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WikiCup 2012 October newsletter
The 2012 WikiCup has come to a close; congratulations toCwmhiraeth (submissions), our 2012 champion! Cwmhiraeth joins our exclusive club of previous winners:Dreamafter (2007),jj137 (2008),Durova (2009),Sturmvogel 66 (2010) andHurricanehink (2011). Our final standings were as follows:
Prizes for first, second, third and fourth will be awarded, as will prizes for all those who reached the final eight. Every participant who scored in the competition will receive a ribbon of participation. In addition to the prizes based on placement, the following special prizes will be awarded based on high performance in particular areas of content creation. So that the finalists do not have an undue advantage, the prize is awarded to the competitor who scored the highest in any particular field in a single round.
The featured article award goes toGrapple X (submissions), for four featured articles in the final round.
The good article award also goes toGrapple X (submissions), for 19 good articles in the second round.
The list award goes toMuboshgu (submissions), for three featured lists in the final round.
The topic award goes toGrapple X (submissions), for three good topics (with around 40 articles) in round 4.
The did you know award goes toCwmhiraeth (submissions), for well over 100 DYKs in the final round.
The news award goes toThaddeusB (submissions), for 10 in the news items in round 3.
The picture award goes toGrandiose (submissions), for two featured pictures in round 2.
Finally, for achieving an incredible bonus point total in the final round, and for bringing the top-importance articlefrog to featured status, abiostar has been awarded toCwmhiraeth (submissions).
Awards will be handed out in the coming days; please bear with us! This year's competition also saw fantastic contributions in all rounds, from newer Wikipedians contributing their first good or featured articles, right up to highly experienced Wikipedians chasing high scores and contributing to topics outside of their usual comfort zones. It would be impossible to name all of the participants who have achieved things to be proud of, but well done to all of you, and thanks! Wikipedia has certainly benefited from the work of this year's WikiCup participants.
We are almost at the end of another great Eurovision year, with preparations now well under way for the2013 Eurovision Song Contest. Individual entry articles are slowly appearing atTemplate:Eurovision Song Contest 2013, although as happens every year, there is tendency to create these article prematurely. Please don't create them without a good two paragraphs of information to post, and with at least tworeliable sources of informationcited - remember every article has to pass theWikipedia:Notability guideline independently.
There is a lot going on atWT:EURO at the moment too, and every project member should have this talk page on theirwatchlist. The currentRfC on country article layout is suffering from a lack of participation - myself and others may not agree with every suggestion made, but we won't bite people's heads off, so please feel free to comment! If you feel like you'll be out of your depth over there, you should know that it was a suggestion by a newbie that resulted in a complete re-structuring of all Eurovion templates, so you don't have to be an "old timer" to bring new ideas to the table! On the same page is aproposal to re-license Eurovision logos uploaded locally, and since this will have a big impact on how we handle logos, some further feedback would be appreciated.
As always, be on the look out for potential new members to the project. Post {{subst:EurovisionInvite}} (which will producedthis template) on any user page you think is interested to join the WikiProject, to officially invite them to join.
If you would like something to appear in the next edition of Eurovision Monthly, then please inform us at theProject Newsdesk.
If there is an article you think we should have? Request ithere.
And finally... a massive thank you to all members of the project for your constant hard work on collaborating and contributing toEurovision related articles. Keep up the good work team!
Please can we also remember to keep this article well presented based on the layout that was agreed upon via the Project RfC. If in doubt, checkEurovision Song Contest 2012 as an example. That article is using the new layout format and gained the project it's first GA-class on annual pages. Let's maintain that high standard.
Also remember to communicate with fellow project members via thearticle talk orProject talk page, as communication is an important tool if we aim to collaborate as part of a team.
Please only add countries who have explicitly stated they will be competing, citing a reliable source. Anything not cited may be removed. If in doubt - ask someone for an opinion!
The tenth edition of theJunior Eurovision Song Contest is scheduled to take place on the 1 December 2012, inAmsterdam,Netherlands. Twelve countries have confirmed their participation with Albania, Azerbaijan, and Israel making their début.
As the contest will be starting in the next few weeks, then the article may become subjected to vandalism from random IP accounts. Please be vigilant and revert any vandalism that you find. Thank you.
ABU Radio Song Festival 2012 - On 11 October 2012 the first ABU Radio Song Festival took place in the Korean capital of Seoul. South Korea won the Grand Prix award with the song "For a Rest" performed by boy band Billy Acoustie. Danielle Blakey representing Australia won the gold award with the song "Fearless", Brunei received the silver award with the song "The sweetest memory" performed by Maria Aires, with Sammy Ray Jones also representing Australia receiving the bronze award with his song "Rinet". K-Town Clan representing Malaysia received the special jury award with their song "Party Animal" and thus finished in fifth place.
ABU TV Song Festival 2012 - Eleven countries performed in the first ABU TV Song Festival on 14 October 2012. The contest was non-competitive and thus no winners.
ABU Radio Song Festival 2014 - It was announced on 11 October 2012 that the 2014 Radio Festival will take place in Australia hosted by radio broadcasterABC Australia.
As it is too soon to start work on the new article, can we please try and avoid creating one. Unless of course, there's enough information out there that would warrant an early creation.
Please remember to keep checking the project articles that have been flagged up as an alert. Since our last publication the following are listed as alerts:
Op-ed:2012 WikiCup comes to an end J Milburn is a British editor who has been on the site since 2006. He is one of two judges of the WikiCup. Here, he uses an op-ed to explain the way the WikiCup works and to review this year's competition, which ended recently.
News and notes:Wikimedian photographic talent on display in national submissions to Wiki Loves Monuments The results of most of the national heats for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) have been published on Commons. A maximum of 10 images have been submitted by all but eight of the 34 participating countries, and the international jury for what is the largest competition of its type in the world is set to announce the global winner in four weeks' time.
In the media:Was climate change a factor in Hurricane Sandy? Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record and has caused millions of dollars in damage. Naturally, Wikipedia covered it. But was Wikipedia's coverage unbiased?
Featured content:Jack-O'-Lanterns and Toads This week, theSignpost interviewed two editors. The first, PumpkinSky, collaborated with Gerda Arendt in writing the recently featured article on Franz Kafka and won second prize in the Core contest last August. The second, Cwmhiraeth, collaborated with Thompsma in promoting the article Frog, which was featured last week. We asked them about the special challenges faced while writing Core content and things to watch out for.
Technology report:Hue, Sqoop, Oozie, Zookeeper, Hive, Pig and Kafka The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for October 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month. TimedMediaHandler also went live.
WikiProject report:Listening to WikiProject Songs This week,The Signpost sings along with WikiProject Songs which focuses on articles about songs of every generation and genre. The project initially began as a rough outline in October 2002 and was reimagined in March 2004 using its parent WikiProject Albums as a template.
Hi, sorry it took a (long) while for us to get back to you - as is usual with wiki-related projects, we've been a bit busy organising ourselves to begin organising other people. It'd be good to chat about how you'd like to get involved though - I'm edsaperia on skype if that works for you, or email me? edsaperia@gmail.comEdSaperia (talk)21:30, 7 November 2012 (UTC)
Anyway. You're getting this note because you've participated in discussion and/or asked for updates to either theArticle Feedback Tool orPage Curation. This isn't about either of those things, I'm afraid ;p. We've recently started working on yet another project: Echo, a notifications system to augment the watchlist. There's not much information at the moment, because we're still working out the scope and the concepts, but if you're interested in further updates you can sign uphere.
In addition, we'll be holding anoffice hours session at21:00 UTC on Wednesday, 14 November in #wikimedia-office - hope to see you all there :). I appreciate it's an annoying time for non-Europeans: if you're interested in chatting about the project but can't make it, give me a shout and I can set up another session if there's enough interest in one particular timezone or a skype call if there isn't. Thanks!Okeyes (WMF) (talk)10:57, 10 November 2012 (UTC)
News and notes:Court ruling complicates the paid-editing debate Last week, media outlets reported a ruling by a German court on the problem of businesses using Wikipedia for marketing purposes. The issue goes beyond the direct management of marketing-related edits by Wikipedians; it involves cross-monitoring and interacting among market competitors themselves on Wikipedia. A company that sells dietary supplements made from frankincense had taken a competitor to court. The recently published judgment by the Higher Regional Court of Munich, in dealing with the German Wikipedia article on frankincense products, was handed down in May and is based on European competition law.
Featured content:The table has turned Thirteen articles, six lists, and five images were promoted to 'featured' status last week.
Technology report:MediaWiki 1.20 and the prospects for getting 1.21 code reviewed promptly In late September, theTechnology report published its findings about (particularly median) code review times. To the 23,900 changesets analysed the first time (the data for which has been updated), theSignpost added data from the 9,000 or so changesets contributed between September 17 and November 9 to a total of 93,000 reviews across 45,000 patchsets. Bots and self-reviews were also discarded, but reviews made by a different user in the form of a superseding patch were retained. Finally, users were categorised by hand according to whether they would be best regarded as staff or volunteers. The new analyses were consistent with the predictions of the previous analysis.
WikiProject report:Land of parrots, palm trees, and the Holy Cross: WikiProject Brazil As promised, we're expanding our horizons by featuring projects that cover underrepresented areas of the globe. This week, we headed to WikiProject Brazil which keeps track of articles about the world's largest Portuguese-speaking country. The project has shown spurts of activity and continues to serve as a hub for discussions, despite the project's collaborations, peer reviews, and outreach activities being largely inactive.
Hey all :). A couple of quick updates (one small, one large)
First, we're continuing to work on some ways to increase the quality of feedback and make it easier to eliminate and deal with non-useful feedback: hopefully I'll have more news for you on this soon :).
Second, we're looking at ways to increase the actual number of users patrolling and take off some of the workload from you lot. Part of this is increasing the prominence of the feedback page, which we're going to try to do with a link at the top of each article to the relevant page. This should be deployed on Tuesday (touch wood!) and we'll be closely monitoring what happens. Let me know if you have any questions or issues :). Thanks,Okeyes (WMF) (talk)14:25, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
Participation: Out of 31 people signed up for this drive so far, 22 have copy-edited at least one article. If you've signed up but haven't yet copy-edited any articles, every bit helps; if you haven't signed up yet, it's not too late.Join us!
Progress report: We're on track to meet our targets for the drive. We have reduced our target group of articles—November and December 2011—by over 50%, and 34 of the the 56 requests made in September and October this year have already been fulfilled. However, the rate of tagging for copy edit has increased, and this month we are just keeping the size of the backlog stable. So, all you copy editors, please do come along and help us!
Seasonal oversight: We had a slight fall from grace in the title of our last newletter, which mentioned the season in the northern hemisphere and thus got it wrong for the southern. Fortunately an observant GOCE member was ready to spring into action to advise us. Thanks! In future we'll stay meteorologically neutral.
News and notes:FDC's financial muscle kicks in The WMF's Funds Dissemination Committee has published its recommendations for the inaugural round 1 of funding. Requests totalled US$10.4M, nearly all of the FDC's budget for both first and second rounds. The seven-member committee of community volunteers appointed in September advises the WMF board on the distribution of grant funds among applying Wikimedia organizations. The committee, which has a separate operating budget of $276k for salaries and expenses, considered 12 applications for funds, from 11 chapters and from the WMF itself for its non-core activities. The decision-making process included community and FDC staff input after October 1, the closing date for submissions. Taken together, the volunteers decided to endorse an average of 81% of the funding sought—a total of $8.43M, which went to 11 of the 12 applicants. This leaves $2.71M to be distributed in round 2, for which applications are due in little more than three months' time.
WikiProject report:No teenagers, mutants, or ninjas: WikiProject Turtles This week, we spent some time with WikiProject Turtles. The young project started in January 2011 and has accumulated 5 Featured Articles, 3 Featured Lists, and 6 Featured Pictures. The project maintains a combined to-do list and hot articles meter, a popular pages ranking, and a collection of resources for turtle articles. We interviewed Faendalimas and NYMFan69-86.
Technology report:Structural reorganisation "not a done deal" WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner was forced to clarify this week that proposed structural changes to the Foundation's Engineering and Product Development Department were not a "done deal" and that it was "important that you [particularly affected staff] realise that ... your input is wanted". The reorganisation, announced on November 5 and planned for the middle of next year, will see its two components split off into their own departments.
Featured content:Wikipedia hit by the Streisand effect Seven featured articles, four featured lists and ten featured pictures – including the photograph that spawned the Streisand effect – were promoted this week.
Discussion report:GOOG, MSFT, WMT: the ticker symbol placement question Current discussions on the English Wikipedia include the question of ticker symbol placement and the notability of various types of creative performer.
The thing that makes this incredibly confusing to me is that it seems to say it was deleted due to copyright infringement but there was nothing in the article that was copyrighted. There were no images, no copied statements, nothing. May I ask for a more specific reason as to why the article was deleted and whether it would be possible to reverse this decision?
I would draw your attention to the date of my admin action - that page was deleted over a year ago. It is not impossible that the copyrighted text has been removed from its source elsewhere on the internet. In any case, the article was clear promotion and could have just as easily been deleted for that reason. —foxj12:37, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
The Signpost: 26 November 2012
News and notes:Toolserver finance remains uncertain On November 24, a general assembly of Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) voted on the fate of the Wikimedia Toolserver, a central external piece of technical infrastructure supporting the editing communities with volunteer-developed scripts and webpages of various kinds that are assisting in performing mostly menial tasks.
Recent research:Movie success predictions, readability, credentials and authority, geographical comparisons An open-access preprint presents the results from a study attempting to predict early box office revenues from Wikipedia traffic and activity data. The authors – a team of computational social scientists from Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Aalto University and the Central European University – submit that behavioral patterns on Wikipedia can be used for accurate forecasting, matching and in some cases outperforming the use of social media data for predictive modeling. The results, based on a corpus of 312 English Wikipedia articles on movies released in 2010, indicate that the joint editing activity and traffic measures on Wikipedia are strong predictors of box office revenue for highly successful movies.
Technology report:Wikidata reaches 100,000 entries Wikidata, the new "Wikimedia Commons for data" and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, reached 100,000 entries this week. The project aims to be a single, human- and machine-readable database for common data, spanning across all Wikipedia projects, which will "lead to a higher consistency and quality within Wikipedia articles, as well as increased availability of information in the smaller language editions" while lowering the burden on Wikipedia's volunteer editors—whose numbers have stalled overall, and continue to dwindle on the English Wikipedia.
WikiProject report:Directing Discussion: WikiProject Deletion Sorting This week, we uncovered WikiProject Deletion Sorting, Wikipedia's most active project by number of edits to all the project's pages. This special project seeks to increase participation in Articles for Deletion nominations by categorizing the AfD discussions by various topic areas that may draw the attention of editors. The project was started in August 2005 with manual processes that are continued today by a bevy of bots, categories, and transclusions. The project took inspiration from WikiProject Stub Sorting and some historical discussions on deletion reform. As the sheer number of AfDs continues to grow, the project is seeking better tools to manage the deletion sorting process and attract editors to comment on these deletion discussions.
Cwmhiraeth (submissions), our 2012 champion! Cwmhiraeth joins our exclusive club of previous winners:Dreamafter (2007),jj137 (2008),Durova (2009),Sturmvogel 66 (2010) andHurricanehink (2011). Our final standings were as follows:
Sasata (submissions)
Grapple X (submissions)
Casliber (submissions)
Muboshgu (submissions)
Miyagawa (submissions)
Ruby2010 (submissions)
Dana Boomer (submissions)
ThaddeusB (submissions), for 10 in the news items in round 3.
Grandiose (submissions), for two featured pictures in round 2.
