Rollout of new user interface to begin in April, includes improved Wikipedia logo
Last week it was announced that the "Vector" skin (example), which has been developed as part of the Usability Initiative and has been in beta test since last August, will replace "Monobook" as the default skin on Wikimedia projects. Deployment will start on Wikimedia Commons on 5 April, and continue on the English Wikipedia in late April. The changes include an improved editing toolbar, relocation of the search box to the top right corner, a simplified layout and a new version of the Wikipedia logo which is "correcting small mistakes and representing new languages" (see e.g. meta:Wikipedia/Logo and earlier Signpost coverage of such issues). More information was provided on the Techblog, in a Q&A and in a discussion on Wikitech-l.
The deployment roughly coincides with the usability project's original conclusion date as projected when it was initiated in January 2009, funded by an $800,000 grant by the Stanton Foundation (see Signpost coverage). Following the success of the last fundraiser and a $2 million grant from Google, the project was recently made permanent as "user experience" (UX) (see Signpost coverage). Other usability improvements such as the template editor or the "outline" (a table of contents allowing easier navigation while editing long articles) are still being tested and will be deployed at a later date.
Server overheating and DNS problems cause global Wikipedia downtime
On Wednesday, 24 March 2010, Wikipedia.org went globally offline for several hours. As explained on the Wikimedia tech blog, an overheating problem at the web site's European data center made it necessary to initiate a standard failover procedure to move the European traffic to the main server cluster in Florida. However, this procedure turned out to be broken, disabling DNS resolution for Wikimedia sites worldwide.
Administrators on the English Wikipedia received a letter this weekend from "Wikipedia Freedom Fighters" asking them to give up their admin account details for the purposes of "utilis[ing] your account to help rid Wikipedia of the corruption and bureaucracy at every level that continues to plague it to this very day." Slightly different versions of the message were sent to inactive and active administrators. The messages were sent through the special:emailuser function, from a variety of throwaway accounts. The messages seem to have been sent to every administrator on the site, including current staff and Board members who are also administrators.
There was brief discussion, including posts containing the text of the letter, on the wikien-l and Foundation-l mailing lists.
Wikimania Scholarships open
The call for applications for Wikimania Scholarships to attend Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, Poland (July 9-11) is now open. The Wikimedia Foundation offers Scholarships to pay for selected individuals' round trip travel, accommodations, and registration at the conference.
Wikimedia Polska (Wikimedia Poland) had their annual general assembly meeting this past weekend in Warsaw. The two-day event featured talks and a general business meeting, including a report on the status of the chapter and discussion about the chapter's future. Lectures included topics such as "Learning in Wikipedia and Wikipedia in learning," "Wikipedia and Marketing – Opportunities and Threats," and "Conversion of Wikipedia pages on DAISY Audio Format for the Visually Impaired and Blind." The English-language version of the program can be found [1].
Elections of chapter officials were also held. The new board is:
Tomasz Ganicz (Polimerek) – President
Marek Stelmasik (Masti) – Vicepresident
Piotr Czerniawski (Szwedzki) – Vicepresident
Agnieszka Kwiecień (Nova) – Secretary
Paweł Drozd (Drozdp) – Treasurer
The conference attracted around 100 attendees and was held in the Zachęta National Art Gallery in the heart of Warsaw.
Briefly
Soxred93's Edit Counter, a tool analyzing a user's contributions which had been linked since last October on the wiki's contributions page, has been made partially opt-in after privacy concerns were raised about the monthly activity graphs it was displaying. The Toolserver rules allow edit counters, but restrict the kind of temporal behavior analysis done without a user's consent. Some years ago, the daily/weekly graphs of Interiot's edit counter were made opt-in due to legal concerns.
The deadline for Wikimania 2011 bids to submit their complete information was 30 March; the current bids include Toronto, Canada; Montréal, Canada; Haifa, Israel, and New York City, USA. The Wikimedia jury will now spend four weeks analyzing and determining the suitability of the bids, including meeting with the bidders; all community members are welcome to comment on and ask questions of the bids on their bid talk pages, which are linked to from here.
Hostnames starting with a "www.", such as "www.en.wikipedia.org" or "www.commons.wikimedia.org" are now redirecting to the corresponding project site (Bug 1698).
The privacy warning that anonymous users see after clicking the edit button (MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning, advising them that their IP address will be stored in the edit history after clicking "Save page"), currently vanishes after they click "Show preview". In the future, the preview window will also display such a message, configurable at MediaWiki:Anonpreviewwarning. (Bug 21520, added in version r64367. When it will be enabled on Wikipedia is unknown.)
On his blog, Guillaume Paumier from the Multimedia Usability project examined the ratio of the number of files to the number of active or very active participants on Wikimedia Commons. Paumier found that both numbers have risen sharply in recent years (in contrast to the ratio of articles per participant on the English Wikipedia), and observes that "MediaWiki does not provide dedicated features to help the limited community of participants absorb the inflow of new media files".
Wikipedia is first reference work to correct long-standing error about the Rhine river
The Rhine (at Leutesdorf, from where its German Wikipedia article was corrected)Brass plate at the source of the Rhine, giving its length as 1320 km
Wikipedia's ability to correct errors quickly was mentioned in recent German media coverage of a surprising blunder that has permeated most reference works, school books and even government publications for decades. A basic fact about one of Europe's most important rivers was discovered to have been incorrectly reported: Generations of school children in Germany and the whole world have learned that the Rhine is about 1320 km long. However Bruno Kremer, a biologist at the University of Cologne, found this number to be inconsistent during his research for an upcoming book (ISBN978-3874634564). According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, at the beginning of the last century the length was still stated correctly to be around 1230 km by the major encyclopedias (the Brockhaus encyclopedia of 1903, the Herder lexicon of 1907 and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1909). Later editions such as the Brockhaus editions of 1933 and today give numbers around 1320 km, an error that Kremer conjectures to have been caused by simple transposition of digits. Encyclopædia Britannica's Rhine River article is even further off, giving a value of 1390 km.
"Cleaning up will take a while ... while atlases, school books, web pages and brass plates have to be changed. At the moment, the online lexicon Wikipedia is ahead of everybody: In January, a pensioner from Leutesdorf near Koblenz [de:Benutzer:Frila, a former inland navigator] has inserted Bruno Kremer's length information into the "Rhein" entry."
That correction on the German Wikipedia was made after a local newspaper had mentioned Kremer's research, and German Wikipedians had reviewed many other sources. On the English Wikipedia, the correction was made on 27 March.
The corrections were noted in a number of follow-up articles published later that week. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad ran a brief article on page 4 which mentioned the changes,[2] there was a full-page article in the world news section of the Norwegian paper Aftenposten which went into more detail,[3] and there was a brief mention in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.[4]
Conference examines Wikipedia from a "Critical Point of View"
Felipe Ortega: New trends in the evolution of Wikipedia. Summary, Slides - Ortega presented his quantitative research about participation on the ten largest Wikipedias, some interpretations of which had been controversial last fall (see earlier Signpost coverage).
Joseph Reagle: Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety. Summary, slides - Reagle aimed to "make sense some of the criticism Wikipedia receives in a historical frame", arguing "that reference works can serve as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change", giving historical examples for criticism of reference works such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Webster's Dictionary.
The CPOV conference was preceded by a small Wiki Analytics Workshop held by the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam.
The usability initiative's announcement of the impending deployment of the new user interface generated some media coverage; see this week's "News and notes".
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
This week, we focused on the windy city by interviewing the director of WikiProject Chicago. The third largest city in the United States is associated with over 22,000 articles, including 64 featured articles and lists. Originally started on 5 July 2005, the project has been home to multiple collaborations and other initiatives from time to time. Currently, the project is sponsoring a featured topic drive intended to bring a collection of articles related to Millennium Park up to featured status by 1 September 2010.
1. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject Chicago.
TonyTheTiger: I describe myself as the "Director" of WP:CHICAGO. I have been involved in most affairs of the project for over three years now. I first reactivated the project in late 2006, ran the collaboration of the week for a year, comment on most WP:AFD, WP:PROD, WP:RM and other types of discussions at Article alerts, coordinate the Featured topic drive, monitor the quality log and do whatever I can to help out. I have had my hand in a large proportion of the project's favorably reviewed articles at WP:FA, WP:GA and WP:FL.
2. When did you first join WikiProject Chicago? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?
TonyTheTiger: I joined the project in the late fall of 2006. Not much was going on so the first challenge was to really become a legitimate project. I requested the assistance of Elkman to get our {{ChicagoWikiProject}} template up and running. We first only had a few hundred articles tagged with our template, and we currently have well over 20,000 articles tagged. The issue has at times been controversial, because many do not see our project as a relevant talk page template for someone who attended college in Chicago decades ago, for example, but as people have become accustomed to having our template on their pages, we have been able to lend a hand in deciding encyclopedic matters for various articles. The most recent example would be the floundering Zak Kustok article that was WP:PRODed. When alerted, we were able to help develop the article into a legitimate resource. At first, we have struggled to monitor the articles with the tag and tag articles that are within the project. The WP:AALERTS system has made this much easier. We have also had problems dealing with low manpower and numerous unrated articles. For a while WP:Illinois had some active editors who rated many of our articles while rating articles that also fell within their project. More recently Xeno has come up with an automated bot rating inheritance system that has helped us tremendously.
3. 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?
TonyTheTiger: I am not sure where the idea for WP:AALERTS came from, but prior to that system, I monitored WP:FAC, WP:FAR, WP:GAC, WP:GAR, WP:FLC and WP:FLRC to manually produce a list of discussions to watch. I think we were one of the few, if not the only project with a centralized location for such discussions for a while. WP:MILHIST also had a centralized discussion system that predates the alerts and I don't know who was first.
4. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?
TonyTheTiger: The project has been unsuccessful in developing an A-Class review, an internal Peer Review and a Collaboration of the Week. I think I have learned that the people who do work for the project often do so in relation to other interests. Not many editors view this geographic interest as their main editorial interest. I think project planning as if this project is the primary focus will be difficult. We have to attempt to plan in a way that will call attention to work that needs to be done without relying on the commitment of editors to focus on this project.
5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
TonyTheTiger: When WP:Illinois was more active, we interacted with them quite a bit. Back in 2007 they were still creating articles and templates for all municipalities and we worked together to fill in holes in the map as they arose. As a geographically-based project, we interact with several projects that are formed for other reasons. Raime of WP:SKY lends a hand on any tall building issues ranging from overseeing the WP:FL promotion of List of tallest buildings in Chicago to helping resolve specialized concerns for the Trump International Hotel and Tower (Chicago)WP:FAC and lending a hand with less well-developed articles such as Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Residence Tower. On issues related to WP:NRHP, Doncram has been quite a resource and we have helped him out as well. He has had a hand in the development of many of our WP:FA and WP:GA articles. Ruhrfisch started helping us develop BP Pedestrian Bridge into a WP:FA because he does a lot of work for WP:BRIDGE and he eventually helped motivate us to purse a WP:GT and then WP:FT for the Millennium Park including the Bridge. This is our project's only current FT. Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force, has helped us indirectly by creating maps for our articles like they have for all geographic projects. Some of their members have even created street signs for articles such as Washington Park Court District and Rush Street (Chicago). As a geographic project, we often overlap with projects for our sports teams and athletes. So we are often talking with WP:CFB, WP:MLB, WP:NFL, WP:NHL, WP:BBALL, WP:WPCBB, etc on matters related to our athletes.
6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and Chicago improvement?
TonyTheTiger: The project once had a mission of improving the article Chicago to WP:FA after it failed a few FACs. At some point, I hope to see a nucleus of editors with an interest in at least getting the WP:GA rating back for the article. The mission for the project is now much broader. We attempt to foster encyclopedic content of any article listed at WP:CHIBOTCATS, which is the list of categories for Cook County, Illinois-related articles that bots tag with our template. In addition, we adopt all WP:GA, WP:FA and WP:FL articles that are for subjects in the Chicago metropolitan area and not in one of these categories. As Wikipedia grows, we expect our the number of articles under our umbrella to grow. We hope to protect encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, now that we are maturing, a lot of our successfully reviewed content from 2007-09 is under attack at WP:GAR and WP:FAR. One way the project will grow is improve these articles to retain their ratings or reinstate their ratings. I also expect the project to grow as a secondary project for articles. However, continued efforts to protect the overlapping encyclopedic content of other projects will surely benefit Wikipedia.
TonyTheTiger: It is indeed dissappointing, but it shows that after success can come dissappointment and failure. However, we eagerly anticipate WP:Meetup/Chicago 3.1.
On behalf of the Signpost, we'd like to thank TonyTheTiger for his time. In addition, we invite you to check out WikiProject Chicago! Anyone who would like to help out can take a look at the project's list of open tasks or browse their articles, particularly the backlog of unassessed articles. Next week, get ready to root, root, root for the home team! Until then, play pitch and catch with our old reports in the archive.
The Arbitration Committee neither opened or closed any cases this week, leaving three open.
Open cases
Asgardian (Week 6): An arbitration case opened to assess the behavior of Asgardian, including accusations of gaming the system to avoid community-based remedies and attempts at ownership of articles. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 6): An arbitration case opened to deal with circumstances on articles related to the eponymous movement similar to those that had surrounded Scientology pages the year prior. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
Motions
Speed of light: A motion was passed restricting some users from commenting on or advocating for Brews ohare. In addition, the motion also makes Brews ohare's editing restrictions expire 90 days from its enactment, barring violations of it (which will reset the timer).
The Arbitration Committee passed a motion requiring that Per Honor et Gloria use only widely available English or French sources (the latter only if a mentor okays them). In addition, a topic ban that was placed upon him as a result of a prior Arbitration concerning him is reinstated for one year.
