Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2008-09-29
Wikimedia UK v2.0 elects first board
Following the dissolution of the first UK Wikimedia chapter (see previous story), its proposed replacement elected an initial board. The results of the vote, open to anyone who had expressed interest in membership of the new organisation, were announced on Tuesday 30th September in a post to the wikimediauk-l mailing list. 27 members voted, and of the eight candidates standing five received the required 50% support and were thus elected to the board:
- Kwan Ting Chan (KTC)
- Andrew Turvey (AndrewRT)
- Tom Holden (Cfp)
- Michael Conn (Warofdreams)
- Michael Peel (Mike Peel)
It is hoped this first board will serve to get the fledgling chapter off the ground. This includes filing for incorporation, seeking charitable status, and opening a bank account. Once these foundations have been laid a new board will be elected at the company's first annual general meeting (AGM), tentatively planned for January 2009. To avoid the limbo which the previous chapter entered, the community has agreed that if incorporation has not happened by March 2009 then new elections will be held, and if there has not been an AGM by 6 months after incorporation then the Wikimedia Foundation will be asked to withdraw any trademark licenses and chapter status granted.
An initial board meeting via IRC is being planned. Discussion also continues on the mailing list and meta-wiki pages, and the chapter is expected to be a topic of discussion at the next London meetup, scheduled for Sunday 12th October.
"Wikimedia UK v2.0" currently has 40 people signed up as interested in being guarantor members, and has received support on the mailing list from Wikimedia Foundation officials including Board of Trustees chair Michael Snow and Executive Director Sue Gardner. It is hoped that the chapter will be able to help with the Oxford bid for Wikimania 2010.
WikiWorld: "Cursive"
- This comic originally appeared on November 26, 2007.
This week's WikiWorld comic uses text from "Cursive". The comic is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
News and notes
Arbitrator resigns
UninvitedCompany resigned from the Arbitration Committee on September 23, effective immediately. UninvitedCompany had not been active on arbitration cases since April. His position will be filled in the December 2008 election, for the remaining year left on his original term.
Military history WikiProject elects new coordinators
The sixth election for coordinators of the military history WikiProject concluded on September 30. As a result of the election, the following nine users were elected to a six-month term:
- Roger Davies, 61 votes (Lead Coordinator)
- Woody, 48 votes
- TomStar81, 46 votes
- Nick Dowling, 45 votes
- Eurocopter tigre, 42 votes
- Climie.ca, 36 votes
- MBK004, 35 votes
- Catalan, 30 votes
- Bedford, 9 votes
Five of the six incumbent coordinators standing for re-election (Davies, Eurocopter tigre, Dowling, TomStar81, Woody) were re-elected. The other coordinator, YellowMonkey, had enough votes to be elected, but subsequently chose not to take the position.
Also, as part of the election, the WikiProject recognized former lead coordinator Kirill Lokshin as a coordinator emeritus, a new designation recognizing him as an honorary coordinator.
Briefly
- The Italian Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles.
- The Spanish Wikipedia has reached 400,000 articles.
- The Marathi Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
- The Romanian Wiktionary has reached 20,000 articles.
- The Bavarian Wikipedia has reached 2,000 articles.
- The Bangla Wikisource has reached 1,000 pages.
- The Lithuanian Wiktionary has reached 80,000 articles.
- The Cebuano Wikipedia has reached 35,000 articles.
- The Ido Wikipedia has reached 16,000 articles.
- The Quechua Wikipedia has reached 8,000 articles.
Features and admins
Administrators
Four users were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Cbl62 (nom), Juliancolton (nom), SoWhy (nom), and Tadakuni (nom).
A total of six users were named administrators in September 2008, the lowest number of new administrators since April 2003, when adminship applications were held informally on the mailing list.
Bots
Four bots or bot tasks were approved to begin operating this week: Naudefjbot (task request), Yonidebot (task request), FA Template Protection Bot (task request), and Cydebot (task request).
FA Template Protection Bot is the first administrative bot approved under the new adminbot policies.
Featured pages
Twenty-seven articles were promoted to featured status this week: Mother and Child Reunion (Degrassi: The Next Generation) (nom), Odwalla (nom), 4chan (nom), Bert Trautmann (nom), Virus (nom), Frank Zappa (nom), Southern Cross Expedition (nom), Ian O'Brien (nom), Little Miss Sunshine (nom), Raptor Red (nom), Morotai Mutiny (nom), Decipherment of rongorongo (nom), Cleveland Street scandal (nom), AMX-30E (nom), Joseph Barbera (nom), Space Invaders (nom), Hurricane Dean (nom), Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal (nom), Martin Keamy (nom), German women's national football team (nom), History of the National Hockey League (1942–1967) (nom), James Russell Lowell (nom), Germanium (nom), Steve Bruce (nom), Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (nom), Farthest South (nom), and Stonewall riots (nom).
Twenty-eight lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Slipknot awards (nom), List of Ciara awards (nom), List of Arizona Diamondbacks Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of George Michael awards (nom), A Perfect Circle discography (nom), List of railway stations in Greater Manchester (nom), The Simpsons (season 3) (nom), Extreme points of India (nom), List of Zulu War Victoria Cross recipients (nom), List of Tampa Bay Rays Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of Boston Red Sox Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of The Open Championship champions (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Feist (nom), List of Colorado Rockies Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of number-one Billboard Top Latin Albums of 2002 (nom), List of Florida Marlins Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of Calgary Flames head coaches (nom), Chimaira discography (nom), List of awards and nominations received by The Neptunes (nom), List of Wranglers of the University of Cambridge (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Metallica (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Muse (nom), List of awards and nominations received by Aerosmith (nom), List of New York Mets Opening Day starting pitchers (nom), List of gay, lesbian or bisexual people: R (nom), List of UEFA Intertoto Cup winners (nom), New York Giants seasons (nom), and List of awards and nominations received by Paul Kelly (nom).
Four topics was promoted to featured status this week: Category 5 Pacific hurricanes (nom), Aston Villa F.C. (nom), Jesus College, Oxford (nom), and Physical geography of Somerset (nom).
Two portals were promoted to featured status this week: Portal:Russia (nom) and Portal:Japan (nom).
The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page this week as Today's featured article: Draining and development of the Everglades, Augustus, Mom and Dad, Zhang Heng, Verdeja, Stigand, and Biman Bangladesh Airlines.
Former featured pages
Eight articles were delisted over the last week: Canon T90 (nom), Cricket (nom), Coconut crab (nom), Laal (nom), Irish Houses of Parliament (nom), The Lord of the Rings (nom), George Brown, Baron George-Brown (nom), and Cathedral of Magdeburg (nom).
One list was delisted this week: Timeline of first orbital launches by country (nom).
No topics were delisted this week.
Featured media
The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: European paper wasp, Tugboat, Grand Central Terminal, River Thames, San Francisco, California in 1850 or 1851, Nautical chart, and Baggage claim.
Seven sounds were featured this week:
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| Irving Berlin - I Want to Go Back to Michigan | (nom) |
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| "O frondens virga" from Hildegard of Bingen's Ordo Virtutum (c.1151) | (nom) |
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| The Carnival of the Animals | (nom) |
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| Pierre Gaveaux - "Dieu du bonheur, Dieu plein du charmes..." from Le trompeur trompé | (nom) |
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| Antonio Pasculli - Gran Concerto on themes from Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani | (nom) |
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| Brass band arrangement of the Hunters' Chorus from The Lily of Killarney | (nom) |
Jean-Baptiste Lully and Molière - Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (set)
No featured pictures were demoted this week.
Eighteen pictures and videos were promoted to featured status over the last two weeks and are shown below.
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.43.0-wmf.2 (ce9d259), and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.
Fixed bugs
- If an IP is blocked with account-creation-blocked, users editing through that IP now cannot create accounts. (r41150, bug 13611)
- Special:PrefixIndex and Special:AllPages now have different HTML <title>s from each other. (r41341, bug 15388)
- Renames of users now work if the old username is entered in lowercase, rather than appearing to work but doing nothing. (r41347, bug 15753)
- When a protected page is moved (thus leaving the new name protected) the protection log for the new name now contains details explaining how the page became protected. (r41227, bug 8296; r41384, bug 15754)
- When a user with a large number of edits is renamed, there is now only one entry made in the rename log. (r40230, bug 15376)
New features
- Moving a protected page now protects the resulting redirect the same way. (r41227, bug 10527)
- Administrators can now choose, when blocking a user, whether that user can edit their own talk page during the block. (r41248, bug 8440)
- A prop=info query on the API now allows a query for a page's URL, and whether it is readable. (Although all pages on Wikipedia are readable, the same is not true for some private wikis.) (r41261, bug 15609)
- A new API query prop=duplicates allows files (such as images) which are duplicates of a given file to be searched for. (r41306, bug 15653)
- Special:ListUsers now shows each user's server edit count. (r41350, bug 15503)
Configuration changes
- Account-creators can now create accounts with usernames similar to existing ones. (bug 14576)
Ongoing news
- Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See mw:Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.
The Report on Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee closed one case this week, leaving three currently open.
Closed case
- C68-FM-SV: A case, lasting over four months, involving disputes among Cla68, FeloniousMonk, SlimVirgin, JzG, and others. As a result of the case, FeloniousMonk was desysopped. Also, a number of principles and findings of fact were enacted, and the parties were instructed to review and abide by them, giving a number of prohibited courses of conduct by way of example.
Evidence phase
- Piotrus 2: A second case involving alleged edit warring and other misconduct by Piotrus and other editors. Piotrus denies the allegations against him, and has suggested that the case may be a deliberate attempt to drive him from the site.
- Sarah Palin protection wheel war: A case involving allegations of wheel-warring on the Sarah Palin article, over a dispute as to the merits of page protection being applied in respect of it.
- SlimVirgin-Lar: A case brought by Thatcher, asking the committee to review the use of checkuser by Lar, in the light of comments by SlimVirgin (here, inter alia), alleging that he misused the tool. Evidence is to be submitted privately to the committee by e-mail, and voting will presumably occur privately as well.