Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2010-09-27

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27 September 2010

News and notes
French million, controversial content, Citizendium charter, Pending changes, and more

In the news
Wikimedia moves into India, critical conference, Vandalism detection contest

WikiProject report
Designing WikiProject Architecture

Features and admins
The best of the week

Arbitration report
EEML amendment requests & more

Technology report
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

2010-09-27

French million, controversial content, Citizendium charter, Pending changes, and more

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By Resident Mario, Tilman Bayer and Tony1

French-language Wikipedia reaches a million articles

The 1,000,000th logo for the French Wikipedia.

The French-language Wikipedia celebrated its millionth article with the creation of the article Louis Babel on September 21. The French-language Wikipedia is the third to cross this threshold, after the German (with 1.1 million) and English Wikipedias (with 3.4), having grown at a steady rate since its formation in 2001. It has more than 60 million individual edits and 300,000 active contributors; article creation at WP.fr spiked in 2005–06, driven by the addition of some 36,000 geographical stubs, then stabilized to a present rate of 300–400 new articles a day, as well as 800 active contributor registrations per month.

The milestone was also announced on Wikimedia France's Twitter feed. Because of lag on the Wikipedia page lists, the milestone was expected to be hit two days later, on September 23; following a flurry of page creations, the developers revealed that the milestone had been hit with the creation of Louis Babel, two days prior to the expected date.

The next Wikipedias likely to break the threshold are the Polish (now at 729,000 articles) and the Italian (728,000).

Draft of controversial content recommendations published

Part Two of three installments of the 2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content has been released (see earlier Signpost coverage: "Board resolution on offensive content", "Study on controversial content"). Authored by consultants Robert Harris and Dory Carr-Harris, it sets out 11 recommendations for discussion, to be presented to the Board in October, among them that:

the status quo be maintained for dealing with controversial text within the Foundation's projects;
the creation of a "WikiJunior" version of the Wikipedias aimed at under-12s be considered;
the application of the existing Commons policy on educational scope be reviewed with a view to deleting images of nudity in Commons where breasts, genital areas or buttocks are clearly visible, and the intent of the image, to a reasonable person, is merely to arouse, not to educate;
historical, ethnographic and art images be excluded from such a review in virtually all cases;
policies of active curation be considered for sexual, violent, or sacred images deemed controversial, which would allow for restriction of the numbers of images in a category, active commissioning of images deemed needed; (Harris gave an example: "We counted more than 1,000 images of penises in Commons, and unless we missed one, they were all white. A curated Commons might actively try to correct this imbalance, to make the collection more representative");
a user-selected optional "regime" (“under 12 button” or “NSFW” button) be established within all WMF projects, but that this feature should only be able to delay (not deny) access for the reader;
Wikimedians should decide what is filterable, and that tagging regimes that would allow third parties to do so be restricted; and
the “principle of least astonishment” be elevated to policy status as a fundamental principle governing relationships with readers. (The term "Principle of least astonishment" has been used earlier in such debates, for example by Jimmy Wales in his intervention earlier this year on the German Wikipedia when that project featured an explicit image on its main page – see Signpost coverage.)

Part Three will contain a "rough catalogue" of existing sexual images on Commons.

Citizendium adopts charter, Larry Sanger's leading role ends

After a deliberation process lasting more than a year, the free wiki-based online encyclopedia Citizendium has adopted a charter (consisting of 55 articles laying a constitution-like foundation for the project's governance). This was announced last week by its founder Larry Sanger, whose role as editor-in-chief ended with the charter's ratification.

Plans for a charter had already been mentioned in Citizendium's initial press release in October 2006, but the drafting process did not start until a July 2009 statement by Sanger, in which he announced his intention to step down as editor-in-chief, partly to fulfill his pledge to do so two or three years after Citizendium's inception, and partly due to his inactivity on the project.

The charter's 55 articles are in seven sections ("Citizenship and editorship", "Content and style", "Organization and offices", "Community policy", "Behavior and dispute resolution", "Administrative matters", and "Transitional measures"). A nomination process has now begun to fill governance roles set out in the charter: A five-member Management Council, a seven-member Editorial Council, a Managing Editor, and an Ombudsman. The preamble to the charter describes Citizendium as "a collaborative effort to collect, structure, and cultivate knowledge and to render it conveniently accessible to the public for free", without mentioning the word "encyclopedia". There were concerns about ambiguous statements and a lack of copy-editing in the final version (there are typos such as "Managament Council"). Sanger himself, who was not directly involved in the drafting process, had objected to the wording of several articles, including those mentioning original research and advertising, and to the absence from the charter of "anything like a bill of rights enumerating the rights of Citizens against unfair procedures and punishments". In last week's announcement, Sanger also criticized the charter's "lack of any requirement that articles be family-friendly" (as in Citizendium's current family-friendly policy), and added that "there is some seriously twisted stuff on Wikipedia that has no business in a resource calling itself an 'encyclopedia'" (cf. Signpost coverage of his earlier allegations against Wikimedia Commons). On the other hand, he expressed hope that the charter would make it easier to exclude problematic contributors from Citizendium, which he said suffered from the presence of "ideologues" and "cranks" (the project has been criticized for being over-lenient towards advocates of topics such as homeopathy or chiropractic).

Despite the criticism of the final version, it was overwhelmingly approved, by 65 of 72 participating members. (In each of the past two months, there were around 100 active Citizendium users, i.e. accounts that had made at least one edit, according to Citizendium's statistics.) Half of the eight-member Charter Drafting Committee had "dropped out" before the vote, and one of the remaining committee members (also the Secretary of Citizendium's Editorial Council) justified the decision not to delay the process further: "Citizendium is on intensive care life support. I think it has a chance to recover with an imperfect charter".

In his announcement, Sanger dismissed "hopeful, mean-spirited reports of our impending demise", observing that "our traffic has been steadily growing, and I've observed new people continuing to get involved". However, he warned that "the funds available to pay for the Citizendium servers are running low" and advised the community to think about funding options and cheaper hosting (see also July 26 Signpost coverage).

Interim poll on pending changes ends

Briefly

Article feedback launched: As first announced in an earlier Signpost article, a trial of the Article feedback tool was launched on September 22. This is one of several changes being tested as part of the Public Policy Initiative. It aims to "capture article feedback from readers". The feedback tool, which consists of several "thermometer-like" bars at the bottom of an article, allows any reader to quickly judge an article by the quality of its sourcing, completeness, neutrality, and readability, on a scale of one to five. The pilot covers around 450 articles under the scope of WikiProject United States Public Policy. Besides offering a new way to seek the input of readers regarding Wikipedia quality, the Public Policy also experiments with the conventional system of editors' feedback, implementing a variation of the widely used Wikipedia 1.0 assessment system. A signup list for its Assessment Team has been started.
"Username," the first video in the series.
Introductory video clips: The Wikimedia Foundation has published a four-part video clip series on Wikipedia, directed by Jelly Helm. In order, they are called "Username", "Nice people", "Edit button," and "Great Feeling." The clips were created as a presentable "short" for future meetings and presentations, and were shot at Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland. They are also distributed on Facebook, Identi.ca, YouTube, Vimeo. Overall 35 people were interviewed. Among those who appear in the videos are Bücherwürmlein, Wittylama, cbrown1023, Henna, Steven Walling, Theo10011, Mstislavl, Chomsky1, Lyzzy, Waldir, Jdforrester, Church of emacs, notafish and Abbasjnr. The videos had been previewed at the Wiki-Conference NYC last month, see Signpost coverage.
French GLAM conference: Wikimédia France has announced a two-day "GLAMWIKI:FR" conference on "cultural heritage and collaborative web" (the first part of a projected "Les Rencontres Wikimédia" series). It focuses on outreach to the cultural sector, including museum curators, librarians, archivists, art historians, subject specialists and associated professions (subsumed as GLAM on Wikimedia projects). This will be the third meeting of its kind, following an Australian one in 2009 and an upcoming British one on November 26–27 (see earlier Signpost coverage). It will be held on December 3 and 4 at the Palais Bourbon in Paris. In related news, the French city of Toulouse announced that it had become the first to sign a collaboration with Wikimedia France, about providing photos from its museum and archives on Commons. And the Europeana GLAM conference on October 14/15 in Amsterdam will feature a keynote by Liam Wyatt (User:Wittylama), titled "Peace, Love & Metadata: a cultural collaboration with Wikipedia".
Account participation initiative: The Wikimedia Foundation has begun the Account Creation Improvement Project, noting that "account creation is not welcoming, it often looks complicated, it is overwhelming, and there is no follow-up. It is not clear what the benefits of account creation are." Only around 31% of new users on Wikipedia ever make a single edit (based on logs extracted from the toolserver in August). The initiative is currently brainstorming ideas and gathering participants and data.

Wikimedia movement roles project: The Wikimedia Foundation's "movement roles" project was officially announced last week (see earlier Signpost coverage: September 13, September 6). It is a year-long effort, commissioned by the Board of Trustees and centered around a working group, aiming to "clarify the roles of various stakeholders in the movement" (such as chapters). The goal is to create a "Wikimedia Charter" – a document where the roles and responsibilities of various members of the Foundation (such as chapters) are clearly defined -, and to put forward a plan for organizational development.
Wikimedia UK appoints "Office Manager": Charles Matthews was appointed Office Manager for Wikimedia UK last week. The position had been announced last month, as the first paid employee of the chapter since its foundation two years ago. The appointment is an interim position meant to "provide the chapter with administrative support and in particular with the annual fundraiser." Matthews has been an active contributor on Wikipedia since 2003, and an administrator since 2004.
Wikimedia Italia board: The Italian Wikimedia chapter elected a new board last week; Frieda Brioschi (m:User:Frieda), who has served as the chapter's president since its foundation in 2005, will continue her role.
Featured articles for the blind: Wikimedia Deutschland has announced (English summary by Ziko) that the German Central Library for the Blind (DZB) is producing audio versions of all 31 "Articles of the Day" that are to appear on the German Wikipedia's main page in October. The DZB (which was founded in 1894 and is based in Leipzig) contracts over 50 professional speakers for audio books and other productions, some of whom will read the Wikipedia articles.
Essay series on Wikimedia: Eugene Eric Kim (User:Eekim), who was the Program Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategic Planning project, has published the second in a series of four blog posts about the Wikimedia movement and its challenges, on the website of his consultancy firm "Blue Oxen Associates": Wikimedia: Power, Leadership, and Movement Roles - topics which he says were not discussed enough in the Strategy Project. (See also Eekim's Signpost article "The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community")
Chapter grants: The WMF has published an update on its grants program: "Fifteen Global Chapter Grants Supported by Wikimedia Foundation".
Wikipedia book: Wikimedia Board member Samuel Klein (User:SJ) has published a brief review of the book "Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia" by Joseph Reagle, which was released last week. In related news, the Foundation's executive director Sue Gardner has written two blog posts ([1], [2]) about a Quaker clerking workshop she attended together with Board member Phoebe Ayers (User:Phoebe), saying that as a non-quaker, she had become interested in "the similarities between Quaker and Wikimedian decision-making practices" from reading Reagle's book. (The Signpost will publish a review by Staeiou soon.)

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2010-09-27

Wikimedia moves into India, critical conference, Vandalism detection contest

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By Theo10011, Tilman Bayer, Resident Mario and UncleDouggie

India: Media speculation on country's future "Wiki-capital"; community newsletter released

Barry Newstead, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Global Development Officer, visited India last week to prepare the opening of the organization's first office outside the US, combined with the hiring of a "National Program Director" for India (see Signpost coverage: September 6 and August 30).

Newstead visited New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. It was the first time a Wikipedia Meetup was ever organized in New Delhi and Mumbai. It brought together a mix of bloggers, Wikipedians and people generally interested in contributing to Wikipedia. Some 40 people attended the Mumbai and Bangalore Meetups and about 20 attended the Delhi meet, despite heavy monsoon rains disrupting the city. Along with WMF Trustee Bishakha Datta and advisory board member Achal Prabhala, Newstead addressed a press conference in Bangalore city.

The office is set to open in early 2011, and its location has not been announced yet. Yet various Indian media speculated which of the three cities might have the best chances. Bangalore, which is already the seat of the Indian Wikimedia chapter appears to be the front-runner according to The Hindu ("Wikipedia eyes Bangalore"), Times of India ("Wiki logs into India for its second office"), and The Economic Times ("Wikipedia aims to interact in top 10 Indian languages"). However, The Press Trust of India ("Wikipedia to open India office soon") said "Wikipedia" would launch the office "probably in Mumbai", while Daily News and Analysis ("Bangalore is in fray to become Wikipedia's India capital") mentioned Pune as a fourth possibility.

Time Out Mumbai quoted Prabhala on possible reasons that might still be "keeping Indians from becoming active contributors". The Economic Times described some of Newstead's personal background. Before becoming the Foundation's CGDO in June (see Signpost coverage), he had been a consultant at the non-profit Bridgespan Group, having quit a lucrative career at the Boston Consulting Group. Newstead explained: "I’ve always had a passion for education and knowledge. I enjoyed the training I got in consulting, but it was a personal decision to spend my career working on important social issues".

In related news, the first Indian Wikimedia Community Newsletter has been released last week. The publication contains a foreword by Bishdatta and Jimbo Wales (who already praised the Indian-language Wikipedias last month). The newsletter is 36 pages long in PDF format.

The newsletter reports the size of the Indian community: because of the large number of languages in India, there are about 20 different Wikipedias, as well as a similar number in the incubator. There is also significant Indian editing activity on the English Wikipedia (English is one of the official languages of India). There is a story on the activities of the Indian Wikipedia Chapter, and information on the activities of the various Indian-language WMF projects and the interactions between them. Some interesting tidbits:

The first Indian-language wikis were in Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, and Malayalam, all created in 2002.
The Hindi Wikipedia is the largest of the Indian projects, with 56,000 articles.
The Malayalam Wikipedia is one of the few languages (and the only one with a non-roman alphabet) to have its contents published as a CD.

Third "critical point of view" conference

On September 25 and 26, the third "CPOV" conference about Wikipedia took place in Leipzig, Germany. Unlike the previous installments that had been held in Bangalore in January and in Amsterdam in March (Signpost coverage), this one was held in a local language (Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt).

As in the other conferences, most of the presentations were by academic researchers from the humanities. But this installment saw more participation by active Wikipedians, several of whom discussed with researchers in a "Wikipedia and Science" roundtable and on a "Wikipedia and Criticism" panel, and gave introductory Wikipedia workshops on the first day, supported by the local chapter, Wikimedia Germany.

The event generated coverage in several major German media. For example, TV news service Tageschau interviewed the director of the Leipzig university library (one of the conference sites) about Wikipedia, with one question being about the new Article feedback tool.

Vandalism detection competition

The "1st International Competition on Wikipedia Vandalism Detection" was held in Padua, Italy on 22–23 September 2010, to evaluate automated tools for detecting malicious edits on Wikipedia (workshop page), having received submissions from nine teams. It was based on a corpus of 32452 edits, sampled from one week of Wikipedia's recent changes, that had been classified by 753 human annotators recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk, enabling the project to check the accuracy of the automatic vandalism detectors, for example by comparing true positives and false positives ("TP" and "FP" in the PDF file). One conclusion was that a combination of all 9 submitted detectors can perform better than any single detector. The combined detector has performance of FP=20% at a threshold level where TP=95% (right-hand chart on page 11), i.e. it would catch 19 out of 20 vandalism edits if it were allowed an error rate of wrongly classifying one in five legitimate edits as vandalism. A data point for higher detection levels is FP=35% at TP=98%. The paper also catalogued the different features that the detectors combine to assess the probability that a given edit is vandalism (one of the simplest characteristics, employed by seven of the nine contestants, is whether it was made by an anonymous editor).

Some other automatic vandalism detection tools were not part of the competition, among them vandal fighting bots like User:ClueBot that already operate on Wikipedia, the STiki tool developed at the University of Pennsylvania (whose author says that it would have finished second if it had participated) and a recently announced project at the University of Iowa.

Briefly

How Wikipedians use sources: A paper that appeared in this month's issue of the journal "Information Research" ("Where does the information come from? Information source use patterns in Wikipedia") reported on a Web survey that had been answered by 108 Wikipedians in spring 2008. Based on the results, the author Isto Huvila distinguishes five groups of Wikipedians according to their use of references (e.g., whether they tend to find sources by online search or by visits to the library): "Investigators", "Surfers", the "Worldly-wise", "Scholars" and "Editors".
Use of image donation analyzed: Five months after announcing a large scale upload of "no known copyright" images from its collection to Wikimedia Commons (Signpost coverage), the Brooklyn Museum has published a brief statistical analysis showing how often the images are used on different Wikipedias, and how often the various metadata fields in the image descriptions were changed or corrected by Wikimedians ("Where in the Wikiverse is the Brooklyn Museum?").

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2010-09-27

Designing WikiProject Architecture

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By Mabeenot and Ohconfucius

WikiProject news

News in brief

The new WikiProject Home Living is looking for members.
Check out the new Law of England and Wales portal.
This is the last week to contribute to the Guild of Copyeditors September Backlog Drive. The drive is only 45 articles away from eliminating all backlogged articles from 2008.
With October just around the corner, WikiProject Holidays could use some help improving Halloween-related articles covered by the Halloween Task Force.

Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

This week, The Signpost visited WikiProject Architecture. The project was created in April 2004 to explore architecture, buildings, and construction. Members and enthusiasts discuss common issues, develop standards, and create templates. The project is now home to more than 16,000 articles, including 67 featured articles, 67 featured lists, 3 A-class articles, and 183 good articles. We interviewed project members Binksternet, Warofdreams, and Elekhh.

Warofdreams started the WikiProject back in 2004 upon a suggestion from User:Isomorphic. This architecture graduate had already been contributing on a wide range of topics connected with this area architecture. Having just created the timeline of architecture, he hoped to encourage the identification of gaps and weak areas in en.WP's coverage. Project member Binksternet joined the WikiProject because of his interest in architectural preservation in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lived. He is inspired by Spanish Revival and Art Deco architecture from the 1920s and 1930s, mid-century modern and Googie from the 1950s and 60s, and "bold and fanciful statements made in construction of a building".

For Elekhh, who started contributing to Wikipedia only a year ago with the aim of improving architecture and articles related to urban design, joining this WikiProject was natural. He is interested in 20th-century and contemporary architecture. Elekhh is also a member of WikiProject Urban studies and planning, which he says is unfortunately not very active.

Binksternet has contributed his share to building the project's repertoire of Featured and Good Articles. He greatly expanded the article about architect Timothy L. Pflueger, helped it to earn GA status, and hopes to bring it to FA some day. He was heavily involved in the articles 100 McAllister Street and Hotel Valley Ho, and advanced them to GA. Having reviewed articles for GA status including World Trade Center and Architecture of Denmark, and helped with FA reviews, he is eager for more. However, he encourages more new editors to get involved, and hopes to encourage anyone to jump in and learn what is required to get an article to GA status.

Many of the potential subjects covered by the project are iconic works of art, and deserve to be portrayed by high-quality images. Warofdreams says it is easy to take average-quality pictures of buildings, as they are easily accessible to all. However, he has some advice to offer for getting better results: "If you have the time, visiting a building at different times of the day or week can reveal how the appearance of the building changes with different lighting. It's also good to consider whether a Wikipedia article might benefit from close-ups of particular details, or shots illustrating the setting of the building, or showing it in use." Binksternet, a casual photographer, expressed frustration at not being able to "stalk" the perfect shot by always being ready at the right time of day or season.

Elekhh says some jurisdictions may impose legal constraints of photographing buildings and monuments. He said that the main difficulty of illustrating 20th-century architecture articles lies with compliance with the Wikimedia image licensing requirements in countries without Freedom of panorama, such as France, Italy or Russia.

The project has a large backlog of requests for new articles. Elekhh says there has been effort by project members to treat these requests by prioritising articles of general interest over local interest. Articles belonging to the former category have been addressed more swiftly in the last year. Unfortunately, many requested articles stay unaddressed for a longer period. These tend to be about architects or buildings of local interest and would be rated as low-mid importance for the Wikiproject.

The way forward

Warofdreams laments how many requests for input posted elicit little or no feedback. He urges more editors with an interest in the field to join, add it to their watchlist, and take part in relevant discussions. Elekhh said "Architecture articles have a good coverage of English speaking countries, in particular of the United States, but rather weak coverage of other countries. I see attracting contributors from non-English-speaking countries to the English Wikipedia as a priority. Binksternet believes that topics of architectural lighting, interior architecture and landscape architecture deserve greater attention.

Editors can help the project by creating and improving articles about architects, architecture, buildings, and construction. Next week, we'll get to the core of a hot project. Until then, read our previous reports in the archive.

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2010-09-27

The best of the week

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By Dabomb87 and Tony1

Administrator

The Signpost welcomes Ron Ritzman (nom), from Atlanta, as a new admin. Ron focuses on maintenance tasks and has a history of contributions going back to 2005, with high levels of activity since mid-2008. He has particularly strong experience at AfD and as a new-page patroller.

Featured articles

An Andalusian performing dressage at the 2007 World Cup Finals, from the new FA Andalusian horse

Four articles were promoted to featured status. These will be considered for Choice of the week in the next edition.

Quainton Road railway station (nom). Nominator iridescent says "for somewhere so obscure, Quainton Road has a very tangled history".
Andalusian horse (nom), a favourite of European kings as early as the 15th century, and still popular among classical dressage enthusiasts today (Dana boomer).
Don Valley Parkway (nom), a major expressway in Toronto, Canada (Floydian).
Ray Lindwall with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (nom), whom the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack said must "be placed permanently in the gallery of great fast bowlers" (YellowMonkey).

Featured lists

Eleven lists were promoted:

Minnesota Mr. Basketball (nom), an annual award given to the best high school male basketball player in the state (nominated by Editorofthewiki)
Billboard Top Latin Songs Year-End Chart (nom), the best-selling Latin song of the year. (Jaespinoza).
List of Family Guy episodes (nom). Family Guy, an animated television sitcom, lampoons American culture, often in the form of cutaway gags and tangential vignettes (GageSkidmore).
FC Barcelona in Europe (nom), a compilation of European competition results for the Spanish football club FC Barcelona. Barça has won 54% of its European competition matches (Sandman888).
Amsterdam Tournament (nom), hosted by the Dutch club Ajax at the Amsterdam Arena. The tournament is unusual in that it awards clubs points for each goal scored (Argyle 4 Life).
List of longest streams of Oregon (nom) The Columbia River, originating in British Columbia, Canada, is the longest stream, with a length of 1,249 miles (2,010 km) (Finetooth and Little Mountain 5). (picture at bottom).
List of Olympic medalists in volleyball (nom), which is played in two disciplines: indoor volleyball and beach volleyball. Brazil's representatives have received the most overall medals (16), while the United States' representatives have received the most gold medals, with 8 (Courcelles).
1973 NBA Draft (nom), the 27th annual draft of the National Basketball Association. Dave Winfield, selected by the Atlanta Hawks, was drafted in four leagues: the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the American Basketball Association (Chrishomingtang and Martin tamb).
List of National Treasures of Japan (crafts: swords) (nom), a list of 110 swords and 12 sword mountings from ancient to feudal Japan (Bamse).
List of Arizona Diamondbacks first-round draft picks (nom) Nominator Courcelles quipped, "I present to you... a fairly boring set of picks. Sorry, but that's the truth here, I had to look pretty hard to find anything interesting to say about these guys."
Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine (nom), given each year for semi-professionally-edited magazines related to science fiction or fantasy (PresN).

Choice of the week. Ruslik0 has written three featured lists in astronomy topics, and is a regular reviewer at FLC. Here is his favorite of the week:

“

Among the lists promoted for the last week, one really stands out. I am talking about List of National Treasures of Japan (crafts: swords), which provides a wealth of information not only about swords but also about History of Japan in general. Some of this information is actually quite difficult to come by. The list is also part of a series of articles about the national treasures of Japan written by the same author, some of which I reviewed in the past. All of the them are of the same high quality. So, I find that List of National Treasures of Japan (crafts: swords) is the best of the week, and would recommend everyone to read it.

”

Featured pictures

Eleven images were promoted. For medium-sized displays, please click on "nom".

Benjamin Franklin (nom), the painting of the Founding Father that is displayed in the White House, "showing a younger Franklin that differs substantially from the more common view of him", according to reviewer Howcheng (created by David Martin).
Sukhoi Su-30 in flight (nom), an advanced fighter jet of the Russian Air Force in flight, June 2010 (created by Sergey Krivchikov).
Tobacco Hornworm (nom), a high-res macro shot using a home-made ring flash adapter to obtain even, shadowless lighting over the entire subject (created by Dschwen).
Olive Baboon (nom), (Papio anubis) in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania (created by Muhammad).
Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill c.1885 (nom), Native American Sitting Bull and vaudeville showman Buffalo Bill in Montreal ca. 1885.
Cymbiola imperialis (nom), a species of volute, shown from four angles (created by H. Zell).
Koppelpoort (nom), a medieval combined land- and water-gate in the Dutch town of Amersfoort (created by Bert).
Mespelbrunn Castle (nom), a medieval moated castle in the Spessart forest – one of the most visited water castles in Germany (created by Rainer Lippert) (Choice of the week: picture at top)
Blue Wildebeest, Ngorongoro (nom), Connochaetes taurinus in the Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania (created by Muhammad).
Bryaninops yongei (nom), a species of sea whip goby fish on a whip coral (created by Nick Hobgood (picture at right).
Charlton Heston (nom), at a civil rights march in 1963 (created by Sir Richardson).

Choice of the week. Gazhiley, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost:

“

For me this week it's been between two very similar, but entirely different pictures: Mespelbrunn Castle and Koppelpoort. The difference in the architecture of these two castles is striking. I have to say though that I find the Mespelbrunn Castle picture is the best. The outstanding colours, the clarity of detail and the unique setting make this picture extremely attractive. And for a picture to receive just one Oppose is a good sign! This is definitely my Choice of the Week. [Picture at top]

”

From the newly featured List of longest streams of Oregon, the North Umpqua and Little Rivers come together head-on, near Glide, Oregon (picture by User:Little Mountain 5).

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2010-09-27

EEML amendment requests & more

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases, leaving one open.

Open case

Climate change (Week 16)

This case resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Innovations have been introduced for this case, including special rules of conduct that were put in place at the start. However, the handling of the case has been criticized by some participants; for example, although the evidence and workshop pages were closed for about five weeks, during this time, no proposals were posted on the proposed decision page and participants were prevented from further discussing their case on the case pages (see earlier Signpost coverage).

The proposed decision, drafted by Newyorkbrad, Risker, and Rlevse, sparked a large quantity of unstructured discussion, much of it comprising concerns about the proposed decision (see earlier Signpost coverage). A number of users, including participants and arbitrator Carcharoth, made the discussion more structured, but the quantity of discussion has continued to increase significantly. Rlevse had said that arbitrators were trying to complete the proposed decision before September 6, but it was later made clear that he will no longer be voting on this decision. This week, arbitrators made further additions to the proposed decision.

Closed cases

Eastern European mailing list

Radeksz (Week 3)

Earlier this week, arbitrators provided their first responses to the request to reimpose an Eastern European topic ban on Radeksz. As reported earlier, the proposed topic ban was originally imposed at the conclusion of the case, but was lifted three months ago by the Committee. Arbitrator SirFozzie warned that most “drastic action” may result if there is no improvement in the topic area, and echoed this in response to the Piotrus request (see below). Arbitrator KnightLago stated that there was a “growing tiredness within the Arbitration Committee for all things EEML related” which "confused" an editor a bit. Other arbitrators asked participants to read and consider both arbitrator's comments.

Piotrus (Week 1)

Earlier this week, Piotrus filed a request for his Eastern Europe topic ban to be lifted. This amendment request is identical to the request which was filed in July (see earlier Signpost coverage) – in that request, this statement (by former arbitrator Charles Matthews), and this statement, persuaded the majority of the Committee to oppose modifying the restrictions. However, arbitrator Newyorkbrad is again considering a motion to partially lift the effect of the restriction.

Transcendental Meditation movement (Week 3)

At the time of writing, no further progress has been made on this clarification request since last week’s Signpost coverage concerning discretionary sanctions. In response to arbitrator Newyorkbrad's question of whether anything further is being requested, the filer confirmed that arbitrators have not responded to, or not answered multiple questions that the filer asked.

Race and intelligence (Week 3)

At the time of writing, no further progress has been made on this amendment request - to impose a topic ban on Ferahgo the Assassin from race and intelligence related articles. Although an arbitrator stated that he would support a topic ban, no arbitrator has cast formal on-wiki votes for the proposal yet.

Other

The Community has been invited to comment on the Wikipedia:Audit Subcommittee (AUSC); in particular, the preferred methods of selecting community representatives, and the duration of time they would serve. “The result of the discussion will inform the Arbitration Committee on how best to proceed before progressing to another election cycle.” AUSC is a subcommittee of the Arbitration Committee which should review and act upon concerns received by the community about CheckUser and Oversight activities. Currently, AUSC consist of three community representatives elected by the community, who serve one-year terms, and three arbitrators who rotate every six months or so. A summary of AUSC’s activity has also been posted for comment.

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2010-09-27

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250 and TheDJ

CTO Danese Cooper does Office Hours

Wikimedia's Chief Technical Officer Danese Cooper last week took part in an "office hours" discussion on IRC. Speaking about her own role, the state of Wikimedia's technical departments, and answering questions from the community, she gave insights into what the future might hold for Wikimedia (public logs). Although discussion was fragmented, a number of important points were touched on:

the hiring of Zak Greant a technology writer, and a volunteer engineering coordinator later this year, to help bridge the communication gap between paid staff and the development community;
that the future of the Toolserver (currently paid for and hosted in Germany by Wikimedia Deutschland) has been discussed with WMDE, although the Foundation is "not ready" to disclose the conclusions;
that plans for the "Data Summit" have not been finalised, including discussion on structured data, analytics and research announced in July;
a reiteration of her priorities, as outlined earlier this month, particularly uptime; and
the news that the Foundation does intend to announce a financial assistance program to help bring developers together at events such as next month's "Hack-a-ton" (see last week's Signpost).

Video developments for Wikimedia Commons

"Cats" (edit)

Michael Dale, a Kaltura employee working with the Wikimedia Foundation to build easier ways of using the power of video in Wikimedia projects, this week announced the creation of a free "video sequencer" for Commons (Wikimedia techblog). The sequencer, which allows users to remix existing and new video, audio, text and images into single video sections (see example, right), was described by Kaltura as "a stepping stone in the world of online media". It requires a modern browser to use, with the best performance by the Firefox 4 betas. It is hoped the sequencer will bridge the gap between images, which are relatively common on Wikimedia projects, and videos, which are relatively rare, to create overview, documentary-style introductions to topics on Wikipedia, among other uses.

As the capabilities around video are refined and expanded, a worry has been that increased usage of video would impose a significant additional cost on the Foundation, especially due to bandwith usage. Michael Dale announced a cooperation with P2P-Next, who presented at Wikimania this year. Their technology makes it possible to use peer-to-peer technology for downloading the videos and all you need is to enter the mwEmbed video pilot and install the P2P-Next Swarmplayer Firefox plugin (a plugin for Internet Explorer and a MacOS version of Swarmplayer are still in development). After viewing the video, your browser will share the video for you with other viewers and thus alleviate the strain on the resources of the Foundation. It is claimed that the sharing is configurable and will not get in the way of your browsing experience.

Google Summer of Code: Stephen LaPorte

We conclude a series of articles about this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) with Stephen LaPorte, a law school student, who describes his project to creating a tool to format judicial decisions, legal scholarship, and statutes for Wikipedia's sister project Wikisource:

“

WikiSource should be a repository of statutory law, judicial decisions, and legal scholarship. Prof. Timothy K. Armstrong identified Wikisource as solution to the architectural limitations of existing repositories for judicial decisions and legal scholarship. Prof. Armstrong listed three obstacles for Wikisource--legal, content, and cultural issues. The legal and cultural issues can be address through education and outreach. This project addresses the problem of content.

A tool to format judicial decisions and statutes will help users move text that is already electronically available and in the public domain to Wikisource, solving the "chicken-and-egg" problem that Wikisource currently faces. Once Wikisource has a substantial body of legal sources, users will gain value from and improve the coverage of those legal sources.

”

Stephen worked on four such tools: importing U.S. Supreme Court cases (example), importing the current U.S. legal code (example), wikifying legal citations (tool) and helping categorise U.S. Supreme Court cases (tool).

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.

Since Brion Vibber, former Wikimedia CTO and general MediaWiki guru, departed almost a year ago, the code review workflow has been continuously playing catch-up. The process, which defines the time it takes to get code from the sandbox to live Wikimedia sites, has slowed down considerably, with only Tim Starling responsible for monitoring it. The amount of work is only increasing, while Tim will be having less time on his hands next month because he expects to become a father. For this reason the Foundation has rehired Brion under a temporary 2 hour-per-day contract, while continuing to look for a more permanent solution to this problem (Wikimedia announcement).
The MediaWiki API's "action=parse" module was briefly deactivated over performance concerns stemming from the Extension:ImageAnnotator gadget, before being re-enabled.
In an unrelated development, the ability to flag parameters as "required" on the API was added, causing an error to be triggered if they are left unset.
Adding the text  to a page will now prevent bots running on the popular pywikipedia framework from moving interwikis to the bottom of the page (as is the norm for the vast majority of pages).
There was a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about when non-WMF MediaWiki users could expect version 1.17 of the software. The conclusion, though indeterminate, was that "I think we can all agree that it doesn't make sense to cut a new release of MediaWiki until the ResourceLoader stabilizes" (User:RobLa) and that that point may be some time off yet. Neil Kandalgaonkar questioned whether fixed releases were required at all.
User:RobLa has invited collaboration on October's WMF Engineering Overview (wikitech-l mailing list).
Developer Trevor Parscal opened a discussion on the idea of more clearly defining which code should be in the "core" MediaWiki setup and which should be classed as optional extensions.
With the resolution of bug #16574, it will eventually be possible to exclude specific IP addresses from the account creation limit. This feature would be useful to, for example, allow Wikipedia to be made available in an educational or event context without all but the first 6 users getting very little out of it owing to being unable to create an account.

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