Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-03-20
Jack Thompson unprotected after office removal
Four days after its protection under the
On 10 March, Danny, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, removed the article upon advice from the Foundation's attorney, replacing it with a protected one-sentence description of Thompson (see archived story). During the protection, the article was rewritten by many users, with better sourcing and a more neutral point of view. On 14 March, Danny and Michael Snow replaced the protected article with the new draft. Since its unprotection, the article has received over 250 additional edits, adding new citations and other information.
Since its introduction in February, the policy has been invoked several times; Harry Reid was protected for a time, and Brian Peppers was deleted through the office actions policy. Some critics of the policy feared that it would encourage litigation to remove unfavorable content from articles. However, most users agree that the policy is necessary to avoid legal troubles.
The Signpost interviewed Brad Patrick, legal counsel to the Foundation, about the policy on Monday:
Wikipedia Signpost: What prompted the Foundation to examine
Brad Patrick: As the community is aware, the Foundation was in receipt of a letter addressed to the Board of the Foundation. As outside general counsel to the Foundation, I was made aware of the letter and responded to Mr. Thompson. Based on our communication, I felt a review of the article was warranted legally, and asked some administrators (with Danny's assistance) to perform that review. That was where the
WS: What sort of problems were there with the article?
BP: I can't comment on the specifics, but generally, his allegations were that certain of the material in the article could, potentially, be considered libelous or defamatory.
WS: About how many office requests do you receive every week/month? Of these, how many are acted upon?
BP: That's a hard question to answer. There are probably one or more noteworthy requests a week, on average. Certainly a legitimate request from an attorney is the exception. Most of the stuff that comes in through e-mail is far from significant. Many readers express shock and astonishment that just anyone "could say [X] like that" and want one of our thousands of "paid" editors to explain how this got there. So, for the most part, the real situations are few and far between, and that's why
BP: If
WS: How much has the article improved since its protection?
BP: I'm not the best person to judge. Michael Snow did a phenomenal job rewriting the article from scratch, in a very short time, and sourcing every bit of it. The challenge to the critics was to source their proposed contributions with the same degree of verifiability, and that is what caused an uproar. So, from a legal protection perspective, I'm very satisfied that the article has improved. In a short amount of time.
WS: Is there anything else you'd like to say in regards to the situation?
BP: Just one other thing. I think people in the community may lose sight of the fact that we are engaged in a very serious venture. It's cool, we love it, we have friends online, we edit what we like. It is freedom in the best sense. But there is a very real issue; it is the responsibility of the Foundation not to be put at risk based on the sloppy, poorly thought out choices of others. We have 1 million users and articles in English Wikipedia. That's a lot. We don't have millions of dollars. We are a small foundation, in the grand scheme of things. We want the Foundation and Wikipedia to be around 2, 5, 10 years from now. And to do that, we need to make sure we act responsibly to keep the mission moving forward. So, my advice to contributors is - keep doing the amazing work you are doing. And my advice to administrators is - if you see a WP:OFFICE warning, trust us. We are doing something at the highest level to make sure we aren't putting the Foundation at risk, and I promise, we are dealing with it - not promising to deal with it later. This isn't a "set & forget" policy.
BP: Also, this isn't my plaything. My job is to advise the Board and protect the Foundation if they are sued. So far, it hasn't happened.
News and notes
CheckUser rights granted to two
Two
Main page redesigned after poll closes
Voting on a
Chinese Wikimedia announces location of conference
The Chinese Wikimedia community has chosen its location for the 2006 Chinese Wikimedia Conference; it will be held in Hong Kong in late August. The choice of the city was announced on March 14th, coming from a selection of six finalist cities. Taipei finished second in the voting, with Shanghai and Beijing tying for third. The judges noted Hong Kong's facilities as a key reason for their choice; the University of Hong Kong is expected to provide accommodation along with the conference facilities.
Newspaper series on Wikipedia continues
The
New projects proposed
Two new Wikimedia projects were proposed this week:
Briefly
- The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 19,000 articles.
- The Slovene Wikipedia has reached 25,000 articles.
- The Spanish Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
- The Italian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 50,000 registered users.
- The English Wikipedia has reached 1.1 million registered users.
- The Dutch Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.
- The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
- The WiKoelsch - Kölsch Wikipedia, a rapidly growing, recognized trial Wikipedia listed on the test-wp page, has reached 3,000 articles and 50 registered users.
- The Korean Wikipedia has reached 22,000 articles.
- The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 60,000 articles.
- The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 32,000 articles.
- The Chinese Wikinews has been activated.
- The Thai Wikipedia has reached 10,000 articles.
In the news
SXSW
On Monday, 13 March,
Harvard debate
On Wednesday, 15 March,
Economist and open source
On Thursday, 16 March,
- Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with around 2.6m entries in more than 120 languages, gets more visitors each day than the New York Times's site, yet is created entirely by the public.
- Constant self-policing is required to ensure its quality. This lesson was brought home to Wikipedia last December, after a former American newspaper editor lambasted it for an entry about himself that had been written by a prankster. His denunciations spoke for many, who question how something built by the wisdom of crowds can become anything other than mob rule.
- Openness has been both the making of, and a curse to, Wikipedia. [...] Yet two seemingly contradictory things happened: chaos reigned, and an encyclopedia emerged. So-called “edit wars” dominated the online discussions, biases were legitimised as “another point of view” and specialists openly sneered. Many contributors were driven away by the fractious atmosphere (including Mr Sanger, who went on to pen essays predicting Wikipedia's vulnerability to abuse). Still, the power of decentralised collaboration astounded everyone. After 20 days, the site had over 600 articles; six months later, it had 6,000; by year's end, it totalled 20,000 articles in a plethora of languages.
Further explanations of Wikipedia's processes were slightly skewed: like many others, the reporter interpreted daily business-as-usual against vandals and trolls as an increasing attack, and the tools Wikipedia uses against them as desperate last-ditch defenses; graphs accompanying the story unaccountably showed the number of articles and contributors falling in early 2006;
Encyclopedia comparison
"Wikipedia and Britannica: The Kid’s All Right (And So’s the Old Man)" is an in-depth feature article in
Plagiarism
A student reporter at Weber State University in Utah was fired after a story submitted to the school newspaper was found to be heavily plagiarized from Wikipedia articles. A review of the reporter's previous work found further plagiarism. His dismissal was mentioned in a broader article on plagiarism in The WSU Signpost ("University to monitor plagiarism"). Earlier this year, a professional reporter at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin was also fired for plagiarizing from Wikipedia (see archived story).
Additional articles
- "Reboot: Is Wikipedia a reliable source of information?", The Guardian
- "Despite the criticism, Wikipedia worthwhile", The Baltimore Sun
- "Wiki attacks join political warfare", Orlando Sentinel (Florida)
- "Wikipedia woes again raise questions about credibility", Bismarck Tribune
- "Bracket Provokes Its Own Madness for the N.C.A.A.", Webster's."
Tools
Features and admins
Administrators
Five users were granted
Featured content
No articles were featured last week.
The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as
Articles that were de-featured last week: Bathing machine, Hip hop music and Ferdinand Magellan.
Two lists reached
Four pictures reached featured picture status last week:
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Last week in servers
Server-related events, problems, and changes included:
- 14 March — Chinese Wikinews created
- 16 March — srv36 set up as mysql server
- 16 March — quickipedia.org/quickipedia.net set up as redirects to the English Wikipedia
- 18 March — srv36 added
- 20 March — Database dump site temporarily down
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed two cases this week.
Boothy443
A
Instantnood
A
Other cases
A case was accepted this week involving Karmafist (user page). It currently has a motion to close on the table. Another case was accepted this week involving Locke Cole (user page). It is in the evidence phase.
Additional cases involving administrators involved in a userbox-related edit war, Lou franklin (user page), editors on Depleted uranium, ZAROVE (user page), and Agapetos angel (user page) are in the evidence phase.
Cases involving
A motion to close is currently on the table in a case involving