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Volume 5, Issue 44 2 November 2009 About the Signpost
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Durova wins 2009 WikiCup

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By Garden, iMatthew and J Milburn

After ten months of near-constant content creation, the 2009 WikiCup drew to a close on October 31, with Durova claiming the ultimate prize. Throughout the competition she alone managed the remarkable total of 3,705 points, made up of several different categories of featured content.

Durova fought past 59 other users in total in the contest, which began as a group stage in January 2009. Around 1,500 pieces of featured, good, or Did you know? content were created by contestants over the course of the competition as a whole, including nearly 40 featured articles, over 200 featured pictures and over 300 good articles.

The competition, the format of which was originally based on an association football contest, began humbly in 2007 with 12 competitors and was based primarily on edit counts and unique page edits. This was won by Dreamafter after a win against Sunderland06 in the final. The 2008 contest had a slightly more healthy competitor count at 24, and the format was still heavily edit count based. This was won by jj137, again beating Sunderland06 in the final round.

However, the format of this year's competition was changed significantly before and, often controversially, during the contest. The focus was shifted from edit counts to content creation, offering substantially fewer points for mainspace edits than for audited content. As well as the familiar featured articles, lists and pictures, along with good articles, In the News and Did You Know?, points were awarded for lesser known areas of Wikipedia's audited content; featured and good topics, featured sounds and featured portals. This change drew the contest away from merely an edit count and encouraged higher quality contributions. Edits outside of the article (and, later, portal) space counted for nothing, and edits made with automatic tools such as Twinkle, Huggle and AutoWikiBrowser were ignored.

The WikiCup will be held again next year, and editors may sign up now by adding their username and a choice of flag (which must represent a real location) of their choice to the sign-up list. The contest's format is to remain similar to this year's, with a strong possibility of minor changes preceding the start. Due to heavy interest, the initial round is planned to include one large pool, before the winning editors are split into more conventional pools in round two.

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WikiSym features research on Wikipedia

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By Phoebe and Staeiou

WikiSym (short for the International Symposium on Wikis) is an annual international conference about wikis and wiki technology. This year's conference was the fifth annual WikiSym, and was held in Orlando, Florida on Oct. 25-27. It was co-located with OOPSLA, the major ACM conference on object-oriented programming.

Compared with Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia Foundation conference, the conference has more of an academic focus, with papers getting published in the ACM digital library, and is broader in scope, with papers about all aspects of wikis. It is also much smaller than Wikimania, with three main tracks: presented papers, workshops/tutorials, and open space.

The opening conference keynote was given by Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, and was called "Visualizing the Inner Lives of Texts" (pdf). In their talk, Viégas and Wattenberg discussed various tools for visualizing the history and content of texts (including wiki articles) that they have developed, including History Flow, Chromogram, and the Many Eyes project.

There were many other papers and posters about researching Wikipedia in the program as well. These included work on the slowing growth of Wikipedia, the formation and roles of groups and WikiProjects, the lifecycles of articles, searching Wikipedia, user interface extensions, bots and assisted editing tools, as well as various ways of measuring quality, credibility, collaboration, and conflict.

Papers that featured research based on Wikipedia included:

  • "Bipartite Networks of Wikipedia's Articles and Authors: a Meso-level Approach" (pdf) by Rut Jesus, Martin Schwartz, and Sune Lehmann, about how networks of related articles and editors behave;
  • "Herding the Cats: The Influence of Groups in Coordinating Peer Production?" (pdf) by Aniket Kittur, Bryan Pendleton, and Robert E. Kraut, about editor behavior before and after joining WikiProjects on Wikipedia, and the impact of WikiProjects (the researchers found that edits to WikiProject pages account for around 1% of all Wikipedia edits total);
  • "The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia(pdf) by Bongwon Suh, Gregorio Convertino, Ed H. Chi, and Peter Pirolli, about Wikipedia editing activity by various levels of editors (by edit count), the slowing growth of mid-level editors, and the growing number of new edits that get reverted;
  • "A Jury of Your Peers: Quality, Experience and Ownership in Wikipedia" (pdf) by Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur, Robert Kraut, and John Riedl;
  • "Assessing the Quality of Wikipedia Articles with Lifecycle Based Metrics" (pdf) by Thomas Wohner and Ralf Peters;
  • "Organizing the Vision for Web 2.0: A Study of the Evolution of the Concept in Wikipedia" (pdf) by Arnaud Gorgeon and E. Burton Swanson, which looked at the evolution of a single Wikipedia article, Web 2.0, over time.

The best paper award went to Michael D. Ekstrand and John T. Riedl at the University of Minnesota for their paper "rv you’re dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History" (pdf), which provides a new way of visualizing an article's history and revision flow, as well as whether diffs between revisions discard previous work, with an overlay over the current MediaWiki history page display.

Workshops and technical demos were also held, including a demonstration called "ProveIt: A New Tool for Supporting Citation in MediaWiki" (pdf) by Kurt Luther, Matthew Flaschen, Andrea Forte, Christopher Jordan, and Amy Bruckman.

Other papers presented at the conference focussed on various aspects of wikis, including wiki search, mapping the universe of wikis, and more. Workshops included topics such as "Wikis for software engineering." Tom Malone of the MIT Sloan school gave the conference keynote.

The conference also made use of Open Space Technology to hold many ad-hoc sessions on a wide range of topics. Open space sessions included discussions on how academics can better research Wikipedia, parsers and search functions, a possible Wikimedia Commons for references, how Wikipedia compares to other large Internet websites, and the future of wikis.

Finally, Brion Vibber gave the closing conference keynote on "Community Performance Optimization: Making Your People Run as Smoothly as Your Site" (pdf).

The next WikiSym will be co-located with Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, Poland.

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2009 ArbCom elections report

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By Manning Bartlett

The annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections are upon us again. ArbCom is the final stage of Wikipedia's dispute resolution process, and the members of ArbCom are typically experienced and respected project volunteers. The 2009 election will select as many as eight new arbitrators, who will begin their term on 1 January 2010.

Important dates

Although some preliminary activities have already begun (see below), the election process will get properly underway on 10 November 2009, when candidates can nominate themselves. Nominations close on November 24, and voting will take place between 1–14 December. The results and the appointments will be announced by Jimbo Wales within a few days of the conclusion of voting.

Candidates

Nomination is open to any editor in good standing over the age of 18 and who is of legal age in their place of residence. Candidates are not required to be administrators or to have any other special permissions.

Potential candidates may also be interested to know that current ArbCom member Risker has written a personal commentary on both the overall election process and the overall experience of being an arbitrator. (For information on the specific procedure of registering as a candidate, see here).

Requests for comment (RFC)

A set of requests for comment are underway, examining aspects of the overall ArbCom election process. Topics under review are:

All Wikipedia editors are warmly invited to participate in these discussions.

Questions

Every candidate will be required to provide answers to both general and specific questions from the community.

General questions are broad in nature and are designed to explore the candidate's overall philosophy. All candidates are expected to provide answers to the general questions. The general question list has not yet been finalised but the drafting has begun.

Once a candidate has nominated him/herself, editors will then be free to ask that candidate specific questions about a range of topics such as their intended approach, their project experience or their opinions on past decisions.

Voting

Voting is open to any editor who had 150 mainspace (article) edits as of 1 November 2009. The actual voting process has not yet been decided. Votes will be cast either using the public method of previous years (see last year's election for an example), or possibly through a secret ballot using a software extension known as "Secure Poll". (For more information, see the Public or Secret Voting section of the RFC.) The SecurePoll facility was tested earlier this year and is currently being used in the Audit Subcommittee election.

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Inaugural Audit Subcommittee elections underway

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By Kirill Lokshin

This week saw the opening of the inaugural elections for at-large seats on the Audit Subcommittee of the Arbitration Committee.

The Audit Subcommittee (AUSC), which is responsible for investigating complaints concerning the use of CheckUser and Oversight privileges on the English Wikipedia, was established in April of this year as part of the Arbitration Committee's overall effort to delegate certain tasks to subsidiary groups. The initial appointments to the subcommittee included three arbitrators (FloNight, John Vandenberg, and Roger Davies) as well as three non-arbitrators (Mackensen, Thatcher, and Tznkai). The arbitrator seats have subsequently been rotated among the members of the Committee, but the other three—intended to be merely interim appointments pending an election—have continued to be held by the initial appointees, as preparations for the election were repeatedly delayed by the emergence of higher-priority matters.

In early October, the Arbitration Committee finally announced that an election would be held in late October and early November, and solicited applications for Committee review. A slate of six candidates was approved for the three open seats:

The candidates include a former arbitrator (Dominic), a current member of the Audit Subcommittee (Tznkai), an Arbitration Committee clerk (MBisanz), and three other administrators.

Following extensive discussion, the elections themselves are being held via secret voting, using the "SecurePoll" extension. Four stewards (Erwin, Thogo, Mike.lifeguard, and Mardetanha) have been recruited to serve as scrutineers for the poll.

Voting in the election began on 30 October, and is scheduled to continue until 23:59 8 November (UTC). Any registered editor with 150 main space edits prior to 1 October 2009 has franchise; the "SecurePoll" extension automatically accepts votes from editors meeting this criterion. Votes may be entered on the voting page.

The Arbitration Committee is expected to announce the results by 13 November, at which point the successful candidates will assume office.

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Wikipedia remembers the Wall

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By Tony1
Map of East Germany showing crossing points on the western and south-western side. In total, there are ten road crossings, eight rail crossings, and two river or canal crossings.
ChrisO's route followed the former inner German border (left side) from the Baltic Sea south to the border with Czechoslovakia.[1]

Next Monday, 9 November, will mark 20 years to the day since the dramatic opening of the Berlin Wall was broadcast to stunned audiences around the globe – footage of East Germans pouring into West Berlin like the bursting of a dam; young people standing on the wall and attacking it with any tool they could lay their hands on. These iconic moments changed the world and appeared to give a sense of closure to a brutal and chaotic century. However, they overshadowed the almost simultaneous fall of a barrier that was more than ten times its length and considerably more elaborate: the inner German border. This vast, fortified border system nearly 1,400 kilometres (900 mi) long marked the physical boundary between two geopolitical systems that were locked in a Cold War for nearly half a century.

The extraordinary events of November 1989 are commemorated with a featured article about the inner German border. The Signpost interviewed the main author of the article, London editor ChrisO, who travelled nearly the full length of the former border from north to south on bicycle during August and September 2009. Chris's trip enabled him to visit the many local museums and archives dedicated to its memory, and to take a large number of photographs of the border. Critically, it gave him background information and experience to write a neutral account of a subject that is usually described in emotive, ideological terms. During and after the trip, he combined what he learned with his knowledge of modern world history to rewrite and greatly expand the article; this has provided a comprehensive overview of the history, structure, operation and eventual fall of the Iron Curtain in Germany.

How was Chris's interest in the border sparked? He says, "for anyone over the age of about 35, the world had been dominated by the confrontation between east and west, an apparently permanent threat of nuclear war hanging over our heads. The border was the front line in the Cold War, with an eerie resemblance to the prison camps of World War II – the watch towers, the search lights, the dogs, the barbed wire, the double fences. I wanted to give young people a balanced account of what it was really like, and to fill in details that older people may not be aware of."

Ironically, while the border left a deep physical scar across some of the most beautiful landscape in Germany, it was protected from the industrial and urban development that compromised much of Europe's natural environment in the post-war period. Germans from east and west have seized the opportunity to make much of the border an international wildlife sanctuary, which has become a popular tourist attraction, especially for cyclists. "Much of the route is through gently undulating terrain, ideal for cycling, and I was lucky to have only one rainy day in my two and a half weeks; it was more a problem of guarding against sunburn." Excellent guide books are available, with maps showing the locations of the border museums, remnants of fortifications, and the remaining watchtowers. Some museums are set up like research centres, with professional archivists and curators. Others focus on exhibiting artefacts saved before the border was dismantled. Among them is the Border learning pathway in Zicherie-Böckwitz, owned and run by a farmer from the Western border community. The kilometre-long path displays an original command watchtower and faithfully reconstructed stretches of the two border fences and the Berlin-style wall that divided the village of Zicherie from its neighbour Böckwitz. Between wall and fences is a replica of what became known as "the death strip".

A lush, green, wooded landscape through which the border line about 10 metres (32 ft) wide, cleared and grassed with a narrow dirt strip in the middle, runs from bottom-left across the image, turning slightly to run directly away from the viewer into the distance. To the right is the outer fence and a steep incline leading up to the near-side fence of a West German road. A schematic arrow, marked "Escape route of Heinz-Josef Großze", points to a memorial cross at the point of the shooting, half way up the incline.
An annotated illustration of Heinz-Josef Grosse's attempted escape route; the scene is now part of the Schifflersgrund Border Museum in Thuringia.

The killings started in 1945. Between then and 1989, more than a thousand people died trying to cross to the West – shot by East German border guards, or killed by mines or through drowning in rivers or the sea. In Schifflersgrund, Thuringia, Chris photographed a section of the border in lush countryside that belies the bitter memory of a young East German man, Heinz-Joseph Grosse. A maintenance worker entrusted with the operation of an excavator right at the border line, on 29 March 1982 Grosse noticed the absence of the border guards and drove his machine across the death strip and over the anti-vehicle ditch to the outer fence. By resting the excavator's bucket on the fence he was able to climb over. Ahead of him lay a steep incline of 50 metres (164 ft) up to the legal border, the near side of a West German road. However, just halfway up the incline, Grosse was shot dead by two guards at a range of 60 metres (197 ft).[2] In 1996, the former guards were brought to trial for this incident, and in a controversial judgement were given only suspended sentences of 15 months. Chris says, "Part of the moral challenge for re-unified Germany lies in how to allocate blame: is it the managerial 'desk killers' who issued the orders or the front-line soldiers following those orders who should be punished? Many in eastern Germany see the border guards simply as conscripts who were doing their duty." Perhaps the eastern view is a pragmatic approach to the need to move on and forget, since a large proportion of the population found ways of surviving by cooperating with the regime, at least outwardly: are they all to feel guilt? Western Germans, who were always permitted to see and discuss the border, are less generous towards those who did the shooting. "This is another of the border's ironies, considering that easterners were the targets of the bullets."

Next week, the German people will commemorate in their own ways the fall of the inner German border and the re-unification of their country. But what are English-speakers to make of it all? Chris's view is that "there's no one way of seeing the border – there are so many angles, depending on who you are and what perspective you're taking at a particular time". The ultimate fault-line between state and mixed economies, freedom and fascism, American and Soviet rivalry? Germany's punishment for the war? A moral dilemma for would-be escapers and border guards? We will continue to debate these issues for decades, but one thing most people agree on is that without the fortified border, the East German experiment would not have been possible.

Chris returned from Germany with the aim of producing a first-class article in time for the anniversary – a tight schedule. An earlier version of the article went through the peer review process at the Military history WikiProject, which is fast becoming one of the Internet's most dynamic centres for producing material in its field. After receiving valuable advice there, he nominated the piece for Wikipedia's tough featured article candidate process. "I was prepared for a lot of work, and it's just as well. The reviewers were generous in their praise, but brought up problems with images, citations, and lots of little stylistic matters. Then we realised it was far too large for an article in summary style and would have to be reduced by more than half, with excess content split off into daughter articles. Unusually, quite a few reviewers pitched in to bring the article to promotion standard, for which I'm very grateful. I'm happy with the result, and now we have a number of daughter articles that could come together into a featured topic next year."

Inner German border will appear on Wikipedia's Main page on Monday 9 November.

Notes

  1. ^ Based on the Appendix to § 18 of the Gesetz über die Staatsgrenze der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik [Law on the State Border of the GDR] (25 March 1982)
  2. ^ Schematic plan of the killing, based on local mapping and display materials at the Schifflersgrund Border Museum


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Strategic planning, November conference, brief news and milestones

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By Phoebe and Rje

Strategic planning update

Several task forces for the strategic planning project are beginning their work, with the first round of task forces being assigned people and questions. The task forces that have begun so far are:

Many other task forces are still in the planning stage. Task forces are tasked with synthesizing data and information relating to their area, answering a set of broad questions relating to this area and Wikimedia's work, and presenting a few proposals to the strategic planning team. The task force work will take place over the next two months.

Community involvement is still requested for strategic planning. The Call for Proposals is still open; current proposals can also be rated and discussed. There is also a current call for discussion of some of the key questions that have been developed. Finally, there is also a wiki to-do list.

Community events planned for November

The deadline for registration for Wikimedia Conference Japan is November 11; more information can be found on the conference website. The conference will be held on November 22, in Tokyo.

Wikimedia Brasil is planning a series of unconferences, on November 18 and 25. The themes are "Building Free Knowledge Through Collaboration," with a sub-theme of "Outreach, Participation and Quality in Wikimedia projects." They are also planning a series of workshops for the general public and Wikipedia volunteers.

So far, community meetups are planned in November for London (Nov. 8); Cambridge (Nov. 14); New York City (Nov. 15); Bangalore (Nov. 22); and Karachi (Nov. 22).

Briefly

Wikipedia in the news

  • Barry Newstead of the Wikimedia strategy project blogged about the strategy project, and how it is trying to be open to non-community members.
  • The Huffington Post has recognized Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, as one of their top 10 media game-changers of the year; the top place is determined by reader votes. Her Wikipedia article was consequently nominated for deletion and speedily kept.
  • Writing in the The Spectator, James Hannam suggests that there is a "subtle campaign on Wikipedia to overstate the contribution of Islamic sages to scientific scholarship." Hannam highlights the comparative length and specific claims made in articles such as Avicenna, Al-Kindi, Alhazen, Rhazes, Al-Farabi and Geber compared with those of Western thinkers.

Milestones

This week in history

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Discussion report for this week

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By tedder, Pretzels, Roger Davies, Dank and Hiding

Add that deduction?

At the talk page of Wikipedia:No original research, a debate is taking place over the extent to which editors can make and record deductions whilst maintaining a neutral point of view. A "simple syllogism exception" was proposed, although a number of editors feared that the average Wikipedian would not be aware of the definition of the word syllogism, or be able to infer the meaning from the context in which it was used. A change using a simple example, namely that if A is in district B, and district B is in province C, then we could state that A is in province C was reverted for fear that the use of the word "simple" would cause disputes.

Policy report

Several contributors shared their thoughts with the Signpost about the many changes to our Sock puppetry policy page in October. FT2 describes it as a heavily used page whose wording had become "diffuse and patchy"; he sees this month's efforts as mainly tightening and improving clarity, more directness about the possible serious consequences of being caught operating sock-puppets, and improved guidance in areas such as sock handling. Amorymeltzer notes the new clearer wording on legitimate uses of multiple accounts, stricter standards for admins, and focus on WP:Assume Good Faith as a governing principle. SmokeyJoe believes the tough language, including the "threat to block and publicly link abusive sock accounts", is helpful, and thinks that the past month's changes have made the page more stable.

Bwilkins points to the "chill" caused by the discovery earlier this month that an administrator was a sock of an admin blocked in 2008 (previous stories) as an impetus for increased activity on this page; he now routinely asks a question related to other accounts in individual requests for adminship. WereSpielChequers observes high levels of community disapproval over the kind of sock-puppetry that recently took place and over contentious uses of "clean start", but believes that the community has not yet reached agreement about who to disclose alternate accounts to, whether tougher rules should apply to admins, whether changes are needed to WP:CLEANSTART, and whether the page should be renamed to reflect the change in our jargon from sockpuppet meaning alternate account, to sockpuppet meaning alternate account used abusively.

New master sockpuppet template

Avi has consolidated the sockpuppet and sockpuppeteer templates. The new version of {{Sockpuppeteer}} is backwards compatible while {{sockpuppet}} requires re-mapping of existing parameters. The mapping, which will cover almost all instances can be found at WT:SPI#Single sockpuppet template. More input is requested at to whether to initiate a bot-driven replacement and re-mapping of the templates, since this would break most instances while the process is in progress. An alternative mapping is also under discussion at WT:SPI, concerning {{Sockpuppetry}}.

New proposals

Polls

see also main story

An election to appoint the three non-arbitrator members of the Audit Subcommittee, using SecurePoll, has now started. You may:

The election closes at 23:59 (UTC) on 8 November 2009.

Deletion round-up

Administrative notices

Briefly

Requests for comment

Thirty-two Requests for comment have been made in the week of 25 October to 2 November:



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Project banner meta-templates

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By Kirill Lokshin

Almost everyone who has participated in a WikiProject is familiar with project banners—the ubiquitous templates that appear on article talk pages to indicate that an article is associated with a particular WikiProject. WikiProject banners have evolved from simply being a way to mark a project's scope and recruit new editors to a sophisticated system for tracking metadata about articles, such as assessment grades, review statistics, and areas needing further work.

What many don't know is that almost all project banners are actually implemented through a single meta-template—the aptly named {{WPBannerMeta}}. First created in February 2008, the meta-banner allows WikiProjects to easily construct very sophisticated banner templates without the need to reinvent—or even fully understand—the complex logic involved in implementing many of their more popular features.

Today, we've asked Happy-melon, MSGJ, and Road Wizard, three editors involved in maintaining the meta-banner, to answer a few questions about their work:

1. What is the history behind {{WPBannerMeta}}? How did the idea of a meta-template for WikiProject banners come about?

Road Wizard: I wasn't involved with WikiProject banners at the time, but looking back through the archives it appears that the idea came from Happy-melon. I think the second comment by Happy-melon in the conversation at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council/Archive 7#WikiProject banners answers this question quite well.
Happy-melon: I wrote the original design for a meta-template for WikiProject banners, always with the expectation that it would grow and develop significantly as it became more widely utilised. The original reasons for wanting such an abstraction haven't changed: to allow WikiProjects to quickly and easily develop a project banner that's useful to them, taking advantage of all the latest 'technology' and features that are always being developed, and conversely centralising the development and deployment of that functionality to allow important changes to be made with the minimum of effort. Features like the C-Class rollout, the tmbox CSS classes, the magic banner shell nesting, and countless other improvements to the way WikiProject banners are implemented, would have been infinitely easier to implement if we had already had the meta-template structure in place; as it was, we had to individually edit thousands of separate banners. As we approach the completion of the WPBM deployment (the conversion of {{WPBiography}} and {{WPIndia}} last week brings the total to 1,330, covering 99% of all banner templates, and 99.9% of talk page instances) such actions will become much easier in the future.

2. How does the meta-template work? What functions does it support?

MSGJ: Over time, the meta-template has developed so that it supports pretty much all functionality that WikiProjects could desire, from the simplest banners which are basically just message boxes, up to the most complicated which support features such as:
  • Sub-projects or taskforces,
  • B-class checklists,
  • Portal links and icons,
  • Alerts for when an article is lacking an image, infobox, taxobox or otherwise needs attention, and
  • Any choice of quality assessment scale.
Recent developments include:
  • The automatic detection of substituted banners (which fill the page with template code and thereafter don't benefit from updates) so that they may be fixed,
  • An improved system for collapsing notes when there are more than a specified number of them, and
  • Better support for priority scales (which are used by a significant minority of WikiProjects instead of an importance scale).
The most complicated banner template is probably {{WPBiography}}, which is also the most used with ¾ million transclusions. This was converted to use the meta-template in early October 2009.
We are constantly trying to find a balance between supporting as many functions as possible which projects will find useful, while not over-complicating the template which would make it harder for the majority of projects to use. For example, there are a few projects which like to include a to-do list for tasks on articles within their scope. As this is a relatively uncommon request, it is not worth supporting it in the main template; instead the extra code is "hooked" on, in the appropriate place and everyone is happy.

3. How smooth has the deployment process been? Have projects readily adopted the new model? Have there been any particularly notable successes or failures?

Happy-melon: What the deployment of WPBM has really highlighted for me is just how undersupported many of our WikiProjects are. In literally hundreds of cases, we found projects that were either totally inactive, or had no one maintaining their project banner. Most project banners were copied from existing projects, which is to be expected, but it was amazing to see just how many banners still contained references to their ancestors in links and category code. The deployment itself was very fluid, as we were also constantly adapting and improving WPBM itself as we encountered new banner features 'in the wild' that weren't currently supported.
Converting {{WikiProject Australia}} was a big milestone for me. It was the first time we had dealt with such a large and active project, and such a complicated banner. The hooks infrastructure in WPBM (where we provide places where a banner can be arbitrarily extended with custom features) was really driven by that conversion, to handle the large number of taskforces. With that conversion complete, it made banners like {{AfricaProject}} very easy to convert.
As we expanded the deployment, we did encounter some issues with WPBM itself; some fundamental decisions that had been made very early on turned out to be mistakes. In particular, our choice of character for the 'default' parameter turned out to be a huge problem. The mechanics of what we do with this feature are quite complicated, but essentially we add an obscure character (we originally chose µ) to many of the parameters as defaults, and then by voodoo magic we can tell the difference between when a banner uses a parameter like |importance= but an individual talk page just hasn't set it, and when the banner as a whole doesn't use that parameter at all. So on pages like this, we can correctly identify all three cases without the WikiProject having to use any complicated parametes in their templates. However, it all hinges on being able to check for the presence of this µ character. What we didn't realise was that there are actually two Unicode characters that look almost identical: the "lowercase letter mu" µ and the "micro prefix" µ; people were getting the two muddled up and causing things to stop working on banners. Over New Year 2008–9 we converted everything over to use ¬, which is a virtually-unused character on the top-left of most keyboards, but it involved updating hundreds of banners, and was a hassle we could definitely have done without.

4. What remains to be done with the meta-template in the future? What new features are you planning to add?

MSGJ: The template is approaching a finished product, but undoubtedly will continue to evolve as WikiProjects grow and editing practices change, and the programmers think of more ideas! There are likely to be further improvements in the efficiency of the code and new features that become possible with future developments to the MediaWiki software.

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Approved this week

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By seresin

Administrators

Two editors were granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Malik Shabazz (nom) and Dumelow (nom).

Fourteen articles were promoted to featured status this week: Nansen's Fram expedition (nom), Makinti Napanangka (nom), Fifth Test, 1948 Ashes series (nom), 2004 World Series (nom), Howie Morenz (nom), Inner German border (nom), Overman Committee (nom), Thomas R. Marshall (nom), J. C. W. Beckham (nom), McDonald's Cycle Center (nom), Star Wars: Episode I: Battle for Naboo (nom), Alpine Chough (nom), Brazilian cruiser Bahia (nom) and Ethan Hawke (nom).

Nine lists were promoted to featured status this week: List of Oklahoma Sooners head football coaches (nom), Snow Patrol discography (nom), DHL Delivery Man Award (nom), List of concert tours by Michael Jackson and The Jackson 5 (nom), List of Oxford United F.C. players (nom), 30 Rock (season 3) (nom), List of Knight's Cross recipients of the Waffen-SS (nom), List of India women Test cricketers (nom) and List of Watford F.C. Players of the Season (nom).

No topics were promoted to featured status this week.

One portal was promoted to featured status this week: Portal:Rhode Island (nom).

The following featured articles were displayed on the Main Page as Today's featured article this week: Fort Ticonderoga, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, Mutual Broadcasting System, Cosmo Gordon Lang, Manchester Mummy, Jacques Plante and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

One article was delisted this week: Salvador Dalí (nom).

No lists were delisted this week.

No topics were delisted this week.

The following featured pictures were displayed on the Main Page as picture of the day this week: De Magere Compagnie, Statue of Liberty, Gaillardia Fanfare, Jamison Valley, Salem Witch Trials, Cripps Pink apples and Gran calavera eléctrica.

No featured sounds were promoted this week.

No featured pictures were demoted this week.

Sixteen pictures were promoted to featured status this week and are shown below.



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The Report on Lengthy Litigation

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By Kirill Lokshin

The Arbitration Committee did not open or close any cases this week, leaving three cases open.

Open cases

Socionics

The Socionics case has entered its fourth week of deliberations. The case was filed by rmcnew, who alleged that Tcaudilllg has engaged in edit-warring and personal attacks. Tcaudilllg has denied the allegations, calling them "ad hominem attacks on [his] character". No significant drafting has yet taken place; a draft decision, to be written by arbitrator Carcharoth, is expected by 5 November.

Asmahan

The Asmahan case has entered its seventh week of deliberations. The filing editor, Supreme Deliciousness, alleges that Arab Cowboy has engaged in a variety of disruptive behavior on the "Asmahan" article; Arab Cowboy denies the allegations, and claims that Supreme Deliciousness is pursuing a disruptive agenda of his own. No drafting of proposals has yet taken place, although the drafting arbitrator, John Vandenberg, has posed a number of questions to the parties. A draft decision in the case was expected by 20 October.

Eastern European mailing list

The Eastern European mailing list case has entered its seventh week of deliberations, and its third week of voting. The case concerns a set of leaked mailing list archives which are alleged to show an extensive history of collusion among numerous editors of Eastern European topics. Standard workshop procedures have been suspended for the case, so normal drafting of proposals by the parties and other editors has not taken place.

The proposed decision, written by arbitrator Coren, would strip Piotrus of his administrator status, ban him for three months, and place him under a topic ban for one year; ban Digwuren and Martintg for three months and also place them under year-long topic bans; and issue a number of admonishments and reminders, as well as an amnesty for all participants of the mailing list not otherwise sanctioned. A secondary proposal by arbitrator Rlevse would ban Tymek for three months as well. No other arbitrators have yet commented on the major proposed remedies.

Amendments, clarifications, and other motions

The Committee announced that Alison was resuming her duties as an operator of the CheckUser and Oversight tools, while FT2 requested removal of checkuser, oversight, and administrator tools at Meta-wiki; he remains a participant and list administrator on the Functionaries-L mailing list.

The Committee also announced that former administrator Mitchazenia's request to regain the tools had been granted.

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SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

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By Aude

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Some bug fixes or new features described below have not yet gone live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version 1.44.0-wmf.4 (a8dd895), 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.

Bots approved

Three bot tasks were approved this past week:

  • SmackBot (task 16) – To migrate geoboxes to a new standard.
  • CobraBot (task 2) – To add Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Classification data to {{Infobox book}} instances based on ISBNs.
  • ZhBot (task 1) – To replace superseded zh-related templates in Category:Chinese multilingual support templates with master template {{zh}}.

Bug fixes

  • A message has been added to note to Special:Block indicating if the IP is already globally blocked. (r58385, bug 20478)
  • Section edit links have been removed from the edit conflict form. (r58362)
  • HTMLDiff has been removed from MediaWiki, with developers noting this could be salvaged someday as an extension but currently it is a mostly-broken experimental feature that does not belong in the core code. (r58267, bug 19859)

New features

  • Some capability has been added for configuring the /16 limit on range blocks, using the $wgBlockCIDRLimit setting. (r58377, bug 3340)
  • A new hook, getOtherBlockLogLink, has been added, which is called in Special:IPBlockList to show links to block logs of other blocking extensions, such as Extension:GlobalBlocking. (r58192)

Other news

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