Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2011-05-02
Picture of the Year voting begins; Internet culture covered in Sweden and consulted in Russia; brief news
Voting for Picture of the Year starts on Commons
On 1 May, the fifth annual Picture of the Year Awards at Wikimedia Commons began the first round of voting, which will last until 4 May at 11:59PM UTC. All editors with at least 200 edits before 1 January 2011 are eligible to vote.
Picture of the Year is a contest that celebrates the best content that has gone through Commons' featured picture process over the previous year. Begun by Alvesgaspar in late 2006, Picture of the Year has become a much-loved tradition throughout Wikimedia projects. In 2010, there were 784 new featured pictures, compared with 890 in 2009, and 501 in 2008.
Voters may vote for as many images as they like, and are encouraged to vote in as many of the award categories as they feel able to judge. The final round of voting will begin in the third week of May, once all of the votes from the previous round have been tallied and confirmed.
- Winners in previous years
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2006: Aurora Borealis, by United States Air Force employee Senior Airman Joshua Strang (public domain)
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2007: Broadway Tower in the Cotswolds, England, by Newton2 (CC-BY-2.5)
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2008: Horses on Bianditz mountain, in Navarre, Spain. Behind them Aiako mountains can be seen, by Mikel Ortega (CC-BY-SA-2.0)
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2009: Sikh pilgrim at the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar, India, by Paulrudd (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
Project Internet in Sweden
As reported last month, the local Wikimedia chapter in Sweden started its ""Projekt Internet i Sverige" in March, aiming to improve Swedish Wikipedia articles about the Internet in Sweden. Funded by the Internet Infrastructure Foundation, the operator of Swedish country-code top-level domain .se, the chapter hired long-time Wikipedian Johan Jönsson (User:Julle) to work on the project from March to July 2011. On the Foundation's blog, he described his work: "I try to find articles dedicated to topics covering the Internet in Sweden. I put them on an importance scale and assess for quality". He outlined the project's goals, which include improving the content quality in this significant area, and inspiring "more people to get involved in Wikipedia and make contacts between experts in the field and Wikipedia editors". The project is believed to be the first to employ someone to specifically edit the Swedish Wikipedia, although other Wikipedias have seen such externally funded projects before (see, for example, Signpost coverage: "First state-funded Wikipedia project concludes after three years").
Russian president meets with Internet community representatives, including Wikimedia
On 29 April Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met with representatives of the Russian internet community, including Stanislav Kozlovskiy (User:Ctac) - executive director of Wikimedia Russia. (Information on the Kremlin's website: Russian, English.) According to the (partial) Russian transcript, the concept of Creative Commons licensing and Wikipedia was discussed. On the Russian Wikipedia, Ctac reported some other conversation topics, such as changes to Russian copyright law, and its lack of a freedom of panorama exemption (cf. Commons:Freedom_of_panorama#Russia).
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Dmitry Medvedev and representatives of the Russian internet community
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Maksim Moshkow (public figure of the Russian Internet segment, left) and Stanislav Kozlovskiy (executive director of Wikimedia Russia, right) at the meeting
Briefly
- New Delhi likely site of Indian Wikimedia office: After a detailed evaluation of several cities, it has been recommended to set up the Wikimedia Foundation's "India Programs" office "in New Delhi (or the NCR / Gurgaon) region". The search for a location has been going on since around last August, and has at times received considerable public attention in India (see e.g. Signpost coverage: "India: Media speculation on country's future 'Wiki-capital'"). Other candidates included Bangalore, which is already the seat of the Indian Wikimedia chapter, and Mumbai.
NARA hosted an event celebrating Wikipedia's tenth anniversary in January (Signpost coverage) - Wikipedian in Residence at US National Archives: Wikimedian Dominic McDevitt-Parks (formerly known as Dmcdevit) is to become the first Wikipedian in Residence at NARA (US National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington DC. Beginning in May, Dominic will be working with the archives to chart out a course of projects and cooperative ventures that will help make the records more publicly accessible.
- British Wikimedia: The UK Wikimedia chapter announced the names of new board members elected at the WikiConference on April 16, and summarized results of the board's first meeting.
- Reports by Wikimedia Germany: The German Wikimedia chapter caught up with the English-language versions of its monthly reports, noting that it is "using a new translation service": March, February and January 2011.
- "Malayalam Loves Wikimedia" concludes: On his personal blog, Indian Wikipedian Shiju Alex summarized the results of the "Malayalam Loves Wikimedia" project, which during April contributed around 2155 free images related to the Malayalam language, and the Indian state of Kerala, aiming "to create more awareness about copyleft-licensed images, wikimedia commons, and to attract more Malayalam speaking people to the wikimedia movement".
- Meetups: A community meet-up was held last month in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (April 30).
- Milestones:
- The Simple English Wikipedia reached 70,000 articles on April 25.
- The Malagasy Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles on April 28.
- The Neapolitan Wikipedia reached 15,000 articles on April 29.
- The French Wikisource has reached 60,000 text units.
- Ombudsman commission: Philippe Beaudette, the Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Reader Relations, has announced changes to the membership of the Ombudsman Commission, prompted by the resignation of User:Herbythyme. The Commission is tasked with investigating complaints about violations of the WMF's privacy policy, in particular concerning the use of the CheckUser tool. User:Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia, will replace Herbythyme for the rest of the one-year term, while User:Dweller, from the English Wikipedia, was added as an "alternate, who will serve as a non-voting advisor to the commission this year, and then remain on for another full term", a new concept that is expected to facilitate "knowledge transfer" to the next generation of Commission members.
- Britannica fifth-most linked domain on Wikipedia: User:Emijrp has produced a list of "Top 1000 most linked domains from external links in English Wikipedia pages" (all namespaces), led by Google.com, toolserver.org, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, dx.doi.org and Britannica.com. In a similar study last August (which also produced mainspace-only statistics, see Signpost coverage), toolserver.org had occupied the first place before Google.com.
- Overview of Wikipedians in Residence: The Foundation's "GLAM fellow" Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama) gave an overview of the various "Wikipedian in residence" projects that have sprung up around the world since his own residenceship at the British Museum initiated the concept last year.
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Wikipedia users name "superinjunction celebrities"; brief news
Administrators removing material that violates UK legal injunctions
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0d/Andrew_Marr_1.jpg/220px-Andrew_Marr_1.jpg)
Editors have repeatedly added details about superinjunctions taken out by four celebrities in Britain to the stars' articles, according to reports last week. The information on the four articles has constantly been reverted and the diffs hidden for BLP reasons; the pages have either been protected or the pending changes system has been implemented. A superinjunction is a legal injunction which prevents all media from broadcasting both the allegation the person has chosen to hide, but also the fact they have taken out an injunction.
According to The Daily Telegraph, one of the celebrities (whose identities are known to The Signpost) is a high-profile actor who reportedly had an extramarital affair with a prostitute, and one is a Premier League footballer accused of having an affair with reality-show contestant, Imogen Thomas. The other two are television presenters: one allegedly had an affair, and another, according to the Daily Mail, took out a superinjunction to quash photographs described as showing him "intimate" with a woman.
While the revisions in the history of the articles have been deleted by administrators, it is evident that on one of the pages the reports of the superinjunction were added ten times by various users. The names of the four celebrities are readily available on the social networking site Twitter. The Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for Wikipedia who said that administrators will continue to remove content that violates superinjunctions. However, Wikipedia's servers are based in the US, outside the UK jurisdiction. "People have tried to sue the foundation for libellous content but it's been thrown out. Our material has to be really well referenced or it is chucked out immediately", according to the spokesperson.
The debate over the moral ethics of superinjunctions has become more intense in Britain in recent months. This week, BBC political presenter Andrew Marr revealed he had taken out a superinjuction in January 2008 to prevent the media reporting an affair he had with a national newspaper journalist. Marr came forward only after Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, threatened to take legal action to expose his superinjunction; Hislop this week celebrated his disclosure of what he termed a "Kafkaesque" and "absurd" court order. David Cameron, the British prime minister, has also spoken out against superinjunctions: "The judges are creating a sort of privacy law, whereas what ought to happen in a parliamentary democracy is [that parliament] should decide how much protection do we want ... so I am a little uneasy about what is happening." Campaign group Index on Censorship welcomed Marr's confession about the superinjuction, which he has now dropped. John Kampfner, the chief executive of the organisation, said: "While there may be exceptional circumstances in which injunctions may be necessary, we are seeing gagging orders being used to hide the wealthy from embarrassment and even commercial damage. We are in danger of creating a secret network of secret rich man's justice."
In January, there was a similar case on Wikipedia after a New Zealand court had issued a name suppression order concerning a sports broadcasting journalist's short-time arrest and minor "disorderly behaviour" charge (Signpost coverage). The information was likewise reverted at first, but was eventually reinstated after the person in question self-identified.
Briefly
- Wikimedia CTO honored: The US-based IT History Society has announced that the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Technology Officer Danese Cooper has been included in its "honor roll", commenting that she is "known for her work in the Open Source movement" in the roll entry (apart from Wikimedia, also highlighting her work for the Open Source Initiative, the Mozilla Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation).
- Indonesian language Wikipedia: An article in The Jakarta Post ("Writing culture on the web: Are we still better at talking?") said the Indonesian Wikipedia suffers from relatively low activity compared to other language versions such as the Vietnamese Wikipedia. Among the possible explanations, it cited the belief by some sociologists "that Indonesians have long been living in a verbal culture and the shift to a writing culture did not necessarily happen after the arrival of the Internet", or that most of them have a traditional language as their first language, instead of Bahasa Indonesia. The Indonesian Wikimedia chapter has received a US$40,000 grant for a program to increase volunteer participation, parts of which are focusing on the Javanese and Sundanese language Wikipedias.
- Baseball vandalism: The insertion of made-up information into the article about US baseball player Brent Lillibridge, despite being removed after just 15 minutes, was reported by Yahoo! News ("Lillibridge’s grabs against Yankees prompt Wikipedia vandalism"), USA Today ("Brent Lillibridge's catches gain him Wikipedia special attention") and CBS News ("Lillibridge catches inspire Wikipedia hackers").
- Podcast covers Wikipedia and Academia: UK Wikimedian Charles Matthews was interviewed on the "Pod Delusion" podcast about the subject of Wikipedia and Academia.
- TV journalist suspected of COI edits: The Miami New Times asked "Did Rick Sanchez Edit His Own Wikipedia Entry to Downplay DUI Accident?", alleging that various edits made in recent months to the article about US TV journalist Rick Sanchez had come from the article's subject.
- WMF summer research fellow announced: The Information School at the University of Washington announced that one of its PhD students had been selected for a summer research fellowship at the Wikimedia Foundation, a Wikimedia Foundation Summer Fellowship, "participating in an interdisciplinary team seeking to gain a deeper understanding of why the active editor base on Wikipedia is not replenishing itself at the same rate it used to — and what to do about it."
- WikiProject Public Art on TV: Milwaukee TV station Fox 6 featured the WikiProject Public Art.
- Did Wikipedia article on pejorative expression contribute to unfair racism charges?: Slate magazine stated that former US senator George Allen "was unfairly branded as a racist" after calling an Indian-American college student "macaca" in 2006, partly due to the Wikipedia article macaca (slur) (created after the incident and according to Slate over-emphasizing the racist connotations of the term).
- Ohio biotech industry finds itself covered on Wikipedia: The creation of the article Ohio bioscience sector was welcomed by US website MedCity News ("Wikipedia website meets Ohio biotech. Why didn’t it happen earlier?"), who called it "a well-sourced – albeit quirky and a little dated – summary of the state’s biotech community", appeared surprised that it seemed to have been written by a hobbyist rather than someone from the bioscience industry, and contacted local biotech trade groups, finding out that they "had no idea about the site".
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The Physics of a WikiProject: WikiProject Physics
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/91/Bruce_McCandless_II_during_EVA_in_1984.jpg/220px-Bruce_McCandless_II_during_EVA_in_1984.jpg)
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Lightning3.jpg/220px-Lightning3.jpg)
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This week we contemplated relativity with WikiProject Physics. The project was started in June 2005 and has grown to include 43 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, and 42 Good Articles. WikiProject Physics maintains four portals covering Physics, Electromagnetism, Gravitation, and X-ray Astronomy. We interviewed Christopher Thomas and Headbomb.
What motivated you to join WikiProject Physics? What area of physics interests you most? Do you have any expertise in physics?
- Christopher Thomas: I was first and foremost interested in writing articles about physics-related topics and improving the quality of existing articles. Working with WikiProject Physics came later. It serves as a very useful meeting ground for getting advice about how best to handle various problems that come up, and getting the attention of a pool of editors who have the expertise to address concerns with any given article.
- I am at best an "armchair physicist". While I enjoy the subject and have read a fair bit about many facets of it, my formal training is with electronics and computing. As a result, I consider myself an adjunct member rather than a full member of WP:Phys, and my main function (other than cleaning up obvious problems) is to highlight problem-articles so that those with discipline-specific expertise can address them.
- Particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology are the subjects I usually follow. I have work-related expertise with optics, lasers, and semiconductor physics, but rarely end up editing those articles.
- Headbomb: I don't think anything really motivated me to join WikiProject Physics per se. I happened to be editing several physics articles [in particular, list of baryons, circa 2008] and people mentioned the physics project to be a good place to get feedback on it. So I joined, because that seemed to make a lot of sense to be part of the physics-oriented community of editors. It's a great place to coordinate efforts on certain topics, get feedback on some particular issue, or get insights on an area which isn't your area of expertise. Experts and other editors interested in physics should definitely join the project. Likewise for chemists and WikiProject Chemistry and all the other science WikiProjects.
- As for expertise, I'm currently a master's student in physics. I've got a fairly good grasp on the history of particle physics, and a pretty good background in solid-state physics and optics (both at the experimental and theoretical levels).
The project is home to 43 featured articles and 42 good articles. Have you contributed to any of these articles? Do you have any tips for editors attempting to bring a physics article up to FA or GA status?
- Christopher Thomas: I've only tangentially contributed. I've certainly edited articles such as black hole that have been through the process, but not as part of an improvement drive.
- If you want to bring an article to GA or FA status, be prepared to put in a very large amount of grunt work, and to have quite a lot of patience. The single most useful task, from my outside impression, is finding and adding references (as unsourced statements seem to be the biggest item picked on during review), but many other tasks are valuable as well. Having the persistence to shepherd an article through its long, slow, and often repeated passage through the review bureaucracy is also important.
- Article improvement to GA or FA status is a noble goal, and those with the patience and persistence to accomplish it have my respect.
- Headbomb: Yes, I worked pretty heavily on List of baryons (a featured list), and Quark (a featured article). The best tip, as Christopher Thomas mentioned above, is basically be prepared to do a lot of grunt work, and to reword every sentence 20 times before being truly happy with the end result. I've never really bothered with the Good Articles, mostly because my interests moved from a select group of articles to "large scale gnoming" assisted with AWB, bots, etc.... I do create content from time to time, but I'm pretty happy to bring it something to something that is both well-presented and decent, without going through the hassle of GAs and FAs.
Do you contribute to other science-based projects? Have there been any inter-project collaborations?
- Christopher Thomas: There's a fair bit of crossover between the Physics, Astronomy, and Astronomical Objects projects. At least one long-term IP editor has been very helpful facilitating communication between these groups. Usually joint efforts occur when something either very new or very dubious gets added to an astrophysics or cosmology article.
- Headbomb: Yes, in fact I'm pretty involved with WikiProject Academic Journals (probably created articles on ~100+ Academic journals, many of which related to physics, but several more related to medicine, mathematics, chemistry, biochemistry, ...) and WikiProject Elements (mostly with regards to individual isotopes), and I take the occasional stroll at WikiProject Astronomy and WikiProject Chemistry. For the non-science WikiProjects, I'm pretty involved with WikiProject Wikipedia Books and from time to time, WikiProject Videogames.
- This "inter-project" stuff led me to come up with the concept of Article Alerts. I was getting tired of missing proposed deletions and various other discussion concerning physics-related articles, and it was very tiresome to review every discussion process for articles that interested me. (See the original Signpost coverage of Article Alerts). Currently 700+ WikiProjects and Task Forces subscribe to the Article Alerts, so I think that's a pretty successful project.
- Another example of an inter-project collaboration I've led has been Journals Cited by Wikipedia, which is basically a compilation of the various
|journal=
parameters of citation templates. This tremendously boosted the output of WP:Academic journals by allowing us to see which journal entry were missing, and which were important for Wikipedia (journals which we cite often should have decent articles, mostly because many readers will want to know about the journal's reliability, its history, etc...). I also compiled lists of missing journals for individual projects (Medicine, Biology, Plants...) to let them know how how their field is represented on Wikipedia. Prior to that compilation, we had some journal cited well-over 1000 times without any articles on them. Now all journals which have been cited more than 80 times on Wikipedia have an article. [Well, cited 80 times as as of last year, the compilation is pretty dated since the bot operator is inactive]. So I say that's another successful project.
Does the project have any difficulty recruiting new members? Does the technical nature of some physics-related articles limit contributions from editors without a physics background?
- Christopher Thomas: Some background is needed, but editors don't need to be true experts in order to contribute. The most valuable trait in that regard is to know how far your expertise goes and where it ends, so that you can get others to help with editing on topics where you're out of your depth. I've certainly done that often enough (that's one of the things the WikiProject is very good for).
- There's more than enough day to day cleanup work needed for the efforts of non-experts to be very useful. Alerting the project of problem articles or problem edits is also very helpful, and takes minimal expertise.
- Our real problem is retaining members. My understanding is that this is endemic to most technical topics on Wikipedia, not just to WikiProject Physics. The problem is twofold. First, editors burn out. The cleanup task never ends, and contrary to the initial goals of Wikipedia, articles don't constantly improve but instead find a balance point where improvement and degradation happen at the same rate. Second, not all editors are able to function in a collaborative environment. Every year or two there's a situation that escalates to ArbCom where an editor (expert or non-expert) has a position against consensus and refuses to drop it. One of the most bitter lessons to learn around here is that there will be times when you feel the position of other editors is just plain wrong, about something important - but that you should back down anyways, for the greater good. When people don't back down, they tend to escalate their actions until they get themselves removed from Wikipedia, and may take a few others with them (due to involvement or just to burnout from dealing with the dispute). This leads to a high turnover rate among experts, in the physics project, at least.
- Headbomb: Well I think we're one of the biggest projects behind WikiProject Biographies, WikiProject Military History and WikiProject Videogames. We're bigger than WikiProject Chemistry and WikiProject Biology for sure, and probably comparable to WikiProject Mathematics. Some people go inactive over time, but there is always new blood, and we don't really make any kind of special efforts to recruit people [at least to my knowledge]. So, at least compared to the other science-projects, I don't think we have trouble recruiting members, as the project is very healthy and very active.
- That being said, we could be twice as many people involved and we'd still have work for everyone. In particular, some fields within physics are less well-represented on Wikipedia. I feel our optics and fluid dynamics articles are overall lacking compared to the our articles on other fields, so maybe we do need to do some targeted recruiting.
The project has its own portal. Do you contribute to the portal? What are your thoughts on the usefulness of portals?
- Christopher Thomas: I have never used the physics portal (might have visited it once to see what it was, or might not have). My impression is that it's most useful to users who want to find physics content. I'm more concerned with maintaining the content that I'm already aware of and in a position to help with. Of course, it's possible I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the portal.
- Headbomb: Nope, never used the physics portal; I don't really care about portals in general. I think they make a lot of sense for the smaller topics, like Portal:Lady Gaga, but when you've got something as big a topic as physics, it's very hard to maintain. So I'm pretty much sharing Christopher Thomas' viewpoint on this. Nice for others, but I'd rather spend time on the articles themselves. I think TStein is the one to is the most involved with the portal.
What are the project's most pressing needs and concerns? How can a new member help today?
- Christopher Thomas: Cleaning up vandalism is always useful (everywhere, not just on physics pages). After that, I'd suggest watching for edits that aren't obvious vandalism but that add information that sounds like it might not be correct. At that point, start a thread on the article's talk page to ask about it, and if you don't get people responding within a few days, leave a note at WT:PHYS to bring in additional eyes.
- This type of maintenance work is 90% of what WikiProject Physics does. It's pretty draining, so help spreading the load is always appreciated.
- Headbomb: Our Article Alerts report pretty much details the "pressing matters". For the rest, it mostly involved copy-editing, finding references, etc... And of course we always need to watch out for the crank scientists trying to insert weird POVs in articles, or various quacks, pseudo-scientists, etc... and people who mean well but are just plain wrong.
Anything else you'd like to add?
- Christopher Thomas: Remember that you're here to have fun. If you get tired of doing cleanup, take a break from it. If you want to make a really cool figure explaining Bremsstrahlung radiation or what-have-you, make one (just propose its use on the talk page, rather than swapping it in immediately, to avoid stepping on toes). Do what interests you, take a break when you need to, and you'll go a long way towards avoiding burnout. We've already lost far too many editors to that; the wiki will still be standing if you take a week off from vandalism patrol, so always take time to enjoy your editing!
- Headbomb: Pretty much what CT said. Take a stub, expand it. Or find an important historical publication in physics and create an article on it. Or create a book on a topic, and see if there's anything missing. And hey, if you want to help, join the project, and drop on our talk page.
Next week we'll break out the board games. Until then, plan your next move in the archive.
Reader comments
The best of the week
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7b/Curve_Leicester_full_panorama.jpg/560px-Curve_Leicester_full_panorama.jpg)
New administrators
There were no new admins last week. At the time of publication there is one live RfA: Catfish Jim and the soapdish, due to finish Wednesday.
Featured articles
No new articles were promoted to featured status.
Featured lists
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Nine lists were promoted:
- List of Los Angeles Clippers seasons (nom). (Nominated by Crzycheetah.)
- Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (G) (nom). (Nominated by Killervogel5.)
- List of Ashes series (nom). (Nominated by Harrias.)
- List of international cricket centuries at Brabourne Stadium (nom). (Nominated by AroundTheGlobe.)
- Huskies of Honor (nom). (Nominated by Grondemar.)
- List of armored cruisers of Germany (nom). (Nominated by Parsecboy.)
- List of highest paid Major League Baseball players (nom). (Nominated by Staxringold.)
- List of National Treasures of Japan (writings: others) (nom). (Nominated by Bamse.)
- Mandy Moore discography (nom). (Nominated by Novice7.)
One featured list was delisted:
- List of Super Rugby champions (nom: [referencing, scope, style])
Featured pictures
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f0/Bronzino_-_Eleonora_di_Toledo_col_figlio_Giovanni_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg/250px-Bronzino_-_Eleonora_di_Toledo_col_figlio_Giovanni_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/RustyChainEdit1.jpg/250px-RustyChainEdit1.jpg)
- Eleanor of Toledo (nom; related article), the mannerist portrait of Eleanor of Toledo, who wears a heavily brocaded dress slashed with black arabesques, with her son Giovanni by Bronzino, 1545. (Painted by Bronzino; photographed by the Yorck Project.) picture at right
- Vanadium (nom; related article), vanadium crystal bars, showing different crystal textures and a greenish oxidised surface. (Created by User:Alchemist-hp.)
- Rusty chain (nom; related article), heavy rust on the links of a chain near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the surface had been continuously exposed to moisture and salt-laden spray, causing surface breakdown, cracking, and flaking of the metal. (Created by User:WikipedianMarlith.) picture at right
- Curve theatre, Leicester (nom; related article), a theatre in Leicester, England, designed by Rafael Viñoly and opened in 2008. (Created by User:NotFromUtrecht.) picture at top
- Bar-Backed Partridge male (nom; related article), found in South East Asia. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
- Bar-backed Partridge female (nom; related article), a companion to the previous image. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
- Flock of sanderlings (nom; related article), a small wader. It is highly gregarious in winter, sometimes forming large flocks on coastal mudflats or sandy beaches. (Created by User:Mbz1.) picture at bottom
- Wood Sandpiper (nom; related article), showing its characteristic short fine bill, brown back and longer yellowish legs. (Created by User:JJ Harrison.)
Featured sounds
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/AnthornisMaleFemale.jpg/250px-AnthornisMaleFemale.jpg)
- New Zealand Bellbird (nom; related article). Several New Zealand Bellbirds (Anthornis melanura), singing and calling around a bird feeder on Tiritiri Matangi Island. The bellbird's song contributed strongly to New Zealand's loud dawn chorus, now essentially absent from most of the mainland, and best heard on protected islands and other wildlife sanctuaries.
- Seventeen Come Sunday (nom; related article), Percy Grainger's choral arrangement of the folk song "Seventeen Come Sunday", performed by the United States Navy Band Sea Chanters ensemble.
- Keep the Home Fires Burning (nom; related article), a World War I patriotic song by Ivor Novello and Lena Guilbert Ford, performed by Frederick Wheeler for Edison Records in late 1915.
- Marcha Real (nom; related article), the national anthem of Spain, performed by the United States Navy Band.
- Address Before a Joint Session of Congress (February 24, 2009) Barack Obama (video) (nom; related article), in which he discussed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 among other economic-related issues during the late-2000s financial crisis.
- Manhattan Beach (nom; related article); this file and the following two are marches by American composer John Philip Sousa (1854–1932), performed by the United States Marine Corps Band.
- King Cotton (nom; related article).
- The Gallant Seventh (nom; related article).
- Radetzky March (nom; related article), Johann Strauss's magnum opus, performed by the US Marine Corps Band.
- The Circus Bee (nom; related article), a circus march by Henry Fillmore, performed by the US Marine Corps Band.
- RollingThunder (nom; related article), a circus march by Henry Fillmore, performed by the US Air Force Band.
- First Inaugural (January 20, 1993) Bill Clinton (nom; related article): video.
- The foggy dew (nom; related article), a traditional Irish song using a penny whistle and percussion.
- Remarks on the Signing of NAFTA (December 8, 1993) Bill Clinton (nom; related article). NAFTA was the historic North American Free-Trade Agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico.
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Two new cases open – including Tree shaping case
The Arbitration Committee opened two new cases during the week. Three cases are currently open.
Open cases
Racepacket (Week 1)
This case was opened two days ago after allegations of harassment, outing, sockpuppetry, canvassing, and disruptive editing. The case will address the behavioral concerns surrounding Racepacket (talk · contribs), the subject of this case, and is likely to review the behavior of all editors involved in the GA processes concerning netball articles. During the week, three editors submitted 12 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.
Tree shaping (Week 1)
This case was opened four days ago after allegations of long-term COI editing on the Tree shaping article, and problematic usage of the article's talk page. During the week, four editors submitted 23 kilobytes in on-wiki evidence.
Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AEsh) (Week 8)
Further proposals were submitted and voting has continued during the week as to which proposals will form the final decision. More votes are likely to be made in the coming week.
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Call for RTL developers, varied sign-up pages and news in brief
MediaWiki needs RTL developers
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Arabic_Wikipedia_homepage.png/320px-Arabic_Wikipedia_homepage.png)
This week, bugmeister Mark Hershberger issued a call for more developers routinely using right-to-left (RTL) interfaces to get involved in MediaWiki ("Entries in Life" blog). The main MediaWiki interface in languages which are written right-to-left is virtually a complete mirror-image of that for all other languages (in contrast to the English Wikipedia, the sidebar is on the right, for example, and Vector's search box on the left). This can cause problems when changes are developed and tested solely on left-to-right (LTR) wikis, as is often the case at the moment.
“ | Despite [internationalisation] support, MediaWiki and Wikipedia lack in some pretty important areas. One of the areas that this is most obvious is in languages that are written right-to-left (RTL) instead of left-to-right (LTR). We do try to fix these problems, but almost all of our developers work in LTR languages, so we don't notice the problems as quickly. The problems don't stare us in the face every day and wiki users in RTL languages like العربية (Arabic), فارسی (Farsi), and עברית (Hebrew) don't have proper support. | ” |
He added, "if you're an RTL developer, let me tell you clearly: We want you!".
Account Creation Improvement Project update
On 27 April, the Wikimedia Techblog carried an update from developer Nimish Gautam about the progress of the Account Creation Improvement Project (ACIP). In particularly, the update included details on some of the technological developments that had accompanied their attempts to buck the (largely) downwards trend in the number of users registering and editing on the English Wikipedia over the past couple of months.
Among these, Gautam noted the deployment of the CustomUserSignup extension on 27 April. The extension allows the destination of the "Log in/create account" link to be varied between visitors, allowing the ACIP team to customise "the look and messaging of these screens to see what kind of impact that has on new editors" more easily than before, when the page had to be changed for all users for two days at a time. In addition to the raw statistics on how many potential editors successfully make it through the registration process, the project is also collecting data on users' activity levels after registering via a tracking cookie associated with a browser session rather than with an individual user or user account. Information collected includes:
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In addition, the project has also utilised an improvement to the ClickTracking MediaWiki extension, which helps to collect anonymous information on users editing habits, to allow multiple tests to be run in parallel, rather than sequentially. As of time of writing, ACP1, ACP2 and ACP3 are identical, but this will be changed shortly.
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. Those interested in the release of MediaWiki 1.17 to external sites should take note of this thread, which suggests a beta release is imminent.
- Developer Brion Vibber blogged about a recent bugfix (involving the patch for bug #26729 going live) that he described as showing that "we’ve got a basically sane setup where issues can be pushed along from confirmation to merging to testing to deployment in a reasonably speedy fashion". In a separate post, he also detailed his plans for adding support for the OEmbed standard to MediaWiki, mainly to improve the ease with which videos hosted on Wikimedia sites can be reused. The standard would need to be expanded slightly to include licence metadata before it met Wikimedia needs, however.
- With the resolution of bug #18682, alternative ("alt") text can now be set for images in image galleries.
- Gerard Meijssen blogged about the limited range of fonts currently supported by MediaWiki's SVG rendering software.
- Sweble Wikitext Parser, the latest in a line of 30 or more attempts to reimplement the MediaWiki parser, has been released, with some remaining bugs. Brion Vibber, the developer now responsible for in-house improvement of the parser, noted that Sweble "should be a good help as we migrate towards a unified canonical parser model" (identi.ca). Such a migration, given the millions of lines of existing wikitext the HTML equivalent of which would need to be accurately reproduced, has long been seen as a Herculean task (see, for example, last year's April Fool's announcement of it finally being achieved).
- The Toolserver's copies of the JIRA (an alternative to Bugzilla) and FishEye software were successfully upgraded and the latest pre-release version of Perl (5.14.0-RC1) is available to Toolserver developers to use (toolserver-l mailing list).
- Mark Hershberger also blogged about a new page he has written for developers about how best to go about getting their custom extensions deployed to Wikimedia sites.
- After a false start, the EmailCapture has been enabled, allowing the email addresses of unregistered users to be provided, validated and then used to send out mailing to potential editors. It has been developed for use, at least initially, with the ArticleFeedback extension (server admin log).
- The MediaWiki projects for this year's Google Summer of Code have been announced. Out of 25 proposals, the proposals of eight students were selected.
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