On 1 May, the fifth annual Picture of the Year Awards at Wikimedia Commons began the first round of voting, which will last until 4 May at 11:59PM UTC. All editors with at least 200 edits before 1 January 2011 are eligible to vote.
Picture of the Year is a contest that celebrates the best content that has gone through Commons' featured picture process over the previous year. Begun by Alvesgaspar in late 2006, Picture of the Year has become a much-loved tradition throughout Wikimedia projects. In 2010, there were 784 new featured pictures, compared with 890 in 2009, and 501 in 2008.
Voters may vote for as many images as they like, and are encouraged to vote in as many of the award categories as they feel able to judge. The final round of voting will begin in the third week of May, once all of the votes from the previous round have been tallied and confirmed.
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As reported last month, the local Wikimedia chapter in Sweden started its ""Projekt Internet i Sverige" in March, aiming to improve Swedish Wikipedia articles about the Internet in Sweden. Funded by the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, the operator of Swedish country-code top-level domain .se, the chapter hired long-time Wikipedian Johan Jönsson (User:Julle) to work on the project from March to July 2011. On the Foundation's blog, he described his work: "I try to find articles dedicated to topics covering the Internet in Sweden. I put them on an importance scale and assess for quality". He outlined the project's goals, which include improving the content quality in this significant area, and inspiring "more people to get involved in Wikipedia and make contacts between experts in the field and Wikipedia editors". The project is believed to be the first to employ someone to specifically edit the Swedish Wikipedia, although other Wikipedias have seen such externally funded projects before (see, for example, Signpost coverage: "First state-funded Wikipedia project concludes after three years").
On 29 April Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met with representatives of the Russian internet community, including Stanislav Kozlovskiy (User:Ctac) - executive director of Wikimedia Russia. (Information on the Kremlin's website: Russian, English.) According to the (partial) Russian transcript, the concept of Creative Commons licensing and Wikipedia was discussed. On the Russian Wikipedia, Ctac reported some other conversation topics, such as changes to Russian copyright law, and its lack of a freedom of panorama exemption (cf. Commons:Freedom_of_panorama#Russia).
Editors have repeatedly added details about superinjunctions taken out by four celebrities in Britain to the stars' articles, according to reports last week. The information on the four articles has constantly been reverted and the diffs hidden for BLP reasons; the pages have either been protected or the pending changes system has been implemented. A superinjunction is a legal injunction which prevents all media from broadcasting both the allegation the person has chosen to hide, but also the fact they have taken out an injunction.
According to The Daily Telegraph, one of the celebrities (whose identities are known to The Signpost) is a high-profile actor who reportedly had an extramarital affair with a prostitute, and one is a Premier League footballer accused of having an affair with reality-show contestant, Imogen Thomas. The other two are television presenters: one allegedly had an affair, and another, according to the Daily Mail, took out a superinjunction to quash photographs described as showing him "intimate" with a woman.
While the revisions in the history of the articles have been deleted by administrators, it is evident that on one of the pages the reports of the superinjunction were added ten times by various users. The names of the four celebrities are readily available on the social networking site Twitter. The Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for Wikipedia who said that administrators will continue to remove content that violates superinjunctions. However, Wikipedia's servers are based in the US, outside the UK jurisdiction. "People have tried to sue the foundation for libellous content but it's been thrown out. Our material has to be really well referenced or it is chucked out immediately", according to the spokesperson.
The debate over the moral ethics of superinjunctions has become more intense in Britain in recent months. This week, BBC political presenter Andrew Marr revealed he had taken out a superinjuction in January 2008 to prevent the media reporting an affair he had with a national newspaper journalist. Marr came forward only after Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, threatened to take legal action to expose his superinjunction; Hislop this week celebrated his disclosure of what he termed a "Kafkaesque" and "absurd" court order. David Cameron, the British prime minister, has also spoken out against superinjunctions: "The judges are creating a sort of privacy law, whereas what ought to happen in a parliamentary democracy is [that parliament] should decide how much protection do we want ... so I am a little uneasy about what is happening." Campaign group Index on Censorship welcomed Marr's confession about the superinjuction, which he has now dropped. John Kampfner, the chief executive of the organisation, said: "While there may be exceptional circumstances in which injunctions may be necessary, we are seeing gagging orders being used to hide the wealthy from embarrassment and even commercial damage. We are in danger of creating a secret network of secret rich man's justice."
In January, there was a similar case on Wikipedia after a New Zealand court had issued a name suppression order concerning a sports broadcasting journalist's short-time arrest and minor "disorderly behaviour" charge (Signpost coverage). The information was likewise reverted at first, but was eventually reinstated after the person in question self-identified.
This week we contemplated relativity with WikiProject Physics. The project was started in June 2005 and has grown to include 43 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, and 42 Good Articles. WikiProject Physics maintains four portals covering Physics, Electromagnetism, Gravitation, and X-ray Astronomy. We interviewed Christopher Thomas and Headbomb.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Physics? What area of physics interests you most? Do you have any expertise in physics?
The project is home to 43 featured articles and 42 good articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Do you have any tips for editors attempting to bring a physics article up to FA or GA status?
Do you contribute to other science-based projects? Have there been any inter-project collaborations?
|journal= parameters of citation templates. This tremendously boosted the output of WP:Academic journals by allowing us to see which journal entry were missing, and which were important for Wikipedia (journals which we cite often should have decent articles, mostly because many readers will want to know about the journal's reliability, its history, etc...). I also compiled lists of missing journals for individual projects (Medicine, Biology, Plants...) to let them know how how their field is represented on Wikipedia. Prior to that compilation, we had some journal cited well-over 1000 times without any articles on them. Now all journals which have been cited more than 80 times on Wikipedia have an article. [Well, cited 80 times as as of last year, the compilation is pretty dated since the bot operator is inactive]. So I say that's another successful project.Does the project have any difficulty recruiting new members? Does the technical nature of some physics-related articles limit contributions from editors without a physics background?
The project has its own portal. Do you contribute to the portal? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of portals?
What are the project's most pressing needs and concerns? How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week we'll break out the board games. Until then, plan your next move in the archive.
Reader comments
There were no new admins last week. At the time of publication there is one live RfA: Catfish Jim and the soapdish, due to finish Wednesday.
No new articles were promoted to featured status.
Nine lists were promoted:
One featured list was delisted:
The Arbitration Committee opened two new cases during the week. Three cases are currently open.
This case was opened two days ago after allegations of harassment, outing, sockpuppetry, canvassing, and disruptive editing. The case will address the behavioral concerns surrounding Racepacket (talk · contribs), the subject of this case, and is likely to review the behavior of all editors involved in the GA processes concerning netball articles. During the week, three editors submitted 12 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.
This case was opened four days ago after allegations of long-term COI editing on the Tree shaping article, and problematic usage of the article's talk page. During the week, four editors submitted 23 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.
Further proposals were submitted and voting has continued during the week as to which proposals will form the final decision. More votes are likely to be made in the coming week.
Reader comments
This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger issued a call for more developers routinely using right-to-left (RTL) interfaces to get involved in MediaWiki ("Entries in Life" blog). The main MediaWiki interface in languages which are written right-to-left is virtually a complete mirror-image of that for all other languages (in contrast to the English Wikipedia, the sidebar is on the right, for example, and Vector's search box on the left). This can cause problems when changes are developed and tested solely on left-to-right (LTR) wikis, as is often the case at the moment.
| “ | Despite [internationalisation] support, MediaWiki and Wikipedia lack in some pretty important areas. One of the areas that this is most obvious is in languages that are written right-to-left (RTL) instead of left-to-right (LTR). We do try to fix these problems, but almost all of our developers work in LTR languages, so we don't notice the problems as quickly. The problems don't stare us in the face every day and wiki users in RTL languages like العربية (Arabic), فارسی (Farsi), and עברית (Hebrew) don't have proper support. | ” |
He added, "if you're an RTL developer, let me tell you clearly: We want you!".
On 27 April, the Wikimedia Techblog carried an update from developer Nimish Gautam about the progress of the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP). In particularly, the update included details on some of the technological developments that had accompanied their attempts to buck the (largely) downwards trend in the number of users registering and editing on the English Wikipedia over the past couple of months.
Among these, Gautam noted the deployment of the CustomUserSignup extension on 27 April. The extension allows the destination of the "Log in/create account" link to be varied between visitors, allowing the ACIP team to customise "the look and messaging of these screens to see what kind of impact that has on new editors" more easily than before, when the page had to be changed for all users for two days at a time. In addition to the raw statistics on how many potential editors successfully make it through the registration process, the project is also collecting data on users' activity levels after registering via a tracking cookie associated with a browser session rather than with an individual user or user account. Information collected includes:
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In addition, the project has also utilised an improvement to the ClickTracking MediaWiki extension, which helps to collect anonymous information on users editing habits, to allow multiple tests to be run in parallel, rather than sequentially. As of time of writing, ACP1, ACP2 and ACP3 are identical, but this will be changed shortly.
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. Those interested in the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites should take note of this thread, which suggests a beta release is imminent.
