This week, the Signpost profiles candidates in this year's elections.

Candidates in the December 2007 Arbitration Committee elections were interviewed this week for an election guide, in preparation for the start of the elections on Monday. The elections will run for two weeks, ending on Sunday, 16 December. It is anticipated that Jimbo Wales will make his selections soon afterward, and the newly elected Arbitrators will take their positions on 1 January, 2008.

The election guide is intended to be a brief overview of each candidate's beliefs and experiences. More detailed information about each candidate may be gleaned from their user pages, as well as their responses to questions from other users. Not all candidates have yet replied to our questions; their replies will be added as they are received.

Due to size, the guide has been split up alphabetically, though a page transcluding all sections is available below:

ArbCom candidate profiles:    A-F  |  G-M  |  N-R  |  S-Z  |  All  |  (Withdrawn)

Nominations for the December 2007 Arbitration Committee Elections remain open through 23:59 UTC Friday. This week, Phil Sandifer re-entered the race (having been withdrawn by another user), and FT2, Sam Blacketer, and Will Beback entered the election. Meanwhile, Dreamafter and Durova withdrew from the election, bringing the number of candidates in the election up to 29. Still possible is a significant number of last-minute entries.

Of the five arbitrators whose terms expire this year, only one, Raul654, will stand for re-election. At least these five seats will be open in the elections; no indication has been made as to whether more seats will be opened.

This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Cursive". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

A new ombudsman commission was chosen by Wikimedia Foundation officials this week. Mackensen, Rebecca, and Hei ber will serve a term of approximately a year. They replace Nathan Carter, Steve Dunlop, and Anders Wegge Jakobson, who served from July 2006 through November 2007. Foundation Chair Florence Devouard quoted from m:Ombudsman commission about their duties:

The ombudsman commission is tasked with processing complaints about violations of the privacy policy on any Wikimedia project, in particular concerning the use of CheckUser tools. The ombudsman is tasked with investigating cases of such policy breach or CheckUser abuse for the board in an official manner. They will mediate between the complainant and the respondent (usually a CheckUser, bureaucrat, administrator, or arbitration committee member). When legally necessary, the ombudsman will assist the general counsel, the executive director or the board in handling the case.

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continued this week. In the first four weeks of the fundraiser, about 29,600 people had donated at least US$1, and the Foundation had raised about $903,000.

The addition of a link to the new fundraising blog, updated a few times a week with reasons why visitors should donate, may have played a part in a large increase in donations. From Thursday to Friday, contributions exhibited not only a 59.6% increase in donors, but also a 17.7% increase in average donation. Part of this increase may have been related to the celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States on the Thursday; Thursday's donations were the lowest of the fundraiser.

In large donations, an anonymous donor contributed $2,500 on Monday.

This week, new job openings at the Wikimedia Foundation were added this week. The deadlines of Head of Partnerships, Head of Development, and Chief Financial and Operating Officer were extended to December 15. The position of Treasurer of the Board of Trustees is still open until December 1. Positions of software developer and public outreach are set to open soon.

A discussion is currently underway to change the default move permissions on all wikis to "autoconfirmed", requiring an account to be at least four days old before it can move pages. This setting is already enabled on many large wikis, including the English and German Wikipedias, but is not set on many smaller wikis, which are often the target of vandalism that is not quickly reverted. Most users support this move, but a few have opposed it, arguing that such a decision should be made at the project level.

• The Bikol Wikipedia, Breton Wikiquote, Armenian Wikisource, Limburgish Wikiquote and Finnish Wikinews have been created.
• Steward elections have begun. New stewards are up for election, and current stewards are up for re-confirmation. Summaries of current voting tallies can be found here.
• The Lombard Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.
• The Asturian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• After dropping below the 100-article mark, the Burmese Wikipedia gains its hundredth article.

Wikipedia hosts content attacking Aborigines - The article on Maddington, Western Australia, a suburb in Perth, Australia, was vandalised to contain material offensive to Indigenous Australians. The offensive material was retained for several hours, and was contributed anonymously. Angela Beesley stated that she found the vandalism "unacceptable" and added that it was up to the community to find the problems with referencing and fix them.

School officials unite in banning Wikipedia - The librarian at Great Meadows Middle School in New Jersey has blocked access to Wikipedia from computers, because the teachers do not see it as an authoritative source given that it can be edited by anyone. She has put up signs all over the library that declare "Just say no to Wikipedia" - a play on the slogan used by Nancy Reagan against drugs.

Other recent mentions of Wikipedia in the online media include:

• Wikipedia work becomes college class assignment - A professor found that her experiment to have students contribute to Wikipedia as a class assignment was "transformative".
• A group approach to teaching teachers - Curriki, an online curriculum resource that intends to open-source textbooks and vets contributions with retired teachers, invites comparisons with Wikipedia.
• Personal Computing: The Threat of "Typosquatting" - Wikipedia is subject to "typosquatting", where others register domain names that are plausible typos of Wikimedia domains and host advertisements and spyware.

(In case you are not aware, Planet Wikimedia is a blog aggregator, for even more commentary on Wikimedia and its projects.)

WikiProject Education in Australia is a WikiProject dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to education and schools in Australia. It is a very new project, having been started on 9 September 2007 by Twenty Years (talk · contribs). As a result of its recent creation, it currenly has four active members, and would benefit from community support.

Each month, the project's members work together to improve an article about Australian education that is in need of help. The current collaboration for the month of November is Brunswick South Primary School, which recently survived an articles for deletion nomination. The requested article for next month's collaboration is Corpus Christi College, Perth.

Only having been in existence for just over two months, the Education in Australia WikiProject has made substantial progress in improving articles within its scope. Currently, it has three Good Articles: Aquinas College, Perth, Scotch College, Perth, and Presbyterian Ladies' College, Sydney. It also has a former featured article, Caulfield Grammar School, in its main subject area. In total, the project has amassed 765 stubs, 734 "Start-class" articles, and 61 "B-class" articles.

• A Request for comment has been initiated recently with the article St. Mark's College (University of Adelaide) as its focus. Its participants are discussing the notability and necessity of including a story about a murder in it.
• It is suspected that the article Newington College has sockpuppet issues that are affecting its content.
• At Template talk:Infobox Aust school private, improvements to the infobox are currently being discussed.

WikiProject Education in Australia has four parent projects, and one sister project.

• Parent Projects:
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Education
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Colleges and Universities
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Australia
• Sister:
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Education in Canada

If you are interested in topics within the project's scope, you can join it by adding your name to its members list. Since it is a very new and small project, it could always use some help.

Twelve users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Gaius Cornelius (nom), Orangemike (nom), DMacks (nom), Spebi (nom), Nikki311 (nom), SkierRMH (nom), Eliz81 (nom), Kathryn NicDhàna (nom), Tbo 157 (nom), Royalbroil (nom), ChrisTheDude (nom), and Bkell (nom).

Eight bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: MenoBot (task request), AfDBot (task request), ImageTaggingBot (task request), ImageBacklogBot (task request), R. Hillgentleman (task request), El bot de la dieta (task request), SXT-404Bot (task request), and SatyrBot (task request).

Twenty articles were promoted to featured status last week: The Green (Dartmouth College) (nom), Manchester (nom), Presque Isle State Park (nom), South Side (Chicago) (nom), Youngstown, Ohio (nom), 1999 Sydney hailstorm (nom), Harriet Tubman (nom), Ulysses (poem) (nom), But I'm a Cheerleader (nom), Superman film series (nom), One Hot Minute (nom), Vega (nom), Nancy Reagan (nom), Bobby Eaton (nom), Karmichael Hunt (nom), John Knox (nom), Arthur Morris (nom), Marcus Trescothick (nom), Crazy Taxi (series) (nom), and The Joy of Sect (nom).

Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status last week: The Corrs discography (nom), List of Swedish-speaking and bilingual municipalities of Finland (nom), List of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes (nom), Nine Inch Nails discography (nom), List of members of Stortinget 2005-2009 (nom), List of birds of Thailand (nom), List of Canadian Victoria Cross recipients (nom), List of Kaze no Stigma episodes (nom), and Bradford City A.F.C. seasons (nom).

One Featured topic was promoted last week: National Hockey League awards (nom).

No portals or sounds were featured last week.

Four articles were de-featured last week: X Window System (nom), Marshall, Texas (nom), Indo-Greek Kingdom (nom), and Sociocultural evolution (nom).

No pictures, 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: Sophie Blanchard, 7 World Trade Center, Francium, Red Barn Murder, Surface weather analysis, Ordinances of 1311, and Cillian Murphy.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Northfleet, Buchenwald, Lyndon B. Johnson, Pupae, Tōyō Miyatake , Nesjavellir geothermal power plant, and George IV of the United Kigdom.

Five pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.

• 
  Louvre (nom)
• 
  T206 Honus Wagner (nom)
• 
  Olympic Stadium (nom)
• 
  Snail (nom)
• 
  Cessna 182 (nom)

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.4 (a8dd895), 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.

(none relevant)

• The new interface messages MediaWiki:Createaccount-title and MediaWiki:Createaccount-text have been added, which control the title and content of the email that's sent out when an account is created for another user via Wikipedia:Request an account; previously, they were the same as the password reminder emails. (r27643, bug 3973)
• The new shortcut Special:Listbots has been added as a redirect to Special:Listusers/bot. (Redirects in the Special: namespace need a developer to set up.) (r27704, bug 12028)
• When visiting Special:Upload for a previously deleted image (for instance, after clicking on an image redlink), the image's deletion log is now shown on that page, the same way as for non-Image:-namespace pages; this is customisable via MediaWiki:Upload-wasdeleted. (r26175, bug 6909)
• api.php now honours the 'maxlag' parameter the same way as non-API accesses to wiki pages do. (r27630, bug 11206)
• A drop-down menu of common deletion reasons is now available in the software to administrators, so that scripts no longer need be used for this purpose, the same way as with block messages; the list is customisable via MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown. (r27832, bug 9633)

• Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.

The arbitration committee opened five cases this week, and closed two cases.

• Railpage Australia: A case involving alleged disruptive editing and sockpuppetry on Railpage Australia. As a result of the case, Tezza1 was banned for one year.
• Martinphi-ScienceApologist: A case involving alleged POV-pushing and incivility on pseudoscience-related articles. As a result of the case, the editing of Martinphi and ScienceApologist was restricted, and ScienceApologist limited to one account.

• Durova and Jehochman: A case involving the actions of Durova and Jehochman, and in particular a controversial block by Durova of !! as a sockpuppet, based on evidence she refused to reveal on-wiki, saying that she was concerned that to do so could give puppetmasters too much information on her investigative techniques. This evidence was provided to some administrators, and was later leaked, with some users, including the Arbitration Committee, arguing that the evidence was insufficient for blocking !!. Durova has resigned her adminship, and, in what appears to be an exceptionally quick resolution of the case, remedies have been proposed, admonishing Durova to exercise greater care when issuing blocks, admonishing all participants to act with proper decorum, and noting that Durova must go through normal channels to regain adminship.
• Privatemusings: A case involving alleged sockpuppetry and BLP violations by Privatemusings. Remedies limiting Privatemusings to one account, prohibiting him from editing biographies of living persons, and banning him for either three months or one year have the support of five to seven arbitrators.
• Anonimu: A case involving alleged revert warring and incivility by Anonimu, who has not yet commented in the case. Some others also allege that Sceptre, who brought the case has stalked Anonimu.
• Episodes and characters: A case involving alleged misconduct with regard to the notability of episodes and characters from television series.
• Winter Soldier 2: A case involving alleged misconduct on Winter Soldier-related articles.

• Macedonia: A case involving a dispute between editors from Greece and from the Republic of Macedonia over the use of "Macedonia" in Wikipedia. Remedies have been proposed with the support of four arbitrators permitting sanctions to be imposed by any uninvolved administrator.
• Asgardian-Tenebrae: A case involving conflict between Asgardian and Tenebrae. A remedy restricting Asgardian's editing has the support of three arbitrators.
• Ferrylodge: A case involving a community ban of Ferrylodge on the now-defunct Community sanction noticeboard, but which User:B has, in accordance with Wikipedia:Community ban, stated that he is willing to overturn. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies, with the support of five to eight arbitrators, disapproving the ban, but restricting Ferrylodge's editing and instructing him not to interact with Bishonen or KillerChihuahua.

• Eyrian: A case involving checkuser-confirmed sockpuppetry by admin Eyrian. If closed, Eyrian would be desysopped, and banned until he explains himself to the committee.