Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-03-21

Wikipedia added its 500,000th article in English last Thursday, with

In the half-million pool to guess when Wikipedia would cross this threshold, the winner was Llywrch. Nobody managed to pick the correct date, however; Llywrch was the closest, coming within one day by guessing 18 March. The pool was held last June, and another pool for the millionth article was set to close once the half-million mark was reached.

Sj started a press release to send to media outlets publicizing this event. Some even got in on the news without any prodding. In anticipation of the milestone, The Inquirer published an article Thursday entitled "Wikipedia nears half million article mark Archived 2005-03-17 at the Wayback Machine", coming barely a few hours before it was actually reached (The Inquirer also happened to be the first media organization to break the news of Wikipedia's one-millionth article overall last September).

Tracking down the milestone article

A number of people were busy watching events as Wikipedia's article count approached this milestone, but it was still difficult to pin down the actual 500,000th article. In the end, technical limitations and some miscommunication made it impossible to be completely certain of its identity.

Among those following progress,

The second issue of the Wikimedia Quarto Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, covering the last quarter of 2004, was released last Saturday, 19 March.

The Wikimedia Quarto was begun in September 2004 as the official newsletter of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Quarto's goal is to distribute regular updates about the Foundation's activities as widely as possible, and to provide a forum for Jimmy Wales, the Board, and the projects to report on important events.

The first goal of the Quarto is to publish quarterly in 10 languages, and to include original content related to Wikimedia from project members, essayists, and great thinkers in related fields. The intended audience includes contributors to Wikimedia projects and people interested in Wikimedia Foundation activities.

For this issue, Quarto editor-in-chief Samuel Klein tracked down Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, founder and chairman of Creative Commons, for an exclusive interview. In a whirlwind session, Lessig talked about copyright, copyleft, barriers to free culture, legal pitfalls for Wikipedia, and fighting the good fight.

The publication of the current issue was somewhat delayed, partly because of the winter holidays, but also due to a dramatic increase in length over the previous issue - more than half again as much text. Ruth Ifcher, Alno, Arnomane, KMT, Li-sung, and the rest of a growing proofreading team helped to clean up the double-length issue. Thanks to Aphaia, the new translation coordinator, and over 50 translators, the Quarto is being released in five languages: Czech, English Archived 2005-06-12 at the Wayback Machine, Spanish, French, and Italian, with Polish, Portuguese, Japanese and German to be finished over the coming week.

To discuss how the newsletter is published, or the contents of the next newsletter, see the current Quarto talk page. All editors are invited to help build the forthcoming issue, which is expected to be significantly shorter. The Quarto team hopes to focus on improving the different steps of publishing an article, and emphasizing the proofreading stage.

Contacts :

• m:user:sj (Samuel Klein)
• m:user:Aphaia (translation coordination)

Please post your feedback to m:Talk:WQ.

Continuing his efforts to promote Wikipedia at professional and academic conferences, Jimmy Wales made an appearance last Wednesday at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (eTech for short), hosted by O'Reilly Media. The CeBIT expo in Germany that concluded last week, one of the world's largest events in the technology industry, also included a Wikipedia booth.

Jimmy Wales at eTech

Wales gave a presentation about Wikipedia at eTech and also participated as a speaker on a panel about tagging methods such as Wikipedia's

The panel discussion focused on the collaborative categorization process sometimes known as folksonomy, and had as its title, "Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess". One particular focus was the different approaches and uses of tags on each site. Schachter described this in terms of whether people were tagging their own contributions or those of others, and whether the tags were meant to benefit themselves or others.

Among the interesting tidbits to come out of the eTech conference were that about 350,000 Wikipedia articles have category tags (David Weinberger's blog post gave the erroneous impression that Wikipedia has 350,000 different categories). Blogger Sean Bonner reported that on a show of hands, about a quarter of the audience had contributed to Wikipedia, compared with around 90% having used Flickr and roughly half using del.icio.us.

Wikipedia at CeBIT

Wikipedia volunteers recently staffed a booth at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany. The fair stretched for a week, of which Wikipedia had a booth for three days, from 10 March to 12 March, as part of a section dedicated to open source projects. Also having a booth in the same hall was Wikipedia's German competition in the encyclopedia field, Brockhaus.

This article is based in part on reports from Cory Doctorow, Ross Mayfield, and Elisabeth Bauer.

Following his offer to serve as a sort of self-appointed prosecutor of arbitration cases (see archived story), Snowspinner last week kept up his pace of bringing new requests. With the Arbitration Committee having spent a couple of months clearing out its caseload, his work seemed to be building it back up again somewhat.

Picking up on an earlier arbitration case whose aftereffects continue to produce tension, Snowspinner submitted a new request last Saturday against Everyking. The request focused on the fact that Everyking had been blocked repeatedly for continuing to make reverts dealing with Ashlee Simpson, in violation of the previous ruling.

The request was accepted, although Everyking complained that the previous steps in

Based on complaints by several users, the Arbitration Committee accepted a case a couple of weeks ago against JarlaxleArtemis, a relatively new contributor. Among the issues involved were some personal attacks, as well as uploading and incorrectly tagging a variety of images, some of them likely to have problems with copyright. The case was closed last Friday with a fairly brief ruling.

Concluding that these actions were out of ignorance, the arbitrators required that before making any further edits, JarlaxleArtemis review the relevant policies (

The arbitrators also closed another case due to lack of evidence. In the Noah Peters case, Apollomelos had asked for the Arbitration Committee to review the situation involving a user with various sockpuppets who was already informally banned for vandalism. The accounts were blocked again indefinitely around the time of the arbitration request, so apparently nobody felt the need to pursue the matter further to get an official ruling.

Other new cases opened

Due to the presentation of a substantial amount of evidence in the 172 case dealing with the user making the initial request, Netoholic, in response to a suggestion from arbitrator Neutrality the Committee decided to split the matter into a separate case. Neutrality is recused from both cases, but along with Snowspinner was involved in presenting most of the evidence about Netoholic.

Also, the arbitrators accepted a case involving Iasson and his alleged use of so-called "public accounts". These are accounts for which the password is made publicly available, somewhat similar to the action of CheeseDreams during her last arbitration case.

Inventor of the Web says Wikipedia is what he had in mind

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/03/17/web.future.reut/^{[permanent dead link]}

Former Britannica editor still not convinced

Robert McHenry, former editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, wrote an article several months ago entitled 'The Faith-Based Encyclopedia', the fuss over which still continues. McHenry does not believe that the anyone-can-edit philosophy of Wikipedia can produce a reliable encyclopaedia, and writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, continues to describe what he sees as the project's failings.

McHenry draws an analogy to

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0503200191mar20,1,26199.story

Jimmy Wales interviewed in Nature

Prestigious science journal Nature this week interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The interview discussed the origins of Wikipedia, with Wales talking about how the tightly-controlled, strictly peer reviewed system adopted by Nupedia worked very slowly, and did not attract large numbers of volunteers, whereas opening everything up completely attracted large numbers of people to the project. Wales was inspired in part to create Wikipedia by the collaborative growth of software projects such as Apache and Linux.

Discussing why so many people become so involved in the project, Wales advanced two possible reasons: firstly, that many people, particularly scientists, simply have a desire to share what they know, that being the nature of science, and are motivated by the global reach and enormous audience of Wikipedia. The second reason, said Wales, is that "it's really geeky fun".

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050314/full/050314-17.html

From the archives...

In the week the 500,000 article milestone was passed, we can look back on an article written by Larry Sanger for Kuro5hin back in 2001 when Wikipedia was still in its infancy. The article, entitled 'Britannica or Nupedia? The Future of Free Encyclopedias', makes a number of bold predictions for what was then still regarded as an offshoot of the now-defunct Nupedia project. At 6 months old, Wikipedia contained 6,000 articles.

"Suppose that, as is perfectly possible, Wikipedia continues producing articles at a rate of 1,000 per month", Sanger speculated. "In seven years, it would have 84,000 articles. It's far from inconceivable that the rate of article-production will actually increase over the coming years--in fact, this seems rather likely". With hindsight, one might think the exponential growth of the project could have been anticipated, but who would really have imagined four years ago that the rate of article creation would eventually reach 1000 articles per day, and show no signs of slowing down?

Citations this week

Among the press citations of Wikipedia articles this week were The Jurist, a legal journal, which referenced the article on the

The rush to Wikipedia's 500,000th article (see related story) was interrupted Wednesday when a disk ran out of space and forced the developers to put the site in read-only mode for about 15 hours. The incident highlighted the need for more people to be involved in Wikipedia development and server administration (see archived story).

The problem developed when the master database server ran out of space, not for the database itself, but for the binlog file used to store updates that need to be sent to the additional slave database servers. As developer Kate Turner explained, when the disk allocated to the binlog runs out of space, MySQL bypasses the binlog and writes updates directly to the database itself. This makes it impossible to resynchronize the slave databases with the master without halting the process.

Under normal circumstances, the potential problem can be avoided through regular maintenance of the binlog. Old binlogs that have already been processed by the slave databases can be deleted, freeing up more space for new updates. However, this requires that someone be actively monitoring the situation at the time when the binlog is filling up.

Unfortunately, the binlog managed to fill up on Wednesday and escaped the notice of the developers until it was too late. As a result, Wikipedia briefly went down around 16:00 (UTC) and was brought back in a locked state. Turner apologised on behalf of the developers for the lack of monitoring. In response to a few complaints, Silsor issued a reminder that "our developers are all volunteers who have lives of their own and often get sucked into annoying Wikimedia issues."

Unlike previous instances of downtime caused by power outages (see archived stories), Wikipedia remained available to readers, so that the only people seriously affected were those trying to edit. Readers also might not have seen some of the latest changes while the site was in read-only mode. Editing was restored at around 07:00 (UTC) on Thursday.

The problem had already come up once this year and is a known issue with MySQL. The MediaWiki developers have previously been in contact with MySQL developers about this bug, although it isn't known whether any progress has been made in that regard. In the meantime, however, Turner reported that she was writing additional code for servmon (a tool used to monitor the status of the servers) that will monitor disk space and hopefully prevent similar incidents in the future.

Last Thursday, Creative Commons introduced a beta version of its new license designed specifically for wikis, in conjunction with Lawrence Lessig's introduction of a wiki to help draft an updated version of one of his books.

As Lessig explained it, with the new license, which has been given the designation of CC-Wiki, "rather than requiring attribution back to the copyright holder, [the license would] require attribution back to either the copyright holder or a designated entity." The designated entity would presumably be whatever organization controlled the wiki. Lessig characterized it as a newly branded version of the attribution/share-alike (CC-by-sa) license, rather than being an entirely new license.

Lessig is also using a wiki to work on updates to his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, originally published in 2000. The wiki for the book, which is powered by JotSpot, will use the new CC-Wiki license, although the published version will not use a Creative Commons license - Lessig told BusinessWeek that he wasn't able to get his publisher, Basic Books, to agree to one of the Creative Commons licenses.

The new license could have implications for Wikipedia, since for quite some time there have been periodic complaints that the GNU Free Documentation License is difficult to comply with and incompatible with the popular Creative Commons licenses. In an attempt to reduce the burden of license compliance on those who reuse Wikipedia content, Wikipedia:Copyrights encourages mirror sites to focus on providing a link back to the Wikipedia article. Ram-Man also spent some time organizing an effort to encourage people to release their contributions under multiple licenses, usually the GFDL and one of the Creative Commons licenses.

However, Lessig's project received a cool reception from some Wikipedians. Angela called the decision to use proprietary software from JotSpot to host Lessig's wiki a bizarre choice. Others, including Jamesday, also criticized the CC-Wiki license itself, particularly over the effect of group attribution on the rights of individual authors.

One of the most popular admins on Wikipedia, Ta bu shi da yu, decided last week to leave the project. He left on his user page a picture of Elvis together with the caption, "Ta bu shi da yu has left the building."

The departure was first noticed by

Ta bu shi da yu asked Angela as a steward to remove his admin status in connection with his departure. He then left a parting message for Jimbo Wales thanking him for helping to create "the most amazing software project I've ever worked on."

As news of his departure spread, Ta bu shi da yu received an outpouring of appreciative comments on his talk page for his participation in the project. Still hanging around somewhat, he took the time to reply personally to each of these comments. He also joined in the widespread support of SlimVirgin's adminship nomination (which passed 77-1, one of the highest support/oppose ratios ever), saying, "Impossible for me to leave without some loose ends to tie up."

Replying to expressions of dismay on the

'What would Ta bu shi da yu do?' The author of this comment has requested that you ask, WWTBSDYD? Please edit this article in any way to improve it.

Perhaps best known as creator of Exploding whale, one of Wikipedia's quirkiest featured articles, Ta bu shi da yu's contributions also included starting the Administrators' noticeboard.