The role of Wikipedia in academia has been expanding rapidly—and to some extent vice-versa. Periodic stories from student newspapers continue to report mixed attitudes to Wikipedia among college and university professors ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]). But in many courses, especially in writing, cultural studies, and interdisciplinary fields, professors are using Wikipedia as the basis for assignments: writing articles or evaluating and discussing them. Jeremy Tirrell, a Purdue English graduate student, recently summed up the advantages and disadvantages of using Wikipedia assignments in writing courses; as he concludes:

"Although it requires some cognitive stretching on the part of both instructors and students, the Wikipedia project taps into relevant themes and technologies, and offers a unique and rewarding writing experience. As with any project, results are all but guaranteed to be mixed, but real audiences and real situations are much prized in composition studies, and online production will only become increasingly important for young authors. As instructors, we would do students a disservice not to engage this burgeoning medium—while keeping, of course, an appropriately critical perspective."

Most Wikipedia writing assignments are relatively small. Typically students are asked to write or revise a few paragraphs to a few pages. For example, in Jonathan Benda's "intercultural communications" course at Tunghai University, students looked at the articles and talk pages for a number of topics related to Taiwan, Islam, and Kuwait. Students in Dean Taciuch's"Advanced Composition" course at George Mason University (in a section for IT majors) chose and expanded stub articles; David Perry ran a similar assignment in his section of "Intro to Writing for English Majors" at the University of Albany. Espen Anderson uses Wikipedia assignments (in both English and Norwegian) in several courses at the Norwegian School of Management. Only a small portion of such assignments are self-reported on Wikipedia's school and university projects page.

However, a number of more substantial course projects have been implemented, many of them in technical fields. In journalism and media studies courses at University of Hong Kong, Andrew Lih and his students worked on an array of current events articles, sometimes over several semesters; Lih's project, among the first, was the subject of a CNN article in 2003. Students in Ellen Cohn's University of Pittsburgh graduate course on cleft palate disorders (assisted by User:Piotrus) created a set of related articles; Kent Norman's students in a "Human/Computer Interaction" graduate course did the same. A Summer "Public Speaking" course at Indiana University used existing articles as the basis for group presentations, with article corrections as extra credit; similarly, a Fall University of New Brunswick English course required editing and presentations on women playwrights. The common denominator of the larger Wikipedia assignments so far has been the involvement of an experienced Wikipedian (usually the professor or teaching assistant).

Only a modest level of attention has been focused on issues related to Wikipedia teaching methods. Earlier this year, Alan Liu of UC Santa Barbara drafted and circulated a statement for students on "Appropriate Use of Wikipedia", which appears to have been well-received among humanities professors. Last fall, Betsy Colwill of San Diego State University implemented a Wikipedia assignment for her "Feminist Thought" course, and presented the results to fellow faculty for the school's People, Information and Communication Technology Project. T. Mills Kelly of George Mason University's Center for History and New Media has been using and promoting Wikipedia assignments for some time, first with graduate students and later with undergraduates as well. Andy Carvin, in his blog and on the educational technology H-Net listserv "edtech", has also initiated discussions about Wikipedia in the classroom.

One interesting development with academia beyond the classroom setting is the new Russian History WikiProject. Created by Marshall Poe, it was organized in response to listserv discussions and consists almost entirely of professional Russian historians and graduate students, many of them new users.

WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.

Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Williams works as a visual journalist for the US-based The Tampa Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida. He also has worked as an illustrator and designer at newspapers in Dubuque, Iowa, and Dayton, Ohio.

(← Prev)	Signpost archives	(Next →)

Following the conclusion of the steward elections last week, the Board of Trustees promoted all 12 candidates who had met both the criteria of having at least 30 support votes and an 80% support ratio. Only three of the 15 candidates in the election - Lar, Mzlla, and Taxman - did not reach those criteria and were not promoted, although each of them had at least 75% support. The appointments were first announced by steward and Board member Oscar van Dillen. Of the 12 newly-elected stewards, four had unanimous support: Dbl2010, Redux, M7, and Effeietsanders; six had above 90% support: Shanel (98%), Pathoschild (97%), Guillom (95%), Bastique (91%), Drini (91%), and Darkoneko (90%). The remaining two successful candidates were Cspurrier and MaxSem, who garnered 87% and 84% support, respectively. A tabular summary of the election is also available.

As of press time, it was not immediately clear if any current stewards would lose their status. Although most stewards had no opposition or negative comments, several stewards did have users opposing their status at the confirmation page. The process of confirmation was detailed as having "the current and newly elected stewards... consider complaints left on this page, and choose to remove stewardship as necessary taking into account both the comments left by community and their own perspective and understanding of the job." Van Dillen, when asked about the issue, commented that the re-confirmation was "a matter for the stewards/community to decide, and not [an issue] for the board."

The Wikimedia Foundation's fundraiser continued this week; as of press time, over US$341,000 had been raised. This amount does not include matching funds donations raised last week.

After the Maltese Wikipedia surpassed 1,000 articles this week, two milestones were reached. First, all Wikipedias in official languages of the European Union now have 1,000 or more articles each. There are presently 20 official languages of the European Union, although three more languages will be added after 1 January, 2007. Each of the Wikipedias in all 23 languages now have greater than 1,000 articles each. Maltese is the official language of Malta and is spoken by approximately 370,000 people. The Maltese Wikipedia also became the third Wikipedia of a Semitic language to reach 1,000 articles; the Amharic Wikipedia became the fourth-such Wikipedia to reach the milestone soon after. The largest of the Semitic languages by number of speakers are Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, and Tigrinya. Each of the first three now have over 1,000 articles each, although the Tigrinya Wikipedia only has seven articles as of press time.

• The Latin Wikipedia has reached 8,000 pages.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 45,000 edits.
• The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 6,000 pages.
• The West Flemish Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Asturian Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Bishnupriya Manipuri Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Persian Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.
• The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 60,000 entries.
• The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 25,000 registered users.
• The Amharic Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Maltese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 30,000 registered users.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 44,000 edits.
• The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 total pages.
• The Czech Wikisource has reached 1,000 text units.
• The Portuguese Wikisource has reached 6,000 text units.
• The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 registered users.

Time named "You" the Person of the Year for 2006 and Wikipedia was prominently mentioned by Time in the article. Time defined "You" as the Internet users whose efforts in creating content is revolutionizing the dissemination and creation of information. The article also cited Wikipedia as the source for historical information on the World Wide Web. See also coverage of the honor in The Boston Globe and other outlets.

A story in Yahoo!'s business section reported that Nielsen BuzzMetrics released a "Top 10 Cited Wikipedia Entries in 2006." Topping the list was Web 2.0, Steve Irwin, Mark Foley scandal, Blog, and Ajax. iTWire reported on the release by noting that technology related topics were the most popular entries on Wikipedia.

San Francisco Bay Guardian reports on the formation of WikiChix. The article states that the group was formed in response to "how male-dominated Wikipedia has become." A related mailing list was briefly hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, but is now hosted by Wikia.

TechNewsWorld reports on the creation of Scholarpedia, tagged the first "free peer-reviewed encyclopedia." Although it reports that "initial response may be, not another Wikipedia wannabe!...Scholarpedia could be very different." The article claims Scholarpedia "is not as elitist as Citizendium," but each article has "a 'curator,' who approves all changes..."

Jimmy Wales continued to get coverage in many news outlets. The Orlando Sentinel carried a story about Wales and the history of Wikipedia. Wales' new search engine, Wikiasari, was covered by The Times. The search engine will use Wiki-like technology to rank websites in the search results. The Times also carried an article on Wales' "next project - a free internet education for everyone."

• BBC - "Wikipedia" was one of the top 10 Google searches.
• Marketwatch.com - Wikipedia takes advantage of the "I-am-somebody" desire to be recognized in each of us.
• The Sydney Morning Herald - Wikipediaholism makes it to a list of internet slang.
• American Chronicle - Reports that rumors about Halle Berry's new CD appear to be a hoax which utilized Wikipedia to propagate.

• The Los Angeles Times - Wikipeda is cited as the source of the first use of "regifting."
• The Ottawa Sun - Article on hockey attributes source as "AP and Wikipedia."

• Many media outlets continued to cover the announcement of free web hosting from Wikia. ...Free as in Free beer; Wikipedia founder's next move: Free hosting; Wikipedia founders open community content site; etc.
• The Tyee - More coverage of Citizendium and Larry Sanger's efforts to create an online encyclopedia.

Three users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Dina (nom), Canadian-Bacon (nom), and Agathoclea (nom).

Fourteen articles were promoted to featured status last week: Bodyline, Hero of Belarus, Kinetoscope, 1995 Pacific hurricane season, Rus' Khaganate, Kitsune, Brabham, Hurricane Erika (2003), Cell nucleus, Charles Darwin, The Boondock Saints, Sei Whale, Hoysala Empire, and Tiridates I of Armenia.

Hero of Belarus was previously a featured article, but was de-featured in June before regaining its featured status this week.

No articles were de-featured last week.

One portal reached featured status last week: Portal:Business and Economics.

Nine lists were featured last week: List of Metal Gear Solid characters, List of Newfoundland and Labrador general elections, List of Encyclicals of Pope John Paul II, Towns of Alberta, List of Canadian Leaders of the Opposition, List of Dartmouth College alumni, List of retired Pacific hurricane names, List of Baja California Peninsula hurricanes, and List of English Football League managers by date of appointment.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Manila Metro Rail Transit System, Muhammad Iqbal, Kengir uprising, Selena, British African-Caribbean community, Torchic, Banksia brownii, and Clement of Dunblane.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Plant cell, Supermarine Spitfire, Cerro de la Silla, gallop, Orthetrum caledonicum, European Squid, Washington Monument, and Crab Nebula.

Two pictures were featured last week:

• 
  Mexican Wolf
• 
  STS-116

On wikis with edit patrolling enabled, users who are able to patrol their own edits now have all their edits marked patrolled. (Rob Church, bug 5411,r18435) After some consternation at certain wikis (especially the Dutch Wikipedia) that allowed all autoconfirmed users — those with accounts more than four days old — to patrol edits, the ability to patrol one's own edits was separated from the ability to patrol others' edits, so it is now possible to only be allowed to patrol others' edits. (Rob Church, r18496)

A new extension, Duplicator, was checked into Subversion. If enabled, it will allow pages to be duplicated, including all history, for purposes such as splitting up articles while preserving contribution history. However, only articles with a limited number of revisions (250 by default) can be duplicated. The extension has not yet been enabled on any wikis. (Rob Church, r18453)

Another new extension, Contributors, was also checked into Subversion. If enabled, it will generate a list of significant contributors to a particular article. The list can be accessed directly or {{included}} in other pages. Some functionality exists for this in the main MediaWiki software, but it is disabled on Wikipedia due to its inefficiency. The extension has not yet been enabled on any wikis. (Rob Church, r18510)

A bug in Safari and other WebKit-based browsers will now be avoided. The bug caused errors to occur in the recently-added "redirect to section" functionality (see archived story), but is fixed in the latest versions of WebKit. Affected browsers will now simply not jump to the correct section. (Brion Vibber, r18459)

The new recent changes counter will now count the length of added substituted templates, signatures, and similar constructions correctly. Previously it would count, for instance, ~~~~ as four characters, when actually many more were inserted. (Rob Church, bug 8329, r18463)

Image captions ending with px now work. Previously they were interpreted as an image width, even if an image width had been previously declared and even if the caption made no sense as an image width (e.g., The IATA code for Air Niugini is PX would be interpreted the same as a width of 0 pixels). (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8335, r18465)

Page names can now no longer include Unicode right-to-left or left-to-right marks, invisible control characters that ensure that left-to-right text can be correctly mixed with right-to-left text such as Hebrew or Arabic. A left-to-right mark is appended to the end of article titles on pages such as Special:Recentchanges to ensure that titles containing right-to-left characters do not display oddly. This was causing problems, because it was easy to copy and paste the title including the invisible mark, rendering it nonfunctional. Now the mark should be ignored, hopefully reducing confusion. (Brion Vibber, bug 3696, r18513)

The "undo" button on the most recent revision now works. Due to a bug in the code, it originally filled the edit box with the current revision's text, not the previous one's. (Brion Vibber, bug 8351, r18546)

CheckUser now has a "reason" field, and it is now possible to check for recent edits by 17-23 CIDR IP address as well as to check for the IP address used recently by a user. (User:Voice of All, bug 5044, r18552)

Several improvements were made to the functioning of language variants, for wikis such as Serbian and Chinese that use more than one script. (Rainman, r18593)

Several interface changes were made:

• A recent change had unintentionally affected the layout of thumbnails. They should now display as they previously did. (Brion Vibber, bug 8326, r18460–r18461)
• A message accidentally removed from Special:Booksources, MediaWiki:Booksources-summary, was re-added, and other regressions were fixed. (Rob Church, r18462, r18469)
• When a user attempts to upload a file with an invalid file extension, now only the part of the extension that was invalid is mentioned in the error message. For instance, if the file extension was .tar.gz, it will be rejected because it ends in .gz, but formerly the user would be told that .tar.gz was the invalid extension. (Thorsten Staerk and Rob Church, bug 6603, r18477)
• The full time and date will now be displayed when viewing a deleted revision. (Rob Church, bug 8271, r18529)
• File sizes will now be displayed in kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes on the file upload screen, not bytes. (Rob Church, bug 8214, r18530)
• Watchlists now display the number of bytes added or removed by each change, just as recent changes does. (Leon Weber, bug 8331, r18542)
• Clicking "watch" or "unwatch" at the top of a page (or in equivalent places, for non-Monobook skins) will now perform the requested action without leaving the page, using AJAX. (Dan Li and Simetrical, bug 7169, r18598)

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

• Finnish (thanks to fi:User:Nikerabbit and Ilmari Karonen)
• French (thanks to Bertrand Grondin)
• German (thanks to The Incredible Raymond and Leon Weber)
• Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
• Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
• Japanese (thanks to Yu Kobayashi)
• Lithuanian (thanks to Edgaras)
• Portuguese (thanks to 555)
• Spanish (thanks to Titoxd)
• Swedish (thanks to Lejonel)

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.

The Arbitration Committee opened six cases this week, including one opened on Christmas Eve, and closed one case. For readers' information, arbitrators elected in the December 2006 elections (Flcelloguy, Kirill Lokshin, Paul August, UninvitedCompany, Jpgordon, FloNight and Blnguyen) will not participate in already-opened cases unless they specifically un-recuse themselves, while those whose terms have expired (Jayjg, Theresa knott, Sam Korn and The Epopt) will continue to participate in cases already opened.

• RPJ: Various users allege that RPJ edits disruptively (although in good faith) on various articles related to conspiracy theories, such as John F. Kennedy Assassination. In response, he denies the allegations, and raised some "practical concerns about arbitration", which seem to regard the legitimacy of the Arbitration Committee bindingly to resolve disputes. Findings of fact have been approved to the effect that RPJ engages in original research and has few contributions that are not disruptive edits to Kennedy assassination articles, and a one-year ban, to be followed by probation, has been enacted.

• Derek Smart: A case involving a dispute over the inclusion of critical material in the Derek Smart article. Various editors on both sides of the dispute claim that the other has violated policy in promoting their case, and some suggest that various accounts (Supreme Cmdr and WarHawkSP inter alia) are in fact used by Smart himself, citing as evidence perceived similarities in their writing styles. These editors deny the allegations.

• Starwood: A case involving links to Starwood Festival-related articles from various pages. Paul Pigman, who brought the case, alleges that Rosencomet "persistently and systematically" added these links, perhaps to an extent that violates WP:SPAM, and that Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999 have harassed users attempting to remove the links. Mattisse confirms that she has been harassed by Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999, but that she has no issue of harassment with Rosencomet himself. Hanuman Das has asked that his name be removed from the request, as "I decline to participate", citing that he has not edited the links since he agreed not to on the 5th of December. Although Arbitration is not a consensual process, he also seems to have exercised the right to vanish. 999 and Ekajati deny the allegations, and allege that Mattisse has used multiple sockpuppets to request the links and then call for their removal. In addition, various users allege that Rosencomet has a WP:COI, as the executive director of the for-profit ACE LLC, which promotes the festival.

• Robert Prechter: A case regarding the behaviour of Rgfolsom and Smallbones on the Socionomics and Robert Prechter pages. Rgfolsom alleges that Smallbones has violated WP:NPOV, WP:CIVIL and WP:DR (by abusing the mediation process), and that he has added "smears, demonstrable falsehoods, and a calculated overemphasis on quotes of critics". In response, Smallbones alleges that Rgfolsom has violated WP:V and WP:NPOV by removing claims critical of Prechter, and adding claims complimentary to him, and WP:COI because he is one of Prechter's employees.

• Husnock: A case involving the actions of Husnock and Morwen, involving a comment made by Husnock, "I would be careful telling a deployed member of the military they shouldn't edit on Wikipedia for whatever reason.", following disputes on various Star Trek-related AfDs, which Morwen considered to be "intimidating", and Husnock alleges that she stated that she was "in fear of her life", and that he has been investigated by real-world bodies regarding it.

• Yoshiaki Omura: Various users, principally Crum375, allege that Richardmalter and alleged sockpuppets have added biased, unsourced material to Bi-Digital O-Ring Test, an alternative medicine technique created by Yoshiaki Omura which was criticised by a New Zealand disciplinary tribunal as lacking scientific basis. However, Richardmalter denies that his pro-Omura edits were either biased or unsourced and claims that the mediation process has supported his position.

• Deltabeignet: SebastianHelm suggests that Deltabeignet's account may have been hijacked due to some edits which he felt were revertions to vandalism. In a somewhat bizarre statement, Deltabeignet denies that he has been hijacked by a vandal but admits that he has violated WP:POINT in an "experiment" to determine possible prejudice towards edits from IPs and offers to request desysopping "if the community wills it".

• Midnight Syndicate: A case brought by Durova involving an edit war on the Midnight Syndicate article. Dionyseus and Skinny McGee allege that GuardianZ has engaged in sockpuppetry and general disruption on the article. He denies the allegations and argues that Dionyseus and Skinny McGee have engaged in similar behaviour. A temporary injunction has been granted placing Dionyseus, Skinny McGee, and GuardianZ on revert parole.

• Naming Conventions: A case regarding a dispute over whether articles without alternative meanings should be disambiguated for the sake of clarity - for example, Never Kill a Boy on the First Date (Buffy episode). While about 80% of involved editors said in a straw poll that it should not be disambiguated, both sides allege that editors on the other have behaved disruptively.

• Iran-Iraq War: A case referred by the mediation committee regarding a dispute on the Iran-Iraq War page. Arbitrator Fred Bauder has proposed a motion dismissing the case for lack of evidence; this proposal has been supported by Dmcdevit and SimonP.

• Brahma Kumaris: A case involving the actions of avyakt7 and 195.82.106.244 (.244) on the Brahma Kumaris Spiritual University article. Avyakt alleges that .244 has defamed Brahma Kumaris in the article but .244 claims that avyakt has misinterpreted the reliable sources policy. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies banning .244 for one year, placing him on probation, and placing the article on article probation.

• Sex Tourism: A case involving a revert war on the Sex tourism article. Remedies have been proposed banning KyndFellow from editing the article, and placing him on probation, with the support of two arbitrators.

• Waldorf education: A case on Rudolf Steiner, Waldorf education and related pages. Fred Bauder has proposed a remedy placing the articles on article probation and this has attracted the support of four other arbitrators.