Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-07-04
Work proceeds on bugs in MediaWiki upgrade as watchlists break
Wikipedia's upgrade to version 1.5 of the MediaWiki software continued this week as developers finished converting the remaining projects and moved on to fixing newly discovered problems. The bug that undoubtedly affected the most people was a temporary glitch in the operation of user watchlists.
Editing on Wikipedia after the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.5 began last Tuesday after a day of read-only service to accomplish the transition (see archived story). Once the English Wikipedia was finished, the developers moved on to upgrade the remaining Wikipedia languages, along with Wikibooks, the one project that had not been converted to version 1.5 before work began on Wikipedia. For the most part, this was accomplished with less inconvenience than the day that the English Wikipedia had to be put in read-only mode. Chief Technical Officer Brion Vibber noted that the second-largest project, the German Wikipedia, was not too large to be upgraded overnight, and was fortunate "to have an 'overnight' in the first place."
Since Wikipedia and other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation are used for beta testing the software, to a certain extent bugginess is to be expected at the beginning of an upgrade cycle. A number of problems were listed on a page for MediaWiki 1.5 bugs, although the MediaZilla bug tracker is the place where bugs are actually reported and monitored.
Watchlist issues
At some point around 12:00 (UTC) on Thursday, 1 July, the watchlist feature broke down and no longer displayed new changes to pages being watched. This is a serious problem, since as Carbonite pointed out, "It takes a lot longer to revert vandalism without current watchlists." During this time, vandalism was reported on the Main Pages of both the English and German Wikipedias.
The effect of this bug was that if the most recent edit to a watched page came after the breakdown, the user's watchlist would no longer show edits to that page. Earlier edits to watched pages would still show up as long as they were still the most recent and no newer edits had been made. As a temporary workaround, Nohat mentioned that it was possible to copy one's entire watchlist and create a user page with all of these links. Clicking on "Related changes" would then reproduce the same behavior as a normal watchlist.
The reason for the problem was finally tracked down as Vibber reported, "This was the result of a bad interaction between an experimental database optimization in the watchlist, and a fix for a minor issue in recentchanges which broke the assumptions the watchlist optimization hack was based on." Watchlists disappeared entirely for a brief period as the developers tried to resolve the issue. Eventually a solution was found, which allowed older edits of watched pages to be seen again, along with edits coming after the fix. However, watchlists apparently will not be able to show edits that happened between the time of the initial glitch and the time it was repaired.
Mailing list moderation efforts hiked
To deal with an atmosphere that some felt was dragging the English Wikipedia's mailing list down to the level of Usenet, the list administrators have stepped up the level of moderation being applied over the past week.
Reacting to longstanding complaints that disruptive behavior was detracting from the ability to hold serious discussions, the administrators of the wikiEN-l mailing list have become more active in exercising their control over postings to the list. Rather than ban people from the list outright, however, they have focused on placing problematic posters on moderation, meaning that their messages get screened by the administrators before being forwarded to the list.
The approach manifested itself after two new participants on the list (one calling himself "Henry Kissinger") posted a number of messages in succession. As nearly all of the messages were unnecessary, irrelevant, or otherwise violated general principles of "netiquette", Jayjg called this a "breaching experiment" and asked for them to be blocked from the list. On Tuesday, list administrator Mark Ryan announced "in the interests of transparency" that he had placed these two contributors on moderation "because their messages to the mailing list appear to be gibberish."
This practice was soon extended on Thursday to Nathan J. Yoder, who joined the list for the first time to complain about a block imposed for violating his temporary injunction against personal attacks. Another list administrator, David Gerard, promptly placed Yoder on moderation for continued personal attacks. This led Yoder to claim bias as Gerard was one of the arbitrators participating in the decision, to which Gerard replied that list readers "are largely sick of fifty-message threads of querulous ranting, so they're not being encouraged." Gerard commented generally, "we'll be trying harder to stop the rubbish at a sensible point", and suggested that moderating all new accounts would be considered as an option.
At this point an unknown user styling himself "A Nony Mouse", who had previously joined the list to object to the treatment of some users back in May, returned to the discussion. Joining a thread in which Yoder had raised charges of "abuse of admin power", he made a couple of posts targeting Ambi and David Gerard in particular with some rather crude language. He promptly returned, posting from a different email address, to say that the administrators "booted me off the list for speaking truth to power." However, Mark Ryan clarified that "A Nony Mouse" had simply been placed on moderation for his "extreme lack of civility" and tried to get a commitment from him to "be constructive and civil." Meanwhile, Gerard indicated that new subscribers to the mailing list would now start moderated by default.
A dilemma for the administrators is that wikiEN-l is also one of the places to which blocked users are directed, so that they still have an avenue to communicate about the reasons for the block. In response to previous complaints, the possibility of creating a separate list dedicated only to complaints from blocked users has been mentioned. It was suggested that this would focus the attention of the most disruptive people elsewhere. However, others recalled that wikiEN-l itself was created in part to divert such traffic from wikipedia-l, and pointed out that most people will have no interest in participating on a list purely about problem behavior.
Cricket Wikiproject turns out extensive featured material in June
June saw the Cricket WikiProject produce plenty of featured content—two featured articles, and five featured lists. In total, there were 9 new featured articles, 6 new featured lists, and 4 new featured pictures this week.
Cricket contributions
Led by Nichalp, ALoan, SmokeDog and a recently returned Jguk, cricket-loving wikipedians helped the Cricket WikiProject put together a notable month this June, producing two new cricket-related featured articles, The Ashes and Sydney Riot of 1879, while nominating a dozen cricket-related featured list candidates and seeing five of them attain featured list status thus far. This week, 4 were promoted—Sri Lankan national cricket captains, Bangladeshi national cricket captains, Indian national cricket captains, and List of cricket terms. The project can now boast a total of 13 featured works, including eight featured articles.
Featured content
There are 9 more featured articles following the promotion of this week's featured article candidates. The new featured articles are Second Crusade, Order of Canada, Indian Railways, Antarctic krill, Captain Marvel (DC Comics), Buckingham Palace (finally promoted after two failed nominations), The Giver, Hubble Space Telescope (which had previously been a featured article and was then demoted), and Liberal Party of Canada leadership convention, 1968, bringing June's featured article total to 40, the highest number of new features in a month since March. On 30 June, 2005, Raul654 noted that, after taking account of articles which had had their "featured article" status removed, there had been a net increase of 181 featured articles so far this year, an average increase of exactly one per day.
In addition to the four cricket-related featured lists, List of Indian districts and List of U.S. House committees were also featured. June's featured list total was 13, and 9 nominations failed.
4 images were featured this week after passing through featured picture candidacy, and June's total was 14.
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Mouse cutaway
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Starlette at Cannes Film Festival
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
After a period of relatively slow activity, the Arbitration Committee increased its efforts to conclude existing matters last week by closing cases. Two requests for arbitration were accepted, one of which involved reopening a case involving Instantnood that had been closed prematurely.
Case without sanctions
On Thursday, the committee closed a case involving Jguk, SouthernComfort and others and their involvement in the dispute over the use of BCE/CE vs. BC/AD notation for historical dates (see archived story). As noted in the decision, the current policy is similar to the handling of British and American spellings, where the appropriate choice may depend on the article. In the general case, either style is an acceptable option so long as the article itself is consistent, but "revert warring over optional styles is unacceptable".
After considering a number of possible findings, the arbitrators ultimately decided not to impose any bans or editing restrictions. The ruling only stated that "Jguk, Southerncomfort, and other involved users are warned strongly to abide by our policies", indicating that they should not simply change the dating system of an article outright, although establishing consistency within an article is allowed.
Closure of the case lifts an injunction previously imposed on Jguk that prohibited him from modifying common era dating entirely. Shortly before the ruling was issued, Jguk returned to regular editing, after he had left Wikipedia when the temporary injunction passed (although he began pursuing the debate on the mailing list instead during his editing hiatus).
Two users banned from subject matter areas
Two other matters were also closed Thursday, the cases against Skyring and Njyoder. Both editors were placed on personal attack paroles for a year, allowing them to be blocked for up to 24 hours per violation. Skyring also received a one-month ban from editing Wikipedia entirely.
Skyring's case arose from a complex dispute over Government of Australia, and resulted in him being banned from making edits on that subject for a year. It later expanded into an incident of apparent "wiki-stalking", in which he made provocative edits to a number of articles that had recently been edited by one of his opponents, Jtdirl. Jtdirl and Adam Carr were admonished for some of their actions in the dispute, but no sanctions were imposed on them.
The case against Njyoder focused on two things: his conduct on Bishonen's request for adminship, and his editing of articles related to gender and sexuality. The arbitrators found that he had removed large chunks of material from articles over the objections of other editors, resulting in an extended dispute. The ruling noted that Njyoder's discussion style was "marked by repetitive plowing of the same ground over and over". As a result, he was banned from editing articles on the subject for a year, in addition to his personal attack parole.
One more case was closed on Sunday, concerning a group of accounts believed to be used by the same person, as part of a push to preserve disputed articles about "Islamofascism" and "Islamic fascism", which have now been consolidated into the broader Neofascism and religion article. The arbitrators identified User:Enviroknot as the primary account and decreed that this person should use only that account. In addition, finding that Enviroknot had made multiple personal attacks, they imposed a one-year ban from all editing.
New cases
In addition to the reopening of the Instantnood case (see previous stories), the arbitrators agreed to consider a case against JarlaxleArtemis, who had already been the subject of a previous arbitration ruling. The complaint, made by Psychonaut and joined by several others, alleged that JarlaxleArtemis had relapsed into "neglect and abuse of Wikipedia policy in spite of repeated warnings", a charge JarlaxleArtemis denied.
Mentor resigns
Kim Bruning, one of the users assigned as a mentor to Netoholic as a result of an earlier arbitration case, resigned from his position on Tuesday. Explaining his reasons, Bruning suggested that Netoholic refused to talk with his mentors and was using them to game the system. For his part, Netoholic said that he was happy to continue working with his other mentors, Raul654 and Grunt, but that Bruning's way of handling the mentorship put him on the defensive and made him less willing to communicate freely. Netoholic stated that in his view the situation was improving, "with the exception of a couple users who really like to push my buttons".
Admin milestones reached, process debated
New requests for adminship resulted in two landmarks last week, as Wikipedia reached a total of 500 administrators and one old/new admin set a record for the number of people supporting his nomination. Meanwhile, an ongoing discussion on the wikiEN-l mailing list debated whether the process was working adequately.
A record was broken on 27 June, when Ta bu shi da yu became an administrator. He received 111 support votes, beating the previous record of 109 support votes held by User:Bishonen (see archived story).
This was his third request for adminship, and he also joins the small number of admins who have voluntarily surrendered their admin privileges and later reapplied. His initial nomination in October 2004 succeeded with the substantial achievement of 57 support votes. However, Ta bu shi da yu left Wikipedia for a while in March and asked for his admin status to be removed, although he still found it difficult to stay away.
Upon returning to greater activity, Ta bu shi da yu requested adminship again, and appeared to be on the way to smashing the record already on that occasion. However, a prank on Dalek, the featured article appearing on the Main Page, turned a number of people to oppose and Ta bu shi da yu chose to withdraw that request.
Not counting the Election Officials, who were temporarily made administrators for the purposes of the Board of Trustees election, Wikipedia picked up its 500th admin on Sunday when Hedley was promoted. Other users receiving administrator status during the past week included Willmcw, Y0u, FCYTravis, Bratsche, Allen3, R3m0t, Mzajac and Spangineer.
Close calls and reform proposals
Meanwhile, partly as an outgrowth of a few more controversial nominations, there has been some renewed discussion of how liberally admin privileges should be handed out. Talrias offered a suggestion that the rollback function be granted separately, a proposal that would be feasible now that MediaWiki 1.5 provides more fine-grained user access levels. Opinions on the idea were mixed, while others took the opportunity to criticize the increasingly high expectations for admin candidates in terms of edit counts and length of participation.
One of the nominations that proved to be a close call, that of Weyes, suffered from some questionable votes and attempts to disrupt the process. The problems and the difficulty in evaluating the outcome prompted the bureaucrats to first extend the vote and then ultimately restart it. This resulted in an extended but inconclusive debate about whether the situation had been handled properly and how to determine whether a vote counted. Nevertheless, the second vote produced a very similar result to the first, 47 supporting and 18 opposing where the initial vote had 49 in favor and 17 against. On Sunday, Weyes indicated on his user page that he would be leaving Wikipedia. It was not entirely clear whether this was prompted by his failed request for adminship.
Media turn to experts for evaluation of Wikipedia
The press took another opportunity to ask academic experts to evaluate the quality of Wikipedia articles in their fields last week, while one newspaper actually wondered if Wikipedia's ability to anticipate upcoming events was taking things too far. More discussion of the aborted wikitorial project at the Los Angeles Times also continued to trickle in.
Wikipedia scores 'mixed grades'
The Roanoke Times this week asked college professors to assess Wikipedia articles on their subjects of expertise [1]. The motivation for the study was to consider the 'nagging question' of whether Wikipedia can be trusted, and the results were variable.
Bob Bodnar, a geologist from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, looked at articles on the geologic timescale and organic chemistry. The former was described as 'quite accurate' and 'consistent with the most recent data', while the latter contained useful links to diagrams, which Bodnar had used in preparing teaching materials. Roanoke College political science professor Bill Hill looked up John Taylor of Caroline, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers, and found that each was 'accurate and pertinent, if brief', although he found the de Tocqueville article 'too superficial'. The Times writer noted that de Tocqueville's article has just over 1000 words, while actress Katie Holmes has almost 1900.
Retired biology professor Dave West provided the sternest criticism when looking at an article on naturalist Fritz Müller. Superficially it looked 'detailed and well-researched', but West, who has written a biography of Müller, found the article 'fraught with errors', including an incorrect date of birth and a picture of someone else. The Times journalist alerted a Wikipedia editor, who corrected the image and birth date, and said he would welcome correspondence with Dr. West to improve the article further (an attitude later praised by Jimmy Wales as making him 'insanely happy' [2]). The incorrect details seem to have arisen from confusion with another 19th century scientist, the Swiss doctor and zoologist Fritz Müller.
The article concluded that 'Everybody makes mistakes - even newspaper columnists - and Wikipedia's system for correcting those mistakes and adding information is its strong point', but that 'my problem, as a journalist, is knowing when it's reliable enough'.
Continuing 'Wikitorial' fallout
The LA Times' abortive experiment in applying wiki technology to editorials (see archived story) continues to generate comment. This week, the BBC website took a look at the issue [3]. Pete Clifton, editor of the BBC News website, had earlier suggested that the BBC might one day incorporate wikis in some form into the BBC website, but about 70% of site readers were opposed to this idea. Clifton therefore said that the BBC would be keeping 'a firm hand on the news tiller' for the moment, and recommended Wikinews for readers interested in seeing what wikis could do for reporting. "I'm impressed by the amazing power of wikipedia", said Clifton, "but as a fully fledged old buffer I feel distinctly more uneasy with the same approach to news".
Meanwhile, London newspaper The London Line theorised on why the LA Times' experiment failed [4]. Noting that vandalism is inevitable on any wiki, the paper said that a wiki could only generate useful content 'if the vandals are outnumbered by those who are more publicly-spirited'. The LA Times lacked the community to ensure that this was the case, but the paper cited Wikimedia foundation projects Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikibooks as examples of wikis with enough of a dedicated user base to be resistant to damaging vandalism.
Mississippi newspaper pleads for less US election coverage
One of the most commonly praised aspects of Wikipedia is that it is able to keep its coverage of current events right up to date. Some people, however, would prefer the odd respite from the continuous updating of time-sensitive articles. The Mississippi Sun-Herald this week issued a plaintive request for a break from U.S. presidential elections [5].
'Didn't we just finish a presidential election?', asked the article, lamenting the apparent lack of any break 'between the end of one nasty, heated campaign and the beginning of the next nasty, heated campaign'. Wikipedia, it noted, already has a 'rather extensive' entry on the U.S. presidential election, 2008, which even goes so far as to list fund-raising timetables and potential candidates.
The author of the article might be relieved to know that Wikipedia has at least refrained from speculating on elections yet further into the future. Articles on the presidential elections due between 2012 and 2028 have all been created, and then subsequently deleted, on the grounds that nothing encyclopaedic can yet be said about them.
Squabble over propriety of games on Wikipedia
The proliferation of various games being played on Wikipedia turned the subject from pure fun into a more serious debate last week, as growing uneasiness about game-playing led to calls for them to be removed from the site. Recent attempts to play chess or checkers on Wikipedia have been a particular focus of attention.
Complaints about these practices have come from a number of Wikipedia editors, who have been vocal recently on the wikiEN-l mailing list, citing the principle that Wikipedia exists to create an encyclopedia. Based on this reasoning, they would prefer that games and contests be directed towards writing articles or otherwise improving the content of Wikipedia. Meanwhile, others have defended the games as a lighthearted opportunity for people to interact and foster community spirit.
Most of the games currently listed in the Department of Fun have at least a nominal relationship to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia project. For example, there have been regular trivia contests and scavenger hunts where competitors must track down information in articles as part of the game. However, other games like chess are also included although they have only a tenuous connection to work on Wikipedia.
The chess game has been set up as a subpage in the sandbox, which is designed as a temporary space for people to experiment while learning how to edit Wikipedia. However, a chess championship page was set up in the Wikipedia namespace to conduct an extended tournament, with the games being subpages of the main championship page. An attempt to have this set of pages deleted was resoundingly rejected in May.
The creation of a checkers page by Jaberwocky6669 provoked a new round of debate on the appropriateness of these pages last week. The page was initially treated as a speedy delete by Danny, but then undeleted and submitted to votes for deletion. Jaberwocky6669 later nominated Wikipedia:N degrees of separation for deletion as well.
Besides the question of whether these belong on Wikipedia at all, several other objections were raised. Danny argued that it would distract people from the actual purpose of Wikipedia and potentially "turn it into yet another gaming site." He also pointed out that playing games involving active and rapid edits clutters up the log of recent changes for those patrolling for vandalism.
Ironically, sj noted that Danny had listed himself as a "member" of the Department of Fun. In defense of those participating in the games, he pointed out that relaxing and having fun would be beneficial to the community, and that some similarly "non-encyclopedic" projects like BJAODN are tolerated. Reflecting the changed mood of the discussion, however, voting on the potential deletion of the checkers page was going much differently from the earlier chess vote. The chess championship was not deleted partly because many of the players objected, but even Hedley, a participant in the tournament, said, "I agree that games may be going too far."
Various solutions have been proposed. Eloquence suggested ending use of the sandbox "as a VfD-resistant incubator for games which distract from the purpose of building an encyclopedia." A number of people have recommended that games unrelated to Wikipedia itself should be moved to Wikicities. Developer Tim Starling suggested that this operated as a sort of psychological barrier, however, being "on the wrong side of the virtual boundary which surrounds our homey little region of cyberspace." He offered instead to set up a separate wiki on the Wikimedia Foundation servers, assuming that this idea is supported by the community.
News and notes: Quarto, German award, meetup
Miscellaneous news items from the week gone by include publication of the Wikimedia newsletter, awards won by the German Wikipedia, a Wikipedia meetup in California, and work on articles related to the Live 8 concerts.
Wikimedia Quarto
The third issue of the quarterly Wikimedia Foundation newsletter, the Quarto, is now available in English and being translated into other languages. It includes messages from Jimmy Wales and the Board of Trustees, reports from each of the Foundation's projects, and also notes from the Foundation's first two local chapters in Germany and France. Recently an additional chapter was also organized in Italy.
Grimme Online Awards
The German Wikipedia won awards in two categories last week from the Adolf Grimme Institut. It took home the award in the category "Knowledge and Education" as part of the fifth annual Grimme Online Awards, with the jury describing Wikipedia as "an outstanding example of collaborative use of the internet". In addition, Wikipedia was the winner of an award voted on by internet users, the Intel Audience Award. The awards were announced last Thursday, 30 June, at a ceremony in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany.
California meetup and WikiProjects
Wikipedians in California have been busy planning activities the past week. The first Wikipedia meetup for the Los Angeles area has been scheduled for Monday, 25 July. Eric Shalov, who organized the event, has more information. Two WikiProjects for California have also been launched in the last week, the California WikiProject and the Southern California WikiProject.
Live 8 updates
Wikipedia's near-realtime coverage of major events continued with the Live 8 concerts over the weekend. Alterego reported that Live 8 was the Wikipedia article that received the most edits for Saturday, 2 July. Some of the pages for the individual concerts were being updated with the songs being played by each performer within moments of the song starting.