Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-10-13/SPV

The idea of splitting questions from voting has been suggested before, but received new attention after Kww suggested such a move on the RfA talk page. The perceived benefit of such a move was that such a format would allow candidates to answer all concerns before voting begins, while under the current format, Kww argued, early voters "set the tone of the whole RFA". With a question-and-answer period before voting, it was believed, the candidate might be able to satisfy those early voters, avoiding a quick cascade of opposition.

The format, as presented by Ironholds, included a four-day question-and-answer period, and a four-day voting period. He opened the RfA up for questions on October 7, and within five hours, 18 questions had been asked of him. By the end of the question-and-answer period on October 11, that number had doubled, and when the RfA was closed, it had reached 48 questions in all.

During the voting period, support and opposition was roughly equal. Particularly damning was a comment in opposition by Acalamari, who brought up concerns about incivility, some of which had not been addressed during the question-and-answer period. Nearly all of the users opposing Ironholds' adminship cited those concerns.

After about two-and-a-half days of voting, Ironholds withdrew the RfA on October 13. The withdrawal reflects an answer he had given to Question 27 on the RfA, where he said that he would withdraw if it seemed there would not be consensus for promotion.

Previous attempts to reform RfA through "trial RfAs" have been largely unsuccessful. In April 2007, the vote tallies were briefly removed from RfAs, and two separate RfA formats were introduced, one modeled after the format of deletion debates, and the other modeled after the format of

Two new developers hired

This week, Wikimedia

• The English Wiktionary and French Wiktionary have both reached 1,000,000 entries.
• The Italian Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles.
• The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Czech Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
• The Czech Wikiversity has reached 500 articles.
• The Galician Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
• The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 90,000 articles.
• The Ukrainian Wiktionary has reached 7,000 articles.

Promotions and demotions

About one in every 1,130 Wikipedia articles is featured; the ratio of FAs to all Wiki articles has been steadily climbing since February 2007.

During the first nine months of 2008, promotions of FAs have been at about the same rate as for 2007, while demotions at FAR have declined slightly relative to 2007.

During the past two years, average FA promotions were 63 a month; 2008 promotions through September are 64 a month, compared with an average of 42 three years ago.

After

Combining promotions and demotions yields an average growth in FAs of 47 a month over the past two years, and 51 a month over the past year; the increase is due to the lower rate of demotions.

Nominators

Through August 18, the top 10 FA producers of 2008, with eight or more FAs for the year, were (alphabetically):^[1]

• Awadewit
  , specializing in 18th-century British literature.
• Blnguyen (aka YellowMonkey), with articles on cricket and South Vietnamese history.
• Brianboulton, with extensive coverage of polar expeditions and exploration.
• Casliber, the fungus, bird, dinosaur, planet, animal and medical Renaissance man.
• Cla68, specializing in military history articles.
• David Fuchs, writing on video games.
• Hurricanehink, the hurricane expert.
• Jimfbleak, specializing in bird articles.
• Moni3, writing on diverse topics, including the Everglades, film and literature.
• Serendipodous, covering the Solar System.

Amazingly, these 10 editors accounted for one in five of FAs promoted in 2008 through August, at 105 of the 489 promotions.

Categories

As of September 16, 2008,^[2] the largest featured article categories had at least 150 entries.

1. Music
2. Warfare
3. Media
4. Sport and recreation
5. Geography and places
6. Biology
7. History

The smallest categories had fewer than 20 entries.

1. Food and drink
2. Philosophy
3. Mathematics
4. Language and linguistics
5. Computing
6. Business, economics and finance

Relative to categories tallied in the February 25 Dispatch, the fastest growing categories are: Transport; Sport and recreation; Video gaming; Geology, geophysics and meteorology; Literature and theatre; Physics and astronomy; and Religion, mysticism and mythology. Three categories had no growth or a net decrease due to demotions: Language and linguistics; Computing; and Food and drink.

Reviewers

At FAR, great saves by a core group of editors contributed to a record-breaking month, with 17 articles retaining Featured article status during September.

At FAC, reviews have become more specialized, with individual editors tackling specific areas of the

As of October 1, 2008,

• 14 articles were larger than 65KB (roughly 10,000 words); 97 were larger than 51KB.
• 23 articles were smaller than 8KB (about 1,250 words); 100 were smaller than 10KB.

Average size at 25KB has not changed relative to a year ago for 1,721 featured articles. At that time:

• 9 articles were larger than 65KB; 46 articles were larger than 51 KB
• 16 were smaller than 8KB; 71 were smaller than 10KB.

Hence, average "readable prose size" has not changed, while the number of FAs of both the larger and smaller size-ranges has increased. (Several of the largest FAs have grown since passing

At around at least the average size of a FA (25KB), the number of

References

Administrators

Seven users were

Eight bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: MPUploadBot (task request), STBot (task request), ArticleAlertbot (task request), Nomenclaturebrowser (task request), TinucherianBot II (task request), OKBot (task request), MifterBot I (task request), and AnomieBOT (task request).

MPUploadBot is an administrative bot that continuously searches for images included on the Main Page, and if the images are on Wikimedia Commons and unprotected, the bot uploads a copy of the image locally, and protects it for the duration of its usage on the Main Page. After it is removed from the main page, the bot deletes the local copy.

Featured pages

Fourteen articles were promoted to

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Midtown Madness, Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, Massospondylus, Akhtar Hameed Khan, Cleveland Street scandal, Grass Fight, and Trafford.

Former featured pages

Four

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Crepuscular rays, Dungeness crab, Arches National Park, Geocentric model of the universe, Tristan und Isolde, Charles Griffin, and Culex mosquitoes.

Five

One additional sound had been promoted last week, but was accidentally left out of the list:

No featured

Eleven pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.

• 
  Joshua Tree National Park
• 
  Pioneertown, California
• 
  Brown Spider Monkey
• 
  Tasmanian Native-hen
• 
  William-Adolphe Bouguereau's L'Innocence
• 
  Crochet tablecloth
• 
  V-2 rocket
• 
  Mikumi National Park
• 
  Richmond Bridge, Tasmania
• 
  Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory
• 
  Woody Guthrie

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.10 (093754a), 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

• <ref/> tags that refer to previous references can now be created with {{#tag:}}. (r41669, bug 15770)
• #iferror: has been improved to catch more sorts of errors. (r41881, bug 15730)
• When a template is removed from a cascade-protected page and the template transcluded a category onto that page, the category is now removed from the page. (r41923, bug 15846)
• The special-pages dropdown is now in the correct place on the Nostalgia skin. (r41940, bug 15928)
• A page's content is no longer silently overwritten if a user has an edit conflict with another user, then an edit conflict with themself when they try to fix it (which could, for instance, happen due to clicking on the 'back' button during the save). (r42034, bug 15991)
• A user no longer overwrites the entire page when trying to edit a section and clicking on 'save' before the edit page is fully loaded. (r42037, bug 1181)
• A large number of SVG-related bugs were fixed by the upgrade of the SVG-rendering code used on the MediaWiki servers; more fonts are now available for SVG as well.

New features

• The "templates used on this page" list at the very bottom of the edit screen now has edit links for those templates which are editable by the user viewing them. (r41829, bug 11904)
• Special:BlockIP now has a link to the contributions of the user who will be blocked. (r41831, bug 15432)
• Images now take their alt text from their alt= parameter, if one is present. (r41837, bug 368)
• Special:RecentChangesLinked can now be transcluded. (r41861, bug 13179)
• Searching Special:IPBlockList now reveals rangeblocks that block a particular IP, as well as blocks directly on that IP. (r41902, bug 14634)

Ongoing news

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

The

New case

• Abtract and Collectonian, involving an editing dispute between the two. A temporary injunction has passed in the case, declaring administrator-imposed editing restrictions
  to remain in effect until a decision is reached, and directing the users to submit evidence speedily, so that the Committee can swiftly introduce a decision that would supersede the injunction.