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2009-10-26

Interview with John Blossom, author of Content Nation

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By Cryptic C62

I recently read Content Nation: Surviving and Thriving as Social Media Changes Our Work, Our Lives, and Our Future, a recent book by John Blossom (User:Jblossom) that discusses the impact of social media and how it may transform our lives in the future. I happened to have a mutual contact with John, and after introducing myself, he agreed to participate in a Signpost interview. What follows is a wikified transcription of the interview.

1. Content Nation discusses the lonelygirl15 video series and likens it to the tale of Robinson Crusoe in that both stories took advantage of a young publishing form to showcase a new kind of storytelling. Content Nation also discusses Gutenberg's printing press as being the one single event that completely revolutionized the technology of publishing. Is there any one social media event or technology that you associate with Gutenberg's printing press as being the single revolutionary spark?

Good question. As I mention in the book, Saurier Duval's Museum of Modern Betas Web site lists more than 4,000 publishing tools and services that have been identified in just the past four years that social media-oriented. With this in mind, I think that it's a little difficult to choose one social media technology to Gutenberg's breakthrough with the movable type printing press. In fact, I would say that this is one of the key differences between social media's challenges to established publishing norms versus established publishing regimens. With the proliferation of publishing tools available to anyone with a Web connection, we have generated millions upon millions of Gutenbergs, and in doing so have created so many Gutenberg-style moments for different cultures at different times that it's easy to lose count of them.

With that in mind, I do think that there are a few key moments that stand out in the development of social media, some of which I have captured in the Content Nation book. We could, for example, consider the very first Web site on the Internet, which had its own primitive form of weblog that kept that then-small community abreast of events on that nascent medium. However, that moment is a bit like Alexander Bell's first telephone from one room to another in his laboratory to call for help from his assistant; significant, but not influential widely at the time as a communication. Since true social media is a highly scalable and affordable medium, I think that we need to look at the early 21st century as the time at which the breakthrough potential of social media became apparent. The three events that stand out most in my mind along these lines are the "Star Wars Kid" phenomenon, The Kryptonite lock incident and the introduction of services such as Blogger.com and TypePad.com.

"Star Wars Kid" was a 15 year-old boy in suburban Montreal who had the misfortune of having a particularly geekish video of him swirling a broom handle around like a light sabre posted on a file sharing service by some schoolmates. It spread like wildfire around the world, was remixed countless times and eventually gathered so much attention that people who felt sorry for the boy sent him donations to comfort him for his unwanted notoriety. Millions of people downloaded this otherwise obscure moment in a matter of weeks, eventually gaining coverage in major media outlets. I'd say this was a particularly important early moment for social media, because it demonstrated that any individual could gain worldwide distribution and monetization of content without the support of mainstream media outlets. In "Star Wars Kid," the fundamental mechanisms that underlie social media today were fully activated on a global scale in a highly influential way.

The Kryptonite bike lock, which was revealed by a video on an obscure user forum to be hackable with a simple ball-point pen, is another significant early moment for social media in that it showed that the ability of social media to have rapidly scalable influence could have a major impact on commerce. The makers of the bike lock were aware of the video clip almost from the time that it was posted, but didn't realize until several days later that a broader array of social media channels had made the product weakness known very widely across the Web. This forever broke through the assumption that a small handful of enthusiasts on a given topic could be treated as an isolated community. With social media, anyone could have global impact on brand perceptions overnight. The impact of this phenomenon is still being felt in today's commerce and is beginning to change the fundamentals of how marketing is being managed worldwide.

The advent of Blogger and TypePad, free weblogging services, is from a technology standpoint perhaps the closest thing to a Gutenberg moment in social media. In these free services that enabled anyone to become a global publisher on highly scalable publishing platforms at a moment's notice, we broke through at last the technology barriers that separated the average person from being full-fledged citizens of Content Nation. From the moment that publishing technology was taken out of the hands of people with specialized knowledge to virtually anyone with access to the Web, the fundamental premise of social media as a highly influential publishing tool that could scale up to challenge major media organizations for insight and attention was unleashed. Blogging now represents only a portion of social media publishing activity, but it's important to remember that even as little as four or five years ago it was considered just a fringe element. Today there is not a major media organization in the world that does not rely upon blogging tools in one form or another. Those same technologies enabled also the development of publications such as the Huffington Post, which aggregated headlines for major media outlets and blogs from prominent contributors. With blogging tools, not only could any individual become a publisher, but any individual or group could become an editorial force for content aggregation.

2. The third chapter of Content Nation (Social Structure in Content Nation: Changing Tribes, New Leaders) discusses a wide variety of statistics regarding the growth and impact of social media. Is there any one statistic that you think is most indicative of this growth? Or is it even possible for statistics to accurately describe the full effect that social media has had on our lives?

The statistics for social media growth are staggering from almost every perspective, which is in a sense why I came up with the concept of gauging "Content Nation" as a group of influencers within that greater body of social media participation. With more than 1.4 billion people using the Web today globally and more than 300 million Facebook users, it's easy to get lost in the scale of what is happening in social media. If each of the 74 million or so influencers who make up Content Nation influence just twenty unique individuals, they influence everyone on the Web today. That's a realistic picture of staggering proportions.

But if you had to choose one of the more common statistics I'd stick with a "top sites" global ranking as a good place to start. Based on current Alexa.com statistics, which are far from perfect but reasonably informative on a large global scale, four of the top ten Web sites in the world are pure social media plays (Facebook being the number two destination), and six of the top thirteen are pure social media plays, with Twitter now number twelve.

Now, add in all of the services and features at destinations such as Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN that are social media plays and it's fair to say that most people's online attention is focused primarily on social media. We want to communicate with the people who matter to us most, no matter the channels. Social media simply extends the graph of possible ways to do that influentially at a pace never seen before in human history.

Another key stat that I found interesting: 41 percent of Twitter users would prefer to contact someone via social media rather than by telephone.

3. No discussion of social media would be complete without mentioning the debilitating effect it has had on the music industry. That social media was able to single-handedly change the entire industry was made possible by technologies that allowed the creation and replication of music far more efficiently than ever before. As new technologies continue to develop, do you foresee any other industries upon which social media might have a similar effect?

Good question. You're right in that technologies such as file sharing services have undermined the presumed scarcity of well-reproduced music. The key factor that social media has also changed, though, is not simply enabling near-free distribution of music but also enabling much more effective marketing models. More music can be exposed to more people in more specific contexts than ever before. Moreover, more artists can develop direct relationships with their audiences through social media, enabling them to build their brands more cost-effectively. As I suggest in Content Nation, this goes beyond the "Long Tail" concept of popular music finding niche audiences over time. It's more about what I call the "big sombrero" economy, in which more money can be made in niche markets that may never grow into mass markets than in mass markets. I think that this "big sombrero" economic effect impacts many economies previously ignored by mass marketers. For example, just to stick with music for a moment, independent artists who have been long ignored by major music companies are able to develop global niche markets for their music without the support of major labels via online channels. None of the individually may be important artists, but in sum the attention that they gather will be more important than a few mass market stars. Instead of focusing on the copyright to a handful of mass-produced stars, the music industry should focus on enabling massively contextual markets for niche stars who have relationships with their markets that are hard to reproduce. It's quality relationships that are most valuable and hardest to reproduce.

To take it to other markets beyond pure media, eliminating artificial scarcity of supply and demand can help on many levels economically, especially for those who have been forced to use "middle men" to access markets. One example that I give in the book is especially important - finance. Services such as MicroPlace and Kiva are enabling individuals in small businesses to receive very small loans - microloans - to finance improvements to their business that commercial banks are unlikely to consider. This enables the flow of capital from one local economy to another, rather than flowing into centralized financial institutions that draw capital out of local economies. We are also seeing fundamental shifts in the development of scientific and technical products through the democratization of the distribution of scientific and technical research. Rather than having institutions pay thousands of dollars to subscribe to individual scholarly journals, the Open Access movement is promoting free access to such journals, with the editorial support required to ensure quality journals supported either by subsidies or payments by publishing authors. In a sense, though, even the Open Access movement is becoming somewhat moot, as researchers increasingly use social media services and other channels to make their preliminary findings available to colleagues before formal papers are published in journals. Yet again, it's valued relationships in valued contexts that create content value.

In these and many more examples, the real question is what produces value on a massive scale. For the music industry and many other industries it's been the creation of massive amounts of a small number of standardized products. Social media argues that if you make standardized things inexpensive or free - such as the open source software used to run many social media services - and focus on creating massive amounts of highly contextual products and services, economies and markets can grow more rapidly and effectively in a way that benefits the producers of the value in those markets more effectively. Centralized publishing, the DNA of civilization for much of the past five thousand years, is being replaced by social media DNA, which will enable economic systems that may not resemble today's economies in many ways but which will enable people to adapt more rapidly to changing markets and changes to our environment. Individuals working through social media may prove to be the key to our survival as a species as a result.

4. Content Nation presents an interesting discussion on the effects of irrigation on the San Joaquin Valley and the ancient civilization of Babylon. Although irrigation initially allowed Babylon to prosper, it also slowly increased the salinity of the soil, leading to Babylon's eventual downfall. You seem convinced that social media will help to prevent and solve problems such as this one. Could it also be possible that social media is a problem such as this one? Could it be that the vast benefits of social media also come with a yet-unseen detriment that will destroy us? If so, how can we keep something as explosive as social media in check?

All evolutionary traits have in them the potential for future disaster. A moth that adapted its color to be darker in response to the soot that collected on trees near coal-burning factories, which happened in the UK in the industrial era, may have faced problems when pollution controls came into force. So even when there are constructive changes, they may not lead to pleasant consequences for every population in the long run.

What I suggest in Content Nation is that the strength in social media as a redefining force in structuring the DNA of society is that it enables far greater diversity in potential paths to survival. As people can use social media to form collaborative relationships rapidly on any scale, there are more likely to be more diverse and scalable responses to the challenges facing humankind. So, to use an example from the book, rather than give one species of potato to millions of people in a contiguous population, the distributed and contextual relationships established in social media are more likely to result in one person going to source "A" for their food, the other person to source "B", and so on. In the process of doing so people who see that centrally dictated mass-market solutions no longer work for them will be able to accelerate their ability to locate and use acceptable substitutes.

However, as you point out, this style of adaptation does not come without a price. While I use relatively gentle language in the book to talk about this, the truth seems to be that social media is about to become the most disruptive force in society since the explosion of printing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries - and far more. With printing, and, eventually, the telegraph, ideas and information could spread far more rapidly and efficiently than ever before. This lead to a proliferation of political and economic concepts being offered to people that created huge disruptions to society -and, sometimes, as in France during the Reign of Terror or all over Europe in 1848, complete breakdown of governments and social structures. So it's quite possible that social media, with its ability to help humankind survive and thrive in the long run, may in fact trigger an era of economic, political and social breakdown, during which things look far more grim - and during which time it's possible that problems that require mass, centralized cooperation to solve go untended. I think that this is a given in many ways.

What comes out the other side of this transformation may not please us as contemporary humans. In becoming more like our ice age ancestors in our patterns of responses to evolutionary challenges, we will be leaving behind many of the patterns and responses of the past five to ten thousand years. In the short run, the mass-produced consumer society is likely to change, and is already changing, in response to the opportunities provided by people expressing their needs more efficiently to suppliers and suppliers responding more efficiently. Mass production as a market strength is being replaced by mass understanding. How long can China continue to grow on the back of slave labor? Certainly not as long as Babylon lasted. The markets themselves will change, enabling more efficient local and global responses to needs that distribute wealth more directly to market participants who create value. The villager who raises crops efficiently will have access to more markets more directly than ever before, and will be more at liberty to use sustainable agriculture methods to ensure that they are looking out for their personal well-being in the long run. With the ability to sustain their way of life, there will be fewer people willing to give up a sustainable living for slave labor. Over-cheap consumer goods will die because we won't be able to afford to make junk anymore.

If you think of the final scene of Content Nation, I intentionally leave out a lot of details, but I think what we wind up with is a highly mobile society, less invested in mass market goods for living a satisfactory life, less prone to the distractions of centralized messages, more focused on living in the moment and constantly in touch with a vast wealth of global and local information. We will act more as a global society, based not on centralized global institutions but on global, personal awareness in very specific contexts. Thinking of how the United States of America was at first simply a confederation of highly independent states, the long-term outlines and potential of Content Nation may seem unlikely at this time. And, as seen in the history of the U.S., violent and painful confrontations, lasting centuries, will be needed for the benefits of a new social structure to take form. But in the end, this is the transformation that we will need to face humandkind's ultimate challenges. We can go the way of Babylon, or we can go the way of the ice age hunter. Circumstances seem to push us towards the hunter's model, so I do argue that social media's ability to make the hunter's model work more effectively is the one that's likely to succeed overall.

5. Are there any final thoughts you'd like to offer us?

Social media is such a pervasive tool these days that it's easy to lose sight of how important its influence is becoming. The traditional media rattles on, but on a click by click basis we are changing human history. Humankind will simply never be the same. We are truly at the beginning of the most drastic changes to human civilization in over five thousand years, presaged by the rise of pervasive print publications and perfected through the truly pervasive ability for any human with access to the Web to be a global or local publisher with extraordinary personal and collective influence. Some of the changes being put into motion by Content Nation are obvious, some subtle, but they are all profound, with a depth that seems to creep up on us until key events reveal how far its influence has come. I think that 2010 will be a turning point for social media, a time when people start expressing themselves with more confidence that their power through social media will turn the tide of major events. A traditional Chinese curse goes, "May you live in interesting times." These will be certain to be interesting times, though I hope not as a curse.

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2009-10-26

New hires, German Wikipedian dies, new book tool, and more

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By Phoebe

New hires

Several new hires at the Wikimedia Foundation were announced in the last week.

Guillaume Paumier (user:guillom) has joined the Usability project, as the Product Manager for the Ford multimedia usability grant project (see previous story).

Pete Forsyth (User:Peteforsyth) has been hired as Wikimedia's first Public Outreach Officer. According to the announcement, he will work on "all of the Foundation's public outreach activities, including the development of educational materials (Bookshelf Project), the development of public outreach related grant proposals and the communication of volunteer-led outreach activities to a global audience".

Moka Pantages has been hired as a communications officer at the Foundation. She will work on communications projects, reporting to Jay Walsh.

Additionally, two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, have been hired on a contract basis to help with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia, according to a message from Erik Moeller.

German Wikipedia editor dies unexpectedly

User:Bradypus (Joachim Miesbauer), a long-time editor of the German Wikipedia, died unexpectedly on October 24 from a heart attack at the age of 38, according to reports from German Wikipedians. There is a condolences page on Wikipedia.

Bradypus had been an editor since 2004. His username came from the brown-throated Sloth (Bradypus variegatus), and he was very active in editing articles about mammals, particularly about primates. He was awarded the Zedler Medal from Wikimedia Deutschland in 2008 for his article on Ceratopsidae, a group of dinosaurs (German, English).

New version of Book tool launched

A new version of the Wikipedia Books tool (see previous story) was launched earlier this month, according to a blog post from PediaPress. The new tool launches a box at the top of the page when you click "Create a book", which then can be used to add more pages to the book by clicking the "add an article" link. Once you have a book started, you can also simply hover over an internal link to add it, via a popup interface. There is also an "add category" tool. The creator also now includes a "Suggest pages" tool, to suggest more articles for the book once you have at least one page chosen.

The tool is available to any logged-in user. More information can be found at Wikipedia:Books.

WatchKnow launched

Larry Sanger's project WatchKnow formally launched last week. WatchKnow is a nonprofit project to collect, organize and enable creation of educational videos. Although the project has been going since the summer, Sanger is planning a "grassroots" launch now.

Custom Google Search skin

As announced on the official Google blog, Google has unveiled a Wikipedia skin modification that integrates Google search features throughout the website. Instructions for applying the modification can be found at the userpage for the project: User:Csewiki.

Briefly

  • Wikizine #120, covering Wikimedia news from the last two weeks, came out October 24.
  • Erik Moller reported that the WMF is fully moved into their new offices.
  • Ed Chi released Part 4 of his group's work on Wikipedia's growth rate (see previous stories)
  • The next IRC staff office hours will take place on Thursday, October 29, featuring Kul Wadhwa, Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Business Development. [1]

Milestones

This day in history

2009-10-26

Editor profiled in Washington Post, Wikia magazines, and more

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By Tarheel95 and Aude

Portrait of a Wikipedian

The Washington Post featured a story last Friday on Wikipedian User:Epicadam (Adam Lewis) and his work on bringing the Washington, D.C. article to featured status. EpicAdam joined Wikipedia in Spring 2008 and in May 2008, announced his intention to make improvements to the Washington, D.C. article. In July, the article passed as a featured article candidate, and was featured on Wikipedia's Main Page on January 20, 2009 (Inauguration Day). Washington Post reporter Michael Rosenwald also quoted User:AgnosticPreachersKid, who described EpicAdam as "very, very courteous" when making edits on Wikipedia. Since the article was published, a number of readers have left various comments and suggestions on Talk:Washington, D.C.

Jimmy Wales a partner in HP Magazine Project

Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, reported Wednesday that he has entered a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Computer Systems that will allow Wikia users to create and print magazines. This new partnership aims to boost the reading of information by allowing users to personalize what they read. Wales stated Wednesday, "We are doing all kinds of things like that to think about ways to sustain this idea of participatory culture." Using HP's new Mag Cloud, users will be able to select the content to be included in their magazine from Wikia's 3 million pages of information. Users then select an image for their cover, then publish them on Mag Cloud, where they will be ready to purchase.

Briefly

  • As reported by William Beutler of "The Wikipedian" blog, the former director of the CIA Michael Hayden was recently on CNN talking about his occasional use of Wikipedia.
  • David Shankbone's brief encounter with Susan Sarandon in which she said she didn't know what Wikipedia was, was picked up by Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog on The Atlantic.
  • An article in Library Journal, a news publication for librarians, highlighted the issue of archives and libraries contributing to Wikipedia in their report on a workshop last week called "Building on Our Strengths: Opportunities for Special Collections in the Digital Age." Several discussions about making archives freely available online (including on Wikipedia) were had at the workshop, and this case study from the University of Washington's libraries is discussed in the article.

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2009-10-26

Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations

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By Hiding

The following is a brief overview of new discussions taking place on the English Wikipedia. For older, yet possibly active, discussions please see last week's edition. For a fuller listing of discussions on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Coordination.

No comment

At the Village Pump, User:Fram discussed the way WikiProjects assess articles and how they comment on those assessments: "Many talk page Wikiproject templates have, when an article is unassessed, a pointer to a /comments subpage. Once the page is assessed, the link to the /Comments subpage is no longer available, making this an abandoned orphan. For the vast majority of pages, this subpage is unneeded, since the actual talkpage of the article is very rarely used. Therefore, I propose that all Wikiproject templates no longer point to the /comments subpage but direct discussion of the assessment to the article talk page proper, where the comments will actually be seen".

Many respondents agreed that deprecating the use of a comments sub-page was a good idea. User:PC78 opined: "These things are half baked and poorly implemented, and it's time to get rid. Talk pages are for comments, so a /Comments subpage is highly redundant. No doubt many of them do have valid comments, but in my experience a lot of them are 2-3 years old and bear little or no relation to the article in it's current state." However User:Geometry guy offered a contrasting view:

This is a matter for individual WikiProjects. Comment subpages provide a way to sign and date WikiProject ratings, and have a permanence and easy accessibility that threaded and/or archived talk page comments do not. Some WikiProjects find them useful. Centralized moves to get rid of them are inappropriate. It is much more in the spirit of Wikipedia to allow WikiProjects to turn the features on or off according to their needs.

User:Titoxd offered some background regarding the creation of such pages: "These pages were created with the intention of adding a small "assessor's note" to pages within WP:1.0/I. Originally, the comment subpages were directly transcluded on pages such as Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Tropical cyclone articles by quality/1 in the listings. Due to technical reasons, they are now being linked instead of being transcluded, but the transclusion capability is slated to be re-enabled with wp10v2." User:Walkerma agreed with the proposed compromise: "If there are projects that find the Comments feature useful, they should be allowed to continue. However, we need to find a way to remove the feature in cases where the WikiProject is not actively using the feature".

On 25 October User:Happy-melon commented "I have removed the "forced comments" functionality from WPBM, so nonexistent comments pages are not redlinked and their creation is not actively encouraged. At some point I will also delete the three groups of pages I listed above (empty, unlinked and ancient). Is there a more general plan to proceed from there?" User:MSGJ suggested "a system of "inline" comments be developed so that, for WikiProjects who wish to use comments, the contents of each /Comments page may be substituted into a comments parameter in their banner".

Categorical division?

In July of 2009 User:SmokeyJoe commented at the talk page of Categories for Discussion that he thought there was "a problem at CfD". His posting was prompted by a number of deletion reviews regarding categories, with User:Good Olfactory ultimately stating "if anyone believes there is a broad "problem" at CfD, then raise it somewhere relevant where it can be dealt with, like Wikipedia talk:Categories for discussion".

The debate pointed to a couple of issues regarding the deletion process for categories. It was noted that currently no notice is "displayed in each article where a category appears that the category is up for deletion. As it stands now, even regular editors who have used the category will only see the CfD notice if they happen to look at the category. Every other type of deletion discussion in Wikipedia -- article, image, template, redirect, etc. -- is marked by notification on the articles themselves where they are used." While this was agreed to be a problem, no solution was forthcoming.

Joining the debate, User:Sam commented that "When categories were created there was no consensus on what they should be used for, and over time competing philosophies of categorization have arisen that are incompatible with each other. Categorization is seen as:

  1. A tagging system that should be free-form and open to any verifiable way of organizing articles.
  2. A way of grouping similar articles together to facilitate browsing.
  3. An organized hierarchical system of article classification.
  4. An indexing system for topics."

Sam concluded:

If we are going to make any improvements, we would first have to have some consensus about our underlying philosophic goals and our technological limitations and an understanding about how to deal with both.

In an effort to resolve the issue of notifying users that a category was up for deletion, SmokyJoe suggested posting "a note to the talk page of every page that is in the category" when a category is nominated for deletion. Most respondents felt the idea had merit, although Good Olfactory noted "this is going to generate a tremendous amount of "junk-mail"-type notices on article pages". The idea has yet to progress to a bot request.

On 6 October, SmokyJoe created Category:Wikipedians who say CfD is broken with the stated intention of "facilitat[ing] communication amongst Wikipedians", receiving a barnstar from User:Stifle for their effort. Within seven days the category was nominated for deletion or renaming by User:VegaDark on the basis that the category "[d]oesn't support collaboration." The debate was closed as Delete by User:Xdamr on 23 October, a close contested by User:Alansohn who asked "how did you come to the conclusion that consensus was for deletion, not renaming or no consensus." Xdamr replied to requests to amend the decision with a pointer to deletion review:

As with all closures that I (or others) perform, all are subject to scrutiny at DRV. I am perfectly content that this should be so. If DRV were to reverse any closure then that would be one thing, but after giving a full and voluminous explanation it would be a little odd for me to completely backtrack on myself and recreate the category only a few hours later. I am content that the closure was done with sufficient rigour as to bear scrutiny.

The deletion review was subsequently opened on the 25 October by Alansohn: "The closing administrator seems to have cast his own vote, without any relevance to the discussion at hand." The discussions regarding perceived problems with the CFD process were userfied to User:SmokeyJoe/Cfd discussion, but have failed to receive as much attention as the deletion review at this point.

Simple log-in

At the Village Pump, it was suggested by User:Dodoïste that "[the account creation] message is so large, that the newbie may not notice there is a registration form under it". Writer of the current message, User:Rd232 said he was addressing a previous version: "I was focussed on making that clearer. And now, in response to the point that the form isn't visible, I've added "scroll down..." near the top." However User:Aude suggested "drastically shortening and simplifying the message, to just advise people about the captcha?" After discussion the form is being amended to a more succinct version, with Aude making short-term code changes to build checks into the form submission process, and allow removal of more text. In the longer-term, it should be possible to provide form validation using Ajax to check username availability, provide feedback on password strength, and other such checks. This functionality is dependent on user login code refactoring that is being done by Happy-melon. During the discussion Rd232 also revamped the related Wikipedia:Request an account commenting that "[s]econd opinion on it would be welcome."

New proposals

  • Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations. Proposed by User:Moonriddengirl to "provide a place where contributors can bring such multiple point infringers to the attention of the community. The process proposed is that an administrator or clerk will confirm the problem if it exists and, if it is sufficiently widespread, open a cleanup subpage with instructions for handling."
  • Wikipedia:Deletion of newly created pages has been marked as a proposal by User:Sebwite. The page proposes that Wikipedians "[d]o not rush to mark pages bearing the {{newpage}} template for deletion unless they appear to have been abandoned by their creator"

Deletion round-up

Your writer has trawled the deletion debates opened and closed in the last week and presents these debates for your edification. Either they generated larger than average response, centred on policy in an illuminating way, or otherwise just jumped out as of interest. Feel free to suggest interesting deletion debates for future editions here.

Outlining a reason for deletion

The deletion of Outline of Texas history after debate has seen fifty-two similar articles nominated by User:Karanacs at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Outline of Louisiana history. Karanacs states in the nomination:

I don't believe these articles can be salvaged into anything approaching a comprehensive, useful, neutral, article that is not a content fork, and as such I think they should be deleted.

The articles are within the remit of Wikipedia:WikiProject Outline of Knowledge, a project which describes an outline article as being one "intended to help the reader become familiar with the subject it presents, and also serves as a table of contents". While User:Til Eulenspiegel felt a mass nomination was inappropriate, User:Mandsford responded "a mass nomination is appropriate, because a random sampling suggests that these [articles] have been created in the same manner".

User:Hipocrite argued to delete, given that 'the entirety of the "Outline" section lacks a strong justification for inclusion in Mainspace. There is no criteria that informs editors what should be included in the Outline, and how the outline should be grouped. To the extent the article becomes a valid use of mainspace, it is little more than History of Louisiana. As it stands, Outlines are not compliant with How We Do Things Here.' User:Highfields instead suggested a "Merge to respective parent outlines", a view supported by a number of commentators, while User:Abductive suggested deletion because "History overviews are done by Timeline of.... These do not aid in navigation." User:DGG felt the articles should be kept, believing that "every possible organizational device that people are willing to support in Wikipedia should be encouraged".

All the news that's new and approved?

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/2009 Fox News – White House controversy discusses whether an important news event is the basis for an encyclopedic article, referencing both Wikipedia articles are not news reports and the notion of coatrack articles. The debate also looked at appropriate etiquette, with User:Adambro refactoring the discussion. However, after an objection from User:Cirt, a better format was found to display relevant information. Debate currently stands at 68kb.

Articles

Administrative notices

A round up of the administrators' noticeboards as viewed by your writer. You can suggest a notice for inclusion, either on the tip line or by directly editing the next issue.

Jeff V Merkey accounts blocked

Briefly

Requests for comment

This weeks requests

Fifteen Requests for comment have been made in the week of 19-25 October:



Reader comments

2009-10-26

Approved this week

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By seresin

Administrators

Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Tinucherian (nom) and Materialscientist (nom).

Featured pages

Eight articles were promoted to featured status this week: Remain in Light (nom), Interactions (The Spectacular Spider-Man) (nom), What'd I Say (nom), Z. Marcas (nom), Lindsay Hassett with the Australian cricket team in England in 1948 (nom), Amagi class battlecruiser (nom), We Are the World (nom) and Gray's Inn (nom).

Fourteen lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of University of Central Florida alumni (nom), Philadelphia Baseball Wall of Fame (nom), 50 Greatest Players in NBA History (nom), Commissioner's Historic Achievement Award (nom), Pink discography (nom), List of places of worship in Adur (nom), List of 1924 Winter Olympics medal winners (nom), List of Oklahoma Sooners football seasons (nom), List of counties in Missouri (nom), List of church restorations, amendments and furniture by John Douglas (nom), List of Major League Baseball players with 100 triples (nom), Premier League Player of the Month (nom), Territorial pick (nom) and List of recessions in the United States (nom).

Two topics were promoted to featured status this week: No Doubt albums (nom) and Bloc Party albums (nom).

Three portals were promoted to featured status this week: Portal:Baseball (nom), Portal:United States Air Force (nom) and Portal:Horses (nom).

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: James Bowie, Synthetic diamond, Mary Toft, Bert Trautmann, Scattered disc, Jackie Robinson, Helgoland class battleship and AC/DC.

Former featured pages

Four articles were delisted this week: Manos: The Hands of Fate (nom), Oroonoko (nom), Virginia Tech massacre (nom) and Warsaw Uprising (1794) (nom).

No lists were delisted this week.

Two topics were delisted this week: Devil May Cry titles (nom) and Video game consoles (seventh generation) (nom).

Featured media

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Orange, Dante's Inferno, Superb Fairywren, 14th century Portolan chart, Strickland Falls Islamic calligraphy, Kyūdō and Houseflies.

Two featured sounds were promoted this week:


1920 – "Comrades of the Legion"(nom)
El Noi de la Mare(nom)

Three featured pictures were demoted this week: Blood values by mass (nom), Sunset with funnel clouds (nom) and Seagull on pier (nom)

Fourteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.



Reader comments

2009-10-26

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By Kirill Lokshin

The Arbitration Committee did not open any cases this week, and closed one, leaving three cases open.

Open cases

Socionics

The Socionics case has entered its third week of deliberations. The case was filed by rmcnew, who alleged that Tcaudilllg has engaged in edit-warring and personal attacks. Tcaudilllg has denied the allegations, calling them "ad hominem attacks on [his] character". No significant drafting has yet taken place; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, was expected by 25 October.

Asmahan

The Asmahan case has entered its sixth week of deliberations. The filing editor, Supreme Deliciousness, alleges that Arab Cowboy has engaged in a variety of disruptive behavior on the "Asmahan" article; Arab Cowboy denies the allegations, and claims that Supreme Deliciousness is pursuing a disruptive agenda of his own. No drafting of proposals has yet taken place, although the drafting arbitrator, John Vandenberg, has posed a number of questions to the parties. A draft decision in the case was expected by 20 October.

Eastern European mailing list

The Eastern European mailing list case has entered its sixth week of deliberations, and its second week of voting. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing list archives which are alleged to show an extensive history of collusion among numerous editors of Eastern European topics. Standard workshop procedures have been suspended for the case, so normal drafting of proposals by the parties and other editors has not taken place.

The proposed decision, written by arbitrator Coren, would strip Piotrus of his administrator status, ban him for three months, and place him under a topic ban for one year; ban Digwuren and Martintg for three months and also place them under year-long topic bans; and issue a number of admonishments and reminders, as well as an amnesty for all participants of the mailing list not otherwise sanctioned. A secondary proposal by arbitrator Rlevse would ban Tymek for three months as well. No other arbitrators have yet commented on the proposed remedies.

Closed cases

The Speed of light case was closed this week. The decision places Brews ohare and FDT under general probation, and bans both from "all physics-related pages and topics, broadly construed" for a period of one year.

Amendments, clarifications, and other motions

The Committee has adopted a motion amending the Date delinking decision to acknowledge that the full-date unlinking bot satisfies the requirements of a community-approved process for date delinking as stipulated in the case.

A pair of motions to amend the ADHD decision have been proposed by arbitrator Vassyana. The motions would either ban Literaturegeek from the topic area for one year, or place him under general probation for the same period. A third motion, banning Scuro from the topic area, has also been proposed. Arbitrator voting on the motions is currently divided.

Following a review by the Audit Subcommittee, Raul654 has resigned his access to the CheckUser and Oversight tools, and the associated mailing lists, and has committed not to use his administrative tools in the topic area of global warming.

Reader comments

2009-10-26

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), 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.

Bots approved

One bot task was approved this past week:

Bug fixes

  • The $wgStylePath and $wgLogo configuration settings were re-added to the default LocalSettings.php file. (r58133)
  • The warning seen when deleting a page with history has been changed so that the number of revisions for that page is displayed as part of the warning. (r58087, bug 3480)
  • Users will now be warned when moving a file to a name already in use on a shared repository, such as Wikimedia Commons. (r58079, bug 18019)
  • Moving subpages of titles containing \\ now works properly. (r58008, bug 21234)

New features

  • MaxSem has fixed several issues related to SQLite database support for MediaWiki. [2] [3]

Other news

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