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23 May 2011

 

2011-05-23

GLAM workshop; legal policies; brief news

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By Rock drum, Tom Morris, Tilman Bayer and Tony1

"GLAMcamp" joins Wikimedians and representatives of cultural institutions in New York City

Group photo of GLAMcamp participants
In the evening, the Wikimedians were given a VIP tour of the Met and visited normally unseen areas.
Ready, steady, code!
So much documentation, so little time!

From 20–22 May, around 30 Wikimedians from all around the world – four continents and eight countries in all – came together at the New York Public Library for GLAMcamp NYC, "a workshop targeting a small group of community-focused and technology-focused Wikimedians to kickstart the key elements of the glamwiki.org project".

Friday

Although many participants had arrived the day before, the event itself began on Friday, with a public workshop. Fifty extra people attended, from four US states, museums, libraries and archives (large and small), as well as several private art galleries, government agencies, universities, think-tanks, and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The workshop lasted for two hours, and included a keynote presentation from Meg Bellinger from Yale University, which has recently announced it will release the contents of its digital archive into the public domain. This was followed with a quick talk from Maarten Zeinstra, from Creative Commons Nederlands, about the Public Domain calculator, and a breakout into smaller groups of both WIkimedians and other participants for Q&A.

The rest of the day was spent on various tasks, although primarily on GLAM ambassadors, tools, and documentation. One group focussed on improving the guide to batch uploading, while another worked on the GLAM point of entry and its subpages. The GLAM ambassadors group decided on a complete overhaul of the project, and renamed the system to "Local contacts", although the term "e-volunteer" was also suggested.

The day ended with a VIP tour of the Met. Barbara Bridgers, General Manager for Imaging, took people around the photography department, after which Neal Stimler and Susan Chun showed groups their favorite artifacts in the Museum.

Saturday

Day 2 started where Day 1 had left off: writing documentation. The POE group continued with what they were doing, and work began on a mass uploading tool. During this time, Nina Paley – famous cartoonist and free culture advocate – dropped in and talked with the Wikimedians.

The first parallel sessions after lunch focused on more coding/documentation and a discussion of the proposal of a Free Culture Index "to evaluate free culture compliance within the GLAM sector", such as whether a museum releases photos for free use, or allows photography by others. The group decided against the idea that this might be awarded to the GLAM by Wikimedians, judging that it would probably be both easier and better if the institution could give themselves some sort of badge for their website, probably along the lines of the HTML5 badge.

The final session of the day was a lengthy discussion of metrics and tools that could be used for GLAM-Wikimedia collaborations. Participants mentioned various tools, which can be seen on the Tools & Requests page.

Sunday

On the final day around half of the participants made their way towards the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library. Sunday was mostly spent working on the projects that had been started during the previous two days.

Ryan Kaldari (Kaldari) showed the group his new "Wikimedia bulk uploader" tool, and gave a demonstration with "Airview" images. The participants then split back up into two groups, working on documentation – in particular, how-to guides and FAQs – and metrics for GLAM partnerships.

The final session of the day was a plenary/wrap-up. Liam Wyatt led the group in going through all of the things that had been achieved throughout the weekend, and who would continue to work on them. Another potential GLAMcamp conference was discussed – which would be held in Europe, if at all – as well as finishing off all of the new guides and tools.

The event was supported by a $10,000 grant from the WMF; the budget appears to have been met.

Further reading

Etherpad notes and blog postings
Tweets

WMF legal department publishes draft of internal policies

The Foundation's legal department has published a draft of legal policies documenting internal staff practices in various matters. These include office actions (such as DMCA takedowns), subpoenas (noting that "As a general rule, the Wikimedia Foundation may not recognize a foreign subpoena or order") and the harassment of users ("The Wikimedia Foundation will fully cooperate in investigations involving harassment of users that include credible threats of violence. Users, however, must report the harassment to local police"). On his personal blog, Larry Sanger (known for his role until 2002 in getting Wikipedia started) applauded the part about dealing with child pornography, interpreting it as a vindication of his allegations a year ago when he reported the WMF to the FBI for "knowingly distributing" such matter. (These allegations were rebutted by the Foundation's legal counsel at the time and do not appear to have resulted in any action by the FBI.)

In brief

  • Foundation report for April: The WMF report for April has been published. Among other items reported previously in the Signpost, it notes that the legal department won an "UDRP case for the domain names wikkipedia.org and wekipedia.org", which had been used by a typosquatter "in connection with a Wikipedia-related survey scam." The "Chapter Relations" section states that "as of April 30, WMF has only received revenue or grants from 4 of 11 chapters who have fundraising agreements with WMF for 2010/11" (current status).
    Temporary site logo celebrating the 150000th page on the Farsi Wikipedia
  • Farsi Wikipedia passes 150,000 articles. According to a post on Foundation-L, the Farsi (Persian) Wikipedia passed 150,000 articles on Sunday. At the time of writing, Farsi Wikipedia has 1,738 active users and 20 administrators, and is the 24th-largest by article count.
  • LangCom meeting report: User:Millosh has posted a report from the first ever in-person meeting of the Wikimedia Language Committee (coinciding with the Berlin Hackathon), listing numerous decisions (still to be verified by other parties), such as wider use of the incubator, the procedure to propose the closing of a project, and the intention to write monthly reports for the community.
  • Missing Wikipedias: Also last week, Millosh posted the observation that "1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native language", based on a comparison of SIL and Ethnologue population data with the list of existing Wikipedias. (However, it was pointed out that this mode of counting does, for example, list Main-Franconian and Upper Saxon German speakers as bereft of their own Wikipedia, – 4.9 million / 2 million people, respectively -, although they can be assumed to be familiar with the German language and therefore able to use the German Wikipedia.) The list has been copied to the Strategy wiki.
  • Pending changes page protection removed: After a Request for Comment began in February and closed earlier this month, the Pending Changes protection was removed from all pages on the English Wikipedia, with only test pages using the feature at the time of writing. An ArbCom injunction governed the mode in which PC protection was being replaced by semi- or full protection on BLPs, see this week's Arbitration Report. The feature had been switched on last June for the start of a two-month trial, see list of previous Signpost coverage.
    Mark Fisher (Vaoverland) in 2008.
  • Admin passes away: Wikipedian Vaoverland (Mark Fisher, based in Virginia, USA) died on April 30, as noted in an obituary on Schoolbusfleet.com (Fisher had been the owner and president of a bus company). His user pages retain Vaoverland's recollections about his contributions to Wikipedia since 2002, emphasizing the value of collaboration, and his thoughts on the administrator role. The entry at the "Deceased Wikipedians" page commends him for having been "unfailingly kind to new editors and veterans alike."
  • New administrators. The Signpost welcomes two new admins. Sadads (nom), an American active at New-page patrol, Unassessed biography articles, and WikiProject Novels. Sadads has consistently performed maintenance tasks such as assessing articles, and making disambiguation pages and templates. He is currently a Regional Campus Ambassador for the Greater Chesapeake Region and member of the Ambassador program's steering committee. DeltaQuad (nom), from Canada, will be active at Sockpuppet investigations, having already gained experience in this highly technical area. DeltaQuad is also a member of the Guild of copy editors. At the time of publication there is one live RfA, for Drmies, due to finish early Friday UTC.


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2011-05-23

Death of the expert?; superinjunctions saga continues; World Heritage status petitioned and debated; brief news

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By Tom Morris and Tilman Bayer

The death of the expert?

Online magazine The Awl published an article by Maria Bustillos, "Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert". It starts with a plea to stop "kvetching about Wikipedia" and describes the various technical and social processes that are used to stop Wikipedia from becoming "a giant glob of graffiti". Bustillos makes the point that the "byzantine array of forces working for accuracy and against edit-warring, sock-puppetry and the like" don't always work:

It's not perfect, of course, but neither is any other human-derived resource, including, as if it were necessary to say so, printed encyclopedias or books.

Bustillos argues that Wikipedia has benefits for those doing serious research: it presents a richer set of citations and bibliographies than traditional encyclopedias (in part due to the insistence on verifiability); it responds quickly to new developments (such as royal weddings and Japanese earthquakes); and most importantly it enables readers to look "under the hood" at the history and talk page of any article, providing valuable access to the controversy related to the subject, albeit with a proviso:

Of course, a load of dimwitted yelling and general codswallop may also emerge, but let's face it, the same thing happens with any given stack of books in the library, only in more formal, less convenient packaging.

It is from this that Bustillos' main argument emerges: that Wikipedia embodies a shift away from the "era of print", with its culture of ownership of ideas by experts and its linear and authoritative representations of knowledge; Wikipedia, she is saying – based on an interview with Bob Stein (director of the "Institute for the Future of the Book") – is at the forefront of an era of digital knowledge as described by Marshall McLuhan, based on "collaborative" and "tribal" knowledge. After responding to critics of this general trend – including Nick Carr and, especially, Jaron Lanier – Bustillos takes the argument further, reaching this rather disquieting conclusion:

Wikipedia is like a laboratory for this new way of public reasoning for the purpose of understanding, an extended polylogue embracing every reader in an ever-larger, never-ending dialectic. Rather than being handed an "authoritative" decision, you're given the means for rolling your own. We can call this new way of looking at things post-linear or even "post-fact" as Clay Shirky put it in a recent and thrill-packed interview with me. [Shirky said:] "Wikipedia, if it works better than Britannica, threatens not only its authority as a source of information, but also the theory of knowledge on which Britannica is founded. On Wikipedia 'the author' is distributed, and this fact is indigestible to current models of thinking. ... Wikipedia is forcing people to accept the stone-cold bummer that knowledge is produced and constructed by argument rather than by divine inspiration."

Shirky compares this with the historical example of the transition from alchemists to chemists: "Alchemists kept their practices shrouded in secrecy. ... The difference was that chemists had become willing to expose their methods and conclusions to the withering scrutiny of their peers" (an example that Shirky had already used in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus, as summarized in the Signpost's review).

Bustillos admits that "there continues to be resistance to the idea that expertise itself has been called into question". But are Wikipedians the ones calling expertise into question? It seems strange to say that people who spend considerable time hunting down citations in old books, journals, newspapers and scholarly databases are undermining the role of expertise. Indeed, the increasing tendency of Wikipedians to try and reach out to universities, museums and libraries (through Campus Ambassadors, GLAM projects, the Public Policy Initiative, and so on) suggests there may be some life left in making a profession out of knowing things. The popularity of so-called "denialist" movements that often set up in populist opposition to the views of experts (for example, climate scientists) may be considered a rather more negative version of the "post-fact" world Bustillos is describing, as pointed out in the comments section to Bustillos' article.

For some, the rhetoric of epistemic free-for-all goes above and beyond the reality of projects such as Wikipedia. One example from the comments section:

Wikipedia hardly devalues experts. It enshrines them like never before. Every statement in a Wikipedia article has to be backed up with a citation to an article or book produced by a journalist, an academic, a scientist, or some other credentialed expert who has carried out primary research according to currently prevailing methods in journalism or academia.

Finally, Wikipedia co-founder and Citizendium founder Larry Sanger weighed in with a post on his personal blog entitled 25 Replies to Maria Bustillos.

Debate on UK superinjunctions continues; celebrity named

In the United Kingdom, controversy over the superinjunctions taken out by at least 4 celebrities to block publication of allegations regarding their private lives raged on, and continued to involve Wikipedia (see earlier story). Legal action brought against Twitter to reveal the identities of users publishing the blocked information prompted discussion on Foundation-l about the implications for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia users. Mike Godwin, former legal counsel of the WMF, recounted that "I've discussed this precise issue (informally) with Twitter's general counsel, and we agree that the exposure for Twitter in the UK is significantly different than it would be for the Wikimedia Foundation" (presumably lower), but that "the risks for WMF in the UK (and, indeed, throughout the EU as a function of UK membership in the European Union) remain pretty significant".

Jimmy Wales, adding to his statements in an earlier interview with the BBC (see last week's "In the news"), continued to speak out against the superinjunctions in an interview with The Independent newspaper ("Wikipedia founder opens new front in privacy battle"), similar to Godwin stating that "We probably wouldn't consider setting up [an office] in the UK due to potential problems with censorship."

After Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald published the identity of one of the celebrities, footballer Ryan Giggs, followed by US media such as Gawker and Ars Technica, the information eventually stayed on Wikipedia, too. In The Independent interview, Wales vowed that "if someone tried to force us to take the information down, we would definitely fight them. If we got a valid court order from a judge in the USA, there would be little we could do other than to comply. But I think that is very unlikely, because of the First Amendment." Similarly, asked on his talk page whether the WMF would release information about an editor's identity in such cases, Wales said that "as someone able to closely observe the general opinions of the board and staff and legal team of the Foundation, I can say that it would be very unlikely that the Wikimedia Foundation would comply casually with a request from a non-US court where no ones life is in danger and there is not clear evidence of libel." In a 2009 court case – held, like some of the current superinjunction hearings, before Justice Tugendhat – concerning the insertion of "private and sensitive information" into the Wikipedia article about the plaintiff and her child, the WMF had "indicated that it would not disclose the [editor's] IP address without a court order, but that it would obey such an order even though it was outside an English court's jurisdiction."

By Monday the name was uttered in the UK's House of Commons, which is exempt from the injunctions by parliamentary immunity, and eventually found its way into major British sources like the BBC.

New York Times and others on Wikipedia UNESCO bid

Kevin J. O'Brien has written an article for The New York Times about the possibility raised by the German Wikimedia chapter ("Wikipedia’s German overseer") of nominating Wikipedia to be listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (cf. past Signpost coverage: May 16, April 4, March 28). The petition is currently featured on the homepage of Wikimedia Germany and on that of the Foundation's tenth anniversary wiki, already listing over 700 signatories at the time of writing. The NYT article quotes Jimmy Wales in support of the idea, and Susan Williams, head of external media relations at UNESCO in Paris, saying that "anyone can apply" for World Heritage Site status but Wikipedia "may have difficulty fulfilling the criteria" as Wikipedia is not currently endangered. The article goes on to explore other possible UNESCO statuses Wikipedia could potentially apply for. The website Monsters & Critics featured an interview with Jimmy Wales with dpa on this and other subjects. User:Ziko briefly summarized coverage of the UNESCO proposal in German media.

In brief

  • Gardner on gender gap: A Marie Claire interview with the WMF's Executive Director Sue Gardner covered the low participation of women in Wikipedia, the Foundation's plans to improve it, and sexism in Silicon Valley media ("Confessions of a Female Tech Exec").
  • Editing from inside Parliament. The website Political Scrapbook states that someone inside the Houses of Parliament in London edited the Wikipedia article for Tory MP Nadine Dorries, specifically to remove critical material (diff) and to insert positive material about Dorries' appearance on the television programme Tower Block of Commons (diff). The edits have been reverted. (Cf. related Signpost coverage: "UK parliament COI editing awards", "British politicians accused of WP cover-ups")
  • Radical librarians. Wikipedia is mentioned in an article on "radical librarians" published on the Canadian website Hour Community.
  • Wikipedia as authority file?: Inspired by the "Wikipedia Miner" software to search and statistically analyze Wikipedia, librarian Jonathan Rochkind wondered about the possibility of using Wikipedia as an authority file for libraries (a sort of index of persons, such as book authors, or of concepts). As pointed out in the comments section of his blog posting, there are already efforts to connect Wikipedia with existing authority files rather than replacing them, cf. Template:Authority control or a seminal GLAM collaboration of the German Wikipedia with the German National Library, initiated in 2005.
  • Public Policy Initiative update. Michigan State University have issued a press release to celebrate the high level of contributions produced by their 94 undergraduate students, and by 11 graduate students who ranked third in average number of characters added to Wikipedia per student. Johannes Bauer, a professor at MSU, and Annie Lin from the Wikimedia Foundation, are quoted in the press release.
  • QAA Podcast: On the podcast of the UK Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), professor Mahzarin Banaji, the president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), talked about the association's call to its members to contribute to Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: "US psychological society starts Wikipedia initiative").
  • Almost half of students use Wikipedia for test preparation in psychiatry: In a US survey of 186 medical students who had recently completed psychiatric clinical clerkships, 47% listed Wikipedia as one of the primary sources of knowledge they would use to prepare for an upcoming exam in psychiatry, according to preliminary results presented at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association recently (as reported by MedPage Today: "APA: Med Students Cram for Exams With Wikipedia"). While less than the ratio for test question books specifically designed for self-preparation (88%), the Wikipedia percentage was much higher than that for traditional textbooks (10%), and conjectured to be under-reported by one of the researchers ("If I used it, I'm not sure I would admit to it on a survey").
  • German Wikipedian corrects omission of former BMW CEO's Nazi past: In an article for Süddeutsche Zeitung, German historian Wigbert Benz describes how user Zsasz from the German Wikipedia, during routine research for writing an article about a Gestapo functionary, Heinrich Richter-Brohm, found out that he was identical to the German manager of the same name who had been CEO of carmaker BMW from 1957 to 1960. For a time around June 1933 he had belonged to the top dozen Gestapo functionaries; among his actions was the order to close the renowned Institute for Social Research and seize its assets because of alleged subversive activities. Benz notes that neither a 1960 Der Spiegel title story about the manager, nor earlier academic research about the Gestapo functionary had noted the identity. BMW historians told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the company's files did not contain information about his professional history between 1932 and 1934.
  • Using Wikipedia for real estate marketing: An article in The Miami Herald described the attempted use of Wikipedia for branding efforts in the city's real estate market, with a hotel investment firm inserting the claim that a certain area of South Beach was "known as the SoBe 10 or Power Mile, [and] considered to be the epicenter of South Beach nightlife and entertainment" (which according to the Herald "might be news" to nightclubs elsewhere in the city, and was removed from the Wikipedia article).
  • Wikipedia motivates release of 450,000 photos: As reported on the blog of Creative Commons Netherlands, the country's "Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed" (RCE) has decided to release 449,318 photos of Dutch national monuments under CC-BY-SA (instead of the previous release under CC-BY-NC) in a low resolution (800 pixels on the longer side), motivated by the possibility of reuse in Wikipedia.
  • Simple English Wikipedia in the classroom: A teachers' blog described the usefulness of the Simple English Wikipedia in education.
  • Spammers try to exploit Wikipedia's popularity: Computer security firm Symantec reports "a new spam tactic being used, which targets the Wikipedia name for the promotion of fake pharmaceutical products ... Wikipedia’s popularity is being exploited here, considering its vast knowledge base and popularity."
  • Geographically densest Wikipedia coverage: A blogger compiled lists of the areas of the world which have the highest density of geotagged articles. Among areas with 1 km diameter, Florence (Italy) topped the list, and both the 10 km and 100 km diameter areas with the highest density were found in London (UK).

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2011-05-23

WikiProject Formula One

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By SMasters
WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.
This photo of Nick Heidfeld and Nico Rosberg at the 2008 Australian Grand Prix, is a Featured picture
The article on seven-time World Champion Michael Schumacher, is a Good article of WP:F1
The 2008 Japanese Grand Prix, a Featured article, documents the race in which Fernando Alonso celebrated his second consecutive race victory

This week, we turn our attention to WikiProject Formula One. Started in October 2004 by Rdsmith4, it has 290 active members. The project is home to 13 Featured articles, 4 Featured lists, 24 Good articles, and a Featured portal – with a total of 3,584 articles under its care. The Signpost interviewed project members 4u1e, Bretonbanquet, and DH85868993.

Tell us a bit about yourself, what F1 team/s you support, and what motivated you to become a member of WikiProject Formula One?

  • 4u1e: I'm not really a fan of teams (or drivers) so much as I am of the sport as a whole. Of course there are teams (Williams, Jordan, Ferrari) and drivers (Damon Hill, Alain Prost, Mark Webber) that I have rooted for at various times, but I try and avoid fannishness! I can't remember why I joined the project – it was over five years ago – but looking at my first edits, it was probably to do with perceived inaccuracies in articles. I should note that despite my editing habits (Brabham, Jack Brabham, Brabham BT19, Brabham BT49), I wasn't a huge fan of Brabham while it still existed. That has become a purely historical passion, driven by what I consider an interesting story and characters.
  • Bretonbanquet: I was a fan for a long time of the Minardi team, until their sad demise, and I have supported various drivers over the years. I show some eccentricity in my choices of favourites, tending towards the less-talented, underfunded or unlucky teams and drivers who struggle at the back of the field. This led to me working on articles about these guys, from the present and the past, as their pages were often one-liners or sometimes non-existent. That was how I started editing F1 articles, quite a few years back.
  • DH85868993: I was an avid fan of Alain Prost for most of his F1 career, to the extent that he inspired part of my username. These days I support Mark Webber, but I also have a keen interest in the history of the sport. When I was first introduced to Wikipedia, I saw the Formula One articles as an area in which I could contribute, and I thought that joining the WikiProject was the best way to maximise my contribution.

Your project has 3,584 articles associated with it. How do you keep all these up to standard and what are your biggest challenges?

  • 4u1e: Current race and driver articles are updated as seasons progress by those who are keen on that sort of thing. A possibly smaller number of people chip away at the 55 or so years of F1 history that precede Wikipedia. The biggest challenge, or at least the one I'm personally least willing to face up to, is taking on the really long articles on controversial drivers that attract large numbers of low quality edits – Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher spring to mind. Those two should really both be FA-class, but it's a major undertaking.
  • Bretonbanquet: I have to agree with my esteemed colleague 4u1e in that there is a lot of work to be done throughout the project, trying to raise the standard. Articles about defunct teams, old races and retired drivers tend to get neglected, and so have to rely on editors taking an interest and bothering to research the topic in order to see improvement. Articles on current drivers and teams tend to see a huge number of minor edits, especially on race days, and effort has to be made to keep the trivia out and to maintain consistency in each article. Race days can be a bit hectic with a lot of statistics being updated in a short space of time.
  • DH85868993: Having a large number of active project members in different timezones makes it fairly easy to keep "one off" vandalism under control. Something that's more challenging is when editors make systematic changes to a large number of articles without prior discussion with the WikiProject – these sometimes take a while to rectify.

WikiProject Formula One has 13 FA-class articles, 4 FLs, 24 GAs and a Featured portal. How did your project achieve this and how can other projects work toward this?

  • 4u1e: The Featured and Good articles have generally been achieved by one or two editors deciding that they want to shoot for a gold star and plugging away. Other project members are always helpful in commenting when asked, but I think the GA Monaco Grand Prix is the only article on which a team bigger than two worked in a semi-structured way to achieve the desired standard.
  • Bretonbanquet: I agree again, most FAs and GAs were the work of single editors, empassioned by the subject. Formula One inspires great passion in people, and there are some incredible stories, some glorious, some tragic – and editors are then inspired to tell the tale. Tom Pryce is a great example. I think the F1 project is fortunate to have a very large number of engaging stories to tell, and that brings out good quality articles from some of our editors.

A typical F1 season runs for around nine months. What do members do between seasons and does the project have any special activities to encourage participation during the off-season?

  • 4u1e: We don't have any special activities between seasons. There's always plenty of historical stuff to do, although there is a difference in the editing communities that cover historical and current events, so I guess some guys have a quiet winter!
  • Bretonbanquet: Yes, apart from working on topics from years gone by and keeping tabs on the off-season shenanigans regarding driver contracts and suchlike, there isn't much to do. I often work on music or football-related articles in my F1 downtime.
  • DH85868993: During the off-season, I tend to focus on project-wide issues such as consistency, and try to attend to some of the little tasks that I didn't have time for during the hurly-burly of the F1 season.

Do you collaborate with other WikiProjects?

  • 4u1e: We have a parent WikiProject in Wikiproject Motorsport, and where appropriate discussions started at WP:F1 will be diverted there.
  • Bretonbanquet: Yes, sometimes the Motorsport Wikiproject gets involved when a debate stretches beyond the boundaries of Formula One, otherwise we're quite independent.

What are the most pressing needs for WikiProject Formula One? How can a new contributor help today?

  • 4u1e: We're not short of people willing to update statistics, but could do with more people willing to write prose. Historical pictures with appropriate licenses are always welcome. And it would be great if more people would comment at Formula One FACs. One recently successful FA took three attempts, largely because of reviewer apathy rather than inherent faults in the article.
  • Bretonbanquet: Certainly more photos would be a welcome development and good prose-writers. Other than that, it would be nice to standardise the sources for statistics across the range of articles. Currently we see a lot of drive-by changes to some of the older stats, and accuracy can sometimes be compromised. We could always do with "outside" help from people to bring articles to a higher standard, just by filling out text with a bit of easy-to-source detail. Editors need not necessarily know much about motor racing to contribute, and a lot of the source material is readily available online. A Featured article may necessarily require some relatively expert knowledge to construct, but a decent B-class article can be written with a fairly basic knowledge of the sport.

Next week's article will be a traveler's delight. Until then, transport yourself to the archive.

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2011-05-23

The best of the week

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By Tony1 and Dabomb87


One of the US Navy Band's ensembles performs in Wisconsin, 2009. Six performances by the Band were promoted to featured sound status. The Signpost thinks whoever pushed the bill through Congress to make US Government images and sound files free should be blessed; it has created a huge source of free cultural content.


This week's "Featured content" covers Sunday 15 – Saturday 21 May


New administrators

New featured picture, of video game designer and producer Robin Hunicke
New featured picture showing the result of the photographic technique of focus-stack microscopy. Here, the result of "stacking" the component images is a single image of a microfossil, at the bottom, with a depth of field almost impossible to achieve at high magnification.
From this edition onwards, The Signpost will announce new administrators at the start of the "In brief" section at "News and notes".


Featured lists

Four lists were promoted:

One featured list was delisted:


Featured articles

There were no new featured articles or delistings.


Featured pictures

Four images were promoted. Medium-sized images can be viewed by clicking on "nom":

  • Warty crab (nom; related article), found in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and eastern Atlantic Ocean. It has decreased in numbers since the 1980s and there are now concerns that it may be an endangered species. (Created by User:George Chernilevsky.)
  • Focus stack microscopy (nom; related article) of a diatom microfossil. Top left are the three source image slices at three focal depths. Top right are the contributions (black is no contribution, white is full contribution) of that focal slice to the final "focus stacked" image. At the bottom is the resulting focus-stacked image with an extended depth of field. Extended depth of field by focus stacking is a powerful tool for light microscopy as at high magnification the depth of field can be extremely shallow, down to around 1 μm. Stack Microscopy. (Created by User:Zephyris.)
  • Grand piano diagram (nom; related article), a schematic horizontal cross-section of a major components of a pianoforte (part names are listed on the image description page). (Created by Polish user Orem; Orem on Commons.)
  • Robin Hunicke (nom; related article), a video game designer and producer known for her work with thatgamecompany and Electronic Arts. She has worked on games including MySims, Boom Blox and Journey. (Created by Charlie Chu; originally posted on Flickr.)


Featured sounds

New featured picture: Polish user Orem's schematic of the grand piano, a design that has evolved continually over the 250-year history of the instrument, and which is still the subject of innovation. The labelled components are listed on the description page.


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2011-05-23

Injunction – preliminary protection levels for BLP articles when removing PC

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee opened no new cases. Two cases are currently open.

Open cases

Racepacket (Week 4)

During the week, drafter PhilKnight submitted a proposed decision for arbitrators to vote on.

Tree shaping (Week 4)

During the week, further comments were submitted in the workshop. Drafter Elen of the Roads is currently expected to submit a proposed decision.

Injunction

A request for arbitration was filed during the week regarding biography of living persons (BLP) articles and implementing the shutdown of pending changes (PC) on those articles. The Committee passed a preliminary injunction, applying to all administrators (admins), which is effective immediately:

When an admin removes PC protection from a BLP flagged article, that admin shall
  1. replace level 1 PC with semi-protection of an equivalent duration, and
  2. replace level 2 PC with full protection of an equivalent duration.
Admins who have recently removed PC from BLP articles are expected to assure that these protection levels have been applied to those articles.

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2011-05-23

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

Note from the editor: the issue of the Signpost in a fortnight's time will be the first anniversary of my time in the role of "Technology Report" lead. In that time, the flavour of the report has not changed greatly: it is much as it ever was. I would like the 6 June issue to include a handful of trial elements, to see if they meet with approval; as such, it would be great to take comments on this issue about what you, Signpost readers, think about the "Technology Report" and what suggestions you may have. Thank you.

Slowness affecting Wikimedia sites

Periods of intermittent slowness (many causing timeouts and consequently edits being lost) intensified this week, prompting a raft of complaints at the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump (permalink). The issues were raised on the Foundation's mailing list, prompting WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller to relay suggestions from the Wikimedia operations team as to what might be behind the issues, which have affected users as far apart as the east coast of the United States and Australia:

(The extension deployed on May 18 - cf. bug #21919 - was GoogleNewsSitemap, an extension designed to make wikis, in this case the English Wikinews site, more accessible to the Google News aggregation service.) The problems underline the need for the forthcoming Ashburn, Virginia data centre, through which requests could be rerouted. In his email, Möller also warned against checking the usual reports on Wikimedia uptime at http://ganglia.wikimedia.org, which is "in the process of being fixed".

In unrelated news, this week also saw a fatal error which made Wikimedia Commons unable to accept edits for a period of some minutes (bug #29078).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

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