This week, the Signpost profiles candidates in this year's elections.
Candidates in the December 2007 Arbitration Committee elections were interviewed this week for an election guide, in preparation for the start of the elections on Monday. The elections will run for two weeks, ending on Sunday, 16 December. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections soon afterward, and the newly elected Arbitrators will take their positions on 1 January, 2008.
The election guide is intended to be a brief overview of each candidate's beliefs and experiences. More detailed information about each candidate may be gleaned from their user pages, as well as their responses to questions from other users. Not all candidates have yet replied to our questions; their replies will be added as they are received.
Due to size, the guide has been split up alphabetically, though a page transcluding all sections is available below:
Nominations for the December 2007 Arbitration Committee Elections remain open through 23:59 UTC Friday. This week, Phil Sandifer re-entered the race (having been withdrawn by another user), and FT2, Sam Blacketer, and Will Beback entered the election. Meanwhile, Dreamafter and Durova withdrew from the election, bringing the number of candidates in the election up to 29. Still possible is a significant number of last-minute entries.
Of the five arbitrators whose terms expire this year, only one, Raul654, will stand for re-election. At least these five seats will be open in the elections; no indication has been made as to whether more seats will be opened.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Cursive". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
A new ombudsman commission was chosen by Wikimedia Foundation officials this week. Mackensen, Rebecca, and Hei ber will serve a term of approximately a year. They replace Nathan Carter, Steve Dunlop, and Anders Wegge Jakobson, who served from July 2006 through November 2007. Foundation Chair Florence Devouard quoted from m:Ombudsman commission about their duties:
The ombudsman commission is tasked with processing complaints about violations of the privacy policy on any Wikimedia project, in particular concerning the use of CheckUser tools. The ombudsman is tasked with investigating cases of such policy breach or CheckUser abuse for the board in an official manner. They will mediate between the complainant and the respondent (usually a CheckUser, bureaucrat, administrator, or arbitration committee member). When legally necessary, the ombudsman will assist the general counsel, the executive director or the board in handling the case.
The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. In the first four weeks of the fundraiser, about 29,600 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation had raised about $903,000.
The addition of a link to the new fundraising blog, updated a few times a week with reasons why visitors should donate, may have played a part in a large increase in donations. From Thursday to Friday, contributions exhibited not only a 59.6% increase in donors, but also a 17.7% increase in average donation. Part of this increase may have been related to the celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States on the Thursday; Thursday's donations were the lowest of the fundraiser.
In large donations, an anonymous donor contributed $2,500 on Monday.
This week, new job openings at the Wikimedia Foundation were added this week. The deadlines of Head of Partnerships, Head of Development, and Chief Financial and Operating Officer were extended to December 15. The position of Treasurer of the Board of Trustees is still open until December 1. Positions of software developer and public outreach are set to open soon.
A discussion is currently underway to change the default move permissions on all wikis to "autoconfirmed", requiring an account to be at least four days old before it can move pages. This setting is already enabled on many large wikis, including the English and German Wikipedias, but is not set on many smaller wikis, which are often the target of vandalism that is not quickly reverted. Most users support this move, but a few have opposed it, arguing that such a decision should be made at the project level.
Wikipedia hosts content attacking Aborigines - The article on Maddington, Western Australia, a suburb in Perth, Australia, was vandalised to contain material offensive to Indigenous Australians. The offensive material was retained for several hours, and was contributed anonymously. Angela Beesley stated that she found the vandalism "unacceptable" and added that it was up to the community to find the problems with referencing and fix them.
School officials unite in banning Wikipedia - The librarian at Great Meadows Middle School in New Jersey has blocked access to Wikipedia from computers, because the teachers do not see it as an authoritative source given that it can be edited by anyone. She has put up signs all over the library that declare "Just say no to Wikipedia" - a play on the slogan used by Nancy Reagan against drugs.
Other recent mentions of Wikipedia in the online media include:
(In case you are not aware, Planet Wikimedia is a blog aggregator, for even more commentary on Wikimedia and its projects.)
WikiProject Education in Australia is a WikiProject dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to education and schools in Australia. It is a very new project, having been started on 9 September 2007 by Twenty Years (talk · contribs). As a result of its recent creation, it currenly has four active members, and would benefit from community support.
Each month, the project's members work together to improve an article about Australian education that is in need of help. The current collaboration for the month of November is Brunswick South Primary School, which recently survived an articles for deletion nomination. The requested article for next month's collaboration is Corpus Christi College, Perth.
Only having been in existence for just over two months, the Education in Australia WikiProject has made substantial progress in improving articles within its scope. Currently, it has three Good Articles: Aquinas College, Perth, Scotch College, Perth, and Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney. It also has a former featured article, Caulfield Grammar School, in its main subject area. In total, the project has amassed 765 stubs, 734 "Start-class" articles, and 61 "B-class" articles.
WikiProject Education in Australia has four parent projects, and one sister project.
If you are interested in topics within the project's scope, you can join it by adding your name to its members list. Since it is a very new and small project, it could always use some help.
Twelve users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Gaius Cornelius (nom), Orangemike (nom), DMacks (nom), Spebi (nom), Nikki311 (nom), SkierRMH (nom), Eliz81 (nom), Kathryn NicDhàna (nom), Tbo 157 (nom), Royalbroil (nom), ChrisTheDude (nom), and Bkell (nom).
Eight bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: MenoBot (task request), AfDBot (task request), ImageTaggingBot (task request), ImageBacklogBot (task request), R. Hillgentleman (task request), El bot de la dieta (task request), SXT-404Bot (task request), and SatyrBot (task request).
Twenty articles were promoted to featured status last week: The Green (Dartmouth College) (nom), Manchester (nom), Presque Isle State Park (nom), South Side (Chicago) (nom), Youngstown, Ohio (nom), 1999 Sydney hailstorm (nom), Harriet Tubman (nom), Ulysses (poem) (nom), But I'm a Cheerleader (nom), Superman film series (nom), One Hot Minute (nom), Vega (nom), Nancy Reagan (nom), Bobby Eaton (nom), Karmichael Hunt (nom), John Knox (nom), Arthur Morris (nom), Marcus Trescothick (nom), Crazy Taxi (series) (nom), and The Joy of Sect (nom).
Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status last week: The Corrs discography (nom), List of Swedish-speaking and bilingual municipalities of Finland (nom), List of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes (nom), Nine Inch Nails discography (nom), List of members of Stortinget 2005-2009 (nom), List of birds of Thailand (nom), List of Canadian Victoria Cross recipients (nom), List of Kaze no Stigma episodes (nom), and Bradford City A.F.C. seasons (nom).
One Featured topic was promoted last week: National Hockey League awards (nom).
No portals or sounds were featured last week.
Four articles were de-featured last week: X Window System (nom), Marshall, Texas (nom), Indo-Greek Kingdom (nom), and Sociocultural evolution (nom).
No pictures, 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: Sophie Blanchard, 7 World Trade Center, Francium, Red Barn Murder, Surface weather analysis, Ordinances of 1311, and Cillian Murphy.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Northfleet, Buchenwald, Lyndon B. Johnson, Pupae, Tōyō Miyatake , Nesjavellir geothermal power plant, and George IV of the United Kigdom.
Five 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.
(none relevant)
The arbitration committee opened five cases this week, and closed two cases.
