This week, we add a new feature: A tutorial series, intended to help new and established editors with various editing, policy, and community tips. Below is Enochlau's introduction to the series:
This feature was requested by multiple users over the last few months; my thanks to Enochlau and The Placebo Effect for handling the series.
Thanks for reading the Signpost.
— Ral315
Last month marked the end of 2007, and the end of the biggest year (and perhaps the most controversial year) that Wikipedia has seen. Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation's reach and influence grew, both within the Board and the office. Along the way, quality improvements were overshadowed by corporate and government editing, and vandalism, with one case resulting in the temporary detainment of a Turkish academic. This week, the Wikipedia Signpost begins to take a look back at the year that was 2007 in Wikipedia.
Wikipedias experienced marked growth in 2007. Of the top 15 Wikipedias, the English Wikipedia ranked 12th in article growth (37.58%) and 8th in edit growth (86.97%). The top Wikipedia by far was the Volapük Wikipedia, which grew nearly 100-fold (9,282.48%) in articles, and 14,189.77% in edits, due mostly to bot edits that raised the number of articles from just over 1,200 at the beginning of 2007 to 114,091 at the end of 2007.
Overall, the number of articles across all Wikipedias grew 52.76%, to over 9.25 million articles. The number of articles is expected to break 10,000,000 around March. Meanwhile, the total number of edits grew 88.63%, to 411,875,822 at the end of 2007 (this number is expected to break 500,000,000 in April or May). As Wikimedia Commons grew more popular, the number of images on individual Wikipedias rose by only 20.28%, while Commons media files grew by more than 110%, from about 1.06 million to about 2.25 million.
Notably, the French Wiktionary overtook the English Wiktionary on November 26; at the end of 2007, the French Wiktionary contained about 45,000 more entries than the English Wiktionary (about 7.3% more). This is the first non-English Wikimedia project to overtake its English counterpart, though this is not the first time it has done so.
Legal issues related to Wikimedia projects continued to be a problem this year. In February, professional golfer Fuzzy Zoeller sued a Miami-based educational consulting firm after an IP address reportedly belonging to the company posted defamatory statements to his biography.[1] The edits, which were deleted in December 2006, were made by Damien Lynch and 208.204.187.19 (an IP that appeared to be related to Lynch). The civil suit was filed in Miami-Dade County, Florida on 13 February. The Miami Herald reported last December that Zoeller dropped the suit after failing to identify the perpetrator.
In late October, a French case against the Wikimedia Foundation, alleging defamation and invasion of privacy, was dismissed.[2] The three plaintiffs sued over a page that identified them as "gay activists"; these claims were introduced by an anonymous editor and were later removed. The judge did not rule on whether the statements were defamatory, but instead ruled that any damage was mitigated by the removal of the material from Wikipedia. He concluded that Wikimedia "acted promptly to cease giving access to the content once it became aware of its character."
In February, in a chilling case of the consequences of Wikipedia's prominence, an historian was detained by Canadian and later by American authorities after his Wikipedia article was vandalized, claiming that he was a terrorist.[3] The story first gained attention in April: On the way to a Montreal university lecture, Turkish historian, sociologist, and author Taner Akçam was detained for nearly four hours at Trudeau International Airport.
The Canadian immigration officer, Akcam says, was "courteous" - but promptly detained him at Montreal's Trudeau airport. Even odder, the Canadian immigration officer asked him why he needed to be detained. ... the Canadian officer showed him - at Akcam's insistence - a piece of paper which was the obvious reason for his temporary detention. "I recognised the page at once," Akcam says. "The still photo and the text beneath it comprised my biography in the English language edition of Wikipedia. For the last year ... my Wikipedia biography has been persistently vandalised by anonymous 'contributors' intent on labelling me as a terrorist. The same allegations has been repeatedly scrawled, like gangland graffiti, as 'customer reviews' of my books at Amazon."[4]
As the vandalism was two months old, and had been reverted quickly, Akçam suspected that a political enemy may have forwarded a copy of the vandalized article to the Canada Border Services Agency prior to his travel. Akçam was again detained for about an hour when returning to the University of Minnesota two days later; he was allowed to leave, but cautioned not to travel until the situation was sorted out with customs.
This year, twelve administrators were desysopped, and seven administrators resigned under what the Arbitration Committee or bureaucrats deemed "controversial circumstances". In February, a wheel war [1] over the article on Daniel Brandt (since redirected) led to the temporary desysopping of Yanksox, Geni, and Freakofnurture by Jimbo Wales.[5] Wales said:
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.
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.[6]
Freakofnurture's sysop privileges were restored before the case was finished, but Yanksox and Geni were formally desysopped by the Committee; Gaillimh was also banned for ten days.[7]
Also in late February and into early March, the "Essjay controversy" broke, leading to the departure of bureaucrat and newly-appointed arbitrator Essjay. Essjay, who had described himself as a "tenured professor of theology at a private university in the eastern United States", was revealed to be 24 years old, and living in Louisville, Kentucky. He had attended several colleges in the area, but did not possess the degrees he had claimed or teach at a university.[8] His identity was revealed upon being hired by Wikia; Essjay, who served as a community manager there, revealed himself to be "Ryan Jordan". When asked about his fake persona, Essjay said that he had "[utilized] disinformation with regard to what I consider unimportant details: age, location, occupation, etc." While keeping this persona, Essjay provided inaccurate details of his persona to The New Yorker for a July 2006 article.
Jimbo Wales initially supported Essjay's actions, telling The New Yorker, "I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it." However, upon learning that Essjay had used the persona in content disputes, Wales called for Essjay to resign his community positions, saying,
I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes. I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people's trust. I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on.
I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community. In terms of the full parameters of what happens next, I advise (as usual) that we take a calm, loving, and reasonable approach. ... On a personal level, EssJay has apologized to me, and I have accepted his apology on a personal level, and I think this is the right thing to do. If anyone else feels that they need or want a personal apology, please ask him for it. And if you find it to be sincere, then I hope you will accept it too, but each person must make their own judgments. Despite my personal forgiveness, I hope that he will accept my resignation request, because forgiveness or not, these positions are not appropriate for him now.
Wikipedia is built on (among other things) twin pillars of trust and tolerance. The integrity of the project depends on the core community being passionate about quality and integrity, so that we can trust each other. The harmony of our work depends on human understanding and forgiveness of errors.[9]
Essjay resigned his positions shortly after this message and left Wikipedia altogether, and later resigned from Wikia.
In April, Robdurbar was desysopped after deleting and vandalizing the Main Page and blocking established users; it was later revealed that he was a sockpuppet of Wiktionary vandal/former administrator Wonderfool, a banned user on multiple projects.[10] Meanwhile, in August, Shreshth91 was desysopped for an unexplained June block of El C; because Shreshth91 had left Wikipedia, a full arbitration case was eschewed in favor of an immediate desysopping.
In June, Runcorn was desysopped after it was revealed that the account was one of many used by a puppetmaster, including RachelBrown, Newport, and at least six other accounts, some of which were used for vote-stacking in adminship requests.[11] Other administrators accused of sockpuppeting in 2007 included:
Next week, the Signpost's 2007 in review continues, with Foundation decisions, numerous elections, technical features, interviews, organizations for deletion, bureaucracy, private correspondence, corporate editing, and a chilling coincidence yet to come.
After a four-week period where individuals were invited to submit bids for Wikimania 2009, bidding ended this week. Six official bids were submitted:
2009's field covers five continents, with only Africa and Antarctica without bids (in 2007 and 2008, bids from just three continents were submitted).
Meanwhile, the jury who will decide Wikimania 2009's location was selected this week. It includes:
Five of the thirteen members currently reside in the United States; two members reside in Taiwan, and the other six members each reside in separate countries (Italy, Australia, India, Israel, Japan, and Venezuela). Ten of the members were also members of the Wikimania 2008 jury; Snow was invited to serve on the 2008 jury but was unable to do so; Walsh and Finol are also new to the jury.
This week, a new user group was created, allowing users to be added to a 'rollback' group, which gives non-admins the ability to use MediaWiki's 'rollback' tool in a limited fashion. So far, 500 users have received the right, but some users questioned whether the process had community consensus.
A poll was started on December 30, and ran through January 8. The poll received just over two-thirds support, with 304 supporting the new right and 151 opposing it. Two-thirds support is usually considered ambiguous consensus, and a previous poll failed to gain consensus with almost exactly the same support. However, after a Bugzilla request to add the right, a developer enabled the right on the English Wikipedia.
Shortly afterward, a requests for rollback page opened, and users were invited to submit their names for consideration for the rollback right. An extended discussion on the administrators' noticeboard ensued, leading to an arbitration request (which appears likely to be denied).
Another poll was suggested by Jimbo Wales, to determine whether the requests for rollback process had consensus; however, persuasive comments by Anthere, indicating that she had no interest in bringing the matter to the Foundation's board and suggesting a time-out with respect to the page, led to the poll's closure for at least the next three months, to see whether the process should be changed or removed then.
The right is limited for non-administrators; users who have the rollback privilege without the "bot" right are allowed just 5 rollbacks per minute, while if a non-autoconfirmed (less than four days old) user were to receive the right, they would be limited to just 5 rollbacks every two minutes. This is designed to prevent the wide-scale damage that some users argued could occur with built-in rollback.
Objections to the process seem to have cooled down, as many users noted that the process was running much better than they had imagined it. Said Ned Scott, who initially opposed rollback but later noted that he misunderstood the proposal:
The situation should have been dealt with better. We should have waited before promoting users. It didn't happen, and for what it's worth, the world did not explode. Still, we need a way of stopping such stampedes in the future.
Still, the way everyone responded, on both sides, was somewhat.. expected/ reasonable, consideration the situations, and how people normally react to such situations (at least for Wikipedia). But I'm still sorry this turned out to be somewhat of a mess. I'm sorry I got mad and that other people got mad. I'm glad that rollback granting itself have gone fairly smoothly despite all this.
However, objections still remain, even though discussion has died down. Doc glasgow, one of the more vocal opponents of the way the process was handled, said on Thursday,
The Christmas holiday coup d'etat has been unprecedentedly successful in forcing through a major change without consensus. All credit to them - I'd probably have tried the same if I'd wanted something as badly and had as little chance of getting legitimate agreement. But, now we effectively have a new status-quo in this crazy process - and I predict we'll rue the day. However, that's what we've got, and the chances of the community obtaining a *genuine* consensus, which could change this status-quo, are as nil as they always have been.
Last week an unregistered contributor posted what was allegedly a draft of Steve Jobs's keynote address at the Macworld Conference & Expo to Wikipedia, sparking a flurry of blog speculation and analysis. While its potential validity was largely downplayed, its appearance still garnered considerable attention.
Macworld ritually kicks off with the Jobs keynote Tuesday, 15 January, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. His address is typically expected to include a major announcement or two, such as new product offerings. The leadup to the event thus fuels a dizzying amount of speculation in the active online community of Apple users and fans.
The "leak" was posted 9 January to the talk page for the article about the conference itself. The IP address, 216.170.223.41, has a limited contribution history and traces to an ISP serving Wisconsin and neighboring states. Its appearance sparked a bit of discussion on the talk page and a brief edit war over whether it belonged there at all - it has since been removed.
Identifying itself as a "Rough Outline; draft 5", the document goes through highlights of various Apple products Jobs would presumably discuss during his keynote. Included are the iPod and iTunes, the iPhone, along with the Mac and MacBook computers. At least in form, it would be plausible if not earthshaking, and as some people pointed out, the real speech is presumably undergoing frequent last-minute changes. This means the actual keynote could be different and makes it impossible to definitively disprove the leak, part of what makes this sort of thing a popular debating subject.
As the opening of the conference approached, a variety of bloggers picked it up, although most thought it likely to be fake, possibly even active disinformation being circulated by Apple. Bryan Gardiner of Wired wrote that it "seems to suspiciously mirror the popular rumors that have gained credence over the past month". On the other hand, Steve Rubel said he was inclined to accept the document - "It sounds real." Steve Jobs keynote on January 15, however did not contain any of the material in the leak.
The choice of the talk page is interesting, suggesting that the poster understood Wikipedia editing practices well enough that source material wouldn't be appropriate to dump directly into the article. For that matter, one could wonder why Wikipedia was chosen at all, as opposed to the unrelated Wikileaks project created specifically for this type of material.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Placebo" and "Nocebo". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser ended on Tuesday, January 8. At the end of the fundraiser, about 44,600 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation has raised nearly $1,500,000. In addition, Erik Möller announced a record $500,000 unrestricted donation, received from an anonymous donor, which along with offline donations brought the fundraiser's total just over $2 million.
Dragons flight (Robert A. Rohde) prepared a series of graphs analyzing this fundraiser as compared to previous fundraisers.
Scott Laws, username Dalf, died of colon cancer on 14 September, 2007. He had been a long-term Wikipedian, editing since before 2005 and accumulating over 3,000 edits. Among the articles he edited were Imperial Japanese Navy, Horcrux, and Nuclear power. Laws was an alumnus of Hickman High School and the University of Missouri; he worked for Microsoft's Hotmail in Silicon Valley until he was diagnosed with cancer in 2004. He was 30 years old.
The Commons Picture of the Year competition for 2007 is now open. Any Wikimedian with more than 200 edits is eligible to vote. There are two rounds of voting (round 1 is Jan 10-17, the final is 20-24 Jan). Information about the voting method and how to get a voting token is at Commons:Picture of the Year/2007/Voting. (Voting is being conducted on custom software on the toolserver written by User:Bryan.)
White bread for young minds, says university professor - A professor of media studies, Tara Brabazon, has described Google as "white bread" for students ("filling, but it does not offer nutritional content"), and says that students turn to Wikipedia unquestioningly because "it's there". Her comments are said to echo Andrew Keen's comments about online amateurism in his book The Cult of the Amateur. Brabazon blames the increased dependence upon pixels over paper on the decline in libraries, and she supplies her students with extracts from peer-reviewed printed texts so that they can experience the "page and the print".
Wikipedia too long-winded for you? Try the simple version - The Simple English Wikipedia got a mention this week, as a version of Wikipedia that uses fewer words and easier grammar. Although designed for people learning English, the simple style can help with understanding. The basis of the Simple English Wikipedia is covered: its use of language comes from Basic English and a special Voice of America protocol.
Other recent mentions in the online press include:
This week marks the first part of the Signpost tutorial series. The aim of this series is to help you use Wikipedia better: by introducing you to the features of the wiki software, the Wikipedia community and its policies and other helpful tips from experienced editors. As the name suggests, each week, we aim to provide you with a short article in a practical, tutorial format. This week, we begin with the fundamentals of editing: things that every editor should know. Please enjoy it, and let us know if you have any comments or suggestions here.
Level: Beginner
This week, we'll talk about the basics of editing Wikipedia. You've all read Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that you can edit, but what about contributing? Thankfully, it's actually quite simple!
Every page on Wikipedia, whether it is an article, a discussion page or a project page, is produced by editing the mark-up presented on the edit tab of the page. The most basic unit of mark-up is the paragraph block, and you separate the text in the page into paragraphs by separating each paragraph with a blank line like this:
I am the first paragraph.
I am the second paragraph, because I am separated from the first paragraph by a blank line.
This text is still part of the second paragraph, because there is no blank line in between.
It's important to remember that you need to press Enter twice after each paragraph otherwise your text will be in one big paragraph!
After you have clicked the save button, you will be taken to the actual rendered view of the mark-up that you have just typed.
Now, what we have looks a little boring. Let's jazz it up with some formatting. To render some text in italics, put two single quotes (not one double quote) around the text like this: ''this is text in italics'', which comes out looking like this is text in italics. For bold, '''use three single quotes''', which comes out as use three single quotes. For both italics and bold, some simple arithmetic will tell you that you need five single quotes, '''''like this''''', which comes out as like this.
Structuring your articles using sections and subsections is very important, especially for longer articles. To insert a section heading, type the section name on a new line surrounded by two equal signs like this: ==My heading==. In articles, this is a top-level heading. For a subheading, use three equal signs like this: ===My subheading===. Additional equal signs indicate additional depths in the section hierarchy.
Wikipedia is a series of linked articles, so let's create some links! To create a simple link, just surround the text you want to link with two square brackets like this: [[Foobar]]. This creates a link to the article called "Foobar" with the link text rendered as "Foobar" like this: Foobar. Links often appear in the middle of sentences, but you don't have to worry about making the first letter upper case. If you want to change the link text, use the pipe notation like this: [[Foobar|this is some other text]]. This still links to "Foobar", but the link text has now changed like this: this is some other text.
[[encyclopedia]]s renders as encyclopedias while linking to encyclopedia, and [[clean]]ing renders as cleaning while linking to clean.There are two types of lists, numbered and bullet lists:
#This is a numbered list
#Another entry in your numbered list
#Note how the hash symbol is used
while
*This is a bullet list
*Another entry in your bullet list
*Note how the asterisk symbol is used
To nest lists, you just stack up the symbols like this:
*My groceries:
*#Milk
*#Eggs
*#Flour
*My subjects:
*#Mathematics
*#English
*#Science
This is rendered as:
:) instead of an asterisk or a hash. What does it do?Here are some additional activities that you can try:
For a more in-depth introduction to editing, check out the following pages:
Eight users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: J-stan (nom), Canley (nom), Kbthompson (nom), Appraiser (nom), Archtransit (nom), Jayron32 (nom), Rudget (nom), and Jeepday (nom).
Three bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: JMuniBot (task request), RFRBot (task request), and MonoBot (task request).
No articles were promoted to featured status last week.
Eleven lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Myself ; Yourself episodes (nom), Dischord Records discography (nom), Indianapolis Colts seasons (nom), List of tallest buildings in Tulsa (nom), List of Blue Drop: Tenshitachi no Gikyoku episodes (nom), List of Gillingham F.C. managers (nom), List of Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States by time in office (nom), List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Greater London (nom), List of storms in the 2003 Atlantic hurricane season (nom), List of players with five or more goals in an NHL game (nom), and List of San Jose Sharks players (nom).
Two portals were featured last week: Portal:Tennis (nom) and Portal:Film (nom).
One topic was featured last week: Powderfinger albums (nom).
No sounds were featured last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Chicxulub Crater, Swedish emigration to the United States, Oregon State Capitol, Boshin War, Trembling Before G-d, 2007 UEFA Champions League Final and British anti-invasion preparations of World War II.
One topic was delisted last week:
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: EIAJ connector, White-crowned Sparrow, SS American Star, Cirsium arvense, Full Moon, Eristalis tenax, and neutrophil granulocyte
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 necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), 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.
{{PLURAL:$1|Category|Categories}} to just Categories; on a wiki as large as the English Wikipedia, and for a message that needs to appear on most pages, this actually makes a significant difference.
The Arbitration Committee opened four new cases this week, and closed five cases, leaving seven currently open.
