Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-04-23/SPV

Robdurbar's admin-enabled account went on a brief rampage on Thursday morning, deleting and then vandalising the Main Page, deleting articles, and indefinitely blocking well-known Wikipedians including Jimbo Wales. Editors could not remember another time when an admin went on a vandalism spree, and a debate opened over whether the response (an emergency desysopping after 17 minutes) was speedy or delayed.

Background

Robdurbar created his account on 6 July, 2005 and was granted admin status after a request which concluded with 48 supports and 3 opposes (2 neutral) on 12 August, 2006. On 3 March this year he announced he was leaving, although he would continue to edit occasionally. He declared that "I'd rather start anew" rather than use his existing account for future edits. Other than blocking himself as an accident, his block log was clean.

Vandalism

On Thursday 19 April, Robdurbar returned, firstly to delete an empty article. The vandalism spree began when he

.

The overall toll of the 17 minutes was ten good standing accounts given indefinite blocks, five established articles deleted, the Main Page deleted three times (and left unprotected for some minutes during which anonymous users vandalised it), and Robdurbar unblocking himself three times. All vandalism and inappropriate admin actions were swiftly reversed.

Aftermath

With Robdurbar not giving an explanation for his actions, some users wondered whether his account had been hijacked. In response to a

to confirm the desysopping was filed and attracted six arbitrators who all agreed to the desysop without hearing a full case. Arbitration Committee Clerks decided that a majority of active arbitrators (which would mean seven) would be needed to decide the issue.

Later, contributors from Wiktionary commented that a similar situation had happened on that project when Wonderfool twice blocked all admins and deleted their Main Page in September 2005. In August 2006, Dangherous went on an identical rampage. On this second occasion, with Stewards unavailable (some were at Wikimania), a developer had to perform the desysopping and revealed via CheckUser that Dangherous was actually a sockpuppet of Wonderfool who worked his way up to adminship once again. A second request for CheckUser tried to find whether Wonderfool was related to Robdurbar, and has shown that Robdurbar is really one of Wonderfool's sockpuppets.

Possible changes

In discussion on Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, Carcharoth asked "is it good or bad that it took 17 minutes to deal with this?" HighInBC commented that the incident showed the "whole emergency de-adminning system works". Robdurbar's actions led to discussion of whether administrators should retain the ability to unblock themselves. Jesse Viviano made a novel suggestion that admins should be able to sacrifice their own sysop status and desysop another admin, in order to allow for debate on which of them should be resysopped.

In a surprising development, one of Wikipedia's most persistent critics was briefly unblocked last week and allowed to edit alongside other contributors, primarily to comment on the

, this change of affairs held up for a few days amid controversy, until Wales reversed the action after his decision was called a mistake by the critic himself.

The critic in question is

Seigenthaler incident

and began criticizing Wikipedia on many points. His critiques of anonymity found expression in galleries of Wikipedia editors posted to his Wikipedia-Watch website, including the purported real names of many pseudonymous editors along with photographs and hometowns.

Brandt edited with the account User:Daniel Brandt as early as October 2005, not long after the article about him was first created. This account had been blocked indefinitely since April 2006, after some previous blocks of shorter duration. Brandt occasionally edited from IP addresses thereafter, either in connection with his ongoing criticism of Wikipedia generally, or to raise complaints specifically about his Wikipedia article. He was unblocked on 18 April, 2007, although apparently some technical issues made unblocking difficult and it took a few hours to sort out before Brandt could edit normally. In explaining the unblocking, Wales said "he asked nicely, we are talking about a productive way forward in the future, it has been more than a year".

The discussion between Wales and Brandt had arisen after Brandt sought to have his block lifted, first by making a request to the

had largely favored a "community ban".

Brandt, meanwhile, did make a few edits to Talk:Daniel Brandt, but wrote to the mailing list criticizing Wales for not deleting the article and saying, "I feel that Jimmy Wales made the wrong decision when he unbanned me a couple of days ago." Responding to this comment, Wales then reblocked Brandt's account.

The outcome left things much like they were a year-and-a-half ago, except for the fact that the article Brandt wants deleted has grown considerably in length. One of Brandt's earliest edits, in debating with SlimVirgin (who had created the initial article about him), said, "Please ban me. I didn't want to be here in the first place."

Editor's note: The Wikipedia Signpost is an independent, community newspaper, and is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Any comments published on this page are the opinions of their author alone, and do not reflect the opinion of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Turkish historian, sociologist, author and professor

in February. The reported reason, according to Canadian authorities: a vandalized Wikipedia entry that claimed that Akçam was a terrorist.

Akçam's biography has been one of the loci of dispute in an ongoing dispute over the

Armenian Genocide

. The 1915 genocide, an attempt by the Turkish government to eliminate all Turkish Armenians, resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million Armenians. Akçam is one of the few Turkish historians to publicly acknowledge and discuss the Genocide, a position which has made him a source of controversy within the Turkish and Turkish-American communities.

On 16 February, 2007, Akçam flew from Minneapolis to Montreal, for a lecture sponsored by

:

The Canadian immigration officer, Akcam says, was "courteous" - but promptly detained him at Montreal's Trudeau airport. Even odder, the Canadian immigration officer asked him why he needed to be detained. ... Akcam was given a one-week visa and the Canadian officer showed him - at Akcam's insistence - a piece of paper which was the obvious reason for his temporary detention. "I recognised the page at once," Akcam says. "The photo was a still from a 2005 documentary on the Armenian genocide... The still photo and the text beneath it comprised my biography in the English language edition of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which anyone in the world can modify at any time. For the last year ... my Wikipedia biography has been persistently vandalised by anonymous 'contributors' intent on labelling me as a terrorist. The same allegations has been repeatedly scrawled, like gangland graffiti, as 'customer reviews' of my books at Amazon."[1]

Akçam, citing the unlikely possibility of the Canadian government finding a two-month-old, reverted copy of his Wikipedia biography, suggested that enemies may have forwarded a copy to the Canada Border Services Agency: "It was unlikely, to say the least, that a Canadian immigration officer found out that I was coming to Montreal, took the sole initiative to research my identity on the internet, discovered the archived version of my Wikipedia biography, printed it out on 16 February, and showed it to me - voilà! - as a result."^[1] Upon again arriving at Trudeau International Airport on 18 February to return to the University of Minnesota, Akçam was again detained, this time by the United States Department of Homeland Security. He was allowed to leave after waiting an hour, but was cautioned not to travel until the situation was sorted out with customs.

The story was first reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune on 21 February, but received little attention (the original article is not available online, but excerpts are available here). The story was publicized by professor Juan Cole in a 14 April blog entry. On 15 April, DragonflySixtyseven semi-protected the article; the protection was removed by Omegatron on 22 April, and re-added by Ral315 on 24 April.

It is believed that the original vandalism was introduced by Ahmetcoxall in a series of edits around 24 December, 2006; all of Ahmetcoxall's edits were reverted in 10 hours or less. The edits, since deleted, claimed that Akçam was "a member of an extreme leftist terrorist organization". Ahmetcoxall was blocked indefinitely by Eloquence on 23 April, nearly four months after his last edit.

Reference

In the last two weeks, several discussions and experiments to reform the

.

Temporary removal of vote tallies

To mitigate the appearance of voting,

. The tallies have since been restored.

Experimental RFA formats

Moralis

In a bolder move,

. This resulted in a lengthy hodgepodge of various opinions.

Moralis's RFA failed with no consensus; supporting and opposing comments were roughly even in number. Much of the opposition focused on lack of experience because Moralis had made fewer than 1,000 edits.

In closing the discussion, Warofdreams explained:

In general, I found that the new format wasn't particularly helpful in determining consensus. On the plus side, it did encourage users to explain their reasons for support or objection, but on the negative side, it led to a large number of comments mixed throughout the discussion repeating issues which had appeared earlier. This made it far more time-consuming than an ordinary RfA to determine which issues had been raised and how many users felt that these were serious concerns.^[2]

Matt Britt

Second, and more drastically, Durin created a new style of RFA for

process. Users could not vote on Matt Britt's candidacy as a whole. Instead, separate discussions were created to focus on individual aspects of the candidacy. Some propositions were uncontroversial ("Nominee appears to be trustworthy", "Demonstrated need for tools"). However, the candidate's level of experience with deletions inspired no fewer than four sections of discussion ("Nominee has no experience with XFDs", "Nominee has little experience with XFDs", "Nominee has little experience with XFDs but this doesn't seem to be much of a problem", "Nominee's experience with XFD/DRV is not sufficient to promote"). Two other sections were devoted to Matt Britt's usage of edit summaries.

The unorthodox format generated much consternation within the community. Many users supported the proposition that "This method of RFA is so confusing that I am unable to participate." For example,

Despite the criticism, Durin defended the need to experiment with new methods. He wrote,

• ...come on, it's just an experiment. There's no damage to the project being caused by this. For far too long, RfA has wallowed in a complete inability to come to any agreement on whether RfA is broken or not, whether we should reform it or not, what that reform would entail if anything...The amount of discourse on these subjects could fill a small library. It's really rather absurd.
• So, I got tired of hashing these endless debates out. Instead, I decided to DO something about it and actually try doing something different for a change. Unless someone can show me how these experiments constitute some threat to the project (especially a threat that's worse than the normal, already damaging RfA formats), then I intend on trying others if I can find willing guinea pigs.
• In the very least, you have to acknowledge these experiments are fostering a considerable amount of discussion on actual attempts at reform rather than theoretical notions of how something might work.[4]

Kim Bruning humorously supported Durin's controversial experiment. He wrote, "RFA can use some spring cleaning. And besides, isn't this fun? :-)"^[5]

Dan declined to promote Matt Britt. He explained:

I have closed Matt Britt's request as unsuccessful because the community appears far from convinced of the validity of this format. I am sorry to Matt, who I suggest should run again under the regular format until such a time as consensus favors the new format -- which, while intriguing, certainly has its issues. My mandate as a bureaucrat permits me to promote administrators under very specific circumstances; with so many users objecting to the very premise of this request, I cannot in good faith promote Matt. I have, however, studied the request in an attempt to reason out how I would evaluate the request, were the format accepted as valid; I believe I would have promoted him. If this format, or some revised version thereof, ever gains the community's acceptance (and I think it has much promise), I will start dialogue among the bureaucrats to decide on a standard way to evaluate these requests.^[6]

Centralized discussion

In a related development, a centralized discussion on RFA reform has garnered 23 proposals and numerous comments. This follows after a survey on adminship from February 2007. The discussions are currently active, and none of the proposals has reached consensus yet.

Citations

Best known for its

. Binns’ Wikipedia article was the subject of national print and online coverage, as well as regional radio and television stories, after a liberal versus conservative editing spat arose.

On 12 April, a reporter from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Canada’s state-owned broadcaster, contacted admin and press contact Nick Moreau (known as Zanimum), inquiring whether political views are normal or encouraged on Wikipedia, pointing to the article on Premier Binns. Moreau quickly replied to the reporter from CBC Radio One Charlottetown (PEI’s capital city), and checked the page, to see what was the matter.

Until mid-March, Premier Binns’ article was of fairly good length and had a

(NPOV), albeit with no references. The situation started when an anonymous user—who decided the article was perhaps too balanced, and not portraying the well-liked Premier in a good light—began editing Premier Binns’ originally NPOV article. Other than a complete lack of references, it was fairly clean, if, perhaps, unexciting prose. It included a photo of Binns, acquired through Moreau who convinced a Flickr user to “free” their creative work. Another anonymous user began cleaning up the less stellar points in his tenure, making the article sound as positive as one would expect from campaign literature.

This attracted the attention of Stephen Pate, a

activist from the province. According to sources, Pate regularly pickets the PEI legislature regarding the issue, as well as running a blog on the topic. Not a fan of Binns' disability policies, Pate decided to revert the article, and add his own content focusing on disability rights. The paragraph included promotion for the Disability Alert blog, labeled as an advocacy organization representing 19,000 people. Pate has since refused to offer the media any membership list, to prove any such organization even exists beyond his PC.

The decision to not only revert, but add an extra helping of criticism angered the anonymous user, who again whitewashed the article. This process repeated itself a number of times, until it degenerated into pranks and name-calling. The

During this process, established Wikipedians would occasionally step in with the revert button. None, however, realized that all-out intervention was needed, no one seeing how both sides displayed childish behaviour for weeks on end.

CBC radio, TV, and online coverage

With an election impending in PEI, CBC found the article, and discussed the editing process with Moreau by email, and with Wikimedia Foundation Communications Manager Sandra Ordonez by telephone. Premier Binns was interviewed by the station, as was the activist, Pate.

Nelson Hagerman, the husband of PEI's

, was dragged into the story, after Pate stated that he might be the anon. Hagerman said that he’d never even heard of Wikipedia, let alone engaged in editing it. The interview didn’t make air on the CBC.

The 10-minute story, as told by Barb McKenna, was used both on 17 April on Island Morning, a PEI-only show, and Maritime Noon, heard also in the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. CBC PEI and CBC Manitoba’s news pages both posted an abbreviated story. Later that evening, a CBC-TV story by reporter Sophia Harris played on CBC Compass, the nightly news program in the province.

For his part, Binns commented, "I live in a public domain, I understand all that; the unfortunate part about it is, someone who's not familiar with Wikipedia ... they would think it's gospel, but it's not."

The initial radio coverage only added to the situation, as a new anon editing the article to suggest Binns was taking bribes to pass laws.

Story spreads west

A writer for the Canwest News Service picked up on the story, publishing in it in the

had placed the blame on “a pair of computer-literate, overzealous PC Youth members who took it upon themselves to write nice things about Binns.”

Moving on

Semi-protection of the article, which was implemented on Thursday, was done indefinitely; it is expected to soon be removed. Pate has agreed to back off from the article. Moreau has created

Article Creation and Improvement Drive

.

Activists could use Pate’s tactics to their advantage in the future; by commencing an edit war in an unfrequented corner of Wikipedia. Such activists would not seek any form of mediation from administrators, then pointing the media to the edit war, get a national audience of thousands for their cause. As commented on a message board, "if you are an attention seeking troublemaker who loves nothing more than to see his face on the t.v. and read about himself in the media - it helps your own cause."[2]

Around 1:00 MST on 23 April, Pate sent out a press release to an undetermined number of media outlets, pointing at recent anonymous edits to the article "Disability rights in Prince Edward Island". Whether this stirs up any more hub-bub is to be seen.

References

“

The Virigina [sic] Tech shooting incident occurred on April 16th, 2007. One person has been reported to be slain.

”

The article on the

some two hours after the second shooting incident, and has since been edited nearly 7,500 times by more than 2,000 unique editors and is now more than 5,000 words long. Each revision has lasted for an average time of only 70 seconds.

In less than one week, it rose to the #2 article position on the top 100 list according to WikiCharts (effectively #1, since the top position belongs to the main page). When the flurry of edits began, it was requested that the article remain unprotected because it is linked to as a news item on the main page. Administrators found a compromise to the consistent vandalism by semi-protecting the article in short segments of roughly 3 hours, hoping to thwart off casual vandals. It has since been semi-protected 12 times, a status under which it remains as of press time. Natalie Erin and Kizor have led the way; the former editing the page more than 170 times since its conception. The two, as well as Swatjester, also figured in a New York Times story covering the development of the article.

On the day of the incident, a timelapse video was created, quickly running through screenshots of the article's first twelve hours. It was uploaded to YouTube, where it has been viewed nearly 40,000 times. On Thursday, Dalejenkins nominated the Virginia Tech massacre article for featured status. However, the nomination was delisted by Michaelas10 7 hours later, after nearly 20 opposing comments that all cited a lack of stability.

The article on

first, he may be known as Cho Seung-Hui and Seung Cho.

20 April, 2007 marked the eighth anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado. The milestone, combined with the discovered connections between the two incidents, propelled the article to the fourth most-viewed for the month of April, behind Seung-Hui Cho. It is currently semi-protected; the new interest may have been detrimental, as the article is now under review to challenge its featured status, which it received in August of 2005.

With the website

reported seeing suspiciously familiar text gracing the packaging for DVDs of American television shows in Beijing.

In a blog entry posted Wednesday, Lih told how he had been browsing the selections of a Chinese DVD store, whose back-cover descriptions (in English) are notoriously poorly-written or belong to the wrong film entirely. He said one DVD, the box set for a season of Family Guy, caught his eye for its uncharacteristically fluent English. Sensing something familiar, Lih, who is working on a book about Wikipedia due out later this year, noticed some clues that prompted him to check the Wikipedia article for the show.

To verify his suspicions, Lih bought the box set even though he said he was "not terribly fond of the show." As it turns out, the text was in fact copied directly from the introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article. Although the current version has changed somewhat since then, Lih was able to find a revision from 1 December 2006 that matched, posting the two excerpts for comparison on his blog.

Given the innocuous nature of the content, "importing" Wikipedia in this fashion obviously would not present any political concerns. Those issues are believed to be part of the reason Wikipedia is not generally accessible in the

. As printed text rather than an editable wiki, it would also have little relevance to efforts by the PRC government to control internet activity in the country.

Ironically, if this curious circumstance were to raise concerns anywhere, theoretically it should be among Western intellectual property rights holders. The DVD is undoubtedly an unauthorized copy, and Lih explained that legal movies are quite scarce in China. The legal version would often be prohibitively expensive to the average Chinese, leaving the market dominated by cheap knockoffs. This phenomenon, along with the fact that potential customers might be Western tourists as much as locals, explains the resort to low-cost English blurbs. As Lih put it: "Wikipedia: bringing information to pirated DVDs near you."

WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential. The comic can now be found on cartoon site Humorous Maximus.

Cartoonist

for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.

(← Prev)	Signpost archives	(Next →)

Unreferenced biographies under scrutiny

After continued concerns about the dismal quality of certain unreferenced articles about living people,

is divided into 17 sub-pages; users are encouraged to review uncited statements, attempt to find sources or remove uncited, controversial statements, and correctly tag articles.

Wikipedia user studies continue

The

).

The first study analyzed a randomly sampled pool of 100 random articles. Within these 100 articles there were a total of 668 edits during the months of November 2004, 2005, and 2006. Of those 668 edits, 31 (or 4.64%) were a vandalism of some type. The study's salient findings suggest that in a given month approximately 5% of edits are vandalism and 97% of that vandalism is done by anonymous editors. Obvious vandalism is the vast majority of vandalism used. From the data gathered within this study it is also found that roughly 25% of vandalism reverting is done by anonymous editors and roughly 75% is done by wikipedians with user accounts. The mean average time vandalism reverting is 758.35 minutes (12.63 hours), a figure that may be skewed by outliers. The median time vandalism reverting is 14 minutes.

The planned

is in a developmental stage; details relating to the study, which will involve a larger sample size, are being planned.

Meanwhile, one of the few user surveys of Wikipedians, conducted in 2005 and originally available only in German, was translated into English recently.

Briefly

• Friday, April 27 meetup in Melbourne
  . Jimbo is also expected to be in attendance at these meetups.
• Wii demolished a record for edits on a Main Page featured article on 18 April, with 667 edits over the 24 hours that it was linked to; the previous record belonged to The Lord of the Rings, which received 453 edits on 5 October, 2006.
• The Friulian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 3,000 users.
• The French Wikinews has reached 1,000 users.
• The Korean Wikipedia has reached 36,000 articles.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 75,000 edits.
• The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 9,000,000 edits.
• The Esperanto Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.

Wikipedia's reporting of the Virginia Tech massacre

The way Wikipedia covered the

in 2005.

• Cohen, Noam (April 23, 2007). "The Latest on Virginia Tech, From Wikipedia". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 2007-04-22.

Future funding possibilities

Reuters published a report of an interview with Jimmy Wales in which he considers avenues for future funding streams for Wikipedia that avoid the use of advertising. It mentions plans for trivia games and quiz programs as possible income sources. Wales has since said that such measures were mentioned off the cuff. He also tried to get Reuters to remove the content from the article, saying these were far flung possibilities. Reuters issued two separate corrected versions of the story; the last said these possibilities had been "mulled" but that Wikipedia "has no plans" to pursue them.

• Roelf, Wendell (April 20, 2007). "Wikipedia founder mulls revenue options". Reuters. Retrieved 2007-04-23.

Administrators

Six users were

).

Featured content

17 articles were promoted to

).

1 article was de-featured last week: Seabiscuit (nom).

2

).

2 portals were promoted to featured status this month: Portal:Cuba (nom), an Portal:Robotics (nom).

1 sound was promoted to featured status last week: That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind."^ⓘ.

1 featured sound was demoted last week: The Entertainer^ⓘ.

No

were promoted to featured status this week.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as

last October with 453 edits.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Construction on the International Space Station, Red Tailed Hawk eating a vole, Lesser Brown Blowfly, Eastern Gray Squirrel, Wreckage of the RMS Titanic bow, Mars north pole, and The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist.

6 pictures were promoted to featured status last week:

• 
  nom

  )
• 
  Mont Saint-Michel (nom

  )
• 
  Leafhopper (nom)
• 
  nom

  )
• 
  Rosie the Riveter (nom)
• 
  Clerid Beetle (nom)

The Arbitration Committee opened four cases this week, and closed no cases.

New cases

• WP:ATT, on "articles on paranormal and pseudoscientific topics", such as parapsychology and Electronic voice phenomenon
  .

• Transnistria: A case involving the actions of MariusM (talk · contribs) and William Mauco (talk · contribs) on Transnistria-related articles. MariusM alleges that Mauco (who has not made a statement because he is blocked) has engaged in sockpuppetry, edit warring and other misconduct.

• talk · contribs
  ) [sic] who, while acknowledged as a productive contributer, many allege to have been incivil on various occasions.

• Zeq-Zero0000: A case involving the actions of Zeq (talk · contribs) and Zero0000 (talk · contribs). Zero alleges that Zeq has engaged in POV-pushing, while Zeq alleges that Zero has misused administrative tools in blocking him, the case in particular involving the question of whether probations, article bans, etc. can be enforced by involved admins.

Evidence phase

• E104421-Tajik: A case involving the actions of E104421 and Tajik. The case was opened, but a motion to suspend the case pending a referral to community-based mediation has the support of five arbitrators.

Voting phase

• Certified.Gangsta-Ideogram: A case involving the actions of Certified.Gangsta and Ideogram, both of whom Durova and others allege to have been involved in edit-warring on Taiwan-related articles. Ideogram, who has also been accused of improper behaviour on the community noticeboard, denies the allegations. Certified.Gangsta presented evidence, in which he alleges that Ideogram has engaged in canvassing, wikistalking, and orchestrating an anti-Certified.Gangsta campaign. He also denies Durova's allegiations. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies placing both parties on revert parole, and admonishing Ideogram.

• bot approvals group
  . Betacommand has noted that he makes numerous username-related blocks, and that most of his blocks were appropriate. Whether Betacommand used his administrative account for bot-related activity, whether he is unique in doing so, and whether such an action should be allowed or not, have also been questioned. Paul August has proposed a remedy, with the support of four arbitrators, desysopping Betacommand; voting on other remedies is split.

• Mudaliar-Venki123: A case involving the actions of Mudaliar and Venki123 on a series of articles. Kirill Lokshin has proposed remedies banning both parties for one year, with the support of three arbitrators.

• Freedom skies: A case involving the actions of Freedom skies. JFD and others allege that he has edit warred to push his point of view. He denies the allegations. A remedy to place Freedom skies on revert parole has the support of three arbitrators.

• article probation
  has the support of five arbitrators; a series of other remedies placing various users on revert parole and/or banning them from Falun Gong and related articles and talk pages have been proposed, but voting on them is split.