Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2005-08-29
Procedural changes this week
A number of procedural changes were made in different areas of Wikipedia this week.
Votes for Deletion naming debate
A debate has ensued on the renaming of VfD to PfD (Pages for Deletion) or AfD (Articles for Deletion). The main problem with the name, according to name change supporters, is that VfD is not actually a vote; rather, it is a discussion on whether to keep or delete. As of press time, the name "Articles for Deletion" seems to have caught on, with non-article namespace articles going to Wikipedia:Non-main namespace pages for deletion.
Collaboration of the week
Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week reduced its scope from two collaborations down to one collaboration, after many readers complained that the number of edits had dropped dramatically since the project split. SimonP noted that over a month, none of the eight COTWs had come close to becoming a featured article. Particularly, SimonP noted the article History of South America, which only received 11 edits during its COTW period, and "saw virtually no improvement during the week."
No objections were received on the talk page, and so the change was made. The first collaboration after the merge was Militarisation of space, which received 60 edits during its period as a COTW.
Reference desk
Wikipedia:Reference desk was split into four sections this week. The sections are: Humanities, Science & Mathematics, Language, and Miscellaneous. Each of these sections has discussion in its subject area. Discussion on the talk page about splitting into sections began in May 2005. Originally, the idea was to break the page into as many as nine sections; however, it was generally agreed that any more than four sections would not be beneficial, making it harder for editors to watch the pages and answer questions within a reasonable time frame. HappyCamper said that the whole process of sorting questions that had already been answered, as well as tidying up pages took about 24 hours and a flurry of editors.
Vandals surface again, disrupting Wikipedia
Two vandals struck Wikipedia this week: the by-now familiar Willy-On-Wheels vandal, and a new vandal, dubbed the "Love Virus".
Willy on Wheels
Willy reappeared again this week, after weeks of dormant activity. Using multiple user names with references to "Willy" and "on Wheels", the vandal mass-moved pages from their original titles to pages with "...On Wheels" added. In addition, the multiple-language portal at www.wikipedia.org was vandalised for over an hour after Willy on Wheels changed the Wikipedia logo on WikiCommons to a picture referencing himself. A long cleanup effort by dedicated Wikipedians ensued, and every page move has now been reverted.
Implications
Because of the recurrance of the vandal, several editors pleaded with developers to install limitations on page moves. Developers assured the Wikipedia community that they were working on the problem; in fact, new users must now wait a certain amount of time before having the technical capabilities to move pages. A page-move limitation scheme was also discussed.
In addition, legal action was discussed at the administrator's noticeboard, with the possibility of contacting Willy on Wheels' ISP.
Love Virus
Another vandal appeared this week. Dubbed the "Love Virus", multiple user names replaced article content with the words "Love Virus". The most-affected articles were ones dealing with AIDS and love. Unfortunately, the user names did not share a common name, and were harder to track down. It is suspected that the "Love Virus" vandal could be a bot. Administrators quickly jumped on the vandals; in fact, one "Love Virus" username was blocked by four administrators simultaneously.
Portal namespace created
A portal namespace was recently created, with the prefix Portal: This namespace is mainly intended for many of the WikiPortals. The idea began with the creation of Portal:Cricket, which was originally in the mainspace under the same name. It was nominated for deletion in April, with the result being to keep, until a portal namespace was created. The namespace was not officially created until earlier this week, when a developer finally made the necessary changes.
Debate on whether a namespace for Portal was necessary was largely in favor of adding the namespace. However, a proposal to make the Main Page a portal was rejected soundly as 'unnecessary' and 'disruptive'.
Editor-oriented WikiPortals will remain at Wikipedia:Wikiportal. Existing reader-oriented WikiPortals have been moved to the Portal namespace already.
News and Notes
Q3 Wikimedia Funding Drive off to strong start
Through just ten days, the Wikimedia fundraising drive has raised more than USD $115,000, over half of the 21-day fundraiser's goal. A $200,000 funding drive started on 19 August. The drive aims to pay for the significant server costs, which have risen dramatically recently.
Briefly
- The Swedish Wikipedia passes 100,000 articles. The 100,000th article is believed to be sv:Jógvan við Keldu or sv:Epiglottal klusil. Wikinews has coverage: "Swedish Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles".
- The English Wikipedia has reached 700,000 articles.
- The German Wikipedia has reached 500 featured articles.
- The Czech Wikipedia has reached 15,000 articles.
- The Portuguese Wikipedia has reached 70,000 articles.
- The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
- The Sicilian Wikipedia reached 2,000 articles.
- The Limburgian Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.
- The Russian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
- The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
In the news
Citations in the news
Wikipedia was cited in the last week in the following publications:
- Western Mail
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
- Denver Post
- San Antonio Express-News
- Sacramento Bee
- Canberra Times
- National Post
- The Capital Times
- Hamilton Spectator
- Toronto Star
- Rocky Mountain News
- St. Petersburg Times
- Chattanooga Times Free Press
See also: User:Lotsofissues/Citations
Rare request for bureaucratship receives vast support
Admins
In the first week where self-nominations were in the same section as admin nominations by others, five Wikipedians were promoted to administration status: HappyCamper (nom), Hall Monitor (nom), Phil Boswell (nom), Lupin (nom), and TheCoffee (nom).
Bureaucrats
Andrevan nominated himself for bureaucratship in the first request for bureaucratship in over nine months. Though general consensus nine months ago was that there were enough bureaucrats, Andrevan stated in his nomination statement, "There has been a MediaWiki upgrade. Bureaucrats don't just end RfAs anymore - now they handle Wikipedia:Changing username as well! Apparently there can be seen a fair number of requests there now that have not yet been fulfilled. I think I could help out with that, and maybe do some RfAs when the other bureaucrats are busy." Though his RfB is not slated to end until 3 September, 2005, as of press time he was on track to be promoted, with the vast majority of votes cast supporting him.
Featured content
Following a week of record-breaking number of featured articles, ten articles were promoted to featured status: Montréal-Mirabel International Airport, The Jackson 5, Michael Thevis, Spyware, San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, Jean Schmidt, Ku Klux Klan, Columbine High School massacre, Augustan drama, and My Belarusy. In addition, History of South Carolina failed its third FAC attempt; even though it had been promoted, there was controversy and featured article director Raul654 decided to renominate the article. Finally, a contentious and controversial FAC began when GordonWattsDotCom nominated Terri Schiavo for FA status. The FAC for that is ongoing.
Two lists, List of Canadian provincial and territorial orders and List of Archbishops of Canterbury, reached featured lists status this week.
Three featured picture candidates were promoted this week: Map of Manila, Red fox with prey, and Prayer flag column.
The Report On Lengthy Litigation
The Arbitration Committee did not close any cases this week.
DotSix
DotSix, the name for an IP address engaged in vandalism, sockpuppeting, and editing of other users' comments in his RFAr, has been banned from all pages except his talk page and his RFAr pages. The case is currently in the evidence phase.
Other cases
Cases against Gabrielsimon and -Ril- are in the working phase. Cases against Stevertigo and Rainbowwarrior1977 are in the evidence phase.
Requests against Ultramarine and Ed Poor have both garnered four votes, the bare minimum for a RFA to be accepted.
Errors and omissions
22 August errors
An article on experimental deletion published last week was factually inaccurate. The article was retracted; the correct article can be found here. Also, an article on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for Decency vfd misstated how vote sections were broken down. Sections for the first day of voting were originally broken down by 3-hour blocks (later merged into 6-hour blocks).