Wikipedia Commons reached five million files on 2 September with the upload of File:Kjøbenhavnsposten 28 nov 1838 side 1.jpg. The file, uploaded by Danish Wikipedian Saddhiyama, is a scan of the front page of the first issue of the newspaper Kjøbenhavnsposten, from 28 November 1838. In response to the milestone, articles on the newspaper were created in the English and French Wikipedias; Saddhiyama had created an article in Danish the day before. The new image annotation function has also been used extensively on the image to provide translations of much of the Danish text in the image, which features an article about democracy.
The UK Wikimedia chapter has issued a press release about the Commons milestone.
Robert Rohde (User:Dragons flight) has created a new analysis of vandalism on English Wikipedia by analyzing reversions in article histories from a mid-June database dump. Rohde's initial results, tabulated at Wikipedia:Vandalism statistics and described in more detail in a mailing list post, indicate that over the first half of 2009 about 0.2% of all mainspace page (including redirects) were in a vandalized state at any given time, or about 0.4% of all articles (assuming that redirects are rarely vandalized).
In a followup analysis Rohde used the article traffic statistics tool to weight vandalism according to page traffic, estimating that 1.3% of page views in recent months contained vandalized content.
The Library of Congress record for an 1891 photograph of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre has been updated based on a discovery User:Durova made while restoring the image: the pile of blankets in the foreground covers four dead bodies (see previous Signpost coverage). Durova also reports that the image is part of an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, with the details she uncovered included in the official program (see item 76).
Following a post-Wikimania New York Times article by Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia Looks Hard at Its Culture", a number of news outlets have picked up the wide gender gap among Wikipedia editors. The gender statistics—across languages, 30% of readers and 13% of editors are female—were reported earlier this year in the preliminary results (see summary from the Wikimedia blog) of the UNU-MERIT survey; the survey results were presented (see slides) and widely discussed at Wikimania.
Following Cohen's article Howard Weaver blogged about Wikipedia and professionalism, arguing that new features to screen out "assholes" and the hiring of consultants are signs that Wikipedia is becoming more like traditional information sources. Eugene Eric Kim (User:Eekim), manager of the Strategic Planning program and one of the consultants to which Weaver refers, posted a response to Cohen's article to clarify his role and his hopes for the strategic planning process.
Coverage of the gender statistics by the Wall Street Journal Digits blog prompted more coverage and commentary from a number of other news outlets. Drawing on an essay about the gender gap in science by Philip Greenspun, Gawker suggested that rather than sexism at work, the Wikipedia gender gap is "an example of the easily conned male ego."
Although it is the best data available, the UNU-MERIT survey is far from perfect. The respondents were self-selected, and there were unexplained anomalies in response rate, including a dramatic over-representation of Russian Wikipedia users (whose responses were initially excluded from the gender statistics and other survey results and analysis).
Courthouse News Service reports that the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine has filed a defamation lawsuit against the Wikimedia Foundation and ten anonymous editors over edits made to the organization's Wikipedia article. The Wikimedia Foundation is widely thought to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act against liability for defamatory edits made by its users (see Signpost coverage of a previous lawsuit). However, Seth Finkelstein points out that the court summons names Wikimedia "solely as a nominal Defendent", which may indicate that Wikimedia is only named so that it can be made to provide identifying information about the individual editors who allegedly defamed the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.
In the draft of his forthcoming article "Wikipedia's Labor Squeeze and its Consequences", to be published in the Journal of Telecommunications and High Technology Law, law professor Eric Goldman explores the difficulties Wikipedia is facing, or may face in the future, in sustaining a sufficient level of volunteer maintenance effort.
Goldman's abstract states:
This Essay explains why Wikipedia will not be able to maintain a credible website while simultaneously letting anyone freely edit it. To date, Wikipedia editors have successfully defended against malicious attacks from spammers and vandals, but as editors turn over, Wikipedia will need to recruit replacements. However, Wikipedia will have difficulty with this recruiting task due to its limited incentives for participation. Faced with a potential labor squeeze, Wikipedia will choose to restrict users’ ability to contribute to the site as a way of preserving site credibility. Wikipedia’s specific configuration choices make it an interesting test case to evaluate the tension between free editability and site credibility, and this Essay touches on how this tension affects user-generated content (UGC) generally.
In the article, Goldman argues that Wikipedia's "recognition systems may prompt existing editors to work harder, but they are weakly calibrated to recruit new editors." He offers a number of possible ways Wikipedia could draw in more contributors.
As Ars Technica notes, Goldman made headlines in late 2005 when he predicted that Wikipedia would fail within 5 years, and followed up with a similar prediction in 2006. As Wikipedia scholar Joseph Reagle (User:Reagle) notes on his blog, Goldman's definition of "failure" for Wikipedia does not match up with the stated goals and core values of the project, which have always placed quality and free access to knowledge above pure openness to editing.
Goldman explains in a blog post about his new work that his current conclusion is that "substantial restrictions to user editability are Wikipedia's only viable long-term solution to preserve site credibility."
The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition.
Full disclosure: Your writer has participated in some of these discussions
Currently, across Wikipedia there are a number of discussions regarding the ability of editors to make bold edits to policy. At Wikipedia talk:Consensus User:M and User:Blueboar debated whether mistakes in policy should be corrected immediately or whether a discussion over the nature of the mistake was more appropriate first. User:Ohms law disagreed with what they depicted as an "extra hoop for people to go through in order to edit any project pages that happen to be policies", to which User:Xandar countered "that a change to POLICY and some major guidelines can often cause widespread troubles that the few people making the change don't consider or foresee." While Blueboar argued that '[t]he point of "discuss first" is that you can often avoid rigidity in the first place' M stated the opposite, that '"discuss first" does not avoid rigidity, it condones and offers support for it'. Over at Wikipedia talk:Policies and guidelines a similar debate is playing out, as a rewrite of the page has foundered over whether to remove guidance that editors can edit policy directly.
Historically, Wikipedia's rules to follow, as they were then known, were proposed at Rules to consider, with editors endorsing or rejecting them by adding their signature. Popular rules would be written up on separate pages, with anyone free to amend and suggest simply by editing the text. These rules were drafted in order to ensure the project could meet its stated goal of creating "a free encyclopedia--indeed, the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and in terms of depth. We also want Wikipedia to become a reliable resource." Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines noted that our policies are ever evolving and changing from its start on 1 November 2001 by User:Larry Sanger until an edit on 6 May 2006 by User:Wereareyou, one of only two edits this account has made, the other being to their talk page.
Where a particular WikiProject reaches a consensus on some particular naming convention, is is de facto the case that their naming convention supersedes the general principle of WP:COMMONNAME.
Debate now continues as to whether there is a logical loop in the relationship between the Naming Convention policy and separate Naming Convention guidelines. This loop is caused by text at Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines.
At Wikipedia talk:Articles for deletion, editor and administrator User:GTBacchus opened a discussion about the best way to "save" an article listed for deletion, noting that "[s]ome editors claim that they would be better able to improve articles if they didn't have to defend them against deletion." User:Ikip suggested adding "a statement at the top of all AFDs: All articles which are deleted can be userfied by request by admin." User:Jclemens suggested "some sort of an 'AFD reset' button if someone has changed a certain percentage of an article".
The discussion also took in administrator behaviour, with User:A Nobody offering anecdotal evidence that "at least one admin ... does not look at the articles under discussion when he closes AfDs, but only the discussion." GTBacchus responded strongly, statingAdmins who close AfDs by nose-count need to be stopped. I will help you stop them, if you bring it to my attention. It's unacceptable; someone doing that should not have the mop.
A round up of polls spotted by your writer in the last seven days or so, bearing in mind of course that voting is evil. You can suggest a poll for inclusion, preferably including details as to how the poll will be closed and implemented, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.
Talk:Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China/FG poll is a poll on whether Reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China should be merged into Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China. The poll runs from 13:50, 3 September 2009 (UTC) and concludes 13:50, 14 September 2009 (UTC).
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.
we aren't creating an article for every season for every player in every sport. These are 15 articles on the most important season for the most important players for one sport. Entire books have been published on this one team.
Debating the fact that some of the articles nominated are amongst Wikipedia's Featured Content, User:Nick-D noted that "their creator, User:YellowMonkey is trying to develop a featured topic on the 1948 'Invincibles' cricket team". WikiProject Cricket is also listing The Invincibles as its Featured Topic drive at Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket, having done so since the 19 May 2008.[1] However, User:Calathan, who has argued for a merger of the articles, felt that "[b]eing a featured article doesn't necessarily mean that something is an appropriate article to keep in the encylopedia."
User:Juliancolton, expressing the view that the articles should be kept as they are, said "[t]hese are as I understand it the most notable players of the most notable team of the most notable year in cricket" with User:Bridgeplayer pointing out in an impassioned argument to keep that "[a]t the same time as one group of editors is effusing over these articles and awarding them coveted featured article status, another group of editors is 'policy wonking' i.e. trying to get the pages deleted on fine nuances of guidelines. Bizarre! What we have here is a unique set of pages; informative, accurate, well sourced, objective, and tolerably well written. If all the time spent on this discussion was spent on writing new material how much better would the project be?" Attempting to remain neutral, User:Resolute commentedOn the one hand, this is a horrendous precedent, but on the other, enough sources exist that four of the articles are featured.
At Wikipedia:Village pump (all)#Making our editing interface more clear and helpful, a proposed change to the editing interface was put forward by User:Anxietycello. Anxietycello described their proposal as "simpler, clearer and prettier than the current situation". User:Noisalt like the proposal, adding that Anxietycello was "absolutely right about the hodgepodge of the current interface. It needs developing but it's a good start." Further revisions based on suggestions at the village pump were made to the draft before it was posted to the Wikipedia Usability initiative.
There is a debate at T(t)he Manual of Style over when to capitalise the definite article. User:Boson proposes we make it clear that it "is conventionally not capitalized, even when it is (or could be regarded as) part of a proper name: the United Kingdom, the Hebrides, the President of the United States." While there is consensus on some sort of standard, there is no consensus as to appropriate wording as yet, and there is some discussion over possible exceptions such as band names.
At Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion User:MZMcBride questioned how the right to vanish affected requests for user talk pages to be deleted. MZMcBride felt there "some sort of consistency. Currently it seems to depend entirely on who the admin going through the category is." User:Rd232 regarded the general consensus to be that "user talk pages shouldn't be speedied; where deletion is required, they should be referred to Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion" and edited Wikipedia:Right to vanish accordingly.
After discussion, Wikipedia:Edit war was moved to Wikipedia:Edit warring. The page was initially created on 26 April 2003 as a redirect to what is now Wikipedia:Requests for comment, before User:Ed Poor wrote a brief description on 4 October 2003. On 29 October 2005 User:Radiant! proposed a merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule, a merge User:Kim Bruning rejected after finding no discussion. In the same edit Kim Bruning marked the page a policy, 6 November 2005. A merge with Wikipedia:Three revert rule was finally achieved on 21 June 2009 after discussion.
At Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy a change to the wording of the Indefinite block section has been suggested by User:Atomic blunder. Consensus among administrators who rely on the section is that the change does not detail current practises.
Twenty-four Requests for comment have been made in the week of 31 August – 6 September:
The Anime and manga WikiProject, founded in November 2004 by the now inactive Pyrop, covers the intertwined topics of anime, manga, visual novels, and the various individuals involved in creating them. Over the past five years, the project has grown to include almost 10,000 articles—including three featured articles, 60 featured lists, and 58 good articles—and nearly 800 members; it has also adopted the increasingly common "task force" model for managing smaller topics, and currently includes 11 work groups.
Today, we've asked four members of the project (Dinoguy1000, Jinnai, KrebMarkt, and TheFarix) to answer a few questions about their experiences there:
1. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?
2. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
3. Anime and manga topics in Wikipedia have sometimes been criticized as being too concerned with trivia and plot details, and there have occasionally been efforts to have significant numbers of these articles deleted. Do you believe such criticism is justified, and how has it affected the project? Have you developed any special methods for dealing with such issues?
4. Your project has partially adopted the task force model for subsidiary groups. Do you find this model to be effective? How might it be improved?
5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Are they useful collaborators, or do you feel that they have little to offer you? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles it shepherds, developing over the next year? The next five years?
The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving four cases open.
Four new requests for arbitration were filed this week:
A fifth request, concerning the naming of the "Catholic Church" article, was filed and subsequently withdrawn by Rockstone35.
The Noloop case entered its third week of deliberations. The case involves mutual allegations of disruptive conduct by several parties, and is expected to address the conduct of all the editors involved. Evidence has been presented by several editors, and one of the parties, Noloop, has posted a statement that he does not intend to participate in the proceeding, but no drafting of proposals has taken place. A draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, is expected by 13 September.
The Lapsed Pacifist 2 case also entered its third week of deliberations. The filing editor, Steve Crossin, alleges that Lapsed Pacifist has engaged in advocacy, original research, and edit warring, as well as various other improprieties, over a wide range of articles. Lapsed Pacifist has so far refused to enter a statement or respond to the allegations, and a temporary injunction prohibits him from editing articles related to the Corrib gas project for the duration of the case. No arbitrators have commented on the evidence or workshop proposals at this time; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, was expected by 5 September, but has been delayed.
The 194x144x90x118 case entered its fourth week of deliberations and its second week of formal voting. The filing editor, Erik9, alleges that 194x144x90x118 has engaged in a variety of disruptive conduct, despite an RFC on the matter; 194x144x90x118 has refused to respond to the allegations, calling the proceedings a "sham".
The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Wizardman, condemns 194x144x90x118 for "soapboxing on talk pages, personal attacks, edit warring, and a lack of a desire to abide by policy" and ban him for one year. A series of additional findings have been proposed by arbitrator Carcharoth, who has also drafted a general reminder of policy for editors of the "DreamHost" article. With a majority of six arbitrators on the case, all substantive proposals in the decision appear to pass.
Finally, the Abd-William M. Connolley case entered its eight week of deliberations and its third week of formal voting. 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.
The proposed decision, prepared by arbitrator Stephen Bain, would place the cold fusion article under discretionary sanctions, remove William M. Connolley's administrator status, place Abd under mentorship, and issue several admonishments and reminders. Alternative proposals have been presented by arbitrator FloNight, who would only remove William M. Connolley's administrator status for three months, but also impose several restrictions on his use of administrative tools following their restoration; by arbitrator Coren, who would place William M. Connolley under administrative probation; by arbitrator Casliber, who would replace Abd's mentorship with a series of editing restrictions and ban him for a period of four weeks; and by arbitrator Risker, who has proposed banning Abd for three months. Voting on most remedy proposals remains deeply split.
A motion to terminate the six-month ban levied against Locke Cole as part of the Date delinking decision appears to have passed, but has not yet been formally enacted. The motion was proposed by arbitrator Risker, and provides for a reinstatement of the ban should Locke Cole be blocked for edit-warring.
Reader comments
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. 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.6 (d77bde6), 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.
One new bot task (CheMoBot) was approved this week. CheModBot will monitor verifiable numerical data in infoboxes, in particular CAS registry numbers. There are also currently a large number of open requests, which anyone can comment on.