Article Incubator, Wikipedians take Manhattan, new features in testing, and much more

Wikipedia:Article Incubator, a space for the development of new articles with potential, has been launched by User:Fritzpoll and User:GTBacchus. The aim of the incubator is to save articles from deletion if they show the potential to meet Wikipedia standards. It is suggested as a better solution than userfication as it allows collaborative editing and improvement to continue, and avoids issues over ownership where there are multiple contributors.

User:Fritzpoll says: "We have two major problems around good-faith new articles that aren't up to our standards: the need to get them out of the mainspace and the desire not to bite new editors. The Article Incubator should help with both and we'll take articles from any venue where it is deemed appropriate: CSD, PROD, AfD, AfC, etc." The project is currently looking for more editors to help develop incubated articles.

Wikipedia Takes Manhattan is a planned scavenger hunt and free content photography contest coordinated with Columbia University and New York University students and The Open Planning Project, aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and Streetswiki articles covering the wondrous sights of the isle of Manhattan, and all across the Five Boroughs of New York City.

Scheduled for Saturday, 10 October 2009, this event will be a sequel to last spring's Wikipedia Takes Manhattan (WTM-1) and last fall's Wikis Take Manhattan (WTM-2) event. Participants may register their team here.

Full story: LiquidThreads in Beta

On Friday, Wikimedia contract developer Andrew Garrett announced an open beta test of David McCabe's LiquidThreads extension, described as "a next-generation discussion system for MediaWiki". The extension, originally developed as a Google Summer of Code project, replaces talk pages with a full-featured forum system, facilitating more organised and effective discussion.

Full story: Technology report

The second release of features from the Wikimedia usability team was released this week, codenamed Babaco. The features enhance the editing window and editing toolbar, and can be enabled through User preferences, by going to the 'Editing' tab and selecting 'Experimental features.'

In today's online announcement of the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Prize committee used free photos from Wikimedia Commons to depict two of the three prize winners, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider. The captions mention the "Attribution Share Alike 3.0" license and duly credit the photos to "Gerbil", a user on Commons and the German Wikipedia who took them in March 2009 at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

Since last week the second largest Wikipedia has been left without a central institution for conflict resolution, after seven members of the arbitration committee ("Schiedsgericht") resigned at once, leaving only two active arbitrators, below the minimum of five. The resignation statements cited multiple reasons, among them internal conflicts, lack of a clear mandate in certain matters, and lack of authority within the community. The German Wikipedia had introduced an ArbCom in April 2007, at a time when such an institution already existed on ten other Wikimedia projects (some of which were consulted about their experiences). Discussion is ongoing, with many users opining that electing new arbitrators won't be enough to solve the problem and that some sort of reform is needed. In April 2009, the Spanish Wikipedia voted to abolish its ArbCom ("Comité de Resolución de Conflictos") altogether.

• A transcript of this week's staff office hours chat with Rand Montoya, WMF Head of Community Giving, is now posted. Montoya answered questions regarding the economic downturn, improving the geographic tracking of donations, and the impending 2 November launch of the Annual Fundraiser.
• Liam Wyatt of the Wikipedia Weekly podcast has posted the first part of a farewell interview with outgoing Chief Technology Officer Brion Vibber. (See also last week's coverage in the Signpost)
• Wikimedia XML data dumps are now part of the Amazon Web Services Public Data Sets.
• Strategic planning IRC office hours will be held this week from 04:00 to 05:00 UTC on Wednesday 7 October.
• Wikizine #119 has been posted.

• The Armenian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Serbian Wikinews has reached 15,000 news reports, overtaking the English Wikinews to become the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles).

• 3 October 2005: Speedy deletion of copyright violations approved
• 3 October 2005: The English Wikipedia reaches 750,000 articles
• 1 October 2007: RSS feed for RecentChanges added to all pages

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In this issue

5 October 2009 (all comments)

New talk pages

Sockpuppet scandal

News and notes

In the news

Discussion report

WikiProject report

Features and admins

Arbitration report

Technology report

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• Seeing a photo credited to a "Gerbil" on the Nobel Prize site is very amusing. :) Rockfang (talk) 07:03, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
• I think we can expect to see the resignation of the German and the abolition of the Spanish ArbComs having an effect here. There's been considerable controversy generated this year by the en ArbCom. The current governance model is failing. --Hammersoft (talk) 17:30, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that in policy discussion it can be very useful to examine the experiences of other projects in analogous matters. However, it also has to be said that there exist considerable differences between arbcoms on different projects. In the article I already alluded to the late founding of the German arbcom. And it seems that at least the "lack of authority" concerns would apply less here on en:. To to quote Tinz, a longtime admin on de: (and member of the Wikimedia Foundation's ombudsman commission): "[On the English Wikpedia] they have arbcom problems which are very different from ours (my impression: The arbcom institution is recognized by the community as an authority, has much more power than the Schiedsgericht ever had, but a few individual members cause petty scandals every now and then)."[1]. Regards, HaeB (talk) 22:02, 6 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]