The time has come once again for the traditional call for new Signpost writers. We need you to keep the Signpost up-to-date and comprehensive. We have several pressing needs right now.
Earlier this year, we began experimenting with a "Discussion report" to summarize major new discussions about policy and project management. These reports proved useful and interesting, but it was too much work for too few volunteers. New editors willing to tackle the "Discussion report" would be most welcome.
"In the news" and the "Arbitration report" would benefit from more backup writers for when the current regulars have to miss a week on their beats. Extra backups or collaborators on the other beats would also be helpful.
You do not have to be a regular beat writer to contribute. There are many opportunities for one-off stories, so if you have an idea for a story or want to write one, please let us know. And if you leave well-formed news items at the tip line that can be included more-or-less verbatim, you may end up with a byline in "In the news" or "News and notes".
There are many recent and upcoming books about Wikipedia and its broader technical, political, and cultural contexts listed at the review desk, but reviewers are needed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the enormous increase in the availability of free information over the Internet, more books are being published than ever. Many of them have useful insights for our community, or interesting things to say about it. If you want to review one of the listed books, or know of another book you think the community might like to read about from a Wikipedian's perspective, please sign up. For new books, the Signpost can try to obtain free review copies, and multiple reviewers can sign up for the same book.
If you would like to write for the Signpost, drop us a line at the planning room, or contact Sage Ross or Phoebe.
Vinegar like most people have never seen it – crystals of pure acetic acid.
Chemicals – love 'em or hate 'em, but you couldn't live without 'em. Water, glucose and sodium chloride are pretty essential for all of us. Other chemicals make our clothes, or colour them, or provide jobs for millions of workers. Still more chemicals (sometimes the same ones as before) can do us some pretty nasty harm if we're not careful, or degrade the environment for our children and grandchildren. Some chemicals are only really of interest to a professional chemist, or to someone who is easily amused by silly names – arsole, moronic acid and vomitoxin all have Wikipedia articles, after all. But information about chemical compounds is big business, worth several billions of U.S. dollars annually worldwide, and the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society) is a leading player, "the global leader" as they prefer to put it!
But if there's something interesting that can be said about a chemical, then sooner or later someone is going to write an article about it… That's why the Chemicals WikiProject slaves away at over five thousand articles about individual chemical compounds (nearly double that number if you count all the drugs), trying to improve the content that we have and to fill in any obvious gaps in our coverage. Five to ten thousand compounds is pretty small compared to other collections of chemical information (CAS boasts 46 million compounds) but, as in many other areas, Wikipedia stands out because of its slightly idiosyncratic choice of subject matter. Free-access databases such as ChemSpider have millions of entries but, as its CEO Antony Williams told us, "for some of those compounds, Wikipedia is the only accessible online source of data."
Most chemicals are white powders. Most chemicals that aren't white powders are black or grey powders. Sodium dichromate is an orange powder (and carcinogenic): it's also one of the chemicals in the collaboration between WP Chem and CAS (number [10588-01-9]).
Getting the numbers right
Of course, none of that is worth anything unless the information is reasonably accurate. Water boils at 100 °C (212 °F) and, if you say it boils at 212 °C (100 °F) you're nearer to an 'F-grade' than a 'C-grade'… About eighteen months ago, after launching an informal survey of chemical information professionals, WP Chem embarked on a mammoth project (still ongoing) of hand-checking certain types of data in the infoboxes. Obviously, the work would be wasted without a clear record of what had been checked and what the correct data was, so WikiChemist and administrator Beetstra wrote CheMoBot, which logs any changes to data in the infoboxes and highlights changes to verified data, all with a feed to the WP Chem IRC channel on freenode (join us for publically logged meetings most Tuesdays at 1600 UTC).
One of the types of data we wanted to verify was the CAS registry number, a sort of ID number for chemical compounds. CAS registry numbers can be found from a wide variety of sources, but the sources often don't agree with one another. The ideal solution would be to check with CAS, the organisation that issues them, and a couple of editors with access to the relevant databases offered to run some checks in their spare time.
The rapid response from CAS, and the controversy it caused in the wider chemical community, at least proved to us that chemical information professionals really do read Wikipedia. The first response from CAS was that anyone using its databases to find information for Wikipedia is breaching its terms of access[1] (the databases are not public). After a hectic week of emails and posts on various blogs and mailing lists (and Wikipedia talkpages) – many thanks to all those chemists who are not involved with Wikipedia but who still stood up for the project – the door was open: CAS were more than willing to help WP Chem, but we needed to agree on how.[2]
The credit for keeping the negotiations moving forward, for calmly explaining to people on each side that the other side couldn't do a deal without this or that (and, most importantly, why), that is all due to WP Chem editor Walkerma. It took a long time, but by last Autumn the talking was mostly over and the hard work could begin.
CAS has provided the WikiChemists with over six thousand CAS registry numbers from the compounds they consider are the most interesting to the chemical community as a whole (mostly compounds that have had more than 1000 scientific papers written about them), along with the other information we need such as structure diagrams (in the right format) and their version of the chemical name (CAS uses its own chemical nomenclature system). ChemSpider stepped in and generated International Chemical Identifiers (InChIs, another widely used ID system for some types of compound) for each of the compounds and added them to the dataset. And a committed group of editors has been working through the list one-by-one checking the data in the Wikipedia articles. If the basic data has been checked – that is, if the article really is about the compound it says it is – the CAS registry number appears bolded in the infobox.
More importantly, CAS has just released the data on a dedicated website, commonchemistry.org so that anyone can access it, not just WP Chem editors. This was an important condition for WikiChemists, as the data has to be verifiable, but it is a completely new departure for CAS, who have built the site from scratch. The site is not meant to be static, and more information and compounds should be added in the future. For the moment, WP Chem is still digesting the data we've got, but we've already freed that data for anyone else to use if they wish.
Looking to the future, looking for the structures
It may seem strange to go to all this trouble over some strange numbers that are meaningless to most people (human chemists included). However, chemical identifiers (of which CAS registry numbers are only one) are the key to finding and classifying chemical information on the internet. Much of that information is graphical, yet the vast majority of chemical images online are completely meaningless to a non-human. The two structures shown here are codeine (the active ingredient in many cough medicines, left) and heroin (an illegal narcotic, right): if you can't tell the difference, then neither can a computer. The relevant chemical data is used by the software that creates the image, but is thrown away when the image is saved in a browser-compatible format because there's no generally accepted standard for chemical metadata. WikiChemists have had discussions with external partners on ways to solve the problem, not just for single molecules but also for reaction schemes. For the moment, we're still talking, but maybe we'll have another dispatch this time next year…
Is it really WP Chem's business to be doing all this? Shouldn't we be chalking up little gold stars instead? Well there's certainly nothing wrong with writing great articles, but neither is there anything wrong with Wikipedians playing an active role in the wider intellectual community. Our outside contacts have been wonderful sources of advice to prevent WP Chem from trying to reinvent the wheel or from wasting time on information that very few people want or need. We also have a vested interest in solutions that are free, especially faced with the giants of the chemical information business: free so that Wikipedia can benefit from them and free so that everybody can benefit from them.
From April 4 to May 4 2009 a competition in writing Norway-related articles was held in the Estonian language version of the international on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, written by volunteers. The competition was supported by the Norwegian Embassy to Estonia. At the same time, a parallel competition for writing Estonia-related articles ran in the Hovudside Nynorsk and Hovedside Bokmål versions of Wikipedia, supported by the Estonian Embassy to Norway.
This is the first time that embassies have supported a competition in Wikipedia. The original idea of the competition came from Mr Ulf Larsen, who works in Norway and lives in Estonia.
Over the course of the competition, 216 new articles on Estonia were written in Bokmål and 202 new articles were written in Nynorsk. Forty users of the Estonian Wikipedia managed to write or edit 768 articles in one month. 623 of those articles were written from scratch during this competition. This great number was very surprising for the jury.
Most articles written in the Estonian language concern the geography and history of Norway. There was also interest in Norwegian literature, art and cinema.
Three of the winners of the Norwegian part of the competition, at the Estonian embassy in Oslo, from right to left Finn Bjørklid from Wikimedia Norway, ambassador Arti Hilpus, prize winner Jpfagerback, prizewinner Naunet, first secretary Leena Prozes, main prize winner Bjoertvedt and Ulf Larsen
Winners in Estonian language version of Wikipedia:
"Wikimedia Conference Japan" was recently announced as being in the planning stages; this will be a one-day conference held between 21-23 November. The details are being worked out at meta:Wikimedia Conference Japan and the mailing list, and the relevant translations are provided at meta:Wikimedia Conference Japan/en and meta:User:Makotoy/Wikimedia Conference Japan. The organizers are seeking both Japanese-language and non-Japanese presentations, as well as help with translation and promotion.
Briefly
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking volunteers from the community who have "financial literacy" to join the 2009-2010 Audit Committee. The Audit Committee, as in previous years, carries out the financial oversight responsibilities of the Board of Trustees.
Wikimedia usability is still looking to hire a software developer; the deadline has been extended to May 30th. According to Noako Komura, head of the Usability Initiative, both candidates local to San Francisco and remote candidates will be considered.
The San Francisco-area meetup group is currently planning their booth for Maker Faire, an annual festival showcasing art and DIY culture that is held in San Mateo, California. The booth will represent all Wikimedia projects; organizers are currently seeking volunteers to help staff the booth and display ideas. This is the second year the Foundation has participated in the Faire.
Newyorkbrad shares his personal views of Wikipedia and its flaws and virtues, and has posts on privacy, biographies of living people, and on "who runs the place". A parallel discussion about Newyorkbrad's posts is going on at Wikipedia Review.
On French Wikipedia, government ministries try to spin articles
According to the article, "French Authorities intervene relatively often on Wikipedia in order to delete what they see as being negative content or to insert its own version of issues".
Few can deny that opera is an acquired taste, but one thing we can be certain of is its impact on society. Culturally, the originally Italian art form transformed music from the time of its sixteenth century conception, and eventually grew into an industry reaching much of the world. WikiProject Opera, however, isn't quite that old, but it covers over five hundred years worth of operas, composers, singers, and many other people who come under its scope. To find out more, we talked to three contributors to the project: Shoemaker's Holiday, Voceditenore and Folantin.
How do you contribute to the Project mainly?
Shoemaker's Holiday: I work largely in sounds and pictures, though I help out with article-writing to some extent. we've also been working on an opera portal recently, which has a lot of my featured pictures and sounds featured in it.
I find it easy to get caught up in the opera project "pushes", so am particularly looking forward to other attempts to get one or more Henry Purcell articles up to featured status, so it can run on the main page on the 350th anniversary of his birthday later this year.
Voceditenore: I mainly work on writing new articles and expanding stubs. But I also help out with "housekeeping" jobs – participating in opera-related Articles for deletion discussions, checking daily for newly created articles that are relevant to the project (many of them are by editors new to Wikipedia and need to be formatted and categorized), and maintaining the Opera Project's main page and talk page. Lately, I've also become involved in re-vamping the Opera Portal.
Folantin: Until January, I spent most of my time creating new articles on individual operas and general opera topics (including obscure areas such as Armenian opera). Now I'm more interested in improving the depth rather than the breadth of our coverage. At the moment I'm working on the Henry Purcell pages along with other members from the project. I also watch out for vandalism and have several hundred opera pages on my list. Fortunately, we don't get many vandals in this area (this is not a request for more!).
Let's talk about your personal contributions to the Project. Shoemaker's Holiday, you're known for restoration work. How would you go about this?
Shoemaker's Holiday: I haven't actually done as much image work on operas as I'd like. This might require a little explanation.
Basically, in order to restore an image, you need access to either a copy of the image, or to a high-quality, high-resolution scan. There's very little you can do if they're too small. The only place I've found images online worth restoring is the Library of Congress, and I've done the vast majority of the ones they have that are worth doing already.
That said, I have been lucky on a few points: I'm willing to spend a certain amount of money every month to acquire things for use on Wikipedia. Last month, I got a copy of the French newspaper, L'Illustration, which reported on the first ever production of Jules Massenet's Le Cid, with four large engravings. One of these I need to sort out a larger scanner for - it's a two-page spread of the finale, about A2-size. Both of the ones I've done so far easily reached featured picture status.
However, even if I keep buying newspapers, the "illustrated weeklies" (as they called them) first appeared in about 1844, started to get really good art in 1860 or so, and then the high-quality engravings all suddenly turn into very-low-quality half toning by 1900. During this period, they reported on most of the major operas; however, opera began in 1597, and operas continue to be composed to this day, so this gives me sources for only a small part of opera's history. I'll take what I can get, but until we start getting access to the archives of the major opera houses, it's going to be hard to fill in the other periods.
I've done much more work with sound restoration, with about twenty or so opera-related sounds, and at least a dozen of those being featured sounds. As you can imagine, having recordings of opera is very, very useful from an encyclopaedic perspective: They allow the readers to at least get some idea what the opera sounds like, and to learn about the various composers' distinctive styles. We're limited somewhat by copyright, but a good chunk of early sound recordings were opera, and copyright rules are much more lenient for sound recordings than for images in most countries.
Voceditenore, how have you contributed to the Portal for the WikiProject?
Voceditenore: Our goal is to make it a Featured portal. We are very fortunate to have someone from WikiProject Portals working with us. His help has been invaluable in making the format and layout easy to maintain and in guiding us through the criteria for featured portals. My contribution has been to help expand the content of the "In this month", "Did you know?" and "Selected quote" sections. These can be important for catching the newcomer's interest and giving an idea of the breadth of the subject. Opera is a living art form that spans five centuries and every continent. It's performed in big arenas, magnificent theatres, city parks, country houses, churches, floating platforms, and even factories and warehouses.
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Opera is a living art form that spans five centuries and every continent. It's performed in big arenas, magnificent theatres, city parks, country houses, churches, floating platforms, and even factories and warehouses.
Which areas of Opera are best covered by the WikiProject?
Shoemaker's Holiday: I think we have decent coverage of quite a lot of opera, but it's a big field - thousands of articles - and there aren't that many of us, so some of our coverage is still rather shallow and unpolished. Since about late 2008 we've been taking some major steps to fix that, adding improvement drives and such to the article creation drives that dominated our work formerly.
Voceditenore: In terms of breadth of coverage, I'd say it's in the area of operas by 19th century Italian composers. We have articles on 54 Donizetti operas and 39 Rossini operas alone, as well as articles on all of the operas by Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini. We also have many biographies of the singers who created the leading roles in those operas. In terms of depth and quality of coverage, I'd say that our strength up to now has been in Baroque opera. I should point out, though, that our two "daughter" projects, WikiProject Gilbert and Sullivan and WikiProject Richard Wagner, have also produced many good quality in-depth articles in their specialized areas, as has WikiProject Composers. (There is a considerable overlap in the membership of these four projects.)
Folantin: I agree with the others. I think our breadth of coverage is pretty good. Not only do we have a page on every Mozart opera, but we also have articles on 13 of his arch-rival Salieri's operas. We've probably neglected composer biographies a bit (although there is some overlap there with the Composers WikiProject) and some general topics could do with improvement.
What are the achievements of the WikiProject so far, and which goals has it set itself?
Voceditenore: There are currently 5,700 articles under the Opera Project banner, including over 1,800 biographies of opera singers. Just keeping our head above water is quite an achievement! Seriously though, the main achievement so far has been to greatly expand opera coverage on Wikipedia. The project was started in 2004, and by May 2006 there were 1,835 articles on opera, rising to 3,530 in June 2007. We reached the 5,000 milestone on September 4, 2008 with La púrpura de la rosa, the first known opera to be written and performed in the Americas. As Shoemaker's Holiday has pointed out, until recently our main goal has been to expand coverage, but we are now increasing our focus on improving the quality of our existing coverage as well. We have two project collaborations each month – one for each of our main goals. The "Composer of the Month" focuses on composers in the opera corpus whose key works still lack articles. The "Opera of the Month" focuses on improving existing articles.
Folantin: As Voceditenore says, we've covered a lot of ground given how few of us there are. The collaboration drives have been very productive (I think half a dozen of us created the bulk of this list within 24 hours). One of our tasks for the immediate future is to get at least one article about Henry Purcell or his operas to Featured Article status so it can appear on the main page to mark the 350th anniversary of his birth this September.
Shoemaker's Holiday: To give some numbers, we have three featured articles, three featured lists, and nine good articles. If the subsidiary projects are factored in, that rises to seven featured articles, and eighteen good. However, this is not really representative of the quality of our work. A lot of articles that probably could easily reach GA or even FA simply haven't yet been nominated.
Voceditenore: We are, of course, delighted when new members formally sign on to the project. But you don't have to be a member to get involved in the project's work. In fact, many interesting new articles have been created by first-time contributors to Wikipedia. And much fine work, particularly in producing articles about Mozart and his operas and in creating a series of detailed sortable lists of operas for individual composers, has been done by editors who are not formally members of the project. A good place for anyone to start is the "Can you help?" section on the project's main page which lists a variety of ways to contribute in addition to writing articles. Our project pages also have detailed guides on the style and format used in opera articles and a guide to online research which provides information on how to use and reference online sources and an extensive list of recommended web sites.
Shoemaker's Holiday: You can also check out our monthly collaborations at the top of Wikipedia:WikiProject Opera, or if you want a little help with working on your own interests, go to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Opera, and we'll do what we can.
Folantin: As Voceditenore says, you don't even have to join to help out and some of the most productive editors on opera articles aren't formal members of the project. Having said that, I think the project improvement drives have attracted more editors, whether members or non-members, to work on opera than would have been the case. I've created stubs on plenty of obscure works and I'm amazed how often an expert new user has appeared and filled out the missing details. The project talk pages are there as a forum to discuss any issues about opera on Wikipedia and any editor is welcome to contribute. In spite of our small numbers, it's a very busy venue (there are over 80 pages of archives). Opera is an attractive area to edit because there is still plenty of work to do.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Please note that some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone 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.
Bug fixes
The file upload form now checks both the post_max_size and upload_max_filesize php variables, and uses the smaller of the two. (r50706, bug 18411)
New features
If a user attempts to move a page that has semi-protection for moves, he/she will now see a semi-protected page move warning to remind of the semi-protected status. (r50701, bug 18466)
div tags with unique classes for each page have been added to watchlists. (r50714)
The insertTags JavaScript function now also works in edit summary box. (r50705, bug 18342)
Other news
MediaWiki release candidate 1.15.0rc1 has been released. [1]
The "create a book" sidebar link has been removed for the Collections (PDF) extension, though the extension is still enabled and can be used via the Special:Book page. In addition to the "Create a book" link, the Collections extension also included an "Add wiki page" link, which was intended for users to add pages to a pdf/book collection. In usability testing [2], some confused that link for something to use to add a new page to Wikipedia. In the MediaWiki SVN, the link has been changed to say "Add page to book". For the time being, the collections sidebar is disabled on English Wikipedia, pending further discussion.
Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved. Over 130 proposals have been presented, including remedies which restrict, ban, topic ban, or admonish certain parties. The case has only recently entered voting, and so none of the proposals presently pass.
Ryulong: A case regarding Ryulong's use of his administrator tools. A proposed remedy which would desysop Ryulong currently has the support of 8 arbitrators (with 0 opposition); additional remedies admonishing and cautioning Ryulong have been proposed. Additional remedies pertaining to Mythdon have been proposed.
Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case, COFS. Thirty-four remedies have been proposed.
Motion to close
There are presently no case with an active motion to close.
Recently closed
Abd and JzG: A case brought regarding a dispute between Abd and JzG about the latter's use of administrative tools on Cold fusion. The Committee held that JzG is not an uninvolved administrator with respect to cold fusion articles, and admonished him to not use his administrator tools in any situation he is involved in. The Committee urged Abd to heed good-faith feedback when handling disputes, to incorporate that feedback, and to clearly and succinctly document previous and current attempts at resolution of the dispute before escalating to the next stage of dispute resolution; and advised Abd to heed good-faith feedback when handling disputes and to incorporate that feedback.
West Bank - Judea and Samaria: A dispute about editor behavior in discussions about naming conventions for certain Israel- and Palestine-related locations. The following users are banned from editing any Arab-Israeli conflict-related article/talk page or discussing the dispute anywhere else on the project: Canadian Monkey, G-Dett, Jayjg, MeteorMaker, Nickhh, Nishidani, NoCal100, and Pedrito. The Committee stripped Jayjg of his status as a functionary and of all associated privileged access, including the CheckUser and Oversight tools and subscription to the checkuser-l, oversight-l, and functionaries-en mailing lists.
Aitias: A case regarding Aitias's use of his administrator tools. The suspension of Aitias' adminship—which had been in effect since a motion passed before the case was opened—was lifted (and Aitias is free to request at any time that a bureaucrat restore his tools). Aitias is admonished for inappropriate and unnecessarily sarcastic comments and is banned from Requests for rollback and its talk page for six months.
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