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12 September 2011

News and notes
Foundation reports on research, Kenya trip, Mumbai Wikiconference; Canada, Hungary and Estonia; English Wikinews forked
In the news
9/11 coverage, Wikimedia hypothetically rebranded and Wikipedia golf 2.0
WikiProject report
Politics in the Pacific: WikiProject Australian Politics
Featured content
Wikipedians explain two new featured pictures
Arbitration report
Ohconfucius sanctions removed, Cirt desysopped 6:5 and a call for CU/OS applications
Technology report
What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live
Opinion essay
The Walrus and the Carpenter
 

2011-09-12

Foundation reports on research, Kenya trip, Mumbai Wikiconference; Canada, Hungary and Estonia; English Wikinews forked

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By Jarry1250 and Skomorokh

Foundation report for August published

The Wikimedia Foundation's report covering its activities during the month of August has been published on the Wikimedia blog. Among those items not to have received coverage in earlier editions of The Signpost is the publication of a final list of projects completed as part of the Wikimedia Summer of Research (WSoR) scheme, which ended in August (a Summary of Findings has since been compiled). In similar news, an update was given about the Kaggle Data competition, where teams were asked to "predict the number of edits a Wikipedia editor will make, based on a training dataset" in order to share in a cash prize (see previous Signpost coverage). According to the report, the competition, which is drawing to a close, has attracted "79 teams, 167 participants and 743 submissions".

Asaf Bartov at the 2011 Wikimania

The Foundation was also active in its pursuit of a more global editor base during August. For example, the report describes how the Head of Global South Relationships, Asaf Bartov, visited Kenya for four days. During the trip he delivered "five public talks on university campuses in Nairobi and Mombasa as well as a tech outreach talk at the Nairobi iHub". He also led a workshop for local Wikimedians and scouted out potential local partners for a more substantial expansion into Kenya. In addition, the WMF Engineering department investigated the possibilities of the USSD protocol in facilitating mobile browsing (an issue also covered in this week's "Technology report"). Meanwhile, the report announced the start of an Education Program in Canada, to which 1700 students are signed up, and a $40,000+ support package for a WikiConference in Mumbai in November (further information is available via foundation-l).

The monthly report also gives publicity to the activities of departments who do not otherwise receive it. For example, the human resources department noted that although it was still behind its target for hiring new staff, it has been able to close the gap, whilst it was also reported that the legal department would be receiving four legal interns, and it was "happy to have their support" in the next few months. According to the report, it has also recently engaged with two external firms: MarkMonitor, to help it track registration of trademark-infringing domain names (for example, cases of typosquatting; see previous Signpost coverage) and Californian law firm Hiaring Smith, to help it manage its existing portfolio of trademarks both in the United States and abroad. The legal teams also finalised the Foundation's internal legal policies during August.

In brief

Milestones

In addition to the Hungarian Wikipedia's 200,000 articles, mentioned above, the following projects also reached major milestones:

2011-09-12

9/11 coverage, Wikimedia hypothetically rebranded and Wikipedia golf 2.0

9/11 anniversary casts its shadow on the wiki

I didn’t necessarily expect to feel vivid, spontaneous emotions about the 9/11 attacks on this 10th anniversary. I suspected that too much time had passed, that 10 more years in journalism had only given me that much more cynical, objective distance.

But of all things it was a simple Wikipedia timeline of 9/11 that got to me. It turned out to be rather effective at dredging up one of the scariest feelings from that horrible day a decade ago: the enormous, unprecedented scale of the attacks combined with too little information from one minute to the next to be able to guess how much bigger the disaster might get.

I literally felt my heart thud-a-thump faster and faster in my chest as I read down the Wikipedia page.

— Kyle Munson, Des Moines Register

On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Noam Cohen of The New York Times explores the mentality and perspectives behind Wikipedia's portrayal of the topic, and specifically the concerted effort to omit mention of the conspiracy theories that appear only in the fringes of the international media portrayal of the attacks. In particular, Cohen, who often writes about Wikipedia, highlighted the distinct lack of links between the main article describing the attacks and the article on the conspiracy theories that dispute the widely accepted version of events. Indeed, as Cohen writes, "there is no description of the celebrities who have endorsed the view; no mention of poll results on the subject that show some support among the public; no account, even, of the attraction of conspiracy theories in a time of crisis".

As Cohen admits, not everyone is happy with the status quo, which is distantly removed from the consensus reached on other articles such as that describing the Rorschach test. He quotes User:Arthur Rubin, who argues that although those who believe the conspiracy theories are pushing against the consensus, the phenomenon deserves coverage. "Although the theories are fringe," wrote Rubin, "the fact that there are theories is a mainstream phenomenon." In related news, the state of links to a special "Sep11" wiki created in the aftermath of the attacks was discussed on the wikitech-l mailing list. As of time of writing, the domain name sep11.wikimedia.org redirects to the correct target (the Internet Archive) but URLs of the form http://sep11.wikimedia.org/wiki/ do not.

A minimalist makeover

Independent branding agency Moving Brands have unveiled a redesign of the Wikipedia logo, after being invited by Viewpoint Magazine to participate in their Brand Lab initiative. Asked to showcase their skills through a hypothetical redesign of a global brand, Moving Brands selected Wikipedia, based on "an initial assumption that they provided an incredible, free learning resource but were hampered with a weak brand and a ubiquitous but unimpassioned following". The Wikipedia redesign resulted in a minimalist "W"-logo made of five interconnected lines, drawing on the project's five pillars concept (mockups are available on Flickr). The consultancy identified Wikipedia's failure as an inability thus far to "communicate its own story, its offer and its role in capturing, building and disseminating global knowledge".

The analysis prompted discussion on the foundation-l mailing list about Wikimedia as a brand. Whilst there was little support for the specific logo that MovingBrands had designed, there was agreement with their analysis of the image issues Wikimedia faces, including the integration of Wikipedia and its sister projects into a single brand. "Wikipedia has a strong, widely recognizable brand, while the sister projects and the Foundation [itself] don't", wrote Orionist, while Michael Snow suggested that logo redesign, although an attractive move for other companies, was ill-suited to Wikipedia, given that the existing globe logo is well-known. Instead, respondents on the list felt that more obvious links to sister projects were the key to a more integrated Wikimedia family.

Briefly

Arthur Lowe, who, it transpires, did not date Joan Collins

2011-09-12

Politics in the Pacific: WikiProject Australian Politics

WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
Parliament House in the Australian capital Canberra
The chamber of the Australian House of Representatives
Julia Gillard is the current Prime Minister and leader of the Australian Labor Party
The Australian coat of arms
The Northern Territory Legislative Assembly meets in Darwin
Parliament House in Brisbane, Queensland
Queen Elizabeth II opening the New South Wales Parliament on 4 February 1954
Chamber of the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly
Edmund Barton was the first Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1901 to 1903
The opening of the first Parliament of Australia in The Big Picture by Tom Roberts

This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Australian Politics. Started in May 2005, the project has built up a collection of over 8,000 pages, including 12 pieces of featured content and 17 Good and A-class Articles. Like many topics related to Australia, WikiProject Australian Politics is supported by a parameter of WikiProject Australia's unified banner template. The project is also related to WikiProject Australian Law and WikiProject Australian History. We interviewed seven of the project's members.

Pete (Skyring) is from Canberra, home to the parliament of Australia. While not as active as he once was, he still keeps an eye on political subjects because "living in the national capital, federal politics is as present as the weather to me." He deplores biased coverage of political parties and politicians, including editors wrangling over trivial information like former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd eating his own earwax.

Orderinchaos joined in 2006 when he noticed massive gaps in the coverage of several states as well as at the federal level. He admits "there's still a *long* way to go, but a lot of the foundations are there now." He thinks this project differs from others he's worked on because "it's more like a meeting space than a workgroup – several of us are or have been very very active in one area and we use the space to ask questions, raise issues or ideas, or bring anomalies to a wider audience."

Roisterer describes himself as "an Adelaide lad" but he was working as a journalist in New Zealand when he first joined Wikipedia in 2004. He studied Australian politics at university "so it was logical to work on politics articles (although I tend to stick to long-dead politicians to lessen the danger of getting embroiled in disputes)."

When Frickeg joined in early 2007, he was upset by gaps in coverage of federal politics, particularly the large number of redlinks for politicians. He's focused considerably on politics at the federal level and in New South Wales.

Canley has always been interested in politics in general and Australian politics in particular "so it was pretty much inevitable I would gravitate to this project." He sees additional challenges in improving Australian topics because "we don't have the luxury of public domain government works and images, so there's a lot more work to do to get decent articles and photos going." Despite the challenges, he enjoys doing research, "whether it's popping into the library or delving into online references such as Trove and Picture Australia, government gazettes or election and parliamentary data." He agree with Pete that "there is a tendency towards trivia and recentism, but that's pretty much the case everywhere."

Satu (SatuSuro) feels that the "ground level Local Government politics in Australia" are not covered well by both the Australian mainstream media and by Wikipedia. Because "most editors appear to be interested in the big picture, national level" he hopes to elaborate on "the forces and the issues in political activity at local government" and the many regional issues that tend to be under-reported.

Nick-D is from Canberra and began contributing to Wikipedia in November 2005. He is also an active member of WikiProject Military History and many of the Featured and Good Articles he helped build are related to the Australian military.

The last time the WikiProject Report featured a project covering Australia was in 2007 and many Australian projects are semi-active or inactive. Do you feel that Australia is under-represented on the English Wikipedia? What are some difficulties faced by Australian WikiProjects?

Nick-D: I think that Australia is adequately represented, though many articles are under-developed compared to the equivalent articles on other countries.
Orderinchaos: The Australian projects have seen a drop in activity in 2009 commensurate with the rest of the project generally – one of our earlier strengths was that we had a strong group of collaborative, experienced editors, but many of these are now either inactive or less active (including myself in the latter category) due to work or study commitments offline which may not have been as big an issue when we started editing. Australia is adequately represented – last I checked, we represent around 3% of all content on enwp, which has been fairly steady throughout Wikipedia's growth. AUSPOL, for the record, has suffered less than some of the other subprojects – we still have an active community, albeit small, and regular use of our talk page.
Roisterer: Unfortunately we have lost a number of very knowledgable editors over the past few years which has slowed the momentum of the project, and, like Orderinchaos notes, many of us remaining aren't as active as we'd like due to work commitments. However, we're slowly making progress.
Frickeg: The project has certainly slowed down recently, but this is perhaps more a consequence of us having worked out many of the issues that used to take up so much time. As Roisterer said we've lost some valuable editors over the years and many of us are semi-inactive; we certainly have a very small base of editors who contribute regularly. I don't feel we're particularly under-represented, though, thanks to a generally high calibre of contributions by that small base.
Satu: Australian sub-projects had a high point some three to four years ago, and the decline in activity has been evident more in the last two years with some projects literally at a standstill. Some projects can be said to have been developed sufficiently to survive periods of inactivity – it is possible that other projects are not as lucky as the politics project which due to he state of Australian federal and state politics – new and recycled issues require attention more than some subjects in other projects – probably eliciting interest in editing to keep up with the issues.

Australia's political system shares similarities with Britain's Westminster parliamentary system and the federal system of the United States. Has there been any sharing of information, templates, or expertise with WikiProjects or individual editors from outside Australia?

Frickeg: Not really – the Australian system is different enough from both Britain and the US that it's been better to do our own thing in general. In particular our use of preferential voting has forced us to develop (or at least modify) many templates for ourselves. Having said that there have been some outstanding contributions to the area by non-Australian editors, like User:Wehwalt's excellent work bringing Gough Whitlam to FA.

Did WikiProject Australian Politics undertake any special initiatives during the 2010 federal election? Is there work still to be done updating articles after the election? Are there any steps being taken to prepare for the next election?

Orderinchaos: Not in particular – there was a spike of activity but no different practices followed. Sometimes elections serve as springboards for drives by individuals to fill holes or develop new structures – User:Frickeg created a series of electoral results articles for every division in Australia (e.g. this one) in the leadup to both the 2007 and 2010 elections. The 2008 election brought our attention to the fact some electorate articles were in a poor state and we went on a drive to replace their content – one Good Article emerged from the process, and all WA electorate articles are functionally complete. A redistribution means we'll probably need another one ahead of the 2013 state election.
Frickeg: Constant vigilance is generally needed around election time, when like all politics-related projects there tends to be an invasion of partisan editing. Apart from maintaining the election page and endeavouring to keep all articles up to date there was no formal initiative during the campaign. There are probably a few of the dustier articles that may have missed an update, but most of them are up to date for the election, if not exactly complete. The next election is (probably) a long way away so there's little to prepare for at this stage other than to continue to update for current events, although our previous elections have served to prepare us quite well.

The project is home to 12 Featured Articles and Lists, 15 Good and A-class Articles, and a variety of Featured Pictures. Have you contributed to any of these articles or images? What are some challenges of bringing Australia-related content to featured status?

Orderinchaos: I've personally written two of the good articles (Electoral district of Perth and Port Macquarie-Hastings Council dismissal, 2008). One big challenge about Australian topics – I assume this would not be specific to Australia – is that so much is not online. Anything on WA for example requires solid library research, it's simply not possible to put stuff together from what is available online. Over the years I've built a reasonable home library of reference texts, as well as a good understanding of the university and state libraries. Another related problem is that the offline information may only be present in one location, and the person with the background to research it may be in another – scanning takes time and can produce files too large to email, so we sometimes resort to the postal system to exchange information. I've made open offers to help anyone looking for sources, and I know other editors have done the same in other states.
Frickeg: I've recently shifted focus to trying to improve some of our content to recognised status, after the exhausting job of creating individual electorate results pages for every electorate. So far I've written three Good Articles: Albert Gould, John Neild and Edward Millen. As Orderinchaos said finding sufficient sources, even on fairly basic things, can be a challenge. I'd also add that the fact that official portraits of Australian politicians are not available for us to use is difficult when it comes to modern politicians; the best recourse for getting photos is generally for editors to attend an event at which the politician is speaking and request a photo personally.
Roisterer: My impact has been fairly small; I brought Wilfrid Kent-Hughes to GA some time ago and started Thomas Playford IV, which was then greatly improved upon to become an FA. Like other editors, I've had plans to build other articles up to GA/FA levels but life seems to get in the way.
Canley: My focus has been on the list-type articles (Members of Parliament for XXXX–YYYY) and statistics such as election results, as well as obscure biographies which are harder to fill out to a high quality, so I haven't really been involved in improving the prose quality of articles. I'm going for quantity over quality, basically!

What are the project's most pressing needs? How can Wikipedians living inside and outside Australia help the project's efforts?

Orderinchaos: The main thing we need is more people. We have most of the sources we need to develop more content but haven't, between us, the time to do it. Our experience with newer editors who want to write about politicians who've historically represented their own area, or who went to their former school, or whatever, has been good. Another pressing need is photographs of politicians – we would love to be able to illustrate articles, but the dogged enforcers of fair use policies have led to many images, rightly or wrongly depending on the case, being deleted and in some cases (Joh Bjelke-Petersen – premier of QLD 1968–1987 – and Gough Whitlam – prime minister of Australia 1972–1975), photos are taken from well before their peak notability in public life simply because those photos are pre-1954 and therefore free. Only a handful of politicians have been willing to donate photos under a free licence – it would be good to either have a US-style setup where government-produced artefacts are in the public domain, or even just an agreement from either parliaments or state/federal political parties to licence one photo of each parliamentarian.
Pete: Wikipedia's policies on co-operation and conflict need to be more scrupulously observed here, to encourage new editors to stay and contribute, rather than being chased away by the old bulls defending their territory... Case in point: in 2010 the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was toppled by his hitherto loyal deputy Julia Gillard... According to our article, he had merely "stepped aside, after announcing a leadership ballot." There was no mention of why on earth a sitting Prime Minister would do this, even though the Australian media had chronicled his disasters and downfall for months previously... Our articles should not reflect hype and scaremongering, but neither should they give a false impression.
Nick-D: I agree with all the points Orderinchaos raises, and especially the one about there being a shortage of active editors. Due to the large number of articles which fall under the project's scope and the fact that many of them are BLPs, a lot of the active editors' time is tied down with maintenance and reverting vandalism and/or POV-pushing. On the topic of POV pushing, it is a problem at times, and especially in the lead up to elections (and I think that people from both sides of politics are equally at fault here – and by this I'm not talking about the regular editors). I've personally seen a number of articles about Australian politicians which were obviously written by their staff, and the situation got quite problematic for a while in the lead up to the New South Wales state election, 2011.
Frickeg: Again, I agree with the points above. We are suffering something of a dearth of active editors at the moment (I know I'm not nearly as active as I used to be, for various reasons), which is leaving many things undone. At the moment there aren't really enough editors to patrol recent changes in our many BLPs, let alone other pages. The POV-pushing thing is still a problem and likely always will be, although it seems to have died down somewhat recently (I noticed far less during the 2010 election than there was in 2007, although New South Wales state politics is something of an exception in this regard). I suspect many of our articles are written from a somewhat insular perspective and could probably benefit from non-Australian eyes to clarify some aspects.
Canley: I would like to see more sources of information and imagery available online, and under free or copyleft terms rather than Crown copyright or non-commercial use. There is some move towards CC licences for government information in Australia which is great, but we're very much constrained by onerous licence terms on things like electoral boundary data and politician's profile photos. It really varies from state-to-state the level of online or even archived data available to the public, from biographical databases to election results, some is behind paywalls as well, although I'm one of the lucky ones who has a university account through which I can access a lot of journal material. I would really like to see Wikimedia Australia and the Australian government co-operate in getting historical data and information out to a wider audience. As others say, there's plenty of information to keep us working for years, but not enough active editors.
Satu: Following on from Canley's comments; the relative disinterest, antipathy and inactivity on the part of some Australian states and some Federal government departments needs to be reversed – specially when seeing how wikipedia friendly Trove is. Also as he says it (the project, the subject) requires active editors.

Anything else you'd like to add?

Roisterer: The Australian political system has had a number of firsts: We were the first to introduce the Secret ballot, the first parliamentary socialist government in the world (at both state and federal level) and in 1861 women in South Australia were voting in local elections. Anyone who gets involved in the project will likely find all sorts of other tidbits.

Next week, we'll find a better excuse than "my dog ate it." Until then, visit the library's secret archive while you're cutting class.

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2011-09-12

Wikipedians explain two new featured pictures



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2011-09-12

Ohconfucius sanctions removed, Cirt/Jayen466 closure, and a call for CU/OS applications

This week by the numbers: total edits per day to the ArbCom page family (above) and pages views for each open case (below)

Two cases are currently open:

  • Senkaku Islands, which looks at the behavior of editors involved in a dispute over whether the naming of the articles Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute is neutral, moved into its fourth week. It is alleged that the content dispute has been exacerbated by disruptive editing.
  • Abortion, a dispute over the lead sentence of Abortion and the naming of abortion-related articles, also said to have been exacerbated by disruptive editing, similarly moved into its fourth week.

There are pending requests for clarification for three cases: Transcendental Meditation movement (since August 26), Digwuren (since August 24), and Ireland article names (since August 19). There are also two cases with pending requests for amendment: Race and intelligence (since September 3) and Russavia-Biophys.

Date-delinking case amended

The two-year-old date-delinking case, concerning the automated removal of date-autoformatting in articles while the relevant WP:MOSNUM guideline was still in flux, has now been amended. Ohconfucius, who was sanctioned in the original case, requested that the last remaining sanctions be removed, arguing they were outdated and that this was a matter of simple housekeeping. Arbitrator opinion was cautious: Jclemens wrote that "The last time we lifted sanctions on an editor sanctioned under this case, I regretted it, because the future behavior in the area was problematic." Risker was strongly of the view that "this should be going in the opposite direction". However, Xeno felt that, if there were any current issues, they appeared to be outside of the intent of the original sanctions and agreed with Ohconfucius that rescinding those was simply housekeeping—an opinion that carried the day 8 to 5.

Cirt and Jayen466 case closure update

In addition to the remedies covered last week, Cirt has also been desysopped (for "admitted violations of the neutral point of view and biographies of living people policies"), but may reapply for adminship by filing a new request for adminship at any time. This additional remedy eventually passed 6 to 5 in support; Cirt has since said that he is "not considering" applying for his admin bit back at this time.

Call for applications for CheckUser and Oversight

The committee announced today that they were seeking applications from suitably qualified users to serve on the CheckUser and Oversight teams. Editors were encouraged to self-nominate by emailing arbcom-en-b@lists.wikimedia.org. The application period is scheduled to close on 18 September 2011; then the committee will review the applications to decide which candidates will move forward to the community consultation phase. Of note, the committee indicated that due to "increasing activity from the South Asian, Southeast Asian, or Middle Eastern regions, CheckUser applications are particularly sought from people ... familiar with the ISPs and typical editing patterns of any of these regions." Further information on the process is available on a special 2011 CheckUser/Oversight appointments page.

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2011-09-12

What is: agile development? and new mobile site goes live

What is: agile development?

On Thursday, the WMF Fundraiser Engineering team posted an update on how preparations for this year's fundraiser were progressing. They reported recent improvements in logging changes to CentralNotices, expanding the number of payment providers (for example, to allow donations in more currencies to be accepted), general bugfixes and other improvements. According to the team's project tracking software, Mingle, progress this year has resulted in at least 22 additional features (known as "cards") being implemented. With a number of tests and trials already being run, the advanced state of the project prompted the WMF's Philippe Beaudette publicly to commend the seven-person team, describing them as "enormously talented young... men and women".

Perhaps more controversially, the Fundraiser Engineering team have been trialling a development framework as yet uncommon in Wikimedia cycles. "Agile development" focusses on short iterations, each including their own design and production stages, improving the product iteratively. Iterations, known as sprints, are separated by retrospectives during which problems are analysed. The benefit of such a scheme, agility, can be described as responsiveness to changing requirements and priorities as designers, software engineers and managers work (normally literally) side-by-side. By contrast, under the waterfall model, the incumbent framework at Wikimedia, product changes are put through a lengthy but comprehensive design process before coding begins. In doing so, requirements are fixed early, tasks divided between teams and deadlines set; not so with agile development, now in use in Fundraiser Engineering, supported by Mingle. Although early signs look promising, critics of the agile development framework will no doubt wait for the fundraiser to come and go before judging its success.


MobileFrontend taking production traffic

Since Thursday, a percentage of visitors to Wikimedia's mobile site will have experienced a slightly different browsing experience. The old Ruby site has been converted into a newer PHP implementation that replicates the existing feature set. Nonetheless, the extension was built not merely to mimic, but to entirely surpass, existing functionality. New features, such as basic editing and uploading interfaces, are scheduled for next year; at the moment, visitors wishing to edit must transfer to the main site, which is not customised for display on slow connections and small screen sizes. The new extension is also built to take better advantage of Wikimedia's existing technical infrastructure in order to filter out and handle requests from mobile devices more effectively.

As such, the project forms an important part of the Foundation's vision of expanding its editor base into "Global South" countries such as Brazil and India, where mobile phone (and mobile Internet) usage can be considerably higher than traditional forms of Internet access. As a result, "Wikimedia should have a strategy that allows Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to be easily read and edited using mobile technology" according to the Foundation's white paper. The white paper, published in March this year, outlined ways of achieving the targets outlined in its five-year plan, including halting the decline in the number of editors.

The English Wikipedia served approximately 580 million pages customised for display on mobile devices last month, up more than 90% compared to August 2010 (full statistics). Since the switch was made, a number of bug fixes have also gone live (a full list of bugs found in the new extension, and possible new features, is also available).

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.

An extension for safely rendering 3D models of molecules (water pictured) has been on a number of users' wishlists for some time, writes Magnus Manske.
  • The problems of packaging software: WMF bugmeister Mark Hershberger blogged about the problems he is experiencing in packaging HipHop for PHP for wider distribution, including to Wikimedia's own servers. In unrelated news, Hershberger also oversaw this week's bug triage, which focussed on bugs relating to the UploadWizard extension, which facilitates uploads to Wikimedia Commons (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Debate over data storage: In light of the news that developer Niklas Laxström is preparing to work on MediaWiki's action logging infrastructure, there was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about the proper format for storing PHP arrays in databases. For example, some users suggested JSON as a storage format, whilst others preferred the output of PHP's own serialize function.
  • 3D molecule viewer closer than before?: There are renewed efforts to get some form of 3D molecule viewer enabled on Wikimedia wikis. According to developer Magnus Manske, the feature "has been on wishlist[s] since ... forever".
  • Does MediaWiki need a skin language?: At the moment, all skins are written in the programming language PHP, making them a security vulnerability. Such a weakness effectively prevents letting users write their own skins, writes developer Daniel Friesen, who argues for the introduction of a "template language", effectively limiting them to a safe subset of functions (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Pre-trial bot runs to be recorded: A bot was approved for use on the English Wikipedia this week to make a note of unauthorised trials on a bot's BRFA. Although such edits are common on other wikis in order to prove functionality, bots on the English Wikipedia must have approval before they begin any edits. A bot task to move hatnotes to the very top of articles is currently being discussed, as are a number of other tasks.
  • JavaScript bug fixed: The use of protocol-relative URLs no longer breaks some JavaScript functionality when using Internet Explorer version 7 (bug #30825).

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2011-09-12

The Walrus and the Carpenter

Rd232 was an active editor and administrator on the English Wikipedia from late 2004 until August 2011, when he retired. The following humorous poem reflects the experiences and interactions of new users and the established community, and was written shortly after retirement from the project.

The views expressed are those of the author only. Other editors will often leave opposing views and potential corrections in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.



With apologies to Lewis Carroll (The Walrus and the Carpenter)



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