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The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), the volunteer-led body that evaluates chapter and (for the first time) thematic organizational annual plan grant requests to the Wikimedia Foundation, is preparing for its third round of public proceedings to deliberate on the distribution of several million US dollars of Wikimedia movement funds.
This week, theSignpost headed to WikiProject Good Articles. As of publishing time, out of the 4,331,477 articles on Wikipedia, only 18,464 are rated as "good" (about 1 in 235).
In this week's "Technology report", we look at how the growth of Wikidata can benefit Wikipedia. Gerard Meijssen is a highly active contributor and frequent blogger about Wikidata. We asked him to share his thoughts on how the new project benefits Wikipedia.
The top 10 is bookended by unlucky dates, as Friday the 13th fell just after the anniversary of 9/11.Breaking Bad's final season continued to draw attention, while interest in Miley Cyrus's youthful exuberance is fading only slowly.
Done. I would suggest that you go about this some way other than tagging them with{{db-move}} — it took a little bit of work for me to understand why Hamirpur needed to be moved (I almost declined the request), and admins with less time may do nothing, neither believing that the page needs to be moved nor thinking it a clear enough situation that they should decline it. Perhaps you should put together a list of all District pages that need to be moved to district, and then either mention it to an admin who's already familiar with the situation, or leave a message atWP:AN explaining what's going on and asking for help. If you want to do the contact-an-admin route, you should feel free to ask me for continued assistance.Nyttend (talk)20:37, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
@Nyttend: Thanks. It was just those two that I saw in a cursory look, so I did them individually. When/if I get to auditing all of them, which is pretty low priority, I'll do it with a list and a better explanation.
Has there been any discussion of a separate "delete page" right that one might get without being an admin? Not that I do a lot of these, but I might look for and do more if it were a faster process (i.e. I could just do them instead of having to waste an admin's time on what probably is fairly low-priority in the scheme of things).—[AlanM1(talk)]—20:55, 22 September 2013 (UTC)
Not as far as I know. Deleting, protecting, and blocking are really the three most significant/powerful/dangerous-if-mishandled user rights, and they really shouldn't be available to people who haven't gone through RFA. With that in mind, I note that you've been here since 2008 with no blocks. Have you thought of asking for the "delete page" right, together with protect, block, etc.? I see only one reason to doubt that you'd be a good admin, and that's your crazy rejection ofan entirely reasonable and sensible idea :-)Nyttend (talk)03:44, 23 September 2013 (UTC)
Understood, but abuse of a good thing isn't a good reason to reject the good thing entirely :-) I wasn't joking when I suggested that you try for admin, by the way.Nyttend (talk)23:30, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
Disambiguation link notification for September 24
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you editedPunjabi language, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation pageMultani (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles.Read theFAQ • Join us at theDPL WikiProject.
Over the last year, there's been extensive debate about whether public relations professionals and other corporate representatives should participate on Wikipedia and, if so, to what extent and what kinds of rules should be followed.
The saga of Walter White, chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin, as told in the critically adored television seriesBreaking Bad, has been a water-cooler necessity for years, and now, as it nears its end, audiences are feverishly following every plot thread to guess what the finale will reveal.
On 30 September, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the Wikimedia community's global photo competition, will reach to the end of its submission period. The proceedings have been underway since the first of this month; national juries will start reviewing submissions for the first round of selections after it closes ... Community aggravation with one of the Wikimedia Foundation's signature initiatives, the VisualEditor, came to the fore again this week with the announcement and implementation of code blocking the tool.
This week, we continued our exploration of other language editions of Wikipedia by visiting the Spanish Wikipedia's Wikiproyecto Fútbol (WikiProject Football).
A conference paper makes a rather serious claim: "We find a surprisingly large number of editors who change their behavior and begin focusing more on a particular controversial topic once they are promoted to administrator status."
Medical images have transformed many aspects of modern medicine. Over the past two decades the increasing sophistication of MRI, CT-scanning, and X-ray techniques has made these technologies the cornerstone of diagnosing a range of conditions, replacing what used to be largely guesswork by doctors. They can be the difference between life and death for a patient, and their importance is underlined by the tens of billions of dollars spent on them annually just in North America. For Wikimedia Foundation projects, advanced images are now a powerful tool for describing and explaining, and educating our worldwide readership of medical articles.
In what will be remembered as a game-changing week for Wikimedia grantmaking, the Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, published a forthright and in places highly critical statement,Reflections on the FDC process, and grantmaking staff revealed that the WMF will significantly strengthen its targeting of optimal impact in funding.
Editor's note: To go beyond the mere facts of cases, the "Arbitration report" invited several editors who participated in the recentInfoboxes case to comment on infoboxes: what they are, where new users can go to find out about them, specifications and protocols, best practices, and how the upcoming community discussion recommended by the Committee in the case decision should be framed.
This week, we revisited the enthusiastic editors at WikiProject U2. Started in June 2007, the project has grown in spurts, resulting in a collection of 8 Featured Articles and 24 Good Articles. The project maintains a to do list, portal, and a list of references.
If you're living in the United States, what did you do during the government shutdown? Well, it seems most people watched the final episode of Breaking Bad.
An investigation by the English Wikipedia community into suspicious edits and sockpuppet activity has led to astonishing revelations that Wiki-PR, a multi-million-dollar US-based company, has created, edited, or maintained several thousand Wikipedia articles for paying clients using a sophisticated array of concealed user accounts.
The University of California, San Francisco attracted substantial media attention over its new course offering that will give credit to fourth year medical students for editing Wikipedia articles about medicine.
A proposed decision has been posted in theManning naming dispute. The workshop phase of theEbionites 3 case closes 13 October. Arbitrator NuclearWarfare has resigned.
Media coverage on Wiki-PR, the multi-million-dollar US-based company that has broken several policies and guidelines on the English Wikipedia in its quest to create and maintain thousands of articles for paying clients, continued this week with a feature story by Martin Robbins in the British edition ofVice magazine.
A slow week, with low overall views and the Top 10 dominated by longstanding pages.Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron's outer space-set action art film, not only held its position at the top of the US box office but climbed to the top of the Wikipedia chart as well, showing that it has become a major talking point.
This week, we studied coats of arms and flags with the folks at WikiProject Heraldry and Vexillology. Started in September 2006, the project has grown to include 20 Featured Articles and nearly 50 Good Articles. The project maintains a portal, a list of resources, and a variety of images and templates.
TheManning naming dispute case has closed, with a strong and unanimous statement by the Committee against disparaging references to transgendered persons. Sanctions were enacted against six editors.
A tag has been placed onTemplate:DST Start Date/EU, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done for the following reason:
Newly-created template with incorrect capitalization was moved. No current refs to unnecessary redirect.
Under thecriteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not meet basic Wikipedia criteria may be deleted at any time.
If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you maycontest the nomination byvisiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Click here to contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be removed without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line withWikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, you can place a requesthere.—[AlanM1(talk)]—22:46, 25 October 2013 (UTC)
The next twice-yearly round of Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) grantmaking is soon to close for community questioning and commentary. Ten nation-based Wikimedia chapters and one thematic organisation are asking for a total of more than US$5M of donors’ money from the Foundation’s renamed annual plan grant process. Aside from Wikimedia UK ($708k), the three biggest asks are from the German-speaking chapters: Wikimedia Germany is asking for $2.4M and Wikimedia Austria $311k; and the German-language-related Swiss chapter is applying for $500k.
Twelve articles, four lists, and four pictures were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia this week, including the article on cabbage.
MIT Technology Review published a long article on what it called "The decline of Wikipedia". Editor involvement has decreased since 2007; according to the article, this has had an adverse qualitative effect on content, particularly on issues pertinent to non-British and American male geeks.
This week, we headed to an elementary subject with WikiProject Elements. Founded by Mav in 2002, this project has grown to have 19 featured articles, 2 featured topics, and 68 good articles. The project also has a list of templates, and a periodic table of elements filled with pictures.
GreetingsWikipedia Library members! Welcome to the inaugural edition ofBooks and Bytes, TWL’s monthly newsletter. We're sending you the first edition of this opt-in newsletter, because you signed up, or applied for a free research account: HighBeam, Credo, Questia, JSTOR, or Cochrane. To receive future updates ofBooks and Bytes, please add your name tothe subscriber's list. There's lots of news this month for the Wikipedia Library, including new accounts, upcoming events, and new ways to get involved...
New positions: Sign up to be a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, or a Volunteer Wikipedia Librarian
Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Off to a roaring start this fall in the United States: 29 events are planned or have been hosted.
New subscription donations: Cochrane round 2; HighBeam round 8; Questia round 4... Can we partner with NY Times and Lexis-Nexis??
New ideas: OCLC innovations in the works; VisualEditor Reference Dialog Workshop; a photo contest idea emerges
News from the library world: Wikipedian joins the National Archives full time; the Getty Museum releases 4,500 images; CERN goes CC-BY
Announcing WikiProject Open: WikiProject Open kicked off in October, with several brainstorming and co-working sessions
New ways to get involved: Visiting scholar requirements; subject guides; room for library expansion and exploration
The top 10 encapsulates the history of human aviation; at #1, a Google Doodle celebrating the 216th anniversary of the first parachute jump; at #10, the enduringly popular scifi filmGravity, a paean to human spaceflight. It's odd to think it's taken us 200 years to travel about that many miles up.
While giving a speech on behalf of a gubernatorial candidate, Paul advocated his pro-life position, and compared allowing unrestricted abortions to the film Gattaca. He went on to use strikingly similar language and phraseology in his speech to what the Wikipedia page reads. TheWashington Post's article conceded that Wikipedia is a widely used source for trivial information, but mocked the fact that a politician would view it as a reliable source.
In January we raised several potentially troublesome issues for the Wikimedia movement in taking on Wikivoyage, including the apparent inadequacy of the English Wikivoyage sex-tourism policy, hurriedly strengthened against mention of child sex after our inquiries. However, both sex-tourism and illegal-activities policies remain equivocal about how the site should treat entries about sex tourism more generally, and drugs that are classed as illicit in almost every country. Yet the Signpost has found it remarkably easy to locate material in Wikivoyage that violates both the spirit and the letter of the policies.
This year's WikiCup competition has finished, while three articles, five lists, and six pictures, were promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week.
Laura Stein, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has concluded that, based on her comparison of user policy documents (including the Terms of Service) of YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia, Wikipedia offers the highest level of participation power overall.
With Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and other gloomy celebrations this week, we're taking a look at Wikipedia's dead and dying. For some dead WikiProjects, the sole purpose of their life was simply to serve as a warning to others. Some of these projects may still be salvageable, but for most, a revival is unlikely. Here are some projects that never got off the ground and the lessons that can be gleaned from their follies
As part of the second major "outing" controversy to hit the English Wikipedia in less than a year, the Chelsea/Bradley Manning naming dispute was dragged into the spotlight yet again when the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee ruled by motion to remove the administrator tools from and ban long-time Wikipedia contributor Phil Sandifer.
It's fair to say that commemorating death was a strong theme this week, with Lou Reed's passing generating interest, as well as a Google Doodle celebrating the costume designer Edith Head. And of course, the world's greatest celebrations of the dead, Halloween and the Day of the Dead, were also popular this week.
HMSHood, one of the most famous warships of the Second World War, was a battlecruiser and therefore part of what is now the largest featured topic on Wikipedia: "Battlecruisers of the world". The topic was promoted to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia last week alongside eleven articles, three lists, four pictures, and two other topics.
This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Accessibility, a project that strives to make Wikipedia accessible for users with disabilities. The project improves Wikipedia's guidelines and Manual of Style, collects useful templates and scripts, and provides support to impaired Wikipedians.
The numbers this week are beyond anything that has been seen since this report began. The top view count beats the average by an order of magnitude. Usually the appearance of numbers this big on the list is due to spamming, but in this case it seems they are due to honest interest; more specifically, Google Doodles, which for the first time claimed all five top slots. This column has raised numerous times the power of a Google Doodle to shine light on Wikipedia, but the wattage has never been as high as this.
The supporting staff of the Wikimedia Foundation’s powerful volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) have released their assessments for the third half-yearly round of funding applications. The applications for the newly namedannual plan grants were submitted by affiliated entities on 1 October, and comprise a total of more than US$5M in bids.
The Italian-language Wikipedia community has overwhelmingly voted to request the Wikimedia Foundation's assistance in recovering wikipedia.it, a website that has been frequently confused with the Italian Wikipedia.
Hi there, I'm pleased to inform you that I've begun reviewing the articleOperation Frequent Wind you nominated forGA-status according to thecriteria. This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period.Message delivered byLegobot, on behalf ofSmallchief --Smallchief(talk)19:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
As I said in August, contributing to theSignpost can be one of the most rewarding things an editor can do. The genre is refreshingly different from that of Wikipedia articles, and can allow writers to use a different range of skills. The need for an independent, volunteer-runSignpost continues to grow, given the increasing complexity and financial expenditures of the global Wikimedia movement, not to mention the English Wikipedia.
Peter Burke'sA Social History of Knowledge: Volume II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia is a broad and wide-ranging look at how knowledge has been created, acquired, organized, disseminated, and sometimes lost in the Western world over the last two and a half centuries, a sequel to his 2000 book covering the prior three centuries,A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot.
Four articles, five lists, and thirty-four pictures were promoted to 'featured status' this week, including an image of a small fraction of the 18,000 taxis that serve Hong Kong.
This week, we headed over to WikiProject National Football League. With 10 Featured Articles, 61 Featured Lists, and 142 Good Articles (as of publication), this WikiProject has done a lot of work improving American football articles.
The Wikimedia Foundation has sent a formal cease and desist letter to Wiki-PR—the public relations agency accused of breaking Wikipedia policies and guidelines by creating, editing, and maintaining several thousand articles for paying clients through a sophisticated array of accounts. The Foundation's attorneys, Cooley LLP, have demanded that Wiki-PR's employees abide by the site's Terms of Use and the language of a community ban from the English Wikipedia.
It's not hard to guess which event is leading interest in the top 25 this week. The sheer scale of Typhoon Haiyan is staggering; estimates place its maximum windspeed upon first landfall in the Philippines on November 6 at 315 km/h, which would make it the most powerful tropical cyclone ever to reach land. To date, the storm has killed nearly 4000 people and damaged or destroyed nearly 4 million homes.
Back in March, when the March 25 Arbitration Report covered the Audit Subcommittee appointment discussion, a statement from the WMF legal division clarified its position that access to deleted revisions required an RFA or RFA-identical process; therefore AUSC committee appointments were not open to non-admins. The WMF legal team has now further clarified its position, saying that running for and winning an election for arbitrator would qualify as the type of rigorous community selection process required for the checkuser and oversight rights held by arbitrators.
Sorry but the case has been closed due to lack of participation for other parties involved in the dispute. I don't think DRN was the proper venue for you anyway as it moderates disputes and does not give outside opinions. I suggest you try asking for a3rd opinion or opening anRfC. Let me know if I can be of any assistance.-- —Keithbob •Talk •18:20, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Summary:Doctor Who nearly got cancelled in its first week because its premiere was swamped by coverage of the JFK assassination, which happened the same day. Thankfully, producers saw fit to rerun it the next day, which is now its official anniversary date.
Wikipedia works on the efforts of unpaid volunteers who choose to donate their time to advance the cause of free knowledge. This phenomenon, as trivial as it may sound to those acquainted with Wikipedia inner workings, has always puzzled economists and social scientists alike, in that standard Economic theory would not predict that such enterprises would thrive without any form of remuneration.
The sister project Wikisource, the digital library that hosts free-content primary sources, is now a decade old. Wikisource, which now has versions in 63 languages, is the sixth type of project to reach ten-year milestone and will be the last until 2016. The Wikimedia Foundation's volunteer Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations to the Board of Trustees on 11 new applications for annual grants by 11 WMF-affiliated organisations. The maximum total budget for the current and upcoming March rounds is US$6M.
This week, we returned to WikiProject Apple Inc. for a peek at their newest articles about the latest in gadgets and software. The last time we took a bite out of WikiProject Apple, they had just finished merging WikiProject Macintosh and WikiProject iPhone OS. Today, the project is hard at work rewriting their primary article, improving the subject's outline, and adding to the project's list of 25 Good Articles and 6 Featured Articles.
When one edits this page for too long, one is tempted to appoint oneself as the psychoanalyst for the human race, or at least the English-speaking portion thereof. Since nearly everyone uses Wikipedia, the constant stream of TV updates, pointless celebrity scandals, and inquiries after who has died can seem like a dreary peek into humanity's surprisingly banal collective consciousness.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales caught headlines last week when he referred to former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden ... Loek Essers of the International Data Group, (IDG) News Service is reporting that a German court has held Wikipedia liable for its content, but still does not have to fact check the information in advance.
Amid great anticipation the international prize winners have just been announced for the fourth annual Wiki Loves Monuments, now the world's largest photographic competition and one of the biggest events on the Wikimedia movement's calendar. ... The first prize has gone to David Gubler's photograph of a Swiss train crossing a viaduct.
On 7 December, Wikipedia editor Wehwalt reached the momentous milestone of 100 featured articles with History of Chincoteague, Virginia. Quite apart from the reading and research, that's around three-quarters of a million words of finalised text, not counting footnotes, image captions and the rest.
On 6 December, the latest version of the MediaWiki software was released. In development from March 2013 through October 2013, the release featured anti-spam and counter-vandalism improvements.
An animated Google Doodle for computer programmer and naval rear admiral Grace Hopper generated another record-breaking hit count for the year, though the count for the list overall was lower than for that of the previous holder.
A little more than six days after the close of voting, the results of the annual Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) elections have been announced. Of the 22 candidates, 13 managed to gain more supports than opposes, though only one gained the support of more than half of the voters. Eight were elected to two-year terms, and a ninth will serve for one year.
This week, the GLAMWikiToolset, or GWToolset, is being deployed to the Wikimedia Commons. It allows for GLAM organizations to batch upload content based on various metadata stored in an XML schema. In the past this has been done by various bots, but now it will be easier for GLAMs to do it directly.
Analyzing edits to the-then 46 largest Wikipedias between July 9 and August 8, 2013, a study identified a set of about 8,000 contributors with a global user account who have edited more than one of these language versions in that time frame.
We saved one last special report for 2013. After our well-received review of great WikiProject logos a couple years ago, it was only a matter of time before we collected a new batch of interesting iconography that showcases the creativity of the Wikipedia community. Hopefully, these logos will also inspire other projects to liven up their drab pages.
A significant move by the Wikimedia Foundation has been to broaden the types of activities it funds to develop several different programs for judging and allocating that funding, and to set up volunteer committees that initially assess applications for funding.
Last month, the OAuth extension was deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. OAuth is a standard used for allowing users to authenticate third-party applications, also known as consumers, to take actions on their behalf.
On New Year's Day, an article by Tim Sampson published inThe Daily Dot and republished shortly after on Mashable covered the currently ongoing medical disclaimer RfC.
This was the year in which one journalist described the flagship site, Wikipedia, as "wickedly seductive". It was the year Wikipedia's replacement value was estimated at $6.6bn, its market value at "tens of billions of dollars", and its consumer benefit "hundreds of billions of dollars". But it was also the year in which one commentator forecast the decline of Wikipedia—that the project is in trouble from its shrinking volunteer workforce, skewed coverage, "crushing bureaucracy" and 90 percent male community.
The year 2013 has come and gone, adding 50 new WikiProject Reports to our long list of projects we've had the privilege to meet. Last year saw the continuation of our Babel series, featuring WikiProjects from other languages of Wikipedia. We also expanded our selection of special reports, offering readers a growing collection of helpful tips and tools as they participate in WikiProjects.
Over the past year 1181 pieces of featured content were promoted. The most active of the featured content programs was featured picture candidates (FPC), which promoted an average of 46 pictures a month. This was followed by featured article candidates (FAC; 32.5 a month). Coming in third was featured list candidates (FLC; 18 a month).
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you editedMichael Jackson, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation pageGlendale (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles.Read theFAQ • Join us at theDPL WikiProject.
I've been taking a break from Wikipedia over the holiday season so hadn't been keeping track of my watched pages. Thanks for your efforts on the GA review and for the barnstar. Best regardsMztourist (talk)18:43, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
This is anarchive of past discussions withUser:AlanM1.Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on thecurrent talk page.
—[AlanM1(talk)]—23:26, 28 September 2013 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but I see no evidence that I editedBrunei or{{Infobox country}}, and my suggestions atTemplate talk:Infobox country are unrelated. Reading the doc you provided, 82(2) seems to make English an "required translation" or maybe "secondary" language – I'm not familiar enough with other countries or the field to say how this situation is normally described.—[AlanM1(talk)]—23:35, 3 October 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I'mBracketBot. I have automatically detected thatyour edit toList of mountains in Virginia may have broken thesyntax by modifying 2 "()"s. If you have, don't worry: justedit the page again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message onmy operator's talk page.
This process may take up to 7 days. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have during this period.Message delivered byLegobot, on behalf ofSmallchief --Smallchief (talk)19:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
; seeTalk:Operation Frequent Wind for comments about the article. Well done!Message delivered byLegobot, on behalf ofSmallchief --Smallchief (talk)23:42, 28 December 2013 (UTC)