Sorry for the delay in getting this issue out; in general we've been running far behind schedule, but a hectic real-life schedule for me, combined with a touch of illness, led to this issue being pushed back a full week. What we're planning to do is publish another issue on Thursday or Friday, upon the announcement of the new board member, and then get back on schedule (or close to it!) next week.
Thanks for reading the Signpost.
— Ral315
Ting Chen wins 2008 Board Election
26 June 2008
Board elections completed; results forthcoming
23 June 2008
Board elections continue
9 June 2008
Board elections open
2 June 2008
Board elections: Candidate questions
26 May 2008
Board elections: Voting information, new candidates
19 May 2008
Board candidacies open through May 22
12 May 2008
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Ting Chen wins 2008 Board Election |
This week, the elections have been completed, with the winner to be announced on Thursday.
The fifth election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees closed on June 21, with results expected on Thursday, June 26. Fifteen users are vying for one (1) one-year seat. 3,019 valid votes were cast in the election, with 7 votes invalidated by the Committee (although more could be invalidated before the final result is announced).
Overall turnout in the election was about 11.63%, based on eligible voter figures given by the Election Committee. Turnout from the English Wikipedia slightly exceeds that, with 13.22%; voters from the English Wikipedia represent about 41.4% of the voter base.
The top five wikis by turnout (with at least 20 eligible voters) were the English Wikinews (56.76%), Meta-Wiki (49.12%), Hebrew Wikipedia (42.42%), French Wiktionary (32.14%) and the Indonesian Wikipedia (29.41%). The English Wikipedia ranked 22nd, out of 56 wikis with at least 20 eligible voters.
In contrast, the Slovak Wikipedia had the most number of eligible voters (45) without a single vote cast. The controversial Volapük Wikipedia, meanwhile, was the largest Wikipedia by number of articles (116,322) without a vote; neither of the two eligible voters turned out in the election. The Japanese Wikipedia had the worst non-zero turnout of any wiki, with just 26 of its 956 eligible voters (2.72%) turning out.
The results will be reviewed by the Election Committee for irregularities over the next few days, with the naming of a new trustee scheduled for June 26. The new trustee will take over for retiring Board member Florence Devouard; her position as Chair, meanwhile, will be delegated to another member at the Board's July meeting.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "John Hodgman". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Most users will have seen the talk page banners that indicate what stage an article has reached in the writing process: {{A-Class}}, {{B-Class}}, {{Start-Class}}, or even {{Stub-Class}}. They may also have noticed that many articles are graded according to their importance: from {{Low-importance}} to {{Top-importance}}. These rankings may seem cryptic to new or occasional editors, and even seasoned editors may not have given much thought to the role of these templates in Wikipedia's quality control process. Moreover, there is often confusion about the relationship between this assessment scale and the processes that determine good articles (GA) and featured articles (FA).
Wikipedia's importance scheme aims to determine the importance attached to an article's topic by its related WikiProject(s) – from those that are "extremely important, even crucial", to those that are "not particularly notable or significant". Thus, the same topic may be more important to one project than to another, and as such can receive more than one assessment on the importance scale. Powderfinger, for instance, has been rated of "top-importance" (priority) by the Powderfinger WikiProject, "high-importance" by WikiProject Australia, and "mid-importance" by WikiProject Alternative music.
The encyclopedia's quality assessment scheme is more complex, because it has to address many facets of article quality, such as completeness, layout and language. Since a June 2008 poll added a new "class", WikiProjects will begin using five levels for quality assessment:
Critically, such "importance" and "quality" are not necessarily correlated: one article might be of "low importance" and "A Class" (see Clea Rose example); another might be a "top-importance" stub (see Judiciary of Australia example).
At press time, the new C-Class still needs to be fully enabled in the WP1.0 bot and elsewhere. This new classification has effectively raised the standards of quality required to attain B-Class. Other classes are included, such as FA-Class and GA-Class, which are not WikiProject-based, as are descriptive classes such as "Portal-Class"; for a complete list, see below.
The original purpose of the assessment processes was twofold: to facilitate the production of an offline release, and to assist WikiProjects in organizing their articles, by categorizing the quality of articles as simply, accurately and comprehensively as possible. A test CD (Version 0.5) was released by the Version 1.0 Editorial Team in 2007, and a larger DVD release (Version 0.7) is planned for the third quarter of 2008. The gargantuan task of sifting through 2.4 million articles (as of June 2008) would be impossible with just a handful of team members. To solve this problem, a standardized baseline had to be developed so the task could be distributed among the editors who comprise Wikipedia's base.
Instead of developing a brand-new scale, the Version 1.0 Editorial Team adopted existing guidelines, and modified them for greater scalability. The assessment scheme in use across the community was originally developed at the Chemicals WikiProject as a method of tracking the completeness of the articles in their Worklist (a set of around 400 articles on which the project decided to focus its effort). By late 2005, the scheme was proposed as part of the article selection process at the 1.0 project. The Work via WikiProjects sub-project was started with the aim of having projects provide subject-expert assessments, which the 1.0 team could then put together to produce a broad selection of articles from the encyclopedia. The initial method was to request manually written lists of the top articles from each project; this did generate around 3,000 assessments and provided some suitable articles, but was very labor-intensive. In April 2006, there were about 1.1 million articles in Wikipedia, so continuing with the older method would have proved ineffective. At about this time, a new category-based, bot-assisted system was introduced; this gave projects valuable tools for their work (lists, a log and a statistics table) and provided the 1.0 group with a much more comprehensive list of articles. Tagging an article (via the talk page) is straightforward, and so the scheme rapidly grew to encompass 30,000 articles by August 2006, and to around 1.3 million articles in June 2008. The following table shows the aggregate of all the assessments by more than 1300 participating WikiProjects and task forces throughout Wikipedia:
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Although the assessment scheme is only approximate, it allows users to broadly gauge article quality, and WikiProjects to keep track of their articles. When combined with the importance assessment scheme (which is not universally used), projects can see which of their key articles need the most work. The Wikipedia 1.0 project is now able to integrate the information from all of the WikiProjects and make selections of articles for offline release.
| Quality | |
|---|---|
 FA
| |
| FL
| |
 A
| |
 GA
| |
| B | |
| C | |
| Start | |
| Stub | |
| Needed | |
| Other classes | |
| Future | Current |
| List | Redirect |
| Disambig | Template |
| Category | File |
| Portal | NA |
Although the scheme is generally working, there is a steady trickle of criticisms and suggestions. The scheme is designed mainly for WikiProjects to assess article content and completeness, but GA and FA levels are included as "cross-references" to Wikipedia-wide quality assessment processes. This has been a regular source of confusion, since GA and FA status are not awarded by WikiProjects.
The Version 1.0 Editorial Team recently reevaluated the number of levels for project-based quality assessments. Until now there have been four (Stub, Start, B and A), but a recent poll indicated support for expanding this to five. To be useful across the community, the system must be simple and straightforward, so that all editors in all projects can use a common system for assessing articles. A greater number of assessment levels may yield a finer analysis of quality, but this is meaningless if the assessments cannot be performed to this level of detail. A majority of those polled believe that a fifth level (C-Class) will give a more refined scheme without seriously compromising reliability. The C-Class level will be introduced in the coming weeks.
The 1.0 team is testing a bot for automatic selection of articles. This involves evaluating the importance of an article using four parameters: a manual assessment by the project, the number of page hits, the number of foreign language "interwiki" links, and the number of links into the article. These factors are weighed along with the quality assessment to produce a selection of the most important "decent" articles for release. Initial test results look promising, but require an improved balance between WikiProjects. This new method should allow the 1.0 team to easily make regular general releases, and individual WikiProjects should be able to produce their own offline releases on paper, CD or DVD.
No users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week.
Seventeen bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: BotMultichill (task request), DinoBot2 (task request), DyceBot (task request), Purbo T (task request), John Bot (task request), Denbot (task request), Lightbot (task request), Diligent Terrier Bot (task request), Swimmingbot-awb (task request), PlankBot (task request), WuBot (task request), TinucherianBot (task request), Legobot (task request), JVbot (task request), Addbot (task request), Maelgwnbot (task request), and kwjbot (task request).
Fourteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Anna May Wong (nom), Montana class battleship (nom), Saint-Sylvestre coup d’état (nom), Crackdown (nom), Creatures of Impulse (nom), Verdeja (tank) (nom), Worlds End State Park (nom), Battle of Verrières Ridge (nom), American Airlines Flight 11 (nom), Indigenous people of the Everglades region (nom), Brian Horrocks (nom), New York State Route 32 (nom), Nathaniel Parker Willis (nom), and Assata Shakur (nom).
Six lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Buffalo Sabres head coaches (nom), List of schools in Northland, New Zealand (nom), List of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in East Sussex (nom), Faith No More discography (nom), List of Nine Inch Nails tours (nom), and List of tallest buildings in Denver (nom).
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: Jurassic Park, 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, George I of Great Britain, Durian, Priestley Riots, Flag of Canada, and The World Without Us.
Five articles were delisted last week: City status in the United Kingdom (nom), Avatar: The Last Airbender (nom), Bruce Johnson (politician) (nom), History of Buddhism (nom), and AK-47 (nom).
One list was delisted last week: List of The Sopranos episodes (nom).
No topics were delisted last week.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Victoria crater, Waldenburg, Baden-Württemberg, United States Capitol dome, Mustard, Korean War, Robber fly and Waterloo Campaign.
No sounds were featured last week.
One featured picture was demoted last week: Einsatzgruppen killing a Jewish man.
Eight 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.3 (b4aac1f), 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.
{{FULLPAGENAME}} and similar magic words when the page name looks like a URL. (r36233, bug 14511)[[link]]'s is now equivalent to [[link|link's]]. (Previously, this worked for letters but not for apostrophes.) (r36253, bug 468)
The Arbitration Committee closed one case last week, leaving three cases currently open.
