Article Alerts back from the dead; plus news in brief
Article Alerts
The Article Alerts system was originally conceived by Headbomb in July 2008. Its original purpose was to check for articles nominated for deletion, proposed for deletion, placed under peer review and so on, then create reports for subscribing WikiProjects on a daily basis. B. Wolterding accepted the request, and started coding ArticleAlertbot, which was operated from 19 September 2008 until 6 April 2010 by Legoktm. During its life, the bot had its scope expanded to cover nearly all systematized discussions on Wikipedia, from stub types for deletion to copyright violations. It also allowed for various customization, such as choosing what to include in the reports. At its peak, the bot delivered reports to over 400 Wikiprojects, with an additional 200 or so taskforces and workgroups.
Sudden stop
The bot came to a sudden stop after a change in Wikipedia's API, and needed to be updated. By then however, B. Wolterding had been missing for several months, and all attempts to contact him were met with silence. Fingers were crossed for him to come back, but there was no such luck. A few attempts at revival occurred during the summer, but none worked until Arlen22 obtained the source code from Legoktm in September this year. With Joe Gazz84 as the new coder and operator, things were looking good. However, after about three months no tangible progress had been made, since Joe Gazz84 had been plagued by compiling issues.
Rebirth
In early December, Headbomb and H3llkn0wz decided to rewrite the bot from scratch. After an 8-month hiatus, the Article Alerts system is finally getting some activity. The bot works differently from the old one, and as a result the subscription method has been redesigned. Previously, projects and taskforces subscribed by placing {{ArticleAlertbotSubscription}} on the project's main page ("Wikipedia:WikiProject Foobar"), and a report would be delivered at ("Wikipedia:WikiProject Foobar/Article alerts").
Now the subscriptions are centralized at the Wikipedia:Article alerts/Subscription list, using a different template {{ArticleAlertSubscription}}. Most of the projects have had their subscriptions imported (see full list), and aren't required to do anything at all. These projects recently received new Article Alerts reports (problems can be reported here). Other subscriptions (the "less standard" ones) are in the process of being imported (pending subscriptions) and their reports have not yet been updated.
The bot is currently in trial and far from finalized. Even so, the "core" features are present and would be of use to most projects out there, even without the bells and whistles. Projects who wish to subscribe can do so simply by following the instructions found on {{ArticleAlertSubscription}}, or by making a request at the subscription list's talk page. General questions should be asked at the Article Alerts' talk page.
Briefly
- German chapter to support legal action against free license violations: Wikimedia Germany has announced that it will start to support Wikimedians in taking legal action to enforce the free license terms of their contributions (possibly including cases such as missing author attribution, or the publication of Wikimedia content without naming the license at all). This represents a change from the chapter's previous, more passive approach, where it would only have put Wikimedians in touch with recommended lawyers. Still, the announcement by the chapter's chair Sebastian Moleski cautioned that it would only get involved in test cases which are likely to be of wider importance, answering unsolved legal questions about free licenses in Germany, and that it would need to take differing interests into account: "An individual interested author or photographer might place most importance in preserving his personal copyright. In particular, photographers sometimes offer alternative, fee-based licenses to reusers who did not follow the [original] license. Materially supporting such individual court cases would mean that pursuing individual damage claims becomes the primary goal, not the support of free knowledge [i.e. the chapter's purpose]." A discussion about the details has been started in the chapter's non-public forum.
- Old Wikipedia revisions found: Tim Starling, a developer and system administrator working for the Wikimedia Foundation, announced on Tuesday that he had recovered backups of Wikipedia pages from February, March and August 2001, which, he said, were assumed to be permanently lost (covered in full in the Technology report).
- WikiLeaks fallout continues: A request for comment has been filed over the use of classified documents on Wikipedia as the whistle-blowers' website WikiLeaks continues to publish 250,000 cables between US diplomats. The Signpost covers this story in full in the Discussion report.
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