Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/In the media
MediaWiki 1.16 approaching, Wikimedia Mobile, new MediaWiki video player progressing, user-agent madness
MediaWiki 1.16 approaching
There used to be a time that Wikipedia was always running the latest and greatest version of the MediaWiki software. In the last year however, this proved to be unmanageable and Wikipedia switched to a stable version, plus those fixes that are required to keep the websites running and of course the new work of the Usability project. For the past few months Tim Starling has been working hard to review all the latest code from MediaWiki, in order to release MediaWiki 1.16 and to deploy this for all the WikiMedia projects. Last week Tim announced that he had created a 1.16 branch. That basically means that Tim has almost caught up, and that no new features that are developed at this point will make it into the next version of the software. Only bugfixes will be allowed from now on. The new version of MediaWiki should be deployed in the next few weeks. (Wikitech-l mailing list announcement)
Wikimedia Mobile
The Mobile version of the Wikipedia websites is slowly progressing. In the past weeks support for language variants for the Serbian and Chinese languages was added, and languages that are written right-to-left were finally properly supported.[1] The translatewiki.net community has been hard at work with translating the software in various languages and the software is almost fully translated for 69 languages now.[2] If you want to help your language, read the instructions on Meta.
New MediaWiki video player is progressing
In a blog post, Wikipedia editor TheDJ [who is also the Technology report author for this week] writes about his experience using the new HTML5 video player that has been in development. The video player has recently gained fullscreen support, and allows for subtitles to be added to videos. The work is a donation by the company Kaltura who are lending their developer Michael Dale to work on the project. The player can be easily tested with this test video, or by enabling the mwEmbed Gadget in your preferences.
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Initial view of the player -
Selection menu of subtitles -
Subtitles beneath the video
User-agent madness
On 16 February, Domas Mituzas, who is one of the primary volunteer system administrators of Wikimedia, announced that from now on all software that accesses the Wikimedia websites will be required to provide a user-agent. This action was taken without announcement and initially broke some software. Breakages of Google's Translator Toolkit and Apple's Dictionary application were noted and quickly resolved. The change did draw a lot of response from people who did not want their browsers identified when browsing the website, but the consensus among the system administrators was that the sacrifice was worth the benefits for a website maintained by volunteers and funded by donations.
The reason for the change was the incredible amount of resources that were being consumed by automated tools, with the sole purpose of using Wikimedia information for spam purposes. The hope is that by forcing everyone to use a user-agent, it will become easier to identify users with good intentions. The system administrators intend to be tougher in the future in dealing with problematic website usage, and being able to identify people with good intentions should prevent them from becoming unintentional victims. The block saw an immediate effect in resource usage as can be seen in last months graphs (search servers, application servers).
Bots approved
The following bots and tasks have been approved in the past three weeks:
- FaleBot – Interwiki bot
- EleferenBot – Interwiki bot
- FrescoBot (Task 2) – Corrects common errors in writing of external, internal and wikilinks
- TedderBot (Task 2) – Bot that can change the name of templates in transclusions.
- Yobot (Task 12) – Adds references to "Name and History" sections of articles about Ohio townships
References and notes
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Opinion
Usability, 15M articles, Vandalism research award, and more
Usability Project to become permanent
The Usability Project, initially funded by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, will be extended indefinitely as a "user experience" (UX) program. The current round of usability work is still in progress—including a much anticipated option to collapse confusing template markup while editing—but at the conclusion of the grant period Naoko Komura and Trevor Parscal will stay on as permanent Wikimedia staff. In the announcement on the Wikimedia blog, Erik Moeller said the move was prompted by the Wikimedia Foundation's recent fundraising success.
Global Wikipedias reach 15M articles
The article count across all Wikipedias has passed 15 million articles. This follows the milestone in which the Russian Wikipedia reached the half-million article mark.
Yahoo Research sponsors investigation into plagiarism and Wikipedia vandalism
The Pan 2010 Lab has published a call for participation on a project to detect online plagiarism and vandalism at Wikipedia. An award of 500 Euros will go to the winning entry. The lab is scheduled to be held as part of a conference to be held in September in Padua, Italy.
Briefly
- A new Wikimedia scorecard with statistics about visitors and traffic has been posted.
- The WikiSym Call for Papers is closing on 7 March.
- A call for proposals for the Wikimedia track at the Open Knowledge conference is now open.
- Right-to-left support is now enabled for the mobile Wikipedia interface.
This week in history
- 2005: Wikipedia has a power outage
- 2006: Trouble with office actions
- 2007: Daniel Brandt wheel war
- 2008: Brockhaus announces last print edition
- 2009: Books extension enabled
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/In focus
Arbitration Report
The Arbitration Committee neither closed nor opened any cases this week, leaving three cases open.
Open cases
- Asgardian (Week 2): An arbitration case opened to assess the behavior of Asgardian, including accusations of gaming the system to avoid community-based remedies and attempts at ownership of articles. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
- ChildofMidnight (Week 2): An arbitration case opened to assess the behavior of User:ChildofMidnight, including allegations that he has defamed editors and contributed to problems in highly controversial areas. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
- Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 2): An arbitration case opened to deal with circumstances on articles related to the eponymous movement similar to those that had surrounded Scientology pages the year prior. Currently in the evidence/workshop phase.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-03-01/Humour