Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit.
Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain more supports than opposes, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities. Three of the 21 candidates gained the support of more than half of the 824 voters: Newyorkbrad, with 70.1%, NuclearWarfare, with 55.1%, and Worm That Turned, with 54.1%. Unlike last year's results, only two sitting arbitrators were returned. Four will be first-time arbitrators, two are sitting arbitrators, and two will be returning members who served in the past. Three of the four first-timers have participated at ArbCom as clerks, so seven of the eight members have already exercised official ArbCom-related roles.
Arbitrator Newyorkbrad commented, "I think it's fair to say that no one was selected who was a complete stranger to the arbitration pages and process. ... On the other hand, several of the new arbitrators have not exactly been supporters of everything the Committee's done in the past couple of years. I also think there will be a healthy balance between continuity and turnover within the Committee from year to year, which is generally for the best." Retiring arbitrator Casliber said, "Having worked with (and seen) lots of folks who ran, I can say there is a diversity of opinion which probably trumps whether the person has been a clerk or [arbitrator] previously".
The eight candidates elected are drawn from many areas around the English Wikipedia:
This election saw 824 editors cast votes (with a further 34 ballots found to be invalid), a figure consistent with what Electoral Commission member Lord Roem told us last week: "While we had a one-day delay in getting the poll up, we've seen consistently higher turnout than last year; 800 votes by the end is a realistic goal." Surprisingly, the number is higher than those for the previous two years, despite the decline in the size of the active community; but it is lower than in 2008 and 2009, when more than a thousand people voted.
Among interesting patterns, a graph by SmokeyJoe shows that the voting for three candidates—Elen of the Roads, Beeblebrox, and Jclemens—was relatively polarised, with a significant dip in their "no vote" (red line). Hahc21 produced a table that displays a rough numerical summary of voter-guide support against the actual election results. This shows a remarkably close match, whether or not by coincidence, in which only one of the eight slots turned out to be different: only Guerrillero was among the top eight candidates in terms of voter-guide support numbers but did not gain a term; and only Coren was not among those eight, but did gain a term.
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In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia. In a break from our usual modus operandi, we interviewed an IP editor who was given the blessing of the project's coordinator, Kungfuman.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Computer Games?
How does WikiProject Computer Games keep track of its articles? Does the project tag or assess articles as part of its quality assurance process?
WikiProject Computer Games is part of the Computer Games Portal. How do the German Wikipedia's projects and portals differ from those on the English Wikipedia? Have you collaborated or shared any material with the English WikiProject Video Games or with similar projects for any other languages? How can communication between the different languages of Wikipedia be improved?
Do Germany's censorship laws regarding violence and the depiction of banned symbols impact the German Wikipedia's coverage of computer games? How does the project handle computer games that have been banned or significantly altered before release in German markets?
How do the German Wikipedia's rules regarding screenshots and covers differ from the English Wikipedia? How difficult has it been to acquire images for articles about computer games?
Video game articles on the English Wikipedia have occasionally been criticized for focusing too much on plot details and trivia. Has the German WikiProject Computer Games also dealt with these issues? What can be done to prevent the accumulation of fancruft?
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can contributors from the English Wikipedia help the German WikiProject Computer Games?
Next week, we'll sing a song of high fantasy. Until then, dance with dragons in the archive.
Reader comments
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include:
This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
Controversy came quickly from a combination of two factors: the eagerness of editors—some new to Wikipedia—to report everything that was reported, and the eagerness of the media to report everything that was said or suggested. Errors resulted and so did edit-warring, but the decision to semi-protect the article was not made until two serious biographies of living person (BLP) violations. First, an IP editor placed a link in the article to the Facebook page of someone with the same name as the person erroneously identified by the media as the shooter, and soon afterward another IP editor placed links smack-dab in the article to photographs ripped from that Facebook page and posted on the internet. Those edits were subsequently rev-deleted.
The decision to semi-protect was immediately contested in the court of public opinion, in this case the article's talk page, since the administrators noticeboard (AN) was uncommonly quiet—perhaps involved editors were too busy dealing with edit conflicts on the article talk page to go there. A thread on AN indicated support for the decision, and semi-protection was later lengthened by Dennis Brown.
There was also discussion on AN and linked pages about semi-protecting the talk page: as of the time of writing this has not been done, but the possibility of BLP violations at the article is taken seriously by a number of the editors and admins who are monitoring the situation, guiding discussions, and answering edit requests—among others, Pol430, MrX, Ryan Vesey, Barek, Uncle G, Masem, and Dennis Brown. Relevant to the scenario is WP:BDP: posting information on recently deceased persons "has implications for their living relatives and friends", and the BLP policy still applies.
Further discussion on AN may lead to a more concentrated effort to handle the fallout from such dramatic events. Masem suggested a shortcut leading to a page with some behavioral guidelines: "a shortcut of accepted admin steps to take that have been accepted and need no discussion in the very short term after such events (eg, is semi-prot of the article appropriate, is creating and full prot of names associated with the event appropriate, etc.); these are decisions that after the initial flurry of edits can be come back to evaluate but in the short term to avoid disruption".
In the meantime, our coverage attracted the attention of the Nieman Journalism Lab, which ran an update with interesting stats on the development and growth of our Sandy Hook article. The Nieman article gave a shout-out to User:Wrong Way Go Back, and was quite positive about how collaborative the editing environment was after the initial few hours: "The ability for these collaborations to unfold as smoothly as they do appears to rest on the ability for Wikipedia editors with newswork experience to either supplant or compliment [sic] the work done by amateurs who first arrive on the page".[1]
School shootings and other high-profile events will continue to occur and to cause problems for Wikipedia editors. Considering that there is an unstoppable drive to write, expand, and update these articles, we are in the same boat as some of the other "new" media whose problems were highlighted in a recent story on American National Public Radio (NPR). According to that story, early coverage in the media is often wrong, and even the New York Times had a "staggering" number of errors. Why? According to a Times editor on the NPR report, "journalistic missteps were driven by the push to meet the speed of expected social media platforms".
As Wikipedia editors, we do not, I believe, have a responsibility to be the first to report anything; but it's a matter of fact that this is how articles are written, expanded, and updated. However, the NPR story cited Dave Cullen, author of Columbine, in which he debunks as myths all the truths we thought we knew about the "trench coat mafia" being bullied by the jocks. Wikipedia articles are more like Cullen's book than they are like blog updates, since they are durable if not always stable; we have, then, the responsibility as encyclopedists to get it right—to get it righter.
Four featured articles were promoted this week:
Three featured lists were promoted this week:
Five featured pictures were promoted this week:
MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation.
Of those five, one (a local group centring on the Indian city of Ahmedabad) was proposed by a non-staff member and has easily surpassed the three signatures that will bring it into being. Of the other four, a second local group—this one based in San Francisco—has also met the participation threshold. The three proposed "thematic" groups (features testing, browser testing and marketing), proposed by staff, are struggling a little more, though all three will probably surpass the three signature barrier.
The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups, of which there are six. Gil wrote: "This is not about devs alone, but about people interested in all MediaWiki aspects, like testing fresh software, translating strings, participating in the UX design of a feature, helping triaging forgotten bug reports or enhancement requests".
In the first of a series exploring some of the newer and less well-known tools (editing aids) available to Wikimedia, the Signpost this week caught up with Aaron Halfaker (User:EpochFail), research analyst at the Foundation, about the tool he's been working on in his spare time, Snuggle.
| “ |  I built Snuggle in response to recent research (some of which is my own) that shows a decline in newcomer retention in Wikipedia[1][2] is the result of an increasing negative environment for desirable newcomers[3][4] and that Wikipedia's current socialization systems don't work because mentors can't find newcomers when those newcomers most need help[5]. Snuggle is designed to help experienced Wikipedians quickly and efficiently identify desirable newcomers who are editing in good faith and help them dodge Wikipedia's sharper corners. Snuggle has two major components: a server-side component that uses Special:RecentChanges to build statistics of new editors' activities; and a browser-based web application that allows Wikipedians to filter, sort and visualize these newcomers' activities. Using recent change data, Snuggle maintains a list of ~6000 newly registered user accounts and a summary of their first 30 days of editing activity. Users can then browse this list of users and sort them into two categories:
Editors looking to operate in a mentorship role can use the good-faith list to find newcomers who are struggling and need help or to send out invitations to the Teahouse. If there's demand for it, I can also add functionality to report the bad-faith users to WP:AIV. |
” |
Aaron reports that the system is currently in its early development phase. "I need your help to prioritize new features and to make sure the system is actually usable." He points potential testers to the current version, an IRC demo and feedback session (#wikimedia-office, 4 January at 1700 UTC/11AM CST), his talk page, and a newsletter. Interested developers can also submit bugs, features and pull requests to the public repository.
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
