Is an interim WMF executive director inherently notable?

Disclaimer and author's note: I have !voted in the AfD, but i try to not pass on any opinions in this publication.

This week's featured content

Seven featured articles were promoted this week.

• William Sterndale Bennett (nominated by Smerus) (1816–1875) was an English composer, pianist, conductor and music educator. By the age of twenty, he had begun to make a reputation as a concert pianist, and his compositions received high praise. In 1837 Bennett began to teach at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), with which he was associated for most of the rest of his life. For twenty years he taught there, later also teaching at Queen's College, London. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s he composed little, although he performed as a pianist and directed the Philharmonic Society for ten years. In 1858 Bennett returned to composition, but his later works, were considered old-fashioned and did not arouse as much critical enthusiasm as his youthful compositions had done. He was Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge from 1856 to 1866. In that year he became Principal of the RAM, rescuing it from closure, and remained in this position until his death. He was knighted in 1871. He died in London in 1875 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
• The Westminster Assembly (nominated by Jfhutson) was a council of theologians and members of the English Parliament appointed to restructure the Church of England which met from 1643 to 1653. Several Scots also attended, and the Assembly's work was also adopted by the Church of Scotland. The Assembly was called by the Long Parliament before and during the beginning of the First English Civil War. The Long Parliament was influenced by Puritanism, a religious movement which sought to further reform the church. They were opposed to the religious policies of Charles I of England and William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. The Assembly worked in the Reformed Protestant theological tradition, also known as Calvinism. It took the Bible as the authoritative word of God, from which all theological reflection must be based. It produced a new Form of Church Government, a Confession of Faith or statement of belief, two catechisms or manuals for religious instruction, and a liturgical manual for the Churches of England and Scotland.
• The passenger pigeon (nominated by FunkMonk and 7&6=thirteen) (Ectopistes migratorius) is an extinct species of pigeon that was endemic to North America. Its common name is derived from the French word passager, meaning "passing by", due to the migratory habits of the species. It was sexually dimorphic in size and coloration. The male was 39 to 41 cm (15.4 to 16.1 in) in length, mainly gray on the upperparts, lighter on the underparts, with iridescent bronze feathers on the neck, and black spots on the wings. The female was 38 to 40 cm (15.0 to 15.7 in), and was duller and browner than the male overall. The juvenile was similar to the female, but without iridescence. It mainly inhabited the deciduous forests of eastern North America and was also recorded elsewhere, but bred primarily around the Great Lakes.
• Christ lag in Todes Banden (nominated by Gerda Arendt and Thoughtfortheday) is a cantata for Easter by the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach. One of his earliest church cantatas, it was probably intended for a performance in 1707, an early work in the genre to which he later contributed complete cantata cycles for all occasions of the liturgical year. It is a chorale cantata, a style in which both text and music are based on a hymn. In this instance the source was Martin Luther's eponymous hymn.
• Serpin (nominated by Evolution and evolvability) are a superfamily of proteins with similar structures that were first identified for their protease inhibition activity and are found in all kingdoms of life. They are notable for their unusual mechanism of action, in which they irreversibly inhibit their target protease by undergoing a large conformational change to disrupt its active site. The conformational-change mechanism confers certain advantages, but it also has drawbacks: serpins are vulnerable to mutations that can result in serpinopathies such as protein misfolding and the formation of inactive long-chain polymers.
• York City F.C. is a professional association football club based in York, North Yorkshire. Its history from the 1980–81 to the current season (nominated by Mattythewhite) saw fluctuating fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s, and relegation from and return to the Football League. The club won its first and only league title after finishing first in the Fourth Division in 1983–84 with 101 points. They were the first team to score this many points in a Football League season. In the 1990s, they knocked Premier League clubs Manchester United and Everton out of the League Cup in successive seasons. In March 2003, York were taken over by the club's Supporters' Trust, and were relegated into the Conference National in 2003–04, ending seventy-five years of Football League membership.
• Physical limitations acquired from spinal cord injury affect sexual function and sexuality (nominated by Delldot) in broader areas, which in turn has important effects on quality of life. Damage to the spinal cord impairs its ability to transmit messages between the brain and parts of the body below the level of the lesion. This results in lost or reduced sensation and muscle motion, and affects orgasm, erection, ejaculation, and vaginal lubrication. Psycho-social causes include depression and altered self-image. However, many people with SCI have satisfying sex lives, and many experience sexual arousal and orgasm. Drugs, devices, surgery, and other interventions exist to help men achieve erection and ejaculation. Although male fertility is reduced, many men with SCI can still father children, particularly with medical interventions. Women's fertility is not usually affected, although precautions must be taken for safe pregnancy and delivery.

Two featured lists were promoted this week.

• Bedfordshire is a county in the East of England. It has an area of 1,235 square kilometres (477 sq mi), and a population estimated in 2016 at 640,000, with an increase of 11% over the previous ten years. As of March 2016 there are twenty Local Nature Reserves in Bedfordshire (nominated by Dudley Miles): eight in Bedford, eleven in Central Bedfordshire and one in Luton. Local Nature Reserve are designated by local authorities under the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949. The local authority must have a legal control over the site, by owning or leasing it, or having a legal agreement with the owner. They are sites which have a special local interest either biologically or geologically, and local authorities have a duty to care for them.
• Ethel Barrymore (1879–1959) was an American actress of stage, screen and radio (nominated by SchroCat). Barrymore's first Broadway role was in The Imprudent Young Couple. She soon found success, particularly after an invitation from William Gillette to appear on stage in his London production of Secret Service. She began her film career in a series of silent films, but she never dedicated herself to the medium fully. She appeared in her first talking film, Rasputin and the Empress and began radio broadcasts on the Blue Network with The Ethel Barrymore Theater. Her film work became increasingly prominent in the 1940s and 1950s, and she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for None but the Lonely Heart.

Four featured pictures were promoted this week.

• 
  Shoeless Joe Jackson
  (created by Charles M. Conlon; nominated by Scewing)
• 
  Curiosity
  (created by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS; nominated by Nergaal)
• 
  The Crucifixion of St Julia
  (created by Hieronymus Bosch; nominated by Fæ)
• 
  Gentoo penguin
  (created and nominated by Godot13)

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2016-03-16

Watchlists, watchlists, watchlists!

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By Legoktm

After a long hiatus, we're back! This week we are interviewing Addshore, who is an administrator and bureaucrat on the English Wikipedia as well as a MediaWiki developer. He currently works for Wikimedia Deutschland as...well, I'll let him explain.

What do you do at Wikimedia Deutschland?

I am a Software Engineer primarily working as part of the TCB Team (TCB stands for Technischer Communitybedarf, which roughly translates to "Technical community needs").

I also work on Wikidata and Wikibase!

One of the features you recently worked on was category watchlists. There were a few hiccups with the deployment the first time, but how did it go overall? If you had to do it over again, what (if anything) would you do differently?

The initial hiccup was a security bug slipping through all of the review that happened on the initial patch, very unfortunate, but not much to change here other than more eyes on code/more review! Other hiccups, such as flooding CheckUser with basically useless data, perhaps could have been forseen, but again nothing really to change here. The initial deployment was basically, turn the feature on everywhere. In hindsight the second deployment, which slowly rolled out to various projects in groups, was far better.

You can track the usage of the feature at https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/mediawiki-catwatch-feature

What cool new project are you working on next?

Expiring watchlist items & general watchlist improvements & refactoring, phab:T100508.

Watchlists have remained the same for years now, and we know what would make them better, (expiring watchlist items specifically as a request from the German community), as well as other changes! Probably going to be a rather slow process though.

As you know, there's been a lot of controversy over the past month, causing heated tensions in some cases. So lets hear it, where do you stand: short array syntax or long? (context)

Short!

Having said that I have nothing against the long syntax...

It makes sense to keep the code consistent with itself and I think the single patch changing all long syntax usages to short usages made much more sense than waiting N years for all usages to finally be gone spread accross 100+ patches..

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2016-03-16

Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States

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By Milowent

Based on this chart, you could think this headline will be true someday. Trump has led the chart for two consecutive weeks with over 8 million views each time -- those are very high numbers, well above the average chart topper. In comparison, Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders is only #22, and Hillary Clinton isn't even on the chart— she was #54 (nor are any of the other Republicans on the chart) . Outside of Trumpmania, the death of Nancy Reagan was #4, narrowly beaten by her husband Ronald Reagan (#3). The rest of the Top 10 include two Reddit-fueled articles, two about UFC fighters, one movie (10 Cloverfield Lane, #5), one drug (Meldonium, #2), and International Women's Day (#9).

For the full top-25 list, see WP:TOP25. See this section for an explanation of any exclusions. For a list of the most edited articles of the week, see here.

For the week of March 6 to 12, 2016, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the report of the most viewed pages, were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes
1	Donald Trump		8,257,174		Donald Trump's dominance of this chart is fairly incredible at this point, though perhaps not surprising when the front pages of most American news outlets are filled with details of the latest exploits and incidents surrounding the most bizarre U.S. Presidential campaign in history. For the second week, this article has exceeded 8 million views, when typically a mere 1 or 2 million views normally is more than enough to be number one for a week. Reporting and commentary in the last week noted that Trump won more primaries last week, that a 78-year old man sucker-punched a protester at a Trump rally (and Trump offered to pay any resulting legal fees), claims that his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski manhandled Breitbart News Network's Michelle Fields at an event, and the cancellation of a rally in Chicago due to protesters. A 1964 ad titled Confessions of a Republican used to defeat Republican nominee Barry Goldwater also has been in the news due to some eerie similarities to Trump's shenanigans.
2	Meldonium		2,108,543		Since January 1, 2016, this drug has been on the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) list of substances banned from use by athletes. On March 7, 2016, former world number one tennis player Maria Sharapova announced that she had failed a drug test in Australia due to the detection of the substance.
3	Ronald Reagan		1,683,665		The 40th President of the United States died in 2004, but his wife Nancy Reagan (#4) died last week. The two articles were only 10,000 views apart.
4	Nancy Reagan		1,673,052		The wife of Ronald Reagan (#3), the former First Lady died on March 6, at age 94. Those who remember the Reagan presidency may most remember her founding of the Just Say No (to drugs) campaign in the 1980s. She has been buried at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, next to her husband.
5	10 Cloverfield Lane		1,208,731		This science fiction thriller, which includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead (pictured) in the cast, was released in North America in 2016, to positive critical reviews. It earned $24.7 million in its opening weekend, putting it second behind Zootopia (#24).
6	Lupe Fuentes		1,020,335		This is all Reddit, who lured in viewers with the headline: "TIL a Puerto Rican man was arrested for watching porno feat Lupe Fuentes, who a pediatrician identified as being underage because of her appearance. The porn star flew there from Spain to show her passport and prove she was 19. The man was in jail for 2 months before that happened."
7	Unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt		971,792		The circumstances of an unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt being painted before his death was a popular Reddit "Today I Learned" topic this week. See Unfinished portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt to view the actual photo which is under a "fair use" restriction; I created a very poor facsimile of it (pictured at left) for you to shake your head at disapprovingly.
8	Nate Diaz		937,440		This mixed-martial artist prevailed over Conor McGregor (#10) at UFC 196 (#13) on March 5.
9	International Women's Day		884,610		This day is celebrated annually on March 8, and is an official holiday in a number of countries. It was again celebrated by a Google Doodle.
10	Conor McGregor		817,535		The guy who lost to #8.

• Just missing the WP:TOP25 this week: O. J. Simpson murder case (#26); George Martin (#27, the Fifth Beatle, not George R.R. Martin); Miesha Tate (#28); Ted Cruz (#29); The Walking Dead (season 6) (#30).
• Elsewhere on the raw WP:5000: List of The Flash (2014 TV series) episodes (#100, 236,534 views); The Night Manager (miniseries) (#200, 155,611 views); List of The Big Bang Theory episodes (#300, 123,248 views); History of Bălţi (#400, 106,498 views, but 0% mobile, so these are not legitimate human views); X-Men: Apocalypse (#441, 100,070 views, the last article to exceed 100,000 views last week); September 11 attacks (#500, 92,746 views); Vikings (season 4) (#600, 84,784 views); Elizabeth I of England (#701, 77,938 views); Vladimir Putin (#800, 72,404 views); Taiwan (#900, 68,039 views); Calvin Harris (#1000, 63,873 views); Lynyrd Skynyrd (#2000, 43,598 views); Green Day (#3000, 34,681 views); Action Bronson (#4000, 29,282 views); Shark Tank (#5000, 25,796 views)

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2016-03-16

Podcast #119: The Foundation and the departure of Lila Tretikov

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By Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt

Wikipedia Weekly Episode 119 (Running time of 1 hour 45 minutes.)

Wikipedia Weekly is a spoken English-language audio podcast that discusses the Wikimedia movement, and has been produced intermittently since 2006. This is the first episode since July 2015 and marks a return to what we hope will be a semi-regular publication schedule. It is also the first episode featured in the Signpost.

In our first episode of 2016, we discuss the two-year term of outgoing executive director Lila Tretikov, and the turmoil that faced the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees, WMF staff, and the Wikimedia community in 2015 and 2016. Andrew Lih (Fuzheado) and Liam Wyatt (Wittylama) go over the timeline of events since May 1, 2014, when Tretikov was introduced by her predecessor Sue Gardner as the "unicorn" the Foundation was looking for. We discuss affiliate selected board seats, Knowledge Engine, a crucial all-staff meeting at the Wikimedia Foundation on November 9, 2015, and the current interim executive director Katherine Maher.

We welcome a diverse range of participation and voices from all over the community. Ideas and feedback can be left on the talk page on the main Wikipedia Weekly page, and an active Facebook group has been popular in keeping the conversation going between episodes. We welcome community help in indexing the time code and topics discussed, to make for easier navigation of the content.

You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.

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2016-03-16

It “revolutionized the way German-speaking people inform themselves about the world”: Fifteen years of the German Wikipedia

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By Ed Erhart

The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. Any views expressed in this piece are not necessarily shared by the Signpost; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments. For more information on this partnership, see our content guidelines.

A German Wikipedia meetup, December 2013. The candle was created for a tenth anniversary celebration two years earlier.

On this day fifteen years ago, the German Wikipedia was announced to the world by Jimmy Wales, becoming the second Wikipedia ever created.

Looking back, Wikipedia editor Dirk Franke told us that “Wikipedia really has revolutionized the way German-speaking people inform themselves about the world. It is almost impossible not to use it.”

Another editor, Christoph Braun, gave a concrete example of the site’s impact: “In the last 15 years, German Wikipedia has become the de facto replacement for the Brockhaus—the German equivalent of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Brockhaus has not been in circulation since 2014 seemingly because of Wikipedia’s success. Everyone from school children to university professors relies on Wikipedia and expects Wikipedia to provide information on the latest news as well as on timeless topics.”

These results have come only at the hands of dedicated community members. The German Wikipedia is known for its number of highly engaged editors, as more than 20,000 active editors—second-most in the world—edit and maintain the site as part of the wider Wikimedia world.

Many of these users live in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, which are all located in Central Europe, and this geographic proximity has played a large role in the development of the German-language Wikipedia’s community.

These countries’ “shared time zone determines German Wikipedia’s daily routine,” according to Braun, and the closeness has fostered a culture of regular in-person meetings, or meetups. As German Wikipedian Ziko van Dijk put it, the distances involved “make it relatively easy to meet each other and to organize.” The first meetup happened in Munich on October 28, 2003, and they have continued to present day; nineteen events are scheduled for this month, only two of which are anniversary-related.

Braun and van Dijk pointed to the influence of these so-called “round table” (Wikipedia-Stammtisch) meet-ups on the German Wikipedia’s culture. Franke noted these meetings have taken on different flavors over time as community members have fit themselves into different categories: “alongside the regional meetings, there are quite a lot of national meetings of different scopes. For instance, sometimes just administrators meet, while sometimes just people writing about chemistry.”

And these meetings are not just for socializing. Franke adamantly stated that “meeting in person plays a huge role in the German Wikipedia, and a lot of its social dynamics can’t be understood without knowing this.” On the social dynamics, Braun notes that the meetups “help to settle online disputes, share ideas, and are useful for networking amongst Wikipedians.” In the wider Wikimedia movement, these social relationships fostered leaders for the whole world; German Wikipedians organized the first Wikimedia chapter, formed in 2004, and the first global conference (Wikimania), held in Frankfurt in 2005.

This post is, however, doomed to be only a disappointingly short summary of a fascinatingly complex culture. Braun told us that to try to explain the German Wikipedia’s history would be an impossible task, and while Franke made an attempt, he was sure to add that we would be missing out on “so much”:

“

Great articles, great projects, great discussions, great fights, great people. From the beginning, when basically five people were all the active editors, to the surge in 2004/2005. Discussions about notability, several featured articles written to prove that single streets or pizza boxes can be notable. People have met and married, have argued, have gotten kids, have taken amazing photographs. We had a story in Der Spiegel (kind of a German Newsweek or Time) about a single edit war. We had times when everybody talked about the writing contest and now people care about the WikiCup. You missed many brilliant inspiring people from all ways of life, often eccentric, sometimes a bit obnoxious but always entertaining and thought-provoking. You missed people travelling across Germany to take pictures and others who edited hundreds of thousands of articles. You missed the one-man project on East Timor that has been going on for several years and one’s obsession about telecommunications towers. There were arguments about the notability of streets [and] brands … plus a three-year conflict (still ongoing) about the right and wrong symbols to use when somebody is deceased.

”

Last, as the site’s two-millionth article is drawing ever closer—they’re at 1.92 million as of publishing time—we took a look at the top 15 edited articles on the German Wikipedia (as of 11 March).

There are only three common names between this list and a similar list for the English Wikipedia (scroll to the bottom): Adolf Hitler, Jesus, and World War II. Articles on Germany itself swept the first, second, and seventh places, in addition to the German national football team (#6) and a controversial political party (#13), but several surprises crop up. In particular, articles on fictional media took three places: Kingdom Hearts II, a video game from 2005 (#3), a list of characters from Harry Potter book and film series (#12), and a list of characters from the US television show The Simpsons (#15).

And, strangely, there’s a list of unusual deaths at #5.

1. Deutschland‏‎ (Germany, 14,073 edits)
2. Kultur Deutschlands‏‎ (Culture of Germany, 13,760 edits)
3. Kingdom Hearts II‏‎ (10,509 edits)
4. Adolf Hitler‏‎ (9,905 edits)
5. Liste ungewöhnlicher Todesfälle‏‎ (List of unusual deaths, 9,595 edits)
6. Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft‏‎ (German national football team, 8,789 edits)
7. Berlin‏‎ (7,637 edits)
8. Schwarze‏‎ (Black people, 7,283 edits)
9. Jesus von Nazaret‏‎ (Jesus of Nazareth, 7,262 edits)
10. Zeugen Jehovas‏‎ (Jehovah’s Witnesses, 7,212 edits)
11. Zweiter Weltkrieg‏‎ (World War II, 7,138 edits)
12. Figuren der Harry-Potter-Romane‏‎ (Characters in the Harry Potter universe, 7,091 edits)
13. Alternative für Deutschland‏‎ (Alternative for Germany, 7,025 edits)
14. Jesus-Mythos‏‎ (Jesus myth theory, 6,983 edits)
15. Figuren aus Die Simpsons‏‎ (Characters from The Simpsons, 6,868 edits)

Ed Erhart is an Editorial Associate at the Wikimedia Foundation.

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