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| Volume 3, Issue 43 | 22 October 2007 | About the Signpost |
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This Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation's fall fundraiser opened. The fundraiser is set to last two months; no goal for the fundraiser was set publicly. Further, instead of assessing the success of the fundraiser through amount of money, it is decided that the success be assessed by the number of people who donated.
So far, the fundraiser has raised an estimated US$26,600 in just over 14 hours. As of press time, 910 individual donations have been received so far; the largest single donations so far were two separate, anonymous $500 donations made on Tuesday.
The fundraising notice, linked from all pages on the English Wikipedia, caused some controversy at the beginning of the fundraiser, because it contained a scrolling marquee element that some users found distracting. The marquee was removed and replaced with a single quote that changes upon page reload; trustee Erik Moeller commented, "Surely I agree with you that running a marquee wasn't a particularly good idea. :-) I think in a few weeks/months we'll all laugh about it. ... Getting attention is always going to be a balancing act between success & irritation."
In related news, a preliminary budget distribution has been released. This distribution for FY2007-2008 estimates spending for the year at $4,611,000, in the following areas:
The fiscal year runs from 1 July, 2007 through 30 June, 2008. Advisor Sue Gardner commented on various aspects of the budget. On the topic of commission work, which is not reflected directly in the budget, Gardner said, "We are setting aside a small amount of money to commission work that can't be done by the staff, for either capacity or expertise reasons. For example, we've occasionally been hiring project managers, developers, legal firms, and analysts/advisors/consultants of various kinds."
On the topic of "Program Services", meanwhile, Gardner explained:
In the non-profit world, "program services" generally refers to initiatives designed to deliver core-mission services. So for the Foundation, for example, it would include partnering with NGOs to get Wikipedia materials into schools in the developing world, or staging Wikipedia Academies to strengthen the smaller-language projects. In this budget, the "program services" allocation will fund, for example, positions dedicated to partnerships development, volunteer coordination and public outreach. Typically in non-profits, the higher the percentage of the overall budget dedicated to program services, the better. That's because most charities want to reduce administrative overhead and reserve as much of their resources as possible for mission-related service delivery. In our case however, we would likely consider that the "Technology" portion of the budget part of core services delivery as well, since that money pays for bandwidth, servers, and so on. So, the fact that only 4% of our budget goes to program services doesn't really suggest that WMF underallocates towards core service delivery.
An analysis of Category:Living people indicates that biographies occupy an increasing proportion of the total article count as Wikipedia grows. With the coverage expanding to explore how far the much-debated concept of notability reaches, for some lesser figures there also comes the sense that having a Wikipedia article is a mark of achievement.
The latter phenomenon has now been treated in a Reuters article headlined, "Wikipedia page the latest status symbol". As it describes, for entertainment and media personalities who are not particularly famous but have some sort of following, the presence of a Wikipedia article validates the significance of their achievements. In contrast with the problem of self-promoters trying to boost visibility by creating articles directly, the story focused on people who generally respect the conflict of interest guidelines. It also highlighted the disconcerting effect on the subject when an article's deletion is mooted (although critics who object to Wikipedia's impact might wish the opposite for themselves).
Writing such biographies seems to be a powerful incentive for Wikipedia contributors, as suggested by data compiled by Greg Maxwell and reported on the English Wikipedia mailing list Tuesday, 16 October. His report indicated that about 11% of the articles in the encyclopedia are about living people (and therefore governed by the special policies related to such subjects). Or to be more precise, as Maxwell put it, "11% of non-redirect articles pages are tagged with Category:Living people."
Not only is the proportion that high, it has apparently been growing steadily for several years. As the chart above shows, articles whose subjects are presently alive remained fairly steady around 4% for about two years. A sharp drop in late 2002 is associated with the use of Derek Ramsey's Rambot to create articles for US localities in bulk based on census data. (The initial spike, Maxwell guessed, is not reliable data and may be based on the conversion script used to transition to MediaWiki.) Since then, these articles have multiplied markedly faster than the rest of the Wikipedia corpus, leading Maxwell to wonder why Rambot might have set off such a reaction.
Despite arguments that editing activity on Wikipedia has slowed down overall, the downward slope at the end of the graph is not necessarily significant. When an article is started, it commonly does not have categories, which are more likely to be added by subsequent editors as time passes. Data pulled in this fashion from newer articles is thus less likely to be stable or complete.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "George Stroumboulopoulos" and "The Hour". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Robert Braunwart (Rbraunwa) died on Oct. 14 of melanoma, based on a comment on Rbraunwa's user page. Robert was born in Richland, Washington in 1948 and grew up in Moses Lake, Washington. He lived for many years in Oaxaca, México and Los Angeles, California. He attended Reed College as a National Merit Scholar before transferring to the University of Washington. Robert contributed almost 12,000 edits and hundreds of articles to Wikipedia, primarily on the viceroys of New Spain. Of these new articles, at least 15 were honored as Did you know selections.
Two Associated Press journalists sued officials of the U.S. state of Arkansas, in response to the denial of a Freedom of Information Act request to determine which state computers had been used in various Wikipedia edits. According to the article, one edit removed controversial information about former Governor and current Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, while another reverted vandalism in current governor Mike Beebe's article.
The Free Image Search Tool (FIST) is the successor to both WatchFlickr and MissingImages. The new tool will look for free images for articles (manual list, categories) or to replace non-free/placeholder images. It currently uses
More image sources will be added in time. There is also a JavaScript tool that adds FIST links to the toolbox for articles (find images for this article), images (replace this image with a free one), and categories (find images for the articles in this category).
WatchFlickr and MissingImages have been turned off and redirected to FIST.
Private Eye magazine has spun off its one-time article "Wikipedia Whispers" into a regular column. The column generally covers violations of the autobiography guidelines by politicians (this week it mentions Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley claiming falsely that the Guardian had libeled him on Wikipedia), corporations and journalists, although other Wikipedia-related news is also covered sometimes (such as inaccuracies in obituaries of Ronnie Hazlehurst sourced from a vandalised Wikipedia article).
A very small statistical analysis performed by checkuser Raul654 showed that very few new users had previously edited an article from the same IP address. In response to a question on Slashdot, Raul654 sampled ten recent users from the new user log. Of these ten, only one had edited prior to registering. No data was released on whether the users made any edits after registering. The study draws from a small sample, making its margin of error relatively high.
WikiProject League of Copyeditors is a WikiProject that is dedicated to copy-editing articles on Wikipedia, or correcting grammatical, spelling, or stylistic errors within them. It was started on 22 November 2006 by Trusilver (talk · contribs), and originally had ten members. Currently, it has grown in popularity, and, having 228 active members and 71 inactive members, it is one of Wikipedia's largest maintenance projects.
Wikipedia articles needing copy edit
2,435 |
The WikiProject has made a very good deal of progress in copy-editing, as evidenced by the time line on its main page, completing hundreds of articles, but as over 2,000 still remain, they will require a good deal of help to completely clear out the backlog.
If an editor consistently impresses with excellent copy-editing, the project has its own barnstar that you can award that user. Its syntax is {{subst:The Copyeditor's Barnstar|message ~~~~}}.
To help the project, you can add your name to its members list and join. Also, articles that need work can be found at Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit, Wikipedia:Pages needing attention, and Wikipedia:WikiProject League of Copyeditors/proofreading.
Five users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Jéské Couriano (nom), Kizor (nom), Hiberniantears (nom), Hut 8.5 (nom), and Tikiwont (nom).
Five bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: EagleAstroidBot (task request), PxBot (task request), Giggabot (task request), Rschen7754bot (task request), and DeliveryBot (task request).
No articles were promoted to featured status last week.
Eight lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of Florida hurricanes (nom), List of Claymore episodes (nom), The Simpsons (season 6) (nom), The Simpsons (season 8) (nom), Red Hot Chili Peppers discography (nom), List of U2 awards (nom), Uncle Tupelo discography (nom), and List of WCW World Heavyweight Champions (nom).
One portal was promoted to featured status last week: Portal:Heavy metal (nom).
No topics or sounds were featured last week.
One article was de-featured last week: History of post-Soviet Russia (nom).
Two pictures were de-featured last week: Image:Buddhabrot-deep.jpg (nom), and Image:St Helens from Monitor Ridge feather.jpg (nom)
No lists, portals, topics, or sounds were de-featured last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: John Mayer, Truthiness, Barnard's Star, Larrys Creek, England national rugby union team, George I of Greece, and Enzyme kinetics.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: The Rhodes Colossus, German forces sweep into Czechoslovakia, Hadrosauroidea superfamily, Milky Way, Child Soldier, Azulejo, and Kiwifruit.
Nine pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
The Arbitration Committee accepted two new cases this week, and closed six cases.
