Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-01-23/SPV

Matters related to the selection and conduct of Wikipedia administrators were the subject of considerable attention last week, as community opinion on these questions was solicited in multiple venues.

Radiant! launched an admin accountability poll on Tuesday in an attempt to see whether any particular changes should be made in order to deal with "a number of perennial complaints about adminship or the related procedures."

The poll asked for opinions on a number of different propositions. Radiant! said he had made an effort to include the most frequently expressed views about adminship issues, whether or not he agreed with them personally. A number of additional statements were still added for consideration after the poll started.

Just after the poll began, Linuxbeak also started a discussion intended to focus on possible reforms to the Requests for adminship (RfA) process. Linuxbeak said he hoped this could develop a rough draft of a modified system for handling adminship nominations. Considerable discussion followed, with people listing a number of complaints about the current RfA system. A few possible changes were mentioned, such as de-emphasizing voting in favor of discussion more like featured article candidates, but a concrete reform proposal has yet to emerge.

On Saturday, meanwhile, Radiant! started work on a possible Administrator Code of Conduct that might synthesize some of the ideas from the admin accountability poll. Initial reactions were positive, but indicated some uncertainty as to wording used. A proposal for an Arbitration Committee Code of Conduct discussed last month has gone nowhere, with the fundamental concept drawing mixed opinions, but the actual proposal was widely panned as the work of dissatisfied users who had come under Arbitration Committee sanctions.

In addition, a proposal was also started regarding Requests for comments (RfC). After a large percent of people commented that RfCs were ineffective and not taken seriously, the proposal was made in an effort to give administrators the ability to carry out and enforce small-scale remedies following RfCs. The proposal allows users to make motions to remedy certain undesirable behavior, such as by banning a user from a particular article, which will then be voted on. If the motion receives 2/3 support and has at least five administrators advocating it, other administrators will then have the ability to enforce that remedy.

The admin accountability poll is not designed to achieve any particular policy outcome, simply to gauge public sentiment. Note that most users made individual comments on most issues, thus the results are not as black and white as statistics would suggest. The responses on specific issues, as of press time, are listed below:

Notes:
# Most dissenters think ignoring consensus is inappropriate in most cases, but cite a few clear exceptions.
@ There are widely varying suggestions for where suffrage should lie.
% The majority of votes are not agree or disagree, so this percentage can be somewhat misleading.
& Several users do suggest the Rollback Tool should be more widely available.

The Arbitration Committee introduced the idea for a clerk's office to help lighten the workload for arbitrators. The proposal calls for a small number of clerks, headed by a former arbitrator, to review evidence and write opinions. Clerks would have write-only access to the arbitration mailing list, to allow them to send comments to the arbitrators. The process is still in planning stages.

Proposals for a new main page design are currently being voted on.

Jimbo has endorsed the creation of Category:Living people to aid in the improved cleanup of vandalism and libel which could be hurtful to living persons. He countermanded early attempts to list the category at Categories for deletion, and encouraged the development of processes (both human-powered and automated) to make the category most useful for its intended purpose. A suggestion to rename the category to Category:* (asterisk) to make it more flexible and less obtrusive to casual readers was made by Kappa; discussion on the possible renaming is ongoing at Categories for deletion.

The Czech Wikipedia has created its own Requests for Arbitration page, and taken its first case, against Vít Zvánovec. Six arbitrators were selected in an election ending on 16 January.

• The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
• The Lojban Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles after falling short of the mark earlier in the week.
• The Japanese Wikipedia has reached 175,000 articles.
• The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 17,000 articles.
• The Venetian Wikipedia has reached 50 articles.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 16,000 articles.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 225,000 articles.
• The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.
• The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.

Several news and blog reports touched on a legal case involving a German hacker named Tron. His parents did not want his real name revealed in Wikipedia and filed a legal suit to take down the site. German Wikipedians did temporarily remove a redirect from "wikipedia.de" to "de.wikipedia.org" (the site's true address), but the site was never taken down, and the redirect was restored within a day. The hacker's name remained on the site throughout the day, and although German newspapers obscured his identity, the name now appears in international news reports as well.

• "German court orders shutdown of Wikipedia", The Register January 20
• "German Wikipedia site goes offline after lawsuit", Ars Technica January 19
• "Wikipedia.de Shut Down", Google Blogoscoped January
• "Wikipedia Germany offline", p2pnet January 19
• "Wikipedia returns after legal blackout", The Inquirer January 20
• "German Wikipedia Back on Net", Techtree.com January 21

A pair of deejays on one of the BBC's national radio stations took to editing their articles while on the air, leading listeners to edit Wikipedia as well. "Wikipedia editing hobby goes nationwide", by frequent Wikipedia critic Andrew Orlowski, was published in The Register January 19.

Two cautious-to-negative columns were printed this week. "Be very wary of that wacky Wikipedia" was printed in the Toronto Star on January 17, and on January 20 the science site Physorg republished a University of California Berkeleyan article carrying a detailed critique from a professor trying to edit the Daniel Defoe article, in "Surfing is safer -- and smarter -- with flotation devices". On January 21 a site called Press Action reprinted an article named "Wikipedia's Accountability Problem" by Daniel Brandt, which originally appeared on his Wikipedia Watch website.

Two more positive evaluations came from The Japan Times ("Something wiki this way comes" and from Digital Lifestyle Magazine ("Wikipedia, despite expert’s opinion, extremely accurate.") on January 20.

On January 18, The Australian ran a short article about Wikiversity: "Wiki uni gets an online push",

• "Mobile version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia now integrated in T-Online mobil portal", Noticias.info

• Tim Ryan: "US reporter loses job for copying Wikipedia content", Journalism.co.uk Jan 18
• Digital Universe: "Firmage's `Universe' needs tweaks", The Mercury News Jan 18
• Seigenthaler: "Worse Than Wikipedia", Accuracy in Media Jan 20

An article in the Sacramento [California] Bee, on Jan 26, panned Wikipedia. http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/education/story/14116860p-14946117c.html

Full article here

The staff of U.S. Rep Marty Meehan wiped out references to his broken term-limits pledge as well as information about his huge campaign war chest. It also deleted a reference to the size of Meehan's campaign account, the largest of any House member at $4.8 million...

More dicussion at User_talk:143.231.249.141 Including a complete list of articles edited.

Administration status was given to eight users this week: Fropuff (nom), Ambush Commander (nom), Yamla (nom), Interiot (nom), NoSeptember (nom), EurekaLott (nom), Haukurth (nom), and Wouterstomp (nom).

A near-record sixteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Karen Dotrice, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Michigan State University, Panama Canal, Céline Dion, Central processing unit, History of merit badges (Boy Scouts of America), Marian Rejewski, Flag of Mexico, This Charming Man, Yagan, Vivien Leigh, €2 commemorative coins, Amateur Radio Direction Finding, Epaminondas, and OpenBSD.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Butter, Article 153 of the Constitution of Malaysia, Hero of Ukraine, Tooth development, Economy of the Iroquois, History of Test cricket (1884 to 1889), and Planetary habitability.

Featured articles that recently lost their status include Noam Chomsky, Jet engine, Ralph Yarborough, and Mark Latham.

Three lists reached featured list status this week: List of notable brain tumor patients, Flag flying days in Mexico, and List of countries.

Fifteen pictures reached featured picture status this week:

• 
  Vortex lift
• 
  Wickiup
• 
  Cattle

• 
  Binoculars
• 
  Nez Perce
• 
  Montreal

• 
  Lewis and Clark Expedition
• 
  Leaf
• Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica
  Notre-Dame de Montréal Basilica

• 
  Cock (chicken)
• 
  White-breasted Nuthatch
• 
  Neuschwanstein

• 
  San Francisco International Airport
• 
  Uncle Sam
• 
  Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Two featured pictures lost their status: Image:William Cranch.jpg and Image:Yarra_river_near_city_medium.jpg.

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 18 January — Caching software upgraded to resolve cache corruption issue.
• 19 January — Hawthorn server up and running.
• 20 January — Squid servers running slow, resolved.
• 21 January — Numerous down servers caused a short inability to access the site.
• 22 January — New database dump system tested, minor bugs fixed.

The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week, marking the fourth straight week without a closed case.

No cases were accepted this week.

Other cases involving VeryVerily (user page), editors on WebEx and Min Zhu, editors on Rajput, freestylefrappe (user page), and EffK (user page) are in the Evidence phase.

Cases involving Firebug (user page), Robert I (user page), Sortan (user page), Benjamin Gatti (user page), Gibraltarian (user page), Carl Hewitt (user page), Reddi (user page), Deeceevoice (user page), numerous editors on Neuro-linguistic programming, Johnski (user page), a series of editors on Winter Soldier, and Copperchair (user page) are in the Voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in cases involving AndriyK (user page), Xed (user page), and voters on webcomics AFDs.