Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-05-24/News and notes

New puzzle globe, feature for admins, Israel's "Wikipedia Bill", unsourced bios declining

Criticism of new puzzle globe prompts revision

Along with the new Vector interface that was rolled out as the default for readers on 13 May, logged-in users got a surprise: the redesigned puzzle globe logo was revealed. The new logo, now rendered as a three-dimensional object, corrects long-standing issues with the old puzzle globe, including different Chinese and Japanese characters and the replacement of a character representing the now-defunct Klingon Wikipedia. On the back, rendered in the full 3D model but not visible in the logo, the globe has been extended to include many additional writing systems.

Although a welcomed revision in principle, the new logo saw a sharp wave of initial criticism of the implementation. Wikimedia Head of Communications Jay Walsh summarized the most common complaints:

• the globe overall is blurry and the characters are not legible
• the definition and depth of the puzzle piece-lines is not as apparent as in the original
• the shadowed 'back' piece (above Ω) is too dark or not as dark as in the original
• lighting across the globe is uneven or does not convey depth
• the globe is too small

Since its initial release, the rendering of the logo has been through several revisions, and the usability team is still seeking feedback to further refine the logo.

"RevisionDelete" feature activated for all admins

On May 18, the Revision deletion function was activated for admins on all Wikimedia projects, following an earlier request. The feature allows individual entries in a page history or log to be removed from public view. While admins had already been able to delete specific page revisions using the more cumbersome process of deleting the entire history and then restoring all revisions except the one to be removed, redacting log entries has so far been only possible for oversighters. (Oversighters have the additional capability to make the removed entries or revisions inaccessible to admins as well.)

Israeli "Wikipedia bill"

The Israeli parliament is debating a bill that would open up government photo archives. It was initiated by Wikimedia Israel and is known informally as the "Wikipedia bill". There would be restrictions on the commercial use of the photos, and use in racist propaganda campaigns would be forbidden. [1]. It is unclear how useful the move would be to the project because of tension between any restriction in commercial use and the fundamental premise that Wikipedia's content should be freely available for re-use.

Unsourced BLP drive on track to clean up or remove 50,000 entries by year's end

passed its first major goal on the way to eliminating all unsourced biographies of living people, or "BLPs". The goal was to have no more than 30,000 "old" unreferenced BLPs on 1 June. There had been about 50,000 at the start of the year. As of this week, editors had reduced the number to fewer than 30,000, ahead of the 1 June deadline.

The June goal is the first of a series, spread over a year, based on an RFC earlier this year. WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons is helping to coordinate efforts, and project members are adding sources and removing outdated tags.

The project is encouraging editors to help in their own areas of interest. Other WikiProjects are being notified of unsourced BLPs that apply to each project. This is being tracked at Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced Biographies of Living Persons/WikiProjects.

Bulgarian Wikipedia reaches 100K milestone

In the early hours of May 24, the

and other languages.

The

, in the "Infoholics Hour" radio show.

Bulgarian Wikipedia was established on December 6, 2003. The first 50,000 articles were written in about 4 years, while the next 50K were written in less than 2.5 years. Currently, it occupies 32^nd place by number of articles (more stats). On November 9, 2009, the Bulgarian Wikipedia was awarded with the "BG Site" 2009 special award for contributions to Bulgarian language webspace (see archived story).

Briefly

• The deadline has been extended to May 27 for nominations for Chapter-appointed Board of Trustees seats. [2]
• The deadline for submissions to the Wikimania 2010 Call for Participation was extended to May 24, 11.59 p.m. (Pacific Time). Many submissions have already been posted and can be read online. Unlike recent Wikimanias, which used a non-public Pentabarf conference-planning database, this year's submissions are public; users can indicate their interest in proposed talks to facilitate the task of the program committee.
• Wikipedia has been blocked in Pakistan along with 450 other websites in a crackdown against perceived "sacrilegious" content.[3]
• An
  overzealous anti-sockpuppet action by a steward resulted in the accidental oversighting
  of a long-time editor's entire contribution history, over 140,000 edits. The edits were subsequently restored.
• The fallout from the Wikimedia Commons sexual content controversy (see previous Signpost coverage) continued after inaccurate follow-up stories from FoxNews.com, "EXCLUSIVE: Wikipedia's Parent Company Starts Purging Porn From Its Websites" (7 May) and "Despite Content Purge, Pornographic Images Remain on Wikimedia" (10 May), with a response on the Wikimedia Foundation blog (13 May) to clarify a number of misconceptions.