Wikipedia:Goings-on/April 18, 2004

Goings-on in the week starting Sunday April 18 2004

• Wikipedia:Naming policy poll is created to determine how geographic articles should be named (more common name or official name) opens. Please vote there.
• Work on a standardized format for a new series of year by year listings of world leaders is taking place at Talk:Incumbents by year.
• New article series on weapons of mass destruction is located at Mediawiki:WMD.
• Slashdot: Three articles have been slashdotted - Frame-dragging [1], EPR paradox [2] and parthenogenesis [3]
• Quickpolls: A quickpoll takes place regarding an edit war at Saddam Hussein. The quickpolls process itself comes up for a 30-day review.
• Vote for the list of links proposal: A vote on whether Votes for deletion should be a list of links.
• Webby Awards: Wikipedia is nominated in the categories Community and Best Practices. Wikipedians can cast their "People's Voice" vote (see also Wikipedia talk:Webby Awards).
• Nohat, Roozbeh, Stevenj, UninvitedCompany, Ww and Zero0000 become administrators. Congratulations!
• Danny has been nominated for the Wikipedia:Mediation Committee. Please add your vote there.

Arbitration committee

• Arbitration committee matters continuing this week: Wik2 and Anthony DiPierro (regarding his behaviour on VfD).
• Three new cases are accepted this week: Mav v. 168 (which had previously seemed too old an issue to arbitrate on), JRR Trollkien, to determine if sysops currently have the right to ban obvious trolls, and Paul Vogel, an anonymous user who apparently has continued to edit while banned.
• Anthony DiPierro's case is nearing completion, with arbitrators voting on their findings of fact and decree.

Articles featured on the Main Page

• Ford Mustang (April 18)
• Trench warfare (April 19)
• Congo Free State (April 20)
• James Bulger murder case (April 21)
• Greek art (April 22)
• DOOM (April 23)
• Hinduism (April 24)

Articles that gained "featured" status

• Hinduism (April 18)
• Assassin (April 19)
• Congo Free State (April 20)
• Kitsch (April 20)
• Anatoly Karpov (April 24)

Pictures that gained "featured" status

• Io (moon) (April 18)
• Che Guevara statue (April 20)

On the mailing lists this week

Wikipedia-l, Wiken-l, Foundation-l, Wikitech-l, 18-24 April.

News, proposals and miscellaneous

• Wikipedia nominated for Webby Awards. Will they send you spam if you register? Should we promote the awards? Jimbo interviewed by Newsweek
• When was the Atlantic Charter signed?
• Quickpolls: Should they continue? Ed quickpolls TDC and the policy of advertising them on RC is reiterated
• Wikipedia in the news leads to a discussion Wikipedia v. the wikipedia. A proper noun or a non-proprietary generic term?
• Carnatic music lyrics
• Use &nbsp if you want no message to appear in Template:Fromwikipedia etc
• The imagewiki/commons idea is apparently awaiting Jimbo's approval.
• Blaubär has written a prototype of a WAP interface for wikipedia
• A new single login proposal

International

• "The free, accessible and gratuitous encyclopedia" - dodgy babelfish translations
• New blocking policy on fr: and requests for selective page protection against specific users.
• Bot requests (see m:requests for permissions). hu:MediaWiki:Showhideminor to be include $1 minor edits | $2 bots | $3 logged in users
• German, Hungarian and Romanian Wiktionaries requested. Tim promises to make them for every language!

Issues

• Paul Vogel believes he is being "BANNED, BLOCKED, and CENSORED". Nohat requested he be unblocked so he could make a case for arbitration.
• Copyediting of material from embargoed nations
• Images: Use of noncommercial-only images prohibited, changes proposed for the Image upload page, Requiring sources and the Berne Convention. MediaWiki talk:Uploadtext.
• Can the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada use Wikipedia for their own purposes? Would this create WalledGarden and NPOV issues?
• The Wayback Machine hasn't indexed Wikipedia for a long time. Is robots.txt or user-agent checking keeping them away or is this policy to leave so long between updates?
• Visitor stats are inaccurate

Technical

• Preparing for MediaWiki 1.3. To-do lists and translations discussed. Various new features and bugs
• Python Wikipediabot release
• Unicode problems with an install of MediaWiki 1.2.4
• "Category" becomes a real namespace, and is in CVS. Various bugs discussed
• New option in MediaWiki for an automatic list of contributors to be appended to an article
• cvs2cl tool for generating ChangeLog files
• DNS needs to be switched to zwinger
• Is it ok to reload a watchlist every 5 minutes?
• dvipng suggested for generating math markup
• MathML is now supported when $wgMimeType = "application/xhtml+xml is set in localsettings.
• Wikihero taken out of the phase3
• The 'magic' parameter for bypassing miser mode is disabled after the disablement of miser mode on de.wikipedia.org caused overload on suda
• New code for a multilingual interface available
• PHP debugging and profiling tools suggested to improve the debugging experience
• Developers are reminded to be careful when applying patches as diffs may be generated from older versions
• More HTML tags allowed including del and ins
• Choosing an OS
• Upload log causes problems while importing cur dump. See m:Useless Perl Scripts for a progress meter.
• Database downtime while curly is set up to be a MySQL slave
• Tokenizer issues
• IE and logo issues in the new skin
• Rebuildall.php can't be used with in-place install