Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2006-04-03

Recurring issues with the requests for adminship (RfA) system flared up again last week, with various complaints and the resignation of two bureaucrats. The two who resigned, Francs2000 and Cecropia, did so of their own volition, however, rather than based on any serious concerns about their conduct. Along with this, an extended debate developed regarding the criteria for selecting administrators and bureaucrats, and the ideal size of each group.

Francs2000 resigned on Wednesday after having closed the RfA discussion for AzaToth. According to the 7-day period for which adminship nominations are considered, AzaToth's nomination was scheduled to end at 23:57 (UTC) on 26 March. However, Francs2000 marked the discussion closed a little more than half an hour early, due to a miscalculation because of the change to British Summer Time. This caused some consternation, in part because voting on AzaToth's nomination stood just below the threshold at which it might have succeeded (73% in favor, where 80% is usually automatic and as low as 75% may be deemed successful at the discretion of bureaucrats).

In response, Francs2000 decided to take a wikibreak and ultimately resigned as a bureaucrat as well, citing stress and real-life priorities. This prompted an outpouring of sympathetic comments and reassurances that despite the mistake, he was still trusted in that capacity.

Afterwards, an unsuccessful self-nomination on Friday from Tyrenius prompted some re-examination of the entire adminship process. Considered alone, the failure of the nomination was not that extraordinary, as Tyrenius seemed to be largely unknown to RfA participants, gave a very terse statement introducing the nomination, and hurt his chances with lengthy (but generally polite) attempts to refute an initial batch of voters opposing adminship. Tyrenius withdrew the nomination within a few hours, leaving in closing a detailed argument that this opposition went against Wikipedia policy for granting adminship.

The incident was called to the attention of the wikiEN-l mailing list, leading to a lengthy discussion about the RfA process. In Tyrenius' specific case, several people pointed to a failure to understand Wikipedia culture and the impropriety of displaying the attitude that adminship is an entitlement. But at the same time, others used the opportunity to question generally whether the process overemphasizes statistics such as edit summary use.

Kelly Martin commented that the current process is "relatively poor at discriminating against people who should not be admins", saying that voters were using criteria unrelated to whether someone could be trusted not to misuse administrator privileges. UninvitedCompany argued that the process was no longer treating people fairly, as the mutual reinforcement of people participating on RfA and in IRC tends to exclude outsiders, and the ever-growing expectations for a minimum number of edits now "have little to do with understanding Wikipedia." However, nobody had a clear solution to offer, although UninvitedCompany did suggest possibilities like granting user access levels divided into smaller chunks.

Among the current access levels, bureaucrat status has also been the focus of some frustration because of the difficulty in having successful nominations. In part this is because a number of RfA participants feel no need for additional bureaucrats, and oppose any nomination for that reason. The lack of a backlog on the few bureaucrat-specific functions is frequently cited, compared to the constant backlog for admin-related tasks such as dealing with copyright problems, although comments also indicate that should any real backlog develop on RfA, it would produce considerable displeasure and impatience.

Prospective bureaucrats have also been held to a higher bar than adminship candidates, with the expectation of roughly 90% votes in support. The promotion of Essjay on Friday was met with questions when his nomination finished barely 0.06% below that mark. One issue raised was that Danny, the bureaucrat who handled it, had voted in support of Essjay, although UninvitedCompany pointed out that other bureaucrats have also occasionally promoted candidates they had voted on. Incidentally, Essjay has been involved in adding to the functions of bureaucrats, having worked on a change to have bureaucrats instead of stewards set bot flags for individual Wikimedia projects.

After all this, Cecropia announced on Saturday that he had also resigned, after he closed a successful adminship nomination but neglected to actually make the user an administrator. He emphasized that his resignation was not an April Fool's Day joke. New bureaucrat Essjay stepped in instead to handle the job, making HereToHelp an administrator.

For the third straight year, a series of April Fools' jokes created animosity between editors, some of whom felt the jokes were in the spirit of the day, and others who felt that the jokes undermined Wikipedia's mission. Most notably, two administrators faced considerable opposition after their jokes were deemed too disruptive.

Cyde and Drini were both involved in separate April Fools' jokes that were frowned upon by many other users. Cyde was blocked three times during the course of the day. The first two blocks were in response to his addition of randomly-generated userboxes to other users' user pages without their permission. Later in the day, he was blocked for changing the text of MediaWiki:Watchlist from "My watchlist" to "Stalked pages", an action that blocking admin Essjay called "far over the line...Making changes to Mediawiki namespace pages is never something to be done on a whim, and certainly shouldn't be done as a joke."

Drini, meanwhile, was criticized for briefly unprotecting the Main Page, an action that resulted in a minor formatting edit by an IP address before it was re-protected. Users countered, however, that doing so left open the possibility for serious vandalism. David Levy noted "the potential to transform our main page into a hard-core pornography showcase or a racist manifesto." Drini was not blocked for his actions.

Another edit to the main page by ABCD replaced it with the April Fools' Main Page, which was reverted by Sean Black. Other notable April Fools' jokes included:

• Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/10th GNAA VfD ON WHEELS!, created by Ashibaka (an 11th nomination was created just two days later)
• User:Jimbo Wales changed for over 12 hours
• The addition of a "New messages" bar to Special:Recentchanges by Celestianpower, an edit that remained for 24 minutes.
• Infinite loop changed to a redirect to Endless loop (itself a redirect to infinite loop)

April Fools' jokes caused similar tension in 2005 (see archived story). However, Cyde's block was an April Fools' Day first. It is yet unknown whether any definitive April Fools policy will be developed (an attempt last year failed), though no attempt has yet been made this year.

The French Wikiquote was taken down on Wednesday and replaced with the following notice in French and English:

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. A policy requiring greater traceability of quotations will be put in place on fr.wikiquote version II. This action has been taken for the benefit of all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Access to database dumps was also prohibited. The relaunch had been expected to take place immediately following the deletion, but after a number of French community members expressed concern about the lack of committed participants to prevent renewed problems, the relaunch was delayed and it is not certain when it will occur.

On Thursday, Raul654, the featured article director, announced that the daily-article-l list, which sends out the featured article of the day, had surpassed over 10,000 subscribers. The list sends the featured article of the day, which appears on the Main Page, via email to the subscribers.

Last week, the French Wikipedia elected seven users to the local Arbitration Committee. The 3rd election for the French ArbCom, each candidate had an average of 65 votes. Voting was conducted publicly on the site similarly to how the English Wikipedia's January elections were held: voters could vote support, oppose, or neutral for each candidate. Of the 14 candidates, 12 met the requirement of having greater than 2/3 support, and the seven candidates with the highest number of support votes were chosen to serve.

Pakistan blocked access to all Wikipedias this week, citing the images of the prophet Muhammad, especially in the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy article. However, the block was brief, lasting only approximately seven hours. Earlier in March, Pakistan had already blocked access to other websites also showing depictions of Muhammad.

A proposal for closing the September 11 Wikipedia, which was a wiki in tribute of the September 11, 2001 attacks, was initiated this week after much discussion. General consensus was to close and then move the site due to inactivity and the inappropriateness of the site as a Wikipedia project. Already partially moved to MemoryWiki.org, the content could also be archived again and be retrievable for those who wish to download it.

A MetaProject to overhaul Meta was started, with the goal of the project to "streamline Meta by eliminating irrelevant content, building infrastructure, rewriting documentation, and organising its content in an efficient, intuitive manner." However, the project soon came under criticism, with people citing that the project's participants were inappropriately deleting images and other useful pages and redirects. Discussion carried over to the English Wikipedia's mailing list, along with the Foundation mailing list.

• The Serbian Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.
• The Macedonian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.
• The Serbian Wiktionary has reached 1,000 entries.
• The Swedish Wikibooks has reached 500 Wikibook modules.
• The Czech Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 90,000 registered users.
• The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 30,000 pages and 200,000 edits.
• The Korean Wiktionary has reached 5,000 entries.
• The Turkish Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Norman Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Bashkir Wikipedia has reached 100 articles.
• The Indonesian Wikipedia has reached 20,000 articles.
• The Persian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 registered users.
• The Basque Wikipedia has reached 6,000 articles.
• The Arabic Wikipedia has reached 12,000 articles.
• The Chinese Wikisource has reached 3,000 articles.
• The French Wikipedia has reached 260,000 articles.
• The Norwegian Wikipedia has reached 10,000 registered users.

• "Pakistan Blocks Wikipedia", Blogcritics

Nature has published an editorial, titled "Britannica attacks... and we respond.", commenting on last week's dispute between Encyclopædia Britannica and Nature over the accuracy of their December comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia. The debate continued to receive some coverage in the media:

• "Encyclopedia Wars Heat Up", CBS News
• "Britannica lashes back at comparison to Wikipedia", Rocky Mountain News, Colorado, USA
• "Britannica bites back in Wikipedia row", Silicon.com

• "Wikipedia world: Popular online site is used by everyone — but how accurate are the articles?", Home News Tribune, New Jersey, USA
• "Wikipedia hits million articles", The Black & White, Maryland, USA (mentions longstanding vandalism of Walker, Texas Ranger article)
• "Enter at your own risk: We put Wikipedia to the test", Grand Forks Herald, North Dakota/Minnesota, USA (intentional vandalism, some caught, some not)
• "Is it possible to tell who wrote certain articles in the Wikipedia?", Inside Bay Area

Wikia (formerly Wikicities), a for-profit company founded by Jimbo Wales and Angela Beesley but completely separate from Wikipedia, has acquired over $4 million in venture capital from various investors. See "Wikipedia founder goes commercial", MarketWatch.

Eight users were granted admin status last week: Dustimagic (nom), Encephalon (nom), Laurascudder (nom), DaGizza (nom), Turnstep (nom), HereToHelp (nom), Gryffindor (nom) and CBDunkerson (nom). Essjay has become the latest bureaucrat with a final vote of (143/16/4).

A record twenty-one articles were featured last week: Mini, History of Michigan State University, Hurricane Iniki, History of Puerto Rico, Battle of Cannae, S. A. Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897, Philosophy of mind, Pakistan, Mexicanos, al grito de guerra, Military history of France, William Tecumseh Sherman, Keratoconus, Ran (film), Geology of the Capitol Reef area, Diane Keaton, Simon Byrne, Hopkins School, Battle of Austerlitz, Retreat of glaciers since 1850, Hurricane Gloria and Manchester City F.C..

The following featured articles were displayed last week on the main page as Today's featured article: Frog, Noah's Ark, Voter turnout, Yom Kippur War, Saffron, Spoo and George IV of the United Kingdom.

Articles that were de-featured last week: Ian McKellen.

Four lists reached featured list status last week: List of French monarchs, List of Florida birds, List of Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes and Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc.

Six pictures reached featured picture status last week:

• 
  Nudibranch
• 
  Solvay Conference
• 
  Space debris

• 
  Typography
• 
  Warship
• 
  Great Wall of China

Server-related events, problems, and changes included:

• 28 March — All wikis updated to add the new "ss_images" database field
• 29 March — srv54, srv71-80 brought into Apache service
• 30 March — lomaria and thistle ran behind in replication; thistle removed from rotation
• 31 March — Mailman briefly shut down to edit archives
• 2 April — English Wikipedia dump restarted; it had stopped due to a database error

The Arbitration Committee closed three cases this week. Additionally, a motion has been made in a previous case.

A case against -Ril- was closed on Tuesday. As a result, -Ril- was banned indefinitely as a sockpuppet of the banned user CheeseDreams. Additionally, CheeseDreams' one-year ban under a previous Arbitration Committee ruling was reset. CheeseDreams was banned in March 2005 for disruption, including the use of sockpuppets. A previous case against -Ril- was closed in October 2005, banning -Ril- for a month and a week.

A case brought against Tony Sidaway was closed on Thursday. As a result, Tony Sidaway was placed on an administrative one revert limit, prohibiting him from reversing any administrative action more than once. Crotalus horridus, meanwhile, was banned from creating or editing userboxes, both in Template and User namespaces, and was placed on general probation. Tony Sidaway had wheel warred on numerous pages, while Crotalus horridus had edit warred and recreated inflammatory userboxes.

A case involving IronDuke and Gnetwerker was closed on Thursday. As a result, IronDuke was cautioned about using unsourced material, and Gnetwerker was cautioned regarding discourtesy and original research.

A motion has been made in the case against Lightbringer. In November 2005, Lightbringer was placed on personal attack parole and banned from freemasonry-related articles. However, sockpuppets have continued to edit the article, and through edit patterns and checkuser requests have been identified as Lightbringer. As a result a motion was proposed to formally ban Lightbringer Wikipedia-wide. At press time, the motion had five support votes with no opposition.

Two cases were accepted this week, with one involving Aucaman (user page), and the other involving Terryeo (user page). Both are in the evidence phase.

Additional cases involving Marcosantezana (user page), users DarrenRay and 2006BC, FourthAve (user page), Locke Cole (user page), editors on Depleted uranium, ZAROVE (user page), and Agapetos angel (user page) are in the evidence phase.

Cases involving administrators involved in a userbox-related edit war, Lou franklin (user page), and editors on Bible verse articles are in the voting phase.

A motion to close is currently on the table in a case involving Lapsed Pacifist (user page).