Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-14/SPV
Single-Page View Archives |
---|
| ||
Volume 5, Issue 50 | 14 December 2009 |
About the Signpost |
| ||
(← Prev) | 2009 archives | (Next →) |
|
| |
Home | Archives | Newsroom | Tip Line | Shortcut : WP:POST/A |
|
Voting closes in the Arbitration Committee Elections
The annual two-week voting period for the Arbitration Committee closed at 23:59 UTC on Monday 14 December. This year, 994 Wikipedians voted, slightly more than last year's total of 984. An alphabetically sorted list of editors who have voted is maintained at the voter log. Twenty-two candidates stood in the election, and nine new arbitrators are expected to begin their terms on 1 January 2010, returning the Committee's numbers to 18.
The 2009 election has been a major departure from its predecessors in the use of the SecurePoll automated, private voting system; this has meant that for the first time the community has not been aware of the running tally. Since the close of voting, the election scrutineers have been checking and certifying the tally. The community has been encouraged to actively identify suspicious voting patterns in the now-concluded ACE2009 voting logs, in the same manner as former ArbCom elections. Election administrator Happy-melon has stated that the scrutineers' task is "to check each vote for validity – principally, that it was not cast by a sockpuppet in a manner so as to be invalid.... Once this stage is concluded, the scrutineers will quickly verify that there are no obvious flaws in the resulting tally which would indicate a problem in the software; obviously none are expected, but is it reassuring to have [six] pairs of eyes double-check. The results will then be published. The exact wording of the two relevant emails that were sent to the scrutineers is here."
To ensure neutrality, the six scrutineers have been drawn from the ranks of stewards not active on the English Wikipedia: Mardetanha, Effeietsanders, Laaknor, Thogo, Millosh and Erwin. On the publication of this Signpost edition, we keenly await the scrutineers' release of the tally on the election talk page. The tally will be presented in sortable tabular form, with numerical scores for each candidate's "Net" vote, i.e, Support − Oppose, and "Percentage" vote, i.e., Support / (Support + Oppose). The appointments will be formally announced by Jimbo Wales by 21 December (expected date), after community consultation if necessary.
Breaking news: The scrutineers have certified and announced the results of the vote. The nine candidates with the highest percentage vote were:
- Kirill Lokshin, 72.9%
- Fritzpoll, 71.1%
- Coren, 70.1%
- Mailer diablo, 68.4%
- Steve Smith, 65.6%
- SirFozzie, 64.9%
- Hersfold, 64.6%
- KnightLago, 60.1%
- Shell Kinney, 59.9%
The Signpost congratulates these candidates and offers its thanks to the other 13 candidates for participating in the election. Jimbo Wales is expected to make a formal announcement of the appointments before the next edition of The Signpost. A fuller summary of the election results will be provided in the next edition.
Feedback page
A page for users to provide feedback on the election has been launched, inviting comment and discussion of ways to improve the 2010 ArbCom election. The topics thus far include "election personnel", "the SecurePoll system", "improving instructions to voters", "voting rules", "supplementary voting", and "questions to candidates".
Timeline
Here are the important dates for the 2009 ArbCom elections:
- 10 November – Candidate nominations opened and the question period commenced
- 17 November – Call for general questions closed
- 24 November – Nominations closed
- 1 December – Voting began
- 14 December – Voting ends; scrutineers soon after certify and announce the results on the ACE talk page, and formally communicate them to Jimbo Wales
- By 21 December – results announced by Jimbo Wales (expected date), after community consultation if necessary
Reader comments
Mapping geotagged articles language, import sources enabled, and more
Geographical distribution of articles by language
Even many of the larger Wikipedias are very parochial, according to a new analysis of geographical density of Wikipedia articles by language, by Mark Graham. Graham wrote a column on "Wikipedia's known unknowns" in
In the new follow-up up on his blog Zero Geography, Graham compares the density of geotagged articles in different language editions. The result is that each language's geotagged articles are largely concentrated in the areas where the respective languages are spoken, and only English and German Wikipedias have significant coverage outside the geographic areas where those languages predominate.
Import sources enabled on the English Wikipedia
It is now possible to import pages with their full history from Meta, several language versions of Wikipedia, and the Nostalgia Wikipedia, a copy of the English Wikipedia database from 20 December 2001. This feature can be used for attribution of translated articles alongside {{Iw-ref}}, and very old edits can be imported from the Nostalgia Wikipedia that are not in the current Wikipedia database. See Wikipedia:Requests for page importation to make requests, and this week's technology report for more details.
Briefly
- The Wikimedia Strategic Planning project is featuring a "Question of the Week", where anyone may help contribute to discussion about the future of the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.
- In a post on the Wikimedia blog, fundraising chief Rand Montoya explores the donation results from different banner messages.
- A Wikipedia poster based on classic war propaganda, with proceeds supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is for sale.
- Should Wikimedia buy renewable energy certificates, asks developer Tim Starling?
- A recent paper in St. John's Law Review entitled "Wikipedia in Court: When and How Citing Wikipedia and Other Consensus Websites is Appropriate" reviews the history of Wikipedia citations in court, why Wikipedia is used and how to best use it; the paper is available for download here.
Wikipedia in the news
- Andrew Dalby, author of The World and Wikipedia, discusses Wikipedia on the BBC Radio program "Start the Week".
- The ABA Journal reports that jurors conducting trial-related research on Wikipedia, and friending one another on Facebook, is becoming a pervasive problem with the potential to disrupt trials.
- Literature and humor site McSweeney's Internet Tendency features a send-up of Wikipedia: "I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article On Our Sex Life" by Alan Trotter.
Reader comments
Discussion Report and Miscellaneous Articulations
Policy Report
Several contributors
There's a lot more detail from all the respondents in the
Reader comments
Approved this week
Administrators
Three editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Killervogel5 (nom), MrKIA11 (nom) and SpacemanSpiff (nom).
Featured pages
Six articles were promoted to
Five
).No
No
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as
Former featured pages
No articles were delisted this week.
One list was delisted this week: List of Victoria Cross recipients by nationality (nom).
No
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: Albino wallaby, Battle of Jerusalem, Zhong Kui, Red Delicious apples, S. bercaea, Red Wattlebird and Mount Redoubt.
One
| United States Army Band Reveille | (nom) |
Four featured
Fifteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week.
-
Common Wombat
-
Red-necked Wallaby
-
Execution of conspirators in theassassination of Abraham Lincoln
-
Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Domenico Ghirlandaio
-
Coat of Arms of the Russian Empire
-
Dust Deviltrails on Mars
-
Cape Barren Goose
-
Desiccation cracks in mud
-
World War I poster in Yiddish
Reader comments
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases this week, leaving three open. No cases were opened.
Open cases
Tothwolf
The Tothwolf case has entered its fifth week of deliberations. The case, which concerns a long-standing dispute between Tothwolf and several other editors, was filed by third party Jehochman. Some preliminary workshop drafting has taken place, though no arbitrators have yet responded to any of the proposals; the drafting of a decision has been reassigned to arbitrator Stephen Bain and is expected by 20 December.
Ottava Rima restrictions
The Ottava Rima restrictions case has entered its fifth week of deliberations and its first week of voting. The case was filed by Ottava Rima to appeal an editing restriction imposed following a community discussion on the administrators' noticeboard.
The proposed decision, written by arbitrator Wizardman, would ban Ottava Rima for a period of between three months and one year and place him on probation on his return, while admonishing Moreschi. All of the remedies currently have the majority support of arbitrators, with greater support for a longer ban.
Eastern European mailing list
The Eastern European mailing list case has entered its 13th week of deliberations and its ninth week of voting. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing-list archives, which are alleged to show an extensive history of collusion among numerous editors of Eastern European topics. Standard workshop procedures have been suspended for the case, so the normal drafting of proposals by the parties and other editors has not taken place.
The proposed decision, written by arbitrator
Closed cases
Asmahan
The Asmahan case was closed this week. The decision imposes topic bans and editing restrictions on Supreme Deliciousness and Arab Cowboy, as well as placing the "Asmahan" article on probation.
Socionics
The Socionics case was also closed. The decision bans rmcnew for six months and Tcaudilllg for one year, as well as indefinitely banning them from all Socionics-related topics, pages, and discussions.
Reader comments
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone 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.
Bots approved
Six new bot tasks were approved this past week:
- December 2009 ArbCom election.
- AnomieBOT (task 33) - To replace templates such as {{cbb link}} when no longer necessary with the generated wikilink to reduce the expensive parser function count.
- AnomieBOT (task 35) - To move single-day articles (e.g. December 1, 2003) in Category:Days in 2003 and Category:Days in 2005 to the corresponding Portal:Current events subpage.
- AnomieBOT (task 36) - To clean up miscategorized pages, such as ensuring that Category:Redirects contains only pages and categories about redirects, and not actual redirects.
- SmackBot (task 21) - Operated by User:Rich Farmbrough, to replace Category:Articles lacking sources, which was added by User:Erik9bot, with an unreferenced tag.
- Xqbot (task 2) - To cleanup double redirects.
Bug fixes
- When querying list=usercontribs with the API and no user specified, the API will now return an error rather than hanging the server trying to scan the entire revisions table. (r59953, bug 21817)
- When requesting (with query parameters) a special page that redirects, the query parameters will now be carried over to the redirect page. (r59906, bug 21803)
Site configuration and database changes
- It is now possible to import pages with their full histories to the English Wikipedia from Meta and the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish and Nostalgia Wikipedias. To request an import, see Wikipedia:Requests for page importation. (bug 20280)
- Revisions that show a 2004 page move from Wikipedia:Main Page to Wikipedia:Community Portal are now accessible. They were previously listed under an invalid title due to page move vandalism. Although they could be found through deleted contributions, they could not be undeleted or moved without the help of a system administrator. (bug 13729)
Other news
- On December 10, Wikipedia database servers were upgraded to run MySQL version 5.1 from version 4.0. [1]
- The master database server for English Wikipedia went down on Saturday, December 12 around 21:30 UTC, causing an outage that lasted for approximately 15 minutes before server admins resolved the problem.
- There is a bug in php 5.3.1 with the __call() function, which causes a breakage in MediaWiki. This means that MediaWiki does not support php 5.3.1 at this time. [2] [3]
Reader comments