The Wikimedia Foundation's 2008 fundraiser opened on November 5, with an ambitious goal of raising US$6 million over the next few months; the fundraiser is currently scheduled to end on January 15, Wikipedia Day. As of press time, the fundraiser had brought in about $525,000 in seven days, bringing the total raised, including gifts since the beginning of the fiscal year, to about $2.43 million.
Robert Rohde, who has compiled graphs and statistics in previous fundraisers, estimated on Tuesday that given current fundraising totals and trends observed in previous years, the Foundation will bring in anywhere from $2.0–3.8 million by early January, not including any additional "major gifts" (over $10,000) collected by the Foundation. When combined with the $1.9 million collected prior to the fundraiser, this would estimate the final YTD collections, as of early January, at anywhere from $3.9 to $5.7 million, not including additional major gifts.
In conjunction with the fundraiser, the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Report was published. This is the first time that such a report has been published. The report includes letters from Executive Director Sue Gardner and Board of Trustees Chair Michael Snow, and an unofficial breakdown of 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 financials. The vast majority of the report, however, explains the projects, the Foundation's goals, and other information geared more toward donors. Audited financial statements have not yet been released for 2007–2008; however, the financials were unanimously approved in a November meeting. It is unclear when they will be publicly released.
As has become standard in Wikimedia fundraisers, the design of the fundraising banner at the top of pages has raised some controversy. Editors across multiple projects and languages have noted that the banner is substantially larger than the banners used in previous fundraisers, and that it is impossible to dismiss the notice completely -- the "[Collapse]" link on the notice merely shows a smaller notice instead. In response to the latter issue, logged-in users see a much smaller notice after clicking the "collapse" link; however, the message is not hidden entirely.
Like in last year's fundraiser, more than one message is being displayed, and the effectiveness of each message is being tracked. Unlike last year's fundraiser, however, the different messages vary much more in appearance, as some messages contain a "fundraising bar", while others contain just text and a "Donate Now" link.
Sometime in November, an anonymous donor made a $250,000 donation, the largest so far this month. In the last few months, a few other large gifts were made that were not widely reported, including a £100,000 ($177,376) donation from Arcadia in October, and a $262,000 donation from the Stanton Foundation in September. These gifts, as well as the $1 million donation pledged by the Sloan Foundation for this year's budget, make up about 69% of the Foundation's income so far this fiscal year. Other notable donations, all made last month, include a $20,000 donation from Mr. Ron Unz, and $10,000 donations from the Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Arlene and Arnold Goldstein Family Foundation.
Similarly to previous fundraisers, the average donation is between $25 and $30. Since July 2008, donations in United States dollars have made up about 60.5% of the total number of contributions, and 22.6% have been made in Euros. The remaining 16.9% were made in fifteen other denominations, including British pounds, Japanese yen, and Canadian and Australian dollars.
A new change to the fundraising form this year suggests donations of $30, $75, or $100, with a textbox marked "other", allowing donors to choose their own amount. At press time, just over 18% of donors (4,217 contributions) had chosen a donation of exactly $30, and about 4.2% of donors (988 contributions) had chosen a donation of exactly $100. Only 1.4% of donors (328 contributions) chose the $75 mark, however.
This week, nominations for this year's Arbitration Committee elections opened. The nomination period continues through 24 November. In order to qualify, candidates must be at least 18 years of age and of legal age in their place of residence, have at least 1000 edits, and should self-nominate with a statement of 400 words or fewer.
As of press time, nominations have been submitted by nineteen candidates: Bishzilla, Carcharoth, Charles Matthews, Cool Hand Luke, Coren, Fish and karate, George The Dragon, Hersfold, Jdforrester, Jehochman, Justice America, Phil Sandifer, Privatemusings, Rlevse, Sam Korn, SirFozzie, Vassyana, White Cat, and Wizardman.
There are at least seven seats to be filled in this year's elections. The terms of four arbitrators (Charles Matthews, Jdforrester, Morven, and YellowMonkey) all end this year. The other three seats stem from the resignations of Paul August and UninvitedCompany earlier this year, and the resignation of Jpgordon (effective December 31).
Two of the four arbitrators whose terms expire this year (Charles Matthews and Jdforrester) have nominated themselves for re-election. Morven has stated that he will not be seeking another term, while YellowMonkey has not made a definitive statement on-wiki as to whether he will be running.
Along with nominations, questions are also being accepted for the candidates. As in previous years, each candidate has a questions page, where questions will be accepted until the opening of voting on 1 December. However, this year, a general questions page has also been added, for the convenience of users who would like to ask each candidate the same general question(s). These questions are being accepted until 17 November, at which point the general questions will be transcluded on each candidate's individual questions page, and they can answer (or choose not to answer) each question at that time.
Voting will run from 1 December through 14 December this year. Upon the close of the elections, Jimbo Wales will make his choices for the Committee. In previous years, Wales has had the option of selecting any candidate with at least 50% support, but he has generally picked largely in line with the community's most favored candidates.
| Book Review |
| How Wikipedia Works |
| By Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews and Ben Yates |
| 507 pages, No Starch Press |
| US$29.95 |
In March, the Signpost reviewed John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, the first book to guide readers through the basics of editing Wikipedia. This week, we review How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be A Part of It (ISBN 9781593271763).
How Wikipedia Works, written by Wikipedia veterans Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates, is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Chapter 12 ("Community and Communication") is currently available in PDF format at the publisher's website.
The book is divided into four parts: "Content", "Editing", "Community", and "Other Projects". Part I covers various aspects of content, including inclusion policies and guidelines in-depth, searching Wikipedia, and understanding and evaluating an article. Among the highlights of this section is an interesting timeline of how Wikipedia came to be, covering the history of the modern encyclopedia, the free software movement, and Ward's Wiki, and how these and other factors led to the creation of Wikipedia, and to its success. Also notable is an acronym, apparently coined by the writers, to help readers evaluate the quality of an article:
There are five general areas to evaluate for every article.
D: Discussion
- Check the talk page of the article for any controversy regarding the article.
R: Rating
- Is there a formal rating of the article, or a cleanup notice? WikiProject ratings are on talk pages, not in the article itself.
E: Edit history
- The history of an article will tell you how and by whom it has been put together.
W: Writing and format
- How does the page read? How does it look?
S: Sources
- Are claims in the article well supported by solid references?
— How Wikipedia Works, page 120
Part II deals with the process of editing Wikipedia, and its description of wiki syntax, cleanup, WikiProjects, disambiguation, images, and the like was very thorough, and would be useful to any beginners, or even users with some experience editing articles. However, I found the two chapters that do not deal primarily with syntax most impressive. Chapter 6 covers writing and research, and its explanations of good Wikipedia research, reliable sources, and correct referencing are much easier for the casual editor to understand than the respective policies. Chapter 10, meanwhile, is a short but fascinating look at "The Life Cycle of an Article" (using the example article Gingerbread cottage architecture). It covers the basics of deletion processes, renaming, tagging, merging, categorizing, bot editing, and other article-related processes, in a straight-forward manner. The chapter also offers the real example of Mzoli's Meats, created by Jimbo Wales in September 2007 and subsequently the subject of a passionate AfD debate.
Part III covers different aspects of the community, including preferences, user and talk pages, watchlists, consensus, the specifics of policies and guidelines, and dispute resolution. Humorously, one chapter here devotes nearly a page to the "Boxen War", highlighting the 2005-2006 debates over the place of userboxes within the community. Most notable in this section is a list of policies and guidelines, grouped by type, along with short summaries of each policy or guideline. Even for experienced users, this list could prove to be useful.
In Part IV, the authors discuss other projects, devoting one chapter to the many languages of Wikipedia, and interwiki links (including a mention of the infamous Klingon Wikipedia). Another chapter deals with the other Wikimedia projects, focusing primarily on Wikimedia Commons. The final chapter of the book explains the Wikimedia Foundation, including its role within the community, chapters, and elections to the Board of Trustees, and also briefly covers MediaWiki and the Meta-Wiki. I was glad to see that the authors pointed out in this chapter not only that Wikipedia is facilitated by a non-profit organization, but also why Wikipedia has no advertisements, something that few readers know or understand.
The book is supplemented by various appendices. Appendix A explains the guidelines for reusing Wikipedia content. Appendix B is a very useful discussion on the use of Wikipedia in a classroom setting. The remaining appendices cover various jargon used in edit summaries, a glossary of commonly used terms and acronyms, credits for the various Wikipedia screenshots included in the book, and a copy of the GFDL.
In general, I was impressed by the book's simple, user-friendly layout; particularly interesting to me was the choice to devote the first four chapters to understanding Wikipedia, before showing the reader how to edit an article. Also impressive was the detail given to various topics that I wouldn't have thought to cover within such a book. A brief section on POV forks and NPOV highlights Wikinfo, the fork created by Fred Bauder that emphasizes different points of view. A section on real-life naming disputes, meanwhile, uses the case study of Gdańsk, the subject of a contentious vote as to when the city should be referred to by its Polish name Gdańsk, and when it should be referred to by the German name Danzig.
So, is this book worth buying? As with Broughton's book before it, How Wikipedia Works is not aimed at those users who already know much about how Wikipedia works, although even the most experienced users might find some of the book's more unique features useful. However, I think new users, and those interested in learning more about Wikipedia, will find this book to be a great guide to understanding Wikipedia, and the community behind it.
Note: The full text of the book can be found at http://howwikipediaworks.net.
In October, several major features were added to the MediaWiki internal search engine and integrated into the English Wikipedia. Wikipedia's search engine has been criticized in the past as it lacked some features which are considered standard in modern Internet search engines, and these additions are an important step forward. Some of the new features are:
prefix: before the search text. For example, try prefix:Wikipedia:Village Pump.Some search options (such as fuzzy search and prefix search) can currently be accessed only through the use of the above-mentioned "magic words." At some point, it is expected that an advanced search page will be added with a friendlier access to many such features.
Further information about these new features can be found in the announcement on Wikitech-l by Robert Stojnic. Some technical details are also available.
This week, four resolutions were approved and published by the Board of Trustees, including a resolution approving the Foundation's audited financial statements for 2007-2008.
The most notable resolution is the unanimous approval of financial statements from Fiscal Year 2007-2008, which ended on June 30. These statements have not yet been released, and no public notice has been given as to when they will be released.
This year, the financial statements were audited by KPMG, a well-known financial services firm considered one of the so-called "Big Four auditors"; in previous years, the Foundation used a St. Petersburg-based firm, Gregory, Sharer and Stuart, as their auditor.
Another resolution approved the Executive Director, Deputy Director, and Chief Financial and Operating Officer as authorized traders and signers on brokerage accounts for the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation's brokerage accounts handle any stock donations received; generally, the policy is to immediately sell stock received, in order to lock in the stock's current value.
Two more resolutions formally approved Wikimedia Norway and Wikimedia Hungary as official chapters of the Foundation. Along with October resolutions approving Wikimedia Indonesia and Wikimedia Brasil, the Foundation now has 21 approved chapters.
Members of three Vietnamese wiki communities met at the Hanoi University of Technology on Friday, November 8, for a series of presentations and discussion panels. The first inaugural Wiki Day includes active members of the Vietnamese Wikipedia and Wiktionary (Wiki Day info); Vietnamese Library of Science (info), a Vietnamese science wiki; and Baamboo Tra từ (info), a commercial, community-oriented dictionary built on MediaWiki. About 120 people attended, both online and in person.
Topics included the wikis' priorities for the future, developments in wiki software, article reliability, and the steps to build a healthy wiki community. Attendees received gifts, including CD-ROMs of each wiki's best content.
The event, which was not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation, has received coverage in Vietnam's major newspapers, and at least three national television networks – VTV3, VTV6, and VTC – taped the event. VTV6 will air coverage of Wiki Day on November 12.
On November 4, 2008, Wikipedia made its own contribution to history by displaying two Featured articles (FA) as Today's featured article (TFA) on the main page. Moreover, for the first time, one of these articles had previously been featured on the main page. The articles represented the two major candidates—Barack Obama and John McCain—in the 2008 United States Presidential Election.
The Barack Obama article was brought to featured status by User:Meelar in August 2004; this version appeared on the main page on August 18, 2004. Since then User:HailFire, User:Tvoz and User:Bobblehead have become the major contributors to the article. The article has retained featured status for four years; this status was reaffirmed at four separate Featured article reviews: January 2007, July 2007, April 2008 and September 2008. As Obama's presidential campaign gained strength in 2008, editing conditions at the page deteriorated. Several threads were launched at the Administrators' noticeboards to complain of edit warring, personal attacks, incivility, and assumptions of bad faith. In July 2008, a proposal that Obama-related pages be placed on article probation was made; the proposal was quickly approved and endorsed several days later. Three days after the election, the article was again nominated for a review.
In March 2008, the article on John McCain was prematurely nominated for Featured Article status by an editor who had not previously worked on the article. That nomination failed, but User:Ferrylodge and User:Wasted Time R continued to work to improve the article. Ferrylodge renominated it in August 2008 and it was promoted without any opposition. By November 2008, Ferrylodge had added about 1,000 edits to the article and Wasted Time R had contributed an additional 500 to his 450 edits at the time of the first Featured article candidacy.
On October 27, User:Remember initiated a discussion at the talk page of Today's Featured Article/Requests (TFA/R) on whether to highlight the articles of the two primary U.S. presidential candidates. The original proposal would have placed the election winner's article on the main page on November 5, and the other candidate's article on the main page on November 6. Other editors were opposed to the proposal for various reasons, including the uncertainty of knowing the winner's identity at midnight (UTC) on November 5 and that having the two articles on consecutive days would be too US-centric. Remember then proposed an alternate solution—have both articles featured on election day. User:SandyGeorgia moved the proposal to TFA/R on October 30 as an Ignore all rules (IAR) request to solicit more opinions. A lively discussion (archived here) ensued. Among the concerns were:
After more spirited discussion, by November 3, the proposal had 28 supports and 12 opposes. FA Director and TFA Coordinator User:Raul654 agreed to run the unprecedented double TFA and to repeat a TFA which had already run on the mainpage, saying:[1]
Ok, so as I read this, ITN isn't going to do anything with the election until after midnight UTC. If that's the case, my largest worry is alleviated. My second worry is setting precedents with regard to featuring (A) two articles at once, or (B) featuring articles on the main page a second time, remain. However, I think this can be dealt with by me saying, here and now, that this is an extremely unusual thing that I have absolutely no intention or desire to repeat in the future. Does that satisfy everyone? Raul654 (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
Independently of the Today's Featured Article discussion, editors at the Administrator's noticeboard discussed what level of protection the articles should be given as the election approached. With the election cycle nearing a close, vandalism and POV-pushing on these articles made it hard for the regular editors to keep the pages at a state that followed Wikipedia's core policies, including the policy on biographies of living people. On October 29, full protection for both the Obama and McCain articles through November 5, the day after the election, as well as the articles on their vice-presidential nominees Joe Biden and Sarah Palin was proposed. Several dozen editors joined the discussion, and after a brief period of full protection, the articles were semi-protected until election day with the understanding that full protection would be enabled on election day.
Originally, the two TFAs were listed in alphabetical order. User:Cyde Weys then added Javascript to randomly change the order in which the blurbs appeared as the page was refreshed. Nevertheless, Talk:Main Page and the TFA page registered several complaints from readers upset that a certain candidate was listed first. A few other readers perceived the selection of these two articles as too US-centric and requested that a similar effort be implemented for other elections. Several others were concerned that only the candidates from the two major political parties were featured, and others were displeased that both articles were fully protected.
Overall, however, response to the double TFA was very positive. Raul654 was lauded for his boldness in choosing to run a double TFA, and for ignoring all the rules to feature the Obama article a second time. Many liked the format as an unbiased way to acknowledge the United States presidential election. User:JayHenry remarked that "I'm mostly happy that we tried something outside the box. The outside the box idea that gets implemented is an increasingly endangered species on Wikipedia."[2] Among those offering kudos on Raul654's talk page were User:maclean25, who awarded Raul a special "Tightrope Award", and User:Fvasconcellos, who posted:[3]
You have my instant respect, for what it's worth :) IAR was made for this. This, and the reasoning and process behind it, is the Wikipedia I love, the Wikipedia I signed up for, etc. etc. Thanks. Fvasconcellos 01:54, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
Throughout the day on November 4, the Obama and McCain articles remained in the top five most popular articles on Wikipedia. For much of the day, the Obama article was the most popular, and received, on average, almost twice as many visitors as the McCain article.[4] In the last 90 minutes of the day (from 4 Nov 23:05 UTC until 5 Nov 00:38 UTC), there were over 210,000 searches for "Barack Obama" (not including any redirects).
In total, while the articles were featured on the Main page, Obama's article (including redirects) received about 728,000 hits, and McCain's article (including redirects), received about 365,000 hits. Together, they received over 1 million hits.[5] In comparison, the TFA for November 3, Delhi, received about 130,000 hits while it was on the main page.
No users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week.
Three bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: Nallimbot (task request), MifterBot I (task request), and Techman224 Interwiki Bot (task request),.
Three articles were promoted to featured status this week: Kevin O'Halloran (nom), 1923 FA Cup Final (nom), and USS Constitution (nom).
Twelve lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of PGA Championship champions (nom), List of Bay Area Rapid Transit stations (nom), List of San Diego Padres Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of number-one Billboard Top Latin Albums of 2004 (nom), List of mergers and acquisitions by Apple (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Bloc Party (nom), List of Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Ne-Yo (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Radiohead (nom), and List of mergers and acquisitions by Symantec (nom), Walter A. Brown Trophy (nom), List of St. Louis MetroLink stations (nom).
No topics were promoted to featured status this week.
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Delhi, John McCain and Barack Obama (both on the same day), Group, Mario Vargas Llosa, Komodo dragon, "Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)", and Priestfield Stadium.
No articles, lists, or topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Skyline of Hong Kong, Seals of the United States, Cosmic microwave radiation, Trevi Fountain, Glen Canyon, David Herold, and Bicoloured Antbird.
No sounds were featured this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Two pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent (as in, since the last technology report was written) 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.
The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving two open.
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