The annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections are now underway. Arbitration is the final stage of Wikipedia's dispute resolution process, and the members of ArbCom are typically experienced and respected project volunteers. The 2009 election will select as many as eight new arbitrators, who will begin their terms on 1 January 2010.
With voting commencing on December 1, this year's election sees the implementation of SecurePoll, based on consensus at this Request for Comment and positive feedback on the use of the system in the October 2009 Audit Subcommittee election. Following discussion, three Election Administrators and six Scrutineers have been appointed. The Administrators are tasked with setting up the voting pages text and appropriate links, as well as ensuring smooth running. The Scrutineers will certify the results.
At bot requests, Skomorokh has asked if a bot can be tasked to create an alphabetical, annotate-able on-wiki version of the list of votes cast. Given that this year's election is using SecurePoll, it has also been suggested that a bot notify every user who has left a comment about a candidate but is not in the voter log to use the secret ballot.
With nominations now closed, there are 23 candidates running. Since the last report, Chutznik has withdrawn their candidacy, while Secret came forward as the last candidate to announce a run. A comprehensive overview of each of the candidates can be examined at the General Summary page.
Individual questions could be asked of each candidate until 23:59 1 December 2009, on his or her "/Questions for the candidate" subpage. Editors were asked to keep questions succinct and relevant, and to ensure they did not overlap with a general question, or with an individual question that had already been asked of the candidate. Candidates were not required to respond to mass questions asked in the individual questions that are not individualised.
Questions could be asked by any editor who was eligible to vote. To vote, you must have an account registered with at least 150 mainspace edits before 23:59 UTC on 1 November 2009. This total includes deleted edits. You may use this utility to check your eligibility. If you have questions about the voting process, or to have an administrator verify your deleted edits, please ask.
Here are the important dates for the 2009 ArbCom elections:
The Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam has donated 35,000 images about Indonesia to Wikimedia Commons. Volunteers are invited to help categorize the material. High resolution selections will also be available upon request for digital restoration. Editors who are interested in doing restorations can contact Durova.
The Tropenmuseum's partnership with Wikimedia projects received coverage in two national radio broadcasts in the Netherlands last week. The broadcasts (in Dutch) are available online.1 (35:45) 2 (15:50) A separate video presentation in English by Tropenmuseum representative Susanne Ton is provided below.
The continuing collaboration between the Tropenmuseum and Wikimedia is expected to bring more donations in the future. The museum has more than 100.000 images about Indonesia alone, but the focus has been on releasing images that will be most relevant for use in Wikipedias and other projects. The Wikimedian restorationist community is also involved in determining which material is released, with the possibility of the Tropenmuseum creating high-quality scans of specific images that make good candidates for restoration.
On 23 October 2009, WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, PediaPress, and the Version 1.0 Editorial Team discussed the best way to monitor Wikipedia-Books (collections of articles that can be downloaded electronically or ordered in print, not to be confused with Wikibooks; see previous story). As a result, a new WP 1.0 assessment class was created: the book-class.
This book-class would permit individual WikiProjects to monitor the various books that fall in their scope, and thus oversee merges, renaming, deletions, and so on, by tagging the talk page of individual books with the projects banner (with |class=book). WikiProjects that are interested in adopting the book-class can do so by adding |book=yes to their project's {{class mask}} (see how-to guide), or by contacting Headbomb if they are unfamiliar with the procedure.
WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is also looking for volunteers to join the WikiProject and help convert Good topics and Featured topics into books, as well as participate and create discussions about all things related to Wikipedia-Books.
For more about Wikipedia-Books, see Wikipedia:Books and Help:Books. For pages that need to be tagged by WikiProjects, see Category:Wikipedia books (community books). To create a Wikipedia-Books, click on "create a book" in the print/export box on the left side of your screen.
In other article assessment project news, just over two million articles on the English Wikipedia have now been assessed for their level of quality. This number doesn't count articles more than once, even if there have been multiple assessments; there have been over 5,000,000 assessments done. Assessment levels are recorded in WikiProject templates on an article's talk page. One caveat to article assessment counts is that ratings do not update themselves: if the quality of an article changes, only a human editor can re-assess the article and change the assessment.
The assessment counts are part of the Version 1.0 project, whose goal is to produce offline versions of core, quality Wikipedia content for use in various settings. The project has so far had two CD and DVD-based releases of articles.
When counting assessments, the current bot uses the rating of the first project to assess the article. According to User:CBM, there is a new bot under development, which
| “ | takes the "highest" rating for each article, which is more likely to be what people expect. The old bot is more or less frozen in its current state; the only changes I want to make to it are for bug fixes. The beta version of the new bot will be publicly announced in December. | ” |
Assessments are typically done by members of WikiProjects, although any editor can make or change an assessment. (In the case of the "stub" category, sometimes assessments are done by a bot). Assessments are to be based on a set of standardized assessment grades: Stub, Start, C, B, GA, A and FA. According to the project page, "Quality assessments are fairly standard across all projects, but priority/importance are evaluated relative to the project's own priorities." There are over 1500 WikiProjects participating in quality assessments; a list can be found here.
Donation statistics for the last two weeks of the 2009 Wikimedia fundraiser show the rate of donation roughly holding steady, with donations coming in at a faster rate than in previous years. According to the fundraiser timeline, new methods to attract donations, including email solicitation of past and prospective donors, may be initiated in the coming weeks. The tentative schedule indicates that the fundraiser will go through five phases before ending in early January. In 2008, a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales stimulated a dramatic boost in donations late in the fundraiser; something similar is planned for December in this fundraiser.
This week brought a wave of media attention sparked by the November 23 Wall Street Journal story "Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages" (see previous Signpost coverage) as well as responses from Erik Moeller and Erik Zachte on the Wikimedia Foundation blog, "Wikipedia's Volunteer Story". Moeller and Zachte note that "The number of people writing Wikipedia peaked about two and a half years ago, declined slightly for a brief period, and has remained stable since then."
The BBC picked up the story with "Wikipedia 'loses' 49,000 editors" and extended coverage in the dot.life blog with the post "Wikipedia on the wane?" by Rory Cellan-Jones. The blog features comments "gathered [Wednesday] morning from some 'Wikipedians'" explaining why they had stopped editing, and both the story and blog post include reactions from Mike Peel (User:Mike Peel), chair of Wikimedia UK. The blog also has a boisterous comments section. The BBC also covered the Wikimedia Foundation reaction, reporting that "Wikipedia denies mass exodus of editors".
BBC News Channel interviewed Wikipedian Charles Matthews (User:Charles Matthews) on Wednesday as well; Matthews has provided a transcript of the conversation.
In response to the wave of coverage, the New York Times vocabulary blog Schott's Vocab featured the word "Deletionists" on Thursday.
The discussion was also picked up on Slashdot (with over 600 comments), and again (with over 200 comments) after the WMF blog post.
Other coverage includes:
Journalist Evgeny Morozov, who surveyed recent research and perspectives on Wikipedia in a review of The Wikipedia Revolution (noted previously), wrote a pair of columns on Wikipedia this week: "Free Speech and the Internet", in the New York Times; and "The serious gap in Wikipedia’s knowledge: The online encyclopedia is bloated with trivia and needs more meat" in The Sunday Times. (Morozov noted on Twitter that the headlines and subheadlines were not his choice.)
In the New York Times piece, Morozov focuses on the case of Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber, in which German Wikipedia chose to follow German law by redacting the names of convicted murderers who had completed their sentences, but English Wikipedia, after extensive discussion, decided to use their full names. Wolfgang Werlé's lawyers recently sent the Wikimedia Foundation a cease and desist letter, and previously won a default judgment against Wikimedia in a German court. According to Morozov,
The German case illustrates that some of the disputes could be too complex to be easily pigeon-holed into an intractable body of Wikipedia’s rules and practices.
He proposes that
whenever current rules and norms of the project come into conflict, Wikipedians shouldn’t shun away from asking for help. An external international panel comprising the world’s most eminent philosophers, legal scholars, historians and others can prevent challenging cases from getting ugly before they reach the courts.
The piece drew the ire of Jimmy Wales in a discussion on his talk page, particularly because of Morozov's negative characterization of Wikipedians and their decision-making processes.
In The Sunday Times piece, Morozov praises Wikipedia for its successes but criticizes the project for its lack of perspective on the relative importance of different topics. He argues that
Wikipedians have to find a way formally to enshrine the concept of “importance” into their editing practices. This doesn’t mean that entries about the disputed anatomy of Rasputin’s penis, or the memorial to a reputed UFO in Sweden, or the cultural history of the Richard Nixon mask, have to go: whoever wants can continue editing them — they should just be made aware that these aren’t areas that need the most attention.
At the village pump, editor IP69.226.103.13 asked "Why is there such a strong bias against academics on wikipedia? I'm not going to write or improve any more scientist stubs or articles on wikipedia. It's pointless. AfD should be renamed: Academics for deletion, because that's essentially what it is." IP69.226.103.13 also provided examples to support the assertion. Kotniski felt the problem may be wider than that, writing: "there's probably a bias against articles on people in general (particularly living ones). The twin concerns of libel and self-promotion mean that editors look with great suspicion at new people articles, and hence they are more likely than others to get deleted. And once the deletionist enthusiasts discover that, they jump on the bandwagon and focus their efforts on those articles".
Fuhghettaboutit countered that "The fact, as mentioned above that the articles are being kept means the system is working", a view ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ supported: "People come, they write what they know...but they don't back it up. They just say "I'm an expert/fan and know this is true!". Then it gets put up for AFD because there is no proof that it's true and/or notable. See the problem? Sure someone may indeed BE an expert, and theoretically WP welcomes them with open arms, but how can anyone else know?"
Discussing the examples, Mr.Z-man stated "I agree that we do have problems with systemic bias, but, to put it bluntly, when someone complains they can't find sources for something, the solution is to prove them wrong by finding sources, not to complain about them." The debate continues.
Wikipedians have been struggling with some basic questions about the nature of policy for years. Should a policy page be permanently full-protected? The text of the Creative Commons license is. Should policy pages deal with off-wiki conduct? Reusing Wikipedia content does. Occasionally, Jimbo or the Foundation will "declare" a new policy ... where do those go? Why do some policy pages have a non-standard message in the nutshell at the top?
As a first step at tackling some of these issues, a new policy sub-category, Category:Wikipedia procedural policies, was created this week after long discussions at Policies and guidelines and the Village Pump. The new category contains the Mediation Committee's policy page and policies associated with the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom's checkuser and oversight policy, ArbCom's policy page, CheckUser, Oversight, Revision deletion) and the Wikimedia Foundation (Global rights policy, GlobalBlocking, IP block exemption, Open proxies, Office actions, Volunteer response team). Also, the legal policy category was expanded to contain the text of the Creative Commons license, text of the GFDL, Privacy policy, Terms of use, Reusing Wikipedia content, and the Non-free content criteria.
The only controversial step so far seems to have been the suggestion that Ignore all rules should be regarded as a principle rather than policy. As we go to press, that change was reverted, but it seems likely given the discussion so far that the page will not continue to live in the conduct policy category.
Next week's Policy report will include discussions from the Civility talk page.
It was a relatively quiet week in deletion debates this week. A fourth nomination for article Smosh was closed as a speedy keep by non-admin @Kate after less than twelve hours of debating. All eleven participants were moved to keep the article, with nominator Fbifriday the only person in favour of deletion. The article was improved to add sources mentioned in the second deletion debate.
Although listed as the second nomination, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series (2nd nomination) is the fifth time the material has been considered for deletion. Each time the result has been to delete, with RHaworth closing the new debate just over twelve hours in as speedy delete, stating "The massive weight of deleted versions on countless variant titles says that we do not want this topic." Dream Focus asked RHaworth to reconsider the close, arguing that given "three [of the] previous AFD's happened in 2006, and one previous one happened in 2007, [they] should not have anything to do with the current one". RHaworth countered: "The article I have just deleted presented no evidence of notability and gave no hint that anything has changed since 2007", directing DreamFocus to deletion review. A deletion review was therefore opened. Although debate is still running, the dominant view is that the close should be endorsed. Those arguing for a relisting are mainly basing their reasoning on the swift nature of the close rather than any merits found regarding the topic.
Mentioned in last weeks report, the debate regarding List of socialist countries has been relisted by Belinrahs. This move seemed unnecessary to a number of editors, with Timurite arguing that "Relisting is done when insufficient participation. The discussion had sufficient attention, which clearly shows that the opinions are polarized, and they will remain polarized as long as the article remains in bad state (unreferenced)." The debate since relisting seems to support Timurite, with new opinions split roughly equally, four editors favouring deletion, three favouring the material kept and one arguing for a "rename at the very least, delete otherwise". Many editors agree that the article is problematic, but no one solution seems likely to emerge as consensual. When challenged on the relisting by User:Tim Song, Belinrahs responded "I relisted it because I felt that consensus was mixed and unclear, and that further discussion in attempt to reach consensus would be beneficial. If you feel that this was likely not the best idea, accept my apologies and let me know so that I may improve my actions in the future!"
Twenty-three Requests for comment have been made in the week of 23 to 29 November:
Three editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Fences and windows (nom), 2over0 (nom) and Ronhjones (nom).
Ten articles were promoted to featured status this week: Weight Gain 4000 (nom), Amador Valley High School (nom), Rolls-Royce R (nom), The Final Cut (album) (nom), SMS Lützow (nom), William Longchamp (nom), Convention of 1832 (nom), Lactarius indigo (nom), L'incoronazione di Poppea (nom) and Sholes and Glidden typewriter (nom).
Six lists were promoted to featured status this week: Sportsperson of the Year (Czechoslovakia) (nom), Charlie Chaplin filmography (nom), List of Oklahoma Sooners head basketball coaches (nom), List of Minnesota Vikings starting quarterbacks (nom), List of Olympic medalists in equestrian (nom) and List of Family Guy cast members (nom).
No topics were promoted to featured status this week.
No portals were promoted to featured status this week.
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: On the Origin of Species, Nikita Zotov, Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, Ngo Dinh Diem presidential visit to Australia, Henry Wells, Hepatorenal syndrome and Caversham, New Zealand.
One article was delisted this week: Hong Kong action cinema (nom).
No lists were delisted this week.
No topics were delisted this week.
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: "The Neck"—an isthmus connecting the two halves of Bruny Island, Polar bears, 1757 engraving of the Colosseum, Muslim preparing for Salah, Leopard shark, 1890 photocrom of Amsterdam Centraal railway station and Act 2, Scene 3 of Le Cid.
No featured sounds were promoted this week.
One featured picture was demoted this week: Japanese Cherry Trees (nom).
Seven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.
The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving five cases open.
The Tothwolf case has entered its third week of deliberations. The case, which concerns a long-standing dispute between Tothwolf and several other editors, was filed by third party Jehochman. Some preliminary workshop drafting has taken place, though no arbitrators have yet responded to any of the proposals; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, is expected by 8 December.
The Ottava Rima restrictions case has entered its third week of deliberations. The case was filed by Ottava Rima to appeal an editing restriction imposed following a community discussion on the administrators' noticeboard. A large number of proposals have already been made on the workshop page; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Wizardman, is expected by 1 December.
The Asmahan case has entered its eleventh week of deliberations. The filing editor, Supreme Deliciousness, alleges that Arab Cowboy has engaged in a variety of disruptive behavior on the "Asmahan" article; Arab Cowboy denies the allegations, and claims that Supreme Deliciousness is pursuing a disruptive agenda of his own. The drafting arbitrator, John Vandenberg, has posed a number of questions to the parties, and has drafted a number of proposals on the case workshop. A draft decision in the case was expected by 19 November.
The Socionics case has entered its eight week of deliberations. The case was filed by rmcnew, who alleged that Tcaudilllg has engaged in edit-warring and personal attacks. Tcaudilllg has denied the allegations, calling them "ad hominem attacks on [his] character".
The proposed decision, written by arbitrator Carcharoth, would ban both rmcnew and Tcaudilllg for one year, as well as indefinitely banning them from all Socionics-related topics, pages, and discussions. No other arbitrators have currently voted on the proposed remedies.
The Eastern European mailing list case has entered its eleventh week of deliberations, and its seventh week of voting. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing list archives which are alleged to show an extensive history of collusion among numerous editors of Eastern European topics. Standard workshop procedures have been suspended for the case, so normal drafting of proposals by the parties and other editors has not taken place.
The proposed decision, written by arbitrator Coren, would strip Piotrus of his administrator status, ban him for three months, and place him under a topic ban for one year; ban Digwuren and Martintg for three months and also place them under year-long topic bans; and issue a number of admonishments and reminders, as well as an amnesty for all participants of the mailing list not otherwise sanctioned. Additional proposals made by other arbitrators include bans for Tymek, Jacurek, and Radeksz, as well as more nuanced topic bans for Piotrus and Digwuren. Voting on the proposals is divided.
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.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.
One new bot was approved this past week:
