Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-05-01/SPV

Morton Brilliant, campaign manager for Cathy Cox (a candidate for governor of the U.S. state of Georgia), has resigned after reports that he edited the Wikipedia article for her opponent in the Democratic primary, Lieutenant Governor Mark Taylor. One of these edits raised ethical concerns by focusing on Taylor's family (an automobile accident involving Taylor's son in which a passenger was killed), a subject Cox had specifically instructed her staff to avoid during the campaign. However, the information was factual and the incident had received considerable coverage in local news media.

Along with a handful of other edits, all of this activity on Wikipedia took place last November. As the edits were made without registering an account, they could be traced back based on the IP address, and this indicated that the computer being used belonged to Cox's campaign headquarters in Atlanta. Some news reports indicated that the origin of these edits had been "confirmed" by Wikipedia or by Jimmy Wales personally, but in reality the information needed to trace them was publicly available to anyone looking at the article's history.

Although the technical evidence was only specific enough to identify the campaign, circumstantial evidence pointed strongly to Brilliant. Aside from editing the articles about Taylor and Cox, the only edits from the IP address had been to two other politicians, Dino Rossi and Mark Sanford. What these two have in common is that they were both gubernatorial candidates (Sanford successfully in South Carolina, Rossi unsuccessfully in Washington) who ran against politicians on whose campaigns Brilliant had worked. The changes were generally factual and backed up by sources, albeit presented in somewhat unflattering terms. The most salient difference, however, was that those campaigns were already long over by the time the edits were made.

The statement announcing Brilliant's resignation did not indicate that he had admitted to making the edits personally, but Cox said in accepting the resignation that Brilliant "is responsible for all the work in my office". On Friday, Cox named Chris Riggall, a senior aide in her current office as Georgia's Secretary of State, to replace Brilliant as campaign manager.

Bill Shipp reported in the Gwinnett Daily Post that Taylor's aides had known for months about the edits and had already traced them back to Brilliant. However, they held back on publicizing the news until this past week to coincide with a speech by Cox that her staff called a "major policy address". As a result, Shipp said the scandal effectively upstaged part of the kickoff to her campaign.

Apparently prompted by this high profile story, Associated Press writer Shannon McCaffrey submitted "Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks", which was picked up by over a hundred media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC News and more.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be honored by several organizations in the coming months:

Time Magazine has named Wales as part of its 2006 TIME 100 list, honoring the 100 most influential figures in entertainment, religion, politics, and technology. Voting is underway at Time's website for the most influential scientist/thinker of the year; currently, Wales is 9th of 10, trailing eight others headed by leader Al Gore (in a different category— see below link).

Reference: Time Magazine 2006 Time 100 Poll— This article stub lists all 100 Time Nominees.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to award Jimmy Wales one of its prestigious Pioneer Awards on Wednesday, according to a Thursday press release. Gigi Sohn and Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist will also be honored. Previous recipients of the award include internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and free software advocate Richard Stallman.

Knox College, an Illinois liberal arts college, will present Wales with an honorary doctor of laws degree at their 2006 commencement ceremony, to be held on 3 June. At the ceremony, former diplomat and human trafficking opponent Shirley E. Barnes and comedian Stephen Colbert will also receive honorary degrees. Like Wales, Colbert was also named one of the TIME 100.

Wikipedia reached 4 million articles in its various languages on Sunday. Of the 4 million articles, over 25% (~1.1 million) were in English.

Wikipedia is participating in Google's Summer of Code, which allows students to perform work for profit for many open source projects. Applications opened on Monday; participants are required to be 18 or older, and be a full or part-time student at an accredited institution. Google employees and their families, as well as citizens of Iran, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar/Burma are ineligible.

During a mailing list conversation comparing the English and German Wikipedias, Elian, a participant in both communities, wrote a detailed comparison of the two, comparing each on issues such as Adminship (requests for adminship are much more frequented on the German Wikipedia), arbitration (the German Wikipedia has no Arbitration Committee, and instead decides bans by community vote), userboxes (relegated to the User namespace on the German Wikipedia), and social structure.

In preparation for a speech to be delivered at Wikimania 2006, Linuxbeak is soliciting survey responses from Wikipedians about what they think about Wikipedia.

• The English Wikipedia has reached 1.1 million articles.
• The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 15,000 registered users.
• The Galician Wikipedia has reached 1,000 registered users.
• Wikipedia has passed 4,000,000 articles.
• The Czech Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• Wikipedia has reached 40,000,000 web page hits for the first time on this day, according to Alexa
• The Walloon Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 8,000 pages total.
• The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 15,000 users.
• The Hungarian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 100,000 registered users.
• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 50 featured articles.
• The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 users.
• The Macedonian Wiktionary has reached 100 entries.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 275,000 articles.
• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 65,000 articles and 200,000 total pages.
• The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 400,000 total pages. Its article count is just above 175,000.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 users.

There were numerous stories, especially in the Southern United States, covering the resignation of Georgia campaign manager Morton Brilliant after ethics questions arose over some of his Wikipedia edits (see related story). A related Associated Press story, "Wikipedia Ripe for Political Dirty Tricks", was picked up by over a hundred media outlets as well.

According to the article "Branson on wealth" at BBC Online, Richard Branson held a meeting in California to plan an African version of Wikipedia a few weeks ago. He discussed "getting Wikipedia to create an education site for Africa ... An African living in South Africa might know nothing about Ethiopia or Nigeria".

In response, Jimmy Wales says, " The news story is significantly confused. We already have several African languages, and I discuss with practically everyone I meet, how we might improve and promote what we are doing in those languages. I was at a meeting with Sir Richard, as the story says, but the meeting was not about Wikipedia, per se, but rather about his own initiatives in Africa, which might or might not include helping us in some ways. His help will be very much appreciated, but nothing specific has been discussed or is planned at this time. I am in an ongoing email dialogue with him."

• "Everyone's an editor as wiki fever spreads to shopping", New York Times (registration required)
• "Amazon gets wikified", Motley Fool

Amazon.com hopes to apply the same sort of collective intelligence behind the popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia to online shopping, allowing users to write, edit, and update product-related wikis on its site. (Note Amazon is applying the word "wiki" to each individual editable section.)

The BBC also wants to "reboot" its homepage to exploit "the functionality and usability of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Technorati and Wikipedia". They have created an open site at http://open.bbc.co.uk/reboot/ to allow users to contribute to the redesign process.

• "BBC's Director of New Media & Technology defines vision for the future", BBC Press Office
• "BBC plans for on-demand future", PC Advisor, London
• "BBC online gears up for complete and collaborative overhaul", PC Pro, UK

• "Get a feel of Wikipedia", Deccan Herald, Bangalore, India

The Western-centric bias found in many Western publications is significantly reduced in Wikipedia. It is one of the few sites on the web to attempt neutral, objective, encyclopedic coverage of popular culture. Wikipedia often produces excellent encyclopedic articles and resources covering newsworthy events almost in real-time.

• "Wikipedia's world, and where it points us", Globe and Mail, Canada, editorial, May 1, 2006. p A12.

The Wikipedia model is not perfect, but its success has implications that go far beyond how people conduct research. It puts a question mark over the whole idea that information must move from credentialed producer to passive consumer. That presents established companies and organizations with a big challenge. Media groups will have to find a way to emulate Wikipedia and bring readers and viewers inside the tent, as this newspaper is trying to do by, among other things, inviting on-line comments and organizing question-and-answer sessions with journalists. Political parties will have to use the Web to involve an alienated public, as Howard Dean managed in his Web-driven run for the 2004 U.S. Democratic presidential nomination. Government itself, that ultimate control freak, will have to open up to the views of its Web-empowered citizens. In the same way that Wikipedia presumes "collaboration among users will improve articles over time," government should learn to accept that collaboration among citizens can change things for the better.

• "Web 2.0: Ready to Go", Line 56 editorial (business executives newspaper)

It seems to be me that, until you use it, it's easy to be skeptical about a wiki (especially if, like Carr, your skepticism is professional; I'd love to sign up for that gig). Once you try it, though, there's no going back.

"Jane Jacobs died this week. There are many online resources devoted to the woman perhaps most responsible for keeping our cities as livable as they are, but her Wikipedia entry may be the best place to start to learn about her." [1], New York Times

The Game Daily site uses Wikipedia as a generic metaphor for a reference work: "Under the Wikipedia entry for 'dinosaur' you'll find photos of journalists who don't consider search optimization..." [2]

Webcomic Bob and George mentions Wikipedia: [3] and [4].

Seven users were granted admin status last week: Lord Voldemort (nom), Humus sapiens (nom), RasputinAXP (nom), Ezeu (nom), The JPS (nom), Keenan Pepper (nom) and Deskana (nom).

Six articles were featured last week: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Halloween (film), Kolkata, Søren Kierkegaard, USA PATRIOT Act, Title III, Subtitle A and Genesis (band).

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, Attalus I, Hong Kong action cinema, 1996 U.S. campaign finance scandal, Swedish allotment system, Mini and Diane Keaton.

Two lists reached featured list status last week: Timeline of Apple Macintosh models and List of NCAA Philippines basketball champions.

Four pictures reached featured picture status last week:

• 
  POV-Ray
• Walschaerts valve gear
  Walschaerts valve gear
• 
  London Eye

• 
  Great Dividing Range

A new special page, Special:Randomredirect, allows a user to visit a random redirect page. Added by Rob Church on 25 April, the page works in a similar fashion as Special:Random.

Another new page, Special:Unusedtemplates, allows users to find templates which are not transcluded on any other page.

Bug #4327 was resolved by adding a timestamp to special pages which contain cached data. Pages like Special:Ancientpages will now display the time the data was last updated.

• 25 April — More specific protection notice and interface editing notices added
• 27 April — Invalid XHTML fixed in image galleries
• 28 April — Spam blacklist circumvention message with multiple URL slashes fixed
• 29 April — Users now warned if a file uploaded with the same name has been previously deleted
• 29 April — New {{NUMBEROFUSERS}} magic word added (current value: 48,264,389)
• 29 April — Bug #93, a parsing error, fixed
• Page protection and unprotection is now included in the revision history
• Watchlists now have a namespace selector

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 27 April — Mail services moved to bart
• 28 April — http://secure.wikimedia.org pointed to bart

The Arbitration Committee closed two cases this week. Additionally, two motions in prior cases.

A case against users involved in a bible-related dispute was closed on Thursday. As a result, SimonP was cautioned to respect consensus. SimonP and other users had warred over articles on single bible verses, and the exclusive use of the King James Version of the Bible.

A case against Agapetos angel was closed on Sunday. As a result, Agapetos angel and related users were blocked from editing articles relating to Jonathan Sarfati, and other editors were warned to follow Neutral Point of View.

A case was accepted this week involving editors on Biological psychiatry. It is currently the only case in the evidence phase.

Cases involving users SqueakBox and Zapatancas, Messhermit (user page), Monicasdude (user page), and Jacrosse (user page), Marcosantezana (user page), Terryeo (user page), Aucaman (user page), and Locke Cole (user page) are in the voting phase.

Motions to close are on the table in the cases involving editors on Depleted uranium, users DarrenRay and 2006BC, FourthAve (user page) and Lou franklin (user page) .

A motion to ban Herschelkrustofsky from Wikipedia for one year has four support votes with no opposition.

A motion to restrict StrangerInParadise to one user account has five support votes with no opposition.