Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-09-11

After being desysopped by the Arbitration Committee in February for his actions in a wheel war, Carnildo was "provisionally sysopped" for two months, after a successful request for adminship. The high amount of opposition raised controversy among those who were opposed to his adminship.

During the course of a wheel war over a userbox indicating a user's status as a pedophile, Carnildo indefinitely blocked three established users for "hate speech". Carnildo was temporarily desysopped, along with four other admins, by Jimbo Wales while the Arbitration Committee decided appropriate remedies in the case. Three of the admins (El C, BorgHunter, and Ashibaka) had their adminship restored automatically within two weeks or less; Carnildo and Karmafist did not have their adminship restored.

Carnildo was nominated for adminship in March by Johnleemk; the request failed, garnering only 53.3% support. In his latest request, Carnildo received 61.2% support, still well below the usual 75% approval guideline that has been cited in many borderline RFAs. In a statement explaining their decision, bureaucrats Taxman, Danny and Rdsmith4 said:

Carnildo was an admin who was caught up in an unfortunate argument for which he was deadmined. Based on statements from members of the arbcom, we believe that this was meant as a temporary measure, a cooling off period, and in that time Carnildo has proved his loyalty and value to the project. While we recognize that there are many users who are opposed to his adminship, we believe that special consideration should be given to the extenuating circumstances of this case and that we should act in the spirit of forgiveness and reconcilliation which is integral to the success of our community. Carnildo has shown good will to the project despite his desysoping, and continues to contribute. We therefore reinstate Carnildo's adminship, on a probationary basis, for a period of two months, after which his activities will be reviewed by the arbcom.

According to a later comment by Rdsmith4, "this particular RFA contained several votes from users of questionable legitimacy, as well as votes from legitimate users which were themselves spurious, including some which admitted complete unfamiliarity with Carnildo with the exception of a brief skimming of his arbitration case." Phil Boswell also pointed out a proxy vote made by R.D.H. (Ghost In The Machine) on behalf of banned user Karmafist.

Oppose voters and others argued that consensus had not been met.

During discussion, many users noted that the "75% guideline" was first introduced by Cecropia, and that prior to this guideline, bureaucrats did not rely on percentages.

Carnildo will be re-evaluated in two months, at which time the Arbitration Committee can choose to allow him to keep his adminship, or to desysop him.

Status and community news

As of Sunday, 10 September 2006, the

The latest three additions to the list of featured articles are: Mamut (Mammoth), Antiochia (Antioch) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (Carl Friedrich Gauss).

As of 10 September, 2006, nine users of the Hungarian Wikipedia were administrators. All of them are male and the majority have a technical background. Sysops make 0.1% of users out of a total number of 8,411 registered users and about 14% of the very active (100+ edits / month) contributors.

Since September 2005, when it had 16,000 articles, Hungarian Wikipedia's article growth index has been 250%.

A featured images page has been recently created. Selected noteworthy images from the Hungarian Wikipedia include:

• 
  Grand Market Hall, Budapest
• 
  Parliament building in Budapest
• 
  Parliament building
• 
  Szinva Terrace, Miskolc
• 
  Váci utca in Christmas decoration at Budapest
• 
  Park of Hungarian Turkish Friendship, Szigetvár
• 
  City of Debrecen
• 
  City of Sopron

Wiki Meeting

The Hungarian Wikipedia community held its fourth meeting on 11 February 2006 in the city of Debrecen. (Previous meetings were held in Miskolc and Budapest.) The two main outcomes were: the creation of the substub template (maintained by a bot) and the introduction of Maintenance Week, when we focus on specific backlogs.

About substubs

Earlier a considerable part of the activity on the Hungarian VfD page consisted of voting on deletion of substub articles (mostly unanimously), which were not valid candidates for speedy deletion, but no-one really questioned their uselessness, either.

After some debate a major simplification of cleanup of this kind of page was introduced. Whenever an editor encounters a page which is considered a substub, it is marked with a special template. The articles marked with this template are collected every hour by a bot, which timestamps them and also lists them on a page sorted by date. In addition, the bot prepares another template, which sorts substubs in three groups: those which have been marked with the substub template for at least five days and thus can be deleted immediately, and those which will reach this state in one or two days, respectively.

Voting is avoided with the following reasoning. If an article is marked as a substub, there is obviously at least one editor voting to delete it. And if someone would vote against its deletion within five days, they would either improve it and remove the substub tag, or promote it to voting by replacing the substub tag with the VfD tag.

After several months of use, most sub-stubs are deleted without any debate, some are saved from deletion by their expansion, and only a few need to be voted on. As a consequence, polls on the VfD page have become less frequent and more meaningful.

In the media

Articles about Wikipedia have been featured in many prominent news outlets in Hungary, including one of the most popular web portals and newspapers.^[1] It has become a common practice that relevant Wikipedia pages are quoted in news articles about different subjects such as religious sects, celebrities or political figures.

In a recent example the special issue of a popular Hungarian newspaper Népszabadság entitled "The 100 Most Influential Hungarians" copied a substantial section from a biographical article of a film director without acknowledging or referring to Wikipedia. Once notified, the editors of Népszabadság turned out to be cooperative in the matter, but after discussions on the Wikipedia village pump, the issue made it to the front page of Hungary's leading web portal.^[2][3]

Recently, the news magazine HVG, "the Hungarian Economist" also featured an opinion piece in its online edition about the political debates among Hungarian Wikipedia editors on the discussion pages.^[4]

Sister projects

Various sister projects also exist in Hungarian. The Hungarian version of Wikibooks is the 9th largest, with 950 articles; Hungarian Wiktionary is 10th, with 27200 articles; and Hungarian Wikiquote is 19th, with 400 collections. A Hungarian Wikisource has recently been created.

References

Voting continues in Board elections

Voting in the Board of Trustees elections continue this week. The vote, which uses approval voting, will end on Thursday, 21 September. All active users who meet the suffrage requirements - over 400 edits on one Wikimedia project prior to 1 August, 2006 with at least one contribution 90 days before that date - are invited to vote. As of press time, approximately 1,800 users had voted.

Voting on new logos for Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity

Votes on a logo for Wikiversity, on a new logo for Wikibooks and on a new logo for Wiktionary are currently ongoing. They started on 7 September and will continue until 21 September.

Foundation hires networking coordinator

Wikimedia Foundation general counsel and interim executive director Brad Patrick announced on 31 August that the Foundation had hired Mark Bergsma as networking coordinator. Bergsma will only be working part-time because of his continuing studies; however, Patrick called Bergsma's "dedicated manpower" a "critical" part of the Foundation's technical team. Bergsma will be responsible for helping maintain the Foundation's infrastructure, including "network reliability [and] independence".

Danny's contest to re-open

This week,

The contest will run through 7 October, and the winner will receive approximately

Briefly

• The Vietnamese Wiktionary has reached 200,000 edits.
• The Assyrian Neo-Aramaic Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Haitian Wikipedia has reached 7,000 articles.
• The Chinese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 registered users.
• The Min Nan Wiktionary has reached 3,000 entries.
• The Tajik Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
• The Belarusian Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
• The Volapük Wikipedia has reached 500 articles.
• The Urdu Wikipedia has reached 500 registered users.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Bengali Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
• The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
• The Portuguese Wiktionary has reached 20,000 entries.
• The Japanese Wikisource has reached 1000 articles.
• The Uyghur Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Albanian Wikipedia has reached 9,000 articles.
• The Latvian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 150,000 articles.

Administrators

Three users were granted admin status last week: Luna Santin (nom), Oscarthecat (nom) and Hoopydink (nom).

Also of note was Everyking's request for re-adminship after being desysopped on an emergency basis by the Arbitration Committee (see previous article) last week. He was nominated by Haukur, and Everyking accepted the nomination on 10 September. Tony Sidaway closed the nomination after a little over ten hours on the grounds of the snowball clause, with the count at 11/32/5.

Featured Content

Sixteen articles were

No portals reached featured status last week.

One list reached

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Emu, United States House of Representatives, Belton House, Hilary Putnam, Autostereogram, Simon Byrne and Actuary.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as the pictures of the day: Sarracenia, Hippopotamuses, Walt Disney Concert Hall, Cuban Missile Crisis, Melbourne Docklands, United States Declaration of Independence and Coal-fired thermal power station.

Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:

• 
  Polychrotidae
• 
  The Moon's orbit
• 
  Honeybee

• 
  Eclipse
• 
  List of large aircraft
• 
  Mallard Duck

Six pictures were de-featured last week: Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Einstein (suspected copyright violation), Alphonse Mucha Dancel (deleted as copyright violation), Gliding, Moscow Metro and Gothic architecture.

Last week in MediaWiki Software

Enhancements

• Set default disabled values for DjVu render options
• Added Xml::option() for generating <option>s easily
• Localized page numbers in drop-down for DjVu page selection
• Add --user, --comment, and --license options to importImages.php

Bugs

• Monobook.js is used for site content, should not be localized (Brion Vibber)
• PHP undefined offset on bad input to Special:Revisiondelete (Rotem Liss)
• PHP error for call to getId() on bad input to Special:Revisiondelete (Rotem Liss)
• PHP error for call to getTimestamp() on bad input to Special:Revisiondelete (Rotem Liss)
• Use WfBaseName in place of basename() in more places (Brion Vibber)
• Replace hard-coded empty message checks with wfEmptyMsg calls (Brion Vibber)
• Remove some PHP 4 compat cruft (Brion Vibber)

The

Closed cases

• original research
  . Arbitrators ruled that unsourced or poorly sourced information be removed from these articles, and a complete amnesty for Andries and SSS108 for any unreliable information they may have added in the past.