This week, you'll notice several changes in the Signpost. Most significantly, Ral315 is ending his tenure as editor-in-chief. Ral315 managed the Signpost from September 2005 through December 2008, and was the driving force in keeping it up-to-date and comprehensive, enforcing an appropriate tone, and defining the paper's relationship to the community. On behalf of the many Wikipedians who have contributed to the Signpost during his tenure, I'd like to extend our deep thanks to Ral315 for all his hard work. I'm going to do my best to maintain the high standards Ral315, and Michael Snow before that, have set for the Signpost.
We're debuting a new feature that we hope to publish regularly: the Discussion report, a summary of the most significant ongoing discussions and polls of community-wide relevance. We welcome suggestions on how this feature could be improved, as well as tips on important discussions that slip through the cracks, or take place on other wikis but are still relevant to this community.
We also hope to improve our general coverage of other Wikimedia projects. Look for more news from other communities in future editions of "News and notes"—and as always, we depend on your tips and suggestions.
Finally, we are rolling out a new look for the Signpost, spearheaded by Pretzels. We will be tweaking the design over the next week or so, and we invite readers' input and bug reports on the Signpost talk page. We also welcome any suggestions readers have for improving the Signpost more generally.
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On 12 February, the third annual Picture of the Year Awards at Wikimedia Commons began the first round of voting, which will last until 26 February. All editors with at least 200 edits before 1 January 2009 are eligible to vote.
Picture of the Year is a contest that seeks to celebrate the best content that has gone through Commons' Featured Picture process in the previous year. Begun by Alvesgaspar in late 2006, Picture of the Year has become a much-beloved tradition throughout Wikimedia projects. For 2008 there are 501 new Featured Pictures, compared to 514 in 2007 and 321 in 2006.
A few changes have been made this year, due to various problems that left no-one in the committee able to pull the project together. A new committee stepped in, and a simplified voting scheme - not using the anonymous, automated vote-counting of previous years - has been implemented. To both celebrate the various types of content that go into featured pictures, and to allow voting to be tallied more easily, awards will be given in a variety of categories this year, and the top 10% of each category will go on to compete for the overall Picture of the Year award.
Voters are allowed to vote for as many images as they like, and are encouraged to vote in as many of the award categories as they feel able to judge. Voting is done simply by going to the gallery, choosing the images that you like best, clicking on the "Vote" button below those images, and adding your name to the list of votes for that image.
The final round of voting will begin in early March, once all the votes from the previous round have been tallied and confirmed.
2006
2007
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
As of 16 February 2009, the German-language Wikipedia has completed its first pass on flagging every article (with just a few dozen recently created unreviewed articles). Of these articles, 99.47% have their most current revision reviewed. Since reaching completion of flagging all existing articles, the backlog of out-of-date reviews has shrunk considerably, from about 14,000 last week to less than 4,600 now. The oldest out-of-date revision is now only about 6 days old (down from 17 – 21 days), and this has been decreasing over the past few days. Editors hope to maintain a maximum backlog of 5 days in the future. A review statistics tool for monitoring German Wikipedia's progress is available here.
In the course of restoring a public domain photograph of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre—one of many high-quality scans freely available from the United States Library of Congress website—Wikipedian Durova discovered something that had gone unnoticed by curators: four dead bodies, barely visible before restoration, in the foreground of the image. The Library of Congress staff is updating their records to reflect the discovery. Durova reports their reply:
| “ | Upon viewing the high-res TIFF file we made of the file, the human remains are quite visible, indeed. Thank you very much for contacting us regarding this image, and for your interest in our collections. You can imagine that among a collection of 14 million items here, there are a lot of secrets waiting to be uncovered! | ” |
One of the Criteria for Speedy Deletion, T1, has been recently repealed. The T1 criterion was for speedy deletion of "Templates in Template: namespace that are divisive and inflammatory." The T1 criterion has a long and interesting history related to the "userbox wars" of 2006; the criterion was added in the wake of this debate and was used for deleting several userboxes, though it continued to be controversial. Today, templates for deletion have a separate deletion page (TFD); templates may be nominated there for deletion.
RecentChangesCamp is being planned for February 20 – 22 in Portland, Oregon. The conference is an unconference focused on wikis, including wiki technology and communities. The conference has been an annual event since 2006; it is hosted by various members of the wiki community. Along with Wikimania and WikiSym, it is one of three ongoing annual wiki conferences. Everyone in a wiki community or who is interested in wikis is welcome to attend the event. To find out more, visit the RecentChangesCamp wiki.
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On Wednesday, February 11, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, clashed over the age at which the Renaissance painter Titian died. Brown claimed he was 90, Cameron later claimed that he was 86. Within minutes, a user editing under the IP 194.203.158.97, which is registered to the British Conservative Party, changed Titian's year of death from 1576 to 1572 to back up Cameron's statement. This sparked a flurry of editing activity (both constructive and vandalism) over the next several days, including nearly 100 edits on February 11. The article's traffic also dramatically increased, as it was viewed more than 15000 times on February 11 alone, up from an average of roughly 1600 views per day earlier this month. In response to the incident, user Malcolmxl5 wrote on the IP's talk page, "I would advise people using this IP address to avoid editing subjects related to the Conservative Party in particular, and to UK politics in general. Such editing may be seen as compromising the neutrality of articles in these areas and risks causing public embarrassment outside of Wikipedia to the [Conservative] Party."
In the German Wikipedia version of the article Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, about German politician Karl-Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, an additional name (Wilhelm) was added, a mistake that was then widely reproduced in German television and print media. According to an anonymous report on Slashdot, based on a post on the German site BILDblog, the error was reverted on German Wikipedia in the meantime. However, it was subsequently reintroduced and backed up by the erroneous media reports caused by the original falsehood.
Following a pessimistic story from The Independent on February 3 (see last week's coverage), more pundits and Wikipedia observers from the academic world have been discussing Wikipedia's future and whether the project is sustainable.
According to Ars Technica, law professor Eric Goldman sees Wikipedia faced with a dilemma as its influence continues to spread but its core community stops growing to match. Wikipedia could either remain open and fall prey to vandalism and misinformation—Goldman cites the above Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg incident—or exert more control—for example, with Flagged Revisions—and slow the influx of new community members even further.
| “ | Wikipedia won't be the same a couple of years from now as it was a couple of years ago, but nothing ever is. | ” |
| — Joseph Reagle | ||
Andrew Lih, author of the upcoming book The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia, sees the vitality of community waning already. On his blog, Lih laments the failure to keep up with new popular culture topics, long the community's strong suit. Until after his post, Wikipedia had no article on How's Your News?, a potentially controversial new American television show premiering on MTV. He also notes an instance of content loss through an undiscussed article merge. Lih concludes that "perhaps that’s Wikipedia’s long term fate as a product of a decimated crowd: a slow march towards being stale and conventional, not out of commission but omission."
Joseph Reagle, a scholar who recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the collaborative culture of Wikipedia, takes a more optimistic view: "I think Wikipedia will survive even though/if the number of contributors levels off and flag revisions are enabled. The latter feature might prompt a flurry of stories about how Wikipedia is over, but it might stem the flow of future stories about embarrassing vandalism. Wikipedia won't be the same a couple of years from now as it was a couple of years ago, but nothing ever is."
Reader comments
Content review processes such as Featured article candidates (FAC), Featured list candidates (FLC), Good article nominations (GAN) and Peer reviews (PR) are important for ensuring articles meet the high standards demanded of Wikipedia's best work, and providing suggestions on how to achieve them. These processes, however, cannot function without the participation of editors willing to review articles (see related story); such reviewers are perennially in short supply. User:Dr pda takes a look back at 2008 to see how busy this aspect of Wikipedia was.
In 2008, 719 articles were promoted to Featured article (FA) status, while 143 articles had featured status removed via the Featured article review (FAR) process. The net increase, 576 featured articles, is approximately the same as in 2007.[1]
A featured article candidate is open to review by the whole Wikipedia community. Editors can support the article's promotion, if they believe it meets all the criteria, or oppose it, by providing examples of instances where it does not. The Featured article director, User:Raul654, or his delegate, User:SandyGeorgia, will promote an article if consensus in favour of promotion has been reached among the reviewers after a reasonable time.
The number of open featured article candidacies thus depends on several factors: the rate of FAC nominations, how well the article satisfies the FA criteria, the number of reviewers and how frequently the FA director or delegate processes nominations. The above graph (to the right) shows the first two factors. The total number of nominations per month has gradually declined throughout 2008 (November was abnormally low in nominations), but the proportion of candidates being promoted has remained constant at around 55%. The graph to the left shows that the number of open FACs has remained relatively constant at approximately 40 during 2008. The large spike at the beginning of the year is the remnant of the backlog experienced at the end of 2007 which led to the appointment of SandyGeorgia as FAC delegate.[2] Smaller peaks, for example in December, are the result of a shortage of reviews; clear consensus is not reached, therefore FACs cannot be closed.
Articles can also lose featured status through the Featured article review process. Editors who believe an article no longer meets the featured article criteria can list it at FAR. Ideally one or more editors will take on the task of bringing it up to standard. The FAR process usually lasts longer than FAC, to allow these improvements to take place. The graph above shows the number of articles undergoing a featured article review has been gradually decreasing throughout 2008.
In 2008, 722 lists were promoted to Featured list (FL) status, while 53 lists had featured status removed via the Featured list review (FLRC) process. This is a significant increase over 2007, for which the corresponding figures are 339 promotions and 7 demotions.[3] The featured list process has been growing steadily since January 2007 and is now comparable in size to the featured article process, both in terms of articles promoted throughout 2008 and number of open featured list candidacies. The absolute number of featured lists (1,229) is still only half that of featured articles (2,387). Both FLC and FLRC work in a similar way to their featured article counterparts.
The number of Good articles (GA) increased by 2,416 over 2008. This is up 45% on the net increase of 1,662 in 2007. There are currently 6,102 Good articles, 2.5 times the number of Featured articles.[4]
The major difference between the Good and Featured article processes, apart from slightly less strict criteria, is that promotion to GA only requires a review from one editor who was not a significant contributor to the article. While this allows more rapid recognition of good quality articles (the monthly increase in GAs is three times that for FAs), here too demand for reviewers outstrips supply. The graph to the left shows that typically 75% of the nominations on the GAN page have not been reviewed; The remainder are mostly awaiting improvement to the satisfaction of the reviewer. From time to time backlog elimination drives are organised (one is running at the moment); their effect shows up as a sharp drop in the number of nominations, for example in October 2008. (The mid-2007 backlog drive caused an even more dramatic drop.)
In 2008, 2,090 articles had a peer review (PR). This is a slight decrease from 2007's figure of 2,296.[1] The graph to the right shows that the number of peer reviews remained roughly constant throughout the year. Peer review differs from the previously discussed processes in that it does not result in the awarding of a particular status to the article; instead it is a means for editors to solicit suggestions for improving an article. Peer review is often recommended as a way of attracting the attention of previously uninvolved editors to spot problems which might not be apparent to those closer to the article. Once again this requires reviewers. In February User:Ruhrfisch started a list of peer reviews which had not received any comments after a few days. The number of items on this list, shown as the red line in the graph, is usually between 10 and 20, typically 10% of the total number of open peer reviews. While this is a much smaller backlog than for Good article nominations, more reviewers are still needed at PR; only a handful of people ensure articles on the PR backlog list get reviewed.
Although a small WikiProject, the Gaelic games project serves a great array of sports native to Ireland. Gaelic games include Gaelic football and hurling, both of which generally take place in Ireland, the games' homeland. Despite its size, the project is quite active, as Gnevin tells us.
| “ | That's one of the joys of the Wikipedia project: you don't have to have a master's degree in English to help out. | ” |
| — Gnevin | ||
The following is a brief overview of the current discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia.
The Arbitration Committee invites cases and discussion of chronic ongoing violations of Wikipedia:No personal attacks, which is fundamental hard Wikipedia policy. Not one-offs and not (at this stage) mere incivility, but chronic ongoing personal attacks. Attempts to work through the problems (e.g. RFCs) will be expected to have been tried and failed before a case is brought.
| This article must adhere to the policy on biographies of living persons. Controversial material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced should not be added and if present, must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted or if there are other concerns relating to this policy, please report it on the biographies of living persons noticeboard. |
If an article is deleted under any of the applicable Criteria for Speedy Deletion, this deletion can only be restored via WP:DRV discussion or via disciplinary discussion in the case of misuse of tools. Regular recreation of non-salted articles with new or improved content is allowed by any editors, and subjected to a regular process as if the article were entirely new, including further CSD if that is the case. Obvious mistakes and self-reversions do not require DRV.
Icons should not be used solely to improve the visual appearance of an article. Icons which do not provide extra information to a reader or improve the readability of long lists are usually just a distraction (example). Generally, infobox fields containing only one or two entries and articles where nationality is not important should not use flag icons.
Regarding terminology: Several words that have very specific meanings in studies of religion have different meanings in less formal contexts, e.g. fundamentalism and mythology. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia articles about religious topics should take care to use these words only in their formal senses in order to avoid causing unnecessary offense or misleading the reader. Conversely, editors should not avoid using terminology that has been established by the majority of the current reliable and notable sources on a topic out of sympathy for a particular point of view, or concern that readers may confuse the formal and informal meanings. Details about some particular terms can be found at WP:WTA.
Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Nja247 (nom) and WereSpielChequers (nom).
Five bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: RFC posting script (task request), Chrisbot (task request), Erik9bot (task request), Robert SkyBot (task request) and Legobot (task request).
Twelve articles were promoted to featured status this week: Carsten Borchgrevink (nom), The Chaser APEC pranks (nom), William Bostock (nom), Hurricane Nate (2005) (nom), Tropical Storm Kiko (2007) (nom), United States Military Academy (nom), In Utero (nom), Sideshow Bob (nom), John Calvin (nom), Edgar Speyer (nom), Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (nom) and Greece Runestones (nom).
Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of ECW Tag Team Champions (nom), Rumford Medal (nom), List of Olympic medalists in short track speed skating (nom), List of Los Angeles Clippers head coaches (nom), 2008 World Series of Poker results (nom), Buchanan Medal (nom), List of Football League Cup winners (nom), WCW Hall of Fame (nom), List of number-one albums of 1983 (U.S.) (nom), List of Kansas City Chiefs starting quarterbacks (nom), List of Ah! My Goddess episodes (season 1) (nom), Pantera discography (nom), List of Hot 100 number-one singles of 2004 (U.S.) (nom) and Nashville Sounds all-time roster (nom).
Five topics were promoted to featured status this week: The Simpsons (season 6) (nom), Seasons of Bleach (nom), Beauchamp–Sharp Tragedy (nom), Numbered highways in Amenia (CDP), New York (nom) and Myst series (nom).
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: Toa Payoh ritual murders, Buildings and architecture of Bristol, History of evolutionary thought, 300, Romeo and Juliet, Aldol reaction, Thomas Cranmer and Theramenes.
One article was delisted this week: Kalimpong (nom).
Three lists were delisted this week: List of Merriam–Webster's Words of the Year (nom), Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama (nom) and List of Metal Gear Solid characters (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Table d'hôte, Dark Small-branded Swift, Charles Darwin, Hilda Clark, Leucanthemum paludosum, Battle of Harper's Ferry, Vernon and Irene Castle and Mark Harmon.
No media files were featured this week.
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Fifteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that some changes described here have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Checkuser and Oversight elections closed on the 15th. Former arbitrator Dmcdevit was reappointed as an Oversight and Checkuser. The appointment was a restoration of tools to an editor who had previously held them; it appears to have nothing to do with the aforementioned elections. The Committee formally deferred appointing a new IRC liaison; Wizardman was announced as the replacement of FT2 for this position a few weeks back, but the appointment was withdrawn. The Committee announced their proposal for a codified process of removing "advanced" user permissions. Significant opposition has arisen to the proposed process for emergency removals.
The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving five open.
