Wikipedia:Goings-on/March 7, 2004

Goings-on in the week starting Sunday March 7 2004

• Wikipedia:Goings-on (Sunday March 7): This page is started!
• Wikipedia talk:Mailing lists: A poll on where meta-discussions should be held ends (9 March) with no consensus.
• Thumbnailed images: A design competition continues on Meta to replace the grey thumbnail borders.
• List of encyclopedia topics (Sunday March 7): Magnus Manske finishes uploading the 78 pages of links.
• Wikipedia talk:How to revert a page to an earlier version: What originally started off as a suggested guideline has sparked discussion (mainly on the mailing list [1] [2] [3]) about a possible introduction of a policy against more than three reverts, punishable by 24-hour bans. Further suggestions from Jimbo follow [4].
• User:Bird: It seems that this user is attempting to remove large amounts of content contributed by himself in the past. See also User:David Newton/Bird Dispute and on the mailing list [5] [6].
• Wikipedia:List of empty images: Silsor calls for cleaning up of zero-length uploads.
• Emmss Vandalism (March 9-11): large scale spambot vandalism at ko:, fy:, gl:, gn:, ja:, ms: and sq:. Measures now taken at the squid server level to block POST commands coming from the proxies used by the spambot. Andre Engels, Angela, Dori, Fuzheado, Jeronim, JorgeGG, Kowey, Maximus_Rex handle most of the damage. Tim Starling assists by deputizing administrators on the spot for the smaller Wikipedias.
• Downtime (March 10): Wikipedia experiences about 1 hour of downtime due to a database crash.

• Administrators: Mkmcconn (March 7), Yacht (March 8), Isomorphic (March 9), Pfortuny, Wesley (March 11), Visorstuff, Lexor and Jay (March 12) have been made admins. Congratulations!

Arbitration committee

• Arbitration committee fills out its Wikipedia:arbitration policy and asks for comments and suggetions on Wikipedia talk:Arbitration policy.
• Plautus satire vs Raul654 is completed. Plautus satire is banned from editing for one year - up to and including March 11, 2005 (8 in favor). A lifetime ban was considered but rejected.
• Matter of Wik: arbitrators vote on their decision; three findings of fact accepted, one rejected, voting on the remedy continues.
• Irismeister: proposed findings of fact and remedy opened for arbitrators to vote on.
• Matter of Anthony DiPierro: remains pending.
• Various users and arbitrators wish to see "Mav v. 168" referred to the arbitration committee; Jimbo has so far not done this, and until the arbitration committee may accept cases without his referral, this cannot be considered.
• Arbitrators formally refuse to hear Wik's request to have Darkelf banned (made February 14, 2004) as it is a political disupte and not suitable for arbitration.

WikiProjects

• WikiProject Songs: A new table is created for use in articles about specific songs.
• WikiProject Space Missions: Articles are being created for every space shuttle mission based upon public domain information from NASA, thanks largely to Theon.

Articles featured on the Main Page

• People's Republic of China (March 7)
• Sperm whale (March 8)
• Bathing machine (March 9)
• Leonardo da Vinci (March 10)
• LEGO (March 11)
• Parthenon (March 12)
• Nuclear weapon (March 13)

Articles that gained "featured" status

• LEGO (March 7)
• Bioinformatics (March 8)
• Isaac Asimov (March 13)

Pictures that gained "featured" status

• Sand sculpture (March 13)
• Lower Yellowstone Fall (March 13)
• Tamar and Brunel Bridges (March 13)

On the mailing lists this week

Wikipedia-l, Wiken-l, Intlwiki-l, Wikitech-l and Wikilegal-l, 7-13 March.

News

• Suda crashed
• The developers prepare for the 1.2.0 release of Mediawiki
• Bandwidth thieves are blocked from taking our images (+ related issues of fair use and lack of a way of getting the images). Worldhistory is unblocked
• Proxies are blocked
• New &action=purge feature
• New squid server in Germany
• Links caching has been turned off and the links table is being rebuilt
• Changes to the links table are made as part of the new database schema, which should solve the issues that occur when renaming pages with a long edit history (won't be live for a few weeks)
• The MIT paper (PDF) on Wikipedia and history flow will be presented at CHI 2004
• The development policy now says developers must document their features
• Penguin is doing extended burnin tests until Friday so Geoffrin will be here soon. Gunther is available again
• New image format now allows formatting and links in the caption
• DNS and Zwinger issues resolved
• The Daily Telegraph are linking to Wikipedia a lot
• NohatBot uploads recordings of IPA sounds
• Requests for de-adminship renamed to Requests for review of admin actions
• New pretty graphs

International

• Spambot attacks
• Jean-Luc Azra wants to start a Tok Pisin Wikipedia
• Goran Kulenovic requested adminship on bs:
• Borislav Manolov requested bureaucratship on bg:

Adverts/announcements/polls etc

• 6 reverts a day poll
• Sidebar poll
• Chess diagrams
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Schools - opinions sought
• Wiki-to-pdf converter
• Arbitration policy is complete
• Magnus Manske's list of encyclopedia topics
• Python script to convert Wikipedia articles to LaTeX or PDF
• How the web ruined the encyclopedia business on Slashdot
• WikiStats Phase II

Issues

• Edit war policy
• User:Bird. Jimbo recommends blocking and sannse attempts mediation
• Jimbo supported the "protect on the version of the person not edit warring" idea
• User:66.185.84.208/User:kchishol1970 unblocked
• The meaning of consensus on VfD
• Problems with the mediation committee including role confusion and access to IPs
• Protection of 1729 (number)
• Are inter-namespace redirects allowed?
• Jesus Chirst and banning of offensive names
• DNA
• User:168... and arbitration
• Eloquence's removal of Sam Spade from WP:RFA
• Talk page spam
• 3-revert rule - rule or policy?
• GFDL section 7, CC-ND and other image licensing issues
• Should "In the news" be on the main page?
• Arbitration
• Single point of failure and the need for a backup DB server
• RickK/Wik mediation

Proposals

• Special:Recent Vandalisms
• Banning by cookie
• Displaying randomly assigned account names instead of IPs
• m:Gnutella
• Replace sysops with one chief duty editor
• "Honorary developers" to be allowed to assign user rights. See m:Developer access
• Wikilyrics project (may violate copyright, if not use Wikisource)
• RSS feeds and their application to watchlists
• m:Edit throttling
• New status of "registered, confirmed users" in between users and sysops
• Require users to provide verifiable non-Yahoo/Hotmail email addresses
• Policy juries
• Edit throttling and per-article bans
• 24 hour bans for reverting
• Copyright of anonymous editors to be assigned to the Wikimedia Foundation
• Using a TeX hieroglyphs module on Wikipedia
• Requiring 3+ admins to approve bureaucrat-type actions
• Parsing HTML-like tags
• Notification to users when they break the 3-revert rule
• Rewards for good behaviour
• Giving wikiprojects wikimoney
• Admins to have the ability to (temporarily) filter all edits which involve a certain domain
• Using captchas to stop spamming (issues with non-spamming bot edits and patents)
• Revert all of a user's edits with one click
• Combined recent changes
• Rollback function to allow deletion

Bugs/feature requests

• Image:Bill Clinton.jpg is undeletable
• Technical implementations for the 3 revert rule.
• Wikipedia is down (fixed)
• Inaccessible toolbar buttons on hu: (fixed)
• French Wikipedia to switch to UTF-8 following a vote
• Problems installing MediaWiki (try MediaWiki 1.2.0rc3 instead)
• Subpages feature
• Non-UTF, non-ASCII usernames cause problems with Special:Export (to be fixed before 1.2.0)
• Image thumbnail feature bug (fixed in CVS)
• Spell checker. See also m:WYSIWYG editor
• LaTeX chess support (stalled by tag-dogmatism at Wikisophia)
• Problems with accented characters in links
• Problems with convertdb.php
• Caching problems leading to no notification of edit conflicts

Miscellaneous

• yahoopops can solve some issues with Yahoo mail
• Timwi asked for temporary developer access
• Do anons get talk page notification?
• French bureaucrats
• Should people edit languages they can't read?
• Erik asked Jimbo to approve 24 hour bans for edit warring
• Is dispute resolution process useful? Do we need less bureaucracy or less unilateralism?
• Desysoppings should be announced
• Differences between developer access and CVS access
• Stats may not be accurate