Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-09-24/SPV

Editor's note: This is a large article, but I really hope you'll read it all, because I find its results very important.

Last week, I asked readers to respond to a survey, in order to help us make the Signpost more relevant. I've reviewed the statistical results of the survey, which have been made available here. Of note:

• 510 users responded. I was honestly hoping for about 100 people to respond, and would have never expected so many responses. Thanks for your help.
• Given the number of respondents, and that about 15% of e-mail users responded, it might be estimated that about 2,000 to 3,500 users view the Signpost on any given week. (This is a small sample, and may not be representative; however, I think that this is a fair estimate nonetheless)
• 89.61% of respondents read the Signpost every week, or almost every week.
• Roughly an equal number of people view the Signpost via the
  single-page view and the spamlist
  , and a relatively small number read via e-mail.
• The most popular feature was by far "News and notes", with 90% of readers viewing it on a weekly basis, and 36.5% calling it their favorite feature. "In the news" was also very popular.
• Only 20% of readers have
  suggested topics
  for us to write on.
• 61.57% of readers found the recent interview with Jimbo Wales informative; 87.1% felt we should do more interviews.
• Respondents favored interviews with ArbCom members and other notable Wikipedians, topically prominent Wikipedians, and technical staff; Board members, Wikimedia Foundation representatives, and wiki-related individuals such as Andrew Keen were less favored.

Non-statistically, I found a lot of very interesting comments about our coverage. Below, I've given a few of the criticisms sent to us, and attempted to explain the reasons why this lack of coverage occurred. I've also asked a few questions -- please leave comments on the talk page if you have a response. I think a few of these questions are important, and I'd like your further opinions on these particular issues.

• Lack of coverage of the 2,000,000th English article. I'll admit, our coverage of the 2 millionth article was scant. However, unlike last year, there wasn't much to cover. There was no official "two-millionth article", and I made the decision not to cover in-depth the attempts to try and find the two-millionth article, etc. The reason our article on the millionth article was so good (apart from the great writing of Catherine) was that much information was known, and there was a lot of press coverage at the time of writing. This was not the case for the two-millionth article, which occurred just a day before we went to press. Nevertheless, it probably would have been worth more coverage.

• Not a lot of questions on the Jimbo Wales interview. This was a scheduling issue -- Jimbo forgot about the interview initially, and then had to leave early due to a prior engagement. I think it might be best to handle future interviews via e-mail, as it's much easier to deal with these issues by allowing the interviewee to respond on their own time.

• Lack of coverage of other languages. A lot of people noted this -- this is a major shortfall. For a while, we had the interwiki report, which tried to cover other Wikipedias. The problem with that was that in most cases, we were unable to find editors from other wikis to help us out, highlighting important community issues. So, the interwiki report became mainly a statistical report on the wikis, because that's all a non-speaker could easily derive. I'll be honest: I'd be glad to have this back, but I don't have the time to handle it. Anyone who would be willing to be a liaison to other languages, please feel free to let me know. Outside a formal report, if any users active in other communities would like to report on happenings within that community, please let me know as well -- I'd love to publish items about German press coverage, or a Polish editing scandal, or whatever may come up within communities.

• More coverage of individual RFAs. Right now, we mainly just list the successful RFAs in the Features and admins report, sometimes commenting on a few notable RFAs briefly. The only time we usually discuss controversial RFAs is when they're the subject of bureaucrat discussion (borderline cases). A few cases, which I'll neglect to note specifically here for privacy reasons, were pointed out to me. These cases were not borderline cases, but were the subject of much discussion. Perhaps these should be the subject of future stories; if you think a particular RFA is worth mentioning, it would help us a lot to add
  a tip
  , to point us toward the specific RFA.

• Not enough coverage of editors. This is an interesting point that I think bears mentioning. A few people mentioned that people don't seem to get recognition in the Signpost unless they pass an RFA, are in an arbitration case, or do something else controversial that garners a story. What could we do to cover editors in detail, beyond mentioning featured articles weekly? Perhaps profiling WikiProjects? I had a few responses asking for that -- would anyone be interested in that?

• Non-coverage of meta-discussion from the mailing lists. As editor, I've tried to highlight important discussions on the mailing lists, and Michael Snow's always done a good job of picking those stories up. However, we don't often cover the discussions themselves if they don't bear fruit. Should we?

• The size. It was noted by one reader that since the Signpost started in January 2005, Wikipedia usage has grown significantly, and the Signpost has remained roughly the same size every week. Statistically, about 15 times more people view Wikipedia on a daily basis than did when we started. That's huge. Thus, one might expect the Signpost to grow as well. I would absolutely love to run 10-20 stories every week, but we don't have a big enough group of volunteers to sustain such a size. I'm sure that some of that is my fault; I've been very inactive outside of the Signpost, and haven't adequately responded to users interested in joining the Signpost. On the survey, 44 users indicated an interest in writing for the Signpost -- a phenomenal number, and I hope that we can get a lot more writers to help out.

On a side note, I cannot thank enough the people who have written articles in the past and present; your work is extremely important, and I don't think others get the credit they deserve. As editor, I do very little compared to the writers, who write and organize the majority of Signpost content. Thanks again.

I hope I'm not beating ourselves into the ground too much. The majority of commenters had little or no complaints, and felt that we were doing a good job. However, I feel that many of the issues that I've added above are systemic problems that can be addressed, and I will try to address them over the next few months.

Thanks for reading the Signpost.

— Ral315

Given concerns about the long-term suitability of its Florida headquarters, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it will be relocating to the San Francisco area to be closer to "the centre of high-tech in the United States."

The plan was announced Saturday by special advisor Sue Gardner, who indicated that San Francisco was selected from a list of five cities. Major considerations included proximity to like-minded organizations and potential partners, as well as cheaper and more convenient international travel than available from St. Petersburg, Florida.

Competing options

The other cities considered were

Of the other candidates, London attracted the most comment in response to the announcement, as the only location outside of the United States, and given occasional concerns about whether Wikimedia is too US-centric. Although a London headquarters might more visibly demonstrate the international character of the organization, several UK natives responded that they agreed with its exclusion, primarily because of the country's plaintiff-friendly libel laws. Placating concerns about the move affecting project policies under the existing legal regime, general counsel Mike Godwin pointed out that defamation law is largely uniform across US states and the most relevant immunity is based on federal law.

Details of the move

Gardner also solicited advice about shopping for office space in the San Francisco Bay area. One possibility mentioned, that of sharing with Wales's

The transition to new headquarters is expected to take place this winter, with a new office opening later this year and the St. Petersburg one closing early in 2008. Some degree of expense will be involved in the relocation, and overhead costs will be higher in California, but Devouard explained that as Wikimedia adds staff, a new location is necessary to attract people with the needed skills. The main cluster of Wikimedia servers will remain in Tampa, Florida, however, and the Foundation is not currently considering moving those.

This week's

(← Prev)	Signpost archives	(Next →)

Most New York Times archives opened

This week, The New York Times opened their archives, allowing free access to all articles written from 1987 to the present, and those written from 1851 to 1922 (those in the public domain). Some articles from 1923 to 1986 will be available for free, while others may be available for a charge. This may help sourcing on some articles, providing a large repository of articles available to all for free sourcing.

Paris conference

The first French language Wikipedia conference is to be held in Paris on October 19 and 20, organised by the French WMF chapter. Some users from the English Wikipedia are attending. The goal is, roughly translated, "to explore concrete problems : How can we attract specialists who can guarantee the quality of a large number of articles ? How can make users more aware of the importance of reliable sources? ... The conference wishes to bring together scientists, teachers, experts and all contributors who care about the project."

Wikimania bidding closed, meeting held

Wikimania 2008 bids closed this week. A public meeting was held on Sunday; a log of the meeting has been made available. Representatives from Atlanta, Alexandria and Cape Town commented on their bids; no Toronto representatives were present at the meeting.

The final jury decision is scheduled for October 6.

Briefly

• The Wikipedia in Cantonese has reached 5,000 articles and 100,000 edits.
• The Portuguese Wikisource has reached 15,000 text-units.
• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 350,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
• The Kurdish Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 1,000,000 edits.

Administrators

Thirteen users were

Four bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: MelsaranAWB (task request), ClueBot IV (task request), BotanyBot (task request), and HMBot (task request).

Featured content

Eighteen articles were promoted to

One list was de-featured last week: List of Final Fantasy media (nom).

No topics or portals were promoted to featured status last week.

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

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Lantana camara, Whirlpool Galaxy, Gun Terret, Yom Kippur, USS Shaw explodes, Washington National Cathedral, and Fulmer Falls.

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

• 
  Neutrophil with Anthrax
• 
  Drone flies (Eristalis tenax) mating
• 
  Japanese Garden
• 
  White-crowned Sparrow
• 
  Eastern Screech Owl
• 
  Common Shag
• 
  Fuel dumping
• 
  Vitruvian Man
• 
  Euler-Bernoulli beam equation
• 
  Iapetus (moon)

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 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), 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

• Special:CategoryTree now no longer accidentally confuses non-category pages with categories with the same name. (r25920, bug 11383)

New features

• The page history now has a different <title> from the page itself, so that they can be distinguished in browser histories; administrators can customize this via MediaWiki:History-title. (r25952, bug 11151)
• When a <ref> tag has no content and no tag with the same name to copy the content from, it now displays an obvious error message rather than a blank reference. (r26045, bug 11426)

Other technology news

• After an unusually heated debate, the Siberian Wikipedia (http://ru-sib.wikipedia.org) was closed; for more information, see m:Proposals for closing projects/Closure of Siberian Wikipedia and bug 11397.

Ongoing news

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

The Arbitration Committee accepted no new cases this week, and closed one case. However, there has been considerable controversy on the Attack Sites case (below).

Closed case

• Anynobody was prohibited from harassing Justanother
  , who was urged to avoid interesting himself in Anynobody's actions; and all Scientology-related articles were placed on article probation.