Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/In the media
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.12 (8b8c762), 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.
2 bots or bot tasks were approved for operation this week. These were:
This week's discussion report contains information on current bot requests and related discussions.
Intermittent problems have hit both editors and readers of the Wikimedia Foundation projects recently. In an incident unrelated to the power outages of last week, servers have been suffering from large amounts of traffic - trying to fulfil so many requests at the same time that few are dealt with successfully and in a timely fashion. At the worst point, all Wikimedia Foundation projects simultaneously experienced these issues (unlike with similar outages, which have in the past affected only individual servers, limiting their negative effect). The exact cause is as of yet unknown, but preliminary investigations by the developers have suggested the source of the traffic was the Network File System (NFS) and not HTTP requests. This would rule out the idea of a simple external traffic spike, such as that which overloaded servers after the death of Michael Jackson recently.
Commons is still (Sunday) suffering from an image server overload, with some queries timing out, and others taking a disproportionate amount of time to complete. Disabling the CentralNotice has eased the problems in the interim. (Technical village pump). The Wikimedia Techblog also discusses the problem.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Opinion
Candidates are now being accepted for the 2009 Elections for the Wikimedia Board of Trustees. Prospective candidates can review the prerequisites and information about being on the Board, and then submit their candidacy as outlined on that page. The deadline for submitting candidacies is July 20, 2009. A list of the candidates so far can be viewed on Meta.
This year, there are three slots open for community elected representatives to the Board; the three open seats are those of Ting Chen, Kat Walsh and Domas Mituzas (see graphic).
The Wikimedia Board oversees the Wikimedia Foundation, helping to provide strategic guidance; detailed responsibilities are in the Wikimedia board manual.
The 2009-2010 Foundation Annual Plan and associated FAQ has been posted to the Foundation website. The plan increases planned total spending to $9.4 million in 2009-2010, $8.1 million of which will be on "core operational spending" and $1.3 milion of which will be on "non-recurring priority projects," including the strategic planning process (identified as the key initiative of this year), the bookshelf project and communications campaign. This is compared to projected spending of $5.3 million in 2008-2009 (and $3.0 million in spending in 2007-2008).
According to the plan, the increased spending will go toward nine new permanent staff (including three new technical staff and a technical project manager, three program staff and two fundraising development positions), and four temporary positions (three for strategic planning and one for the bookshelf project). The other new expenses will include an office move to larger quarters in San Francisco; more bandwidth and servers; a communications campaign and bookshelf project to produce educational materials (see last issue for job posting); grants to chapters; and the collaborative strategic planning process. This last item is projected to cost $700 thousand, according to the FAQ, but is a one-time expense.
To account for this additional spending, revenues are projected to increase to $10.6 million, from projected 2008-2009 totals of $7.4 million. This total amount includes a buffer of $1.2 million of planned contingency revenue. Increased growth is primarily projected in small (<$10K) donations and an additional projected $1.3 million in earned income.
The plan contains a Board resolution approving the budget which according to Veronique Kessler, Foundation CFO, was unanimously approved by the entire Board.
Google Image Search recently introduced an option to search images by license. Under the "advanced search" tab, you can now choose to filter your results by "usage rights". The choices are: "not filtered by license," "labeled for reuse", "labeled for commercial reuse," "labeled for reuse with modification," and "labeled for commercial reuse with modification." According to the Google blog, the search will look for images tagged with Creative Commons licenses, but "your search will also include works that have been tagged with other licenses, like GNU Free Documentation license, or are in the public domain." Images from Wikimedia Commons do show up on the license-restricted searches.
A WikiProject has been formed to port content from Citizendium to Wikipedia, now that the licenses of the two projects are compatible. According to the original project proposal, content only from Citizendium's "approved articles" will be imported. Reaction on the Citizendium forums has been mixed.
WebCite, a popular on-demand web archiving service referenced by Wikipedia over 20,000 times, went down for a server upgrade on June 24th. WebCite is currently "on-line" but a few things were broken in the upgrade and it is currently not working properly - for example, returning error messages or blank pages for most previous archives. ThaddeusB has been in contact with Gunther Eysenbach throughout the process and would like to assure the community that efforts are underway to fix the broken links. In the mean time, please do not remove, or otherwise attempt to fix, "broken links" to webcitation.org. See this discussion for more information.
Felipe Ortega released his PhD thesis on Wikipedia, entitled Wikipedia: A quantitative analysis, which compares the top 10 language editions of Wikipedia. According to a message from Ortega on the mailing list wiki-research-l in February, "[the thesis] presents a complete study of the activity of logged authors, articles and talk pages, evolution in time of distributions of key parameters (diff. authors per article, articles per author, revisions per author/article, etc.). It also offers a more in-depth study of the inequality of contributions by logged authors, and also for articles. Likewise, it presents a complete survival analysis to examine the average lifetime of Wikipedia contributors...Finally, we already examine some very basic metrics for quality."
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/In focus
This week the Committee voted to unban Betacommand under strict and specific conditions.
The Committee also announced the convening of the Advisory Council on Project Development, a body that according to the original announcement "acts as an advisory body to the Arbitration Committee and to the community; considers various issues facing the project and develops ideas, proposals, and recommendations for improving it; and serves as a forum for the sharing of best practices among the different areas within the project." Initial response was not positive. Concerns included the apparent expansion of ArbCom's purpose from a dispute resolution body to one of project governance; the presence of two Arbitrators on the council; the ill-defined scope and purpose of the Council; its closed nature; and that opinions were not solicited beforehand. Kirill Lokshin, one of the Arbitrators who would be appointed to the Council, announced that he would resign from the Arbitration Committee, as he felt he had let the community down, viewing his actions with regard to the Council as poor judgment. Rlevse also resigned, citing dissatisfaction with the community's response to the Committee's efforts. SlimVirgin opened an RfC on the Council to clarify community sentiment, which is currently underway.
The Arbitration Committee neither closed nor opened cases this week, leaving one open.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Humour
