Summary: With most TV shows on hiatus for the northern summer, attention has turned to movies, celebrity and sports. The dramatic events at the 2013 Confederations Cup drew massive attention, as did summer blockbusters like Man of Steel and World War Z. But the most searched event of the week was the tragic and unexpected death of popular actor James Gandolfini on June 19.
For the complete Top 25 report with analysis, see here.
For the week of June 16 to 22, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the 5,000 most trafficked pages* were:
| Rank | Article | Views | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | James Gandolfini | 1,692,389 |  |
| 2 | Yahoo! | 1,670,003 | The corporation finalised its $1.1 billion purchase of the popular microblogging site Tumblr on June 20, increasing speculation on the implications for both it and the site. Yahoo! promises however, that Tumblr will remain independent. |
| 3 | Man of Steel (film) | 1,218,396 | The second attempt to rework the Superman mythos for modern cinema (after Bryan Singer's Superman Returns) has earned $255 million worldwide in its first week. |
| 4 | Yeezus | 878,466 | .jpg) |
| 5 | Jeanne Calment | 711,319 | The oldest woman in history, who famously said, "I’ve never had but one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it", was the topic of a popular TIL thread on Reddit. |
| 6 | 684,298 | .JPG) | |
| 7 | The Last of Us | 676,691 | This eagerly awaited and critically adored post-apocalyptic video game was released on June 13. |
| 8 | 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup | 630,147 |  |
| 9 | World War Z (film) | 613,702 | Brad Pitt's loose adaptation of Max Brooks's zombie apocalypse novel follows a now-well-worn precedent of the less-popular opening film generating many more hits on Wikipedia. Monsters University, despite winning the weekend, barely broke the top 100. |
| 10 | Father's Day | 579,315 |  |
In a 25 June article entitled "How Wikimedia Commons became a massive amateur porn hub", the Daily Dot examined the perennial controversy over explicit or pornographic media on Commons. This latest salvo was touched off when Russavia uploaded a portrait of Jimmy Wales made by the artist Pricasso, who paints with his genitalia. The conflict between Wales—who declared that the image was "sexual harassment"—and Russavia (with other editors becoming involved along the way) has been brewing over the issue of pornographic material on Commons since 2010 and has intensified in recent months. Recent areas of conflict include the issue of model consent and the scope of Commons itself, which the author calls the "black sheep" of the Wikimedia projects. Commons hosts a wide variety of media of drastically differing quality, and the categorization scheme means that explicit media is hosted in a variety of categories that may appear innocuous.
| “ | You can't walk down a street on the Commons without stumbling upon some dude's penis, or something equally explicit or shocking. Search for a "wheel," and you'll shortly discover a photo from a BDSM torture session. The same goes for "jumping ball," "bell tolling," or "electric toothbrush." | ” |
The Daily Dot says that Commons has an "exhibition culture … dominated by men", and cites the example of Hansy2's extensive upload log, including "at least 29" explicit pictures of his genitalia. When the images were all put up for deletion, all were kept because one penis picture exhibits a rare skin disorder and is used in the article on that disorder.
The author asked both Russavia and Pricasso if he commissioned the portrait, and both confirmed that Russavia had requested the portrait, though the latter claims that "there was no exchange of cash or quid pro quo involved"; Pricasso was quoted in the article as saying that the anonymous patron offered a Wikipedia article with him as the subject in exchange for the portrait, yet another controversy in the continuing paid-contribution saga. The debate over this portrait has included a massive deletion discussion at Commons (commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Jimmy Wales by Pricasso.jpg), where it was kept, many noticeboard debates, several discussions on User talk:Jimbo Wales, and two essays in the Signpost. The author concluded that the community's decision to keep the files was wrong, saying "And what better way, incidentally, to prove that Commons is ethically broken than for one of its top bureaucrats to employ the site in a harassment campaign against the cofounder of Wikipedia itself?"
The banned English Wikipedia user Gregory Kohs, who is also a member and frequent commentator on Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy, published an article on Examiner.com claiming that the "notorious" co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales (User:Jimbo Wales) had looked into whether the PRISM leaker and current fugitive Edward Snowden had ever edited on Wikipedia, due to his active online presence. The article goes on to chastise Wales for what Kohs claims was a violation of Wikipedia's policy against "outing" editors. The article, to which the Signpost cannot link because of the English Wikipedia's spam blacklist, states:
| “ | Certainly as the man who co-founded the Wikipedia project and who has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from speaking to assembled audiences about Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales should know better than to ask others to violate one of its community's most respected rules. But that does not appear to be the case. | ” |
After Wales’ initial comment on his talk page, a thread on the Administrators' Noticeboard was initiated by Wikipedia administrator Fram. The article quotes several Wikipedians' responses (without revealing their usernames in the article), commenting that editors "picked apart Jimbo with a precision only Wikipedians could exact":
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The article then quotes Wales, who said that all editors except Fram are welcome to discuss the issue at his talk page, and finally goes on to harshly criticize Wales and Wikipedia in general.
Wales and Kohs later directly exchanged perspectives on the popular Q&A site Quora.
As to whether or not Wales actually did violate Wikipedia policy, views in the ANI thread were mixed. Fram, who started the thread, said, "Speculation on which accounts may be used by named (notable) persons, for the sake of curiosity, have no place on Wikipedia." Nick, who closed the thread, remarked in his closing comments, "BLP policy and our civility guidelines apply everywhere so if Edward does have any publicly acknowledged accounts, they need to be kept free from inappropriate comments and behaviour. The same care and attention will need to be lavished upon any accounts discussed in the press, regardless of whether they are confirmed to be Edward's accounts." Dennis Brown fell somewhere in the middle: "Jimmy, I don't think you were trying to out him directly, but your comments are what some might call a 'red flag' comment, an indication that a user is trying to connect dots. If you weren't 'Jimbo' and were instead a <5k editor, I would have given a polite notification and a pointer to WP:OUTING. The comments as they are might be seen as you encouraging or condoning others outting him, even if that isn't your intention."
This story was widely covered in the international media, including ITPro, Softpedia, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Tech2. France24 pointed out that usernames similar to TrueHOOHA, Snowden's username on sites like ArsTechnica, came under suspicion by Wales and others following an investigation into his other online activities. However, as of now, it has not been verified whether or not Snowden edited, nor under what name, had he edited. France24 noted that the outing policy is a "golden rule" of Wikipedia and reported Fram's criticism of the search for Snowden's username, as did Der Spiegel (Germany) and Der Standard (Austria). Both of these latter articles later had statements by Wales added to them. According to Der Spiegel, Wales told them it was the community that had asked questions about Snowden's activities on Wikipedia, while he himself had warned against an outing – a statement that seems hard to reconcile with the discussions that took place on his talk page and at the administrators' noticeboard. The article in Der Standard was updated after an an exchange of views on Twitter between Wales and Florian Hirzinger.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A comparative work by T. Yasseri., A. Spoerri, M. Graham and J. Kertész on controversial topics in different language versions of Wikipedia has recently been posted on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) online scholarly archive [1]. The paper, which will appear as a chapter of an upcoming book titled "Global Wikipedia: International and cross-cultural issues in online collaboration", to be published by Scarecrow Press in 2014, and edited by Fichman P., and Hara N., looks at the 100 most controversial topics in 10 language versions of Wikipedia (results including 3 additional languages are reported in the blog of one of the authors), and tries to make sense of the similarities and differences in these lists. Several visualization methods are proposed, based on a Flash-based tool developed by the authors, called CrystalView. Controversiality is measured using a scalar metric which takes into account the total volume of pairwise mutual reverts among all contributors to a page. This metric was proposed by Sumi et al. (2011)[2], in a paper reviewed two years ago in this newsletter ("Edit wars and conflict metrics"). Topics related to politics, geographical locations, and religion are reported to be the most controversial across the board, and each language seems to feature specific, local controversies, which the authors further track down by grouping together languages with similar spheres of influences. Furthermore, the presence of latitude/longitude information (geocoordinates) in several of the Wikipedia articles in the sample analyzed in the study let the authors map the top controversial topics to a global world map, showing how each language features both local and global issues as the most heated topics of debate.
In summary, the study shows how valuable information about cross-cultural differences can be extracted from traces of Internet activity, though one obvious question is how the demographics of Wikipedia editors affect the representativeness of the results, an issue which the authors seem to be aware of, and which is probably going to play a role of increasing importance, as the field of cultural studies looks more and more at data generated by peer production communities.
The research has been intensely featured in the media, e.g., Huffington Post, Live Science, Wired.com, Zeit Online.
"A Case Study of Sockpuppet Detection in Wikipedia"[3], presented at a "Workshop on Language in Social Media" this month, describes an automated method to analyze the writing style of users for the purpose of detecting or confirming sockpuppets. The abuse of multiple accounts (also known as "multi-aliasing" or sybil attacks in other contexts) is described as "a prevalent problem in Wikipedia, there were close to 2,700 unique suspected cases reported in 2012."
The authors' approach is based on existing authorship attribution research (cf. stylometry, writeprint). In a very brief overview of such research, the authors note that data from real-life cases is usually hard to come by, so that most papers are testing attribution methods on text that was collected for different purposes, and comes from authors that were not deliberately trying to evade detection. Whereas on Wikipedia "there is a real need to identify if the comments submitted by what appear to be different users belong to a sockpuppeteer".
Using the open-source machine learning tool Weka, the authors developed an algorithm that analyzes users' talk page comments by "239 features that capture stylistic, grammatical, and formatting preferences of the authors" - e.g. sentence lengths, or the frequency of happy emoticons (i.e. ":)" and ":-)"). Apart from features whose use is established in the literature, they add some of their own, e.g. counting errors in the usage of "a" and "an".
The paper examines 77 real-life sockpuppet cases from the English Wikipedia - 41 where the suspected use of sockpuppets was confirmed by "the administrator’s verdict" (presumably most of them based on Checkuser evidence), and 36 where it was rejected. For each case, the algorithm was first trained on talk page comments by the suspected sockpuppeteer (main account), and then tested on comments by the suspected sockpuppet (alternate account). On the average in each case less than 100 talk page messages were used to train or test the algorithm.
The system achieved an accuracy of 68.83% in the tested cases (for comparison, simply always confirming the suspected sockpuppet abuse would have achieved 53.24% accuracy on the same test cases). After adding features based on the user's edit frequency by time of day and day of the week, it achieved 84.04% confidence when tested on a smaller subset of the cases.
The authors remark in the introduction that "relying on IP addresses is not robust, as simple counter measures can fool the check users". In this reviewer's opinion, this probably underestimates the effort needed (for example, DSL or cable users simply resetting their modem to obtain a different dynamic IP most likely will not "fool" Checkusers). Still, a later part of the paper treats rejections of sockpuppet cases as definite proof that the accounts were not sockpuppets. Thus, they are possibly ignoring cases where a sockpuppeteer managed to avoid generating Checkuser evidence - in other words, some of results counted as false positives in this methodology might actually have been correct.
Looking forward, the authors write: "We are aiming to test our system on all the cases filed in the history of the English Wikipedia. Later on, it would be ideal to have a system like this running in the background and pro-actively scanning all active editors in Wikipedia, instead of running in a user triggered mode." If all the resulting similarity scores would be public, it would be doubtful that this would remain uncontroversial - many editors (especially on the German Wikipedia) are uncomfortable with the publication of aggregated analysis data about their editing behavior, even if it is based purely on information that is already public; compare the current RfC on Meta about X!'s Edit Counter.
The authors state that "to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle [the problem of real sockpuppet cases in Wikipedia]" with this kind of stylometric analysis. This may only be accurate in an academic context. For example, in a high-profile sockpuppet investigation on the English Wikipedia in 2008, User:Alanyst applied the tf-idf similarity measure to the aggregated edit summaries of all users who had made between 500 and 3500 edits in 2007. (This measure compares the relative word frequencies in two texts.) The analysis confirmed the sockpuppet suspicion against two accounts A and B: Account B came out closest to A, and account A 188th closest to B (among the 11,377 tested accounts). For an overview of this and other methods developed by Wikipedians to evaluate the validity of sockpuppet suspicions, see the slides of this reviewer's talks at Wikimania 2008 and the Chaos Congress 2009.
Building on their earlier work on the feasibility of automatically assigning maintenance templates to articles (review: "Predicting quality flaws in Wikipedia articles"), three German researchers investigate[4] how an article's topic might inform the detecting of text that needs to be tagged for quality problems. In this paper, they focus on maintenance tags for neutrality (e.g. {{Advert}}, {{Weasel}}) or style (e.g. {{Tone}}), cataloguing them into "94 template clusters representing 60 style flaws and 34 neutrality flaws". As an example of a maintenance tag that is restricted to certain topic areas, they cite "the template in-universe... which should only be applied to articles about fiction." Differing standards between different WikiProjects are named as another possible reason for "topic bias" in maintenance tags.
To make their classification algorithm more aware of article's topics when assigning maintenance templates, the researcher modify their previous approach by populating their "positive" and "negative" training sets by revision pairs from the same articles: The version where a (human) Wikipedian had inserted a maintenance tag first, and the later revisions of the same article when the tag is removed (assuming that the corresponding flaw has indeed been eliminated at that time). To evaluate the success of this approach, the authors introduce the notion of a "category frequency vector" assigned to a set of articles (counting, for each category on Wikipedia, how many articles from this category are contained in the set). The cosine of the vectors of two article sets measures how similar their topics are. They find that "topics of articles in the positive training sets are highly similar to the topics of the corresponding reliable negative articles while they show little similarity to the articles in the random set. This implies that the systematic bias introduced by the topical restriction has largely been eradicated by our approach." Sadly, this evaluation method does not seem to have yielded direct information about which quality flaws are prevalent in which topic areas.
Apart from their own software, the researchers used the WikiHadoop software to analyze the entire revision history of the English Wikipedia, and the machine learning tool Weka to classify article text.
Less than three days after the close of voting, the volunteer election committee posted the results on Meta. The worldwide Wikimedia movement has elected three WMF trustees for two-year terms on the 10-seat Board: Samuel Klein (supported by 43.5% of voters), Phoebe Ayers (38.3%), and María Sefidari (35.6%). The new trustees will take their seats at a critical time for the movement: one of the first tasks in their terms will be to help the Board to find and approve the new executive director to take up the top job when Sue Gardner departs.
Samuel Klein, from the United States, has expertise in digital libraries and participates in an internet research group. His academic qualifications are in physics, mathematics, algorithms and language. He has been closely involved in outreach and community content for the One Laptop per Child project. Samuel speaks intermediate-level German, Spanish, and French. He is just completing his second term as a WMF trustee.
Phoebe Ayers, also from the US, is a science and engineering librarian. She has experience in Wikimania coordination and administration, and is a co-author of the book How Wikipedia Works (2008). Phoebe served as a chapter-selected WMF trustee from 2010 to 2012.
María Sefidari (Raystorm), from Spain, has qualifications in psychology and was vice-president of Wikimedia Spain (2010–12). She speaks near-native-level English and intermediate-level French. María is the treasurer of the WMF's Affiliations Committee and has been a member of the IEG Committee.
The first two elected members of the Funds Dissemination Committee will be Delphine Ménard (notafish) and Cristian Consonni (CristianCantoro). The FDC recommends to the Board the funding it believes FDC-eligible Wikimedia affiliates should receive, based on applications made to it in two rounds each year.
Delphine Ménard, from France, studied in the US and Austria, and holds an undergraduate degree in political science and a postgraduate degree in international communication and marketing. She has worked as an event manager and has experience in managing budgets, and has near-native-level English, good German, and intermediate-level Spanish. Delphine is a board member of Wikimedia Germany and has worked for the WMF as chapters coordinator. Cristian Consonni has experience in the GNU/Linux and Free Software worlds, and is a member of the Board of Wikimedia Italy. He speaks intermediate-level English and French.
Susana Morais (Lusitana), from Portugal, speaks advanced-level English and German, and intermediate-level Spanish. Her interests lie in the arts and photography. Susana was appointed as the inaugural FDC ombudsperson last year. The FDC ombudsperson is charged with receiving and publicly documenting complaints about the FDC process, and providing feedback and recommendations to the WMF Board about how the FDC process can be improved.
One of the surprises of the election was that only 1809 members of the global community voted, just over half of the numbers who had their say in the election of community-elected trustees in 2011, against a much less marked shrinkage over that time in the number of active editors, from about 90,000 to about 80,000. In the so-called support–oppose electoral system—imported for the first time from the English Wikipedia's ArbCom elections against doubts expressed by several editors at the election talk page—voters faced three choices for each candidate: to support, to oppose, or to leave the setting at neutral.
The scatter graph at the top of the page shows each candidate as a diamond point—red for the three successful candidates and blue for the eight unsuccessful candidates. By definition, the three rightmost candidates were successful, based on the S/S+O formula, where supports are divided by supports plus opposes; this formula is represented by the x-axis. As a simple guide, all possible votes fall within a triangle bounded by theoretical lines representing zero supports, zero opposes, and zero neutrals (the top half of the triangle is not shown to produce a clearer display).
Faced with 11 candidates and three vacant seats, voters cast an average of 3.2 supports, 1.9 opposes, and 5.9 neutrals. Compared with the pure support votes on the y-axis, the use of the formula resulted in only two differences in the order of candidates: the inversions of Kat Walsh's and Michel Aaij's positions, and John Vandenberg's and Jeromy-Yu Chan's positions. The fact that the red–blue boundary between the successful and the unsuccessful remained untouched by these differences has avoided immediate debate about the operation of the formula.
The Signpost's attempts to locate the voter list for the last community-elected trustee positions in 2011 were unsuccessful—despite the apparent significance of the ability this would give to analyse the patterns of shrinkage in the active electorate throughout the world over this period.
Seven candidates competed for the two FDC positions. Delphine Ménard gained the support of 45.7% of voters, and Cristian Consonni 32.0%. Voters cast an average of 1.8 supports, 1.1 opposes, and 4.1 neutrals; relative to the number of candidates for each body, this was a much higher proportion of neutrals. The two new members will join an FDC that is grappling with the need to streamline the process for applicants, while at the same time to deliver to the FDC and the staff the right type and level of detail to make its judgements fair and accurate.
The two candidates for ombudsperson gained 42.8% (Susana Morais) and 35.4% (Matt Bisanz). Voters cast an average of 0.8 supports for this single position, with 0.2 opposes and 1.0 neutrals.
As for previous elections, comments on this year's election are being gathered on a Meta post mortem page. While the results were released abnormally quickly, issues included a perceived difficulty on the voting page itself, which was extremely confusing to get to. In the words of one editor:
| “ | I think this statement is really nonsensible: Go to the wiki page "Special:SecurePoll" on one wiki you qualify to vote from. For example, if you are most active on the wiki meta.wikimedia.org, go to meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll. I cut and pasted Special:SecurePoll in the search box. It took me to what looked like the right place to vote. So I tried to vote. It said I was disqualified. After looking around for an hour and trying different things I realized I was going to a meta page. So I backed out to the main page and pasted it there. Then it took me to a place I could vote. You all really need to rethink how this voting process works. I'll bet there are lots of editors who give up in frustration. | ” |
However, in replying to this user, Risker (a member of the election committee and its principal public face) pointed out that a direct link to the poll page would allow readers to vote without seeing the candidates. The voting wiki was also rife with problems; MZMcBride pointed out several partway through the election. Translation of the election introduction and candidate statements was also slow to come in, a problem occasionally exacerbated by a need to clarify texts after they had already been translated.
Translations were also a major part of what was possibly the largest issue: the sudden delay of the election by one week at very nearly the literal last minute. The election committee gave as its reasons:
This is mostly a list of Non-article page requests for comment believed to be active on 25 June 2013 linked from subpages of Wikipedia:RfC, and recent watchlist notices and SiteNotices. The latter two are in bold. Items that are new to this report are in italics even if they are not new discussions. If an item can be listed under more than one category it is usually listed once only in this report. Clarifications and corrections are appreciated; please leave them in this article's comment box at the bottom of the page.
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(This section will include active RfAs, RfBs, CU/OS appointment requests, and Arbcom elections)
On participating at FPC
Well ... it's sort of a moral issue. In the UK, with a strong culture of used books and well-stocked libraries, it's easy for me to come across amazing illustrations. But these illustrations can all too easily become inaccessible. It's all very well that I get to see them, but if I do the research, then hide it, or, worse, find some cheap old book in a charity shop that turns out to be an amazing treasure – which, because I got it, no one else will ever see – it just feels morally wrong. But with Wikipedia, sharing them, and making sure they get to the people who can use them becomes so much easier.
The thing to remember about Featured Pictures is that you don't have to nominate your own works, if you see, for example, a really good photograph by someone else, you can – and indeed, are encouraged – to nominate it for featured picture status. And I'm sure we'll come back to advice on how to do that later. I'm pretty sure my first featured picture was something along those lines. But I can remember my first successful restoration that got featured picture status. Bit of a story there, though.
On the relation between pictures and articles
I've kind of evolved in my Wikipedia focus: I used to be a featured article writer. and, alongside various collaborators, did a lot of the work setting up Gilbert and Sullivan-related articles as one of Wikipedia's strengths, with featured articles on W. S. Gilbert, Creatures of Impulse, Thespis (opera), H.M.S. Pinafore, and various others. Now, part of making a good featured article is finding good illustrations. If you have access to enough libraries, though – and I did – you'll find some. I began uploading scans of the illustrations, and, after a while, started to do the occasional minor edit to them. Then, one day, the edits stopped being so minor.
It was this illustration. And, if you check the edit history to that, you'll see increasing attempts to make an image that, while good, had some printing issues that drew all focus away from the main image, into something where the intent was maintained, but the problems making it awkward to use gradually disappear. And the best part is, one can always go back to the original scan, if the divisions between the woodblocks are important to the use someone wants it for.
Now, about that image. I don't find anything to be embarrassed about from it, but it makes a number of decisions I wouldn't make today. The biggest of which had to do with the crappy computer I had at the time. I literally couldn't do anything with the image unless it was near-monochrome. And I used Microsoft Paint to edit it. But, well, I was pretty much the first person on Wikipedia to really get to know engravings (Durova started around that time, but she focused on photographs and the occasional lithograph). Before Wikipedia, this sort of thing was highly specialised knowledge. Of course, there are downsides to this. Modern publishers don't always handle engravings well. I've seen expensive art books of Gustave Doré's work that were just awful. Hell, come to think of it...
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On the pre-nomination phases of a picture
This is from a 2007 edition that I started scanning in before realising it was utter crap and stopping. There's a few issues. First off, note the solid black areas. In the original, there's lots of details in those areas. The worst example was in one from this book I apparently never uploaded to Wikipedia (which is probably a good thing), in which a solid black area replaces a murderer hiding in the shadows. Secondly, look at the signature in the lower left. You may note it's signed "Doré".
The problem is that the original is signed "G. Dore", and the image continues left of the G. See, in the original printing, you had to turn the book on its side to see some of the images, such as this one, and, when you did, the caption was printed under the image after you turned the book on its side. In this reprint, they wanted all the captions to be in the same place, so just cut off the edges of the landscape-format images. They didn't even do it cleverly – they cut out nearly an entire person from the left hand side of this image but didn't crop anything from the right hand side.
We don't actually seem to have a good copy of this. Luckily, I have a horrible, god-awful beat up Victorian copy of the Inferno, but the engravings in it are fine, so I think I might make that my next featured picture attempt. Should've done this years ago, but, as was explained to me, if you made any attempt to be comprehensive, reviewer fatigue would set in, and they'd start opposing your images solely for being more of the same. Thankfully, Featured Pictures has moved on, so doing what I always wanted to do – completeness – is now encouraged.
On Commons FPC vs. English Wikipedia's
Commons FPC has very different rules. The one I dislike most is that Commons only allows two nominations by any individual at once, which really cuts down on the ability of active contributors to highlight the works of others. Commons also ignores encyclopedic value, and, while this has some advantages, it does mean that it ends up focused very heavily on photography – we have a lot of great photographers there, and, while that's almost always a good thing, it's far easier for a photographer to evaluate other photographs, and, well, as the number of supports is also based on the standard photographic nomination, it's harder for non-photographic images to pass on Commons' Featured Pictures.
Combined with the multilingual nature of Commons limiting the amount of comments you get, I tend to prefer English Wikipedia's Featured Pictures, but that's really a personal thing, based on my unusual focuses.
Twelve featured articles were promoted this week.
Six featured pictures were promoted this week.
This week, we walked the runway with WikiProject Fashion. Started in March 2007, the project is home to 4 Featured Articles and 41 Good Articles. The project has a lengthy list of how you can help and a list of Article Alerts. We interviewed Johnbod, Daniel Case, PKM, and Calliopejen1.
Next week, we'll bark at the postman. Until then, celebrate man's best friend in the archive.
Reader comments
Argentine History was closed. Two cases, Race and politics and Tea Party movement, remain suspended until July.
In the case, brought by Lecen, an editor was accused of systematically skewing several articles involving former Argentine president Juan Manuel de Rosas to portray a brutal dictator as a democratic leader, in keeping with the political motives of Argentine "nationalists" or "revisionists".
The committee was unanimous in passing findings that 1) the locus of the dispute involved allegations of POV-pushing in Juan Manuel de Rosas and other articles related to the history of Latin America, that 2) Cambalachero "has edited in a manner inconsistent with the neutral point of view policy" including the citation of a source "whose reliability they themselves have disavowed", and that 3) MarshalN20 engaged in "tendentious editing and battleground conduct." Also passing 5 to 3, with 1 abstention, was a finding that Lecen "has not always conducted himself with an appropriate level of decorum".
The committee unanimously passed remedies that Cambalachero and MarshalN20 be topic banned "indefinitely from all articles, discussions, and other content related to the history of Latin America". A remedy that Lecen is "reminded to conduct himself in accordance with Wikipedia's behavioral guidelines" passed 5 to 3, with 1 abstention.
The Race and politics case, brought by UseTheCommandLine and dealing with sourcing methods in articles pertaining to race and politics, has been suspended, after one of the editors central to the case withdrew from editing. The case will remain open for two months from the May 26, 2013 passage of the motion to suspend; if by that time the editor has not returned to editing, the case will be closed and a topic ban will be imposed.
This case involving an American political group, brought by KillerChihuahua, was suspended until the end of June, pending a moderated discussion. Pages related to the Tea Party movement are placed under discretionary sanctions. The case, along with any progress towards resolution, is to be reevaluated on 1 July 2013.
