Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-04-25
From the guest editor
As you read this week's The Signpost you may notice slight changes in style, as for the first time Michael Snow's careful hand is not moderating and clarifying each article. I have been asked to fill in during his vacation, and hope to maintain the steady tone and thorough coverage that have marked the first months of the Signpost.
Last week saw the first use of a new newsroom for contributing stories and ideas; it is now being used to develop all of the articles that go into each issue. Please take advantage of it to write about the projects and events closest to your heart.
Wikipedia keeps on top of the news
Rapid updating noted
The media this week noted Wikipedia's capacity to remain extremely up to date with rapidly changing events. Discussing Encarta's new functionality, webpronews.com said that the capacity to create new entries on Wikipedia would probably keep it on top, and noted that there is an extensive article here on
Demonstrating the point, news of the election of a new pope brought Wikipedians out in force to keep the article on Pope Benedict XVI up to date. The new pontiff's article was moved from 'Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger' to his papal title at 17:44 on 19 April, just 45 minutes after the white smoke had been sighted from the roof of the Sistine Chapel and just minutes after he was proclaimed as the new pope. Since then, the article has been subject to furious editing, accruing over 3,000 edits as of late evening on 24 April, 1,200 of which came in the first 12 hours of the article's life.
Server rush
As well as triggering rapid editing, the conclusion of the conclave also brought a flood of visitors to the site. Following the announcement of the election, a rush of traffic to Wikipedia saw up to 2100 hits per second registered, rising from the normal 1,500/s in just a few minutes [2]. Tim Starling temporarily disabled searches, due to the excessive load on the Apache servers, but the site was otherwise unaffected by the flood of traffic.
News.com discussed the media coverage of the
Continuing success at covering breaking events
Since the
International writing contest results announced
The results of the
Rules and entrants
The rules for the contest stipulated that nominated articles must have been shorter than 2000 characters at the start of
Judging and winners
Judges
The judges announced five runners-up:
Nominees go on to featured status
Several nominations in the contest went on to become featured shortly afterwards, including
International results
The other language-contests participating in the International Writing Contest were won by articles on a diverse range of subjects. In Germany, first place went to an article on the Sachsenross, a motif occurring in many German flags; while on the Dutch Wikipedia, a history of Dutch spelling was declared the narrow winner ahead of an article on the iron/nickel alloy Invar. In Japanese, the winner was an article on the Chromosome theory of inheritance. Results of the Ukrainian contest were not available as of April 23.
In the media this week
Encarta pseudo-wiki debate continues
Discussion has continued this week about Encarta's recent announcement of a facility by which users can suggest additions and revisions to articles (see last week's story). Search engine website searchnews.com described the idea as "Wikipedia for wimps", and said that "Unlike Wikipedia's quasi-hippie vision of the Internet as a collaborative medium...for Microsoft it's all about the cost savings" [5]. The cost saving point was also noted by CNN [6], who noted that the extra cost involved in hiring fact checkers was offset by Microsoft's expectation that people would be offering their expert advice for free.
Microsoft's Encarta blog [7] Archived 2005-04-24 at the Wayback Machine saw further comment from users, who were generally unconvinced by what Encarta was offering. A couple of people said they had made suggestions: one to "an article that I have been trying to get encarta to correct for a couple years", and another to Encarta's entry on Karate, aimed at "fixing some of the most glaring problems". In response to a question from a Microsoft employee asking what would make people use the editing facilities, another user responded "Actually citing who's written the article, and a history of how it's been changed by in-house Encarta editors, would help. As it stands, with the articles completely uncited, Encarta possibly suffers from greater credibility problems than Wikipedia." [8][permanent dead link].
Goverments should be more like wikis, suggests think tank
British think tank Demos this week published a paper looking at open source software, which included extensive analysis of Wikipedia, and why Wikipedia and Linux in particular are such successful examples of projects based on open source principles. The paper analysed the factors which make open source projects successful, and then suggested possible new applications for open source principles, including making laws open to public scrutiny during their drafting stages and setting up open learning collaborations.
Wikis to supersede newspapers?
The rise of the new media and decline of the old raised comment this week, as Rupert Murdoch said that newspapers were often out of touch with their readers. The Economist reported that the media mogul had said that news outlets should become more interactive, and looked at phenomena such as blogs and wikis [10] which enabled dialogue and collaboration on the Internet. Considering Wikipedia, the magazine said that while wikis might be expected to be "a recipe for anarchic chaos", Wikipedia was "growing dramatically richer by the day".
Meanwhile, Alexa.com Archived 2009-08-09 at the
It's not all onward and upward progress for the new media though:
Citations
Among the news outlets citing Wikipedia articles this week are the
.
Historical retrospective triggers lively debate
Looking back to the early days
Last week, Larry Sanger published two lengthy excerpts from an upcoming memoir, in which he looked back at the early days of Wikipedia and how it evolved from the now-defunct Nupedia project. The memoir was published in two parts on Slashdot ([16],[17]), and will also appear later this year in Open Sources 2.0[18], a collection of essays by people from the open source movement.
Sanger was originally employed by Jimmy Wales as editor-in-chief of Nupedia, and later played a key role in starting up Wikipedia. He introduced his retrospective by noting that there has been much debate recently on the credibility of Wikipedia as a reference work, with Sanger himself being a negative voice. Sanger stated that despite being recently cast as an enemy of the project, he remained "one of Wikipedia's strongest supporters". However, he said that "if a better job can be done, a better job should be done".
Sanger went on to correct what he saw as a number of common misconceptions about his role in the project, with journalists misquoting the system under which Nupedia ran, how it was funded, and how it led to Wikipedia, saying that this had motivated him to tell his side of the story.
Could Nupedia have worked?
One of the themes of the memoir was Sanger's disappointment that the rigorously reviewed, expert-driven Nupedia model didn't work. He outlined his original idea that Wikipedia could have generated content quickly (Nupedia's primary failing), from which the best could have been creamed off to be released in Nupedia. But the success and rapid early growth of Wikipedia left little time for Nupedia to be developed, and in early 2002 Sanger was laid off due to tightening financial circumstances at Bomis, then the owner of the project.
Culture and evolution
As Wikipedia began to decisively replace Nupedia as a viable project, Sanger originated many of the rules and conventions which were adopted, a large proportion of which are still in use. He notes his surprise that one rule he wrote as a joke,
Considering what policies could have been better formulated, Sanger wrote that the policy of extreme tolerance of 'difficult' contributors caused the most problems. He noted that when he had tried to use what authority he had to counteract abuse of the system, troublemakers had made sport of challenging his authority, and suggested that Wikipedia could have evolved in a multitude of different ways, if slightly different policy decisions had been taken early on.
Lively discussion shows that recollections differ
The memoir triggered lively debate on blogs and mailing lists. Clay Shirky, writing on the Many-to-Many blog [19], disagreed with the idea expressed by Sanger that Wikipedia could have evolved very differently, considering instead that any consensus-based encyclopaedia-building community would have ended up broadly similar.
Discussion on Many-to-Many also included criticism of Sanger's description of himself as 'co-founder' of Wikipedia, with one poster accusing him of alternately distancing himself from and then associating himself with the project, according to how he thought it would affect his reputation.
Sanger rejoins the mailing list
The issue of whether Sanger could call himself co-founder of Wikipedia was also taken up on the wikipedia-l mailing list. Larry Sanger himself resubscribed after an absence of three years, to question Jimmy Wales' assertion that the original idea for a wiki encyclopaedia had come from another Bomis employee, Jeremy Rosenfeld. Sanger declared himself "extremely disillusioned" by what he saw as an attempt to write him out of the history of the project. Wales said he did not want to start a war, and was only pointing out interesting historical trivia. He "enthusiastically seconded" a post describing Sanger as "the main person that held things together long enough for the community to be strong and oriented enough to take care of things on its own" [20]. With a final post suggesting a valid description of the origins of Wikipedia, Sanger once again left the mailing list [21].
Sanger's essays appeared at an auspicious time; Wikipedians have recently been gathering their own reflections of Wikipedia's early history for a special Retrospective section of the next Wikimedia Quarto.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
Personal attacks cases dominated Arbitration Committee proceedings this week. Progress on cases already accepted by the ArbCom continued this week; four of nine cases were concluded since the last report.
Cases Brought
A case regarding User:STP remained stuck in the petition phase as arbitrators apparently suffered disagreement as to whether or not the user in question should be blocked as a sockpuppet to another user, Alberuni, who was previously banned for anti-Wikipedian behavior. Arbitrator Grunt suggested an immediate ban, while Arbitrator David Gerard felt that insufficient evidence of sockpuppetry existed to provoke such a response. A decision should be forthcoming as Wikipedia's technical support advisors are consulted.
Another outstanding issue was that of
Cases Accepted and Cases in Evidence
The accepted case — after an unusual delay of several days for comment — was the matter of
The
Cases in Voting
Four cases remained in voting this week. The
The
The final case, involving a dispute about classicism centered around WHEELER, involved the usual allegations of incivility coupled with an interesting dispute upon the viability original research as well as the extent to which minority points-of-view ought to be given weight in an article — or even split off into their own. The proposed ruling, which would amount to essentially a slap on the wrist, has already garnered the necessary votes and the case remains only to be moved for closure.
Cases Closed and Moved to Closure
Progress on cases in arbitration continued this week, with a few cases reaching closure since that of Irate, reported upon last week. Motions to close were outstanding on cases regarding 172 and were opened on RJII and Rex071404 3 and his various surrogates. The first is likely to be dismissed, as 172 declared his intention to leave Wikipedia upon the initiation of action against him. The second had a motion to close opened as Arbitrator Grunt noted that significant improvements had occurred in the subject's behavior, as well as objecting to several proposed findings of fact offered by Arbitrator Fred Bauder as being "extraordinarily close to content decisions". In the final case, resolution is likely to involve official sanction of a self-imposed six-month ban, with additional restrictions placed thereafter.
News and notes: Features and new administrators
Prolific contributors manage it again
This week saw a slight drop in the quantity of material that gained featured status, with only 8 articles and 3 images promoted.
Of those, both Eldfell (an Icelandic volcano, by Worldtraveller) and Kalimpong (an Indian mountain village, by Nichalp) received massive support, after a peer review listing didn't result in any comments. The articles about Canadian politician Louis Riel and New Zealand architect Francis Petre received slightly fewer votes.
These promotions mean that Nichalp has now reworked 6 articles from the ground up to featured article. One of his other works is Goa which was promoted last week.
For Worldtraveller this is his ninth featured article. Before Eldfell, he helped 2 articles all the way from creation to featured article status and 6 others from a stub to featured status.
But he isn't planning on stopping there. He also got another article on
None of these editors will overthrow the current record holder any time soon, though. Having worked on a total of 50 featured articles Lord Emsworth has a very comfortable lead.
New featured content
The 8 articles that gained featured status last week are: Eldfell, Francis Petre, Diamond, Dream Theater, Palace of Westminster, Geology of the Grand Canyon area, Kalimpong and Louis Riel.
The three images that gained
After some initial disagreements about copyright status and quality, the "first photograph" image received featured status 25 to 3.
The image of Bodie ghost town also received some opposition by people who found the perspective and some power lines which could be seen in the background distractive. But eventually it turned out the number of people supporting the images was much larger.
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Red-crested Pochard
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First Photograph
Requests for adminship
Last week also saw the promotion of six new administrators. They were
.