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2010-08-16

Book publisher apologizes for plagiarizing photos by Wikipedians, brief news

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By Deryck Chan, Tilman Bayer, Alex Stinson and Theo10011
Reprinted on half a page without attribution: Aerial shoot of Tai Po, taken by Samuel Chan (zh:User:CX257), a Hong Kong/Belfast Wikipedian, on a flight between his two homes
No unfree alternative available? Photo of a sign for the Queen's Pier in Hong Kong, uploaded by QPBOT20, two years before the pier was demolished

Hong Kong book publisher plagiarizes photos by Wikipedians, apologizes

Last month, Wan Li Book Company, a leading Hong Kong publisher, released A Speaking Map of Hong Kong – a multimedia guidebook to Hong Kong history and geography. It was soon discovered that it used some 100 photographs from Wikipedia and Flickr without any copyright acknowledgement. When comparing any page from the book with the relevant Wikipedia article about the corresponding district of Hong Kong, one can almost certainly find a Wikipedia picture replicated exactly in the book.

Aware that the book in question is actually the sequel to A Speaking World Map, a similar interactive book by the same publisher, a writer on Hong Kong Inmedia, set out to buy the previous book in search for more copyright violations. Instead, he was surprised to discover copyright acknowledgements for various pictures in the book. Those credited included both individual photographers and organisations such as the United States Geological Survey. For one illustrated photograph, the acknowledgement was so delicately written that it included the photographer, the illustrator, and the Tajik Agency on Hydrometeorology who provided the original data. A skim through the inside covers of the two books reveals that they were compiled by the same chief editors.

The publisher did leave a line in A Speaking Map of Hong Kong as a defence: "We were unable to contact some of the old street photographs' owners due to a lack of information. Copyright holders should feel free to contact us." However, Wikipedians noted that every picture description on Wikipedia and Flickr is clearly accompanied by the username of the author, and the copyright licence under which the author released the picture. The infringing book did not credit anyone in compliance with the licences; neither did the publisher leave a comment to the authors asking for authorisation.

Jeromy-Yu Chan, president of Wikimedia Hong Kong, called it the largest infringement of Wikipedia images in Hong Kong's history. A Hong Kong freelance writer filed a case against Wan Li Books with the customs.

On August 14, one user identifying as deputy editor-in-chief of the publisher posted an apology on the talk page where the infringements were being discussed. The user stated that the editor for the book had resigned and that all copies would be recalled and destroyed, and asserted that the apology was made "not on legal grounds, but out of conscience."

Briefly

  • Wikimedia's annual fundraising campaign is scheduled to begin on 7 November this year. Donations from the fundraising drive are still the single largest source of income for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and the Chapters. Community members are invited to propose messages for the banners that will run during the fundraising campaign. Also, there are plans to increase awareness and outreach this year through social media websites. Anyone interested in participating is invited to join in and work on the campaign through the fundraising page or by contacting Philippe Beaudette (philippe@wikimedia.org). Last year's fundraiser generated considerable controversy about the choice of banners (see Signpost coverage), but became the most financially successful one in the Foundation's history, bringing in over $8 million (Signpost coverage).
  • As part of the Geograph Project, every part of the United Kingdom and Ireland with the exception of the Channel Islands have been photographed. The first batch of 250,000 pictures were uploaded on Wikimedia Commons from December 2009 to February 2010 (see Signpost coverage). Multichill has announced that he recently received the remaining 1.5 million images and is planning to upload them to Commons. The Geograph project is sponsored by the Ordnance Survey, with a similar project planned for New Zealand next. Photographs selected in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant features from every 1 km × 1 km grid square in the British and Irish National Grid System.
    An early draft of the Contribution Taxonomy Project's classification of volunteer roles
  • On Meta, the Contribution Taxonomy Project was started last week by longtime Wikimedia volunteers Steven Walling and Damian Finol, in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Department. In the announcement, Walling explained it as a research project whose goal it is "to try and highlight highly active volunteers who may not participate in tasks that produce a high edit count. By creating a detailed taxonomy of sorts for all the different roles users can take in a project, we hope to get a better picture of who the most active contributors are and what they are doing."
  • A workshop was organised at the Wits University in Johannesburg recently to discuss the formation of a South African chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. It brought together a group of local Wikimedians, who along with representatives from the Foundation, set off the process of forming a local chapter. The workshop resulted in an initial timeline, a draft vision, and possible initiatives for the chapter. User:Greenman has published a blog post about the event.
  • As announced earlier (see last week's Signpost coverage), a workshop was held at George Washington University from August 10–12 for the Campus Ambassadors participating in the Public Policy Initiative and the WikiProject United States Public Policy. A mix of experienced Wikipedians and university representatives, the participants received training in presentation skills, teaching Wikipedia and using Wikipedia in the Classroom. Frank Schulenburg, the WMF's Head of Public Outreach, has posted a video (8:21) recorded at the workshop. – The Campus ambassadors will be partnering up with Professors in the Fall and future semesters in designing and teaching courses that involve the use of Wikipedia. The campus ambassadors will also be charged with sustaining and expanding the program to other Public Policy professors and professors of other subjects. As part of this mission, the Ambassadors were asked to consider reaching out to students on their campus as well, to create student organizations like the one currently at the University of Michigan and being organized at James Madison University.
  • Wikimedia Polska have published their English-language chapter report for January to July 2010. Among other activities, it mentions the chapter's own toolserver, the chapter's support for the recent Wikimania conference in Poland (although it was not directly involved in the organization, it paid for 17 participant scholarships), an event called "Wikiexpedition" ("Wikiekspedycja") to visit "selected places, which are not well covered in Wikipedia and/or Wikimedia Commons" (results), and the "Wikimedia Polska Conference 2010" with 110 participants.
  • Wikimedia Catalonia (not an officially recognized Wikimedia chapter) have published their English-language report for July 2010.
  • Dmitry Chichkov has provided a list of "most reverted pages" on the English Wikipedia (i.e. those where reverts form the largest percentage of the edit history). Based on an older dump and restricted to pages with more than 1,000 edits, the most reverted page – apart from a few user pages – is, curiously, Help:Reverting, with 49% of edits consisting of reverts. Among articles, 69 (46%), Nipple and Apple sauce (both 45%) had the largest portion of reverts.
  • On her private blog, Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's Executive Director, presented preliminary results from her informal survey among Wikimedians about the goals for the Foundation's five year plan (How Wikimedia will measure success over the next five years). The plan has been developed by the Strategic Planning Project since last year (see also the Sister projects report in last week's Signpost) and Gardner "wanted to gather some additional input" about its movement priorities before presenting them to the Board of Trustees later this month. The survey can still be filled out "until roughly 7PM UTC, Wednesday August 18". – Sue Gardner will also hold IRC office hours, a public chat, on Thursday, August 19 at 17:00 UTC [2].

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2010-08-16

Large scale vandalism revealed to be "study" by university researcher

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By Tilman Bayer

Two heavy spam attacks on the English Wikipedia last month have been traced back to a researcher at a U.S. university, in an affair that is likely to add to existing debates about the ethics of Wikipedia research.

The incidents

The first attack occurred on July 14, with several autoconfirmed accounts (example) inserting the message "Want to be inches larger?" in large letters on top of many different articles, linking to an online shop. In a blog post for computer security firm Sophos ("Wikipedia hacked - Footballers need help in bed?", a reference to 2010 FIFA World Cup, one of the affected articles), Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at the company, described the vandalism, noting that the advertised site had an unusual appearance: "Unlike the usual spam for penis pills and cheap Canadian drugs that uses a couple of 'medical professionals' to promote the site, this campaign uses a photo of a satisfied couple" (he included a screenshot, too). Wisniewski's observations were quoted in news reports about the attacks that appeared on Softpedia.com [3] and on Spamfighter.com [4].

Following the attacks, Versageek blocked a number of other accounts with the rationale "abusing multiple accounts for spamming - checkuser block" and posted the following on the talk page of an established user, under the heading "Misdirected Testing?":

Checkuser results suggest that one of your linkspam related software tests may inadvertently be pointing to the English Wikipedia rather than test wiki. Please check your settings & adjust accordingly.

The account belongs to A. W., a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Computer and Information Science. On his university home page, he states:

Currently, I work on the Quantitative Trust Management (QTM) project under the advisement of [I.L.], [S.K.], and [O.S.]. My recent research has been on spam mitigation techniques, the prevention of vandalism on Wikipedia, and spatio-temporal reputation.

W. is known to Wikipedians as the developer of STiki, a vandalism detection tool released earlier this year which relies on a "spatio-temporal analysis" of revision metadata and machine learning techniques. It has received praise by several of its users and was the topic of W.'s presentations at several conferences (Eurosec, Wikisym, Wikimania).

W.'s edits during the following days do not show a reaction to Versageek's note. On July 20, another heavy spam attack occured, inserting a message on top of many articles that read "Congratulations! Wikipedia's one-billionth user. Click to collect your prize!". (Example of one of the autoconfirmed accounts used for the attack.) Many readers of Wikipedia appear to have been troubled by the message, judging from the questions about it in web fora and on Wikipedia's help desk. Some suspected a PC virus infection ("My sister was searching on wikipedia and the following text came up in big red letters: ..." [5]).

On the following day, SirFozzie blocked a number of accounts for "Abusing multiple accounts" and left the following comment on the talk page of W.'s main account:

I have blocked this account (amongst others) for the recent issues with regards to recent tests done on Wikipedia's articles. Please contact the Arbitration Committee via email [...] at your earliest timeframe, to discuss this. SirFozzie (talk) 16:37, 21 July 2010 (UTC)

The contributions of one of the accounts blocked by SirFozzie show a rapid succession of edits to the Sandbox with the edit summary "an exploration into rate-limiting".

The ArbCom later confirmed to the Signpost that W. had carried out both attacks.

Resolving the affair

On August 11, ArbCom member Risker posted the following statement on W.'s talk page:


W. reacted to the unblock offer ten minutes later, stating:

As clarified by ArbCom to The Signpost, condition 3. refers to the possibility that the English Wikipedia might develop a community process to oversee research, and to the Research Committee that the Wikimedia Foundation intends to form (see last week's Signpost coverage).

According to an RfC announcement about the introduction of the "Researcher" user rights group last June (see Signpost coverage), W. had requested to be granted this new right back then, but his application had been put on hold by the Foundation's Deputy Director Erik Möller, suggesting it should be handled by the community.

Interview

W. agreed to answer several questions about the affair to the Signpost:

1. What were your motives for carrying out these edits?
An economic study of spamming behaviors on Wikipedia was conducted. That is, for a link addition (or group thereof), how many (1) see the link, (2) click the link (click-through), and (3) continue to make a purchase on the destination site (conversion). The net-profit of these sales can then be compared to the cost of making the link additions, and an economic argument made about such behaviors[1].
The experiments allowed us to obtain data that convincingly demonstrates (1) that Wikipedia is vulnerable to major spam attacks, which can be highly profitable to the perpetrators, and (2) that current protection mechanisms are insufficient. Having shown this, it was our intention to collaborate with WP/WM/WMF on solutions to prevent truly malicious attacks of this nature.
2. Why did you choose these particular forms of vandalism for your test?
To an end-user, we desired our experiments to appear consistent with what a truly malicious entity (i.e., a spammer) might attempt. In this manner, the click through and conversion rates we measured would be unbiased. Blatant link placement on popular articles permits many users to see the link -- even under the assumption it will be reverted seconds later. Vulnerabilities in Wikipedia make it trivial for users to obtain the privileges necessary to carry out such an attack.
Internal to the experiment, protections were taken to ensure no harm to participants (e.g., Wikipedia users). Our external links took users to an online business under our control, a pharmacy. The payment functionality of this pharmacy was disabled, and therefore could only measure an “intent to purchase.” Further, the IP addresses of our visitors were not stored (our goal was to measure their quantity).
3. Was one of your advisors ([I.L.], [O.S.], or [S.K.]) aware of these actions, and if yes, did he approve them?
[S.K.] was not aware of these experiments. [I.L.] and [O.S.] were aware of my motivations in these experiments, and support them.
4. Any other comments you would like to make on the issue?
Our decision to engage in active measurement involved many considerations. Primarily, more passive strategies were believed to be inappropriate. For example, a proxy-based redirection of existing spam was considered. But, the nature of existing spam events is such that statistics would not speak to the economics of a blatant strategy that targets popular pages. Further, a large quantity of such redirection events (somewhat disruptive) would have been required to obtain meaningful statistics.
Objective data could not be obtained without these experiments and their non-consenting participants. Attempting to have participants “opt in” or “de-briefing” them after their participation presents both technical and practical difficulties. Opt-in procedures would bias user behavior. Given the “pipeline” nature of experiments, ex-post facto “de-briefing” is difficult, and may have forced us to sacrifice user anonymity. Additionally, our pharmacy collected a minimal amount of data about visitors – a level consistent with what most major websites measure.
Some users have speculated that these experiments were the result of a mis-configuration of my anti-vandalism tool, STiki. I would like to clarify that this is not the case. STiki remains a safe tool, which is still under active development, and working hard to locate acts of vandalism on Wikipedia.
Finally, we apologize to the Wikipedia community for any disruption caused, and reinforce that our intentions were for the betterment of the community.
  1. ^ Kanich et al., “Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion” [1]

[Note: The names of the UPenn researchers have been redacted to initials for this article.]

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2010-08-16

Supportive communication and missing incentives on Wikipedia, and more

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By Tilman Bayer and Theo10011

Wikipedia's communication norms analyzed

Wikipedia researcher Joseph Reagle (a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center) announced a new paper last week ("'Be Nice': Wikipedia norms for supportive communication", preprint available online). The abstract reads as follows:

Wikipedia is acknowledged to have been home to ”some bitter disputes”. Indeed, conflict at Wikipedia is said to be “as addictive as cocaine”. Yet, such observations are not cynical commentary but motivation for a collection of social norms. These norms speak to the intentional stance and communicative behaviors Wikipedians should adopt when interacting with one another. In the following pages, I provide a survey of these norms on the English Wikipedia and argue they can be characterized as supportive based on Jack Gibb’s classic communication article 'Defensive Communication'.

Gibb's 1961 paper distinguishes between "supportive" and "defensive" communication, as summarized by Reagle: "Supportive behavior/climates are characterized by non-judgmental description, problem orientation, spontaneity, empathy, equality, and provisionalism. Their 'defensive' opposites are evaluation, control, strategy, neutrality, superiority, and certainty." Using these twelve characteristics, Reagle classified the text of 104 pages from Wikipedia, including policies, guidelines, essays and humorous texts. Examples included Wikipedia:No legal threats, Wikipedia:Right to vanish, User:Dlohcierekim/apathy, Wikipedia:Thankspam, Wikipedia:Five pillars of evil, and Wikipedia:BOLD, revert, revert, revert. The majority was found to be in the "supportive" realm.

A book by Reagle based on his 2008 dissertation about Wikipedia is to appear next month ("Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia"). A Signpost review is in preparation.

Newsweek: Wikipedia contributors need materialistic incentives

An August 9 Newsweek article by Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu argued that "Crowd Sourcing Loses Steam" because "most people simply don’t want to work for free", adding to the longstanding debate on whether user-generated content can replace that produced by paid workers (see e.g. Carr-Benkler wager). Among other examples, Newsweek named Wikipedia: "In the history of the web, last spring may figure as a tipping point. That’s when Wikipedia [...] began to falter as a social movement." This statement was apparently based on the statistical research by Felipe Ortega, which had led to debates about Wikipedia's future last year after it was covered in the Wall Street Journal (see Signpost coverage on 23 November, 7 December, and 30 November of 2009). Ortega criticized the Newsweek article for implying "additional conclusions that don't apply to Wikipedia".

Dokoupil and Wu appeared to argue that in the past, most Wikipedians had contributed to the project because it was seen as fashionable at the time:

The practice of crowd sourcing, in particular, worked because the early Web inspired a kind of collective fever, one that made the slog of writing encyclopedia entries feel new, cool, fun. But with three out of four American households online, contributions to the hive mind can seem a bit passé, and Web participation, well, boring—kind of like writing encyclopedia entries for free.

Apart from Google's Kiswahili Challenge (where the company offered prizes for contributions to the Swahili Wikipedia), the article also cites the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative as evidence for its thesis that goodwill motivations are not enough: "Wikipedia’s new recruiting push will not rely merely on highfalutin promises about pooled greatness and 'the sum of all human knowledge.' Instead, the organization is hoping to get students to write and edit entries as part of their coursework."

Cliff Lampe, a professor at Michigan State University who was quoted in the Newsweek article, commented that "the reporter had an axe to grind, and I did my best to thwart the predefined narrative".

In brief

  • A new tool called Linkypedia analyzes external links on the English Wikipedia to a given web site (providing more information than MediaWiki's own external link search function) intending "to help cultural heritage institutions that are putting content online to see how wikipedians are citing and annotating their stuff". It was mentioned in a talk at the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) annual meeting last week (summary, slides), which described the insertion of links into Wikipedia articles as an important SEO tool for archives.
  • The August 7 print edition of The Independent incorrectly stated that the music festival The Big Chill initially had a different name, which happened to have some obscene connotations. On August 9, blogger Kat Arney noted the error and traced it back to the Wikipedia article about the festival, as did The Guardian's "Media Monkey" blog on the following day. The erroneous information had been inserted into the Wikipedia article without giving a reference on August 4, and has since been removed.
  • On August 10, The Huffington Post listed 15 Surprising Facts about Wikipedia.
  • On his "Information Is Beautiful" blog, David McCandless presented some of the "lamest edit wars" from Wikipedia's own list of them, in a visualization covering such examples as "should wee link to the article on Nintendo wii or the urine?" and "is it NPOV (Neutral Point Of View) to say an animal is 'cute'". The infographic was linked by many blogs during the following days, with one on CNET UK calling it "pure gold". On his "The Wikipedian" blog, William Beutler (User:WWB) harshly criticized it as "so lazy as to be misleading, glib as to be condescending, and generally unhelpful that I’m inclined to say that it sets back the public understanding of how Wikipedia works all by itself." For example, the size of each edit war in the graphic corresponded to the total edits of the article, not the edits expended in the edit war, and its position on the timeline matched the article's inception, not the time during which the edit war occurred. McCandless conceded that Beutler had made "fair points", but that the visualization was "light-hearted, playful" and that "[p]age edits [were] used as barometer of controversy".

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2010-08-16

A Pit Stop with WikiProject NASCAR

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By Mabeenot


WikiProject news
News in brief
Submit your project's news and announcements for next week's WikiProject Report at the Signpost's WikiProject Desk.

WikiProject NASCAR was established on December 10, 2004 as an effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of NASCAR auto racing and related topics. The project is home to over 150 participants, although only about 25 are active. Of the project's over 1,500 articles, 12 have achieved Good Article status. The project maintains a portal, to-do list, and recently started a monthly newsletter. WikiProject NASCAR is a child project of WikiProject Motorsport and sibling of a variety of automotive projects, including WikiProject Formula One. This week, we took a spin with Royalbroil, Nascar1996, NerdyScienceDude, and Doctorindy.

Royalbroil, an admin, describes himself as "a long-term fan of motorsports" who is "interested in the history of auto racing." Royalbroil enjoys working on biographical articles in particular and has experience promoting Good Articles. Nascar1996 is "a fan of NASCAR for three years." When the project fell on hard times, Nascar1996's efforts to revive the project inspired other editors to join, eliciting praise from Airplaneman during our interview. NerdyScienceDude, "a big NASCAR fan," joined the project to "help out [by] adding NASCAR races to this growing encyclopedia" and has promoted several good articles in a short amount of time. Doctorindy has "nearly 30-years of interest in all forms of auto racing, including NASCAR" with a preference toward the '70s, '80s, and early '90s.

Have you contributed to one of the project's 11 good articles? Are there any articles you are currently working toward achieving GA or FA status? Share your experiences with us.

Nascar1996: I have created and expanded four of the good articles. I'm currently working to get 2010 Toyota/Save Mart 350 to FA status, while I'm also expanding 2010 Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen so it could be a good article.
NerdyScienceDude: I helped Nascar1996 with the articles he mentioned above. I am working to get articles like 2010 Crown Royal Presents the Heath Calhoun 400, 2010 Gillette Fusion ProGlide 500, and 2010 Coke Zero 400 to GA status. The latter two articles also appeared on the DYK section of the Main Page.
Royalbroil: I like working on biographies and I asked 4u1e for coaching to get the Mario Andretti article to Good status. After it passed, I started working alone and improved Alan Kulwicki to Good status. Article creation got easier with the added experience, and I worked Tim Richmond and David Pearson up to Good standards. I think that Kulwicki's article is near Featured level and plan to keep working on it.

Four of the project's good articles and another four former good articles are about races that occurred this year. How does your project produce quality articles about recent events in such a short time?

Royalbroil: Early in 2010, Nascar1996 asked me for some coaching on the expectations for a Good Article. He and NerdyScienceDude have worked hard on recent race articles and they have been impressive new members to the WikiProject.

Has your project developed particularly close relationships with any other projects?

Royalbroil: Decisions made at our parent WikiProject Motorsport affect how our articles are organized. Some new NASCAR drivers have come from other racing genres and series such as Formula One, the Indy Racing League, and sports cars. So we share articles with several other WikiProjects (Formula One, American Open Wheel Racing, and Sports Car Racing).
Doctorindy: After contributing to Wikiproject NASCAR for several months, I branched off and took the initiative to start the WikiProject American Open Wheel Racing (IndyCars & Indy 500) in Oct. 2006.

What are WikiProject NASCAR's most pressing needs? How can a new contributor help today?

Royalbroil: The most pressing needs are keeping the career statistics up to date. Another major need is to watch the articles for vandalism and unsourced content, especially on articles for drivers who are more frequent vandalism targets such at Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.. Another area that a new contributor could help is to try to find free-use pictures of drivers from free image resources. Flickr has proven to be a great resource.
Nascar1996: Our project has many pressing needs, but assessing all the articles in the unassessed articles category is probably one of the biggest.
Doctorindy: Among many general needs, the race pages could use help in creating race summaries. In many cases, the race pages only summarize recent runnings, suffering from "recent-ism."

Doctorindy concluded the interview by pointing to the collaborative community built around motorsports: "I've noticed a fair and refreshing amount of cooperation between the editors spanning the several genres of auto racing (NASCAR, IndyCar/Champ Cart, F1, sports cars, etc.)" Despite the differences of opinion between fans of each type of racing, Doctorindy noted that the project has seen "no sparring between NASCAR and open wheel fans (particularly IRL/CART), as would be expected in internet message boards..."

Next week, we'll venture into the wilderness in search of unknown creatures. Until then, feel free to explore the archives.

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2010-08-16

The best of the week

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By Dabomb87 and Tony1

Administrator

The Signpost congratulates Mkativerata (nom), a lawyer from Brisbane, Australia, on his promotion to adminship. Highly active since last December, he has been with us since 2007. His significant contributions include the sourcing of BLP articles, copyright cleanup, and the detection and resolution of sockpuppet issues. He has one FA and two GAs to his name, and has begun more than 100 well-sourced articles on Malaysian politicians.

Featured articles

Daniel Lambert, by Benjamin Marshall, c. 1806
The fossa resembles a small cougar; it is known for its bloodthirsty treatment of prey and its extended mating sessions.

Eighteen articles were promoted to featured status:

  • Wally Hammond (nom), "one of the best cricketers of all time" from the 1920s and 30s, says nominator Sarastro1, "and a moody so-and-so". He was captain of the England team.
  • Daniel Lambert (nom), gaol keeper and animal breeder from Leicester, England, famous for his unusually large size. Upon death, his body weighed 335 kg (739 lbs) and rapidly began to putrefy (iridescent, with assistance from Parrot of Doom) (right).
  • Miss Meyers (nom), possibly of similar weight to the previous subject, but a 1950s racing American Quarter Horse. Nominator Ealdgyth says this article will eventually form part of an application for featured topic on the horses in the AQHA Hall of Fame.
  • Siege of Godesberg (nom), which grew out of the article on the Cologne War in 16th-century Germany. Reviewer Iridescent said, "you've done a good job of keeping a complicated story on track" (auntieruth, and JN, who added valuable German material).
  • Quietly Confident Quartet (nom), the self-named Australian men's 4 × 100 m medley relay swimming team that against expectations won the gold medal at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. All four of the swimmers had clashed with swimming authorities over disciplinary issues and three had been suspended or expelled from the Australian team during their careers. (YellowMonkey)
  • Fossa (animal) (nom) a cat-like, carnivorous mammal endemic to Madagascar. It tears open and disembowels its victims—among them the Grey Mouse lemur, a primate—and is known to participate in arboreal mating sessions of up to 14 hours (Sasata, Ucucha, UtherSRG, and Visionholder) (right).
  • Belle Vue Zoological Gardens (nom), a 140-year-old place of entertainment for the genteel middle-classes in Manchester, offering formal gardens and open-air dancing. It evolved into the third-largest zoo and one of the earliest and largest amusement parks in the UK, a major venue for exhibitions and sports such as boxing, speedway, and greyhound racing, and housed a fine symphony orchestra (Malleus Fatuorum, J3Mrs, WebHamster).
  • Midshipman (nom), a commissioned officer of the lowest rank in the Royal Navy, United States Navy, and many Commonwealth navies (Kirk).
  • Sweet Track (nom), constructed in 3807 or 3806 BC in Somerset, England, is one of the oldest engineered roads known. Its discovery in 1970 revealed crossed wooden poles driven into waterlogged soil to support a walkway that consisted mainly of planks of oak, laid end-to-end (Rod).
  • Hurricane Guillermo (1997) (nom), one of the most powerful Pacific hurricanes ever recorded, producing deadly swells across the Pacific Ocean that affected areas from Hawaii to coastal Mexico (Cyclonebiskit, and Mitchazenia).
  • Stan Musial (nom), a Polish-American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1969 (Monowi).
  • SMS König (nom), which led the German line at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the largest single fleet action in history (Parsecboy).
  • Tower of London (nom), a historic castle on the Thames in London, founded in 1066 by William the Conqueror. It has played an iconic role in English history. (Nev1)
  • Statue of Liberty (nom), a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor; it was dedicated in 1886 as a gift to the US from the people of France, and has become an iconic symbol of American freedom (Wehwalt).
  • Robert Catesby (nom), the leader of a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Preparing the article required careful navigation around historical uncertainties (Parrot of Doom).
  • Courageous class battlecruiser (nom), comprising three fast and lightly armoured vessels that saw service in the Royal Navy from 1916 to 1944; they were the first battlecruisers to use geared steam turbines and small-tube boilers, which maximised their speed (Sturmvogel 66).
  • Pipistrellus raceyi (nom), a species of bat in Madagascar, not formally named until 2006 (Ucucha).
  • Brill Tramway (nom), privately built in 1871 as a horse tram-line to transport goods from the Aylesbury Vale, northeast of Oxford, to the national railway network (Iridescent).

Choice of the week. We asked regular FAR delegate, FA reviewer and nominator YellowMonkey for his opinion (disregarding his own nomination): "I chose the Tower of London because I've always had a soft spot for history, and the Princes in the Tower is a source of high school nostalgia. More generally, the older the topic, the more quaint and fascinating the story tends to become, especially as society evolves over time, making such things stand out in contrast to modernity. The subject is a rich blend of medieval history, architecture, political intrigue and supernatural phenomena, so it should have something for everyone. It's also very comprehensive—the predominant theme of my concerns at FAC, much to the chagrin of many a nominator. I'd like to give a special mention to Wally Hammond."

Featured lists

Pigeon Tower, from Listed buildings in Rivington, our featured list Choice of the week

Eight lists were promoted:

Choice of the week. We asked FL nominator and reviewer Jujutacular for his choice of the best: "I picked Listed buildings in Rivington as my choice for this week. The structure of the list is very appealing, the prose flows well, and it sparks an interest in the subject for the reader. As someone unfamiliar with the area, it makes me want to visit! Beautiful images illustrate many of the entries. Congratulations and thanks to J3Mrs for the wonderful work on this list." (right)

Two featured lists were delisted:

Featured pictures

Saturn's moon, Mimas, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on a fly-by at 70,000 km
Full 360º fogbow

Ten images were promoted:

  • Eastern Barred Bandicoot (nom), a small Australian marsupial with a long, pointy snout; the image was taken at night with multiple off-camera flashes by Noodle snacks.
  • Louis-Marie Autissier, Self-portrait (nom), of the 1817 watercolour on ivory by the miniaturist. The image was edited by Papa Lima Whiskey to expand into unused colour space while preserving the details (created by the Swedish National Museum).
  • Mantoux tuberculin skin test (nom), but don't look if you're scared of needles (created by Greg Knobloch, CDC).
  • Diatomaceous earth (nom), an ingredient of dynamite, among other products. All reviewers praised this micrograph, created under bright field illumination on a light microscope of a total area of a tiny 1.13 × 0.69 mm (created by Richard Wheeler (Zephyris). (below)
  • Common clam worm (nom), a widely distributed species of marine worm; here, it has turned into a form capable of reproduction, and after releasing its sperm or eggs, the animal will die. Created by Hans Hillewaert (Lycaon) with colour balance by Zephyris after much debate.
  • Mimas (moon) (nom). The edge of Saturn is clearly visible in the original, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 13 February at a distance of about 70,000 km from one of the gas giant's moons, Mimas. This artefact was removed by the creators, NASA/JPL/SSI. (right)
  • 360 degrees fogbow (nom). A fog bow is similar to a rainbow, but because of the very small size of water droplets has only very weak colors, and is sometimes known as a "white rainbow". This striking image of an intriguing phenomenon was created by Mbz1. (right)
  • Sydney ferry Collaroy (nom). Reviewer Fletcher said, "there is a sense of motion in the image that draws you into it" (created by Diliff).
  • Squilla mantis for sale (nom). This species of shrimp is chiefly found and fished in the Mediterranean Sea. Here, it is shown at the fish auction of l'Ametlla de Mar in Catalonia, Spain (created by Lycaon).
  • Peter Ustinov (nom), a high-quality portrait of the English actor, writer and dramatist (created by Allan Warren).

Choice of the week. Miya was a member of the 2009 Organizing Committee for the Commons Picture of the Year Award. We asked her to choose what she sees as the best new featured picture: "The three I like most are Eastern Barred Bandicoot, Diatomaceous earth, and 360 degrees fogbow . It was not easy to choose one of these. But at last I've made my choice: Diatomaceous earth. The photo of the micrograph of Diatomaceous earth is beautiful as well as of great scientific interest; it is both encyclopedic and educational. The full resolution‎ allows you to clearly see the fossilized remains of diatoms; this may provide insights into the nature of Diatomaceous earth." (below)

Featured picture Choice of the week: Diatomaceous earth under the microscope


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2010-08-16

ArbCom releases names of CU/OS applicants after delay

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By Ncmvocalist

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, leaving two open.

Open cases

  • Climate change (Week 10): This case, which is technically open, resulted from the merging of several Arbitration requests on the same topic matter into a single case, and the failure of a related request for comment to make headway. Special rules of conduct were put in place when this arbitration commenced. Since the workshop phase was closed on July 19 (four weeks ago), arbitrators have not formally set any specific target date to post a proposed decision. This has sparked a large quantity of discussion among participants, some of which was collapsed as "Extended content". Five days ago, when the three drafters were each asked for an update, Newyorkbrad could not "assign a specific date" to post a proposed decision, but two minutes earlier, Risker stated that arbitrators were looking to post it before 15 August 2010, while Rlevse provided a similar response a few hours later. Shortly after these responses were received, some participants raised general concerns about the handling of the case [6] [7] [8]. A proposed decision has still not been posted on-wiki, but currently, a proposal to reopen the workshop pages is being considered.
  • Race and intelligence (Week 11): This case concerns accusations of incivility, disruptive editing, and tag-teaming to control the content on articles related to race and intelligence. Following a number of delays (see Signpost coverage from June 28, July 5, July 12), the case moved to the proposed decision phase. The proposed decision that was drafted by Coren has sparked several concerns among participants and non-participants (example). Other proposals by other arbitrators are being considered.

Other

  • The Committee stepped in to resolve two heavy spam attacks on the English Wikipedia that occurred last month; see the special story in this week's Signpost.

CheckUser/Oversight positions

Last month, the Committee stated that it would release, "on 13 August 2010, the names of all candidates being actively considered for appointment" to CheckUser and Oversight positions on the English Wikipedia. At 21:21, on 13 August 2010 (UTC), it instead announced that "[f]or a variety of reasons, mostly real-life related", it would delay releasing this information on-wiki. The announcement included an apology for inconvenience that the delay may cause.

Today, in an announcement, the Committee has released the names of applicants being actively considered for appointment. The announcement, which did not specify the total number of applications received, also stated that between now and 23:59, on 25 August 2010 (UTC), the Community may comment on candidates. This means that the period in which the Community may comment on candidates has been extended by exactly three days (this is the approximate length of the delay in releasing the names). The announcement also stated that "appointments will come into effect on 1 September 2010".

The candidates being actively considered for CheckUser permissions are:

The candidates being actively considered for Oversight permissions are:

2010-08-16

Bugs, Repairs and Internal Operational News

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By Jarry1250

What would the ideal WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki look like?

Following on from discussions last week around an enhanced in-built wikitext editor, discussion on the wikitech-l developers' mailing list this week concerned existing and new external editors for the MediaWiki software Wikimedia sites are based on. WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editors of this type "would allow easy editing to newbies, while still allowing to use the full wikisyntax to power users" (as stated by User:Platonides). However, given the complexity of wikitext, WYSIWYGism is notoriously difficult to achieve fully. A list of attempts is given on MediaWiki.org.

This week's discussion started with an external, cross-platform local (rather than web-based) application. It moved onto another, web-based attempt, the "Myrilion" editor (example). It rewrites the main wikitext parser to OCaml, which can then be turned into a fairly hefty chunk of JavaScript. A number of problems with WYSIWYG editors were discussed, including the inability of many to differentiate between two wikitext elements that give the same HTML output (e.g. [[Foo|Foo]] and [[Foo]]) and inadvertently convert between the two. The projects are similar to the Wikimedia User Experience team's attempts to improve the in-built ease of editing MediaWiki projects. The hope is that shared code and experience could be useful in building new attempts to solve the usability question.

In related news, Dutch developer Jan Paul Posma has published a mock-up of what a web-based MediaWiki editor might look like in the future.

Google Summer of Code

The "coding" phase of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects has now ended and the "evaluation" phase has begun. Each year, Google sponsors student developers to work on open source projects under the guidance of mentors. This year, six such students were selected to work on the MediaWiki software which underpins all Wikimedia sites:

  • Jeroen De Dauw ("Extension management platform")
  • Brian Wolff ("Improve [file] metadata support")
  • Samuel Lampa ("General RDF export/import in Semantic MediaWiki")
  • Sanyam Goyal ("Javascript overhaul of Semantic MediaWiki")
  • Stephen LaPorte ("Wikisource Legal Tool")
  • Peter Potrowl ("Reasonably efficient interwiki template transclusion")

A full list containing more information (including mentors) on each is also available. The Signpost hopes to catch up with the students in the coming weeks and to establish the success of each project and what it might mean for Wikimedia.

In brief

Note: not all fixes may have gone live on WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

  • Colour profiles of images are finally preserved when generating thumbnails of the original image, after a new version of the image scaling software ImageMagick was deployed on the servers last week (bug #19960). The same change also fixed thumbnailing of files with question marks in their names (virtually all had previously been renamed anyway).
  • Relocation of servers internally in the datacentre caused a temporary loss of search snippets, "did you mean..." and interwiki searches (wikitech-l mailing list). The transfer is now complete.
  • With the resolution of bug #2257, from four years ago, extensions can now access template-style parameters.
  • noc.wikimedia.org has a new homepage giving an overview of what it's used for (bug #19191).
  • The WMF's CTO Danese Cooper noted on Twitter last week that she was "listening to [a] pitch for [a] possible analytics solution to track traffic at Wikimedia" [9], but that Wikimedians should "[b]e assured we're looking at Privacy. [We are l]ooking for better data in areas we already track (and already publish)." [10].
  • Researcher Luca de Alfaro from the "Wikitrust" project has announced a publicly available API which for a given revision of the English Wikipedia gives a score indicating the likelihood that it is vandalized.

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