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Technology Report
Usability beta supplemental release
On the Wikimedia Tech Blog, Trevor Pascal announced that the Usability Team is preparing a supplemental release that will "bring more stability and functionality" to the current Babaco usability beta. The largest change is a switch away from the previous HTML textarea to an HTML iframe and a special design mode supported by modern browsers. This will allow for future functionality such as collapsible templates and syntax highlighting.
Other improvements include a more accurate table of contents with controls for expanding, collapsing, and resizing, a link dialog that intelligently detects whether the user intends to make an internal or external link, and language specific icons for features like bolding and italics. According to the post, the upgrades will be deployed "in the coming days".
Software enhancements
The following changes were made to the MediaWiki software this week. There will be a delay of up to a few months before changes take effect on Wikimedia wikis.
- Enable creation of templates that substitute their contents when the template itself is substituted. (Bug 22297)
- Make information on a global user's unified accounts available through the API. (Bug 22312)
Bots approved
Three new bot tasks were approved this past week.
- KittyBot – Recategorize pages in categories renamed via CFD.
- RjwilmsiBot (Task 2) – Tag redirect pages with various templates specified at WP:TMR.
- WildBot (Task 3) – Check pages with links to sections of other articles to ensure that the section header or other anchor actually exists, and tag the linking article if not.
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New CTO, Britain Loves Wikipedia, Telefónica partnership, Multimedia and more
Danese Cooper hired as CTO
Danese Cooper has been hired as the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer (CTO), according to an announcement by Sue Gardner. Cooper has a long history of involvement with open-source projects, leading open source projects at Sun Microsystems, then Intel, and most recently REvolution Computing.
The announcement was covered by tech news outlets, including CNET. According to User:Steven Walling, Cooper will be the only female CTO of a top-10 website. Cooper, who starts on 4 February, fills the gap left by the departure of long-time CTO Brion Vibber (see previous story).
Britain loves Wikipedia
Britain Loves Wikipedia, a drive to increase Commons photographs of British museum content, officially began on 31 January. The month-long competition and series of events began at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and will continue across the United Kingdom throughout February according to the official Wikimedia UK press release. Numerous prizes will be offered for the best photography. The event's website has more details.
Telefónica partnership
Wikimedia has signed a partnership deal with Telefónica, one of the largest mobile phone companies in the world, serving Europe and the Americas. According to the press release and press release questions and answers page, the deal will include co-branded content, including the "development of mobile & TV applications using knowledge from Wikimedia’s projects", and access to Wikipedia on mobile phones.
This is the second deal with a large multinational phone company that Wikimedia has formed, following last year's deal with Orange Telecom (see previous story). Telefónica was also a sponsor of Wikimania 2009.
Strategic planning recommendations
The recommendations developed by the various strategy project task forces have been posted. (See related story).
Multimedia usability project updates
Neil Kandalgaonkar has joined the multimedia usability team. Additionally, an update on the multimedia usability project was posted to the Wikimedia Foundation blog.
The Multimedia Usability project has also issued a call for proposals for professional usability and user experience studies of the file upload process on Wikimedia projects. The deadline for proposals is 10 February.
An office hours to discuss the project will be held on IRC on 4 February, from 16:00 to 17:00 UTC; see the office hours page for more.
Wiki conferences
Two Wikipedia-related academic conferences are coming up: WikiSym (which is being held in conjunction with Wikimania in Gdańsk, Poland from 7–9 July) and the 2nd part of the "Critical Point of View" conference (CPOV), to be held in Amsterdam, 26–27 March. WikiSym has an open call for papers, while CPOV is seeking contributions to a reader scheduled for 2011.
Briefly
- Following up on last week's article on birth and death trends in Wikipedia biographies, Andrew Gray (User:Shimgray) has a blog post extending the analysis to include German, Spanish, French and Czech Wikipedias.
- Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, posted her September and October reports to the Board of Trustees.
- The deadline for listing a bid for Wikimania 2011 is 8 February. Bidding cities then have until 29 March to provide their bid information (venue, team, etc.)
- Magnus Manske posted a related places script to the toolserver. It plots related articles with coordinates onto Google Maps.
- The Free Culture Conference 2010 is scheduled for 13–14 February in Washington, D.C.; the conference will have a focus on global access to knowledge.
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Arbitration Report
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week and closed one, leaving two open.
Open cases
- Chabad movement (Week 4): A case opened to examine accusations of biased editing and combat on articles related to Judaism's Chabad movement. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
- MZMcBride II (Week 2): A case opened to look into allegations of misconduct by MZMcBride with regards to BLPs and Thekohser. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
Recently closed
- Tothwolf: A case opened to examine the behavior of four editors: Tothwolf, JBsupreme, Miami33139, and Theserialcomma. Tothwolf was placed under a civility restriction, while Miami33139 and JBsupreme were both rebuked (both being cautioned to abide by best deletion practices, and the latter to avoid incivility and personal attacks). As this case was active when Stephen Bain's term as an arbitrator expired, he retired from the Arbitration Committee shortly after its conclusion. (Notification for the case, Notification for Bain's retirement).
Amendments
- Speed of light: An amendment to this case makes exceptions to the topic ban upon Brews ohare so that he can edit and discuss the images in that article with regards to featured article candidacies.
Motions
- Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern European mailing list: A pair of motions amend the topic ban on Radeksz so that he may create a category for and add sources to unreferenced Polish biographies and authorize three users to act as proxies for Piotrus with regards to Lech Wałęsa's Good Article nomination.
- In lieu of a full case, the Arbitration Committee passed a motion to desysop Craigy144 due to his unresponsiveness to concerns that several of his contributions are copyright violations.
Miscellaneous
- The BASC allowed an appeal from Green Squares.
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