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The Signpost: 24 September 2014

Six articles, four lists, one topic, and 17 pictures were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
The Hindustan Times speculates (September 18) that politicians and their supporters are "sanitizing" their articles in advance of the 2014 Maharashtra State Assembly election. The Times notes the absence of significant controversies in the articles of particular politicians and the presence of heavily promotional language.
0.75% of Wikipedia birthdates are inaccurate, reported Robert Viseur at WikiSym 2014. Those inaccuracies are "low, although higher than the 0.21% observed for the baseline reference sources". Given that biographies represent 15% of English Wikipedia, the third largest category after "arts" and "culture", their accuracy is important.
This could be the beginning of a new era for this list. Until now, decisions to remove suspicious content have been largely educated guesswork. This week though, we have a new collaborator who can shine a light on the origins and patterns, sorting once and for all the webwheat from the cyberchaff.
A year and a week later, we're with some of the members of WikiProject Good Articles, who wanted to share the news of their upcoming contest within the project, the GA Cup. The aim of this friendly competition, which is held in the same light friendly manner of the WikiCup and the Core Contest, is to reduce the backlog of unreviewed articles at Good article nominations which has been a constant problem for quite a few years for those running the GA process.
Banning Policy finishes the workshop phase on 23 September. Parties have proposed findings of fact on the topics of the 3RR, the role of Jimbo Wales, and proxying for banned users. A request for arbitration was posted on 20 September about Landmark Worldwide.

The Signpost: 01 October 2014

Contributing to the Signpost can be one of the most rewarding things an editor can do.
This article was first published in the Signpost in 2009. Written by several long-standing editors, including the late Adrianne Wadewitz, the article was subjected to extensive commentary and ultimately influenced the English Wikipedia's plagiarism guideline. With recent debates about close paraphrasing vis-à-vis plagiarism, we feel that this dispatch retains its relevance and deserves a second airing.
The argument on Wikipedia over the benefits of crowdsourcing versus the primacy of "expert" contributors stretches back to co-founder Larry Sanger's break with the project to start the alternative Citizendium.
This week, the Signpost went down to the farm to have a look at the work of WikiProject Agriculture, which has been in existence since 2007 and has a scope covering crop production, livestock management, aquaculture, dairy farming and forest management.
Jews wished each other Shanah Tovah ("Good year") this week as Rosh Hashanah was our most popular article. It was also a week not dominated by heavy news and tragedies, so aside from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (#2, sixth week in the Top 10), our popular article list runs the gamut of current events including new television series Gotham (#3), the 2014 Asian Games (#4), and Reddit-fueled popularity for German director Uwe Boll (#7).
As the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Civil War draws to a close, the race to improve content continues. The Battle of Franklin, fought on November 30, 1864, will, quite appropriately, be Picture of the Day for November 30, 2014, its 150th anniversary. If you want to help commemorate the American Civil War, why not help out at the Military History WikiProject's Operation Brothers at War. Or help out with the World War I centennial, just starting up, Operation Great War Centennial.

Thanks!

Thanks for the quick reverts on that vandalism. Apparently I've got a Wiki-stalker who is trying to muddle in the articles I've created. He doesn't seem to understand that that sort of garbage is caught virtually instantly by good editors like yourself (and Cluebot.) Thank you. Sergecross73 msg me 22:34, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

You are welcome. WadeSimMiser (talk) 22:37, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 08 October 2014

Also, Wikimedia Norge and Nobel Peace Center edit-a-thon
2 Featured articles, 4 Featured lists, 62 Featured pictures, and 2 Featured portals were promoted.
The first case of the Ebola virus on US shores sent people into a tizzy, rushing to their keyboards to try and learn what they could.
No seriously, it is.

The Signpost: 15 October 2014

Why does Wikipedia still use the gendered pronouns "she" and "her" for ships?
Ben Koo of the sports blog Awful Announcing investigated how player Joe Streater's name became involved in recent years with a historic sports scandal.
The Banning Policy case was closed on 12 October. Arbcom affirmed that users have "considerable leeway" in terms of how their talk pages are managed.
Nine articles and twenty-six pictures were promoted to featured status on the English Wikipedia.
This week we sat down with The Earwig to learn about his wikitext parser.
We are pleased to report that the WP:5000 has now been updated to include mobile views, including a column reflecting the percentage of views coming from mobile devices.
Today, it's the turn of WikiProject Ohio to give us an interview probing deep into of how they manage to run a project covering one fiftieth of the United States, and the workings of how they manufacture their successes and other articles.

The Signpost: 22 October 2014

Four articles, four lists, and fifty-three pictures were promoted to featured status.
Our op-ed writer this week opines that the organization of Hong Kong's "Umbrella Revolution" resembles how Wikipedia is organized.
Among many newsworthy stories this week, the Signpost notes the passing of Italian Wikipedia administrator and former Wikimedia Italia treasurer [Cotton
Ebola, movies and television articles appear in this week's top ten.
PaintedCarpet explains that "WikiProject Orphanage aims to connect all Wikipedia pages, so that pages can be found and read more easily."

Message from Deansfield-Community-School

I am trying to edit the page Deansfield Community School as I am one of the senior leaders there. Twice I have pasted some text on there and twice it has been automatically removed. I'm not sure how this works. Please could you help. The page was originally created without the schools knowledge and is not really very helpful as it only shows bad thing about our school and we want to make it more positive. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Deansfield-Community-School (talk • contribs) 20:29, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

It appears you may have a connection with the school, considering your username. WadeSimMiser (talk) 20:33, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

The Signpost: 29 October 2014

By the way, there is a monster at the end of this article
Noam Cohen reports in The New York Times (October 26) that Wikipedia's "Ebola Virus Disease article has had 17 million page views in the last month," an indication of the public's reliance on the online encyclopedia.
Rather than the usual WikiProject Report, this week our guest author Jheald is telling us about a campaign to identify thousands of old maps which have been digitised, to make them available for georeferencing and upload
Ebola virus disease leads the Report for the fourth straight week. The rest of the list is primarily a mix of pop culture topics, including movie Avengers: Age of Ultron (#4) whose trailer was leaked early, and the death of Oscar de la Renta (#7). A BuzzFeed article on creepy Wikipedia articles, no doubt well-timed with Halloween (#9) around the corner, was responsible for three articles in the Top 25, including June and Jennifer Gibbons (#10), Taman Shud Case (#17), Joyce Vincent (#25). And the internet-run-amok controversy of Gamergate cracked the Top 25 for the first time at #19.
In new research conducted in light of proposed changes to data protection legislation in the European Union (EU), authors Bart Custers, Simone van der Hof, and Bart Schermer conducted a comparative analysis of social media and user-generated content websites’ privacy policies along with a user survey (N=8,621 in 26 countries) and interviews in 13 different EU countries on awareness, values, and attitudes toward privacy online.

The Signpost: 05 November 2014

"Rachel Feltman, in The Washington Post (November 4), examined research in which a team, mostly from Los Alamos National Laboratory, headed by Kyle Hickman developed a model that enabled them "to successfully predict the 2013-2014 flu season in real time" by employing "an algorithm to link flu-related Wikipedia searches with CDC data from the same time." Apparently when individuals search for information about the flu and its symptoms in Wikipedia when they feel ill, this generates data useful in forecasting the the flu season."
"It is, perhaps, ironic that humanity chose the week of Halloween to finally put its fears to bed. Let's face it: 2014 has been a year of tragedies, conflicts, plagues and pain, and eventually something had to break... Whether we at last came to terms with our limited ability to affect events, shoved those events under the carpet, or just decided to let go and move on, we turned our eye to more positive things, such as sports heroes, hotly anticipated movies, and lifelong learning; two Google doodles appeared in the top 25 for the first time since the beginning of August."

The Signpost: 12 November 2014

"Technology media outlets are abuzz after the November 6 unveiling of the Amazon Echo, an Internet-connected voice command device"; "The EUobserver talks (November 4) with Dimitar Dimitrov (User:Dimi z) about the lack of freedom of panorama in some European Union countries and its implications for Wikimedia projects"; "Scott Cantrell, classical music critic for the Dallas Morning News, recounts efforts to verify an uncited claim in the Wikipedia article for the Béla Bartók opera Bluebeard's Castle."
This was very much a week dominated by holidays and pop culture over current events, with new film Interstellar taking the top spot followed by holidays Day of the Dead (#2), Guy Fawkes and his Night (#4 and #5), and Halloween (#8, and its third week on the list). And a foursome of television shows, all return visitors, appear to setting up residence on the greater Top 25: The Walking Dead (#11), American Horror Story: Freak Show (#14), Gotham (#16), and The Flash (#18).
Nine articles, two lists, and 55 featured pictures were promoted during the week of 26 October.
We return to our interview format this week, speaking with the participants of WikiProject Hospitals. This project, formed in 2010, has no Featured content and only three Good articles, yet aided by around 30 hard-working Wikipedians covers a topic that is essential to life.

The Signpost: 26 November 2014

Four articles, four lists, eleven pictures, and one topic were promoted.
Numerous media outlets are reporting on a November 14 statement on the website of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library announcing the formation of a Russian "alternative" to Wikipedia, a "regional electronic encyclopedia" dedicated to "Russian regions and the life of the country".
The monthly roundup of research related to Wikimedia.
It's time for this year's edition of the Report looking at possibly our largest wikiproject: Military history. Since our last interview in June 2013, the project has had no break in its huge quest to document everything in their scope, that is, militaries and conflicts of the past. As usual, its participants were eager to answer the questions posed by The Signpost and update us on how they are doing.
Often times in popular culture, a subject will be quite popular among a distinct niche of people or region of the world, but little-known elsewhere -- like a musical artist that is boasted to be "big in Japan". The Traffic Report provides a bevy of examples this week.

The Signpost: 03 December 2014

The Signpost: 10 December 2014

The Signpost: 17 December 2014

The Signpost: 24 December 2014

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The Signpost: 31 December 2014

Wikidata, Wikimedia's free linked database that supplies Wikipedia and its sister projects, is gearing up to submit a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. The proposal, supported by more than 25 volunteers and half a dozen European institutions as project partners, aims to create a virtual research environment (VRE) that will enhance the project's capacity for freely sharing scientific data.
A "study tour" by the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation for the purpose of researching development projects has been the subject of much controversy and criticism in the Indian press... The Indian Express described a government report about the trip as having copied extensively from the Wikipedia articles for Port Blair and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation.
Unlike last year, Wikipedia viewers seem to have embraced the Christmas spirit, with three topics in the top 10 (and eight in the top 25) focused on the holiday season.
Chris Troutman has been a campus ambassador for six classes in the Los Angeles area over the past four consecutive semesters. He is currently a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at University of California, Riverside.
Three articles, three lists, fifteen pictures, and one topic were promoted.
A paper titled "Factors that influence the teaching use of Wikipedia in Higher Education" uses the technology acceptance model to shed light on faculty's (of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) views of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.
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