The Signpost
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29 March 2010

News and notes
Usability rollout, downtime, admin phishing, Wikimania scholarships and more
In the news
Overdue correction, Critical Point of View conference, brief headlines
Sister projects
A handful of happenings
WikiProject report
The WikiProject Bulletin: news roundup and WikiProject Chicago feature
Features and admins
Approved this week
Arbitration report
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
 

2010-03-29

Usability rollout, downtime, admin phishing, Wikimania scholarships and more

Last week it was announced that the "Vector" skin (example), which has been developed as part of the Usability Initiative and has been in beta test since last August, will replace "Monobook" as the default skin on Wikimedia projects. Deployment will start on Wikimedia Commons on 5 April, and continue on the English Wikipedia in late April. The changes include an improved editing toolbar, relocation of the search box to the top right corner, a simplified layout and a new version of the Wikipedia logo which is "correcting small mistakes and representing new languages" (see e.g. meta:Wikipedia/Logo and earlier Signpost coverage of such issues). More information was provided on the Techblog, in a Q&A and in a discussion on Wikitech-l.

The announcement was covered by The Guardian ("Wikipedia gets a redesign"), on CNET Australia ("Wikipedia to finally get a facelift"), in The Huffington Post ("New Wikipedia Layout 2010: See PICTURES Of The 'Vector' Redesign") and on Wikinews ("Wikipedia and sister projects prepare new, easier interface").

The deployment roughly coincides with the usability project's original conclusion date as projected when it was initiated in January 2009, funded by an $800,000 grant by the Stanton Foundation (see Signpost coverage). Following the success of the last fundraiser and a $2 million grant from Google, the project was recently made permanent as "user experience" (UX) (see Signpost coverage). Other usability improvements such as the template editor or the "outline" (a table of contents allowing easier navigation while editing long articles) are still being tested and will be deployed at a later date.

Server overheating and DNS problems cause global Wikipedia downtime

On Wednesday, 24 March 2010, Wikipedia.org went globally offline for several hours. As explained on the Wikimedia tech blog, an overheating problem at the web site's European data center made it necessary to initiate a standard failover procedure to move the European traffic to the main server cluster in Florida. However, this procedure turned out to be broken, disabling DNS resolution for Wikimedia sites worldwide.

The story was covered by a number of media outlets.[1][2][3] Bigtimepeace put together a list of related tweets.

Wikipedia administrator accounts targeted

Administrators on the English Wikipedia received a letter this weekend from "Wikipedia Freedom Fighters" asking them to give up their admin account details for the purposes of "utilis[ing] your account to help rid Wikipedia of the corruption and bureaucracy at every level that continues to plague it to this very day." Slightly different versions of the message were sent to inactive and active administrators. The messages were sent through the special:emailuser function, from a variety of throwaway accounts. The messages seem to have been sent to every administrator on the site, including current staff and Board members who are also administrators.

There was brief discussion, including posts containing the text of the letter, on the wikien-l and Foundation-l mailing lists.

Wikimania Scholarships open

The call for applications for Wikimania Scholarships to attend Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk, Poland (July 9-11) is now open. The Wikimedia Foundation offers Scholarships to pay for selected individuals' round trip travel, accommodations, and registration at the conference.

To apply, complete and submit the application form. For additional information, please visit the Scholarships information and FAQ pages.

Wikimedia Polska report

Wikimedia Polska (Wikimedia Poland) had their annual general assembly meeting this past weekend in Warsaw. The two-day event featured talks and a general business meeting, including a report on the status of the chapter and discussion about the chapter's future. Lectures included topics such as "Learning in Wikipedia and Wikipedia in learning," "Wikipedia and Marketing – Opportunities and Threats," and "Conversion of Wikipedia pages on DAISY Audio Format for the Visually Impaired and Blind." The English-language version of the program can be found [1].

Elections of chapter officials were also held. The new board is:

The conference attracted around 100 attendees and was held in the Zachęta National Art Gallery in the heart of Warsaw.

Briefly

This week in history

2010-03-29

Overdue correction, Critical Point of View conference, brief headlines

Wikipedia is first reference work to correct long-standing error about the Rhine river

The Rhine (at Leutesdorf, from where its German Wikipedia article was corrected)
Brass plate at the source of the Rhine, giving its length as 1320 km

Wikipedia's ability to correct errors quickly was mentioned in recent German media coverage of a surprising blunder that has permeated most reference works, school books and even government publications for decades. A basic fact about one of Europe's most important rivers was discovered to have been incorrectly reported: Generations of school children in Germany and the whole world have learned that the Rhine is about 1320 km long. However Bruno Kremer, a biologist at the University of Cologne, found this number to be inconsistent during his research for an upcoming book (ISBN 978-3874634564). According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, at the beginning of the last century the length was still stated correctly to be around 1230 km by the major encyclopedias (the Brockhaus encyclopedia of 1903, the Herder lexicon of 1907 and Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1909). Later editions such as the Brockhaus editions of 1933 and today give numbers around 1320 km, an error that Kremer conjectures to have been caused by simple transposition of digits. Encyclopædia Britannica's Rhine River article is even further off, giving a value of 1390 km.

Süddeutsche Zeitung devoted a whole page of its 27/28 March print edition to the topic, concluding:

"Cleaning up will take a while ... while atlases, school books, web pages and brass plates have to be changed. At the moment, the online lexicon Wikipedia is ahead of everybody: In January, a pensioner from Leutesdorf near Koblenz [de:Benutzer:Frila, a former inland navigator] has inserted Bruno Kremer's length information into the "Rhein" entry."

That correction on the German Wikipedia was made after a local newspaper had mentioned Kremer's research, and German Wikipedians had reviewed many other sources. On the English Wikipedia, the correction was made on 27 March.

The corrections were noted in a number of follow-up articles published later that week. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad ran a brief article on page 4 which mentioned the changes,[2] there was a full-page article in the world news section of the Norwegian paper Aftenposten which went into more detail,[3] and there was a brief mention in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.[4]

Conference examines Wikipedia from a "Critical Point of View"

The second part of the "CPOV" conference about Wikipedia took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands on 26/27 March, organized by Geert Lovink's Institute of Network Cultures. (The first part, entitled "WikiWars", had been held in January at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.)

Talk summaries have been posted to the institute's blog. This animation gives an impression of the coverage on Twitter.

Talks included:

  • Mayo Fuster Morell: Wikimedia Governance: The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Form and Geopolitics of its Internationalization. Summary, presentation notes, see also her text Wikimedia evolution in terms of governance and the creation of a Foundation published in the run-up to the conference and her talk at Wikimania 2009 about a similar topic.
  • Felipe Ortega: New trends in the evolution of Wikipedia. Summary, Slides - Ortega presented his quantitative research about participation on the ten largest Wikipedias, some interpretations of which had been controversial last fall (see earlier Signpost coverage).
  • Joseph Reagle: Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety. Summary, slides - Reagle aimed to "make sense some of the criticism Wikipedia receives in a historical frame", arguing "that reference works can serve as a flashpoint for larger social anxieties about technological and social change", giving historical examples for criticism of reference works such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Webster's Dictionary.

The CPOV conference was preceded by a small Wiki Analytics Workshop held by the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam.

Briefly

2010-03-29

A handful of happenings

2010-03-29

The WikiProject Bulletin: news roundup and WikiProject Chicago highlight

News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, we focused on the windy city by interviewing the director of WikiProject Chicago. The third largest city in the United States is associated with over 22,000 articles, including 64 featured articles and lists. Originally started on 5 July 2005, the project has been home to multiple collaborations and other initiatives from time to time. Currently, the project is sponsoring a featured topic drive intended to bring a collection of articles related to Millennium Park up to featured status by 1 September 2010.

1. First, tell us a bit about yourself and your role in WikiProject Chicago.


2. When did you first join WikiProject Chicago? What are some of the challenges that the project has met since you joined, and how were they dealt with?

  • TonyTheTiger: I joined the project in the late fall of 2006. Not much was going on so the first challenge was to really become a legitimate project. I requested the assistance of Elkman to get our {{ChicagoWikiProject}} template up and running. We first only had a few hundred articles tagged with our template, and we currently have well over 20,000 articles tagged. The issue has at times been controversial, because many do not see our project as a relevant talk page template for someone who attended college in Chicago decades ago, for example, but as people have become accustomed to having our template on their pages, we have been able to lend a hand in deciding encyclopedic matters for various articles. The most recent example would be the floundering Zak Kustok article that was WP:PRODed. When alerted, we were able to help develop the article into a legitimate resource. At first, we have struggled to monitor the articles with the tag and tag articles that are within the project. The WP:AALERTS system has made this much easier. We have also had problems dealing with low manpower and numerous unrated articles. For a while WP:Illinois had some active editors who rated many of our articles while rating articles that also fell within their project. More recently Xeno has come up with an automated bot rating inheritance system that has helped us tremendously.


3. What aspects of the project do you consider to be particularly successful? Has the project developed any unusual innovations, or uniquely adopted any common approaches?

  • TonyTheTiger: I am not sure where the idea for WP:AALERTS came from, but prior to that system, I monitored WP:FAC, WP:FAR, WP:GAC, WP:GAR, WP:FLC and WP:FLRC to manually produce a list of discussions to watch. I think we were one of the few, if not the only project with a centralized location for such discussions for a while. WP:MILHIST also had a centralized discussion system that predates the alerts and I don't know who was first.


4. Have any major initiatives by the project ended unsuccessfully? What lessons have you learned from them?

  • TonyTheTiger: The project has been unsuccessful in developing an A-Class review, an internal Peer Review and a Collaboration of the Week. I think I have learned that the people who do work for the project often do so in relation to other interests. Not many editors view this geographic interest as their main editorial interest. I think project planning as if this project is the primary focus will be difficult. We have to attempt to plan in a way that will call attention to work that needs to be done without relying on the commitment of editors to focus on this project.


5. What experiences have you had with the WikiProjects whose scopes overlap with yours? Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?


6. What is your vision for the project? How do you see the project itself, as well as the articles within its scope, developing over the next years and Chicago improvement?

  • TonyTheTiger: The project once had a mission of improving the article Chicago to WP:FA after it failed a few FACs. At some point, I hope to see a nucleus of editors with an interest in at least getting the WP:GA rating back for the article. The mission for the project is now much broader. We attempt to foster encyclopedic content of any article listed at WP:CHIBOTCATS, which is the list of categories for Cook County, Illinois-related articles that bots tag with our template. In addition, we adopt all WP:GA, WP:FA and WP:FL articles that are for subjects in the Chicago metropolitan area and not in one of these categories. As Wikipedia grows, we expect our the number of articles under our umbrella to grow. We hope to protect encyclopedic content. Unfortunately, now that we are maturing, a lot of our successfully reviewed content from 2007-09 is under attack at WP:GAR and WP:FAR. One way the project will grow is improve these articles to retain their ratings or reinstate their ratings. I also expect the project to grow as a secondary project for articles. However, continued efforts to protect the overlapping encyclopedic content of other projects will surely benefit Wikipedia.

7. How do you feel about the dissappointment of WP:Meetup/Chicago 3 after the success of WP:Meetup/Chicago 2?

  • TonyTheTiger: It is indeed dissappointing, but it shows that after success can come dissappointment and failure. However, we eagerly anticipate WP:Meetup/Chicago 3.1.

8. Any announcements for the project?

  • TonyTheTiger: Yes, this is new for the project.

On behalf of the Signpost, we'd like to thank TonyTheTiger for his time. In addition, we invite you to check out WikiProject Chicago! Anyone who would like to help out can take a look at the project's list of open tasks or browse their articles, particularly the backlog of unassessed articles. Next week, get ready to root, root, root for the home team! Until then, play pitch and catch with our old reports in the archive.



Have your project's ad featured here! Let us know at the WikiProject Report page!



Reader comments

2010-03-29

Approved this week

Administrators

RfA candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report
Polargeo 2 66 1 0 99 10:11, 6 April 2010 5 days, 19 hoursno report
Skater 2 10 23 15 30 2:13, April 5 2010 4 days, 11 hoursno report
RfB candidate S O N S% Ending (UTC) Time left Dups? Report

No editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week.

Nine articles were promoted to featured status this week: Quehanna Wild Area (nom), Oryzomys dimidiatus (nom), Dutch 1913 battleship proposal (nom), Aiphanes (nom), Bayern class battleship (nom), Brad Pitt (nom), Karl Aloys zu Fürstenberg (nom), McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink (nom) and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) (nom).

Four lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Texas Tech Red Raiders head football coaches (nom), List of birds of South Carolina (nom), 1984 NBA Draft (nom), and List of counties in Florida (nom).

No topic was promoted to featured status this week.

No portals were promoted to featured status this week.

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: see Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 2010.

Eleven featured articles were delisted this week: Frog (nom), Himno Nacional Mexicano (nom), Jaws (film) (nom), Puerto Ricans in World War II (nom), Action potential (nom), USS Bridgeport (AD-10) (nom), Iowa class battleship (nom), Mount Pinatubo (nom), K-os (nom), Hurricane Katrina (nom), Cool (Gwen Stefani song) (nom).

No list was delisted this week:

No topics were delisted this week.

No portals were delisted this week.

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: see Wikipedia:Picture of the day/March 2010.

No featured sounds were promoted this week.

No featured pictures were demoted this week.

Five pictures were promoted to featured status this week.



Reader comments

2010-03-29

Arbitration Report

The Arbitration Committee neither opened or closed any cases this week, leaving three open.

Open cases

Motions

  • Speed of light: A motion was passed restricting some users from commenting on or advocating for Brews ohare. In addition, the motion also makes Brews ohare's editing restrictions expire 90 days from its enactment, barring violations of it (which will reset the timer).
  • The Arbitration Committee passed a motion requiring that Per Honor et Gloria use only widely available English or French sources (the latter only if a mentor okays them). In addition, a topic ban that was placed upon him as a result of a prior Arbitration concerning him is reinstated for one year.

    Reader comments
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