in the news include:
WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles is a WikiProject that was formed to better organize the creation of articles that exist in other notable encyclopedias, including print encyclopedias and other language Wikipedias, that should exist in the English Wikipedia. After the project was started by Bluemoose (talk · contribs) on 11 June 2005, it grew quickly, and currently has 186 active and committed members. It, to date, has compiled several lists of articles to be created from around 70 encyclopedic sources and journals. The project's most significant milestone to date was achieved on 27 February, 2006, when the last of the 14,707 missing Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition articles was finally added to Wikipedia.
The Missing encyclopedic articles project has a number of lists with articles that are in other encyclopedias. They include, but are not limited to:
The project is currently about 57.7% complete with article creation, and could always use more help. If you are interested, you can add your name to its members list, or add the project's userbox, {{User WikiProject Missing}}, to your userpage.
Twelve users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Henrik (nom), Esprit15d (nom), Bongwarrior (nom), Thespian (nom), Hit bull, win steak (nom), Pigman (nom), Nyttend (nom), Woodym555 (nom), LaraLove (nom), Cremepuff222 (nom), Rigadoun (nom), and Neranei (nom).
Six bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: Kotbot (task request), PixelBot (task request), AZatBot (task request), CloudNineBot (task request), Jotterbot (task request), and RoboMaxCyberSem (task request).
No articles were promoted to featured status last week.
Seven lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Naruto chapters (Part II) (nom), Pavement discography (nom), List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people: Sd-Si (nom), List of Ipswich Town F.C. Players of the Year (nom), List of York City F.C. Clubmen of the Year (nom), List of Polish flags (nom), and Billie Piper discography (nom).
One Featured topic has an addition last week: Kingdom Hearts (nom).
One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Military of Greece (nom).
No sounds were featured last week.
Six articles were de-featured last week: Stuttering (nom), Formula One (nom), The Old Man and the Sea (nom), Nepal (nom), The Jackson 5 (nom), and Denis Law (nom).
Five pictures were delisted this week: Image:Villianc.svg (nom), Image:Mad scientist.svg (nom), Image:Painter's algorithm.png (nom), Image:Argentina-Perito Moreno-Glacier.jpg (nom), and Image:Notre dame-paris-view.jpg (nom).
No lists, portals, topics, or sounds were de-featured last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Beijing opera, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Webley Revolver, Montreal Screwjob, Rings of Jupiter, Bobcat, and Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Buffalo Bill, Lightning, Acrididae, Tesseract, The Happy Land, Iberian Peninsula, and Stable Fly.
Two 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 necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The Arbitration Committee accepted three new cases this week, and closed three cases.
