This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from " World domination". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

( ← Prev)	Signpost archives	( Next →)

"The Wikipedia Story"

BBC presenter Clive Anderson will host a half-hour show about Wikipedia, entitled " The Wikipedia Story". The show, scheduled to air on Tuesday, July 24 at 11:30 a.m. British Summer Time (10:30 a.m. UTC) on BBC Radio 4, is described as "[asking] whether Wikipedia is a valuable source of human knowledge or a symptom of the spread of mediocrity." It includes interviews from Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger, former Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry, Web 2.0 critic Andrew Keen, and singer Mike Scott, who was involved in an edit war on his own article [1]. The show will be available on BBC Radio 4's website ( RealAudio link) or available as a podcast ( Radio 4 Choice podcast) for about a week after its original airing.

Visa ruling incorrectly mentions Wikipedia

A Federal Magistrates' Court of Australia ruling that overturned the denial of a visa to an Armenian citizen repeatedly mentions Wikipedia, in an apparent misunderstanding:

21. It should be noted that the reference to the web site www.armeniapedia.org (the web site) is taken to be a reference to what I understand the parties to accept is a linked web site to the web site known as "Wikipedia".

The court appeared to have assumed that Armeniapedia.org was the same as, or related to, Wikipedia; some of the court's individual findings are questions about the reliability of Wikipedia, not Armeniapedia.

Briefly

• The Volapük Wikipedia reaches 30,000 articles.
• The Asturian Wiktionary has reached 1,000 entries.
• The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 1,000 entries.
• The Latvian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Slovenian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The French Wikiversity has reached 2,000 pages.
• The Ewe Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The English Wikipedia has reached 150,000,000 edits and 750,000 local media files.
• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wiktionary has reached an average of three edits per page.
• The French Wikisource has reached 2,000 registered users.
• The Afrikaans Wikiquote has reached 100 articles.

Administrator writes SEO tips

Durova, who is an administrator, wrote an article for a search engine optimisation magazine in SEO Tips & Tactics From A Wikipedia Insider. Her article begins with an example of what happens when ignorance of the ways of Wikipedia meet the transparency in Wikipedia's archives: the ease in which biased edits from Congressional computers have been traced. Evidence can be gathered even without additional administrator tools. Durova posits eight "white hat strategies" for driving traffic to a client's site, concluding that one should "Look for approaches that reconcile your goal of sending traffic to websites with Wikipedia's goal of being an informative and reliable first stop for research". A follow-up comment agrees with her sentiments that being ethical with Wikipedia is the only way to go.

Cult of the Amateur review

Last week, the Signpost carried a review of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur ( see archived story); The Plain Dealer also carried a review, albeit more sympathetic to the views of the author. The reviewer found Keen's book "scary and convincing", and he believes that the book offers food for thought for those who participate in blogosphere. His only criticisms relate to the Keen's use of anecdotes to make his arguments, and his ignorance of the role of traditional media in certain events that he blamed on the influence of bloggers.

Wikipedia editors said to lack maturity

Entitled Wikipedia - Can Teenagers Write An Encyclopedia?, the article written by Sam Vaknin in the Global Politician argued that Wikipedia's flaw lies in the inexperience of its editors, who, the article claims, are mostly under the age of 25, or "teenagers". Blissfully ignoring the possibility of under-25s attending or having attended an institution of higher learning, or the use of consensus on Wikipedia articles, the article debunks the ability of "teenagers" to satisfactorily evaluate and synthesise third-party sources and other material: "Knowledge is not comprised of lists of facts, "facts", factoids, and rumors". It asserts that knowledge cannot be democratised; instead, it must be "learned", and established through merit. Finally, the article argues for the existence of a "pernicious" feedback loop between Wikipedia, Google, MySpace and other Internet properties frequented by the younger generation, a feedback loop that apparently results in the teens of MySpace dictating Google's search results.

Other mentions in the news

Other mentions of Wikipedia in the online press include:

• Tetrapods - about the oddly-shaped wave-breaking blocks on the coast of Japan
• Websites, classic films on English study list - New South Wales, Australia, students read pages from Wikipedia as part of the English syllabus
• Old growth Chugach National Forest celebrates 100th birthday - Wikipedia cited about creation of national rainforest

Administrators

Seven users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Melburnian ( nom), carlossuarez46 ( nom), ST47 ( nom), DerHexer ( nom), Philippe ( nom), Stephan Schulz ( nom) and MoRsE ( nom)

Bots

Two bots bot tasks were approved to begin operating or begin performing a new task this week: EchoBot ( task request) and Android Mouse Bot ( task request).

Featured content

Nine articles were promoted to featured status last week: Beagle ( nom), Bernard Quatermass ( nom), House with Chimaeras ( nom), Siege of Malakand ( nom), Zhou Tong (archer) ( nom), Ronald Niel Stuart ( nom), Chad ( nom), Structural history of the Roman military ( nom) and Soviet invasion of Poland (1939) ( nom).

One article was de-featured last week: Spring Heeled Jack ( nom)

Five lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of polio survivors ( nom), List of counties in Rhode Island ( nom), Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture ( nom), Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score ( nom) and Wilco discography ( nom).

No portals, topics or sounds were promoted to featured status last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Pierre Rossier, Cameroon, Fighting in ice hockey, Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Domenico Selvo, and Cyclol.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Earth's atmosphere, An example of homeomorphism, Horse anatomy, Plastic utensils with photoelasticity, Sather Tower, King Kelly, and A diagram of osmotic pressure on blood cells.

Nine pictures were promoted to featured status last week and are shown below.

• 
  Beautiful Demoiselle (Calopteryx virgo)
• 
  Holoplatys
• 
  Sitting Bull
• 
  Lightning strike
• 
  What Mars might look like at various stages while being terraformed
• 
  Iberian Peninsula
• 
  Stable fly (Stomoxys calcitrans)
• 
  Michele Merkin
• 
  Panoramic view of Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), and changes with a version number higher than that will not yet be active.

Fixed bugs

• Visiting Special:Search by manually entering a URL with a blank search string now redirects to Special:Search rather than Main Page. ( r24207, bug 8054)
• There was a fix for CSS validity in the way the stylesheet for <source> tags was included. ( r24208, bug 10594)
• A configuration issue causing occasional problems with CAPTCHAs and other image processing-related tasks was fixed. ( bug 10610)
• Some code related to Opera browsers was corrected so that styles for correcting rendering in older versions of the browser were correctly applied to version 9.2 but not to 9.5. ( r24270, bug 10638)
• The code for selecting multiple checkboxes by clicking on the first and shift-clicking on the last (on pages like Special:Watchlist/edit and Special:Undelete) has been made more portable (i.e. it now works correctly on a wider range of browsers), and its behaviour in some unusual cases has been improved. ( r24272, bug 10642)

New features

• Special:ProtectedPages now specifies whether pages are cascade protected or not. ( r24195, bug 10614)
• A warning now appears when illegal characters are given in the 'Destination filename' box at the image upload form. ( r24241, bug 10631)

Other technology news

• The Python Wikipediabot Framework is now being stored on Wikimedia servers, at http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/pywikipedia/trunk/pywikipedia/.

Ongoing news

• Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla.

The Arbitration Committee accepted two new cases this week, and closed one case.

Closed case

• CharlotteWebb: A case arising from the revelation by Jayjg, who has checkuser access, that CharlotteWebb had edited from TOR proxies. This occurred during CharlotteWebb's request for adminship, which then failed to reach consensus. As a result of the case, the Arbitration Committee noted that CharlotteWebb remains a user in good standing and is welcome to resume editing, and reminded Jayjg to seek to resolve this type of dispute privately before making public statements alleging misbehavior.

New cases

• Catalonia: A case involving alleged edit warring, possible sockpuppetry and other misconduct, including alleged misuse of blocking tools, by various editors on Catalonia, Valencian Community and related articles.

• Boris Stomakhin: A case involving a dispute between Biophys and Vlad fedorov, involving alleged BLP and 3RR violations, block evasion and edit warring.

Evidence phase

• Vision Thing, initiated by Infinity0, concerns alleged edit-warring on anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, and related articles. The dispute has already been the subject of a prior arbitration case, Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Infinity0, involving some of the same parties.

• Pigsonthewing 2, initiated by Moreschi, concerns the conduct of Pigsonthewing, including a series of conflicts between this user and other editors involving the use of microformats on Wikipedia and other matters.

• Attachment Therapy, initiated by Shotwell, alleges that other editors have engaged in POV pushing and tendentious editing on attachment therapy and related articles.

• Great Irish Famine, a case initiated by SirFozzie, involves allegations including misuse of sources and harassment relating to Great Irish Famine and other Ireland/Northern Ireland articles.

• COFS, a case initiated by Durova based on a discussion at the community sanctions noticeboard. The case involves allegations of tendentious editing by various editors, sockpuppetry, conflicts of interest, and other user conduct issues on Scientology related articles.

Voting phase

• Armenia-Azerbaijan 2: A case alleging misconduct by various editors, some of whom were previously placed on revert parole in an earlier case, on articles relating to Armenia, Azerbaijan, the conflict between them, and related matters. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies, supported by SimonP, extending to revert parole applied to various editors to probation, and imposing these remedies also on anyone who edits the articles aggressively.

• Zacheus-jkb: A case involving the actions of -jkb- and Zacheus. -jkb- alleges that Zacheus has published personal data on him, and has made legal threats. Zacheus denies the allegations, and Thatcher131 alleges on the talkpage that -jkb- has himself revealed personal information on Zacheus. In the proposed decision, the Arbitration Committee would admonish both editors for their previous misconduct against each other but note that the problematic conduct seems to have stopped, and warn the parties not to resume practices such as posting identifying information about other editors or making personal attacks.

• Abu badali: A case alleging that Abu badali has disruptively tagged non-free images for deletion, even when a valid fair-use justification exists, and has harassed editors who have complained about this behavior. Abu badali denies the allegations. The proposed decision submitted by arbitrator Fred Bauder would place Abu badali on probation for one year. Arbitrator voting on the remedy, an alternative, and some of the findings of fact underlying it is split. However, a remedy "counseling" Badali has the support of five arbitrators.

Motion to close

• Piotrus: A case involving User:Piotrus and other editors on Central and Eastern Europe-related articles. In the case, multiple parties have accused one another of edit-warring, incivility, unethical behavior, and biased editing. If closed, an amnesty would be granted for prior editing problems on these articles, and the parties would be reminded of the need to edit courteously and co-operatively in the future. However, two arbitrators have opposed the motion to close, citing possible article probation remedies.

• Paranormal: A case involving the actions of various users, especially as regards bias and attribution, on "articles on paranormal and pseudoscientific topics", such as parapsychology and Electronic voice phenomenon. If closed, Dradin and Kazuba would be cautioned, but Fred Bauder has opposed closure, citing "many unresolved issues".

• Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram: A review of the Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram case. Ideogram and Sean William allege that Certified.Gangsta engaged in tendentious editing since the main case was closed and violated a revert parole imposed in the decision in that case. Since Certified.Gangsta has not edited since early June, a motion to suspend the case pending his return has the support of four arbitrators.

• Miskin: A case involving the actions of Miskin, who was blocked by Swatjester for one month (later reduced to one week) for an alleged violation of the three revert rule following an earlier history of blocks. If closed, the committee would advise Miskin to seek consensus on an article's talkpage if his initial edits are reverted, and caution Swatjester to take the length of time since previous blocks into account in deciding on the length of a later block and to treat all editors violating the 3RR fairly.