The Signpost
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WP:POST/1
14 February 2011

News and notes
Foundation report; gender statistics; DMCA takedowns; brief news
In the news
Wikipedia wrongly blamed for Super Bowl gaffe; "digital natives" naive about Wikipedia; brief news
Accreditation
Gaining accreditation as Wikimedia photographers at sports events
WikiProject report
Articles for Creation
Features and admins
RFAs and active admins—concerns expressed over the continuing drought
Arbitration report
Proposed decisions in Shakespeare and Longevity; two new cases; motions passed, and more
Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
 

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/In the media


2011-02-14

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Theo10011 and Waldir

MediaWiki 1.17 deployment failed, postponed

The planned update of MediaWiki as the underlying software which forms the basis of WMF wikis to version 1.17 failed last week (Wikimedia Techblog). The original deployment was expected to begin 07:00 UTC on February 8 (see previous Signpost coverage), but preparations took longer than anticipated and actual deployment began at around 13:00 UTC.

Several issues became apparent almost immediately. The parser cache miss rate almost doubled with the new deployment, at which point the Apache servers, which are responsible for delivering content to users, became overloaded and started behaving unpredictably. The increased load culminated with multiple issues across the project from increased lag to even outage for some users. At this point, the deployment was rolled back to the previous 1.16 release. The tech team investigated and prepared for another attempt after resolving some technical issues. A second attempt was made at 16:27 UTC, but this ran into similar performance issues and had to be called off 90 minutes later. Further attempts were put on hold.

Danese Cooper, Wikimedia's Chief Technical Officer, blogged about the failed deployment and explained what the Foundation had attempted to deploy:

After further investigation and several fixes to the release, Rob Lanphier, a developer with the WMF, added that "some of the unsolved issues are complicated enough that the only timely and reasonable way to investigate them is to deploy and react". As a result of this, he said, a new plan had been drawn up in which 1.17 will be deployed on "just a few wikis at a time". The tech team believes the problem was located in the configuration of the $wgCacheEpoch variable, which caused a more aggressive culling of the cache than the servers could handle (Wikimedia Techblog).

The team decided on a two-stage deployment for their next attempt (reviving some old code for project-wise upgrading). The first phase took place 6:00–12:00 UTC on Friday, February 11. This was limited to the Simple English Wikipedia and Wiktionary; the Usability and Strategy Wikis; Meta; the Hebrew Wikisource; the English Wikiquote, Wikinews and Wikibooks; the Beta Wikiversity; and the Esperanto and Dutch Wikipedias.

At the time of writing, the deployment had been completed on all but the last two projects. The Hebrew Wikisource, included after a request from a community member, gave a chance to observe the deployment on a right-to-left language wiki. The team also reported some localization issues which triggered ParserFunction bugs on both nl.wikipedia.org and eo.wikipedia.org. The traffic from nl.wikipedia.org was enough at the time to cause a noticeable spike in CPU usage on the web servers, including some time-out errors; thus, deployment onto nl.wikipedia.org had to be delayed. After these issues are resolved , the second wave of deployment is expected to start on Wednesday, February 16 (see the current list of WMF wikis that are already running 1.17).

An IRC office hour Q&A was held on matters related to the ResourceLoader, which is expected to cause compatibility issues with some existing Javascript code. Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw, the main developers of the ResourceLoader, were available on IRC on February 14 at 18:00 (UTC) to answer queries related to the new feature.

In brief

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.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Opinion


2011-02-14

Foundation report; gender statistics; DMCA takedowns; brief news

Foundation's report for January: Anniversary impact, Brazil and India travels

The Wikimedia Foundation's monthly report for January has been published, much of it related to the celebrations of Wikipedia's tenth anniversary on January 15. The Communications Department observed that although journalists and other commentators have often been very critical of Wikipedia since its inception, "as the 10th anniversary approached, the international media seized the opportunity to reassess: this resulted in hundreds of stories around the world that were overwhelmingly positive" (an observation that had similarly been made by Sue Gardner and some Wikipedia critics, see Signpost coverage). The report called the shipment of "more than 80 Wikipedia 10 celebration kits" (with T-shirts, buttons and stickers) from the WMF to event organizers worldwide "an important pilot for the Wikimedia movement: new data about customs, logistics, and postal services for a wide range of nations has been gathered, and new processes for soliciting orders from chapters or other groups for timely delivery have been developed." Preparations to set up a Wikimedia merchandising webstore are underway.

The Human Resources Department reported a downside of the celebrations: "A large percentage of the staff in San Francisco was out for at least a week with the 'WikiPlague', a variant of the RSV virus that we seem to have caught at the 10th Anniversary Party." The department also reports that it has "started tracking metrics for new hires and the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole, and will start compiling anonymized data regarding diversity and other internal characteristics so that we stay mission-aligned."

Staff members of the Global Development department spent time in India and Brazil in January, and progress with the "Catalyst Projects" for both countries was reported.

Among the visitors to the Foundation's office in January, the report records representatives of IT firm Trivad, Inc, three consultants from communications firm OMP (a former employer of Chief Community Officer Zack Exley) attending a "Wikipedia brainstorming", the CEO of Paymentwall (a company offering ecommerce solutions) and the CEO of Charity Navigator.

Wikipedia's gender gap examined further

DMCA takedowns of fair use and US-Gov-PD images

The Foundation complied with two more DMCA takedown requests last week, continuing the recently established custom of making copies of them available on its website (cf. previous Signpost coverage).

The first request came from the US Department of Health and Human Services, concerning photos on Commons that apparently had been mistakenly designated as public domain by publishing them on the government's own websites: "Although the images had been posted to the public NCI/NIH Websites in the past, that posting was done in error. ... The photographs are protected by a license agreement and none of the parties involved ... has ever intended for the image to be in the public domain." Last month, the photographer had contacted the NCI, who took down its own copies of the images and notified the Wikimedia Foundation.

Another DMCA takedown request last week resulted in the deletion of a photo that had been illustrating the article about 1960s style icon Talitha Getty. According to the image description page as still available in Google's cache, the image had been uploaded on 15 November 2010, copied from another website with a resolution of 344 × 457 pixels, with a standard non-free content rationale as it is frequently used for portraits of deceased persons, which includes a fair-use claim.

Briefly

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/In focus


2011-02-14

Proposed decisions in Shakespeare and Longevity; two new cases; motions passed, and more

The Committee opened two new cases during the week. Four cases are currently open; two of which have posted proposed decisions.

Open cases

Opened on 12 February 2011, this case involves allegations of problematic behavior relating to the Monty Hall problem article. During the week, one editor submitted under 2 kilobytes of content as on-wiki evidence. A deadline for evidence submissions has not yet been set.

Kehrli 2 (Week 1)

Opened on 11 February 2011, this case involves allegations of disruptive editing to the Kendrick (unit) and Kendrick mass articles. The case is following on from the 2006 case concerning Kehrli (talk · contribs). During the week, two editors submitted over 10 kilobytes of content as on-wiki evidence. A deadline for evidence submissions has not yet been set.

On 10 February 2011, drafters Newyorkbrad and SirFozzie posted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals which are being voted on include "standard discretionary sanctions"(see Signpost coverage: 20 September 2010) and rulings concerning two editors. Yesterday, arbitrators Cool Hand Luke and Elen of the Roads added a new principle to the proposed decision; the principle builds on the proposals made in the workshop. A motion to close was then adopted on 14 February, ending the case.

Longevity (Week 12)

On 7 February 2011, drafter Kirill Lokshin posted a proposed decision in the workshop; the proposals, consisting of 14 kilobytes, attracted comments from arbitrators, parties, and others. During the week, more than 50 kilobytes of content was added to the workshop, of which more than 15 kilobytes was contributed by a single party. On 12 February 2011, the drafter submitted a proposed decision‎ for arbitrators to vote on. Proposals being considered include "standard discretionary sanctions", an evidence subpage remedy, rulings concerning two editors, a specific ruling that affiliation with the Gerontology Research Group does not in itself constitute a conflict of interest when editing longevity articles, as well as a proposal that urges WikiProject World's Oldest People to seek experienced editors as mentors to the WikiProject.

Motions

As reported last week, arbitrator Newyorkbrad proposed two motions to amend this case. The motions were passed this week with two recusals:

Other matters

The Committee conditionally suspended the indefinite ban of Lyncs (talk · contribs) (formerly Justanother (talk · contribs) or Justallofthem (talk · contribs)). The conditions are such that Lyncs is subject to a single account limitation, an interaction ban, and a Scientology topic ban. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-02-14/Humour

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