Picture of the Year 2010; data challenge; brief news
Commons Picture of the Year 2010 announced
On the Wikimedia Foundation's blog, the results of the fifth annual Picture of the Year competition were officially announced last week. 2,463 votes were cast, with all 783 pictures that were promoted to featured picture status in 2010 entered into the competition. The winning image is a photo by Yuri Beletsky, Photo Ambassador of the European Southern Observatory (ESO): File:Laser Towards Milky Ways Centre.jpg (above, Signpost readers might recognize it as "choice of the week" from the November 8 "Features and admins" section).
Reacting to the news via email, Beletsky said in thanks, "I am really honored and delighted with the results of the poll. I am happy ESO released the image under a free license." ESO (which had itself featured it as "Picture of the Week" in September) highlighted the result in an announcement on their website: "ESO Picture of the Paranal Observatory Voted Wikimedia Picture of the Year 2010".
Wikipedia data analysis challenge
Last week, the Wikimedia Foundation announced "the launch of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge, a data-modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia", hosted by Kaggle, a platform for crowd-sourcing predictive modeling. Based on data derived from Wikipedia's public XML dump, contestants are to "develop a model to predict the number of edits a given editor will make in six months' time", competing for $10,000 in prize money provided by an anonymous donor. The challenge was noted on various blogs, such as Revolution Analytics and New Scientist. User:Protonk noted that the dataset has been anonymized "to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness", and gave detailed advice to participants, especially those not familiar with Wikipedia editing processes. A blog posting by a former collaborator of the WMF's data scientist Diederik van Liere, titled "Mind. Prepare to be blown away. Big data, Wikipedia and government", compared the challenge to an earlier one on Kaggle that had significantly improved existing models from HIV research, and noted that "Within 36 hours of the wikipedia challenge being launched the leading submission has improved on internal Wikimedia Foundation models by 32.4%". By July 1st, the dataset had been downloaded more than 200 times. At the time of writing, 17 teams have submitted models.
In brief
- Referendum on offensive image filter to take place in August: Last month, the Wikimedia Board passed its long-awaited resolution on controversial content (Signpost coverage), which included the recommendation to implement a "personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to view" (Signpost coverage of the design mockup for this feature: "'Personal image filter' to offer the ability to hide sexual or violent media"). Last week, it was announced that a movement-wide referendum will be held from 12–27 August on servers hosted by a neutral third party. More details will be made available on Meta.
- WikiHistories – Tagalog Wikipedia: One of the Foundation's WikiHistories summer fellows reported on her field trip to the Philippines to study the local Wikipedia/Wikimedia community, where she attended a meeting between Wikimedia Philippines and members of the official Commision for the Philippine Language, with the chapter "essentially asking for government approval of Tagalog Wikipedia’s language policies. This signals a greater tendency [...] for that body to take cues from established entities such as the government [and] universities". She said another "key difference between the English and Tagaog Wikipedia movements is that there is significant overlap between Wikimedians and Wikipedians", in that the President and Vice-President of the local Wikimedia chapter are "two of Tagalog Wikipedia’s most active editors".
- DMCA takedown despite OTRS permission: The Wikimedia Foundation complied with a DMCA takedown request for several photos from Canadian artist Gregory Colbert's "Ashes and Snow" collection recently, even though several of them carried an OTRS permission (Village pump discussion on Commons). In the takedown request, the law firm representing Colbert wrote "we have been advised by you that several years ago an administrative assistant at Ashes and Snow authorized (via the Internet) the publication and the use of certain photographs constituting Works and agreed to the terms of a Wikimedia Commons free license. Please be advised that [...] under no circumstances was the administrative assistant authorized to grant a license to Wikimedia Commons or anyone [... She] was not an authorized agent or Gregory Colbert, nor was she a manager, officer or director of any entity to which Mr. Colbert has licensed the Works, and did not have authority to grant such license."
- Good article monthly round-up: In June the number of good articles rose to 12,237. This means that for the first time at least one in 300 of Wikipedia's articles has been quality assessed as passing the good article criteria. The proportion has been steadily rising since the good articles program was launched in 2005. An additional one in 1100 articles have attained the higher-quality featured article status, although this proportion has remained relatively steady for several years. This month's increase of 194 GAs was somewhat better than May's 181, but was still well below the project's average for the last 12 months. One controversial suggestion discussed this month, as a solution to the perennial nominations backlog, was encouraging nominators to review each other's articles. This received a mixed reception from experienced reviewers due to concerns about apparent conflicts of interest during quid pro quo reviews.
- Wikimedia Mexico: A posting on the blog of the Mexican Wikimedia chapter reported in Spanish and English on some regional activities of Wikimedia Mèxico Occidente, the chapter's "regional ccordination" for the Western parts of the country.
- NARA Wikipedian in Residence interviewed by Wikinews: User:Dominic has been interviewed for Wikinews about his position of Wikipedian in Residence at the National Archives and Records Administration. See "Wikinews interviews US National Archives Wikipedian in Residence". Dominic spoke of the importance of maintaining relationships between cultural institutions and Wikipedia, saying that Wikipedia "will not only make [NARA's] holdings findable, but it will add value to them". He also emphasized the importance of organizing and taking advantage of the Wikimedia community and its resources. Earlier mainstream media coverage of the residency (including an interview with the Washington Post) had highlighted similar aspects. Also last week, a posting by Dominic on the Foundation's blog described "Bringing Ansel Adams to Wikimedia Commons", referring to a donation of public domain photographs by NARA (see Signpost coverage: "Wikipedian residency at US National Archives begins with image donation").
- The quarterly policy update is available at WP:Update. Contributors are welcome for this and future updates.
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WikiLove roll-out; €25,000 in damages for being removed from Wikipedia; brief news
Intense media coverage of WikiLove roll-out
The new WikiLove extension (a software feature created by Kaldari and other developers of the Wikimedia Foundation, allowing easy posting of messages of appreciation on user's talk pages, extending and simplifying the long-standing custom of awarding barnstars) went live on the English Wikipedia last week (see also last week's "News and notes", this week's "Technology report" and the earlier and later deployment notes).
Media coverage leading up to the deployment was unexpectedly intense, with stories appearing in Slashdot, Wired, The Huffington Post, MSNBC Technolog, PC Magazine, PC World, and elsewhere. Most of the news coverage simply reiterated the information from the Wikimedia blog post, including the research data on user interaction. Two exceptions to the neutral news coverage were Business Insider and The Atlantic. Business Insider put a positive spin on WikiLove: "… it actually sounds like a great idea. Giving people on the internet more opportunities to show appreciation can only be healthy." The Atlantic was more critical: "While I appreciate comments and praise as much as the next editor, I wouldn't appreciate my inbox filling up with the same generic cat pictures and beer steins by readers who are unwilling to go out of their way to reach me with a more personal message" (the feature supports, but doesn't require, individual text messages). Despite this criticism, The Atlantic still expected that it "could evolve into a truly useful feature".
The blog coverage of WikiLove was more diverse and opinionated. Slashdot characterized WikiLove as "a cunning plan to make wikipedians nicer to each other," while a Mashable post wrote that "The addition of this simple feature makes a lot of sense." The highest praise came from ReadWriteWeb: "This kind of gentle social engineering to create a structure for the site that's more welcoming, accessible and effective could help produce a better product for us all (more edited Wikipedia content) and could help the site better serve us as people. Ultimately that is the point of all this, right?" Opinions in the blogosphere were not universally positive, however. A post on The Stir characterized WikiLove as "a superficial system" with "ridiculous, immature awards" and suggested that "a boring ol' 'like' button is far less sophomoric than a barnstar." Several other sources also compared WikiLove with Facebook's 'like' button, in some cases erroneously assuming that their functions were analogous.
In somewhat related news, the WMF last week published results from its editor survey – conducted before the widespread introduction of WikiLove, in a blog posting titled "Positive feedback works for editing, say Wikipedia editors". 70% said that "getting a barnstar or similar award from another editor" motivated them to edit Wikipedia further, somewhat below the 78% for the top motivator, "having others compliment you on your edits/articles".
Company to pay €25,000 in damages for removing competitor's name from Wikipedia article
A French court decision issued on July 1st (as reported on lefigaro.fr) awarded the company Rentabiliweb €25,000 (US$36,000) in damage and interest from its competitor Hi-Media, on the basis of a single Wikipedia edit that had removed mention of Rentabiliweb (and a link to their website) from a list of vendors in the French Wikipedia's article on micropayment. The IP used for the anonymous edit, conducted in 2008, was held to be that "of a device belonging to Hi-Media". The Paris court rejected Hi-Media's objection that this method of determining the author of the edit was illegal (as an intrusion of privacy), since an IP address did not directly provide the person who used the computer, but on the other hand held that because the computer had been installed on Hi-Media's premises, "Rentabiliweb offered sufficient proof that it was a person acting under the authorization of Hi-Media which was the author of the deletion". Rentabiliweb initially claimed €150,000 in damages, but the court reduced the sum to €25,000, as there had been no detailed justification, and also because "Wikipedia does not appear to the site where an Internet user will habitually search for suppliers of services". (Because Rentabiliweb itself was found guilty of two other actions – unrelated to Wikipedia – for which Hi-Media was awarded €50,000 in damages each, the entire case still resulted in Rentabiliweb having to compensate Hi-Media for a sum of €75,000.)
Briefly
- Bachmann fans rewriting history? After Republican presidential candidate and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann made some slip-ups while campaigning, Wikipedia was updated to reflect her errors with changes being made to John Wayne (not to be confused with serial killer John Wayne Gacy) and John Quincy Adams. This was reported at The Raw Story (which noted that in case of the article about Adams, "the page's administrator [sic] quickly struck down the revision"), ThinkProgress, AddictingInfo.org, Crooks and Liars, and Wonkette, while The Randi Rhodes Show, a progressive US talk radio show, purported to have recorded a meeting of "The Super-Secret Conservative Wikipedia Modification Committee". In a posting on his "The Wikipedian" blog, titled "Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin and the Boring Truth About Wikipedia Vandalism", User:WWB applied a dose of reality to the allegations, linking to the diffs and talk page entries, concluding that "General mischief on Wikipedia is an everyday fact of life" and that the affair "hardly rises to the same level as the Palin-Revere controversy, and really says more about the partisan/ideological online media than it does about Michele Bachmann or her political supporters—let alone Wikipedia" (referring to earlier US media reports about edits supporting Sarah Palin's controversial claims about Paul Revere, see Signpost coverage).
- Wikipedia and Education: The website 'Online Courses' lists 10 Ways Wikipedia has changed education, also mentioning the Commons and Wikiversity.
- Manypedia: Wikipedia researcher Paolo Massa (User:Phauly) has announced "Manypedia: comparing linguistic points of view (LPOV) of different language Wikipedias", a web mashup for direct comparison of articles about the same subject in different language Wikipedia, automatically translating them into a common language using the Google Translate API. As one example, he recommends comparing the English Wikipedia's article on the Gaza War with those on the Arabic and Hebrew Wikipedias.
User Tinucherian: interview on the future of Wikipedia in India - "India: The Future of Wikipedia": Indian Wikipedian User:tinucherian was interviewed on Global Voices ("India: The Future of Wikipedia ").
- Most people are basically good: David Horovitz from the Jerusalem Post interviewed Jimbo for a piece entitled "Jimmy Wales’s benevolent Wikipedia wisdom". In the interview, Jimbo discusses the role of Wikipedia in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and participatory media.
- Jimbo on privacy panel: The BBC Radio 4 news show PM spoke to Jimmy Wales on Thursday 30 June as part of their "Privacy Commission", a series of interviews looking into the balance between privacy and press freedom in the light of the recent flurry of superinjunctions (covered previously in the Signpost, e.g. on 2 March and 23 May). During the interview, Wales briefly explained Wikipedia's role in the superinjunction scandals—Wikipedia didn't openly publish the information until it was reported in reliable sources outside the UK—but then goes on to criticise current British regulations on privacy as being outdated and now affecting ordinary people using sites like Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook. The audio and transcript of the interview is on the BBC website.
- What can we learn from Wikipedia?: A blog called The REXpedition published a video called Lessons from Wikipedia where Jerry Michalski describes the lessons that society can learn from the success of Wikipedia as a self-organising system where people only do the things they are interested in.
- List of bizarre articles: Listverse.com presented the "Top 15 funny and bizarre Wikipedia pages", including deleted ones.
- Reminiscing a Main page deletion: A Reddit user recalled "How I became an administrator on Wikipedia and inadvertently deleted its main page" (referring to an incident in 2007).
- Political edit warring: US regional newspaper Billings Gazette reported on conflicts over the article about former US Congressman Rick Hill, who is running for governor in the state of Montana ("Candidate struggles to control Wiki biography"), quoting Hill's campaign manager among others.
Suspects Wikipedia may "fuck it up": Fred Durst, frontman of the band Limp Bizkit - Pharmaceutical companies editing Wikipedia? In a blog posting titled "Wikipedia – a simple strategy for pharma?", Alex Butler, a marketing executive of a large pharmaceutical company proposed "what could be a simple transparent stepping stone for pharma in gaining more influence over one of the most powerful sources of information on the internet". Although rife with potential conflict of interest issues, Butler proposes to engage with Wikipedia in an "open, fully disclosed manner" although quite how that would work in practice is not spelled out.
- Limp Bizkit on BLP issues: Some lines in a song on Limp Bizkit's new album Gold Cobra, noted by Village Voice, might be interpreted as a commentary on WP:BLP from the perspective of a controversial rock star such as the band's frontman Fred Durst: "Never worry if anybody gonna like me, don't give a damn if anybody give a fuck/ I'ma say what I want, you can look it up/ Wikipedia probably gonna fuck it up."
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The Star-Spangled WikiProject
- The July 2011 Copyedit Backlog Elimination Drive has started. Join the initiative to have some fun, meet nice people, and earn a barnstar for your efforts.
- These projects could use new members to help improve articles and increase activity on the projects' talk pages: WikiProject Doctor Who, WikiProject Lego, WikiProject Turtles, and WikiProject World Heritage Sites
As the United States of America celebrates its Independence Day, we sat down with two members of WikiProject United States to see how the world's last superpower fares on the world's largest encyclopedia. The project was founded by BrendelSignature in August 2006 and was rebooted from late 2010 to early 2011 by Kumioko. WikiProject United States is home to over 100,000 pages which include 235 Featured Articles, 133 Featured Lists, 254 pieces of Featured Media, 56 A-Class articles, and 396 Good Articles. The banner for WikiProject United States incorporates a growing variety of nation-wide subprojects ranging from American Television to the Library of Congress to State Legislatures. No individual states are currently included in the project's scope, although the project does support WikiProject District of Columbia. WikiProject United States maintains the United States Portal, a newsletter, and the U.S. Wikipedians' notice board. We interviewed project members Kumioko and Royalbroil.
Kumioko set out to restart WikiProject United States back in October 2010 because the project "was dormant for the last few years with almost no organized activity." In addition to rebuilding the project page, he led an initiative to centralize the banners of many fragmented projects that had become inactive in the past couple years. His most recent initiative is an effort to make Featured Media a widely used article quality classification. Royalbroil is a member of both WikiProject United States and WikiProject Wisconsin, one of the more active state-focused WikiProjects. He is an admin with 111 Did You Know? articles under his belt. Royalbroil praised Kumioko, saying he "did a great job of revitalizing the WikiProject by going to child WikiProject to solicit new members."
The project went through some revitalization and reorganization earlier this year. What are some of the project's new features? Were there any concerns brought forth by other projects and if so, how were they resolved?
- Kumioko: Basically we have restructured and rebuilt almost everything but here are some of the key improvements:
- We restructured the project page
- We automated a lot of the project tasks using bots. The full list of the bots in use on the project and what the do can be seen on the Members tab of the project.
- We restarted the project collaboration, portal and created a newsletter
- We were the ones that suggested creating the new Featured Media class that several projects have already started using.
- In regards to the 2nd question there were some other projects and editors who had problems with the broad scope of the project. These concerns still occur occasionally today but we continue to work through the concerns and discuss them as needed.
- Royalbroil: The biggest issues were "What is the scope of the WikiProject?" and "How should it overlap with state WikiProjects?" Some non-state WikiProjects were completely inactive so they were incorporated into WikiProject US.
What are some of the challenges of overseeing 92,000 pages? Have you borrowed any strategies from other large projects? Have there been any efforts to reduce overuse of the project's banner on articles?
- Royalbroil: A lot of the discussion during the early revitalization phase focused on deciding what belongs in the project so that WikiProject US is manageable. We could have included every state in the scope but decided against since it may have resulted in almost 1 million articles.
- Kumioko: Well on this one I would first like to clarify that the 92,000 includes a lot of templates, categories, files and the like that were added so that they can be more easily watched for changes (using a notification by Article Alert Bot). In actual articles we currently only have about 38,000 articles but that number does continue to grow. There are challenges to this but they are minimized through the use of bots and other tools. It also makes it easier to have the articles under 1 project rather than multiple projects that all need to be maintained and watched.
- Many of the tools and strategies we use in the project are borrowed from other projects. Most notably WikiProject Military History but we have also created several of our own as well that are being used by other projects. Some of the things we have used from other projects include automation of tasks by bot, creating a newsletter, the format of the project page, the collaboration and many others.
- As for the question about overuse of the banner we try to only add it to pages that meet one or more of a couple of criteria:
- The article is of National importance or interest
- it falls under one of the projects that are supported directly by WikiProject United States (like District of Columbia or United States Government)
- The article is part of an ongoing collaboration of the project
- The primary project that the article falls into does not support that class (some of the US related projects don't support all the assessment classes)
Does the project sponsor any monthly collaborations, drives, or newsletters?
- Kumioko: Yes, since restarting the project we have started to do many things of this nature, and we plan to do more in the future.
- We restarted the U.S. Wikipedians' notice board including redirecting several defunct US related noticeboards there
- We restarted the US Wikipedian's collaboration. It was formerly a weekly collaboration, but we changed it to Monthly in the reboot of the project. We have already made significant improvements to several articles and the United States Bill of Rights is the Collaboration for June. With this one we have reached out to the GLAM/National Archives project to collaborate with resources from the National archives to get this article to GA quality by July 4th.
- We are also currently working to get Portal:United States to featured portal status. This will hopefully be done in the next couple months.
Have you had a role in maintaining the project's portal?
- Kumioko: Yes, but only a minor one. I credit several of the other members like RichardF for doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new contributor help today?
- Kumioko: I would say that there are several urgent needs that need more help:
- The most important thing is just to help improving the articles. It doesn't matter which one, just pick one that interest you and work on it.
- We are going to be working on a collaboration soon to either get all the states or all the presidents to FA status. Both of these 2 groups of articles are extremely high importance so any help on these would be hugely beneficial.
- Getting the Portal to featured status
- helping with the Collaboration of the Month articles
- We currently have about 1400 articles that need be assessed
- Royalbroil: Improve the articles. I'm sure there will be more discussion about which items belong in the scope. I suspect that more child WikiProjects will want to be rolled into the scope of this WikiProject.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Kumioko: Over the past few months the primary focus has been on building the project infrastructure, membership, automation of tasks and establishing scope and guidelines. In the next few months we will begin focusing more effort on article improvement through drives and collaborations.
Next week, we'll show off our impressive collection of vinyl. Until then, enjoy our DRM-free content from the archive.
Reader comments
Two newly promoted portals
Featured portals
- Hudson Valley Portal (nom). The Hudson Valley refers to the canyon of the Hudson River and its adjacent communities in New York State, stretching from Westchester County northward to the cities of Albany and Troy. The Valley was a historic cradle of European settlement in the northeastern US and a strategic battleground in colonial wars. (pictures at top and bottom)
- London Transport Portal (nom). London Transport is one of the oldest and largest public transport systems in the world. Many components of its transport system, such as the double-decker bus, the Hackney Carriage black taxi, and the London Underground, are internationally recognised symbols of London. The portal is maintained by WikiProject London Transport. (picture at right)
Featured articles
Seven articles were promoted to featured status:
- Bryan Gunn (nom) (born 1963), a Scottish former professional goalkeeper and football manager, described as "a leader with a big presence". Gunn spent most of his playing career at Norwich City, the club with which he came to be most closely associated. (Nominated by Dweller and The Rambling Man)
- False potto (nom), a lorisiform primate, related to lemurs and found in Africa. the species is of uncertain taxonomic status. (Ucucha)
- Banksia canei (nom), a species of shrub in the plant genus Banksia. It occurs in sub-alpine areas of the Great Dividing Range in south-eastern Australia. (Casliber)
- Hurricane Charley (1986) (nom), the costliest tropical cyclone of the 1986 Atlantic hurricane season. (Hurricanehink)
- Kenesaw Mountain Landis (nom), an American jurist who served as a federal judge from 1905 to 1922, and as the first Commissioner of Baseball from 1920 until his death in 1944. (Wehwalt) (picture at right)
- English National Opera (nom), one of the two principal opera companies in London along with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden. A distinguishing feature of ENO's productions is that they are sung in English. (Tim riley)
- Kathleen Ferrier (nom) (1912–53), an English contralto who achieved an international reputation as a stage, concert and recording artist, with a repertoire extending from folksong and popular ballads to the works of Bach, Brahms, Mahler and Elgar. Her death from cancer at the height of her fame was a shock to the musical world. (Brianboulton)
Two featured articles were delisted:
- Hamlet chicken processing plant fire (nom: prose, comprehensiveness, sourcing, neutrality)
- Sheffield Wednesday F.C. (nom: referencing, prose, style)
Featured lists
Twelve lists were promoted:
- Latin Grammy Award for Best Pop Album by a Duo or Group with Vocals (nom) (Nominated by Jaespinoza).
- Grammy Award for Best Long Form Music Video (nom) (Crystal Clear x3).
- List of Cornwall CCC List A players (nom) (Harrias).
- Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story (nom) (PresN).
- List of Victoria Cross recipients (A–F) (nom) (Woody).
- Grammy Award for Best R&B Album (nom) (Crystal Clear x3).
- List of San Diego Padres team records (nom) (Albacore).
- List of Kraft Nabisco Championship champions (nom) (SaysWhoWhatWhenWhereWhyHow?).
- List of Grand Tour general classification winners (nom) (NapHit). (picture at right)
- Grammy Award for Best Native American Music Album (nom) (Another Believer).
- List of number-one EPs (UK) (nom) (Rambo's Revenge).
- 1998 Asian Games medal table (nom) (Bill william compton).
Featured pictures
Three images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":
- Long-toed Stint (nom; related article), a small wader bird. It breeds across northern Asia and is strongly migratory, wintering in south and south-east Asia and Australasia. It occurs in western Europe only as a very rare vagrant (created by User:JJ Harrison).
- Lesser Sand Plover (nom; related article), a plover that breeds above the tree-line in the Himalayas and discontinuously across to bare coastal plains in north-eastern Siberia, with the Mongolian Plover in the eastern part of the range; it has also bred in Alaska. (created by User:JJ Harrison).
- Future ozone layer concentrations (nom; related article). Led by NASA Goddard scientist Paul Newman, a team of atmospheric chemists simulated "what might have been" from 1974 to 2060 if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and similar ozone-depleting chemicals had not been banned at the Montreal Protocol. The Protocol evolved from the late 1980s to the late 1990s (stills by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, animation by User:Fallschirmjäger).
Arb retires while mailing list leaks continue; Motion re: admin
The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.
Open cases
MickMacNee (Week 3)
(See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case.) During the week, the evidence which was submitted on-wiki by the filer of the case (now blocked as a sockpuppet of a banned user) was collapsed. Other parties made modifications and additions to their on-wiki evidence.
Tree shaping (Week 10)
(See earlier Signpost coverage for background about this case.) During the week, 11 of the 15 active arbitrators voted on the principles and findings of fact drafted by Elen of the Roads. In the coming week, arbitrators are expected to submit more votes in the remedies section of the proposed decision; currently, proposals concerning three individual editors and a discretionary sanctions scheme are being considered.
Motion
An arbitration case request regarding administrator Nabla (talk · contribs) was declined. Instead, the Committee enacted a motion, which was passed 13 to 1 (with 1 abstention):
- The Committee reaffirmed its expectation (along with the Community's expectation) that admins will observe all applicable policies, avoid inappropriate edits, and behave with maturity and professionalism throughout their participation on Wikipedia. While admins are not expected to be perfect, severe or repeated violations of policies and Community norms may lead to appropriate sanctions, up to and including desysopping.
- Nabla's conduct in admittedly making several unproductive edits while editing as an IP has been subject to significant, and justified, criticism. The Committee joined in disapproving of this behavior, but accepted Nabla's assurance that he will not repeat it in the future, even to express good-faith concerns or frustrations regarding aspects of the project.
- Nabla is aware from the relevant admin noticeboard discussion, as well as the arbitration case request, that some editors' trust in his ability to serve as an effective admin has been eroded, both because of his IP edits and because of his period of inactivity. If Nabla intends to resume active work as an admin, he should first refamiliarize himself with all applicable policies. The Committee recommended that he initially focus on less controversial admin tasks.
- The Committee noted that to an extent, the recommendations in 3. apply to any admin after a long period of inactivity.
- Although not directly relevant to Nabla's situation, the Committee expressed its awareness of the ongoing community discussion regarding inactive admin accounts. The Committee indicated that it stands ready to play its part if necessary once consensus has been determined.
Other
Arbitrator resigns
- The Committee announced that Shell Kinney resigned from her position as an arbitrator. A few hours before the announcement was made official, Shell Kinney put a "retired" tag on her userpage with an edit summary that said "update". Her name was also removed from the list of current members of the Arbitration Committee.
- The resignation has come at a time where several email threads of arbcom-l, the Committee's non-public mailing list, continue to be leaked on Wikipedia Review. See also last week's Signpost coverage.
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June report: Virginia datacenter, parser, user profiles; WikiLove 1.0; brief news
June Engineering Report: Virginia datacenter, parser, user profiles etc.
The Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering Report for June was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. Apart from various topics reported previously in the Signpost, it highlights work on the new "eqiad" datacenter at Equinix in Ashburn, Virginia (network setup at the site has been completed and connectivity with the old datacenter in Tampa was established, various services are expected to start getting served from eqiad this month); the first results from this year's Google Summer of Code; and "major progress on our code review backlog".
At the Berlin Hackathon in May (see previous Signpost coverage), a roadmap had been laid out for a reform of the MediaWiki parser, with the purpose of enabling visual editing. In June, Brion Vibber continued to work on the parser plan, while Trevor Parscal and Neil Kandalgaonkar worked on the "Visual editor 0.1".
Also at the Hackathon, WMF User Interface Designer Brandon Harris had outlined plans to make the "identity" of contributors more visible, which is hoped to strengthen communities by connecting users with tasks and collaborators corresponding to their interests (while assuaging fears that this would "turn Wikipedia into Facebook"). The June report notes that Harris has now started to work on StructuredProfile, a "feature [which] aims to make it easier for new editors to fill out their profile pages with meaningful information about their background and interests, and surface select profile information to experienced editors within lists such as recent changes [and] watchlists". Currently, the profile is envisaged to contain details such as the user's real name should they wish to provide it; interests; languages; associations, such as WikiProject membership, being an admin or being a WMF staff member; a user avatar and a 140 character statement about the user's motivation to participate.
Chad Horohoe started work on a project called "academic publications authentication proxy", "whose goal is to allow selected Wikimedians to access third-party academic publishing sites to help with content verifiability". At the same time, however, WMF work on LiquidThreads 3.0 "was mostly on hold in June due to limited resources". A June 23 outage that lasted about 45 minutes and appears to mainly have affected logged-in users was linked to a failure of the server that hosts CentralAuth, the system that handles logging in.
The report notes the large number of jobs currently open in engineering (12 according to a summary by Erik Möller last week, who asked readers of Wikitech-l for help in reaching out to potential candidates).
In related news, Guilaume Paumier (User:Guillom, the report's main contributor) has now officially assumed the newly created role of "Technical Communications Manager".
WikiLove 1.0
Amid a flurry of media coverage (see this week's "In the news"), the new WikiLove extension (created by Kaldari and other WMF developers) was deployed to the English Wikipedia as scheduled on June 30 (see previous Signpost coverage). The extension was turned on for all logged-in users except those who marked "Exclude me from feature experiments" in their preferences. The deployment went smoothly, although some users of Internet Explorer reported problems using the "make your own" feature. This was traced to an API bug which will be fixed later this week (wikitech-l mailing list). Support for older skins such as Classic and Cologne Blue will also be deployed later this week.
Based on the first day of WikiLove usage, the Wikimedia Foundation posted an analysis page, showing some very preliminary usage trends. More extensive analysis is expected in the weeks to come. In addition to logging usage data, the Foundation is also collecting WikiLove stories to examine how the extension is being used by the community. Editors are encouraged to add interesting or exceptional stories to the page to facilitate discussion on WikiLove's impact.
Instructions for how to customize or disable WikiLove are available at MediaWiki.org.
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.
- Jeff Green has been hired as Operations Engineer for Special Projects.
- The order in which the ResourceLoader loads various modules has been modified. The main modules (startup, jQuery, mw.config.set()) are now loaded in the
<head>again. Programmers can choose to have their own modules loaded in the<head>too, or at the end of the<body>. In the discussion, concern had been voiced that the execution of some modules which modify the appearance of the page significantly was sometimes delayed too much, in some cases causing users to click on the wrong links (bug #27488, revision #85616, which went live in #91089).
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