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2011-03-28

Berlin conference highlights relation between chapters and Foundation; annual report; brief news

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By Tom Morris and Tilman Bayer

Wikimedia Conference joins representatives of chapters and the Foundation in Berlin

Group photo of participants

The Wikimedia Conference 2011 was held in Berlin from March 25 to 27. It consisted of the annual Chapters Meeting, to which representatives from all Wikimedia chapters had been invited, as well as a two-day meeting of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees.

The schedule of the Chapters meeting lists about 19 sessions, most of them aided by professional facilitators and documented in notes of varying degrees of detail. Chapter representatives were sharing their experiences about topics that are common to chapters (example: Professionalization: the first employee), and presented a short overview of their chapter in two "State of chapters" sessions (notes for Part I).

At the conference, it was proposed that Wikipedia should apply for UNESCO World Heritage status.

The conference was accompanied by a meeting of the "Movement Roles" workgroup, which, in a process re-started last year, has been trying to sort out the sometimes difficult relationship between the Foundation and the chapters, also encompassing other groups within the Wikimedia movement.

In the run-up to the conference, the Foundation's Deputy Director Erik Möller had warned that questions like "How do chapters earn legitimacy in the eyes of the communities they serve and the donors who support them?" and "What's the impact of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars on a chapter's role relative to the community?" need to be answered to avert an impending "crisis of legitimacy", where "the very existence of chapters [is] increasingly being questioned due to a lack of perceived community benefit, community and donor accountability and transparency, community participation, or community-relevant program work". Last week, "personal opinions" by Sue Gardner in response to questions posed by the facilitator for the Movement roles project were published. She warned of the so-far hypothetical case that "a chapter [could] set for itself goals that were fundamentally out of alignment with the goals of the Wikimedia movement. To pick a ridiculous example: let's say that a chapter decided its energy would be better put towards housing homeless people". In such a situation, it would become apparent that "there is no mechanism or body in the Wikimedia movement with clear responsibility for overseeing the activities or practices of international chapters"; this presents a "quite serious risk to the movement":

Gardner criticized the current financial arrangements within the Wikimedia movement, arguing that a chapter's financial success depends mostly not on the value of its own activities, but on external factors such as "the reputation and impact of Wikipedia in" its geographical area, and that the agreements entitling a chapter to 50% of the fundraiser revenues they process hinder the flow of donations from rich countries to poorer countries with a huge potential, a transfer which is necessary to realize the goal to "create a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge."

In addition, Sue Gardner took exception to a lack of transparency in some chapters:

(At the time of writing, most chapters appear to have not yet submitted an English-language activity report since the beginning of the year, with the Dutch, Indian, Swedish, Hungarian, French – see below – and Italian chapters among the exceptions.)

At the chapters meeting, such questions were the topic of a session of the movement roles working group, and a session about accountability and legitimacy. According to the notes, representatives from the German and Polish chapters reported good experiences with full transparency (with the exception of matters such as staff salaries): "We don't have anything to hide. Be sure that you spend your money wisely." However, "WMDE has had a pretty rough year with their community. At one point there was an attempt to basically demote the Board. If there is a lesson learned, it is that the Board didn't communicate efficiently. Put simply: There are people out there to get you. Transparency is a difficult learning process". The Indonesian chapter, whose funding initially included other donors such as private companies, recalled "disappointment ... that the WMF wanted to know what we did with all of the money, although they only gave roughly half of it", and issued separate reports for separate donors. The Swedish and Australian chapters reported good experiences with communicating over their blogs. The French chapter recalled difficulties with the different audiences in French and English, but found a good solution to inform the latter one: "The one place that is most read is the Signpost. So we connect with the Signpost, if we want to spread things."

The chapters meeting was reportedly funded with €50,000 from Wikimedia Germany and a few other chapters.

Wikimedia Foundation publishes 2009–10 annual report

Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2009-2010, cover and back (Web resolution PDF)

The Wikimedia Foundation have published the annual report for 2009–2010. It is available as a PDF or on Meta-Wiki as a text article.

In an "introductory photo-essay", four double-page images illustrate the Foundation's vision statement ("Imagine a world ...", slightly modifying "can freely share in the sum of all knowledge" to "is given free access to ..."), selected after an earlier search for such images.

The report includes discussion of the production of the strategic plan (see previous Signpost coverage). The report also notes the importance of the GLAM collaborations, highlighting the work with the British Museum, illustrated with the example of Hoxne Hoard, a Featured Article on a significant find of Roman gold and silver found in Suffolk that is displayed in the British Museum ("if details are of interest to the British Museum, they are also important to Wikipedians").

As "case studies", the report documents the Wikimedia Usability Initiative, a small grant to the Wikimedia Czech Republic chapter which enabled them to photograph everyday life in the country, the significant donation of images of former Dutch colonies from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Public Policy Initiative in the United States (see previous Signpost coverage).

In the design notes, the Foundation's Head of Communications Jay Walsh encouraged reuse and translation and explained that "this year we opted for a journalistic style treatment and voice for the report", working with writer David Weir on the "overall narrative", and with design firm Exbrook, which also designed the previous annual report and other WMF publications. The report will see a print run of 1000 copies. Walsh said that "we are releasing a bit later than preferred, but as we pull resources together for future design projects in the coming year we're poised for a 2011 'anniversary' year report to be released by November 2011." (The annual reports cover the Foundation's fiscal year from June to July. The 2007–2008 report, the first of its kind, was released in November 2008 – Signpost coverage -, the 2008–2009 report came out in January 2010.)

Briefly

  • Wikimedia South Africa: At its Berlin meeting last week, the Wikimedia Board of Trustees approved the founding of the South African Wikimedia chapter.
  • GLAM Ambassadors: In a posting on his personal blog, Liam Wyatt (User:Witty lama, currently holding a year-long fellowship from the Foundation to work on GLAM partnerships, i.e. relations with cultural institutions), outlined the "concept of the 'Wikimedia GLAM Ambassador'": "There are two central purposes to the idea of a Wikimedia GLAM Ambassador: For Wikimedians it is a way for people to volunteer to represent our movement in an in-real-life capacity in their own city. For GLAMs it is to provide an appropriate local contact for when a GLAM asks 'who do you call when you want to work with Wikipedia?'." (On the Outreach wiki, some thoughts had been spent on how GLAM Ambassadors would fit into a hierarchy including other ambassadors types such as the "Campus Ambassadors" and "Online Ambassadors" introduced last year by the Foundation's Public Policy Initiative, and real-name requirements were discussed.) Witty lama also announced Barcelona-based Àlex Hinojo (User:Kippelboy) as "Wikimedia's first official GLAM Ambassador". Kippelboy has started an (English-language) blog documenting his activities: "The GLAM-WIKI Experience".
    Signing of an agreement between Wikimedia France and the city of Toulouse in October, by the chapter's president Adrienne Alix and the city's mayor Pierre Cohen
  • Wikimedia France report: The French Wikimedia chapter has published an English-language report for July to December 2010. Among many other activities covered previously in the Signpost, such as cultural partnerships with the French National Library and the city of Toulouse, it states the chapters fundraiser results (€241,171 in November, €227,422 in December, and €22,775 in January), and lists some events for which the chapter helped Wikimedians to get a photographer's accreditation, with links to the resulting photos on Commons.
  • Spanish Wikipedia overtakes Japanese Wikipedia: Reaching 740,000 articles, the Spanish Wikipedia overtook the Japanese Wikipedia as the sixth largest Wikipedia by article count last week. A blog posting rejected the assumption that this event might have to do with the recent earthquake in Japan, pointing out that the daily growth of the Japanese Wikipedia did not appear to have decreased significantly and that the overtaking had been predicted even before March 11, the day of the disaster; the difference in the growth rates of the two projects has existed for many months. The preceding two ranks in the table of Wikipedias by article count have reversed again since the Signpost reported in October that Polish Wikipedians were congratulating their Italian counterparts on overtaking them; the Polish Wikipedia is now again the fourth largest. The number of articles is somewhat controversial as a measure for a Wikipedia version's success, but is for example used for one of the five targets for 2015 in the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic plan: "Increase the number of Wikipedia articles we offer to 50 million", from currently over 18 million.


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2011-03-28

Sue Gardner interviewed; Imperial College student society launched; Indian languages; brief news

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By Tom Morris and Tilman Bayer

Fast Company interviews Sue Gardner

Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner has been profiled and interviewed by Karen Valby in an article for the April edition of Fast Company. The article describes Gardner's family background and the reasons she got involved in Wikipedia as well as listing a few of the challenges that lay ahead for the Foundation including opening the office in India, recruiting more women editors (see m:Gender gap), reversing the dropping number of regular editors overall and trying to resolve "a growing sense of insularity among seasoned editors who can set a punitive, unwelcoming tone for newcomers".

Gardner praises what she sees as idealistic younger editors meeting at Wikimania: "Everybody would stay up all night and then they would go and stand on this bridge in Gdansk and watch the sun come up. When I was that young, I would not have had the scope to think about a place halfway around the world. I would not be contributing to a global endeavor. If I stayed up all night, I would've been getting drunk. These are not ordinary kids; these are extraordinary people who are doing something awesome." (On his personal blog, User:Steven Walling remarked: "I remember that bridge.")

While lauding Gardner's success at helping to raise $16 million in the 2010–2011 funding drive, the article raises the age-old question about whether Wikipedia should take advertising or sponsorship. Erik Möller responded: "It would be ridiculous for us to say to the community, 'Hey, thanks for all your free labor. Now we're going to just change the business model under your feet. Sorry.' Our nonprofit would have clearly broken its covenant with its contributors. And Sue has never questioned that."

The magazine asked "Whatever Happened to Jimmy Wales?". The answer? He spends his days on the road, "spreading the gospel of the openly editable encyclopedia–sometimes charging top dollar". Sometimes–not always, as it goes on to make clear: many of the lectures and talks are done for free or at cost. Sue Gardner is then quoted: "I consider myself and the foundation really lucky that he’s willing to evangelize on behalf of the organization".

BBC News covers Wikipedians at Imperial College

The BBC News website published an article this week profiling the launch of Wikipedians at Imperial College, a new student society at one of London's scientific research universities. The founder of the group, Vinesh Patel (User:Vinnypatel) was interviewed and rebutted a number of the criticisms of Wikipedia frequently raised by the academic community, including concerns over plagiarism. The article also covers an upcoming conference – the London Wikipedia Academy – organised by the society which hopes to raise awareness of the issues around academic involvement in Wikipedia.

The formation of the Imperial College society (Signpost mention) was recently formally approved. It has been supported by Wikimedia UK chapter members and two on-campus recruitment drives were held in February at Imperial's central London campus (Signpost coverage). These were supported by the Contribution Team. In addition to getting sign-ups for the society, leaflets about how to edit Wikipedia were handed out as well as badges and T-shirts.

The story was also covered on Sify.com, an Indian news website, and the popular weblog Boing Boing.

Indian media highlight Wikimedia projects in local languages

The Hindu profiled "Malayalam's Wiki warrior" – User:Santhosh.thottingal, a developer of free software in Indian languages, in particular for the 2010 release of the Malayalam Wikipedia CD. Last month, he became "the only Indian" in the Wikimedia Foundation's newly expanded 16-member m:language committee". In another article, the paper covered the launch of the Sanskrit Wikisource.

The Indian magazine OPEN noted Wikipedia's commitment to Indian languages: "It’s not just Hindi and Tamil. The online encyclopaedia is serious about Wiki versions in Sanskrit, Pali and forgotten languages like Angika too". It quotes numerous Wikimedians who contribute to the Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi versions of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikibooks and Wikisource, and describes how new projects are started under the auspices of the Foundation's language committee.

In brief

  • Indian gender gap: In an article titled "Wiki wants women", The Hindustan Times reported on efforts in India to narrow Wikipedia's gender gap, including recent "Womens's Wikipedia Workshops" in several cities. Having attended one of them in Kolkata, the paper quotes, among others, admin User:Tinucherian and Trustee Bishakha Datta (who pointed to the discussion page Talk:Woman, which contains debates on what image to use as that article's lead illustration).
  • Introducing Wikipedia: In the Kids section of The Hindu, Murali N. Krishnaswamy explained the "Encyclopaedia on the web", mentioning other Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia India chapter. The Bellingham Herald from Bellingham in Washington State presented an article explaining what Wikipedia is and describing how to contribute.
  • "Powerful lessons" from WMF strategic planning process: An article titled "Reinventing your business, Wikipedia-style" by Fortune online described the strategic planning process that resulted in the Foundation's 2010–15 plan, particularly the ways in which it invited participation from the Wikimedia community (Signpost coverage: "The challenges of strategic planning in a volunteer community", "Strategic planning update"). The article quotes the Foundation's Philippe Beaudette, who said that "collaborating with the Wikimedia community on strategic planning was originally the idea of Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation - "The Wikimedia community would have hung us by our toenails if we tried to develop a strategic plan any other way". Among the key lessons, the article lists that Linus' law ("Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow") "even holds true for strategic planning". One criticism from community members was acknowledged: "Even Beaudette at Wikimedia readily admits they could have done a better job planning for what they would do next after receiving the initial barrage of proposals (a fact the community reminded him of mercilessly)." Nevertheless, Fortune asserts that "the unique process used to craft that vision contains powerful lessons for leaders and organizations of all types." An article by Barry Newstead and Laura Lanzerotti in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review had presented a similar perspective, cf. Signpost coverage: "Foundation's strategic planning process as a model for companies?".
  • Public Policy Initiative: The Public Policy Initiative is featured in an article for Brandchannel. Two Foundation representatives are quoted, Rodney Dunican and LiAnna Davis. Davis said of the Initiative: "Students are learning a lot about media literacy, assessing sources and practicing neutral points of view through our Public Policy Initiative. And we are getting an increase in accurate content through student work."
  • Beautifying Wikipedia: Observing that Wikipedia's "utilitarian design does the trick, but it doesn’t exactly look inviting", technology news website NewsGrange featured "Wikipedia Beautifier", a browser extension for Chrome that "fades out all the extra crud around the text and allows you to fully focus on the article itself", also changing the font and applying automatic hyphenation. Navigational content such as the Sidebar becomes visible when moused over; the license notice in the footer remains visible. (Many of the user-submitted Wikipedia styles on userstyles.org, as well as Wikipedia versions for mobile devices, likewise remove or hide such content.)
  • Newspapers losing "first draft of history": A comment in The Post and Courier, a local newspaper in South Carolina worried that Wikipedia might replace newspapers as "the first draft of history": "As I peer into the future of information, the thing I fear most is the loss of credibility." Techdirt highlighted a related but different observation by Wikipedian David Gerard about the New York Times' new paywall, arguing it "means the NY Times will be cited a lot less on Wikipedia, thereby handing over the 'first draft of history' to other publications like The Guardian and the BBC." Gerard and another commenter cited by Techdirt also questioned a moral argument for the paywall, that newspapers were entitled to payments for the aggregation and condensation of "their" content elsewhere (as an example, Gerard quoted from a 2009 article about Wikipedia by The New York Times's Noam Cohen: "Many Wikipedia articles are another way that the work of news publications is quickly condensed and reused without compensation"). Gerard retorted: "Every journalist I've spoken to since 2006 uses Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. Funnily enough, there's a distinct lack of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from newspapers and media organisations. How much did the New York Times donate in the fundraiser?"
  • Karl Rove's political campaigning group Crossroads GPS launched a site called "Wikicountability" and compared it to Wikipedia. The site is intended to contain the result of Freedom of Information Act requests that shine a negative light on the Obama administration. It is hosted on MediaWiki software, but requires participants to send an e-mail to the administrators to get an account.
  • Wikipedia as an exercise in democracy: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a talk by Jimmy Wales at Washington University: "Founder sees Wikipedia as an exercise in global democracy". As quoted by the university's student newspaper, Wales also highlighted the different levels of interest some topics are getting in different language versions of Wikipedia: "The Germans are the most interested in geography. Just saying. ... Sex is in the top topics in every language here except for in French and Spanish, and I thought this was kind of puzzling until someone explained to me that it’s because the French and Spanish are actually having sex, and everyone else is just reading about it."
  • Local newspaper traces down vandalism: The Bolton News reports on the discovery of vandalism of articles related to the UK town of Bolton. After tracing IP addresses, they have discovered that some of it comes from the offices of the social landlord Bolton At Home.
  • AT&T ad features Wikipedia: In a new advert for AT&T's iPhone service, guess which reference source is used to look up the release date of Whoomp! (There It Is)? No prizes for guessing Wikipedia.
  • Politically charged list entry "roiling township council meetings"': The New Jersey Jewish Standard investigated why the article on Teaneck, New Jersey claimed the town was twinned with Beit Yatir on the Israeli West Bank, an error that "has been roiling Teaneck township council meetings." A local "who describes himself as a Jewish anti-Zionist activist" had asked the mayor and others about the politically charged twinship, only to find out that no one knew about it. The newspaper's "investigation of the editing history of the Wikipedia article about Beit Yatir shows that the reference to a twinning with Teaneck was inserted by a Canadian editor who goes by the name 'Shuki'", and notes that this user "has been heavily involved in the disputes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian editors that make articles on topics as apparently neutral as hummus deeply contentious. In December, he was banned from editing Wikipedia for six months, for allegedly using a false account to vote on the deletion of controversial articles concerning Israelis and Palestinians." As an explanation for the error, the paper pointed out that Beit Yatir had indeed long been twinned with a synagogue in Teaneck, instead of the town itself.

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2011-03-28

Linking with WikiProject Wikify

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By SMasters


WikiProject news
News in brief
  • Following over two weeks of breathtaking progress, the March Copy Editing Backlog Elimination Drive hit a wall at the beginning of last week. The drive's 80 participants could use your help in the final week to end March with a strong push!
  • Two new portals are up and running. Check out the Rock Climbing Portal and a portal for The Cleveland Show.
  • Dough4872 over at WikiProject Highways is hosting a "GA by number" challenge to see who can improve 99 articles about local, state, provincial, territorial, and/or national highways to GA status or above. Part of the challenge is picking a highway for every number from 1 to 99.
  • The WikiProject Wikify April Drive starts Friday. Join their efforts to knock out 3,000 articles from the project's backlog and earn barnstars for your work!
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
The new logo of WikiProject Wikify
The February 2011 Wikification Backlog Elimination Drive reduced the backlog by over 700 articles
A graph showing the progress of the Wikification backlog of 2008 by sources (Oct 2010 to Feb 2011)
Editors who make significant contributions to the project may earn themselves a Wikify barnstar. You can sign up for the April drive to participate.

This week, we turn our attention to the maintenance-oriented WikiProject Wikify. Started in August 2006 by Draicone, it currently has 68 active members. The project focuses on wikification, as well as improving the layout and formatting of articles that have been tagged with the {{Wikify}} template. Although a relatively old project, participation had dwindled until recently, when it enjoyed a revival of sorts. The project is currently preparing for their fourth backlog elimination drive in April, which aims to reduce the backlog of over 21,000 articles. The Signpost interviewed four members of the project.

Sumsum2010 has been an editor on Wikipedia since January 2010: "I became interested in WikiProject Wikify when I saw an invitation to the first drive posted on NerdyScienceDude's talkpage. I participated in the drive and managed to get first place on the leaderboard. Ever since then, I've been hooked on the project! I have been a coordinator in both the December and February drives, and was recently elected to be an assistant coordinator [of the project]." WikiCopter has been an editor since August 2010, and can't recall the exact reason for joining, "but it might have something to do with the shabby shape of the project and the thousands of articles tagged for wikification. The project was going down. I started the first drive along with User:Mono modeled after the Guild of Copy Editor's copy editing drive, and ever since, every drive has been a further step to destroying the backlog." Nolelover had participated in the backlog elimination drives held by the Guild of Copy Editors, "and Mono invited me to the October 2010 wikification drive as someone who might be interested. After that, I began taking part in all the work that needed to be done as the project became active again, and [was] assistant coordinator for the December drive." Guoguo12 has been on Wikipedia since February 2009, and was recently made executive coordinator for the project upon the retirement of User:Mono.

Your project has adopted an unusual page design for a WikiProject. What are the advantages of such a design?

Sumsum2010: The advantages are that it looks very sleek and you don't feel like you're being bombarded with information. For navigation, I can normally find everything I need on the news bar, except for the main newsletter page.
WikiCopter: I personally like the new page design... In fact, it's more like a menu rather than a list of subpages. Which one is easier to navigate?
Nolelover: Because of the relative youth of this project (founded in 2006 but only active within since late 2010), many of our members are fairly new to Wikipedia and we have to be careful not to overwhelm them with information and instructions. We've tried to slim down the page and most of what remains is the only thing that new members really need to know: how to wikify. That said, a navigation bar has been recently added, and it is available to those looking for more detailed information on the project.

WikiProject Wikify has over 21,000 articles that need to be wikified. How do you keep all these up and what are your biggest challenges?

Sumsum2010: One of the best ways to keep that number somewhat under control is to hold drives. Another big one is to try to educate people on when to use, and when not to use, the Wikify tag. The second is very difficult to do. Sometimes an article needs to be fixed and people don't know just what needs to be fixed, so they slap on a Wikify tag and hope someone else will figure it out.

Your project has conducted three drives: October and December in 2010, and February 2011. How successful were these, and what did you learn?

Sumsum2010: These drives were very successful, although the numbers may not show it. Hundreds of new articles are added everyday, to even slow stabilize this is a huge accomplishment. I learned a lot about the Wikify tag. Such as what it really means, need to be done. Some of my first "wikifyings" would be better classified as copy-edits. I was re-writing entire paragraphs and trying to place commas. Eventually, I figured out that wikifying is not very difficult. It is as easy as fixing wiki-markup, adding links, fixing heading levels, and adding an infobox (if possible).
Nolelover: Our drives were based on the ones held by the Guild of Copy Editors (GOCE), and over the course of the three drives we have been trying to figure out what works for this project – the rewards, the methods, etc. In October 2010, we tried to make our drive look as much like those put on by the GOCE, because that was the only proven method. Since then, a lot has been learned by trial-and-error, and we've changed as a result of that. Each drive has gotten better and better, both in results and in organization, and we are looking forward to continuing that trend with our upcoming April drive.
Guoguo12: More specifically, for our next drive we have introduced a new scoring system aimed at making the drive easier to understand for newcomers. Awards are no longer being handed out for word counts, but for number of articles completed only.

Do you collaborate with other WikiProjects?

Sumsum2010: Yes, we collaborate with the Guild of Copy Editors. We stagger our drive schedule with theirs, to allow people plenty of time to devote to each. Many of our participants also belong to GOCE. The people on their participant list is where a large portion of our October drive advertisements were sent out to.
Guoguo12: In addition, we are thankful for partnering WikiProjects like WikiProject Novels, which supported our last drive.

What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Wikify? How can a new contributor help today?

Sumsum2010: The most pressing need is for more people who can stay on top of the backlog all the time, not just during drives. If people are always hacking away at the backlog, it will not jump up between drives and will eventually get very low. While this may take some time it can still be done. A new contributor could help by reading the cheetsheet and then looking at how a Featured article is formatted and organized. This area of Wikipedia can be very daunting to a new editor, mostly due to the mass of Manual of Style (MoS) reading. While the MoS contains good information, it is way more than an average editor would want to read in its entirety (even I've never read the whole thing).
Nolelover: For an article maintenance project like us, helping out isn't too complicated – having editors sit down and wikify articles is the only way we'll ever make headway into our massive backlog. Our backlog drives are also an easy, rewarding way to help out. We're preparing one for April, and that's as good a time as any to start wikifying.
Guoguo12: WikiProject Wikify needs all the help it can get. Every month, over a thousand articles are tagged newly for wikification. Sometimes we get even bigger surges, like in January 2011, in which over 5,000 articles were added to the backlog. It really isn't hard to help out. If you have spare time, just click here (or on the WikiProject logo on our project page) to find a random article to wikify. Don't forget to add yourself to the member list here.

Next week, we keep our hydrostatic equilibrium in check while we launch into orbit. Until then, let gravity draw you to our archives.

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2011-03-28

Featured list milestone

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87
From the newly promoted List of Governors of Washington, the incumbent, Christine Gregoire (left). From List of Baltimore Orioles first-round draft picks, baseball player Mike Mussina, who was drafted by the Orioles and made five all-star appearances for the team (right).
This week's "Features and admins" covers Saturday 19 – Friday 25 March


2,000th featured list

From the list of Moons of Saturn, promoted May 2010: a raw image from the Cassini space probe of the equatorial ridge on Saturn's moon Iapetus, taken September 2007 at a distance of just over 60,000 kilometres
From Order of battle at the Battle of Camperdown, promoted April 2010, a painting of the Battle of Camperdown (1797) by William Adolphus Knell, now on display at Edinburgh Castle
On 14 March, the English Wikipedia reached a milestone with the promotion of its 2,000th Featured list (FL). Featured lists are determined by the community to be the best and most useful stand-alone lists on Wikipedia. The featured list process was created in May 2005 by Filiocht, and the first featured list, List of North American birds, was promoted on 1 June 2005. The criteria against which nominations are judged focus on the list candidate's usefulness, completeness, accuracy, neutrality, style and prose, and have been changed to reflect the community's higher standards for content-forks and red links (see previous stories).

The 2,000th FL designation is shared by the six lists simultaneously promoted by director Dabomb87:

Harrias, nominator of List of international cricket centuries by David Gower, had this to say about one of his FLs being among those designated as the 2,000th FL: "It's nice to be a part of history, but to be honest, writing the (joint) 2,000th is merely a number: each one of the 1,999 (ish) FLs promoted previously are just as important as these six. I think the FL process is actually among the better ones for recognised content on Wikipedia! The reviewing team is quite small, but tends to be pretty friendly, especially once you've experienced the FLC process a few times."

On 20 February, Giants2008 was made the third featured list director. Giants2008 joined Wikipedia in March 2008; he has made 9,000 edits, is a primary contributor to nine featured lists, and has been an active reviewer at both featured lists and featured articles. We asked him for his thoughts on being director and on the FL process: "I've always felt that reviewing lists provided a nice change of pace from checking standard articles. The lists at FLC have a wide variety of styles, and I enjoy working with nominators to get the most out of them. FLC is also cordial as a whole, which makes interacting with nominators easy. When I accepted the position as FL director, the most important factor for me was that I enjoy the reviewing that comes with it. There's a lot of extra work that comes with being a director, but since I like it I'm willing to devote the time necessary to ensuring the next 2,000 FLs are the highest quality possible."

In another milestone, arrangements have been made for one featured list and two featured sounds to appear on the main page each week.

Ten other lists have been promoted to featured status in the past two weeks: Latin Grammy Award for Producer of the Year List of 1952 Winter Olympics medal winners, The Simpsons (season 13), Grammy Award for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, U.S. state reptiles, List of Oakland Athletics first-round draft picks, Venues of the 1994 Winter Olympics, Philadelphia Phillies all-time roster (E–F), and List of Oakland Athletics managers.

One list was demoted:


New administrators

The Signpost welcomes two editors as our newest admins.

  • Fæ (nom), from the UK, can be found doing anti-vandalism work and CSDing and is heavily involved in GLAM collaborations, the Hoxne Hoard featured article, OTRS and Commons.
  • Valfontis (nom) brings more than five years' experience as a Wikipedian to the role. She is an active member of Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon, has worked for Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam, and is familiar with AfD and reporting vandals to AIV. Valfontis has helped to promote five articles to GA status, and one to FA.

At the time of publication there are two live RfAs: Neutralhomer and Salvio giuliano, both due to finish Saturday.


Featured articles

Early motorsports: from the 1906 French Grand Prix
Robert Oppenheimer (left) at the remains of the Trinity test in September 1945. The white canvas overshoes prevent fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes
Ten articles were promoted to featured status:
  • 2009 World Series (nom), Major League Baseball's 105th championship series, in which several records were tied and broken. (Nominated by Staxringold)
  • Kennedy half dollar (nom), first issued only months after the assassination of US President Kennedy in 1963. Co-nominator Wehwalt says the double whammy of hoarding and rising silver prices meant that "the half dollar failed to circulate despite massive mintages, and effectively destroyed the half dollar as a coin used in trade. It has never recovered, and the coin is only struck today for collectors." (RHM22 and Wehwalt)
  • Sacagawea dollar (nom), which proved unpopular with Americans in commerce. "Nonetheless, it continues to be minted, now with a reverse that changes yearly", says nominator RHM22.
  • History of Sesame Street (nom), the American preschool educational television show, now a cultural icon. (Christine)
  • J. Robert Oppenheimer (nom), theoretical physicist best known for the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, and the prediction of quantum tunnelling, neutron stars and black holes. He worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first nuclear weapons. (Hawkeye7)
  • Eastbourne manslaughter (nom), the death of a 15-year-old boy at the hands of a teacher. The case was important in the development of modern laws surrounding corporal punishment. (Nikkimaria)
  • 1906 French Grand Prix (nom), from the very early days of motorsports: on a dusty road outside Le Mans, drivers in huge, rickety cars fought, driving on temporary wooden-plank roads, being blinded by tar. "It was a miracle no one died", says co-nominator Apterygial, with AlexJ.
  • Planet Stories (nom), now one of the most sought-after pulp science-fiction magazines from the 1940s and 1950s. (Mike Christie)
  • Flow (video game) (nom), originally played millions of times as a free flash game and then successfully used to launch to prominence an American independent video game developer co-founded by two University of Southern California Interactive Media Division students. (PresN)
  • Suillus salmonicolor (nom), or "the slippery Jill", a widely distributed, slimy, and (somewhat) edible mushroom. (Sasata)

One featured article was delisted:


Featured pictures

User:Alvesgaspar's photograph of a tabby cat
Twelve images were promoted
The Lion Tower in Tripoli, an important example of 15th-century Lebanese architecture, photographed shortly after 1900
. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":


New featured picture: of more than a little relevance to events over the past few weeks, a map of caesium-137 contamination in 1996, a decade after the Chernobyl crisis. Restriction orders are still in place for the production, transportation and consumption of food contaminated by Chernobyl fallout.


Featured sounds

Engraved portrait of composer Richard Strauss by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1922); a performance of Strauss's Burleske was promoted to featured status.
Four sound files were promoted:
Information about new admins at the top is drawn from their user pages and RfA texts, and occasionally from what they tell us directly.


Reader comments

2011-03-28

New case opens; Monty Hall problem case closes – what does the decision tell us?

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By Ncmvocalist and Lord Roem

The Committee closed one case during the week, and opened one new case. Three cases are currently open.

Open cases

Henri Coanda (Coanda) (Week 1)

This case was opened this week after allegations of tendentious POV-pushing and a content dispute involving the usage of sources in the Coanda-1910 article. 21 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence by three users.

Arbitration Enforcement sanction handling (AE sanction handling) (Week 3)

During the week, another 66 kilobytes was submitted as on-wiki evidence while several proposals were submitted in the workshop by arbitrators and others.

Rodhullandemu (Week 4)

See last week’s Signpost coverage.

Closed cases

Monty Hall problem (Week 7)

This case involves allegations of problematic behavior relating to the Monty Hall problem article. Evidence was submitted on-wiki by 17 editors. Drafters Elen of the Roads and SirFozzie submitted several proposed principles in the workshop before submitting a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on. The case came to a close during the week after a total of 12 arbitrators voted on the proposed decision.

What is the effect of the decision and what does it tell us?
  • Article talk pages should not be used by editors for proposing unpublished solutions, forwarding original ideas, redefining terms, or so forth. Although more general discussion may be permissible in some circumstances, it will not be tolerated when it becomes tendentious, overwhelms the page, impedes productive work, or is otherwise disruptive.
  • Users who disrupt the editing of articles by engaging in sustained attacks on other editors may be banned from the affected articles, and in extreme cases, may be banned from the site.
  • Articles should be understandable to the widest possible audience. For most articles, this means understandable to a general audience. Every reasonable attempt should be made to ensure that material is presented in the most widely understandable manner possible.
    • If editors disagree on how to express a problem and/or solution in mathematics articles, citations to reliable published sources that are directly related to the topic of the article and directly support the material as presented must be supplied by the editor(s) who wishes to include the material. Novel derivations, applications or conclusions that cannot be supported by sources are likely to constitute original research within the definition used by the English Wikipedia.
  • Glkanter (talk · contribs) is indefinitely topic-banned on subjects related to the Monty Hall problem.
    • Glkanter is banned from editing Wikipedia until 25 March 2012.
  • Nijdam (talk · contribs) is topic-banned from the subject of the Monty Hall problem until 25 March 2012.
  • Rick Block (talk · contribs) is subject to a 1RR restriction until 25 March 2012 when editing the article.
  • Gill110951 (talk · contribs) is reminded to follow good practice in respect of conflict of interest, when referencing or inserting his own sources of his own authoring into the article as references, namely to avoid undue weight, use reliable sourcing, and to seek consensus first if editing in a contentious segment of the mainspace.
  • Articles related to the Monty Hall problem are subject to "standard" discretionary sanctions.

    Reader comments

2011-03-28

UploadWizard release; code review – should MediaWiki move to Git?; brief news

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By Jarry1250

Upload Wizard release expected shortly

This week, Neil Kandalgaonkar, a developer working with the WMF, blogged about developments on a new UploadWizard the Foundation was working on. He announced that the wizard, aimed at easing new users into uploading to Wikimedia Commons, was nearing a stable release (Wikimedia Techblog). As well as noting that a deployment to Wikimedia Commons is expected "by the end of this month", he explained the project:


Why isn't code being reviewed as quickly as it's being written?

A long debate formed this week on the wikitech-l mailing list about the issue of code review. The fundamental problem will be familiar to regular Signpost readers: that the review process just can't keep up with the volume of new code being written by developers day in, day out. Readers may also be familiar with the recurrent debate about which Version Control System MediaWiki developers should be using: the incumbent (Subversion, SVN), or an alternative (such as Git, or a similar system known as Mercurial).

This week's debate combined the two, as the question was asked, "is there still interest in [preparing for a move to Git]". The debate started with direct questions about the practicalities of transferring to a new system, the benefits, and how it may change the development cycle. Critics highlighted the difficulty of submitting localisation updates to the multiple code repository system preferred by Git users, though Git's capability to handle complex updates was defended by advocates on the grounds that it merely required new automated scripts to be written. The discussion then broadened onto the impact this would have on code review times, and the process of code review.

A number of WMF developers hold that a move to Git or similar is in the best long term interests of MediaWiki post-1.17. A number of suggestions came from various developers: go entirely to Git with a separate repository for each of MediaWiki's hundreds of extensions, to maintain one SVN repository and one Git repository for "core" code (also known as "phase3"), and to do the same but have them both as Git repositories. The contra position was taken by Mark Hershberger, who suggested that rather than rely on the arrival of "the mythical GIT", developers should ask "what can we do to improve code review now?" He suggested reverting unreviewed code after a period of seven days, with effect from next week. Roan Kattouw, who supports a move to Git, supplemented the proposal with improvements to "reviewer allocation, discipline and assignment" before implementation. Simetrical also highlighted concerns that after the 1.17 release, paid developers would be moved off code review where they were desperately needed.

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.

  • The SSL certificate for HTTPS support on secure.wikimedia.org (Singer) briefly registered as "expired" before it was renewed by the Foundation (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Gerard Meijssen blogged about his "ten suggestions", a collection of what he sees as "the top MediaWiki challenges", and about MediaWiki's PDF support.
  • The file blacklist, which prevents uploads with names such as DSCF001.jpg, was restored to functionality (bug #27470).
  • Mark Hershberger posted a list of "sprint" bugs that need to be fixed before the 1.17 tarball release (wikitech-l mailing list). Several have since been fixed.
  • Developer Tim Starling suggested changing the focus of MediaWiki's PHP optimisation strategy from just the Zend compiler to both that and Facebook's new HipHop compiler (wikitech-l mailing list).
  • Bug #542, from September 2004, was finally closed. The successful resolution means that for some simple links, the title attribute (commonly displayed as a tooltip by browsers) will no longer be set, in order to comply with current accessibility guidelines.

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