Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-07-17/News and notes

News and notes

News and notes

Blocking changes implemented

The blocking changes announced last week were put into place on Tuesday. In light of the potential effects this would have on logged-in users working from a shared IP address, it was suggested that the change might warrant a range block of AOL proxies. These have been a chronic problem due to the difficulty in blocking vandals while still allowing legitimate editors to participate. However, soon after this was proposed Angela Beesley reported that AOL had agreed to set XFF headers, which will hopefully allow administrators to block one AOL user without affecting others.

Single-user login nearly ready

Single-user login, a long-awaited technical feature, is nearly ready to be implemented. The change would allow users to register a username once and have it serve as an universal username across all languages and all Wikimedia projects. To prepare for the change, developers requested that people make their email addresses and passwords uniform in all of their accounts; after the implementation, "all old accounts will be valid on all Wikimedia wikis, using a consistent username and password everywhere" after the migration of any conflicting accounts.

Fair use amendment implemented

An amendment was added to the fair use criteria after three weeks of discussion (see archived story). It allows deletion of newly uploaded images that claim fair use but fail to satisfy the criteria 48 hours after the uploader has been notified.

The process of choosing a new logo for the Incubator entered a new step this week when voting proceeded to a new phase. After a previous vote resulted in an overwhelming result for a "meddie egg" logo, the community is now deciding between three variants of the logo. Each of the variants differs in the orientation of the middle of the "egg". A poll on the name of the Incubator wiki also continues, as does a vote on a logo for the developers' Test Wikipedia.

Briefly