Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
- EarwigBot (Task 16) – The bot leaves notices on the talk pages of WikiProjects that have Wikipedia-Books
- EarwigBot (Task 15) – The bot replaces the deprecated parameters
|penalty=and|status=in transclusions of {{Infobox criminal}} with|conviction_penalty=and|conviction_status=, respectively. - FrescoBot (Task 5) – Put {{db-blanked}} on pages created and blanked by a single author
- SmackBot (Task 25) – Delink dates per full-date unlinking bot, but in portal space only
- SPPatrolBot – Notifies WikiProjects and creators of pages of being BLP prodded.
- SmackBot (Task 26) – Move non-redirects from the old VfD space to AfD where no conflict is found.
- RjwilmsiBot (Task 3) – CiteCompletion: a script that completes fields within citations to common English-language news sites on the English Wikipedia. It works by taking the news article URL from the Wikipedia article page, looking up the news page and extracting the missing details of the news article based on per-site rules. User:Rjwilmsi/CiteCompletion.
- ZéroBot – Adding and correcting interwiki-links
- SmackBot (Task 28) – Substitute templates that are documented as "always subst".
MediaWiki 1.16
On 9 April, lead software engineer Tim Starling switched the servers of the Wikimedia Foundation to a beta version of the upcoming MediaWiki 1.16 software.[1] Although some of the most important 1.16 changes had already been applied to the server park, this was the first major software update since July 2009, when MediaWiki 1.15 was released. The switch itself was relatively uneventful and Wikipedia was back in business after just a few hours. As expected after 10 months of development, a substantial amount of problems and oversights were discovered in the hours and days following the switch to the new software.
- Several problems in wikis of languages such as Malay.
- Garbled thumbnails for videos. Bug 23160
- Broken edit conflict detection. Bug 23139
You can find details about the MediaWiki 1.16 changes in the release notes and some highlights follow:
- The order of the "diff" and "history" links was switched on Contributions pages in order to be consistent with the Recent Changes views and the Watchlist. Bug 2971
- Math images now have a transparent background. Bug 8
- Support for HTML 5.
- First letter capitalization can now be a per-namespace setting Bug 13750
- Rewritten Special:Upload that is more extensible and has improved warning and error reporting.
- You can no longer upload files of one file type on top of a file of another filetype.
Other changes
- On 7 April, a security issue with the login process was discovered and fixed.[2][3] The fix caused many bots to temporarily be offline, but software updates for the major bot frameworks, such as AWB and Pywikipedia, were quickly released by the maintainers of the various bot frameworks.
- Daniel Kinzler (WMDE) announced the availability of the PagedTiffHandler extension. This new extension will allow the creation of thumbnails for (paged) TIFF files and was developed by Hallo Welt under contract of Wikimedia Germany. When the code is fully reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation staff, it is hoped that this extension will be deployed on Wikimedia Commons. This will fulfill a longstanding request by the image restorationists for support of the TIFF format that their source material and restoration work normally use.[4]
References and notes
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Opinion
Wikimedia announcements, Wikipedia advertising, and more!
- The British Board of Film Classification has reached an agreement with filtered ISP Tibboh to apply film-style ratings to the web; the English Wikipedia has been rated as "Parental guidance".
- Wikimedia Norway had its annual general assembly on 19 April, and elected a new board.
Wikimedia announcements list formed
An announcements-only mailing list has been formed for the Wikimedia Foundation, as a mechanism for those who want to keep up with major Wikimedia and project news but don't want the traffic of Foundation-l in their inboxes.
The new list is called wikimediaannounce-l, and can be subscribed to here. To date there have been no postings beyond initial testing. The list in future will include press releases and major announcements from the Foundation, Wikimedia Chapters, and the community.
The types of posts to be accepted are detailed in the list guidelines on Meta, which were initially developed by Wikimedia Foundation Head of Communications Jay Walsh based on community ideas. This is the first announcements-only list for the Wikimedia community, although the general idea of an announcements list has been proposed several times in the past; the idea was brought up again last November during the discussions about moderating and improving Foundation-l, the open discussion list for the WMF (see previous story).
The announcements list is fully moderated; Walsh is the initial moderator. Replies sent to the list will go directly to Foundation-l, which is open participation. Everyone interested in Wikimedia news is encouraged to subscribe to the new list.
Wikipedia on transit
Advertisements featuring Wikipedia and Wikimedia began appearing on Berlin subways last week, in a project run by Wikimedia Deutschland (Germany). According to Catrin Schoneville, press contact for Wikimedia Deutschland, the ads were produced by TV production company Berliner Fenster GmbH, who were contacted by Wikimedia volunteer Juliana da Costa.
The ads feature short "did you know" clips and information about Wikimedia. The spots are showing on 3768 double screens in 1106 wagons, approximately 8 spots per hour, with an average of 1.5 million viewers per day. The advertisements are worth approximately 150,000 €/month. Wikimedia Deutschland hopes to expand the program to more cities' subways as well.
Some more pictures of the ads can be found on Commons.
WMF hiring leadership
A Head of Office Administration job has been added to the list of current job openings at the Wikimedia Foundation; this job opening closes 1 May. In addition to the office administration position, which will manage "the administrative services support team" and functions related to the physical office, several core leadership and management positions are currently open at the Foundation. These including Chief Human Resources Officer (will manage issues related to HR), Chief Global Program Officer (will manage the Programs department, including outreach and communication), and Chief Development Officer (manages the fundraising plan), all of which are "open until filled." The Chief Human Resources and Chief Development officer positions are newly created positions. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/In focus
Arbitration Report
The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving four open.
Open cases
- Alastair Haines 2 (Week 2): The case was opened to address allegations of edit warring and other disruptive editing. The case is in the evidence/workshop phase.
- Gibraltar (Week 7): The case was opened to address issues of ownership and nationalist warfare on articles related to Gibraltar. The case is in the voting phase.
- Russavia-Biophys (Week 4): The case was accepted to expedite a complicated Arbitration enforcement issue concerning Russavia and Biophys. The case is in the evidence/workshop phase.
- Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 10): The case was opened to deal with circumstances surrounding articles related to the eponymous movement, similar to the circumstances at issue in Scientology pages a year ago. The case is in the evidence/workshop phase.
Other
- The Committee released ban appeal statistics for the first quarter of 2010.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-04-26/Humour