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A barnstar for you!

Moved, see User:TCN7JM#Last but not least, my awards

The Signpost: 01 January 2014

In fact, the majority are relatively evenly split between three themes: people of interest, television, and websites.
In 2013, the arbitration committee closed 10 cases, 9 amendment requests, and 26 clarification requests.
On New Year's Day, an article by Tim Sampson published in The Daily Dot and republished shortly after on Mashable covered the currently ongoing medical disclaimer RfC.
Dariusz Jemielniak's book is the newest about Wikipedia, published in Poland in 2013 and with an English edition forthcoming in 2014.
This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars". But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project is in trouble from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia and around the Wikimedia movement include...
The year 2013 has come and gone, adding 50 new WikiProject Reports to our long list of projects we've had the privilege to meet. Last year saw the continuation of our Babel series, featuring WikiProjects from other languages of Wikipedia. We also expanded our selection of special reports, offering readers a growing collection of helpful tips and tools as they participate in WikiProjects.
Over the past year 1181 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured picture candidates (FPC), which promoted an average of 46 pictures a month. This was followed by featured article candidates (FAC; 32.5 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 18 a month).
2013 saw a lot of changes to MediaWiki software and Wikimedia infrastructure.

The Signpost: 08 January 2014

Public Domain Day—January 1, 2014—gives me an opportunity to reflect on this important asset, mandated by the Constitution of the United States.
The various maladies that befall humanity got some well-known faces this week: the death of the well-liked actor James Avery topped the list, but Michael Schumacher, who is in a coma after a skiing accident, also drew attention.
MediaWiki developers will be meeting in San Francisco on January 23–24 for an Architecture Summit.
On 8 January, the Wikimedia Foundation notified the Wikimedia-l mailing list that Sarah Stierch, a popular Wikimedian and the Foundation's Program Evaluation Community Coordinator, was no longer an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, as a result of being paid to create articles on the English Wikipedia.
At the very start of the new year, 2014's WikiCup—an annual competition which has been held on Wikipedia in various forms since 2007—began.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Television.
Twelve articles, three lists, seven pictures, and a portal were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.

Wikidata weekly summary #92

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Leaderboard

Hey! Will you be able to do the leaderboard soon? If not, no worries. --Rschen7754 02:17, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

If I don't do it within the next few hours, I won't be able to do it until Saturday evening, so I guess I can do it in a little while. Sorry you've not seen me on IRC. It's been a bit of a hectic week for me in the real world. TCN7JM 07:00, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
 Done TCN7JM 12:42, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

The Center Line: Winter 2013

Volume 7, Issue 1 • Winter 2014 • About the Newsletter
Departments
Features
State and national updates
Archives • Newsroom • Full Issue • Shortcut: WP:USRD/NEWS
—MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:15, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Admin

Hey, would you like to be an admin? I read on your userpage that you'd like to be one some day. Philroc (talk) 16:56, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

I ran last October, but I failed. I don't think it would be smart to run again now because:
  1. It's only been about eighty days since my last request. That's enough time to go around the world, but most people prefer six months or more between RfAs.
  2. My activity on Wikipedia has declined since October, so there's less of a reason to support me now than there was back then.
  3. I have a lot of stuff going on in the real world in the next few months so even if I miraculously passed I wouldn't be able to do much with the tools until, like, July.
So now is not the time for me to run for adminship, and I don't think I should run again until maybe this autumn...if I'm still around and active by then. TCN7JM 22:47, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #93

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The Signpost: 15 January 2014

Wikimedia Germany, the largest national affiliate, has authored an extensive critique of the Funds Dissemination Committee's process for issuing funding recommendations for the various large organizations in the movement.
The proposed schedule for the MediaWiki Archicture Summit has been published. The two main plenary sessions will be about HTML templating, and Service-oriented architecture.
It is heavily ironic that two decades after the World Wide Web was started — largely to make it easier to share scholarly research — most of our past and present research publications are still hidden behind paywalls for private profit. The bitter twist is that the vast majority of this research is publicly funded, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year.
Wikipedia's recent decline in readership, possibly due to Google's Knowledge Graph. ... Judith Newman in the New York Times asks "What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?"
We now can get a far more accurate picture of which short surges in popularity are likely natural and which are not.
This week, we studied human social behavior with the folks at WikiProject Sociology.

Wikidata weekly summary #94

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The Signpost: 22 January 2014

A particularly esoteric anthology of speculative fiction, filled with imaginary Wikipedia entries from, as the introduction puts it, "the many Wikipedias across the Multiverse."
The Wikimedia Foundation's Director of Community Advocacy's application of pending changes level two on the article Conventional PCI—an action taken under its rarely used office actions policy—has escalated to the Arbitration Committee after an editor upgraded it to full protection.
Fifteen articles, nine lists, twenty pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia over the last two weeks.
On 15 January, Wikipedia turned thirteen years old. In that time, this site has grown from a small site that was known to only a select few to one of the most popular websites on the internet. At the same time, recent data suggests that there is a power curve among users, where the comparative few who are writing most of Wikipedia have most of the edits. The result of this is that there is going to be bias in what is created, and how we deal with it as Wikipedians is indicative of the future of the site. Furthermore, this brings up what we have to do in order to combat this bias, as there are many ideas, but the question is whether they will work or not.
This week we're interviewing Brion Vibber about the then-upcoming Architecture Summit. Brion is a long time Wikipedian, the first employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and currently the lead software architect working with the mobile team.
An article in USA Today announced that a European-funded project called RoboEarth that is designed to give robots a mechanism by which to access information to dispense.
While the 71st Golden Globe Awards, held on 12 January, had an impact on the top 25, their presence was largely absent from the Top 10. With the exception of Best Actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio, the only Golden Globe entrants in the Top 10 are films that would have been there anyway.

Your GA nomination of K-44 (Kansas highway)

Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the article K-44 (Kansas highway) you nominated for GA-status according to the criteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period. Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of CycloneIsaac -- CycloneIsaac (talk) 20:42, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #95

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

Your GA nomination of K-44 (Kansas highway)

The article K-44 (Kansas highway) you nominated as a good article has passed ; see Talk:K-44 (Kansas highway) for comments about the article. Well done! Message delivered by Legobot, on behalf of CycloneIsaac -- CycloneIsaac (talk) 00:22, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Now you get it

http://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=6658.msg147943#msg147943 --NE2 06:13, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Hah. Funny. But...you're aware that that is vandalism, correct? TCN7JM 06:16, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
I had no idea. Next you're going to tell me that I can't draw maps on bathroom walls. --NE2 06:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
Of course not. Why should I be forced to look at such profanities as I-238 whenever I've to use the restroom? TCN7JM 06:38, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

WikiCup 2014 January newsletter

The 2014 WikiCup is off to a flying start, with, at time of writing, 138 participants. The is the largest number of participants we have seen since 2010. If you are yet to join the competition, don't worry- the judges have agreed to keep the signups open for a few more days. By a wide margin, our current leader is newcomer Smithsonian Institution Godot13 (submissions), whose set of 14 featured pictures, the first FPs of the competition, was worth 490 points. Here are some more noteworthy scorers:

Featured articles, featured lists, featured topics and featured portals are yet to play a part in the competition. The judges have removed a number of submissions which were deemed ineligible. Typically, we aim to see work on a project, followed by a nomination, followed by promotion, this year. We apologise for any disappointment caused by our strict enforcement this year; we're aiming to keep the competition as fair as possible.

Wikipedians interested in friendly competition may be interested to take part in The Core Contest; unlike the WikiCup, The Core Contest is not about audited content, but, like the WikiCup, it is about article improvement; specifically, The Core Contest is about contribution to some of Wikipedia's most important article. Of course, any work done for The Core Contest, if it leads to a DYK, GA or FA, can earn WikiCup points.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. J Milburn (talk • email), The ed17 (talk • email) and Miyagawa (talk • email) 19:54, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 January 2014

There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.
Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.
Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".
The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.
An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.

The Signpost: 29 January 2014

There are times when this job is hard. As an analogy, imagine navigating in fog at night, except you don't know where you are, you don't know where you want to go, and your flashlight keeps dying on you.
Contests have existed almost as long as the English Wikipedia. Contestants have expanded hundreds of articles and made tens of thousands of edits. Although it may seem as though there aren't any negatives to contests, they have occasionally become a divisive topic on the English Wikipedia.
Wiki-PR, a public relations agency, whose employees used a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts to create, edit, and maintain several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients, has told Business Insider that it was demonized by the online encyclopedia. Jordan French, Wiki-PR's CEO, said he believes the Wikimedia Foundation "painted" his company to look like an "evil entity" that is "scrubbing truths from Wikipedia".
The Kafziel case has been closed, with Kafziel losing his administrator status as a result.
An author experimented with "a promising type of assignment in formal translator training which involves translating and publishing Wikipedia articles", in three courses with students at the University of Warsaw.

Wikidata weekly summary #96

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Events/Blogs/Press
    • See the office hours logs at meta
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • See the FOSDEM slides
    • Thiemo joins the Wikidata development team
  • Development
    • More work on badges by Bene*
    • Lots of Lua improvements by hoo (separate announcement with details soon)
    • Created backend Time parsers (yet another necessary step towards doing more in the backend instead of in Java Script in the frontend)
    • Automatic builds created, tested and deployed to beta labs every day!
    • Investigate Elastic Search as possible backend for queries
    • Made Wikibase Query work with our new component structure
  • Monthly Tasks

Autopatrolled

Hi TCN7JM, I just wanted to let you know that I have added the autopatrolled right to your account, as you have created numerous, valid articles. This feature will have no effect on your editing, and is simply intended to reduce the workload on new page patrollers. For more information on the patroller right, see Wikipedia:Autopatrolled. Feel free to leave me a message if you have any questions. Happy editing! AdmrBoltz 23:42, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Thanks. TCN7JM 23:45, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 12 February 2014

As reported in various media outlets this week, including The Next Web and The Daily Dot, this past week, Wikimedia Commons and various language Wikipedias are working together to encourage subjects of Wikipedia articles to record a 10-second clip of their voice to be appended to their Wikipedia article.
Software evolution does not always mean that features are being added. It also means that old fat is being trimmed. It is no different for MediaWiki.
In a bold move, the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has announced a major change in policy concerning affiliated groups in the worldwide movement, and FDC funding levels to eligible chapters and thematic organizations over the next two years. Both decisions were published last Tuesday after considerable post-meeting consultation with the FDC and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom). The core of the first decision is
Thirteen articles, three lists, and twenty-five images were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia from 19 January to 1 February.
Two great sporting events, the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics, collide in one week, transforming the top ten into a festival of flying feet, a carnival of colliding caraniums and a bacchanal of bouncing balls, combined to influence Wikipedia's most popular articles last week.
In celebration of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, we revisited the team at WikiProject Russia to learn how the project has changed since our first interview in 2011.

Wikidata weekly summary #97

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
  • Reasonator
  • Did you know?
  • Development
    • Wrote performance tests so we can track performance improvements better
    • Did a code review of all gadgets that are enabled by default in Wikidata. Found and fixed a performance bottleneck.
    • Work on making the interface more responsive, e. g. live preview when editing labels and updating the watchlist star when saving.
    • Started refactoring and fixing issues with automatically created summaries that are, for example, created by bots via API calls.
    • Fixed an issue with OAuth on Wikidata because of permissions
    • Started code review of the code the student team is working on for suggestions
    • Discussed updates to the data model document to be able to update it to the actual implementation
    • Did a technical debt analysis and design review of Wikibase.git, with initial focus on WikibaseLib
    • Got (backend) EntityStore on the way, so we can test API modules without touching the database
    • Further work on TimeParsers move to the backend
  • Monthly Tasks

The Signpost: 19 February 2014

The Wikimedia Foundation has proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' Terms of use to specifically ban undisclosed paid editing. ... Dimitris Liourdis, a lawyer in training who moonlights as an administrator on the Greek Wikipedia, is embroiled in a legal dispute with a Greek politician over alleged edits made to his Wikipedia article.
Runa Bhattacharjee has notified the community that the Foundation is ready to turn the Universal Language Selector back on.
WikiProject Countering System Bias aims to combat imbalanced coverage while encouraging neglected cultural perspectives and points of view, both in articles and in the larger Wikipedia community. As you'll see from the varied experiences and motivations of our nine respondents, the biases that the folks at WP CSB tackle run the full gamut of human characteristics and dispositions. The interview that follows unveils many of Wikipedia's greatest shortcomings.
Five articles, seven lists, forty-three pictures, and two portals were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia in the last two weeks.
Valentines Day got a somewhat muted reception this week, overshadowed by continuing coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi and the death of Shirley Temple.

Wikidata weekly summary #98

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.

The Signpost: 26 February 2014

About a week ago, the Wikimedia Foundation proposed to modify the Wikimedia projects' terms of use to specifically ban paid editing, by adding a new clause titled "Paid contributions without disclosure". We have asked two users, one in favor of the measure (Smallbones) and one opposed (Pete Forsyth), to contribute their opinions on the matter.
Eight articles, three lists, and nine pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
This week, we found three Ph.D.s willing to give us a crash course on WikiProject Neuroscience.
Ukraine has been gripped by widespread protests over the past three months. Due to a decision by former president Viktor Yanukovych—at Russia's urging—to abandon integration with the European Union, the country was (and in many ways still is) split between the Europe-favoring Ukrainian-speaking western half and the Russian-speaking east and south. Hundreds have died during the unrest, leaving thousands of family members and friends to bury their loved ones. This week our Wikimedian colleagues in Ukraine are facing that challenge after the death of one of their own.
Following a trend started by Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Argentina has published an open letter challenging the recent deletion of hundreds of images from the Commons under its policy on URAA-restored copyrights, relating to the United States' 1994 Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
The 2014 Winter Olympics had more of an impact on the Top 25 than the Top 10, which had to shoulder old stalwarts like the death list, Reddit threads, TV shows and the eternal presence of Facebook; still, with four slots, it's the most searched topic on the list.
The monthly roundup of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee.

WikiCup 2014 February newsletter

And so ends the most competitive first round we have ever seen, with 38 points required to qualify for round 2. Last year, 19 points secured a place; before that, 11 (2012) or 8 (2011) were enough. This is both a blessing and a curse. While it shows the vigourous good health of the competition, it also means that we have already lost many worthy competitors. Our top three scorers were:

  1. Smithsonian Institution Godot13 (submissions), a WikiCup newcomer whose high-quality scans of rare banknotes represent an unusual, interesting and valuable contribution to Wikipedia. Most of Godot's points this round have come from a large set of pictures used in Treasury Note (1890–91).
  2. Oh, better far to live and die / Under the brave black flag I fly... Adam Cuerden (submissions), a WikiCup veteran and a finalist last year, Adam is also a featured picture specialist, focusing on the restoration of historical images. This month's promotions have included a carefully restored set of artist William Russell Flint's work.
  3. United States WikiRedactor (submissions), another WikiCup newcomer. WikiRedactor has claimed points for good article reviews and good articles relating to pop music, many of which were awarded bonus points. Articles include Sky Ferreira, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus and "Wrecking Ball" (Miley Cyrus song).

Other competitors of note include:

After such a competitive first round, expect the second round to also be fiercely fought. Remember that any content promoted after the end of round 1 but before the start of round 2 can be claimed in round 2, but please do not update your submission page until March (UTC). Invitations for collaborative writing efforts or any other discussion of potentially interesting work is always welcome on the WikiCup talk page. Remember, if two or more WikiCup competitors have done significant work on an article, all can claim points equally.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article candidates, a featured process, or anywhere else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews. If you want to help out with the WikiCup, please do your bit to help keep down the review backlogs! Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove yourself from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. J Milburn (talk • email), The ed17 (talk • email) and Miyagawa (talk • email) 00:01, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #99

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
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