Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/In the media
Intermittent outages planned, first Wikidata client deployment
Wikidata deployed to Hungarian Wikipedia
The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository. Although they are now little more than edit window clutter, members of the Hungarian Wikipedia community have been hesitant with regard to remove existing links, given that Wikidata-ignorant interwiki bots remain in operation, potentially re-inserting the "missing" links in the wikitext. Changes coming from Wikidata can also be seen in recent changes and in the watchlist, though they are hidden by default, marking an end to interwiki-link changes cluttering watchlists (announcement on huwiki (in Hungarian) and blog post (in English) on the Wikimedia Germany blog). Deployments to the Hebrew and Italian Wikipedias are planned for 30 January, and assuming all goes well – and communities remain receptive – the Wikidata client should have found its way onto English Wikipedia by the end of February and then onto other language Wikipedias in the following month. The Wikidata team welcomes feedback, either via the Contact the development team page on Wikidata, on #wikimedia-wikidata on IRC, or on the mailing list. In addition to Hungarian Wikipedia, the client is also enabled on test2wiki where interested users who do not speak Hungarian can test it.
Development of phase 2, relating to infobox-style data entries is progressing well, the Wikidata team reports, though again code review is likely to be a slow and arduous process and no deployment dates have yet been set. In related news, the 3 millionth Wikidata item was created on January 13: "List of mayors of Westdorpe", a large village in the Netherlands.
Intermittent outages expected during primary data centre switchover
The Wikimedia operations team is busy preparing to switch over the master database servers and other key infrastructure to use the Ashburn, Virginia data centre as the primary data centre. The Ashburn data centre is already serving about 90% of traffic, but this is mainly the result of it hosting caching servers which serve pages for logged-out users, as well as images, JavaScript and CSS. When Wikimedians edit a wiki, the regeneration of the pages is still handled by master database servers in the Tampa data centre. The switchover is part of an ongoing project to enable redundancy for key infrastructure; in addition, the change in "primary" centre from Tampa to Ashburn revolved around the quality of the facilities at both locations.
CT Woo, the Foundation's Director of Operations, announced the change on the wikitech-l mailing list:
| “ | The team has scheduled the week of 22nd January, 2013 to perform the switchover. We are going to block a 8-hour migration window on the 22nd, 23rd and 24th. During those periods, 17:00 UTC to 01:00 UTC (9am to 5pm PST), there will be intermittent blackouts. ... We will make the final Go/No decision on 18th January. | ” |
In the event of an outage, Wikimedians can get updates on IRC in the #wikimedia-tech channel, or via Wikimedia's Twitter accounts @wikimedia or @wikimediatech (detailed server logs).
As the operations and core platform team are setting up new servers and infrastructure, they are taking it as an opportunity to also switchover to new deployment tools (git-deploy) and a new internal workflow for the regular code updates to the Wikimedia projects.
Echo project holds office hours
The Echo team held IRC office hours on January 8 where they discussed development progress on a Facebook-style notification system for editors. As previously reported, Echo, currently deployed on MediaWiki.org, provides notifications when someone edits your talk page, creates a link to an article you created, nominates it for deletion, adds maintenance tags, or reverts your edit. There will be a notifications "badge" at the top of the page, next to your user name, which can replace the "yellow" bar that users see now when you have a new talk page message. The team described how they have a "'user mention' notification in the works" which could work similar to Twitter mentions and notify you when someone mentions you on another page. The team welcomes feedback on the types of notifications to provide, although they initially have in mind new users, who are more likely to miss important events than established users. Echo may also provide a public notifications API that could be used by bots and scripts, the team said, though they, together with the community, would need to figure out how to balance ease of use of the tool while minimizing abuse and spamming with the notifications API.
Echo is available for testing on test2wiki. The Echo team plans on initial experimental deployment to English Wikipedia sometime next month (presumably of an opt-in nature). Interested editors can also stay informed and discuss with the Editor Engagement team about Echo and other projects on their new editor engagement mailing list.
- Disclaimer: User:Aude is an employee of Wikimedia Germany, working on the Wikidata project.
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 several weeks.
- Experimental features pushed to mobile: Following the release of a new mobile Wikimedia experience in 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation has further extended their beta to include new features. This update is intended to "unleash the full creativity of our engineers and designers without disrupting the user experience for millions of readers". Specifically, logged-in mobile users can now upload pictures to the Wikimedia Commons directly from their browser, while Wikimedia editors will be interested in the new watchlist and section editing tools. These features, while functional, are described as experimental at this time.
- Monthly engineering report published: The Wikimedia Foundation has released their December 2012 technical report, highlighting important developments including the deployment of VisualEditor to the English Wikipedia, as well as progress on many of the Foundation's less-well-known projects.
- Universal Language Selector deployment broadens: The Internationalisation team at the Wikimedia Foundation is deploying the Universal Language Selector on wikis with the Translate extension currently enabled (Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Outreach wiki, Incubator and the Wikimania wikis). The Universal Language Selector is replacing the similar Narayam and WebFonts extensions, which will be disabled on those wikis. The Selector, which enables easier switching between interface languages and input scripts, will be available only to logged-in users, as there are still caching issues for logged-out users; the plan is to release it to all users later in the year.
- Staff promotion at Foundation: Patrick Reilly has been promoted to the role of Site Performance Engineer and Senior Technical Advisor at the Wikimedia Foundation. Reilly has previously worked on the MobileFrontend extension and as technical lead for the mobile development team.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Opinion
Launch of annual picture competition, new grant scheme
Commons' annual contest opens
On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits on any one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012.
This year will mark the seventh annual contest, which was originally started by Commons editor Alvesgaspar in late 2006. Since then, editor participation has expanded greatly and the contest has become an important part of the Commons calendar. The last contest was won by Heinrich Pniok, a German volunteer who submitted a photograph taken in Norway.
The 2012 Picture of the Year contest is organized by a small group of volunteers who are responsible for tasks like sorting images from the featured picture process, promoting the event, translating messages, and contacting the contest winners. In addition, a new script has been deployed to improve the voting experience. The tool allows voters to quickly and easily vote for the images of their choice, while checking the eligibility of voters.
Voting in the first round will run from from January 16 to January 30. Eligible editors can vote for as many of the 988 images featured in 2012 as they wish. The second round will start on February 7 to determine the winner among the finalists from the first round.
New WMF grant scheme kicks off
On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEGs). The program, after going through a consultation period since mid-December 2012, aims primarily to empower individual volunteer grantees or small groups, working on structural and time-intensive problems of the editing communities.
The scheme works on an eight-step process, from applicants learning about the program to assessing whether they are comfortable with the framework, to finally reporting results on Meta. The second step, the application process, is open from January 15 to February 15 in this first round, and at the same time Meta is setting up a volunteer reviewer committee. Its membership is supposed provide feedback on, evaluate and finally make recommendations on the proposals.
Siko Bouterse and other supporting staff will be checking whether submissions fulfil the formal requirements. Community discussions of applications will be open until February 24. The day after, the committee will start considering both the proposals and their related discussions in making its final recommendations until the grantee announcement, scheduled for March 15.
Successful applicants will secure a grant for one of the maximum seven IEG pilots. They will gain access to US$5–30K to fund their efforts for 6–12 months, and are expected to file mid-point reports on Meta by July. A second round is planned to start on August 1. Volunteers interested in participating in the work of the related committee are invited to join it.
Brief notes
- Wikimedia Conference Japan 2013: Japanese Wikipedians are preparing this year's Wikimedia conference at the University of Tokyo on February 3. Information on the program, keynote speakers, and conference details is on both the conference website and on Facebook.
- Steward elections: On January 15, Meta started its annual steward election proceedings. Candidature submissions for this vital global role are open until January 28, 23:59 (UTC). Community voting is set to begin on February 8, parallel to the reconfirmation process of volunteers already serving in that role.
- Milestones: On January 13, Wikispecies—the WMF-supported project aiming at disseminating free knowledge of all known biological species—reached a milestone, with Tetramorium alpestre, its 350,000th entry. At the time of writing, the Italian Wikipedia project was less than two thousand articles short of its millionth entry.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/In focus
First arbitration case in almost six months
The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
Open cases
Doncram (Week 1)
The case concerns Doncram's creation of masses of articles composed of unchecked content transferred from foreign databases and his perceived misrepresentation of legitimate criticism. The filer, SarekOfVulcan, notes that while he is a long-standing editor, he "has frequently run up against other editors relating to both the content and how he reacts when the content is challenged." When arbitrator Roger Davies asked the parties to "provide details of a [recent] arbitratable issue that the community has failed to resolve", SarekOfVulcan cited two instances:
| “ | See Architects of the National Park Service for his continuing to create lists with insufficient evidence for inclusion. Note Cbl62's edit summaries of "it's been 3 months since sourcing discussion began and still nothing to support these entries." Note particularly their exchange on Jan 4, where Doncram and Cbl62 disagree on a source.
Also note this AfD, where he declares "If this was userfied to my space, I would be inclined to return it to mainspace immediately, as it is an obviously valid, completely sourced article." |
” |
In November 2011, SarekOfVulcan noted on the administrators' noticeboard for incidents that Doncram created the Chambers Building article without substantive content. Snottywong described the report as "an immediate kneejerk [sic] ANI complaint [which] was uncalled for." In her reply, Elen of the Roads states that she originally blocked him
| “ | to stop him transferring the content of another database into Wikipedia without any check being made on the quality of what was being imported (there were a lot of problems with the other database). All the time. Without stopping. And endlessly abusing both the guy who wrote the script that he used, and anyone who tried to clean up the mess. | ” |
Orlady's statement says that her long-standing complaints include Doncram exhibiting "an attitude of article ownership", escalating minor disagreements into larger arguments, believing that he is exempt from policies and guidelines, and demonstrating "a pattern of personalizing interactions with others, including engaging in blisteringly vitriolic personal attacks against [her]." Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Humour