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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2008-06-02

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2 June 2008

 


2008-06-02

Board elections open

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By Ral315


This week, the Signpost covers the opening of the 2008 Board elections.

The fifth election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees opened on Sunday. Fifteen users are vying for one (1) one-year seat, to be filled in the election. As of press time, 1,774 valid votes had been cast.

This week, a statistics page was provided by election committee member Jesse Plamondon-Willard. The statistics show the votes by date, project, language and individual wiki. Unsurprisingly, English and the English Wikipedia had the most turnout numerically so far. What was perhaps surprising was the turnout from Hebrew wikis; as of press time, 90 of 272 Hebrew Wikimedians (33.1%) had voted in the elections (more than four times the 8.1% turnout so far across all languages). English turnout is currently at 7.4%.

Voting

To help users decide which candidate(s) to support, we compiled a list of candidate questions that we felt were important. These questions are still available, and have been updated to reflect responses made over the last week:

Candidate responses

As in previous years, election officials will monitor votes for voting irregularities, and discount votes as necessary, if it is deemed that some votes are those of sockpuppets. All voters must have made at least 600 edits before March 1, 2008 on any one wiki, and have made at least 50 edits between January 1 and May 29, 2008 on that particular wiki. The wiki for these requirements must be the same one for both, and edits cannot be combined across multiple wikis to gain suffrage. Exceptions to these edit requirements are given to Wikimedia server administrators with shell access, paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation who began working at the office before March 1, and current and former members of the Board of Trustees.



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2008-06-02

WikiWorld: "Facial Hair"

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By Greg Williams
This comic originally appeared on January 8, 2007.

This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Facial hair", "Moustache", "Shaving" and "Goatee". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.



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2008-06-02

In the news

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By Enochlau

Wikis knocking on the iron gates of Oxford

Andrew Keen on New Media – Recently, Internet commentator Andrew Keen was at Oxford University together with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger to debate whether "the internet is the future of knowledge". Keen notes that it was ironic for the discussion – which included whether the internet was democratising the creation and distribution of knowledge – to have occurred at Oxford, a representative of the "ivory tower business model for knowledge". He notes that establishment of Oxford University by a wealthy landowner contrasts with the origins of Wikipedia, and sites like Wikipedia and Citizendium are driving the adoption of wikis, podcasts and blogs, even by traditional knowledge companies. Keen found the response of Oxford faculty and students to the democratic potential of the internet enthusiastic and "anything but snooty".

Other mentions

Other recent mentions in online media include:



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2008-06-02

Dispatches: Style guide and policy changes

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By Tony1

May was a big month for changes, topped by wholesale structural reform of the Featured list candidates process. We present the two most recent monthly updates, for April and May 2008. For feedback and any corrections that are required, please leave a note here. All monthly updates from the start of this year are listed here.

May 2008

Nymphs and elves are furious that the reference to them in Wikipedia's MoS has been removed (see "Capitalization" below). Here, Ricardo's moon nymph is in a state of relative composure.

Manual of Style (main page)

Non-breaking spaces. The scope of the recommendation to use a non-breaking (i.e., "hard") space was narrowed from all instances where:

"numerical and non-numerical elements are separated by a space",

to:

"measurements in which values and units are separated by a space".

Compound items such as "20 chairs" are thus excluded from the recommendation.

En dashes vs. minus signs. Previously, en dashes were permitted as an alternative to minus signs. This is no longer the case:

"Do not use an en dash for negative signs and subtraction operators: use the correct unicode character for the minus sign (&minus;) (see also Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics).)"

Foreign terms and italics. The second of these two sentences was struck out:

"Use italics for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that are not current in English. However, in an article on a subject for which there is no English-language term, such terms do not require italics."

Spelling and transliteration of foreign terms. The use of anglicized versus native spellings was clarified:

"Names not originally in a Latin alphabet—such as Greek, Chinese or Russian scripts—must be transliterated into characters generally intelligible to English-speakers. Do not use a systematically transliterated name if there is a common English form of the name, such as Tchaikovsky or Chiang Kai-shek. The use of diacritics (accent marks) on foreign words is neither encouraged nor discouraged; their usage depends on whether they appear in verifiable reliable sources and on the constraints imposed by specialized Wikipeda guidelines."

Identity. There was a change from:

"When there is no dispute, use terms that a person uses for himself or herself, or terms that a group most commonly uses for itself", to:
"When there is no dispute, the name most commonly used for a person will be the one that person uses for himself or herself, and the most common terms for a group will be those that the group most commonly uses for itself".

Alignment of images. The previous preference for the right-alignment of images, with exceptions, was simplified to:

"Images of faces should be placed so that the face or eyes look toward the text, because the reader's eyes will tend to follow their direction. Therefore, portraits of a face looking to the reader's right should be left-aligned, looking into the main text."

Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

Symbols for bits and bytes. The following sentence was added:

"By extension, the symbols for the units of data rate kilobit per second, megabit per second and so on, are "kbit/s" (not "kbps" or "Kbps") and "Mbit/s" (not "Mbps" or "mbps"). Similarly, kilobyte per second and megabyte per second are "kB/s" (not "kBps" or "KBps") and "MB/s" (not "Mbps" or "MBps")."

Binary prefixes. A dispute tag still hangs over this section.

Units of measurement. The section "Follow the literature" is still the subject of a dispute tag and has been unstable.

Minus signs. A similar change was made to that listed above under "En dashes vs. minus signs". [Editorial note: The wording of both points now needs to be made consistent.]

Geographical coordinates. This section was restored with an edit summary to see WP:GEO.

[Editorial note: MOSNUM and the main page of MOS are now in need of housecleaning to ensure consistency in duplicated sections.]

Merger of two supplementary MOS pages

Naming conventions (abbreviations) was merged into Manual of Style (abbreviations).

Manual of Style (capital letters)

Capitalization of names of deities, etc. This was removed:

"Pronouns referring to deities, or nouns (other than names) referring to any material or abstract representation of any deity, human or otherwise, are not capitalized."

Capitalization of religious and mythical beings. This was clarified:

"Do not capitalize terms denoting types of religious or mythical beings such as angel, fairy or deva. The personal names of individual beings are capitalized as normal (the angel Gabriel). An exception is made when such terms are used in fantasy fiction and they also denote ethnicities, in which case they are capitalized."

Layout

A long and discursive guideline for the See also section was replaced by a shorter one, introducing a new requirement:

"Like links in other embedded lists, the links in the See also section should be worked into the text where possible, and usually removed from the See also list, unless that would make them hard to find."

The Further reading section may now be called "Books" if it contains only books; it is best to avoid the title "Bibliography", because it may mean different things to different readers.

Citing sources

Reference qualification in article text. This new section was added, opening with:

"An incontrovertible statement requires no qualification in the article apart from its reference."

Examples were provided.

Featured article criteria

The criteria were reformatted to reduce redundant repetition; bolded titles were inserted for easier comprehension. The numbering and substantive meaning of the criteria are unaltered. The word count was reduced by about 11%.

Featured article candidate instructions

The instructions now clarify and reinforce the proscription, in the lead, of dual nominations, with the addition of the underlined words:

"Before nominating an article, ensure that it meets all of the FA criteria and that peer reviews are closed and archived."

The criteria underwent a major overhaul to produce a set of clearer, more concise tools for nominators and reviewers, reduced from 420 to 220 words. The major substantive changes involve the requirements that the writing be of "professional standard" and the lead "engaging", and the clarification of "scope" and "comprehensiveness". The need to take particular care in sourcing claims about living people was made explicit.

There were significant changes to the FLC instructions to legitimise the identity and roles of the first two Wikipedians to be appointed as FL directors. Some of the wording and new procedures were borrowed from the FAC instructions. Two important changes were (1) the abolition of the rule that a nomination must have a minimum of four declarations of support to be eligible for promotion, and (2) the way consensus is judged and the weight of "support" declarations compared with the resolution of critical comments, as embodied in the following insertion:

"Consensus is built among reviewers and nominators, as determined by the FL directors, Scorpion0422 and The Rambling Man. A nomination will be removed from the list and archived if, in the judgment of the director who considers a nomination and its reviews:
  • actionable objections have not been resolved; or
  • consensus for promotion has not been reached; or
  • insufficient information has been provided by reviewers to judge whether the criteria have been met.
It is assumed that all nominations have good qualities; this is why the main thrust of the process is to generate and resolve critical comments in relation to the criteria, and why such resolution is given considerably more weight than declarations of support.

The criteria were amended in two ways. Added this sentence: "Article and biography summaries should not significantly exceed 200 words in length." Added these underlined words: "images where appropriate, with good captions, linked credits, and acceptable copyright status.

Non-free content

Non-free content policy statement. The following sentence was inserted: :"There is no automatic entitlement to use non-free content in an article".

WP:NFCC#3a. The criterion was amended from:

"As few non-free content uses as possible are included in each article and in Wikipedia as a whole. Multiple items are not used if one will suffice; one is used only if necessary." to:
"Multiple items of non-free content are not used if one item can convey equivalent significant information."

WP:NFCC#3b. The scope was broadened (italics replacing struck-through text):

"Low- rather than high-resolution/fidelity/bit rate is used (especially where the original could be used for piracy deliberate copyright infringement)."

April 2008

Manual of Style (main page)

Titles. Clarification that common nouns denoting deities or religious figures are not capitalized.

Acronyms and abbreviations. The terms "abbreviation", "acronym" and "initialism" were clarified.

Quotation marks. Clarification that (block-quoted) multiparagraph quotations "must be precise and exactly as in the source. The source should be cited clearly and precisely to enable readers to find the text that supports the article content in question." Instead of HTML tags, {{quotation}} or {{quote}} can be used to render block quotes.

SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:

"A lowercase s is the SI for seconds; thus, kgs means "kilogram-seconds"."

SI symbols and unit abbreviations. This was added:

"Exponentiation is indicated using a superscript, an; do not use a caret, a^n" and "Do not use E notation".

Disputes over people's proper names. The previous statement:

"Use terminology that subjects use for themselves (self-identification) whenever this is possible"

was replaced with:

"Disputes over the proper name of a person or group are addressed by policies such as Verifiability, Neutral point of view, and Naming conventions where the name appears in an article name. When there is no dispute, use terms that a person uses for himself or herself, or terms that a group most commonly uses for itself.

Alignment of images. The last four words were added to the statement:

"Right-alignment is preferred to left- or center-alignment for the lead image."

An exception was added:

"Wherever possible, images of faces should be placed so that the face or eyes look toward the text, because the reader's eye will tend to follow their direction."

This was added:

Where the lead image is a portrait with the face looking to the reader's right, it should be left-aligned, looking into the text of the article. Where this is the lead image, it may be appropriate to move the Table of Contents to the right by using {{TOCright}}."

Pronunciation. The last three words were added:

"For ease of understanding across dialects, fairly broad IPA transcriptions are usually provided for English pronunciations."

This sentence was added:

"For English pronunciations, pronunciation respellings may be used in addition to the IPA."

Manual of Style (dates and numbers)

Decade abbreviations. Two-digit abbreviations for decades may have a preceding apostrophe only in reference to a social era or cultural phenomenon as a stock phrase that roughly corresponds to or defines a decade (the Roaring '20s, the Gay '90s), or where there is a notable connection between the period and the immediate topic (a sense of social justice informed by '60s counterculture, but grew up in 1960s Boston, moving to Dallas in 1971). [This is now inconsistent with the main page of the MoS.]

Units of measurement. A new section was inserted:

"Use terminology and symbols commonly employed in the current literature for that subject and level of technicality. When in doubt, use the units of measure, prefixes, unit symbols, number notation, and methods of disambiguation most often employed in reliable periodicals directed to a similar readership.

This was marked with a dispute tag and has been the subject of an edit war and page protection.

Units of measurement. The recommendation to use "sq" and "cu" with US-unit abbreviations was removed; now superscript exponents may be used in that system.

Manual of Style (disambiguation pages)

The piping of disambiguation pages. Clarification: piping may be used to add italics to the part of an article name inside parenthetical clarifiers (for instance [[Neo (The Matrix)|Neo (''The Matrix'')]]); until now the guideline only allowed italics and quotation marks for the part outside the parentheses.

Featured article candidate instructions

The third bullet was added to the instructions (underlined here):

"A nomination will be removed from the list and archived if, in the judgment of the director or his delegate:
  • actionable objections have not been resolved; or
  • consensus for promotion has not been reached; or
  • insufficient information has been provided by reviewers to judge whether the criteria have been met."

The following sentence was added to the Featured portal criteria:

"It should include links to other Wikimedia Foundation projects when applicable. Portals that focus on a specific group of life-forms (other than humans) should contain a link to Wikispecies project."

Non-free content

The phrase that was removed from Non-free content Criterion 8 last month (underlined here) was reinstated and is currently under discussion:

"Significance.' Non-free content is used only if its presence would significantly increase readers' understanding of the topic, and its omission would be detrimental to that understanding.



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2008-06-02

Features and admins

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By OhanaUnited

Administrators

Three users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Fritzpoll (nom), Werdna (nom), and Huntster (nom).

Bots

Twelve bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: DOI bot (task request), PeerReviewBot (task request), PeerReviewBot (task request), FritzpollBot (task request), TinucherianBot (task request), Ganeshbot (task request), SoxBot II (task request), ChenzwBot (task request), MrVanBot (task request), Muro Bot (task request), PseudoBot (task request), and SoxBot VI (task request).

Seven articles were promoted to featured status last week: Preity Zinta (nom), The Garden of Earthly Delights (nom), Cogan House Covered Bridge (nom), Natalee Holloway (nom), Macintosh Classic (nom), New York State Route 175 (nom), and Hubert Walter (nom).

Twelve lists were promoted to featured status last week: List of New Orleans Saints first-round draft picks (nom), List of Texan survivors of the Battle of the Alamo (nom), List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein (nom), Seinfeld (season 3) (nom), List of NBA champions (nom), 2006 Winter Olympics medal count (nom), List of Harvest Moon titles (nom), 2004 Summer Olympics medal count (nom), List of Maryland and Washington, D.C. hurricanes (1980–present) (nom), Geri Halliwell discography (nom), List of Pittsburgh Steelers head coaches (nom), and Boston Red Sox seasons (nom).

One topic was promoted to featured status last week: The Orange Box (nom).

No portals were promoted to featured status last week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Nguyen Ngoc Tho, F-4 Phantom II, Troy McClure, Oil shale, D. B. Cooper, Bratislava, and Ran.

No articles were delisted last week.

No lists were delisted last week.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Lawn mower racing, John Muir, Respiratory system, Greater Crested Tern, Cusco and Battle of Leyte.

No sounds were featured last week.

Three featured pictures were demoted last week: Millennium Bridge, London, Koh Samui, and Fisherman on Lake Tanganyika.

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



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2008-06-02

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By ais523

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.8 (f08e6b3), 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.

Fixed bugs

  • Many bugs in Single User Login were fixed this week:
    • It is now impossible to create an account that has the same name as a global account (this was always meant to be impossible, but previously could happen from time to time). (r35340, bug 14248)
    • Only confirmed email addresses are now used to unify accounts into a global account. (r32091, bug 12098)
    • Account autocreations (that is, when a user with a global account visits a Wikimedia wiki they haven't formerly visited, thus causing a local account to be created for them on that wiki) now do not show in Special:Recentchanges (although they still show in Special:Log). (r35441, bug 14299)
    • When not previously logged in on any wiki, a global account can now correctly log in on a wiki which that user had never visited previously, rather than getting a bad-CAPTCHA error message. (r35506, bug 14317)
    • Logging out now logs a global user out from all the Wikimedia wikis involved in the automatic cross-wiki login. (r35533, bug 14301)
    • Accounts on deleted wikis no longer interfere with Special:MergeAccount. (bug 14300http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14300)
  • The &assert= parameter now works on the API, as well as for normal edits. (r35472, bug 12038)
  • A (nonfunctional) rollback link no longer appears for non-admin rollbackers on protected pages. (r35571, bug 14155)
  • Special:FileDuplicateSearch now correctly links to images, rather than sometimes confusing an image on the English Wikipedia with an image with the same name on Commons. (r35576, bug 14147)
  • Pressing Return on Special:Renameuser now does the rename rather than opening the user's block log. (r35625, bug 14344)
  • <gallery> tags can now handle links to images containing URL-encoded special characters. (r35683, bug 11659)

New features

  • Logging in now logs a user in on all wikis (rather than all wikis on the same domain) if that user has a single-user-login global account (except non-Wikimedia wikis and some wikis on .wikimedia.org).
  • 'Related changes' (since April 2008) can show either recent changes to pages linked from a given page (the default, and old behaviour) or recent changes to pages linked to a given page (i.e. across a page's what-links-here). (bug 6528http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6528)
  • When rolling back an edit, the screen that appears to let a user know that the rollback has happened now shows the diff of what the rollback did. (r35688, bug 14263)

Configuration changes

  • A new extension (TorBlock) has been installed, to regulate edits of Wikipedia through Tor. Edits from unregistered users via Tor exit nodes are now blocked; and editors who are logged in via Tor do not count as autoconfirmed (allowing page moves, etc.) for 90 days and until they have at least 100 edits.

Ongoing news

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



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2008-06-02

The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By Ral315

The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving four cases currently open. With a holiday weekend for U.S.-based arbitrators, little to no action was taken this week on any of the cases currently open.

Evidence phase

  • Giovanni33: A case involving the accusation of sockpuppetry by Giovanni33. Giovanni33 and Rafaelsfingers, who has been labeled as a sockpuppet of Giovanni33 by some, have denied the charges.

Voting phase

  • Homeopathy: A dispute involving a number of editors over the Homeopathy article. Remedies with the support of five to seven arbitrators include banning DanaUllman for one year, the creation of a "Sourcing Adjudication Board" regarding the inappropriate use of citations, and emphasizing the Committee's ability to issue subsequent sanctions in the case, based on reports of "inappropriate conduct" as judged by the Sourcing Adjudication Board. Another remedy, with the support of five arbitrators, allows uninvolved administrators to impose sanctions on editors involved in Homeopathy-related articles, for various reasons.

Motion to close

  • Footnoted quotes: A case involving the use of quotes in footnotes, and general concerns with the biographies of living persons policy. Currently, one arbitrator supports closing the case, with two opposing. Remedies supported by eight arbitrators encourage more enforcement of the BLP policy, and impose a one-year restriction banning Alansohn from making any edits judged to be "uncivil, personal attacks, or assumptions of bad faith". The latter remedy allows his blocking, without warning, should he violate it. The former remedy currently passes, but the two opposing arbitrators have cited concerns about the remedy as written.



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