The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees chair Ting Chen has published a letter to the members of the Wikimedia movement, stating what the Board intends to do with fundraiser money. This opened a new front in a war of words that had raged on Meta for weeks, as posts in a personal capacity by WMF's treasurer, Stu West on the foundation's mailing list and on his blog attracted waves of heated commentary.
The statement has brought to a head a complex set of issues that have been causing friction between the WMF and local chapters for at least a year. The disagreements appear to revolve around the extent to which WMF fundraising should be decentralised to the chapters, which currently operate under different tax-deductibility and donation laws. Each country has its own rules on how funds can be disseminated from the chapter to other organisations and countries, and in some cases it is messy to transfer locally raised funds to a foreign entity—in this case the WMF in San Francisco. Some chapters believe their cultural independence owes a lot to their ability to conduct fundraising and manage the proceeds in their own jurisdictions. Other Wikimedians have expressed disquiet at the proposed new "grant" system for disseminating donor funds.
Historically, certain established chapters such as those of Germany, France and the UK have played the role of processing donor payments during the annual fundraiser under a revenue-sharing agreement with the Foundation (see the 2011 Fundraising Agreement for the specifics).
Following an August 2011 meeting in Haifa, the Board of Trustees issued a "Letter regarding fundraising accountability" in which it disclosed that US$4M of donor money (or 15% of the total) had been retained by 12 national chapters in the previous year's fundraiser. The letter went on to question the merit of the chapters, especially the recently established and less organised ones, receiving significant funds largely on the basis of the geographical distribution of donors rather than organisational need. It also found fault with the lack of consistency in the chapters' transparency, regulatory environment and use of funds; the letter announced the expansion of the Foundation's grants program and called for a new needs-based model of fundraising and fund dissemination.
In early 2012, at the board's request, Foundation executive director Sue Gardner issued a series of draft recommendations for a radical restructuring of fundraising, proposing that all proceeds of the annual fundraiser should be processed and retained by the Foundation, with chapters and other affiliate entities left free to raise their own money or to apply for funding from a newly established central Funding Dissemination Committee (FDC), staffed by community members.
In an article covering the developments for the Kurier, the president of the Wikimedia Nederland chapter Ziko van Dijk commented that chapters' role in fundraising had become "a question of prestige" in some cases, even though control rested with the Foundation in any respect – as chapters had to submit to it their budgets under the existing system. He assessed the likely impact of the proposed restructuring:
| “ | Gardner's model is impressive in its cogency, addressing older discussions and requests in an intelligent way, and appealing to many people, individually and collectively. The FDC is supposed to make the model acceptable, because it can perhaps restrict the so far unlimited power of the WMF. Purely from the chapters' perspective, however, there is reason for concern. What's more, in a decentralized fundraising model, the individual Wikimedia activist has several doors to knock at for his plans, behind which decisions are being taken independently. In a centralized one, it would be just one door, at the end of the day. | ” |
On February 9, chair of the WMF board Ting Chen published a letter on the foundation mailing list announcing the board's latest position on the issues at hand. The gist of the announcement was summarised in the subsequent discussion by Alice Wiegand (lyzzy), a member of board of Wikimedia Germany until July last year [minor corrections made]:
Board member Phoebe commented, "... we do intend to discuss fundraising in Paris with everyone, we will receive Sue's final recommendations in early-mid March; and we will plan to take a final vote at (or perhaps just after) the Berlin meeting. ... it would be bad to talk about this for two days in the Board meeting and not report back to the community about where we were at."
The letter is reproduced below:
Dear members of the Wikimedia Movement,
As you are probably aware we have been discussing the the future of fundraising and fund dissemination for the Wikimedia Movement for almost 6 months now. After discussing fundraising and funds dissemination at this past meeting, the board has drafted the following statement. It our intention to discuss these matters in the coming weeks to come to a final decision mid March.
But first we would like to thank everyone who took part in the discussion so far and spent their valuable time providing us with their viewpoints which we have of course taken into account in our decision making process. We hope that you will continue to participate by giving feedback on this letter.
The board wants to create a volunteer-driven body to make recommendations for funding for movement-wide initiatives (Working title: Funds Dissemination Committee, FDC). The Wikimedia Foundation has decision-making authority, because it has fiduciary responsibilities to donors which it legally cannot delegate. The new body will make recommendations for funds dissemination to the Wikimedia Foundation. We anticipate a process in which the Wikimedia Foundation will review and approve all but a small minority of recommendations from the FDC. In the event that the Wikimedia Foundation does not approve a recommendation from the FDC, and the FDC and the Wikimedia Foundation aren't subsequently able to reach agreement, then the FDC can ask the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees to request the recommendation be reconsidered.
The board intends to evaluate this process together with the FDC and see if it is working.
Our thoughts on fundraising are less specific. We have come to the following two statements which are important
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees
NB: Please note that rather than spend a LOT of time on wording at this time, the board preferred to amend the above text if necessary when moving towards a resolution. This letter indicates our intent, and we may "wordsmith as needed" in our final resolutions.
It is becoming clearer that the Board has in mind at least a partial shift towards the distribution of worldwide donor funding on the basis of grants, whether by application by the chapters and others in the Wikimedia movement, or by centralised fiat. WMF treasurer Stu West says on his personal blog:
| “ | The reasons I prefer a grants process, to reiterate again, are 1. it distributes funds around our movement based on an assessment of impact rather than based on arbitrary splits, 2. it can be more efficient for our movement as a whole by reducing duplicated effort on bureaucracy and distraction from program work, 3. it gives chapters the option of not focusing on fundraising and 4. it helps avoid the whole host of legal/financial control problems we discussed back in our Haifa letter. I totally appreciate the challenges of a new system. Grant-giving has got to be efficient and truly-reflective of our movement principles, ... | ” |
Former Wikimedia UK treasurer Thomas Dalton (Tango) was scathing in response: "I’m getting very tired of vague claims like this from the Foundation. We have had enormous and ever-increasing success with fundraising over the last few years. What has gone so terribly wrong? [Your point 3] is just complete nonsense. Giving chapters the option means letting them decide. If you decide for them, that is taking away options. ... It is very unclear if the economies of scale from centralisation are enough to counter the advantages to local fundraising (tax, desire of donors to suppose local organisations, local payment methods, etc.)."
Craig Franklin (Lankiveil), treasurer of the Australian chapter and a candidate for an upcoming chapter-appointed seat, said, "these sorts of changes will just push chapters into spending valuable time and effort looking for other sources of income. In essence, you are proposing to replace one set of problems with another set of problems. ... My fear is that by cutting off chapters from fundraising, they’ll end up wasting even more time trying to find other revenue sources, which will benefit no one."
Liam Wyatt (Wittylama), also a candidate for a chapter-appointed seat, told The Signpost he believes there are conflicting signals coming out of the Foundation – pointing to both financial "decentralising" and "centralising". "In that context," he says, "this FDC looks like a 'scapegoat solution' where the problems of the existing system are placed upon a new and undefined committee to own."
Pavel Richter (Pavel Richter (WMDE)), chief executive of the German chapter, told Stu West that "a localised fundraising model is more effective and more efficient than a centralised model", referring to the Wikimedia Deutschland proposal. Much of the angst among chapters appears to stem from differences in tax laws." The German chapter's Jürgen Fenn, speaking on his own behalf, said "tax deductability is a standard that makes a charity organisation notable and honorable in the eyes of donors. In this country, it is an absolute must for anyone who is willing to donate money. We will not contribute to other organisations. Period. There is a world outside the U.S. where people act according to different standards and think and decide differently." In reply, Stu West said, "my gut instinct is that no one makes a €20 donation because of tax deductibility. But we can and should do this analysis, understand the tradeoffs, and make an informed decision."
Florence Devouard (Anthere), a former chair of the WMF Board and current vice-president (with responsibility for fundraising) of Wikimedia France, was more positive, although she was critical too. She told The Signpost, "I think the board took a good decision, but expressed it very poorly, which raises many doubts and unfortunately weakens the bold position they took. [The Board has] reiterated their desire for a somewhat decentralized organization, using a peer-reviewed system for funds allocations movement-wide. [It's commendable that they've chosen] this difficult path, which remains to be clearly defined."
One senior chapter member who preferred not to be named told The Signpost, "The German chapter has put forward a well-formulated and articulated model for fundraising and dissemination that's widely regarded by the chapters as viable and self-consistent." He was particularly annoyed by Ting Chen's statement that the Foundation "has fiduciary responsibilities to donors which it legally cannot delegate". He said, "this is self-serving circularity: you centralise the fundraising system, then you say you have a direct relationship to the donors and that it can't be legally delegated. These donors are the same that were just taken away from the chapters."
Stu West's fellow WMF Board member, Bishakha Datta, is skeptical about West's stance: "Because decentralization is such a core value of this movement, I believe we need a decentralized approach to the organizational part of this movement, including fund sharing. I signed on to the fundraising letter because I believe that the proposed Funds Dissemination Committee is a step in the right direction – it decentralizes one layer of financial decision-making. Despite your observation that distributed payment processing does not work, I believe the jury is still out on that one – there may be regions where it does make sense, regions where it does not work. Until there is clear evidence of one or the other, I do not believe we have the information we need to make a solid decision on this."
Stu West responded by pointing out what he sees as the inadequacies of the current system:
| “ | The one part of distributed payment processing that I absolutely feel doesn’t work was the automatic assignment of a fixed percentage of the funds raised to the local entity. As i said in my “impact” section, i think this is a horrible and possibly negligent way for us to allocate donor funds. Impact should be the driver. And I’d rather an imperfect assessment of impact (e.g. from a Funds Dissemination Committee) than an outright bad model of automatic allocation to one or another entity. | ” |
Discussion on the issues shows no sign of abating, as national chapters have become a locus of scrutiny and debate not only in the light of fundraising considerations, but amid fresh calls for restructuring Foundation-affiliated organisations and continuing debate over the allocation to chapters of seats on the Board of Trustees itself. The future of movement roles – and particularly the relationship between the Foundation and the chapters – promises to dominate much of the agenda in the coming year.
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Philippe Beaudette, formerly Head of Reader Relations, will be the Director of Community Advocacy, reporting to the General Counsel, Geoff Brigham. Several other positions have been reorganized to accommodate the needs of the new department. The Foundation plans to base the department on the Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary.
LCA's first order of business will be a consultation period, expected to take 6–12 months, as it builds its team and develops its goals. Part of this process will be its establishment of a community advisory board to reinforce its commitment to "a global perspective while understanding and promoting communities beyond English Wikipedia". The team held its first office hours on 10 February.
The announcement precipitated much discussion on foundation-l, with particular focus on what it might mean for the Wikimedia Foundation's attitude towards community consultation in its decisions, legal strategy, and what role the new department might have in catalysing the community in activism. It may also indicate the continuing evolution in the handling of sensitive matters such as threats of suicide, takedown challenges, criminal activity affecting local projects, and legal liability for functionaries – which, although traditionally handled by volunteers (raising legal and ethical questions), have increasingly become the domain of the tireless Mr. Beaudette and his colleagues.
My improvement lasted five minutes before a Wiki-cop scolded me, "I hope you will familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
I guess this gives me a glimmer of hope that someday, perhaps before another century goes by, enough of my fellow scholars will adopt my views that I can change that Wikipedia entry. Until then I will have to continue to shout that the sky was blue.
In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Timothy Messer-Kruse, a professor at Bowling Green State University specialising in the history of the American labor movement, detailed his frustrated encounters with Wikipedia's immune system in endeavouring to set perceived inaccuracies in its historical coverage to rights. Messer-Kruse had been moved to correct the "detailed and elaborate" Wikipedia article on the Haymarket affair – the controversial trial of left-wing radicals for allegedly bombing police officers during a labour march in Chicago in 1886 – but saw his efforts repeatedly thwarted by the enforcers of the encyclopaedia's nuanced doctrines of content authorship – verifiability, neutrality and original research.
Attempted corrections were rebuffed successively as unsourced, inappropriately sourced to primary documents, and ultimately – after Messer-Kruse tried to appeal to a book of his on the topic published in the interim – as undue weight. In dialogue with his editing opponents in the meantime the professor incurred charges of incivility and possible vandalism, and against the barrier of "verifiability not truth" his efforts foundered. He concluded the column with a tepid expression of hope that in time, his stance on the facts would win over sufficient numbers of his colleagues to tip the scales of due weight in the direction of his studied perspective.
The anecdote is unlikely to turn too many heads among Wikipedians, rather serving to confirm established beliefs on either side of the divided line of content policy. For critics, it can be taken as yet another instance of the core community's mistreatment of expert contributions and its comparative disregard for the truth; for ardent defenders of the encyclopaedia, as an illustration of the resilience and necessity of author-blind scholarly vetting procedures, vital for production process requiring consistency, balance and openness – as prone to the pitfalls of outdated or spurious claims as they may be. The text of the article was posted on the foundation-l mailing list.
A report by CNN.com casting a critical light on edits by Joe DeSantis, communications director for U.S. Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, reverberated online this week, being picked up by Toronto Star, The Daily Beast, International Business Times, Slate, Wonkette, ThinkProgress, Global Post, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times. Although it noted that the Gingrich staffer had registered an account under his own name – Joedesantis – and disclosed his interest in the topic area on the account's userpage, the CNN report and articles it inspired portrayed him as having conducted an ongoing campaign to present a more favourable view of his employer, only curtailing after being reprimanded by Wikipedia's editors.
DeSantis' activity was initially flagged in an article by Politico last month (Signpost coverage), which, compared to the unsympathetic tone of some of the subsequent coverage, was restrained and noncommittal as to DeSantis' record of contribution. In a rebuke of the critical news cycle, marketing professionals' website Socialfresh published a critique of the CNN report, outlining how DeSantis had stuck mostly to talk pages as conflict of interest guidelines recommend and hadn't edited the articles about his employer or his employer's wife in over a year, and that Wikipedians' responses to his activity had been selectively quoted by CNN to give the impression that the encyclopaedians were generally critical (reception has been far from unequivocal). Jimbo Wales, who had taken a proactive interest in the issue of paid advocacy in the wake of the Bell Pottinger affair (Signpost coverage), declared that since being informed of conflict of interest issues, DeSantis' had been "following what I consider to be best practice ... he's openly identified his affiliation and he's interacting with the community directly and respectfully, but he's completely avoiding article space edits".
For a special edition covering the ongoing debates in the editorial pages of news media over piracy and copyright enforcement on the internet, see this week's "In focus" feature.
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A trio of editorials appeared in American national newspapers this week, reigniting the war of words over the protests against SOPA and PIPA earlier this year which saw an unprecedented blackout of Wikipedia and other websites inspire the defeat of the proposed anti-piracy legislation.
The latest round of the debate was initiated by The New York Times' writer Bill Keller in an op-ed for the paper's February 6 edition, "Steal This Column", on February 6. The polarizing struggle over the bills had been widely characterised as a resounding albeit temporary defeat of efforts by established content industries to protect their business models (through muscular copyright enforcement) by an upsurge of opposition by internet users marshalled by a ragtag group of technology firms and their allies, Wikipedia prominent among them. Keller, whose recently concluded tenure as executive editor at the Times had been dominated by the threat to its future posed by the new media environment heralded by the internet, took sideswipes at the lofty rhetoric of web titans Google and Facebook, but sang the praises of Wikipedia:
| “ | Among the wonders of the Internet, Wikipedia occupies a special place. From its birth 11 years ago it has professed, and has tried reasonably hard to practice, a kind of idealism that stands out in the vaguely, artificially countercultural ambience of Silicon Valley. ... Wikipedia, while it has grown something of a bureaucratic exoskeleton, remains at heart the most successful example of the public-service spirit of the wide-open Web: nonprofit, communitarian, comparatively transparent, free to use and copy, privacy-minded, neutral and civil. | ” |
Although he appeared to take a conciliatory tack in "the great sectarian war over the governing of the Internet" by critiquing the inadequacies of the defeated legislative efforts, Keller wrote vociferously of the "rampant online theft of songs, films, books and other content", arguing that "parasite Web sites should be treated with the same contempt as people who pick pockets or boost cars". He adopted the framing of the bills' supporters in referring to topic of the debate as "the attempt to curtail online piracy", and disclosed his surprise and dismay at seeing "Wikipedia’s founder and philosopher, Jimmy Wales" giving credence to the opposition in emerging as "a combatant for the tech industry".
Keller cast doubt on the OPEN Act praised as an alternative by Wales, describing it as fraught with loopholes and difficult to enforce, while calling on the music and film industries to engage with it and come to terms with the internet coalition. Wales' plea for "serious reform" rather than sectarian struggle was deemed by Keller to be at odds with the polarized state of American politics. He posited that the sense in which the volunteer encyclopaedia was "free" was distinct from the notion of "free" expression as laid out in the U.S. Constitution – one markedly infused with an emphasis on intellectual property and copyright protection.
Keller ended his piece by arguing that content industries and internet firms are bound in a co-dependent relationship, with the former dependent on the latter's capacity for channeling creative expression, and the internet – and Wikipedia specifically – dependent on the copyright-protected content for its own part. Commenters on the article were notably resistant to this conception, with many voicing skepticism about the notion that copyright still served its purported function of fostering creativity, and speculating as to whether the legacy content owners had more incentive to obstruct rather than embrace the new internet-enabled forms of innovative expression and collaboration. Keller's woes continued later in the week, when the newspaper was alleged by The Boston Phoenix to have flagrantly disregarded its copyright by hosting and linking to content belonging to its competitor on New York Times servers.
The following day saw the paper run another op-ed on the issue, this time from Recording Industry Association of America head Cary Sherman. The article, "What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You", again strongly emphasised the piracy combating purpose of the defeated legislative efforts, but unlike Keller's piece, it explicitly denounced the opponents of the bills as having used the "dirty trick" of inflammatory misinformation to goad a credulous public into mass outrage. Furthermore, Sherman contested, in doing so internet-based organisations had transgressed by violating their users' expectation of neutrality:
| “ | The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations. | ” |
It was proof positive for Sherman of the self-serving hypocrisy of a culture which in loudly arguing for net neutrality had insisted on that the controllers of service providing platforms refrain from the temptation to misuse them for their own ends. Unlike the unscrupulous websites, the lobbyist pointedly noted, broadcast media such as television and radio networks did not use their access to an audience to push their point of view. Although he granted that some opponents of the bills were sincerely concerned with fighting piracy but alarmed by potential overreach of the legislation, Sherman went on to characterise other constituents of the protest alternately as dupes, proponents of piracy, or malevolent hackers bent on suppressing points of view contrary to their own. Sherman called on the obstructionist internet entities to partake in "respectful fact-based conversations" with their erstwhile opponents to address the "real and damaging" problem of piracy, concluding with a barbed reiteration of Keller's summation the day before: "We all share the goal of a safe and legal Internet. We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve it."
The reader response was predictably scathing, seeing Sherman accused of disingenuously dodging the real motivations for opposition to the bills – a fear of draconian, overreaching powers going far beyond the aim of sustaining creativity through copyright to imposing unreasonable and burdensome regulations that would have the effect of curtailing free expression, all orchestrated by powerful vested interests lobbying to have their way in an undemocratic behind-closed-doors process. Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Watch summarised the fallout as follows: "Readers, however, had no sympathy for Sherman or the RIAA. Overwhelmingly, readers supported the efforts of Google and Wikipedia to kill the bills." At Ars Technica, Nate Anderson accused Sherman, whom he recognised as having a "keen grasp of the issues", of engaging in "hand-waving demagoguery", and declared the "strangely angry" response to be so alienating and off-the-point that it would become a textbook case study of how not to respond to a controversy. The opponents of the bills, he argued, were unlikely to want to engage in reasoned discourse about the way forward with a self-pitying accusatory adversary.
In a column for Techdirt titled "RIAA Totally Out Of Touch: Lashes Out At Google, Wikipedia And Everyone Who Protested SOPA/PIPA", Mike Masnick was also damning of Sherman's editorial, contending that while the misinformation put forth by opponents of the bills was explainable by an errant focus on early drafts and the participation of a subset of the public prone to exaggeration and untruth, the misinformation propagated by the supporters was "the direct and planned out strategy of the MPAA, RIAA and US Chamber of Commerce to directly mislead Congress and the press by presenting information in a manner that was flat out false". Masnick concluded:
| “ | Eleven paragraphs of pure rhetoric and misinformation... and then at the end, a plea for an end to such tactics? Sorry, but it might help if you actually started dumping the misinformation and nasty rhetoric yourself. Then feel free to join the rest of us on the open internet where these discussions are already ongoing. | ” |
On February 9, Wikimedia Foundation trustees Jimmy Wales and Kat Walsh gave voice to the dominant perspective of Wikimedians in an op-ed for the Washington Post, "We are the media, and so are you". It was notable by contrast to the week's two preceding editorials in that the authors resisted the framing of the debate as a battle between the competing worlds of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, vested interests at war to protect their narrow goals by whatever means at their disposal. Rather, Wales and Walsh, proposed, the defeat of SOPA/PIPA represented an awakening of political consciousness on the part of millions of regular internet users who had hitherto been "all but invisible to Congress". Defying charges that the upswell of protest was a calculated instigation by deep-pocketed technology firms and their lobbyists – "about as organic as the masses of North Koreans crying in the streets upon hearing of Kim Jong Il’s death" (PCC Associates), Wales and Walsh distanced themselves and this emergent activist movement from the large technology companies, whom they characterised as just another instantiation of rising commercial powers enmeshing themselves in the murky world of legislation for their shareholders' benefit. Wikipedia, a donation-funded mass movement of ordinary people, was an entirely different entity, they conjectured:
| “ | Wikipedia is not opposed to the rights of creators — we have the largest collection of creators in human history. The effort that went into building Wikipedia could have created shelves full of albums or near-endless nights of movies. Instead it’s providing unrestricted access to the world’s knowledge. Protecting our rights as creators means ensuring that we can build our encyclopedias, photographs, videos, Web sites, charities and businesses without the fear that they all will be taken away from us without due process. It means protecting our ability to speak freely, without being vulnerable to poorly drafted laws that leave our fate to a law enforcement body that has no oversight and no appeal process. It means protecting the legal infrastructure that allowed our sharing of knowledge and creativity to flourish, and protecting our ability to do so on technical infrastructure that allows for security and privacy for all Internet users. | ” |
The Wikimedia movement is uninterested in entering a phase of permanent advocacy, they argued, but what the debates had changed is that they forced the acknowledgement that the projects' existence was inherently political, and demanded defence on those grounds. The Wikimedia movement could no longer stand on the sidelines while organisations such as Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought to protect the environment that facilitated its existence, the trustees argued; the shifting cultural and political landscape meant that the institutions of Congress and copyright, designed for times now past in which small number of industrial titans controlled the dissemination of culture and information, required rethinking in this age of technologically-enabled mass expression. The piece concluded with a forceful reframing of the terms of debate:
| “ | [W]e are the media industry. We are the creators. We are the innovators. The whole world benefits from our work. That work, and our ability to do it, is worth protecting for everyone. | ” |
In the spirit of this distributed media age, the privilege of editorials need not remain the sole domain of the elite thoughtleaders. The Signpost is soliciting compelling, thoughtful and provocative opinion essays of all perspectives: if you think you could have something worthy of attention and debate to write on this or another issue of critical relevance to the reading community, consider proposing it at our dedicated desk or by email to wikipediasignpost
gmail.com
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This week's subject, WikiProject Stub Sorting, was started in November 2004 with the intention of organizing and categorizing stubs and stub categories. The project's 267 participants use a vast array of categories, celebrate the discovery of new categories, and discuss the deletion of unnecessary ones. The project maintains a field guide for stub sorters, to-do list, and handbook on naming conventions. We interviewed Grutness and PamD.
Sorting articles sounds like a mundane task. Why do you do it? What motivates so many Wikipedians to join WikiProject Stub Sorting?
Why do stubs deserve special attention? How does proper categorization benefit stubs and the encyclopedia as a whole?
The project's talk page receives new posts on a daily basis. What sort of discussions attract editors to the project's talk page? Describe the community that keeps this project going.
Amid the vast variety of stub categories, how do you determine which categories to use for a stub? Have there been any efforts to educate editors on how to select categories for stub articles? Do you foresee the number of categories increasing or decreasing in the future?
When working with stubs, how often do you come across articles about non-notable subjects, promotional material, and other examples of what Wikipedia is not? Does your effort to sort stubs benefit other stub-related projects?
What are WikiProject Stub Sorting's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
Anything else you'd like to add?
Next week, we'll head to the phoenix city to see a country that has risen from the ashes of war time after time. Until then, sing Mazurek Dąbrowskiego in the archive.
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Eight featured articles were promoted this week:
Two featured lists were promoted this week:
Ten featured pictures were promoted this week:
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases this week, and closed one case (Betacommand 3), leaving three open.
On 9 February, the Arbitration Committee announced the five editors whose application to serve as community members on the Audit Subcommittee ("AUSC") were approved for consideration. AUSC was established by the committee to investigate complaints concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia, and to provide better monitoring and supervision of the CheckUser and Oversight positions along with the use of the applicable tools.
There are three vacancies in non-arbitrator positions on the subcommittee, due to the election of past community members AGK and Courcelles to the full committee itself and the expiration of community member Keegan's term in March. Applicants for the positions will be reviewed by arbitrators in internal discussions starting on 19 February. Until then, the community is invited to question and discuss the candidates. The committee is due to announce the appointments on 29 February.
The five candidates are:
The arbitration case regarding Δ (formerly Betacommand) has closed. The case was opened to address the multitude of sanctions in effect on the editor. In the final decision, the committee noted that the community had the ability to sanction editors who cause a detriment to the encyclopedia, and that sanctioned editors are expected to correct the identified issues, lest more severe sanctions be implemented.
They found that the community had in the past raised concerns about Betacommand regarding both the content of his edits and his failure to adequately communicate their purpose when asked, and that the community had placed him under various restrictions as a consequence.
The committee determined that the community sanctions that were imposed on Betacommand have not been successful at addressing the editing problems, noting that he had on several occasions ignored the sanctions, and that he was still not communicating with other editors in an appropriate manner.
As a result of this, by a 10–6 majority, the committee superseded the community sanctions that were in place and imposed a site ban of no less than one year. Betacommand may request that the ban be lifted once the year has passed and after detailing his intended editing activities and demonstrating his understanding of and intention to refrain from the actions which resulted in his ban. Such a request would then be presented to the community for review.
This case was initially opened due to the actions of several administrators in relation to an editor who was blocked over perceived incivility. The evidence and workshop phases ended over a week ago with the submissions of over twenty editors. A proposed decision was posted by Hersfold on February 14, with sanctions proposed that range from admonishments to desysopping for the administrators involved in the case, and admonishments to site bans for Malleus Fatuorum. A general warning to the community has also been proposed, warning against conduct that causes a breakdown of communication within a discussion, reminding that uncivil conduct can be a factor in the breaking down of consensus forming, and that blocks or other restrictions may be used in the event of repeated disruption to ensure the collaborative environment of Wikipedia is maintained. At the time of writing, there is no clear indication as to which remedies are likely to be implemented.
This case was opened to review alleged disruptive editing on the Manual of Style and other pages to do with article naming. Over the last week, 11 editors submitted evidence to the Committee while 7 editors discussed proposals at the case workshop. Decision drafters AGK, David Fuchs, and Casliber will close these two stages on 19 February, a week prior to the release of a proposed decision.
On 9 February, a major party in the case, JCScaliger, was blocked as a sockpuppet of Pmanderson by arbitrator Elen of the Roads. However, the latter editor noted on her talk page that the block was not under the aegis of the Arbitration Committee, but rather one made in her capacity as the administrator who originally blocked Pmanderson. The block decision is notable as it has shown an evolution in sockpuppet investigations, as the evidence employed sophisticated forensic analysis to match the two accounts. Additionally, The Signpost can independently confirm similarities between the two user accounts from an analysis of the relevant data in question.
This case was brought to the Committee by an editor to appeal a site ban that was imposed by Jimbo Wales. The expected proposed decision, as mentioned in previous Signpost coverage, is yet to be posted but has been scheduled for 17 February.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for January 2012 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. The projects and events picked out by the report writers (the San Francisco Hackathon, SOPA blackout, release of an official Wikimedia Android app, and creation of extra testing facilities ahead of 1.19's deployment) have all been covered in the previous issues of The Signpost; however, the report did contain several items of note that were not.
For example, the report describes how developers Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw recently visited Ballarat, Australia to attend the linux.conf.au conference, where they presented a talk about the Wikimedia Resource Loader entitled Low-hanging Fruit vs. Micro-optimization, Creative Techniques for Loading Web Pages Faster. It also includes a list of 11 open engineering-related positions at the Foundation, as well as confirmation of the changes in personnel over the month; news of the successful upgrade of Wikimedia's mail servers (likely to allow all users to enjoy email notifications for watchlist changes if they so wish); and expansion in the number of projects running on Wikimedia Labs; the slower but still good progress in expanding the range of functionality included in the new parser (and hence eventually destined for support in the new Visual Editor); and the creation of a beta geo-coordinate API module that will allow, for example, proximity searches when fully deployed and integrated.
At the time of writing, https://test2.wikipedia.org is set to soon be updated to run MediaWiki 1.19. This will yield the closest approximation yet of how the software is likely to fare when deployed to front-line wikis, as it is scheduled to in the coming weeks (see also a detailed recent blog post describing how best to help test the software before its release). 1.19 had been formally branched on Wednesday, clearly defining which features have and have not made it into the release: from now on, only bug fixes will be accepted into the branch.
Unfortunately for the head developers managing the release process, the hard part is still to come. From here on in, they will be fighting not only to get 1.19 out on time and on spec, but to ensure the swift and satisfactory switchover of the core MediaWiki repository from Subversion (SVN) to Git. The former had required a long code "slush" in order to allow developers to review months' worth of unchecked code; the latter demands that in many respects it must continue until Git is cut loose from SVN (wikitech-l mailing list). Long code slushes are difficult for developers to work with, however, since they block easy collaboration and obstruct development work more generally; indeed, avoiding the need for future code slushes (or indeed full code freezes) is one of the motivating factors behind the switchover. The next few weeks, then, are likely to be tense ones as staff and volunteer developers alike hold back on major development work unrelated to getting 1.19 on time and agree upon the myriad of details necessary to ensure a clean Git switchover, first of core code and later of extensions (also wikitech-l).
One such detail that received discussion time this week was the code review system to be used under Git (since the current system is highly customised for use with SVN). A system developed at Google and known as Gerrit was generally assumed to be the preferred choice, with some members of the Wikimedia system administration team already using it. This week the prospect was raised of instead switching to the more GUI-friendly Phabricator developed at Facebook; lead developers have decided to postpone a final decision until the summer and to use Gerrit in the meantime (also wikitech-l).
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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