Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-07-03

Angela Beesley has indicated that she is resigning from Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation after two years of service. The seat will be filled in an election later this year. Beesley was first elected in June 2004 for a one-year term; the election will be for the balance of the two-year term to which she was elected last year.

The news was first reported on Saturday in the Wikizine, after which Beesley confirmed it in a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list. She said she would remain involved in the projects and organizing a Wikimedia chapter for Australia. The only trustee to oppose the resolution to hire an interim executive director, she did indicate some concern about deterioration in "the collaborative consensus-based nature Wikimedia had before the start of this year". However, she expressed confidence that remaining Trustees Jimmy Wales and Florence Nibart-Devouard would continue to manage the Foundation for the benefit of the Wikimedia projects. Looking back, she said, "It's been a great two years and I've enjoyed the role".

Beesley made the decision to resign a month ago, intending for the resignation to go into effect 1 July. The Board of Trustees had been trying to find someone to fill the vacancy on an interim basis, but was unable to do so in that time. Instead, Beesley's resignation is effective once her replacement has been elected. The Board passed a resolution accepting her resignation on 26 June.

According to the resolution, the election is scheduled to start 1 September; additional information should be forthcoming. It is not known how many positions will be open in the election. The possibility of creating additional seats on the board has been mentioned before, but it is not known whether those would be elected positions. Discussions of expanding the Board of Trustees have explored bringing in outside perspectives as well as adding more people from the project communities. Wales has indicated that some or all of the additions might be appointed rather than elected.

A proposal to require a confirmed email address from users uploading images and other media stimulated an extended debate on the Wikipedia mailing list. The purpose behind this idea would be to improve the chances of tracking down source and license information for uploads.

The discussion began with a suggestion from Kat Walsh on Wednesday that uploads require a confirmed email address. As she put it, it would be "a big step forward" in the effort to appropriately tag images and could prevent the deletion of many images for which the uploader cannot otherwise be contacted.

This idea got an enthusiastic reception from a number of people. Tomasz Wegrzanowski objected, however, arguing that it was another step toward Wikipedia being less open and that it "would be annoying every single contributor while gaining absolutely nothing." Walsh responded that it was actually intended to prevent the annoying of contributors, particularly those who come back later to find their contributions deleted because nobody was able to contact them. Greg Maxwell reported that for March, when email confirmation started, while 63% of uploads came from someone without a confirmed address, 83% of the images deleted came from this group of contributors.

The proposed change would not require people to give up anonymity, and it was pointed out that one must already have registered an account in order to use the upload function. A comparison came up to requiring account registration in order to create new articles, but the idea has a different philosophy behind it. The change to article creation, instituted in the aftermath of the Seigenthaler incident, was intended to prevent the addition of libel and vandalism, material that needs to be removed in any case. With respect to image uploads, the objective would be to save content from being removed. Users sorting through the mass of uploads for inappropriate submissions did comment, however, that if the proposed change reduced the scale of this task it would be a beneficial side effect.

Some users, especially those who started editing a long time ago, may already have provided an email address but never gotten around to confirming it. The confirmation system was only implemented in March as an anti-spam measure (see archived story).

The Wikimedia Foundation also gets regular requests from people interested in reusing a particular image, where the contributor may not have edited for some time and is unlikely to check his or her talk page. Such a change would facilitate redistribution of images, especially where the interested party is likely to find GFDL requirements awkward as applied to a single image.

Wikipedia has been cited for the first time in a reported judgment of the High Court of Justice. The case, Kay v. the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis [2006] EWHC 1536 (Admin) (27 June 2006), concerned Critical Mass, a regular meeting of cyclists who ride through London along an unplanned route. Critical Mass' counsel introduced the English Wikipedia entry on Critical Mass, quoted in paragraph 4 of the judgment, to show that the group was leaderless and had no goals other than cycling together.

The claimant was Des Kay, a participant in the Critical Mass rides. He won a declaration that there was no need to apply for permission from the Metropolitan Police Service before holding its events. The court was unable to accept there was definitely no campaigning motivation to Critical Mass rides, but went on to find that it is "not necessarily" true that they have a campaigning motivation. Ultimately, the claimant won a favourable declaration by demonstrating that there had been over 140 rides since April 1994, and, as a result, the meetings were held to be "commonly or customarily held", a specific exception to the requirement to give prior notice of a public procession under section 11 of the Public Order Act 1986.

While this is the first known citation of Wikipedia by the English High Court, Wikipedia has been mentioned in two other reported rulings in the Courts of England and Wales. The first was in BBT Thermotechnology UK Ltd v Brainfire Group [2006] DRS 3931 (12 January 2006), a disputed internet registration claim decided by an independent expert under the Nominet UK Dispute Resolution Service. In pre-trial emails quoted in paragraph 6.4 of the decision, the original registrant of buderus.co.uk referred the other to the existence of Danny Buderus as a demonstration that the name Buderus "was not a fanciful term" but originated as a surname, and therefore the domain should not be transferred to the Boulter Buderus domestic boiler company, which had been trading since 1731. The ruling ordered that the domain name should be transferred.

Wikipedia was also cited by the Competition Appeal Tribunal in the case of Media Marketing & Promotions v. Office of Communications [2006] CAT 12 (15 May 2006). Media Marketing & Promotions referred to the entry on rent (see paragraph 117 of the judgment) in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid action by OFCOM for contravention of the Communications Act 2003.

In the US, Wikipedia has been cited and discussed by courts on a number of occasions, most recently by the California Court of Appeal in the Apple v. Does case. For a list, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia as a court source.

A change was introduced last week in the instructions to blocked users, hopefully reducing the burden on existing fora by sending them to a dedicated mailing list. The new list will be known as unblock-en-l.

The creation of the new mailing list was announced Tuesday by UninvitedCompany, a member of the Wikimedia Communications committee. This step was taken partly to distinguish unblock requests as an internal community matter from the general email traffic from the public handled by the committee via OTRS. The unblock-en-l mailing list is open and those interested in providing a fair hearing to blocked users are welcome to join.

The process for appealing a block has developed a number of options, partly to deal with inadvertent blocks of legitimate editors, which sometimes results because of situations like dynamic IP addresses and ISPs using proxy servers. A change allowing blocked users to edit their own talk pages was made nearly a year ago (see archived story). They may also contact the administrator who imposed the block via the "email this user" function if they have an email set in their user preferences (all admins who impose blocks are expected to have their own email set in preferences for this purpose).

Previously the designated place for appealing a block was the English Wikipedia mailing list, wikiEN-l. This list has very high traffic and there are regular complaints about the signal-to-noise ratio in any case. The tone of discussions there has been criticized as well, with requests sometimes degenerating into an exchange featuring rants on one side and mostly sarcasm and mockery on the other. In advertising the new list, UninvitedCompany encouraged members to "limit themselves to only highly respectful replies even in those cases where the unblock request is wholly without merit."

Wiktionary, a sister project of Wikipedia, has exceeded a total of 1,000,000 entries in all languages. An unofficial press release cited that the project has seen extraordinary growth since its inception in December 2002, and since then the free dictionary has been started in nearly 150 languages. In addition, the total number of edits in all Wikimedia projects surpassed 150 million.

Changes to the Wikimedia Foundation's privacy policy became effective on Saturday, July 1. The changes, which were approved by the Board of Trustees in June, mainly reflect the use of CheckUser, with the major change providing that people with access to CheckUser can view a logged-in user's IP address "in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address."

The promotion and translation subcommittee, part of the communications committee, released their first newsletter this week. Temporarily dubbed "The Babylonian", the monthly newsletter will serve to coordinate translation of news, press releases, and notices, and bring together promotional efforts, such as poster designs.

A medical dictionary wiki was proposed recently, with the goal of providing a comprehensive medical resource. The advocates of the proposal admitted that the project would have a controversial legal status, as law prohibits anyone from giving medical advice except for medical professionals. However, the proponents argued that "[the project] would be retelling medical advice from legitimate sources" instead of giving medical advice.

Voting began on a new logo for the Incubator Wiki, a place where projects can be developed and tested before launch. As of press time, there are four logos proposed, with one logo having the vast majority of votes. A vote is also ongoing on whether the name should be "Wikimedia Incubator" or something else.

• The Hebrew Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
• The Ligurian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Samogitian Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Slovenian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 600 articles.
• The Bengali Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
• The Ido Wiktionary has reached 60,000 pages.
• The Russian Wikipedia has reached 20,000 registered users.
• The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 1,000 entries.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 130,000 articles.
• The Thai Wikipedia has reached 7,000 registered users.
• The Korean Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
• The Tagalog Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
• The Italian Wikibooks has reached 1,000 wikibook modules.
• The Turkish Wikibooks has reached 100 wikibook modules.
• The Russian Wikipedia has reached 90,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wiktionary has reached 100 entries.
• The Latvian Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Venetian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wiktionary has reached 25,000 total pages.

The press has discovered another politician whose career problems are being detailed in Wikipedia. This time it's San Jose mayor Ron Gonzales, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News, "On Wikipedia, someone's adding mayor's troubles to his profile".

Linda Knapp of the Seattle Times, who recently wrote a review of Wikipedia (see archived story), followed up with an article based on responses to her column. She discussed the use of Wikipedia in schools and the Nature-Britannica dispute. Knapp also mentioned her efforts to submit an article on Photoshop Elements 4.0, based on another of her columns, but it "disappeared" into a redirect to Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Wikipedia was discussed again by the radio program Open Source, as part of its show on The Limits of Crowds. Prompted by Jaron Lanier's recent essay about "online collectivism", it featured a discussion with Lanier along with other guests including James Surowiecki, Ze Frank, and David Weinberger.

• "Talking point: Wikipedia may be fallible, but we'd be crazy to stop consulting it", The Times, UK
• "How to game Digg and the blogosphere", ZDNet, re: "Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google."
• "Please contribute your Wikipedia headline here", Straight.com, Vancouver

• "OSS CEO Speaks Out on First Amendment, Open Source Intelligence as Antidotes to State Secrecy and Questionable Practices", Yahoo! Finance (press release from OSS.net), calling on members of the intelligence community to contribute to the Open source intelligence article.

Self-published author Sam Vaknin wrote "The Six Sins of the Wikipedia" in Global Politician, his website, and dozens of other sites that distribute self-published content. Ta bu shi da yu wrote an extended rebuttal to Vaknin's points at User:Ta bu shi da yu/Global Politician. Ta bu shi da yu also deleted the Wikipedia article on Vaknin, which had been recreated after an earlier deletion.

• "Answers By the People, For the People", MIT Technology Review, Massachusetts
• "Nothing left to prove" Scott McNealy says, "On average, Wikipedia will get it more right than the publishers will."
• "NetSurf conquers Wikipedia", Drobe, re RISC OS browser, now able to display the absolute positioning on http://www.wikipedia.org/.

Five users were granted admin status last week: Ohnoitsjamie (nom), Extraordinary Machine (nom), theProject (nom), Jaranda (nom) and Where (nom).

Twelve articles were featured last week: Azerbaijani people (nom), Cochineal (nom), Actuary (nom), Belton House (nom), Pope Pius XII (nom), Battle of the Eastern Solomons (nom), Fermi paradox (nom), Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (nom), Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (nom), Velociraptor (nom), Tropical Storm Allison (nom) and Cryptography (nom).

One list reached featured list status last week: List of areas in the National Park System of the United States.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Kolkata, Oroonoko, Deconstructivism, Right whale, Manila Light Rail Transit System, Sunday Times Golden Globe Race and Lindsay Lohan. The appearance of Lohan one week after Uma Thurman prompted questions on the English Wikipedia mailing list. This was explained by geni as the young male demographic writing about subjects they're interested in that are easy to source. Some attention was also directed to the overuse of fair use images in these and other featured articles.

These were the pictures of the day last week: Eagle Nebula, Prosobranchia, Carbon, Personal computer, Bog, Spanish shawl and Solvay Conference.

Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:

• 
  Hippopotamus
• 
  Walt Disney Concert Hall
• 
  March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

• 
  Fossil fuel power plant
• 
  Salzburg
• 
  Formula Three

• Run link table updates when importing pages [Brion Vibber]
• Update Special:Recentchanges and the import log when importing pages [Brion Vibber]
• List pages created after import [Brion Vibber]
• Link to page histories in Special:Newpages [Rob Church]
• Show a more specific message when an anonymous user tries to access Special:Watchlist [Rob Church]
• Introduce {{formatnum:}} magic word [Niklas Laxström]
• Enforce bad image list in categories [Brion Vibber]
• Show relevant log fragment in Special:Movepage [Rob Church]
• Preserve language selections in the mode switch link on Special:Userlogin [Rob Church]
• Rename "searchquery" to "searchsubtitle" and support wiki text in it [Rob Church]

• Don't do message transformations when preloading messages for editing [Rob Church]
• Fix paging links in Special:Prefixindex [Rob Church]
• Treat spaces as underscores in parameters to {{ns:}} [Rob Church]
• Respect page existence on Special:Shortpages [Rob Church]

• The Wikimedia Grid Report at http://static.wikipedia.org/ganglia/ is working [Tim Starling]

The Arbitration Committee closed five cases and opened two others this week.

• Deathrocker: Closed on Tuesday, this case involved Deathrocker and Leyasu involved in revert wars on various articles related to Gothic rock. The Arbitration Committee placed both Deathrocker and Leyasu on revert parole, banning them from reverting more than once per 24 hour period, more than twice in any 7 day period, or more than three times in any 30 day period. Deathrocker could be blocked for up to a week for violations of the ban; Leyasu, who was already subject to a revert parole in a previous case, could be blocked for up to a year.

• Locke Cole: Closed on Thursday, the case dealt with a dispute between Locke Cole and Netoholic. The Arbitration Committee found that Locke Cole's tactic of arguing on previously untouched pages after Netoholic was sufficiently "similar to stalking" to warrant a one-month ban for harassment. Locke Cole was also placed on non-vandalism one revert per page per day parole, requiring all reverts to be explained on the article's talk page. Meanwhile, Netoholic is again subject to restrictions imposed in a previous case, which had been temporarily suspended. These bar him from editing in the template namespace and restrict him to one revert per page per day. Netoholic was also reminded of Wikipedia's fair use policy, and both Netoholic and Locke Cole are banned from interacting with each other. Locke Cole has since left Wikipedia.

• Blu Aardvark: The review of the block status of Blu Aardvark was closed Friday. Blu Aardvark had been banned by general community agreement on 2 April for a series of disruptive activities, including vandalism, harassment, and creating sockpuppets. An attempt on 28 May by Linuxbeak and Raul654 to unblock him after negotiating a mentoring arrangement met with considerable opposition, leading to the arbitration case. Blu Aardvark was unblocked to participate in the case with a temporary injunction limiting his edits to his talk page and pages relating to the case. In the end, it was decided to ban Blu Aardvark for one year, although he claims to have left Wikipedia for good [1]. The administrators involved in the May incident, which included several unblocks and reblocks, were admonished for block-warring.

• Infinity0: This case, involving Infinity0 and RJII, was closed Saturday. RJII has been banned for one year, after a number of blocks based on a previous probation. Infinity0 was placed on one-revert-per-day parole for a year, requiring Infinity0 to discuss any reverts on talk pages.

• Election: Closed Saturday, this case involved the conduct of editors on 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities. The dispute traced back to edit-warring on the article, including the addition and removal of a "NPOV" tag. The arbitrators found that the addition of the tag had been "adequately justified". To deal with the situation, they decided to structure a probation around articles rather than users, focusing on a set of nine related articles. Editors may continue to work on the articles, but any editor may be banned by an administrator from this group of articles "for disruptive edits, including, but not limited to, edit warring, incivilty, and original research."

Two cases were opened this week; both are in the evidence phase.

• Eternal Equinox: A case involving Eternal Equinox. Several users complained that Eternal Equinox has been trying to claim ownership of articles with edit wars and abuse directed at those who try to edit them. Eternal Equinox claims to have left Wikipedia, but the other parties argued that this was not credible because of a number of similar statements previously.

• Hunger: A case involving a dispute about articles related to The Hunger Project. One of the parties, Jcoonrod, identifies himself as John Coonrod, an executive with that organization. The dispute has been in mediation about how and whether to include unflattering material about the organization in the article.

• Añoranza: A case involving Añoranza. Users asserted that Añoranza had been incivil, and had filed a retaliatory request for comment and request for checkuser. The dispute involves the usage of terms such as "Operation Iraqi Liberation" for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

• 8bitJake: A case involving 8bitJake. badlydrawnjeff, the initiator of the arbitration request, has asserted that 8bitJake's editing on political articles was biased, and that 8bitJake was incivil to other editors on the articles.

• Dionyseus: A case involving Dionyseus and Danny Pi, and their actions on Veselin Topalov, an article on a Bulgarian chess player accused of cheating.

• Iloveminun: A case brought against Iloveminun. Evidence presented asserted that Iloveminun violated fair use and image deletion policies by uploading copyrighted images and removing tags. A checkuser request confirmed that Iloveminun also was involved in sockpuppetry.

• Moby Dick: A case brought against Moby Dick. Administrators Tony Sidaway, Bishonen, and MONGO have alleged that Moby Dick is a sockpuppet of Davenbelle, violating previous arbitration rulings in his political edits and his relations with Cool Cat.

• Pudgenet: A case brought against Pudgenet, involving a dispute between Pudgenet and -Barry-. The dispute involves pages relating to Perl, as well as Wikipedia:Wikipedians with articles.

• Irishpunktom: A case involving Irishpunktom, Karl Meier, and Dbiv. Measures to ban Irishpunktom and Dbiv from editing Peter Tatchell for one year, place Irishpunktom and Karl Meier on probation for one year, place Irishpunktom on one revert per article per week parole, and desysop Dbiv have the support of two arbitrators.

• Saladin1970: A case involving an appeal of Saladin1970's indefinite block originally placed by Jayjg, and later by SlimVirgin. Arbitrator Fred Bauder has submitted remedies in the case, but none have been voted on by other arbitrators as of press time.

• Raphael1: A case brought against Raphael1, involving the display of images on Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. Measures to place Raphael1 on article probation for one year, as well as general probation, and to ban Raphael1 from Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy for one year, have the support of three arbitrators.

• Francis Schuckardt: A case involving editors on Francis Schuckardt. Remedies to place the article on probation are being debated.

• Highways: A case involving naming conventions on highway-related articles. Current remedies that will likely pass include a probation against move warriors in the case, a ban on moving pages between names until a policy on the names is adopted, and a warning for JohnnyBGood and SPUI to remain civil at all times.