Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-08-08
From the editor
I regret to announce that I am suspending operations for The Wikipedia Signpost, at least temporarily. The work needed to produce it remains a daunting task for me in particular, and my schedule for the next month would make it difficult to satisfy the standards I have for this project. And even if I had more time, I don't think I could maintain my present level of effort indefinitely. In addition, we would in any case shortly be losing Spangineer, who has regularly been covering featured articles but needs to prepare to resume his studies.
I do wish to thank everyone who has helped in any way, and especially those who have taken the time to write stories. I'm glad that many people have enjoyed and appreciated the work we've done, and I hope it can resume in some form in the near future. To be sustainable, however, it would need substantially more participation from the community in creating the content. I would welcome continued discussion of how we can organize and accomplish this, and make any necessary changes, during this hiatus.
Deletion of Votes for deletion shocks system
Longstanding dissatisfaction over Wikipedia's deletion process came to a head last week after Wikipedia:Votes for deletion (commonly known as VfD) was itself briefly deleted, sparking renewed discussion of possible reforms to the system. The incident also disrupted general editing for a few minutes as the database recovered from the shock.
Debates over closure
The immediate impetus for these events came from a disagreement over how Tony Sidaway handled the closing of a number of VfD debates. A request for comment was started by Aaron Brenneman and Ambi (the latter incidentally quit Wikipedia this week as a result of general dissatisfaction). The complaint, which prompted a vigorous debate, focused particularly on VfDs for which Sidaway had not deleted the article in question, even though there were few if any users voting "keep" (votes to merge or redirect were typically also present).
Sidaway responded that he was choosing the most conservative option available and leaving future solutions up to later editors, as the deletion policy says, "If in doubt, don't delete!" Also, he pointed out that when dealing with options other than deletion, such as a merge or transwiki, the administrator closing the discussion is not required to implement these steps, particularly when a consensus for them is not clear. Others pointed out that votes other than "delete" implicitly favor keeping the article in some form, even if only as a redirect.
A number of people indicated that while they might have reached different results in closing the same VfDs, the judgments being made were within Sidaway's discretion. The discussion also turned to the merits of the deletion system in general, with Kelly Martin arguing that "the entire VFD process is harmful to Wikipedia and should be discontinued immediately."
This sentiment found its way elsewhere as well, as David Gerard posted a message to the wikien-l mailing list calling VfD "completely pathological". As a postscript, he added the following:
- MOTION: That while VFD nominally performs a useful function in clearing crap out of Wikipedia, its current operation and subcommunity is so pathological and damaging to the Wikipedia community that it should be removed entirely. Remove it completely. Then talk and think how to come up with something that works without becoming an engine for rancor.
Ed Poor responded in agreement and, taking the "motion" seriously said, "I'm tempted to just Be Bold and just go ahead and delete vfd." To everyone's surprise he did so at 19:43 (UTC), and although the action was soon reversed by ABCD at 20:05 (UTC), the effect of VfD's lengthy page history and many links created some problems. With thousands of page revisions being archived and then un-archived, this caused some temporary database update lag, which automatically locked out edits for some users for a few minutes while the system recovered from the effects.
The community reacts
A number of people applauded Poor's boldness and echoed similar frustrations about VfD. Others were more critical as indicated by a request for comment started regarding this action. A poll to see whether people agreed with the action is running 4-to-1 against, with a number of people refusing to participate because they felt there hadn't been enough discussion and any vote was premature. However, most of those opposing the move conceded that VfD has serious problems, but argued that a workable alternative was needed before getting rid of the current system.
Efforts to brainstorm solutions to the situation produced a plethora of suggestions, which are collected at Wikipedia:Deletion reform. Proposals include: software changes to make blank pages show up as red links, so that blanking a page can substitute for deletion, an idea dubbed "pure wiki deletion"; using the article rating feature (which is not yet ready to be activated) to determine which articles should be removed (Wikipedia:Version System sketch); and the possibility of splitting VfD up into various categories, for which Visviva has proposed a deletion sorting project modeled on the stub sorting project. In the meantime, VfD has resumed its normal operation while possible reforms are being discussed.
Additional consequences
The aftermath of these events also produced some additional fallout in other areas. In an extension of the debate that started it all, Tony Sidaway got into a dispute with Carnildo after the latter tried to reopen some of the VfD listings he had closed. Since he considered this to be vandalism, Sidaway blocked Carnildo for 3 hours over the issue, prompting Cyrius to intervene and unblock Carnildo, then block Sidaway for 24 hours. After further communication, Cyrius reversed this block and the matter was hashed out on the administrators' noticeboard.
Also, the request for comment regarding Ed Poor's deletion of VfD was itself briefly deleted and led to a request for arbitration. Poor contended that the page should be deleted according to procedure because it had not been properly certified; Kim Bruning later argued the same thing. The attempts to delete it were quickly reversed, however, and a brief discussion on Votes for undeletion indicated that a number of people wanted the discussion preserved. A request for arbitration was also made, although the parties have since discussed the matter privately and indicated that they would attempt to pursue mediation. Poor has already conceded that the deleted discussion "was serving a higher purpose" and restored it to its original location.
Media hypes Wikimania announcement that wasn't
Media coverage of this past week's Wikimania conference caused some consternation among Wikipedia editors when news circulated that plans were being made to permanently lock pages. As it turned out, the press had mistakenly transformed some comments from Jimmy Wales into what many people took for a major announcement.
As reported by the media, Wales had been giving an interview to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in which he was quoted as saying that Wikipedia planned to "freeze" the content of pages once they reached a state of "undisputed" quality. The story was picked up by the Reuters wire service and thus spread to a number of news outlets. A typical headline for the story ran: "Wikipedia to tighten editorial rules". The news also led to an extended discussion on Slashdot.
The apparent announcement worried some people who thought it would contradict the way Wikipedia works, and that most articles can never be truly "finished". However, Wales stated that there was no announcement, and the story resulted from a garbled translation. He explained that he had been answering questions about longstanding efforts to develop a stable version or Wikipedia 1.0, with his answer in English being translated to German, and the story later being translated back to English, resulting in the miscommunication.
In response to the "news", Wales posted a comment on Slashdot that started, "Wikipedia hereby formally announces tighter editorial controls on Reuters and Slashdot... ;-)". On the wikien-l mailing list, he added that he was "glad to see that the general reaction in the Wikipedia community was to doubt the media rather than simply assume that I've gone insane."
Although no announcement was being made, Wales pointed out, "We are constantly reviewing our policies and looking for ways to improve". One tool that may help in this process, an article rating feature designed by Magnus Manske, is still on hold. David Gerard, who has been active in pushing for it, reports that implementing the current code "would bring the wiki to a screeching overloaded halt." As a result, further improvement is needed before the feature could even be considered ready for a trial run.
Jimmy Wales blogs for Lawrence Lessig
As part of the lead-up to the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has spent the past week as a guest blogger for Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. As the theme for his stint on Lessig's blog, Wales indicated he would present a list, with some audience input, of "Ten Things That Will Be Free".
According to Wales, the inspiration for this list came from Hilbert's problems, an influential list of then-unsolved mathematical problems presented at a conference in 1900 by David Hilbert. Most of the problems have since been resolved, and Wales said he hoped his list could similarly inspire and motivate the free culture movement.
Not surprisingly, the first item on the list was the encyclopedia. As part of his explanation, Wales pointed to a goal of providing "a freely licensed and high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet". He also offered some benchmarks to use in evaluating when this goal might be attained.
Wales said that for English, German, French, and Japanese, the target has arguably been reached, as Wikipedia has more than 100,000 articles in each of these languages and already "provides a reasonably comprehensive resource." However, he acknowledged that it was important to reach out "beyond just wealthy western nations with broadband Internet access", along with a need to reach more people in their native languages. Taking these issues into account, he provided this definition of success: "When Wikipedia versions with at least 250,000 articles [exist] in every language which has at least 1,000,000 speakers and significant efforts exist for even very small languages." He predicted that this goal would be achieved in 15 years.
The second item Wales provided in his list was the curriculum. He described the goal as a complete curriculum running from kindergarten up through the university level. Here his prediction was that it would be accomplished by the year 2040, at least for English and other major languages, with the rest to follow afterwards.
Wales indicated that the media attention surrounding Wikimania had delayed him from posting further as of press time. However, a preview of the complete list can be found on the blog of Ross Mayfield, Socialtext CEO and also a speaker at Wikimania. Additional items on the list included dictionaries, music, art, file formats, maps, product identifiers, TV listings, and communities. Mayfield offered his own suggestions as well, such as search engines and scientific data.
Hoax exposé prompts attempt to delete author
A story in Slate relating the story of an internet hoax led to an attempt to have a Wikipedia article about the journalist who wrote the story deleted, after he indicated that he had started the article in question himself.
First, the hoax
The story, published 1 August, was called "Green-Collar Crime: How I stopped an Internet sex hoax". The author, freelance journalist Cyrus Farivar, told how a message board at the Something Awful website had created a rumor about "greenlighting", which supposedly referred to a practice of wearing green shirts with the collar up in order to arrange anonymous trysts. Farivar said the hoax was being organized at www.wookiefetish.com, and that he and others had been working to expose it as a hoax at places like Metafilter and Wikipedia itself.
Wikipedia did in fact have an article on greenlighting, created 5 July by Jlassoff. Within a day it had been nominated for deletion by Bmicomp, with Farivar himself following immediately behind to identify it as a hoax. The vote to delete the article was overwhelming, as the perpetrators of the hoax made surprisingly little effort to prevent this. However, the article has since been recreated to relate the story of the hoax itself.
Next, the vanity
In the course of his story, Farivar mentioned the Wikipedia article about himself, saying, "Yes, I added an entry on myself to Wikipedia. Why haven't you?" His parenthetical statement prompted Delfuego to nominate this article for deletion as well.
Farivar's article was originally created 30 January 2005 by the IP address 160.39.242.31. Back in April, Refdoc attempted to have it speedily deleted as a vanity page, but Kappa intervened and submitted it to Votes for deletion instead, where the decision was to keep the article. However, with the fact that this was originally a vanity page now confirmed by the Slate article, the issue was revisited.
In contrast with the vote regarding Greenlighting, the VfD listing for Farivar actually attracted more controversy and saw a far greater influx of new users and IP addresses attempting to vote. Initial comments strongly supported deletion, until Snowspinner interjected to declare that the subject was notable, regardless of whether it was originally a vanity page, and that if the article was deleted he would undelete it unless forced to stop by the Arbitration Committee or Jimbo Wales.
This led GregNorc to complain to Wales, but Wales agreed that Snowspinner was correct and said, "Even if VfD _did_ produce a consensus that this article should be deleted, then VfD is broken and should be ignored". Afterwards, the trend of comments shifted to include many more editors who favored keeping the article. In the end, while a majority still favored deletion, it did not reach the 2/3 level normally considered the minimum to justify deleting an article, so it was kept.
Press cautious, but notes breadth of detail on Wikipedia
"It's a little bit like pulling on a stray thread"
That was the verdict of the Tucson Citizen when they looked at Wikipedia [1]. "You mean only to pull a little bit", said writer Romi Carrell Wittman, "but soon you have a whole pile of string". The abundances of links in Wikipedia articles can lead the curious on a never-ending trail of further information. Wittman took the article on the Mona Lisa as an example, saying every term that could need explanation had a separate article. "Don't know what 'sfumato' is? No problem", she said, also noting that you could find your way to articles giving more information about Leonardo da Vinci, art history, and the Italian Renaissance from the Mona Lisa page.
Wittman cautioned readers to "beware [Wikipedia's] free-edit, free-posting nature", though, saying that at a given time an article might not be accurate or reliable.
Considering some alternative resources, she looked at encyclopedia.com, saying that although its content was vetted by professionals, the site contained a lot of pop ups and advertisements. Encarta, meanwhile, with 4,500 articles available online, was described as lacking the "breadth of topics" found on other sites, although its content was also "compiled by professionals, not bloggers with too much time on their hands".
"Robust and diverse"
More consideration of the pros and cons of using Wikipedia as a resource came this week from the Society of Environmental Journalists. The SEJ published a primer on its website last week on the concepts of peak oil and peak gas [2], which recommended Wikipedia as a source of information on the topic. The SEJ noted our tagline, "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and suggested that this immediately raises credibility issues by saying "but don't dismiss this great resource too quickly". However, the article went on to say that Wikipedia's article offered a "robust and diverse" discussion of the original proposition of the concept by M. King Hubbert.
Multiple mentions in UK press
UK newspaper The Guardian has made several references to Wikipedia in the past week. The paper's online edition has the largest readership of any UK newspaper, and in recent months has often highlighted Wikipedia content, as well as featuring an interview with Jimmy Wales in its weekly technology supplement.
Last Thursday saw Wikipedia's article on Ismail Kadare cited in John Sutherland's weekly column [3]. Albanian novelist Kadare recently won the first International Man Booker Prize, and in his acceptance speech attacked the totalitarian regime of Enver Hoxha, under which he had worked until he fled Albania in 1990. His speech prompted a backlash, though, from people who felt his defection was a token gesture against a regime under which he had previously prospered. Sutherland quoted Wikipedia's article which said that Hoxha supported Kadare as they were from the same city and the dictator 'personally liked' his work.
Saturday saw reader's editor Ian Mayes briefly discussing the contents of his own entry [4]. Mayes is responsible for the Guardian's daily 'corrections and clarifications' column, which has recently cleared up such matters as a columnist's confusion of Sarah Bernhardt and Sandra Bernhard, and Ginger Rogers and Ginger Baker. Plugging his new book highlighting the best corrections the paper has published, Mayes noted that Wikipedia credits him with the 'discovery of the apostrofly', which causes the appearance of wrongly placed apostrophes which are common fodder for the corrections column.
And finally, Monday saw the appearance of an editorial on the 10th anniversary of the stock market flotation of Netscape [5]. The piece cited Wikipedia as one of the best examples of the "huge liberating and enabling force" of the internet in the form of the open source movement, along with Linux and OpenOffice.org.
Canadian Wikipedian achieves national renown
Bryan Derksen this week made the pages of several Canadian newspapers. A syndicated article, appearing in such papers as the Montreal Gazette and the National Post, discussed his Wikipedia activities and noted his earlier appearance in a Wired Magazine story. The article warned readers not to play Derksen at Trivial Pursuit, given his remarkable knowledge of esoteric trivia gained at least in part through editing Wikipedia [6].
The article discussed how Wikipedia is resistant to vandalism thanks to the efforts of people like Derksen, explaining, "If somebody vandalizes a page, he'll know. If somebody wilfully spreads misinformation, he'll fix it". He was quoted as saying, "My friends used to poke fun at Wikipedia. Now they're starting to realize that my little hobby is turning into something significant". However, Derksen also added that it should not be used as a primary source but instead as a starting point from which to learn more.
Ulster town happier now
And finally, following the recent news that the mayor of the Northern Ireland town of Ballymena was upset by its entry in Wikipedia, the Belfast Telegraph has reported that its article highlighting the mayor's disquiet triggered a clean-up of the article, which the mayor and residents of the town are happier with [7]. Formerly described as the heroin capital of Europe, and taunted with satirical references to its housing estates, the town now has a considerably more neutral entry with sources cited to back claims. Both articles triggered numerous edits, with almost 50 having now been made since 22 July, compared to just 35 over the preceding six months.
Attempt to feature notorious article causes controversy
In the featured article process last week, the article Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA) again was the subject of controversy, while eight users were given admin powers and five articles, four lists, and five pictures reached featured status.
GNAA nomination
After surviving six VfD's (with a pool open on reaching ten) and being the subject of a policy proposal, the article covering the GNAA once again was the cause of intense debate, this time as a featured article candidate.
The partial self-nomination by Ta bu shi da yu quickly led to heated discussion over what types of objections were actionable and whether or not the article could be featured. FAC guidelines state that "each objection must provide a specific rationale that can be addressed", but the exact implications of that requirement were unclear. While some objections were purely symbolic, others objected by claiming that the article was "unstable" or "not comprehensive" and thus not in compliance with the featured article criteria.
While Ta bu shi da yu, Zscout370, and others made improvements to the article during the nomination process, some users argued that the article lacked depth, saying that more information on the association's background, members and goals was necessary. Others argued that such objections were not actionable and thus should not be considered, suggesting that such information was not documented anywhere and that including it would amount to original research.
After six days and 52 kilobytes of debate, featured article director Raul654 closed the nomination as failed. Soon after, Zscout370 requested a peer review, hoping to gain further input on how the article can be improved.
Admins
Eight users were granted admin status last week—Dan100 (nom), Ragib (nom), MarkSweep (nom), Jondel (nom), Kmccoy (nom), Humblefool (nom), Longhair (nom), Thunderbrand (nom), and Madchester (nom).
Featured content
Five articles were promoted to featured status: Restoration spectacular, Blaise Pascal, Astrophysics Data System, History of South Carolina, and Canadian Heraldic Authority
The lists List of signatories of the United States Constitution, New Zealand national cricket captains, United Nations member states, and List of members of the Commonwealth of Nations by date joined each reached featured lists status this week.
Five featured picture candidates were promoted this week, and two nominations for removal, Painted Bunting and Mackerel Sky, were kept after higher resolution images were found.
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Hippo skull -
Petronas Towers
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee has negotiated an agreement to hopefully resolve a longstanding personal conflict that has cropped up in a variety of places on Wikipedia. While moving quickly on this situation, the arbitrators were steadily working on the remaining backlog of cases.
The case in question involved Everyking, based on a complaint by Snowspinner about his conduct on the administrators' noticeboard. Although the request for arbitration was framed in terms of Everyking attacking administrators generally, it seemed that the primary issue was that Everyking was criticizing Snowspinner in particular. The arbitrators thus undertook some private discussion with the parties and persuaded Everyking to agree that he would no longer make comments anywhere on Wikipedia about Snowspinner's actions. Everyking's ability to edit is not subject to any other restrictions.
The agreement does not have any particular enforcement provisions, other than the possibility of reopening the case if the agreement falls through. Everyking is allowed to "politely converse" with Snowspinner on either of their talk pages, and he is also free to submit a request for comment or a request for arbitration against Snowspinner if he wishes.
Other cases
One additional matter is apparently ready to be completed as four arbitrators have voted to close the case. This would lead to Cantus being banned from editing several pages due to "lengthy edit warring with respect to a number of articles". The pages in question are Developed country, Template:Europe, and Terri Schiavo. He could also be banned from additional pages if he exceeds a new revert parole, which would allow him only "one revert per article or other page per 30 day period." Cantus would then be subject to blocks of up to a week for editing articles from which he is banned, and if use of a sockpuppet to circumvent bans is verified, he could be blocked for a month.
Work on other cases has progressed to the point where the arbitrators are deliberating and voting on their rulings for all of their outstanding cases, other than one new case that was accepted during the week. This is in part due to the efforts of arbitrator Fred Bauder, who has frequently taken the lead in writing drafts of findings of fact and remedies for a case.
The new case is a request involving Gabrielsimon, which was opened even though the arbitrators were evenly split on whether to accept it. Initially five arbitrators had voted to reject the case, but after three others voted to accept, Theresa Knott concluded that there were continuing problems and changed her vote. Since opening a case under the arbitration policy is based only on votes to accept, the decision is not affected by the votes to reject.