 | This is an archive of past discussions with User:Wikipelli. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
From the modeling of social dynamics in a collaborative environment to why the number of Wikipedia readers rises while the number of editors doesn't.
Wikimedia Foundation published its Annual Plan, focusing on technical improvements, editor retention, and structural reforms over the coming year. The movement's total revenue, including almost all chapter funding, is slated to rise by 35%, from $34.2 million to $46.1 million, and global spending to more than $42.1 million. The foundation's own core spending will grow by 15% to $30.2 million in 2012–13.
We continue our Summer Sports Series this week with WikiProject Horse Racing. Started in November 2005, the project has grown to include nearly 8,000 articles maintained by 34 active members. There are 10 Featured Articles and 19 Good Articles included in the project's scope. In addition to preparing articles for GA and FA status, the project attempts to create requested articles and locate requested images. We interviewed Redrose64, Montanabw, Tigerboy1966, Ealdgyth, and Cuddy Wifter.
Eight new featured articles, five new featured lists, and eight new featured pictures. The highlights include a new featured picture of Frank Sinatra, created by William P. Gottlieb and nominated by Tomer T. Sinatra (1915–98) was a highly successful American singer and film actor whose career spanned 60 years. This image dates from around 1947.
In the light of recent questions over the long-term reliability of Wikimedia wikis, the Signpost caught up with CT Woo, the Wikimedia Foundation's director of technical operations.
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion requiring the alteration of any instances of an editor's previous username in arbitration decisions to reflect their name changes. The Devil's Advocate has initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
Vandals on this page are making me crazy. I can't keep up, there's too many of them FrostedΔ14 14:41, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
- I'm seeing that. I requested page protection for that page. Wikipelli Talk 14:44, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Hey all. Some quick but important updates on what we've been up to and what's coming up next :).
The curation toolbar, our Wikimedia-supported twinkle replacement. We're going to be deploying it, along with a pile of bugfixes, to wikipedia on 9 August. After a few days to check it doesn't make anything explode or die, we'll be sticking up a big notice and sending out an additional newsletter inviting people to test it out and give us feedback :). This will be followed by two office hours sessions - one on Tuesday the 14th of August at 19:00 UTC for all us Europeans, and one on Wednesday the 15th at 23:00 UTC for the East Coasters out there :). As always, these will be held in #wikimedia-office; drop me a note if you want to know how to easily get on IRC, or if you aren't able to attend but would like the logs.
I hope to see a lot of you there; it's going to be a big day for everyone involved, I think :). I'll have more notes after the deployment! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 3 August 2012 (UTC)
At this year's Wikimania, I [Brandon Harris] gave a talk entitled The Athena Project: Wikipedia in 2015. The talk broadly outlined several ideas the foundation is exploring for planned features, user interface changes, and workflow improvements. We expect that many of these changes will be welcomed, while others will be controversial. During the question-and-answer period, I was asked whether people should think of Athena as a skin, a project, or something else. I responded, "You should think of Athena as a kick in the head" – because that's exactly what it's supposed to be: a radical and bold re-examination of some of our sacred cows when it comes to the interface.
On August 1, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) portal was launched on Meta. The FDC will implement the Wikimedia movement's new grant-orientated finance structure in accordance with the WMF board's recent resolutions. As a volunteer committee, the FDC will make recommendations to the WMF board on a $11.4 million budget for 2012–13.
Arbitrator Kirill Lokshin proposed a motion for a procedure on the alteration of an editor's previous username(s) in arbitration decisions to reflect their name change(s). ... The Devil's Advocate initiated an amendment request for the controversial Race and intelligence case.
This week the Signpost interviews Casliber, an editor who has written or contributed significantly to a startling 69 featured articles. We learn what makes him tick, why he edits, and why he can write on everything from vampires to dinosaurs, birds to plants. He also gives some advice to budding featured article writers.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for July 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project). ... At least one fibre-optic cable was damaged at the WMF's Tampa site on August 6, leading to a sharp downwards spike in traffic lasting over an hour and almost three hours of disruption for readers around the globe.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Martial Arts. Since April 2004, the project has been the hub for discussion and improvement of martial arts articles, including all disciplines and national origins. The project maintains a variety of conventions for handling the names and descriptions of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Sikh, Filipino, Okinawan, and hybrid martial arts. WikiProject Martial Arts has spawned or absorbed several subprojects focusing on boxing, kickboxing, sumo, and mixed martial arts.
Earlier this month, you left final warning on this user's userpage as a consequence of vandalism. The vandalism has since continued, see Eucharist and Church of God (Holiness) for major blanking. I have not checked all the small edits but several consist of changing a word, at times in a link, which completely alters the sense while appearing to be a copy edit. Could you please take the necessary action? Thanks for all you do to keep Wikipedia clean! Jpacobb (talk) 15:57, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
- As it happens, it was about an hour ago that I left the last warning and, strictly speaking, the editor has not vandalized since then. As the warnings/actions are generally applied, I really can't go back to earlier edits (before the final warning) and count those against the editor. I will watch to see if there is more vandalism today and will happily report them if it continues. Wikipelli Talk 16:06, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
Hey all :)
A couple of new things.
First, you'll note that all the project titles have now changed to the Page Curation prefix, rather than having the New Pages Feed prefix. This is because the overarching project name has changed to Page Curation; the feed is still known as New Pages Feed, and the Curation Toolbar is still the Curation Toolbar. Hopefully this will be the last namechange ;p.
On the subject of the Curation Toolbar (nice segue, Oliver!) - it's now deployed on Wikipedia. Just open up any article in the New Pages Feed and it should appear on the right. It's still a beta version - bugs are expected - and we've got a lot more work to do. But if you see something going wrong, or a feature missing, drop me a note or post on the project talkpage and I'll be happy to help :). We'll be holding two office hours sessions to discuss the tool and improvements to it; the first is at 19:00 UTC on 14 August, and the second at 23:00 on the 15th. Both will be in #wikimedia-office as always. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 15:58, 10 August 2012 (UTC)
Hello. I hope this finds you well. You helped remove some vandalism on the Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma) page about a year ago, and we had a brief exchange after that. You mentioned coming to you if I needed help. My understanding of Wiki is limited, at best. I mainly try to make sure that Amma's page remain clean and tidy and adhere's to basic BLP guidelines. Unfortunately some people are trying to post various topics in the Controversy section that seem inappropriate to me. I have removed two that I feel are inappropriate, but expect they will be back soon. Amma's organization is an internationally respected, UN-member charitable organization. One wiki person is trying to put as a controversy something about a request for financial inquiry. Apparently this appeared as an editorial in a magazine by a writer. It seems to me that this is A) not a valid reference source and B) inappropriate because it would be a crime, no one has ever legally charged Amma or her ahsram with this. The other one I just deleted is due to a recent incident, wherein someone attacked Amma and was arrested. The person then died in prison due to beating. I also dont see how this has any connection with Amma. If you could help watch the page, and perhaps remove anything from the controvery section that seems in appropriate to you, I would appreciate it.
LanceMurdock999 10:39, 8 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by LanceMurdock999 (talk • contribs)
In fact, within two minutes, a bunch of IP-only people have put these back in. They really are just trying to attack Amma by posting this stuff. While it is true a person attacked Amma, the beating of that person in prison should not be relevant on Amma's page. Please help me deal with this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by LanceMurdock999 (talk • contribs) 11:19, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
- I looked at the page and tried to sort out the edits over the morning. It appears to me that one editor (IP) has been blocked for including copyrighted material and the edits are undone. What remains is fairly poorly written but good faith addition and referenced (though I can't seem to get to http://www.hindu.com and one is self-published). I'll put it on my watchlist. I would encourage the other editors to use the article's talk page to discuss rather than edit-war. Good luck! Wikipelli Talk 18:13, 8 August 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for your help. I agree discussions are better, but most of these are made by people with an axe to grind who come on via IP. My doubt is this: Other than the strike, do any of these "controversies" belong on a BLP according to Wiki guidelines? For example, the death of the attacker in prison has no connection with Amma or her organization. It is an issue of controversy for the Kerala Police and Kerala State Mental Hospital. It has been put on Amma's page to vaguely imply that somehow Amma's organization was behind the death in prison. Even the book against Amma is basically a self-published book that accuses Amma/MAM with a bunch of unfounded felonies. In 30 years no one has ever taken these accusations seriously and no one has ever placed charges against Amma/MAM for these. IN BLP guidelines it says: "A person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty and convicted by a court of law. For people who are relatively unknown, editors must give serious consideration to not including material in any article suggesting that the person has committed, or is accused of committing, a crime unless a conviction is secured.[5] If different judicial proceedings result in seemingly contradictory judgments that do not override each other,[6] refrain from using pithy descriptors or absolutes and instead use more explanatory information." Does that apply here? Again, thanks for all your help and suggestions, and I definitely appreciate your willingness to monitor the page.
LanceMurdock999 01:22, 9 August 2012 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by LanceMurdock999 (talk • contribs)
Have you been able to monitor the page? I made what I believe to be some constructive changes, and also left a full explanation of why I believe all of the "controversies" should be removed from the section. Then someone--perhaps overzelous--deleted the entire section. It was immediately put back, including very ridiculous accusations of money fraud cited from an editorial in a small press anti-religious magazine. Were you able to look at my comments in the Talk Section on Amritanandamayi's page? Can you please offer some more guidance? I dont want to get into just a deletion war.
LanceMurdock999 05:57, 14 August 2012 (UTC)
In a certain way, writing Wikipedia is the same everywhere, in every language or culture. You have to stick to the facts, aiming for the most objective way of describing them, including everything relevant and leaving out all the everyday trivia that is not really necessary to understand the context. You have to use critical thinking, trying to be independent of your own preferences and biases. To some effect, that's all there is to it. Naturally, Wikipedians have their biases, some of which can never be cured. Most Wikipedians tend to like encyclopedias; but millions of people in the world don't share that bias, and we represent them rather poorly. I'm also quite sure that an overwhelming majority of Wikipedia co-authors are literate. Again, that's not true for everyone in this world. Yet we have other, less noticeable but barely less fundamental biases.
The Bangla language, also known as Bengali, is spoken by some 200 million people in Bangladesh and India. The Bangla Wikipedia has a very small active community of about ten to fifteen very active editors, with another 35–40 as less active editors. The project faces particular challenges in being a small Wikipedia, and Dhaka-based WMF community fellow User:Tanvir Rahman is working to understand these challenges and to develop strategies that can improve small wikis that have strong potential to expand their editing communities.
A request for arbitration was filed late last week, ending the three-week long absence of pending cases.
Six featured articles were promoted this week, including Business US Highway 41, which was a state trunkline highway that served as a business loop in Marquette in the US state of Michigan.
Three weeks into a month-long evaluation of code review tool Gerrit, a serious alternative has finally gained traction in the review process: Facebook-developed but now independently operated Phabricator and its sister command-line tool Arcanist.
This week, we interviewed the lively bunch at WikiProject Dispute Resolution. Started in November 2011 to study and discuss improvements to Wikipedia's resources for resolving disputes between editors, the young project has supplemented dispute resolution efforts currently handled at the Dispute Resolution Noticeboard, Mediation Committee, and other venues. Over 40 editors have signed up to provide feedback, a variety of ideas have been proposed, and a manual for dispute resolution has been created.
Current proposals and requests for comments include a competition to redesign the main page ...
The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes proposes new features that receive substantive criticism from Wikimedians, yet those criticisms may be dismissed on the basis that people are resistant to change—there's an unjustified view that the wikis have been overrun by vested contributors who hate all change. That view misses a lot of key details and insight because there are good reasons that Wikimedians are suspicious of features development, given past and present development of bad software, growing ties with the problematic Wikia, and a growing belief that it is acceptable to experiment on users.
The Core Contest is a month-long competition among editors to improve Wikipedia's most important "core" articles—especially those that are in a relatively poor state. Core articles, such as Music, Computer, and Philosophy, tend to lie in the trunk of the tree of knowledge; by analogy, featured-and good-article processes generally attract more specialist topics out on the branches.
In the Utah Court of Appeals this week, the majority opinion in Fire Insurance Exchange v. Robert Allen Oltmanns and Brady Blackner relied on Wikipedia for the basic premise of their legal opinion, and included a concurring opinion devoted solely to the issue of citing Wikipedia in a legal opinion.
Thirteen featured articles were promoted this week, including pelicans, which are a genus of large water birds comprising the family Pelecanidae, characterised by a long beak and large throat-pouch. They have a fossil record dating back at least 30 million years and are most closely related to the Shoebill and Hammerkop. These fish-feeders have a patchy relationship with humans: the birds are sometimes persecuted and sometimes feature in mythology.
New embeddable scripting ("template replacement") language Lua received considerable scrutiny this week when it began its long road to widespread deployment, landing on the test2wiki test site on Wednesday (wikitech-l mailing list). ... the fourth in our series profiling participants in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) programme.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Korea. Started in September 2006, WikiProject Korea covers the history and culture of the Korean people, including both countries that currently occupy the Korean peninsula. This task has proven difficult with North Koreans notably absent from the Wikipedia community due to tight control over access to external media. The project is home to over 16,000 pages, including 15 pieces of Featured material and 66 Good and A-class Articles.
Regarding neutrality and controversies around the Windows refund article (and my last edit) I opened discussion on the corresponding talk page. -- Bahaltener (talk) 20:20, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
Wikimedia editors have been debating a community proposal for the adoption of a new project to host free travel-guide content. The debate reached a new stage when a three-month request for comment on Meta came to an end, with a decision to set up the first new type of Wikimedia project in half a decade. The original proposal for the travel guide unfolded during April on Meta and the Wikimedia-l mailing lists, centring around the wish of volunteer contributors to the WikiTravel project to work in a non-commercial environment.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, edited jointly with the Wikimedia Research Committee and republished as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
Developers were left one step closer to an understanding of the code review outlook this week after the creation of a graph plotting "number changesets awaiting review" over time. The chart, which also shows the number of new changesets created on a daily basis, reveals a peak in the number of unreviewed changesets in mid-July, followed by a short drop. The current figure stands at approximately 219 unreviewed changesets.
This week the Signpost interviews Mark Arsten, who has written or contributed significantly to ten featured articles; most have related to new religious movements, and some have touched on other controversial or quirky topics. Mark gives us a rundown on how he keeps neutral and what drives him to write featured content; he also gives some hints for aspiring writers.
This week, we hopped in a little blue box with a batch of companions from WikiProject Doctor Who. Started in April 2005, the project has grown to include about 4,000 pages about the world's longest-running science fiction television show, its spinoffs, and various related material. The project is the parent of the Torchwood Taskforce and a child of WikiProject British TV and WikiProject Science Fiction. With new Doctor Who episodes airing this week and a 50th anniversary celebration around the corner, we thought now would be a good time to inquire about the famed Time Lord.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia.
Hi,
Thank you for your input and feedback. I would like to point out that that my username is in no way promotional as I have never made a change to the actual wiki page for Mount Auburn Cemetery- it purely reflects who I work for. Any other representation of who I am and where I am getting my information from, would in my mind, not be forthcoming. In regards to the username itself, I do not make changes to Wikipedia articles in my personal time and therefor will not make this a "personal" account, nor will I disclose who I am as that provides more information to the public than I am willing to share. I work in the Visitor Services department at the Cemetery, and while this account is not shared by others, it would be professionally inappropriate for me to link this account to one that appears to be "personal" as I am not adding citation on my "personal" time. The purpose of adding the information that I have, was purely to add more data to Wiki articles that lacked or contained inappropriate data that our archives have the ability to provide. If you find this to offend Wikipedia's policies, then so be it. Remove any changes that have been made under this account.
Thank you again for your concern,
Mount Auburn Cemetery 02:46, 1 September 2012 (UTC)Mount Auburn Cemetery — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mount Auburn Cemetery (talk • contribs) 02:43, 1 September 2012 (UTC)
Some of Wikimedia's most valuable photographs have been shot and uploaded under free licenses as a direct result of the annual Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) event each September. Last year, the project was conducted on a European level, resulting in the submission of an extraordinary 168,208 free images of cultural heritage sites ("monuments") from 18 countries, making it the world's largest photographic competition. Organising the 2012 event—which has just opened and will run for the full month of September—has required input from chapters and volunteers in 35 countries.
Developers are currently discussing the possibility of a MediaWiki Foundation to oversee those aspects of MediaWiki development that relate to non-Wikimedia wikis. The proposal was generated after a discussion on the wikitech-l mailing list about generalising Wikimedia's CentralAuth system.
Five featured pictures were promoted this week, including a video explaining the recent landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. NASA called the final minutes of the complicated landing procedure "the seven minutes of terror".
Since May 2012 I've been a Wikimedia Foundation community fellow with the task of researching and improving dispute resolution on English Wikipedia. Surveying members of the community has revealed much about their thoughts on and experiences with dispute resolution. I've analysed processes to determine their use and effectiveness, and have presented ideas that I hope will improve the future of dispute resolution.
Thanks to the initiative of Yuvi Panda and Notnarayan, the Signpost now has an Android app, free for download on Google Play. ... but would readers be interested in an iOS app for Apple devices?
Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated.
Philip Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, wrote an open letter in the New Yorker addressed to Wikipedia this week, alleging severe inaccuracies in the article on his The Human Stain (2000).
Three hip hop discographies were promoted this week, alongside seven other lists.
After a week's hiatus, the WikiProject Report returns with an interview featuring WikiProject Fungi. Started in March 2006, the project has grown to include over 9,000 pages, including 47 Featured Articles and 176 Good Articles. The project maintains a list of high priority missing articles and stubs that need expansion.
In dramatic events that came to light last week, two English Wikipedia volunteers—Doc James (James Heilman) and Wrh2 (Ryan Holliday)—are being sued in the Los Angeles County Superior Court by Internet Brands, the owner of Wikitravel.com. Both Wikipedians have also been volunteer Wikitravel editors (and in Holliday's case, a volunteer administrator). IB's complaints focus on both editors' encouragement of their fellow Wikitravel volunteers to migrate to a proposed non-commercial travel guidance site that would be under the umbrella of the WMF.
In its September issue, the peer-reviewed journal First Monday published The readability of Wikipedia, reporting research which shows that the English Wikipedia is struggling to meet Flesch reading ease test criteria, while the Simple English Wikipedia has "lost its focus".
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for August 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment).
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia.
There were survivors. Zero is an unfair and incorrect designation. How many people didn't show up for work that day? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.185.168.69 (talk) 16:42, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
- You're editing articles about airline flights from which there were no survivors. The events on the ground are a separate topic. Acroterion (talk) 16:46, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
- From a purely editing standpoint, I didn't understand how "did not hit the intended target" was appropriate in the field for survivors. Yes, the people at the intended target survived, but so did all the people that lived when the plane didn't crash earlier. I think the point of that field (survivors) is to indicate the number of passengers who survived the crash. Wikipelli Talk 17:02, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
The reason why I edited Matthew O'Connor's page was because it was completely fictious with no links to subject. I will try and find links about the Soccer player.
Thanks
Ray30 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ray30 (talk • contribs) 13:46, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
- No problem finding and adding links but please don't delete the article while you're working. :) Thanks! Wikipelli Talk 13:55, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
Fixed! Mephistophelian (talk) 14:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC).
- Thanks! I didn't like the blanking but the more I looked into the history, the more I could see that it had been terribly messed up. Go to it, Ray30! :) Wikipelli Talk 14:16, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
We now have a Facebook page at facebook.com/wikisignpost. We invite you to "like" the page and join the discussion there.
This week, we shine the spotlight on the Indian Cinema Task Force, a subproject that seeks to improve the quality and quantity of articles about Indian cinema. As a child of WikiProject Film and WikiProject India, the Indian Cinema Task Force shares a variety of templates, resources, and members with its parent projects. The task force works on a to-do list, maintains the Bollywood Portal, and ensures articles follow the film style guidelines. With Indian cinema celebrating its 100th year of existence in 2013, we asked Karthik Nadar (Karthikndr), Secret of success, Ankit Bhatt, Dwaipayan, and AnimeshKulkarni what is in store for the Indian Cinema Task Force.
Eight featured articles, six featured lists, ten featured pictures, and one featured topic were promoted this week.
The world's largest photo competition, Wiki Loves Monuments, is entering its final two weeks. The month-long event, of Dutch origin, is being held globally for the first time after the success of its European-level predecessor last year. During September 2011 more than 5000 volunteers from 18 countries took part and uploaded 168,208 free images. This year, volunteers and chapters from 35 countries around the world have organised the event. The best photographs will be determined by juries at the national and finally the global level.
1.20wmf12, the 12th release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch, was deployed to its first wikis on September 17; if things go well, it will be deployed to all wikis by September 26. Its 200 or so changes – 111 to WMF-deployed extensions plus 98 to core MediaWiki code – include support for links with mixed-case protocols (e.g.
Http://example.com) and the removal of the "No higher resolution available" message on the file description pages of SVG images.
DIRECTED TO: Wikipelli
Re Rego School Shanghai
Whilst I was editing the article last night, I received a message that someone else was editing it at the same time.
What I wrote was changed/deleted.
There is a person previously employed by the school who is maliciously circulating rumours and potentially libelous information in the article.
You also made a comment about advertising or reference to web sites: I did not include any websites in my changes.
I am employed by Rego as their Marketing Manager and authorised by the owners to reflect the current situation.
I would like to replace the article so that the information is correct.
Please advise.
Thanks for your help and often thankless work.
Kind regards,
Norm — Preceding unsigned comment added by Aussie Rover (talk • contribs) 06:38, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
- Hi Norm... I looked again at the article and found a couple of things. First, I reverted your changes because they appeared to be page blanking/content removal. I understand that you are in the process of rewriting/updating but it's probably a better idea just to edit rather than remove everything and start over. You can also work on the article in your 'sandbox', which, while public, is not part of the encyclopedia and no-one else should edit there. Then, the new article can be copy/pasted over the old. NOTE: I strongly urge you to use the article's Talk page to let other editors know of your activities and purposes. As I'm sure you're aware, there is no 'ownership' of Wikipedia articles and everyone may edit.
- I couldn't find any advertising links that you added to the article but I will say that there were some words included that are opinion rather than fact (for example: The facilities provided by the school are excellent ). Words such as 'excellent' are opinion and shouldn't be included.
- As for the additions concerning the controversies, unfortunately, even though you might not want mention of controversies mentioned, they are arguably appropriate for the article about the school. The information about visas, etc. does have references to support the information and, thus, should stay. This, too, is something that can be discussed on the article's talk page. I notice that the information cited is from several months ago (January 2012). If there is more recent information that the controversies have been dealt with, that should be included as well - with proper references!
- Finally, you mention that you are the marketing manager for the school. This indicates that you have a conflict of interest when editing the article. This doesn't mean that you are prevented from editing the article, but you must understand that it is very difficult to edit/write with a neutral point of view (and that's how words like excellent show up in the copy!). Again, you can edit but I suggest you make known your position with the school on the article's talk page.
- I hope this is helpful. If I can help any further, please let me know! Wikipelli Talk 14:13, 19 September 2012 (UTC)
Hey Wikipelli. This will be, if not our final newsletter, one of the final ones :). After months of churning away at this project, our final version (apart from a few tweaks and bugfixes) is now live. Changes between this and the last release include deletion tag logging, a centralised log, and fixes to things like edit summaries.
Hopefully you like what we've done with the place; suggestions for future work on it, complaints and bugs to the usual address :). We'll be holding a couple of office hours sessions, which I hope you'll all attend. Many thanks, Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 10:59, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
Oliver Keyes' (User:Ironholds) defense of Wikipedia against the recent Philip Roth controversy has drawn a significant amount of attention over the last week. The problems between Roth, a widely known and acclaimed American author, and Wikipedia arose from an open letter he penned for the American magazine New Yorker, and were covered by the Signpost two weeks ago. Keyes—who wrote the piece as a prominent Wikipedian but is also a contractor for the Wikimedia Foundation—wrote a blog post on the topic, lamenting the factual errors in Roth's letter and criticizing the media for not investigating his claims: "[they took] Roth’s explanation as the truth and launched into a lengthy discussion of how we [Wikipedia] handle primary sourcing."
A paper to appear in a special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (summarized in the research index) sheds new light on the English Wikipedia's declining editor growth and retention trends. The paper describes how "several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have lead to a more restrictive environment for newcomers". The number of active Wikipedia editors has been declining since 2007 and research examining data up to September 2009 has shown that the root of the problem has been the declining retention of new editors. The authors show this decline is mainly due to a decline among desirable, good-faith newcomers, and point to three factors contributing to the increasingly "restrictive environment" they face.
This week, we tinkered with WikiProject Robotics. From the project's inception in December 2007, it has served as Wikipedia's hub for building and improving articles about robots and robotics, accumulating two Featured Articles and seven Good Articles along the way. The project covers both fictitious and real-life robots, the technology that powers them, and many of the brains behind the robotics field
In the second controversy to engulf Wikimedia UK in two months, its immediate past chair Roger Bamkin has resigned from the board of the chapter. The resignation last Wednesday followed a growing furore over the conflict of interest between two of Roger's roles outside the chapter and his close involvement in the UK board's decision-making process, including the access to private mailing lists that board members in all chapters need. But the irony surrounding Roger's resignation is its connection with efforts by Wikimedians and collaborators to strengthen the reach of Wikimedia projects through technical innovation.
Late last month, the "Technology report" included a story using code review backlog figures – the only code review figures then available – to construct a rough narrative about the average experience of code contributors. This week, we hope to go one better, by looking directly at code review wait times, and, in particular, median code review times
Fourteen featured articles were promoted this week, including Dodo, along with six featured lists and five featured pictures.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
Sorry - my friend started typing some rude stuff. Sorry :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by TheDataMonster (talk • contribs) 17:50, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
Does Wikipedia Pay? is a Signpost series seeking to illuminate paid editing, paid advocacy, for-profit Wikipedia consultants, editing public relations professionals, conflict of interest guidelines in practice, and the Wikipedians who work on these issues by speaking openly with the people involved. This week, a scandal centering around Roger Bamkin's work with Wikimedia UK and Gibraltarpedia erupted ... In light of these events, opinions on how to avoid future controversy are as important as ever. ... The Signpost spoke with Jimmy Wales to better understand how he views the paid editing environment and what he thinks is needed to improve it.
Following considerable online and media reportage on the Gibraltar controversy and a Signpost report last week, the Wikimedia UK chapter and the foundation published a joint statement on September 28: "To better understand the facts and details of these allegations and to ensure that governance arrangements commensurate with the standing of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK and the worldwide Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia UK's trustees and the Wikimedia Foundation will jointly appoint an independent expert advisor to objectively review both Wikimedia UK's governance arrangements and its handling of the conflict of interest."
Five articles, three lists, and nine images were promoted to "featured" this week.
The Toolserver is an external service hosting the hundreds of webpages and scripts (collectively known as "tools") that assist Wikimedia communities in dozens of mostly menial tasks. Few people think that it has been operating well recently; the problems, which include high database replication lag and periods of total downtime, have caused considerable disruption to the Toolserver's usual functions. Those functions are highly valued by many Wikimedia communities ... In 2011, the Foundation announced the creation of Wikimedia Labs, a much better funded project that among other things aimed to mimic the Toolserver's functionality by mid-2013. At the same time, Erik Möller, the WMF's director of engineering, announced that the Foundation would no longer be supporting the Toolserver financially, but would continue to provide the same in-kind support as it had done previously.
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film series, we spent some time bonding with WikiProject James Bond. The project is in the unique position of having already pushed all of its primary content to Good and Featured status, including all of Ian Fleming's novels, short stories, and every film that has been released. Work has begun in earnest on the article Skyfall for the release of the new Bond film later this month. The project could still use help improving articles about Bond actors, characters, gadgets, music, video games, and related topics
Wikipedia in education is far from a new idea: years of news stories, op-eds, and editorials have focused on the topic; and on Wikipedia itself, the Schools and universities projects page has existed in various forms since 2003. Over the next six years, the page was rarely developed, and when it did advance there was no clear goal in mind.
On this day five years ago, the WikiProject Report debuted as a new Signpost column with an overview of WikiProject Biography. Today, we're celebrating two milestone: five years of the WikiProject Report and the tenth birthday of our first featured project. WikiProject Biography is by far the largest WikiProject on Wikipedia, with over one million articles under the project's scope. As a comparison, WikiProject Biography is three times larger than Wikipedia's second largest project, and if WikiProject Biography were split into its 14 subprojects and work groups, it would still make the list of the 20 largest WikiProjects... four times.
This week the Signpost interviews Arsenikk, an editor of six years who has brought sixteen lists through our featured list process, mostly regarding transportation in Norway but also about the 1952 Winter Olympics and World Heritage Sites in Africa. Arsenikk tells us about why he joined the project, what moves him, and how editors can join the sometimes daunting world of featured lists.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for September 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project, phase 1 of which is edging its way towards its first deployment). Three of the seven headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: problems with the corruption of several Gerrit (code) repositories, the introduction of widespread translation memory across Wikimedia wikis, and the launch of the "Page Curation" tool on the English Wikipedia, with development work on that project now winding down. The report also drew attention to the end of Google Summer of Code 2012, the deployment to the English Wikipedia of a new ePUB (electronic book) export feature, and improvements to the WLM app aimed at more serious photographers.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include ...
There is wide agreement among English Wikipedians that the administrator system is in some ways broken—but no consensus on how to fix it. Most suggestions have been relatively small in scope, and could at best produce small improvements. I would like to make a proposal to fundamentally restructure the administrator system, in a way that I believe would make it more effective and responsive. The proposal is to create an elected Administration Committee ("AdminCom") which would select, oversee, and deselect administrators.
This week saw a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal on editorial debates in Wikipedia. The story focused on the title-naming dispute surrounding the Beatles article, and specifically the RfC on whether the 'the' in the band's name should be capitalized or not.
On the English Wikipedia, five featured articles, ten featured lists, and four featured pictures were promoted, including USS Lexington, a ship built for the United States Navy that, although ordered in 1916 as a battlecruiser, was converted to an aircraft carrier. It was sunk in the Battle of the Coral Sea during the Second World War.
The volunteer-led Wikimedia Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) and interested community members are looking at Wikimedia organization applications worth about US$10.4 million out of the committee's first full year's operation, in just the inaugural round one of two that have been planned for the year with a planned budget of US$11.4M.
A trial of the first phase of Wikimedia Deutschland's "Wikidata" project–implementing the first ever interwiki repository—may soon get underway following the successful passage of much of its code through MediaWiki's review processes this week.
This week, we experimented with WikiProject Chemicals. Started in August 2004, WikiProject Chemicals has grown to include over 10,000 articles about chemical compounds. The project has a unique assessment system that omits C-class, Good, and Featured Articles. As a result, the project's 11 GAs and 9 FAs are treated as A-class articles. WikiProject Chemicals is a child of WikiProject Chemistry (interviewed in 2009) and a parent of WikiProject Polymers.
Hey all :).
We're (very shortly) closing down this development cycle for Page Curation. It's genuinely been a pleasure to talk with you all and build software that is so close to my own heart, and also so effective. The current backlog is 9 days, and I've never seen it that low before.
However! Closing up shop does not mean not making any improvements. First-off, this is your last chance to give us a poke about unresolved bugs or report new ones on the talkpage. If something's going wrong, we want to know about it :). Second, we'll hopefully be taking another pass over the software next year. If you've got ideas for features Page Curation doesn't currently have, stick them here.
Again, it's been an honour. Thanks :). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 12:05, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
Hi,
Here is the link for Hunted.
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/news/a432502/melissa-george-talks-hunted-series-two-plans-its-set-in-berlin.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.120.30.51 (talk) 16:55, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
- Terrific.... I can't say for sure that the source is reliable, but feel free to use that to reference the information you wish to add to the article. :) If you need any help, feel free to let me know. Wikipelli Talk 16:57, 22 October 2012 (UTC)
Unlike the long-running disputes that have characterised attempts to reform the RfA process on the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia's tradition of making decisions not by consensus but knife-edged 50% + 1 votes has led to a fundamentally different outcome. In 2009, the project managed to largely settle the RfA mode issue in 2009 indirectly.
One clarification request concerns the civility enforcement case – specifically, Malleus Fatuorum's perceived circumvention of his topic ban. It has resulted in thousands of bytes spent in vitriolic discussions, multiple blocks, and "no confidence" motions against the Arbitration Committee and one arbitrator, among other ramifications.
Planning for Wikivoyage's migration into the WMF fold built up steam this week following a statement by WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller about what the technical side of the migration will involve. Wikivoyage, which split from sister site Wikitravel in 2006, is hoping to migrate its own not-inconsiderable user base to Wikimedia, as well as much of its content, presenting novel challenges for Wikimedia developers
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
It is well known that women are underrepresented in the sciences, and that high-achieving female scientists have often been excluded from authorship lists and passed over for awards and honours solely on the basis of gender. Also significant has been the underplaying in the academic literature, news reporting, and online, of women's current and historical contributions to science.
The WikiProject Report normally brings tidings from Wikipedia's most active, inventive, and unique WikiProjects. This week, we're trying something new by focusing on Wikipedia's dark side: the various regional and national WikiProjects that are dead or dying. How can some tiny municipalities and exclaves generate highly active, cross-language, multimedia platforms be successful while the projects representing many sovereign countries and entire continents wallow in obscurity? Today, we'll search for answers among geographic projects large and small, highly active and barely functioning, enthusiastic about the future and mired in past conflicts.
Eleven articles, including one on Franz Kafka, three lists, one image, and one portal were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
The first round of the Wikimedia Foundation's new financial arrangements has proceeded as planned, with the publication of scores and feedback by Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) staff on applications for funding by 11 entities—10 chapters, independent membership organisations supporting the WMF's mission in different countries, and the foundation itself. The results are preliminary assessments that will soon be put to the FDC's seven voting members and two non-voting board representatives. The FDC in turn will send its recommendations to the board of trustees on 15 November, which will announce its decision by 15 December. Funding applications have been on-wiki since 1 October, and the talk pages of applications were open for community comment and discussion from 2 to 22 October, though apart from queries by FDC staff, there was little activity.
This week, we're checking out ways to motivate editors and recognize valuable contributions by focusing on the awards and rewards of WikiProject Military History. Anyone unfamiliar with WikiProject Military History is encouraged to start at the report's first article about the project and make your way forward. While many WikiProjects provide a barnstar that can be awarded to helpful contributors, WikiProject Military History has gone a step further by creating a variety of awards with different criteria ranging from the all-purpose WikiChevrons to rewards for participating in drives and improving special topics to medals for improving articles up to A-class status to the coveted "Military Historian of the Year" award.
The TimedMediaHandler extension (TMH), which brings dramatic improvements to MediaWiki's video handling capabilities, will go live to the English Wikipedia this week following a long and turbulent development, WMF Director of Platform Engineering Rob Lanphier announced on Monday ... Wikidata.org, a new repository designed to host interwiki links, launched this week and will begin accepting links shortly. The site, which is one half of the forthcoming Wikidata trial (the other half being the Wikidata client, which will be deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia shortly) will also act as a testing area for phase 2 of Wikidata (centralised data storage). The longer term plan is for Wikidata.org to become a "Wikimedia Commons for data" as phases 2 and 3 (dynamic lists) are developed, project managers say.
Thirteen articles, ten lists, nine images, one topic, and one portal were promoted to featured after peer reviews.
A paper in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, coming from the social control perspective and employing the repertory grid technique, has contributed interesting observations about the governance of Wikipedia.
J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.
The results of most of the national heats for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) have been published on Commons. A maximum of 10 images have been submitted by all but eight of the 34 participating countries, and the international jury for what is the largest competition of its type in the world is set to announce the global winner in four weeks' time.
Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and has caused millions of dollars in damage. Naturally, Wikipedia covered it. But was Wikipedia's coverage unbiased?
The Signpost's weekly roundup of topics for discussion on the English Wikipedia.
This week, the Signpost interviewed two editors. The first, PumpkinSky, collaborated with Gerda Arendt in writing the recently featured article on Franz Kafka and won second prize in the Core contest last August. The second, Cwmhiraeth, collaborated with Thompsma in promoting the article Frog, which was featured last week. We asked them about the special challenges faced while writing Core content and things to watch out for.
The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for October 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. TimedMediaHandler also went live.
This week, The Signpost sings along with WikiProject Songs which focuses on articles about songs of every generation and genre. The project initially began as a rough outline in October 2002 and was reimagined in March 2004 using its parent WikiProject Albums as a template.
This is just a tribute.
Anyway. You're getting this note because you've participated in discussion and/or asked for updates to either the Article Feedback Tool or Page Curation. This isn't about either of those things, I'm afraid ;p. We've recently started working on yet another project: Echo, a notifications system to augment the watchlist. There's not much information at the moment, because we're still working out the scope and the concepts, but if you're interested in further updates you can sign up here.
In addition, we'll be holding an office hours session at 21:00 UTC on Wednesday, 14 November in #wikimedia-office - hope to see you all there :). I appreciate it's an annoying time for non-Europeans: if you're interested in chatting about the project but can't make it, give me a shout and I can set up another session if there's enough interest in one particular timezone or a skype call if there isn't. Thanks! Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
Thirteen articles, six lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status last week.
In late September, the Technology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), the Signpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.
The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include the question of ticker symbol placement and the notability of various types of creative performer.
On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
Six articles, one list, and six images were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.
The global jury of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the world’s largest photo contest, announced its results on 3 December.
Three articles, two lists, and four images were promoted to 'featured' status this week.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
Deployments of MediaWiki 1.21wmf5 cause widespread problems for users across wikis when HTML and CSS updates came temporarily out of sync. On the first wikis targeted for deployment, this was caused by the different cache invalidation rates for HTML (typically one month) and CSS (typically five minutes). The retrospective on the problem highlighted the fact that that the test wiki – the WMF's answer to a production environment that individual developers can no longer practically emulate themselves – actually demonstrated the exact problem that would later manifest itself on production wikis. It went unnoticed.
This week, we went searching for white roses in the lands of WikiProject Yorkshire. The project began in May 2007 as a way to improve articles about the historic English county of Yorkshire and its modern-day administrative divisions and cities. Since then, the project has accumulated 31 Featured Articles, 14 Featured Lists, 91 Good Articles, and a monstrous list of Did You Know entries. Despite all of the effort improving Yorkshire articles, the project has experienced waning participation in the last few years. The project still publishes a newsletter each month, monitors the popularity of and recent changes to its articles, maintains a portal, and collects resources for contributors to use.
Hello, I have recently been reading my Talk Page, and saw my messages that I have changed many pages. I don´t recall going on those pages in the past. I have no account, but I use the ip. If you could tell me what I changed that would be great. Its a school computer and its used by 5 people including me. Send a message on my talk page with the things that I changed on that page.
Thanks!
-Guest — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.219.49.158 (talk) 19:38, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
- If you read through the warnings on the page, you will see that each one contains a link to an edit that has been reverted. In a school it often happens that you will see messages on the talk page about things that another editor has done on the same IP address. I encourage you to create an account and thn you won't have to worry about it.Wikipelli Talk 19:41, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Dear Wikipelli you deleted some information from Amir Abbas Fakhravar wikipedia page information which was a mistake. These information was accurate and has many facts and was deleted as vandalism attack before. Can you help me to protect that page? Siavash777 (talk) 16:52, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
- I'm sorry I deleted the information that you added. I was actually reverting the changes on the basis of a misspelling in one of the section headings that appeared to me to be vandalism. I see that you have restored the changes that you made and I have corrected the misspelling. It doesn't appear to me as though the level of changes warrants page protection, but I'll keep an eye on it. Cheers! Wikipelli Talk 17:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I was looking at your user page and thought you'd be a good candidate for the Wikipedia:Ambassadors program. You might want to check it out if you don't know it already. -- kosboot (talk) 22:08, 4 December 2012 (UTC)
- I've always thought about it. I'll check it out, thanks! Wikipelli Talk 13:59, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
At the time of writing, this year's election has just closed after a two-week voting period. The eight seats were contested by 21 candidates. Of these, 15 have not been arbitrators (Beeblebrox, Count Iblis, Guerillero, Jc37, Keilana, Ks0stm, Kww, NuclearWarfare, Pgallert, RegentsPark, Richwales, Salvio giuliano, Timotheus Canens, Worm That Turned, and YOLO Swag); four candidates are sitting arbitrators (David Fuchs, Elen of the Roads, Jclemens, and Newyorkbrad); and two have previously served on the committee (Carcharoth and Coren). Four Wikimedia stewards from outside the English Wikipedia stepped forward as election scrutineers: Pundit, from the Polish Wikipedia; Teles, from the Portuguese Wikipedia; Quentinv57, from the French Wikipedia; and Mardetanha, from the Persian Wikipedia. The scrutineers' task is to ensure that the election is free of multiple votes from the same person, to tally the results, and to announce them. The full results are expected to be released within the next few days and will be reported in next week's edition of the Signpost.
Eight articles, four images, six lists, and one topic were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
The Visual Editor project – an attempt to create the first WMF-deployable WYSIWYG editor – will go live on its first Wikipedias imminently following nearly six months of testing on MediaWiki.org. A full explanatory blog post accompanied the news, explaining the project and its setup. Once a user has opted-in, the editor can handle basic formatting, headings and lists, while safely ignoring elements it is yet to understand, including references, categories, templates, tables and images. At the last count, approximately 2% of pages would break in some way if a user tried the Visual Editor on them; it is unclear whether any specific protection will be put in place beyond relying on editors to spot problems.
In celebration of Human Rights Day, we checked out WikiProject Human Rights. Started in February 2006, the project has grown to include over 3,000 articles, including 12 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, 66 Good Articles, a large collection of Did You Know entries, and a few mentions "in the news". The project monitors listings of popular pages and cleanup tags. We interviewed Khazar2, Cirt, and Boud.
Seven days after the close of voting, the results of the recent Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced by two of the four stewards overseeing the election, Mardetanha and Pundit. Of the 21 candidates, 13 managed to gain positive support-to-oppose ratios, and the top eight will be appointed to two-year terms on the committee by Jimbo Wales, exercising one of his traditional responsibilities.
In the past year, we've tried to expand our horizons by looking at how WikiProjects work in other languages of Wikipedia. Following in the footsteps of our previously interviewed Czech and French projects, we visited the German Wikipedia to explore WikiProjekt Computerspiel (WikiProject Computer Games). The project dates back to November 2004 and has become the back-end of the Computer Games Portal, which covers all video games regardless of platform. Editors writing about computer games at the German Wikipedia deal with unique cultural and legal challenges, ranging from a lack of fair use precedents to the limited availability of games deemed harmful for youths to strong standards for the inclusion of material on the German Wikipedia.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include ...
This week's big story on the English Wikipedia is obviously the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (which, by the time you read this, may be renamed 2012 Connecticut school shooting). Quickly created and nominated for deletion not once but twice, and both times speedily kept, the article saw the expected flurry of edits (a look at the history suggests an average of at least one a minute over the first day and a half) and more than half a million page views on the first full day.
Four articles, three lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week, including a picture of a three-week old donkey (also known as an 'ass').
MediaWiki users (including Wikimedians) can now organise themselves into groups, receiving recognition and support-in-kind from the Wikimedia Foundation. The project, backed by new Wikimedia technical contributor coordinator Quim Gil, has seen five proposals lodged in its first week of operation. The idea of MediaWiki groups mimics that of Wikimedia User Groups.
As part of its new focus on core responsibilities, the Wikimedia Foundation is reforming its grant schemes so that they are more accessible to individual volunteers. The community is invited to look at proposals for a new scheme—for now called Individual engagement grants (IEGs)—which is due to kick off on January 15. On Meta, the community is once again debating the two new offline participation models—user groups (open membership groups designed to be easy to form) and thematic organizations (incorporated non-profits representing the Wikimedia movement and supporting work on a specific theme within or across countries). In a consultation process on Meta that will last until January 15, the community will be discussing WMF proposals for a new guideline on conflicts of interests concerning Wikimedia resources. The draft covers COI issues for both volunteers and organizations across the movement.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject A Song of Ice and Fire, which focuses on the eponymous series of high fantasy literature, the television series Game of Thrones, and related works by George R. R. Martin. The project was started in July 2006 and has grown to include 11 Good Articles maintained by a small yet enthusiastic band of editors.
Seven articles and two lists were promoted to 'featured' status this week, including List of battlecruisers. The article covers all of the battlecruisers—which were a type of warship similar in size to a battleship but with several defining characteristics—ever planned or constructed. The last British battlecruiser built, HMS Hood, is pictured at right.
Efforts were stepped up this week to sow a feeling of trust between the major parties with an interest in the future of the Toolserver. The tool- and bot-hosting server – more accurately servers – are currently operated by German chapter, Wikimedia Germany, with assistance from the Foundation and numerous volunteers, including long-time system administrator Daniel Baur (more commonly known by his pseudonym DaB). However, those parties have more recently failed to see eye-to-eye on the trajectory for the Toolserver, which is scheduled to be replaced by Wikimedia Labs in late 2013, with increasing concern about the tone of discussions.
In the impersonal, detached Colosseum that is Wikipedia, people find it much easier to put their thumbs down. As such, many people active in the Wikimedia movement have witnessed a precipitous decline in civil discourse. This is far from a new trend, yet many people would agree that it all seemed somehow worse in 2012.
A recent, poorly researched and poorly written story in the Register highlighted the perceived "cash rich" status of the Wikimedia movement. ... The Telegraph and Daily Dot, among others, have alleged that there are multiple links between the WMF, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, and Kazakhstan's government, which is, for all intents and purposes, a one-party non-democratic state.
On 27 December the Wikimedia Foundation announced the conclusion of their ninth annual fundraiser, which attracted more than 1.2 million donors. The appeal reached its goal of US$25 million, even though fundraising banners ran for only nine days.
In the first of two features, the Signpost this week looks back on 2012, a year when developers finally made inroads into three issues that had been put off for far too long (the need for editors to learn wiki-markup, the lack of a proper template language and the centralisation of data) but left all three projects far from finished.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include ...
Brion Vibber has been a Wikipedia editor for nearly 11 years and was the first person officially hired to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. He was instrumental in early development of the MediaWiki software and is now the lead software architect for the foundation's mobile development team.
At the beginning of the year, we began a series of interviews with editors who have worked hard to combat systemic bias through the creation of featured content; although we haven't seen six installments yet, we've also had some delightful interviews with people who write articles on some of our most core topics. Now, as we close the year, I would like to present some of my own musings on the state of featured content—especially as it pertains to systemic bias and core topics.
This week, we're celebrating the New Year from Times Square by interviewing WikiProject New York City. Since December 2004, WikiProject NYC has had the difficult task of maintaining articles about the largest city in the United States, many of which are also among the the most viewed articles on Wikipedia. The project is home to 22 Featured Articles, 7 Featured Lists, 32 pieces of Featured Media, and a lengthy list of Did You Know? entries.
Northeastern University researcher Brian Keegan analyzed the gathering of hundreds of Wikipedians to cover the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. ... A First Monday article reviews several aspects of the Wikipedia participation in the 18 January 2012, protests against SOPA and PIPA legislation in the USA. The paper focuses on the question of legitimacy, looking at how the Wikipedia community arrived at the decision to participate in those protests.
Hello, I refer to your message (14:09, 6 December 2012 (UTC)) stating an update was made, appearing to be by me, to do with the Royal Court Theater. I don't recognize this subject or page and have had messages from other editors before, asking me to rectify changes that I haven't made. Could there be an IP related issue here? I've looked at the updates you refer to and I can confirm that I did not make them. They are not on my contributions page either. Thank you Thedaveformula (talk) 14:23, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hello! I noticed that you completely erased (blanked) a page recently. This is why I reverted your edit. You should never erase content on Wikipedia without explanation. If you feel that the information is incorrect, you can explain your concerns on the article's talk page. In this way, other editors can offer their opinions as well.
- It's great that you are interested in Wikipedia and I hope that you continue to help with the project. If you are new, I would strongly recommend watching and learning about how the project works before you start to revert. There are a number of resources such as, wp:Tutorial that can help you get started. Let me know if I can be of any help to you. Cheers! Wikipelli Talk 18:27, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Meta is the wiki that has coordinated a wide range of cross-project Wikimedia activities, such as the activities of stewards, the archiving of chapter reports, and WMF trustee elections. The project has long been an out-of-the-way corner for technocratic working groups, unaccountable mandarins, and in-house bureaucratic proceedings. Largely ignored by the editing communities of projects such as Wikipedia and organizations that serve them, Meta has evolved into a huge and relatively disorganized repository, where the few archivists running it also happen to be the main authors of some of its key documents. While Meta is well-designed for supporting the librarians and mandarins who stride along its corridors, visitors tend to find the site impenetrable—or so many people have argued over the past decade. This impenetrability runs counter to Meta's increasingly central role in the Wikimedia movement.
The dawning of a new year offers both a fresh slate and an opportunity to revisit our previous adventures. 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of the WikiProject Report and was the column's most productive year with 52 articles published. In addition to sharing the experiences of Wikipedia's many active projects, we expanded our scope to highlight unique projects from other languages of Wikipedia, and tracked down all of the former editors-in-chief of the Signpost for an introspective interview ... While last year's "Summer Sports Series" may have drawn yawns from some readers, a special report on "Neglected Geography" elicited more comments than any previous issue of the Report. Following in the footsteps of our past three recaps, we'll spend this week looking back at the trials and tribulations of the WikiProjects we encountered in 2012. Where are they now?
The past 12 months have seen a multitude of issues and events in the Wikimedia foundation, the movement at large, and the English Wikipedia. The movement, now in its second decade, is growing apace in its international reach, cultural and linguistic diversity, technical development, and financial complexity; and many factors have combined to produce what has in many ways been the biggest, most dynamic year in the movement's history. Looking back at 2012, we faced a difficult task in doing justice to all of the notable events in a single article; so the Signpost has selected just a few examples from outside the anglosphere, from the English Wikipedia, and from the Wikimedia Foundation, rather than attempting to cover every detail that happened.
Over the past year, 963 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured article candidates (FAC), which promoted an average of 31 articles a month. This was followed by featured picture candidates (FPC; 28 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 20 a month). Featured topic and featured portal candidates remained sluggish, each promoting fewer than 20 items over the year.
Following on from last week's reflections on 2012, this week the Technology report looks ahead to 2013, a year that will almost certainly be dominated by the juggernauts of Wikidata, Lua and the Visual Editor.
After six years without creating a new class of content projects, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has finally expanded into a new area: travel. Wikivoyage was formally launched—though without a traditional ship's christening—on 15 January, having started as a beta trial on 10 November. Wikivoyage has been taken under the WMF's umbrella on the argument that information resources that help with travel are educational and therefore within the scope of the foundation's mission.g
On January 16, voting for the first round of the 2012 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest will begin. Wikimedia editors with 75 edits or one project are eligible to vote to select their favorite image featured in 2012. ... On January 15, the foundation launched its latest grant scheme, called Individual Engagement Grants (IEG).
This week, we set off for the final frontier with WikiProject Astronomy. The project was started in August 2006 using the now-defunct WikiProject Space as inspiration. WikiProject Astronomy is home to 101 pieces of Featured material and 148 Good Articles maintained by a band of 186 members. The project maintains a portal, works on an assortment of vital astronomy articles, and provides resources for editors adding or requesting astronomy images.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
Comforting those grieving after the loss of a loved one is an impossible task. How then, can an entire community be comforted? The Internet struggled to answer that question this week after the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a celebrated free-culture activist, programmer, and Wikipedian at the age of 26.
Continuing our recap of the featured content promoted in 2012, this week the Signpost interviewed three editors, asking them about featured articles which stuck out in their minds. Two, Ian Rose and Graham Colm, are current featured article candidates (FAC) delegates, while Brian Boulton is an active featured article writer and reviewer.
The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
The Wikidata client extension was successfully deployed to the Hungarian Wikipedia on 14 January, its team reports. The interwiki language links can now come from wikidata.org, though "manual" interwiki links remain functional, overriding those from the central repository.
I tried browsing to
Media related to Association footballs at Wikimedia Commons as well as to
Media related to Association football balls at Wikimedia Commons. For me the former link does not lead to a category on commons, whereas the latter link does lead to a category on commons. I hope that explains the edit made to the article. 12.208.10.7 (talk) 20:53, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
- My apologies. Your edit was in good faith. I've restored your edit and removed the warning from your talk page. Cheers! Wikipelli Talk 00:06, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
The English Wikipedia's requests for adminship (RfA) process has entered another cycle of proposed reforms. Over the last three weeks, various proposals, ranging from as large as a transition to a representative democracy to as small as a required edit count and service length, have been debated on the RfA talk page. The total number of new administrators for 2012 was just 28, barely more than half of 2011's total and less than a quarter of 2009's total. The total number of unsuccessful RfAs has fallen as well. These declining numbers, which were described in what would now be considered a successful year (2010) as an emerging "wikigeneration gulf", have been coupled with a sharp decline in the number of active administrators since February 2008 (1,021), reaching a low of 653 in November 2012.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Linguistics. Started in January 2004, the project has grown to include 7 Featured Articles, 4 Featured Lists, 2 A-class Articles, and 15 Good Articles maintained by 43 members. The project's members keep an eye on several watchlists, maintain the linguistics category, and continue to build a collection of Did You Know? entries. The project is home to six task forces and works with WikiProject Languages and WikiProject Writing Systems.
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured topics. We interviewed Grapple X and GamerPro64, who are delegates at the featured topic candidates.
The opening of the Doncram case marks the end of almost 6 months without any open cases, the longest in the history of the Committee.
On 22 January, WMF staff and contractors switched incoming, non-cached requests (including edits) to the Foundation's newer data centre in Ashburn, Virginia, making it responsible for handling almost all regular traffic. For the first time since 2004, virtually no traffic will be handled by the WMF's other facility in Tampa, Florida.
I was merely correcting a typo at the reference desk by changing 'possiblt' to 'possible' and then went to the 'View History' page to check out my edit, which then prompted me to take a quick look at the IP address's edit history on Wikipedia and its own Talk Page, loaded with criticisms and bannings from earlier edits prior to Summer 2012. My second edit was the semi-deletion of the Talk Page, but apparently, someone found that or the other one 'unconstructive'. Actually, it seems to me that all mass deletions or deletions of whole paragraphs are perceived to be 'unconstructive' or suspect to 'unconstructive edits' on Wikipedia, based on my experience. 140.254.226.197 (talk) 14:47, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hi... The revert and warning that I placed on your page were prompted by your removal of the 'criticisms and bannings from earlier edits' from the talk page [1]. I don't really understand why you would remove content from a talk page other than your own. In any event, it's inappropriate to remove others' comments from a talk page.
- It's often difficult to edit in a public or school library without logging in because the IP addresses might be blocked. I believe that you are editing in good faith and I would encourage you to get an account with Wikipedia! Cheers! Wikipelli Talk 15:28, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Another method is to archive the whole Talk Page and place it under __________'s Old Talk Page. 140.254.226.197 (talk) 16:19, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi Wikipelli! I've been seeing you patrolling for vandalism using Huggle. I would like to suggest that you take note of the IP range warnings given by Huggle. Some of your reversions could have been done better, as multiple edits were made by different IP addresses but on the same IP range, meaning they share for example, the first two sets of digits: 111.222.XXX.XXX. This could suggest that the edits were done on shared IPs by the same person. Huggle produces this warning whenever it detects edits over an IP address range as Huggle will only revert edits made on the same IP address, not edits over a range. If you need examples, do feel free to approach me. Happy patrolling! Optakeover(Talk) 14:49, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Hi Optakeover... Thanks for the heads-up. I'm familiar with Huggle's warnings and I generally take note of them and, rather than revert to another edit within the same range, I open the page to check the edit history. I think I went out on a limb on one this morning and took a chance on reverting. I'll check them more carefully. Thanks again! Wikipelli Talk 15:31, 29 January 2013 (UT
Thank you so much Wikipelli.
Of course that was right.
I'm a international known light artist with clients like Canon, Mercedes Benz, Diesel, Nike, Coldplay and many more.
I was very angry about this edit.
Thank you very much for you help.
JanLeonardo (talk) 17:25, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
- Your message on the talk page was good-faith and I was too quick to remove it. However, you will want to be very careful about conflict of interest when including information about yourself in Wikipedia. It is regarded as particularly bad form to include information about yourself in an article. Self-promotion is the greatest risk. If other editors feel that your edits are simply to promote yourself they can, and probably will, revert you. If, however, your work has gained you notoriety and thus notability, then it would be better for others to include it in articles. Good luck! Wikipelli Talk 17:34, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
UPS i did a again. sorry. please help me. sorry, sorry. JanLeonardo (talk) 17:38, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
No problem you can post the information wikipelli. please edit and post it again. JanLeonardo (talk) 17:41, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
On New Year's Day, the Daily Dot reported that a "massive Wikipedia hoax" had been exposed after more than five years. The article on the Bicholim conflict had been listed as a "Good Article" for the past half-decade, yet turned out to be an ingenious hoax. Created in July 2007 by User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a, the meticulously detailed piece was approved as a GA in October 2007. A subsequent submission for FA was unsuccessful, but failed to discover that the article's key sources were made up. While the User:A-b-a-a-a-a-a-a-b-a account then stopped editing, the hoax remained listed as a Good Article for five years, receiving in the region of 150 to 250 page views a month in 2012. It was finally nominated for deletion on 29 December 2012 by ShelfSkewed—who had discovered the hoax while doing work on Category:Articles with invalid ISBNs—and deleted the same day.
A special issue of the American Behavioral Scientist is devoted to "open collaboration".
When we challenged the masters of WikiProject Chess to an interview, Sjakkalle answered our call. WikiProject Chess dates back to December 2003 and has grown to include 4 Featured Articles and 15 Good Articles maintained by over 100 members. The project typically operates independently of other WikiProjects, although the project would theoretically be a child of WikiProject Board and Table Games (interviewed in 2011). WikiProject Chess provides a collection of resources, seeks missing photographs of chess players, and helps determine ways that Wikipedia's coverage of chess can be expanded.
New discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
To many Wikimedians, the Khan Academy would seem like a close cousin: the academy is a non-profit educational website and a development of the massive open online course concept that has delivered over 227 million lessons in 22 different languages. Its mission is to give "a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere." This complements Wikipedia's stated goal to "imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge", then go and create that world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the highly successful GLAM-Wiki (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) initiative has partnered with the Khan Academy's Smarthistory project to further both its and Wikipedia's goals.
This week, the Signpost featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured lists. We interviewed FLC directors Giants2008 and The Rambling Man as well as active reviewer and writer PresN.
The Doncram case has continued into its third week.
As reported in last week's "Technology Report", the WMF's data centre in Ashburn, Virginia took over responsibility for almost all of the remaining functions that had previously been handled by their old facility in Tampa, Florida on 22 January. The Signpost reported then that few problems had arisen since handover. Unfortunately that was not to remain the case, with reports of caching problems (which typically only affect anonymous users) starting to come in.
On February 12, 2012, news of Whitney Houston's death brought 425 hits per second to her Wikipedia article, the highest peak traffic on any article since at least January 2010. It is broadly known that Wikipedia is the sixth most popular website on the Internet, but the English Wikipedia now has over 4 million articles and 29 million total pages. Much less attention has been given to traffic patterns and trends in content viewed.
Article feedback, at least through talk pages, has been a part of Wikipedia since its inception in 2001. The use of these pages, though, has typically been limited to experienced editors who know how to use them.
This week, we took a trip to WikiProject Norway. Started in February 2005, WikiProject Norway has become the home for almost 34,000 articles about the world's best place to live, including 16 Featured Articles, 19 Featured Lists, and nearly 250 Good Articles. The project works on a to do list, maintains a categorization system, watches article alerts, and serves as a discussion forum.
This week, the Signpost's featured content section continues its recap of 2012 by looking at featured portals, a small yet active part of the project. We interviewed FPOC directors Cirt and OhanaUnited.
On 30 January 2013, Kevin Morris in the Daily Dot summarised the bitter debates in Wikipedia around capitalisation or non-capitalisation of the word "into" in the title of the upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek Into Darkness.
Following the deployment of the Wikidata client to the Hungarian Wikipedia last month, the client was also deployed to the Italian and Hebrew Wikipedias on Wednesday. The next target for the client, which automatically provides phase 1 functionality, is the English Wikipedia, with a deployment date of 11 February already set.
Wikipedia has a long, daresay storied history with hoaxes; our internal list documents 198 of the largest ones we have caught as of 4 January 2013. Why?
Six articles, one list, and fourteen pictures were promoted to "featured" states this week on the English Wikipedia.
This week, we got the details on WikiProject Infoboxes.
Foreign Policy has published a report on editing of the Wikipedia articles on the Senkaku Islands and Senkaku Islands dispute. The uninhabited islands are under the control of Japan, but China and Taiwan are asserting rival territorial claims. Tensions have risen of late—and not just in the waters surrounding the actual islands.
Wikimedia UK, the non-profit organization devoted to furthering the goals of the Wikimedia movement in the United Kingdom, has published the findings of a governance review conducted by Compass Partnership.
Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include...
The WMF's engineering report for January was published this week.
Hi,
I saw you gave the user of this IP address a very last warning (see User talk:203.153.12.80): was that based on his first attempt (around 1955 GMT) to vandalize the Dell page or his 2nd attempt at 2034, so some 40 minutes later. Based on timestamp it seems for the 2nd attempt - but imho such a dual attempt with 40 minutes between the two edits can't be excused and imho (again) this user should have been blocked already. If the IP address is actually a shared IP address (where the user does indeed vary) it is a good reason for real editors to use an account. Tonkie (talk) 00:54, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
This week, we put our life in the hands of WikiProject Airlines. Starting in July 2005, the project has improved articles relating to airline companies, alliances, destination lists, and travel benefit programs. WikiProject Airlines has accumulated over 4,000 pages, including 4 Featured Articles and 26 Good Articles.
As of time of writing, twenty wikis (including the English, French and Hungarian Wikipedias) are in the process of getting access to the Lua scripting language, an optional substitute for the clunky template code that exists at present.
On February 15, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) declared 'victory' in its counter-lawsuit against Internet Brands (IB), the owner of Wikitravel and the operator of several online media, community, and e-commerce sites in vertical markets. The lawsuit clears the last remaining hurdles for the WMF's new travel guide project, Wikivoyage.
Sue Gardner's visit to Australia sparked a number of interviews in the Australian press. An interview published in the Daily Telegraph on 12 February 2013, titled "Data plans 'unnerving': Wikipedia boss", saw Gardner comment on Australian plans to store personal internet and telephone data. The planned measure, intended to assist crime prevention, would involve internet service providers and mobile phone firms storing customer usage data for up to two years.
Two articles, nine lists, and thirteen pictures were promoted to 'featured' status on the English Wikipedia this week.
Just found this page, which is a redirect to Church Hill Road Covered Bridge. Still need it? If so, of course you don't need to reply; I just thought you might want to have it deleted if you don't care about it anymore. Nyttend (talk) 04:28, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
- No. I don't need it at all, really. In fact, there are a number of similar redirects there - left behind when pages are moved. Guess I didn't want to bother an admin with a bunch of deletion requests! :) Wikipelli Talk 11:46, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
- Found a bunch of these pages when looking at all of the articles about Columbiana County places listed on the National Register. Would you like me to delete all of them that are purely redirects? No need to tag them, if you'd like all to be deleted. Nyttend (talk) 12:33, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
- That would be great! Thanks! Wikipelli Talk 13:13, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
On 13 February 2013, PR Report, the German sister publication of PR Week, published an article announcing that PR agency Fleishman-Hillard was offering a new analysis tool enabling companies to assess their articles in the German-language Wikipedia: the Wikipedia Corporate Index (WCI).
"Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Production" by Jeff Loveland (a historian of encyclopedias) and Joseph Reagle situates Wikipedia within the context of encyclopedic production historically, arguing that the features that many claim to be unique about Wikipedia actually have roots in encyclopedias of the past.
The Wikimedia Commons 2012 Picture of the Year contest has ended, with the winner being Pair of Merops apiaster feeding, taken by Pierre Dalous. The picture shows a pair of European Bee-eaters in a mating ritual—the male bird (right) has tossed the wasp into the air, and he will eventually offer it to the female (left).
Current discussions include...
Six articles, three lists, and twelve images were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this month.
How can we measure the challenges facing a project or determine a WikiProject's productivity? Several prominent projects have been doing it for years: WikiWork.
Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) this week committed itself to funding the Wikidata development team, ending fears that phase three would be abandoned.
Hi there,
As for Supreme; no problem; I knew my comment was not the sort of thing that should be on the page itself, but I didn't know how else to draw attention to the page's deficiency. I visited the Supreme page in order to find out which exact years that series was published. This is such basic info that I feel it should definitely be given at the top of the page, but it isn't there, and thus I did not get the (again, very basic) info I was looking for, which prompted me to react. I figured that maybe the author was monitoring the page and I could leave a message about it right there. But you are not the author of the page? The top paragraph of a Wikipedia page always seems to be locked, and I don't know what to do if I felt corrections were needed at that level.
- Tue Sorensen, Denmark
82.143.208.65 (talk) 14:41, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
- You can edit the top paragraph of a Wikipedia page by clicking Edit at the top, not on the right. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 16:27, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
- Hi Tue.... Demiurge is quite right about where to click on the page.
- I understand that it can be frustrating looking for information that isn't there. The thing to be aware of, though, is that individual pages do not really have 'authors' in the usual sense. In fact, since the Supreme (comics) page was created in 2005, I'd say there have been dozens of 'authors'. That's just how Wikipedia works. I'm sure there are those that monitor the page to see if there are changes. I just happened to notice your edit through a vandalism checking program.
- The BEST thing to do in a case like this is to put comments on the article's "Talk" page. All articles on Wikipedia have an associated Talk page (you'll see the tab at the top of the window). There, you can put in comments about how the article is written, and certainly suggestions for information to include. This allows other interested editors to see your comments and discuss them and perhaps (hopefully!) find and include the information that you're seeking. Thanks for your comment and your message! If there's anything more I can do to help, feel free to leave me a message! Cheers! Wikipelli Talk 23:30, 2 March 2013 (UTC)
Recently I was having a casual conversation with a friend, and he mentioned that he spent too many hours a day playing video games. I responded with a comment that I, too, spent way too much time on an activity of my own – Wikipedia. In an attempt to reply with a relevant remark, he offered something along the lines of: "So have you ever written anything?" After a second, I quickly answered yes, but I was still in shock over his question. It seemed to be rooted in a belief on his part that using Wikipedia meant just reading the articles, and that editing was something that someone, hypothetically, might do, but not really more likely than randomly counting to 7,744.
"WP:OUTING", the normally little-noticed policy corner of the English Wikipedia that governs the release of editors' personal information, has suddenly been brought to wider attention after long-term contributor and featured article writer Cla68 was indefinitely blocked last week. This snowballed into several other blocks, a desysopping by ArbCom, and a request for arbitration.
Three articles, six lists, and three pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including the article on "Laura Secord", who was a Canadian heroine of the War of 1812 best known for warning the British of an impending American attack.
This week, we tuned to WikiProject Television Stations, a project that dates back to March 2004. WikiProject Television Stations primarily focuses on local stations, national networks, television markets, and other topics related to television channels in North America, the Caribbean, and some Pacific countries. The project has a fair bit of work ahead of them with over 4,000 unassessed articles and only one Good Article out of 626 assessed articles, giving the project a relative WikiWork rating of 5.262.
- Thanks much! :) Wikipelli Talk 15:18, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
I am pleased to announce that the Signpost and Wikizine have reached an in-principle agreement that will see Wikizine published as a special Signpost section at the beginning of each month.
During March, three of the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking schemes on Meta will reach important crossroads, which will shape how both the editing communities and Wikimedia institutions handle the distribution of donors' money across the movement.
Twelve articles, five lists, and eight pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including an image of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a front-engine, 2-seat luxury grand tourer automobile developed by Mercedes-AMG.
There are three open cases, and a final decision has been given in the Doncram case.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject U.S. Supreme Court Cases.
The WMF has aborted a plan to deploy version 5 of the Article Feedback tool (AFTv5) rolled out to all English Wikipedia articles.
I must begin by giving a thousand apologies for misusing the "wikipedia" system. I have never edited on it before, and only did so because I was absolutely bombarded by their messages (be2) on facebook and email when i went to investigate their claims. Having worked for a psychometric company and many, many psychologists i have some understanding of what those tests (they purport to give) involve. Compounded with that I am now studying Environmental Science and have undertaken several Statistics courses so have a basic understanding of that as well (so know their claims to be bullshit). I apologise for any inappropriate responses on the site. I should definitely have read through things more appropriately to find out the best way to respond. I will definitely not make the same mistake again, and I genuinely have the utmost understanding for the integrity the site wishes to have. I simply got a bit carried away with the preposterous claims the Be2 site maintained to any integrity. I certainly never lost any money to them, only took seconds for me to understand they were a complete shambles, I simply wanted to warn others, albeit not in the best way. Again, I apologise for causing any offence or disrespect to Wikipedia. I definitely would like to post again, but this time I will read the regulations and protocols a little bit more fully and temper my response with good sense rather than indignation.
I would be grateful and appreciative of any advice that you could give.
Kind regards,
Catriona Lamberton — Preceding unsigned comment added by Catriona UTS (talk • contribs) 16:53, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
- Thanks for the message. Apologies aren't necessary at all. I'm glad you see the point of the reverting of your edits and the messages left on your page. Remember, too, that Wikipedia is not a means for advertising a business or service. The article on Be2 should be factual and non-biased. If you see claims to things that are false and you can provide reliable third-party sources, you can certainly include those in the article. The goal is to create a verifiable article. Thanks again for your message! If you have any questions, please let me know! :) Wikipelli Talk 16:59, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Just wanted to say a quick thanks for the revert to my talk page, much appreciated. Fraggle81 (talk) 03:20, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
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Hello Wikipelli, I will be celebrating my birthday on 19 March. So, I would like to give you a treat. If you decide to "eat" the cookie, please reply by placing {{subst:munch}} on my talk page. I hope this cookie has made your day better. Cheers! Arctic Kangaroo 16:03, 17 March 2013 (UTC)
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Hi Wikipelli! I have always been a fan of your new-page-patrol work, and I just noticed that you weren't an admin yet. Would you be interested in running? I see that someone asked you last year, but I hope enough time has passed since then for you to reconsider. :) For what it's worth, I don't think you would have any trouble at all passing RfA, judging from your articles, your anti-vandalism and NPP work, and your calm and helpful interaction style. What do you think? Best regards — Mr. Stradivarius on tour ♪ talk ♪ 05:30, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
- Thank you very much for your comments and suggestion. Becoming an admin is something that I have thought about and that I would like to do. Right now, my work life is a little overwhelming, but I'll give it some thought. Perhaps in a couple of months I'll give it a go. Thank you again for your message. :) Cheers Wikipelli Talk 11:16, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
- Not at all. You can expect to see me back here in two months' time. :) If you decide you're ready to run in the meantime, just let me know and I'll write you up a nomination statement. — Mr. Stradivarius ♪ talk ♪ 11:19, 21 March 2013 (UTC)
Just two months into his second term as an arbitrator on the English Wikipedia, Coren resigned from the Committee with a blistering attack on his fellow arbitrators. At the heart of a strongly worded statement, posted both on his talk page and the arbitration notice board, was the claim that ArbCom has become politicised to the extent that "it can no longer do the job it was ostensibly elected for".
This week, we composed a tribute to WikiProject Composers. The project was created during the final hours of 2004 and finalized in early January 2005. It has grown to encompass over 8,000 pages, including 26 Featured Articles and 23 Good Articles. WikiProject Composers faces a difficult workload, with a relative WikiWork rating of 5.45.
Ask librarians what they think about Wikipedia and you might get some interesting answers. Some will throw up their hands about the laziness of the Google generation and their overdependence on Wikipedia. Some see it as the "competition". And some will tell you it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Nine articles, seven lists, eleven images, and one topic were promoted to "featured status" this week on the English Wikipedia.
On Thursday, arbitrator Coren resigned, following closely on the heels of Hersfold's resignation on Wednesday. There are two open cases. A final decision has been given in the Richard case.
The WMF's engineering report for January was published this week, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month.
please explain why have u rejected my posting our website is fully relevant as we have created in the message.
- Hi.. I see that your account is blocked now so I don't know if you'll read this or not. I just wanted to let you know that I reverted this edit for a couple of reasons. First, when you inserted the information, you completely erased the entire article. The article is about Open Directory Project and the information was valid. Second, the information that you added to the article was promotional in nature. That is, it appeared to me that the information was not encyclopedic but designed to promote a business with which, judging by your user name, you are associated. If you have any other questions about it, please feel free to leave me a message. Wikipelli Talk 15:57, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
Our travels have brought us to Pittsburgh, the American city known for steelworks and bridges.
Seven articles, one list, six pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
This case, brought by Mark Arsten, was opened over a dispute over transgenderism topics that began off-wiki. The evidence phase was scheduled to close March 7, 2013, with a proposed decision due to be posted by March 29.
Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation since December 2007, has announced her plans to leave the position when a successor is recruited. Ranked as one of the most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine, Sue Gardner is widely associated with the rise of the Wikimedia movement as a major custodian of human knowledge and cultural products.
Since its inception in May 2011, the Foundation's Visual Editor project has grown to become one of its main focuses. As the project nears its two-year birthday, the Signpost caught up with Visual Editor project manager James Forrester to discuss the progress on the project.
A paper presented at last month's CSCW Conference observes that "Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order", yet Wikipedia has a well developed body of policies to support it as an organization.
The Wikimedia Foundation has released its latest report card for the movement's hundreds of sites. The WMF has published statistics about the sites since 2009, but only recently have these been expanded in scope and depth to provide a rich source of data for investigating the movement and the world it serves. Dutch-born Erik Zachte is the driver of the WMF's statistical output, and he writes that the report card and accompanying traffic statistics comprise "enough tables, bar charts and plots to keep you busy for a while".
This week's Report is dedicated to answering our readers' questions about WikiProjects. The following Frequently Asked Questions came from feedback at the WikiProject Report's talk page, the WikiProject Council's talk page, and from previous lists of FAQs.
The Signpost interviewed prolific featured content creator and former Signpost "featured content" report writer Crisco 1492 about ? and Indonesian cinema. ? was the "Today's featured article" for 1 April 2013. 1 April is popularly known as April Fools' Day in many countries.
The first round of individual engagement grants (IEGs) have been awarded, disbursing about $55.6k (€42.7k) to seven applicants.
A case brought by Lecen involves several articles about former Argentinian president Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877).
Users of ten Wikipedias got access to phase 2 of Wikidata following its first rollout to production wikis.
you seem really cool. can i have your email. mine i shadowsneak@aol.com — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.54.17.249 (talk) 17:54, 8 April 2013 (UTC)
Numerous Wikimedia Commons editors have chimed in on the Wikimedia Foundation's deployment of a new feature to its mobile website. Allowing anonymous users to register and upload pictures for use in an article, the feature was placed prominently at the top of Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.
This week, we felt the world tremble in the presence of WikiProject Earthquakes. The project was started in May 2008 to deal with articles about earthquakes, aftershocks, seismology, seismologists, plate tectonics, and related articles. While the project has seen success building 14 Featured Articles, one A-class Article, and 21 Good Articles, a fairly heavy workload remains, with a relative WikiWork rating of 4.94. WikiProject Earthquakes maintains a portal, a list of open tasks, a popular pages listing, and an article alerts watchlist.
Last Friday, the Wikimedia movement awoke to news that one of their number—Rémi Mathis, a French volunteer editor—had been summoned to the offices of the interior intelligence service DCRI and threatened with criminal charges and fines if he did not delete an article on the French Wikipedia about a radio station used by the French military.
The arbitration committee is looking for expertise in Argentina and the Spanish language for a case involving former Argentinean president Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877).
Four articles and two pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
The deployment of phase 2 of Wikidata to the English Wikipedia, originally scheduled for 8 April but delayed due to technical problems, may be rescheduled again as the result of community resistance.
The RfA process is widely discussed here on the English Wikipedia and it has been well documented that less and less new Requests for adminship are being filed. There are an abundance of bytes devoted to the discussion and analysis of this situation and plenty of hands have been wrung over the matter. Various RfCs have attempted to find a way to fix the problem. Many proposals have been made offering solutions, some more potentially drastic than others, with the goal of making the changes necessary to kick–start RfA back into regular action. However, Wikipedia operates based on consensus and, to this point, there are have simply been too many disagreeing views for us to reach a consensus on how to increase RfA activity.
This week, we ventured to WikiProject South Africa. The project was started in February 2005 and is home to thirteen pieces of featured material, two A-class articles, and twenty-one good articles.
The most recent move to reform the requests for adminship process on the English Wikipedia has failed, after a complex and drawn-out three-step procedure for community input was subject to decreasing participation as time wore on and came up with no clear consensus.
Four articles, twelve lists, and seven pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week.
An article by John Sweeney published on 22 April 2013 on scnow.com, the website of the Florence, South Carolina Morning News, reported that Florence city officials have taken to monitoring and correcting the Wikipedia article on their city.
This week, we spent some time with a project that develops tools and methods for improving the user experience in the hope that new users will continue editing the encyclopedia. The project was started in July 2012 and has grown to include 124 members. The project's members partner with the Teahouse and the Welcoming Committee to spread WikiLove, welcome new users, encourage civility, and other related activities.
The Wikimedia Conference is an annual meeting of the chapters to discuss their status and the organisational development of the Wikimedia movement. For the first time it included groups that wish to be considered for WMF affiliation as thematic organisations and one of the three groups that was recently affiliated as a user group. The conference was also attended by members of the Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) Board of Trustees, the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), the WMF Affiliations Committee, and a representative of the Wikivoyage Association.
Nine articles, four lists, eight pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" status this week on the English Wikipedia.
The Sexology case is nearing completion after arbitrators were unable to agree on a topic ban for one of the participants.
On Monday, the English Wikipedia became the 12th wiki to be able to pull data from the central Wikidata.org repository, with other wikis scheduled to receive the update on Wednesday.
The Funds Dissemination Committee released its recommendations to the WMF board last Sunday. The news that the Hong Kong chapter's application for US$212K had failed was followed by a strongly worded resignation announcement by Deryck Chan on the public Wikimedia-l mailing-list.
On 24 April 2013, novelist Amanda Filipacchi published what turned out to be an influential op-ed in the New York Times; illuminating the unusual background of the Yuri Gadyukin hoax.
Nine articles, three lists, three pictures, and one topic were promoted to "featured" this week.
This week, we traveled to the Japanese Wikipedia's WikiProject Baseball for perspectives from a version of Wikipedia that treats WikiProjects as their own unique namespace (プロジェクト:) independent of "Wikipedia:".
The WP:TOP25 and WP:5000 reports chronicle the most popular Wikipedia articles on a weekly basis.
The Sexology case closed shortly after publication with no changes.
A report on an online service which was created to conduct real-time monitoring of Wikipedia articles of companies, and more.
This week saw the deployment of the Echo extension, also known as "notifications".