Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Progress on 1.17
Foundation developer Rob Lanphier gave an update this week on the next milestone release of the MediaWiki software, version 1.17 (wikitech-l mailing list):
| “ | The code review group continues to make headway on the backlog of outstanding checkins in "new" status. We peaked at 1400 unreviewed check-ins [updates to the software] back in September, last month we were at 800, and now we're now under 300.
We *hope* this means we can push a 1.17 version of MediaWiki to production sometime this month, with a tarball [i.e. a release to non-WMF sites] available some time after that. That still looks like a bit of a stretch goal, but more plausible now than the last time this came up. |
” |
Due to the way Wikimedia wikis are run, they already benefit from some, but not all, of the updates present in 1.17. Most external sites have not yet been able to take advantage of these changes.
In brief
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.
- Signpost regulars will note the lack of an Engineering Update in this issue. The report due (January 2011) is still in draft form and should be published shortly. The Signpost will of course report on its contents when this occurs.
- Thumbnails and the upload preview will now be auto-rotated if a rotation is built into the metadata associated with an image e.g. by a digital camera (bug #6672).
- Users installing MediaWiki on their own servers will now have the option of easily subscribing to the announcements mailing list (bug #26550).
- svn.mediawiki.org is now an alias (alternative name) for svn.wikimedia.org when trying to access the MediaWiki Subversion repository (bug #26474).
- A range of new parameters have been added to the MediaWiki API, allowing users to get information about a page (interwiki links, external links, etc.) without parsing the page's wikitext directly (bugs #26480, #26483, #26484 and #26485).
- After a successful conversion on January 3, both Toolserver login servers, nightshade and willow, now run the Solaris operating system (toolserver-l mailing list and elsewhere).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Opinion
Anniversary preparations, new Community fellow, brief news
Wikipedians worldwide prepare for decennial celebrations
The annual celebrations of Wikipedia Day on January 15 will be of unprecedented dimensions this year, as Wikipedia completes its first full decade. As reported earlier ("Preparations for Wikipedia's tenth anniversary gearing up"), the Wikimedia Foundation has set up a separate wiki to coordinate events – at the time of writing, it listed over 300 events in over 100 countries – and has been supporting these by offering anniversary-themed merchandise, such as buttons and T-shirts. The wiki is currently being advertised via banners on the English Wikipedia.
Considerable worldwide media coverage of the anniversary has already begun, see this week's "In the news".
Foundation announces fourth Community Fellow
The WMF's Chief Community Officer Zack Exley has announced that Swedish Wikipedian Lennart Guldbrandsson (User:SvHannibal) has become the fourth recipient of a Community fellowship. He has joined the Outreach team and during his fellowship will work on two of its projects: the Bookshelf Project (focusing on translation and dissemination of the project's instructional material about Wikipedia) and the Account Creation Improvement Project. Guldbrandsson/Hannibal is a longtime Wikipedian, founder and first chair of the Swedish Wikimedia chapter, and author of a book about Wikipedia.
In the community fellowship program, started in September, community members are employed full-time for a limited amount of time by the Foundation's Community Department to work on specific problems (Signpost coverage). The first fellow, Steven Walling (User:Steven (WMF)), is currently coordinating celebrations of Wikipedia's upcoming tenth anniversary (see above) and is also working on the Contribution Taxonomy research project (Signpost coverage). He was followed by Victoria Doronina (User:Mstislavl) and Maryana Pinchuk, who around the end of September started an eight-week research project to develop methods for writing histories of Wikimedia projects (Signpost coverage).
In brief
- Wiktionary's 10 million milestone: On January 10, Wiktionary reached 10 million entries across all languages (as observed by Yair rand based on the statistics at http://s23.org/wikistats/).
- "Four essays every Wikimedian should read!": On her personal blog, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director Sue Gardner recommended Four essays every Wikimedian should read! from Less Wrong (a rationalist community blog co-founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, see also the entry LessWrong on RationalWiki). As described by Gardner, the four postings are about "collaboration, dissent, how groups can work together productively". In another posting, she described her recent travels in India.
- Fundraising results from chapters: After the Foundation, some Wikimedia chapters also reported results of the recently concluded annual fundraiser. Wikimedia Germany stated that during 55 days of the fundraiser, 68,700 donors had given more than €2 million to the chapter (around 50% of which goes to the Wikimedia Foundation). Wikimedia UK received £500,000 from 30,000 donations.
- Chapter reports: Several Wikimedia chapters recently caught up with their monthly reports for the Foundation: Wikimedia Estonia (July–December 2010, starting from the chapter's founding on July 25), Wikimedia Nederland (October 2010, November 2010), and Wikimedia UK (January 2011, 2010 "catchup").
- Wikimania registration opens: The registration and scholarship application process for Wikimania 2011, to be held from August 4th to 7th in Haifa, Israel, is open. Also, the Wikimania 2012 bidding has opened.
- Look back on foundation of the Esperanto Wikipedia: User:Chuck SMITH has blogged recollections on how he started the Esperanto Wikipedia in late 2001, aided by a donation of content from the existing Esperanto online encyclopedia Enciklopedio Kalblanda.
- Toulouse image donation uploaded: In September, the Archives of Toulouse (France), in a partnership with French chapter Wikimédia France, announced they would contribute digitised photographs by its former curator, French naturalist, mountaineer, geologist and photographer Eugène Trutat. This project was presented at the GlamWiki conference in December (see Signpost coverage). A pre-process had to be done to match the extensive metadata provided by the Archives into Commons auto-translated templates and infer precise categorisation. The 200 files finally hit Commons on December 29. Help is needed to check, categorise further, geolocate and spread the files on Wikimedia projects.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/In focus
World War II case comes to a close; ban appeal, motions, and more
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, but closed one today, leaving one case open.
Open case
Longevity (Week 7)
The deadline which has been set for evidence submissions in this case is 15 January 2011. The original deadline, 3 December 2010, was extended after parties made requests to have more time to present their evidence. At the time of writing, except for this, no further evidence or workshop proposals have been submitted on-wiki during the week.
Closed cases
World War II (Week 6)
This case concerns allegations about misrepresentation of sources, disruptive editing, and WikiProject Military history (the Mil-Hist WikiProject). The filer and main party of the case, Communicat (talk · contribs), made a series of accusations about the behavior of editors of the Mil-hist WikiProject. He also alleged that World War II articles rely on orthodox Western sources to the exclusion of non-Western or significant-minority Western positions. Other editors, including editors from the WikiProject, made accusations about Communicat's editing and behavior. Evidence and workshop proposals were submitted (see earlier Signpost coverage), and the drafter of the case, arbitrator Newyorkbrad, posted a proposed decision for voting on 6 January 2011 which attracted votes from 13 arbitrators. The case came to a close today.
- What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?
- Communicat is indefinitely topic banned from articles about World War II or the Aftermath of World War II.
- Communicat may appeal the topic ban after 6 months. Should he appeal the topic ban, the Committee would consider whether he will edit collaboratively and in accordance with Wikipedia policies and guidelines in other topic-areas.
- Communicat is subject to a civility restriction for 1 year.
- Users who engage in tendentious or disruptive editing may be subject to bans.
- Articles need to comply with core policies concerning verifiability, reliable sources, neutral point of view and original research; editors should avoid misusing sources.
On 5 January 2011, Piotrus (talk · contribs) requested the Committee to lift his modified topic ban which bans him from "articles about national, cultural, or ethnic disputes within Eastern Europe, their associated talk pages, and any process discussion about these topics". The ban is set to expire on 2 March 2011. On 6 January 2011, Newyorkbrad indicated that arbitrators are waiting for others to comment, including on whether the topic-ban should be lifted altogether or whether the wording of the topic ban should be clarified. The question about the wording being clarified arose after this arbitration enforcement appeal. Although an editor has supported Piotrus' request, two administrators have repeated their requests for the restriction to be amended - to better-communicate ArbCom's intent in a clearly worded editing restriction.
Motions
On 14 December 2010, Jayjg (talk · contribs) requested the Committee to lift the topic ban that was imposed on him at the conclusion of the case. The Committee accepted his request and a motion was passed; Jayjg is no longer banned from Arab-Israeli conflict-related articles.
On 30 November 2010, Koavf (talk · contribs) requested for his Community sanctions to be lifted. Arbitrator Newyorkbrad formally proposed a motion on 3 January 2011 to terminate the restrictions that were placed upon Koavf in the Koavf arbitration. 12 arbitrators supported the motion and it was adopted on 6 January 2011. On 9 January 2011, clerk NuclearWarfare pointed out that the motion does not address the community sanctions. Newyorkbrad apologized for the delay and proposed to copyedit the motion. He said that unless an arbitrator objects to the change he made to the motion ([1]), it will be considered adopted as if the Community sanctions have also been removed. As no objections were made, the motion was passed today.
Other
- The Committee decided to overturn the block of Turbotad (talk · contribs) after receiving "credible new evidence by email".
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-10/Humour