Voting in the annual election of members of the Arbitration Committee has closed. The voting period saw the withdrawal of two candidates, Balloonman and FT2, and the community ban of another candidate, Loosmark. They will be included in the tally, but are ineligible for positions on ArbCom. Thus, 18 candidates are competing for a possible 12 seats.
The four independent scrutineers, all stewards based on WMF projects other than the English Wikipedia, have begun the task of enforcing and ruling on the validity of individual votes, and certifying the results of the election. The role of the scrutineers is outlined here. Their work is expected to take up to a week, after which they will post the tally on the election page. Jimbo Wales is expected to formally announce the appointments a few days after this.
A feedback page has been established for community comments on all aspects of the election process.
Make your own book with Wikiproject Wikipedia-Books
6 June 2011
ArbCom tally pending; Pediapress renderer; fundraiser update; unreferenced BLP drive
6 December 2010
Fundraisers start for Wikipedia and Citizendium; controversial content and leadership
15 November 2010
Wikipedia books launched worldwide
10 May 2010
Wikipedia-Books: Proposed deletion process extended, cleanup efforts
22 March 2010
New Book namespace created
11 January 2010
35k donated, WikiProject for Wikipedia-Books, 2M rated articles, and more
30 November 2009
Books extension enabled
2 March 2009
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Make your own book with Wikiproject Wikipedia-Books |
PediaPress, the print-on-demand partner of the Wikimedia Foundation, is now giving access to its PDF rendering servers for Wikipedia books. This would enable the community to review books for rendering errors and licensing issues, as well as layout problems. In the past, Wikipedians only had access to the "Download PDF" function, which used the PDF renderer from the Wikipedia servers.
There are two main differences between the renderers. On Wikipedia, PDFs are downloaded several tens of thousands of times per day for at-home printing. Because of these constraints, these PDFs are optimized for A4 paper size and for rendering speed. However, the PediaPress renderer has a much lower workload, as it is only used for printed books. It is also optimized for A5 paper and rendering quality.
To get access to the PediaPress render, see Help:Books/PediaPress PDF rendering for details. As usual, any rendering errors or feature requests can be reported at Help:Books/Feedback, or on the PediaPress ticket tracker. For more information on Wikipedia books, see Help:Books or Wikipedia:Books. Users interested in creating and maintaining Wikipedia Books can join Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books.
See also The Signpost's full background report on the annual fundraiser: "November 15 launch, emphasis on banner optimization and community involvement"
The annual Wikimedia fundraiser reached slightly more than $6.5 million in donations to the Foundation on December 5, according to the official Fundraiser Statistics page – corresponding to about one million donated during the third week after the fundraiser's official launch on November 15, considerably less than in earlier weeks. As indicated by Philippe Beaudette, the head of the Foundation's fundraising team, such a slowdown had been expected from the beginning and the campaign was moving into different phases. While the graphic banners featuring Jimmy Wales' personal appeal (which had generated numerous parodies across the Internet - see last week's "In the news" - and a kind of "Jimmy fatigue") were still displayed to Wikipedia users in most of the world last week, in the United States of America readers were seeing more and more banners featuring personal appeals from various different Wikimedians instead.
Beaudette explained that the following phase of the fundraiser would see "a campaign update, probably from Sue, with the introduction of a graphical thermometer treatment" (a graphic displaying the amount of donations so far as a portion of the $16 million fundraiser goal, similar to those used in previous fundraisers).
Most of the editors banners featured participants of this year's Wikimania in Gdansk, where the Foundation had invited volunteers to participate in video testimonials. The first personal appeal to be tested was that of 22Kartika, an Indonesian Wikipedian who had attended the conference as the winner of the Indonesian chapter's "Free Your Knowledge 2010" writing contest (see also brief news). One version of her letter featured the tagline "If you have knowledge, you must share it". (However, elsewhere the Indonesian chapter quoted her with critical remarks about Wikipedia, stating she was "not interested to [become] involved socially in Wikipedia, since she thinks 'there are many weird people'.")
She was followed by Joan Gomà, from Barcelona, Catalonia (example letter), Lilaroja, likewise from Spain (example letter), and later others ([1][2][3][4][5][6]).
The changed banners received some positive media coverage - one writer asked himself "why was Joan so much more successful in getting my money that Jimmy was?" Seth Godin interpreted them as a message of "You own Wikipedia".
Parodies and critical coverage of the Jimmy Wales banners continued in the meantime. Know Your Meme is currently evaluating the status of Please Read: A Personal Appeal From X Founder Y as an Internet meme. (Example with X=WikiLeaks, Y=Julian Assange; see last week's coverage for several earlier examples.) Tim Hwang (himself a founder of ROFLcon) decorated his apartment with a version of one of the fundraising banners [7][8]. Business Insider asked "What's With The Huge Jimmy Wales Ads On Wikipedia? Wouldn't BMW Ads Be Better?"
An infographic titled "the science behind Wikipedia's Jimmy appeal" on the "Information Is Beautiful" blog by David McCandless, purporting to demonstrate the banner testing results that had shown the effectiveness of the graphical banners featuring Jimmy Wales, was widely circulated in recent weeks. However, in a posting on his visualjournalism.com website ("Another beautiful infographic with glaring errors goes viral"), Gert K. Nielsen compared it against its source data from Wikimedia and found several serious errors in the visualization, concluding: "The story is correct. The Jimmy-appeal is a lot more effective than the text-based ads. But the visualization is not showing why and how." - Some months ago, an earlier Wikipedia-themed infographic by McCandless had likewise been shown (by User:WWB) to contain serious errors, see Signpost coverage.
In countries where there are Wikimedia chapters that can accept donations on their own behalf, these chapters control the content of the landing pages. Beaudette voiced some frustration on the lack of different language versions of these pages in some countries, likely causing a loss of donations there from readers of projects that are not in the country's main language.
The German chapter had collected more than one million Euros in donation as of December 6. In related news, the controversy in the German chapter about the process by which a new nonprofit corporation had been created to meet the demands of the fundraising agreement (Signpost coverage) has recently led to 66 members expressing their distrust in the chapter's board's handling of the issue, reaching the necessary quorum to request an out-of-schedule member convention, to possibly displace the current leadership.
New figures have been published showing the success or otherwise of over 600 Wikiprojects at reducing their unreferenced Biographies of Living People in the five weeks to 4 December.
The net decrease was of 2,853 articles or 12.5% in just five weeks; obviously the total number of articles dealt with was far greater, as more are found or created all the time.
The biggest success amongst the WikiProjects for this five weeks was Olympics which reduced its backlog from 496 to 77, but honourable mention must be made of reggae with a 65% reduction, and Africa with nearly 60%.
WikiProjects which still have over 100 unreferenced BLPS are as diverse as Philosophy, Boxing, Israel and Beauty Pageants. Even MILHIST has a gross.
Disclaimer. Figures can go up as well as down, and major drops or increases can relate to random factors such as which categories are being trawled for uBLPS and whether an inordinate number of your uBLPs were created in the months most recently cleared by the Wikipedia:Unreferenced BLP Rescue team.
For the full set of figures and to check how your WikiProject is doing, go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/WikiProjects. Thanks to User:The-Pope for compiling the figures.
Amazon.com has begun showing copies of Wikipedia pages on its site, each labeled "Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Page". One example appears to be based on the October 23 version of the main page, with most or all links redirecting back to Wikipedia. In the James Joyce page, however, most or all links stay on Amazon.com, and pages about books such as the copy of Ulysses (novel) contain a "See Buying Info" button near the page title. According to CNET, Wikipedia pages will eventually appear in all Amazon search results, and link to mirrored Wikipedia articles containing embedded links with items for sale on Amazon. The mirror complies with Wikipedia's terms with "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or any later version" at the foot of each page. Amazon spokeswoman Anya Waring told CNET "As of November, we have rolled [the feature] out in the books category; however, [it] will be expanding to new categories in 2011." CNET.com, Also at Zdnet
The Wikimedia Foundation's Deputy Director Erik Möller reacted to the news by stating: "We were not consulted, and are currently fully examining this. It is not official or endorsed by us". He later added:
| “ | We're concerned about the degree to which the Amazon.com pages resemble Wikipedia pages. The content use itself is clearly permitted, and we're not opposed to commercial use per se. On the contrary, free licenses encourage this kind of experimentation by anyone.
The potential issue with this kind of commercialization is that it creates confusion about the "Wikipedia" brand and what it stands for. Wikipedia is currently understood to be one of the few mainstream sources of information that isn't commercialized, and which aims to provide a neutral and inclusive view of any given topic. A third party adding single-vendor shopping ads into the content, while the way the content is presented closely resembles Wikipedia, threatens to undermine that perception, as Amazon.com visitors may assume that this is something that's part of our operating model. |
” |
Last week, Jimmy Wales appeared from London on Al Jazeera's Morning Talk (حديث الصباح) program, giving a 19-minute interview (via a translator) with presenter Julnar Moussa (جلنار موسى). The interview was preceded by a two-minute clip that explained how Wikipedia works. Moussa gave congratulations for Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. Wales started off talking about how the Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit charity, and the purpose of Wikipedia, as a free encyclopedia.
A major question discussed was "How do we assess reliability of the information?", both generally and when it comes to divisive and controversial topics, such as politics. Moussa cited the Jerusalem article where it says Jerusalem "is the capital of Israel, though not internationally recognized as such" as a specific example which she thought was biased towards the Israeli point-of-view. Wales explained how Wikipedia has the Neutral Point of View policy, that different points-of-view should be represented in an article, and that anyone can engage in discussion on the talk pages or get involved in editing. As for use by students, Wales explained that Wikipedia can be a starting-point for searching for information but not the end-point.
Moussa also asked "what about the other languages?" to which Jimmy Wales replied and explained Wikimedia's mission to provide free knowledge to all people in their own language. Wales discussed Wikimedia's interest in doing added outreach in the Middle East to bring in more editors to the Arabic Wikipedia. Replying to a question about WikiLeaks, Wales said there is no relation between them and Wikimedia. (Full interview on YouTube, posted on 25 November, Arabic-only)
On the Canadian "Search Engine" podcast, host Jesse Brown interviewed Joseph Reagle (author of the recent book on Wikipedia "Good Faith Collaboration"), asking him "Why can't we all be more like Wikipedia?". In the introduction to the 16-minute interview, Brown said: "Do you remember the time not so long ago, when Wikipedia was the punchline to many a bad late night talk show joke? ... An encyclopedia that anybody could alter at any time seemed ridiculous? ... You don't really hear those jokes a lot anymore. ... [Wikipedia] has been shown through a number of studies to be an incredibly accurate encyclopedia. For many of us, it is the de facto first stop for learning about something new. And the question these days about Wikipedia is no longer: 'How can that information be any good?', the question is: 'Why isn't the rest of the Internet more like that?' Apart from this question, Reagle was asked about topics from his book, explaining community norms such as neutral point of view and assume good faith, and about being harassed by members of Wikipedia Review (aggressive online comments which he explained by the endorsements his book had received from Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales). Asked whether or not students should be allowed to cite Wikipedia, Reagle described a method he had used in his own courses, allowing students to cite from a set of Wikipedia articles that he had pre-vetted himself in specific versions. Coming back to the opening question, he cited from the concluding chapter of his book that there was no such thing as magic "wiki pixie dust" that would allow people to apply the wiki model to other arbitrary sites.
GLAM-WIKI:UK – a joint conference for Wikimedians and people from the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums sector – was held at the British Museum in London on 26 and 27 November 2010. This was Wikimedia UK's first public conference, and was convened by Witty lama (Liam Wyatt). Jimbo Wales kicked off both days with an introduction. Cory Doctorow gave the keynote presentation on the Friday, and Sue Gardner on the Saturday. Tom Morgan, Head of Rights and Reproductions at the National Portrait Gallery, gave a presentation entitled Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery – a bad first date? about the previous copyright-related disputes between the two institutions.
Attendees from the GLAM sector included people from organisations that Wikimedia has already collaborated with, such as the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Tropenmuseum, and the city of Toulouse, as well as potential partners such as Kew Gardens. Wikimedians attending included many of the London regulars and contingents from the French, Dutch, and Chinese Wikipedias.
After a welcome by the British Museum and an introduction by Jimbo, there was a keynote by science-fiction writer and free-culture advocate Cory Doctorow, who spoke about how "Being a beloved institution will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of being an irrelevant one." This was followed by brief statements by each Wikimedian about their role on Wikimedia projects.
The rest of the morning was devoted to a trio of plenaries, beginning with Joscelyn Upendran from Creative Commons UK, who provided a broad introduction to the concept of Creative Commons and the various licences that are available, and gave examples of how organisations such as the UK government make use of the licenses. This was followed by Matthew Cock from the British Museum, who spoke on the successful Wikipedian in residence program, including their motivations in running the project and the resulting benefits. In the last session of the morning, Jill Cousins talked about Europeana and Wikimedia. Europeana is an EU-wide project to bring together and share information about objects of cultural significance; one focus of the collaboration is to enable people to re-use that content. Although they currently cannot share that content with Wikipedia due to Europeana's use of a non-commercial license, Cousins was optimistic that Europeana–Wikimedia integration projects would be possible in the future.
In the afternoon, delegates split into three separate tracks. Mathias Schindler continued the explanation of licenses started by Joscelyn earlier in the day, and talked about how copyright is enforced on Wikipedia. In parallel, Andrew Dalby gave an introduction to Wikipedia for librarians, highlighting the parts of Wikipedia that are likely to be of interest to these professionals, including the different language versions and bibliography sections. Sebastien Beyou and Jean-Frédéric Berthelot then talked about the partnership with Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which recently provided more than 1,400 scanned books to Wikisource. In the third session, User:Johnbod, the primary author of featured article Royal Gold Cup (one of the articles that benefited from the British Museum collaboration), gave a guided tour of the English Wikipedia.
In the parallel session, Daniel Pett talked about the Portable Antiquities Scheme and how it brings together volunteers with experts in its work. Josefien Schuurman and Maarten Dammers spoke about "Collaboration projects at the National Archives of the Netherlands", followed by Frank Meije's talk on the partnership with the Tropenmuseum. Roger Bamkin gave the third session, "A history of the world in 100 articles".
Dr Kenneth Crews from Columbia University, author of Control of museum art images: the reach and limits of copyright and licensing keynoted about "The free-conomy and the cultural sector", followed by a panel discussion by Jill Cousins (Director of Europeana), Paula Le Dieu (Head of Digital at the BFI), Tom Morgan (National Portrait Gallery) and Bill Thompson (Presenter of the BBC's Digital Planet).
The day began with Sue Gardner's keynote. She began by giving a thumbnail sketch of her journalism career and her current job as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. She started out as a journalist at the CBC, and within a few years was managing their website. She describes herself as "straddling the new world of Wikipedia and the old world of journalism".
Her presentation focused on Wikipedia statistics. One slide showed that Wikipedia is the most searched-for information website, way above Sky news, the CBC, the BBC and anything else. She made a point that 87% of Wikipedians are male. She suggested that initiatives such as women-only events could help to solve this bias, but a woman in the audience pointed out that this might promote them as "different".
A general Q&A session followed, which included interesting points, such as one in reply to a GLAM representative about whether Wikimedia is attempting to replace cultural institutions' own web services. Liam Wyatt said that some things are important but are not necessarily notable enough for Wikipedia; for example, local history; "Therefore, it should still be published, but not on Wikipedia." He made the case that the Wikipedia editorial policies of No Original Research and Reliable Sources support rather than undermine the existence of GLAM websites.
Sue Gardner pointed out that the Wikimedia Foundation is not meant to "eat the lunch" of the Wikipedia editors. The WMF is there to handle legal issues, domain names, and fundraisers, among other things. There are also some staff who work closely with the editors. She pointed out that it was important for the staff to engage with the editors.
One of the most anticipated presentations was that of Tom Morgan, the head of Copyright and Reproduction at the National Portrait Gallery (London)
Many Wikimedians are aware of the conflicts between the NPG and Wikipedia, which go back to at least 2005, when the NPG's demands that Wikipedia remove images of the famous Chandos portrait of Shakespeare and other 400-year-old paintings were publicly rejected by Jimmy Wales in his keynote at the very first Wikimania, and escalated last year (Signpost coverage: "UK public gallery threatens Wikimedian"). In Morgan's description of the 2009 incident, the National Portrait Gallery's website had high-res photographs of their artworks which could be viewed using the Zoomify tool. Surfers were not able to see the whole image in the original quality, but a Wikipedia user (Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee)) wrote a script to extract these high-quality images from the website. He then uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons, making them freely available; until then, the high-res images were available only for sale on the Gallery's website.
Morgan noted jokingly that he was pleased to have been invited, as otherwise he would have been in the audience heckling. He said the NPG has a 150-year history of collecting objects and undertaking meticulous research into the copyright status and provenance of the works. He pointed out that after a time of conflict, a productive dialogue has developed. Nevertheless, he felt "the Gallery has a strong culture of engagement and somebody [Wikipedia] has just driven a big truck through it".
At the time he felt that the difference between Wikipedia and the gallery was so great it could only ever be settled with a court case, which would be devastating for both parties. As a result of the coverage of this event, the Streisand effect was apparent (the phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or remove information has the unintended consequence of causing it to be publicised widely), which he felt made matters worse. "Don't get me wrong," he said, "Wikipedia is a really interesting project and conflict is essential to it. The enthusiasm of its editors is valuable and has to be supported, but they are, somewhat, ignorant when it comes to image reproduction." Morgan said that one thing the gallery has learned through reading the sometimes vitriolic commentary that arose in the ensuing debates was that the gallery is not adequately explaining to the public the skill and effort of all the work that goes on "behind the scenes" (including conservation, accessioning and of course digitisation).
At this point, Liam Wyatt joined the discussion: "We do care about copyright. We care a lot. More than," he paused, "is healthy." He then argued that if a court case provided a legal ruling which showed a clear precedent superseding Bridgeman v. Corel Wikimedia would immediately adhere to it – whichever way the decision fell. In the meantime though, they had learned to live alongside each other like a family. "Admittedly a rather dysfunctional one," said Tom Morgan, "but a family nonetheless."
Several parallel afternoon sessions were held. The second track was a presentation by Kajsa Hartig, from the Nordic Museum (Nordiska museet). She described how Swedish GLAMs have related to online dissemination in the past and how this had recently changed, citing Flickr Commons as an influential project. Hartig stressed how copyright issues can be complex, highlighting the differences within Swedish law. She presented the cooperation project, announced earlier that week by the Nordiska museet and Wikimedia Sverige, and concluded with the advantages of such a project and the questions it raises. Neil Wilson, "head of Metadata services" for the British Library described their project to open up their data under the Creative Commons CC-Zero Waiver, and how that is part of their overall strategy for the coming decade. Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum, summarised the proceedings of the MCG conference. Jean-Frédéric Berthelot and Bastien Guerry from Wikimédia France talked about the partnership with the City of Toulouse and several cultural institutions. Nadia Arbach from the Victoria and Albert Museum recapped with comments on the Britain Loves Wikipedia project. She explained how the project has resulted in files with high-quality descriptions for Wikimedia Commons, and how the sheer number of submissions is an extra workload for the museum staff involved.
The controversies over the ongoing United States diplomatic cables leak by WikiLeaks are having a noticeable impact on Wikipedia and Wikimedia, due mainly to the widespread confusion between Wikipedia and WikiLeaks that has lingered since the setting up of WikiLeaks almost four years ago (see earlier Signpost coverage: "Difficult relationship between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia"). As in the aftermath of WikiLeaks' Afghan War documents leak, Sue Gardner and Jimmy Wales stated – in interviews with the BBC and Al Jazeera, respectively (see below) – that there was no connection between WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. As reported earlier, Jimmy Wales has criticized WikiLeaks several times for possibly endangering innocent people by revealing their identity in the leaked documents.
However, Wales' criticism of WikiLeaks was much more measured than that of Larry Sanger (known for his role in starting Wikipedia until 2002), who on November 26 began posting critical comments about WikiLeaks on Twitter. They soon received wide attention as the view of "Wikipedia's co-founder" – Sanger proudly observed that apart from blogs such as Little Green Footballs[9], 265 different Twitter users had retweeted or replied to his initial tweets (by December 6, he had posted more than 140 messages on the topic). One of Sanger's comments read:
| “ | Speaking as Wikipedia's co-founder, I consider you [WikiLeaks] enemies of the U.S. – not just the government, but the people. | ” |
It was quoted by Gordon Crovitz in the opening paragraph of an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal, to support the claim that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had "ended the era of innocent optimism about the Web". On the other hand, Sanger received many adverse reactions which appear to have prompted him to elaborate on his views about "Wikileaks' latest disastrous actions" in an essay published on his website, saying about his motivation, "I suppose at this point it is my duty to post at least the following; I think I'm in a position where I could do some good, so I had better". He clarified his affiliation as follows: "I was and am not speaking for Wikipedia, but only for myself." Responding to Twitter users who had announced they would not donate to Wikipedia in protest at Sanger's views, he said: "To those who said that they'd stop contributing to Wikipedia, you might not know that I left Wikipedia a little over a year after I got it started, and have since founded a competitor." Sanger complained about "people insulting me vociferously", but himself called Assange a "twit" in his essay. In 2008, when WikiLeaks had already published much classified material, Sanger had praised it: "specific online services, such as WikiLeaks, have been set up for anonymous free speech. Long may they flourish", but in September 2010, after the site's first major US-related leaks, he told The Signpost that "I certainly don't approve of Wikileaks' latest behavior. Publishing classified material anonymously (or not) is a no-no".
Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, seemed to feel considerably less entitled than Sanger: An article by a reporter of The Oregonian quoted him as saying "I don't think the fact that I wrote wiki gives me any more say than anybody else", and recommending opinion pieces by other commentators instead. However, Cunningham pointed out that "WikiLeaks doesn't use much of the wiki offerings. It's not really a collaborative effort."
As observed by Media Matters, right-wing US talk show host Glenn Beck ("Beck just makes things up about Wikipedia") was also confusing Wikipedia and WikiLeaks in a November 30 show: "The storm is here, the one we have been telling you about for five years, it's here. And Wikipedia is just a part of it", quickly being corrected by one of his sidekicks to "WikiLeaks". However, another added: "Wikipedia is also a part of it though. Those bastards, and their 'free' encyclopedia! I hate those people!" As summarized by Media Matters, Beck then insinuated the involvement of George Soros (a billionaire whose charitable activities are viewed with suspicion on the American far right) in WikiLeaks via its use of the MediaWiki software: "Beck then asserted that Soros 'helped develop software' for Wikipedia. Sidekick Stu Burguiere responded, 'I’ve read this before, but I don’t think it’s actually accurate.' Beck went on to add: 'Maybe you’re right. ... I’m not saying it’s nefarious. What I’m saying is that he is an open society guy. This is an open society – this is perfect open society stuff. ... The software was, I think, helped developed by Soros, which is the software that WikiLeaks is using.'"
Across the Atlantic, the Wikipedia/WikiLeaks confusion had a tangible negative impact on the German Wikimedia chapter. On November 30, it announced the resignation of its treasurer, who cited adverse reactions among his customers that were threatening the existence of his (real-life) company; he also requested to have his account on Wikipedia deactivated. He later told news magazine Der Spiegel that he had already lost three contracts for this reason.
One long-time Wikipedian became a tangential subject of the massive WikiLeaks media coverage: In a widely cited report-cum-interview about Julian Assange, Forbes quoted David Gerard's observation that Assange had "titanium balls", recalling his resistance to efforts to censor a website of Gerard's in the 1990s at an ISP where Assange worked as sysadmin.
One of the cables leaked so far (less than 1000 of around 250,000 altogether) contains mention of Wikipedia: A January 2010 message from the US embassy in Luxembourg reported on public appearances by former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg (lobbying EU governments to accept former detainees, in accordance with US goals). This included one at a screening of the documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side. The cable recommended Wikipedia for background information:
9. (U) Please see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moazzam_Begg and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxi_to_the_Dark _Side {sic] for extensive information on Moazzam Begg and the film "Taxi to the Dark Side."
The cable was marked "Confidential" and signed "Stroum", presumably meaning Cynthia Stroum, the current United States Ambassador to Luxembourg. A previous release by WikiLeaks, the Afghan War documents leak, had similarly shed some light on the use of Wikipedia in internal reports by US personnel, in that case a military unit (Signpost coverage).
Six days after the start of the release, the grammar of a December 4 WikiLeaks statement on Twitter hinted at considerable excitement:
| “ | 'Wikileaks' now twice as known as well known as 'Wikipedia' according to Google | ” |
This Halloween, Wikipedia unwittingly featured a truly scary article on the main page: a copyright violation produced by a member of the Arbitration Committee. After generating a large amount of buzz, the incident led to the replacement of the featured article and the retirement of an Arb (see Signpost coverage). Just a few weeks before, another long-time editor was indefinitely blocked and over 10,000 articles were blanked because of copyright violations (see Signpost coverage). With copyright policy garnering headlines so frequently, we decided to ask WikiProject Copyright Cleanup for some insight into copyright policies and how editors can avoid getting in trouble. We interviewed Moonriddengirl, MLauba, and Physchim62.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Copyright Cleanup?
There's been a lot of buzz about copyright cleanup recently. Could you provide some insight?
What does the project do? What is your role in the project?
How does copyright infringement and plagiarism affect Wikipedia?
How can editors help you with the project? What do you recommend for users who need to clean up their own articles?
Next week, we'll focus on some photosynthetic, unicellular and multicellular eukaryotes dating back to the Precambrian Eon... To return to a simpler time, study our previous reports in the archive.
Reader comments
The Signpost welcomes Panyd (nom) from the UK as our newest admin. She has editorial experience in a number of areas, including OTRS, BLP sourcing, deletion work, random page patrol, and content editing.
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In the past two weeks, ten lists were promoted:
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.
Reader comments
The Arbitration Committee opened one case this week, leaving a total of two cases open.
On 30 November, the arbitrators accepted a new case petitioned by Communicat (talk · contribs), who alleges that "NPOV/content issues are consistently evaded, deviated from and obscured" by editors at the Military History Project. Five other editors are joined as parties to the case. Arbitrators Kirill and Roger Davies, both "coordinators emeritus" of the project, recused themselves.
On the petition of John J. Bulten (talk · contribs), the Committee accepted a case on Longevity on 22 November. The filer named 18 editors, including himself, as parties.
Reader comments
The new "Upload Wizard", featured a number of times in recent editions of The Signpost, was launched on Wikimedia Commons last Tuesday. The new wizard was developed under a one year grant from the Ford Foundation and aims to improve the upload experience, especially for novice editors. It allows users to upload multiple files at the same time, add the proper licensing and sourcing information and will only allow them to publish the file to the public if they have properly completed all the steps. It also features the new licensing tutorial (see previous Signpost coverage), to help novice users determine if their material can be uploaded and freely licensed.
The new wizard is not yet the default option on Commons as it still has many problems with different types of browsers, but further improvements are planned to make this the default option in the future. Users are invited to try the new system and to report any problems they encounter.
Many changes have been made to the MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia since the (Northern) summer. However many of these changes have not yet been made available in the form of an official update to the software. The developers are now starting to plan for a new release of the software. A new 1.17 branch of the software is planned to be created this week. From that moment on, only the bigger bug fixes - and, importantly, no new features - will be allowed into that version of the software. There is still a lot of work to be done: all code that has not yet been reviewed will have to be reviewed by senior developers, for example, and a lot of testing will be required.
The hope is that in January a first test version of the software can be deployed on Wikipedia, though many important fixes are already live (draft roadmap).
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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