Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-01-08/SPV

The Wikipedia Signpost Single-Page View Archives

Volume 3, Issue 2	8 January 2007	About the Signpost
(← Prev)	2007 archives	(Next →)

Special: 2006 in Review	Another newspaper columnist found to have plagiarized Wikipedia
Blogs track attempts to manipulate articles	Nutritional beef cooks PR editor
WikiWorld comic: "Facial Hair"	News and notes: Fundraiser continues, milestones
Features and admins	Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
The Report on Lengthy Litigation

SPV

Special: 2006 in Review

By Ral315

Last week marked the end of 2006, and the end of the biggest year Wikipedia has seen, in terms of growth, press coverage, and quality. During last year, the English Wikipedia grew from less than 900,000 to over 1,500,000 articles. It began with an impressive $380,000 fundraiser in January, and ended with an even more impressive fundraiser which has raised over $900,000. This week, the Wikipedia Signpost begins to take a look back at the year that was 2006 in Wikipedia.

Growth

Wikimedia projects grew dramatically in 2006. Besides the English Wikipedia's growth, other projects also made significant gains. Of the top 12 languages, the Russian Wikipedia showed the most growth, with 146% more articles in 2006 than existed in 2005. English ranked just 10th of the 12 in terms of growth (75%), perhaps because it was already very large, ahead of only Swedish (61%) and German (56%). 38 additional Wikipedias were created in 2006, bringing the total number to 250. Of all Wikipedias, 22% (55 of 250) had at least 10,000 articles, and more than half of the Wikipedias (126 of 250) had at least 1,000 articles at the end of 2006 (compared to 17% and 40%, respectively, in 2005). Across all Wikipedias, the total number of articles increased from 3.09 million in 2005 to 6.05 million in 2006, a growth of nearly 96%.

Wikipedia's growth can also be measured in the number of visitors and other page statistics. Wikipedia's rank on Alexa's traffic analyzer rose from about 24 in 2005 to as high as 12th in 2006. Wikipedia is now considered more popular than such sites as eBay, Microsoft.com, and Amazon.com. According to Wikipedia developers, the site is now generating approximately 30,000 requests per second (about 2.5 thousand million requests per day). Requests are not the same as page views; a single page view can make many requests.

Other projects also experienced growth. Wikibooks grew from 34 language editions to 119 last year. Since late January 2006, the number of English Wikibooks modules grew by nearly 10,000 (a 72% increase). Overall, the number of Wikibooks modules grew from about 26,700 to nearly 57,000 last year, a 113% increase. Wiktionary was among the projects with the most growth, as the English Wiktionary went from 109,000 to 316,000 entries, an increase of 188%. Overall, Wiktionary grew from just over 500,000 entries to over 1.7 million entries, a 236% increase. Wikiquote showed relatively slow, but still impressive, growth, moving from almost 31,000 articles in 2005 to about 53,000 in 2006 (a 73% increase).

Of all the projects, Wikinews seems to be the slowest in growth. It is difficult to judge Wikinews by the number of articles, because news articles, by definition, do not stay in flux for long; multiple stories can cover the same event. In the English Wikinews, 3,722 articles were written in the first 13 months of existence (December 2004-December 2005, about 9.4 articles per day). In 2006, the site was up to 7,498 articles (3,776 new articles, or about 10.3 articles per day). This shows a growth of about 9.5% over the last year. The German Wikinews actually showed a decrease in activity of about 1.5%, though some languages, like Italian and Swedish, did show improvement. Overall, the top 10 languages by total number of articles averaged about 6.6% growth in articles per day.

Legal issues

Legal issues began to become a significant problem on Wikimedia projects in 2006. The French Wikiquote was deleted completely in March 2006, after it became clear that the site was significantly composed of copyright violations. A Wikimedia Foundation statement on the site stated that "After analyzing the data contained in the fr.wikiquote site, the Wikimedia Foundation has determined that the material stored in the fr.wikiquote database does not provide the basic assurance of legal soundness necessary to the permanence of the project. Therefore, the site will be entirely taken down to be erased and relaunched." While the plan originally was to relaunch the project immediately, after concern that the project's lack of community would allow the same problems to recur, the site was not relaunched until December.

On the English Wikipedia and elsewhere, legal concerns led to the creation of the Office Actions policy. The policy, created on 6 February by Jimbo Wales, attracted little attention until it was used on Brian Peppers, an article about a disabled man whose photograph was promoted as a meme on the YTMND website. The article was deleted by AFD, and speedy deleted multiple times thereafter as recreations of deleted content. UninvitedCompany deleted the article on 6 February after a request from Peppers' family. The article was restored on 13 February, and a wheel-war ensued. Upon the conclusion of another AfD on the article, continued problems occurred, and Jimbo deleted the article, with the decree that the article was not to be recreated for at least a year.

The policy received even more attention on 10 March, when Danny Wool, acting under the policy, replaced the contents of Jack Thompson, the article on a Florida attorney who has garnered criticism in gaming circles, with a single sentence after receiving a letter about the article. The article on Thompson contained at least 21 uncited statements before its blanking. In response to criticism for the blanking, and worries about 'censorship', Wool said, "An article about Jack Thompson will be created. It will, I hope, be a very thorough article. It will also be properly and fully cited." The article was unprotected and replaced with a collaborated draft on 14 March. The Signpost interviewed Foundation legal counsel Brad Patrick (currently the Wikimedia Foundation Interim Executive Director) afterward:

"What sort of problems were there with the article?"

"I can't comment on the specifics, but generally, his allegations were that certain of the material in the article could, potentially, be considered libelous or defamatory."

"Is there anything else you'd like to say in regards to the situation?"

"Just one other thing. I think people in the community may lose sight of the fact that we are engaged in a very serious venture. It's cool, we love it, we have friends online, we edit what we like. It is freedom in the best sense. But there is a very real issue; it is the responsibility of the Foundation not to be put at risk based on the sloppy, poorly thought out choices of others. We have 1 million users and articles in English Wikipedia. That's a lot. We don't have millions of dollars. We are a small foundation, in the grand scheme of things. We want the Foundation and Wikipedia to be around 2, 5, 10 years from now. And to do that, we need to make sure we act responsibly to keep the mission moving forward. ... My job is to advise the Board and protect the Foundation if they are sued. So far, it hasn't happened."

Today, the article contains a whopping 112 citations, with no marked uncited statements.

One of the most notable issues involving the office actions policy happened in April, when confusion over whether an action taken by Danny Wool was an office-related one involved in the temporary blocking and desysopping of long-time contributor and current Foundation Trustee Erik Möller. On 17 April, Wool protected Christopher Ruddy and NewsMax.com, but did not specifically mention that the action was taken due to Office concerns. Two days later, Möller unprotected the pages, calling the protection "inappropriate per protection policy". Kelly Martin reverted the action minutes later, and Wool indefinitely blocked Möller. The block was later reduced, then removed altogether by Wales, who later noted, "What got things wound up in this case was not the secrecy, but a wildly disproportionate and unfair blocking and desysopping."

Foundation turnover

The Wikimedia Foundation experienced significant turnover in 2006. First and foremost was the hiring of Brad Patrick as general counsel and interim executive director in June. The Board is still planning to replace Patrick in the role of executive director, though he will retain his position as general counsel.

In 2006, four new board members were introduced, with two members retiring. In prior years, the board's makeup had stayed relatively constant; from July 2004 (the beginning of the board's existence) through mid-2006, the board did not change. However, Angela Beesley announced her intention to retire from the board in July. Elections were held in September, with Erik Möller declared the winner, with 42% support. Just one month later, Jimbo Wales resigned his position as Wikimedia Foundation Chair (while still retaining his position on the board), and was replaced by Florence Devouard. In December, the Board acknowledged the retirement of Tim Shell, and simultaneously filled Shell's seat and added two additional seats. Among those chosen were Kat Walsh and Oscar van Dillen, who finished second and third, respectively, in the September elections, and Jan-Bart de Vreede, a Kennisnet employee who has worked with the Foundation previously.

Next week

Next week, the Signpost's 2006 in review continues, with numerous elections, an audit, userboxes, Arbitration Committee decisions, a lawsuit, real and implied lawsuits, oversight, resignations, and desysoppings.

Links/references

SPV

Another newspaper columnist found to have plagiarized Wikipedia

By Michael Snow

A year after Wikipedia editors discovered an article had been plagiarized in a newspaper, last week another columnist became at least the second person to lose their job after plagiarizing from Wikipedia.

Jacqueline Gonzalez, a columnist at the San Antonio Express-News and an assistant to the paper's editor, resigned after the plagiarism was discovered in her "Watchdog" column for Christmas Day. The newspaper determined that she used information from Wikipedia without attribution. The material in question, presumably taken from the Christmas article, concerned the origin of 25 December as the traditional birth date for Jesus Christ.

The case resembles one at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which dismissed reporter Tim Ryan last year after Wikipedia editors found a number of cases in which Ryan appeared to have plagiarized, including from Wikipedia. In contrast to the Star-Bulletin, the Express-News appears to have caught the plagiarism on its own, rather than having it pointed out to them. The discovery of Gonzalez's plagiarism was made by another employee of the paper.

After Gonzalez admitted to this initial error, the Express-News had its research department examine a batch of her previous columns. Matching Dragons flight's observation that "a writer is never caught for their first act of plagiarism", on Tuesday the investigation turned up two additional cases in previous weeks. Gonzalez also resigned Tuesday, 2 January.

The Express-News situation was resolved relatively quickly over the course of a holiday weekend. At the Star-Bulletin, three weeks elapsed between the time the paper was initially informed and when the dismissal of Ryan was announced. One source reported that a suspension had initially been imposed, but additional instances of plagiarism continued to be discovered.

In these two situations the consequences became public, but they are not the only cases in which the media has likely plagiarized Wikipedia articles. Possible instances previously reported include news agencies Reuters [1] and Agence France-Presse [2], along with German magazine Der Spiegel [3] and an Australian community newspaper group [4].

SPV

Blogs track attempts to manipulate articles

By Michael Snow

Blogs and online media pursued two different story angles last week involving efforts to manipulate Wikipedia articles by someone with a personal interest in the topic. One apparently involved an article created by its own subject, while the other focused on floating rumors about media personalities.

Rumors allegedly traced to former Fox employee

The rumormongering involved the article on Megyn Kelly, a Fox News correspondent in Washington, D.C., who frequently reports on legal matters. Her work has included coverage of Supreme Court nominations and the long-running media furor over criminal charges against Duke lacrosse players. Formerly known as Megyn Kendall, she recently went back to using her maiden name on air (and her Wikipedia article was soon moved to reflect the change).

As reported by Radar online, this change followed Kelly's recent divorce. Hinting at the reasons behind this, in December an unregistered Wikipedia editor had added (and, a few hours later, removed) an insinuation that she had a relationship with Fox anchor Brit Hume. According to Radar, the IP address was allegedly matched to the computer of a former Fox spokesman. A current spokesperson denied the rumor. The incident was also picked up by the political blog Wonkette which described it as a rumor "that is so poorly sourced, so speculative, and so hilarious that we wish we’d make [sic] it up first." [5]

Building a nonexistent reputation

Meanwhile another Gawker Media property, Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag, devoted some attention to a series of posts about San Francisco entrepreneur Auren Hoffman's work on Wikipedia. As he subsequently admitted to VentureBeat, Hoffman (editing as User:Mlkhamilton) created an article about himself and also edited other articles related to his business interests. Valleywag attributed the choice of identity to two of Hoffman's personal heroes, Martin Luther King and Alexander Hamilton. The article was subsequently deleted by Naconkantari as "A7", a reference to the speedy deletion criterion for "unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content."

While the creation of "vanity pages" is relatively common, one of the issues addressed by the conflict of interest policy, it had additional relevance because of the nature of Hoffman's business. Hoffman is a founder of Rapleaf, a site for rating people's reputations that proclaims, "your Rapleaf profile will reveal you for the honest person that you are." He is also known for his personal networking efforts, and someone, apparently a personal friend, described Hoffman's San Francisco loft as being decorated with pictures of Republican politicians. An unregistered editor, which VentureBeat identified as being Hoffman again, later removed this information. Valleywag said the incident made Hoffman look "shifty", "hypocritical", and "stupid".

As a follow-up, Valleywag contributor Paul Boutin then offered his own instructions on getting into Wikipedia as part of the blog's "Silicon Valley Users Guide" feature. He suggested getting a friend to start the article, and establishing some kind of track record before actually editing it yourself. Boutin noted how his own entry had been created by an unregistered user, and insinuated that it had been created not by himself, but by fellow journalist Cyrus Farivar. Farivar already admitted creating his own entry two years ago, having mentioned this when he wrote about the effort to expose the greenlighting hoax (see archived story).

SPV

Nutritional beef cooks PR editor

By Sam Blacketer

A dispute over popular scientific books about nutrition spilled over onto Wikipedia and the British national press this week. In his weekly Guardian column on "Bad Science", Ben Goldacre claimed that the article about Patrick Holford has been edited by a user who was actually Holford's public relations agent, and as a result, the account was blocked.

Patrick Holford is the author of more than twenty books on nutrition and health and the founder of the Institute of Optimum Nutrition, and often appears on British television and radio programmes to promote his ideas. Goldacre, who has criticised Holford's approach before, noted that all criticism which was in his Wikipedia article had been removed on 22 December by Wikipedia user Clarkeola, whom he identified as Stephen Clarke of Fuel PR.

Goldacre reported that Clarke had been intending to add a defence of Patrick Holford and that the deletion was a mistake. After the deletion had been reverted by another user, Clarkeola added a section defending Holford against Goldacre's claims on 4 January. However, administrator Robdurbar indefinitely blocked the account on 6 January as a 'meatpuppet'. The defence provided by Clarkeola has subsequently been incorporated in the text of the article by other editors.

Other than his edits on Patrick Holford, Clarkeola also wrote short entries on the Food for the Brain Foundation and the Brain Bio Centre, two entities for which Holford acts as the director. The former was deleted on 28 December after being proposed for deletion for its lack of sourcing and non-notability, while the latter is currently up for proposed deletion.

In his column, Goldacre observes that there is nothing wrong with the subjects of articles editing them, so long as they do so openly, and approvingly mentions blogger Cory Doctorow and journalist Peter Hitchens as examples of subjects who have done so. He also pays tribute to Wikipedia as "a valuable resource in the hands of those who know its limitations".

SPV

WikiWorld comic: "Facial Hair"

By Greg Williams

WikiWorld is a weekly comic, carried by the Signpost, that highlights a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. The text for each comic is excerpted from one or more existing Wikipedia articles. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life - as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.

Cartoonist Greg Williams developed the WikiWorld project in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation, and is releasing the comics under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Williams works as a visual journalist for the US-based The Tampa Tribune, a daily newspaper in Tampa, Florida. He also has worked as an illustrator and designer at newspapers in Dubuque, Iowa, and Dayton, Ohio.

SPV

News and notes

By Ral315

Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser continues

The Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser was extended this week, and will end on 15 January, to coincide with Wikipedia Day. As of press time, the fundraiser had raised over US$900,000. Matching funds donations from Virgin Unite have not yet been received. Wikimedia Foundation Chair Florence Devouard indicated that no more matching funds promotions were scheduled for this fundraiser.

The Wikimedia Foundation C.O.R.E. fundraising site has been updated to include all donations from 2006 (though until the database is updated to indicate whether donors wished their name to be public, all old entries appear as 'anonymous'). The site indicates that during 2006, the Foundation received US$1,467,062.93 in donations (before fees).

Mailing lists moved

The mailing lists for Wikipedia and other projects have changed to new addresses after the Wikimedia Foundation migrated them to a new server. All new addresses will use @lists.wikipedia.org, so that for example the English Wikipedia mailing list is now wikien-l at lists.wikipedia.org. Old addresses will still work, but the transition will include mail headers and may require recipients to adjust any filters or other settings they use to read list messages.

Briefly

• The Romanian Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The English Wikipedia has reached 7 million total pages.
• The Portuguese Wikisource has reached 7,000 texts.
• The Voro Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
• The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.
• The Tajik Wikipedia has reached 4,000 articles.
• The Turkish Wiktionary has reached 75,000 entries.
• The Yiddish Wikipedia has reached 3,000 articles.
• The Malay Wiktionary has reached 100 entries.

SPV

Features and admins

By Daniel.Bryant

Administrators

One user was granted admin status via the Requests for Adminship process this week: Nilfanion (nom).

Featured content

No articles were promoted to featured status last week. The last occurrence of this, as reported by the Signpost, was 20 November, 2006; interestingly, the following week a record thirty-four articles were promoted.

Five articles were de-featured last week: Eureka Stockade, Spyware, London Underground, First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Saxophone.

Six lists were promoted to featured status last week: Volcanoes in Indonesia, Ontario general elections, Quebec general elections, Timeline of Canadian elections, Formula One fatal accidents, and Ice hockey teams in Alberta

Two portals were promoted to featured status last week: Disasters and United States Navy.

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the Main Page as Today's featured article: Yarralumla, John Brooke-Little, The Adventures of Tintin, Ahmose I, Genesis, and Operation Auca.

The following featured pictures were displayed last week on the Main Page as picture of the day: Clock Tower, Atlantic salmon egg hatching, Magellanic penguin, Tulip Stairs and lantern of the Queen's House, Roman Baths, and Villarceau circles.

Two pictures were promoted to featured status last week:

• 
  Crystal Mountains, California
• 
  Black-bellied Whistling Duck

SPV

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

By Simetrical

Links can now be used in captions for <gallery> tags. (Rob Church, bug 8489, r18813)

Specific usergroups can now be exempted from IP blocks. By default, all sysops are immune to them. They can only be blocked if their account is blocked. (Andrew Garrett, bug 3706, r18904)

A separate stylesheet for handheld devices like PDAs and cellular phones has been added to the software for the default skin, Monobook. In principle, the site should now display better on such devices. However, this may not affect devices that do not correctly implement CSS 2. (Simetrical, r18949 and r18965)

Administrators can now add custom text to the bottom of the Special:Statistics page by editing MediaWiki:Statistics-footer. (Rob Church, bug 6937, r18972)

The block log will now mention whether the block stops account creation and (for IPs) whether it is limited to anonymous users, as Special:Ipblocklist does. This will only apply to new blocks. (Rob Church, bug 6638, r18992)

Some bugs were fixed:

• A bug causing incorrect display of special page lists in Internet Explorer and Opera was fixed. (Brion Vibber, bug 8493, r18830)
• A bug causing an Indonesian error message to appear in place of a French one was fixed. (Tim Starling, r18846)
• On image pages, EXIF information specifying an unknown date will now display correctly. (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8417, r18861)
• An empty <math> tag will now correctly display nothing, rather than the current character encoding. (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8372, r18870)

A few interface changes were made:

• When printing out a page in the Monobook skin, external link icons are no longer overlaid on the link URL or link text. Instead, they are hidden. (Simetrical, bug 8463, r18768)
• When a query page has been disabled for performance reasons, the page will now display a message to that effect instead of simply showing no results. (Rob Church, r18799)
• Irrelevant preferences, such as whether a user who can't move pages wishes to watch pages he moves, are now hidden on Special:Preferences. (Rob Church, bug 8487, r18800)
• On wikis that have mathematical anti-bot captchas enabled, so that anonymous users may give the solution to an arithmetic problem to prove they are not a robot rather than typing the text they see in an image, the message will now correctly reflect the fact that users need to solve a mathematical problem rather than an image-recognition one. (Rob Church, bug 8484, r18803) The message for these captchas will also now warn the user that they must have HTTP cookies enabled to submit an edit. (Rob Church, bug 8469, r18820)
• The counter for recent changes and the watchlist can now be made to state explicitly that the count is of bytes, potentially clarifying its purpose. To enable this, MediaWiki:Rc-change-size may be edited. (In the formatting used by MediaWiki, UTF-8, characters that can be typed on an English keyboard are generally one byte and others are two or three bytes.) (Ashar Voultoiz, bug 8330, r18811; Brion Vibber, r18917)

Some updates were made to non-English messages, specifically:

• Bishnupriya Manipuri (thanks to Uttam Singha)
• Finnish (thanks to Niklas Laxström)
• French (thanks to Bertrand Grondin and Ashar Voultoiz)
• German (thanks to Raymond and Jimmy Collins)
• Hebrew (thanks to Rotem Liss)
• Indonesian (thanks to Ivan Lanin)
• Italian (thanks to BrokenArrow)
• Japanese (thanks to kaikkd)
• Lingala (thanks to Denis Jacquerye and Etienne Ruedin)
• Upper Sorbian (thanks to Dundak)

Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to Mediazilla.

SPV

The Report On Lengthy Litigation

By David Mestel

The Arbitration Committee opened no cases this week, and closed one case.

Closed case

• Deltabeignet: SebastianHelm suggests that Deltabeignet's account may have been hijacked due to some edits which he felt were revertions to vandalism. In a somewhat bizarre statement, Deltabeignet denies that he has been hijacked by a vandal but admits that he has violated WP:POINT in an "experiment" to determine possible prejudice towards edits from IPs and offers to request desysopping "if the community wills it". In a relatively rare decision, Dmcdevit proposed a motion to close with absolutely no other motions whatsoever, following an informal agreement with Deltabeignet, where he agreed for his IP to be softbanned. This motion was adopted.

Evidence phase

• Piotrus-Ghirla: A case involving the actions of Piotrus and Ghirla on various Russia- and Poland-related articles. Piotrus alleges that Ghirla has added unsourced POV material to these articles, and generally been incivil, while Ghirla claims that Piotrus has engaged in various forms of harassment, and calls for his desysopping. However, the parties have now entered into informal mediation, with proposals including mutual civility parole (and in which Ghirla has dropped his call for desysopping), and as a result of this, a motion has been proposed temporarily deferring the case until the outcome of the mediation is known.

• Starwood: A case involving links to Starwood Festival-related articles from various pages. Paul Pigman, who brought the case, alleges that Rosencomet "persistently and systematically" added these links, perhaps to an extent that violates WP:SPAM, and that Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999 have harassed users attempting to remove the links. Mattisse confirms that she has been harassed by Hanuman Das, Ekajati and 999, but that she has no issue of harassment with Rosencomet himself. Hanuman Das has asked that his name be removed from the request, as "I decline to participate", citing that he has not edited the links since he agreed not to on the 5th of December. Although Arbitration is not a consensual process, he also seems to have exercised the right to vanish. 999 and Ekajati deny the allegations, and allege that Mattisse has used multiple sockpuppets to request the links and then call for their removal. In addition, various users allege that Rosencomet has a WP:COI, as the executive director of the for-profit ACE LLC, which promotes the festival.

• Robert Prechter: A case regarding the behaviour of Rgfolsom and Smallbones on the Socionomics and Robert Prechter pages. Rgfolsom alleges that Smallbones has violated WP:NPOV, WP:CIVIL and WP:DR (by abusing the mediation process), and that he has added "smears, demonstrable falsehoods, and a calculated overemphasis on quotes of critics". In response, Smallbones alleges that Rgfolsom has violated WP:V and WP:NPOV by removing claims critical of Prechter, and adding claims complimentary to him, and WP:COI because he is one of Prechter's employees.

Voting phase

• Husnock: A case involving the actions of Husnock and Morwen, involving a comment made by Husnock, "I would be careful telling a deployed member of the military they shouldn't edit on Wikipedia for whatever reason.", following disputes on various Star Trek-related AfDs, which Morwen considered to be "intimidating", and Husnock alleges that she stated that she was "in fear of her life", and that he has been investigated by real-world bodies regarding it. Fred Bauder has proposed motions describing Husnock's comments as "regrettable", and others desysopping as well as cautioning him on various matters, and encouraging Morwen to "be more sensitive to the feelings of others".

• Sathya Sai Baba 2: Thatcher131 alleges that Andries has repeatedly added a link to an unreliable source to the Robert Priddy article, in violation of a remedy in a prior case on the subject, and that SSS108 has edit warred and exhibited signs of article ownership on the page. Both users deny the allegations. UninvitedCompany has proposed remedies banning Andries from editing the article, or starting any dispute resolution procedures regarding it and requiring Etanik to edit under one username only. Fred Bauder has supported the proposals, but Charles Matthews has opposed the editing restrictions.

• Midnight Syndicate: A case brought by Durova involving an edit war on the Midnight Syndicate article. Dionyseus and Skinny McGee allege that GuardianZ has engaged in sockpuppetry and general disruption on the article. He denies the allegations and argues that Dionyseus and Skinny McGee have engaged in similar behaviour. A temporary injunction has been granted placing Dionyseus, Skinny McGee, and GuardianZ on revert parole. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies, supported by jpgordon, banning GuardianZ and Skinny McGee from the article indefinitely, and Dionyseus for a period of six months, and forbidding any employees of Midnight Synidcate, Nox Arcana or Monolith Graphics from editing the article.

• Yoshiaki Omura: Various users, principally Crum375, allege that Richardmalter and alleged sockpuppets have added biased, unsourced material to Bi-Digital O-Ring Test, an alternative medicine technique created by Yoshiaki Omura which was criticised by a New Zealand disciplinary tribunal as lacking scientific basis. However, Richardmalter denies that his pro-Omura edits were either biased or unsourced and claims that the mediation process has supported his position. Fred Bauder has proposed motions to the effect that "Richardmalter...[has] edited Yoshiaki Omura in an aggressive biased manner", and banning him from the article indefinitely. These motions have attracted the support of SimonP.

• Derek Smart: A case involving a dispute over the inclusion of critical material in the Derek Smart article. Various editors on both sides of the dispute claim that the other has violated policy in promoting their case, and some suggest that various accounts (Supreme Cmdr and WarHawkSP inter alia) are in fact used by Smart himself, citing as evidence perceived similarities in their writing styles. These editors deny the allegations. Remedies have been proposed prohibiting single-purpose accounts (of which Mael-Num, WarHawk, WarHawkSP, and Supreme_Cmdr are named as examples) from reverting the article, and banning Supreme Cmdr for two weeks. These remedies have the support of three arbitrators.

• Naming Conventions: A case regarding a dispute over whether articles without alternative meanings should be disambiguated for the sake of clarity - for example, Never Kill a Boy on the First Date (Buffy episode). While about 80% of involved editors said in a straw poll that it should not be disambiguated, both sides allege that editors on the other have behaved disruptively. Fred Bauder has proposed a principle stating that appeals to the Arbitration Committee as a method to determine consensus in a policy dispute is not generally viable, due to the press of work as well as other considerations, and a remedy stating that no penalties are to be imposed in respect of past actions in the dispute, but has proposed an enforcement motion stating that editors who violate the consensus decision in the matter may be briefly blocked. These remedies have the support of five arbitrators. In addition, UninvitedCompany has proposed a remedy banning Izzy Dot for two weeks, which has the support of four arbitrators, but has been opposed by Fred Bauder, who claims that there is "no supporting evidence".

• Brahma Kumaris: A case involving the actions of avyakt7 and 195.82.106.244 (195) on the Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University article. Avyakt alleges that 195 has defamed Brahma Kumaris in the article but 195 claims that avyakt has misinterpreted the reliable sources policy. Fred Bauder has proposed remedies banning 195 for one year, placing him on probation, and placing the article on article probation. These proposals have the support of five arbitrators.

Motion in a prior case

• Giano: On the application of Dmcdevit, various motions were proposed imposing a variety of bans and paroles on Giano. However, none of these obtained a significant majority, and this afternoon Fred Bauder removed the motions, with the edit summary "Start over".