Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2009-02-16
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that some changes described here have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.13 (ab7da13), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Fixed bugs
New features
- The magic words for namespaces and pagenames can now be used as parser functions to return the desired namespace or normalized title/title part for a given title. (r46662, bug 8249)
- GeSHi has been upgraded to r1402, providing syntax highlighting for additional languages. (r46666, bug 10967)
- Import and export functionality have been added to the API. (r46815, bug 17007)
- Revision and log suppression (RevisionDelete) is now enabled for oversighters, so that edit summaries and log entries can be hidden but are not completely purged from the database. This feature can be used in cases of vandalism, spam, and other abusive edits and actions.
Other news
- The Wikimedia Foundation has purchased 36 new application servers (with 8 cores at 2.5 GHz each). So far, 9 of the servers have been installed, making the page load on Wikipedia much quicker and helping alleviate site slow downs which have occurred at peak times when the servers had hit a CPU wall. With the new servers installed, the AJAX suggestions for searches have been re-enabled. [1]
Ongoing news
- Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Opinion
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
Update on German Wikipedia Flagged Revisions
Predicting admin elections; studying flagged revision debates; classifying editor interactions; and collecting the Wikipedia literature
26 March 2012
Studying German flagged revisions, French library agreement, German court case
12 April 2010
Financial statements, discussions, milestones
8 March 2010
BLP deletions cause uproar
25 January 2010
Flagged revisions petitions, image donations, brief news
28 December 2009
Vibber resigns, Staff office hours, Flagged Revs, new research and more
28 September 2009
WikiTrust, Azerbaijan-Armenia edit wars
31 August 2009
An extended look at how we got to flagged protection and patrolled revisions
31 August 2009
Misleading media storm over flagged revisions
31 August 2009
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
24 August 2009
New board member, flagged revisions, Eurovision interviews
25 May 2009
End of Encarta, flagged revisions poll, new image donation, and more
30 March 2009
Commons, conferences, and more
9 March 2009
Flagged Revisions, historical image discovery, and more
16 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Wikipedia's future, WikiDashboard, and "wiki-snobs"
8 February 2009
Wikipedia in the news: Flagged Revisions, Internet Explorer add-on
31 January 2009
Jimbo requests that developers turn on Flagged Revisions
24 January 2009
News and notes: Flagged Revisions and permissions proposals, hoax, milestones
10 January 2009
Sighted revisions introduced on the German Wikipedia
12 May 2008
Page creation for unregistered users likely to be reenabled
29 October 2007
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
2 April 2007
The Seigenthaler incident: One year later
4 December 2006
Wikipedia in the news
2 October 2006
Single-user login, stable versioning planned soon
7 August 2006
As of 16 February 2009, the German-language Wikipedia has completed its first pass on flagging every article (with just a few dozen recently created unreviewed articles). Of these articles, 99.47% have their most current revision reviewed. Since reaching completion of flagging all existing articles, the backlog of out-of-date reviews has shrunk considerably, from about 14,000 last week to less than 4,600 now. The oldest out-of-date revision is now only about 6 days old (down from 17 – 21 days), and this has been decreasing over the past few days. Editors hope to maintain a maximum backlog of 5 days in the future. A review statistics tool for monitoring German Wikipedia's progress is available here.
Image restoration leads to new discovery
In the course of restoring a public domain photograph of the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre—one of many high-quality scans freely available from the United States Library of Congress website—Wikipedian Durova discovered something that had gone unnoticed by curators: four dead bodies, barely visible before restoration, in the foreground of the image. The Library of Congress staff is updating their records to reflect the discovery. Durova reports their reply:
| “ | Upon viewing the high-res TIFF file we made of the file, the human remains are quite visible, indeed. Thank you very much for contacting us regarding this image, and for your interest in our collections. You can imagine that among a collection of 14 million items here, there are a lot of secrets waiting to be uncovered! | ” |
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Unrestored version: mislabeled scattered debris of camp in Library of Congress bibliographic notes. -
Restored version: four human remains in foreground partially wrapped in blankets. -
Detail from restored version: a face in profile, hand at right.
CSD:T1 repealed
One of the Criteria for Speedy Deletion, T1, has been recently repealed. The T1 criterion was for speedy deletion of "Templates in Template: namespace that are divisive and inflammatory." The T1 criterion has a long and interesting history related to the "userbox wars" of 2006; the criterion was added in the wake of this debate and was used for deleting several userboxes, though it continued to be controversial. Today, templates for deletion have a separate deletion page (TFD); templates may be nominated there for deletion.
Recent Changes Camp
RecentChangesCamp is being planned for February 20 – 22 in Portland, Oregon. The conference is an unconference focused on wikis, including wiki technology and communities. The conference has been an annual event since 2006; it is hosted by various members of the wiki community. Along with Wikimania and WikiSym, it is one of three ongoing annual wiki conferences. Everyone in a wiki community or who is interested in wikis is welcome to attend the event. To find out more, visit the RecentChangesCamp wiki. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/In focus
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Checkuser and Oversight elections closed on the 15th. Former arbitrator Dmcdevit was reappointed as an Oversight and Checkuser. The appointment was a restoration of tools to an editor who had previously held them; it appears to have nothing to do with the aforementioned elections. The Committee formally deferred appointing a new IRC liaison; Wizardman was announced as the replacement of FT2 for this position a few weeks back, but the appointment was withdrawn. The Committee announced their proposal for a codified process of removing "advanced" user permissions. Significant opposition has arisen to the proposed process for emergency removals.
The Arbitration Committee neither opened nor closed any cases this week, leaving five open.
Evidence phase
- SemBubenny: A case about the communication behavior of SemBubenny (formerly Mikkalai), and his use of administrator tools in disputed deletions.
- Ayn Rand: A case about editorial behavior, such as alleged POV-pushing and bad faith, in relation to the Ayn Rand article. The Arbitration Committee accepted the case as they found that all other avenues of dispute resolution had failed to resolve the dispute.
- Date delinking: A case regarding the behavior of editors in the ongoing dispute relating to policy on linking dates in articles. An injunction has been issued prohibiting large-scale linking or delinking of dates until the case is resolved.
- Scientology: A case regarding behavioral problems in Scientology-related articles; the case is related to the prior case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/COFS.
Voting
- Fringe science: A case initially filed about the behavior of ScienceApologist, but opened to look at editing in the entire area of fringe science, and the behavior of editors who are involved in the area of dispute. In a proposed decision now being voted on by arbitrators, Coren has proposed the creation of a new type of arbitration remedy, "supervised editing", which an editor may be placed under when he or she does not "engage other editors or the editorial process appropriately". A designated supervisor would be permitted to revert or refactor the edits of the other editor at his or her discretion, ban the editor from articles, or require that the editor propose any substantial content edits to the supervisor, who will make the edits on his behalf. After the period of supervision terminates, the supervisor will submit a report to the committee who will revise the remedy that placed the editor under supervision. Other remedies include placing ScienceApologist under such supervision, restricting Martinphi from editing policy and guideline pages, admonishing Pcarbonn, and issuing general warnings to behave and seek mediation. Arbitrator voting is in progress.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-02-16/Humour