A privately conducted arbitration case involving the actions of Orangemarlin was made public on Friday by arbitrator FT2. The case was criticized by many for its private nature; while some serious cases have been conducted in private with the knowledge of all parties involved, Orangemarlin apparently was not informed of the case until its conclusion. The criticism became much more pronounced after arbitrator Kirill Lokshin declared that the case and other announcements made by FT2 "[had] no authority or binding weight whatsoever". After discussion on their mailing list, the Arbitration Committee vacated the decision, an unprecedented move. They then directed that the case be submitted as a request for arbitration through public channels. However, Orangemarlin apologized for his behavior, agreed to a mentorship, and the case was rejected.
On Friday, June 27, FT2 made a post to the Administrators' Noticeboard, revealing a series of measures and announcements made by the Committee. The case against Orangemarlin was just one of the many announcements made there (see related story for other announcements), but because of its privacy, and because of its implications, it immediately drew the most attention.
The case centers almost exclusively around Orangemarlin. Evidence presented by FT2 mentioned concerns about Orangemarlin's behavior since 2007, including:
In light of the evidence presented by FT2, the Committee, according to FT2, had enacted remedies in the case, including admonishing Orangemarlin for a variety of concerns, placing Orangemarlin on parole for incivility, personal attacks, and assumptions of bad faith, assigning Orangemarlin a mentor, and noting the Committee's intent to review the community ban of Rbj. Odd nature was also admonished.
Because the case was kept private, with no known community involvement, no opportunity was given to present evidence in defense of Orangemarlin. This was widely criticized, as many argued that without any way to present a defense, Orangemarlin was not given "due process", and that the secrecy was not justified for such a case. Stephan Schulz argued that the Committee "did not perform arbitration, but prosecution, followed by conviction. All that behind closed doors and even the veil of anonymity (FT2 excepted)". FT2 justified the secrecy in response to such criticism:
This was an exceptional case, and the matter was clear and unambiguous. If Orangemarlin wishes to appeal, he may. But for various reasons, this was the right way to go about it. We have that discretion, and we very rarely use it. But on this case, we have done so. By the very nature of what we saw, the user defends via smoke, and invented pretexts, and smears. We have no interest in enduring a week or two of that, or asking others to. We considered emailing the user for comments before posting, but that too would lead to email and "smoke" as well, and wikidrama and hearsay until the case was belatedly made public anyway and finally decided (and pile-ons that in fact would add little, the evidence being in fact very unambiguous), having had to endured that smoke and hearsay in the background in the meantime.
This argument failed to gain much steam, with an overwhelming majority of those commenting concerned about the way the case was conducted.
Another criticism was that the individual arbitrators' voting was not released, and was apparently not tabulated; instead, the case was passed "nemine contradicente", or "without dissent / by consensus". This criticism became even more pronounced after Kirill Lokshin's declaration that the case and other announcements made by FT2 "[had] no authority or binding weight whatsoever", apparently contradicting the claim that the case had passed without dissent:
The announcements made today by FT2 (including both the Orangemarlin issue and the various other matters) were posted without the approval or prior knowledge of the Committee as a whole. Further, no formal proceeding, secret or otherwise, has taken place regarding Orangemarlin or any other editor named in that particular statement.
As far as I'm concerned, these announcements have no authority or binding weight whatsoever.
Not on behalf of anyone but myself, Kirill
This statement resulted in even more criticism of the case, and of FT2, and led to an ill-fated deletion attempt for the arbitration case itself; the page was "speedy kept". Discussion continued, and Jimbo Wales weighed in, urging calm in the matter:
I just wanted to personally weigh in here with a request for calm. Nothing permanent has happened. I am unclear on the facts (just heard about this today... from a lot of people) at this point, and it is not my style to jump to conclusions quickly. I can state some general principles
though, which should soothe people a lot. It is ok for the ArbCom to work quietly with people to resolve conflict in a way which preserves dignity and minimizes drama. We have done that a lot, both formally and informally, and it works well. It is not ok for us to have secret trials in which the people to be punished have not even been notified or offered the opportunity to defend themselves. I have no opinion at all about the editor(s) in question, because I have not studied the facts of the underlying case at all. However, it is part of our longstanding governance traditions that there is a right of appeal, and I can overturn ArbCom decisions, and I would consider that a lack of opportunity for defense would be in the category of reasons I would consider valid. The main thing is, there is no reason for drama right now, drama is not necessary, what is necessary is a thoughtful look at everything, and assumption of good faith. If errors have been made, things can be set right quickly enough.
I would particularly urge Orangemarlin and Odd nature (and others) not to engage in "civil disobediance" [sic] to prove a point, etc. (No one has threatened this, to my knowledge, I am just saying is all...) To everyone: let's all be on our best behavior here and sort this out with a minimum of dramatics.
Other Committee members also urged patience as they discussed the issue privately; Jpgordon noted that "We are discussing the situation (rather intensely) on the mailing list, but, it's Friday evening now (or later) for most of us, and not all of the committee are available at the moment."
Over the weekend, the matter was discussed, and an official statement from the Committee was posted by Charles Matthews on Sunday. According to the Committee's statement, the case was handled "in a way normally reserved for serious socking"; "[e]ven so, a number of Arbitrators were in the end, and after review of the case, not convinced of the need for such summary implementation. This course of events could have been avoided by better use of internal ArbCom communications, and it is not going to set any precedent for the future."
They declared that the case would be vacated, and would not go into effect. The Committee instead ordered that the case be submitted through the normal method at requests for arbitration, and be reviewed independently of the prior case, with the opportunity for involved parties and community members to give evidence. That request received an unusually large amount of community input, with some users arguing that the disruption caused by Orangemarlin was worth looking into, and others arguing that the botched case would affect the Committee's ability to fairly judge a new case.
However, the case took a much less dramatic turn on Monday when Orangemarlin apologized for his behavior that led to the case:
Over the past few days, there has been a large amount of drama centered around the so-called "secret" RfAR posted publicly by User:FT2. I will make no further comment on FT2's motivation for creating this drama-filled episode. Whatever the reasons, I was deeply offended by not only the comments written but lack of communication with me. I appreciate the support written on this page and in other locations from individuals who both worked with me and, in a sense, against me. The common theme across many of the comments was not only the apparent in camera nature of the proceedings, but also my behavior in many situations. It is clear that I received support from individuals who were as offended as I with respect to the nature of the actions, but were almost as equally offended by how I treated other editors. I will not make any excuses--that RfAR has opened my eyes to what I've done right and what I've done wrong; it is clear that I've tested the patience of this community, and the goodwill I have created through adding to the project is being eroded by my behavior. It is time to end this drama, and to move on. Without reservation or exception, I apologize from the bottom of my heart to everyone in this community. I will remain civil at all times. It is my feeling that for the good of this project, I must be a valued editor, and if I remain civil, then the whole community wins. I really hope that we can move beyond this drama, and build an encyclopedia.
Early Wednesday, arbitrator jpgordon voted to reject the case, revealing that Orangemarlin had agreed to put himself under jpgordon's mentorship, and that he would deal with any further incivility by Orangemarlin. After three other arbitrators rejected the case, it was briefly removed, but the request was added back so that other arbitrators could go on the record regarding the case. As of press time, five arbitrators had rejected the case, with none supporting. Morven noted that "Relapse will make for a speedy opening of a future case."
The case is unprecedented for a few reasons: First and foremost, the case is one of just a few cases to be held in private, and the first case ever to be heard without the prior knowledge of the sanctioned party. It's also the first case to ever be immediately vacated, rendering the verdict moot.
While the case is over, effects of the case are still noticeable. A request for comment on the Arbitration Committee has received nearly 1,250 edits as of press time. The RfC focuses on the role of the Committee, its limits, and possible changes to the Committee.
In response to criticism over its handling of the case, and the relative lack of information regarding the situation, some Committee members have indicated that the Committee may post further statements regarding the handling of the case in the near future.
While the Committee as a whole has faced significant criticism, arbitrator FT2 has received even more criticism, because he was seen as a main architect of this case. However, Kirill Lokshin, who disagreed with FT2 on the case's status, later said that FT2 was not personally to blame for the problems with the case:
Please, let's not have any calls for people's heads here. As far as the Orangemarlin thing goes, I don't think FT2 is really to blame; he was acting under a reasonable interpretation of what the proper procedure was, and a number of us—myself included—failed to communicate our assumptions about what we thought the procedure would be to him. And a number of important matters were unfortunately overlooked in the confusion. Personally, I think that I'm as much to blame for that as anyone else.
In the wake of controversy over a since-vacated private arbitration case against Orangemarlin (see related story), most of the other announcements made at the same time by FT2 were largely ignored. These announcements are likely to be revisited by the Committee, as FT2 and fellow arbitrator Thebainer temporarily blanked the announcements page. Prior to this blanking, Charles Matthews revisited these announcements, adding a few more proposals and suggesting a rough timetable for when each proposal will be implemented or discussed; it's unclear what the Committee plans to do with the individual proposals at this time.
The announcement suggested an Appeals Review Committee (ARC), a committee working under and alongside the Arbitration Committee on indefinite block, ban, and routine administrator abuse appeals. The ARC would "assist in the review of cases where Arbcom would open a case now", by reviewing evidence and reporting concerns to the Committee, and suggesting whether the Committee should open a case. The Arbitration Committee would make the final decision whether to open a full case.
The Arbitration Committee would retain the ability to take such cases directly as desired, or where significant privacy or neutrality concerns are evident. According to the timetable posted by Charles Matthews, this proposal would have been scheduled to be "worked up" and put into action soon. As with the other announcements made by the Committee, however, this proposal is subject to significant change as the Committee continues to discuss the merit of these proposals.
The announcement clarified the Committee's plans regarding the granting of the CheckUser right, which has historically been given rather conservatively, with Committee members and a few hand-picked users holding the right at any time. The Committee identified the possibility of appointing up to four or five new checkusers. While checkuser appointment would continue to be hand-picked by the Committee, the announcement suggested that after the Committee picked candidates for the position, community input would be solicited before users were given the right. This was labeled by Matthews as "current for discussion", with the appointments to be dealt with by the Committee in the "near future".
This would mark a sharp contrast to the current policy, where all users with the right are either members of the Arbitration Committee, or were appointed without community input. The appointment of checkusers has been controversial recently; last week, former arbitrator Raul654 requested the granting of checkuser access to bureaucrat Kingturtle; however, after discussion and criticism of the choice by some, the request was removed by Daniel as an apparent "misunderstanding".
Three of the proposals were listed by Matthews as "on hold", indicating that they would not be advanced immediately:
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute have developed a statistical model for identifying potential administrator candidates, and propose an "AdminFinderBot" to automatically identify users likely to pass the Requests for adminship (RfA) process.
In their contribution to the 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Florence, Italy this April, social psychologist Robert E. Kraut and Ph.D. student Moira Burke (User:Grammarnerd) describe the problem of increasing administrative backlogs (not currently a significant problem) and the shrinking ratio of administrators to non-administrators. They also argue that "people are more likely to contribute to a collective good such as Wikipedia when they know that they are uniquely qualified for the task, or that the likelihood of success is good", and that "[d]espite protestations that admins are lowly janitors mopping up, in many ways election to admin is a promotion, distinguishing an elite core group from the larger mass of editors." Thus, they suggest their model could be useful for both identifying editors with strong potential and as a "self-evaluation tool" for admin hopefuls.
The model takes into account users' detailed edit histories, including per-namespace edit counts, edits to specific page types such as deletion discussions, policy pages, WikiProjects and the administrators' noticeboard, and the presence of keywords (e.g., "POV", "revert") in edit summaries. For 2006 and 2007, during which 42% of adminship requests were successful, the model predicts with 75% accuracy whether candidates were successful or not.
According to the model, diversity of editing—and in particular, edits to Wikipedia policy pages, WikiProjects, and article talk pages—are the strongest indicators of likely success at RfA. Every 1000 edits to articles increases the probability of success by 1.8%, while edits to Wikipedia policy pages or WikiProjects have about ten times that effect. Every 1000 article talk edits boosts a candidates chances by 6.3%, while excessive userpage, user talk, and deletion discussion edits actually decrease chances for success. Comparing changes in the weighting of the model's factors from the pre-2006 period to the 2006-2007 period, the authors conclude that "the community as a whole is beginning to prioritize policymaking and organization experience over simple article-level coordination" when it comes to selecting administrators.
Another contribution to the conference, by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes the roles of rules and policies on Wikipedia. The authors conclude that, despite the reputation of wikis as venues for "peer-based, nonhierarchical, non-bureaucratic, emergent, complex, and communal" work, the key feature of wikis is that they "allow for, and in fact facilitate, the creation of policies and procedures that serve a wide variety of functions."
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Mike Birbiglia", "Rapid eye movement behavior disorder" and "Sleepwalking". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
All individual votes in the Board of Trustees election have been released. From these votes, other voting methods can be compared to the voting method selected for the 2008 election, the Schulze method. We tested the votes using approval voting (the method used in prior elections) and Instant-runoff voting. (Because it's impossible to tell how many candidates each voter approves of, for the purposes of this comparison we assume that any candidate marked as the first choice for an individual voter is "approved"). Neither of these methods result in any changes in the top three positions, though some lower positions do result in slight changes. The results are below.
| Candidate | Schulze | Approval | IRV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad Huikeshoven | 5
|
5
|
6
|
| Alex Bakharev | 2
|
2
|
2
|
| Craig Spurrier | 11
|
14
|
13
|
| Dan Rosenthal | 10
|
11
|
11
|
| Gregory Kohs | 15
|
12
|
12
|
| Harel Cain | 4
|
4
|
4
|
| Jussi-Ville Heiskanen | 6
|
7
|
10
|
| Kurt M. Weber | 13
|
10
|
9
|
| Matthew Bisanz | 12
|
13
|
14
|
| Paul Williams | 14
|
15
|
15
|
| Ray Saintonge | 9
|
8
|
8
|
| Ryan Postlethwaite | 7
|
6
|
4
|
| Samuel Klein | 3
|
3
|
3
|
| Steve Smith | 8
|
9
|
7
|
| Ting Chen | 1
|
1
|
1
|
The wisdom of crowds – Wikipedia's founder writes about what he sees as the fruits of the change inspired by Wikipedia. Although humans can be portrayed as "irrational captives to their background and identity", Wales argues that it is possible for objective collaboration to occur if the lens of irrationality and conflict is abandoned and we accept non-initiation of force as a fundamental principle. He believes that rationality will prevail, thereby preserving the best aspects of our culture and permitting participation to thrive in the developing world. The open processes of Wikipedia, where you are likely to be challenged if there are flaws in your argument, epitomise the "virtue of the marketplace of ideas", he says.
Other recent mentions in the online media include:
As the June 26 Dispatch mentioned, generally the most reliable sources in medicine and biology are peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. An excellent starting point for locating peer-reviewed articles is PubMed, which offers a free search engine for accessing the MEDLINE database of biomedical research articles offered by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Although PubMed is a comprehensive database, many of the journals it lists restrict online access; at the alternative site, PubMed Central, access to the full text of articles is free of charge.
There are two main types of sources in the scientific literature: primary publications, which are papers describing novel research for the first time, and review articles, which summarize and integrate a topic of research into an overall view. In medicine, there are also clinical trials, which test new treatments, and meta-analyses that bring together the results from many clinical trials and attempt to arrive at an overall view of how well a treatment works. It is usually best to use reviews and meta-analyses where possible, as these give a balanced and general perspective of a topic, and are usually easier to understand!
The quality of sources varies considerably, and assessing it is difficult. To know how much weight to give a particular publication usually requires a good grasp of what has been published and how this fits into other people's results – this is why reviews are so useful, since they do this for you. However, two rules of thumb can be useful. First, if a biology/medicine journal is not listed in PubMed, it is of doubtful quality – the journal published by the Creation Research Society is one example. Second, the impact factor of a journal, published yearly in Journal Citation Reports, can tell you how influential it is. This number measures how often papers in the journal are cited by other papers – good journals publish papers that other people find useful, while bad work sinks into well-deserved obscurity. These impact factors are not the definitive word on reliability and vary significantly from field to field; however, occasionally they may assist editors in knowing how seriously a source will be regarded by expert readers.
Other than peer-reviewed journals, the most reliable sources are conference proceedings and books published by university presses and other respected publishing houses. Wikipedia also accepts sourcing from non-peer-reviewed academic sources, such as press releases from respected universities, government research organizations, scientific societies, and from reliable non-academic publications, particularly if they are respected mainstream publications; these include professional and trade magazines, journals, and newsletters. Mainstream newspapers may contain reliable information, but it is often wise to check the reliability and status of particular journalists. A non-peer-reviewed source is sometimes also cited because it is a readable lay summary of a peer-reviewed article; here is an example:
Other things being equal, it is better to cite a source whose full text is freely readable, so that your readers can follow the link to the source. However, many high-impact journals, such as Nature and Science, require a fee or a subscription, and as these journals publish some of the best papers it can still be best to cite them.
Often an article's abstract – usually 100–200 words summarizing the findings and significance – is freely available if its full text is not. When searching for sources, it is wise to skim-read everything you can, including abstracts of papers you can't access, and use that to get a feel for what reliable sources are saying. When it comes to actually writing your Wikipedia article, though, it is generally not a good idea to cite a source after reading only its abstract, as the abstract necessarily presents a stripped-down version of the conclusions and omits the background that can be crucial for understanding exactly what the source says. You may need to visit a library to access the full text, or ask somebody at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange to either provide you with a copy or read the source for you and summarize what it says; if neither is possible, you may need to settle for using a lower-impact source or even just an abstract.
Some sources are in the public domain. These include many U.S. government publications, such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. You can incorporate public-domain text into a Wikipedia article without infringing copyright, which can help you write an article on a new topic quickly. However, in such cases you should follow scholarly practice and cite the source, putting quotation marks around direct quotations, or using the blockquote facility for longer quotations. The amount of directly quoted text can sometimes be minimized by working it into the grammar of a Wikipedia sentence. It is often better to paraphrase a source (without quotation marks but with attribution), which allows you to summarize it, improve the wording, and turn it into an encyclopedic register.
Each search engine has its quirks, advantages, and disadvantages, and may not return the results that you need unless used carefully. It typically takes experience and practice to recognize when a search has not been effective; even if you find useful sources, you may have missed other sources that would have been more useful, or you may generate pages and pages of less-than-useful material. A good strategy for avoiding sole reliance on search engines is to find a few recent high-quality sources and follow their citations to see what your search engine missed. It can also be helpful to perform a plain web search rather than one of scholarly articles only.
There are basic and advanced options for searching PubMed. For example, if you enter keywords such as "breast cancer" in the basic option, you'll be flooded with a six-figure number of results. At the top right of the list of hits there are three links, one labeled "All", the second "Review" and the third "Free Full Text". Clicking on the "Review" link will slash your hits to a more manageable 14,000 review articles.
To look at one of these in more detail, just click on the title – such as RE Coleman's review, Risks and benefits of bisphosphonates. This takes you to a summary (the abstract) of the review, providing a list of authors and, on the right, a list of related articles. This "See all Related Articles" link is very useful for narrowing down searches. At top-right there can be a link to the journal website (here it is the British Journal of Cancer). At the bottom of the abstract is a number called the PubMed ID number, which is "PMID 18506174" in this instance. To generate a {{cite journal}} template for Coleman's review, just copy the PMID number into the Diberri-Boghog tool.
To perform an advanced search with the same keywords, go back to the search screen, enter "breast cancer", as before, and then click on the "Advanced Search" link just above the search box. This takes you to a set of options that allow you to limit your search to particular dates, types of article, and topic areas. For example, to search for meta-analyses, tick that box in the section on Type of Article and hit "search". This will generate a list of about 460 meta-analyses that deal with breast cancer.
If your Pubmed search finds a lot of sources, you can restrict yourself to the freely readable ones by clicking on the "Advanced Search" link and checking the box labeled "Links to free full text".
Pubmed is not the only game in town for biomedical searching. There are alternatives.
Three users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Oren0 (nom), SarekOfVulcan (nom), and Lifebaka (nom).
Two bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: SoxBot VII (task request) and SoxBot V (task request).
Fifteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Under the Bridge (nom), General relativity (nom), First-move advantage in chess (nom), Mary Shelley (nom), Zhang Heng (nom), Lince (tank) (nom), Myst III: Exile (nom), Year Zero (album) (nom), Donald Bradman (nom), Hare coursing (nom), The Penelopiad (nom), Trial by Jury (nom), Terry Sanford (nom), Strapping Young Lad (nom), and Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (nom).
Nine lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Golden State Warriors head coaches (nom), List of IIHF World Championship medalists (nom), List of schools in Marlborough, New Zealand (nom), List of WWE SmackDown video game titles (nom), List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations (nom), Death Cab for Cutie discography (nom), List of Sultans of Zanzibar (nom), Kaiser Chiefs discography (nom), and List of baryons (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: Moe Berg, Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, The General in His Labyrinth, and Oxidative phosphorylation.
Six articles were delisted last week: Kazi Nazrul Islam (nom), Theodore Roosevelt (nom), 3D Monster Maze (nom), Libya (nom), Alliterative verse (nom), and War of the Spanish Succession (nom).
Two lists were delisted last week: List of Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes (nom) and IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship (nom).
No topics were delisted last week.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Mice Galaxies, Buffalo Soldiers, Racist campaign poster, and Arches National Park.
No sounds were featured last week.
No featured pictures were demoted last week.
Seven 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.
This week, the Arbitration Committee briefly announced the result of a privately-decided case involving Orangemarlin; amid some criticism, the case was blanked by the Arbitration Committee, and a public case has been filed instead (see related story).
The Arbitration Committee also announced a series of proposals relating to arbitration and other community matters; none of these have yet been acted on (see related story).
Apart from those announcements, the Arbitration Committee opened one case last week, and closed one case, leaving three cases currently open.
