Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/In the media
The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for October was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. Many of the projects mentioned have been covered in The Signpost, including the New Orleans hackathon, the introduction of native https support for all Wikimedia wikis, and the local deployment of MediaWiki 1.18. Also included among the headlines on the report were the deployment of the Translate extension to Meta-Wiki and the completion of the first revision of the MediaWiki architecture document.
As described in brief in last week's "Technology report", progress is being made on a new parser and visual editor combination. The official engineering report documented exactly where that progress was coming from, with at least six developers (Trevor Parscal, Inez Korczynski, Roan Kattouw, Neil Kandalgaonkar, Brion Vibber and Gabriel Wicke, who only joined the team recently) each working on different elements of it concurrently.
Progress in other areas was more restrained but still being made; for example, developer Andrew Garrett worked on a script to convert existing LiquidThreads installations to the new, revised schema. Likewise, the "last critical bugs" in version 0.9 of WMF-supported offline reader Kiwix were fixed, with the release candidate cycle expected to begin shortly. There was also some bad news in the report, however, as it described how data analyst Erik Zachte had discovered inconsistencies in his report card numbers, which were investigated and attributed to packet loss of up to 25%, rendering several figures unreliable.
Scheduled for November are substantive work on the Git conversion and https support on the mobile platform to mirror that available on the non-mobile site.
With the switchover to native https slowly fading into history, the baton for ensuring total security has been passed on to script writers. This is because, although all interface images were switched over to using protocol-relative URLs, many user scripts will also have to be updated to use the new format.
Forcing use of insecure images or dependency scripts negates much of the benefit of using a secure site; as a consequence, browsers are right to show warnings, Ryan Lane explained. And as Brion Vibber described, the warnings are often very obvious: "Firefox can throw up a scary dialog box on every page view... Chrome does the big scary X-ing out of the 'https'... IE in latest versions just ignores any of the content that came over HTTP unless you opt back into it by clicking on a little bar at the bottom of the window" (Words and what not blog).
And so, with increasing numbers of users expected to switch to using the https version of the site, more and more script developers have been working to clear up any warnings; nonetheless, help will be needed within smaller sites to fix code copied and pasted from larger wikis months or even years before the https support went native.
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.
As developer Chad Horohoe explained on the wikitech-l mailing list, the conversion from SVN to Git requires that names and email addresses be input for all contributors to the project. Since SVN had no such requirement, help is needed to pair up the correct names and email addresses with old developer pseudonyms (help now).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Opinion
Wikimedia Norway received the Folkeopplysningsprisen (Award for Public Education) last week for "...[doing] perhaps more than any other [organization] to promote public education in Norway." Wikimedia Norway supports three major Wikipedia language branches, the Bokmål/Riksmål version, which rounded 300,000 articles and its tenth million edit this year, the Nynorsk version, which is currently nearing 75,000 articles, and Sámegielat (Sami) Wikipedia, a minority language version with 3,700 articles.
The Folkeopplysningsprisen has been awarded by the Voksenopplæringsforbundet (The Norwegian Association for Adult Learning) on an annual basis since 1998, to "celebrate individuals, groups, organizations or institutions that make a continuous effort beyond the ordinary to lay the ground for liberation, cooperation, growth and development through knowledge". The award was presented to Wikimedia Norway in a ceremony in Oslo on October 28, during NAAL's annual conference. "This is the first such recognition Wikipedia Norway has received, and we hope the award will help pave the way for us and others to promote the growth of free knowledge in Norwegian languages," said Wikimedia Norway's chairperson, Jarle Vines, who accepted the reward on behalf of the organization. The award had previously been given to, among others, the paleontologist and popularizer of science Jørn Hurum, the radio station NRK P2, and the television program Schrödingers katt.
The Today's Featured Article for Halloween 2011, The Human Centipede (First Sequence) led to one of the hottest debates at the Main Page discussion in October. The article, created and developed by Coolug and just recently promoted to featured status, was the subject of complaints focused on the graphic nature of the blurb, including the image originally included and the use of the term "mouth-to-anus". While the debate was raging, the article received 136,500 hits.
Meanwhile, Did You Know? (DYK) ran fourteen blurbs, on topics including cemeteries, ghosts, murderers, Ghost Frogs, and a wrestler nicknamed Lucifer. One of the articles featured, Eternal Silence, received 71,800 views while on the Main Page. This makes it the third most-viewed DYK article ever, after Paul the Octopus and Euthanasia Coaster. According to article creator IvoShandor, "I really didn't intend on doing an article on the statue when I first went to see it, but when I came across Eternal Silence I was stopped in my tracks, it literally took my breath away. I can only hope that the effect of the article on others was in some way similar to the effect that the sculpture had on me in person." The sets, although initially questioned thematically, were generally well-received.
Further down the page, the Picture of the Day (at right) was of an écorché, or flayed figure, riding a horse; the écorché was prepared by anatomist Honoré Fragonard. The image, created by Julia W as a derivative work of a picture by Jebulon, was viewed by 18,700 readers, but did not attract much commentary.
The UK Wikimedia chapter, which was founded in November 2008 and approved as a chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2009, was awarded charity status by the UK Charities Commission late last week. The chapter, which is particularly active in GLAM and university outreach, recently hired as its first two employees an office manager and CEO, and is currently looking into expanding its outreach programs in Scotland.
Wikimedia UK chair Roger Bamkin (Victuallers) had this to say:
| “ | “Achieving charitable status is the culmination of much hard work by the Board... Wikimedia UK is anticipating another successful year of outreach work, building on the time, dedication and effort of a wonderful group of volunteers in the Wikimedia community.” | ” |
The news came just before the annual fundraiser, during which the UK chapter plans to raise £1 million; the decision is likely to be worth over a hundred thousand pounds a year to the UK chapter as donors who pay UK tax can now have their donation topped up by the tax office via Gift Aid. It also enables the chapter to use other forms of fundraising such as payroll giving. In related news, the Wikimedia Foundation has been busy this week preparing for the fundraiser, as a peek in Special:RecentChanges shows.
The promotion of open access to content and user-generated and -enriched content has not, until now, been recognised as a charitable purpose under UK law. However, the chapter's recognition as a charity marks a significant step forward in changing views in the UK, and developments in modern communications and the evolution of user-generated content.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/In focus
One case was opened this week, making a total of two cases now open.
The Betacommand 3 case was opened this week to review the status of Δ, who previously edited as Betacommand.
Δ has been the subject of both community and Arbitration Committee sanctions in relation to his use of bots. The case grew out of a request for clarification following a discussion about relaxing some of Δ's community restrictions and allowing him to run certain bot tasks where it was realized that there might be relevant Arbitration Committee sanctions as well. The case was opened by motion from there. Arbitrator Coren, who supported the motion, wrote
| “ | I'm really not happy at the prospect of an arbitration case over this matter, but the fact is that Δ is currently under a complicated mishmash of variously interpreted community sanctions, and is the focus of much dispute around many the edits he does (which are also just as varied and impossible to qualify as a whole). It is not entirely clear either how much of those disputes can be attributed to Δ himself. Untangling this to try to solve the problem will indeed require more than a simple clarification or motion work. | ” |
It was another slow week for the Abortion case. There was limited activity in the workshop, and even less in evidence. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-11-07/Humour
