Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Proposed changes to category sorting
Last week saw a significant discussion on the wikitech-l technology mailing list about the future of category sorting. The discussion was prompted by Aryeh Gregor (User:Simetrical) announcing that he would be working on the area. Among the outstanding bug requests being targeted was the ability to paginate sub-categories, pages and files separately. Of particular interest to non-English wikis is the development of a system to allow custom category sort-orders, instead of relying on the Unicode specification. For example, this would allow the sorting of "é" straight after "e" in languages that use such a diacritic, rather than at the end of the alphabet as at present. Discussion on how best to fix these bugs is ongoing.
Multimedia upload wizard: preliminary test results promising
As User:TheDJ wrote, last week Guillaume Paumier (User:Guillom) of the Wikimedia Multimedia Usability team published some results on his blog from the first testing done of the usability of the Wikimedia Commons upload process, and the first prototype for the new upload wizard currently under development. Paumier noted of the tests:
| “ | Long story short: the current interface is a nightmare, and the prototype is way better, even if there are some minor things to improve. The good news is, all the items to improve were already planned features at the time of testing, and they have either already been added, or will be before the upload wizard is released.
Namely, one of the main remaining issues is the fact that users don’t really understand copyright and free licenses. That’s why we've been working on a licensing tutorial at the same time, to be released jointly with the new upload wizard. |
” |
He added, "we don't want to make a lot of publicity about our prototype yet. If you happen to know about it and you want to share your opinion, that's fine. But we'll officially invite the community later to try it out."
In brief
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
- Edits to extensions are now more likely to be (auto-)"deferred" in the CodeReview process for centrally managing improvements to the MediaWiki software. The hope is to save time for reviewing edits to the MediaWiki core (wikitech-l mailing list post).
- The
page_propsdatabase table will now include the displaytitle value, allowing its far quicker retrieval via the API (bug #23936). - With the resolution of bug #24398, new projects will be automatically announced on a special mailing list.
- Cassia, one of the Toolserver servers, is currently experiencing problems. Some services may be affected (toolserver-announce mailing list post).
- XML-format dumps were halted temporarily to allow for the removal of several bad dumps and the implementation of improved creation processes.
- Guillaume Paumier also reported about his participation in a recent conference about KDE: Wikimedia at KDE Akademy 2010 (including video and slides for his presentation about the UX program, together with fellow Wikimedia developer Parul Vora)
- Domas Mituzas has published a blog post about MySQL versions at Wikipedia.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Opinion
New interwiki project improves biographies, and other news
New collaboration checks biographies across 71 Wikipedias for consistency
One of the sad facts about biographies of living people is that eventually one has to update the biography because the subject has died. Sometimes we are not as quick at that as we'd like to be, but as many notable people have bios on multiple language versions of Wikipedia, there is an opportunity to share information between different Wikipedia projects. Hence the creation of meta:Death_anomalies_table in June 2010. This table and set of lists enables any project that has a category equivalent to Category:Living people to feed in data, and request a report out.
The en.wiki report is at Wikipedia:Database reports/Living people on EN wiki who are dead on other wikis. User:Merlissimo has a bot that updates it daily, and is willing to produce reports for other projects.
While data is now being fed in from over 70 different languages, reports are only being generated for the German and English Wikipedias. However, initial results on en.wiki are encouraging: well over a hundred anomalies have been resolved, with probably more out-of-date biographies fixed than incorrect wikilinks corrected. As the number of contributing Wikipedias and interwiki links increases, we anticipate that the number of anomalies this finds will increase.
| “ | I'm excited to see this kind of machine-assisted editing. In the foreseeable future, it will not be possible for machines to actually make judgment calls about editorial matters, but it is entirely possible for this type of work, as well as more advanced semantic analysis, to provide useful assistance to human editors, particularly in finding contradictions and anomalies. Merlissimo is a rock star! | ” |
| — Jimbo Wales, 26th July 2010 | ||
Briefly
- As reported previously by The Signpost, the Wikimedia Foundation's recently formed Community Department wants to fill several positions. It is specifically inviting Wikimedians to apply (a page inviting submissions has been up for more than three weeks). A post on the Foundation's blog on July 17 explained the motive for trying a different kind of job advertisement: "At Wikimedia we are always looking to innovate – to try new things and see how they work.... Rather than focus on traditional resources for hiring new talent, we have decided to put out a call to the broad, global audience that visits our projects. We’re focused on casting our net widely – in many languages and countries. Our goal is to find interesting people; people who have unique experience and skills and are interested in working with us." It was also announced that banners with a link to the submissions form would be posted on Wikimedia projects.
- The log for the July 15 IRC office hour, a public chat with Frank Schulenburg, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Public Outreach, has been posted.
- The log for the July 22 IRC office hour, a public chat with Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, has been posted. Among the topics covered were the Foundation's plans for Africa, community hiring (see above), the concept of chapter-selected members of the Board of Trustees, and the geographical distribution of chapters. Gardner said she hoped she would be able to do IRC office hours more often – every two weeks – because the Foundation's shift to a "community giving" revenue strategy, away from large grants to small donations, means that she has more time to interact with community members instead of major benefactors.
- In June, Wikipedia – now (usually) the seventh most popular website in the world – was surpassed on Alexa world site traffic statistics by the Chinese search engine Baidu.com, which took the sixth position [1] and [2].
- Wikipedia researcher Felipe Ortega (User:GlimmerPhoenix) has posted summaries of Wikimania 2010 and Wikisym 2010, and was interviewed on the CPOV blog, commenting on his research (including the WikiXRay tool) and on the future of Wikipedia.
- Robert Harris, the consultant who was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation last month to provide recommendations to the Board later this year for the handling of objectionable content on Wikimedia projects (see Signpost coverage), has now invited Wikimedia communities to comment on a list of ten Questions for Discussion.
- In a nine-minute interview recently posted on YouTube, students from Colgate University (as Nbenfield, Mrobson1987 and Kblum201) reflected on an assignment to edit certain Wikipedia articles, part of a senior history seminar held by professor Noor Khan (apparently not yet listed at Wikipedia:School and university projects).
- In a blog post last month titled The art of editing Wikipedia, an employee of the European Commission asked "should the European Commission edit EU-related Wikipedia pages?" She started by recalling a case where the staff of the Commission's Vice-President Antonio Tajani had tried to correct what they considered to be wrong information (a "euromyth" stemming from a UK newspaper) in the article about him, reviewed Wikipedia policies and help pages such as the Organizations FAQ as well as general Wikipedia advice from PR experts. She concluded "all things considered, monitoring and editing Wikipedia entries related to the EU would be risky, time-consuming and would require substantial human resources".
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-07-26/In focus
Arbitration Report
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.
Open cases
- Climate change (Week 7): Special rules of conduct were put in place for this arbitration. The case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Although the case is still technically open, the workshop phase has been closed to give a break to all participants while arbitrators think about a proposed decision.
- Race and intelligence (Week 8): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The proposed decision that was drafted by Coren has sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants. After last week's Signpost was published, Signpost readers have also made on-wiki comments about the proposed resolution of the case (example). The case remains in the proposed decision phase.
Motion
- Eastern European mailing list: A motion was passed: the case remedy that banned Miacek from the Eastern Europe topic was lifted.
Other
- The Committee took the unusual step of posting a statement regarding an unsuccessful ban appeal earlier this week, but explained that it was taken in this case because the text of the email appeal was "publicly posted...on an external website" by the subject, Ottava Rima, and because "multiple editors have posted on Ottava Rima's talk page" in relation to the same ban.
The statement on the ban appeal by Ottava Rima provided background surrounding the original case findings and remedies, separate remedies imposed at other Wikimedia Foundation projects close to the date of the ban appeal, Ottava Rima's "correspondence" with the Committee, as well as the focus of his appeal. The statement also provided the decision which "denied" Ottava Rima's ban appeal on the grounds that "he has not yet come to understand the collaborative nature of this project"; this outcome means that the next possible unban request may not be made earlier than 15 January 2011. The last part of the statement, which concerned the act of importing content written by banned users, was clarified by an arbitrator: "ArbCom isn't making any comment on how to transfer in content beyond what already exists in policy, we're just saying that we don't consider legitimately importing content written by a banned editor to be the same thing as proxying for a banned editor."
Note: Last week's Arbitration report coverage of ArbCom announcements regarding the selection of CheckUser and Oversight candidates has drawn some concern by FT2, who provided a reworded version. Here, both versions can be compared. As always, readers are welcome to leave informed comments about the Signpost's coverage and to express their general expectations of the Signpost.
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