On 5 April, it was announced that the remaining vacant seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees had been filled last month by Bishakha Datta, an Indian journalist and filmmaker who leads a Mumbai-based nonprofit organization that "focuses on conveying women's perspectives in culture and the media". Michael Snow, the board's chair, wrote:
"In a bit of an ironic twist, Bishakha's organization is called Point of View, but rest assured that she understands and endorses the neutral point of view approach for Wikimedia projects. Her journalistic background means she appreciates the value of an objective presentation, and throughout our conversations with her it was clear that she supports our mission and values."
Datta is the first Board member from India. Her term will end in December 2010.
In an interview with Indian business newspaper Mint, Datta explained some of her objectives as a Board member.
CheckUser and Oversight Elections
The Arbitration Committee has determined that there is a need for additional oversighters and checkusers to improve workload distribution and ensure complete, timely response to requests. Experienced editors are invited to apply for either or both of the Oversight or CheckUser permissions. Current holders of either permission are also invited to apply for the other. The last day to request an application is 10 April 2010. For more information, please see the election page.
Main page continues April non-fool tradition
The tradition of "reverse" April fools' jokes on Wikipedia's main page – statements which are designed to appear made-up but are factually accurate – was continued this year. For example, the featured article of the day was wife selling ("a traditional English practice for ending an unsatisfactory marriage"), and the featured image was an ad for a dietary supplement that promised to help customers concerned about their figure to "get fat".
As TheDJobserved on his blog, many readers, including journalists,
"do not realize that everything on the page is true. Basically the editors are putting the joke on the 'quick critics'. The people with an opinion about Wikipedia, without truly knowing what and why they are critiquing."
Before the current custom was established, the main page had featured actual hoaxes on 1 April, leading to considerable controversy (see 2005 Signpost coverage).
Rewrite of MediaWiki parser
On the software side, the long-standing goal to rewrite the MediaWiki parser "in a more friendly and accessible implementation" was achieved on 1 April by porting it to the LOLCODE programming language.
Wikimedia Italia produced a video guide to Wikipedia (in Italian); it is available on the Italian Wikipedia, or a smaller version on Commons. It is also on Youtube with subtitles in English and Spanish. The text of the video is available here for translators who wish to translate into their own language.
A thread on Foundation-l discussed differences between the content policies of Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap that appear to prevent OSM editors from using location data from Wikipedia, out of copyright concerns. Topics included: Whether location data is to be regarded as (non-copyrightable) facts, what the effect of contract law restrictions imposed by sources such as Google Maps might be, and possible implications of the fact that Wikipedia and OSM are hosted in different jurisdictions (the latter in Europe, where database protection laws might apply)
Andrew N. Nelson, a Sociology major at James Madison University, is working on his senior thesis "Locating Knowledge and Power within an Open Source Community". A sample of the top 4,000 editors by edit count have received an email from JMU researcher alpha (talk·contribs) with a solicitation for participation in an online survey.
WikiProject Essay Categorization and/or Classification has been renamed WikiProject Essays and re-invigorated in recent months, with an effort to tag all Wikipedia essays for automatic classification based on the number of watchers, incoming links, and pageviews. A portal has also been created to showcase significant essays.
The Living People Task Force invites comments about the draft of its recommendations, which will be presented to the Foundation's Board of Trustees for adoption at its next meeting (the date of which hasn't been published yet). The aim is to create a guideline and policy applicable to all Wikimedia projects.
The UK's Private Eye (issue 1259) reported that a November 2009 edit to the Wikipedia entry for mephedrone, an increasingly popular drug, had resulted in UK newspapers erroneously using "meow" (or "miaow", also "meow meow" or "miaow miaow") as a street name for the drug.[1] The name had been proposed at one time by a now-defunct online seller, owing to the abbreviation MM-CAT for the drug's chemical name 4-methylmethcathinone, but according to a drug expert had never caught on.[2] The Eye also noted that on 17 November the Wikipedia entry had claimed "Mugabe" as a street name (it was among several accumulated unsourced terms removed on 17 November), and on 31 October as "the Chinese" (which remained for an hour).
However, research by Wikipedians found that the crucial unsourced street names passage which included "meow" was removed on 17 November, some days before the UK press ran a number of mephedrone stories using the doubled term "meow meow". On 26 November the doubled term "meow meow" was added, the day after the term was published in the Daily Express, which was the source given.[3] The doubled term "meow meow" rapidly took off, appearing for example in The Sun on 26 November. An earlier story in the Irish edition of the Daily Mirror, on 15 September, had already given "meow" as the street name,[4] some time before it was added to the Wikipedia entry on 2 November. It appears the Eye was jumping to conclusions.
Briefly
Wikipedia was mentioned in a UK-published magazine which was published on 1 April. Aeroplane, published by IPC Media had an article on the remotely operated guns of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, and mentioned the Wikipedia article when pointing readers to other sources of info on the aircraft and its systems.[5]
A 26 March article in Inside Higher Ed describes a Wikipedia assignment asking students to answer the question "Does Wikipedia Suck?"
What motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Baseball? What kind of baseball-related articles do you like to work on?
Wizardman: What motivated me was having a general interest growing up in the game. I got lucky and got to watch a good baseball team, so my enjoyment of the game moved into here, where I could learn about the different players of the game. Each baseball player has their own unique story which ends up being quite fascinating. I typically like working with biographies of retired players. No preference on who they played for or when, though most frequently they've been American League players from the World War II era.
Killervogel5: I've been editing baseball articles ever since I started using Wikipedia (my first edit was creating Chase Utley). I grew up watching the game, though I didn't really understand all of its intricacies, and watched Harry Kalas and the Phillies most of my adolescent and adult life. I started out doing mostly list work, as my first major project here took me weeks to complete. Since then, I've branched out from Phillies-only work into baseball in general, and from lists to biographies as well. Generally, my bio focus has been on Philadelphia players, but I tend to prefer more obscure players who don't get a lot of focus (Paul Bako), or creating new non-stub articles for players who don't have one (Putsy Caballero, Jocko Thompson).
Most projects we've previously highlighted had a larger number of featured articles than featured lists. WikiProject Baseball has 23 featured articles and a surprising 117 featured lists. Why are there so many excellent lists in baseball?
Killervogel5: Baseball is a sport that is heavily dependent on its statistics and, as such, lends itself very well to the creation of high-quality lists. Part of the reason behind the large number of featured lists that we have is the project's informal featured topic drives, which are usually just collaborated and coordinated at the project talk page. Recently, we completed and promoted the MLB awards featured topic, a featured topic with two fully featured subtopics; in sum, this topic encompasses 1 good article and 36 featured lists, which I believe is the second-largest complete featured topic on the English Wikipedia. In addition, we have an informal topic drive going for lists of managers, some of which has already been completed and which will increase our featured content even further.
Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?
Killervogel5: I have joined the Awards and prizes WikiProject mainly based on my work with the MLB awards FT. Additionally, we have several subtopics that are dependent on WP:MLB members for support.
What are WikiProject Baseball's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?
Wizardman: Aside from the redlinks in all-time rosters, while current baseball players and seasons are generally well-handled, former baseball players do not follow suit, even those with particularly illustrious careers. You would think Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley would have nicer articles than Jason Hirsh and Ryan Garko, for example. Hall of Famers having great articles would be a top priority in my opinion, as the casual person is gonna associate baseball not with someone who played a few years, but the greats of the game, the Ruths, DiMaggios, etc.
Killervogel5: Take a look at some of the all-time team rosters, and create articles for redlinked players. Fill in a season page for an old team season, including the game log and month-by-month summaries. Any contributor who wants to help out would be welcomed at the project talk page.
Staxringold: I would definitely agree with Wizardman on Hall of Fame biographies. Take Walter Johnson, arguably the greatest pitcher in the history of the game. There is plenty of source material out there, it's just a daunting task for an editor to consider starting (probably why so many "big" players have lesser articles). Beyond that I would say maybe work on notable events/moments/teams like the Shot Heard 'Round the World, 1927 New York Yankees season, or the 1978 American League East tie-breaker game (aka "The Greatest Game"). There are seminal figures and moments in the history of baseball, and the improvement of their articles would be a massive coup for the project.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Wizardman: We're always looking for new members and new areas to grow upon.
Killervogel5: We're gearing up for the start of the season, so let's play ball!
Next week we'll fire up the hog. Until then, cruise over to the archive for more WikiProject interviews.
Asgardian (Week 7): 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 voting phase.
Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 7): 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.
Other
The Committee announced that it was seeking to add oversighters and checkusers in order to reduce the workload on those already holding those tools.
For its April Fools' Day joke, the Committee announced a new Arbitration procedure requiring that all users seeking arbitration bring all their requests to the almighty and unwavering eye of the magic eight-ball.
As announced last week, the rollout of the new interface has begun and Wikimedia Commons was switched April 6 at 8:00 UTC. No major problems have been encountered so far.
Other changes
Bug 22041 about problems with scaling GIF images was finally fixed and closed. The behavior is now as intended and only large animations are no longer thumbnailed.[1]
The default thumbnail-size of images was changed from 180 pixels wide to 220 pixels wide on the Commons, following a similar change on the English Wikipedia in February.[2]
All protected pages now have a "Submit an edit request" link on the View Source tab (shown instead of Edit This Page if the user doesn't have permission to edit that page). The link takes users to a form to help them request an edit be made.[3]
Bots approved
The following bots and tasks have been approved in the past four weeks:
DYKUpdateBot – Makes updates related the Did you know section of the Main Page
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