Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2007-01-08
Special: 2006 in Review
Last week marked the end of 2006, and the end of the biggest year Wikipedia has seen, in terms of growth, press coverage, and quality. During last year, the English Wikipedia grew from less than 900,000[1] to over 1,500,000[2] articles. It began with an impressive $380,000 fundraiser in January, and ended with an even more impressive fundraiser which has raised over $900,000. This week, the Wikipedia Signpost begins to take a look back at the year that was 2006 in Wikipedia.
Growth
Wikimedia projects grew dramatically in 2006. Besides the English Wikipedia's growth, other projects also made significant gains. Of the top 12 languages, the Russian Wikipedia showed the most growth, with 146% more articles in 2006 than existed in 2005. English ranked just 10th of the 12 in terms of growth (75%), perhaps because it was already very large, ahead of only Swedish (61%) and German (56%). 38 additional Wikipedias were created in 2006, bringing the total number to 250. Of all Wikipedias, 22% (55 of 250) had at least 10,000 articles, and more than half of the Wikipedias (126 of 250) had at least 1,000 articles at the end of 2006 (compared to 17% and 40%, respectively, in 2005). Across all Wikipedias, the total number of articles increased from 3.09 million in 2005 to 6.05 million in 2006, a growth of nearly 96%.
Wikipedia's growth can also be measured in the number of visitors and other page statistics. Wikipedia's rank on
Other projects also experienced growth. Wikibooks grew from 34 language editions to 119 last year. Since late January 2006,[3] the number of English Wikibooks modules grew by nearly 10,000 (a 72% increase). Overall, the number of Wikibooks modules grew from about 26,700 to nearly 57,000 last year, a 113% increase. Wiktionary was among the projects with the most growth, as the English Wiktionary went from 109,000 to 316,000 entries, an increase of 188%. Overall, Wiktionary grew from just over 500,000 entries to over 1.7 million entries, a 236% increase. Wikiquote showed relatively slow, but still impressive, growth, moving from almost 31,000 articles in 2005 to about 53,000 in 2006 (a 73% increase).
Of all the projects, Wikinews seems to be the slowest in growth. It is difficult to judge Wikinews by the number of articles, because news articles, by definition, do not stay in flux for long; multiple stories can cover the same event. In the English Wikinews, 3,722 articles were written in the first 13 months of existence (December 2004-December 2005, about 9.4 articles per day). In 2006, the site was up to 7,498 articles (3,776 new articles, or about 10.3 articles per day). This shows a growth of about 9.5% over the last year. The German Wikinews actually showed a decrease in activity of about 1.5%, though some languages, like Italian and Swedish, did show improvement. Overall, the top 10 languages by total number of articles averaged about 6.6% growth in articles per day.
Legal issues
Legal issues began to become a significant problem on Wikimedia projects in 2006. The French Wikiquote was deleted completely in March 2006, after it became clear that the site was significantly composed of copyright violations. A Wikimedia Foundation statement on the site stated that "After analyzing the data contained in the fr.wikiquote site, the Wikimedia Foundation has determined that the material stored in the fr.wikiquote database does not provide the basic assurance of legal soundness necessary to the permanence of the project. Therefore, the site will be entirely taken down to be erased and relaunched."[4] While the plan originally was to relaunch the project immediately, after concern that the project's lack of community would allow the same problems to recur, the site was not relaunched until December.[5]
On the English Wikipedia and elsewhere, legal concerns led to the creation of the
The policy received even more attention on 10 March, when
- "What sort of problems were there with the article?"
- "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."
- "Is there anything else you'd like to say in regards to the situation?"
- "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. ... My job is to advise the Board and protect the Foundation if they are sued. So far, it hasn't happened."[8]
Today, the article contains a whopping 112 citations, with no marked uncited statements.
One of the most notable issues involving the office actions policy happened in April, when confusion over whether an action taken by Danny Wool was an office-related one involved in the temporary blocking and desysopping of long-time contributor and current Foundation Trustee
Foundation turnover
The Wikimedia Foundation experienced significant turnover in 2006. First and foremost was the hiring of Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim executive director in June.[10] The Board is still planning to replace Patrick in the role of executive director, though he will retain his position as general counsel.
In 2006, four new board members were introduced, with two members retiring. In prior years, the board's makeup had stayed relatively constant; from July 2004 (the beginning of the board's existence) through mid-2006, the board did not change. However, Angela Beesley announced her intention to retire from the board in July.[11] Elections were held in September, with Erik Möller declared the winner, with 42% support.[12] Just one month later, Jimbo Wales resigned his position as Wikimedia Foundation Chair (while still retaining his position on the board), and was replaced by Florence Devouard. In December, the Board acknowledged the retirement of Tim Shell, and simultaneously filled Shell's seat and added two additional seats. Among those chosen were Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen, who finished second and third, respectively, in the September elections, and Jan-Bart de Vreede, a Kennisnet employee who has worked with the Foundation previously.[13]
Next week
Next week, the Signpost's 2006 in review continues, with numerous elections, an audit, userboxes, Arbitration Committee decisions, a lawsuit, real and implied lawsuits, oversight, resignations, and desysoppings.
Links/references
- ^ Ral315. "News and notes", 9 January, 2006
- ^ Flcelloguy. "News and notes", 27 November, 2006
- ^ Statistics were not recorded prior to 27 January, 2006.
- ^ Flcelloguy. "News and notes", 3 April, 2006
- ^ Flcelloguy. "News and notes", 4 December, 2006
- ^ Michael Snow. "Interventions by Foundation have bumpy road", 27 February, 2006
- ^ Ral315. "Office actions policy receives renewed debate", 13 March, 2006
- ^ Ral315. "Jack Thompson unprotected after office removal", 20 March, 2006.
- ^ Michael Snow. "Confusion over office actions as veteran contributor briefly blocked", 24 April, 2006
- ^ Flcelloguy, "Foundation hires Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim executive director", 19 June, 2006
- ^ Michael Snow. "Angela Beesley resigns as Wikimedia Foundation trustee", 3 July, 2006
- ^ Flcelloguy. "Erik Möller declared winner in Board of Trustees election", 25 September, 2006.
- ^ Flcelloguy. "Board of Trustees expanded as three new members are appointed", 11 December, 2006
Another newspaper columnist found to have plagiarized Wikipedia
A year after Wikipedia editors discovered an article had been plagiarized in a newspaper, last week another columnist became at least the second person to lose their job after plagiarizing from Wikipedia.
Jacqueline Gonzalez, a columnist at the
The case resembles one at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which dismissed reporter Tim Ryan last year after Wikipedia editors found a number of cases in which Ryan appeared to have plagiarized, including from Wikipedia. In contrast to the Star-Bulletin, the Express-News appears to have caught the plagiarism on its own, rather than having it pointed out to them. The discovery of Gonzalez's plagiarism was made by another employee of the paper.
After Gonzalez admitted to this initial error, the Express-News had its research department examine a batch of her previous columns. Matching Dragons flight's observation that "a writer is never caught for their first act of plagiarism", on Tuesday the investigation turned up two additional cases in previous weeks. Gonzalez also resigned Tuesday, 2 January.
The Express-News situation was resolved relatively quickly over the course of a holiday weekend. At the Star-Bulletin, three weeks elapsed between the time the paper was initially informed and when the dismissal of Ryan was announced. One source reported that a suspension had initially been imposed, but additional instances of plagiarism continued to be discovered.
In these two situations the consequences became public, but they are not the only cases in which the media has likely plagiarized Wikipedia articles. Possible instances previously reported include news agencies Reuters [1] and Agence France-Presse [2], along with German magazine Der Spiegel [3] and an Australian community newspaper group [4].
Blogs track attempts to manipulate articles
Blogs and online media pursued two different story angles last week involving efforts to manipulate Wikipedia articles by someone with a personal interest in the topic. One apparently involved an article created by its own subject, while the other focused on floating rumors about media personalities.
Rumors allegedly traced to former Fox employee
The rumormongering involved the article on
As reported by
Building a nonexistent reputation
Meanwhile another
While the creation of "vanity pages" is relatively common, one of the issues addressed by the
As a follow-up, Valleywag contributor
Nutritional beef cooks PR editor
A dispute over popular scientific books about nutrition spilled over onto Wikipedia and the British national press this week. In his weekly Guardian column on "Bad Science", Ben Goldacre claimed that the article about Patrick Holford has been edited by a user who was actually Holford's public relations agent, and as a result, the account was blocked.
Patrick Holford is the author of more than twenty books on nutrition and health and the founder of the Institute of Optimum Nutrition, and often appears on British television and radio programmes to promote his ideas. Goldacre, who has criticised Holford's approach before, noted that all criticism which was in his Wikipedia article had been removed on 22 December by Wikipedia user Clarkeola, whom he identified as Stephen Clarke of Fuel PR.
Goldacre reported that Clarke had been intending to add a defence of Patrick Holford and that the deletion was a mistake. After the deletion had been reverted by another user, Clarkeola added a section defending Holford against Goldacre's claims on 4 January. However, administrator Robdurbar indefinitely blocked the account on 6 January as a 'meatpuppet'. The defence provided by Clarkeola has subsequently been incorporated in the text of the article by other editors.
Other than his edits on Patrick Holford, Clarkeola also wrote short entries on the Food for the Brain Foundation and the Brain Bio Centre, two entities for which Holford acts as the director. The former was deleted on 28 December after being proposed for deletion for its lack of sourcing and non-notability, while the latter is currently up for proposed deletion.
In his column, Goldacre observes that there is nothing wrong with the subjects of articles editing them, so long as they do so openly, and approvingly mentions blogger Cory Doctorow and journalist Peter Hitchens as examples of subjects who have done so. He also pays tribute to Wikipedia as "a valuable resource in the hands of those who know its limitations".
WikiWorld comic: "Facial Hair"
WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.
Cartoonist
News and notes
Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continues
The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser was extended this week, and will end on 15 January, to coincide with
The Wikimedia Foundation C.O.R.E. fundraising site has been updated to include all donations from 2006 (though until the database is updated to indicate whether donors wished their name to be public, all old entries appear as 'anonymous'). The site indicates that during 2006, the Foundation received US$1,467,062.93 in donations (before fees).
Mailing lists moved
The mailing lists for Wikipedia and other projects have changed to new addresses after the Wikimedia Foundation migrated them to a new server. All new addresses will use @lists.wikipedia.org, so that for example the English Wikipedia mailing list is now wikien-l at lists.wikipedia.org. Old addresses will still work, but the transition will include mail headers and may require recipients to adjust any filters or other settings they use to read list messages.
Briefly
- The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
- The English Wikipedia has reached 7 million total pages.
- The Portuguese Wikisource has reached 7,000 texts.
- The Voro Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
- The Tajik Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
- The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 75,000 entries.
- The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
- The Malay Wiktionary has reached 100 entries.
Features and admins
Administrators
One user was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Nilfanion (nom).
Featured content
No articles were promoted to featured status last week. The last occurrence of this, as reported by the Signpost, was 20 November, 2006; interestingly, the following week a record thirty-four articles were promoted.
Five articles were
Six
Two
.The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Yarralumla, John Brooke-Little, The Adventures of Tintin, Ahmose I, Genesis, and Operation Auca.
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Clock Tower, Atlantic salmon egg hatching, Magellanic penguin, Tulip Stairs and lantern of the Queen's House, Roman Baths, and Villarceau circles.
Two pictures were promoted to featured status last week:
-
Crystal Mountains, California
-
Black-bellied Whistling Duck
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Links can now be used in captions for
)Specific usergroups can now be exempted from
A separate
)Administrators can now add custom text to the bottom of the Special:Statistics page by editing MediaWiki:Statistics-footer. (Rob Church, bug 6937, r18972)
The block log will now mention whether the block stops account creation and (for IPs) whether it is limited to anonymous users, as Special:Ipblocklist does. This will only apply to new blocks. (Rob Church, bug 6638, r18992)
Some bugs were fixed:
- A bug causing incorrect display of special page lists in )
- A bug causing an Indonesian error message to appear in place of a French one was fixed. (Tim Starling, r18846)
- On image pages, EXIF information specifying an unknown date will now display correctly. (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8417, r18861)
- An empty )
<math>
tag will now correctly display nothing, rather than the current character encoding. (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8372, r18870
A few interface changes were made:
- When printing out a page in the Monobook skin, external link icons are no longer overlaid on the link URL or link text. Instead, they are hidden. (Simetrical, bug 8463, r18768)
- When a query page has been disabled for performance reasons, the page will now display a message to that effect instead of simply showing no results. (Rob Church, r18799)
- Irrelevant preferences, such as whether a user who can't move pages wishes to watch pages he moves, are now hidden on Special:Preferences. (Rob Church, bug 8487, r18800)
- On wikis that have mathematical anti-bot captchas enabled, so that anonymous users may give the solution to an arithmetic problem to prove they are not a robot rather than typing the text they see in an image, the message will now correctly reflect the fact that users need to solve a mathematical problem rather than an image-recognition one. (Rob Church, bug 8484, r18803) The message for these captchas will also now warn the user that they must have HTTP cookies enabled to submit an edit. (Rob Church, bug 8469, r18820)
- The counter for Brion Vibber, r18917)
Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:
- Bishnupriya Manipuri (thanks to Uttam Singha)
- Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
- French (thanks to Bertrand Grondin and Ashar Voultoiz)
- German (thanks to Raymond and Jimmy Collins)
- Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
- Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
- Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
- Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
- Lingala(thanks to Denis Jacquerye and Etienne Ruedin)
- Upper Sorbian (thanks to Dundak)
Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, and closed one case.
Closed case
- WP:POINTin an "experiment" to determine possible prejudice towards edits from IPs and offers to request desysopping "if the community wills it". In a relatively rare decision, Dmcdevit proposed a motion to close with absolutely no other motions whatsoever, following an informal agreement with Deltabeignet, where he agreed for his IP to be softbanned. This motion was adopted.
Evidence phase
- Piotrus-Ghirla: A case involving the actions of Piotrus and Ghirla on various Russia- and Poland-related articles. Piotrus alleges that Ghirla has added unsourced POV material to these articles, and generally been incivil, while Ghirla claims that Piotrus has engaged in various forms of harassment, and calls for his desysopping. However, the parties have now entered into informal mediation, with proposals including mutual civility parole (and in which Ghirla has dropped his call for desysopping), and as a result of this, a motion has been proposed temporarily deferring the case until the outcome of the mediation is known.
- WP:COI, as the executive director of the for-profit ACE LLC, which promotes the festival.
- WP:COIbecause he is one of Prechter's employees.
Voting phase
- -related AfDs, which Morwen considered to be "intimidating", and Husnock alleges that she stated that she was "in fear of her life", and that he has been investigated by real-world bodies regarding it. Fred Bauder has proposed motions describing Husnock's comments as "regrettable", and others desysopping as well as cautioning him on various matters, and encouraging Morwen to "be more sensitive to the feelings of others".
- Thatcher131 alleges that Andries has repeatedly added a link to an unreliable source to the Robert Priddy article, in violation of a remedy in a prior case on the subject, and that SSS108 has edit warred and exhibited signs of article ownership on the page. Both users deny the allegations. UninvitedCompany has proposed remedies banning Andries from editing the article, or starting any dispute resolution procedures regarding it and requiring Etanikto edit under one username only. Fred Bauder has supported the proposals, but Charles Matthews has opposed the editing restrictions.
- Midnight Syndicate: A case brought by Durova involving an edit war on the Midnight Syndicate article. Dionyseus and Skinny McGee allege that GuardianZ has engaged in sockpuppetry and general disruption on the article. He denies the allegations and argues that Dionyseus and Skinny McGee have engaged in similar behaviour. A temporary injunction has been granted placing Dionyseus, Skinny McGee, and GuardianZ on revert parole. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies, supported by jpgordon, banning GuardianZ and Skinny McGee from the article indefinitely, and Dionyseus for a period of six months, and forbidding any employees of Midnight Synidcate, Nox Arcana or Monolith Graphics from editing the article.
- Yoshiaki Omurawhich was criticised by a New Zealand disciplinary tribunal as lacking scientific basis. However, Richardmalter denies that his pro-Omura edits were either biased or unsourced and claims that the mediation process has supported his position. Fred Bauder has proposed motions to the effect that "Richardmalter...[has] edited Yoshiaki Omura in an aggressive biased manner", and banning him from the article indefinitely. These motions have attracted the support of SimonP.
- are named as examples) from reverting the article, and banning Supreme Cmdr for two weeks. These remedies have the support of three arbitrators.
- Never Kill a Boy on the First Date (Buffy episode). While about 80% of involved editors said in a straw poll that it should not be disambiguated, both sides allege that editors on the other have behaved disruptively. Fred Bauder has proposed a principle stating that appeals to the Arbitration Committee as a method to determine consensus in a policy dispute is not generally viable, due to the press of work as well as other considerations, and a remedy stating that no penalties are to be imposed in respect of past actions in the dispute, but has proposed an enforcement motion stating that editors who violate the consensus decision in the matter may be briefly blocked. These remedies have the support of five arbitrators. In addition, UninvitedCompany has proposed a remedy banning Izzy Dotfor two weeks, which has the support of four arbitrators, but has been opposed by Fred Bauder, who claims that there is "no supporting evidence".
- reliable sourcespolicy. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies banning 195 for one year, placing him on probation, and placing the article on article probation. These proposals have the support of five arbitrators.