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[edit] Citizendium update

It would be nice to see a story about the current state of Citizendium, since they opened up the sign-up process recently so that anyone can browse the pilot wiki and/or edit (after signing up). Of possible note:

"Unforking": Citizendium deleted all content that had been ported from Wikipedia but not edited since, to encourage the creation of new articles from scratch. There was some discussion of switching to a non-commercial license (e.g., CC-BY-NC) on the forum, but it looks like that probably won't happen.
Scope: Citizendium is apparently happy with articles like Choosing a dog.
Approved articles: Thus far, there are six approved articles: Barbara McClintock, Biology, Chiropractic, Horizontal gene transfer, Metabolism, and Wheat. Content from the introduction of the CZ version of Biology was introduced to Biology; after Larry Sanger noted the failure to credit CZ on the talk page, the changes were reverted and purged from the article's history.
Live articles: There are currently almost 1000 "live articles", though most are copies of Wikipedia articles.
Activity: By my very rough estimate, CZ is now getting about 300 mainspace edits per day. (By comparison, Uncyclopedia is somewhere around 3000.)

--ragesoss 00:48, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility (research study)

Chesney, Thomas. An empirical examination of Wikipedia’s credibility. First Monday, volume 11, number 11 (November 2006)

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_11/chesney/index.html

From the abstract:

“This short study examines Wikipedia’s credibility by asking 258 research staff with a response rate of 21 percent, to read an article and assess its credibility, the credibility of its author and the credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Staff were either given an article in their own expert domain or a random article. No difference was found between the two group in terms of their perceived credibility of Wikipedia or of the articles’ authors, but a difference was found in the credibility of the articles — the experts found Wikipedia’s articles to be more credible than the non–experts. This suggests that the accuracy of Wikipedia is high. However, the results should not be seen as support for Wikipedia as a totally reliable resource as, according to the experts, 13 percent of the articles contain mistakes.”

--Bookgrrl ^holler/lookee here 14:37, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] CBC Manitoba...

...ran a story on (not) citing Wikipedia, based on the NYT Middlesborough College story. They interviewed a prof, who says "go use Wikipedia, so long as you corroborate the information". The story airs locally in Winnipeg on CBC (channel 2) at 6 pm central time today. -- Zanimum 20:31, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Apparently, it's "Middlebury": See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=ad418204e5130dd2&ex=1172379600&pagewanted=print --Jerome Potts 09:16, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tax Court Cites Wikipedia 8 Times

Tax Court Cites Wikipedia 8 Times. Ferguson v. Commissioner, T.C. Summ. Op. 2007-30 (2/28/07). (SEWilco 06:33, 2 March 2007 (UTC))

Disturbing. ~ UBeR 05:45, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The Times article

Here, with interviews with various editors. Gzkn 09:24, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Please. It's not the London Times, it's The Times. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 01:36, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Academic paper on Wikipedia

"Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia", Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman[1] Samw 17:42, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia used as part of uni course

Now and then you get a story about how uni professors ask their students to use Wikipedia as part of their course. The BBC has covered another such instance (even in the wake of the *cough*Essjay*cough* scandal). – Chacor 09:43, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Definitely good news. Hopefully AP or Reuters sees this. -- Zanimum 19:25, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia to Seek Proof of Credentials

AP story in the New York Times. Note that it was published mentioning the "Robert Seigenthaler Sr." incident. -- Zanimum 16:08, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

An article noting the dynamic state of the various conflicting proposals to encourage (or ban) proof of credentials would bring editors' attention to this ongoing debate. Articles (and talk pages) to discuss include:

Wikipedia:Credentials - a proposal for credentials to be verified
Wikipedia:Credential ban
Wikipedia:Credential verification
Wikipedia:Credentials are irrelevant
Wikipedia:Ignore all credentials
User:Avraham/Wiki of Trust - A proposal that would enhance the security how personal ID would be verified.
User:Jimbo Wales/Credential Verification
User:MikeURL/Credentials
User:Misza13/Nobody cares about your credentials

--SteveMcCluskey 18:33, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikichix

Article about women in tech discusses Wikichix. Anyone know if that's still active? -- Zanimum 18:48, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

I believe it is; how active it is is questionable. I've contacted an anonymous source who has claimed to be a list member. Ral315 » 12:08, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

That article doesn't discuss Wikichix - it mentions it in passing in a single reference! Yes, it's still active. --pfctdayelise (talk) 09:13, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Essjay scandal on EWTN

I was flipping through the channels when EWTN showed the wikipedia logo (prononced "wika-pedia" by them). I stopped to hear a report on the whole Essjay scandal. They mentioned that Catholisism for dummies, a book Essjay defended and the program reported as his main source, was written by some of the original EWTN founders "who unlike Ryan Jordan really do have PHDs". It then went on to report about random papal matters. Quite interesting how far reaching wikipedia has become. -Ravedave 06:19, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

oh if you wish to cite: The show was "The World Over with Raymond Arroyo" for March 9th, 2007. -Ravedave 06:19, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

That's really, really interesting. I love the mention of Catholicism for Dummies. Ral315 » 12:09, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

It's a good book, if kinda patronising at times. I learnt a lot from it. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 12:20, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Interesting articles

This piece by a communications professor evaluates emerging Internet sites and Wikipedia in particular in light of media economics.[2]

And in an unrelated story the Times of India publishes an interview with Jimbo about the growth of non-English language versions of Wikipedia.[3]

Durova^Charge! 04:21, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stable versioning

Could we have an update on this? I have not seen anything about this since the August 2006 announcement that experiments would be conducted on the German Wikipedia. Eiler7 02:34, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

As far as I know, it's proceeding very slowly, and brion tends to beat people up for asking him about it. Ral315 » 06:18, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Sadly it's not one of the projects scheduled for the Google Summer of Code 2007. -- Zanimum 14:28, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Uhh.. didnt anyone read this weeks BRION? "A contractor, Joerg Baach, was hired to work on an implementation of the "stable versions" concept, that would present only reviewed versions of pages to users who did not explicitly request the very latest (possibly unreviewed) revision." -Ravedave 15:06, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

That's great, but since August 2006, has nothing been done besides this recent hiring to put stable versions into effect? Seems a little slow. Unless I'm missing something here...? Mahanga^{Talk to me} 19:10, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

It would seem quite absurd, but I often don't get the chance to really read some of the articles until later in the week- while editing, I just try to check for obvious errors in spelling and formatting. Ral315 » 19:09, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

It seems that nothing much has happened then. I assume this is because

Brion and others are just too busy keeping things going to focus on it. Is there no way we could bring other programmers into the issue? Wikipedia has a number of Bot people it would seem. Maybe some of them could help. Failing that I could work on the implementation myself if that would be appropriate. I am responding here because I do not want to annoy Brion. Is there a way to broach the issue without causing him grief? Eiler7 21:56, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

No, things have actually happened. I don't remember exactly when, but I think it was December, the first "pass" to check how many accounts would be affected was made. There is also intermittent coding to implement this; the CentralAuth extension has a few commits to it every now and then. It's just that this is a huge amount of work, and the time it takes to code this competes with the time it takes to keep the servers running smoothly. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 22:12, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
- If you have experience coding for PHP, and are interested in coding for MediaWiki, whether it is SUL or something else, please approach Brion in #mediawiki. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 22:14, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
  - What does a first pass at single user login have to do with stable versions? Is it that Brion is doing one, then the other?--ragesoss 22:42, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
    - I believe, based on what I heard at Wikimania 06, that the answer is yes - they are doing SUL first, then stable versions. Raul654 22:59, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
    - Yeah, that one will be made after the other. Both are a lot of work. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 23:18, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
      - I think things may have changed since then, though, since stable versions are now assigned to the contractor. According to the MediaWiki roadmap, both were planned for completion by the MediaWiki 1.9 release in January, and were pushed back to the next release, 1.10 in April. Stable versions still has the comment "end of the [2006] year?", while status of SUL was updated after the January 2007 release to "mostly already in 1.9, but may need a few more tweaks as it goes live". That makes two-and-half months worth of tweaking, and counting. April's not very far away, for the projected completion of two major chunks of development. Maybe Erik Möller (who updated the roadmap regarding the contractor on March 6) can tell us more about the contractor and when we might expect him to be done, or we could send some questions to the contractor himself.--ragesoss 00:01, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

On the Roadmap talk page: "That was vaguely targeting end of 2006, but it's ended up sliding. There's a new programmer on it, we're hoping to see it ready for demoing and public testing in a month or two from what I heard." --brion 22:16, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm excited Mahanga^{Talk to me} 20:23, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The New Republic Online article by history professor

Wikipedia is good for academia, by UC Davis historian Eric Rauchway, hot off the virtual presses. In part, a response to the Middlebury ban, but a wide-ranging and well-informed defense of the value of Wikipedia.--ragesoss 05:44, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I second ragesoss's recommendation of this article. If the required TNR login is a problem, please let me know. · j e r s y k o talk · 03:20, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Chronicle of Higher Education article

We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies, a "Point of View" piece by Duke English professor Cathy N. Davidson, from the March 23 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is another response to the Middlebury ban; here's a choice snippet:

Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students? Rather than banning Wikipedia, why not make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses?

Get there quick, before the paywall goes up.--ragesoss 17:10, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Do not cut and paste

Rather old now, but I don't remember seeing a mention of this story. -- ALoan (Talk) 13:43, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

Of relevance is that the Sioux Lookout newspaper refused my offer to write a letter to the editor, encouraging the community to participate in the expansion of the article. -- Zanimum 20:56, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia: target for jihadists, source for U.S. Government intelligence

Wikipedia Becomes Intelligence Tool And Target For Jihadists, an article in Intelligence Week. The article is basically a sensationalized paraphrase of this blog post from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. The latter is worth reading, if not the former.--ragesoss 00:31, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] New York Times blog summarizes recent Wikipedia news

I'm apparently on the trail of NYT blogger Mike Nizza, of The Lede blog: Life, Liberty and Wikipedia points to the New Republic piece as well as the above story and blog post on Open Source Intelligence, along with yesterday's Time interview, 10 Questions: Jimmy Wales and a Business Week opinion piece, Wikipedia's Not the Net Police.--ragesoss 00:40, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

On related news, NBC Nightly News talked about Wikipedia here. It was featured on MSN's main portal with the "Wikipedia plagued by errors" headline. Titoxd^{(?!? - cool stuff)} 03:13, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

More Questions with Jimmy Wales in Time, an extension of the above.--ragesoss 18:54, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikiality in My Classroom

Wikiality in My Classroom, in the Washington Post, a decent discussion of the "internet ethics" of the current generation of students and the challenge this poses for educators, by a high school teacher.--ragesoss 18:51, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia could play pivotal role in $450,000 decision

Sculptor's dog-killing past threatens WSU project, in The Wichita Eagle, is the story of a sculpture commissioned from Tom Otterness by Wichita State University, which has caused controversy since someone read the Wikipedia entry and learned that Otterness had once created an art film that involved shooting and killing a dog.--ragesoss 19:05, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

An anonymous editor blanked Tom Otterness about a 45-min ago - I've restored the content. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 19:18, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] SCO

Someone at the yahoo message boards dug up someone from SCO whitewashing their article. SCO. Getting a checkuser done to verify the IP would be interesting. -Ravedave 15:53, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Please report this sort of thing to WP:ANI. I've semiprotected the article. Durova^Charge! 02:14, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Checkuser confirms that this user (as well as sockpuppet user:Cbush) originates from SCO (the 132.147.0.0 - 132.147.255.255 range). Raul654 02:42, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Ooh, where's a journalist when you want one? Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 09:32, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Found the orig link on digg.com so the citizen journos are at it already :) Durova - feel free to report to ANI I have no idea what I am reporting, everything has been reverted afaik. -Ravedave 14:23, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Um. It's pretty typical and not that shocking to see a company whitewashing their article. Either they cut it out and figure out how to only remove unsourced/incorrect things and only add well sourced things, or they end up blocked like any other POV editor. What really concerns me is that it appears that we've violated our own privacy policy here. I don't see any real activity that would have justified the CU in the first place, ... so announcing the results in public really seems out of line. Sure, SCO is widely disliked, but being widely disliked doesn't reduce someone's ability to sue. --Gmaxwell 17:06, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Just because you claim it is typical doesn't mean we should allow it or not take action when it is brought to our attention. In this case, there are a number of edits stemming from those two users which are questionable (for example: Massive whitewashing on the SCO article Logding complaints about factually accurate, cited material, 'etc). These edits violate the Conflict of interest policy. That, in and of itself, justifies a checkuser on the address. And that's not to mention the other evidence the yahoo person brought up independently connecting this user to SCO (via their Yahoo SCOX chat board). Raul654 17:18, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Furthermore, as to the release of the data, It is the policy of Wikimedia that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations... Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way", which I judged to be the case here. Raul654 17:19, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The fact that we did not block the user for this behavior contradicts your argument that they were vandalizing or otherwise highly disruptive. Furthermore when the disruptive behavior is confined to a single account, there is no reason to release CU data. When the disruption spans multiple accounts we may need CU to justify blocking all of them to end the disruption, but thats not what we appear to have in this case. It's not at all clear to me that they violated any policy beyond good taste. WP:COI states "you should avoid or exercise great caution" it's certainly not a hard rule that subjects can't edit articles about themselves, although I often wish it were.--Gmaxwell 17:27, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The fact that we did not block the user for this behavior contradicts your argument that they were vandalizing or otherwise highly disruptive. - Funny you should mention that: 04:19, 23 March 2007 Alison (Talk | contribs | block) blocked "Cjhebgen (contribs)" (anon. only, account creation blocked) with an expiry time of 31 hours (Blanking pages)

Furthermore when the disruptive behavior is confined to a single account, there is no reason to release CU data. - Your opinion, not policy. Beyond the foundation privacy policy, there is no rule limiting the reasons for which CU data can be released. Using checkuser data to expose a conflict of interest strikes me as a perfectly valid use of checkuser.

When the disruption spans multiple accounts we may need CU to justify blocking all of them to end the disruption - Again, your opinion, not policy. And, in point of fact, checkuser is used to identify sockpuppets for purposes other than blocking all the time. There is no rule prohibiting checkuser's use in this capacity. And, let us not forget, that a sockpuppet was in fact discovered here (user:Cbush)

It's not at all clear to me that they violated any policy beyond good taste. - Their edits to the SCO articles do not abide by the conflict of interest policy for any reasonable definition of editing with "great caution" Raul654 17:35, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The foundation policy limits when CU data may be released rather than a limit on when it may not be. As a checkuser you should be aware of this important distinction. I am very worried that you do not understand this and I am concerned that your actions have resulted in an unjustified and unreasonable liability to the foundation.

It's not at all clear to me that the user was blocked for the ongoing behavior.

Although cbush appears to be the same person. The edit with that account appears to be a good faith attempt to get some issues with the article resolved, and not a malicious or even harmful action as we normally require for complaints about sockpuppetry. --Gmaxwell 17:41, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The user in question did violate policy, checkuser was run per standard operating procedure, a conflict of interest was found, and this fact was released as allowed by our privacy policy. Your arguments to the contrary have been thoroughly demolished, so you are now attempting to pose this non sequitur. Given that our privacy policy has been fully upheld, there is no liability to the Foundation here.

It's not at all clear to me that the user was blocked for the ongoing behavior.

This user was blocked for "blanking pages". Given this user's editing history (and relatively few edits all on the same subject), that is obviously a reference to these edits ([4][5][6][7]) blanking any mention of the SCO-IBM litigation. Thus, the block is indeed related to the ongoing COI violations.

Their editing was completely separate and I see no reason to believe their edits were uncoordinated actions by separate people - Only if you ignore the fact that they edit from the same IP, on the same articles, and that one started editing right after the other got blocked. Raul654 18:01, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

I thoroughly support Raul654's handling of this matter. Durova^Charge! 01:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject on Vandalism studies just finished Study 1

The WikiProject on Vandalism studies recently finished its first study and has published its conclusions (a full and detailed copy can be found here).

The first study analyzed a randomly sampled pool of 100 random articles. Within these 100 articles there were a total of 668 edits during the months of November 2004, 2005, and 2006. Of those 668 edits, 31 (or 4.64%) were a vandalism of some type. The study's salient findings suggest that in a given month approximately 5% of edits are vandalism and 97% of that vandalism is done by anonymous editors. Obvious vandalism is the vast majority of vandalism used. From the data gathered within this study it is also found that roughly 25% of vandalism reverting is done by anonymous editors and roughly 75% is done by wikipedians with user accounts. The mean average time vandalism reverting is 758.35 minutes (12.63 hours), a figure that may be skewed by outliers. The median time vandalism reverting is 14 minutes.

Anyways, I thought this might make up an interesting tidbit for an article in the signpost. If people want to further discussing Study 1 or any of the up and coming studies being planned (such as on planned second major study here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Vandalism studies/Study2), come 'round. Cheers. Remember 12:56, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Arbitration Committee soliciting checkuser access requests

See Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Checkuser requests Raul654 03:37, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Put in a blurb for us Alexa obsessives

Wikipedia's three-month Alexa traffic rank reached ten, a major milestone. Karl Dickman ^talk 00:05, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

As can be seen from the graph, the ranking has been fluctuating between 9 and 11 for the past 2 months. They have only changed the 3 month average to 10, which is accurate. Also, it should be noted that during the fundraiser it was advertised that Wikipedia was a "top 10" website, based presumably on it hitting #10 though it was not established there and quickly fluctuated back down (also, Wikipedia was then and still is #8 in the United States). So, while they did change the 3 month average, it is something that has very clearly been coming for several months and there is some lies, damn lies, and statistics involved. —Centrx→talk • 01:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

With the three-month hitting 10, I will. Ral315 » 03:04, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Community enforceable mediation

A new dispute resolution option has gone into experimental implementation with support from Jimbo Wales and several members of the arbitration committee. Community enforceable mediation provides editors with the option to voluntarily enter a binding agreement that has arbitration-like remedies such as WP:1RR or civility parole. The community would ratify these agreements by consensus at the community sanctions noticeboard. This provides a streamlined alternative to arbitration for some types of disputes. After a 90 day test phase the community will decide whether to make WP:CEM a permanent dispute resolution option. Editors who are interested in trying community enforceable mediation may post to Wikipedia:Community enforceable mediation/Requests. Durova^Charge! 21:49, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Good Articles 2000th article milestone

This week, Wikipedia:Good Articles reached the 2,000-article milestone with Ronda Storms being the 2000th article. Currently 1 in 850 articles are GAs. --Nehrams2020 22:31, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] March was a great month for FAs

In March, we promoted 70 new net featured articles. This totally blows away the old record of 45, set way back in August 2004. (Also, the 31 promoted FAs in the last week of March is at or near the record). Raul654 17:05, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Also - the FA proportion has increased back to its October 2006 level. See Wikipedia:Featured article statistics Raul654 17:42, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

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