In recent weeks and months, the Signpost has received many helpful suggestions for making it more useful, easier to navigate, easier to contribute to, and otherwise better—and more suggestions, along with help implementing the tough ones, are always welcome. Now I'm asking for help to articulate more clearly where the Signpost should go from here. What is the mission of The Wikipedia Signpost and what purposes ought it try to serve? What guidelines for content should the Signpost adhere to? Are opinion pieces or editorials desirable in the Signpost, and if so how should they be handled? What are the Signpost's relationships to the English Wikipedia community and the broader Wikimedia community, to the Wikimedia Foundation, and to the outside media that also cover Wikimedia issues?
As always, the Signpost could also use more good writers. Featured content dispatches, which reports on the various quality content review processes, has been on hiatus for several months and could use an infusion of fresh talent. In terms of regular features, the discussion report is very useful when done well, but it will need more contributors to sustain itself on a weekly basis. For those who enjoy reading and conducting interviews, WikiProject reports and other interviews with community members and Wikimedia employees offer a wide range of possibilities for contributing to the Signpost. A number of new suggested books have been added at the review desk (and more suggestions are welcome), and we have been very successful in soliciting review copies for interested reviewers. If you want to do something else for the Signpost that doesn't fit into the typical categories, just pitch your story on the tip line or the planning room.
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BBC Radio 4's recent comedy series Bigipedia has provided me at least with some food for thought as a Wikipedian.
For those who did not listen to the series or live outside the UK, Bigipedia is a four-episode long radio sketch show described by the BBC Press Office as, "a unique experiment in 'broadwebcasting'". It recreates for radio the experience of exploring a Wikipedia-like website, essentially a parody of Wikipedia.
Bigipedia shares many things that Wikipedia has, including articles (some featured), discussion pages and disambiguation pages, and audiovisual content. However, Bigipedia has its own vast range of unique "Bigi" functions, including music software programme Bigiband, health care service Bigimedic, dating service Bigiromance (which does not actually exist) and children's site Bigikids (which is no longer called Kidipedia "due to a misunderstanding"). Unlike Wikipedia, Bigipedia also has advertising, and suffers from a bombardment of pop-ups; the whole project is sponsored by a drink called Chianto ("Officially recognised by the EU as a wine-type product").
The series has managed to get quite a lot of favourable reviews from the press and it is easy to see why. There is a considerable amount of high quality writing. Mind you, the amount of writing itself is considerable. Even for a radio show, the sheer amount of wordy material is phenomenal.
Personally, my favourite sketches are the disambiguation pages. With these sketches, a term is used—for example, "Nazi gold"—and like its Wikipedia counterpart, a Bigipedia disambiguation page lists a range of different articles all about things connected to Nazi gold. However, with this being a comedy show, the disambiguation pages are starting points for a whole range of jokes using this subject: the disambiguation term is the punch line, and all the article descriptions are different jokes with the exact same pay off. So articles about Nazi gold on Bigipedia include "the now discontinued breakfast cereal", "the unacceptably nostalgic radio station" and "the colour of Jimmy Savile's tracksuit".
When I first listened to Bigipedia, I was not listening to it as a comedy show, but as a dedicated Wikipedian, I felt a bit like how certain rock stars must have felt when they watched Spinal Tap for the first time, thinking it was a documentary rather than a mockumentary. So as I listened to the first episode, I was constantly trying to point out things like: "Well, that's rubbish. Wikipedia doesn't accept advertising", or, "Perhaps Wikipedia should have a children's section. Then again, maybe not."
However, I do feel that rather than just attacking Wikipedia as a piece of inaccurate rubbish like some comedians, the writers have treated it more favourably. It is a bit like Stephen Colbert with his notions of "Wikiality", although his comments did lead to a huge wave of vandalism. Bigipedia is not just a mockery of Wikipedia, but of many of the annoying or ominous aspects of the modern internet, whether it be biased opinions, shoddy homemade websites, dating websites or the rising power of other websites. The final episode in a series featured a parody of Google Street View and saw Bigipedia slowly taking over the world from their base in the Philippines. Also, the principal writers for the series have attempted to edit Wikipedia to see for themselves what it is like and some of the sketches are directly inspired by actual Wikipedia articles. A sketch from the third episode about the "Bee Whisperer", the only person on the planet who keeps bees for their company and not their honey, was inspired by an article that was discovered by the "Random article" function.
Overall I found Bigipedia to be a very enjoyable series and I for one hope that it gets a second series soon.
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In the early morning of 17 August, an article on the Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen was created, the three millionth article on the English Wikipedia. The article was created by Lampman, who wrote five new articles for the milestone effort. The precise three millionth article was determined by a bot run by X! that monitored the live IRC feed of article creations and deletions. A snapshot of the results lists the articles created immediately before and after Beate Eriksen.
As with previous million article milestones, many Wikipedians saved articles to submit for the occasion; articles are typically created at a rate of about 50–70 per hour, but within minutes the article count rose from 2,999,970 to nearly 3,000,100. Of the 6 milestone winners (being 0.5M: user:Altenmann, 1M: user:Nach0king, 1.5M: user:Quarma, 2M: user:Zzxc, and 2.5M: user:Wizardman) only Nach0king and Wizardman participated in this "wikirat race".
Wikimedians have highlighted other recent and upcoming content milestones. Wikimedia Commons recently reached 100,000 Ogg files and is projected to pass five million total files during Wikimania (which takes place in Buenos Aires from 26 to 28 August). The total number of articles across all Wikipedias is nearing fourteen million. And Wikia co-founder Angela Beesley Starling (User:Angela) noted that Wikia in aggregate will soon pass English Wikipedia for total articles.
The milestone was reported in The Daily Telegraph, blogs of The Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor, and other mainstream media.
Samuel Klein, Kat Walsh and Ting Chen were all elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees last week. Both Walsh and Chen are incumbents, while Klein is new to the Board. In total, 2940 valid ballots were cast.
Klein, Walsh and Chen will fill the three "community representative" Board seats. Their terms of office are two years.
The Augmented Social Cognition group at PARC published two blog posts this week about their research on Wikipedia which caused a stir. The first post was called PART 1: The slowing growth of Wikipedia: some data, models, and explanations.
In "PART 2: More details of changing editor resistance in Wikipedia", the researchers conclude that there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content, especially when the edits come from occasional editors". In total, 5.8 percent of all edits in 2008 were reverted for reasons other than vandalism, or by a bot, double the percentage in 2005 (2.8 percent). As for occasional editors: By the end of 2008, this revert rate (again, non-vandalism) was close to 25% for editors making only a single edit during a given month, and was more than 15% for editors making 2 to 9 edits in a given month.
The posts got picked up by many news outlets.
An Amazon.com book search on 9 June 2009 gives 1009 (6 August, gives 1,859) "books" from Alphascript Publishing.[nan 1] 1003 of the books are described as "by John McBrewster, Frederic P. Miller, and Agnes F. Vandome". They are called editors in the book listings. It seems the only content of the many books is free Wikipedia articles with no sign that these three people have contributed to them.
The articles are often poorly printed with features such as missing characters from foreign languages, and numerous images of arrows where Wikipedia had links. It appears much better to read the original articles for free at the Wikipedia website than paying a lot of money for what has been described as a scam or hoax. Advertising for the books at Amazon and elsewhere does not reveal the free source of all the content. It is only revealed inside the books which may satisfy the license requirements for republishing of Wikipedia articles.
As an example of the "care" given to the books, the book "History of Georgia (country)" is about the European country Georgia but has a cover image of Atlanta in the American state Georgia.[nan 2] The Wikipedia article History of Georgia (country) does not make such a comical blunder.
PrimeHunter has compiled a list of the 1009 titles identified in June.
After filing a complaint under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in June, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted the domain names "wikipeadia.com" and "wikipediia.com", which had been registered by a Californian online marketing company. The 7 August decision by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center found that both domains were "confusingly similar" to the Foundation's "Wikipedia" trademark, calling the second one "a classic example of typosquatting". Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation had already obtained the domain "visualwikipedia.com" under the UDRP.[1]
Two weeks ago the Signpost reported that the local UK chapter of Wikimedia had been denied charity tax status. Wikimedia UK is documenting the process of drafting a revised application for charity status. According to their website, while the initial decision found that "production of an encyclopaedia is not the charitable advancement of education", they expect a different outcome from their subsequent application directly to the UK's Charity Commission, which will address more specifically the educational goals of the chapter. The initial application was made to HM Revenue and Customs Charities Unit, because with annual income below £5,000 at the time, Wikimedia UK was ineligible to apply to the Charity Commission; since then, the chapter has been approved for a £5,000 grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.
The following new projects were opened this week:
The Guardian reports both the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (see last week's coverage) and the imminent surpassing of the three million article mark. The writer reports PARC researcher Ed Chi's assertion that the higher rate of reversion for casual editors is evidence "that it is increasingly difficult to enjoy contributing to Wikipedia unless you are part of the site's inner core of editors." Web developer Aaron Swartz (User:AaronSw) is extensively quoted about his feeling "that the site feels more insular and exclusive than in the past". The writer suggests that the editing slow down is a result of a victory by deletionists over inclusionists, while Chi waxes metaphorical: ""As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power."[itn 1][itn 2] A CNET article bemoans the PARC study, stating it "makes for the same kind of dispiriting reading that you might once have expected from a Politburo travel brochure" and comparing the described hierarchy to the U.S. Senate.[itn 3]
A TechCrunch article asserts, "We’ve known for a while that Google’s Knol is no Wikipedia killer, but now the knowledge-sharing site is being reduced to a sad Craigslist wannabe". It is estimated that Knol attracted only 174,000 visitors in the past month.[itn 4] For comparison, Wikipedia's article on Barack Obama alone received nearly 700,000 visits in the same period.[itn 5] TechCrunch suggests that Knol should be closed, for it "will never come close to Wikipedia."
On 12 August, the Associated Press announced plans to improve their content's search rankings in an effort to take on aggregation sites such as Wikipedia. The AP will create "news guide landing pages" that aggregate AP content on a particular topic. The internal AP analysis states,
The Wikipedia page on Michael Jackson is not very pretty to look at, but it has more blue hyperlinks than black type. Forget the "wiki" method of community updating, the key to Wikipedia’s success is that its pages are designed to catch traffic, provide key information and then send users on their way to deeper engagement on the subjects they’re interested in.[itn 6][itn 7]
Lee Gomes of Forbes describes the article discussion pages and gives an account of how Propofol, a drug article related to the Michael Jackson death, "was about 900 words long, and was as straightforward and helpful about the basic questions as you'd expect a Wikipedia article to be." He describes the article's talk page as mostly "a long argument—10 times longer than the actual article, in fact—about whether it was improper editorializing to use the term 'drug abuse'". Noting that the discussants were "passionate, sincere and, by and large, polite", Gomes opines, "If the Internet can bring people together like this to strive toward a common good, is there nothing it can't achieve?"[itn 8]
The recent poll on our Civility Policy has been closed and summarised by User:SilkTork. SilkTork noted that:
the majority of people feel the current civility policy is too lenient, and that it is inconsistently applied and unenforceable. Most people feel that civil behaviour applies as much on personal talkpages as elsewhere, and that there are particular problems with civil behaviour on Recent Changes Patrol and Admin Noticeboards. Almost everyone feels we are too harsh on new users, though just over half the people feel that when it comes to experienced users that expectations of behaviour depends on context and the people involved. Most people feel that baiting is under-recognised, although it was noted that it is difficult to recognise baiting, and that people have a choice in how they respond. There was no clear consensus on the use of warnings before blocking, though most feel that the warnings are about right. A number of people feel that everyone should be treated with respect regardless of circumstances, and that being civil does not impede communication. A number of people also feel that experts should be treated like everyone else.
Discussion as to what changes need to be made to reflect the poll has begun. See Wikipedia talk:Civility#Civility Poll results.
Debate has reignited at a request for comment regarding notability and how it applies to fiction. Most participants agree that the community is currently divided on the amount of detail with which Wikipedia should cover fictional topics. There is also support for the view that no consensus exists as to whether articles split from a "parent article" in line with Wikipedia:Summary style are part of an overarching topic or become an article on a new and separate topic. However, the correct application of our notability guidance is still under debate. User:WesleyDodds has been making the case for a strict application of the guidance laid out in Wikipedia:Notability applying to articles related to fictional topics:
User:Jinnai countered that Wikipedia:Notabilitywhat needs to happens [sic] is we need to stop overrelying on primary sources. This is the biggest problem facing fiction-related articles on Wikipedia, as too many people are more interested in charting chararcter [sic] minutae [sic] instead of trying to explain to the general reader why they should care in the first place.
An essay attempting to reflect the dominant views of the request for comment is being drafted at Wikipedia:Notability and fiction.is not universaly [sic] accepted in its current form so anyone claiming that it has consensus is on shaky ground to begin with.
A discussion regarding the role of building a consensus on policy pages through editing has been initiated at Wikipedia:Editing policy. The discussion itself was started after a change to the Editing Policy. The contested change saw the removal of text which had been added without discussion. The removed text follows:
User:Kim Bruning made the change on the 15 August, noting it on the talk page. User:Ched Davis objected to the change, stating:However, changes that would alter the substance of policy or guidelines should normally be announced on the appropriate talk page first. The change may be implemented if no objection is made to it or if discussion shows that there is consensus for the change. Major changes should also be publicized to the community in general, as should proposals for new policy pages (see also Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines#Proposals).
Changes to a policy page should be discussed on the relevant policy talk page.
An RFC has been opened at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not as to whether or not current television schedules for television networks/stations are appropriate content on Wikipedia. Opening the debate, User:Mark pointed to discussion from April 2008, found in the archives of the village pump. User:Masem commented that
User:DGG felt thatThe key factor between being a TV guide and an encyclopedic coverage of what shows a network airs is the fact we do not break this down week-by-week, episode by episode or include one-time events.
schedules for individual stations are not generally appropriate. The stations can do it better themselves. The work it would take us to do it correctly should be better spent on writing articles on topics we need to cover--or perhaps improving the plot sections of TV shows.
Making the case for "historic block schedules", User:Firsfron argued that
these block schedules are in use in television encyclopedias, and appear frequently in reliable sources (these are available upon request). These national schedules affected (and still effect) millions of viewers each year, and have a major impact on the television industry each fall, especially around Upfront time. Entire books have been written about these schedules
there are many 'fake celebrity' Twitter accounts out there ... [s]hould we allow such external links coming from Twitter, should we require verification, or what?
Putting the case for allowing Twitter links, User:RL0919 argued that:
I don't see why a subject's official Twitter feed wouldn't typically be an appropriate external link, even if the subject also had some other form of internet presence. If the feed is a fake or is never used, then subject-article editors can handle that on a case-by-case basis.
Outlining a way forwards, User:Ianmacm commented that:
[t]here is nothing wrong with the current policy, which has little to do with anti-Twitter snobbery. The real problem is having external links sections clogged up with non-notable trivia and blatant spam from blogs etc. This has to be removed, which takes up time that is better spent doing other things. If a user really thought that a tweet was of earth-shattering importance, they could raise it on the talk page of the article to see what other editors thought. The reality is that most tweets are non-enyclopedic, and it would be a worrying development to allow them as external links as things stand.
A poll has opened to resolve a long-standing and contentious dispute over the names of several articles related to Ireland, most recently dealt with by the ArbCom. Polling is by Single transferable vote / instant-runoff voting; the chosen solution will be enforced for a period of two years. The poll opened on 2 August, but it is unclear when it is to close.
At the village pump, a poll on whether to create a recent changes page for unwatched articles to prevent vandalism by modifying the recent-changes table in MediaWiki is currently open. So far everybody is in full agreement with the idea. The poll opened on the 5 May, but it is unclear how the poll will be closed or how the idea will be implemented.
Your writer has trawled the deletion debates opened and closed in the last week and presents these debates for your edification. Either they generated larger than average response, centred on policy in an illuminating way, or otherwise just jumped out as of interest. Feel free to suggest interesting deletion debates for future editions here.
35 Requests for comment have been made this week:
Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Steve (nom) and Fribbler (nom).
MBisanz was promoted to bureaucrat status.
Five articles were promoted to featured status this week: Effects of Hurricane Georges in Louisiana (nom), George Koval (nom), Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (nom), Kaiser class battleship (nom), United States Senate election in California, 1950 (nom) and HMS Endeavour (nom).
Eight lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Olympic medalists in figure skating (nom), List of cities and towns in Arizona (nom), List of Wimbledon Gentlemen's Singles champions (nom), List of Los Angeles County Metro Rail stations (nom), List of Olympic medalists in table tennis (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Alison Krauss (nom), List of Victoria Cross recipients by campaign (nom) and NWA Mid-Atlantic Heavyweight Championship (nom).
Three topics were promoted to featured status this week: Chough (nom), Timothy Blackstone (nom) and BBC Sports Personality of the Year (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: H.M.S. Pinafore, PNC Park, Song Dynasty, Magic Johnson, Maynard James Keenan, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Matthew Boulton.
Eight articles were delisted this week: Whale song (nom), Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (nom), Woody Guthrie (nom), Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (nom), Algerian Civil War (nom), Suburbs of Johannesburg (nom), Eurovision Song Contest (nom) and Vancouver (nom).
One list was delisted this week: Timeline of Macintosh models (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page this week as picture of the day: Retrograde motion, Flaming Cliffs, Colorado Blue Spruce, Dragonflies, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Noah's Ark and Rooster.
Eighteen featured sounds were promoted this week:
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| The Creatures of Prometheus by Ludwig Van Beethoven, Op. 43 — 14. Andante | (nom) |
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| Toccata and Fugue in D minor | (nom) |
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| Diabelli Variations | (nom) |
One featured picture was demoted this week: File:Romanian hay.jpg (nom).
Eight pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
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The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week, and opened one new case, leaving two cases open.
A request for arbitration concerning the contents of Jimbo Wales' user page was filed by Drew R. Smith, and then withdrawn after it was discovered that the filing account had been compromised.
Two additional requests for arbitration, concerning Noloop and Lapsed Pacifist, were filed by Abce2 and Steve Crossin, respectively.
The 194x144x90x118 case was opened this week. The filing editor, Erik9, alleges that 194x144x90x118 has engaged in a variety of disruptive conduct, despite an RFC on the matter. 194x144x90x118 has so far refused to respond to the allegations. Evidence has been presented by several editors, but no substantial drafting of proposals has taken place. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, is expected by 24 August.
The Abd-William M. Connolley case has entered its fifth week of deliberations. The case was filed by Abd, who alleged that William M. Connolley had improperly banned him from the cold fusion article; William M. Connolley denied these allegations, and stated that Abd's conduct had been inappropriate. Arbitrator Stephen Bain has prepared a preliminary draft decision on the workshop page; the proposals encompass desysopping and banning William M. Connolley, requiring Abd to enter a mentorship arrangement, and admonishing several other editors. Response to these proposals has been generally negative. The case is expected to move to voting by the end of the week.
In response to the request for clarification regarding the Obama articles decision filed by Wikidemon, arbitrator Carcharoth has proposed a motion extending ChildofMidnight's topic ban to include related discussions in all namespaces. The motion currently stands at five arbitrators supporting and one recused, with seven votes necessary for adoption.
A request that the Falun Gong decision be amended was filed by Olaf Stephanos. Olaf argued that the six-month topic ban he had received was unwarranted, and asked the Committee to rescind it. At present, no arbitrators have commented on the substance of the request.
The Committee has enacted a motion in response to Everyking's request to amend the Everyking 3 decision to remove the remaining sanctions against him. The motion denies the request, but provides for the sanctions to automatically expire one year after the date of the motion or of any future appeal, whichever is later.
The motion proposed by arbitrator Newyorkbrad in response to Greg L's request to amend the Date delinking decision appears to have passed, but has not yet been published. The motion reduces the various editing restrictions related to style and editing guidelines imposed by the decision to apply only to topics specifically related to the linking or delinking of dates.
The Committee enacted an open motion clarifying that The Rambling Man's resignation during the Date delinking case did not preclude him from regaining his bureaucrat status on request, and encouraging "any users concerned that the policies and procedures governing restoration of administrator and bureaucrat privileges following a resignation may be unfair or unclear to convene a community discussion on an appropriate policy page and to seek to develop a community-written policy on these matters".
Following the conclusion of the August 2009 CheckUser and Oversight elections, the Committee announced that CheckUser rights would be granted to three editors:
and Oversight rights would be granted to nine editors:
The Ban Appeals Subcommittee announced that it had unbanned Keeblesound, Arindamp, Mrinal Pandey, and Carlisle Rodham as a result of successful appeals.
The Committee announced that, as a consequence of arbitrator travel, Committee business would be conducted at reduced levels between 23 August and 31 August.
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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.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.
The only bots approved this week were FoxBot and TobeBot, both of which are to use the standard python framework to maintain interwiki links.
